Utilities Want to Convert Coal Plants to Nuclear; Skeptics Abound
wsj.com
wsj.com
Well the local utility just SW of Lincoln Nebraska needed the power one way or the other, and didn't know if the new type of reactor was going to work or not. So they decided to build an equivalent power coal plant on the other side of the turbo-generator building! The idea was that when the nuclear reactor was in an outage, the coal plant could spin the turbine. Two plants, one turbine-generator! Wild.
So anyway the nuclear plant did have a few troubles. The vendor, Atomics International, had them figured out and was planning to fix, but the utility declined it's option to purchase the plant in the end. Today, a grassy outline of a nuclear reactor can be seen right next to the still-operating coal plant down in Hallam, NE.
Honestly it was an awesome reactor concept and I want to see it brought back. I visited this site a few months ago and got a little tour. Very fun.
https://whatisnuclear.com/reactor_history.html#the-hallam-so...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallam_Nuclear_Power_Facility
Google maps view of the outline: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hallam,+NE+68368/@40.55864...
EDIT: Massive portions of the US! I find this mindblowing.
An interesting historical note is that across much of the west, each of those mile square sections was divided up into 16 pieces at 40-acres, which IIRC was the smallest unit of land you could purchase from the federal government.
You'll still find a lot of old homestead remnants across the west -- I used to climb through a few of them on a ranch I spent time at as a kid.
See:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_(United_States_land_su...
But, yeah, the amount of roads, even just basic gravel or dirt double-track, is pretty amazing. I knew some of it existed, but didn't quite realize it spanned the entire middle third of the US until just now.
If you want to have even more fun, most of those roads have Street View.
I’m utterly awed at the scale of infrastructure that must’ve been involved in building those thousands of kilometres of roads, let alone maintaining them (I imagine they aren’t particularly “maintained”, but all the same).
There's so much interesting nuclear-related tech and concepts we haven't fully explored because of nuclear FUD ( much of which would be solved by the new tech).
It seems the Alfa class was decommissioned for scrapping, though one was refitted with a pressurized water reactor for a while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfa-class_submarine#Decommiss...
An interesting issue with this design is that if the Pb-Bi coolant ever solidified, the reactor control rods became frozen in place.
Very interestingly, this is a 1974(!!) program plan to resume development of MSR from the US ORNL MSR team
I think a lot of these plans to retrofit coal plants with nukes are quite overoptimistic. I'm ambivalent since they could be used as reasons to prop up coal plants longer. "See, we should invest in, and get some subsidy for a new steam turbine in our coal plant so it can be used with the graphite-sodium nuke that's going to replace the boiler in 15 years". But on the other hand, we need all potential, even unlikely solutions to replace coal burning.
Is that so? I think you are confusing air with water here. In contact with air, sodium oxidizes quickly, but it does not burn spontaneously.
"At 19:47 high temperature liquid sodium coolant at one of the three secondary heat exchangers started leaking through a broken thermometer sheath ... on the piping and it ignited on contact with air."
https://onlineethics.org/cases/case-1-fire-sodium-coolant-le...
If you read more closely though the article you linked to, you'll see that the complaint there was not the fire in particular (which caused some damage, but no radioactive leaks), but the claim of the plant operators that the plant was "absolutely safe", and the attempt of a cover-up. In other words, the safety of this plant was judged not in comparison with the safety of a conventional water-cooled reactor, but in comparison with an absurd goal of "absolute safety".
When people hear the sodium can cause fire when in contact with the air, they immediately remember the spectacular explosions of sodium in contact with water. Then they assume a sodium cooled reactor is a beast that only a madman would contemplate.
In reality, sodium cooled reactors are not any worse than water-cooled reactors. All reactors present various challenges, and some of the challenges faced by sodium cooled reactors will be higher, and some lower than those facing water-cooled reactors.
But sodium cooled reactors have an absolutely tremendous advantage: most of the fissile material they use as fuel (be it Uranium or Plutonium) does undergo fission and creates fission products, as opposed to actinides. Bottom line: the nuclear waste from sodium cooled reactors (and all types of fast neutron reactors) is much, much more manageable than the nuclear waste of conventional nuclear reactors.
Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PEVmflpUCo
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAYW9n8i-C4> graphite moderators
Nope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reacto...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY
Top comment: "Advantages of thorium:
Much safer than uranium-no pressure vesel, no fuel rods to melt down
Much simpler reactor-Thorium salt liquid is pumped from the reactor tank through a heat exchanger and back into the tank
Thorium is much more plentiful than uranium--in fact so plentiful it is considered a waste product from rare earth mining
Thorium doesn't need expensive enriching to make it usable
Thorium is of little use for weapons
If power goes off liquid fuel simply drains into a pit which stops reaction. No fuel rods to cool or melt down if power fails
This technology has been around for years. Why was it not developed long ago?"
