(this is even more true when you consider the cost of externalities)
Solar and wind are simple and very amenable to mass production. Many parts of them are usable for other purposes -- we need generators for things other than windmills, inverters for things other than solar powerplants, etc. This means we're not making things as a one off, but doing mass manufacturing, and the different users all reap benefits.
They're easy to produce, which means there's lots and lots of competition, which pushes down price.
They're easy to install, scale and maintain.
They're easy to iterate, because it doesn't take billions to test a new design on a small scale.
They don't need most of the parts nuclear has -- if you think of it a windmill contains parts a nuclear plant needs too, but unlike nuclear doesn't have all the nuclear stuff along with it, which isn't cheap.
The way I see it, nuclear could have been successful but is going the way of the mainframe -- today mass computing is done on huge amounts of commodity hardware, and in the same way large, purpose built plants are already being overtaken by mass production of panel after panel being churned out of a factory, and that's not going to get any better for nuclear.
What reason is there to believe a generator with blades attached to it is going to lose to a generator with a containment building and reactor attached to it?
Fear-mongering is _the reason_ for the absence of progress and rising prices, not some technical obstacles.
Much more plausibly, the technology itself is to blame.
Although there are other options like pumped hydro (pump the water back up the hill) though clearly that has logistical limits.
Grid scale batteries make wind cheaper by allowing less overproduction but they do that for everything by assisting grid balance and acting as a form of high frequency trading which is productive in ways other than increased market liquidity.
I am personally of the point of view that if we went on a nuclear power plant building spree back in the day to replace coal plants/provide for growing needs and used breeder reactors to deal with waste we would be far better off. Renewables are cheaper per kWhr now however. For the future, who knows if fusion or renewable will work better for terrestrial grid applications once fusion reaches the point of a positive energy balance?
But if your goal is to actually eliminate carbon emissions, you need to factor in the cost of storage. And there really no feasible plan of storing the amount of energy required at the moment.
If your goal is to actually eliminate carbon emissions, nuclear presents a much more realistic option. We keep celebrating Germany, but in reality their carbon emissions per KWh of electricity is not actually very good. It is worse than Britain. And it's ~7x worse than it's neighborhood to the west, which we tend to ignore for some reason.
The US has 25 GWh of storage, as compared to an hourly electricity consumption of 500 GWh. Literally less than ten minutes of storage. Almost all of it hydroelectric, which is a big infrastructure project on par with building nuclear power plants
I'm sure you're eager to talk about how thermal storage, or concret weights with pulleys, or compressed air is going to be 100x better than current solutions. But until those things move out to prototypes and I to mass production, they represent potential solutions not actual solutions. Like fusion. If the next attempt at fusion works, great! But building out infrastructure assuming it's going to work is extremely unwise.
Invalid argument.
> The US has 25 GWh of storage, as compared to an hourly electricity consumption of 500 GWh. Literally less than ten minutes of storage. Almost all of it hydroelectric, which is a big infrastructure project on par with building nuclear power plants
Irrelevant point.
Storage was marginal in the past because there wasn't much of a business case for it. With renewables crashing in price and fossil fuels being phased out, that is changing. There are now strong market forces pushing development of storage technologies. Your insistence of carrying over the market conditions of the past into the future leads you astray.
Maybe one of the proposed storage solutions will pan out. But building out trillions of dollars of infrastructure projects on the hope that a future breakthrough will make storage feasible is very risky. Fusion has been 10-20 years away for the past 50 years. General artificial intelligence has been 10-20 years away for the past 50 years. Between:
1. Going with a known solution, that already generates more electricity than solar and wind combined and one we have 70 years of experience working with.
2. Going with a solution contingent on a massive technological breakthrough to actually work.
When the stakes are as high as climate change, I cannot even remotely justify going with #2 over #1 even if the costs are potentially lower on paper.
And that is a recent thing there. The global market is still developing, and technologies don't materialize instantly. CO2 taxes are still low (or zero) just about everywhere.
But hey, I hope you are also not going to claim nuclear will be cheaper in the future, because I could reflect that argument right back at you. And I could observe that, unlike with renewables and storage, nuclear has a horribly bad historical experience curve.
> Maybe one of the proposed storage solutions will pan out. But building out trillions of dollars of infrastructure projects on the hope that a future breakthrough will make storage feasible is very risky.
It's only a $$$ risk. We absolutely know the storage is possible, we just haven't confirmed how cheap it will be. Worst case is we spend a bit more. This is fine. Investments are not guarantees; one is always gambling.
By this logic why not just use fusion? It's possible. We don't know which exact approach we'll use (lasers, magnets, etc.). We don't know how cheap it'll be, but hey it'll happen eventually right? No.
It's not "worst case we spend more money". It's "worse case we never solve climate change". And that's a pretty bad worst case.
