People keep telling me that Solar + Storage is way cheaper than nuclear power. So let me try again to put some facts into this discussion.
Nuclear power is an 80–100-year asset, solar is typically a 20-year asset, and batteries are 15 year assets. So, build nuclear once, solar 4 times and batteries 6 times
Nuclear is between 6 and 15 billion a GW (so we will use $15 billion – the cost of Vogtle)
Solar is about $1/watt installed A kilowatt of PV produces 52 kWh in December
There are 744 hours in December so 52kWh/744 = 69 watts in an average hour
14.31 GW of solar PV in December is 1 GW of baseload power
Using good farmland (flat, and level) that asset covers 112 square miles @5 acres per MW.
The cost is $14.3 billion, not including transmission and substations.
Batteries are $600/kWh installed.
Solar operates 4 hours a day above the 1 GW level, so 20 hours of storage would be required to make solar baseload in Michigan.
That is 20 GWH for day/night shifting (on long term storage). $12 billion.
Build 80-year asset:
Nuclear = $15 billion
Solar PV = 14.3 billion X 80/20 = 57.2 billion
Storage = 12 billion X 80/15 = 64 billion
Nuclear $15 billion vs. Solar + Storage $121 billion
It costs more to maintain this amount of battery and solar PV than it does Nuclear.