$60/MWh for advanced nuclear electricity is achievable: GE Hitachi Executive | Hacker News Reader

$60/MWh for advanced nuclear electricity is achievable: GE Hitachi Executive

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170 pointsPaulHoule366 comments

The independent review of costs for nuscale they link is brutal:

https://ieefa.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/NuScales-Small-...

> As currently structured, those project risks will be borne by the buying entities (participants), not NuScale or Fluor, its lead investor. In other words, potential participants need to understand that they would be responsible for footing the bill for construction delays and cost overruns, as well as being bound by the terms of an expensive, decades-long power purchase contract.

> These compelling risks, coupled with the availability of cheaper and readily available renewable and storage resources, further weaken the rationale for the NuScale SMR.

He seems to be complaining that NuScale keeps increasing the energy output of its modules. Am I reading that right?

Nuscale is moving the goalposts - they started off with lots of modules with small power output on each and slowly approached few modules with lots of power each. A few more iterations and they will be indistinguishable from a regular nuke plant.

None of that matters, really, so long as the modular reactor remains small enough to have fully passive protections and no need for large containment structures. That is the real value of small modular reactors.

The linked article doesn't say if any of these properties are affected by the change, so I have no way of assessing it.

You may be confusing NuScale with someone else.

NuScale got an approval for an SMR that produces 50 MW of electricity (see [1], published by NRC in the Federal Register)

  > The NuScale reactor building is designed to hold up to 12 power modules. Each power module has a rated thermal output of 160 megawatt thermal (MWt) and electrical output of 50 megawatt electric (MWe), yielding a total capacity of 600 MWe for 12 power modules

NuScale has also applied for another approval, for a slightly larger design for an SMR that generates 77 MW of electricity. The review in underway [2]. They don't have any other reactor in the pipeline. 77 MW is more than the already approved 50 MW, but it is nowhere near what a full-size nuclear reactor produces.

[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/01/19/2023-00...

[2] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/smr/licensing-acti...

Yes, out of context that is the least damning of the many issues raised.

But if you claim you can reduce costs by building something you call a small modular reactor, and it keeps getting less small and less modular, questions do arise as to whether the initial costs will similarly become more like traditional fission.

> nuke generation is cheap if you push all the risks for construction cost overruns onto someone else.

I am a big fan of nuke as the generation source that is mostly environmentally benign right now today full stop. It's well known, though, that the main problem with nuke is that it's very expensive to build because we're quite worried about the safety so we have a lot of process and regulatory approval built into the design and construction. That extra process and regulatory approval is quite expensive.

Of course it's a lot cheaper if you just disregard those things.

> nuke generation is cheap if you push all the risks for construction cost overruns onto someone else.

This is what France tried to do with the reactor they built for Finland. There was a budget hole of a few billion and an argument/lawsuit over who would pay for it.

Nuclear costs are a hot potato.

The EPR design is bloated because germany wanted to sabotage the project and achieved to increase the cost through additional security no other nuclear plant ever needed.

That's an interesting idea, any source? Certainly the containment building is very heavy construction, supposed to be able to withstand a passenger jet collision. Keep in mind the design was made right after the WTC attacks.

> That's an interesting idea, any source?

Sadly, I had one months ago but I can't find it again.

The EPR have a double containement layer where EPR2 have a single one. The EPR was also an industrial demonstrator.

> supposed to be able to withstand a passenger jet collision.

Our autorithy of nuclear safety says any regular nuclear plants should be able to whistand an passanger jet collision, but added extra protection on the EPR for it: https://www.francetvinfo.fr/replay-radio/le-vrai-du-faux/seg...

> Even if "they are not built to withstand such a shock without damage, nuclear power plants would offer a good resistance capacity", assures the Nuclear Safety Authority. But no evaluation exists because this type of accident was considered at the time as totally improbable.

That said, after the authorities and EDF claim to have made arrangements for the construction of the future Flamanville EPR. "The specific protection against falling aircraft called aircraft hull is a reinforced concrete structure covering the following buildings: the reactor building, two divisions of the safeguard auxiliaries building and the fuel building".

