Nuclear power is the only green solution (2004) | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear power is the only green solution (2004)

jameslovelock.org

199 pointsmpweiher372 comments

In 2004 solar power was still far too expensive to be a viable option, to the point where he didn't even bother to mention it: "there is no chance that the renewables, wind, tide and water power can provide enough energy and in time." This is no longer true; installing new photovoltaic generation capacity is now cheaper than continuing to run existing coal plants in much of the world, and although the humans still need to ramp up production capacity to build enough panels, it looks like they are on track to make the switch in the 2020s. The total solar resource is about three orders of magnitude larger than marketed world energy consumption.

We shouldn't fault James for not seeing this in 2004, but now we know he was wrong, as many of us were.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics

Edited to add: competitive-bid power purchasing agreements hit a new low this week of US$15.67 per MWh in Qatar https://archive.fo/UBWWi but there are projects in many equatorial parts of the world hitting similar lows. This is a factor of 10 less than what end-users currently pay for electricity in California and roughly a factor of 3 less than the average wholesale cost there.

But coal plant as opposed to solar plant has a reliable, predictable output and works after dusk. Nuclear power plant also has these characteristics.

We do not have to limit ourselves to just one source. Blocking nuclear in favor of some sort of pie in the sky global power network and huge renewable infrastructure is common for some reason.

We can use any and all power sources that are clean.

I completely agree with you. My argument was not against solar. It was against ‘solar only’. Of course, there are other renewables and if some country has an option to use solar + hydro then they do not need nuclear. But not everyone has that option.

Disclaimer: I am a layman in this topic and not energetics expert, this is my understanding of the state but please feel free to correct me.

> We can use any and all power sources that are clean.

I completely agree with you on that. Of course, the disagreement hinges on whether you can consider nuclear power "clean"...

There's enough data today to show that it absolutely is. No air pollution, very little CO2, almost no deaths/TWh compared to other sources.

Accidents have been bad but recall that fossil while operating normally kills 3.8 million/year and causes climate change. In comparison to that nuclear is absolutely pristene.

Germany's choice to phase nuclear out and leave coal on straight up kills a few thousand people per year.

> Germany's choice to phase nuclear out and leave coal on straight up

Often repeated, but still wrong: Germany also phased out coal.

"Is in the process of phasing out", maybe, but it's absolutely not phased out yet. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-51133534

Incorrect. Here's some live data for you to gander at: https://www.electricitymap.org

They still run over 40 GW of coal.

Yeah, sorry, native German speaker here, I got the tense wrong. Germany is in the process of phasing out coal, just as with nuclear. https://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-germany-coal-powe...

Yup. They promised to phase coal out later and phased nuclear out today. Literalling killing a few thousand per year by air pollution while they're at it. It's a great anti-scientific tragedy of our times due to fear of radiation and inability to judge actuarial statistics correctly.

I'm not at all disagreeing. The coal phase-out should have happened a) before the nuclear phase-out and b) decades earlier. Processes like these tend to be pretty sluggish, the political discussions for both date back to the 1970s. Chernobyl was a big thing in German politics, and there are still some species of mushrooms that can't be eaten in the country. The actual health problems were negligible, but this isn't how politics work.

Gotcha. Yeah the mental effects of Chernobyl melded with all the fears about nuclear weapons fallout, which Russians and American had been scaring people with for years at that point.

The nuclear industry totally failed to recover from a PR point of view, and since then has hid under a rock rather than explained how low carbon and safe it is.

Although Germany do say they will phase out their Coal-fired power stations by 2038 - so another two decades to go.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/26/germany-agrees...

Nuclear risks tend not to be straight up death; the risk is that a Chernobyl type incident would contaminate a very large area of farmland with bioaccumulative fission products, eg. Cesium-137: https://www.oecd-nea.org/rp/chernobyl/c06.html

The risk can't be measured in "lives per year" because for most years it will be zero. The "long tail event" is something like: each reactor has a 1/10,000 lifetime chance of an incident of releasing cs137 which will contaminate a random area of Europe in which agriculture becomes uneconomic to make safe. It's a probabilistic judgement of the type that we're very bad at dealing with.

The numbers I'm using incorporate the UN UNSCEARs estimate of long term cancers due to Chernobyl. These are factored in.

In fact, building a straight-up Chernobyl reactor that runs for 5 years and then explodes is still safer than running a regular old coal plant for 5 years. Fossil is that bad.

The concern about farmland contamination is not because people are farming around Pripyat and getting cancer. On the contrary, it's because people are not farming around Pripyat. Deaths per terajoule doesn't factor in the loss of the farmland.

I think you're probably right that, even with frequent meltdowns, nuclear power would be less bad than coal. But I also think that we don't have a large enough number of disasters to extrapolate reliably. A hundred Chernobyls might produce much more than a hundred times the deaths from one Chernobyl — or much less.

Well we just had a triple-meltdown at Fukushima where the plants actually had containment domes. Estimated deaths from radiation integrated over all time? Up to 1.

The difference between nuclear's safety and fossil fuels anti-safety is astounding. They are not even remotely comparable. 4 million deaths per year from fossil, year after year. Up to 4000 total deaths across the decades from nuclear.

Fossil fuels are causing over 2 long-term cancer-included Chernobyls per day every single day right now.

This is an important point that's hard to get through to people.

Sounds like fossil is really helping to prevent overpopulation.

People's emotional reaction to nuclear plants isn't about long term safety, it's about the failure mode. When a nuclear plant fails catastrophically it becomes a long-term area denial weapon.

At a statistical level, I'm willing to bet that driving a car is probably much more dangerous than living near either a nuclear plant or a fossil fuel plant, but we still do it.

The problem with nuclear power is, unlike fossil fuel plant or cars, an accident takes your home, your daily social connections, and your daily life. It turns you and your family and friends into refugees.

It's not impossible for fossil accidents to be that bad; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buncefield_fire are the ones from the UK I remember, but the biggest may be the huge poisioning of the Bhopal disaster which is technically more the chemical industry's fault.

But the big shadow behind nuclear is weapons proliferation. From the 60s onwards nuclear bombs brought the possibility that there might be a civilisation-destroying nuclear exchange, and as the discourse around Iran has shown it's quite difficult for bystanders to distinguish between the two.

Something else is at the root of nuclear fear. There have been much more serious renewable accidents.

Banqiao Hydroelectric Dam, China, was breached Aug. 8 1975 killing more than 85,000 people that day. A study conducted by eight Chinese water science experts who probably had access to censored government reports, estimated the number of total dead — from flooding and the resulting epidemics and famine — at 230,000.

https://www.ozy.com/flashback/230000-died-in-a-dam-collapse-...

Are solar panel and wind turbines clean ?

They need to be changed often, they use lots of concrete (especially for wind turbines), they need lots of materials and have a quite low power factor (10-20%).

> They need to be changed often, they use lots of concrete (especially for wind turbines), they need lots of materials and have a quite low power factor (10-20%).

How many tonnes of concrete per megawatt do wind turbines use, and how many do nuclear power plants use? Solar plants used to use a lot of concrete, but they no longer do.

"Power factor" is an attribute of electrical loads, not electrical generating equipment; it describes how far the load's current consumption deviates from the perfect in-phase sine wave of, say, a resistor. Perhaps you meant "capacity factor", the ratio of average power produced to peak power produced. Typical capacity factors for wind turbines are in the vicinity of 35%, although some offshore wind farms reach 60%. Photovoltaic plants typically have a capacity factor of around 25%, though in sunny places like Arizona and California it can exceed 30%. In the US, the lowest PV capacity factors are in Maine, which averages 12%. Germany's average PV capacity factor is 10%. Natural gas peakers are around 9%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor

I've already thoroughly demolished this nonsense about "need to be changed often" in the case of photovoltaic panels. I don't know what wind turbine lifetimes are. Shorter, I imagine, but they still have a much higher ERoEI than PV or in fact any other power source.

> Nuclear power plants built in the 1970’s used 40 metric tons of steel, and 190 cubic meters of concrete, for each megawatt of average capacity.

> Modern wind energy systems, with good wind conditions, take 460 metric tons of steel and 870 cubic meters of concrete per megawatt.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2007/07/constructing-lot-of-nu...

First source I found.

Wind turbine lifetimes are 20 to 25 years at the best.

I agree for solar panels, they don't need lots of concrete and only loose efficiency over time. But you would need lots of them + a complete power storage system behind. So the cost and material used to have a similar power output is still order of magnitude higher.

Can you find a source from, say, the last five years? I think wind turbines have changed substantially since 2007.

> But you would need lots of them + a complete power storage system behind. So the cost and material used to have a similar power output is still order of magnitude higher.

This turns out not to be true.

https://www.forconstructionpros.com/concrete/article/1088605...

https://www.forconstructionpros.com/concrete/article/1088605... is still 7 years ago, but it says they used 30,000 "tons" (probably about 27000 tonnes in modern units) of cement occupying 122500 "cubic yards" (94000 m³ in modern units) to support the 152 2-MW turbines of a 304 MW wind farm. That's 89 tonnes (though that number is probably wildly approximate) or 304 m³ per megawatt. This is a little more than the 190 m³/MW for nuclear plants cited by the 2007 NextBigFuture artcle, but a lot less than the 870 m³/MW for wind farms they cited.

So, if concrete requirements for wind farms dropped by two thirds from 2007 to 2013, what do you suppose they are today?

Dropped by 2/3 ok. For a lifespan of, 20 years ?

Again a power plant life expectancy is 3, maybe 4 times that. And you need to do the foundation once.

You don't replace a wind turbine over a wind turbine, you need to redo the foundations (the concrete is constantly stressed and fragilized through the years), same for a power plant (also for security purposes).

This doesn't count the concrete needed for the access roads and cables to connect everything. From the article "Lafarge also supplied 20,000 tons of Type I cement for soil stabilization of approximately 44 miles of roads".

Let's try to do the maths with a modern power plant as well. Knowing that you produce more energy than in the 70' with modern turbines and we have bigger plans as well on smaller areas.

My first thought to this: can the turbines be made from wood instead? Searching for it, I found this:

https://newatlas.com/timbertower-wooden-wind-turbine/25007/

Making things out of wood is generally a good idea to save on carbon footprint. I have doubts you could build a nuclear power plant from timber given all the containment & shielding requirements.

Nice! But I bet it still uses a comparable amount of steel to the reactor reactor (in the blades), and I don't think replacing steel with wood would impact the concrete usage either.

I think the blades are mostly fiberglass these days?

Glulam wood can substitute for some uses of concrete, but I'm thinking it's probably not ideal for earth contact applications. Especially in places like Ohio, which we mentioned as an example in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22181187

There are utility-scale solar installation options that use no concrete at all. Steel earth anchors support the frames on which the modules are mounted.

The low capacity factor (it's actually around 30% for new solar and 50+% for wind) is already accounted for in the levelized cost of energy. LCOE from renewables is a factor of 3-4x lower than from new nuclear.

> They need to be changed often

I looked for some reference material and I found a "rule of thumb" which claims that PV panels lose about 1% efficiency per year of operation and can last 25-30 years.

Nuclear power stations (in China) are designed for a 40 to 60-year operating life.

25–30 years is the design life; they can last a lot longer than that. Silicon is an astoundingly stable substance.

> We can use any and all power sources that are clean.

I would prefer if we did not use use any power source that is dirty. It might sound similar but the outcome is very different. A ban against fossil fuels would prevent countries from relying on fossil fuels for base load when wind or solar can't fulfill demand.

> We do not have to limit ourselves to just one source.

Well, as long as it is no coal or nuclear, no, we don't. But those two do not like to share capacity, so as much as you have them, you better use them.

> Blocking nuclear in favor of some sort of pie in the sky global power network...

The natural state of nuclear is blocked. It's not in favor of a renewable network, it simply is. Maybe it would be better if it wasn't, but that's not reality.

Reliable and predictable at 2x the cost.

Saving 50% on generation gives you a lot of options in terms of demand shaping and storage.

It's also far, far less capital intensive and doesn't require an uncapped disaster insurance subsidy from the taxpayer.

1) Increased investment in nuclear energetics should bring the cost down

2) 2x cost for these attributes does not seem particularly bad to me.

3) I am not aware of any production ready options that have been deployed at scale somewhere. I know there are a lot of ideas however. If you have time can you please point me to the most promising ones? I am genuinely interested.

Nuclear has shown no particular inclination to come down in price whereas renewables have.

It's just not cost effective without both massive implicit and explicit government subsidies.

Renewables are cost effective now and will only become more so.

They're cost effective when the sun is shining or wind is blowing but are strongly tied to increased high carbon fracked natural gas otherwise. When batteries are used the Energy Return on Investment drops below what's necessary to sustain industrialized civilization (around 5:1).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2019.100399

Even without including cost overruns and decomissioning, wind energy costs the same per kilowatt of capacity[0,1].

And the actually produced energy as share of capacity (= the capacity factor) is way better than most think. For the nuclear plants in France it currently is just over 70%, while it is about 50% globally for offshore wind parks [2,3]

[0] http://www.windustry.org/how_much_do_wind_turbines_cost

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-edf-nuclear-epr/frances-e...

[2] http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/wind-energy-factsheet

[3] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/20170912wnisr2017...

Edit: Changed phrasing because it apparently sounded like the 50% capacity factor also referred to France.

You are completely wrong on your numbers, in France in 2018 nuclear has a capacity factor of 71% and wind of 21,1%

https://bilan-electrique-2018.rte-france.com/eolien/

Also there is currently no offshore wind park, as only offshore would approach the 50% capacity factor, but they won't, they will be in the 43% as estimated by renewables.ninja

The price of the MWh of offsore park will be from 44 to 150€/MWh, where EDF is forced to sell its nuclear at 42€/MWh, average price of wind in 2020 93€/MWh.

It sounds like you confirmed their nuclear capacity factor ("just over 70%") and pointed out that French wind farms have a lower capacity factor (21.1%) than wind farms on average. I don't think that constitutes evidence that they are "completely wrong on [their] numbers".

Price and capacity factor where completely wrong for wind, also current wind subsidies are about 93€/MWh.

They were citing worldwide capacity factors and prices for wind, not French ones, which I agree are much worse.

That was not obvious, it was written like a French nuclear with French wind comparison. And also that is misleading because comparing the low capacity factor of French nuclear because it is used for load following and curtailed in summer because it is scaled for winter usage using restive heating. And comparing it to offshore with intermittent power, not dispatchable in the best location, does not make sense. With penetration wind will also be curtailed, and is already happening in china and Germany.