We're already at the point where markets are starting to see saturation with renewables. But this unfounded aversion to nuclear power is hampering actual progress to decarbonization. The cost of waiting around and hoping for storage to become viable is not just the cost of building those storage systems, but also the continued release of fossil fuels as we wait for that to happen - and who knows when that will happen, if ever.
We solve climate change by raising CO2 costs high enough. Again, this is not a go-no go thing, it is just haggling over the price.
> We're already at the point where markets are starting to see saturation with renewables.
This just means CO2 taxes aren't high enough. BTW, they'd have to be $300-400/ton for new nuclear to compete with gas in the US.
It's easy to make renewables look cheap if you assume some wundertech makes storage free. Will thermal storage, synthetic methane, or who knows what else fulfill this need? Who knows, but they don't yet. Thus renewables only present a solution coupled with an engineering breakthrough. It's like assuming moore's law held true and developed an app that assumed it'd run on a 1THz single-core processor presumably developed a decade in the future. Seems reasonable in 1995, but that's have been a very bad bet.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectric...
To recover energy, this is reversed, with the temperature difference driving the cycle in the other direction. Detailed calculations with inefficiencies show an overall round trip efficiency of 60% or better could be achieved. All the temperatures are below the creep limit of ordinary steel, so this system would require no exotic materials whatsoever.
It's also possible to design a thermal storage system without the cold store, using the ambient environment as a heat sink when running the generator. In that case, adding a backup heater (burning hydrogen, say) would make the store double as a backup generator at extremely low extra capital cost.
To the best of my knowledge, fusion only demonstrated net-positive energy production this decade, and hasn't yet reached ignition in a man-made device.
They're not the same.
It's like trying to be carbon neutral through burning biomass. Yeah, it works as a general principle. But the energy density just isn't there. The US consumes about much energy each year as we'd get from clear-cutting the entire country over the span of a single year. And the plants take longer than that to grow. Sure, we could try more exotic things like dumping iron into the ocean and harvesting algae blooms. But as a general principle, biomass energy source doesn't scale well.
Same with energy storage. Nuclear isotopes are a great store of energy. The best we know how to tap into in term of energy density, that's why we use it on submarines. Chemical energy like methane is good, but the sabatier process isn't that feasible and it needs a pre-existing source of carbon dioxide. Electrochemical storage like batteries is great for systems that need to store a relatively small amount of energy, like cars and electronics. But it isn't available at nearly the required scale. Hydroelectricity storage is better for scale, but still not good enough. And I'm sure you can name other proposed systems like pulleys, hydrogen, compressed air, an d more. But the point is that until they've demonstrated commercial viability let alone beaten competitive solutions it's a big assumption to factor these into solutions to climate change.
Are people accepting contracts to store X GWh of electricity in pulleys, or or compressed air and operating those projects successfully? Until then, these do not represent presently available solutions to climate change. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but until then saying we have a realistic plan to provision enough energy storage to decarbonize through renewables is counterfactual - at least save for places like Norway or Iceland that have dispatchable sources of renewable energy nearby in the form of geographically dependent hydro and geothermal power.
The argument that nothing that hasn't been commercialized can be considered is a double standard. Nuclear on the scale needed to replace fossil fuels is also currently impossible. The infrastructure to build it isn't there, and the breeder reactors that would be needed to fuel it aren't commercially available either.
No, it's not deception. Both solar and wind suffer from low energy density, especially as compared to nuclear. 200 Watts per square meter isn't all that good energy density.
> Nuclear on the scale needed to replace fossil fuels is also currently impossible.
Again, France just mysteriously doesn't exist in the alternate reality that hardcore renewable supporters live in. Globally, nuclear generates more than solar and wind combined.
The ideal plan for nuclear is to pump out power at 100% 24/7. You save nothing by being idle, and you want to pay off your loan as soon as possible.
All that goes to hell once cheap renewables show up, because the moment wind or solar can sell power cheaper, a rational person would buy it from renewables. Which means that if the sun is shining, you're either not selling at all, or selling much less or cheaper than you'd like to. And so your loans now get repaid much later.
At some point a bank looks at that and figures that the proposition of maybe making a profit 30 years in the future isn't that great of a deal. That's a long time, for all the bank knows, solar might be dirt cheap by then and kill nuclear for good before it gets to making a profit. Probably better to put billions to some safer use.
Politically it's not a lot better -- nuclear costs $$$, and takes a long time to build, which means that if you're the one who got the country into nuclear on a large scale you can't really expect to see a benefit within your term. Worst case it goes wrong and is an expensive boondoggle, which doesn't bode well for reelection.
Nuclear may make sense if you think "emissions are paramount, screw money". But there's not a lot of people who'd be willing or even able to risk billions in such a manner.