The fact remains that zero risk does not exist, as Jacques Repussard, Director General of IRSN, affirmed during his hearing before a parliamentary commission of inquiry last February: "I could not affirm under oath that in the event crash of a very large aircraft, loaded with tens of tons of fuel, the consequences of the fire would be brought under control"

Further to your point - South Korea built 4 reactors for the UAE at the Barakah site. Took 11 years from deal to first grid connection and cost $25 billion for 5.3 GW of nameplate capacity. It's expected to cost another $20 billion for operation, maintenance and fuel

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant supply.

Contrast that to the Al Dhafra PV project also in the UAE - $1 billion for 2 GW of nameplate capacity. One can apply whatever discount is wanted to account for solar's shortcomings and it still comes out ahead when planning an energy generation portfolio. Further away from the equator a similar case can be made for wind.

The Barakah reactors will be generating 5.3 GWh from 6 pm to 8am which of course solar can't do. In that time it will deliver 14 hours X 5.3 GW ~= 75 GWh of electricity.

Capital costs for 4 hour utility scale lithium storage are expected to be $250 million per GWh by 2025. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/79236.pdf

75 GWh x $250 million = ~$19 billion to get those gigawatt hours from storage.

The nameplate capacity of the solar plant to generate 75 GWh for night time use in the hours from 8 am to 6pm is 7.5 GW. To prove my point let's double that to 15 GW.

The cost of that 15 GW solar plant, based on the Al Dhafra PV plant would be $7.5 billion. Another 5 GW solar plant to deliver the same day time GWh that the reactors do...let's double that to 10 GW so another $5 billion.

So my back of the napkin calculations say that the cost to replace the Barakah reactors with solar + storage are: - $19 billion for Li-ion storage - $7.5 billion for a solar plant to charge that storage for nighttime use. - $5 billion for a solar plant to deliver (more than) equivalent daytime use.

$31.5 billion in total. Very much competitive with the nuclear option taking into account a) time to completion / general project risk b) the falling cost of storage plus the development of new options like sodium ion storage c) radioactive waste risks, solvable as they are d) security concerns - Houthi rebels fired a few missiles at the Barakah site a while back. e) construction and operational workforce skill requirements

The math here seems pretty well reasoned. But it assumes that the price doesn't change as the amount of materials increases. Can an organization just write a $10b check and get the batteries? Does anyone just have the stock of them sitting around?

I'd have to imagine not. And that it might take as long to get all the batteries built and installed as it does to build a nuke plant.

If you cut a $10 billion check, I think you can negotiate yourself to the front of the line. Also, we are talking about the UAE - $30 billion for energy is a significantly better investment than a large number of Softbank bets.

Total global battery production seems to be 200-300GWh/year. If you want to buy approx 30% of total yearly output it's very unlikely you can negotiate your way to the head of the line. In fact, buying that much might raise global prices for batteries.

If I want enough solar panels and batteries to make my house off grid I can just write a check and the stuff shows up in a few weeks. But that doesn't scale upwards without limit. Eventually the limits on global supply kick in no matter how much you want it.

Nobody said the installation had to happen overnight. A five year plan would be impressive and still feasible.

Worth pointing out here that nobody is planning to do large scale 12-hour storage with lithium ion batteries.

Even leaving out better battery chemistries for the moment, you can use pumped hydro (even with seawater - some of the UAE’s highest mountains are near the coast) and thermal storage (you might think you don’t need it in such a hot place but you’ve still got to bake bread etc etc).

Word on the street is that locations for pumped hydro are, for a variety of reasons that vary by locale, pretty much maxed out already.

Pumped hydro doesn't require mountains, you can also dig an underground reservoir.

Pumped hydro requires a large volume of fluid and a height difference.

Valleys are useful as they provide a large volume that can be capped with relative ease.

An underground reservoir requires a large volume to be excavated (or a pre existing cave system) and a deeper chamber again for the turbines to powered by the fall .. to yet another deeper underground reservoir.

I'm not saying this is impossible, I stating that as an engineering venture (actual civil engineering not software "engineering") there are some real challenges and greater ones than using existing topography.

You're hand waving a lot away with your comment.

To be honest I'm pretty doubtful the economics of excavating a reservoir are going to work. It needs to be very big and very deep, which is going to be very expensive unless you're planning to go all Edward Teller (don't go all Edward Teller).

You're mixing it up with hydroelectric dams which need a river. Pumped hydro needs two close bodies of water at different heights. That geography is very very common.

> That geography is very very common.