Let's look at actual and current numbers for construction costs, ignoring subsidies:

Wind: "The costs for a utility scale wind turbine range from about $1.3 million to $2.2 million per MW of nameplate capacity installed." http://www.windustry.org/how_much_do_wind_turbines_cost

Nuclear: " Companies that are planning new nuclear units are currently indicating that the total costs (including escalation and financing costs) will be in the range of $5,500/kW to $8,100/kW or between $6 billion and $9 billion for each 1,100 MW plant." https://www.synapse-energy.com/sites/default/files/SynapsePa...

I was giving actual current feed in tariff for French wind.

Then it's now my turn to call your numbers misleading ;) I don't think you can directly compare the two that way because a) The French government heavily invested in nuclear for strategic reasons, not directly economical ones. The EDF still is essentially state-run. We can't really infer cost arguments from this. b) Practically all nuclear plants in France are decades old, and had many years for recouping initial investments. Current market prices for energy are therefore not a good argument for costs of newly built plants.

If we look at the costs of constructing new nuclear plants (which the article we comment on is about), France is a particularly bad example, with current costs already at $11B for 1600MW of capacity for the Flamanville project. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-edf-nuclear-flamanville/e...

I'm a bit confused where we disagree? You posted the same capacity factor for nuclear. Here is a real world example of a Danish wind farm averaging 47.7% over 7 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horns_Rev_Offshore_Wind_Farm#H...

I disagree that current onshore wind in France is not 50%, only 21%; also maybe you were comparing the low capacity factor of French nuclear because it is used for load following and curtailed in summer because it is scaled for winter usage using restive heating. And comparing it to offshore with intermitttent power, not dispatchable in the best location. Totally misleading.

You are right, it wasn't my intention to imply the 50% refer to France. I'll try to edit the phrasing.

I don't get why you think comparing to offshore wind is misleading, though. Could you expand on that?

Comparing worst capacity factor (for cited reasons) with best CF without saying it is offshore in some of the best location is misleading. Also is comparing dispatchable and intermittent/fatal. There a other factors to consider like reserve ratio, or how the production can cover the power needs over the year, it gives hints at how you need to scale seasonal storage.

I see, thanks. 50% isn't that much of an outlier, though, as the average over both onshore and offshore farms seems to be 42% for younger projects: http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/wind-energy-factsheet

Nuclear is way too expensive, it essentially has lost. It will certainly will play a part for decades, but e.g. wind turbine parks are already at the same price level and have none of the disadvantages of nuclear. Plus several wind parks in a grid work just fine as base load providers, see e.g. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.475...

The intermittency is the one thing nuclear does better than wind. Nuclear can run 24/7 for multiple years on one fuel load on a tiny land footprint with very few raw materials. No other low-carbon source can do that.

But real world nuclear plants seldomly run for years. I just posted links in another comment, nuclears capacity factor in France (the country with a high nuclear buildout) is about 72%, while that of wind is about 50%. The nuclear plants in France routinely have to be shut down / throttled during the summer heat - just at the times of high energy demands.

In the US the nuclear capacity is over 90% across 100 plants. Just because France chooses to curtail doesn't mean they have to. Wind cannot be higher than the wind itself. The characteristic of coming on and off when you want is called being dispatchable.

In the us northwest there's a fairly regular 2-week wind outage across a 4 state area each winter.

It's unavoidable that if you get almost all of your power from some source, but demand varies, you will have a lower capacity factor for that source, unless you have utility-scale power. France does indeed have to curtail nuclear power plant output, because they get almost all their electrical power from nukes, and they don't have big enough resistors to burn up the excess electrical energy that would be produced otherwise. The US has a higher nuclear capacity factor because it gets most of its power from other sources.

> This characteristic is called being dispatchable.

While I mostly appreciate your contributions to this conversation as being informative, a dispatchable plant is one that you can turn on and off to respond to demand, not one that cannot be higher than the wind itself.

If we do get serious about intermittent renewable scale-ups without fracked gas backup we will have to build giant energy storage systems that the nukes will be able to feed into just like the solar PV and wind.

Additionally, nukes can be used for district heating, seawater desalination, hydrogen production, and lots of other non-electric things when the electricity demand is low by using steam bypass techniques.

Regarding correction: I meant to say that but thank you for pointing out that it made no sense as written. I have edited accordingly.

That's an excellent point about the fungibility of energy storage. But I don't think the lower capacity factor of nuclear plants in France is a reasonable argument against nuclear energy anyway.

The non-electric uses of nuclear thermal energy you mention are potentially interesting, but essentially they're just a slightly different form of demand response. If you're doing demand response in your desal plant, you can do it regardless of whether it's an MSF plant driven from nuclear thermal power or an RO plant driven by electric pumps. (And RO is usually considered more efficient.) I think it's more common for waste heat from power plants to be a nuisance that results in cooling towers rather than an asset that results in district heating, although I'm not entirely sure why that is.

You are completely wrong on your numbers, in France in 2018 nuclear has a capacity factor of 71% and wind of 21,1%

https://bilan-electrique-2018.rte-france.com/eolien/

Also there is currently no offshore wind park, as only offshore would approach the 50% capacity factor, but they won't, they will be in the 43% as estimated by renewables.ninja

Throttling nuclear power happens only a few days in the summer, once every few years, with only a few percent because it only impact a few reactor on some rivers for environmental norms, during the lowest electricity usage of the year.

> in France in 2018 nuclear has a capacity factor of 71%

Which is the same number I wrote?

This is what I said, I was talking about the ludicrous 50% capacity factor for onshore wind.

There are a number of onshore wind farms that reach 50%, but a better average for onshore wind is 35%. But offshore wind can reach 60%, and so 50% is a reasonable overall average, depending on where you expect wind farms to be built in the future.

And the onshore wind in France is 21%, and that is a fact you can easily check on the internet with public numbers.

Well I never said "onshore". Nevertheless, wikipedia has an example of an onshore wind farm with 60.2% in 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#Wind_farm

There is currently no offshore wind park in France.

Maybe you mean to compare wind in France with world best wind, but this is what you wrote.

"nuclears capacity factor in France (the country with a high nuclear buildout) is about 72%, while that of wind is about 50%"

Nuclear is more expensive than building a combination of wind turbine parks and natural gas plant. That is a fact.

People theorize that nuclear could be more expensive than a grid that relies on over capacity wind turbine parks in combination with thermal or hydro batteries, but no country has gone that route yet. We have countries that are almost 100% nuclear and we have a bunch that are a mix between wind/solar which falls backs to fossil fuels when needed.

The cost of running a energy grid is the total cost, not individual megawatts being produced in isolation.

Ban fossil fuels and the real costs comparison between clean energy becomes apparent.

What's more predictable than the day/night cycle? We can work around that. More problematic is what's known as a 'Dunkelflaute' in German: Overcast skies, fog, etc, combined with no wind, for days. Doesn't happen that often (in Germany, every 2 years or so), but it happens.

You answered it yourself, it’s not about day night cycle only but also about the weather. But I agree that in this particular area we can probably achieve solid innovation.

Do you think we should base all our hope into things that are not even in the labs yet ?

I prefer to use good ol' technologies such as power plants/damns, they are reliable, they can be done locally (most of solar panels are coming from China), they can be repaired and we can handle them country wise easily.

If we want to reduce our CO2 emissions, we move to gaz (coal -> gaz is -20%), we reduce our consumption (building isolation is -30%, sometimes -50%), and we massively reduce cars usage (by developing trains, another good ol' technology that works really well).

Trains and isolation are great. But gas still produces net carbon emissions. So if you adopt it, you have to move away from it very soon anyway. Seems like wasted effort from my point of view.

It is indeed for a transition phase. I agree.

But if we need to reduce our CO2 emissions really fast it's one of the most efficient way to cut 1/5 of the emissions without massively changing how the grid and the other things are working.

But for sure in the end it's more a way to save time and to reduce coal usage that is also producing serious health issues to the populations.

BTW in English the word for "isolation" in this sense is "insulation".

You can easily find people that did the math for those cases.

Basically we still need to do x10 or more in electricity storage (hard to do when you already built all the reversible damns you can build in your country) in most places by still having the risk of a several day grid cut if we don't have wind and enough sun for a while.

In France for example, we don't have space to build reversible damns anymore. Which represent a huge majority of the electricity stored (batteries are only 2%). We can basically store 14h of the country consuption. Handling those "no wind, no sun" cases would need up to weeks of storage.

Moving to renewable energy is basically stressing the grid. The Germans can use the other countries to limit the impacts but it doesn't work when everyone is doing it.

Except if our society is ok to have multiple times per year global power cuts of several days.

I'd also like to stress that CO2 emission are also massively coming from transports and buildings. Focusing massively on electricity generation decarbonation only is I think a nonsense.

Energy can be stored as electricity... or thermally (most of our electricity is used to create heat or cold, that we can cheaply store for days and even months)

Reversible damns are for small amount of energy and short term... but most classical damns do store much more energy - that is an energy you can decide to use now, or in two weeks, or sometime in few months. They store energy, just can't store already produced electricity

Energy efficiency and demand-response have HUGE potential to reduce energy consumption, and to make energy consumption "programmable"

A good mix of different renewable energy (hydro, biomass, onshore wind, off-shore wind, solar) make it impossible to have a "no wind, no sun" case, even if there will be fluctuation in what level of electricity you can produce

Germany is a terrible place for solar; their solar plants average a 10% capacity factor. By contrast, solar plants in Arizona are around 30%, and even the worst lower-48 US state, Maine, is 12%. Yet they've largely made it work, though perhaps as with Harvard's early computer and the US's early adoption of the Tele-phone, perhaps their pioneering status will slow them down further down the road.

> What's more predictable than the day/night cycle?

Human stupidity.

Wind + Solar + hydro + demand response + some thermal and electric storage has a reliable, predictable output and works after dusk

And for new capacities, that is cheaper than coal or nuclear

what about pumped storage hydroelectricity? It currently accounts for 95%-99% of potential energy storage capacity, is far cheaper and more efficient than current commercially available chemical battery storage methods.

Causes biogenic methane emissions.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5023102/

That's primary hydropower, where there is an external water source constantly carrying organic material into the reservoir. A closed pumped hydro system could have much less organic input (and possibly could exploit the pumping to keep the water oxygenated, so methane would not be produced.)

Solar power towers can be built with molten salt heat stores, which continue to power the turbines during the night, so they do work after dusk now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower

The thermal part of these is essentially the same cost as a coal plant — the only difference is that you're boiling the water with molten salt instead of burning coal — so they're having a really hard time competing with modern photovoltaic. It's true that they're a zero-carbon option for energy storage, but batteries are a more likely option.

Any power plant basically. All those kind of plants are mostly similar (turbines activated by steam that produces electricity), the biggest difference is how you produce the heat.

Solar power is still a tiny part of global power and even in terms of growth its not dominate. Not a single industrial country is anywhere close to use solar as their primary power source.

Their are massive unsolved problem when it comes to energy distribution and storage. People love to quote prices of the cells, ignoring the larger end to end cost. Solar power will have to be replaced much, much faster then a nuclear plant. Replacing 1000s of km² of solar is a massive problem in itself.

France used nuclear to go to zero carbon power in the 70s its truly a sad state when 50 years later we are still saying 'solar is gone soon replace coal', the same thing that Jimmy Carter was advocating.

This was and is the fundamental failure of environmental policy and environmentalist have not a small part of the responsibility for the situation.

Not to speak of the costs of waste disposal.

https://www.google.com/search?q=solar+panel+waste

I found this article illuminating on that topic:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...

Even the Grauniad article is giving far too much credit to the waste concerns; it talks a lot about the risks of cadmium leaching, for example, but the panels in current massive deployment don't contain cadmium. (By contrast, cadmium was a common anti-corrosion cladding metal for ships 50 years ago, and while it caused environmental problems, it was far from an environmental disaster. We aren't talking about PCBs or mustard gas here.)

> About 80% of a solar panel module can be recycled

Operative word here is 'can'. The reality is that this is not happening for the most part and there is no standard solution in sight.

> The Electric Power Research Institute notes that long-term storage of used panels until recycling technologies become available may be the best option for dealing with this waste stream. Ultimately, it’s an issue that will need to be addressed as solar panels become more widespread and reach the end of their 25-plus year lifespan, much like the issue of nuclear waste. But it’s an issue that we should be able to resolve with smart policies and technologies.

Unlike with nuclear waste, this is not actually regulated or managed, most of solar cell waste is simple general electronics waste and gets resold to Africa where kids can get to take it apart. Solar also produces about 1000x more waste in volume.

In comparison not a single gram of the wast from nuclear escapes into the environment. Its all captured and accounted for, and in most countries already financed by part of the electricity price. The US already has a huge saving account with money (that is politically deadlocked).

I really don't see how this is a defense.

> But that’s only a problem for broken panels, which are relatively rare except perhaps in the wake a natural disaster like a hurricane or earthquake. In a disaster area, leaching of metals from some broken solar panels is the least of a city’s problems.

I agree that that is not to bad of a concern.

This articles seems to basically say, 'well, Michael Shellenberger, was right' BUT technology can eventually solve this. This is incredibly weak defense when it comes to the nuclear critics. They are right on some of the EV stuff, but that's not what we are talking about.

> Operative word here is 'can'. The reality is that this is not happening for the most part and there is no standard solution in sight.

The reality is that the vast majority of solar panels are still in operation, not junked, so they are being reused rather than recycled, which is even better.

> Unlike with nuclear waste, this is not actually regulated or managed

Well, not any more than things like concrete. You can still get fined for littering if you dump broken solar panels. But there's no reason it should be regulated or managed; broken solar panels are less toxic than things like concrete, chicken bones, fluorescent light tubes, and brass pot scrubbers, and enormously less toxic than things like used cars and CRT TVs. (Even the tiny fraction of solar cells that are the CdTe thin-film type contain only a tiny amount of cadmium or tellurium.)

Spent fuel from nuclear reactors, by contrast, is extremely dangerous, and it makes sense to treat it specially.

> most of solar cell waste is simple general electronics waste

No, that is not true. The usual kind of solar cells are not circuit boards; they are silicon chips, although much larger than the usual kind, and mostly polycrystalline rather than monocrystalline. They are covered by a sheet of glass which is many times heavier than the cells themselves.

