Activists who embrace nuclear power | Hacker News Reader

Activists who embrace nuclear power

newyorker.com

249 pointspseudolus586 comments

Articles like this miss the main point and instead focus on culture war material. There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear.

The issues aren't safety, waste, and environments opposition. There are plenty of climate hawks that support nuclear too. It's all excessive costs.

They briefly mention the cooling retrofits for Diablo Canyon in San Lui Obispo, but they don't mention that they bids from Bechtel to simply build a modern cooling system were all billions of dollars of expense. Just the cooling system is more expensive than alternatives.

And this is a trend we will see in the future. For primary generation of electrons, steam based thermodynamic cycles are pretty much obsolete. The number I typically hear is that it's $1-2W to build, say, a cooling system for coal steam. A nuclear plants cooling is pretty much identical. Solar and wind are going to undercut that cost very soon.

So the name of the game is now storage. Attaching four hours of storage to a solar generation farm, just enough to get through the duck curve, is now slightly cheaper than coal.

The best estimate of what the cheapest possible future grid looks like is: solar/wind capacity at 4x of total demand (thermal generators are roughly at 2x on the current grid), with 3-4 days of storage. This translates to world with abundant energy, at certain times, that's generated at zero marginal cost. There are still lots of transmission costs however. The future of energy is all about spatial and temporal arbitrage of renewable electrons.

Afaik, nuclear energy is more expensive only because it is regulated far beyond what any other form of energy for the same level of risk.

Disposal of nuclear waste is a huge expense, but the main waste product generated by natural gas (CO2) gets away scot free despite literally being the cause of what might be our generation's biggest problem.

The end-of-life expenses of nuclear plants are included in the cost sheets, but dams get away scot free.

Material procurement is justifiably expensive, since security measures for handling nuke-fuel are far more stringent. But, that is more a virtue of global politics than the actual cost of nuclear energy.

Another cold-start problem is that the USA does not have the same experience with frequently building nuclear plants, vs say a country like France has. Thus, any new contractor spends extra money to be the first to wade through bureaucratic / training related challenges that would otherwise have been resolved if building nuclear plants was more common place.

Just saying, the numbers for energy source comparison aren't always as fair as they look.

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> Attaching four hours of storage to a solar generation farm, just enough to get through the duck curve, is now slightly cheaper than coal.

Wow, I didn't know we were that close to dealing with the storage/temporal variability problem. If we can solve that problem with money to spare, then I can see the adoption of solar + wind going up through the roof.

That's simply not true. Nuclear has always and is still receiving significant indirect subsidies. A huge subsidy that nuclear power gets is that plants are not insured against incidents (because essentially nobody is willing to sell them insurance), so it's essentially the state that does it. Also many argue that the nuclear waste storage costs are significantly underestimated, I mean I understand estimating cost for safe storage for thousands of years is difficult.

Interesting you mentioned France, the only project they are building is Flammanville 3 which started in 2007 with an estimated cost of ~3 billion euros, it is now estimated to go online in 2022 with an estimated cost of 19 billion euros. That's just construction cost.

Regarding the cost for decommissioning, the European commission has actually called out France for currently significantly underfunding the cost by a factor of 3 or 4.

Part of the problem with Flamanville is notoriously that France hasn't built a new nuclear reactor for 20 years, and a lot of the expertise has been lost; also, the ASN's safety regulations have become a lot stricter in that time.

So I think overall GP's points apply.

I used to hear stories about using a breeder reactor to recycle used waste, which reduces the storage requirements for the remainder to a few centuries. Not sure if that is a pipe dream though.

> Afaik, nuclear energy is more expensive only because it is regulated far beyond what any other form of energy for the same level of risk.

This is a (very) common misconception.

A MIT study found that safety and regulatory increases contributes less than 1/3 of the cost increase in nuclear plants since 1975 (after adjusting for inflation):

Since many of the researchers are in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at MIT, they are able to go through and connect the cost changes to specific motivations and check these connections by looking at patents and journal papers that describe the ideas driving these changes.

Some of the driving factors are definitely regulatory. After the Three Mile Island accident, for example, regulators "required increased documentation of safety-compliant construction practices, prompting companies to develop quality assurance programs to manage the correct use and testing of safety-related equipment and nuclear construction material." Putting those programs in place and ensuring that documentation both added costs to the projects.

But those were far from the only costs. They cite a worker survey that indicated that about a quarter of the unproductive labor time came because the workers were waiting for either tools or materials to become available. In a lot of other cases, construction procedures were changed in the middle of the build, leading to confusion and delays. Finally, there was the general decrease in performance noted above. All told, problems that reduced the construction efficiency contributed nearly 70 percent to the increased costs.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...

> Figuring out what's causing those changes involved diving into detailed accounting records on the construction of these nuclear plants; data on that was available for plants built after 1976.

My understanding was that the cost of nuclear started skyrocketing around the mid-late 70s, so around the period this study period begins to get data.

And I thought the nature of the cost increases was things like being stuck iterating on designs optized for being part of a weapons program rather than safety or economics, and making it difficult enough to get approval that only companies of the "win the contract, then hold the sunk costs to random for more money" sort would bother trying to build them.

SMRs should change this because they'd be produced on an assembly line, just like vehicles or household boilers.

> This is a (very) common misconception.

It is not just a misconception. It is a Big Lie, endlessly repeated, endlessly debunked. Continuing to repeat it makes one a Big Liar.

When you need to lie to make your case, you don't have one.

People started lying about nuclear power before it even existed: "Too cheap to meter", they said. Now with FOIA we have documentary evidence that they knew at the time it would always be a high-cost choice. But on the back of Red Scares and nuclear weapons tie-ins, they got and still get monstrous public subsidies, so we all pay, wherever we get our power.

In recent years, the agency that had once collected payments from nuke operators for waste placement has instead been paying out huge amounts to remaining operators, who pocket it.

The only bigger liar is fusion research. There, the only tech the feds will fund is hot-neutron fusion; that's the giveaway that it is really just a jobs program for hot-neutron physicists, to maintain a population to draw on for weapons work.

There will never be one lonely erg of commercially-viable Tokamak fusion. It can never even begin to approach competitiveness with solar + wind + storage, even without counting the enormous sunk cost of decades of $billions/year with nothing meaningful to show for it.

The continued hemmorhage of money for Tokamaks starves actually potentially-viable fusion programs.

The reason administrators like huge centralized projects like nuke plants always are is that they provide almost unlimited scope for corruption: steady, year-over-year corruption. Cost overruns are not accidental; they are the whole point of the operation.

Small modular nuke plants don't offer scope for as much corruption, so they would face an uphill battle even if they could be made compretitive. But even with huge subsidies and high pricing, they weren't competitive, nothing new has made them cheaper, and prices are still plummeting.

> Afaik, nuclear energy is more expensive only because it is regulated far beyond what any other form of energy for the same level of risk.

Nuclear's problems are neatly encapsulated by one number. It's called the learning rate. The learning rate is how the unit cost of production changes as production increases. As a general rule the more you make, the better you get at it and so the costs reduces. The fast the cost reduces the greater the learning rate.

This is a good a summary of learning rates for various ways of producing electricity as any: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014... Here are some figures from that paper:

- Coal: 2.5% ... 20%

- Gas Turbine: 10% ... 22%

- Onshore wind: –11% ... 32%

- Offshore wind: 5% ... 19%

- Solar PV: 10% ... 47%

- Nuclear: –38% ... 6%

The point the paper was making is "gosh, we are bad at measuring learning rates". Even so, you could make two predictions based on those 2015 ranges:

- Solar PV is going to crush everything else,

- Nuclear is totally screwed.

And that's now looking like how it will turn out. It's nice to see predictions come true.

Getting worse do doing something the more you do it is difficult to imagine, getting -38% worse demands an explanation. As it turns out -38% is the figure for the USA. Other countries returned +6%, so perhaps regulation is it as you suggest.

But now turn your attention to the other end of the range. Nuclear is +6%, even in the best country. Everything is better than that. Solar is +47%. No matter how you look at it, Nuclear is still screwed on cost.

It's not hard to understand guess reasons why it's a low +6% either. Gas, wind, solar - they churn out thousands to millions of units a year, so there is lot of opportunity for experimentation and learning. For nuclear it's maybe 10 units a year.

Solar is great but until you can store a week's worth of backup power while the weather makes demand spike and while clouds block 70% of the sunlight not accounting for snow and ice covering it I think we are going to need fossil fuel unless OR nuclear. Unless you want to see what happened in Texas last week X10

You can often run these numbers in ways with varying hyper parameters that can get you to nuclear or others as cheaper. I know Brookings did one such analysis in 2014 (note higher solar and wind prices back then)[0] where they included carbon costs at $50/ton and found nuclear to be fairly cheap in that respect. I've also seen some do health and that gives nuclear an edge too. But these are difficult to accurately do and honestly exemplify the complexity of the issue at hand.

The major problem with these comparisons is that people are treating sources as if they are equal and placed on an arbitrary piece of land. As you kinda elude to in your comment with the batteries, that has to be taken into account with wind and solar, but just making it through the duck curve isn't enough since storms exist and everywhere isn't as sunny as southern california. Land mass also matters. Materials for the batteries, etc. This is an extremely complex issue that everyone is overly simplifying and are pulling articles that they don't realize are making simplifications that the authors and experts understand but the linkers don't.

The reason I hate these conversations on HN (and Reddit) is because people are comparing things as if they are equal (I'd expect HN to know that this is the first rule of analysis: compare apples to apples) and then getting really aggressive about a singular metric (anti-nuclear: costs, anti-renewables: batteries, etc. Please don't let these become dog whistles). Being pro nuclear isn't "nuclear vs renewables" it is "nuclear + renewables vs fossil fuels". It is simply not taking it off the table. It is "if the experts think that would be best for the situation then I, as a member of the public and not an expert, am okay with trusting the experts and letting them do what they need to do." If there is an area where nuclear fits best, use it. If it doesn't, don't. One power source for everything is just an idiotic idea. It literally comes down to trusting the experts or not.

[0] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/planetpolicy/2014/05/20/why-t...

Personally I get defensive when people pit nuclear as a solution to the climate disaster because I am skeptical that it is. And worse I think considering nuclear as a solution to be harmful to the effort to combat the climate emergency. It reminds me of how people would pit GMO as a solution for world hunger, when better food distribution is a better solution; or when people pit self driving cars to combat traffic congestion when public transit infrastructure is a better solution.

I consider this harmful because in some cases it might affect public policy. See example of city governments delaying or canceling needed public transit infrastructure because of the promise of the self driving car, or hyperloop and whatnot.

New nuclear sounds to me like a similar pipe dream. It is not a good solution to combat the climate disaster (renewables are), and people advocating for it risk affecting public policy that might get much needed renewable infrastructure delayed or cancelled.

>Being pro nuclear isn't "nuclear vs renewables" it is "nuclear + renewables vs fossil fuels".

Since nuclear competes with renewables for subsidies it is kind of a competition.

Propaganda is dictates by market realities. We likely wouldn't be seeing this much pro nuclear stuff pushed to the front of hacker news if nuclear didn't require subsidies and hence favorable public opinion to survive in the face of cheaper green competition.

>It is "if the experts think that would be best for the situation

And if the experts are paid off by the in question? Brookings has a pretty long history of this and takes money from Lockheed, general dynamics, etc. who would be keen to profit from nuke subsidies by building next generation nuke plants.

You can't wipe a continent out with the worst case coal plant failure. A reactor going critical and exploding, however "impossible" would do just that. Look at the Saudi plant going up. It is jokingly referred to as "a car with no seatbelts".

You’d be surprised how many people die every year from coal power exhaust.

People naturally overweight low frequency high impact events like a nuclear meltdown but drastically undervalue high frequency low impact events. Someone dying early because they lived too close to a coal plant doesn’t make the news, but in terms of actual human impact it trounces nuclear’s impact by multiple orders of magnitude.

You can't even wipe out a continent with a fusion bomb, how would a nuclear power plant even have enough material to be that damaging? Yeah, it might spread a bit of radiation if the entertainments cracked open like an egg, but that would be very obvious if terrorists, say, were trying that.

We are slowly wiping out the whole planet with coal now.

Research what a critical fission reaction is, then come back and figure out why your sentence doesn't make sense.

>There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear.

Honestly ... it isn't just about cost. Nuclear is expensive but it isn't prohibitively expensive. The big picture is we know that nuclear can power an economy, it does not emit global warming gasses, and also places a tiny footprint on the surrounding ecosystem.

Solar and wind cannot power an economy. But let's pretend they can so as to not get bogged down on this point. Let's also pretend they are non-trivially cheaper than nuclear. Even under those assumptions nuclear still wins in my eyes.

Global warming is only one environmental problem we have to solve and it may not be the most important one either. The other one is regular environmental collapse due to needing to support 7-10 billion people. In this context, solar and wind are atrocious and a total disaster because they have massive land-use requirements (land-use around mining for necessary materials, deployment and maintenance of the collectors, and finally land-fill once out of use). And they will always have those horrendous land-use requirements because solar and wind are diffuse energy sources. Worse, we're going to need to increase solar and wind collector production by several orders of magnitude (and come up with a battery technology that doesn't exist today) to fully support a fossil fuel transition. What cost do you think the environment will bear for that compared to nuclear infrastructure?

