Hacker News Reader

Comment by Creationer | Hacker News Reader

The problem isn't cost of power generated, its the ability to respond to rapid volatility - when clouds obscure solar panels, and when the wind stops blowing.

Nuclear cannot do this so it is useless. Batteries and gas power plants can which is why they are being rolled out.

Wind, Solar, Gas, Batteries and Electric Vehicles are existing solutions to the climate problem. The market will implement them slowly, since they are cheaper and superior to legacy solutions, but we need political effort to do it more quickly.

View on HN

A certain baseline power requirement must be met.

It's also interesting to see the volatility of solar and wind be used as an argument against baseline generation, as this has traditionally been an argument against renewables.

It's an argument against renewables only when the renewables are expensive. When renewables are cheap, then nuclear is placed in an impossible situation, as nuclear either displaces the renewables when they ARE available (incurring a large marginal cost), or only runs when they aren't (forcing nuclear's large fixed costs to be amortized over much less output).

It's likely that a cost optimized grid will have little or no nuclear in it.

Unless you do solar and mostly skip wind, in which case you can build enough nuclear to run the nighttime load and solar for just the extra daytime load, then you can run the nukes 24/7. That minimizes both nuclear downtime and storage requirements.

But if we're going to build a lot of wind, that still doesn't necessarily doom nuclear, if we can lower the capital cost of nuclear. The article describes some fairly simple ways to go about that; a recent study at MIT had the same recommendations.

Down the road a decade or so, molten salt reactors will start to be available, and those look to have much lower capital costs and good load-balancing.

Running nuclear plants just at night would double the cost of that power. This would be insane.

Using nuclear instead of solar when solar was available would increase the cost of that power by a factor of 3 or more. That would also be insane.

Nuclear just doesn't have a place on a grid with a large renewable supply.

EDIT: You wrote:

"I agree that would be insane, which is why I said to run the nuclear 24/7 and build enough solar for the extra demand during the day."

This is case #2, using nuclear power during the day when you could have used cheap solar. It makes no sense economically at current nuclear costs.

I agree that would be insane, which is why I said to run the nuclear 24/7 and build enough solar for the extra demand during the day.

Wind/solar is only that much cheaper if you ignore storage.

Stop ignoring the possibilities of much cheaper nuclear and things look different anyway. South Korea is already 6X cheaper according to the article, and some GenIV designs are likely to do even better.

South Korea's numbers lack transparency, and I believe they assume very low interest rates (that is, they socialize the financial risk.)

Is there a POSSIBILITY of much cheaper nuclear? Sure, anything is POSSIBLE. Is it LIKELY? Experience says "no". And surely it's not possible in the US right now. Who is going to suddenly build these much cheaper nukes here, the Nuclear Power Plant Fairy? The SMR companies are not in a position to deliver now; the one that is closest, NuScale, is not promising the kind of cost reductions that would be needed.

You believe that do you? Do you have a source? Because there's a recent MIT study that says they really are much cheaper, for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with assuming low interest rates.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2018/10/01/3-reason...

Maybe the U.S. will keep dragging its feet, but that doesn't mean the technology is inherently expensive, it just means we're bad at it in the U.S.

(And you're still ignoring storage savings in the solar/nuke scenario.)

> Who is going to suddenly build these much cheaper nukes here, the Nuclear Power Plant Fairy?

There actually is a simple solution: follow UAE and let Koreans build standardized APR-1400.

"Robin Mills, CEO of Dubai-based energy consultancy Qamar Energy, has projected that Barakah will supply energy at a cost of roughly 11 U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour, assuming the startup delays are not substantial. (All four reactors are scheduled to be operating by 2021.) Mills regards that as inexpensive for low-carbon power that can be ramped up as demand increases. But solar is now even cheaper in the Gulf region, where the same intense sun that keeps the seawater hot puts solar power plants on steroids. “Solar has become the lowest-cost source of electricity compared to pretty much anything,” says Mills."

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/the-united-arab-emi...

At the same time, solar PPAs in the US are falling so fast it's hard to keep track of the record holder. Here's one from last year for $0.023/kWh.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/nevada-beat-ari...

Batteries and things like batteries serve shifting demand relative to slower-moving supply for nuclear even better than they fit unpredictable/irregular supply renewables.

Unlike sunny or windy days, nuclear power is consistent 24/7 and output can be modulated (albeit, with delay) by raising and lowering control rods. Batteries (electrical or mechanical) can store extra nuclear-produced energy and use it to power the grid while output increases to match demand, and vice versa.