One could have high temperature reactors like pebble bed, that would be a better fit but they are more exotic and experimental.
Didn't read the article because I won't subscribe to WSJ. They have been an anti climate science platform.
Sadly, the reporting side of the WSJ and "WSJ Opinion" are basically two entirely different universes lumped under the same brand / subscription umbrella. Clearly there's a significant share of subscribers who like the opinion pieces so the Journal has historically chosen not to do away with them, but I keep hoping they will kill or spin off that business. In fact, as a subscriber I was asked not too long ago to fill out a survey about WSJ Opinion and whether I think it adds or subtracts value from my subscription. I'm not sure these types of decisions are best informed by the results of online surveys but wanted to note that just FYI...
I signed up for the WSJ when they had a holiday special and I think I pay something like $5 / month for a year
Do you have anything I can read up about regarding nuclear reactors having cooler temperatures than what coal fire generates?
[1] https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S173857331...
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/coal-fired-...
The hottest outlet temperature today from a nuclear reactor is about 1000 °C from HTTR in Japan, but that's fairly exotic.
There have been hotter outlets back in the NERVA nuclear rocket days. Also exotic.
Good read is this one: https://www.iaea.org/publications/8692/advances-in-nuclear-p...
Though, those were rocket engines with a design lifespan of several minutes. It's not possible to sustain temperatures like that, is it? (I am not an engineer).
I remember reading that one of the NTR test firings saw bits of molten corium flying out in the exhaust plume.
(And the crazy thing is, if you think about it, they are also gas turbines! The bough I guess perhaps your question was more specific to the reactor itself)
- "The average exit gas temperature was 2,550 K (2,280 °C), the highest ever recorded by Project Rover. The chamber temperature was 2,750 K (2,480 °C), another record."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Rover
There's also one notable difference: internal combustion turbines see their highest temperatures in the gas phase, which is somewhat insulated from the turbine blades (by weird fluid dynamic effects I don't understand). No solid material needs to withstand the peak temperature.
Indeed, exhaust gases are even hotter.
I believe turbine elements are cooled by grouch internal channels these days, which is quite mind blowing.
That would mean investing in new coal plant steam turbines now would be a dead end.
They are very expensive things.
Compare the cost of a coal build to a nuclear build and you will see this is not the case.
Nonetheless, the transmission infrastructure is super valuable, and super expensive, as that is a huge fraction of the cost of electricity in the US, something like 40% on average. Reusing these sites for batteries is probably a good idea.
Big industry, such as green ammonia production from electrolyzed hydrogen, could be good though. But I bet those will likely be powered by massive amounts of solar plus batteries, as is being planned in places such as Spain right now. For at least the next generation of electrolyzer tech, energy costs will be dwarfed by the capital costs of electrolyzers, and the electrolyzers will need to be run nearly continuously. It remains to be seen if the tech curve of electrolyzers will decrease more quickly than the cost or batteries and solar do.
The cost for electrolysers is amortized over not just the time to refill local tankage, but over all the time when surplus power is available, generating direct revenue. The presence of electrolysers makes overbuild of top-line generating capacity an obvious win, because it is always generating income.
The newer technology, what amounts to drilling by vaporizing rock with microwaves, enables drilling to much greater depths quickly and cheaply. Being new, it has not actually been used yet, but once mature should be less dependent on local geology, and not generate (sometimes reasonable) fears of causing damaging earthquakes, and should yield more power from a single borehole than EGS gets from two more costly holes.
But there seems to be no prospect of commercial deployment before 2028, and something could go wrong on the way, delaying or even deep-sixing it.
EGS, even where it works best, is more costly than solar and wind. Working independently of weather gives it a leg up, but money for it is less available than for those, for now, because we haven't enough of those yet.
Cost wise, it’s unclear how much actual savings will take place.
If you want to repurpose your steam turbines, geothermal is a better choice. Now that we know how to bore very deep holes electrically, geothermal is practical in many more places than before.
Battery costs have also plunged to a level where Hawaii pairs them with solar farms to provide baseload.
The extreme low cost of all of these technologies is largely why nuclear power is dying out. It struggles to compete. The consistency just isnt that much of an advantage.
Take away the insurance subsidy so that the taxpayer funded $800 billion cleanup costs for Fukushima are privatized and nuclear moves from struggles to compete to eye wateringly expensive.
It can share some of the costs with nuclear arsenal maintenance though, so some governments will continue to push it on their populace.
Each dollar dumped into building a nuke is a dollar taken out of circulation and unavailable for wind/solar/storage. It would (a) in the end displace much less coal, (b) produce nothing for an unknown number of years, maybe forever. During each of those years, more dollars would go to coal making it also unavailable for wind/solar/storage.