Could you provide some more info for this? My understanding was a lot of the sites that could do this, have done. If that's not the case it'd be good to see what the real picture is.

There's no point if you don't have energy to store. Only 1% of potential sites need to be developed

https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/

Probably won't happen because batteries will be even cheaper by the time much of it is developed.

That link is what makes me concerned when talking on these topics. Far too much certainty and trust seem to be derived from and placed in such studies.

In this case, from the study:

> None of the PHES sites discussed in this study have been the subject of geological, hydrological, environmental, heritage and other studies, and it is not known whether any particular site would be suitable. The commercial feasibility of developing these sites is unknown.

> makes me concerned

There it is. Always so concerned" about whatever imaginary downside alternatives have, but completely credulous about nuclear which has failed over and over again.

You're claiming without any evidence whatsoever that at least 99% of geographically appropriate sites are unusable.

> Always so concerned" about whatever imaginary downside alternatives have

It's not a downside. It's a problem with the study.

> completely credulous about nuclear which has failed over and over again

Can you cite where I've done this?

> You're claiming without any evidence whatsoever that at least 99% of geographically appropriate sites are unusable.

And where I've done this?

yes and no. we've put dams in the obvious places, but we're mostly using them as generation rather than storage. switching them to be run as batteries will massively expand the amount of grid storage.

Pumped hydro is storage by definition, is it not?

A dam in a river can either be used as generation (if you always run it) or as storage if you vary the output. Most pumped hydro is already storage, but most hydro currently isn't pumped.

And it’s worth pointing out here that conventional hydro is being optimised in some places for a world with a lot of wind and solar in the grid.

In a nutshell, you put in more generators to maximise your peak generation capacity, and operate them only when required.

Ah, understood. But this isn't to do with renewable power storage at this point, just using artificial lakes as separate peak power storage?

Outside of the enormous engineering pitfalls of dealing with seawater, you would even get a slight boon in energy storage because it is 2-3% more dense than pure water.

To make the costs more comparable, in the report he mentions, they estimate 2.5% per year of the installed battery capacity cost as the ongoing maintenance costs. And, the batteries have an 85% efficiency rating meaning they'd need 92 gwh of installed battery capacity to meet the 75 gwh demand, so tack on an additional $4.25 billion so the battery cost which is now $23 billion.

Based on the lifetimes of these South Korean plants(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_South_Korea), I'm just going to use 40 years as the lifetime for these calculations as I couldn't find any numbers for how long the UAE expects that plant to be operating regarding that operational costs of $20 billion which gives us:

Maintenance costs for solar of: 40 years x $23 billion x 2.5% = $23 billion

So now we're at a total current cost of $46 +7.5 = $53.5 billion for Solar vs. $45 billion for Nuclear.

Edit: Forgot the actual cost of the solar array that G80z said was $7.5 billion

The amount of solar/wind paired storage drops significantly if you take into account wind energy's anti correlation with solar, demand shaping and overproduction.

It isnt just a matter of getting 2GW of solar and getting enough batteries to supply 2GW through the night.

We should disregard the cost and aggressively subsidize a massive expansion of nuclear power, guaranteeing the price for consumers (matching something reasonable re the market).

Some might proclaim that's not fair competitively. I have no interest in being fair about the matter, I don't want my government to be either.

There are certainly a lot of excuses for why nuclear is so expensive. As far as I can tell they are all just that, excuses. Korea is by far the largest producer of nuclear power plants today. They have the scale that people claim is necessary to reduce cost. They have the pro nuclear regulatory environment that would never be politically possible in the states. Nuclear still costs them more than solar and wind.

> Nuclear still costs them more than solar and wind

...if you ignore storage.

Solar and wind will continue to be the most expensive, difficult to scale method until the issue of energy storage is resolved.

Batteries are getting cheaper, but they're not being produced on the scale necessary to supplant base load power. Until then, you need to calculate the full cost of base load into the cost of solar and wind if you want to consider them a substitute, rather than a compliment.

nit: compliment → complement (in this case)

sigh I blame my phone's auto-correct feature.

Sure, but the biggest problem with nuclear is it takes a decade to build the plants, at best. It's impossible to plan on that time scale because you have no idea what the alternatives will look like once the plant is operational. You may have just spent billion on an energy source that is already obsolete.

