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Comment by elihu | Hacker News Reader

I'd be fine with more nuclear power plants, but if wind/solar plus batteries are cheaper, that's what's going to get built.

Also, renewables don't require a high degree of trust in the human operators to manage risks appropriately. I think that's really the main sticking point with nuclear; reliable reactors can be made, but how do you manage the humans who maintain the plants in a way that's not susceptible to corruption or corner-cutting?

If nuclear can be made to handle more of our energy needs for a reasonable cost, then that's a good thing, and if it can be made cheaper by updating regulations without sacrificing safety, then I think that would be awesome. But I think we should plan for the future under the assumption that most of our energy will come from renewables. That's the lowest-risk plan that doesn't require major regulatory changes or new technology. (Apparently there are also some major lithium iron phosphate patents that are expired or expiring soon, which should open up cheap battery manufacturing to companies outside of China.)

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Solar, wind plus batteries (and other intermittent sources) are only cheaper because it is subsidized by the base power stations.

Only about 20% of the cost of coal and 5% of nuclear comes from the fuel. Almost all costs are fixed costs. They need to be paid regardless of whether people use the power or not. But in the current system, those who use solar or wind and only use base power occasionally aren't paying those costs. Instead everyone else has to cover those costs, which is why the price of electricity skyrockets wherever there are more 'renewable' (or specifically, 'intermittent') sources.

This is why electricity costs 10c per kwh in many parts of the US, but 40c per kwh in European countries with lots of windmills.

basically it is a huge market distortion. The real cost of base power is a fixed yearly fee to get access, then 2c per kwh after that (i.e the 20% fuel cost). If this is what was charged no one would use wind or solar at all. (or you would have people using solar but disconnected from the grid, which would be great too).

What costs aren't being paid for exactly?

The ones that ensure with several 9's that the lights come on 24/7 regardless of time of day or weather. LCOE covers the generator alone, but not transmission lines, idled gas plants, energy storage, smart load balancing, etc.

You can keep big gas plants around in a high intermittent grid and fire them up 10% of the time. The way we view LCOE right now, those plants would be insanely expensive while wind/solar would be super cheap. But we would still pay for the backup capacity. This kind of system cost is what matters dramatically more than LCOE.

LCOE is just an investment tool to figure out where you get the most bang for your buck as an investor. It does not tell us what the best option is for the energy system as a whole.

I know. Yet it is being used to say what energy tech is cheapest.

The thing that bothers me about the whole energy discussion is that there seems to be little room for a middle ground, it's just a political discussion at this point. In reality we won't have 100% renewables and we won't have 100% nuclear either. Neither of those 2 options, at their extremes, is best from a cost perspective.

Grid stability/storage, plus sunk costs.

Say it's a cold cloudy day with no wind and it's been so for a week. You'll need the capacity of that coal/nuclear plant those days. And let's say every other day of the year solar and wind make enough power. So who pays the extremely high fixed cost of the nuclear and coal plant so it's available that one week you need it? No one wants to, so they're shutting them down. The power company could still be paying the bond for the plant, but ultimately that's the consumer's money. Then, surprise, you end up with blackouts or you pay for new natural gas plants to be built. Prices and fragility go up.

It's likely cheaper to make demand more flexible, but that has a cost too.

Grid scale batteries have become cost effective in the last two years.

It'll take time to build out capacity but it'll take more time AND cost to build new nuclear plants.

This is something people get confused about. Grid scale batteries are definitely not cost effective or in existence. The media does their best to obfuscate this. What has been built around the places are battery packs to absorb dangerous power fluctuations caused by windmills. They destroyed the grid in South Australia a few years ago, and Elon Musk famously went in and installed batteries (maybe that is what you are thinking of).

If you don't believe me go back and have a look at how big the batteries were. The 500 million dollar project installed 130 MWh worth of electricity storage. That is enough to produce the same energy as a power station for 10 minutes before being fully drained.

I'm thinking of battery backed solar farm in Hawaii that cost around $70/MwH and supplied about 1/5th of the power for the island. There's a few new projects in California/Nevada/Colorado that are allegedly costing around $30-40MwH (although I'm skeptical of how much storage they have for that price).