So, starting a nuke plant brings global climate catastrophe nearer, even if it might be made produce some power someday, and not be canceled because of massive cost overruns and delays. Every dollar that can be pulled together for energy should go to building out solar, wind, and storage. And maybe geothermal.
There are certainly promising options emerging in the area of storage, but I don't think it's a solved problem, especially at the scale necessary here. If I had your confidence about storage then I would agree with you completely, but I don't, and it doesn't seem like there's any consensus that storage is a solved problem. Quite the opposite: the consensus seems to be that we're not ready yet. As such, investments in that area are also potentially places where capital expended might produce nothing for an unknown number of years, maybe forever. CAES is often cited as a storage mechanism but nothing has been built at utility scale and multiple projects that have tried have fallen apart before getting there.
This is an extreme crisis situation where no single option has a guaranteed outcome. Pursue multiple in parallel. Heck, if we'd done that two decades ago-- massively build out nuclear while massively investing in renewables-- the issue wouldn't be nearly as critical.
But for planning, the universal method is good enough. We already know we can make, tank, and transport any amount of, e.g., anhydrous ammonia, anywhere and at any scale, and can burn any amount of anhydrous ammonia (in existing gas plants) for power, anywhere and at any scale. It has a round-trip efficiency of X, requiring top-line generation with capacity factor Y of 1/XY, which we know we can afford. And that suffices.
We have not built out much storage yet, specifically because the costs of storage alternatives are in free fall, just as costs for wind and solar generation plummeted in the past, but faster. So, building out storage next year gets you a lot more storage than building out this year. Storage method X is likely to be undercut by method Y next year. Projects X "fall apart" because methods Y are turning out cheaper, just as concentrated-solar projects fell apart when photovoltaics undercut that. Falling apart is bad for whoever put money into those, but very, very good for the rest of us.
In the meantime, money is much better spent on top-line generating capacity, because you will need that to charge up the storage from, anyway. And, your dollar gets by far the most top-line generating capacity building photovoltaic solar and wind. Tying that dollar up in a nuke project that won't deliver anything at all for years, if ever, and more dollars buying coal in the meantime, is the opposite of good strategy.
If we can get to the point where we are routinely overproducing from solar and wind and turning off the gas then yea we should ramp up storage. We will see it coming years away though.
China is ahead of the curve on this having just completed a 40GWh 3.6GW pumped storage battery.
Nuclear power would also need a lot of this if we were to rely upon it 100% since it is not dispatchable.
However, you should probably account for solar farms and battery installations taking 6 months to plan, execute and deploy. Offshore wind farms are a couple of years. Large pumped storage projects can take up to 4.
Meanwhile Hinkley point C will be completed in 2026 after being kicked off all the way back in 2010 and will provide power that is "only" 3x the price.
I'd argue that nuclear has really expensive and slick PR.
I think I'm only half serious about this. Payoffs (well, "subsidies" in political language) might be an awful idea. It's a realpolitik viewpoint, maybe not a good one. But maybe it could get us around the roadblocks.
It would either mean no new nuclear plants or somebody comes up with a genuinely cheap, safe version that theyd be willing to put their money behind.
That isnt what the propaganda is demanding though. It wants the perpetuation of free insurance for nuclear and to be given massive subsidies on top of that that solar, wind and pumped storage will never be granted. to produce less electricity for more money. It wants the market contorted out of all recognition to allow this and the only reason I can think of why is because the military needs it.
Sometimes I wouldn’t be surprised if wooden ships would be coming back again, especially now with all the modern technology.
Thus the most economical way to construct a grid right now is renewables when weather is optimal and fossil fuels when its not. Optimize for cost and that is what you get, and that type of grid is exactly what many countries energy politic has been subsidizing towards. Nuclear don't need storage, but it also cost more than both renewables and fossil fuels.
It is only sunk-cost nukes, ignoring construction and leaning on military subsidies, that match the current cost of renewables + solar. And, of course, the cost of the latter at the time any new nuke construction could (ever) be completed will be much lower.
A full discharge cycle mean it must charge and then sell all the energy it captured, and in their prognosis, it need to do so every single day. A battery that does that, and only carries 1-6 hours of capacity, can match the cost of nuclear power. Otherwise nuclear power is cheaper, and in comparison to green hydrogen, nuclear power is cheaper by a very large margin.
And anyway, all the money tied up in it during all that time would be unavailable to displace coal, so you would additionally need to pay for coal that whole time.
Someone has to take responsibility while waiting for that cost to come down. A proper market solution would be to ban fossil fuels now and let non-fossil fuels alternative compete for investment and research. Not hopes and dream but technology that works when one can not just fall back on burning murder gas. Fossil fuel advocates are working very hard to convince people that coal should be replaced with natural gas, rather than non-fossil fuel alternatives.