That's a figure with some bounce to it:

    Nuclear reactors connected to the grid in 2021 had a median construction time of 88 months. (7.3 years) [1]

and

    According to an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) study, Tuesday, 15 countries have built a total of 83 nuclear plants over the last 20 years among the 31 countries with nuclear power. It took on average 190 months to build each plant.

    During that period, Korea has built a total of 13 nuclear power plants. The average construction period for each plant was only 56 months (4.6 years), more than three times faster than other countries building nuclear plants. [2]

South Korea insists it meets Nuclear Safety and Security Commission standards, by contrast:

    In France, [ ... ] taking an average of 126 months to build each plant, nearly three times as long as Japan. [2]

    The United States has a total of 100 nuclear power plants, taking on average 272 months to complete one. [2]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/712841/median-constructi...

[2] https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/2027347/south-korea-s...

You should definitely add the timelines for Japan and China from [2]

  Japan, which has built a total of eight nuclear power plants since 1996, was the fastest, taking only 46 months to build each plant, while China ranked third, building 28 nuclear power plants during that period and averaging 68 months to complete each one.

  Japan’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant Unit 6 is the world’s fastest-built nuclear power plant, taking only 39 months for completion, while of Korea’s Wolseong Nuclear Power Plant Reactor 3 took 49 months to build.

> The United States has a total of 100 nuclear power plants, taking on average 272 months to complete one.

Looks like one or two plants never finished.

You don't build a nuclear power plant for in ten years though, you build and plan it for the next 100. If there's better sources once it's been built, that's fine, they can be operated alongside the nuclear power plant - or the plant can be decomissioned, it wouldn't be the first one that gets decomissioned even before being put into production.

From the point of view of someone providing a stable grid no matter the cost this is correct. But from an investor's point of view this is problematic.

Most of the cost of nuclear power is in building and demolishing the plant, not in operating it. So if you plan a plant now to go operational in 10 years and run for the next 50, you are locked in to producing electricity for (amortized) $60/MWh for the next decades. Or shut it down early and eat a giant loss, if the projections for solar, wind and storage costs become true. That's a hard sell when you also have the option to build a wind farm in 5 years or a solar installation in two, decommission them after 20 years and repeat with whatever is the most cost effective then.

> if you plan a plant now to go operational in 10 years and run for the next 50, you are locked in to producing electricity for (amortized) $60/MWh for the next decades. Or shut it down early and eat a giant loss

Time will tell if that hypothesis remains true, but inflation is a thing. What you build now with an amortizing cost over decades may weight much cheaper on your debt than you thought.

In that aspect, if you're a state actor, paying more to get lower maintenance costs is usually a good choice.

I would bet money that storage is a solved problem by the end of the decade, about the same amount of time it takes to build a nuclear reactor.

What stocks are you buying and how much of your retirement fund are you betting?

Most of the companies I'd like to buy aren't public yet. As for retirement, I'd probably put 20% into energy storage, again if I could.

It's a false dichotomy anyway, because I wouldn't put _any_ money into nuclear stocks.

LiCycle and GMET, and also exercising my own company’s stock options. As soon as Form Energy goes public I’ll put a significant amount of money into them as well.

Storage IS a solved problem, it's just not scaled up yet (batteries) or depends on geography (water / hydro).

Battery storage is still mostly LiIon, simply because it has a lot of preexisting investment in R&D and large-scale production. I expect battery storage to become much more economical once a technology developed for the requirements of grid-scale storage takes off. There are plenty of good candidates, but none of them seem to be quite there yet.

I also expect a lot more hydro to be built eventually, it's not as dependent on geography if you just build two ponds at different elevations for pumped hydro, or repurpose old mineshafts to get the elevation difference on flat ground.

You are my hero, been telling this at clouds for years after I took a power engineering course. Solar and wind are cheaper until you consider storage and grid reliability. Grid storage battery can be used for peaker/frequency regulation regardless of what you used to charge them full stop.

They're five times cheaper when you dont take storage into account. Theyre cheaper after you consider storage too.

Indeed, if you use solar and wind to synthesize natural gas and burn that for electricity (a process that is ~40% efficient) it's still cheaper.

https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...

This means that even on the darkest most windless winter days when the grid has to eat into long term seasonal storage, solar and wind energy is currently still cheaper than an MWh of nuclear power is on the sunniest, windiest days.

