Hacker News Reader

Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

You may wish to look into the economic case against nuclear since it's been dire for a few years now. It's good in comparison with coal (if you include externalities) but solar and wind have undercut it today and are forecast to keep getting cheaper.

It's getting to the point that just the steam turbine part of the nuclear plant is more expensive than solar/wind/battery.

The fact this is such a powerfully held opinion I'd put down to highly effective anti-renewable propaganda having a pernicious effect. Most people seem more anti-renewable than pro-nuclear, probably from absorbing fossil fuel funded propaganda.

In fact I spoke to a Green Party member the other day who thought Tesla batteries only lasted 5 years before needing replaced. It's amazing how well propaganda works if you just repeat stuff enough.

View on HN

Speaking of propaganda, I’d love to see citations on solar and battery being cheaper than just the turbine of a nuclear plant. This seems so hyperbolic as to have gone well into the realm of silliness, but I’d love to learn I’m wrong.

You can see this fairly clearly in the Lazard LCOE report. It shows how much it costs to build each type of plant seperate from running and fuel costs. (Pages 11 and 12 specifically, note the low end coal has no carbon capture so that's more appropriate here for just steam cost, and why the cost of coal overlaps nuclear at the high end)

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019

So low end, coal is about half the cost of nuclear to build, and gas turbines, which are simpler to build as they don't need the phase change (though some add secondary steam generation based on waste heat to enhance efficiency) are about a third of the cost.

Now obviously, to run those coal and gas systems you need to burn fossil fuels which you need to pay for and they generate CO2 (both things that nuclear will win on and regain lost ground, as seen by the high end coal costs with 90% carbon capture included) but we're excluding all of those things entirely from this comparison to try to get the cost of merely building and running a steam turbine.

You could say that not all the cost of the coal plant is the cost of the turbine, but it's unlikely to be much less than the cheaper end of gas plants, and we're not even counting maintenance and operation costs, which again are less for gas than for coal, so that gives us a lower bound.

So in this slightly rigged comparison, gas comes out well ahead of steam generation alternatives, they simply cost more to build and run, even just the coal one with no fancy nuclear stuff.

But renewables are matching that gas cost in many places today. Not only are they the same price to build, if you ignore the build cost of coal and gas entirely they're still cheaper than just the fuel and running costs in many cases. That's why many existing fossil fuel plants are being closed as uneconomic and replaced with newly built renewables even in places with flat energy demand.

I think everyone kind of knows this implicitly. Is there anyone, even their biggest fan, who has ever claimed current nuclear can compete with gas on price if you ignore carbon costs? I've never seen it.

Renewables plus batteries are wrecking the business case for building new gas plants and even rkeeping existing ones open. This will only become clearer as prices drop further.

The dramatic price decline of renewables is projected to continue. Solar plus battery storage is predicted to be cheaper than just gas running costs by 2045.

Which seems like a long way away in some senses, but if you build a gas plant today, you'll probably be relying on projections of still making money at that point, which makes gas less economic to build today.

And if you start planning a fission plant, then you'll be planning for it to come online around that timeframe and run for 40 years. So unless that fission plant will cost less in total than just the cost of running a gas plant, there's no point starting to build it just on economics alone.

This an interesting a well-written post and I am learning things from it, thank you. But when I cry foul on anti-nuclear, I'm not just talking about generating power today, but all the nuclear power plants we could have built over the last 50 years. We could be 0-carbon today except for ICEs, and this would have been so much better. And all that cheap energy would have spurred research into batteries sooner we I'd bet we'd probably already be ICE free by now.

Instead of worrying about the future of this civilization, we'd just be with wind and solar a) pandering to some NIMBYs in Las Vegas after a few decades of Yucca Mountain with b) pulling imperialist foreign policy gimmicks to stop the spread of centrifuges to nations other than cold war powers. Much lower stakes!

Back to your technical points and this shitty timeline, I have a few questions:

1) if we were to eliminate ICEs completely in the US, how much would more electricity would we need to produce?

2) Is there any declining returns of renewables as we aim for that much more? (I don't think but just checking.)

3) Assuming no problem generating the energy, how much more batteries would we need? How much more rare earths and other environmentally costly resources would we need to mind, or are you proposing e.g. fluid pumping?

1) because EVs are effectively a form of grid storage, the two transitions work hand in hand. Smart chargers will absorb excess solar and wind and get discounts as a result. The UK national Grid says no new capacity will be required as long as that flexibility is taken advantage of. The utilisation of the grid will be more consistent as a result.

2) the plan for the last 20% of renewables is a bit more murky than the first 80% which most seem to agree will be straightforward and inexpensive and using the obvious solar and wind tech. I'm fairly confident that a range of solutions will present themselves, I just wouldn't want to predict exactly what mix they'll be as it'll come down to a lot of small innovations and decisions. We have answers now but I believe we'll have more, better, cheaper answers by the time we need them.

3) Rare earths aren't rare, that's not what the name means. So they're not a fundamental blocker, though they are more expensive to extract so the market for electrical storage will naturally gravitate towards more cheap and abundant materials if they're out there.

Batteries for short day-to-day storage are already entering the market and making/saving money. As renewables expand and battery prices fall they'll expand massively (see my answer about EVs). I think we'll need something with a different model for long term seasonal storage though, but the main thing will just be building lots of cheap renewables. The "problem" will be as much about all the cheap abundant energy we have in spring/autumn as about the shortages caused by winter heating, summer cooling peaks. Storing that electrical energy as ammonia/hydrogen/whatever to shift energy is going to be a big thing I think, but only so far as it's cheaper than just adding yet another solar panel. (The current big innovation is just putting more solar panels on the back of your solar panels. It only add 1% but it's cheap, so why not?)

I think focusing on building costs is a red herring. Yes, solar today is relatively cheap to build. But are storage solutions really going to be that much better in 2045? How much of the build cost of nuclear is assuming the use of relatively outdated 1970’s designs plus the associated regulatory burden?

The economic case against nuclear is largely a byproduct of falling prices from fracking. That obviously can’t go on forever, and pulling back subsidies for fossil fuels would slowly help the economics align.

Meanwhile nuclear plants are being built at a good pace throughout the world.

A lot of the “anti renewable” people I know are some of the biggest proponents of nuclear. It’s strangely a popular position among America’s “right”.

See my other comment for some thoughts on how much gas generated electricity would cost even if you set the price of gas at zero and ignored carbon pollution

In the past fracked gas and unpriced carbon externalities have been the big factors for nuclear cost disadvantages, starting roughly about now (and already in some places) renewables will be doing to gas what gas has done to nuclear and take nuclear (and coal) out at the same time as a byproduct.

A carbon tax would give a short term boost to existing nuclear over gas, which is one of the many reasons it's a good idea, but it also accelerates renewable adoption and price declines which already render new build nuclear ridiculous in economic terms.

> The economic case against nuclear is largely a byproduct of falling prices from fracking.

Fracking changed the economics of all energy production, not just nuclear. The economic case against nuclear is that it can potentially wipe out everyone in a 50 mile radius. The cost of a nuclear power plant is therefore proportional to the surrounding real estate value.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com