There were no other compliant bidders ten years ago.

What was notable about that process was the province required bidders to taking on risks that the province would not back. The only bidder willing to do that (Areva bid but did not do so, so their bid was not compliant) priced the cost of the risk into the bid.

This demonstrated that, properly priced, nuclear is far out of the running economically. It only gets built when the risks are forced on others (taxpayers, ratepayers) outside a fair competitive process.

In retrospect, this should have been a serious warning that other new builds in the "nuclear renaissance" were extremely risky, as they turned out to be.

Given this history, I would believe NuScale only after they've built their Nth-of-a-kind system on budget and aren't bankrupt.

> What was notable about that process was the province required bidders to taking on risks that the province would not back. The only bidder willing to do that (Areva bid but did not do so, so their bid was not compliant) priced the cost of the risk into the bid.

The problem with these risk calculations is that you're asking a private insurance company to issue a very large policy with a small probability of payout. The major cost of those policies isn't actually in the risk itself, it's the cost of holding enough capital in reserve to be able to satisfy the policy size independent of the risk probability. They're not allowed to just invest that money in the stock market, so you're essentially paying them to forego the market rate of return on a huge pile of money for the entire term of the policy, even if no claim is ever filed.

That's why it's typically a government providing the insurance in these cases -- they're not required to hold the money in reserve so they don't have to effectively pay interest to hold money that might never actually have to be paid out.

Also notice that the competition there still wasn't solar, it was fossil fuels. And if you want to talk about pricing in the that risk then nuclear looks very attractive.

> The problem with these risk calculations is that you're asking a private insurance company to issue a very large policy with a small probability of payout.

And the problem with the opposite is that risk is foisted off on unwilling consumers. The bidding process is subverted.

If risk is placed on the groups selling the technology, they have an incentive to work on technologies that are inherently less risky. Renewables, for example, typically come in within 10% of the bid price. Yet you would not allow this risk advantage to have any place in the decision process by subsidizing nuclear's risk.

> And the problem with the opposite is that risk is foisted off on unwilling consumers. The bidding process is subverted.

It isn't the consumers who take on the risk, it's the government. But nobody's asking them to do it for free, just charge an actuarially honest insurance premium that doesn't include having to effectively pay interest on a giant reserve fund even if it's never used.

> If risk is placed on the groups selling the technology, they have an incentive to work on technologies that are inherently less risky.

And yet they would still be stymied by a similar requirement.

Consider that solar panels have some nasty stuff in them. Heavy metals. That's well and good so long as they stay inside like they're supposed to and then get properly recycled, but what's the worst case scenario? Maybe something like a major hail storm that cracks open the panels, followed by severe acid rain that leeches the metal into the soil and the groundwater, or maybe a big forest fire that burns them and releases the toxins into the air.

A 1GW solar farm would have something like a million panels, so tens of millions of pounds of material, maybe a hundred million. If they all burned, the cloud could spread over a huge area, or pollute the soil and groundwater for millions of people. So all I ask is for you to have to carry $200,000,000,000 worth of insurance just in case that happens. The worst case is really bad but the probability of that happening is pretty low, so you won't have any trouble finding someone to write a policy that size and whoever you do find will give you a good rate, right?

Assuming risks like that is what governments do. If your giant solar farm burns to a crisp and you go bankrupt, they're the ones who will have to make it a superfund site, clean it up and bail everyone out.

Doing the same thing with nuclear isn't a special subsidy, it's standard operating procedure across all industries. Requiring nuclear plants to account for every last penny of risk or externality is fine if they're going to do the same thing for everybody else, but they don't. So are we going to require everybody to insure against the worst case scenario, or not?

Solar risks are often dismissed, more probable, but still much less nasty.

Typical solar cells are made of glass/ceramics so they don't actually burn and the cleanup should actually be manageable.

Ah, so you're telling me that your proposed new power plants can't meltdown. Well that's great to hear, but you know it hasn't been deployed at large scale for very long, so we don't actually have a good actuarial model of the true risk it poses.

Doesn't that mean we should prohibit operating it at scale until we have some better data on the risks of operating it at scale? Or at least require you to carry the insurance in the meantime, say for six to twelve decades?

Isolated demands for rigor can make anything too expensive to be competitive.

The risk that was being discussed in reference to Ontario was not the risk of meltdown, it was the risk the plant would blow way past the promised cost.

On that metric, we know renewables are far less risky. They typically come in within 10% of the bid.