> In this context, solar and wind are atrocious and a total disaster because they have massive land-use requirements.

No, they don't. There is a lot of empty land in the world that isn't useful for people to live in or to grow crops due to lack of rainfall, which also makes those sites more valuable for solar energy.

We'd consider a utility-scale solar array that's a couple square miles to be absolutely huge, but plotted on a map of, say, the United States it would be a barely visible dot in a massive sea of land-that-isn't-devoted-to-solar-power. The Earth is very big, and when you get outside the areas where people congregate there's a lot of wide open spaces.

This says that US electricity consumption was 3.9 trillion killowatt-hours in 2019:

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect...

39 quadrillion watt hours divided by (36524) gives us average power consumption in watts.

Let's say a pretty good solar panel gets 100 watts per square meter, then reduce that to 30 to account for night-time. If we divide average power consumption by 30 watts per meter and divide by 1,000,000 to convert to square kilometers, we get:

Prelude> (((3.9 1000 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000) / (36524)) / 30) / (1000 1000) 14840.182648401827

So, about 15,000 square kilometers of solar panels would satisfy current US electrical needs. Let's double that to be conservative, that's 30,000 square kilometers. Sounds like a lot, right? That's a rectangle 100 km by 300 km. It's slightly more than 10% of the land area of Nevada. Definitely big, but attainable. Compared to the land we use for farming, it's barely anything (and it can be done in places that we don't farm). And in practice it would be spread out, not just in one place. And it also assumes we get 100% of our power from solar, which we wouldn't.

>There is a lot of empty land in the world that isn't useful for people to live in or to grow crops due to lack of rainfall, which also makes those sites more valuable for solar energy.

There is no such thing as 'empty land'. Every square meter of Earth is part of some ecosystem that is under stress due to human activity. Solar and wind compound this problem.

>then reduce that to 30 to account for night-time

How about reduce that to 0 for night-time? I have yet to see a solar panel that works at night, or works well in cloud weather, or when covered by a layer of snow.

>Sounds like a lot, right? That's a rectangle 100 km by 300 km.

You missed some detail of land-use requirements in calculations. Like accounting for the battery technology that doesn't exist in order to bridge the intermittency of solar and wind. Also, even if this mythical battery technology existed, you would need to over-build wind and solar because after all, when the sun is shining you need to collect enough energy for right now + enough energy to save for later. Given that estimates say that we would need a minimum of few day (but more likely few weeks) of stored energy, for each day of power you generate, you need to over-generate a few days (or weeks) extra to store for later. Also, the population is growing. Our per-captia energy use is growing.

But let's set that aside. That is a lot of land. How can you say it's not!!!?? Every single one of those panels will be land-filled and replaced continually ... forever. So you have 100km x 300km (+ whatever materials you need to support and maintain those panels) of shit going to landfills that then you will need to subsequently dig up again to replace ... forever. And that's just one country. Our ecosystem is already stressed!

> also makes those sites more valuable for solar energy.

Unfortunately, you don't need the energy where people do not live, and transporting energy has a efficiency cost as well. In other words, it's massively more efficient to produce energy where you use it.

>No, they don't. There is a lot of empty land in the world that isn't useful for people to live in or to grow crops due to lack of rainfall, which also makes those sites more valuable for solar energy.

Yes, I grew up near a lot of that land. Unfortunately that land is also far, far away from most of the population in the US and thus where energy is needed.

You do realize transmission loss is a thing, right? And then what do you do when the sun isn't shining? We still consume power at night.

If this was such a trivial problem we wouldn't still be talking about it, no?

It’s disingenuous to factor in mining requirement for solar panels but not uranium.

Sure the supply chain to support the infrastructure required for 10 billion people is a lot on the environment, and we certainly could do a lot better. But these include better recycling of existing minerals (this includes solar panels), better forest management, better land use for food production, more careful road design that doesn’t fragment the wildlife, etc. And of course (most important of all) stop emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and stop warming the planet.

How much land solar and wind farms use seems kind of minuscule next to all these efforts. And given how urgent the climate disaster is, complaining about land use from solar farms seems like a distraction.

Given the timescale we have to react to and reverse the climate crisis the best technology that we have right now is wind and solar. We don’t have the technology nor infrastructure anywhere in the world to replace the fossil fuel plants with new nuclear plants in anywhere close to the timescale needed. Our best bet today is wind and solar (and geothermal and hydro where applicable) even with existing battery technology, it is still a better bet then new nuclear. This thread will tell you why.

Nuclear fuel is several orders of magnitude more energy dense than solar or wind, so the amount of fuel required is shockingly low, especially compared to how many resources all those panels and windmills require to build and transport.

> How much land solar and wind farms use seems kind of minuscule next to all these efforts. And given how urgent the climate disaster is, complaining about land use from solar farms seems like a distraction.

No, it's part of the equation for picking energy sources. Solar and wind both work better in some areas than others, and none of the equipment maintains itself. The 100 acre solar farm you build instead of a 1 acre Nuclear plant is going to have its' own environmental and maintenance challenges. It's not clear why it is a priority to limit roads through wildlife, but not apply the same principles to energy policy.

> Given the timescale we have to react to and reverse the climate crisis the best technology that we have right now is wind and solar.

What are you basing this on? Nuclear technology is being held back by regulation and economics, not by engineering or technology.

> It’s disingenuous to…

This is an interesting thread but not applying the principle of charity to the person you're in discussion with, when they've done nothing worthy of putting charity aside, really lowers the tone.

There are a lot of other ways to put your riposte without questioning the motives of those responding to you simply because they or - even just a point they've made - disagrees with you.

> It’s disingenuous to factor in mining requirement for solar panels but not uranium.

Because Uranium is much much much much more dense in terms of energy than anything used to make solar panels. That's why mining uranium does not even register in the equation.

Uranium can be extracted from seawater, and my understanding is that there's enough uranium in the oceans to last 10s (maybe 100s?) of thousands of years at current energy consumption levels. It's also renewable, albeit on a very long timescale -- but the timescales of consumption and renewal for uranium in seawater are much closer in length than the consumption/renewal timescales for fossil fuels.

We have plenty of nuclear "waste" ripe for burning if we would get politics and fear out of the way.

No need to mine or bury it. Burn it!

It's disingenuous to pretend that the mining requirements for wind and solar (and the lithium required address the duck curve) are remotely comparable to nuclear power. Uranium's energy density is such that extremely little uranium is necessary to produce power.

>It’s disingenuous to factor in mining requirement for solar panels but not uranium.

It would be if it wasn't for the fact that nuclear power is incredibly energy dense so mining requirements for Uranium or Thorium or whatever iteration of nuclear we have, are not even in the same universe as what we will need to scale solar and wind.

> But these include better recycling of existing minerals (this includes solar panels)

I don't know what to say to that. Solar panels are not recyclable. Neither are wind mills. Both are high-tech devices. They may never be recyclable. Also recycling, especially recycling of high-tech devices, is not free as it tends to be incredibly energy intensive. In most situations it's more efficient to just bury the darn thing.

>better forest management, better land use for food production, more careful road design that doesn’t fragment the wildlife, etc. A

The problem is that by going with solar and wind you're compounding all these problems, and the general problem of ecosystem collapse.

>Given the timescale we have to react to and reverse the climate crisis the best technology that we have right now is wind and solar.

That's not true. It's where the mindshare inertia is (notice the deployment of wind and solar is pathetically low on a global scale), but if we truly internalized the danger of not just global warming but environmental collapse, we could pivot on a dime and we could expand our nuclear infrastructure probably in around two decades (we already lost 50 years by the way). It's like what happened with this pandemic. It takes a decade or more to roll out a new vaccine, unless a global pandemic shuts down the global economy and kills millions of people. Under those constrains, it turns out you can develop a vaccine in a year, and take another year to roll it out.

The other aspect is that there are no technical or engineering barriers to nuclear deployment. It's solely regulations and cost (though not prohibitively impossible costs. I'm willing to concede that nuclear is more expensive than things like natural gas). Wind and solar, on the other hand, still have unsolved technical challenges. You can't will those into existence.

But again, we haven't really internalized the dangerous of global warming and ecosystem collapse, so we're dicking around with wind and solar because it feels right.

The thing about land use that always got me was that solar can be implemented as a roofing system in parking lots. We have a lot of parking lots out there.

IMO the model used for parking at Lego Land looks like the ideal approach for solar expansion to me.

>The thing about land use that always got me was that solar can be implemented as a roofing system in parking lots.

That's not enough. Rooftop solar panels on a single family home roof cannot provide adequate power for even that family (forget even trying to use appliances like washer/dryer/stove when on solar, much less charging your electric car). And if they cannot do that, then how the hell are they going to provide power to even moderate-density housing (e.g. a small apartment building), much less high-density buildings and housing (like office buildings), or heavy industry and transportation (from electric cars, to buses, to trains).

Solar and wind are diffuse energy sources. That will never change. So you will always have to have a large number of collectors. Our population will continue to go up for a few more decades. Our per capita energy use will also keep going up for a few more decades.

So you're going to have to build huge solar and wind farms and place them somewhere. You're going to have to mine necessary minerals to build those farms from somewhere. You're going to have to landfill the collectors somewhere.

Solar panels degrade over time, so it's massive waste over a long period of time to replace them as well. There's no free lunch anywhere.

You are vastly overstating the mineral requirements.

Wind power can share land with other uses.

There is a staggering amount of land out there that's not suitable for even grazing but will support utility scale solar.

>You are vastly overstating the mineral requirements.

No I didn't.

A typical solar panel weighs around 40 pounds. All that material has to be mined from somewhere, then transported, then processed. Some of that material are rare earth minerals that have an outsized mining requirement (like for every 1 pound, you need to turn over 1000 pounds or 10000 pounds of earth). All of that material will need to be landfilled at some point in the future as well, no matter how recyclable the solar and wind collectors are (and today, they aren't recyclable at all).

>Wind power can share land with other uses.

Sure. I didn't say it couldn't or it won't. I'm saying that you will need vast new tracks of land regardless of that fact. Why? Because you need to scale wind and solar collector deployments by several orders of magnitude.

>There is a staggering amount of land out there that's not suitable for even grazing but will support utility scale solar.

I have no idea why you think only 'grazing' areas are the only ecosystems we need to protect.

Every square meter of Earth is part of some ecosystem that is already under tremendous stress due to human activity - that includes areas like deserts, mountains, ocean floors.

>There is a staggering amount of land out there that's not suitable for even grazing but will support utility scale solar.

yes, but how much of that land is also near where the energy is needed??

Transmission loss is a thing. Also how are you handling the whole "sun doesn't shine at night" thing? We still have no economical ways of storing vast quantities of electrical energy.

>>There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear.

>Honestly ... it isn't just about cost. Nuclear is expensive but it isn't prohibitively expensive. The big picture is we know that nuclear can power an economy, it does not emit global warming gasses, and also places a tiny footprint on the surrounding ecosystem.

What do you call prohibitively expensive? It's expensive enough that it's essentially uneconomical to build any new plants by a large margin and that margin is increasing compared to wind and solar.

>Solar and wind cannot power an economy. That's not true, they can using a sufficiently large grid and overprovisioning.

>But let's pretend they can so as to not get bogged down on this point. Let's also pretend they are non-trivially cheaper than nuclear. Even under those assumptions nuclear still wins in my eyes.

>Global warming is only one environmental problem we have to solve and it may not be the most important one either. The other one is regular environmental collapse due to needing to support 7-10 billion people. In this context, solar and wind are atrocious and a total disaster because they have massive land-use requirements (land-use around mining for necessary materials, deployment and maintenance of the collectors, and finally land-fill once out of use). And they will always have those horrendous land-use requirements because solar and wind are diffuse energy sources. Worse, we're going to need to increase solar and wind collector production by several orders of magnitude (and come up with a battery technology that doesn't exist today) to fully support a fossil fuel transition. What cost do you think the environment will bear for that compared to nuclear infrastructure?

So you're including mining for solar/wind but not nuclear? Also you're talking about that we need to increase solar and wind production by several orders of magnitude, well we would need to do that with nuclear as well. And you conveniently ignore the fact that uranium is a limited resource. Also regarding your space requirements, it's true that nuclear power plants have a relatively small footprint, however we are limited to where we can build them and the footprint for power distribution is considerable. That is one of the big plus points of decentralized power sources you can produce the power were you need it (which also significantly reduces additional space requirements). Let's not even talk about the energy loss from long distance distribution.

>So you're including mining for solar/wind but not nuclear?

We have hundreds of years of "waste" that could be burned before we would ever need to mine anything. Only thing stopping it is a gross combination of politics and fear :p

It doesn't have 100% nuclear or 100% renewables, that's why it's called an energy mix. Nuclear does play an important role as France has shown time and time again. Compare France's energy mix (70% nuclear, 2% coal) with Germany's (47% renewables, 30% coal). Shutting down nuclear almost always means burning fossil fuels. Remember, these are NPPs that have already been built and can continue to generate electricity for many years to come. Closing them down one reactor at a time can be easily done after renewable capacity is installed to compensate for the closures.

https://environmentalprogress.org/france

I'm squarely of the opposite opinion.