Either way, conservatively speaking, $50-60/MwH for battery backed wind/solar on the mainland seems fairly doable. Prices will likely keep dropping too.

By contrast, in the UK Hinkley Point C is being paid $124/MwH guaranteed for 20 years. It doesn't exist because it's a cost effective way of supplying green energy that's for sure, but it does bolster the nuclear economy. The military do like to hire nuclear technicians and buy parts for PWRs in nuclear subs, etc. and somebody has to pay for these things. Rate payers, I guess.

These numbers are way off though, maybe those are just the cells? If we look at the 2021 estimates by the National Renewable Energy Labs for utility scale 4h batteries [0] We get cost estimates of 250 $/kWh for the high case, 200 $/kWh for the middle case and 150 $/kWh for the low case by 2030. [0] https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/79236.pdf.

That seems to be the cost of the physical batteries, not the price the grid would pay the farm for.

That makes sense I guess.

Assume enough energy is supplied to charge the batteries. So lets say we want 1kWh during 4 hours, that puts our capital cost at 4 kWh*200$/kWh = 800$. Now we assume this system runs every day for 4 hours during ten years. Ten years sounds reasonable, but it could be less. 7 years maybe? So about 1kWh*365,25*10=14610kWh in total. That gives us 800$/14610kWh = 0,0548$/kWh or 54,8 $/MWh in 2030 if I didn't make a major mistake somewhere and assuming no efficiency losses. That's pretty good.

Your link says a lifetime of 15 years. Capacity would degrade over time though.

> Grid scale batteries are definitely not cost effective or in existence.

California has more than 1.5 GW of utility-scale chemical batteries interconnected to it's grid with another 1 GW anticipated to enter service by the end of the year. Most of these batteries can sustain full output for four hours. This is in addition to the more than 3.0 GW of pumped hydro "batteries."

1 GW is roughly the output of one nuclear power plant.

Source: I develop power plants in the western US.

1GW is roughly the output of one nuclear reactor (most plants have 2 or more) for one hour.

We'll need at least half a day's worth of storage, likely much more if we want to use wind for a significant portion of power generation.

I remember people saying something similar about the amount of deployed solar and wind shortly after it became cost competitive. There used to be a tiny amount deployed but it was the cheapest form of power.

Then over the course of a few years there was a lot.

All that really matters is A) is it cost effective B) will there be scaling problems C) will there be political impediments.

Solar is not cost-effective today for applying power after the sun sets (duck curve) or at night. Wind is not cost-effective at supplying power on calm days. If they were required to build the rest of the system to be reliable (longer interconnects, batteries, etc) it suddenly wouldn't be cost-effective, this explaining why energy cost continues to go up while this supposedly cheap power ramps up.

Combined solar+battery is not just cost effective at dealing with the duck curve it is downright cheap. Hawaii canceled an inter-island grid interconnect because of this.

If you develop power plants then how come you don't know the difference between energy and power?

Those batteries only have a few hours of storage at max power, they're for solving the duck curve not a week-long supply shortage (let alone seasonal fluctuations). If we got the Midwest on heat pumps, how you planning to keep places heated when there's a week of blizzard? Right now we have no plan for addressing the occasional bad week besides overbuilding natural gas. That's worse than keeping our nuclear running and expanding, but the solar and wind is subsidized but not the natural gas. The way the market for power works, bidding on a daily or hourly basis, doesn't account for seasonal variation. The solar and wind builders are off the hook on blizzard week but get subsidized enough to run the reliable plants out of business the rest of the year.

>how you planning to keep places heated when there's a week of blizzard?

When the wind is blowing really hard? Wind turbines?

The texas winter was a bit of an anomaly. It got so cold that every power source ending up failing because none were set up to deal with it even though all of them in theory could have (& would have if they were in, say, alaska).

I think their point still stands - even if every town/city has both solar panels and wind turbines, there are times when you won't get enough power from them to meet demand (remember demand can vary too), just due to natural fluctuations in weather. You either need an absurd amount of battery storage, or some sort of backup power source.

I think if you combine demand shaping, overbuilding, grid scale LIon batteries, better grid interconnects (another thing texas failed miserably at) & pumped hydro you'll find that demand can be met for most people.