The greenpeace dolts who got it regulated into oblivion (in no small part thanks to the help of a bunch of useful idiots who equated nuclear power with nuclear weapons) with the specific aim of making it not cost competitive.
A generation later, the clipboard warrior dolts point to the results of the prior generation of dolts and say it's not cost competitive.
It's only not cost competitive because we make it that way. You could bring down the cost of nuclear substantially without actually changing the physical requirements of the plants themselves simply by setting the bureaucratic processes up to default to speedy approval rather than default to delay and deny.
I'd love to know more about this. Links?
Nuclear has the highest opex of any electrical generation method; it's also estimated by some to have a greenhouse gas impact worse than natural gas. Wind costs a fraction of any other electricity generation method, solar isn't far behind, and continuing to drop around 10% a year.
This is why you see wind and solar replacing decommissioned nukes at a ratio of 6:1 (not including commercial or residential capacity) in the US and growing, and coal plants being decommissioned. There are now multiple technologies for recycling turbine blades, and solar panels are recycleable (or just resellable in the secondhand market where people don't care that they've lost 20% of their capacity.)
Storage is also plunging in cost, and additional technologies are already in commercial use (iron flow, for example.)
HVDC transmission is spreading, with higher capacity, lower cost, and higher efficiency for moving electricity greater distances (in other words, it's less of a deal if it's really windy in one spot and not in another, and ideally-suited wind sites can be further from where electricity is needed.)
Fanboys who think it's as simple as "if only we could work past the NIMBY issue" are ignoring the fact that nuclear power has not been economically viable for three quarters of a century (it has only been viable because of the military applications of nuclear power), while wind and solar keep getting more economically viable, and our grid keeps leaning more and more toward being distributed. Nobody needs the slow-reacting, base load generation nuclear provides.
Wind and solar are as distributable and scaleable as you want.
Wind and solar have significantly simpler supply chains, regulations, and maintenance/repair/inspection needs.
You don't need to worry about geological stability with wind and solar.
Wind and solar don't require tens or hundreds of megawatts of cold-start / post-operation (cooling) power.
Wind and solar have little/no security concerns nor do you need to worry about area social/political/economic stability.
Wind/solar don't generate waste that is weaponizeable.
You don't need a highly trained workforce to install, operate, repair, and decommission wind/solar.
I would expect such outrageous claims to be heavilly substantiated
> You don't need to worry about geological stability with wind
Really? Almost 1,000 feet tall, top heavy structure under huge windload does not need geologican stability?
'require tens or hundreds of megawatts of cold-start / post-operation (cooling) power.'
How or why is this ever relevant, they operate at >90 capacity factor for 2 years at a time
> Storage is also plunging in cost, and additional technologies are already in commercial use (iron flow, for example.)
> HVDC transmission is spreading, with higher capacity, lower cost, and higher efficiency for moving electricity greater distances (in other words, it's less of a deal if it's really windy in one spot and not in another, and ideally-suited wind sites can be further from where electricity is needed.)
How do you transform DC up and down? By converting it to AC. Running it through a transformer and converting it back, HVDC isn't gonna take over the world, certain stretches might be HVDC where beneficial but not all over the world.
The difference with nuclear is that anyone can build and operate next-gen storage, so you're commercial right out the door. I could hook my UPS up to the grid and feed back, commercial success!
> Wind and solar are as distributable and scaleable as you want.
Not without storage, which is harder to scale than production of other kinds.
> You don't need to worry about geological stability with wind and solar.
I don't see the USP, there are plenty of geologically stable areas in most countries.
> Wind and solar don't require tens or hundreds of megawatts of cold-start / post-operation (cooling) power.
They have the added downside of only producing power when the weather guy says so.
> Wind/solar don't generate waste that is weaponizeable.
Good point, for now.
> You don't need a highly trained workforce to install, operate, repair, and decommission wind/solar.
No, you need a disposable workforce that can die from workforce accidents without anyone batting an eye.
Bill Gates is a good example of someone with a bit of time around the smartest people on earth asking for advice where he can make a difference, here's a TED talk where he explains that we'll need all solutions to come together rather than one single silver bullet: https://youtu.be/JaF-fq2Zn7I
Does it sound reasonable that we should use all good tech we have? To me it does, and it includes all energy sources in different amounts and situations.
Yes, this is a core problem. It seems like a large number of people want to focus on only one solution. They complain that solutions $X is more expensive or solution $Y is less proven or solution $Z isn't consistent. That sounds like a great reason to embrace them all to have each one's strengths complement the other's weaknesses. Cost should also be a secondary issue to speed of scale out & reliability. We're racing a clock where going too slow has its own costs, in capital & lives. It should be a factor but not the factor.
Who are those "some"? It's an outrageous claim. Are you sure you aren't mistaking it for hydro?
That is if you ignore experience curve effects.
