Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Except in some specific cases (Finland, other Arctic regions with long periods of low sunlight) I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage. Storage is the main cost barrier for 100% renewable-powered grids, but this is also an area where technological development is possible.
Much of the discussion of energy in the American media is pretty poor these days. For example, the solar tariff issue on China sourced PV - there are simply no US companies making panels of comparable quality (monocrystalline Si lasts longer and is more efficient). Concepts like requiring Chinese manufacturers to open factories in the USA if they want to sell in US markets would make sense but probably would violate some trade provision or other.
Another factor that this article should have mentioned is the reliability of the global uranium ore -> fuel rods supply chain. Costs vary significantly based on the purity of the ore (18% is the top, 0.1% is the economically viable limit) and like oil, uranium ore is not globally distributed (unlike sunlight and wind).
As far as Russia/Ukraine, the real agenda the US government seems to be pushing there is using that conflict to rapidly increase LNG exports to Europe from the US West/South coast, even though energy prices are spiking due to inflation (and plausibly due to exports of crude oil from the USA, allowed under that 2015 bill lifting that restriction). A far better plan for Europe would be to go 100% renewable asap, meaning no need for fossil fuel imports from any party. Yes, that's technologically possible, but would require massive economic investment.
https://np.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/9unimr/dutch_satiric...
That said, there is only one submarine power cable connecting Norway and Germany, and it's been operational for one year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NordLink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HVDC_Europe.svg
"Don't underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with tapes" also applies here. The amount of energy you can deliver by transporting fuel rods by truck/train/ship is immense.
Capital costs is why Hawaii has traditionally imported oil versus having an undersea power connection to the continental US.
When costs are all capex, the more you use, the less it costs. (And, as with nukes, the less you use, the more it costs.)
Power losses are measured in single digit percents per 1000km. That's not nothing of course, but it's sufficiently low to transmit power from windy places to less windy places and from sunny places to less sunny places.
????
> Currently, the most complete bottom-up inventory of natural gas system emissions is the 2012 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Greenhouse Gas Inventory (GHGI). (2) It estimates an overall system-wide methane loss rate of 6.2 Tg/yr of methane, or 1.3% of methane transported (Supporting Information (SI), Section 16) and that the transmission and storage sector (T&S) is the largest emitting segment of the natural gas industry, (2) accounting for about one-third of methane emissions.
> For T&S stations that are required to report to the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP), this study estimates total emissions to be 260% [215% to 330%] of the reportable emissions for these stations, primarily due to the inclusion of emission sources that are not reported under the GHGRP rules, updated emission factors, and super-emitter emissions.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.5b01669
Gas will literally bleed right through the seals at a certain rate, especially with the compressor motors, which is no different to the electrical losses from stepping voltage up/down.
And this is actually a huge problem with natural gas specifically because methane is an incredibly potent greenhouse gas... around 30x as potent as CO2 over 100 years. Losing a couple percent of your methane is a big deal. That is actually what is driving the push for electric-driven heat pumps for home use... it's better to lose a little bit of electricity than to have thousands of miles of poorly-maintained residential gas distribution that even in the best case are leaking highly potent methane through seals.
But they do. Normally. A fraction of the fuel transmitted through the pipe will be lost, seals, punctures, breaks, medium changes, over-pressure release through venting and so on.
> Power lines do leak. It's called "line loss" and it's a significant factor in power distribution.
Not all that significant in short range transmission, and until we figured out HVDC a major factor in long range transmission but the number of HVDC links that are coming online is increasing rapidly making this much less of a problem. The gear used for this is very impressive stuff, it is a different level of semiconductor engineering than what you normally have kicking around the yard but it works and is deployed at scale already with very good results.
Sure, if you handwave the unsolved-at-scale technical problems with grid energy storage and make a series of generous assumptions about future technology, that's probably true. Nuclear technology has been up to the task for the past fifty years.
> Another factor that this article should have mentioned is the reliability of the global uranium ore -> fuel rods supply chain.
Seawater extraction is an option if that's ever a real concern, as is using breeder reactors to reprocess spent fuel. And the exact same issues apply to storage.
Of course, that 50% efficiency cost seems like a bit of a bear in itself. If you lose half of the stored power, that would seem to significantly drive up the total lifecycle cost of a Watt of wind power. (Recognizing, of course, that not all of it must be stored.)
The cost and inefficiency (==cost) of storage seems like an unfortunate thing to handwave away in a conversation about relative costs.
It's just that since we live in a world where we burn lots of gas, we don't need to do the "generate synthetic methane" step, we can just burn less of it.
Sure, we could spend billions on generating synthetic methane from renewables while at the same time burning natural methane, but that would be stupid.
The more you use it, the less it costs, per kWh.
What are these problems, exactly? I see videos and news stories about grid batteries being successfully deployed for short term management and how pumped hydro is basically a big cheap gravity battery, but I'm not a civil/electrical engineer, so I accept there could easily be elephants in the room here.
We need O(100x) current production to fully switch away from hydrocarbons. That's a lot of reservoirs or a lot of cobalt that have to be mined.
"Rare earths" are a column (edit: ha ha see below) in the periodic table, and are not used in batteries.
Some types of electric motors use rare earths, others do not.
Here's a primer: https://blog.ucsusa.org/josh-goldman/electric-vehicles-batte...
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/08/10/worlds-largest-grid-f...
> Battery rollout: "AGL Energy has committed to build 850 MW of battery-based assets by 2024. To that end, Torrens Island marks the first project to be constructed at the site of a fossil-fuel power plant. It won’t be the last, however, as big batteries are planned for New South Wale’s Liddell coal plant and Victoria’s Loy Yang facility. In January, AGL Energy revealed that it had secured both Wärtsilä and Fluence under non-exclusive framework agreements to supply up to 1 GW of large-scale battery storage."
So, would it make more economic sense for this 1GW battery-storage system to be replaced by a nuclear power plant? Australia after all is one of the places with the most high-grade uranium ore, being among the top three exporters.
Here's an example of more reliable analysis:
> "To illustrate this point, the 2,430 MW Vogtle nuclear plant could be expected to generate 21 million MWh per year. That is enough to power about 1.75 million residential households. Meanwhile, a hypothetical 3,500 MW solar power plant would be able to produce just under 6 million MWh of electricity per year. This number is enough to power only 500,000 homes, which is considerably less than nuclear power. For solar to produce as much electricity as is generated by a nuclear power plant, it would require about 13,000 MW of utility-scale solar capacity, which about four times as much as built in the existing plants. However, the cost to build this 13,000 MW facility would be $12.1 billion, which is still just 50% of the cost of the $25 billion Vogtle nuclear plant."
https://www.solarfeeds.com/mag/solar-power-vs-nuclear-power/...
Wind and solar are cheap now because their fuel cost is zero and the cost of grid reliability is borne by us - consumers. In a better world, the cost of balancing the grid at night should be borne by a solar PV generator because it caused the problem.
Even if you match the energy output of a solar and nuclear plant, the component of time is ignored. On a grid powered by solar, where will energy come from at night? How many batteries will you construct? The scale of these batteries is again something that’s dismissed by claims of continental-scale grids but has that been achieved anywhere? All the batteries in the world combined can power à giga watt scale grid for hours. That’s right, hours.
Nuclear is a solution in the here and now. It buys us time to sort through these problems while we work towards a better future.
Also why do you only mention solar and not wind? Maybe because eit would make your argument less convincing? The wind still blows at night, so you do not need battery storage to provide all the demand during the night.
Why are the same simplistic arguments being brought forward again and again. They have all been debunked.
Is it enough wind to meet all the demand at night? And what happens when it stops blowing as much as expected for a long period of time[0]? You still need baseline power generation for quite some time to come until those questions that, well, keep getting hand waved away are solved.
0: https://fortune.com/2021/09/16/the-u-k-went-all-in-on-wind-p...
The wind doesn't blow as strongly at night. It's much calmer.
Whereas with solar and wind, you need to do both, because you need the overprovisioned capacity to recharge the batteries.
But this is really a question of economics, the mix of how much storage you want to include is really a question of cost and the specific grid. One should also say that pretty much every grid already has some level of overprovisioning, because otherwise you run into problems when some exceptional events hit.
In the end why would you pay for more expensive nuclear if you can get more capacity for the same price with wind/solar. So it is cheaper to build the overprovisioning with that. Moreover if the current trends for storage prices continue then things become cheaper still.
Nobody would use this kind of lithium ion battery for grid storage. Instead use Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePo4) batteries- no cobalt needed. LiFePo4 batteries are absolutely good enough right now for grid storage.
Utilities are not generally in a habit of reflexively choosing the most expensive alternative, even if some have plumped for nukes in places where ratepayers have no say.
None of these things exist at a large scale except for pumped hydro / water gravity, and that requires very convenient topography and geology to work. Generally, any non-chemical storage system is overpriced (too inefficient) or a maintenance disaster.
Not much storage exists because it has not been built yet. It has not been built yet because we haven't the renewable generating capacity to charge it from yet. Thus, we are spending on renewable generating capacity first, and lately factories that will build storage systems.
Battery storage is the most expensive variety. Round-trip efficiency is not very important anymore. I.e., other concerns dominate now. Anyway, gravity storage efficiency has always been fine.
Even if less efficient, you can get enormous potential storage from pumped water with relatively simple machines compared to massive battery farms.
This is partly because it needs no watershed, and partly because transmission lines mean it need not be local.
Anyway pumped hydro is only one of many equally viable alternatives. All will be used. Eventually which ones are cheapest will become clear.
The sweet spot for storage is near-zero opex, very low per-Wh stored capex, and cheap capex per-W in and, particularly, out. Thus, weight for watt-hours, and simple motor / generator for watts in and out.
Synthetic fuel has the appeal that the stored energy is readily tanked and transported, and very saleable; enough so to overcome low round-trip efficiency, expensive electrolysers for W-in, and complicated combined-cycle turbines for W-out.
He also said the inertia of a falling weight is enormous, and would help stabilize the grid.
Except if water, pipes and pumps are used, as water is heavy, and pipes and pumps can transport a lot of it very efficiently and cheaply. That’s called pumped hydro storage and is currently the #1 grid scale storage in the world.
Trying to do the same with solid materials can sound like a genius idea but it’s really not.
> efficiently
Are you sure about that? He said the losses due to pipe friction were considerable.
If the railroad is already built, and disused, that drives down cost.
Cost is what matters most.
That is why vertical motion in a disused mineshaft is attractive. A single 10,000t weight hanging from a winch has just one moving part, the winch, and cable all in tension, with no preparation of the shaft sides; everything is concentrated at the top. The mineshaft provides isolation from environmental disruption.
You get much the same effect with a float attached to a cable down to a pulley augered into the sea floor; thence to an onshore winch. The cable and pulley are exposed to sea (or lake) water, but you get the advantage that the winch may be shared among as many cable reels as you like, with only simple clutches. A 20m diameter float displaces 4000 tons of water, and the sea floor may be much more than a km deep.
(In principle you could share a winch drive among lots of mineshafts, but they are rarely close enough together. You could bore more, but that drives up cost. The world is absolutely perforated with disused mineshafts.)
That one had the winch and motor / generator at the sea floor, and a big rack of floats. It was, of course, too expensive. This is a common feature of energy storage ideas: people seem to love to promote the most stupidly expensive version of a good idea, and then give up when it is shot down for that.
Certainly, any scheme where you put complicated electromechanical stuff on the sea floor, it will be expensive. And likewise, where the expensive part is only usable with one "unit" of storage. Or anyway it just costs too much or needs perfect weather or something. (E.g., Energy Vault (NRGV) is stupid and their investors will lose their shirts.)
But there is usually a simple variation that lacks these problems.
Assuming utilities will do the stupid, expensive thing leads to failed analyses.
Sounds like an Elon Musk solution. Make it bigger, taller, make more of it, and somehow it’ll bend basic physics facts to become the ground breaking disruptor technology of the next century.
Mineshaft storage is very, very efficient, but has an upper limit on energy per mineshaft determined by its depth and how much weight fits in it. The cost of the winch apparatus is amortized over that amount. More mineshafts means more total storage.
Pumped hydro has very, very low cost per Wh stored, but kinda high per W in and out. But thousands of pumped hydro systems were already built, almost, so seem free; they just needed pumps added.
Synthetic H2 and NH3 are very, very cheap per Wh stored. W out uses existing turbines, so seems cheap. W in depends on your electrolysers, which are improving fast.
In batteries, cost per Wh stored has been large, but is different in different chemistries. In a better chemistry it is lower. Flow batteries have lower cost per Wh stored, for any liquid chemistry, but higher per W in or out; and need plumbing and pumps.
Details matter. Numbers matter. Dumb choices make dumb designs. Dumb designs can be improved on.
Drawing conclusions based on dumb choices is just dumb.
Musk is dumb, but just barely smart enough to hire smart people and, sometimes, let them be smart. So, Hyperloop was just dumb, no matter who works on it. Starship is kinda smart, depending on what you can think of to do with it. Mars colonization is dumb. Starlink could possibly be smart, depending on a lot of details.
A wholly new capability, like radically cheaper mass to orbit, can often enable smart ideas. Super-expensive mass to orbit was good enough for weather satellites, planetary probes, and geosynch COMSATs.
The weight system only requires part of a hillside, has a pretty small environmental footprint, and there are lots and lots of hills.
The rail system needs maintained rolling stock and maintained rails. The mineshaft method is overwhelmingly cheaper and more reliable, because all that must be kept working is an electric winch. There are lots and lots of disused mineshafts.
There are indeed many unused mineshafts, but a shaft would be only suitable for a small weight, maybe enough for a single house. This does not scale.
Algorithms have been created to use GIS data to automatically find potential PHES sites. There are lots of candidates. Australia, for example, has 300x more potential that it would need for a 100% renewable grid.
If not, maybe there is a box canyon you can close the end of with a dam.
In places, they have flattened a convex hilltop and used the material to make a dike.
Usually you don't need anywhere near as much storage volume as a typical hydroelectric dam reservoir holds.
Now if you use water, pipes and pumps, instead of solid materials, now we’re talking. It’s called pumped hydro storage and is the number one grid scale storage in the world.
It is #1, just now, because a lot already existed. They cost a great deal to build, back when. New ones would cost as much, but a small variation is much cheaper, not needing a dam or a watershed.
A small variation on a bad idea can be a very good idea.
Lithium batteries have the momentum and are dropping in price because of the EV cars revolution happening right now. When solar revolution will happen i utility scale, the utility-type batteries that will emerge may be seriously different.