No. If renewables are cheap, then batteries and other storage will just serve to reduce the fraction of time renewables are not covering demand (why charge the batteries with nuclear if cheaper renewable power is available?) The smaller this fraction is, the worse nuclear does economically.

What if you need twice as much electricity in the winter as in the summer? You're either going to need double the renewable capacity (4 x if you're solar-based) or some kind of super battery. Which doesn't exist yet.

The point for nuclear isn't just to cover demand curves; it's that to decarbonize the entire economy you need to both switch current electricity production to low-carbon sources and increase the capacity by 3-6x to cover all other energy requirements (including sucking carbon from the air to counter chemical processes we can't decarbonize).

Nuclear has to be part of the solution.

Solar is headed toward as little as $0.01/kWh, an order of magnitude cheaper than high capacity factor nuclear. At that price, you cover seasonal shifts by some combination of overbuilding and curtailment in the summer, plus production of hydrogen. You burn the hydrogen in the winter in relatively cheap gas turbines (simply cycle turbines + generators are around $400/kW). This would be much cheaper than seasonal low capacity factor nuclear.

The other thing that will happen is that energy-intensive industry migrates to lower latitudes where there's less seasonality. Sorry, Europe.

I don't think nuclear advocates have gotten through their heads just how dire the situation is for nuclear energy. It is just not anywhere close to viable now, or even needed, and you do yourselves a disservice by concocting flawed arguments that let you think otherwise. Nuclear is going to survive only by large reductions in cost (and those costs are not due to some conspiracy of your political adversaries; they are due to the complexity and difficulty of the technology). Otherwise, it's going the way of vacuum tubes and magnetic bubble memory.

Some non-trivial nuclear capacity is expected to make high-renewable deep-decarbonization scenarios significantly cheaper [1]. That hydrogen and battery storage stuff quickly adds numbers to the system cost. Solar alone with no storage doesn't work even a little (because of night time).

[1] http://energy.mit.edu/research/future-nuclear-energy-carbon-...

Renewables (and batteries) simply aren't that cheap. Even ignoring externalities like disposing of EOL solar panels.

Not yet. But if you extrapolate out the cost of solar. using the historical experience curve, as it builds toward tens of TW of installed global capacity it could get there.

If you extrapolate this trend line far enough, does it reach zero? There's only so much future prediction you can accurately make from historical performance.

> as it builds toward tens of TW of installed global capacity it could get there

And that's kind of the other problem. How much land is that?

Per this perhaps dated 2013 report[0],

It takes "3.4 acres of solar panels to generate a gigawatt hour of electricity over a year." Unclear on if that's only in sunny desert locales like California/Nevada, or average over the US, or whatever.

Anyway, if my math isn't radically incorrect, that comes out to 114 kW of capacity on average, in whatever these test conditions were.

Just 10 TW of capacity would require, uh, 1.2e12 m², or 13k "survey townships" (US land units get weird), or 466k "sections" (weird US land unit that equals mi²) or 298 million acres.

For some comparison, California is 164k mi². Texas is 269k. You could (hypothetically) cover the entirety of California and Texas with solar panels (433 mi²) and you still would not reach 10 TW of average production.

Admittedly, your scope is global and these examples are US states. But it is still a ton of land. Perhaps efficiency has increased slightly since 2013, but by a factor of 2 or more? 10? And how much space will we need in landfills for EOL panels?

Global demand was about 22,100 TWh/yr in 2011 (random figure), so say it's doubled since then; we'd still need something like 233k mi² of these panels to supply the world, assuming perfect capture from season to season and overnight. That's most of Texas in (2013) solar panels...

[0]: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56290.pdf

There's plenty of land for tens of TW of global capacity. Remember, the Earth is constantly being struck by ~100,000 TW of sunlight.

And no, an experience curve never reaches zero. It's a power law in cumulative production.

Interesting this gets quickly downvoted. I totally agree with what he/she says. Screwing up once, then the site is fucked for total human eternity, and you have a no-go zone on the map forever. Afterall, "Anything That Can Possibly Go Wrong, Does".

"Forever" may be a bit of an overstatement as we get better understandings of the health effects of low-dose radiation. Wolves are loving it in there (people were worse than radiation for them) [1].

[1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a22011471/c...

No, it's the cost of power. And even if nuclear were technically able to respond instantly, it's economically pointless, since if you don't run a nuclear plant most of the time the cost of power goes all to hell.

You can do a few things to solve this problem:

* Couple the nuke to a large thermal storage system and load follow with that

* Use steam bypass to switch energy from the turbogenerator to desalination, direct decarbonization, liquid fuel synthesis, district heating, industrial processes, and so on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com