There are 2 main concerns I think "only renewables" solutions miss:

1. Impact on land usage. The sheer amount of land required to provide 3-4x global use is impractical and has major environmental consequences. It's not free to pave over large areas with solar panels or make huge swaths of air unsafe for birds.

2. Cost of storage is usually projected using current prices with some decline due to production efficiencies. However, producing grid-sized storage would put such pressure on the supply of critical metals that the subsequent price rise would put bitcoin's performance to shame.

Whereas, we know we can scale nuclear to meet global demand, at least as a major base load supply as part of a mixed-generation strategy.

Compare your best estimates of land usage to the amount of land the US uses to grow corn for ethanol.

Or compare it to the amount of land used for parking. Or for roads. Or for roofs of buildings.

I've never, not once, ever seen a comparison of this sort that sounded the least bit scary.

2. I'm a bit flabbergasted that you think we can scar nuclear production to what we need. We can't even scale nuclear production to hit replacement rate of our existing reactors. Nuclear does not scale, because it can not be built.

And I'm similarly flabbergasted that you think storage would hit scaling problems, when we build new factories for storage all the time, use new chemistries all the time to reduce the use of limited input components.

Storage production is growing at a massive pace, problems are getting solved all the time. Nuclear is shrinking all the time, gets more expensive all the time, and we can't even figure out basic concrete pours and welding. These industries are hugely contrasting, but I don't know how you can reach your conclusions when looking at the reality of storage and nuclear as they are in the real word.

Nuclear is actually intentionally crippled through legislation under over-hyped concerns over dirty bombs accidents (for the right and left politically inclined respectively).

Nuclear can be done safe, efficient, cheap and at-scale. All it requires is to allow for the secondary market of spent fuel like was originally started when nuclear first starting to get rolled out. The security concerns can be handled in other ways than crippling nuclear from being self-sustaining I think.

It's not that nuclear cannot be built. It's that America is incapable of building... Pretty much anything in the 21st century. If the interstate system were to disappear tomorrow, for example, we simply wouldn't be able to rebuild it.

It's not because concrete is some arcane technology that isn't cost effective, or doesn't work. It's because we just aren't very good at building things anymore.

Land usage is not much of an actual problem. For one sunlight falls pretty much everywhere. You don't need to put a solar plant out away from cities like coal and oil plants. You can cover the acreage of a city with solar panels. Just putting panels up over parking lots in suburbs/exurbs contributes significantly to the area's power needs.

Offshore wind is also extremely productive and eats up no arable/useful land. Farmland is also great siting for wind because there's enough uninhabited acreage to safely put up large turbines. A lot of wind power in Texas for instance comes from turbines on farms and ranches.

That's in addition to more site limited renewables like hydro, tidal, and geothermal.

There's lots and lots of untapped energy hitting the Earth every day. The Earth is also really big. To handle a few integer multiples of human power needs with renewables by tapping a tiny fraction of that is not outside the realm of possibility or even all that difficult. It's more a question of will than technical capability.

On point 2, you're ignoring that nuclear has the same problem only even worse. There are very few companies in the world that can make reactor vessels and related stuff. In particular a lot of projects are bottlenecked on one company in Japan.

In any case, I think it's a weak point. We can scale up battery production. I'm not a fan of the Elon Hype Squad, but he's right about this point.

About 0.5% of the US needs to be covered in solar panels to meet the US's current energy requirements (about the size of the Mojave desert).

About the size of New Mexico needs to be covered to meet the whole world's energy consumption.

In the grand scale of things, and considering how much sunny, arid desert land there is in the world (and without even thinking of floating solar farms) that's really not a lot...

It also needs to be sunny 24 hours a day. Solar requires storage. Batteries are non-renewable.

You're worried about birds? Better raze all buildings and kill all the cats. Wind turbine bird deaths are negligible.

https://www.evwind.es/2020/10/01/the-realities-of-bird-and-b...

You know you can set up solar panels on roofs, and in the desert, right?

The direct impact of turbines on wildlife (e.g., from direct strikes) may be negligible. But the secondary effects of carving-up large blocks of intact grasslands in the Great Plains with infrastructure like service roads, wallpapering desert soils with panels, or placing high-capacity transmission lines, are not. This clearly contributes to habitat fragmentation and scientists have not thoroughly studied how recent infrastructure change is influencing habitat for wildlife.

I'm not arguing that increasing green energy production like wind and solar should stop. Because climate change is arguably a larger existential threat to the planet. But we do need to do a better job planning where infrastructure lands so we can mitigate habitat fragmentation. Habitat fragmentation doesn't really factor into the planning calculus at all.

Desert solar is certainly going to be part of the story, but I can’t imagine that we can feasibly power the whole country with desert solar alone, and I don’t think residential solar will be a significant contributor because you lose the efficiencies of scale afforded by acres and acres of collocated, homogeneous, ground-level panels for construction, maintenance, and operation. Consider even the overhead of dealing with thousands of individual property owners rather than a single land owner (if that—the utility may own the land for a solar farm outright).

The issue isn't so much the number of birds, but the type:

>...Although fatality rates for raptors may be lower compared to passerines, raptors are especially vulnerable to collisions due to their flight behaviors. Given the life history traits of raptors (i.e., long-lived and low reproductive rates) their populations are more at risk of decline from the number of different sources of impacts that affect these species on a daily basis.

https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/...

This isn't to say that means we should drop wind, but we shouldn't hand wave away the issue and pretend it is not an issue.

>...You know you can set up solar panels on roofs,

The levelized cost for residential rooftop solar is at least as high as nuclear, but that cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates.

>...and in the desert, right?

Advocates also describe how we will rebuild the electrical grid to move vast amounts of solar or wind power across the USA. This will not be cheap or easy or particularly easy to protect from terrorism. Even the relatively small proposed Tres Amos SuperStation hasn’t been completed yet. This cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates.

Deserts are not ecosystems devoid of all life. Here’s a life long anti-nuclear activist talking about how his direct experience in this space evolved as he started looking into the data more:

https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_why_i_change...

Hah, that’s a great point- for all the hand wringing about bird strikes, none of the concern trolls are saying a thing about outdoor housecats.

How many eagles are killed by housecats?

As I said the other day, nuclear energy is the Amiga of energy sources.

Ahead of its time, it was unjustly rejected and persecuted by the ignorant masses. Its advocates are bonded by the quiet pride that at least they weren't unthinkingly siding with those masses. (And they're right!) Meanwhile, as the Amiga stagnated for terribly unfair reasons, other, scrappier technologies like the i386 and UMG-Si grew from being worthless boondoggles (except in special circumstances, like spaceflight) to being actually far better and cheaper. But the Amiga advocates keep the faith, sharing their suffering and resentment. They inevitably try the alternatives a little and perhaps even start to like them. Gradually their denial recedes, decade by decade.

But they know that however much fab costs go down and leave their beloved Amiga behind in the dust, you'll never be able to run nuclear submarines and Antarctic research stations on solar panels.

You say, "Solar and wind are going to undercut that cost very soon." But the truth is that wind, where available, undercut the cost of steam power (including nuclear and coal) a decade ago, and PV undercut it in equatorial parts of the world about four years ago, or even more of the world if you don't include storage.

Guru Meditäyshun!

I worked in nuclear. There's definitely no way now to insure a new plant and make money. Try as they may, even Duke couldn't break ground on any new US project because there hasn't been money in it for about 40 years. The economics kill it and there aren't going to be anymore PWR/BWRs, with the possible exceptions of BCH, 2 PWRs at Turkey Point, and 1 ESBWR at North Anna. Renewables will likely undercut them all to cancellation.

how much of that is due to regulations or other overhead or inefficiencies?

e.g., "China Tariffs Blocked Bill Gates’ Plan for Safe Nuclear Power"

https://futurism.com/trump-china-tariffs-bill-gates-nuclear-...

also, SpaceX managed to make reusable rockets, I just have to imagine we could make nuclear energy feasible if we approached it from first principles and took a hard look at the entire process.

I always ask: what regulation would you change? Nobody in the nuclear industry has suggestions for what is unnecessary, as far as I can tell.

And as Texas showed us last week, without regulations, profit motive alone is not enough to maintain proper equipment. The nuclear plant that tripped off could have made months worth of profit in less than a day. Yet they did not do simple weatherization preparations that they knew they should have based on 2011's events.

Gimme a break. Don't pull the Reagan/Bush/libertarian "all regs are bad" line. It's tired.

The NRC knows their job, have excellent people, and are good at it. It's like questioning whether we need the NTSB or not.

Will anyone ever finish VC Summer? Maybe after they will have done Vogtle right?

Very unlikely. It would not be economical to finish it even at the estimated cost left when they abandoned it, and since then it's been degrading in place.

> Attaching four hours of storage to a solar generation farm, just enough to get through the duck curve, is now slightly cheaper than coal

This completely ignores scenarios of extended cloud cover, cold temperatures and low wind (somewhat like we just saw in Texas) where properly winterized baseline power would be the only way to keep everything up the whole way through.

Barring future unknown tech, we will always need either nuclear or natural gas if we want five nines of uptime in our electrical power. There is just no practical way currently to build enough storage across the grid to maintain 100% uptime during a week or more of reduced renewable generation.

If your grid covers a large region and you have sufficient transmission, then somewhere, there is excess electricity from wind/solar that you can bring in.

Remember, we're talking about a world where building renewables to 4x peak demand would be actually economical.

This works on the same principle as an insurance market: it's likely that even at 4x capacity, your local solar farm has a few cloudy days. It's highly unlikely that your entire regional grid generation falls below demand. That probability falls (super?-)exponentially in the size of the region.

Taking a step back: yes, renewable power is intermittent and you need electricity here, now. Either 1) transmit from elsewhere, 2) store locally, or 3) supplement with a stable source (nuclear / thermal). The choice simply comes down to cost (to provide a given level of reliability).

The most efficient solution is likely to do all of the above, taking local conditions into account. Adjusting for local conditions is one thing that a (well-managed) market helps tackle.

> It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear.

When it’s night in Germany, it’s night in the rest of Europe.

When there is no wind in Germany, there isn’t usually much more wind across Europe.

Please take some look at actual electricity generating data for Germany (see smard.de) and find out why your assumptions are not correct.

>If your grid covers a large region

Like a belt of solar panels around the equator? Works for Dyson Sphere Program but that's a game. As big as the US is, for CONUS the entire continent is in the dark for significant portions of the day. It doesn't get more intermittent than that!

> and you have sufficient transmission,

Well duh. And assuming zero transmission loss. Or enough resources to overcome transmission loss and still be economically viable.

Quite a bit of hand waving there.

This is a dangerous and wrong assumption. Weather events can have high area. What do you do if a hurricane comes at the same time as high cloud cover?

I don’t foresee anybody paying for all this over built over provisioned solar/wind generation and transmission. I suppose if it has to be overbuilt 4x to be as reliable as the power system we have now then my power bill will be 4x more.

When people quote $1/W for solar generation it really should be $4/W because you have to build 4x as much and then add another ... infinite amount for increasing the size of the transmission system by 4x too so that areas that have sun can transmit to areas that have none. All possible just expensive.

If I were in Texas last week, I would have loved to have a home solar system with a battery that let me island from the grid. This is definitely practical and happening even at today's high prices.

In a decade, ERCOT will look nothing like it does today. It will have massive amounts of solar and storage, and even more wind. This is replacing gas plants as they age out.

A buddy of mine has solar panels. During the storm they got covered in ice and snow, and generated about 180 watt hours in a 24 hour period

You would think that but some municipalities like New Orleans are addicted to the franchise taxes from new gas plants and roll over for the utilities (I am speaking about the South in general)

Will we actually need five nines out of renewables any time soon? We have the option of hanging on to old fossil fuel plants as emergency power for many decades to come. Peaker plants already perform a similar sort of role.

Our CO2 goals won’t be compromised by running emergency power off fossil fuel once every decade or two.

keeping old fossil plants sitting idle but in working order is possible but will cost nearly as much as generating at full capacity, minus the cost of fuel.

Imagine a car that sits in a garage and once a decade you take it out and thrash it. Machines degrade just from time not necessarily wear as rubber and gaskets become brittle, metal rusts, capacitors leak, fuel degrades, algae grows, rats chew on whatever they can, shafts and bearings and motors seize or get flat spots from sitting.

Look at Texas and their fleet of plants that didn’t start when they were needed. Any machine that is not running is likely to stay not running.

How about not having five nines, and just finding a way to live within that envelope?

Yep. Cheaper than all of this is having a few blankets, a camp stove, and a week's worth of rice and beans on hand.

> China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear.

They have brought 15 GW online the last 5 years, and they have another 15 GW under construction. How is that pulling back?

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

It's still the country building the most new nuclear power, but it's also reducing ambitions from just a few years ago.

From your own link:

The 13th Five-Year Plan formalized in March 2016 included the following nuclear projects and aims: ... Reach target of 58 GWe nuclear operational by end of 2020, plus 30 GWe under construction then.

China actually has 47.5 GWe operational now. See table "Operable nuclear power reactors" in your link. They fell short of the 2020 target and with only 15 GWe under construction they're not catching up with their original goals either.

A large part of that is actually due to civilian opposition after Fukushima that led local governments to attempt to get others to build nuclear.