I too, am pro-grid scale solar (and wind). However, solar and wind require both land, or at least suitable locations. It aint compact. The decision to do solar might be constrained by population centers - you can't build it too far away, but can't be too close; there may not be such an available space.

Nuclear is compact, and can really be built anywhere (may be consider earthquakes and don't build near tsunami zones). Therefore, a country that does not have suitable solar or win terrain would necessarily have to consider nuclear. A place like South Korea.

But of course, countries like australia (and to some extend the USA, and many other countries that's not in europe) would have the land, and it's just political and financial reasons that these power sources aren't more invested in.

It doesn't monopolize that land though. There is already a vast amount of farmland, for instance, which is hosting wind and solar and operating about as efficiently as before.

In theory nuclear power being compact would serve it well for small countries without a lot of space (e.g. Singapore), but because of the risks they want nothing to do with it.

South Korea builds nuclear power for the same reason as Iran and Sweden: it's part of their national strategy to be able to quickly develop nukes. It's not about economics.

> Nuclear is compact, and can really be built anywhere (may be consider earthquakes and don't build near tsunami zones). Therefore, a country that does not have suitable solar or win terrain would necessarily have to consider nuclear.

It really isn't if mining is expanded. Low yield mines (the only kind left for new resource) produce tens of watts per m^2

It has also shown no evidence of being viable without a river, coastline or lake. It needs specific geological and geographic features and it can't be too close to population centers or important watersheds.

Contrast with wind where the land right up to the base of the tower can be used and solar where the land under the panels can be more productive than it would without partial shade (effectively a negative land use).

Not that the quantity of land matters because for solar it's over 20W/m^2 and usually over 50W/m^2 -- more land is reserved for the average US car to park in than required to power someone's life.

> Theyre cheaper after you consider storage too.

What's the price of the Ukraine war?

So you're advocating for a base load of natural gas power plants, with wind and solar supplementing them, which was my original point- that they only work as a supplement, rather than a replacement, for nuclear and fossil fuels.

Maybe nuclear isn't a great alternative to natural gas. I'm down with that. I'm not going to ignore the fact that wind and solar are at best complimentary, and that we can talk about pricing them without also talking about pricing in the base load that they're supplementing.

I'm advocating for solar+wind+batteries+pumped storage+windgas long term which provides supply matching demand cheaper than nuclear power.

Windgas (synthesized natural gas) is carbon neutral, for what it's worth. It's inefficient to make but stores for long periods very cheaply so it's good for when the pumped storage and batteries run dry - e.g. rare long spells of relatively dark/still weather.

Short term while grids are 60% natural gas powered with no need for baseload it makes even less sense to build nuclear instead of solar or wind. 5x more expensive and 5x-20x as long to build? Why?

> Solar and wind are cheaper until you consider storage and grid reliability.

Counter example. South Australia hit 80% of it's electricity production from renewables in the last two quarters:

    https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australia-enjoys-80-1-pct-wind-and-solar-share-in-blackout-free-summer/

Power prices are now cheaper then before renewables were took over:

    https://www.aemc.gov.au/sites/default/files/2021-11/sa_fact_pack.pdf

Grid reliability remains about the same as everywhere else:

    https://reneweconomy.com.au/five-years-after-blackout-south-australia-now-only-state-with-no-supply-shortfalls/

Sodium ion batteries will change this equation. 150 wh/kg, not even lithium is needed.

The tech for sodium ion batteries have been around since the 1970's or 80's. The problem is capacity fade- the most stable anodes require titanium or molybdenum, and even then they're not a great deal better than lead acid batteries.

The cheapest low-end estimate for sodium-ion batteries is $40 per kw/h of capacity. The Texas grid at any point had about 85 gigawatts of available generation capacity in 2021 (100% would be around 115, but solar and wind aren't always producing, plants are sometimes offline for maintenance, etc).

So, with no nuclear or fossil fuel production, you're looking at $27 billion just to buy the batteries (not counting installation or maintenance costs) to keep the lights on for 8 hours in Texas on a windless night.

That's at the cheapest option, so you can figure that you'll need to pay roughly 1/4 of that a year making up for batteries that have lost capacity. If you double it, that drops to 1/5 to 1/6 the total cost, unless a miracle occurs in anode tech or the weather is wonderful and they don't cycle as frequently.