I am curious where you picked up such remarkable misconceptions about electronics recycling.

> Solar power is still a tiny part of global power and even in terms of growth its not dominate. Not a single industrial country is anywhere close to use solar as their primary power source

This demonstrates how poor the humans are at reasoning about exponentials. In September 1918, the flu was still a tiny part of global mortality; not a single industrial country was anywhere close to having flu as their primary cause of death. By December it had killed several percent of the global population.

> Their[sic] are massive unsolved problem when it comes to energy distribution and storage

I think you mean transmission, not distribution, presumably because you don't know the difference. There actually aren't.

> People love to quote prices of the cells, ignoring the larger end to end cost

Nowadays people instead love to quote the prices established in power purchasing agreements won by competitive bidding; these hit a new low this week of US$15.67 per MWh in Qatar https://archive.fo/UBWWi but there are projects in many equatorial parts of the world hitting similar lows.

> Solar power will have to be replaced much, much faster then a nuclear plant

Although the most common solar modules are sold as having a 25-year lifespan, they typically continue to work after that time with modest power degradation. Solar cells made in the 1970s are still in use today. Unlike the situation with nuclear plants, there is no known danger in leaving obsolete solar panels in use. Typical nuclear plant design lifetimes are 30–40 years, though some new plants have design lifetimes of up to 60 years.

> Replacing 1000s of km² of solar is a massive problem

Yes, but it's a much cheaper massive problem to solve than replacing the 50 or more nuclear power plants that would be needed to produce the same 250 GW as 1000 km² of solar panels, assuming a typical 25% capacity factor (that's 1000 GWp). At today's prices we're talking about something like 400 billion dollars; this is comparable to the US$200B Qatar spent to prepare for the World Cup or the US$400B budget for the Siberian gas pipeline.

> This was and is the fundamental failure of environmental policy

I would rather say that the fundamental failure of environmental policy is a failure to think through possibilities and consequences using knowledge and reason, instead acting based on gut feeling. Your comment betrays a similar lack of knowledge and reasoning. I suggest you level up your game before you lose all your money in a pyramid scheme.

> I think you mean transmission, not distribution, presumably because you don't know the difference.

Any and all problems from production source to consumption fall under the category of energy distribution. That includes long range transmission, storage, last mile and so on.

> This demonstrates how poor the humans are at reasoning about exponentials. In September 1918, the flu was still a tiny part of global mortality; not a single industrial country was anywhere close to having flu as their primary cause of death. By December it had killed several percent of the global population.

Environmentalist have predicting the raise of solar since 1970. Around 15-20 years ago they started arguing 'its actually cheaper' and 'exponential growth is coming'.

Maybe humans are bad at exponentials, but they are also bad at predicting when exponentials will happen.

And as far as I can tell growth of solar has not been on that aggressive of a curve. If you want to see exponential growth of energy policy go look at the first 20 years of nuclear.

> I would rather say that the fundamental failure of environmental policy is a failure to think through possibilities and consequences using knowledge and reason, instead acting based on gut feeling. Your comment betrays a similar lack of knowledge and reasoning. I suggest you level up your game before you lose all your money in a pyramid scheme.

The difference is that my ideas are actually proven in reality. You know the thing we live in. And it has been done with technology from the 70s. So its a simple fact that if the political will exists a massive nuclear build out can be achieved very quickly and historic data is also totally clear on the fact that nuclear plants, like basically everything else, get massively cheaper if built in high volume.

Carbon energy production had a solution and it had it for 50 years. As anybody knows, carbon that escapes earlier in time is more harmful. Countries like France have done a huge service to humanity by not polluting for the last 50 years.

And not admitting the complete and utter failure of environmental policy in light of this fact is just denial. If nuclear had been adopted on a large scale, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

Your solution basically says 'well hopefully this 5-10 industries will be able to show exponential scales in the next 30 years' because only if that happens to you have even a small chance at actually reaching 2050 goals.

> 250 GW > 400 billion dollars

If we want 250 GW of reliable power at the times we need them will require lot more then just panels.

For that same money we could just build the same basic nuclear plant over and over again, literally at the same location as current coal plants. Requiring almost no broader infrastructure change. A fraction of environmental disruption. A fraction of land use. A fraction of overall resource use. And I would be willing to be, less overall cost.

France build close to 50 GW in the 70s.

Can solar scale enough to cover our needs or would we run into space issues? (And keep in mind most countries don't have the USA's space availability) What would be the environmental impact of covering as much land as we need to cover with photovoltaics or wind turbines?

The benefit of solar is that you can install it on homes and make them self-sufficient (using battery storage at night), or at least vastly reduce the load on the grid. It does not require "new" space, as it simply takes over your roof.

That would probably work in american suburbia but would it even make a dent in the power consumption of densely inhabited cities?

http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/15/pdf/rap-enq/r2195-t1.pd...

"Lors de leur audition précitée, les représentants du BRGM ont indiqué que pour remplacer un réacteur nucléaire de 1 GW fonctionnant avec un facteur de charge de 75 %, il faudrait recouvrir 5200hectares de panneaux photovoltaïques, soit la moitié de la surface de Paris."

Replacing a 1GW nuclear reactor (a power plan can have 2, 3 or 4) with a capacity factor of 75% will need 5200h of solar panels, half of Paris surface.

This doesn't also solve the transport and storage issues to handle the intermittence.

After that you simply have to do the maths. Knowing that solar panels are loosing efficiency over time and needs to be replaced after 20 years. Nuclear power plants are currently holding after 70 years.

5200h is 52km2

France is 551,695 km2

So 1/10,000th of france would be needed for 1GW

A 1GW reactor produces 9 billion kwh a year

France's entire electric requirement is 450 billion, so needs about 50GW, or 0.5% of France's surface area.

Based on those figures, space isn't a problem.

If you draw a 50x50km square on a map of France, you'll quickly realize that's an area the size of Luxembourg - not exactly negligible.

A 50×50 km square would be 2500 km². We're talking about 52 km², which is a 7.2 km × 7.2 km square. Shitty dimensional analysis strikes again!

> A 50×50 km square would be 2500 km². We're talking about 52 km², which is a 7.2 km × 7.2 km square. Shitty dimensional analysis strikes again!

According to the parent poster, those 52 km² are needed for 1GW. France needs around 50GW, 50 times more power and area, ergo 2500 km².

Oh, I see. Thank you for clarifying.

The US would need about 50x500km !

Pretty much. How much is used by vinyards? Or farms?

It's the yellow dots here

https://imgur.com/418BI6Q

France has about 1 million km of roads [1], lets assume at least 2m wide. That's 2,000 sq km.

How many of these roads can you see on this picture

https://imgur.com/FCyt4O6

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_road_netw...

It is becoming very hard to install news wind onshore in France, people are revolting against wind turbine because it decrease real estate price and are found ugly and noisy, and it is happening at a way lower penetration rate than Germany.

Generation isn't the bottleneck - it's the storage.

Solar produces dramatically less power in the winter, and having season long storage is not practical.

As an example, the largest plant in Arizona produces only 10% in January compared to June.

1) That is why you should rely on different (renewable) complementary energy : solar, onshore wind, offshore wind, biomass, hydro

2) You don't really NEED Season long storage, but Season long thermal storage would do the job

1. This doesn't address my point at all.

2. Of course you do. Power needs to be 99.95% reliable. We cannot have entire winters without power just because the sun wasn't out enough in one particular June. ..."thermal storage" is incredibly inefficient and entirely theoretical.

No, seasonal thermal energy stores are a well-known technology with many large-scale deployments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_store

But they are only applicable in some cases. Utility-scale seasonal electrical energy storage is orders of magnitude from practicality.

You don't need it, though. Most populated places can easily install enough solar panels to provide their winter energy demands, providing a great surplus of energy during the summer.

Perhaps continuous power is a luxury we can’t afford.

My thought is we could use combined cycle nature gas power plants to back stop renewable's. So lack of storage isn't the show stopper people seem to think it is.

Perhaps with CCS but that is yet to be proven.

This technology is highly promising:

https://gasturbineworld.com/first-fire-for-la-porte-carbon-c...

Again, show us papers that did the maths where such things are working, even "theoretically".

Throwing techs at a problem will not solve the problem.

Not really, you need massive seasonal storage, like giant hydrogen cavern, or lot of methane gas holder.

Seasonal grid-scale energy storage is indeed not practical, but a factor of 10 is unusually large; the sun angle doesn't change that much. (Must be clouds?) Even seasonal thermal stores are infeasible under some circumstances, although in other circumstances they do work. Massive overprovisioning is probably practical. Demand response is definitely practical, and in Arizona happens by coincidence to some extent, but it remains to be seen whether the reduction delivered by demand response is a factor of 2, 3, 10, or 100.

Source? From what I have seen it is more like 40%.

Finding a grid connection can be a serious bottleneck. Rural substations often lack the capacity to export lots of power. And reinforcing capacity or building new lines is expensive. Interestingly this can make it viable to co-locate battery storage at solar sites. This reduces the peak power that is exported and makes the power line cheaper to build. And the battery's can be recharged from the grid if generation is low and used to generate income through storage contracts.

> As an example, the largest plant in Arizona produces only 10% in January compared to June.

Utterly false.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesquite_Solar_project

Many are only looking at solar panels in term of greenhouse gas emission in the production chain, while any kind of semiconductor processing will have a lot of chemical waste occuring.

Edit: Also, recycling solar panels isn't sraightforward at all because of heavy metals (e.g. Cadmium) being used as dopants.

Semiconductor process waste is a real problem (I used to work in an office where the old Fairchild Semiconductor plant had been, which I was told was the first Superfund site, though it wasn't) but it's actually a very manageable problem. It isn't inherent to the process in the way that CO₂ emission is inherent to burning coal, smelting steel, or making concrete, and it's orders of magnitude better than it used to be.

No, most solar panels do not contain cadmium, and cadmium is not used as a dopant in any kind of semiconductor. Cadmium telluride is a semiconductor, and there are some thin-film solar panels that use it, but the market is dominated by silicon solar panels, which do not contain any cadmium. (CdTe is the most popular thin-film type, though.) Recycling CdTe is enormously easier than mining cadmium and tellurium from ore, so it won't be a problem. If I were doing it, I'd be more worried about the tellurium than the cadmium — that shit stinks in a way that gives new layers of meaning to the word "stench". Finally, "cadmium" is not a brand name; it is a chemical element and thus does not need to be capitalized. This isn't German.

> Excretion is mainly renal although small amounts of tellurium are exhaled as dimethyl telluride which has a distinctive garlic odour which may persist for many days; Reisert (1884) reported garlic breath odour for 237 days following ingestion of 15 mg tellurium oxide.

In short, you have managed to pack so many errors into under 20 words that it required an entire paragraph to explain most of them. Your epistemology is bad and you should feel bad.

Thank you for clearing that up then. For the record, I do feel bad.

Sending hugs. Next time you can leave a higher-quality comment by checking Wikipedia before commenting!

The environmental impact of covering enough land to fulfill world marketed energy demand would probably be insignificant, especially compared to agriculture. The sun on 0.1% of the world's surface would provide all of world marketed energy demand.

There are some possible nuances, though:

1. We do need to be careful about the environmental impact of the manufacturing. Current semiconductor manufacturing is not a major polluter, but semiconductor manufacturing has been a major polluter in the past before emissions controls were imposed, and we're talking about scaling up semiconductor fabrication by about three orders of magnitude.

2. Shading a significant proportion of the Atacama, the Sahara, and the Gobi will surely produce local environmental changes. Perhaps it will give rise to new oases, as shipwrecks sometimes become artificial reefs. But it's hard to predict things like this.

3. It seems very unlikely that energy demand will remain static in the face of such a dramatic expansion of energy supply and consequent lowering of costs, so construction probably will not stop just because current world marketed energy demand is met. In the 2040s we will surely be complaining about the percentage of the Pacific that is covered in nasty solar barges.

You're not wrong here, but solar isn't the whole answer either. While storage is also important, there will always be a need for reliable "baseline" power located closer to usage centers in order to reduce strain on the national grid.

Right now, that is produced by coal or gas. Nuclear is the only realistic "green" option to replace them. Newer small-scale sealed reactor designs make nuclear energy both safer and cheaper than it ever has been. Solar / wind / hydro will certainly displace a lot of coal and gas, but they're not the whole answer in every location.

At the same time, nuclear, coal and gas are exactly the power sources that you do not want located close to usage centers, due to their environmental problems. If grid strain is a concern, local storage is likely the best solution, which could be charged slowly from large remote sites. A small windmill or solar farm could also be present nearby.

Plus, with solar panels on the roof and batteries like the PowerWall, it's possible for many homes to be self-sufficient from the solar panels, as well as run off their storage (even if charged by the grid instead of solar) to offload the grid, either due to supply issues or just to level out peak demand.

there is no technology that exists or is contemplated that can provide storage at the required scale. renewables are very cheap when they are a smaller percentage of the power, but as the percentage increases you need to massively over provision them to deal with the variability.

You'll probably want to read the calculations in Dercuano about lithium reserves, but I agree that massive overprovisioning is a better solution than just massive batteries.

For current large-scale battery projects, see the 100MW (soon 150MW) Tesla battery deployment in Australia.

It is also much easier to install something like a PowerWall in individual homes, and alternative storage forms such as good ol' potential energy storage with water dams or hoisted weights are also available.

Finally, unlike with coal/gas/nuclear where plant size and number has a direct negative environmental impact (one thing being that they all need to run idle even if unused), over-provisioning with renewable energy, especially wind, is not really a problem.

PowerWall doesn't remotely scale to grid-scale, and 150MW battery deployments don't begin to address the hundreds of 2000+ MW coal plants [1] out there. They're a band-aid that only works in specific use cases. Battery manufacture, recycling and transport, combined with the need to replace most of the cells every decade are seen to largely negate both the carbon offset and cost benefits of solar.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal_power_stations

Clearly you haven't done the calculations. And what is this nonsense about negating carbon offsets?

PowerWall scales fine, like most things do, with infinite money. All you need is a ~$10K [1] investment (including installation) for every house every 10 years (warranty period) and voila - grid scale! Oh warranty doesn't cover normal degradation of energy capacity over time. [2]

[1] https://www.energysage.com/solar/solar-energy-storage/tesla-...

[2] https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/new-powerwall-warranty/

No, not for winter heating, also shared is cheaper than privately owned.