The really long term Chinese goals are ~80% nuclear still.

Falling 20% short of a five year plan that included 2020 is not strong evidence they're pulling back.

linear vs exponential when compared to other sources.

I've done a fair amount of research into molten salt reactors, and if we can solve the containment issue they should be very cost effective. The molten salts are extremely corrosive, which cuts their lifespan down to ~5 years. Newer designs should reach 10 years and there is extensive research into designing systems that will last 20+ years.

They should be much cheaper to build and operate because they have several inherent safety features. They operate at one atmosphere, so you don't need expensive pressure containment systems. The fissile material is already melted, so meltdowns are basically impossible. Most designs have a drain line to a gravity fed safety containment vessel full of control rods. The drain line is actively cooled to solidify the salt, forming a plug that automatically melts during a power loss or over-temperature event.

This is solving the wrong problem, and therefore will not advance nuclear. Cost is the impediment to nuclear, not any sort of safety concerns.

That molten salt reactor will need to have a negative cost in order to compete with the cost of stored renewable energy.

The future of nuclear energy must either abandon the thermal steam cycle for electricity generation, or generate massive value from the nuclear reaction part apart from generating steam.

> Cost is the impediment to nuclear, not any sort of safety concerns

That's not entirely true, and safety features and regulations are a major part of nuclear's cost.

> That molten salt reactor will need to have a negative cost in order to compete with the cost of stored renewable energy

Does stored renewable energy come for free? From what i recall, there's still no actual solution to that problem on a big scale.

> Cost is the impediment to nuclear, not any sort of safety concerns.

Safety systems and regulations greatly inflate costs. Any reasonable, safe measures that can be taken to reduce them will make nuclear more profitable.

A good example of this is small modular reactors. Current nuclear plants need to be approved by regulators on a case by case basis. Nuscale, a SMR company, is the first to get their module design signed off by the nuclear regulatory commission. This means that they can build them at volume and skip most of the red tape.

Analysts expect Nuscale's systems to be 1/4 to 1/3 cheaper than current nuclear plants. Imagine the price reduction of a SMR with half the complexity.

> with the cost of stored renewable energy.

Which is how much? We don't have a good way to store energy right now.

I like molten-salt reactors, but they still depend on steam turbines† and cooling systems to convert the heat into useful energy. So they don't help to solve the fundamental cost problem Epistasis identified: although they might reduce the gap between high nuclear-plant cost and low coal-plant cost, but they won't cross the Rubicon to even lower solar-plant cost.

________

† which operate at substantially more than one atmosphere!

Given the enourmous costs of decommissioning nuclear power plants already I fail to see how a reactor containment that lasts 10-20 years at best improves the situation.

It's interesting, the poster above was complaining that we have to put solar panels and windturbines into landfills and now you're proposing molten salt reactors with lifespans of 5-20 years (where the 20 years are still extensively researched)?

> steam based thermodynamic cycles

Technical question: my understanding is that the frequency of an electrical grid is literally related to the RPM of turbines providing power, and that over/under frequency are related to supply and demand.

https://www.brighthubengineering.com/power-plants/45640-grid...

If we hypothetically had a grid that was 100% solar, presumably there'd no longer be any spinning turbines. At that point, would the grid frequency be completely synthetic? How would supply/demand impact the frequency in that case?

Edit: partially answered here ("smart inverters):

https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-integration-inverter...

South Australia, which generated 60% of its electricity with renewables last year, is installing synchronous condensers to provide some kind of grid stabilisation. (The current conservative government is aiming for net 100% renewables by 2030 and 500% by 2050.)

This assumes that larger investment in nuclear won’t yield reduced costs, just as larger investments in solar did.

According to the IEA we are spending more on nuclear power research than any other category. (More than wind and solar combined.) More money won't magically give us better nuclear technology. If renewables keep getting better we're going to have to start some serious conversations about cutting nuclear funding in a few years, we're investing too much money with basically zero return on investment.

https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-technology-rdd-budgets-20...

> According to the IEA we are spending more on nuclear power research than any other category.

Does that include fusion research?

How much of this R&D goes into nuclear power research, and how much of it is nuclear weapons research that is billed as power research?

For example, the laser fusion research that hit 'break even' a few days ago was a byproduct of work on nuclear weapons.

We already tried that, didn't we? Several national gov'ts, subsidized the building of hundreds of reactors, trained gillions of nuclear scientists and engineers, etc. And indeed, nuclear power still is a bigger fraction of US electrical generation then renewables.

Obviously, a new effort might yield a break-through the old one didn't. But it seems likely all the "low-hanging" fruit in lowering reactor costs have already been picked.

It seems like the largest feature of modern nuclear power is that it got a lot more expensive as we realized how much safety we truly needed to build into it. Whereas, without much prompting, solar got a LOT cheaper.

When nuclear develops that significantly, we will all pay attention. Until then, build cheaper sources.

Also consider when building nuclear, you are locking into technology from 10 years ago (when the plant is finally done), for the next 50 years (when the plant is finally decommissioned). Solar and other sources have much faster iteration cycles and much lower commitment.

Isn't the point of nuclear to provide power when it's not sunny as a cheaper alternative to storage in batteries? If so then what's the purpose of comparing the cost of solar and nuclear as if they're directly competing for the same use case?

> 50 years

most often it is way longer

Given that nuclear has existed for quite some time now and hundreds of very costly plants have already been built, how much more cost-effectiveness can we expect? It feels like the current state is exactly what "larger investments" in nuclear get you.

Nuclear was considerably cheaper when it was built at scale. Both the US during the 70s and France both built plants at a cost of 1-2 billion per GW. Which, in the context of 24/7 carbon-free energy is fantastic.

Obviously what we need is some sort of "Manhattan Project" for nuclear energy! :)

It would, but not as much as solar did. But people don't include recycling cost in PV, as well as electrical grid maintenance, impossibility to work as a baseline, no pilotability.

Solar is good if the population is mature enough to accept the cost of sending PV to a recycling plant. And as long as it doesnt go past 50% of the energy production (you NEED a baseline of 30 to 40% at the very least)

Recycling is just getting started, but so far the most expensive part of recycling is shipping the panels to the recycling plant. Which is to say, that end of life recycling will not be a significant cost in any way.

Base load power is unnecessary.

The only type of power that's required is dispatchable power. If you have enough dispatchable power to meet peak demands you don't need anything else. For example, the northern towns served by a diesel generator. Other types of power are optional, but should be thrown into the mix for cost, reliability or environmental reasons.

> impossibility to work as a baseline

Not true. Just overbuild it, and make sure your grid is large enough to transfer power between areas or just store it. Still cheaper than nuclear.

What's "pilotability" in this context?

There is a track record for nuclear and the line does not go in the good direction. Even France, which is often cited as a nuclear success, has underfunded decommissioning costs by a factor of 3 or 4. Building nuclear results in gouging ratepayers.

> So the name of the game is now storage.

If I look at my own country (Sweden) at what is currently being planned on a political level and invested in, the name of the game is to use fossil fuels under a plethora of different schemes which hides the fact.

The first and primary scheme is to call the energy grid free of fossil fuel if the total amount of renewable energy being exported each year exceed that of imported fossil fueled energy. Find someone willing to buy the energy at some point in year, and you can subtract the numbers from fossil fuel usage during other parts of the year. In order to sustain increased capacity the government uses tax money to invest into better power line connections between countries for higher export and imports.

The second strategy is to use tax money to pay fossil fueled power plants directly, but rather than calling it a subsidy which would have a negative connotation, we call it "reserve energy plan". Fossil fuel plants first get paid for just being a fossil fuel plant that is ready to start the generators at demand, and then they can get paid a second time for any energy they do generate.

The third scheme is to use fossil fuels to create artificial fertilizers, grow and harvest biomass using machines that operate on fossil fuels, transport the biomass on ships that travel on fossil fuels, and then call it carbon neutral when we burn it.

Storage for wind farms (or the much smaller portion of solar that we have) is not being planned, invested or built. It is not being discussed on a political level. No tax money direct to it.

I would like it if storage was cheaper than the above schemes because then maybe they would go away. I do not want tax money to be given fossil fuel. I would prefer if a ultimatum was set in the energy sector so fossil fuels no longer is a possible choice. Under such ultimatum we would find out very quickly which of the choices between storage and nuclear is cheapest, and then it would hopefully see some actually investment.

Forgive my nitpick but power generation doesn't generate electrons it pushes existing ones around, very slowly. Highly recommend http://amasci.com/miscon/whatis.html to anyone interested in discovering how inconsistently electrical concepts are defined and taught.

I don't think you are correct. For electricity to propagate at near light speed, electrons will have to move at near light speed, if only for a short time. Or to be a little more precise, shape changes in the electron wavefunction will need to propagate at near light speed. I think we can do this to electrons because their mass is so low.

This only really applies when a circuit is opened or closed however. Once a circuit reaches a stable state (voltage is unchanged) the electrons don't move fast, I guess.

No, he is correct, its the wave that propagates at a fraction of the speed of light (depending on the conductor). The electrons themselves don't move very fast.

"An electron travels at a speed of about 1 cm/sec. " (in copper) per: https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2916283&seq...

This should be taught in a basic AP physics class in HS (where i initially heard it). I vaguely remember doing some of these calculations in my physics for engineers class as a first year engineering student too.

That was an especially unfortunate typo in a post riddled with typos.

I will stand by my use of electron arbitrage though.

Do solar and wind cost estimates account for the sheer volume of land? How much land would be required to convert us fully to green energy (where “fully” means not only replacing existing electrical applications but also transforming other fossil-fuel operations such as transport and various heavy industry applications and residential/commercial heating and etc)? Also, don’t we need more storage than 4 hours? What about those times when weather patterns mean little sun or wind for days or weeks on the scale of the whole country? I’m not trying to be a wind/solar pessimist; these seem like important questions and I don’t hear them discussed often.

Winter is hard to store for, but in general there aren't times where both sun and wind are low production across wide areas.

Of course solar isn't operating at night, but wind keeps blowing.

One way to check this would be to find a wind farm that publishes their output over time. Looks like NREL has some good resources: https://www.nrel.gov/grid/wind-toolkit.html

> in general there aren't times where both sun and wind are low production across wide areas.

I'm sure those times aren't common, but we need to have some answer for when they do inevitably occur. The recent Texas freeze was a once-in-a-century event and I don't think many consider that acceptable (and I would think that the no-sun / no-wind scenarios are more frequent than once-in-a-century). I'm sure someone has researched the amount of storage necessary, but the numbers I've heard from articles and podcasts tend to be in the days-weeks range--much longer than 4 hours.

Yes, they include the value of land. In Texas, for example, land cost for PV might be a couple percent of the cost of a PV field.

Does that assume current land values? Presumably land values go up as the demand for PV-suitable land increases?

I'm glad you said storage and not "batteries". Batteries are not even in the ballpark for this kind of usage.

The reasonable means of storage are hydroelectric (via water) and offsetting usage of fuels (coal/natural gas/oil/wood/biogas/nuclear). I'm pro-hydro because it is reliable (24h/day) throttable, significant, non-emitting, renewable, and behaves like a battery. The downside is that locals will lose their precious local ecosystem under the reservior. Some costs are worth paying. There has been concern that reservoirs emit methane - this is easily solvable by evacuating the plant material and topsoil ahead of time. As for the concrete issue, I don't have any good answers.

If you really want solar/wind at 4x demand capacity, then the hydro reservoirs could be refilled by pumping water from a lower reservoir. But I think a better mix is just more hydro: use wind/solar when you have it, hydro when you don't.

To back up my battery point, I'll quote Bill Gate's new book: "How many batteries would they need in order to power Tokyo for three days, until the storm passes and they can turn the turbines back on? The answer is more than 14 million [1kwh thought experiment varity $100] batteries. That's more storage capacity than the world produces in a decade."

The costs of wind/solar are basically lies. The numbers are based on best case generation and fail to account for storage, and overbuild requirements to supply that storage.

AKA today you say wind is X dollars a MWh, but in order to actually be free of NG or other fossil fuels it needs to be built at some multiple of total demand (say 3X) to compensate for low periods. Then there you need sufficient storage (4 hours is a joke) to smooth it all out. In the end the actual cost is ballpark an order of magnitude more per MWh if one actually tried to run 100% renewables.

You need only dig up the recent TX ERCOT generation numbers to see just how useless wind/solar can be. It was functioning at less than 1/10 of its installed capacity for the entire week. During most of the winter months its a good 1/3 of its summer peaks/etc. And that is one of the leading wind providers in the entire world.

Nukes are really the only technology we could deploy in the next 5-10 year to completely eliminate CO2 production in the electricity grid. Build enough of them to supply peak generation and rather than trying to load follow use the excess energy for syngas production via CO2 recapture and it would be possible to turn a part of the vehicle fleet carbon neutral as well.

Are you seriously bringing up the wind turbines that ERCOT repeatedly failed to winterize and failed in a major storm as evidence that wind turbines are bad? This is an extremely bad faith argument. Wind turbines in the rest of the country where it's even colder aren't failing, because they're actually built for the weather, and the power company didn't cheap out.

It was mostly the NG plants the didn't get winterized and weren't available, in some cases due to lack of NG. The wind actually was after some initial glitches AFAIK working as expected. Pretty much everything failed (including a nuke).

