That's just a question of lifetime. Run them for 40 years and your $15 billion for a 3GWe plant will turn out to under $0.015/kWh (assuming constant full load).
Where did $0.015/kwh come from? Here is an interesting report by a MIT faculty group to study the future of nuclear power done in 2003.
http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/
Granted it 6 years old and every nuclear plant now being built has billions in cost overruns. Here are the chapters I am quoting from;
http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/pdf/nuclearpower-ch4-9.pdf
Plus this is the real world, on average a countries nuclear capacity as a whole is never 100%.
In 2000, the capacity factors for the nuclear plants in
France were 76%, for those in Japan 79%, and for those
in South Korea, 91%. (Notes page 45 in report; page 17 in pdf)
Since they are comparing nuclear costs to coal and gas they use overnight cost not all-in cost/installed costs and they are using $2,000kwh overnight which is no where close to the all-in
estimates $6000kwh utilities companies are forecasting for current constructions, and that doesn't include cost overruns. Here is a very telling quote;
We have not relied on construction cost
data for U.S. plants completed in the late 1980s
and early 1990s; if we had, the average overnight
construction cost in 2002 U.S. dollars would
have been much higher. (page 40 in the report, page 11 pdf)
It does mention a number close to yours;
In addition, the average operation and maintenance
costs of U.S. nuclear plants (including
(though average O&M costs had fallen to about
$18/MWe-hr and the lowest cost quartile of
fuel) were over $20/MWh during the 1990s
plants to about $13/MWe-hr by 2001)8, rather
than the $10/MWe-hr often assumed in many
paper engineering cost studies...
As previously discussed, our base case assumes
that O&M costs are 15 mills/kWe-hr (page 38 in report; page 10 in pdf)
But that $0.015/kwh is for Operation and Maintenance only, not taking into account construction costs. And their charts are on pages 42-43 for the 40 year life cycle you mentioned running at 85% capacity(more realistic than full load) is $0.067, but that is using their base overnight cost of $2000/kwh not all-in cost(again, not realistic). Even with the their base number, with all those
assumptions of what the cost are, the lifetime cost is still 25% more than your number, which in statistics is equivalent to being miles/km(s) apart. Telling any public company that their cost have increased 25% would be devastating not only to their bottom line, but stock prices too.
Another very telling quote;
The cost improvements we project are plausible
but unproven. It should be emphasized, that the
cost improvements required to make nuclear
power competitive with coal are significant:
25% reduction in construction costs; greater
than a 25% reduction in non-fuel O&M costs
compared to recent historical experience
(reflected in the base case), reducing the construction
time from 5 years (already optimistic)
to 4 years, and achieving an investment environment
in which nuclear power plants can be
financed under the same terms and conditions
as can coal plants. Moreover, under what we
consider to be optimistic, but plausible assumptions,
nuclear is never less costly than coal.(page 41 in report; page 13 in pdf)
China's new construction of the plants with the Westinghouse AP1000 (the same reactor being planned for construction in South Carolina, Florida and Georgia) won't go online a until 2016 at the earliest and they started construction last year. So their already optimistic 5 years is in actuality 8 in reality and that is in a totalitarian government. I can't see a western liberal democracy building them any faster.
Again this is a 6 year old report and costs have increased tremendously since.
narf said:
PS: I love those solar plants,
just wanted to state facts
I just wanted to set the facts straight.