It'll take time to shift to using green energy and there will be problems but the same would be true for any other kind of shift to any new sources of power.

Probably not 16 years like the new UK nuclear plant will take though :/

Yes, we could do that, but that's not what is incentivized by the market so it's not being done on a large scale or with any urgency. Changing the way the market works is what is needed to make those things the action chosen.

>Say it's a cold cloudy day with no wind and it's been so for a week.

What if it's been so for a month?

What if the country is Sweden?

What if the month is January?

What if the average temperature is -20C?

>So who pays the extremely high fixed cost of the nuclear and coal plant so it's available that one week you need it? No one wants to, so they're shutting them down.

Those who don't want to freeze, they want to pay.

Change the way the market works, pick a baseline power and bid it yearly. Then the nuclear stations can compete. But our current one results in shutdowns while we pay for extraneous wind capacity and new natural gas.

If you'd add the cost of maintaining radioactive waste for thousands of years on the cost of power, you'd end up with even higher prices and how do you think those reactors came into existence in the first place? Not even Bill Gates wants to pay for his reactor by himself.

Here are state subsidies for energy sources in Germany in Billion: https://i.imgur.com/NbaNLK4.jpeg

Than there is maintenance. EDF will have to pay staggering 100 billion € to increase the life of their fleet for another 10 years and the price won't go down in the future. Even though the fleet is quite well maintained and France relies on it, accidents, overheated rivers, too cold winters force them to buy (often dirty) power from Germany.

LCOE for nuclear is only surpassed by peak gas: https://i.imgur.com/gRj8GS0.jpeg

https://zenodo.org/record/5573719

So yeah...number juggling is quite trendy in Shillenbergers Astro-Turf but it won't change the facts: nuclear is too expensive and too slow to fight climate change.

Home solar also doesn’t have to support transmission and distribution lines.

What you are talking about is the marginal cost of producing an extra kWh of electricity. That does vary between different sources. For nuclear, solar and wind it is exceptionally low. For gas and coal it is higher due to fuel costs and market volatility (see gas prices now). A further factor is how quickly a generator can turn on, maintenance costs, and fuel efficiency. Also, different locations have better grid connections closer to population centres.

These kind of discussions always touch on a few of these points. But actually a well designed market absolutely can take these factors into account and price accordingly. You have strike prices to cover capital costs, capacity markets, bidding to reduce costs etc.

The low price of wind is just an acknowledgement that it is less valuable due to intermitancy. But you guarantee the rate regardless of the market because the low CO2 emissions are valuable.

Nuclear is expensive because it is more valuable due to low CO2 and low intermitancy. Give it a relatively high subsidised rate. It should be more expensive than wind.

Gas peakers are valuable because they can be turned on quickly. But they are dirty. So they charge a high rate but the rate is not guaranteed. The market avoids using them.

You could and maybe should replace all of this with a state run electricity company that makes all the decisions. That is really what people are arguing for rather than a particular type of generator. But in an energy market costs need to actually mean something more than a political point.

While it's nice to believe that through the magic of the market, everything just evens out, a simple thought experiment easily shows this isn't the case.

Take the simplest case and ignore CO2 and carbon tax for now. The base power stations have to be sufficient to supply the whole power grid when the wind doesn't blow, and the sun doesn't shine. Ok, so now imagine what happens if we simply remove all the solar panels and all the wind turbines. What happens? Nothing happens. The grid still works normally. In other words the cost of all those windmills, solar panels, their construction, their maintenance, etc, it is all extra cost that the consumer has to pay somehow.

So isn't the magic market supposed to fix all this? Why doesn't market dynamics take care of this? Because government regulation doesn't allow fixed power plants to charge a fixed yearly fee. If the government did allow this then the market would indeed price everything correctly.

Now if you add a carbon tax, having a number of windmills on the side does eventually become advantageous, but never compared to non-intermittent sources of renewable power like hydro or nuclear which could also charge this fixed yearly fee.

> Because government regulation doesn't allow fixed power plants to charge a fixed yearly fee. If the government did allow this then the market would indeed price everything correctly.