Of course, three days of mild, cloudy weather means brownouts or blackouts, because 8 hours of storage is not very much at all. If it were connected to other grids, they could import excess energy from across the continent, but that means those places won't be recharging their own batteries, and you now need to factor in more HVDC lines, and over-provisioning to cover transmission losses into your base price.

Nobody is saying replace ALL energy generation with wind and solar. It’s ok to have a baseline to keep the basics running at least. Also I never understood why is the default that we all have to have as much energy at our disposal as we want, with a bit of preparation on our end we can easily deal with any intermittent power issues. This is such a consumerist, comfort-over-everything view

> This is such a consumerist, comfort-over-everything view

I wish this bad-faith nonsense would vanish, and people would stick to issues.

I was in South Africa when the blackouts really started, in 2014 and 2015, and every person and business that could afford it bought a diesel generator. Not for their comfort, except in an extreme definition of the word. For their survival. Businesses cannot survive without power. Hospitals cannot. Communications networks cannot. Electric cars cannot.

But diesel and petrol generators and vehicles can. That's the most likely "preparation on our end".

I’m not talking about those extremes for fucks sake. A smart grid can prioritize hospitals and industry while not allowing you to spend energy on cooling your whole house at 19 Celsius. I’m not talking about going to the level of South Africa, I’m just saying we can be much smarter and deliberate about our energy usage.

We should do anything that is necessary to have power available anytime, even a bit in excess in case of potential spikes that are not usually accounted for.

I do not believe "smart-grids" or blackouts are the solution. And especially not having my power cut because someone somewhere decides that I should cook inside my house because the power consumption priority lies elsewhere.

So you want a future where the electric energy supply is unreliable. Such an infrastructure is orders of magnitude less useful (read cost efficient) than the current one.

There’s big difference in 95 percent reliability and 100 percent. Also with a smart grid we can prioritize industry but limit the cooling of the house to something like 25 degrees C. I’m talking about doing smart things with energy without just having a free for all

> Also I never understood why is the default that we all have to have as much energy at our disposal as we want

And there it is. Active hostility to improving our civilisational capabilities, celebrating decline. "People shouldn't have so much", and of course they never mean themselves. Politburo mindset.

Yes let's improve it but not by boiling the planet and destroying it for the next generations so we can be nice and comfy. I honestly don't understand your point - either development is sustainable or it's not. If it's not it's selfish. IF you think that any care for others or a sense of responsibility leads to communism, you're the one that's brainwashed

Every generation since the dawn of time has had its doomsday prophets. The underlying psychology is "I can not imagine a world without me", in other words: pure narcissism. There is a reason its called "Extinction Rebellion" - look at their manifest [0], and tell me this is isn't a death cult.

I'm not saying climate change isn't real or that it isn't a problem, but we're certainly not "boiling the planet", and attacking the most vital foundation our societies are based on, namely reasonably cheap energy (everything depends on this), is insanely dangerous.

If the medicine is worse than the illness, its time to get rid of the doctor.

[0] "Advice to Young People as they face Annihilation" https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xlEbMab_dRs4Wx3nESYT0bkF...

Funny how all rationalizations we come to are conveniently the ones that alleviate us from any responsibility or blame. I'm advocating for taking responsibility, tackling the problem seriously and making sacrifices if necessary. I believe we can solve the problem and I'm all for improving the world of atoms instead of everybody working on stupid service industry jobs or pushing ads and widgets, but I don't see it happening - especially looking at responses to my post.

[0] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/

> Funny how all rationalizations we come to are conveniently the ones that alleviate us from any responsibility or blame.

See, you accuse me of rationalizing, because I apparently choose „the easy way out“. Making sacrifices is a feature, not a bug! This tells me climate activism satisfies a deep human need, the need for redemption, now that Christianity is dead. We sinned, and thus must atone. I get it, we all like to feel like Good People.

The problem is just that so much is at stake, namely our energy supply.

Man I don't know how to talk to people like you. It's like I'm going crazy. Imagine we're a tribe and most people are burning all wood supplies and wasting food having parties constantly. And some people are saying "hey winter is coming, we have to prepare, we'll be hungry and die" and all you get is "but look how comfy we are, look at all the warm jacuzzis we made, stop bugging me." Depressing.