Solar and wind are both intermittent. Wind is dependent on the weather and experiences situations with near zero production for long stretches of time. Solar is also weather dependent, and has day-night cycles on top of it.
This is fine if you're not actually looking to decarbonize a grid, just trying to opportunistically shave off carbon emissions here and there in a primarily fossil fuel grid. But if you're actually trying to eliminate fossil fuel use this is not a good approach. Theoretically we could store excess energy, but no scalable storage solution exists at the moment. That leaves nuclear power plants to serve as a dispatchable source. But as you pointed out, nuclear plants are just as cheap to run 24/7 as it does to run intermittently. So why not just build the nuclear plants and skip the renewables?
Unless your power production is run by the government, generation is done by companies looking to make a profit. Solar and wind companies don't mind in the slightest that they're screwing up the business model of nuclear. The fact that their production is intermittent isn't important to them -- it's already accounted into their business model, and nuclear's lack of ability to deal with that and grid stability is somebody else's problem.
If you think nuclear is the solution here you must be prepared to pour many billions of tax money on supporting its existence even though it's currently unprofitable. China can do that, because China's government has the long term control and lack of concern about public opinion to get such things done.
Politicians in democratic nations in general lack such a luxury. They know that they can get kicked out of power before their first plants get built, and then the successor either pulls the plug on the project entirely, or keeps whatever got built, but almost definitely nowhere near close to the full capacity needed.
You'd have a hard time skipping the renewables, because you'd essentially have to forbid them. You'd have to go there and make a law that you can't build solar even though it would produce power that's twice as cheap, or take craploads of tax money and subsidize nuclear. I suspect neither is going to look very good in the news.
Last time I checked France was a democratic nation. So was Belgium. Both of those have achieve majority nuclear power generation, and France over 70%.
The cynical reality, though, is that you're right. People would rather make a token effort on intermittent sources, while continuing to burn fossil fuels for most of their energy. The damage to the environment caused by the continued use of fossil fuels in this approach, though, will eventually take a toll. But that toll will mostly be borne by poor people in the global south, not in the countries that had the capability to build nuclear but chose to primarily use fossil fuels supplement it with intermittent sources.
That was the past. The dynamics have changed, and renewables are much more competitive now. Nobody is building more nuclear right now. True, there's paranoia, but there's also economics.
And I'm not talking about fossil fuels either.
Here's what I expect to happen today with a carbon tax: it'll kill fossil fuels, and give a huge boost to renewables. Nuclear won't benefit nearly as much, because renewables can sell each GW/h cheaper and are much faster and easier to build. We'll get a grid full of solar panels and wind, and probably serious instability. This is because the people that build powerplants don't care about the system as a whole, but about making profit within it.
At that point you can subsidize nuclear, heavily tax renewables, or subsidize storage. My view is that the last one is the long term solution because nuclear won't outcompete renewables long term.
Uh... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#/media/File:Nucl...
> Here's what I expect to happen today with a carbon tax: it'll kill fossil fuels, and give a huge boost to renewables. Nuclear won't benefit nearly as much, because renewables can sell each GW/h cheaper and are much faster and easier to build.
This is overly simplistic. Eliminating carbon emissions is not just about generating more clean energy. It's about replacing the energy that fossil fuels currently provide. It's hard to do that with intermittent sources.
> At that point you can subsidize nuclear, heavily tax renewables, or subsidize storage. My view is that the last one is the long term solution because nuclear won't outcompete renewables long term.
Perhaps, if we have a miraculous breakthrough in energy storage. But unless that happens, we'll end up building nuclear power to fulfill off-peak demand. And since nuclear power is just as cheap to run 100% of the time as it does to run part of the time it'll just make the bulk of renewables redundant.
If you have 100 GW of solar solar panels plus nuclear plants generating 100 GW for nighttime use, it's just as cheap to run the nuclear plants 24/7 and ditch the solar panels.
The UK for instance has one powerplant actually in construction and it already got a bad rap because it's a bad deal economically.
Besides that, I think you're missing my point. My point is that you have to deal with reality, and reality doesn't really align with the way you want things to work. For instance, you said:
"So why not just build the nuclear plants and skip the renewables?"
My question is: "Who 'we'"? In a lot of countries, there's no "we" that applies. There's a government that sets the rules, and private enterprise that builds the plants. If "we" is the government, then they don't build powerplants themselves. They may allow them to be built, but a company still has to want to.
And if "we" is the commmercial enterprise, then nuclear is far too big for anybody to build it out of sheer altruism or good PR. That's big money territory and it must make a profit.
If you simply impose a carbon tax, private enterprise will just go and build solar. We have no storage? Those companies won't care. It's not their problem to solve. They'll build whatever makes the most money, which is almost definitely not nuclear.
