Australia

Their rationale for why larger Nuclear Reactors were not and could not be included in the report seem to make sense.

GenCost has been advised by stakeholders that small modular reactors are the appropriate size nuclear technology for Australia. Australia’s state electricity grids are relatively small compared to the rest of the world and planned maintenance or unplanned outages of large-scale nuclear generation would create a large contingent event of a gigawatt or more that other plants would find challenging to address.

In the present system, it would take two or more generation units to provide that role. As such, large-scale nuclear plants which are currently lower cost than nuclear SMR, may not be an option for Australia, unless rolled out as a fleet that supports each other - which represents a much larger investment proposition. 

The second issue is that observations of low cost nuclear overseas may in some cases be referring to projects which were either originally funded by governments or whose capital costs have already been recovered. Such prices will not be available to countries that do not have existing nuclear generation such as Australia. 

For more detail go to GenCost section 2.4.4 Perceived inconsistency between high nuclear SMR capital costs and low-cost nuclear electricity overseas from page 17. 

Have you actually read the report or do you just get your opinions from Sky News?