If you can do it by this winter it would solve inflation, enable a complete sanction packet against Russian oil and gas, solve several political conflicts within EU in regard to the Ukraine war, eliminate the food shortage problem and significant reduce the cost of farming, make a large dent in reducing global warming, improve GDP, and boost prosperity in general.
What I can't predict is when some of them will become competitive enough to matter, and thus used in some large infrastructure projects.
Just this week in Europe, during the summer vacations and when energy usage is at the lowest point during the year, the energy market price still jumps by 3000% when the wind go from high to low.
A couple years back, "60 Minutes" ran a segment of somebody developing grid batteries with seawater and dirt. They didn't store much energy per weight and volume, but who cares for grid batteries. I wonder what happened to this technology.
With current and projected reserves we can manage intra-day requirements for the whole world. This is the we mine it all option.
But we need intra-year storage capacity.
Nuclear is clearly the easier and only option (and the most environment-friendly to me, considering the mining requirements)
Electricity to H2 to electricity has horrendous efficiency (about 20% at most IIRC). We'd be much better off CO2-speaking using it to replace coal in steel production, and replace gas in fertilizer production. Both of which are proven tech (but not globally deployed, as coal and gas are cheap)
https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/round-trip-...
The round trip efficiency is 30% or more and rising with better electrolysis and reverse electrolysis being developed.
For hydrogen, we have to solve the horrible cycle efficiency of its storage. It's not so bad for use as a fuel (e.g. for airplanes), but as static storage hydrogen is currently a very bad choice.
But hydrogen efficiency is improving as fast as all renewable tech.
I tell you what: show me a cost optimized renewable energy system in which the electrolyzers have a capacity factor of 5%.
It's bizarre how anti-nuclear activists point at problems caused by anti-nuclear activism and ask, like Eric Andre, "how could nuclear power do this?"
Biggest, by a large margin, is capex which simply prices it completely out of the market.
The insurance issue is similar identical to other energy sources. Why isn't hydro power insured in the case of accidental flooding? If they were it wouldn't be possible to run them at current energy prices. We don't see fossil fuel plants being insured against increased air pollution, nor do they have to pay if people around them get sick. If a hydrodam causes a flood, then there will be a flood. Hopefully those people downstream has their own insurance.
The storage problem has not been solved because we do not have the technology. There is no evidence that the technology os possible.
The long term waste (not much in quantity, but it does mount up. A few million litres at the moment I believe ??) has to be stored for periods of time on the order of hundreds of thousands of years.
There is no way we can write a warning sign that we know can be read for that long.
We cannot build a structure that will last that long.
There are no places on this planet that we can be sure are stable for that long.
It is making future generations pay for our current consumption.
Okay, then in places where wind/solar/storage aren't up to snuff we'll just keep burning coal.
That anti-nuclear movement was huge in the 1970s, and was successful in many states and countries at creating major roadblocks to new power plants. Their success in California back then is big reason why the last plants are going offline now, and there haven't been any new plants since Diablo Canyon, which was started in the 1960s. To say that anti-nuclear groups weren't influential until the 21st century is absurd.
The technical issues are solved.
The political issue is that the "green lobby" will not accept any nuclear waste storage solution.
O_o There's been a significant and influential anti-nuclear movement for the last 60 years...
Storage has /been solved/ for decades.
High Level Waste is only a tiny fraction of total waste. As it stands, all of the HLW created by all the nuclear plants in the world could be kept in a football field sized area. The vast majority of the rest of the generated waste will decay to to harmlessness during the lifetime of a plant.
HLW regulations around transport are so high in most countries that the standards for transport casks has made them practically indestructible. They can literally be hit by trains and no be breached. Solutions like those developed by Deep Isolation also effectively solve any long term storage problem for the HLW.
Operation will start next year.
People might even keep a stock on hand.
So you don't have power outages on windless nights.
> backup fossil fuel
In practice this means fossil fuels become the baseload power source.
China is building solar in Chile, at their antipodes, and a transmission line back to China with only 50% loss, for solar energy through the night.
False. In the immediate future, synthetic anhydrous ammonia will displace it. Extracting NG will be too expensive to compete, because the only cost of ammonia will be capex. The more you make, the less it costs.
The previous poster talked about using fossil (or any other means) to supply the mismatch between the supply and demand at the times where such a mismatch might exist. This is completely unrelated to baseload, it could in fact be larger than baseload. Note that such a mismatch would also exist for nuclear (dependent on overprovisioning). However it would in general be only needed of short periods of time.
Because if your baseload is your minimum power consumption (which generally occurs at night) and you have a windless night (therefore your renewables are generating 0 power), your "gas peakers" will have to provide the entire baseload amount of power.
As the name baseload power implies, it would have to be providing power all the time and that's not what is needed.
It is one of the main reason why investing in fossil fuel energy when countries turn to wind power is fairly good choice. The plant has lower costs in terms of fuels, when it burn fuel it does so when the market price is at the highest possible, and it get paid regardless from the government. The government are also locked into continuing this scheme as the alternative is to not have the reserve energy when needed which makes voters very angry.
Burning fossil fuels when the price is lowest and without any government subsidies is just something people with too much fossil fuel can afford to do.
In France it is, and has been successfully for more than 33 years [1]
That is, assuming that grid scale storage is in fact viable.
France's nuclear fleet has an all-in cost of 7c/kWh, which is roughly the same as the cost of solar or wind power in France, but without the need for storage or smart grids that doubles the cost of solar/wind. (For all this remember that France has about a third of the insolation of California or Arizona per year, or maybe half at best in some places.)
I don't think that is correct. This is a table of average insolation for different cities around the world derived from NASA's Surface meteorology and Solar Energy data set: http://stalix.com/isolation.pdf
Los Angeles gets 5.4 kWh/m^2/day. San Francisco gets 4.9. Lyon, Paris, and Toulouse get 3.7, 3.3, and 3.7 respectively.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrie_nucl%C3%A9aire_en_Fr...
Currently the capacity factor for french nuclear reactors is less than 50% because of various technical issues and maintenance schedule slippage.
It will go further down because of a very hot summer and regulations on maximum released water temperatures.
Lithium Sulfur looks VERY PROMISING, and other schemes and grid-specific chemistries will be developed.
Within the timeframe of any new nuclear construction, you cannot predict the cost targets with respect to any of these industries/technologies: they all are in prime economies of scale and technological improvement curves. I don't think they will improve as well as the last decade where solar dropped double-digits per year, but we'll see.
Nuclear keeps trying to say the scale isn't solvable with wind/solar/battery. That is a completely unproven/unsubstantiated claim. It's basically FUD. The materials being targeted for near-term alt energy will be massively scalable.
As much as I detest the pro nuclear shilling, this isn't a valid comparison. 250MWh of storage is only useful for very short term energy arbitrage and isn't a replacement for always-on power.
The real answer is a mix of solar, solar-thermal, wind, storage, and combined cycle plants for the holes (ideally eventually powered by plant-based and solar-cracked hydrogen/methane/etc.). This mix costs a bit more than nuclear does now, but doesn't have the huge massive downsides of total dependency on and subservience to a handful of companies operating out of the five or so countries that are allowed to produce fuel (as well as all the existential risk stuff, concentration of risk to mistakes/attacks, horrible un-accounted externalities and supply chain fragility). It will also likely cost less to build it at a time such that it would still be completed before a nuclear plant which was comissioned now.
Of course that's all moot because the balance *right now* is running existing fossil fuel infrastructure more vs. building solar and not storing the energy. And in this equation, the cost of solar is a tiny fraction of nuclear.
Yes this is generally my argument. If you take the money you would spend on nuclear and spend it instead on solar, wind, gridscale storage, as well as EV and home battery rebates, you end up with a much more robust distributed energy production grid with very low maintenance costs. I think the idea of including rebates for home batteries and EVs is an important one, because it means that when major parts of the power line system are knocked out for some reason, you still have a lot of distributed storage.
You can also begin energy production with a solar and battery roll out MUCH sooner than new nuclear construction. From a climate change perspective, producing clean energy sooner is a big deal.
And we should not overlook that nuclear energy is a single target for terrorist attack and requires a powerful state to manage security for the plant and its supply chain, while batteries and renewables require no such thing. From a libertarian/anarchist perspective, we can have a weaker state and still have good energy production with renewables.
EDIT: I am also realizing that handing out a bunch of rebates to the voters for new stuff (rooftop solar, home batteries, new EVs) would be WAY more politically popular than "lets pay now for a big monolithic nuclear power plant that takes 20 years to build." If you want a plan that actually works, keeping the voters happy seems like an important component.
But you need to add that Renewable solution only last 20 years vs 60 for nuclear. That can be seen like triple the cost you factored in already.
And also, your renewable energy source won’t work 100% of time and not at 100% of the capacity. Which also implies that you need to build multiple time what you planned to really get that planned capacity.
I don’t know what you mean. I proposed spending the same total amount.
> And also, your renewable energy source won’t work 100% of time and not at 100% of the capacity. Which also implies that you need to build multiple time what you planned to really get that planned capacity.
This was already factored in to the calculation I was agreeing with. They said that to get sufficient capacity in renewables considering reduced availability, it still costs 1/2 what nuclear costs.
I will copy and paste the relevant section from that comment for clarity:
>> "To illustrate this point, the 2,430 MW Vogtle nuclear plant could be expected to generate 21 million MWh per year. That is enough to power about 1.75 million residential households. Meanwhile, a hypothetical 3,500 MW solar power plant would be able to produce just under 6 million MWh of electricity per year. This number is enough to power only 500,000 homes, which is considerably less than nuclear power. For solar to produce as much electricity as is generated by a nuclear power plant, it would require about 13,000 MW of utility-scale solar capacity, which about four times as much as built in the existing plants. However, the cost to build this 13,000 MW facility would be $12.1 billion, which is still just 50% of the cost of the $25 billion Vogtle nuclear plant."
> https://www.solarfeeds.com/mag/solar-power-vs-nuclear-power/...
Solar + battery is great in those locations, and basically no one is aruging using nuclear when solar and battery is viable for 365 days of the year. Australia has a fairly large desert where such assumption would be true. Finland, Sweden, Germany, France, UK and most of Europe do not have reliable 365 days of sun each year. There aren't many investors spending their money to build solar + storage in northern Finland.
The state where the mega batteries are installed uses about ~32 GWh total a day. An 850 MWh doesn't even come close to covering their needs. Covering ~2.6% of their load is equivalent to keeping power on for about 40 minutes.
>Solar + battery is great in those locations, and basically no one is aruging using nuclear when solar and battery is viable for 365 days of the year. Australia has a fairly large desert where such assumption would be true.
Deserts actually make for the worst place to install solar. Dust / sand covering panels substantially lowers their efficiency (to near zero), and keeping them clean involves a lot of water (Can you guess where it's hardest to get water? Yep, a desert). And lastly, because the deserts are so far away from everyone else, there is significant transmission loss.
For seasonal storage you need a hydrogen economy. H2 is very very expensive and has never been rolled out at scale. Not a single large gas turbine to burn pure H2 has ever been build.
In the middle of a crisis it's better to go for proven and economic technologies than trying to invent something completely new and untestet.
They have very high double standards in Nuclearstan.
Don't worry, they're lobbying to lower those standards in order to be more cost-competitive with renewables.
I remind you the double standard involved criticizing renewables "at scale", so a few problematic breeder reactors won't dispel the hypocrisy.
Also, the main reason we haven't invested in breeder reactors is that it turns out uranium isn't actually scarce enough to justify it.
Yes, the process involves production of Pu-239, which is weapon-grade and may raise proliferation concerns. But for the US, or France, or UK, or India, or China (and a bunch of others) this should not be a concern, since they officially have nuclear weapons.
It's mostly the political will, and the public opinion (which are interlinked) that limit a nuclear renaissance. If you talk about subsidies, please remember how huge were the subsidies that kickstarted the current solar and wind booms; early panels and wind towers were completely uneconomical by today's standards, and R&D costs were colossal. But now, with the technology streamlined and the economies of scale kicking in, solar is competitive even without subsidies.
The same could happen to a new crop of nuclear technology, much cleaner and more efficient than the kind we've inherited from 1970s.
Not if you use Thorium breeder reactors.
Nuclear's position at this point is "we had a meh run, but next generation will be better, pinky promise".
On a global scale for the past fifty years we had 2 meltdowns, a country attacking another's nuclear facilities as a threat, and no clear replacement plan for the aging reactors in most countries even as they are way past the set date for decommission ing, and se still don't see how to cheaply deal with the waste.
People tend to brush the "political problems" under the rug, but they are real issues either way, so not taking them into account when doing comparisons wouldn't be fair.
There is an argument to say that on balance the pros outweigh the cons.
> Seawater extraction is an option if that's ever a real concern
Hmmm.... Hand waving unsolved at scale technical problems
Grid storage technology is already there with pumped hydro storage(PHS). As 90% of built and newly building grid storage is already PHS. It is political problems and inertia that's holding it back. To be clear, I'm referring to off the river closed-loop PHS, which doesn't need a huge river check dam, flood zone, huge population relocation or ecological issues. All it needs is two places with area of 1sqkm each some hundred meter elevation apart. There is ANU study that claims we have enough of such sites for needed storage. Look at how fast China is building PHS recently. I think PHS approvals, even for closed-loop, in US are as hard to get as nuclear, which is holding it back.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/01/05/sustainable-pumped-hy...
https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2021/10/05/aussie-scie...
wind/solar/storage are on actively improving cost curves that even gas turbine is losing to. No one knows the price target of wind/solar/battery in 10-20 years, but I'd guess it is at least half the cost in real dollars of today.
Nuclear proponents are pushing all the media outlets because they are in the same boat as coal: LCOE is so much lower for wind/solar that electric companies lose money on them relative to alt energy. Only base load is a viable role onthe grid, and gas turbines beat them at that handily (although with a carbon tax who knows).
I'm not opposed to keeping existing nuclear plants online with some subsidies, but new nuclear plants? Come on. And I am a huge fan of those LFTR presentations and strongly believe next gen nuclear will be viable once a stable price point can be targeted.
Aluminum is the most abundant metallic element on earth. Cobalt demand is already peaking. Copper and nickel have been produced in the millions of tons annually for a century, and will not slow down.
Why the progress is possible only for Solar and storage and in your opinion not possible for nuclear? Nuclear could be cheaper if people would not be paranoid about it. What I think could happen is this new smaller reactors could be deployed in countries more rational, irrational countries will have to buy energy from the others.