If you want nuclear to happen you'll have to force it somehow, and I'm not seeing any particularly attractive ways of doing so. You want to be the politician who runs on a campaign of forbidding or heavily taxing solar and wind at the same time as dumping billions of $ into nuclear construction? Yeah, that'll go great, I'm sure.
Depends on how high the carbon tax is. Put it at a high enough rate that the country needs to go 100% carbon-free and people will build nuclear because that's the only solution (besides geographically limited things like geothermal and hydro) that can feasibly bring carbon emissions to zero.
Renewables are cheap when going from a mostly fossil fuel grid to a 50/50 renewable and fossil fuel grid. But bringing fossil fuels below 50% without the help of nuclear or hydroelectricity is extremely difficult. Any plan to do so basically assumes that some future breakthrough will make storage cost a fraction of what it does today.
> We have no storage? Those companies won't care. It's not their problem to solve.
Yeah, that's why there's no plan to actually decarbonize with renewables.
And if we actually want to stop climate change, yes it absolutely a problem that needs to be solved.
> If you want nuclear to happen you'll have to force it somehow, and I'm not seeing any particularly attractive ways of doing so. You want to be the politician who runs on a campaign of forbidding or heavily taxing solar and wind at the same time as dumping billions of $ into nuclear construction? Yeah, that'll go great, I'm sure.
Pass a carbon tax such that building a nuclear plant is less expensive than running solar during the day and natural gas at night. Renewables depend on fossil fuels until we make a breakthrough in storage.
Why? Because there's no "we". There's no central planning. What there is is a bunch of self-interested parties that don't care about the entirety of the problem. Everybody will go with what makes the most sense to them, the result will be suboptimal, and then once things go wrong the country will have to fix the problems somehow.
Your plan may make sense in China where the government can indeed implement a central plan, costs and opinions be damned. But it seems extremely unlikely to happen in most western democracies because the politics won't support it.
"Yeah, that's why there's no plan to actually decarbonize with renewables."
What I'm trying to say is that there's no global plan whatsoever. In most countries we don't have the ability to implement any kind of comprehensive central policy. We have multiple parties that can nudge things in one direction or another but none of which has full control over what happens.
"Pass a carbon tax such that building a nuclear plant is less expensive than running solar during the day and natural gas at night."
But the problem is that there's no single party in charge of solving that problem. You pass a carbon tax. Fossil fuels die. Companies will build solar, because it makes them money. Companies won't build nuclear because it's expensive to build and solar is eating their lunch. The powerplant building company cares nothing about the economics of keeping the country powered 24/7, they care about the economics of building their plant. If their business model works okay while selling nothing at night, then it works, and that's that.
Then we'll get blackouts at night, solar companies will shrug "not our problem", and the government will have to scramble to find a solution.
Where you have strong central government control -- there you can have comprehensive plans. Where you don't, you can't.
Which is why Covid-19 is a clusterfuck in the US -- because the US doesn't have strong enough central control (and heck, Trump didn't care anyway). Even with Biden at the helm his power is limited and he has to convince the various states to act, and Congress hangs in a very delicate balance.
Also, the fact that a country can do one thing doesn't mean it necessarily can do another. That you have centralized healthcare and can command a country-wide response to covid-19 doesn't mean you have centralized power generation and can command a country-wide decarbonization.
Sure, things can be restructured, laws can be passed, power generation can be nationalized, but none of that is quick nor easy and by no means guaranteed to happen even if it would result in the best outcomes.
Plus as far as the public is concerned, covid-19 is a lot more understandable and immediate of a concern. Climate change is more of a vague and slow moving threat, and that makes it much harder to do dramatic things in response.
It doesn't work like that.
Contrary to your repeated insistence that there is no central planning, there is indeed extensive government planning in electrical grids. You can't just say "we'll only give you power during X hours of the day" to your customers. Likewise, you can't just tell customers who don't live near a dam that they won't be getting electricity when it isn't windy.
Wholesalers can do this, because they sell to other grid companies who actually sell to consumers. But no, if we have solar and wind and these sources aren't producing enough electricity then they have to burn gas and pay the carbon taxes. And if the carbon taxes are high enough, it's less expensive to build nuclear plants that emit no carbon and don't suffer from intermittency.
The second part to the plan is to spend a lot of tax money expanding the power lines to nearby country in order to increase the capacity for importing energy from nearby countries coal based power plants.
As a conclusion I agree that the people that build power plants don't care about the system as a whole. The government however do care about stability and mine is perfectly fine with spending tax money on that. Politically, voters are not going to be upset that money is spent on grid stability, even if then ends up in the hands of owners of fossil fueled power plants.
Today is the long term, and the costs are still uncontrolled.