To repeat myself: I'm not saying climate change isn't real or that it isn't a problem. We need to get off fossil fuels due to climate impact, finite deposits and health reasons. There are several ways how this can be done without dooming our children to significantly worse prosperity.

I take issue with the "if it doesn't hurt, it doesn't count" sentiment I so often encounter in these discussions. This tells me that it is not about solving a physics problem, which it is, but something different and potentially much more dangerous.

A good historical parallel to Extinction Rebellion:

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

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

They had a real problem with cattle diseases -- and a more imaginary problem with Europeans in "their" land -- and somehow imagined killing ALL their cattle would help solve both problems.

(Both the Xhosa and the Europeans were recent immigrants to the area.)

You think the world's scientists constitute some kind of Politburo?

While the fossil companies - the ones that suppressed the research from those scientists for decades - are the freedom-loving heroes in this story?

This is the laziest strawman reply I‘ve received so far.

Because comfort matters? Essentially every advancement in society/technology is about making things easier and humans more comfortable.

Also, changing my home’s thermostat to 72 from 68 isn’t going to make renewables-only (or mostly) feasible. It would barely make a dent.

The only question is is it sustainable or not. I'd be very happy if there were many kWh of energy cheap and easy energy available to all. With how we currently approach the issue, the supporting systems will give out way before we reach that point. So, when your grandchildren ask why did you let things get to a point where whole cities need to be rebuilt, parts of the ecosystem have collapsed and constant wars are occurring over resources and migrations, show them this post and say hey at least I was comfortable.

You mean you will show them all of recorded human history?

Humans have always fought over resources. The idea that we should sacrifice advancement for purported sustainability is a very recent idea.

I’m overall still very happy the Industrial Revolution happened (despite global warming effects) and that we aren’t still living in an 1800s society where I have to worry about dying from an infected papercut or toiling away with a pickaxe.

We are living in the most peaceful time ever recorded. It’s hubris to think we are the “problem generation” or that the problems we face today aren’t solvable.

No, it's hubris to think we'll easily manage a system that's handling 44 quadrillion watts of power

Your baseline has to come from somewhere, which means the cost of that baseline has to be added into solar and wind. It's been my central point all along; intermittent generation can only complement, not replace, nuclear or fossils. At that point, you're better off building nuclear at scale using reproducing designs (or as close to as possible) to bring costs down like South Korea.

There's a solar install not too far from the Canadian border that has produced zero energy for months. It had to be shut down because, despite the panels being 16 feet tall, there are 12 feet of snow around them from accumulation and drifting. Over the next two days, they're getting another 6-12 inches of snow and sleet- conditions which cause wind turbines to draw energy from the grid to heat the blades so they don't build up ice and get damaged.

Is the answer to everyone not on the coast north of Arkansas to move somewhere else? For the whole of Canada to just get fucked?

No. All these answers use some extreme example. Fossil fuels are very useful, but they come with drawbacks. Let's not use them for everything just because it's currently conventient, let's make a scientific, engineering and manufacturing push to mitigate the bad effects as much as possible and use smart grids, renewable energy, nuclear and behaviour changes where possible. What a stupid answer. Don't put solar where it's covered in snow for months at a time, nobody is saying that.

The investment and energy going into solving energy storage will bear fruit long before any of the many technical and regulatory hurdles in the way of cheap nuclear power are cleared. And I’ve put my money where my mouth is on this.

how much storage capacity do you think is needed to deal with the worst cases for solar/wind that are encountered during the year? Last time I did a rough calculation on this, I quickly realized there is a fairly low upper limit on how much wind/solar capacity one can install, because the storage required is so immense.

Don’t have the number in my head, but my day job is building software to enable (among other things) moving load around to avoid the “worst case,” which is just as good as building the storage.

> Don’t have the number in my head

That’s because it’s weeks, if not months, in places that have actual seasons.

> moving load around to avoid the “worst case,”

There is no such thing with base load in winter. You either provide constant heating or people freeze.

There are places where rearranging the chairs works and there are places where it doesn’t.

There hasn‘t been a single day in Germany last year where renewable energy dropped below 30% of consumption. So overbuilt geographically dispersed systems can handle a very wide range of weather conditions, even without battery and hydrogen storage taken into account.