Each decade, nuclear builds also trend towards getting more expensive. Like it or not, it at least partially Fukushima Daiichi that killed the nuclear expansion US. The AP1000 had new missile shield requirements that was slowing it down before that happened, and then the Japan accident added even more regulation. There was an anti-nuclear chair of the regulatory commission at the time, and yes, this is fundamentally political, but it's hard to push back on these specifics.
The alternatives are cheaper and cause no such problems.
> Why the progress is possible only for Solar and storage and in your opinion not possible for nuclear?
Nuclear had more than triple the amount of time and significantly more subsidies for showing this technological scaling.
> Nuclear could be cheaper if people would not be paranoid about it.
People were super enthusiastic about nuclear for the first 40 years. Even after Tschernobyl nuclear opponents were largely portrait as unrealistic hippies in most countries and policies were certainly driven by people very favourable to nuclear. Even Germany one of the most nuclear sceptic countries only decided after fukushima to stop nuclear.
What is the technological breakthrough that we already know about that would suddenly change the progress massively?
>What I think could happen is this new smaller reactors could be deployed in countries more rational, irrational countries will have to buy energy from the others.
What people tend to forget is that about 40-50% of a nuclear power plant is the same as any other thermal power plant. We generally don't build small coal plants either, the scales don't work well.
The reason why wind and solar have very different scaling is because their principle of electricity generation is very different.
If you have two stocks one in exponential just starting and the other being slowly growing linearly for a long time, which one would you invest in? In particular if indications are that both stocks will continue on the same curves. That's the situation we have with nuclear vs renewables.
Very unlikely. Nuclear costs are sky high only because in the last decades it was suppressed rather than invested in and improved. Had it seen the same level of support the wind and solar energy have, we'd have a dirt-cheap abundance of nuclear power, with very little carbon emissions. Take away the red tape and scaremongering, and wind/solar/storage combination will be left very far behind in costs and efficiency.
In fact, it's quite exactly like saying that, because nuclear is the fastest path to solving climate change.
Starting a nuke, we get no power out for a decade or more, and get much less power at the end than building renewables with the same money, which furthermore start displacing carbon immediately.
There is no reasonable expectation for substantially better costs for nukes. Anywhere they have to compete with $0 opex renewables, they will run at well under 50% capacity, thus more than doubling their per-kWh cost, making them even less competitive.
Thus, costs are not falling, and new starts are negligible. Even China, which asserts they will build 220 of them, has only started 10. The rest will be cancelled as their price is undercut, unless politics forces the matter. China is not cost- or value- driven. (Cf. "Ghost cities".)
Nuclear cost in South Korea, Japan, and India is generally under $3000/kW, according to this peer-reviewed study. See Figure 12: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
Now let's model overall grid costs, here: https://model.energy/
Pick a country and "fetch wind and solar." By default the modeler doesn't include nuclear, so click "show advanced assumption settings." Check "dispatchable technology 2."
This defaults to a nuclear cost of $6000/kW. Leave it there or try $3000. It assumes a nuclear plant lifespan of only 25 years; the average plant age in the US is 40 years and expected lifespan for many plants is 60 years, so set it to whatever you think is more realistic. The default also sets the discount rate for nuclear to twice what it has for everything else, so fix that.
Run the model. With any reasonable assumptions, many countries end up with at least some nuclear on their grid, and some get their lowest grid cost with all nuclear. The US has some of the best wind and solar resources and relatively high nuclear costs (for now anyway), but the US situation doesn't generalize to the whole world.
If we are talking about Korean export NPPs, the Barakh NPP has four reactors for a total of 24.4B$, producing 5.6GW(e). THis is about $4B/GW. If I plug in 4000 per MW (its euros, not $, but they're not too different right now) for the capital cost of nuclear in model.energy, increase the NPP lifetime to 40 years, and use US 2011 weather data, nuclear optimizes to zero.
I'll add that model.energy is looking at the best case for nuclear: providing baseload. Handling variability will incentivize storage, which means renewables will be at an increased advantage. Dispatchable demand of any kind, even slightly dispatchable (allowed to be off 10% of the time, say) also tilts the game toward renewables.
The 25 year lifespan for nuclear there may reflect economic obsolescence rather than technical lifespan. Energy technology is evolving quickly now, so investors may simply refuse to credit the promise of such long lifespans. Even in the US, there have been existing NPPs that shut down because they could not recoup their operating costs (granted, much of that was due to gas and also renewable subsidies, but with solar having dropped in cost by nearly an order of magnitude in the last decade it's a bold move to assume it won't keep falling.)
I would very much like to see a similar model that includes a demand curve. Preferably, customizable demand curves, to allow for modeling of e.g. flatter curves due to electric vehicle charging at night.
This is all just delaying the crossing point though. Nuclear fans are betting nuclear's costs fall while renewables and storage run into brick walls and stop getting cheaper. It's not clear why one should assume this, or why an investor should bet on that outcome. And it is just a financial bet; in the worst case for renewables they just come in a bit more expensive than nuclear, so it's not like the economy explodes.
Solar historically declines in cost by 24% for each cumulative doubling of production (of the solar hardware). Solar is about 4% of global electricity production now, so scaling it to saturation (just for current electricity demand, which will grow as the world becomes richer and more electrification replaces fossil heat) would drop the cost by another factor of 3.
This only worked while panels were the lion's share of the cost of a solar installation. These days, costs of real estate, installation and grid connection far exceed the cost of panels -- and those costs go up every year with labour costs rather than coming down.
Or are you talking labor-intensive installation onto residential rooftops? Well, stop doing that, it's kind of stupid.
Real estate costs are a tiny fraction of the cost of installed solar in much of the US, and in much of the world. A solar powered global economy will not be putting many panels on the small fraction of the world's surface that's unusually expensive, but will focus those panels on places where it's cheaper. It's the same reason we don't grow wheat in Manhattan.
Which isn't a ridiculous assumption, given their caveats and default options, unless you're trying to argue for 100% nuclear, in which case it renders any conclusion totally nonsensical.
(But if we start charging a lot of electric vehicles at night, the demand curves will flatten out anyway.)
If governments provide guarantees for the loans, a discount rate of 3% is not unreasonable.
Set it like that, and it spits out a price of €32.6/MWh.
Now, to make it even more reasonable to emerging economies, assume that through mass production and a relaxation of security requirements to less paranoid levels, the overnight cost can be reduced to €1500, you get $21.3/MWh.
This is what the price of electricity SHOULD be, if we want the world to stop depending on hydrocarbons. (Not just a few rich countries.)
"Has Russia Been Financing Western Environmentalism?" (2022) [1]
"Putin Is Funding Green Groups to Discredit Natural Gas Fracking" (2017) [2]
"German green group branded a Russian ‘puppet’ over Nord Stream II gas pipeline" (2021) [3]
[1]: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18330/russia-funding-envi...
[2]: https://www.newsweek.com/putin-funding-green-groups-discredi...
[3]: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/german-green-group-brande...
The greens in Germany have consistently worked on destroying Germany's nuclear energy generation, and now it is completely dependent on gas import from Russia, funding Putin's war with Ukraine.
I call bullshit on the absurd idea that the global failure of nuclear is due to these groups.
Indeed, the NYT article in the topic is discussing this very question.
Germany elected to build out a great deal of wind generation capacity rather than refurbish a much smaller capacity of aged, ramshackle nukes. That has worked out extremely well, and they continue.
Really? It has worked really well?? Thanks to these really well policies, Germany has an unbreakable dependence on Russian has [1] and has paid billions of euros to Putin's murderous regime since the start of the war with Ukraine [2].
If this is 'really well', I'd rather pass.
In conclusion, I suggest you start looking more rationally on energy generation, I sense a lot of anger and unexplained hatred towards nuclear power ('aged, ramshackle nukes' is not a rational sensible argumentation).
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/world/europe/germany-gas-...
It is a fact that the nukes shut down would have needed a great deal of expensive work to continue operating. Germany elected to spend the money on wind, instead, and it bought them more actually delivered wattage than the shut-down nukes had provided.
If nukes were not the most expensive power source going, I would be all for it.
Everyone including Germans have understood by now that phasing out nuclear was a mistake, but you still repeat that no, gas dependency good, nuclear power independence bad.
For some reason, you (incorrectly) presume that maintaining nuclear energy prevents building wind generators. Also, the money 'spent' on reactors is kinda paid off by customers who pay for the generated electricity.
Electrical power is also fungible. A kWh delivered is a kWh, whether generated on a nuke or in a wind turbine.
Attempting to build just one hour of storage via lithium ion batteries would case the cost of batteries to skyrocket because 1 hour of global electricity use equates to 2,500 GWh. And annual battery output is only around 300 GWh. Supply shock would immediately drive up the cost of batteries.
So we're building those batteries anyway, because EVs are cheaper and better than ICE. It's just a bonus that they'll help roll out renewables too.
And as you correctly point out, most of these batteries are going to go to EVs rather than grid storage.
But if, as basically everyone acklowledges, we'll all be driving EVs, then we will charge them from the grid. So they'll be better than grid storage, they'll be responsive demand (with grid storage you need to send the electricity back to the grid, which incurs another efficiency loss).
But if we are going to predominantly use intermittent energy sources we'd need massive amounts of grid storage. Delivering this through batteries is not feasible. We need to conserve battery supply for things that cannot be directly powered from the grid, like vehicles. It's too precious to be squandered on grid storage
By insisting that storage is a trivial problem to solve, yet neglecting to actually share what your supposed solution is?
By insisting that storage costs are falling yet neglecting to specify the cost and for what technology?
By all means "correct" me all you like.
I'm not opposed to investing heavily in solar...it's the best long-term energy source we can hope for until we crack the fusion nut. However, until we have the resources in place to make it happen, fission is our best bet. This shouldn't be an either-or: we should be building both, as fast as we can. And once we have enough solar to power our collective needs consistently, we can decommission our nuclear plants and put this behind us.
Installing wind and solar is also much easier than installing NPPs. Solar installation does not require expensive highly trained labor, again because the installations are robust to installation mistakes.
That's why the number of solar power related deaths (Mainly, falling from roofs) far exceeds the single fatality from nuclear related incidents we had this century.
> Very unlikely. Nuclear costs are sky high only because in the last decades it was suppressed rather than invested in and improved. Had it seen the same level of support the wind and solar energy have, we'd have a dirt-cheap abundance of nuclear power, with very little carbon emissions. Take away the red tape and scaremongering, and wind/solar/storage combination will be left very far behind in costs and efficiency.
And your sources are? Nuclear power has received significantly more subsidies than solar and wind combined [1] (note you can find similar numbers for Europe) . The myth that somehow solar and wind received more subsidies is just propaganda.
[1] https://cen.acs.org/articles/89/i51/Long-History-US-Energy-S...
[1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Too_much... [2] https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/greenpeace...
If you remove liability and the insanity of our current methods of waste storage the costs become outright cheap, especially in an imagined future where there is massive investment into new nuclear infrastructure.
By the metrics people use to judge nuclear, hydro would be the most expensive power source known to man if you were to build one today. Just the land costs would make the entire project nonsensical if viewed solely in that frame.
Those are just artificial constructs though. In a world where there is actual human suffering (in the west) due to physical energy shortages the politics (and thus cost models) may shift rapidly.
The reason costs are high is not political, it's that the systems involved need to be over-engineered relative to say, a coal-fired power plant, where a breakdown or fire will create a big mess, but not a 100-year exclusion zone. Water pumps for nuclear reactor cooling systems, for example, are the most robustly engineered (and expensive) pumps ever built, as far as I know.
For example, California's decision to close the San Onofre reactor was mostly related to maintenance costs, as their steam generator system was shaking itself to pieces and had to be shut down due to the radioactive loop leaking into the non-radioactive steam generation system. The rational conclusion is that long-term maintenance of nuclear reactors is an expensive proposition, due to catastrophic failure modes:
https://www.fairewinds.org/nuclear-energy-education/san-onof...
Which is not an issue with newer reactor designs, which are no less proven than grid storage.
In comparison to something like grid storage where one can site, build and operate, in less time than the make a minor nuclear design correction. Grid storage can correct mistakes at very low cost and on a very rapid cycle compared to nuclear.
Newer reactor designs are well simulated but have zero real world implementation.
To cite uncertainty about storage is only to admit you have no argument.
Proponents of new nuclear solutions would argue that reactor design, which is today at 4th generation, has greatly evolved and improved in too many ways to count since the late 60’s.
> If you remove liability and the insanity of our current methods of waste storage the costs become outright cheap, especially in an imagined future where there is massive investment into new nuclear infrastructure.
You are misinformed. Nuclear power operators do not have to covee liability costs (no insurance is willing to cover nuclear disaster, so this is a massive subsidy). Also the cost of long term storage is typically not included in cost calculations for nuclear power either. Despite of this nuclear is more expensive than renewables.
> By the metrics people use to judge nuclear, hydro would be the most expensive power source known to man if you were to build one today. Just the land costs would make the entire project nonsensical if viewed solely in that frame.
Just because you say it doesn't make it true. In fact hydro projects have to typically compensate land owners when building a dam.
2021 figures:
> China was the biggest contributor, adding 121 GW to the continent’s new capacity. Europe and North America—led by the USA—took second and third places respectively, with the former adding 39 GW, and the latter 38 GW.
81% of new electricity generaton build globally was renewables last year.
Did the pumped hydro dams they built alongside nuclear power plants replace the baseload? No, they took the cheap energy that was produced at times when it wasn't needed and provided it back at peak times. They literally increased the base load by propping it up when it would otherwise droop at night (mostly).
It charges, when electricity prices are low, which generally means off peak overnight.
In a future renewable grid, with zero dispatchable power it might be used on occaision to help meet the baseload, but it's almost certainly going to be used more during demand peaks, because that's when most electricity is used. Maybe in equatorial regions with a lot of solar, not much wind and no other energy sources it'll share baseload duties with the solar that charges it during the day, but unless the term baseload has lost all meaning (which I fear it has) storage is not ever providing baseload, since that would imply supplying that amount constantly and storage needs to absorb more energy than it returns.
I can't see a definition of 'baseload' provider that storage meets that solar doesn't for example.
True solar with storage is not economical.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
(you have to compare cost of nuclear on first page with wholesale PV+storage energy on subsequent pages).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...
China – 288.32 GW. ...
United States – 122.32 GW. ...
Germany – 62.85 GW. ...
India – 38.63 GW. ...
Spain – 27.24 GW.These are just PEAK numbers that are totally useless when planning a grid.