You can definitely provide winter heating from rooftop solar panels except within the Arctic and Antarctic circles. Shared things may or may not be cheaper than privately owned; it depends on the particular situation. A utility-scale battery energy storage system needs inverters and distribution lines, each of which have both costs and energy losses; a home battery energy storage system doesn't need distribution lines and may not need inverters. And even if you have shared utility energy storage, it may not meet your reliability needs, so you may need private energy storage anyway, as most data centers do, adding to the costs.

Solar in winter is not as bad as you might think. Up here in Scandinavia, the primary issue is the shortened days, which obviously cut our capacity a bit.

However, if you're using electric heating in your country, maybe we should start by fixing that first. Use something more efficient like ground heat exchange, and possibly remote heating for residential areas. Electric heating is silly.

Well, hydro is still a big source of energy... A diversified renewable energy mix, including offshore wind is much less intermittent than what u imagine

Massive investment in both energy efficiency and demand-response would reduce the need of electricity (even with electric car), and would make the energy consumption more controlable...

And mechanical, thermal and electricity storage could be the final peace allowing a mostly renewable grid... Nuclear could definitely help, but not required

Hydro is not possible in most locations. Diversification is important, but each region must have its own 99.95% reliable power sources.

The national grid cannot provide power beyond a few hundred miles without major losses in power. If you look at Quebec, as an example, they lose between 20-40% of their power in transmission because the hydro dams are so much further north than the population centers.

"Cannot" and "does not" are not the same thing; existing 735kV lines in Québec have losses in the 5%–8% range, and new HVDC designs can lower the losses even further. HVDC transmission is potentially economical even at transoceanic distances — thousands of "miles", if you insist on using poorly defined units from the Roman Empire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydro-Qu%C3%A9bec's_electricit...

https://www.electricitymap.org shows a rather simple pattern. When the wind is clam in EU it goes brown in most countries right now. I take a walk outside and even if south of Sweden is only a single data point, I can often make a pretty good prediction about the color of the map.

More dynamic energy grid and storage could change that, as could investment in nuclear. In the mean time the investment money are currently going into the combination of gas plants and wind farms. Its a local maximum where investment into wind pays off as it is cheaper than fossil fuels when the winds blows, and investment into natural gas pays when the wind is still because then its a sellers market.

> power located closer to usage centers

If you are willing to throw money at the problem then high voltage DC transmission lines can move a lot of power over long distances with surprisingly little loss.

A 1,100 kV link in China was completed in 2019 over a distance of 3,300 km with a power of 12 GW. HVDC transmission losses are quoted as less than 3% per 1,000 km.

What did that cost per km? A large part of the nuclear vs renewable discussing is one about which is cheaper.

Probably not much more than regular transmission lines. Making transmission lines higher in voltage means that they can carry more power over the same amount of current, which means the same amount of aluminum. You just have to put them further apart.

A lot of the costs of transmission lines have to do with safety: it's dangerous to repair them, even when you take expensive safety measures. AC and DC lines have different safety characteristics. You've probably seen the videos of helicopter transmission line mechanics working on HVAC lines like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x94BH9TUiHM — you see those meter-long arcs when they establish and terminate contact with the lines? Those don't happen on HVDC lines. But HVDC lines have their own special safety concerns. We just don't have the century-plus of experience with them, so it wouldn't be surprising if they were more dangerous at first.

Unknown.

ABB has won orders worth over $300 million to supply breakthrough technologies for the world's first 1,100 kilovolt (kV) ultra-high-voltage direct current (UHVDC) transmission link. [1]

For an 8 GW 40 km link laid under the English Channel, the cost was ~£750M.

An April 2010 announcement for a 2,000 MW, 64 km line between Spain and France is estimated at €700 million. This includes the cost of a tunnel through the Pyrenees.

I'd guess ABB's contract was equipment only and that installing 3000km of power line would have been the majority of the costs based on the Spanish/English/French pricing.

[1] https://new.abb.com/news/detail/13922/abb-wins-orders-of-ove...

A more recent reference and thorough analysis on moving to 100% wind, water and solar (WWS) can be found in the soon to be published, 100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything. A draft is available online

https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/WWSBook/WWSBook...

While I am still bullish on nuclear, particularly for space operations, the time delta argument is most compelling against nuclear plants. It can take 20 years for a new plant to become operational. Even after 70+ years of controlled nuclear fission. This is the cost then of not allocating research dollars to civilian long term projects.

And even with a transition to 100% WWS, carbon capture tech will still require some sort of Manhattan Project level of urgency. This may be a great candidate for AI-mediated materials discovery. To search for the "tungsten filament" which will power next-gen "artificial tress" ;)

https://asunow.asu.edu/20190429-solutions-lackner-carbon-cap...

Let's recall that the author of that first link literally sued his scientific critics who published a peer-reviewed take-down of his 100% renewable plan a few years ago.

https://www.technologyreview.com/f/609308/a-renewable-energy...

One element not often mentioned in these is the Energy Return On Investment which drops to around 5:1 as intermittent renewables with massive backup systems ramp up. This low level (5:1) seriously challenges the renewable transition plans.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2019.100399

Nuclear eroi is closer to 50:1.

That paper looks very interesting, thanks! I'll have to read it. I agree that the cost of storage is an important concern, but the calculations I've done don't substantiate the worries I've often seen. On skimming the paper, it isn't obvious what level of overprovisioning, utility-scale storage, and demand response they're presuming, or what learning curves for PV and battery costs (including energy and material costs). Have you been able to find where they described those assumptions?

Most of the world's population does not live near the equator.

The top of the bell curve is roughly on the Tropic of Cancer [1], ie roughly Central America, North Africa, Arabia, northern India, China, etc. That's a lot of solar availability for a lot of people.

[1] - https://www.themarysue.com/world-population-latitude-longitu...

20 years ago most of Earth's humans did not live in cities, either.

It's a common misconception that the closer to the equator you go the better solar panels work. Solar panels are less efficient the more heat they are exposed to.

Far from being "a common misconception", it's definitely true that solar power plants closer to the equator have a higher capacity factor than solar power plants further from the equator. It's true that warm solar panels are less efficient than cooler solar panels, but there are two countervailing effects: solar panels (at a given temperature) become more efficient when more brightly illuminated, and the day is longer and there are less clouds in tropical regions. It turns out that these effects are enormously more important than the thermal effect. That's why PV in the UK has a capacity factor of 11%, German PV 10%, Maine PV 12%, California PV 28%, and Arizona PV 29%.

There's a lovely bargraph in the US at https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=39832 and an even nicer colorcoded map of the US at http://euanmearns.com/solar-pv-capacity-factors-in-the-us-th...

As a point of comparison with the UK's forthcoming Hinkley C reactor they negotiated "£92.50/MWh (in 2012 prices) which will be adjusted (linked to inflation)" which comes to about US$135 per MWh just now. That is on the high side for nuclear but still illustrates that it can cost a fair bit.

Nothing about the greenest and most sustainable solution: reducing consumption. Most Americans could drop their consumption by 75% purely improving their lives, before difficult decisions, many of which would also improve their lives. Several nations, like Thailand, have lowered birth rates purely voluntarily, increasing prosperity and abundance.

Without reducing, new power sources will repeat what led Norman Borlaug said on receiving the Nobel Prize for his part in the Green Revolution:

"The green revolution has won a temporary success in man's war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing space. If fully implemented, the revolution can provide sufficient food for sustenance during the next three decades. But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only. Most people still fail to comprehend the magnitude and menace of the "Population Monster"...Since man is potentially a rational being, however, I am confident that within the next two decades he will recognize the self-destructive course he steers along the road of irresponsible population growth..."

We haven't made much progress stemming growth. Projections to 2100 still show our population growing, yet our global footprint is greater than one Earth.

The population growth is now sublinear, and expected to stop around 2070.

Actually we've made huge progress in stemming growth. Fertility rates in most of the world have been falling, and in most developed nations are now below replacement levels. The big exception is Africa:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...

There's some lag built in, so even with a fertility rate below replacement, population can still grow for a while, but the root cause of population growth is already solved in much of the world.

The problem isn't the people that don't exist yet. It's the 7.8 billion that are already here; and the notion that the best way forward for Humanity is getting as many of them plugged into a system that - in reality - requires vast amounts of dirt cheap, easily transportable and scalable energy solutions.

Came to the US from Europe in 2014, been living in a small 2-room NYC apartment ever since. I realize that not everyone enjoys living in a urban shoebox, but damn everytime i go outside NYC i realize just how much STUFF and SPACE the average American househol has. The huge property, the huge house, all the small and big appliances, gadgets, tools and obviously the riding lawn mower.

Things like the tiny house movement and the sharing economy still have a long way to go.

This is a non-solution. Its basically saying, why don't we just go back to living like before we had technology. That is not gone happen because people want do those things and consume those things. And people already have made those decisions.

The people who were predicting doom because of population were utterly and completely wrong and have been for 50+ years now. Just as terrible a prediction as those who predicted 'Peak Coal' in 1870. Guys like Borlaug are good at what they do but their understanding of the economy is incredibly limited.

The idea that population was the big issue is just fundamentally flawed assumption. The idea that population growth needs to end in order not to have a huge catastrophe is also incredibly flawed.

And add to all that, we can have both population and consumption growth at the same time, and we had that for a long time now and we can continue to do it for a long time. The energy inherent in the LITERAL DIRT on the ground alone could power advanced human civilization for 1000s of years and that is before we even start considering space based resources.

Simply put, with the 3x3x3 Cube of Dirt from where you are now, you have enough Thorium to literally power your whole life, including flying around with airplanes, driving and so on.

In fact we can do that AND at the same time reduce the amount of space people actually life on. Forest and other nature preserves are growing in the Western world. Increasingly people will live in population centers and more and more of the land around will have little actual use other then looking at it.

From wikipedia[1], annual CO2 emissions per capita in the US are 16.1 tons, while for many European countries it's around 6 tons. I understand that there are emissions that aren't included there (like things manufactured elsewhere and imported), but I don't think those are significantly different between the EU and the US?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

Not sure where I claimed there was no difference.

Yes and by far the biggest difference is with countries that use nuclear like France, Switzerland, Sweden.

Many of those gains, can absolutely not be achieved by US population 'purely improving their lives, before difficult decisions'. That is simply not the case.

It would require a total change in energy and transportation policy. Massively increasing the price of gas and flying. Changes in the way they live. And so on.

A comparative person living in New York City, Berlin, London is already not that different.

I agree that improving our energy generation is important.

But we must also get over the idea that we need mass immigration into the West.

The most environmentally friendly thing to do is accept a slow decline in absolute population numbers.

This will mean roads are not as busy, hospitals not full to bursting and the chance to improve the kids to teacher ratio.

I just want those people that want children to have them, and those that don't now. We don't need a global or national policy on how much population we want.

In fact, we are currently subsiding families. I tend to oppose that, but not because of fear of overpopulation.

Most roads are already not used often, its really just a few roads that are to full. And in those cases its really a density problem that we are not gone solve by having slightly less children.

For the rest I don't think population is the issue. The issue is with how those markets are organized. More people means you can have more teachers, not just more children. Currently the ratio is going down already, so I this is happening automatically anyway.

> Nothing about the greenest and most sustainable solution: reducing consumption. Most Americans could drop their consumption by 75% purely improving their lives, before difficult decisions, many of which would also improve their lives.

As an Indian, when I see resource consumption per capita for US, it boggles my mind. But I don't believe every single American can make a significant change without institutional and government support.

Environmental impact is a function of what your society has optimized for. You can't really depend on public transport if the entire society around you is optimized and designed for cars. You'd have a tough time being a vegetarian if meat is a primary component of every meal. You can't forego flights if the rail infrastructure doesn't work well.

A similar thing happens in India. India optimizes for cheap stuff so a lot of stuff available for purchase near me is practically use & throw. I've had keyboards, monitors, powerbanks, cables die on me in 6-12 months. I'm having a hard time buying good quality stuff as India grows. That also has a significant environmental impact.

At the risk of sounding like fatalist, I won't discourage individual action. Every single step is welcome but as humans we need to significantly step up our political initiatives if we are to make a significant dent in climate change.

>At the risk of sounding like fatalist...

No, you sound like a realist. My wife has been an ardent environmentalist her whole adult life, but she has echoed this sentiment to me, to the extent she would rather people not even recycle. It is, she says, the security theater of environmentalism. Political action is needed.

In fact, I believe the populist movements around the world will soon meet with climate change environmentalism, and we will see a great voluntary contraction, supported by governments, that will indeed make a big dent on the problem. Until then, not using plastic straws and veganism is just theater.

The one thing theater can do is raise the consciousness of those around the one performing and socially normalize previously “weird” behaviors, both of which are useful groundwork for effective political action.

Maybe, but I don't think we really know what a "good" global economic contraction will look like, or what behaviors will come with it. Although, it seems pretty obvious that gas-powered vehicles will become a rarity, and (I hope!) working from home becomes the norm, not the exception. (That last one seems like such an obvious change we could encourage NOW.)

We should stop recycling our politicians, and throw away the old ones in a landfill.

Norman Borlaug's nobel prize speech was in 1970. Demographics have not gone in the direction he expected. Dependancy crises are now looming from falling birthrates in most developed countries, and China. China removed the one child policy in 2016 but their birthrate continues to decline and age despite the party's new efforts to encourage fertility. Have a look at Hans Rosling's work.

Why is birthrate decline a bad thing? The global population can't just keep growing... it has to slow down and stop at some point. Honestly we would all be better off if we had stopped growing at 2-5 billion, rather than continuing to grow unchecked to 8+.

It isn't. High dependancy ratios, however, are. i.e. a top-heavy population structure in which everyone is old and they rely on few people of productive working age.

>Nothing about the greenest and most sustainable solution: reducing consumption.

Well that's because it's not a realistic solution. Any solution that goes against the human nature is doomed to fail. Our species historically had issues with implementing solutions that require short-term detriment no matter how large the long term benefits were. Montreal protocol is often cited as one of these collective actions that succeeded, however what is NOT often cited is that the cost of implementing it was tiny compared to respective countries GDP. I.e. millions, not billions of USD.

I agree that we can consume less, it is just a hard policy to push. How will the market be affected? Any politician enacting this change will be hit with the 'destroying the economy'. Is there room for capitalism in that economy? It feels like the idealism wars have doomed us.

Not having children would beat your greenest most sustainable solution.