My point wasn't that there were failures, its that the wind capacity was pretty poor leading up to the failures too. Why that is, isn't clear to me other than its apparently not unusual to have significantly less during the winter in TX. This isn't usually a problem because the demand is low as well.

(random link with graphs, these are a bit harder than the one I was looking for but are good enough https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/19/climate/texas...)

edit: maybe the first graph here https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/02/17/3-graphs-that-shed-li... shows just how poorly the wind was performing, even before the storm relative to its peak.

A significant part of the cost issues come with how the market is structured. If consumers can buy power on a hourly basis, nuclear plants can not be more expensive than gas/coal (and even with some carbon tax, this is not going to be sky high prices), and can not make a profit during abundant renewable availability, because renewables drive prices close to zero.

If you structured markets by selling kW rather than kWh, renewables would have to bear the cost of low wind/sun availability, either by building storage or by pairing with fossil power producers. This would price the stability of production, which is simply not priced today.

> It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear.

Another renewables advocate who equals the LCOE (levelized cost of energy) with the system costs, completely ignoring that it’s not the LCOE which drives up the costs for renewables, it’s the necessary backup plants unless you have access to lots of hydro power per capita.

Case in point.

France: 50 million tons CO2 p.a. in the energy sector, 50 g/kWh

Germany: 350 million tons CO2 p.a. in the energy sector, 400 g/kWh

Germany: 31 Euro-Cents/kWh

France: 18 Euro-Cents/kWh

Please stop spreading the “nuclear is expensive” narrative.

China is increasing its spending in molten salt reactors; they are NOT pulling back.

And not all designs have to be expensive. Turns out smaller can be dramatically better: https://www.forbes.com/sites/llewellynking/2020/10/13/new-de...

Lots of smaller distributed generation sources closer to the points of consumption also help with complexities (and fragilities!) in the electrical grid. Also solves the issues around transmission loss as well.

Solar and wind are not going to undercut costs any time soon. For every current nuclear plant that gets taken offline, the bulk of the load is made up for with fossil fuel generation. If solar and wind were as awesome as you are convinced, then why aren't they picking up the slack?

Until we come up with something far better than current battery technology for energy storage, solar and wind will never be more than a niche solution. The disproportionate amount of money being dumped into them is downright criminal when proven technology such as molten salt reactors is overlooked for either political or emotional reasons.

You implicitly assume the goal is to replace the current power generation capacity. What if the goal is to increase it 10 times? The US and Western Europe got to a point that's possibly close to "peak power", but what about China, India, Pakistan, Africa? Billions of people who hope to reach the living standards of the Americans one day.

How much of the cost thing like the $1B cooling solution because Diablo Canyon was an “old” design from the 70s.

I’d imagine future investment doesn’t doesn’t mean building more Diablo style reactors.

A big problem that promoting nuclear usually comes with plenty of arguments in the form of the problems of old reactors (like the Tokyo disaster one being built in the 1950s).

To be fair this is California, which can’t been been a mile of high speed rail for under $1B. It means absolutely nothing in terms of costs.

It's hard to put your finger on the true "main point." Energy, especially nuclear energy has always been fraught, politically and technically.

Your point is definitely poignant currently. Renewables are looking like a good bet atm.

A fundamental point is that nuclear energy has a lot of potential, ultimately. The debate will always be about investing in nuclear now. Long term, it's hard to imagine nuclear energy doesn't have a place.

In fact, it's surprising that nuclear energy hasn't been a bigger gamechanger. That's my last point. Nuclear energy has been, historically, somewhere between "eh" and disappointing. Applicable where natural gas is inconvenient.

The fact that most nuclear plants them are nuclear powered steam engines... something not right. Generally, nuclear is promising. Particularly, the options available to a region that needs power just aren't that attractive.

A grid that relies on transmission to that degree will require unifying some disparate grids won't it? Also it seems horribly vulnerable to attacks digital or physical.

If you're worried about attacks, you should be even more worried about nuclear.

Not really. This is actually a primary design consideration taken very seriously at nuke plants. The same can NOT be said about the rest of the grid, and renewable generation facilities.

Protecting single facilities is very hard, protecting an entire grid seems impossible. Ild hope for a decentralized grid where every generator, user, and conveyer of electricity was assumed to potentially be a subverted actor. But that seems super hard.

"It's no longer cost competitive" is just the tip of the financial iceberg. Nukes are no longer price competitive, if they ever were, even with all the unpaid externalities: Waste containment and storage is a public sector megaproject. Nuclear plants are not insurable. Set-asides for decommissioning are gamed by selling plants nearing EOL.

Completely disagree with this assessment. Storage is the key problem. There are no easy solutions and you need scalable capacity that can quickly spin up in the mean time. Otherwise you’ll have to build some sort of crazy world wide energy internet that won’t be finished in time to beat climate change.

I agree that storage is the key challenge. But it's a lot easier for us to build storage than it is to build new nuclear. In the time it takes to build new nuclear, we can build two consecutive generations of battery factories. We do this all the time, lots of different companies are building battery factories, and they never get delayed or abandoned due to inability to build.

Nuclear, even if we were happy to throw all the money we have at it, is not a climate solution because it can not be deployed quickly enough. In addition to its economic costs in terms of labor and materials, it has huge time costs, and it's now too late to try to build something that may or may not be able to scale. We have zero examples in the West of being able to build nuclear in a scaleable manner within the past 30 years. It's all failure after failure. And the only reason that any utility has tried again is 1) regulatory capture to put all the economic risk on ratepayers, and 2) intensive lobbying of utility executives to make the bad economic decision to try nuclear once again.

SMRs are literally the only hope for nuclear in the US, and even their best predictions don't look that great.

>but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. It's no longer cost competitive

If markets valued the low-CO2 nature of nuclear, they’d be doing better

https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html

> Attaching four hours of storage to a solar generation farm, just enough to get through the duck curve, is now slightly cheaper than coal.

How much would attaching two weeks of storage, which is how long panels around here have been under 20cm of snow twice this winter, cost?

> all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear

Only because the cost of carbon emissions are externalized. If carbon were properly accounted for, nuclear would most likely be economically viable.

> It's no longer cost competitive

There is no equivalent in energy density. And this is what matters the most.

solar generation farm takes way too much land. If it's in a desert, that would be fine. But many of them are on otherwise beautiful mountains, how can this be environmentally acceptable?

Solar power (or any other type of terrestrial power source) does not generate or capture electrons, so I don’t know what you’re trying to say about steam cycles. Similarly I can’t imagine what you mean by arbitrage of renewable electrons, a charged battery doesn’t have any more electrons in it than an empty battery.

Just stop the anti-nuclear argument please. Cost shouldn't be a thing if it means we can avoid a climate disaster.

The whole, 'nuclear is too expensive' argument was had 10 years ago with electric vehicles and look where we are now.

If cost is your main motivation to be anti-nuclear, you're hiding a bias whether you're aware of it or not.

We need a replacement for base load power and nuclear can fill that capacity.

Cost is certainly relevant. Its the reason that older plants are shutting down in the US, because even though they are already operating they can't compete with gas.

Cost is also the reason that what was supposed to be the reactor of the US's nuclear renaissance, the AP1000, has had all its projects cancelled. The two projects that started construction under Obama were financial failures, with one getting cancelled after spending $9B on a hole in the ground, the other is about to go online after going 2x+ over budget for time and money.

>> It's no longer cost competitive

If you compare apples to oranges it is not. Once you start to compare apples to apples it is very competitive. What do I mean by this?

People like to compare nuclear to wind or solar. There is a fundamental difference. Wind or solar is not controlled by the energy demand while a nuclear power plat's energy production is. This is why you cannot compare them. If you talk about solar or renewables you should talk about:

- the production part (solar panels or wind mills)

- the energy storage part (some sort of batteries or pumped-storage hydroelectricity)

- if you do not want to build either batteries of pumped-storage then you have to build in the same amount of quickly accessible power source (this is natural gas turbines mostly)

There are few other challenges:

- solar or windmills require massive amount of construction because the energy density is very low

- the damage to nature with windmills especially is bad (there is preemptive maintenance during animal activity for many of the windmills)

- weather can damage these facilities

- the lifetime of windmills or solar panels are much shorter than nuclear power plant lifetimes

Given all these and the general public's hatred towards nuclear energy largely fuelled by politicians many countries shut down research into nuclear with very few exceptions. Instead, these countries invested billions into renewables without much success yet. I think soon we are going to be at a tipping point when this whole circus ends and we are going to get back on track with nuclear which is much needed in the coming of space era.

It's straightforward accounting to address the issue you mean. Go read Lazard's levelized cost of energy slides. The cost comparison isn't some sort of mystery everyone but you is getting wrong.

Thanks, it just confirming what I thought. Solar is in the same bracket as nuclear. The difference is pretty small. Adding the energy density to the mix makes it obvious which one is a better option.

When she first contemplated working at Diablo Canyon, she imagined the rat-infested Springfield Nuclear Power Plant on “The Simpsons,” where green liquid oozes out of tanks. Eventually, like Hoff, she changed her thinking. “What we were doing actually aligned with my environmental values,” she told me. “That was shocking to me.”

You can tell from my username what an enormous fan of The Simpsons I am. One of the few things I wish the show hadn’t done is inserted into its world such a thoroughly negative vision of nuclear energy. If you don’t know much about the subject, The Simpsons leaves you thinking that using nuclear power at all is incredibly dangerous and foolish, and motivated by simple greed. It’s especially effective in this because the show is so pitch-perfect in how it depicts so many other aspects of society and human nature. I see this one element of the show as an unfortunate relic of the prevailing counterculture that informed Matt Groening’s otherwise generally brilliant worldview.

TMI (plus other 80s US NPP incidents) and Chernobyl had happened in the previous 10 years when Simpsons started. Those plants had real problems and caused badly needed corrections to NPP safety culture and standards. It was a pretty reasonable take for its time.

fukushima too caused an overreaction in Germany

Exactly. Judging nuclear safety based on Chernobyl is the same as judging fire safety based on a camp fire in a cave during in 15_000 BCE.

I understand that is was bad and it could have been much worse, but we are not stopping flying with airplanes because the mishaps of Boeing 737 MAX 8.

Well, let's base it on fukushima then.

>leaves you thinking that using nuclear power at all is incredibly dangerous and foolish

No one in his right mind can state with a straight face that nuclear power isn't incredibly dangerous. It might not be foolish with the right regulations and safety -that can always be debated- but no one can pretend nuclear power isn't incredibly dangerous if they know anything about it. The whole reason for all the regulation is exactly because it is so incredibly dangerous.

I think you mean hazardous. Dangerous implies a hazard is regularly manifesting in measurable harm.

Many people claim that nuclear is not unduly dangerous, and have good statistics to back it up. Certainly no one would argue that it isn't hazardous.

Similar things can be said about fire.

Bumbling idiots and greedy management causing a major disaster is what happens in real life. Not sure I'd blame The Simpsons for merely reflecting that.

The Springfield plant is cheap to operate compared to real reactors though. It would cost only $56 M to bring it up to the latest safety code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_(The_Simpsons)#Spr...

Department of Energy’s take on the Simpsons:

> https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/7-things-simpsons-got-wro...

I read Stewart Brand's 'Whole Earth Discipline' about five years ago, and came away pretty convinced by his pro-nuclear arguments. The price situation has definitely changed dramatically in the last few years, with solar dropping remarkably. So some of it may be worth revisiting.

But that said, something else has happened in the last five years that has made me a bit ... cautious about being decisive on nuclear. And that is general global instability. E.g., things sure feel like they've come off the rails recently and things I used to take for granted: that competent people would generally be in charge, has been challenged.

So to me, the biggest risk with nuclear isn't the technology itself. In isolation I see it as a great solution to one of the key challenges of climate change. To me, the biggest risk is political stability. It's a technology that requires constant competence.

All that said – I aim to be open-minded. If the new breed of reactors can safely shutdown under neglect, if they can't be weaponized if society breaks down – awesome. I'd love to hear more about it.

>And that is general global instability. E.g., things sure feel like they've come off the rails recently and things I used to take for granted: that competent people would generally be in charge, has been challenged.

There's almost never been a safer time to be alive, and there have been incompetent leaders since time immemorial.

Not even a lifetime ago incompetent leadership caused tens of millions of people to perish because they thought killing all the birds would save more of their crops, among other things.

You've been living in a bubble and/or have been ignoring history, even recent history.

I read Pinker’s book — I’m familiar with the argument. I also think it looks at a data point (now) and compares it to the long tail of history, and says, “things are great!” I’m not sure if you look at the curve’s derivative since, say, 1995, it’s clear we’re heading in a good direction. And I’m an optimist.

There have been warning signs flashing “systems failure” for a little while now, like a “check engine light” people just learn to ignore. I don’t think there’s been a year in modern history like 2020 since 1968, and even that pales in comparison.

We’re in the midst of a global pandemic with nearly 500k dead in America alone. We’ve suffered two deep, major financial crises in roughly a decade. The entire west coast was on fire this fall, and not in the gentle way it was when Native American’s used to do controlled burns every year. Texas completely fell apart this week.

Living in a bubble?