The only studies you'll see are that they proved to be economical on a certain day, or maaaybe overnight. ...but there are zero studies that any solar and/or wind (even combined), can provide consistent power for a full year. ...because that is not currently possible with economical tech.
The problem is that “100 year”, “1,000 year” or worse events will require more than currently stored. Then, potentially millions of people will be at risk of injury or death from cold or heat.
Reliable generation of at least enough to cover survival seems necessary.
Okay, then we can keep gas power stations around for another 100 years and only turn them on for the few days they are needed. Probably, though, after 50 years we will have solved climate change and energy storage (or wiped ourselves out) anyway.
It's tough to really get that ball rolling if that's your goal due to this marketing issue.
Over the past decades, a couple of hundreds of plants have been build globally. Doing nuclear fission safely is a massively complex technological undertaking. While the basic principles are by and large the same, the concrete designs of each of those plants aren't similar. Therefor, decommissioning a nuclear plant is equally complex and expensive, and requires a per-case approach. And currently, there is a growing number of plants which are pretty much EOL, where upkeep costs outstrip revenue.
Sure, there's an argument to be made about the operational costs per kWh between solar / wind / nuclear relative to the revenue they generate over their lifespan. But compared to solar / wind, the perceived economical benefits of those solutions are also offset by their initial cost of construction and their decommissioning.
If consumers / voters / taxpayers assume that they get to enjoy cheap power while the costs of those won't ever land on their doorstep, they are in for a surprise.
For waste, there's a separate fund called the Nuclear Waste Fund in the US (and other nuclear-operating countries) that has a current balance of $55B.
Finland has proven this to be false.
...and frankly, so did the US even in the 1980s. The roadblock to storage misguided activism, not science or tachnology.
Reopen the Yucca storage facility. It has the space for literally ALL the US's spent fuel storage.
It took them more than a decade beyond schedule, and 5 billion euros beyond quoted cost.
The finally delivered only because it was clear the money would dry up either way. If they could have strung it out further, they would have
Something I've been thinking about for a while: the best course of action to secure a nation is to build out renewables until the need for external fossil fuels is zero. Even if that means using renewables to make fossil fuels via a process like Fischer–Tropsch as a stop gap.
I also think it would be advantageous to start thinking about how to drive the cost of generation and distribution down until electricity is free or nearly free. This might sound utopian but imagine how secure and prosperous a society could be if energy was super cheap or free? We are moving towards an electrified future and at some point we will have to heat homes and charge cars with electric that will place significant demand on an ageing grid.
Probably the last big holdout for hydrocarbons will be aviation, but anywhere LH2 airframes start to move in, the old stuff will be wholly unable to compete. Transitioning the whole fleet will take a long time, though.
"Free" (as in, your taxes) energy for all is very likely to entirely wreck the economy.
Not to mention there are costs involved with maintenance which make that energy not free. Even ignoring the huge debt incurred by implementing such a solution, who will pay for the maintenance? Our taxes again?
What are the benefits of not paying energy? What innovation is not happening because the pesky electricity has a cost?
Most likely it would just become the country of choice to run computations (whether meaningful research or pointless crypto mining) - if we ignore the gargantuan tax rate this country will have.
Being independent is valuable, that's why I think everybody should source their electricity independently (eg. solar)
“asap” LOL
Here in the real world, we have Germany, which has the strongest pro-green anti-nuclear agenda in Europe, but is (1) building coal plants, (2) financing Russian war and (3) blocking sanctions on Russia to save its economy (along with Hungary who are doing it for political reasons).
The green agenda is a massive failure in the real world. Maybe it will work in 50 years (when “possible technological development” in batteries catches up) but not right now.
That claim may be a little out of date, especially as the new government plans to phase out coal by 2030. It's true that a new coal power plant was opened in 2020, but it was "expected to be the last"[0]. Admittedly, it's also true that the country is temporarily reactivating old coal power plants to reduce Russian gas imports.[1]
[0] https://ifrf.net/combustion-industry-news/new-coal-power-pla...
[1] https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/germany-reactiv...
It's all the same. "Green" energy failed, even for one of its biggest proponents.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-coal-tops-wind-as-primary-elec...
> In the first half of 2021, coal shot up as the biggest contributor to Germany's electric grid, while wind power dropped to its lowest level since 2018.
Nuclear on the other hand which, if you read what proponents said in the 50s, 60s and 70s, was going to give us unlimited free energy, is somehow deemed a success?
Now that renewables are essentially eating fossils and nuclears lunch we are supposed to believe that some sort of nuclear technological revolution is just around the corner and all the high costs are due to the "bad government regulations" anyway?
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/05/09/hungary-slovak...
https://www.politico.eu/article/eus-russian-oil-ban-stalls-a...
I agree, but: It's 100% impossible to replace the need for gas in the short timespan of five months until the next winter, no matter how much money or resources we throw at the problem. The absolute majority of heating is done with gas and major parts of the electrical grid depend on it. We cannot replace it with renewables in time. We need gas or people will freeze to death in the worst case, there are no alternatives to the LNG imports in the short-term, IMO.
And the countries that can export LNG, including the US, are aware of their strong negotiating position and want long-term contracts.
Europe may not have a choice. :/
How is this possible, technologically or economically? It sounds like absolute fantasy in anything less than a decade.
> plausibly due to exports of crude oil from the USA
Our refineries are at max capacity. How is hoarding crude going to help anything? Exporting crude allows foreign refineries to assist with relieving the global shortage of refined products.
If you eliminate gas and coal powered plants then the costs of nuclear plant lifecycle is incidental compared to economic losses that a country would encounter if they relied on solar and wind.
The dirty secret about "clean energy" is that it isn't actually very clean. When you eliminate big coal plants and try to use solar or wind, what you are actually doing is moving your dependence from coal to natural gas.
Those wind farms and solar farms require significant investment in numerous smaller style natural gas plants in order to function correctly.
So, right now, when people think they are moving away from fossil fuels they are really just moving to natural gas that is supplanted by solar and wind when conditions are ideal for them to work properly.
If you want to eliminate your dependence on natural gas, then, the only feasible option is nuclear.
no. you need gas for nuclear AND renewables. it really does not matter. it's bullshit to argue against it unless you show the world a way to have an on/off button for a nuclear plant. (if you do, you might be very very very rich)
> Load-following plants are typically in between base load and peaking power plants in efficiency, speed of start-up and shut-down, construction cost, cost of electricity and capacity factor.
as said, they don't remove gas and it's stupid to assume since your article specially talks about france which is heavy on gas for peaks.
Also, I’m not sure those comparisons take into account the ~20 year lifespan of solar panels and windmills, versus the ~40-50 year lifespan of nuclear plants.
Finally, another factor that may drastically reduce the cost of nuclear is the fabrication of small modular reactors which eliminate custom construction/permitting and simplify installation.
No, but there are limits on the amount of raw materials that said factories can use to produce equipment.
I believe a global renewable energy system can be constructed using only elements available in essentially unlimited amounts, and using those elements at a modest scale compared to industrial society as a whole.
Uh Lithium?
This is a generic problem with anti-renewable arguments: they argue against specific technologies rather than the entire class of possible technologies.
(And then they go and posit all sorts of as-yet unbuilt reactor types, blithely ignoring the irony.)
Utilities will choose the cheaper among many alternatives, not the most expensive; the which is why they are not building nukes.
Ironically ESG has guided capital away from extractive industries like this.
It's not a physical limitation, it's a timing of scaling limitation, and we haven't hit it in a hard way yet. Plenty of new lithium resources, and more being discovered all the time.
The 40-50 year lifespan of a nuclear plant is also somewhat illusory, as planning on achieving that is a bet that competing technologies don't keep getting better.
SMRs are talked about as being cheaper, but they have inherent diseconomies of scale. They need more materials and components per unit power output than large NPPs, and have inherently worse neutronics (this is why NPPs got large). The putative economies of scale of manufacturing are first consumed clawing back this loss, and it's not clear they can even do that.
Now the problem with solar and wind is that those also have pretty large energy investment needs at the beginning and given that we still mostly run on hydrocarbons these will also look cheap (include a sizeable amount of externalities).
Other than that, you're right that these articles rarely mention the problem of the fissile uranium supply. From what I've read and heard, without breeder reactors, the known U235 reserves won't last long if we plan to switch the world over. (Not that it's a viable plan to build so many reactors in time.)
Personally though I really have always liked Geothermal!
Nukes, of course, have lots of other opex on top of the turbines, and also crippling capex.
Geothermal might be able to compete at very high latitudes where the alternative is shipping in synthetic ammonia from the tropics when wind flags and transmission lines don't deliver.
But steam turbine s are absolutely not getting any cheaper or more reliable.
"U.S. oil refiners’ margins smash records, but few plan to build more plants"
https://www.marketplace.org/2022/05/23/u-s-oil-refiners-marg...
How are they pushing this and you claim it's "the real agenda", what are they claiming instead? Are you claiming the US got involved with the Ukrainian conflict in order to sell LPG to other countries?
There is little storage, yet, because it would be stupid to build out storage there is not enough renewable generating capacity, yet, to charge up. When there is, then storage will be built. All without you lifting a finger.
On what basis do you make this assertion?
Because when it comes to renewables, I very rarely see any inclusion of the costs of additional large scale energy storage (probably because it still remains an unsolved issue) and I never see any inclusion of the cost of new transmission lines from any new renewables site.
The Germans have invested billions upon billions in becoming wholly renewable, with miles of new grid infrastructure (but next to no energy storage) and they are still at the mercy of Russian gas supplies... and dependant upon French nuclear power.
It's time to face reality and start investing in fission again, at least until fusion becomes a viable alternative.
The issue comes when people think that renewables are a panacea, and we should start building renewables capacity where it doesn't even make sense. For example; wind power is great in and around the North Sea, but makes little sense in central and eastern Europe. Solar power is great in Spain, Portugal and Italy, but the ROI is very poor anywhere north of the Alps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
Duration: 23 min
Speaker: David Ruzic, Prof of Nuclear Engineering at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
It should be possible to say, given that power grid and this amount of solar, wind..... this would have happened in this region during that year.
It isn't enough to build solar and wind, you also have to build backup. This is currently done by coal and gas but in the future it has to switch to climate friendly sources of energy. A hydrogen economy is very very expensive.
Here's an example: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...
- To reduce carbon in the air, getting clean electricity is key. If we can do that, we can more easily reduce emissions from other areas.
- There are no paths to clean energy by 2050 without nuclear power.
What business have they gotten into? Thermal storage of grid energy with a > 50% round trip efficiency. It heats sand with a compact resistive heater, stores the sand in insulated silos, and recovers the energy by a Brayton cycle system with a really interesting and compact fluidized bed heat exchanger. Storage capacity is sized for 100 hours of operation. Not just overnight, but four days.
https://www.babcock.com/home/about/corporate/news/babcock-wi...
Westinghouse is also doing thermal grid storage now. Pumped TES can have a round trip efficiency > 60%.
https://www.energy-storage.news/nuclear-power-company-westin...
28 times that, ignoring the shutdowns (I don't actually know how long wind lasts, IIRC nuclear is "about 50-70 years" and PV is "about 30 years"), gives a total of: 5124 GW PV, 2800 GW wind, 218 GW nuclear.
But that's a lower bound for PV, as that's growing with what looks like an approximately exponential long-term trend (since 1992) of 36.5% per year.
While such a growth rate is physically possible to maintain for 28 years even without going into space, given that if we did make so much we wouldn't merely give everyone an American lifestyle but also be able to get the entire human population continuously flying[3], I'm assuming it will turn into a sigmoid before then.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
[3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28105*1.365%5E%2828%2B...
Storage seems hard and expensive. We're going to need a whole lot of approaches:
- Wind taking a bigger share of renewables
- Whatever storage we can reasonably build, including some exotic stuff like power-to-gas-to-power.
- Nuclear filling in a little bit
- PV comically overbuilt and routinely throwing away a lot of power midday on most days.
- Still peaking off natural gas, a little bit.
> Renewables' capacity factor is much greater than 10%, in practice. If you need falsehoods to make your case, you have no case.
Residential/commercial PV -- e.g. rooftop solar-- very often is 10% or less.
If you want to only look at utility-scale fixed tilt, instead, recent deployments average near (not quite) 20%.
https://emp.lbl.gov/pv-capacity-factors
Nuclear's capacity factor is 93%. In which case, 183GW from utility-scale, fixed-tilt PV is like 183/.93 * .20 = 39GW. Which, admittedly, is outside of my range of 20-30, but also relies on generous assumptions (utility scale projects only-- which are only ~25% of US solar wattage).
If you consider only tracking, you can get all the way to 49GW, which still doesn't eliminate the point.
Perhaps the bigger point is looking at the eastern seaboard. Shipping power 2000 miles is not super practical for various reasons, and the capacity factors for a whole region of the US are pretty poor.
Nuclear should be part of the equation (it has it's own issues with wastewater) but if adding nuclear means not investing equally or more in solar/wind renewables, that's completely misguided.
I'm not sure how much is residential, but about 25% is utility-scale projects. The rest is stuff on commercial buildings and homes-- which have an average capacity factor around 12%.
> Nuclear should be part of the equation (it has it's own issues with wastewater) but if adding nuclear means not investing equally or more in solar/wind renewables, that's completely misguided.
I totally agree. I think our priorities should be, in order:
- Wind
- Pumped storage
- Improved utility interties
- Demand-side management
- PV
- Nuclear
- Battery storage
- Electrolyzers, etc
But even the lowest priority item should be aggressively pursued.
Your graph shows in total generated energy per year it's roughly even--- not in nameplate power. Because the capacity factor is worse, you need a lot more nameplate power at non-utility installations to get the same energy out.
> This is good, because utility scale solar is cheaper per unit output than small scale solar.
Yup. Small scale solar really needs to stop, other than for installations that have special requirements (e.g. need for power backup / diversity).
Better that production go to installations that have good capacity factors than to your roof.
It's also time to reconsider how good an idea net metering at retail electrical prices is. Grandfather existing customers, but ... sure looks like we need a grid, so maybe only buy power from new end customers at wholesale rates (this further incents storage!)
China has a project to send it 8000 miles from solar farms they are building in Chile, for use during nighttime in China.
DC interconnect makes it more practical, and it's better than storage, but losses and costs accumulate.
> China has a project to send it 8000 miles from solar farms they are building in Chile
Chile has proposed a project to do just that. It is in exceptionally early conceptual planning stages-- but look at you acting like it's a fait accompli!
I doubt it will end up built, but that will not be because it is impractical. It will be because local generation and storage will turn out to be cheaper and less vulnerable to geopolitical upset.