Be the first of your ancestors to be an evolutionary dead-end! Tough sell...

Our consumption isn’t about things like turning off lights in your house. In the developed countries every human consumes about 10kW. You can actually graph energy consumption per capita and a quality of life index and they will correlate basically one to one. The bulk of that energy goes to power agricultural machinery that produces the food we eat and the transportation of that food from the mid west states to the coasts. There is little you can do to reduce that consumption because geography doesn’t allow for it. Local farms aren’t much better. They often times use old pickup trucks which are way less efficient than trains to deliver food. Even if you don’t use any power at all in your life, no heat, no lights, no transportation, you still would be in the 7-9kW range as long as you eat food.

> Local farms aren’t much better. They often times use old pickup trucks which are way less efficient than trains to deliver food.

This doesn't really make sense to me. Trains don't deliver from foreign farms to my door. You have to drive the food from those farms to the train, and drive the food from the train to its final destination. I don't see how that can possibly be less resource-intensive than getting food from local farms. And that's not even mentioning the difference between monoculture industrial agriculture and small-scale organic farming.

In any case, if you're worried about your resource consumption, you can always make more of your diet plant-based, drive your car less, and avoid flying when possible. In every carbon impact calculator I've used [1], these things make a significant impact. And I agree with the above poster that these decisions can, far from being sacrifices, greatly improve your life.

[1] https://footprint.wwf.org.uk/#/

Large farms move their crops in larger, more efficient vehicles. The efficiency offsets, to some degree, the distance.

You also are conflating organic and polyculture farming. Most organic farming is monoculture and much of it is industrial.

> Large farms move their crops in larger, more efficient vehicles. The efficiency offsets, to some degree, the distance.

Yes I understand this. My point was that it's not as simple as comparing trains to old pickup trucks, which seemed like a strawman. But I've been doing some research and was surprised to learn that food-miles are a relatively small portion of the emissions associated with food, so point taken.

> You also are conflating organic and polyculture farming. Most organic farming is monoculture and much of it is industrial.

I didn't mean to conflate them, I meant that monoculture + industrial is more resource-intensive than organic + small-scale. But I guess I was using "organic" as a catch-all for sustainable farming practices, e.g. polyculture, rather than literally "USDA organic".

Debate about "local produce" aside (which I probably should have let go), my more important point is that it's definitely possible to reduce your carbon footprint meaningfully.

Even if you don't eat, the energy uses to keep the society you benfit from going is high

> Most Americans could drop their consumption by 75%

What would be the impact on overall income and employment rates?

> improving their lives

How could it be done with less income and less employment?

I'm asking honestly because I see this as a huge social-economic challenge.

Imho both would improve because of the change and innovation required. New technologies, new service industries (“decluttering consultant”, maybe).

Plus of course what good does income do if the world around you is shit?

Air quality, water quality, etc, should be baked into our economic models.

Income and employment age currently incomplete measures of health, happiness, and well-being — of which they are supposed to be indicators for.

> We haven't made much progress stemming growth.

The simplest and most effective way to limit population growth is 1) women's education, and 2) increase standard of living. With some or even one of those things, population rate naturally falls (even to below replacement rate, which is not good as Japan and increasingly Europe are learning).

Already, even China's birth rate has fallen to levels that will soon be of concern to the country (obviously, a small working population can't support a massive elderly population). And once India's birth rate makes the same transition, the global birth rate will start to level out. Already, projects are that it will level out around 2100.

Population growth is not the problem. Consumption levels and lack of environmentally-friendly sources of energy are the problem. We can solve one of those now, with nuclear power.

Reducing consumption at this point is not a good option, rather wee need to find ways how to produce more energy in a clean manner, as that's how most of our current problems can be solved.

Carbon capture, polluted water/air filtering, land recultivation, waste recycling, desalination, electricity powered transport, carbon neutral fuel production and even spaceflight - all these can fix our environmental problems if we have enough clean & cheap power.

Just reducing consumption means we reduce our options while still using our current old, expensive and dirty power sources.

And as for global footprint being bigger than the one of Earth at some time in the future - well, Earth and it's resources are just a very tiny part of our Solar System, not to mention it's wider neighborhood.

Only limiting ourselves to the resources our our single planet is a very bad thing to do as that will indeed lead to strife, but using the wider resources of the Solar System should enable us to avoid this pressure for quite a while to come.

> We haven't made much progress stemming growth.

Birth rates in the United States are already below replacement rate. Population growth is a result of immigration. Americans lowering their birth rates further won't do much.

That could be an argument for carbon pricing. If you price in the externalities people might reconsider if they need to use quite so much.

“ Published in The Independent, 24 May 2004.”

16 years later coal generated electricity is still huge and 80% of the world’s electricity is still generated by fossil fuels.

I imagine if we’d used nuclear instead, the world would have bought itself an extra decade or two to solve the problem.

More like an extra 100,000 years http://www.daretothink.org/numbers-not-adjectives/how-long-w...

I don’t think going green on electricity alone is enough to solve global warming.

We need cars to go electric, etc.

The point is that co2 generated over the last 16 years will stay with us for some time. We could have delayed the problem by doing more sooner.

A slow train wreck of decades that everyone sees coming.

At this rate, we’ll be saying the same thing in 2030.

> We need cars to go electric, etc.

Yes, and that creates massive extra demand for electricity generation, which seems very hard to achieve without nuclear power.

> We need cars to go electric, etc.

Marketing is once again far from the truth, check how co2 expensive producing a battery is. Then couple that with the fact that you need let's say 20 years of normal use of a car to "paybacck" that co2 footprint (comparing to an oil car).

Last one is : are you going to keep that same electric car for 20 years?

Battery research should probably be the single most well funded area of research.

Or hydrogen production, hydrogen fuel cells, and hydrogen-based engines. Hydrogen can be created with electrolysis using solar, wind, or nuclear power. Hydrogen-based vehicles have a much better range. Refueling a hydrogen vehicle quicker than charging a battery. Also, it is easy to transport hydrogen to locations where there is no power grid.

(I guess we should do both, but I feel like hydrogen as a fuel seems to be ignored.)

Hydrogen is hard to handle - it is very good at leaking, including through things not normally thought of as porous like metals, and it has low energy density unless under high pressure.

Synthetic CH4 from H2+extracted CO2 seems more likely to happen.

I feel that if anyone took hydrogen seriously, they'd start talking about anhydrous ammonia. This compound actually contains more hydrogen by volume and pressure than elemental hydrogen does. It doesn't have the embrittlement issues that elemental hydrogen has. Ammonia liquefies at a much higher temperature and has a much higher heat of vaporization, which makes it easier to handle. It is a hazardous fuel, but not really more so than gasoline and definitely less so than elemental hydrogen. Anyway, there is already a well-developed infrastructure for handling anhydrous ammonia, because it is regularly used in agriculture. Any cheap and environmentally friendly process that produces hydrogen also produces ammonia, because ammonia is just hydrogen plus nitrogen.

Because I very rarely see mention of ammonia as a fuel, I conclude that no one is seriously attempting to develop hydrogen fuel cells.

Could you post a source or two? I read this claim a few times, but never seen a credible source to confirm the claim.

I’m not sure if your statement is true.

https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-ev-battery-production-co2-em...

Also, consider that we are in the early stages. Battery technology will improve.

There are people still driving cars older than 20 years. If the car is able to last 20 years I am sure plenty of people would keep it that long. Most people trade in their car due to it giving them trouble. It winds up being cheaper to trade in for a new model.... Wonder if car companies are in on this...

Where are you getting your 20 year figure from? There's a study which says 10 years but doesn't account for the energy/co2 required to refine oil. EV battery packs can also be recycled as grid storage.

> We need cars to go electric, etc.

Batteries making process is far from being carbon-free yet.

I completely agree. I imagine using electricity to power everything paired with basically free nuclear power makes for a pretty sweet future. For whatever reason though, people and even “green” politicians generally seem opposed to nuclear.

I do believe nuclear should have a role, but please don’t peddle the ‘basically free’ fantasy.

Can you elaborate in what way it is a fantasy?

It’s actually very expensive.

USA electricity demand was 12071 kWh/person over 2016. Multiply by $0.1/kWh (cost of nuclear power given elsewhere in replies to this submission) means Americans would have spent $1207 on electricity, per person not per household, for that year.

It's expensive to build and maintain to the required level of safety?

Even if, somehow, you had a perfectly safe magic hot rock that could put out a gigawatt, all the plumbing and turbine machinery would still have a minimum cost level that would be cheap but still metered. Maybe something like half the cost of natural gas.

Because nuclear is more expensive than on-shore wind and solar (as well as natural gas, for that matter). The problem with renewables today is not cost, but concerns about variability of the output.

In conservative western countries a large proportion of people are opposed to new development of all kings most of the time. That is absolutely true of energy developments, new housing, infrastructure. Dealing with public opposition is a basic neccessity of building stuff.

Society could literally decide how much energy they want and grow it at whatever rate. No need to be bound by how much oil is in a deposit.

You mean "basically free" as in 10ct/kwh (the price HinkleyPointC in the UK got guaranteed). While most renewable sources on the market get guarantees in the range 2-5 ct/kwh. Even Power2gas2power seems cheaper at this point. And let's not talk how long it currently takes to build a nuclear power plant. In Europe we are currently at about 20 years for that to happen. Sure that happens partially because people oppose it but people also oppose green energy in their backyard and even coal power plants are built faster.

If it is clever to shut down existing nuclear power plants (which are very often past planned life time) one can argue, but building new ones?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...

Are you a time traveller? Because I've only read about the "basically free nuclear" myth in some books from the early 80s.

Nuclear energy is not free, though. Doing it safely is pretty expensive. The "whatever" reason that many people were opposed to it, is that nuclear disaster and nuclear waste are serious issues. Just not nearly as serious as global warming is. It's possible that the risks posed by nuclear energy have been overestimated, while the risks of fossil fuels have been underestimated quite a bit.

> "imagine using electricity to power everything paired with basically free nuclear power"

The problem with this fantasy is that nuclear power is not by any stretch of the imagination "basically free". New build nuclear is very expensive, costing much more on a per-MWh basis than most renewables.

This doesn't mean that we shouldn't be developing new technology to improve the cost effectiveness of nuclear in the future. But right now, each dollar spent on renewables delivers more carbon savings than each dollar spent on nuclear.

While car batteries are charged using fossil fuel derived electricity, you're gaining nothing, and probably losing due to inefficiency. Once electricity is green and cheap, electric cars will naturally follow.

Typical car internal combustion engines are about 20% efficient; typical fossil-fuel power plants are about 35% efficient. So you gain significantly, even before you get to regenerative braking.

> We need cars to go electric, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces...

> The point is that co2 [sic] generated over the last 16 years will stay with us for some time. We could have delayed the problem by doing more sooner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_removal

The graph of global emissions is a nearly flat line, we will be able to look back at any decade and say it could've bended there...ultimately, we just have decisions day to day that will bend it or not.

Your're mixing a non-GHG emmitting technology with waste. Apples and oranges.

How long will our supplies of uranium and thorium last?

There's never been a commercially viable thorium reactor.

That's the big thing that keeps surprising me about thorium. It's supposed to be great, cheap, abundant, and much safer than uranium, and yet nobody is actually doing it. If the claims about thorium are true, you'd think we'd see thorium plants popping up all over the place by now.

> great, cheap, abundant, and much safer than uranium

Some of the claims are true. Cheap, abundant and safer. It's the "economically viable" part that's tricky. No-one has solved that yet. India has a ton of thorium and are highly motivated to build a commercial reactor but haven't been successful yet.

MSRs have to deal with some truly harsh materials for very long periods. Getting that to be reliable for 30+ years of on time is not easy.

Didn't see that, thanks! Title updated.

And totally agreed on the rest. The crazy bit is that in order to make nuclear power as safe as possible, very strict standards were created. Laudable. Now those very strict safety standard are used to paint nuclear power as unsafe, when any realistic accounting of actual harm done shows it to be either the single safest or at least amongst the safest forms of power generation available.

And we could make it better still, by switching to reactor designs that weren't optimised for military use.

It is similar to flying an aeroplane. Lots if intrinsic risk that can only be mitigated by strict adherence to rules.

People are afraid of big "booms", slowly suffocating over a few generation is fine as long as we don't have a chernobyl 2

Some of the blame for this should lie at the feet of activists with good intentions like Jane Fonda.

I don’t think she realizes the damage she’s responsible for. Lots of the fossil fuel usage she is now against only happened because of her cause in the 70s.

What was her cause in the 1970s

Nuclear power:

https://www.nytimes.com/1979/09/25/archives/haydens-start-a-...

After the movie the China Syndrome and the Three Mile Island accident, no one wanted nuclear power.

Your comment seems to be equate the impact on public consciousness of a movie with an actual nuclear disaster. Surely the near-meltdown of Three Mile Island had a far greater impact?

People protest everything. People a few towns over protested a wind turbine and won. People are even protesting the ITER fusion reactor.

What? I feel like an ITER protest could be broken up by one informed individual coming to clear up misunderstandings for ten minutes. Though, it is entirely possible people lose their mind at “tritium” or the word “nuclear”.

> could be broken up by one informed individual coming to clear up misunderstandings

Brexit proved you wrong. People don't want facts.

Trump is more than a few towns over from the carcinogenic wind farm he protested and tried to block in Scotland.

https://qz.com/1291269/the-scottish-wind-farm-donald-trump-t...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0s5Zqmb09g

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-story-of-...

>The story of Donald Trump’s feud with his one true nemesis: Windmills

There's some people that still never forgave her for teaming up with North Vietnam.

Ironically, many of the the same people who are cheering on and covering up the crimes of Trump for teaming up with Putin's KGB and Xi Jinping's China and Erdogan's Turkey and Kim's North Korea.

And even more ironically, one of the few Republicans who isn't mindlessly cheering him on and lying in support of him is a certain hard core right wing neocon who the Jane Fonda haters used to worship but now suddenly desperately despise and don't want to testify:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/28/us/politics/bolton-book-t...

>Bolton Book Puts New Focus on Trump’s Actions in Turkey and China Cases

>Interventions in Justice Department proceedings draw scrutiny after the former national security adviser raised concerns about the president’s embrace of authoritarian leaders.

It's almost as if they knew for sure that Bolton's testimony would incriminate instead of exonerate the president, don't you think?