>I'm not sure if you look at the curve’s derivative since, say, 1995, it’s clear we’re heading in a good direction.

Crime was near all-time highs in the US, Europe's deadliest war since WWII was raging, numerous civil wars in Africa and elsewhere were claiming millions... It's clear it's way better, and definitely got better since your arbitrary timeline.

>I don’t think there’s been a year in modern history like 2020 since 1968, and even that pales in comparison.

Of course 2020 was a weird year, but to compare that to the height of the Vietnam and Cold War, with nuclear mutually assured destruction just inches away, among the many other things boiling is just naivete. 2020 was NOTHING like 1968, not even a close comparison.

>We’re in the midst of a global pandemic with nearly 500k dead in America alone.

Indeed, but we're rounding it out, things are slowly opening back up, and vaccines are out.

>We’ve suffered two deep, major financial crises in roughly a decade.

And mostly recovered.

>The entire west coast was on fire this fall

Objectively false. Less than 50 people died. If the entire coast was on fire, that number would be several orders of magnitude larger.

>Texas completely fell apart this week.

And recovered this week.

>Living in a bubble?

Correct, you're not living in reality. You're living in a constructed delusion that doesn't match with facts, has no context for history, and is just neurotic/alarmist.

> Less than 50 people died.

The number of people dying in a wildfire is not a good measure of its impact in the life or properties of everybody living in the area.

And here I was thinking we were having an honest debate and not just hurling insults behind a throwaway account.

Well the parent comment is simply arguing against nuclear, and given that no civilization before 1940 had to think about nuclear, it’s not a bad take...

Despite being somewhat of a subjective political position, Its not crazy to think late era Obama administration was more competent than Trump administration.

In the past, bad leader + nuclear = Chernobyl

So you completely missed his point, (s)he’s not saying “times are bad now”, they are saying “I see now that times are not good enough”

>Well the parent comment is simply arguing against nuclear, and given that no civilization before 1940 had to think about nuclear, it’s not a bad take...

No civilization had to think about electric generation at all 60 years before that.

>Its not crazy to think late era Obama administration was more competent than Trump administration.

It's not, it's a fact. Obama's administration was absolutely more competent than Trump's.

>So you completely missed his point, (s)he’s not saying “times are bad now”, they are saying “I see now that times are not good enough”

Except I didn't. Even accounting for Trump's blip, times are more than good enough for new nuclear plants now.

I suppose you could see it the other way. A nuclear plant in everyone's backyard might be incentive to put competent people in charge?

Respectfully, i think this is a naïve position, given the Zeitgeist of the last few years

Yes the question mark should be read with hesitancy. I suppose you are right. Too hopeful.

That sounds ready made for a monkey's paw situation with intelligence agency intervention. Sort of like this joke of mine which probably isn't original despite thinking it up myself. "Sure everyone says they want world peace but when you take steps towards it suddently you're 'illegally proliferating nuclear weaponry and launch capability to rogue nations'!".

I don't think people would be more inventivized in a practical sense than they already are.

> And that is general global instability. E.g., things sure feel like they've come off the rails recently and things I used to take for granted: that competent people would generally be in charge, has been challenged.

You must have lead a charmed life. :-)

I'm sick of every single thread on nuclear turning into a flame war of wind/solar vs nuclear. It really detracts from the real issue of high carbon sources -- why is the conversation never about nuclear vs the natural gas plants that are being built at an astoundingly fast rate? Those two things are even more similar since they are both baseline power sources.

I’m guessing that is because nuclear is often framed as a solution to the climate disaster.

If the discussion was simply: “see how cool of a technology nuclear power is; see how nuclear powers the latest mars rover” I would not guess there would be a lot of backlash. However in this thread you see a lot of: “wind and solar has some problems too”, or “nuclear waste is better then the warming of the planet”.

The problem with pitting nuclear as a solution to the climate disaster is that there are existing technologies that can solve the energy part of it, those technologies are primarily wind and solar. And there is ample reason to be skeptical about how well nuclear could solve it. So naturally when someone states that nuclear is good actually at solving the climate crisis, a natural response would be: “well actually, it isn’t. Wind and solar is”.

Huh? Nuclear is an existing solution to climate change, though. More existing than wind and solar. It provides more electricity in the US than wind and solar combined. The problem of climate change would already have been worse without it. So it already is part of the solution.

It doesn’t have to be and isn’t the entire solution. But no activist calling for the end of nuclear electricity is doing any favors to climate action.

Nuclear was largely built 50 years ago. Our technological capacities have shifted vastly since then. Also, the nuclear industry is completely unwilling to reuse those same designs, and regulators don't want that either.

So the nuclear from 1970 may still be operating, and operating somewhat cheaply, but that doesn't mean that nuclear as a technology still matches the technological productive capacity of our economy.

The thermal conversion of steam to electricity used to be considered dirt cheap, as far as the overall cost of electricity: low capital costs that last a good amount of time. The primary expense was fuel.

Zero-fuel electricity generation capital costs are starting to eclipse the thermal conversion capital costs. This has huge implications for what we should think of basing our future grid upon.

Take natural gas for example. Turbine-driven generators followed by a steam cycle-combined cycle- have completet obsoleted thermal-only gas plants. It's why coal is so much more expensive than gas.

The world is different, and nuclear only seems like a solution because we paid massive capital costs at a time when the competitive environment was entirely different. We no longer live in that world.

China alone is building 12 reactors alone and if the US isn’t going to get their act together and stops with that renewables-for-all non-sense, China will be the dominating world power.

I always took it as: As the nuclear plants from the 70s and 80s are getting decommissioned because of age, there is no plan to replace them with new nuclear. So they should be replace them with wind and solar, because wind and solar is a cheaper, quicker, and more reliable alternative then new nuclear (as this tread demonstrates).

I don’t see the debate as existing nuclear vs. new wind and solar, but as new nuclear vs. new wind and solar.

Germany is a counterexample. Much progress was lost with the decision to accelerate retirement of (rather than extend) nuclear power plants. The rule ought to be we retire all coal, then all (or virtually all) natural gas before considering retiring nuclear. Extend or even upgrade existing nuclear to ensure safety and productivity.

(The US has mostly been doing a pretty good job of this, upgrading and maintaining the existing fleet and even adding a reactor here or there, although we have had some unforced errors like how some nuclear power plants in California were shut down early.)

There was supposed to be a nuclear renaissance kicked off by the loan guarantees passed under Bush. The AP1000 was supposed to be safer, simpler, more efficient and easier to build.

However, the 2 plants that started under Obama were failures, with one getting cancelled after spending $9B on a hole in the ground and the other about to come online after going 2x+ over time and money budgets. Westinghouse, the maker of the AP1000, went through bankruptcy as a result. All prospective AP1000 projects have been halted.

No generator in their right mind would order one without huge additional subsidy from the government, guaranteeing against construction risk.

Wind and solar need backup power plants and therefore *CANNOT* replace nuclear power plants.

Nuclear is the largest source of emission-free electricity in the US and it’s the only one that can be built at scale.

Emissions free uranium mining. Emissions free uranium enrichment. Emissions free refueling.

Where are they?

It’s framed as a solution to energy reliance on fossil fuel because it is a solution.

These guys explicitly want to couple their nuclear plant with wind/solar: https://usnc.com/mmr-energy-system/. And from top level, it looks a lot like a natural gas plant.

According to the Department of Energy, nuclear energy creates minimal waste, has a small land footprint, and is cleaner for the air. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/3-reasons-why-nuclear-cle...

Interestingly: “ All of the used nuclear fuel produced by the U.S. nuclear energy industry over the last 60 years could fit on a football field at a depth of less than 10 yards!”

Cleaner than than the air compared to what? Coal? No shit.

How about the cost compared to solar and wind? Oh, don't want to talk about that? I wonder how much nuclear waste solar and wind creates.

Interestingly enough, CO2g per W of energy is considered much higher (4 times?) for PV than for nuclear, at least in common statistics used to evaluate power plant emissions (12 gCO2eq/kWh for nuclear, 11g for wind, 24g for hydro and 45g for solar - source:IPCC2014).

Most nuclear waste can be reprocessed and burned further down (that's the strategy that was used by France). A big issue with that is the effective voiding of non-proliferation treaty by, among other, USA - nothing scares them more than a country running plutonium economy, thus proposals of designs with remote kill switches operated by USA and other imperialistic moves like it.

Nuclear waste is nuclear fuel

> According to the Department of Energy

Isn't that the department that corrupt US politicians staff with people who are partial to the interests of the industry they're supposed to regulate?

Anyway, the link seems rather propagandistic. Let the Secretary of Energy bury a football field's worth of nuclear waste next to his town.

i just dont buy it. hypothetically, there is a nuclear power plant design that is perfectly safe in that it will never melt down. but there is no nuclear power plant that produces no waste. as long as you are producing waste, you are depending on bumbling bureaucrats to properly dispose of that waste and manage the waste often for extremely long periods of time. its just not an ideal situation. the government cant even keep the water potable in certain places.

meanwhile, solar is safe to set up, safe to operate, and there is no radioactive waste to manage. if flint michigan has a solar array, then the worst that can happen is that their lights go out. this is a small but critical advantage in my eyes.

and then look at the bigger picture. there hasnt been a nuclear reactor that is perfectly safe to operate. its still hypothetical. solar is growing every year, the battery market is growing every year. panels and packs never truly retire, just decline in capacity. solar wins.

The issue with radioactive waste is more of a political and emotional problem than a real one. The amount of waste is rather small and it's not like it will irradiate you from a kilometre away :-). It can be stored in safe containers and buried in stable geological sites or even stored temporarily for many years in storage houses and maybe later re-used in types of reactors that will be able to recycle the spent fuel rods. Whole US produces 2000 tones of radioactive waste a year. In fact, the U.S. nuclear industry has produced roughly 64,000 metric tons (one metric ton equals 1.1 U.S. tons) of radioactive used fuel rods in total or, in the words of NEI, enough "to cover a football field about seven yards deep." Which really isn't much compared to any other pollution.

The issue for me is not quantity but time. 1000-10,000 (or even much longer) years for decay is an incredible amount of time for the human race. Written language only appeared ~5500 years ago.

Let’s say ancient Rome 2,000 years ago made and stored a substance that kills everyone exposed to it, would we expect that substance to still be intact and unblemished right now?

Worst case scenario is that society collapses and nuclear knowledge disappears. Then at some point in the future some farmers will get radiation poisoning and others will avoid the area since it’s “cursed”. This hypothetical problem is hardly anything to worry about when nuclear is sorely needed to help us with an actual problem, climate change.

It's kind of facile to argue about a hypothetical future a thousand years in the future when we're facing crises right now that depend on solving energy issues yesterday.

Scenario 1: a hypothetical societal collapse happens and scientific knowledge and written language are somehow lost. A handful of people explore a dangerous area and are swiftly killed by radiation from tampering with a storage facility.

Scenario 2: millions die from climate-related catastrophes and ecological collapse leads to famines that kill millions more.

We know we're facing scenario two as a distinct possibility, or we'd be happily burning coal until we can't find any more. The first scenario relies on several assumptions, none of which are honestly likely at this stage of human society. And it unlikely to have an effect on nearly as many people.

Fuel reprocessing is a thing, modern reactors deplete the fuel much more thoroughly, and there isn't even that much of it. All of the spent fuel France has used since the 1970s fits in a small fraction of their basketball-court sized storage facility.

Cadmium and lead will stay inside landfill for 1000 -10,000 million years. It already kills people in China, due to the extraction process (probably in Africa too), and destroyed PV panels were a nightmare in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami, and it was often a small pv that just activated water pumps. If that happened now, it would be a disaster on top of a disaster. And one that would displace millions.

Well, there are vast amounts of highly toxic oil that we yet have to extract from below the surface - if something of that leaks by accident then it will poison and kill everything it will touch and it has been there since the dinosaurs died :-). Radioactive waste is solid waste and the amount is small - even if someone would dig it up, it would be only a local danger and it could maybe kill a reduced number of humans, but it will not be a global catastrophe. We are probably producing more highly toxic and poisonous waste that is not radioactive but it will also last hundreds if not thousands of years (e.g. toxic heavy metals) and kill many more people. Tens of thousands of people die every year from industrial pollution. How many people die from stored nuclear waste? Zero? (and even in worst case when a future civilisation digs up the nuclear waste - we are not speaking about hundreds of thousands like in case of industrial pollution).

In general there is an inverse relation between the half-life and the intensity of radioactivity of an isotope. Isotopes with a long half-life decay very slowly, and so produce fewer radioactive decays per second; their intensity is less. Istopes with shorter half-lives are more intense.

In nuclear waste, isotopes with very short half-lives, say a few days or even a few weeks, are not the major concern. They will decay to negligible amounts within a year or two. Isotopes with very long half-lives, more than 1000 years, are likely to be less intense.

Long-term isotopes are more complicated. They don't dose as heavily, but there are a lot more issues than just that. Plutonium for example is comparatively long-lived, but some of its decay products can be quite nasty. At the extreme end are isotopes that are so long-lived that their hazard levels are close to zero. Uranium-238, the kind left after the fissile 235 is removed, pretty well falls into this category.

You are talking about worst case scenario.