Almost all current utility storage is gravity. That probably won't change.
I definitely don't see any other gravity batteries being useful on this scale.
[0] specifically I suggested that there was a lot of room for a lot of additional pumped hydro — I don't mean my more recent claim, which is merely that existing pumped hydro is cool
People like to insist pumped hydro is badly limited by geography, but hills are very common, and need not be nearby: transmission lines work very well. Transmission losses matter little when top-line generation has zero opex and minimal capex. You just build a little more of it.
Chile proposes it, hoping that Asia invests a very large amount of money into Chile to make it happen. Thus far, this latter bit has not happened.
https://www.gob.cl/en/news/president-pinera-presents-proyect...
Any evidence it has progressed past the Chile-showing-other-countries-Slideware-phase?
You tend to uncritically read the most positive, tentative stuff about PV/storage and accept it as absolute fact.
Nukes will shortly be mothballed, to perhaps be fired up once in a while in response to spiking demand.
It doesn't lead to productive conversation.
From what I've seen, the cheapest solution is a few square meters' cross section of HVDC encircling the planet, but that would almost certainly take a big increase in global metal mining even on these time scales and even when ignoring the political issues.
Note non-utility scale solar is 75% of the installed watts, too-- so you have a huge share of it pulling towards that 10-12% number.
Storage cost being excessive means it's early adoption timeframe. As the need for it becomes clear options will open up.
PV throwing off excess during peak is fine even if we don't have storage, because it means PV is adequate for a bigger fraction of the morning and evening (and in turn, the needs for storage become a little less because of the over-provisioning of production).
Batteries will only ever be a tiny fraction of storage.
This is either stupidly wrong or stupidly right.
Stupidly right, there's fairly new nuclear plants in operation that there's no real reason to shut down, so will probably be running in 2050.
Stupidly wrong, it seems to be placing some entirely unwarranted implication that without nuclear we'd be lost, when most serious analysis agree that renewables will be about 80% of energy production, which doesn't really leave much room for nuclear to take all the credit.
IEA's net zero roadmap:
> In the net zero pathway, global energy demand in 2050 is around 8% smaller than today, but it serves an economy more than twice as big and a population with 2 billion more people. More efficient use of energy, resource efficiency and behavioural changes combine to offset increases in demand for energy services as the world economy grows and access to energy is extended to all.
> Instead of fossil fuels, the energy sector is based largely on renewable energy. Two-thirds of total energy supply in 2050 is from wind, solar, bioenergy, geothermal and hydro energy. Solar becomes the largest source, accounting for one-fifth of energy supplies. Solar PV capacity increases 20-fold between now and 2050, and wind power 11-fold.
> Net zero means a huge decline in the use of fossil fuels. They fall from almost four-fifths of total energy supply today to slightly over one-fifth by 2050. Fossil fuels that remain in 2050 are used in goods where the carbon is embodied in the product such as plastics, in facilities fitted with CCUS, and in sectors where low-emissions technology options are scarce.
> Electricity accounts for almost 50% of total energy consumption in 2050. It plays a key role across all sectors – from transport and buildings to industry – and is essential to produce low-emissions fuels such as hydrogen. To achieve this, total electricity generation increases over two-and-a-half-times between today and 2050. At the same time, no additional new final investment decisions should be taken for new unabated coal plants, the least efficient coal plants are phased out by 2030, and the remaining coal plants still in use by 2040 are retrofitted. By 2050, almost 90% of electricity generation comes from renewable sources, with wind and solar PV together accounting for nearly 70%. Most of the remainder comes from nuclear.
Well, let's see them; and see how much they rely on yet to be proven industrially new storage tech (and without humongous mining activity)
Once battery storage doesn't pan out(and it won't currently for trucks), I see synth hydrocarbons picking up the transport slack. But that will require alot of energy..
>IEA's net zero roadmap...
I'd like to make a slightly vague rebuttal to your slightly vague rebuttal (ofc not your fault if the IEA doesn't explicitly say anything about nuclear, not blaming you). The IPCC has said that nuclear is necessary if we want to hit our climate goals.
> By 2050, almost 90% of electricity generation comes from renewable sources, with wind and solar PV together accounting for nearly 70%. Most of the remainder comes from nuclear.
So "no path to clean energy without solar" and "no path to clean energy without wind" are a bit more defensible, though in both cases, we'd just build more of the other one.
"no path to clean energy without hydro"? Maybe, again we'd just build more solar and wind.
So, if someone waves a wand and magically makes nuclear disappear (or just economically unattractive) then I think the our path is still fairly clear. No real need to take that path unless nuclear becomes much more relatively expensive, but it's definately an option, and possibly one we'll gladly take because it's cheaper.
In other words, IPCC counts nuclear as "renewable"?
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
[2] https://imgur.com/a/xvkZSRi
[3] https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/1064529619951513600
Since we're going to stop doing that, by electrifying lots of things that currently burn fuel, we can achieve both goals at the same time.
The text on top of the graph you cite says this:
"Primary energy is calculated based on the 'substitution method' which takes account of the inefficiencies in fossil fuel production by converting non-fossil energy into the energy inputs required if they had the same conversion losses as fossil fuels."
It would be clearer to reduce the fossil fuel amounts by that percentage, since we currely don't use that energy, and in fact expend more energy trying to get rid of it as waste heat in many cases.
And, note the difference betwene energy and electricity, they say electricity will grow by nearly 3x ("To achieve this, total electricity generation increases over two-and-a-half-times between today and 2050").
You should look up recent graphs of renewable growth, with hydro seperated out, to see that your quick mock-up looks positively sedate by the recent standards of growth.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-change-renewables?...
global renewables including hydro. Solar and Wind are barely noticeable until 2000, when wind, then solar (in 2010) grow from nothing to octuple previous hydro within about a decade:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-change-solar?tab=c...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-change-wind?tab=ch...
They have an article about why this is occuring too: https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
I didn't choose IEA to demonstrate because they are the only outlier that support my point. My whole claim is that even the boring, cautious industry analysts are saying broadly the same thing.
I think their assumptions about carbon capture are silly and more renewables will be built instead, but even their numbers make it clear than nuclear is a sideshow at best.
Conversion efficiency of Solar/EV/battery storage vs. extraction/refining/storage/burning just for transportation is like 10x better.
If EVs go with their curve (especially with petrol prices) we can project 80% are EVs on the road by 2040, that'd be a massive improvement in transport alone.
The source I provided (current to 2019) does show coal down a hair (Peaked at ~45000 TWh in 2013, hovering around 44,000 TWh in 2019), but oil continuing to increase (49700 to 53600 over same period) and natural gas increasing even more (33700 to 39300). Renewables all increasing (solar 356-1793, Wind 1628-3540, even hydro 9765-10,455).
The part that I think is unrealistic is dropping the fossil fuels to 20% and simultaneously restricting growth to negative 8%. Increased energy usage is desirable for anyone, so while decreasing renewable cost will certainly encourage wider adoption, I think a more realistic prediction would be at least 20-30% growth over the next 30 years (compared with ~75% growth over the last 30 years, ~20% over the last 10 years alone). Fingers crossed we can do this simultaneously with abandoning current fossil assets.
Well there's no opportunity for him to make inflated profits off a technology that he can't patent...
https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bi...
He is personally responsible for "have you tried turning it off and on again?". Before MS, that was plenty of reason to demand a refund.
Some things I found interesting:
Under development: 11 in China, 3 in US
Operating: Over 40 in the US and no major accidents since Three Mile Island (1979).
1: https://www.tva.com/newsroom/watts-bar-2-project
2: https://www.chooseenergy.com/news/article/failed-v-c-summer-...
3: https://www.southerncompany.com/innovation/vogtle-3-and-4.ht...
So... is it unreasonable to have lots of fairly low-regulated nuclear power plants in, say, 50 mile uninhabited areas (maybe even make it a nature preserve or something for animals)? And if one or two meltdown, oh well?
Fukushima's containment exploded in hydrogen detonations, and vented a great deal of radioisotopes. They are today flushing tritium to the ocean, which seems wasteful; we will want the 3He that decays to.
This is why they go on and about the "sarcophagus" required to keep it contained. They had to build a proper containment unit after the fact. You want that stuff built BEFORE you have a nuclear reactor. Not wait until after one blows up.
I, very literally, would love to have a nuclear reactor in my backyard if it's off the correct design. A design that depends on physics to be safe, not human operators.
Which is entirely possible. You can build a nuclear reactor in such a way that if the worst possible case happened it would meltdown and dump it's guts into a container. Then just sit there until it cooled to the point were it could be processed correctly.
Or, indeed, any at all. Thus, also no Fukushimas, and no TMIs, and no Santa Susanas.
Batteries and hyrodelectric storage are the only energy storage mechanisms for which we have any meaningful cost history.
Are there any >1GWh thermal battery facilities? Remember the US uses 8GWh of electricity per minute.
I don't know about that, but for comparison, the "world’s biggest battery storage system" opened last year in California[0] at 400MW / 1,600MWh.
[0] https://www.energy-storage.news/expansion-complete-at-worlds...
My point was that GWh-scale thermal battery proposals would be competing with already existing (and possibly cheaper) chemical batteries, and that energy storage on this scale is not unheard of.
Even as a nuclear supporter I would welcome more renewables if we had cheap scalable storage, which no one has it seems. (at least no one pointed out such project in the entire thread)
But for much of the world what doesn't have this option, nuclear remains the most viable energy source.
Btw even the Sweden example uses nuclear for decarbonization of the grid ...
You are already well aware of numerous alternatives. Insisting they are "untested" is not fooling anybody.
Now repeat the same math for global production of new nuclear power plants, in GW/year.
While writing your reply about how this isn't the right way to think about the future of nuclear power, realize that those exact same arguments apply to batteries, too.
Nuclear power plants are mostly steel, concrete, and copper. They need to be manufactured to precise tolerances, but the cost of a nuclear plant isn't driven by the cost of concrete and steel as rae inputs. The nuclear industry accounts for a negligible share of steel, copper, and concrete consumption. The lion's share of the cost is in the design, approval, and construction of the plants. Unlike batteries, these are factors that benefit from building the same repeated design. A serial run of 40 heat exchangers is a lot cheaper than a one-off production of 3 or 4 heat exchangers. This is why nuclear plants were so much cheaper in the 1970s and 80s when the same designs were built repeatedly.
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1143399/global-cobalt-co...
2. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shortages-flagged-ev...
Even so, we're on track to produce li on batteries for cars by the twh per year. And most of those will have a second life in grid storage. That's before considering the effects of vehicle to grid storage.
There are no plans for nuclear anywhere close to the same scale. Changing that will require a debate about cost. This article does a great job of avoiding that topic entirely.
Then please share what storage mechanism is going to be cheaper.
> Second, natural resources almost always get cheaper to extract as demand increases, especially when they’re not actually scarce (there’s tons of Lithium out there).
Incorrect, as easily accessible reserves get depleted more and more remote reserves must be tapped. This increases cost of extraction.
They've increased more than sixfold since 2000.
All you're doing is repeating the fact that we've been under-investing in lithium (and other energy minerals[0]) for the past decade+. Everyone already knows that.
Nothing indicates lithium mining & refining is at its physical or technology limits. Far from it: we see large low-hanging fruit for process improvements in both.
Ion exchange and/or membrane and/or electrochemical separation vs ponds, lithium carbonate intermediate vs lithium hydroxide, clay vs spodumene, etc. Lots of exciting stuff going on!
Answer: We import fuel. We will have no reason to give up the ability to import fuel at need. We might even stockpile some.
Nuclear is unique in that it's the only geographically independent, and non-intermittent energy source. Hydroelectricity and geothermal are non-intermittent but are geographically dependent. And also fossil fuels, but those emit carbon dioxide.
Repeating your falsehoods here does not make them true.
As per your previous comments, you assume that hydrogen, compressed air, or some other form of energy storage will be this silver bullet. This is a very risky assumption. We have no cost history for these systems being built at scale. There's a massive difference between writing a white-paper promising a super cheap storage cost, and actually building an energy storage facility and looking at the bill.
But you think its easier and risk free to develop from where we are to R&D plus supply chain, operating procedures, and workforce for safe and cost effective nuclear power?
Grid storage has no cost history. Nuclear power has a known cost history of being too expensive, and its had trillions of dollars of investment so theres no low hanging fruit.
Grid storage has existing components used in other industries and applications, nuclear power doesn't.
By comparison, we have 70 years of experience building and operating nuclear plants. We only need to build 4 nuclear plants for each one we currently have to achieve a 100% decarbonized grid. The cost history of nuclear power shows a clear trend that serial production is cheaper than one off builds.
And you are incorrect about nuclear power not sharing components with existing applications. Nuclear power plants use steam generators, turbines, dynamos, and cooling towers. These are used in other heat engine based power plants.
Which is why nukes are today uncompetitive, and get less so every day. The cost to build all those nukes would build far more renewable generating capacity and storage, far more than we will need. So, we will instead spend far less and get all the power we need. Existing nukes will shortly be too expensive to continue operating, and will be mothballed. Their eventual dismantling will consume a not insubstantial fraction of our much reduced energy budget.
Uhh, mining and uranium enrichment and transportation all require fossil fuels, and more fossil fuel energy than a fueled nuclear produces in electrical energy. Increasing 4x nuclear plants would increase fossil fuel consumption in the nuclear supply chain.
Nuclear isn't some secret technology you've just discovered thats being suppressed by environmentalists. It literally ended the biggest war ever and was pursued for decades afterwards. Unless you know a secret, if its feasible it would have been done.
Incorrect. Nuclear power actually has the second lowest net CO2 emissions per energy source, second only to hydroelectricity. Less than solar and wind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...
There is, thus far, little use for storage, because there is not enough renewable generating capacity yet to charge up storage. (Charging it by burning fossil fuels would be stupid.) By the time we need much of it, it will be very, very cheap. In the meantime, building generating capacity and factories is the right use of capital.
Although people insisting there is a problem love to talk about expense of batteries, only a tiny fraction of utility-scale storage will ever be batteries. The cheapest storage is gravity, exemplified by pumped hydro, which represents today almost all utility storage. But there are many variations that all work.
The only uncertainty is which ones will be cheapest. Each is a different mix of build cost, maintenance cost, storage cost, charging cost, and discharging cost, with capex and opex for each. Different users will favor different places on those axes. Best for most uses are those that cost only capex, and store as much energy as you care to, cheaply.
Synthetic ammonia and hydrogen are attractive storage media, despite some higher costs, because they may be sold, and burned in gas turbines.