At the time, many of the same people were cheering on and covering up the crimes of dictators Ngô Đình Diệm and Dương Văn Minh. There wasn't a democratic side in the Vietnam War.

Was there a President of the United States who was teaming up and colluding with authoritarian dictators against the strong advice of his national security director during the Vietnam war, like we have now? You'd think if he was so anti-corruption, he'd go after Putin, don't you think?

No, they were teaming up and colluding with authoritarian dictators in accordance with the strong advice of their national security directors. I don't think politicians are ever anti-corruption, not even Simón Bolívar. Anti-corruption people can be prophets, or hackers, or writers, or just regular people, but politicians have to prioritize power over honesty to some extent in order to gain power.

Just as an interesting historical note, during the Nixon-Humphrey election Nixon made back-channel communications with various foreign players to sabotage ongoing negotiations with North Vietnam by the current administration, so that his electoral chances would not be damaged by any peace which might arise.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2016/12/31/opin...

It's amazing how successful activists have apparently been with nuclear and how unsuccessful in other areas. I wonder why it was so easy to stop when other industries are so much worse. My guess is that politicians don't like the decades of cost and program over-runs.

The nuclear industry is terrible at making reactors, but really good at making excuses.

It seems that the problems and delays with the EPR design, at least in the case of Olkiluoto and Flamanville, have more to do with building the surrounding containment structure than the reactor itself.

This - I see comments strawmanning "environmentalists" and "activists" stopping nuclear power in these threads. I find it hard to believe that activism would successfully block almost all nuclear construction for decades in the US and EU.

Environmentalists are against fracking, coal, oil and pipelines, yet these sources have managed to be built pretty much endlessly since the dawn of the movement.

GE, Westinghouse and others in nuclear industry are hardly unfamiliar with lobbying and getting things done in almost any other industry. There is a lot of money to be made if nuclear was as cheap as some claim.

Instead the nuclear power plant operators in North America and the EU lobby for new government subsidies instead:

https://energynews.us/2019/04/24/midwest/ohio-nuclear-subsid...

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2016/05/30/ontari...

https://www.reuters.com/article/europe-nuclear-energy-idUSL6...

A plant expansion under construction in Georgia is expected to cost $27 billion for construction alone! Imagine how much wind/solar/storage that could buy, at a much faster speed.

https://www.ajc.com/business/after-wrangling-over-georgia-nu...

Well when a governor orders state officials NOT to approve ANY evacuation plan... it doesn’t matter what you do.

That explains one case. It can't be an explanation of the widespread failure of nuclear.

Hell, I've seen "green energy" proponents NOW oppose nuclear because they want to push their own favorite (solar or whatever). Instead of saying "I support anything that's not fossil fuels, but I prefer solar", their stance is "It's either solar or nothing (where 'nothing' is fossil fuels)".

You summarized Germany.

And certain green energy opponents oppose wind energy because it causes cancer, unlike "clean coal" that they love.

Wait, how can wind energy possibly cause cancer?

Also, there must be a name for the fallacy where you oppose one thing for some reason, without considering that the only alternative is much worse.

When people raise those issues it’s not sincere. They’re just taking advantage of the system for their own benefit.

Didn't you hear about that? Or is there too much other stuff happening that it distracts from important issues like protecting children from windmill cancer?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-story-of-...

https://qz.com/1291269/the-scottish-wind-farm-donald-trump-t...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0s5Zqmb09g

> "Some of the blame for this should lie at the feet of activists with good intentions like Jane Fonda."

Public and political opposition to nuclear has, over the decades, had a lot more to do with Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima than Jane Fonda.

100% of the blame for 80's style workout leggings, leotards, leg warmers, neon spandex, scrunchy socks, headbands, and mullets deserves to lie at the feet of Jane Fonda, however.

https://www.liveabout.com/how-to-dress-like-1980s-aerobics-3...

Yeah... styles or rather fashions are quirky. All it did was make people look ridiculous but it didn’t retard a foundational industry by decades like her anti-nuke movement.

Blaming Jane Fonda's anti-nuke movement for retarding the foundational nuclear industry is like blaming her and her first husband's movie Barberella for retarding feminism, instead of the patriarchy who fought tooth and nail against the ERA.

https://purpleclover.littlethings.com/entertainment/7556-reg...

Now how exactly did you mean she was responsible for Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and Fukushima?

Chernobyl and Fukushima came long after her no-nukes romp.

TMI was a minor event that was fearmongered way out of proportion by the movement.

The "fearmongering" was about much worse things that could possibly happen in the future, and some of those much worse things have actually happened since TMI. Getting lucky in one incident doesn't mean your luck will always hold and the fear is unjustified.

When I was a kid, some old friends of my family lived on a horse ranch in Mt. Wolf, Pennsylvania, a mile or so from TMI (which had a 20 mile radius evacuation zone). When we visited them some time before it happened, they joked and teased me about how I should be worried if ever I saw steam rising from the cooling towers (which I could clearly see there always was).

A year or so later, they were cowering in their basement with diarrhea from the radiation leak, with no idea how long they would be there or how it would end.

TMI had much more influence over their change of opinion about nuclear energy than Jane Fonda did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#Vol...

That experience contradicts the EPA and Dickinson college (which had radiation monitoring equipment) who did not detect elevated levels of radioactivity.

They also sampled wildlife from the vicinity afterwards and found no evidence of radiation.

Can you provide a link to that evidence please? The claim that there were no elevated levels of radioactivity agrees with what Met Ed and public officials were incorrectly announcing at the time, but contradicts what Wikipedia cites NRC historian Samuel Walker as writing in "Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective".

Dickenson College is 30 miles or so from TMI, while Mt. Wolf is a few miles away, and from the ranch the cooling towers loomed clearly visibly on the horizon.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Mount+Wolf,+PA,+USA/Dickinso...

Do you have any doubts that the power company and public officials were terribly prepared for the disaster, and lied to the press and public (as was also true with Chernobyl and Fukushima), and that is a much bigger continuing problem for nuclear power's reputation than Jane Fonda ever was?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#Eme...

>The uncertainty of operators at the plant was reflected in fragmentary, ambiguous, or contradictory statements made by Met Ed to government agencies and to the press, particularly about the possibility and severity of off-site radioactivity releases. Scranton held a press conference in which he was reassuring, yet confusing, about this possibility, stating that though there had been a "small release of radiation...no increase in normal radiation levels" had been detected. These were contradicted by another official, and by statements from Met Ed, who both claimed that no radioactivity had been released. In fact, readings from instruments at the plant and off-site detectors had detected radioactivity releases, albeit at levels that were unlikely to threaten public health as long as they were temporary, and providing that containment of the then highly contaminated reactor was maintained.

>Angry that Met Ed had not informed them before conducting a steam venting from the plant, and convinced that the company was downplaying the severity of the accident, state officials turned to the NRC. After receiving word of the accident from Met Ed, the NRC had activated its emergency response headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland and sent staff members to Three Mile Island. NRC chairman Joseph Hendrie and commissioner Victor Gilinsky initially viewed the accident, in the words of NRC historian Samuel Walker, as a "cause for concern but not alarm". Gilinsky briefed reporters and members of Congress on the situation and informed White House staff, and at 10:00 a.m. met with two other commissioners. However, the NRC faced the same problems in obtaining accurate information as the state, and was further hampered by being organizationally ill-prepared to deal with emergencies, as it lacked a clear command structure and did not have the authority either to tell the utility what to do, or to order an evacuation of the local area.

Walker, J. Samuel (2004). Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-23940-1. (Google Books)

https://books.google.com/books?id=0EDwbQF5k24C&dq=%22three+m...

The fact that you're casually dropping Three Mile Island and Fukushima in the same list with Chernobyl has a lot to do with Jane Fonda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Syndrome

There were then and are now legitimate concerns about nuclear fuel storage and how trustworthy and transparent the human organizations managing the nuclear plants are.

Imho the industry brought it in itself. Even now — look at how TEPCO was irresponsible prior to Fukushima and initially dishonest in its reports to the public about the scope of the problem.

Around the time this was published Finland tried to use nuclear instead. What they got was a nuclear plant that was planned to operate in 2011 and still doesn't work.

There was actually big talk about a "nuclear renaissance" in the first decade of this millennium. It hasn't worked out.

The new OL3 reactor at Olkiluoto power plant is an EPR reactor with nameplate capacity of 1600 MW, i.e. it was the first of it's kind anywhere. With all the delays in Olkiluoto project, there are now two units with similar design running in China so it will not be the first one to start.

Reason for the delays mostly has to do with the project model, i.e. having two vendors from France (Areva) and Germany (Siemens) working for the Finnish client TVO. Poor management by the client has allowed the vendors to point fingers at each other on various issues, so not only is the plant completing a decade late but there's also a court battle brewing between the parties. Most of this has nothing to do with nuclear power per se, however.

In a sense it is a problem distinct to nuclear, at least in the energy space. Reactors need to be so big and are so complex that they're vulnerable to horrific project management failure modes. Avoiding those failure modes takes experience at a level very few people get to operate, so skills are rarer than projects.

The fact that nuclear projects require this sort of huge, long term projects, instead of a quick buildout as compared to solar, does indeed mean that all of that has to do with nuclear power.

When you're not building on a new design at a scale never done before, it is a very different story from the case of OL3. Just take a look at how the French built their currently serving reactors in the 1970s - more than 30 units with the same design were build in a timeframe of about 10 years. High degree of standardization has significant benefits also in the nuclear space.

But of course you're right - it's very easy to deploy a bunch of solar panels compared to building a nuclear plant. And once you're done, you get to start to figure out the energy storage part - which in many practical settings is still mostly an unsolved problem.

The plant is coming online next year - I would not characterize that as "not working out".

But ask yourself "why". What causes delays in nuclear projects? Was it because the technology is somehow flawed, or is it because of the fearmongering and politics around nuclear power that make it a frequent target for the uneducated masses.

The Finish reactor projects have faced steep opposition from the Green Party in the government. They have delayed and blocked construction where-ever possible.

It is like pushing someone off a cliff and then accusing them of being clumsy.

From the info I got on one of the conferences on energy saving, the coal is used in addition to nuclear because of the spikes in electricity usage. So nuclear is only covering whatever is the lowest level throughout the day, while coal plant is being started two times a day to cover the spikes.

Coal plants are not able to rapidly start and stop like that and still operate efficiently or at peak capacity - their startup time is measured in hours not minutes. Gas (particularly OCGTs - CCGTs are usually less efficient than OCGTs if you do that with them) does that.

Coal can be used in some markets seasonally (ie to supply additional baseload demand for summer AC / winter heating depending on local needs).

A year later construction of Olkiluoto 3 began. It is still not finished today. The costs are currently estimated at 11 billion. Original estimated costs were 3 billion.

If we used nuclear the first few new plants would probably go online around now.

1) The article does not mention consuming less energy/stuff - whether by being mush more efficient for the same result (huge potential there !) or with more sobriety

2) "there is no chance that the renewables, wind, tide and water power can provide enough energy and in time" was true in 2004, now this totally an option : this is cheaper and faster to deploy than nuclear

3) "Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear" in only partly true... 1% of all nuclear power plant did had a super serious problem (Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl)... And there are other unsolved issues around the short term and long term security

4) Nuclear is and always was incredibly expensive to set up. There is a reason why nuclear plants are never paid for in their entirety by any private firm/operator and heavily subsidized (at least in the EU)

5) I am still fascinated by the lack of awareness regarding waste (particularly since it is with well educated/smart people)

Yes, I know, there are alternative nuclear power sources where we don't need to safely store nuclear waste for millions of years. But those are not readily available.

We still do not have a real solution for nuclear waste. Just dumping something so dangerous for thousands (or millions) of years is mindbogglingly reckless. And loudly asking to increase this amount by plastering waste-producing facilities everywhere... That's like pouring poison in the floor below your own garden, hoping the next guy will have a solution for it.

But I guess good ol' America, where dumping any waste is not considered a problem, there is simply no awareness for this practice. Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it has no effect.

Dumping. is. not. a. long-term. solution. And just because You don't need to care about it anymore, doesn't mean nobody has to.

All of the used fuel ever produced by the commercial nuclear industry since the late 1950s would cover a football field to a depth of less than 10 yards.

https://www.nei.org/fundamentals/nuclear-waste

Could you store it that way though, or would it start a spontaneous chain reaction?

There would be no spontaneous chain reaction, the waste is depleted below the radioactivity of naturally occurring sources. You can't practically store it that way though because no-one really likes moving waste any distance for fear of spillage.

Without disputing that assertion, you might not have chosen the most unbiased source to back it up.

Upvoted :) I'll concede that point.

Nuclear waste is not a serious problem. It's pretty small by volume and if you're willing to build breeder reactors you can reduce it by 95% or so.

Is nuclear power so very expensive right now? My understanding is that one of the main drivers behind the huge up front costs of nuclear power is that the builder had to take out a loan to cover the cost of construction before the wheels of regulatory approval started turning. After several years approval would be granted and then construction would still take quite a bit more time. And over all this time that initial loan was accumulating interest - often doubling or more the total capital cost of building a new plant.

But these days interest rates are pretty low and I wonder how much this has affected the price of building new nuclear power plants.

"The project completion cost at Hinkley Point C is now estimated at 21.5 billion to 22.5 billion pounds". [1]

Agreed, the project hit some regulatory roadblocks, yet, this is a lot of money. The original cost bid was 18 billion already. Imagine how much solar/wind that would give you. And the costs for operation and waste storage are not even considered.

Also in this article: "The giant atomic project is expensive compared with U.K. wind, for example, where power from the latest offshore auction sold at less than half that from Hinkley" [...] "The additional costs will be borne by EDF [...], though they’re still set to receive 92.50 pounds for every megawatt-hour of power Hinkley generates -- more than double the current market price" [1]

This is a state-of-the-art reactor.

Nuclear is not the solution, particularly not the "cheapest", and particularly not green.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-25/edf-raise...

edit: forgot to cite source

Nuclear waste is not "dumped". It is stored under the strictest safety regulations possible. It is the only energy source where 100% of the waste is captured and securely managed. Yes, even renewables create unmanaged waste.

Nobody has EVER died from nuclear waste, whereas millions (www.who.int/airpollution/en/) of people a year are estimated to die from the effects of fossil fuel waste.

Hm, if you consider storing something for a timeframe that well exceeds everything we are possible to plan ahead "safe". We simply put it in underground storages we consider "safe" for the time being. We have no idea what will happen with this deposits considering such a long timespan.

