White House eyes subsidies for nuclear plants to help meet climate targets

Nuclear generation can't react to changes in demand very fast and so doesn't play well with large amounts of wind generation. It's ok with solar, because you can predict night-time 8 hours in advance, which is optimal for ramping up nuclear generation.

Combined-cycle gas turbines, while they do use fossil fuels, are the most carbon-efficient way to get electricity from fossil fuels, and can quickly react to changes in demand.

So while I agree with the point about not getting rid of nuclear too fast, both nuclear and natural gas have their place in moving to mostly renewables. Natural gas could especially be important if it allows other fossil-fuel burning, eg for transport, to be replaced by electricity generated with non-zero but low carbon emissions.

Battery storage can scale large, but more importantly, it can scale really small. This means that you can throw a couple shipping containers of it at one side of a congested transmission link, and save tons of money. It means that we can make all our houses self reliant for hours at a time.

Storage will help us solve the problem of transmission lines causing massive wildfires. It will provide massive reliability and resilience across the grid. Small nuclear won't help much with that, unless is also paired with storage.

If nuclear can provide electricity at rates competitive with solar and wind, then storage will help nuclear too. But if nuclear is not beating the cost of solar and wind, then we will have less wealth if we spend our labor building nuclear than if we build renewables and storage.

A world built on solar wind and storage will probable have peak power capacity 2x-4x more than we need, with 2-3 days worth of storage. The ratio between power and storage will largely depend on the relative costs of storage versus power.

And I think it's time to start thinking about the sort of word where we have an over abundance of energy that renewables will provide. We will have lots of excess energy being produced, and with the right applications that can tolerate intermittency, that excess energy will incredibly cheap.

The event that is precipitating CA's shutdown has been planned for more than a decade. And the cost of keeping the nuclear plant would be $7B-$14B, before any of the inevitable cost increases that accompany large construction projects. $7B for solar and storage will easily replace nuclear. At $1/W for solar, and $250/kWh for storage, $7B will buy 4GW of solar and 12 GWh of storage, and cost overruns are unheard of for solar and storage installations.

And I think that you have some serious metal fatigue in some critical nuclear reactor core components.

There are two reasons why everything is still built for 20 years: Firstly, there is not pressure on the projects to increase lifetime, because the deprecated value today of further production in year 21 is basically zero. Secondly, the turbines we installed 20 years ago were so small that there is really no reason to keep them going.

It does require running the grid differently. But part of that is becoming more responsive to constantly changing conditions, and a grid that it used to that will have far fewer problems then one where a GW reactor trips off because of some sensor problem (as happened in Texas). As we get closer to 80% renewable grids, then we will be used to running backup natural gas plants to keep everything running. And the ultimate in resilience and reliability will happen as we add more storage. With batteries everywhere, we will have buffering all over the grid that will make it far far easier to make sure everybody has power, and to limit outages to the smallest areas possible.

The first year of power shut offs for PG&E's public safety in the face of high wind and fire conditions covered massive areas. This last year they covered far less, as they could focus the power shut offs far better with an extra year of work. This sort of finer grained granularity and control is what happens as more renewables and storage will be added to the grid, as we update this impressive machine that we started building a century ago. Adding modern communication and control will come along with more storage, demand response, and home-to-grid power from solar.

Costs are dropping so rapidly that typical 5-year timelines for utility planning and procurement is running into some problems. People who make bids have to anticipate their costs in the future, so there's considerable betting going on.

Agreed on the heat pumps versus fossil heat. I moved in the past few years, and replacing all the natural gas is my first task before installing solar. By replacing natural gas with a heat pump, my total energy consumption has plummeted drastically. However, my utility charges only about 15% as much for a unit of natural gas energy as it does electrical energy, which eliminated the cost savings! So now that I better know my total energy consumption the switch to solar will happen very soon, and save me a ton of money.

I wouldn't get hung up on paring battery storage with a particular generation technology. Just connect it to the grid and let the market decide when to charge and discharge.

One good reason for colocating battery storage with renewables is that you get to share the grid connection. That connection can be expensive and will be under utilized due to intermittency. So store some of the energy in batteries and spend less money on expensive AC cables. You can even reverse the flow and take energy from the grid.

How silly is that? This is kinda my point. 8% of power for the most populous state in the second most populous nation is no small amount. The operator didn't want to do the necessary maintenance, so we opt for a cheaper, objectively worse solution, instead of spending the money required to do the job correctly. It's not like it was physically impossible to fix San Onofre, the engineers know exactly what work is required to be done, but the beancounters in charge of the purse strings ultimately thought better and we are all worse off for it in ways that will costs us far in the longrun than this maintenance would have.