Liquifying nitrogen is extremely mature tech and, like the synthetic fuels, valuable in its own right. Power is extracted by boiling in ambient air to drive a turbine.
Compressing air underground, adiabatically, is another mature method. Compressing to a sea-floor bladder through a hose from a compressor onshore, likewise. Turbines, again.
Buoyancy, drawing a float down toward a pulley on the sea floor, using a winch onshore; and raising a very, very heavy weight up a disused mine shaft are other, very similar examples of gravity storage. Both have startup time of seconds, and are useful for stabilizing grids. Energy is released by running the winch out, driving a generator.
There are various battery chemistries, for cases where batteries are useful at all. All under consideration are much cheaper than lithium. Farthest along may be iron-air, molten-metal, and sodium-bromide, none of which are prone to fires.
Storage costs of all kinds are falling much faster than solar generating capacity. Utilities will build whatever is cheapest when they finally need any. As prices change, the mix will change. There is no value in picking just one, and plentiful value in using the right one for immediate circumstances.
Nobody needs very much storage, because you can always import and burn fuel. The cheapest fuel will be surplus ammonia and hydrogen, although burning aluminum powder for direct process heat has been used in production at local scales. Scrap aluminum is very cheap.
This commenter is also incorrect in the claim that there is not enough renewable capacity to charge up storage. California , Hawaii, and other energy markets often hit days of excess renewable production. Proponents of energy storage promised that companies would swoop in to store and resell this excess energy. But this has not materialized, because energy storage is not nearly so simple or cheap as this commenter claims it is.
If in fact they were exotic and untried, billions of dollars would not already be committed to factories to produce them in industrial volume. The processes involved are used industrially billions of times worldwide every day.
You only wish they were exotic because you imagine it would make nukes more appealing. But nothing can make nukes appealing. They get less so with each passing day.
Yes, for purposes different from energy storage. The massive amounts of ammonia synthesized through the Haber process for fertilizer production does nothing to demonstrate ammonia's viability for electric grid storage.
Likewise the hydrogen used in space rockets has no bearing on the feasibility of electrolyzing water, storing the hydrogen, and converting it back to electricity. If anything, the fact that most hydrogen is produced through steam reformation highlights the difficulties of electrolysis at scale.
We have plenty of experience with flywheels. Almost every car has a flywheel in it. Does that mean it's guaranteed to be extremely cheap and scalable to store electricity by spinning a bunch of giant flywheels? That's the kind of leap you're making here.
When someone actually builds and operates a facility that takes in electricity, produces ammonia, and then taps that stored ammonia to produce electricity later, then we can actually measure real-world cost of such a storage system. Until then, it's just optimistic predictions. And optimistic predictions don't actually store any energy.
We have plenty of experience with flywheels. I bet there's millions of cars built every year that have a flywheel in them. Does that mean energy storage using giant flywheels is guaranteed to be insanely cheap and way cheaper than the existing storage systems?
Just because we have plenty of experience using a given technology in one application doesn't mean it's guaranteed to be a smash hit in a different application.
Now, whether LN2 (or LAir) energy storage is practical is another matter. The efficiency seems poor unless you have a source of waste heat to juice the process.
> It's off the shelf technology for chemical processes. It's not off the shelf technology for energy storage.
The while point I'm making in these last few comments is that just because a certain technology is effective for one application doesn't guarantee it's effectiveness for a different application.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_separation#Applications
But you can't do this for cryogenic air storage. The whole point is to produce liquid nitrogen (or liquid air) that can be stored and then reheated later to drive an engine to generate electricity. If you ran the liquid nitrogen output through the input stream like in typical air separation, you'd warm the output stream and turn it back into a gas. So even though the two systems both involve cooling systems they're actually substantially different processes. One of them is separating air's constituent gases, and mixes the input and output streams to achieve efficiency. The other is essentially a big liquid nitrogen plant.
Unfortunately the only existing cryogenic air storage plant delivered 15 MWh of storage at a cost of 8 million pounds [1]. That's about $650 per KWh, as compared to ~$130 per KWh for battery storage. Like I said, just because a technology is effective in one application, doesn't mean it's guaranteed to be effective in another one.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryogenic_energy_storage#cite_...
We build plenty of flywheels. Does that mean energy storage based on giant flywheels is guaranteed to be efficient at scale because we have experience using flywheels in other applications like automobiles?
Similar deal with ammonia energy storage. We've got plenty of experience with synthesizing ammonia for fertilizer production. We've got very little, if any, experience using synthesized ammonia as a form of energy storage.
It was you, not I, that started this tangent about air separation in this comment [1]. I was, from the beginning, talking about energy storage systems.
Do you imagine the ammonia knows why it is being synthesized, and would balk at being synthesized and tanked for energy storage or fuel? Do you imagine it will object to being burnt in a combined-cycle turbine?
Your credibility is at zero.
Ammonia storage would first require a source of hydrogen. Currently almost all hydrogen is produced through steam reformation which releases carbon dioxide. So this has to be replaced with electrolysis, which is more energy intensive and has issues with corrosion of electrodes. Then there's the issue of heating up this hydrogen and nitrogen to ~400C and compressing it to fix the nitrogen into ammonia. Currently this is done through combustion of fossil fuels. That too needs to be replaced with an electric source. All these changes drastically increases the cost of producing ammonia over existing processes.
Cryogenic storage is essentially producing liquid nitrogen by refrigerating air, and then hearing the nitrogen to create a pressure gradient to drive a heat engine. Cooling the air is a huge energy sink, and releasing the energy often has to be coupled with a heat source in order transition the liquid nitrogen to a gas. It's actually using the heat gradient of the ambient air and the liquid nitrogen to drive the heat engine, and that ambient air often doesn't have the required energy density to produce more than a few dozen megawatts. Existing prototypes often scavenge waste heat from a fossil fuel power plant. But again, not an option if you plan to eliminate fossil fuels.
Below 100mSv, there is "no evidence" that exposure leads to any elevation of cancer risk. At levels covered by the article, ie 1000Bq/kg / 80000 Bq/mSv = 0.0125 mSv/kg.
In other words, you can eat 8 tons of those mush before there is any measurable increase in cancer risk.
And breating the air in Berlin for 1 year is MUCH more dangerous than eating those 8000 kg of mushrooms. (Not to speak about taking a single shot of covid vaccine.)
In other words, dispite being scientifically "true", the net effect of an article like this, is to mislead people into thinking that radiation is a lot more dangerous than it is in reality.
If nuclear were to be treated like other health hazards in our environment, the thresholds should be set somewhere between 10000-100000Bq/kg, depending on how much people would eat of that food in a year, not at 600Bq/kg.
For the mushrooms, as a side order, even every day would be harmless. If you follow some stone age diet, eating only meat, then MAYBE eating those boars every day might cause a measurable increase in cancer risk. Probably still less than simply breathing the air in a city, though.
> and the contamination was much higher in the first months/years after Chernobyl
In the first days and months after Chernobyl, there were real reasons to be somewhat careful. That was before the short-lived isotopes had decayed. Once the decays of those isotopes took over, and Cs-137 became the main source, the levels were pretty safe, even if they were double compared to today (the half-life of Cs137 is 30 years).
> The overall point is that the impact was not restricted to a 50 mile radius as suggested by the GP.
And this is where my main objection is. The "impact" as counted in measurable increase in cancer risk, is nil.
By employing the ultra-conservative "linear no-threshold model" (LNT) of radiatino risk, then theoretically, over a very large population, you could calculate some number of expected cancer cases. But there is (last time I checked) no consensus that the LNT hypothesis matches data better than a null-hypothesis that doses under about 100mSv are harmless.
In any case, at that level, the risk for any given individual is so small, that it disappears next to any other risk you can imagine from pollutants or similar, so there is no reason to take such hypothetical risks into account for your personal behavior.
Just because it is well known that vaccines come with a tiny, tiny risk of some complication doesn't mean we should not take them. They save a lot more lives than they take.
is the same as
Just because it is well know that nuclear power come with a tiny, tiny risk of some complication doesn't mean we should not use it. It saves a lot more lives than it takes.
From: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
We seem to have been fine burning coal and not thinking about the radiation that puts into the surrounding environment.
It's also disingenuous to think that there aren't negative environmental externalities from the production and operation of "renewables".
All forms of energy production will have some negative consequences and we need to understand what those are and think of ways to mitigate them, rather than just pointing to what's bad about one form and ignore what's bad about others.
It's like a kid preferring 5 nickels to 2 quarters because 5 is more.
In many places that role is being moved to NG. The immediate hiccup is a short-term setback that will be fixed the way we are doing, building out renewables, later storage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert
Even if it's not perfectly accurate, it's probably quite close.
Starbase, e.g.
Such disasters should only be a small - if bright red - footnote to a good policy: "NEVER build anything resembling this historic disaster. And if anything ever shows operational characteristics remotely resembling it, then shut it down IMMEDIATELY."
(If you're not familiar with this in the context of renewable energy, then you might want to google for news stories on what the long-term drought in the western U.S. is doing to the "sure thing, forever" supply of hydroelectricity at many of the major dams.)
The environs of Hoover Dam are exactly as safe today as 10,000 years ago, and will reliably be as safe 10,000 years in the future provided no nukes blow up upwind or upstream.
Solar panels floating on the Hoover Dam reservoir will happily produce as much power as the dam at full tilt, with enough left over to pump water back up to it for overnight use, reduce evaporation enough that water drought will be substantially less problematic, and provide power for desalination besides.
Floating, water-chilled panels will last at least 50 years, by which time they will likely not be needed anymore.
We have one use for the nuclear industry - building scientists who can then build nuclear bombs. IMO this is a reasonable use of public funds - the strategic needs of nuclear weapons are not going away.
But please please just accept that and move on. Stop getting in a vital public debate.
Nuclear fission is a terrible civilian technology - vastly expensive, the effects of a catastrophic failure are massive and the costs to avoid it (yes you can build safe nuclear plants) are huge - basically nuclear projects need to be on the A game - all the time, year after year, constantly upgrading and improving for decades to come.
I might believe that for five or six plants run to just build weapons. But i refuse to believe we can build 1,000s of the fuckers in every country on earth and think that they will be all maintained to standards better than Fukijyma
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...
They told us it was safe back then. They tell us its safe today. They will always tell us it's safe. The fundamentals tell us they're wrong.
The "fundamentals" you speak of boil down to the first principles analysis, based on physics, of the possible states a nuclear energy production system can get into. This is not invariant with regards to technology. It seems far too reductive to claim "putting radiocative materials together in the same location" should box out all civilian use of a energy production mechanism.
Administration and adherence to standards of excellence are not improving.
That will save us from an absolute rash of accidents as habitually corrupt administration fails to operate at necessary standards. With some luck, most of those planned will be cancelled before completion as their operating cost is recognized as already undercut.
And this is my argument - the reactors were not on their A-game. One slip, one B-level decision, one in decades and decades and the price is paid.
And this is for one of the richest countries on Earth. Who is going to build and run the nuclear reactors in Argentina, Sudan, Belize. Will they be on their A-game in 2045?
Why choose the option with the high cost and the nasty downside when you literally do not have to.
France gets ~75% of its power from nuclear, safely and economically. France inhabits the same physical world as the rest of us, but is different politically.
If there were a will, there would be a way. If the environmental movement had paid more attention to James Hansen's testimony in 1989 than it did to Chernobyl in 1986 then we would be living in a different world.
There is no amount of damage from nuclear accidents that will be worse than what we are suffering from climate change, with no end in sight. Proliferation is another story, but how's that going anyway...?
HBO with their Chernobyl miniseries single-handedly undid years of progress in the perception of nuclear energy.
For example, because everyone is terrified of nuclear, regulations may require an absurd level of safety expenses that no other energy producer is burdened with. If the political climate lead to burdening fossil fuel burners with costs to reduce their pollution and GHG emissions that directly and indirectly lead to orders of magnitude more deaths than nuclear ever has, then nuclear might actually be price competitive.
As another example, since the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the US started in 1975, they have never, not once, approved the construction of a new nuclear site in the US. They've approved expansion of existing sites, but never a new one. In fact, it was a huge deal when the NRC approved the expansion of a site several years ago, for the first time in 30 years, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclear-license/nrc-a...
How much pain and death is the NRC ultimately responsible for for holding nuclear energy to such a high safety standard that it's been literally impossible to build a new site for almost 50 years? Because all that means, is that we've burned drastically more fossil fuel than necessary over the past 50 years.
Shame on the NRC and the US government for using irrational fear to protect the fossil fuel industry at the expense of nuclear energy. And shame on environmentalists for falling for the same trap and failing to think holistically and systemically.
"The researchers start out with a historic analysis of plant construction in the US. The basic numbers are grim. The typical plant built after 1970 had a cost overrun of 241 percent—and that's not considering the financing costs of the construction delays [..] while safety regulations added to the costs, they were far from the primary factor [...] In the end, the conclusion is that there are no easy answers to how to make nuclear plant construction more efficient. And, until there are, it will continue to be badly undercut by both renewables and fossil fuel."[0]
[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...
Really, actual cost is much more than reported cost, because disaster insurance and decommissioning are always omitted from cost accounting.
Wait, seriously? That miniseries was not perfect, but I thought it did a pretty good job of pointing out the issues with Chernobyl were largely political and not technical. (Sure the RBMK reactors were flawed, that is a technical issue. But the only reason that escalated into a disaster was due to gross mismanagement and flagrant disregard of safety systems...)
Gross mismanagement and flagrant disregard of safety systems are inevitable, inherent features of power utilities. If your technology is disastrous without perfect handling, your technology is disastrous.
Did we watch the same miniseries? Chernobyl went beyond gross negligence. To say nothing of perfection. In the reactor design, in its operation and in post-crisis management.
But since the rest of the world doesn't build reactors of that type, and never built any without even a containment building AFAIK, it's not really applicable to modern nuclear power plant designs.
Because it's centralized, quite isolated from the public eye and with the potential to cause invisible environmental impact.
E.g. Bill Gates' nuclear startup would be dead in the water without its subsidies. That makes it political.
It’s not that nuclear is any worse, it’s just that the alternatives got better.
Fossil fuel is the alternative to nuclear (and possibly battery supported wind/solar) as the base load. Fossil fuels are fundamentally cheaper because they can more easily avoid paying the cost of their negative externalities than nuclear can. If we could actually internalize the negatives of fossil fuel burning (i.e. by carbon tax) then nuclear might actually be the most economical option for the base load with solar and wind picking up the slack.