And this storage does not come for free. All these sites are maintained and must be. Just as much as the (very complicated) transport of the material. Every single castor transport in Germany and France is a huge operation.

And "Nobody has ever died from" is such a great argument. "Nobody has ever died from radiation in space" does not mean we should ignore it, does it?

Yes, I consider storing something in a way that is a demonstrably secure as feasibly possible "safe", regardless of the timespans. Especially when compared to the alternative, which is fossil fuels spewing their waste straight into the air.

And a better analogy would be that what anti-nuclear folk are arguing is like saying we shouldn't go to space at all because there's radiation there.

Nothing can be "demonstrably" secure if we cannot demonstrate it. We simply cannot guarantee control over the depot for the given time-frame. A lot of things can happen in 1 million years.

You should really read this for another view on that "simple" topic: https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/11/26/the-stag...

Well nothing in this universe is 100% demonstrably true, yet we still must take an evidence-based and scientific approach to making energy policy decisions. The evidence says that the current management process is working. There is no evidence to say that the current process will stop working. We cannot paralyze ourselves with unfounded fears of future unknowns. What we do know is that there is plenty of evidence to say that there are going to be catastrophic consequences should we not clean up our energy production, and currently there is no 100% low-carbon solution that does not involve nuclear.

I'd likewise recommend you read this for a contrasting viewpoint from the same publication: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/06/19...

Does (2.) include storage cost? Otherwise wind and solar cannot replace base power, so it does not make sense to compare the electricity production cost alone.

Yes, including cost for balancing the grid :

- electrical storage (increasingly cheap, and providing ancillary services to the grid), but also thermal and mechanical storage

- demand-response (Huge one ! especially if you do investment at the same time you invest in energy efficiency

- a diversified electricity mix, with "oversupply" of cheap renewable energy

Nuclear can help, but is super expensive, super slow to set up, and have more security concerns

To your point number 3: this mirrors my own concerns. It's not the technology per se (which is incredible and modern designs are undeniably safer), but that humanity just seems like it's bad at these complicated extremely long term projects like nuclear power generation with horrific fail states.

> 1% of all nuclear power plant did had a super serious problem (Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl)

Are you saying that we have around 300 plants worldwide? Because that’s quite off if I trust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors:

> As of April 2018, there are 449 operable power reactors in the world [...]

> Additionally, there are 58 reactors under construction and 154 reactors planned [...]

> Over 300 more reactors are proposed

Also note that not all plants are the same, we improved quite a lot since the first generations, in part due to previous disasters. Comparing the number of big disaster to the number of active plants is misleading IMHO.

You are talking about reactors

I am talking about power plant ; one nuclear power plant has generally multiple reactors

A lot of active nuclear power plant are old and based on old design. This article was written before Fukushima !

Many new projects are canceled because nuclear is now too expensive, partly due to the security constraint

> I am talking about power plant ; one nuclear power plant has generally multiple reactors

Thanks for the correction, I wasn't aware of the distinction.

> super serious problem (Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl)

Chernobyl ended lives, while TMI harmed bank accounts. You may as well mention Pol Pot and Bernie Madoff in the same utterance.

That was indeed in 2004 – long before nuclear stopped being cost-competitive with renewable energies.

Oh, and renewables are also faster to deploy than nuclear plants (which take years to build).

But renewables are very bursty and don't allow you to plan well, so we need both.

The intermittency of renewables means nuclear doesn't help. Nuclear needs a constant market at a good average price to make sense. Renewables, even when they do not cover 100%, crash the price often enough to kill nuclear's business case.

As renewables build out, the prospects for nuclear will only get worse. At this point, it's a delaying action by utilities to try to get their existing reactors profitable enough to keep from shutting them down. New reactors are not close to making economic sense, and the effective CO2 taxes that would be needed to make them so would be very large.

Isn't that because we're using fossil fuels for the base load? What happens when all we have is renewables?

Fossil fuel baseload is also incompatible with renewables, although not as badly because more of its costs are variable. This is one of the reasons coal is hurting.

Think carefully about the economics. Suppose we want to use nuclear to cover the (say) 20% of the time renewables + short term storage might not cover. Nuclear's cost of power would be greatly inflated over what it would be if it were baseload. The effective CO2 tax to make that cheaper than (say) gas turbines burning natural gas would be outrageous, over $1000/ton. A vast array of CO2-reducing changes would occur before that. It would also likely be cheaper to use renewable hydrogen (from electrolysis, stored underground) in gas turbines for that last bit. The round trip efficiency would be lousy, but it would still be cheaper than using nuclear there.

View it another way: if we have really cheap power most of the time, insisting we use nuclear then, just so nuclear would be available in that other 20%, would incur a huge opportunity cost. That cost should properly be assigned to the place nuclear is being depended on (that 20%).

That makes sense, although I don't know enough to refute it. However, renewables covering 80% sounds very high to me without some large-scale energy storage solutions.

Solar is getting so cheap that the first thing one would do is over-install and curtail it. In some places, the solar gets installed at near-vertical angles to maximize output in winter. The next is diurnal storage. The final 20% or so is seasonal and rare long outages due to weather.

Dispatchable demand is also a big possibility, especially if it can exploit the times the curtailed output is almost free.

There was a study in Minnesota that solar and wind could get to 70% of the market there before storage would make sense. The crossover point depends on economic details.

I'm sure you're aware that nuclear heat and electricity could be stored and/or distributed just like renewable stuff in the vast energy storage system of the future.

I still would like an answer from you on EROI

There is no point charging batteries with expensive nuclear energy when cheap renewable energy can be used. And the operator of a battery can shift when they are charged, making nuclear even less likely to be the cheapest source available at any time. So this doesn't save nuclear.

Heat is difficult to transport any great distance, and the reactors we have today produce only moderate grade heat, which isn't very valuable. And if PV becomes a bit cheaper, then the cost per joule of its power will become comparable to the cost per thermal joule of natural gas. In that situation, consumers will shift to resistive heat, and be able to bank that heat in large thermal stores. This will provide enormous cheap storage capacity for that solar energy.

EROI of renewables is just fine, some horribly flawed claims to the opposite notwithstanding. In particular, the EROI of PV was estimated to be about 8 in Europe -- but that assumes one puts the solar-powered PV factories IN EUROPE, rather than in a location with more sun. The real issue there is that energy-intensive industry will flee Europe in a solar-powered world.

It needs government backed strike prices, which is definitely possible and somewhat unavoidable for countries with an energy market (like the UK).

This is so debunked, I don’t know why the industry keeps repeating this falsehood. Google “Hornsdale” for just one example.

Anything is viable if you want to pay Australia's electricity prices.

Australia (Hornsdale) enjoys some of the highest electricity costs in the world despite being a major coal producer and using coal for 75% of their electricity.

We have highly variable prices here in the US. It's all about demand. During periods of peak demand, energy prices spike, and providers bring more costly dirty plants online as a stopgap. This has bad environmental effects, and is expensive in money terms as well. Batteries offer a compelling solution to such problems even outside of places like Australia.

He writes in the context of the UK. In January 2008 the UK Government gave the go-ahead to build a nuclear power station. This is Hinkley Point C. It might be producing power in 2023. It could cost as much as £22 billion. This kind of project is certainly not the solution.

That piece is from 2004. The installed cost of utility scale PV has fallen by an order of magnitude since 2004. The conclusions he reached then are not relevant now.

Nuclear power is the only green solution that allows necessary power density and a constant power output. Too bad it has so much negative press, mostly by journalists interested in sensational scary stuff.

"Necessary" power density? Please explain why the power density is necessary.

Great (great!) podcasts about nuclear fusion reactors (the second one is an interview with a physicist at ITER, being built in the South of France):

http://omegataupodcast.net/22-nuclear-fusion-at-mpi-fur-plas...

https://omegataupodcast.net/157-fusion-at-iter/

Nuclear critics seem to ignore, at least when discussing the dangers, that the world is currently producing 10% of its energy from ~440 nuclear power plants in ~50 countries. France for example, derives about 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy. This is not some spooky new technology to be wary of. It's doing fine. All we need is to scale by a single factor of 10 compared to what we have now to go 100% green. [0]

In terms of public perception of danger, Nuclear vs Coal is akin to Flying vs Driving. In both the latter kills many many more people, although little by little. The former has disasters extremely rarely, and even then they are not that bad [1][2][3], but when they do its all anyone can talk about for a long time, and they cement an erroneous perception of danger. "Coal is responsible for over 800,000 premature deaths per year globally and many millions more serious and minor illnesses." [4]

The only real issue is cost. While its very competitive to run a NPP, its very expensive to build one. Note how the number of plants has grown exponentially(?) until 1986 and then just plateaued. [0]

Considering the crisis we are in, I think its only logical we subitize NPPs, take extra care of them (for example in Fukashima the right protocols were in place and so the death toll as a result of radiation is "1" [5]), deal with the waste problem later, and work on perhaps better solutions in the ensuing decades.

Sure it's not perfect, but its our best bet.

[0] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-an... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di... [3] https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy [4] https://endcoal.org/health/ [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

> Nuclear critics seem to ignore, at least when discussing the dangers, that the world is currently producing 10% of its energy from ~440 nuclear power plants in ~50 countries.

We don't ignore it, we recognize that it is irrelevant. You seem to be saying that if a choice was the correct one at one time, it will always be correct. But that's nonsense.

Suppose you exhaustively incorporated all risk when engineering power plants, and you designed such that exhaustive risk was equal across all power plants.

That would mean risks from climate change were included in the engineering of coal plants, and the engineering of nuclear plants therefore needed to match the exhaustive risk of coal plants including climate change risk.

That would mean nuclear plants could be engineered to accept higher risk, to match the exhaustive risk of coal plants.

If a nuclear plant might render a region uninhabitable due to radiation, that would be matched against a coal plant rendering a region uninhabitable due to sea level rise, etc, all risks exhaustively incorporated.

How much cheaper would a nuclear plant be if it was engineered to an exhaustive risk-mitigation standard commensurate with the exhaustive risk of other industrial plants like coal-fired power plants, mines, chemical plants?

One negative aspect of nuclear reactors that I found is rarely discussed is their vulnerability to military attacks. Wind, water and solar are distributed much more. Of course there are other single points of failure, but at least those failures don't involve risk of nuclear contamination.

Does anyone have a good cost comparison of nuclear, gas, coal/lignite ? Total cost, with decommission. My understanding is that even with Carbon Tax coal is cheaper.

From HN comment: > Take the average IPCC meta-analysis numbers [1] at face value: 820 gCO2-eq/kWh for coal, 490 for gas. Those are both extraordinarily high. This is because they both combust carbon in the presence of oxygen to form energy and CO2. They're both very high-carbon fuel sources. If we are trying to reduce carbon emissions, we need to build things that do not combine C + O2 to make CO2 + energy. Options with less than 50g CO2-eq/kWh (in decreasing order of emissions) include solar (41), geothermal (38), hydro (24), tidal (17), nuclear (12), and wind (11).

Nobody does. Nuclear power plants don’t get built without assurances and help from the state.

Gas CCGT is usually long run cheaper than coal once you include CO2 cost. But old and existing coal plants can often beat new build gas CCGT because theyre fully depreciated and have financing paid off. Additionally it's got a lot harder to finance new build CCGT and is pretty much impossible to finance new build coal these days in most markets.

Depending on the market, offshore wind can be cheaper than gas because of that effect and because of scale (the newest wind turbines are absolutely enormous) even ex subsidy.

The investment analysis firm Lazards publishes detailed reports on LCOE every year. These are current costs per MWh without subsidies [1]:

  Nuclear            : $118 to 192
  Solar with storage : $102 - 139  
  Gas                : $44 - 68
  Wind               : $28 - 54
  Solar PV           : $32 - 42

They don't include carbon pricing which will increase solars price a bit, it should also push its carbon output from manufacture down as it will be more economical to optimize it.

[1] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019

I mean yes - if I was playing Civ this is the route I would go.

But I look at the current landscape of both political opinion and technological progress and think: we should go all-in on Solar and storage.

I look at practical-minded organizations like the US Navy (who certainly have access to nuclear reactors in a more streamlined way than civilian utilities) and yet they still put in a 21 MW solar farm at NAS Oceana [1].

1 - https://navysustainability.dodlive.mil/energy/repo-3/project...

How green is it when we've had it for 70 years and already created two* exclusion zones on earth. How many more exclusion zones will we have created with our hubris that we can create a perfect system?

I understand that my entire career (IT) depends on nuclear, but I can't ignore the fact that we have a giant reactor at the center of our solar system. We should focus on using that instead.

*not counting all the fallout from weapons.

But with six billion, and growing, few options remain; we can not continue drawing energy from fossil fuels and there is no chance that the renewables, wind, tide and water power can provide enough energy and in time.

I beg to differ. So far in China's electricity mix renewables have contributed much more than nuclear.

And it's poised to stay that way given how difficult it really is to build nuclear power in practice.

Right. Although, arguing China's side of the discussion as an example seems very very disproportionate at this point. See these giant, graphite-black sectors on the 2017 diagrams listed? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China

My point is that China having the fastest growing nuclear program in the world is still not getting more energy from that source than renewables.

Nuclear appears to be simply too slow to roll out.

The problem is the kind of nuclear reaction used. Fission reactors are bad, but once we got fusion reactors, we'll have an almost perfect energy source: clean, reliable and cheap.

The project Iter (http://iter.org/) is building the first fusion reactor. It's a big challenge but I'm glade that this project exists at all.

Fusion is going to be more expensive than fission, if it works at all. The idea that it would be cheap has no rational basis. The power density of ITER that you reference there is 400x worse than a PWR. Fusion reactors will be monstrous expensive things.

If we were to build reactors to replace existing fossil fuel plans there would not be enough uranium cheap enough that it makes sense to use it.

Someone on HN recently posted this link https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/

I don't have a full read on how accurately the figures backing this tool reflect reality, but one thing that really stood out to me while playing with it was how small an impact nuclear has on the overall outcomes.

Ideally the future is nuclear fission transitioning to fusion, with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.

Lithium battery production and recycling is still very damaging to the environment, even if it stopped relying on coal for energy[1][2].

Hydrogen vehicles also have a longer lifespan and range compared to electric vehicles, while needing less time to refuel[3]. Now if only we invested as much in hydrogen harvesting technology as we are investing in lithium batteries.

[1]https://amp.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/aug/24...

[2]https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/11/battery-batteries-ele...

