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Comment by rllearneratwork | Hacker News Reader

being anti-nuclear at times of climate crisis is a moral and intellectual equivalent to being anti-vaccines during the pandemic

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You're judging to quickly without looking at all parameters.

The cost of nuclear power has only been rising and the price per kWh is much higher compared to wind or solar.

Building cost and time has never been correctly estimated for new plants. Just ask France, UK and Finland. Which resulted in going way over budget.

All of this while prices for solar and wind are lowering... Obviously you can't rely solely on wind and solar but at the moment it would make more sense to invest in those solutions compared to nuclear, for some countries.

> cost of nuclear power has only been rising and the price per kWh is much higher compared to wind or solar

Do we have numbers from China? They're actually pursuing this technology. The West, largely, is not. I'd thus be hesitant about comparing numbers from a stagnated industry from one with active R&D.

wind and solar are heavily subsidized and nuclear is, arguably, over regulated despite being statistically the safest source of energy (as measured in deaths / twh)

every time someone mentions the cost of wind and solar, i remind them of the same point - there are lots of costs that are not borne by wind and solar. The “low” cost is primarily due to their fuel cost being zero and that’s not inherently a bad thing.

The problem is in assuming that the current “cost” scales linearly. it does not.

Some examples of these costs are balancing, standby, frequency support and so on. At the moment, no “cost” metric for renewables includes these costs. They assume that all energy generated is consumed by the grid and this is increasingly not the case.

Is it not more like being anti Pfizer?

Here is a better analogy: Being pro nuclear is like being anti-vaxx because monoclonal antibodies work. They just cost a large multiple of vaccination.

bullshit.

If there are cheaper and safer alternatives. being anti-nuclear is common sense.

Holding out for new battery stuff when we should have acted yesterday scares me.

Confusing the new marginal cost of renewables with the cost of them playing all roles in power demand is similar to the sort of myopic thinking that got us into this mess in the first place --- reliability is also an externality. If that's too harsh an analogy, comparing going all-window/solar to just-in-time supply chains might be better.

no one is asking for 100% nuclear. Sure, when sun shines solar makes sense. But it can't satisfy all the needs all the time. Look at California - we are closing our nuclear and buying more electricity from Utah where it is generated using coal and gas. You can't outsource climate change.

the problem with cheaper and safer is that you are assuming there will come a point in the future where carbon-based generation will be eliminated. That date is indeterminate and isn’t guaranteed.

On the other hand is nuclear, a technology that’s well understood, expensive, over-regulated but which does not have ongoing carbon emissions.

Climate change is a problem today. It was a problem yesterday and needs a solution ASAP, not at some indeterminate point in the future.

Which ones are those that are also effective enough?

Renewables, pumped and battery storage, HVDC transmission, interconnectors between grids. California and Australia (picked from the top of my head based on knowledge of their forward looking policies) will be almost entirely powered by renewables in 2045 and 2030 (respectively) without any nuclear power.

"Green" hydrogen and ammonia are still in early stages of development, but are promising very long duration storage technologies that can buffer excess renewable production.

We do not yet have the technology to power California with non-nuclear renewable energy by 2045. Those estimates are based on expectations that we will have that technology by then, but we don't have these capabilities yet. What we do have today is nuclear energy that can achieve that goal by 2030, if we began today.

are alternatives really cheaper when you need to build more to compensate for the moments when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow?

Yes, even assuming curtailment, renewables + storage are cheaper than nuclear.

EDIT (sources): https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/06/28/los-angeles-seeks-rec...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/07/01/new-sola...

https://twitter.com/mzjacobson/status/1144654725901504512

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/08/09/solar-challenging-nuc...

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/minnesota-study-finds-it-ch...

are you certain this remains true on a grid dominated by wind and solar? it is true at the moment because the grid just deals with the vagaries of these sources and other generators (and consumers) bear the cost.

Will this continue to be the case?

Renewables have zero marginal cost to generate. When the spot price goes negative, they can simply stop exporting. Other generators are paying others to take power and for the fuel they're using to generate. As renewables penetration increases, it only puts more pain on legacy generators and increases the arb opportunity for storage (which can charge when power is cheap, and discharge when demand is high). This is the entire model around Tesla's Autobidder platform [1] and their energy trading division [2], and their desire to become a virtual utility (with the value in energy orchestration between system components).

[1] https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/tesla-software/autobidd...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/tesla-plans-begin-tr...

EDIT: @eldaisfish: Energy storage growth in the US: https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/electricity/batterystor...

Tesla currently orchestrates 1.2Gwh of storage, and their Megapack manufacturing facility will have the capacity to build 40Gwh of storage per year: https://electrek.co/2021/03/16/tesla-autobidder-managing-ove..., https://electrek.co/2021/10/08/tesla-megafactory-aims-40-gwh...

The Hornsdale Power Reserve (built and orchestrated by Tesla) is used for grid services (frequency and voltage response, "continuous power"), and has exceeded expectations: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/05/20/hornsdale-and-its-big...

Utility scale PV can also provide grid forming services at minimal cost (firmware upgrade to inverters): https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2020/renewables-rescue-st...

tesla's service does not scale to gigawatts and gigawatt hours. Battery storage works for minutes of demand, not hours. At the moment, any battery tries to profit from arbitrage, not supplying continuous load.

You mention zero energy prices but fail to address the major problem - reliability. The power is always on and losing power is catastrophic.

The solution to the current problem is more transmission capacity. Not batteries.

Wind and solar can help but they are not the solution unto themselves.

Oh and the cost of wind and solar are not only in fuel. There's lots of costs to O&M and grid balancing, both of which are not included in their energy cost.

While of course oversimplified, https://model.energy is interesting site to simulate the issues, as it tries to model a "base load" generation using green energy. The moment the storage costs of hydrogen go beyond ridiculously low (based on assumptions of available salt caverns), or if you try to use batteries only, the numbers game is over for non-nuclear - unless you add gas turbines which defeat the 0-emission target.

For a simulated replacement of 2GW power plant (2-3 reactors, enough to provide for a metropolitan region base load, assuming Poland for weather/solar data) using only batteries for storage, we look at needing to build:

  ~29GW of solar power
  ~12GW of wind power
  ~46.7GWh of battery storage (with ~3.5GW output)

Going for hydrogen storage, the result is

  ~10.2GW solar
  ~6.5GW wind
  ~5.5GWh battery (with 0.98GW output)
  ~1.5GW hydrogen gas turbine
  ~760GWh hydrogen storage.

All of that, to replace a 2GW power plant with non-nuclear zero emission sources. (for comparison, polish base load demand is effectively around 14GW, and we don't really have any place for more pumped storage or hydro power without some funky exclusion zones and environmental destruction)

Source?

Being anti-nuclear is more like being anti-facebook. Nuclear is a giant centralized free-loading subsidized secretive toxic industry. Just like nuclear.

I think the usual way of phrasing that joke is:

"What's the difference between nuclear power and Facebook? One is a giant centralized free-loading subsidized secretive toxic industry, and the other is a way of providing low-carbon electricity."

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