France had nuclear capacity factors around 70% when America and much of the worlds nuclear power plants where closer to 90%. It physically worked, but dramatically increased production cost per KWH.
Assuming they cut back to 30% or even 40% of all electricity being supplied by nuclear that’s still a significantly reduction.
Nuclear completely undelivered on this promise. Tschernobyl was just the nail in the coffin.
On top of that has the nuclear industry been one of the strongest lobbying groups against wind and solar, mainly to protect their investments. I would argue on the whole we would have been much further in terms of renewable energy if it wasn't for the nuclear industry.
Both should be sort of ok, fingers crossed.
But this is only replacement. If we're serious and want to reduce iron ore with hydrogen for our steel needs, and use the same electrolytic hydrogen for fertilizers, we would need to build about 50 of them.
The technology is there, but yes, it is more of a political issue in France as well.
Germany's electricity production has emitted about 8 times more CO2 emission than France over the last 30 years: I blame the german political ecologists for being directly responsible for a massive amount of our current ecological woes by demonising the nuclear industry and limiting it's spread across the world for the last 30 years.
It's really a sad story to be so misguided to end up contributing to destroy the one thing you wanted to save...
If the French (of all people) can no longer get it together to build new reactors even remotely on time and on budget, then maybe we just need to be honest and give up on the "build lots of new nuclear plants, quickly" as a credible medium-term component of a plan to deal with climate change.
"France's Flamanville 3 reactor will cost 300 million euros more than forecast and fuel loading is being pushed back by up to six months, EDF (EDF.PA) said on Wednesday, in the latest setback for a project already running more than a decade late.
EDF now estimates the total cost of the project at 12.7 billion euros ($14.42 billion). Its expected cost has more than quadrupled from the first estimate made in 2004."[0]
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edf-announces-new-de...
That won't prevent me from blaming the anti-nuclear crowd that put us in that situation in the first place.
Yes, nuclear is expensive, yes it can be messy but it was our best shot to produce abundant amount of low carbon power. All this talk about switching to wind and solar power omit the inconfortable fact that the current low prices for those technologies are low because we are using fossil fuel to make them.
When you have to make advanced renewable tech with only renewable energy, you will see that it's no longer possible to make it economically either.
When you need falsehoods to make your case, you have no case.
I admit that I don't myself know much, but I can tell you that you need at least:
- A modern metallurgy industry using coal to make steal
- Possibly a chemical industry to make composite material
- A logistic industry to move components around the world using petrol (all the solar and wind renewable production is based in china)
- Cement to build your fondation (using gas)
Remove all this and try to build it locally and see how much they cost you...
Nuclear reactors also require steel (and a chemical industry and cement) but fortunately that doesn't require coal:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/19/green-steel-...
The point is that those that claim that we can replace fossils fuel entirely by wind and solar based on the current price of wind and solar production produced by an industry doped with fossil fuels at every stage are deluding themselves.
everything is built with the current fossil fuel powered industry. cement, steel, uranium mining and enrichment all is subsidized by the fossil fuel doped industry. Same with wind and solar.
The fact that nuclear power costs more than fossil fuel power is really a reflection that its whole supply chain is consuming more fossil fuel energy than its producing. it is not the magical bullet you think it is.
furthermore, as certain installations of solar and wind are actually producing power cheaper than fossil fuels, its contributing to a trajectory where the % fossil fuels in industry can actually diminish.
We built them so fast, that even if we had cross-partisan will to keep forever using nuclear, we'd still have 30-40 years of gap without making any new reactor. And after a generation of engineers, we need to make reactors again and we're basically doing it from scratch again.
There are other reasons: people's fear of nuclear became quite real (either because of greenpeace, or local green political parties). There's also a bit of hubris I think, rather than making some "easy" "usual" reactor model, we decided to do our brand new own, which has its own cost: If Flamanville's EPR had succeeded, we would likely have made more reactors and we would already be producing >100% of nuclear power
Somewhere to the north-east of Strasbourg would be ideal, not only for the abundant water supply, but also because the location is ideal for export to places in Europe that have not invested enough in stable sources of energy, lately. And if France plans to import power when the wind is blowing in those countries, the grid capacity out of that area will be needed anyway.
The rest of the world will be building out renewables, and getting much more power for each euro than France will. France will have more expensive power than everyone else in exact proportion to their nuke construction.
Ultimately, the French will buy their power from outside, because the nukes will be unable to deliver at a matching price, and the plants will be mothballed. French taxpayers will be the poorer.
My prediction is the opposite, that nuclear will remain cheaper than wind in northern temperate climates for another generation.
I suppose time will tell.
It was very very expensive. It was also nothing to do with global warming.
Those plants are fully paid off but nearly all close to death. Replacing them will still be very very expensive. Extending their lives will be dangerous. France isnt quite sure what to do.
If there's unlimited money and patience for years long delays then yes nuclear power is just fine.
If you want it reasonably priced it either wont happen at all or you're risking catastrophe.
No, these plants are close to the end of their original grant for exploitation. Many of them get renewed for 10, 20 years easily. The US has had plants renewed for 40 years and are still running just fine.
> France isnt quite sure what to do.
We know what to do, every single scientist from the ASN knows what to do, every economist knows what to do. The non-renewal of nuclear plants is purely a political play to gain votes.
Stop spreading your ignorant, fearmongering, unsubstantiated opinions.
The ones who underestimated Flamanville's cost by 80%? (and it's still not in production)
Let's maybe not trust them completely, and have our eggs in other baskets as well.
It's an entirely new design of a complicated piece of technology, of course it will be over budget and delayed. Grand Paris Express and the Paris Philharmonic were also over budget and delayed, does that invalidate the opinion of all experts involved in both projects?
demonstrably, yes?
I wonder what that means for software developers who notoriously struggle to predict basically the same stuff, only on much less drastic scales (if an engineer underestimates how much time and effort a feature will take, usually people don't die. If a building crumbles or a nuclear power plant has an accident or a train crashes people do die).
The Finns recognized the gravy train would stop soon, anyway, and elected to deliver a (more-or-less) working reactor, after consuming 5B euros beyond the 3B quoted cost, more than a decade late. In the US, corruption is secure enough to go far, far beyond that price, with no demand to deliver.
Additionally, EDF offered multiple estimates at the time of construction, from "everything goes well" to "oh dear god so many delays". Many of these estimates were perfectly in line with the current costs. It is, once again, political decisions that only allocated the minimal budget, while knowing full well that it would go over (but that EDF would take the blame, and not the government).
And once again, this is also a result of letting our nuclear industry decay for 40 years, losing every single person that has the knowledge on how to build nuclear plants either to retirement or other countries.
In the US, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission employs 2000 people to reject nuke construction plans. They are cheap at the price.
> No, these plants are close to the end of their original grant for exploitation. Many of them get renewed for 10, 20 years easily. The US has had plants renewed for 40 years and are still running just fine.
The moving goal post by nuclear proponents never cease to amaze. When we talk about safety the argument is always: "don't look at these old designs, all these modern designs are 100% safe". Then when we talk about cost it is: "don't look at the cost of building new plants, just extend the operation of these 40 year old plants by another 40 years". And the they complain about regulations for nuclear, while at the same time arguing that regulations about decommissioning a plant after its regulated lifetime ran out should not apply to nuclear plants.
Why should the rules about safe operation lifetimes not apply to nuclear plants?
> > France isnt quite sure what to do.
> We know what to do, every single scientist from the ASN knows what to do, every economist knows what to do. The non-renewal of nuclear plants is purely a political play to gain votes.
> Stop spreading your ignorant, fearmongering, unsubstantiated opinions.
They are not fear mongering or unsubstantiated. Plants were build/commissioned with an expected lifetime. There are reasons for this, aging of components and materials especially under exposure to radiation, aging of computer systems...
This is only said as an answer to all the people screaming "but Chernobyl was horrible". Old designs are pretty safe too ( especially when terrible bugs like the one that caused Chernobyl are fixed), precisely because they keep getting updated to newer norms during refreshes and refits. There are nuclear power plants out there that were constructed in the 1950s that still work.
OP's point is that most nuclear power plants can have their life extended, at some cost, which is negligible compared to the cost of a new plant, and there's rarely a case where that doesn't make sense ( usually when for some reason the retrofit to update to new standards is too expensive). Why waste that? Prolong the life of existing plants, and build new ones to expand production and eventually replace the old ones.
Yes it is ( big nuclear buildout to replace most of the current fleet, while also doing lots of renewables and experimenting with small modular reactors):
https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20220210-announcing-new-r...
Occasionally, ratepayers are forced to pay far above market rates in order to keep the plants in operation.
Coercing users does not make nukes look more viable.
So yes it is a political decision, France is willing to highly subsidise their nuclear industry.
Why is the EU more trustworthy on these estimates than the French?
Does the EU have an incentive to inflate the reserve requirement?
However, they are by far the most practical and safe way to generate ludicrous amounts of environmentally friendly energy out of all technologies that we have available. Even solar can't match up. If you factor in the really long term cost on every country on this planet due to climate change for example, this footed bill is chump change.
Starting a new nuke means burning coal for an extra decade, and at the end of that decade getting much less power per euro, displacing correspondingly less CO2, than if you had built out renewables instead.
There is simply no contest.
Even refurbishing a nuke instead of building out renewables is a losing proposition. Just continuing to operate a nuke instead of building out and then operating renewables is a losing proposition.
The only legitimate use for keeping a nuke running is while you are waiting to bring enough renewables you are building online to wholly displace it, because what you are spending operating it is using up money that could be building more renewables.
This is the magic of exponentially falling costs.
At the point where enough spare renewable generating capacity is available to charge storage, it will be time to start building out increasingly cheap storage.
And most of the world is willing to subside Oil and Gas to the tune of $5.9 trillion in 2020 or about 6.8 percent of the _world's_ GDP. [0]
Tax payer's money will be sunk anyway, choose your poison.
[0] https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2021/09/23/Sti...
Theres a large difference between building new reactors vs running the old ones until the end of life (in terms of economics).
Also the modular reactors that are getting a lot of hype right now also still have a nuclear waste disposal issue.
I would like to see Nuclear thrive but until it gets the cost / waste disposal resolved it's a tough sell.
On the contrary! Nuclear plants pay a fraction of their revenue through their life into special decommissioning funds that have so far been more than enough to perform full greenfield decommissioning.
For waste, there's a separate fund called the Nuclear Waste Fund in the US (and other nuclear-operating countries) that has a current balance around $50B.
Read: problem not resolved.
I think the scale of the issue is significantly larger in the US.
Yucca isn't viable politically and there isn't anyone who lives close by.
Legal shenanigans. They got a court decision declaring the waste fund as a lie because there is no viable plan for waste.
We are not distracted.
Only political bias allows nukes to continue.
EDF, Areva have a long history of bailouts, buyouts and subsidies by the French government. You are right that it's a political decision that France has so much nuclear, but it is not an economical one.
Even though they decided to replace old reactors with new ones, they do not manage to build enough reactors fast enough and especially not economically. Flamanville has a budget overrun of around 500% and time overrun of around 300%.
Nuclear is neither fast nor economical enough to be built. Only building renewables can help push down CO2 emissions fast and cheap enough.
The high cost of nuclear is due to the inherent complexity of nuclear power plants, and the rise in particular is principally due to a nuclear industry that no longer knows how to construct plants affordably, with increased regulatory compliance a minor contributor.
Source: https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118
The result of that high cost is that nuclear is a lot more expensive to build than renewables for the same amount of energy. This difference is growing and not shrinking, because the solar and wind industries keep getting better at cheaply rolling out capacity.
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
Because most of a nuclear project’s cost is upfront, earned back over the lifetime of the plant, a profitable project has to be able to assume it can outcompete renewables + storage over multiple decades. This already is not the case today, and less so in the coming years. No private business can make these numbers work, so no private business is willing to fund a nuclear plant without subsidies. Renewables however can and are being funded privately to a large degree, because they turn a profit more quickly and can be built in smaller increments.
Subsidies come out of taxes, which means the money can’t be spent on something else. Government budgets are already stressed. Between the choice of a largely privately funded solar/wind/hydrogen/storage path and a mostly government-funded nuclear path governments around the world are choosing the cheaper option.
And yes, there is the public perception of nuclear which doesn’t help. But people are also opposed to solar and wind projects. NIMBY is always a thing. Besides, even if you could convince people of the safety of nuclear energy, the numbers still wouldn’t work out.
There are challenges to rolling out solar and wind at scale with grid redesign and hydrogen storage and distribution, but nuclear at scale has similarly sized problems. TANSTAAFL when it comes to energy production.
And his conclusion was pretty grim. Paraphrasing: If we bet on nuclear for mitigation of climate change, it is inevitable that nuclear accidents will happen more often. Also each accident causes a major setback in peoples minds regarding nuclear safety and the next Fukushima might kill off a lot of progress and the opportunity cost lost would be huge.
I don't know how to argue with this. I personally think nuclear is really safe. If the worst accidents have killed a few hundred and caused premature deaths to at most hundreds of thousands. Compared to the millions of premature deaths PER YEAR for fossil related energy and the possible billions coming from climate change, nuclear is as safe as it gets (I mean probably more PV installers will fall off roofs than get killed by nuclear accidents), but peoples fears might not be surmountable.
Any newspaper mogul could make that happen.
Any time there is any accident, people interviewed need to start with "There is a risk this incident might stop nuclear from being the safest energy source. But to be honest, I think we'll still keep the crown".
The only cancer that clearly went up in immediate connection to Chernobyl was thyroid cancer, and that was in most cases very treatable. It's also unclear how much of the increase in incidence, was due to increased screening. Thyroid cancer seems to have affected the general population, but in a dose-dependent manner, where the increased risk became really low when looking outside the cleaning crew.
On top of that there is some evidence to suggest that the risk of leukemia and other blood cancers increased in the cleaning crew. (But still really low numbers). And as far as I know no signs of increased blood cancer rate was seen in the general population.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28929329/
It actually appears that the largest loss of human life from Chernobyl happened because of panic. Women chose abortion because of the perceived increased risk of malformation in offspring. As far as I am aware, the actual increased risk of malformations has not been detectable, and I presume it to be negligible.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8516187/
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ywyqzv/why-hundreds-of-thous...
Planes are crashing all the time and kill tons of people (way more than nuclear power plants anyways), yet flying is more popular than ever (before Covid, anyways)
It is many, many times safer to fly than to drive the same distance. This is almost miraculous. It is also almost miraculous that the measures to make it so safe do not make flying enormously more expensive than it is.