[3]https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/hydrogen-fu...

"Ideally the future"

When, how ?

Yes ideally the future can have magical technologies that will solve humanity problems. We had this magical "nuclear" thing in the sixties. Today a huge majority of electricity worldwide is produced by coal, oil and gaz.

Hydrogen is a no go, you're loosing 70% into transforming electricity to hydrogen and back to electricity. And no you cannot simply "throw money at it" to turn 70% into 5%.

This is just plain desinformación, hydrogen has an efficiency of 70%, which means a loss of 30%, and yes this figure is improving by "throwing money at it"

For cars ?

https://insideevs.com/news/332584/efficiency-compared-batter...

Battery-Electric 73%, Hydrogen 22%

This article is 2 years old and rather misleading. The battery electric vehicle itself is much less efficient than both the fuel cell electric and conventional vehicles. This is because of the weight of the batteries that need to be transported. If you also take into account the energy used to produce the vehicles, in particular, the batteries, the BEV becomes the least efficient of the 3. It also doesn't account for on site hydrogen production and PEM or Alkaline technologies, which reduce the losses in transport, production and compression for an 86% efficiency.

I am sorry you are so misinformed.

Lithium is a common abundant resource and battery packs are easily recycled but more importantly there is a financial incentive to do so.

Manufacturing technology for cells is improving rapidly. Much faster than the pace of innovation in Hydrogen fuel cells. Most are focusing on reducing Cobalt and other techniques to reduce or eliminate chemicals and energy used in wet electrode processes.

Hydrogen is pretty much DOA for cars. This is a good video on the subject: https://youtu.be/f7MzFfuNOtY

"common abundant"

> Even though 365 years of reserve supply sounds very comforting, the point of the EV and stationary storage revolutions is that current demand will shoot up, way up, if these revolutions do happen. The 100 Gigafactories scenario could come true. And if that happens, the 365-year supply would be less than a 17-year supply (13.5 million tons of reserves divided by 800,000 = 16.9 years).

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/is-there-enough...

Is 17 years "common and abundant" ?

> But very little recycling goes on today. In Australia, for example, only 2–3% of Li-ion batteries are collected and sent offshore for recycling, according to Naomi J. Boxall, an environmental scientist at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). The recycling rates in the European Union and the US—less than 5%—aren’t much higher.

https://cen.acs.org/materials/energy-storage/time-serious-re...

Perhaps lithium battery manufacture is improving rapidly because we're investing more on it.

And your video has one huge logical fallacy "assuming energy comes only from Green and renewable sources" If that's the case then hydrogen is the most environmentally friendly choice even with the loss of energy, which is also improving.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_recycling#Lithium_ion_...

Li-ion batteries are very poorly recycled if at all. There is poor financial incentive to recycle batteries, and in fact you lose more money than you get back for many components.

Pace of hydrogen fuel cell innovation is moving at warp speed: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cars/news/fuel-cell-powertrains-...

We could see FCEVs no more expensive than ICEVs.

> Hydrogen is pretty much DOA for cars. This is a good video on the subject: https://youtu.be/f7MzFfuNOtY

It's a nonsense youtube video, citing claims that are a decade out of date.

The article is old and outdated.

Since Nuclear does not scale, it is no solution to climate change, for example.

The World Nuclear Status Report says:

https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/The-World-Nuclear-Industr...

--- Non-Nuclear Options Save More Carbon Per Year. While current nuclear programs are particularly slow, current renewables programs are particularly fast. New nuclear plants take 5–17 years longer to build than utility-scale solar or onshore wind power, so existing fossil-fueled plants emit far more CO2 while awaiting substitution by the nuclear option. Stabilizing the climate is urgent, nuclear power is slow. ---

Just look at the electricity production trends of China:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#/m...

worldnuclearreport.org is an anti-nuclear activist organization, FYI. They are not an official body of any kind.

There are a number of flaws in the conclusions they advocate.

1. They compare raw generation costs, but always neglect storage costs for renewables - which is the MAJORITY problem with most renewables.

2. They claim that nuclear takes long and is expensive, while continuing to advocate regulations to make nuclear more expensive and take longer. I call this the "push someone off a cliff and then accuse him of being clumsy" strategy.

3. Nuclear scales better than any other solution. Storage (at least in North America) is trivial - we have a massive facility capable of storing ALL the waste from the US & Canada, just sitting closed because of politics and fearmongering.

4. Building a nuclear plant takes 10-15 years. The most ambitious "New Green Deal" plan from environmentalists has a timeline of 10 years (despite have no solution to the storage problem). Frankly, if we get to 100% nuclear and hydro in 20 years, that is very much in line with preventing climate change. Note also that China is currently building 24 GenIII nuclear plants.

> Note also that China is currently building 24 GenIII nuclear plants.

Too slow. What is it? 30 GW production capacity? 40? 50?

China is going in the direction of total 1300 GW production capacity with just coal.

> Building a nuclear plant takes 10-15 years.

A single one. I was taking about scale. To replace the coal power plants of China, one would need to build 1000 reactors.

> A single one.

You think they are built in series? Like one after the other? Do you place that same requirement on renewable plants?

> To replace the coal power plants of China, one would need to build 1000 reactors.

The Chinese plants under construction will bring nuclear from 2% of the current grid to 20% by 2030. So, no, it's not 1000 reactors, it would be 100 - which is entirely doable. ...and indeed they are planning for an additional 1500GW of nuclear power construction AFTER this current set is finished.

[source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#Nu...)

> You think they are built in series?

They need a ramp up. Which is much easier for renewable.

> The Chinese plants under construction will bring nuclear from 2% of the current grid to 20% by 2030

Renewable is there already.

See here for nuclear:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

--- As of March 2019, China has 46 nuclear reactors in operation with a capacity of 42.8 GW and 11 under construction with a capacity of 10.8 GW.[4][5] Additional reactors are planned for an additional 36 GW. China was planning to have 58 GW of capacity by 2020.[3] However, few plants have commenced construction since 2015, and it is now unlikely that this target will be met.---

Nuclear will be far from providing 20% in 2030. Probably not even 10%:

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...

---By 2030 nuclear capacity will be 120 to 150 GWe, and nuclear will provide 8% to 10% of electricity.---

> Nuclear does not scale

Tell that to France, who have been sourcing the vast majority of their energy from nuclear for decades and, other than territories with the geography to support large amounts of hydro, are the only country to ALREADY have a low-carbon, stable energy supply.

So, instead of opting for a low-carbon solution which is already in place and proven to work, we want build renewables alone, depending the on decades-away storage technology needed to stabilize their intermittence. In the meantime, we either back renewables with nuclear, or we back them with fossil fuels. They are your options.

That was decades ago with outdated technology. We have 2020.

Checkout the current demand and current capabilities of France. France has only one extremely expensive reactor under construction (though it soon needs to replace many), with cost overrun, time delays and technology problems.

If France, a modern economy, can't deal with it, how should countries like China or India, which are each 20 times larger deal with it? France has less than 70 million people. The actual growth is in Asia and Africa - and the growth is about countries with a billion people, like China or India.

While being better than coal and petroleum, nuclear is still based on non-renewable uranium.

How abundant is uranium compared with coal and petroleum? How destructive and energy intensive are the extraction and refinement processes compared with fossil fuels?

We have about a 230 year supply as it stands, including mining out known deposits. However there are plenty of ways to use recycling, breeder reactors and alternative sources that could in theory give us nuclear power for thousands of years. That’s not forever, but it’s a start.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo...

The breeder reactors don't yet, and may never, exist, from what I understand.

Part of the appeal of renewables is they have lower environmental impact than mineral and fossil fuel extraction.

It just seems to me that nuclear energy sits closer to extractives than renewables in the energy production landscape.

The world's present measured resources of uranium (5.7 Mt) in the cost category less than three times present spot prices and used only in conventional reactors, are enough to last for about 90 years. [1]

There are an estimated 1.1 trillion tonnes of proven coal reserves worldwide. This means that there is enough coal to last us around 150 years at current rates of production. In contrast, proven oil and gas reserves are equivalent to around 50 and 52 years at current production levels. [2]

[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

[2] https://www.worldcoal.org/coal/where-coal-found

As compared to billions of years of projected solar availability.

Thanks for the details. Out of curiosity, are those industry-neutral organizations that made those estimates?

> Are those industry-neutral organizations that made those estimates?

Do neutral organizations still exist when even school children have strong opinions on coal power? I don't believe neutrality is thing for coal anymore and it hasn't been for nuclear for a long time. Thus, by definition, these cannot be neutral sources.

Even if these were the best estimates possible, how would anyone else authenticate it? With an audit? Like how Arthur Andersen audited Enron?

I feel we are post-truth and thus nothing can be claimed to be unbiased.

We have -20 years of sustainable fossil fuel available to us (i.e. our usage is unsustainable and has been for 20 years). Even if there were only 100 years of Uranium on the whole planet, switching would still be a sane time-buying measure.

I'm not convinced that any energy source relying on mineral extraction for fuel could be defined as "sustainable".

Isn't this also a question of dependency?

Maybe the uranium will hold on for 20 - 200 years, who knows, but look how we sustained the monarchies in the middle east by depending on their non-renewable resources.

The way to go should be getting rid of dependencies as much as possible.

> we sustained the monarchies in the middle east

Fortunately the fracking revolution broke OPEC's hold on oil prices.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2018/07/22/how-the-frac...

nuclear power is not scalable though https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=6021978

It’s an overly centralized solution in that it takes control away from the individual citizens and property owners, who have to foot the bill for costs, taxes, bonds, overruns, and profits for corporations not to mention possible payoffs to politicians. Including costs that are cleverly kept off the official pronouncements with accounting tricks.

Technically it may have come a little by way but small individual solutions like solar panels with battery systems have huge advantages when it comes to freedom and self determination.

Nuclear is probably the best solution, but it only works if you somehow manage to calibrate its impact on people's psychology (or just hope for no disaster to happen in the next 100 years, which is hard to to be sure about). The standard procedure in case of disaster involves a massive evacuation, cleanup, and confinement, which are costly[1], deathly[2], and traumatizing for the population[3]. All of that is probably still worth it in comparison to the consequences of global warming in regards to many factual metrics (number of deaths, purchasing power, etc), but I'm not actually sure it's worth it in regards to the only metric that actually matters: how much of a disastrous state people perceive their environment to be in.

In the case of Fukushima, Japan, which was beforehand in the process of switching more and more of its energy to nuclear, changed their stance overnight to switch back to all-fossile, because of pressure from the public opinion. If a nuclear disaster would come to happen in a country like France, the situation would probably be an absolute disaster, with people on a major psychosis and a state unable to realistically switch to another form of energy.

[1] The cost of a nuclear disaster in France (similar to the one in Fukushia) has been estimated at 430 billions euros, which is 20% of the country's economic output. (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-nuclear-disaster-c...)

[2] Fukushima's evacuation caused 1,600 deaths, that is more than the deaths caused by the tsunami itself.

[3] Following the Chernobyl disaster, there was a large increase of PTSD instaces, psychosomatic diseases, alcoholism, suicide, etc. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_the_Fuk...)

TL;DR: you need to somehow make people chill about nuclear if you want to argue that nuclear is a satisfying source of energy. It might still be the best option nonetheless.

As other comments in this thread have mentioned, since 2004 the renewable energy landscape has changed a lot and we're at a point were the technology and cost of solar is there, we just need to ramp up production. While nuclear might be carbon neutral it comes with a whole load of problems without clear solutions. Burying nuclear waste in a hole is pretty shortsighted both in terms of saftey and cost, the raw materials are not renewable and an accident can be devestating.

I'm with you. But, we should see to evolve nuclear reactors to a point that they can be abandoned at any point of time without any catastrophy at all. If we have to sacrifice efficiency to do so, let's solve the issues we agree on and then push on the efficiency front towards or even beyond the previous outputs.

We have managed to make people mostly chill about hydro despite it having killed way more people than nuclear and where disasters cause way more material damage.

I posted this about David MacKay's book "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air", which advocates nuclear energy, to a discussion about solar panels, and llukas pointed out that solar power development has exceeded MacKay's expectations, and linked to a page with updates, and dane-pgp also posted some interesting criticisms and links.

If Solar Panels Are So Clean, Why Do They Produce So Much Toxic Waste? (forbes.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18751049

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/23...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18751049

DonHopkins on Dec 24, 2018 [-]

The late David MacKay's book "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" is available free online:

http://www.withouthotair.com/

Here's the chapter about solar energy:

http://www.withouthotair.com/c6/page_38.shtml

Here's a 1000 word synopsis he wrote for his talk to the House of Lords:

http://www.inference.org.uk/sustainable/book/SUMMARY

David MacKay also invented the Dasher text input system:

http://www.inference.org.uk/dasher/

llukas on Dec 24, 2018 [-]

Very good book but tech went lot further than David expected in many places (ie. solar power efficiency vs price).

This page tried to keep it updated:

https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2017/3/30/l6qcqgoedse1...

dane-pgp on Dec 24, 2018 [-]

David MacKay has done some great work, but I feel I need to present some of the criticism he has received, for balance. In particular, there is a perception that he is biased towards nuclear energy (understating its drawbacks, while also being unnecessarily dismissive of renewables).

People can consider these articles for themselves:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/professor-david-mackay-br...

"Professor David MacKay: Britain ‘must go nuclear’ to control climate"

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/03/idea-of-...

"Idea of renewables powering UK is an 'appalling delusion' – David MacKay"

The latter, from 2016, includes the line:

"There is this appalling delusion that people have that we can take this thing that is currently producing 1% of our electricity and we can just scale it up..."

For reference, according to:

https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/wind-solar-overtak...

"Renewables’ share of electricity generation shot up to 29 per cent, while nuclear sources accounted for around 21 per cent."

benj111 on Dec 24, 2018 [-]

I think when he was writing, solar wasn't competitive, and neither really was wind. With that in mind nuclear had a place in zero carbon fuel mix, we should perhaps be thankful that other renewables have made such amazing strides.

He isn't around anymore to update his book, but I'm not sure it matters. For me anyway, it was the approach not the specifics that mattered.

Id rather be reading MacKay's 10 year old book for advice rather than those people who think banning straws is going to save the world.

That was the book that assumed solar included very large usage of land for biomass, right? Biomass is extraordinarily inefficient at converting sunlight to usable energy, so it's no surprise he concluded the UK could not be solar powered.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com