In the US only one nuclear power plant came online in the last 25 years. For plants like Vogtle, the majority of the workers on site have never built another nuclear plant in their career before, and will never build after. That is a very good way to keep construction cost astronomical.
Compare with the reactors for nuclear submarines. They are being built at a rate of about 1 per year. Most workers have participated in building numerous reactors in the past, all of the same design. New workers can learn from experienced peers, and use their learning in building lots more reactors during the rest of their career.
In the last 25 years, the US brought online only one civilian nuclear power plant, but 23 nuclear submarines and 4 aircraft carriers (those have 2 reactors each). The cost of naval reactors is classified, but I’ve seen non-classified information that indicates that a submarine reactor costs in the lew hundreds of millions, and a carrier reactor about one billion ([1] page 10).
The idea of SMR’s is to replicate the success story of naval reactors in the civilian sphere.
[1] https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/112th-congress-2011-...
The promise of the small reactors is lego like building blocks that are very safe, idiot proof, can be carried on a train, and you return them to the factory for maintenance or refueling. Site integration is literally a cement pad, water in/out, steam in/out, data connection, and some power. If any of those in/outs fail the reactor shuts down. That way the factory builds 1000s, becomes an expert on them, and you get the efficiency of higher volumes. That way you don't need 24/7 coverage by a large team of PhDs just to produce power.
That's the dream anyways, will be interesting to see if anyone can get it to work.
By comparison, when plants of the same design are built in series they're much cheaper. Nuclear plants that started construction in the late 1960s and early 1970s were some of the most effective clean energy investments, delivered at a cost of $1-2 billion per gigawatt. Check out the costs in the historical list and there's a large stretch of plants that were built at this price point [2].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_power...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...
They probably could be made more cheaply than they have been. Making them cheap enough to be economically competitive will be very hard and and very uncertain of success. And, trying will take time we cannot afford, because you get no power out until it is all finished, and you burn coal until then. Renewables start producing and displacing coal almost instantly.
You are replying to a post that provides historical evidence and geuine argument, and your only counter argument is a Tautology and outright dismissal?
Back in the '50s, the promise was that power from nukes would be "too cheap to meter". They knew they were lying when they promised that, as we now know from internal memos. Cost estimates published have never matched actual costs. Delivery schedules published have never matched actual delivery, when anything is delivered; and when not, none of the money is ever returned.
So, the first and most important lesson about nukes is that what promoters estimate bears no resemblance to what might be delivered, and relying on such estimates puts you in a bottomless moneypit.
The demand curve is lumpy on a daily, weekly and yearly cycle. Nuclear is flat and predictable, renewables are (like demand) predictable to a reasonable degree but variable (weather and energy demand are linked too).
Nuclear (and coals) difficulty meeting peaky demand is a big reason for pumped hydro to exist for decades. It is still the biggest source of energy storage we have. Why should renewables pay for storage built for nuclear?
And note that's averaged across 4 years, across the whole US across multiple time zones and doesn't include energy for heat currently not sourced from electricity.
Cold places use more energy in winter and in cold years, the opposite in hot places that need a lot of cooling.
But, let's put that all to one side, on that graph what amount of energy are you intending to generate with nuclear and what are you intending to do with the excess (if you aim high) or with the peaks (if you aim low). Because whatever you do, is almost certainly going to be the same things renewables would do when demand and supply don't meet exactly. Like pumped hydro or off peak pricing which already exists and is therefore included in your "flat" graph.
Excesses of energy are easily solved: use it to desalinate water, create hydrogen fuel, or some other energy intensive things. And as stated previously, nuclear power plants can reduce their output if needed by more aggressively cooling the reactor. Nuclear plants want to operate at 100% load as much as they can, but they don't need to.
Renewables have the opposite problem: they don't produce energy when we need it. No amount of solar panels will produce energy when the sun is down. Peak pricing is not going to help us here. This is why renewable advocates assume that there's going to be some magic storage solution that offers effectively free and unlimited storage.
> Like pumped hydro or off peak pricing which already exists and is therefore included in your "flat" graph.
The USA has 20 GWh of pumped hydro storage. That's 2.4 minutes of electricity supply at an average hourly consumption of 500 GW.
This is called "overprovisioning" and it's exactly what renewables intend to do. In both cases it's more expensive than having magical demand matching production.
Or your going to use it to desalinate when power is abundant. This is "demand response" and again, it's exactly what renewables grids are going to do.
I see you also want to create Hydrogen, another great idea that renewables also plan to do, except nuclear generated is called Pink Hydrogen and renewable powered is called Green Hydrogen for some reason. Same basic idea though.
So, I don't understand why you're so angry about renewables when you already know all the solutions a fossil free grid needs.
> No amount of solar panels will produce energy when the sun is down.