The ARC fusion reactor concept would require even more Be per MW(th) of output.

Because "no hope" in politics can become "certain outcome" with only a few switches in influencers. The US is subject to minority veto in all of its national legislation, so if the Koch influence were to cease, or if there was a (shocking) change of heart from that huge influence on the minority political power that is the roadblock to a carbon tax, that could all change.

That customers will feel price pressure from their most-carbon-emitting activities and commodities is precisely the point. This will encourage finding alternatives. No demand is entirely inelastic.

You could also have tax paid off over time. E.g. a concrete building that lasts 60 years, vs a stick build that lasts 20. Bricks are frequently recycled, >100 year lifetime.

I'm open to hearing counter-examples, i.e., where there is an external cost to not manufacturing a high CO2 cost product. The examples I've seen so far are really arguments about competition with BRICS economies, and their bizarre exemption from controls.

1. In the short term it makes steel more expensive. But because steel is essential, we still use it, it just costs a little more. If you're building a clean energy power plant, or making a generator for a hospital, some of the tax revenues could go to you, to make those things still affordable.

2. In the longer term, there are now huge financial incentives to either reduce the carbon consumption of steel production, or to replace steel with something which uses less carbon. Which is what you want.

If the price is set on carbon, I’d expect it to be proportionate.

But if we have to drastically reduce ground freight and shipping emissions to reduce co2 emissions enough, which we do, goods will be more expensive. And it's also not free to switch private cars to EVs. If goods in general are more expensive, then peoples' money goes less far.

To be clear, I am in favor of this. Maybe you can make the very wealthy eat the cost, but somebody has to pay for it, and I can't see how it doesn't result in lower mean quality of life.

Average age of a car in the US is 12 years. The fleet gets swapped out naturally pretty quickly, and slight incentives would accelerate that. It's faster than swapping out electric generating capacity.

Not really, that’s why it’s an externality. The damage in the US caused by climate change is maybe a few billion annually in increased hurricanes right now. That’s only like $10/person a year.

This is why it requires getting people to understand the future damage that will be caused. What’s happening now isn’t enough to justify doubling electricity costs, etc because most citizens aren’t feeling any pain from climate change.

> the costs in terms of healthcare and QALYs just due to air pollution alone are tremendous.

CO2 != “air pollution” in the sense that causes health problems.

Say you are choosing between 2 otherwise identical apartments that include utilities in rent. One building is more energy efficient than the other thus can charge less in rent and still make as much profit. Even though you are getting a dividend check you will still choose the lower priced apartment (if you are a rational economic actor).

Multiply this scenario across the billions of economic decisions across the economy and it adds up quickly.

In your specific scenario, since the initial tax is low a few pennies in added cost won't really matter, gas prices go up and down already. But you know that the price will continue to rise, so if you are a rational economic actor, the next time you buy a car you will take that into account. And by the time you need a new car the price of EVs may have declined enough to be cheaper than a new gas car, as they are predicted to be by the middle of the decade (fuel and maintenance are already significantly cheaper).

Normal civilian reactors work on low enrichment uranium or even natural uranium--stuff that has no potential to go boom.

Even reprocessing isn't the danger it's made out to be. First, the plutonium from spent reactor fuel has a lot of Pu-240 in it. Bombs need Pu-239, too much Pu-240 will make them malfunction. (If you are trying to make Pu-239 you switch out the fuel rods much more frequently.) Second, the reprocessing plant has access to a lot of very hot stuff. All you actually need to do in reprocessing is strip out the waste products that poison the reaction, a fuel rod heavily "contaminated" with something like Cobalt-60 won't interfere with reactor operation, but it will ensure no thief will make off with it.

Naval reactors, however, are built to be as small as possible. That means very highly enriched uranium. Building a gun-type uranium bomb is easily within the range of what Al Qaeda can do, the limiting factor is obtaining the materials. Thus naval reactor fuel needs to be treated with extreme security.

I would say "citation needed". France typically had a documented public investment plan for nuclear energy, and is enjoying one of the cheapest and low-carbon emission electricity in Europe.

> And now we have just experienced a decade where intermittent renewables have plummeted in cost to below that of fuel-base energy

I still read this here and there, but strangely, solar/wind still need large subsidiaries to exist. How so ?

Other renewable such as hydro are fine, though, but they tend to be already at their max everywhere.

> And storage is on that trend too, with storage being added to most solar and wind projects these days

We don't have real storage solutions for now. Batteries ? Won't scale. Reversible dams ? Doable if you have the chance to have a lot of hydro.

But how much does a nuclear plant actually cost?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26348520

Setting a firm limit on radiation release ahead of time, rather than one based on economics like ALARA just seems like it would be far safer. The other examples also seem like they are bad regulations that don't help safety or construction either. Would be great to see if they could result in more efficient construction.