In the US, in most markets (except ERCOT/TX), it's the opposite of what you say. Government regulation _requires_ either the market operator or load serving entity to contract for capacity (as opposed to energy). PJM, which operates the largest market in the US, runs an annual auction for capacity. Incredibly, due in part to subsidies offered to the natural gas industry, existing nuclear power plants have not cleared in the auction. [0, 1]

[0] https://insidelines.pjm.com/pjm-successfully-clears-capacity...

[1] https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...

The fact that wind and solar are included in this purchase 3 years ahead of time, should make it clear this isn't what you think it is. Solar and wind can't know even a day or two in advance whether they will be able to deliver the power. In fact, this auction, which allows intermittent power to compete on the exact same footing as base power, is exactly what I mean by a market distortion in their favor.

You seem to be fixating on the word "market". I don't mean that in a liberal economic way. Electricity markets are natural monopolies and need intervention. That is what subsidies are. The energy markets let you bundle up different issues into a single price per kwh. But that doesn't always work. For example in the UK there are capacity markets that give fixed payments for reliable capacity. Most of which are fossil fuel power stations.

You are trying to simplify things too much. Unpicking a few factoids to make an argument. The advantage of this kind of energy market is that individual companies don't have to do that. Small developers don't need to worry about building backup for their solar panels. And nuclear power stations can take on a big risk. All bundles into the price.

But all this is specific to particular markets. No idea what is going on in the USA and as a European I assume it is probably a mess.

> d be fine with more nuclear power plants, but if wind/solar plus batteries are cheaper

Cost is not just a single factor. Energy density is very important too. Solar farms take huge amounts of space to produce very little energy compared to a nuclear plant.

Solar farms can be pretty big, but we have the space for it. If you look at a map of the United States, there's a lot of land in the Southwest that gets a lot of sunlight and isn't usable for growing crops. It's an ecosystem, and anything that intrudes on that ecosystem will be somewhat disruptive, but as long as reasonable care is taken I don't see it as a problem to use a smallish fraction of that land for solar production.

Not all of the United States is in the southwest, and why should the southwest destroy all their natural environments to power the rest of the rest of the country over lossy power lines when local nuclear could do it?

Decent high-voltage DC lines can move that power around with pretty small losses. (Wikipedia quotes about 3.5% per 1000km.) And the Southwest doesn't have to destroy all their natural environments; they just happen to have a natural advantage in power generation on land that otherwise isn't economically productive. (Not that all land has to be economically productive.)

This could be a major industry in those states.

Ecological impact should be looked into and installations should be done in a way that creates minimal environmental impact, but I'm not going to say that it should be an absolute showstopper if sagebrush is interspersed by the occasional array of black panels.

The environmental costs of major solar farms aren't going to be zero, but just because it's non-zero doesn't mean we shouldn't do it if it's environmentally preferable to burning coal and natural gas.

I'm also not against nuclear, I'm just not optimistic we can get the costs down.

While the losses aren't too big, transmission lines are very expensive and take many years of planning to get the land rights required if there isn't already a transmission line going there. There aren't currently a lot of lines going to the middle of nowhere, except for some hydroelectric dams.

Also, solar apparently pollutes a heck of a lot more than nuclear.

It’s still > 100x better than fossil fuels, and I’m still putting some on my roof, but the figures in the article are surprising.

Nope.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...

The thrust was correct according to your source, or am I misreading it? Nuclear median 12, Solar 48 (4x nuclear), gas 490 (10x solar), coal 810 (20x solar).

Yes, it was, however this dates back 2014 and solar recycling is progressing, and becomes more and more legally mandatory in industrialized nations.

Solar panels: operators now reach ~80% recycling (glass, metal, silicon, plastic).

Wind turbines recycling is also quickly progressing.

Nuclear waste recycling is also progressing.

Many old industrial setups are now closed, and there are not many new projects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing#List_of_s...