Did you happen to notice where the bottom of the lumps in your graph were? Nighttime. So we'll need some wind power and/or storage and/or HVDC lines.
But if you have to pretend you've never heard of wind power in order to justify nuclear power, maybe that's a sign that it's not as good an idea as you think.
And finally, the reason we don't have much storage on the grid today, is because we burn fossil fuels for a great deal of power and turning them off actually saves money (and lives) so that's what we do rather than store energy.
I'm fairly chill about storage because cheap solar that lets you turn off gas during the day and cheap wind that lets you turn gas off another half of the time is the quickest and cheapest way to stop burning fossil fuels. We only need to come up with crazy solutions once we try to get rid of the last few bits of fossil fuels. And you already listed them for a fully nuclear grid so we don't need to go over that again.
Some people try to act all appalled about that, as if burning 80% less fossil fuels easily at an overall cost saving in a short period of time is some big conspiracy by fossil fuel companies to undermine nuclear. It doesn't really pencil out though. Not even if you pretend wind power doesn't exist.
> And finally, the reason we don't have much storage on the grid today, is because we burn fossil fuels for a great deal of power and turning them off actually saves money (and lives) so that's what we do rather than store energy.
No, the reason why we don't have storage on the grid is because we have no feasible way of storing energy at grid scale. Hawaii, California, and parts of Germany all produce excesses of electricity during peak solar and wind generation. We were promised that people would take this energy off the grid, store it, and release it later when energy is in greater demand. But these promises have not panned out, because storage remains infeasible. So instead, we keep burning fossil fuels. And we'll continue to keep burning fossil fuels until we either adopt nuclear power or some massive breakthrough in storage is found.
It'll still take significant amounts of storage even to drive fossil fuel use down to 20%. Estimates say 12 hours of storage [2]. That's an incredible amount of storage, hundreds of times greater than what we have now.
1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=20112
2. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...
The second link also doesnt say what you claim. It says 12 hours of storage or HVDC connections would be required. 12 hours storage being half an EV per American household, which isnt particulalry massive and is explicitly an upper bound, ignoring hydro and nuclear and biomass and demand response etc.
Their solar only model suggests 1.5x overprovision. How much cheaper does solar need to be for a purely solar grid to beat nuclear using your number? 1.2/1.5 suggest 20% cheaper is all they need in this extreme solar only model. But in reality solar (and wind) are 20% of the cost of new nuclear (80% cheaper) and predicted to fall further.
So even your entirely unsubstantiated claim about needing 3-4x wind overprovision means it would be cheaper than nuclear.
Overproduction without storage results in diminishing returns, as most of the excess energy is wasted.
"New nuclear" is 4-8x more expensive than nuclear power built at scale. When multiple copies of the same plant design built in series, costs in the range of $1-2 billion per GW is typical. And remember, that's a GW of generation with >90% capacitor factor, as compared to 25-35% for most renewables.
If you use more energy in the winter, and wind power works better in the winter, you've got a positive correlation.
You don't just assume you need an average output equal to the max demand.
And the price for solar is based on generation, not capacity.
> The LCOE "represents the average revenue per unit of electricity generated that would be required to recover the costs of building and operating a generating plant during an assumed financial life and duty cycle", and is calculated as the ratio between all the discounted costs over the lifetime of an electricity generating plant divided by a discounted sum of the actual energy amounts delivered.
Unfortunately for the US, energy use is highest in the summer when wind is producing the least amount of energy. And then there's the hour-by hour variations on top of that.
Wind production: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=20112
Energy use: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
Wasted nuke overcapacity is very, very expensive.
To see what later copies of existing nukes cost, we need look no further than Vogtle.
Except we have no way of building grid scale storage. Again, we have a few minutes of storage. Until then, wind and solar is really wind, solar, and fossil fuels. We have no plan to get rid of the fossil fuels until a storage breakthrough occurs.
> To see what later copies of existing nukes cost, we need look no further than Vogtle.
Like I said: building one power plant of a given design is way more expensive than building repeated copies of the same design. There were dozens of nuclear projects that had a cost to energy production ratio of less than a fifth of Vogtle.
It just isn't built out yet. Building out storage will be premature until after there is enough extra renewable generating capacity to charge it from.
If lots of projects would have been cheaper than Vogtle, we may reasonably conclude that they didn't want one cheaper than Vogtle: it would have left too little scope for corruption and graft. Corruption is the ever-present companion of all nuke projects. Any nuke project without a ready conduit for graft will not be funded.
I think you meant "co2-emission-free-while-operating"
1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage#/media/File:N...
That's always been a paradox with nuclear power. On one hand, of all electric power generation technologies, nuclear power has the most toxic waste; on the other hand, that toxic waste is completely contained under normal operation, so that looking from the outside, it's one of the cleanest. That's why in these discussions you always have people talking past each other: depending on how you look at it, nuclear power can be very clean or very dirty.