I used to be very bullish on Nuclear. The numbers just don't pencil out in the US under the current constraints. We would need a vast reduction in the overhead to build a Nuclear plant, or a vast increase in the costs of the alternatives.
The chance of someone in the US dying from a terrorist attack is about 1 out of 3 million. It's a rounding error compared with heart disease (1:6), suicide (1:93), storms (1:35k) or even sunstroke (1:6k). Yet, the US spends $52B / year on the department of homeland security.
Whether or not this would be cheaper overall is anyone's guess. There are also questions about the reliability and efficiency of small modular reactors in general; past novel nuclear reactor designs like the pebble-bed reactor were similarly promoted but never went anywhere.
For example, let's say you use hydrogen (by far the most promising candidate as of now). You need to build a plant to perform the water electrolysis and a power plant to convert the hydrogen into electricity. Both these plants will work at most half of the time, but in reality, much less. So, whatever capital costs you have for an electrolysis plant, you just double, triple, or multiply by 10. The same for the hydrogen power plant. A hydrogen power plant will cost at least as much as a current natural gas power plant. That is not a lot, but if you multiply by 5, then it becomes a lot.
But what if you could run these plants 100% of the time. Now we are talking. Let's say you build lots of solar capacity in Morocco, run an electrolysis plant year long, liquefy it, ship it to Germany, where it is burned in a power plant 365/24/7. Or make the hydrogen in Australia and ship it to Japan. Or make it in Nevada and ship it to New York and Toronto.
Do you still need nuclear? I'm not 100% sure. But if lots of people who were against nuclear before changed their mind, then maybe they ran the numbers, and it turns out we need nuclear.
But it's certain we need nuclear if we ever want to explore the outer solar system. And if we climb again the knowledge ladder of commercial nuclear fission, then maybe one day we'll be able to make efficient nuclear rockets.
How bad of a solution is this? How bad does solar/hydro output get during the off season in most places (presumably wind is more consistent than those two when averaged out over shorter time frames than a whole year)?
In June there's 6 times more solar generation than in December.
That's it, if you want to build enough solar capacity to cover you in December, then it's going to be 6 times more than you need in June.
Solar might be cheaper than natural gas, but not by a factor of 6.
[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/monthly-gener...
(plausible, adj.: superficially fair, reasonable, or valuable but often specious.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31759753
? One of the projects has a plan to get p-11B closer to working. It didn't seem immediately stupid. It would be great to have a system that doesn't depend on unobtainium.
Maybe in 50 years we will be able to take down the wind turbines, or explore the Kuiper Belt at length.
Nuclear provides the so called base load (the minimum level of electricity demand required). To replace base load with renewables + energy storage requires so much CAPEX and battery manufacturing that you don't have money to fill gaps between caseload needs and renewable energy production.
> has built
But enough?
Global battery manufacturers have invested so much that they can take total battery capacity to more than 5,500 GWh by by 2030. US would need something like 3000 Gwh of energy storage to replace the base load. (within days, then few weeks). It would would be insane misuse of resources.
Nuclear is the most cost effective way to achieve base load.
It cannot be cancelled soon enough.
Because the public has been anti nuclear energy for the past 4 decades.
> And one big difference is the renewables are actually built, while the fission projects never make progress.
Nuclear energy regulations are an absolute nightmare and make building anything virtually impossible.
You're not necessarily wrong with your point, but man the world would've been so much cleaner if we didn't abandon nuclear energy 40 years ago. Now that we've lost all expertise and have neglected research, yes it's very hard for nuclear energy to make a huge resurgence.
The odd catastrophe didnt help though.
Why there is a resurgence of interest now when dirt cheap solar and wind have effectively rendered it a costly relic of the past is somewhat puzzling.
I guess PR campaigns like the OP's link are one reason.
> Why there is a resurgence of interest now when dirt cheap solar and wind have effectively rendered it a costly relic of the past is somewhat puzzling.
If cheap solar/wind was enough right now Europe wouldn't be going through an energy crisis.
It's an oil/gas crisis, not an electricity crisis - that one went away when the days started getting longer.
If nuclear power depends on lowering the safety regulations to be economically viable, it is not economically viable, at least for now.
Take for example the infamous Flamanville third reactor: it could be opened by 2014, but "nightmare" regulations detected flawed components. A year later, regulations detected faults in cooling valves. Three years later, the secondary cooling systen didn't meet regulations. A year later, a failure in steam pipes delayed more the opening, literally more than 100 defective welds. All of the delays combined more than tripled the costs, but to me they sound valid requirements.
Per kwh fossil fuel disasters have killed more people and have caused more damage to the environment. Compare the public reactions to the Three Mile Island Accident vs the BP oil spill.
Subsidizing solar and wind 40 years ago, in the amount nukes got, would have brought us to the present efflorescence of miraculously cheap renewable energy 30 years ago, and we would not today be facing imminent climate disaster and ocean ecosystem collapse.
Instead of saying to welders "Learn nuclear grade welding, develop a valued expertise and you are going to have a safe, well paying job for the next 30 years". We told them "this is the last reactor we're gonna do, do the bare minimum and find something else, your job is gone anyway".
Instead of saying to your graduates "Study nuclear and you are going to work in building/managing reactors and provide carbonless energy to your country" we told them "If you study nuclear, all you are going to do is dismantle old reactors we don't want to see anymore".
And surprise: 25 years later we have a very hard time properly building and maintaining reactors. And that is the consequence of the opening authorisation regulations.
Industries rise and fall. Coal is largely being phased out (in Europe), so coal miners are expected to lose their jobs and certainly their sons are not going to be miners. Of course they sang the same tune "we need guaranteed and well paid jobs for the next 30 years, and then for our youth", but sadly no industry is free from falling.
If nuclear power cannot teach their people to weld properly, they cannot exist. If their plan is to wait for the state to send them fully formed, the plan is flawed. It's like tomorrow Google or Facebook cries because MIT isn't teaching how to harvest data properly.
Your article links to capacity not effective production when customer needs it. The issue with electricity production resides in being able to reliably produce electricity when customer needs it, not when planet aligns for [insert preferred electricity production method].
It's great to say "I can produce 100Gw of green electricity", but if I ask you "Give me 30GW now" and you tell me "Best I can do now is 5GW, there are clouds in the sky", I'll kindly ask you to shut up about your "100GW capacity".
As the recent price hikes in Europe have shown, the prices paid by customers is dictated by the cost of the most expensive megawatts. Solar and wind have not suddenly become pricier, but gas has. And as a consequence, prices paid by customers have increased proportionally.
Batteries might seem like a good answer, but basic physics shows us that it is not remotely doable on a large scale, if we want to guarantee reliable supply. The energy density simply isn't there.
California is building battery storage at a rate of ~2500MW/year. There are ZERO physics problems standing in the way of this. And there is considerable innovation in fixed batteries like iron-air flow batteries, ones that exist and aren't just VC scams like most of the nuclear stuff.
https://www.energy-storage.news/california-utility-pge-propo...
The US produced 4 10^9 MWh in 2017 [1]
That's roughly 11 10^6 MWh / day or 11 10^12 Wh /day
So to power 50% of the US for half a day, we need : 11 10^12 Wh /day * 0.5 day * 0.5 = 2.75 10^12 Wh = 275 10^10 Wh
The energy storage of a Lithium Ion battery is roughly 270 Wh / kg [2], let's round this up to 275, I am feeling nice here.
This means we need : 275 10^10 Wh / 275 Wh / kg = 1 * 10^10 kg of Lithium Ion batteries. That's 10 million tons of batteries
The total reserve of lithium for the whole world are roughly 20 million tons [3]
[1] https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/energy-storage-2019 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery [3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1253739/lithium-reserves...
Also, I didn't realize that Li-ion batteries were the only conceivable energy storage technology.
1) You don't know how little lithium is contained in a li-ion battery cell; and
2) You don't know that li-ion is less than half the global battery market.
275 10^10 Wh are needed as per my comment above and there is 160g of Lithium in a battery per kWh of capacity [1]
275 10^10 Wh = 275 10^7 kWh => 275 10^7 kW * 160 g / kWh = 45375 10^7 g = 453 750 tons
As you can see, Lithium-Ion batteries are not remotely sustainable if they aim to help replace the baseline production that is currently provided by fossil/nuclear with intermittent renewable. They can only be considered at the top of the curve to help renewable manage the peak power, where their ability shine and where the total needs are far, far lower.
Other battery type do exist, I am willing to admit that, but grand parent projects all involve Lithium Ion batteries....because the other types are even less economically practical (more loss, less energy density, ...).
Rechargeable batteries (Lithium Ion or otherwise) are perfectly fin to store intermittent energy. They just aren't remotely practical to run an entire country off their output, which is why we leverage "natural batteries" aka: fuel (plutonium, oil, coal or otherwise).
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-much-lithium-li-ion-vehic...
So, your concern trolling about battery materials is misplaced.
There is no need for a storage "center". Energy will be stored wherever convenient. Utilities will build out zero-opex storage so they can drop NG opex.
Many different storage technologies will be used. The cheapest ones will eventually be identified and used more. But anhydrous ammonia and hydrogen are certain despite being far from cheapest, because of other merits.
Right now the overwhelming majority of utility storage is pumped hydro, using existing hydro power reservoirs. I expect various gravity methods, including pumped hydro, to continue to dominate. New pumped hydro will not consume watersheds.
(But Energy Vault, NRGV, is strictly a scam.)
Nuclear is definitely a good idea for the future, but only if SMRs are the basis of moving forward.
[1] https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactor...
Whether it's human error, terrorist attack, or natural disaster, nuclear facilities are vulnerable in a way that solar and wind facilities are not.
And don't get me started on the political cost which the news make so obvious now.
If I have to choose between an additional 3 Fukushima and the loss of thousands of costal cities due to sea level rise, I know what I'm choosing.
This study predict than sea level could rise by 2m by 2100 displacing up to 187 million people. Fukushima displaced about 160 thousands.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6561295/
Pick your poison, wisely.
There's been 25 years between Chernobyl and Fukushima, and assuming we build new reactor, there is no reason to imagine it would happen more frequently. Why do you think there could be a catastrophe per year ?
Also, many of those reactors are going to have to be breeders. Accidents in fast breeders are potentially even worse than Chernobyl.
And even if, Germany is more densely populated than the Ukraine. The Chernobyl exclusion zone in Ukraine is the same size as the state of Saarland.
So I made a mistake and it's for 1 ton not 1 KG but my point rest, even divided by 1000: Germany destroy close to their GDP per year with their electrical production emission, which is in my book worse than potentially, loosing a region if you are unlucky.
> Found the source at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-020-02785-4.
> So I made a mistake and it's for 1 ton not 1 KG but my point rest, even divided by 1000: Germany destroy close to their GDP per year with their electrical production emission, which is in my book worse than potentially, loosing a region if you are unlucky.
Are there more ionizing radiation in a German mushroom or boar than in an average banana?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium-137
Still even though it's hard to find good numbers, and the average seems to be ~ banana / kg. I believe there's at least reports of mushrooms and boars with ~10-100 times the radiation of an average banana.
I don't think it's actually possible to show any health effects of that amount of radiation, even if ingested (and excreted) but it's more than the average banana.
It would have made more sense though to first replace coal plants before shutting down nuclear plants.
They could have chosen to continue operating the old contraptions unsafely, but chose not to shoulder Fukushima-style risks.
Armchair second-guessing is misleading. Each euro spent on one is a euro not spent on the other.
I actually feel sorry for them.
I felt similarly. Then I learned about Bonhoeffer's theory of stupidity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc
No progress in the conversation and no discussion of more subtle aspects, like centralization of control/power, systemic risk, nuclear proliferation etc.
One problem is that France's nuclear industry has committments to use something like 2/3rds of the world's reserves of Uranium Ore.
Another problem is, we've had 3 once-in-1000 years accidents in 40 years. By my calculations, the entire world will be a radioactive waste dump in 250,000 years, given the rate of land contamination by nuclear accidents.
Why do nuclear cheerleaders ignore this fact? They must.
That means that the oil, gas, wind and solar industry has more money and interest in spreading FUD.
On top of that the fear that has been succesfully deployed, has pushed nuclear energy into a bureaucratic nightmare, driving up costs, and also incentivizing a large part of the nuclear industry (the part living off the regulation and bureaucracy) to continue the FUD.
The total number of causalities and environmental impact from non-weaponized nuclear power, including Chernobyl, Fukushima and three mile island are so small, that I guess a larger number of people have died or been injured from rare-earth metal mines for solar panels or floods due to dams for water turbines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
Electricity generation isn't the only way we use fossil fuels and cause pollution. Fertilizer production needs hydrogen, where does that hydrogen come from? Natural gas. Why? Because not using natural gas increases the energy costs of fertilizer production near 10x over. Since it is currently 1% of total world electricity consumption already, that is a near 10% global increase in electricity demand for one (admitedly large) product. The replacement of plastics with other materials like paper, glass, and metal? All require higher energy input to produce than plastic. Not to mention that plastic will eventually breakdown and release carbon also. As the most economical mines start to dry up and we seek lesser ores to mine, mining and processing electrical requirements will continue to rise. Nearly every chemical reagent all around you causes pollution during products, but it can be 90% solved, mostly by the addition of more electrical electricity for heating, cooling, high and low pressure chambers, ect. to not create so many waste products that we trash into both the atmosphere and the ground and water. We don't use those cleaner methods now mostly because using the electricity to do so costs a LOT more. Nearly every industry on earth can be cleaner, but it costs significantly more electricity which needs to be fairly cheap. Something like concrete production could be done more far more cleanly, but again, massive amounts of additional electricity needed. And that is before we get into things like active carbon sequestering.
Or goals shouldn't be a direct replacement of fossil fuel electricity sources, our goals should be exceeding currently world electrical output multiple times over without fossil fuels, which means we should be producing nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal power across the board in an attempt to meet our extreme future demands.
Maybe solar and wind and batteries will be up to the task in the future with some new technology, but also maybe not. Nuclear is a known feasible solution to providing as much power as we could ever want or need with technology we have right now. Solar and battery tech is often assuming we will continue on the same path of increased efficiency and reduced costs seemingly indefinitely, but you know what, they thought the same thing with nuclear energy until they started hitting some walls in generation efficiency and costs. And if it ends up not being significantly cheaper or easier, you gotta start bringing up questions of land usage and grid complexity on top of everything else.
Meanwhile the price keeps rising...
years of anti-nuclear propaganda all over EU past decade, thanks Germany, only to end up depending on the US even more, while boycotting their friend France