Citation please

From TFA: "Jacopo Buongiorno, a nuclear-engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has calculated that over the life cycle of power plants, which includes construction, mining, transport, operation, decommissioning and disposal of waste the greenhouse-gas emissions for nuclear power are 1/700th those of coal, 1/400th of gas, and one-fourth of solar. Nuclear also requires 1/2,000th as much land as wind and around 1/400th as much as solar. For any given power output the amount of raw material used to build a nuclear plant is a small fraction of an equivalent solar or wind farm. Although nuclear waste is obviously more difficult to dispose of, its volume is 1/10,000th that of solar and 1/500th of wind. This includes abandoned infrastructure and all the toxic substances that end up in landfills. One person’s lifetime use of nuclear power would produce about a half-ounce of waste human mortality from coal is 2,000 to 3,000 times that of nuclear, while oil claims 400 times as many lives."

A solar farm that produces the same power as a nuclear power station (1GW) requires 1000 3MW turbines (33% efficiency) at 700 meters apart.

That's 500 square kilometers of turbines (something like 200 square miles).

I once did the calculation and it came out to something like 10 times as much concrete and steel to build the turbines as it would have taken to build the nuclear power plant.

Did you mean wind instead of solar? Or panels instead of turbines?

yes, I mean wind, thank you.

60-64% capacity factor, 14MW.

https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/offshore-wind...

> 10 times as much concrete and steel to build the turbines as to build the nuclear power plant

But all those materials are 100% recyclable as raw matters the next week after the wind turbines close.

With nuclear, you can't touch those iron an concrete in generations. And we need to include in our calculus the two concrete sarcophagous that were required in Chernobyl also. We will be pouring tons of concrete for a lot of time in that place.

Solar farms don't need to be near water courses or water masses. They can be put in arid places blown by the wind where people typically don't like to live. Deserts are wide and empty

Nuclear requires water. Humans societies need water also. So nuclear normally competes for the same areas that humans inhabit. All big cities were built near water sources.

The problem is nuclear has been the affordable solution for decades and hasn't been built, due to politics.

Affordable by looking at any other measure than the balance sheet, maybe.

Nuclear plants that are on time and on budget are exceptions, not the rule.

Affordable by looking at the decimation of the plantet. It comes at a fraction of the cost (destruction of human civilization and 80% plus of the world's animal population)

I read an excellent article written in Physics Today by a nuclear physicist once. For the life of me I have never been able to find it again. But he describes this in detail.

Basically, in his description this is entirely due to the environmental movement. Any time a nuclear plant gets planned the green groups move in a mountain of lawyers and lock down the process for years and years. The costs this adds to the projects are staggering and it is solely because of this that nuclear power can't be built in the US. In Europe, people have no problem building nuclear cheaply and on time.

I'm pretty sure I know why you can't find it anymore...this is ridiculous.

Don’t worry, they did their own research.

Astroturfing by fossil fuel companies.

I'll bet the physicist was also an ex-environmentalist. I've seen a few nuclear/carbon PR pieces dressed up this way.

> In Europe, people have no problem building nuclear cheaply and on time.

Not true, unfortunately. The same political dynamics that made nuclear expensive in the U.S. eventually made it expensive in Japan, France and, mostly recently South Korea. None of those countries, which were global leaders during their respective nuclear industry booms, can build nuclear nearly as cheaply as they used to; certainly not domestically, and not even internationally as the absence of continuous construction meant loss of skilled labor and project management expertise. See, e.g., https://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-u... (Google other more recent articles that better detail the current state for South Korea.)

> In Europe, people have no problem building nuclear cheaply and on time

Very much no.

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

"The main contractor, Areva, is building the unit for a fixed price of €3 billion, so in principle, any construction costs above that price fall on Areva." [...] "The total cost of the project, therefore, is estimated to be €11 billion."

Since it's hard for me to track the scandals surrounding Areva and the different ownership structures of it, involving EDF, Framatome, TVO and who-knows-what-else, take this with a grain of salt, but I think the cost overruns may ultimately have to be paid by French tax payers?

"The construction of the unit began in 2005. The start of commercial operation was planned for 2010,[19] but has been pushed back several times.[20] As of August 2020, the estimate for start of regular production is June 2022.[21]"

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

"EDF estimated the cost at €3.3 billion[4] and stated it would start commercial operations in 2012, after construction lasting 54 months.[5] The latest cost estimate (July 2020) is at €19.1 billion, with commissioning planned tentatively at the end of 2022.[6][2]"

And there were also problems with the EPR reactor containment vessel EDF/Areva/Framatome delivered to China.