India has the unique position of granted an exception by the US Senate for nuclear technology transfer, but subsequent administrations have never done it (for multiple geopolitical/trade treaty reasons). There is public appetite for small reactors and power generation - especially in the fast growing smaller towns(which by definition means 3-5 million people in India).
But unless the tech transfer happens - it will take India and China about 2 decades to catch up. All the while being the most polluting nations on earth. and nothing can be done about it.
The only way to learn is the hard way. Suffering and defeat, failure. I have a high opinion of trauma because it has a biological purpose it is harmful to deny. you remember everything perfectly and vividly so you can bear witness against what happens reliably and accurately, and that sharp memory combined with reliving it over and over reveals little clues that just might solve perfect crimes. Trauma is the only form of memory that can survive a lobotomy.
Some solar and wind and battery projects are sited to take advantage of disused or in some cases shared infrastructure (e.g. floating solar on hydro dams).
Data centers in old powerplants that use the infrastructure in reverse to buy electricity (and sometimes for cooling) are also a thing.
But anything that uses steam is probably not going to be competitive with renewables even with the savings this adds (particularly if you could have used the infrastructure for something else).
Present economically viable sources of uranium will last 150 - 300 years. This article from 2009 puts the number at at least 200 years. [1] [ ] With the number of new reactors coming online (being constructed now), old ones keep running, and new plant construction would cut that number significantly.
There is a lot of be claimed from the ocean, current that is not economical. (and I thibnk it wouldl be horrible for the ocean ecosystem to sift through such volumes).
So usually the argument is
a) That reactors will use torium so it wont be a problem. b) We will build fuel-recycling fast-breeder reactors already has enough fuel to run for a billion years.
As far as I know (and on this I might well be), there are no big commercial thorium or fast breeder reactors in commercial use.
If true that means
a) we cannot build them today, if we want nuclear power fast the reactors will be tried and true LWRs
b) if we wait for research to finish up it might take a while.
So, the immediate need for power cannot reasonably be met by nuclear. Waiting for it to replace coal and fossile fuels will not do much in the immediate future.
Now building a nuclear plant in a democracy filled with bureaucracy is an extremely long process anyways. Getting all the permits required for where to build, how to build it, all the protests because nobody wants it close to them.
When the plant is ready to start construction of a is fast breeder reactor that is economically, scientifically and environmentally viable. It would be dumb for all the countries to start building Gen 1. That is more of a beta best.
Get at least a decade of metrics to learn what works, what does not work, how could it be optimized, what went wrong? Plus, scientific progress would make Gen2 a better alternative as a template.
After all after Chernobyl and Fukushima I have heard "Well, those were old plants and we dont build them like that anymore. The new ones are much safer".
Then building a fast breeder or thorium should be given time to learn from the process.
I might be totally wrong about how far along the research for fast breeders and thorium is, and that would make most of the above pointless.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo...
Also, people seem to be more interested in nuclear waste than in coal waste, so I expect more sophisticated solutions.
Short term solution is similar to nuclear, just gather it in random places and hope you've gone bankrupt before anyone asks you to pay for dealing with it because if you pay up front then you are obviously economic self-harm and people would move straight to the long term solution.
https://www.expertsure.com/2011/03/27/more-illegally-dumped-...
Any time you outsource disposal of such a dangerous substance you're pretty much guaranteeing that it'll all be dumped improperly. That's why it's not a tiny problem at all.
Allegedly, back in the 80s and 90s, organised crime in Italy was involved in the improper disposal of toxic and radioactive waste. Much of it was dumped around Italy, but some was said to have been dumped in Somalian waters. Attempts to verify this have proven difficult; the main informant hasn't proven reliable, and a UN mission to Somalia in 2005 wasn't able to find anything.
Still, it does seem like some toxic waste was dumped in or around Somalia back in the 1980s or early 1990s, and that's certainly terrible.
That being said, it seems to have happened thirty years ago, and although there was concern the 2005 tsunami could have stirred it up, that doesn't seem to be happening, and there's no evidence it's causing any harm at all. (And remember, most of the waste was in the Med off the coast of Italy, where it would be much easier to detect any impact than in Somalia.)
> Any time you outsource disposal of such a dangerous substance you're pretty much guaranteeing that it'll all be dumped improperly.
That seems to be the opposite of what your link is suggesting?
Uh, Project Censored and Boing Boing? I'm not finding any reporting on this purported nuclear waste dumping in Somalia. I'm seeing reports of toxic waste, but not nuclear waste.
Furthermore, The USSR and United Kingdom both dumped massive amounts of nuclear waste into the Arctic and Atlantic oceans respectively [1]. There are no observed adverse effects of this.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...
I don't think we can be so cavalier about nuclear waste, it's a heavy responsibility to push off to the future.