LNT stands for Linear No Threshold: cancer risk is directly proportional to dose, that doses are cumulative over time (rate doesn‘t matter), and that there is no threshold or safe dose. This contradicts studies that we have about people who received enough CUMULATIVE doses of radiation that they would be dead if it was at the same time.

ALARA: Radiation should be As Low As Reasonably Achievable. In practice this means that any cost reduction simply means freed money that you're now required to spend on safety.

Nuclear fans like to complain about the LNT, but I don't think they're really thinking this through.

In a nuclear accident, most of the population exposure will be a minor increase spread across a vast population. At those doses, we basically cannot check whether LNT is true or not -- the small cancer incidence it predicts is statistically invisible against all the other causes of cancer.

So foes of LNT want to say "we can't show LNT is correct", which is fine, but then they say "so we must assume the actual effect is smaller, perhaps zero", which is not fine. The evidence doesn't support that second step, and this is not a court of criminal law where radiation must be presumed innocent unless found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. One might very well argue that one should take a precautionary approach, which is to assume that low level radiation has the worst effect it could have that is not ruled out by evidence. This would imply even larger threat than under LNT.

What's to prevent cutting massive corners after the original half plan was approved?

Or since they are modular if significant long term loads shift geographically, you can easily move them around to where needed too.

I agree the concepts of massive plants aren’t desireable - luckily there are alternatives if we can ever get past the emotional arguments and actually discuss things rationally.

How do you compare the deaths from a distributed reactor network to the deaths from additional global warming?

And there are far more easily obtainable things than uranium if you want to construct a dirty bomb. Another fantastic anti-nuke red herring.

Governments are not unaware of the environmental impacts, so that impression is accurate.

We do nuclear at scale today. The vast majority of blockers from doing more nuclear at scale today are political; not technical.

That’s the other facet of this that always seems to get overlooked.

If batteries were viable Elon wouldn’t just be talking about them.

Batteries are no where near the cost efficiency of, say, pumped hydro. Nor can batteries touch the overall capacity of pumped hydro. And pumped hydro can’t happen just anywhere - you need the right physical environment for it to be effective.

So yeah, unless you have something more concrete than “batteries, obviously” it is hand waving.

There is also somewhat of a use case for renewables for powering things that can make do with highly unreliable power. Consider, for example, a desalination plant. The heart of the plant is pumping water through membranes--but do you really need to do that? Lets build our plant differently, build a storage system high enough up that gravity provides the pressure. When you have power you run the pumps to fill the storage system, when you don't have power you don't run the pumps. You need bigger pumps and you need a big storage tank but it can be done.

Or flip the scenario--don't pump the seawater in the first place. Place your desalination plant on the ocean floor and use your pumps to extract the fresh water. In this case you need fresh water storage underwater rather than salt water storage up high.

There are a few new flywheel plants that have popped up in the US in recent years, and it'll be interesting to compare the material costs and benefits over the coming decades.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewab...

I am reminded of the quote attributed to Arthur C Clarke.

If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

There are scientists and engineers who say getting to a 100% renewable grid is possible.

Anyway, the more important point is that we already have large regional grids across the country, and while it's obviously nice to have generation and consumption close to each other, it's not a requirement.

It isn't that big an area in the scheme of things. If you try to find a single place for it it probably won't work of course, but it is a tiny little fraction of the developed land already devoted to New York.

New York State is 35 million acres. You don't think 0.2% of that, including rooftops of existing buildings, might be useable for solar/wind/battery storage? And again, NY already uses tons of out-of-state energy.

Great argument.

The problem with statements like this is that we don't actually know what a worst case scenario truly looks like. The day before Chernobyl, the worst-cast scenario, by definition, not as bad as Chernobyl. Similarly, the engineers who built Fukishima were aware of tsunamis and earthquakes and built the plant to withstand what was considered the worst case scenario at the time. Then an even worse case scenario happened.

Silicon is produced by carbothermic reduction of silica in arc furnaces. Charcoal can be used, though (and is use by some producers; I think the porosity helps silicon monoxide gas react with the carbon.)

But given that we don't have perfect numbers we have to go off of the ones we have, and solar installations are over 4x the death rate than nuclear. The only reason I bring it up is this constant barrage of anti-nuclear sentiment even though nuclear works great in countries where it is approached correctly. Canada and France, for example, have professional, reasonable cost nuclear that create the medical isotopes we need.

It's all besides the point though, because coal is 1000x more fatal than nuclear, and like I said in my original comment, I'll take anything but coal and oil.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

If this is a price of clean air and pushing the global warming further into the future we can build a couple of mini pyramids of nuclear doom and call it day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository#Nuc...