This is all from the foremost "experts" at fission plant production in France.

To my knowledge, only China has successfully (that we know) built new reactors lately.

China: overbudget and overdelay. Then a reactor leaked and was shutdown for maintenance.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/31/asia/taishan-nuclear-plan...

The balance sheet doesn't include externalized costs, last I checked.

I imagine there are probably ways to make nuclear power cheaper than it is without sacrificing safety, but can it compete purely on cost with solar and wind, or even coal and natural gas?

If you have a plan to fix the regulatory environment in a way that makes it cheaper than fossil fuels (ignoring long term hidden costs of fossil fuel use), then by all means advocate for that. I just think that we shouldn't assume that the technical, economic, and political hurdles will be overcome. Wind and solar are the cheapest option we have right now, so I think that's what we should plan to use. If another better option becomes available we can use it too. I just don't think we should put our eggs in the "nuclear will save us" basket. Maybe it could, but maybe it won't and we need a plan B.

Nuclear can compete purely on cost with coal. Which is fundamentally the problem. A decade ago nuclear was still legitimately the cheapest source of power but the economics have totally changed and now coal is not profitable and nuclear is likely on the way out.

how are you getting that coal is not profitable? Demand for coal is at an all time high. Check out coal prices.

https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/coal

We are also producing more coal than ever before (modulo the dip during covid lockdowns), and coal use is projected to increase:

"Global coal production is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 2.3% between 2021 and 2025 to reach 8.8 billion t in 2025. While thermal coal production is expected to have a relatively marginal 2% CAGR to reach 7549.6 million t, metallurgical coal is forecast to register stronger growth of 4.2% per year, to reach 1216.9 million t in 2025."[1]

[1]https://www.world-energy.org/article/17139.html

By that chart it looks like mining coal is quite profitable. On the other hand, if you're generating electricity from coal, high coal prices make generating electricity from coal more expensive, and thus less competitive with nuclear or renewables.

The price represents the intersection of supply and demand. Since supply of coal is steady, the higher price is coming from an increase in demand.

Of course coal purchasers would prefer a lower price, but the fact that the price is high is proof that there is great demand for coal. This does not mean that there is not demand for renewables, either. Both the usage of renewables and the usage of coal is predicted to increase.

See https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=49976

Increases in coal-fired generation in Other non-OECD Asia—which includes Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand, among other countries—will account for over 75% of our projected increase in global coal-fired generation from 2030 to 2050. For Other non-OECD Asia, we project that renewable energy sources will account for about 60% of the generation increase over the projection period, primarily from wind and solar. Coal-fired generation will account for nearly all of the remaining growth.

From what I've read, most cost and time overruns from nuclear are due to lots of design revisions during construction to make site-specific adaptations that need to be intensively reviewed, approved, revised, over and over again. Small modular reactors are designed to address this since they're preassembled at the factory and small enough that you can easily just move the reactor to adjust for any site adaptations. Unfortunately still years away from approval.

It is the solution to the climate change problem caused by coal and natural gas. Competing with their price should not be in the equation. Your second paragraph seems hostile, no, I don't have a plan and won't submit one.

Sadly competing with coal and natural gas on cost is relevant. I think we should close those plants as soon as possible even if it means replacing them with a more expensive option, but sometimes it's hard to get political traction on things that cost more. Solar and wind tends to be cheaper than fossil fuels, anyways, though that might not be true if you have to factor in batteries. (Whether that's an issue is geography-dependent: I'm in Oregon, and we get a lot of our power from hydroelectric, which means we can use bodies of water essentially as capacitors to buffer out the irregularities in wind and solar. The East coast doesn't really have that option.)

I don't mean to be hostile, I'm just saying that as far as I understand it, nuclear is expensive which means that people who are looking to get the most power for the least cost probably are going to go with wind and solar. If we can somehow make nuclear cost competitive then that's great but I don't know what's needed for that to happen and in the mean time I think the sensible thing is to treat nuclear as something that might work, but we aren't counting on it.

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