Like most things, this decision is about trade-offs. No, we have not figured out how to process nuclear waste in 1000 years. But if that's our major problem in 1000 years, we have succeeded in our most important challenge right now.
I mean, okay, I guess pick a corner that's fairly geologically stable. But the volume is (compared to other energy sources) tiny, and it's just not that dangerous.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing#List_of_s...
US got 15,000 tons of massively subsidized fuel processed from Soviet bombs.
I would much rather live downstream from a nuclear waste "temporary" storage area that has an indeterminate lifespan than downstream from an oilsands tailings retention pond!
For the pedantic nuclearphiles, it doesn't have to be an airstrike. Domestic terrorism is a real thing as well.
An older and perhaps more beautiful solution is to put the reactors fairly deep underground, or underwater. Sadly, underground construction is extra pricey.
EDIT: I was thinking of aircraft impact here rather than hostile military attack. Defending against hostile military attack is not built into the regs.
"partly" seems like it's doing a lot of work in this sentence.
https://www.ans.org/news/article-1646/root-cause-of-vogtle-a...
Hostile military airstrikes are another thing entirely, that's true. See edit above.
https://assets.sourcemedia.com/8c/d8/6686933e49518782cdc7cc1...
Haven’t looked in a while, but I’m pretty sure a Fukushima every month of our life (and onward) is much less worse than current coal consumption.
Reactor buildings themselves are extremely sturdy already. And if you do serious damage to the reactor it'll probably spread out the fuel so nothing particularly bad happens before you can do cleanup.
And how much safer than coal does it have to be, anyway? Coal kills so many people.
So, continued operation of coal plants depends on uneconomic behavior, typically via cultural inertia or domination by entrenched interests. Of course that is always possible, but it is disfavored.
You mean the 1 to 3 pilots that used the anti-hijacking doors to help them commit suicide by intentionally crashing passenger airliners? It’s a stretch to blame the taliban for that, and 9/11 was over twenty years ago.
Additionally, they seem to have a budding relationship with China, who are capable of manufacturing more advanced aircraft.
Which, I don’t exactly know Canada-US defense agreements, but given we share assets like NORAD—I assume an attack on southern Ontario would be tantamount to declaring war on the US, which would probably go poorly for everyone.
EDIT: Oh, strike that, they literally mean Canada attacking the US, which is the stupidest idea I’ve heard in a while.
If this pandemic has taught me anything, it's that contingency plans are put together with great effort and careful thought, and are then placed into a filing cabinet somewhere.
Short answer, the design is such that reactor shuts down automatically with loss of cooling.
Meltdowns are hard to cause, because once the reactor slags itself it also stops reacting because it's destroyed its moderator.
You're probably thinking of "what if Chernobyl?" and the issue there is that it took genuine, sustained effort to create Chernobyl, and a reactor design that could do it: Chernobyl's big problem wasn't a meltdown (3 mile island was a meltdown) it was a steam explosion beneath the reactor, and then the subsequent graphite fire which spread radioactive particulates over the surrounding area.
No practical air strike is going to create a Chernobyl equivalent explosion - there's not enough energy in explosives to do it.
You don't need a "meltdown". All four of Fukashima's active reactors exploded after the cooling systems lost power. They had been automatically SCRAM'd when the earthquake hit and had been cooling for a while before the tsunami hit and destroyed the generators, but reactors take months to 'cool down.'
https://youtu.be/saM85y8lFm4?t=1997
One of the spent fuel storage pools at Fukashima was still generating 3MW of thermal heat at the time of the disaster. Waste fuel that hadn't been in the reactor for months. It came within one degree Celsius of its safe storage temperature - 85 degrees. Its normal operating temperature was 30 degrees.
> Physically exploding the reactor core might make a mess, but other then a very small amount of radioactive dust, the pieces, consisting of heavy uranium, would be scattered over a small area around the plant,
"Small area"? The Fukashima explosion has left an area around the size of Tokyo proper uninhabitable in one of the most expensive, constrained real estate markets in the world.
Anyway, we know how to build nuclear plants that are physically incapable of melting down. Also, foreign and domestic(1) terrorist organizations are largely funded by oil (and, since I count putin as a terrorist, gas and coal) magnates.
Rapid nuclearization (and renewable energy roll outs) cuts the funding.
(1) Fox News, etc are clearly recruitment tools for right wing domestic terrorist groups. Even if you disagree, my point on foreign terrorists still holds.
I'm sure someone will point to bleeding-edge tech with waste that has shorter half-life, but nuclear power as we build it now generally produces waste that is hazardous for hundreds or thousands of years, afaik.
The other objection will be: yes but what about the price of heating the planet? It's a strong point, but it's still a very hard calculation to balance.
How do we least burden future humanity?
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61048256
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/russians-in-chernobyl-to-suf...