It’s 40GW of hydro

If we use Vogtle as a cost benchmark you'd get roughly 5 GW (note you typo'd units to MW).

Looks like at least 30GW

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

All the good sites were used by 1940.

The ideal big dam is Hoover Dam. Large, deep canyon in a desert. Narrow, deep canyon dam site. Hard rock geology. No major towns or agricultural areas in the area to be flooded above the dam. That's the best case.

Most later dams are at worse sites.

I thought it was cost-competitive with something on the scale of mega-dams and takes about as long to finish too. Except unlike dams, you don't disrupt river flow and cause water-rights disputes (and potentially wars).

Nuclear is cost competitive if you have a reliable cadence of building plants and if folks get out of the way of location permits and waste storage and people can actually make decisions about them without endless debates and lawsuits. The problem is one-off designs and the decades long gap between project inception and when investment returns start coming in. As opposed to solar where I could order a few panels and accessories online and start producing energy within a week. Obviously larger solar projects take more planning but if you've got a roof, a credit card, and an electrician on hand you can start producing electricity or expand your production in a very short time achieving break even in a few years.

It was cost-competitive before it faced ridiculously unfair regulations due to being so easy to fear-monger about.

Tell that to China

> isn't economically viable

That is not an intrinsic truth. We have chosen to make it economically unviable.

Most things get cheaper to build with time. Nuclear is an outlier where it used to be affordable and now it isn’t. That’s insane.

But what to do in Finland during the winter months? I'm massively pro solar, and I'm sceptical of nuclear, but this seems like a problem to me. Batteries work well on shorter time scales but not over the entire year.

And at night, nuclear power plants produce infinitely more power than solar. Same during winter months.

Solar simply can't work alone for northern countries without insane amount of batteries. We're talking about having a MONTH of supply in reserve for Germany. It's probably even worse for Finland.

I would add that also a lot of solar power is funded by small capital (homeowners). There is no real way for small capital holders to fund and gain profits from nuclear energy, and installing wind or water turbines are not realistic at 99% of homes.

Great comparison to use the most delayed neuclear power plant constrution in human history to extrapolate an argument. Really fairly done.

Japan builds them in 3 years. USA took about the same during the heights of its use.

> The solar panels installed in China during the past 2 years produce as much electricity as all of their nuclear plants combined.

Because it doesn't have very many nuclear power plants relative to its size? France has the same number of nuclear reactors as China despite being a much smaller country.

I'd argue 50-60 nuclear power plants having the same energy output as millions (billions?) of solar panels is a win for nuclear - it's much higher energy density, much smaller environmental footprint, much smaller infrastructure investment, etc.

> but can you understand concerns around batteries?

No I can't. Just recycle the batteries, and you've solved both concerns in one go. Lead acid batteries have a >99% recycling rate, the economics for recycling EV & grid storage batteries are even better.

Sand batteries provide a very nice scalable solution IMO. https://polarnightenergy.com/sand-battery/

Yep, and if you can pump water back into the lake with excess solar power when the sun in shining, you now have a giant storage battery as well.

Very situational on where it can be used, and requires some very careful cost calculations.

Ignoring the local effects of their construction, a damb breach is one of the worst man-made disasters possible. Mantinence and error margin must be very very carefully accounted for. There is a reason the world bank stopped funding them, and it wasnt purely enviromental. (Some badly managed projects led to expensive and dangerous situations)

So when relevant it's most powerful energy source avalible. But the list of preconditions and caveats is massive.