There are nuclear reactor types specifically built for getting rid of high half-time traditional nuclear waste.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/destroying-nuclear-wa...

I mean storing waste that is dangerous for that long is the result of politics, not any technological limitation. Recycling and reusing that waste would make most of it dangerous for like 50-100 years, and after that the only danger is living on top of the low radioactive waste for 20 years or eating it, which would kill you even if it wasn't radioactive because it is a heavy metal.

Nuclear waste occurs naturally well before humans created it, I think we will manage

And yet we have places like the Marshall Islands where US nuclear waste is leaking at this very moment. If it is that easy to contain then why isn't happening?

The problem with nuclear is that people are too greedy to use it safely or want to weaponize it so lots and lots of regulation is needed. Nuclear energy will be fixed the day human greed and aggression are gone.

So nuclear has been up and running in mainstream use for what, fifty years at this point? If that waste sticks around for just 10,000 years (optimistic), and assuming no increase in demand over today (which is laughable), your ‘just one football field’ waste site is actually two hundred times bigger.

And that’s raw waste, it doesn’t include containment for each deposit you make.

Not to mention the issues we’re already having today with containment decay around existing waste sites.

There's also more waste than just the spent fuel rods. One of the things I learned that really shifted my views is just how expensive decommissioning nuclear plants is. Meanwhile, recycling solar is basically the cost of shipping the material around.

Two hundred football fields is absolutely trifling even now and much less on the scale of 10 000 years.

You're also ignoring the fact that reactors that recycle spent fuel have been made and can be drastically improved, so demand for storage of waste as well as how hard they are to contain can very realistically go down.

Princeton did a study, and found to get to net zero by 2050, the US could do it with only renewables (the "E+ RE+" scenario). To accomplish that:

> Cumulative total wind and solar farm area in E+ RE+ by 2050 is ~1 million km^2, or roughly an area the size of AK, IA, KS, MO, NE, OK, and WV combined (with an additional 64,000 km^2 of offshore wind); directly impacted lands total 70,000 km^2, an area larger than WV.

* PDF: https://environmenthalfcentury.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/t...

* https://environmenthalfcentury.princeton.edu

Most of it taken up by wind farms (94%)

Transmission lines would have to expanded as well: in 2020, there is ~320,000 GW-km of capacity, and so by 2050 ~1,702,000 GW-km (5.3x) would be needed. They estimated it would cost US$ 3,710B (3.7T), though amortized over the next thirty years.

E+RE+ assumes that renewables can be constructed/grow at a rate of 10%/year. They have a E+RE- scenario which growth is limited to what was achieved already, and that scenario needs some nuclear to get to net zero.

Of course net zero may be "too much", and we can achieve good climate goals with modest releases of carbon/GHGs.

> Most of it taken up by wind farms (94%)

Wind farms do not exclude the land involved from also being used for other purposes, like agriculture.

This study starts with existing laissez-faire energy demand projections. Hopefully another large part of the emissions reduction will come from people adopting less wasteful living, transport, eating etc behaviours and preferences.

> Hopefully another large part of the reduction will come from people adopting less wasteful living, transport, eating etc behaviours and preferences

Zero chance. This would require reductions in quality of life. Even minor fuel tax increases have spawned capital-freezing protests from the Arab world to Paris.

I do not know if this is pro or anti-, but I thank you for your statistic.

The land required for this is absolutely insane. Insane.

I challenge anyone with a straight face to argue that utilizing 6 huge to medium size states out of the 50 is an efficient use of land or physical resources. We can't recycle ordinary trash correctly without throwing it to developing countries, who are rejecting it. We don't recycle wind turbines at all. But we're supposed to be able to routinely recycle six whole states worth of panels and turbines?

It's madness.

i dont want to be contrarian, but this is wrong. you get 150-100 w per square meter. what am i missing?

Talk to the PhDs at Princeton and their collaborators:

* https://environmenthalfcentury.princeton.edu/experts

I'm just copying and pasting the December 2020 report.

Off the top of my head, renewables (in the US) only produce electricity about 30% of the time, so you have to 'over build':

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

They have energy storage experts, so I'm sure batteries and such are taken into account.

total power requirement of the united states / amount of average power including weather and TOD produced by a square meter of land + amount of land to store necessary batteries = a corner notched out of nevada. not multiple states. i dont think you need a phd to see this, and elon musk also agrees with this and i think he is knowledgeable enough about solar and batteries. plus, there are lots of efficiency gains still in the pipes that will reduce our power consumption. when all houses are properly insulated, heated with a heat pump, have efficient appliances, thermal loops and have solar on their roofs then all of this becomes even more feasible. and thats not even including wind, hydro or thermal.

"High level nuclear waste" is such a weird idea once you take a bit of in depth look at nuclear technology. It's just fuel. Just nuclear material. No need to "manage for extremely long periods of time". Only requiring more sophisticated Fast Neutron technology to be used, and if used, provide practically unlimited supply of electricity and nuclear material to a nation.

The reason as to why "safe storage of nuclear waste" is a problem lies in the last part: unlimited supply of nuclear material. Completely destroys national security for everyone. Without that part the problem reduces to just engineering challenges of building and running some Sodium cooled Fast Neutron reactors.

Disclaimer1: I'm "pro" nuclear (as a baseline to supplement hydro), and i think nuclear is the 3rd best option (behind hydro and reducing consumption) Disclaimer2: i have investissment in veolia

Panels do decline, a lot, and especially older panels, but also most newer industrial solar PV are using heavy metals that can burn land (I mean, go to indonesia and look at farmland or even forest near communities were ONG installed a lot of PV before the tsunami, you'll understand what i mean, you can literally see where those PV were buried).

Veolia Rousset plant was the first to recycle most of the materials (the shareholder paper said almost 95%, i believe them) and not simply landfill them. But this have increased cost, and right now, most PV panels end up in landfills, poisoning earth for decades (and now that we understand saturnism)

I'm not saying PV is not a solution, it is, especially locally, but it have to be handled well. But you can't have solar+wind make up more than 50% of your electrical network, its not possible. And even 50% add a lot of costs.

Why is it not possible?

Well, it is tbh, but not right now, and not in the US. It would probably be doable in Europe if we massively overbuilt?

You want to have a stable baseline because you want to be able to provide electricity to some services in worst case situation. Those services often have backup generators, but in worst case scenarii, the generator is too cold/old/dirty, and you don't take risks. In France we had a scenario were our grid managing center is under attack and cannot indicate who dispatch power to who, and to respond to that you can't not have a base load. But also, having a base load that can fluctuate daily permit emergency maintenance on multiple electricity production site.

Isn’t there still a lot of implied waste from the solar panels themselves though, as well as the storage batteries i.e. once they’ve reached their end of life?

My understanding is that this cost and the manufacturing cost (rate earth metals etc.) are often overlooked when reasoning about the total footprint of both solar and electric vehicles..

rare earth metals etc.

The rare earth elements are the lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium [1]. None of these elements are needed to manufacture solar panels. The only rare metal used in quantity by solar panels is silver, which is used to make electrically conductive pastes for cell contacts [2].

The question of what resources solar panels require is deliberately muddied by a couple of vested interests.

1) Junior mining companies and their promoters who want to create the impression that vast wealth awaits the next rare earth miner. (It doesn't. Consumption is too limited. The market value of zinc alone eclipses all rare earth element production combined.)

2) People who are playing up the environmental impacts of solar to make the fossil fuel status quo look better by comparison. "Sure, coal is a dirty mining business, but so is rare earth production!"

These people either don't know or don't care that solar doesn't use rare earth elements.

You also have credulous people who just repeat what they heard from members of groups 1 and 2.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element

[2] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/08/28/slimming-down-on-silv...

Hafnium is used in some next generation MEG solar cells, to say nothing of ITO electrodes

Batteries should be refurbish-able and definitely recyclable.

And definitely energy intensive to recycle.

>> meanwhile, solar is safe to set up, safe to operate, and there is no radioactive waste to manage

Only some giant amount (only 300x compare to nuclear) of non-radioactive waste that ends up in poor countries. Do you care about that?

https://www.solarpowerinternational.com/wp-content/uploads/2...

https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die...

https://www.technocracy.news/solar-energy-produces-300-times...

That last link is hilarious. It cited a study that found that the mass of solar panels is 300x the mass of SPENT NUCLEAR FUEL. Because, of course, pound-for-pound a solar panel and spent nuclear fuel have the same toxicity?

You can build recycling plant and force PV vendor to sent their panels to said plant once the panel hit the end of its life.

Then do that and see how costs increase, and do the comparison again.

>there is no nuclear power plant that produces no waste.

"no" is difficult. "Very little" is feasible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor#Nuclear_...

As long as flint's heat is still natural gas based then lights going out is the worst thing. I'm guessing an average winter in flint (if it's not then shift my statement to MN where it is) is much colder then the mess Texas just went through. Things just break when things are that colder, particularly electricity. Just try starting your car when it's -30F.

Power generation for Billions of people seems like a complex problem that everyone seems very willing to boil down to solving with "Just focus on electricity and use wind, solar, and batteries." Sounds a lot like the "just use mongoDB" talk from 6-7 years ago.

Solar requires energy storage. It is not on demand. Wind and solar must be backed by an on demand source as we don't have sufficiently cost effective storage methods.

Options are then basically hydroelectric, natural gas, petroleum, coal, or nuclear. Nuclear is the cleanest if you can't put a dam somewhere.

Or batteries, which are getting cheaper and are now less expensive than natural gas peaker plants in many locations

Interesting. Can you please provide a source? I've never heard as such, but would be glad to find otherwise.

there are many huge packs. tesla has built some of the biggest ones.

> bumbling bureaucrats

Sounds like a government problem, not a nuclear problem.

exactly. fission is great if its run by smart, motivated people. unfortunately, the government is not always populated by the kind of people who are up to the task. and they are not always structured in a way that allows them to work optimally. its a big, complicated system. to have total confidence in it is foolish. its like any other huge, complicated and convoluted machine... you should be skeptical of it, not blindly faithful in its ability to do things like manage nuclear waste. maybe someone comes back at me saying that the government already does things like manages the nuclear arsenal, wages war, etc. my response is that you should be worried, we should try to reduce all of that as much as possible.

Hope you have a solution to never having bad government.

Yes, none.

> as long as you are producing waste, you are depending on bumbling bureaucrats to properly dispose of that waste and manage the waste often for extremely long periods of time.

The entirety of nuclear waste ever produced by humanity can fit in a football field.

This is without even considering fuel recycling. Acting like this is a problem has to be the most absurd (and I might add politicized) argument ever made against nuclear energy.

ok well lets settle it. how much waste would be produced if the whole country ran on nuclear? regardless of the volume of waste, how serious is a breach of containment? is the waste a target for terrorists? can it be weaponized?

> ok well lets settle it. how much waste would be produced if the whole country ran on nuclear?

That waste goes into Yucca mountain, and it's behind / underneath 100s of meters of neutron heavy metals. If we were exclusively powered by nuclear power for a century without recycling, it'd be something like 100 football fields. Absolutely, completely, utterly inconsequential.

1 inch of neutron-heavy lead is enough to dispel the radioactivity from full blast of a thermonuclear weapon and be safe for a human. Saying that the Yucca mountain waste facility had potential for harm is the most unscientific, embarrassing thing that a certain unnamed political party has ever claimed on nuclear waste.

The risks you end up taking on don't make sense for the amount of energy received. Solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro are more than enough to power the world. They're cheaper too.

In terms of baseload requirements, batteries are the far safer alternative for transitioning away from fossil fuels. Nuclear power may have been tenable as a solution, even with the heightened risks, if improvements in battery technology were stagnant and/or stagnating. But this hasn't been the case, and so nuclear fission as an energy source will likely become a relic of our past. Now nuclear fusion on the other hand...

The risk people aren't considering is public opinion. It takes about 10 years to build a nuclear power-plant. Historically when have had one major accident every 30 years. Each time an accident have happened, projects have been canceled or put on ice. This mean that if you start planing a power-plant today there is ~33% chance, public opinion will stop it before its completed.

One good illustration id the documentary "Inside Bills head". Bill gates spent untold millions to develop safer, cleaner, less expensive nuclear power. One day he woke up to the news of the accident in japan, and all of a sudden all partners pulled out, permits where revoked and no one was interested anymore.

(The costs, risks and time lag are more important arguments against nuclear, but I think this one is worth considering too)

Yes, Fukushima definitely put a huge damper on nuclear. And I do generally agree with you. Every time an accident happens, which is an inevitability, it's guaranteed that some investors will pull out.

We're going to have to build up our Nuclear infrastructure eventually because outside of fossil fuels, geothermal and hydro (both of which need particular geography so they can never be the final answer) there is nothing else.

Unfortunately the cultural push is for wind and solar, so it looks like we're going to have to give wind and solar the 'old college try' and lose precious decades before we realize we need nuclear.

It would have been nice to invest in Nuclear in the 70s to the same level as France, for example, and thereby prevent trillions of tons of CO2 that were emitted between the 70s and today from being emitted, and the trillions more between now and whenever we wake up to the fact that wind and solar just can't scale. I suspect future generations will take a dim view of the anti-nuke environmental movement.