There's also no good reason to dispose of waste at the moment, since we don't reprocess our nuclear fuel. Existing waste is a future source of fuel.

One of the many issues with solar that doesn’t get addressed.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m a huge proponent of solar when it make sense. I grew up in the Desert Southwest so it can make a lot of sense there in particular.

But solar is NOT a replacement for technology like nuclear energy.

You can't compare wind turbines from 70 years ago to today. (I noticed the convenient deemphasizing of solar farms. Look up issues with abandoned solar farms.)

The last point is moot. Land is abundant in America. I also question the hand-wavy "investors have done the math"

People bristle at terms like “virtue signal” - here’s an opportunity for our “elites” to show some real leadership.

I won’t hold my breath.

Ironically, wind turbines are more efficient than nuclear power plants. Solar panels are not, but at least they do direct energy conversion from sunlight (whereas the nameplate efficiency of nuclear power plants additionally ignores the requirements of the fuel processing chain that starts with removing mountains of ~500ppm ore these days).

Renewables are better on a raw $/KW measure. But that's a naive way of assessing intermittent sources. Once you start saturating the market during peak production, only part of the newly installed capacity actually displaces fossil fuels. Non-intermittent sources of energy like hydroelectricity and nuclear power aren't subject to this constraint

Nuclear can replace fossil fuels today. If we finally get other renewables to a place where they can address issues like predictability and reliability, then we look at de-commissioning nuclear.

But preemptively removing a very viable tool from your toolset is just bananas.

> Given the choice between our land covered in solar panels, wind mills and battery farms, and a few very large but very safe and cost effective nuclear power plants....that choice gets pretty easy in my opinion. But I'll take the former as well, if needed.

From my perspective, there are a lot of things that become significantly easier to do if we can produce as much energy as possible, ranging from synthesizing liquid fuels from air and water (chemically possible but energy-intensive) to extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering it in some sterile chemical sludge that we can pump into empty oil wells to large-scale water desalination (combined with removing the salt). And that’s just in the realm of climate change and sustainability—we are also going to need energy to do new things, not just to do the same things we’re doing now with less ecological impact, or even reversing the ecological impacts we’ve already caused.

We’re going to find productive uses of energy faster than we’re going to be able to develop the energy production needed to sustain them. So I’m not sure we’ll be given the choice—we’ll need to do both. The main difference being that a high amount of nuclear baseload would obviate the need for batteries.

Which they conveniently hand wave off since that was a subject for another paper.

If they had confidence in their ideas, they would at least summarize the findings of that paper that justify their implying the grid as not being an issue in the practicality of their plan. For example: even if the grid is 100% reliable (which - spoiler - it’s not), what are the sizing implications due to transmission loss? How do you get power across continents to have true geographic diversity? This paper presents all upside with no downside? Ha!

Again, nice theory in a perfect world. We do not live in a perfect world.

Solar makes a lot of energy, but:

- you need a lot of land to make energy

- energy generation scales poorly with materials required

- you lose efficiency because you have to transport the power from the optimal place to every other place

By contrast, nuclear can be built anywhere regardless of climate (greatly reducing transmission loss), fuel is fairly widely distributed (i.e. every big political bloc has a good source of uranium), it provides continuous power, and material costs are low to build massive plants. And there is a lot of energy stored in the world's nuclear reserve. Way more energy than is stored in coal/ng/oil. Because of the energy density of nuclear fuel, if you add a little bit more material input, you get a lot more power. Not true with solar or any other source.

You can't run an entire advanced economy on solar, or even majority on solar. By contrast, you can have a 100% zero emissions economy run entirely on nuclear. My main point would be that if we want to continue to grow technologically, energy production must be centered on nuclear, with enhancements to efficiency provided by solar energy. Energy is the ultimate constraint on human development.

That's not what we have, though. Most people think that we can completely de-carbonize using solar energy which is false. Running an entire grid on batteries at night is a pipe dream -- the US grid has 3 seconds of energy storage total. By contrast, the technology for a completely de-carbonized modern economy exists right now with nuclear.

* I consider nuclear "renewable" because there's so much energy that in the short term, it may as well be.

> A few thousand were estimated to eventually die from cancer related to the incident.

How many people could conceivably be downwind of a nuclear meltdown? I think it could be much much more than that.

I can't imagine why we would not include the people who eventually die of cancer.

That's just meltdowns. Given that you can also use nuclear material to create weapons, I'd also point you toward Hiroshima and Nagasaki as examples.

The point I was making in my original comment, is that it's only safe when the systems are in place to keep it safe.

Which is not something you can guarantee.