Worse, though wind and solar collectors may reduce CO2 emissions they are incredibly environmentally destructive in other ways. Let's keep mind that global warming is only one aspect of environmental destruction. The other is regular habitat and ecosystem collapse due support of human civilization (cities, agriculture, transportation etc.). Solar and wind collectors have horrendous land-use requirements (land-use around mining for necessary materials, deployment of the collectors, and finally land-fill once out of use). So when it comes to ecosystem destruction, solar and wind make it worse on all counts.

I have no fuckin clue what environmentalists think will happen to the environment when we increase Solar and Wind collectors by several orders of magnitude (which would be necessary to support 7-10 billion people move partially from fossil fuels). Pure Insanity.

Oh well. It is what it is.

Your post reads oddly anti-renewables. You can't genuinely discuss energy and renewables in 2021 without mentioning battery storage -- so many procurements now are packaged solar/batteries. No one suggests pure wind/solar, but rather batteries as a 3-4 day short-term storage system. Yes, long term storage is needed, that is an acknowledged sticking point that many companies are looking at. There is in fact evidence that solar is beneficial to some ecosystems it's installed in, and it certainly adds value to homeowner's houses too. But with batteries, you unlock the next level for renewables.

With these batteries in hand, you don't need new base-load nuclear power, it's much slower and harder to build, in terms of regulatory and complexity issues, and it's going to cost you a lot more -- see the debacle in South Carolina and their wasted money on a failed nuclear plant. The only place really building new nuclear is China, but why would the US when electricity demand growth is largely flat in recent years and only smaller bits of incremental additions are needed to replace retiring or dirtier plants? Where do you see nuclear fitting in, which design to be used, and how will it be funded?

Compared to solar/wind/batteries, there's simply nothing as cost-effective at stopping climate change.

There's very little doubt that investments in wind and solar are beneficial. It may not get to the point that it takes the place of everything else but it is definitely a good ancillary source. As in the solar panels on your house might not be enough to subvert traditional power sources, but it will take some of the stress off the grid. It may not be helpful to the current situation in Texas, but it definitely helps a place like Texas in the summer.

>As in the solar panels on your house might not be enough to subvert traditional power sources, but it will take some of the stress off the grid

Sure, except that's not really a problem we are trying to solve.

That solar and wind have niche application, sure, I agree. There will always be applications and settings where solar and wind make sense. The argument that is made is that solar and wind can replace fossil-fuel generated power. And sometimes the argument is made that solar and wind can replace fossil-fuel generated power AND nuclear power. That's crazy talk but like I said, as a society we already made the choice to give it a try. We'll lose decades on top the decades we already lost, but it is what it is.

Citation needed.

Citation for which part? That solar and wind have huge land-use requirements compared to nuclear (and even other generation sources)? That we need to increase production of solar and wind collectors by several orders of magnitude to fully replace fossil fuel generated power, and by extension need to increase mineral extraction (rare-earth or otherwise) to build them? That every single collector we build today will need to be land-filled at some point in the future and replaced by another one we have yet to build? That there is no battery technology today that can bridge the intermittency issues of solar and wind in order for that technology to actually power the economy without fossil fuel backup? That global warming is not the only environmental problem we are dealing with?

Those are all statements of fact.

Those doesn't look like facts at all but your opinions but feel free to prove otherwise.

Let's start with a simple one:

>solar and wind have huge land-use requirements compared to nuclear

Can you build nuclear in the oceans, safely, like offshore wind turbines? Or on hillsides and in desert hundreds of kilometres from the nearest town (and get people to work there without disrupting the local ecology with local housing etc.) using only land no one wants? Land is not something we have unlimited amounts of and in many places it is only better if it is somewhere else or smaller than what is there now.

Can we build a nuclear plant that is safe? Not according to you or a talking head but to the people who have to live close to it. If you won't you clearly don't believe in it your self so, would you rather live close beside its perimeters with your children in an earthquake, tsunami or hurricane compared to windmills?

>global warming is not the only environmental problem we are dealing with

No, one of the big ones is that the rich countries who have polluted for decades wants everyone to now live up to their rules today which is not going to happen. So before anything else all of us that live in the richest parts of the world have to pay for everyone who doesn't to get environmentally friendly electricity. The problem is global and the people who are being lifted out of poverty today have as much right to use old coal technicology today as we had 50 years ago unless we pay the difference in cost for them.

Will you help pay for electricity in places that need it more than you to save the planet? Because that is the biggest problem we need to solve - not if Sweden use nuclear or Texas upgrade its grid. Those are close to irrelevant unlike the costs of environmentally safe power plants in India, Africa, China, etc.

>Can you build nuclear in the oceans, safely, like offshore wind turbines? Or on hillsides and in desert hundreds of kilometres from the nearest town (and get people to work there without disrupting the local ecology with local housing etc.) using only land no one wants? Land is not something we have unlimited amounts of and in many places it is only better if it is somewhere else or smaller than what is there now.

I don't know how you can say that it is merely an opinion and not fact that, land-use requirements of solar and wind are high.

Also, every square meter of Earth is part of some ecosystem that is already under tremendous stress due to human activity. That includes areas that are deemed 'undesirable' to human life, like deserts and oceans and hillsides. And by the way, those are not the only regions that are used for wind and solar farms. You only need to look at how wind and solar are being deployed today to see that all kinds of tracks of land are allocated for wind and solar farms, and we will have to scale that by several orders of magnitude in order to make a dent in getting rid of fossil fuels.

>Not according to you or a talking head but to the people who have to live close to it.

I lived within 10 km of a nuclear plant all my life, as did millions in my city.

>No, one of the big ones is that the rich countries who have polluted for decades wants everyone to now live up to their rules today which is not going to happen. So before anything else all of us that live in the richest parts of the world have to pay for everyone who doesn't to get environmentally friendly electricity.

I don't understand what that has to do with anything.

Go heavy nuclear and invest in fusion. The later will lead to clean abundant energy and eventually a reduction in resource scarcity. What is the economics of air? That's the economics we want.

Fusion research? Sure. I hope you aren't expecting practical commercial reactors anytime soon. I believe the current fusion scientists just entering the workforce are hoping for major strides by the end of their CAREER when they finally retire.

Yea, plus we've reached the point where even if you do believe the most optimistic timelines for fusion power development, its not going to come in time to make a meaningful contribution to fighting climate change.

I don't see where that's implied. The scenario that makes sense is that by the time our heavy investments into nuclear pay off and then some, maybe in 80-100 years, we can transition to fusion.

Luckily we already have a working fusion reactor. It's 92M miles away, but it's a big one. All that is required are some solar panels and wind turbines to harness its power.

I'm down for a Dyson Swarm.

We'll get there. As soon as we stop listening to the morons that want to do step Z before they finish step C.

oh... I see the "we're going to Mars" wet dreamers did not like my post.

techies... lol.

The more interesting climate advantage of nuclear power is it can be used directly in manufacturing, for example in creating steel (which represents 8% of GHG emissions). You can't make steel with electricity - the current strategy involves essentially setting a bunch of oil on fire on top of the requisite components (you can tell I'm not actually an industrial engineer, but steel generation is very not green).

However, you could harness the heat from a nuclear plant directly (instead of using it to create steam and drive turbines) to create steel. This has been discussed for decades[1], but modern improvements in nuclear technology could make it a reality

[1]: https://inis.iaea.org/search/search.aspx?orig_q=RN:8341064

From your link: "The most promising concept is a High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Nuclear Reactor heating helium to a temperature sufficient to steam reform hydrocarbons into reducing gases for the direct reduction of iron ores."

That still consumes fossil hydrocarbons.

Hydrogen can substitute for hydrocarbons in the production of direct reduced iron from iron ore.

"Assessment of hydrogen direct reduction for fossil-free steelmaking"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261...

Hydrogen can of course be produced cleanly from nuclear power. But it's questionable if nuclear-derived hydrogen will be cheaper than other clean hydrogen sources.

If anything can reduce/limit now the climate catastrophe then it is total transformation to clean electric energy which is produced with minimal emissions: housing, transport, industry, everything must go electric. Producing does not need to be renewables, it can be even fossils, it just has to be without GHG emissions. Nothing else matters. These theoretical risks, long-term waste storage etc are at best secondary questions which are totally irrelevant in current situation where we have almost lost that battle. Considering that full electrification requires automatically 3-4 times hike of energy demand any clean enough tech has to be considered and where possible deployed right away. It is simple like that.

I think it behooves the US and any other country serious about both climate change and extra-planetary exploration and colonization to develop a robust terrestrial nuclear power program as well as encouraging a trained cadre of nuclear engineers who can manage nuclear power sources on other planets, satellites and space-craft.

  > encouraging a trained cadre of nuclear engineers who can manage nuclear power sources

Ignoring the context of the rest of your comment, it should be noted that the US Navy has a near-perfect record in nuclear safety. This is often attributed to them not working for a profit motive. If we're going to use nuclear power on other solar system bodies, and I expect that we will, then most likely that knowledge will come from US Navy expertise.

I am aware of the US Navy's nuclear engineering program but it's likely not capable of producing enough nuclear engineers for future needs, I expect.

They also have the benefit of being able to flood and sink reactors in the ocean to prevent meltdowns. Which is why im an advocate for off-shore nuclear power, either floating, or even better, completely underwater. Of course that increases costs, but it would make nuclear almost completely safe even in the worst case scenarios.

I think that's their plan: https://usnc.com/space/

Is the US serious about extra-planetary colonization?

As serious as any other country from what I can tell.

if (US == "Musk") ? true : false

It is hard to take peoples arguments of cost seriously when governments around the world are printing fiat at alarming rates. Covid has proven that where there is a will the money can be found.

As it happens, macroeconomics and microeconomics are different, like chemistry amd physics are different.* The printing presses are not running in order for governments to buy more stuff.

That printing could be good or bad, but any argument based on “run printing presses as a way of raising money” doesn’t address any of the issues. Nobody has advocated that in decades (the odd Zimbabwean despot aside).

* I’m not claiming economics is anywhere near as scientific as chemistry or physics, heavy trappings of math notwithstanding.

So Bill Gates doesn't think we can do this with a majority solar, wind, and storage. He invented the backslash and has a lot of money, so he is getting a lot of attention.

But has a good computer simulation been made? Just collect annual sunlight data from a million points across the US, along with wind, throw in 200M electric vehicles (can use satellite data and image recognition data to guess how often they are parked for V2G), and see how far we can get towards a 100% green grid.

I haven't seen a computer simulation and yet here is Bill saying it's impossible. Is it? Or is this just another "computers will never need more than 640k" moment?

Fun fact: one aircraft carrier (CVN-78) has the same number of nuclear reactors as the entire state of California.

https://archive.is/PDebD

I'm all for nuclear power too, as long as it's nowhere near me.

I would rather risk a few local meltdowns than a global heatup.

Just buy solar and wind, avoid both.

Solar & wind != nuclear.

Solar and wind are not on demand and require storage that's not currently practical.

Nuclear also isn't 'on demand', but load-following at best. You'd have to add some peaker plants (or storage) into the mix if you wanted to go majority-nuclear as well...

Nuclear can handle variable load by more aggressively cooling the reactor. Same thermal output, lower electrical output.

Nuclear isn't really on demand either, it takes days to change production capacity.

You're never going to have a powermix that's 100% renewables. There will always be a few power plants to pick up the slack if weather conditions are unfavorable for a long period of time. Should these plants use coal, gas or nuclear?

This is mistaken. I'd suggest looking through Lazard's levelized cost of energy and cost of storage slides. A pure renewables + battery approach is becoming economically viable.

The main problem that remains is organizing the industry to do it when natural gas is dirt cheap due to fracking.

Also, wind + solar is generally a pretty stable mix. We already know how to do continent scale power grids to shift power around local weather. What recently happened in Texas was a result of their conscious decision to go it alone with their own grid, and making insufficient winterization investment in the grid they built.

You're never going to have a powermix that's 100% renewables

There have been a whole bunch of studies that say you could, in principle. If things like power-to-gas or cryogenic storage panned out, going from 'in principle' to 'in practice' would no longer seem particularly far-fetched to me...

You can overbuild solar and wind to cover all needs, with grid and storage construction (batteries, water or other reservoirs).

I'm not advocating shutting down working reactors until their planned end of life, so we already have a built-in phasing out schedule, measured in decades.

Geothermal.

Realistically, buy solar and wind but never drive fossil fuel use below 40% because there's not enough energy storage.

Now that launching stuff into orbit is getting much cheaper, is there any reasonable calculation to just ship nuclear waste into orbit? Or even further away (crashing it into Sun would be ideal but too expensive I guess)

Some rocket launches fail, and it would be a problem if you're constantly launching radioactive waste into space and 1% of those launches end with a crash that scatters dangerous material on the ground.

The US produces 2,000 metric tons of nuclear waste per year. There's also about 90,000 metric tons in storage.

Falcon Heavy is the most cost effective rocket in operation. For $90M it can send 8 tons to GTO (its harder to get things into the sun but the numbers are available for GTO).

So just the launching would cost would be $22.5B per year. And it would be $1T to take care of the existing waste. But that's way too low because transporting the waste and preparing it for launch would be very expensive in itself.

There goes the carbon benefits...

NIMBY on steroids: Not on my back-yard planet :-)

Luckily for you there aren't other sentients in the Sol system.

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