German grid must be very low in terms of CO2 emissions then, right? Not just marginally better than neighbouring Poland?

One of the biggest blind spots in this conversation is people who think renewables need lots of storage, but nuclear doesn't.

What's your calculation on the amount of batteries needed for a nuclear grid to meet all peak needs?

Once you've done the sums you'll almost certainly say something like, "well we can just overbuild nuclear and find uses for the excess, including timeshifting".

It's the exact same problem (matching demand and supply), with the same solutions but one gets hyperfocus at the same time the other is totally ignored.

Nuclear doesn't need any storage because the power is generated continuously at the same pace. On the other hand, there's no sun during the night and wind strength is variable and cannot always be harnessed.

If you want to have all the power generated by renewable, you would need big enough storage to hold all the power consumption during the highest peaks - like really hot summer nights where everyone is running AC at maximum. And it tends to cost quite a lot to have a giant UPS. And, because we need power 24/7, you need to have that in a redundant fashion, which basically boils down to two giant UPS systems in the gigawatt range. And I have this feeling that doing this is very dirty and very expensive to build and maintain.

but demand isn't flat.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35441549

right, but that means you still have to over-build capacity

So are you complaining about changing demand? Or about overbuilding?

Note: it's much easier to "overbuild" nuclear because nothing can compare to it in terms of power density.

Demand isn't flat and nuclear can't scale quickly enough to meet the daily peaks and troughs.

> Demand isn't flat and nuclear can't scale quickly enough to meet the daily peaks and troughs.

Of course it can. https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...

--- start quote ---

Modern nuclear plans with light water reactors are designed to have strong manoeuvring capabilities. Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode, i.e. they participate in the primary and secondary frequency control, and some units follow a variable load programme with one or two large power changes per day.

... according to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100 % of its rated power P. with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% of P, per minute.

Most of the modern designs implement even higher manoeuvrability capabilities, with the possibility of planned and unplanned load-following in a wide power range and with ramps of 5% P, per minute.

(Where P is rated power)

--- end quote ---

So you're overbuilding nuclear, and then throwing the extra power away when you don't need it with (at best) no savings on fuel or running costs? That doesn't sound cheap.

Wouldn't it make sense to take some of that power and make hydrogen or something that can be stored for later peaks? Then maybe you can close the nuclear plant you only turn on 1% of the time and fill that peak with hydrogen instead and save a lot of money.

Maybe offer cheap rates at night so EV users fill up on cheap nuclear power when it's available. Or store heat in water tanks or brick. Or use some of that power to pump water uphill like nuclear plants have been doing for half a century already.

You could do like France and schedule refueling during the summer when the demand is lower and taking a plant offline has less impact.

Lots of boring sensible things you can do to match nuclear supply to demand.

But of course if you admit these things exist, it kind of puts a big hole in your argument, so best to pretend they don't happen and are only needed for renewables.

> So you're overbuilding nuclear

So are complaining about changing demand or about overbuilding?

> Wouldn't it make sense to take some of that power and make hydrogen or something that can be stored for later peaks?

Yes, you could probably do that if any if those solutions scaled in any meaningful shape or form.

> But of course if you admit these things exist, it kind of puts a big hole in your argument

My argument was that your claim that "demand isn't flat and nuclear can't scale quickly enough to meet the daily peaks and troughs" is a lie.

None of the weird tangent you went off on makes a hole in this argument: nuclear power can scale quickly and is literally used to do that right now.

The fact that it isn't used for something that you want it used for is completely orthogonal to whether it can be scaled or not. For example, no one stores nuclear power in hydrogen or whatever because it's literally not needed because nuclear power can be scaled quickly on demand.

> My argument was that your claim that "demand isn't flat and nuclear can't scale quickly enough to meet the daily peaks and troughs" is a lie.

That was someone else's argument, and the second part is kind of irrelevant, but it's also true.

The speed that Nuclear can ramp, even in the best case is not enough to match demand spikes. It doesn't ramp as fast as gas plants and gas plants don't ramp as fast as batteries.

So even if you ramp nuclear, at an increased cost, you still need gas or batteries or hydro for fast ramps. So you might as well use the power you ramp down to fill batteries, make syngas or hydrogen or fill pumped storage.

Just like you'd do with excess renewables.

> The speed that Nuclear can ramp, even in the best case is not enough to match demand spikes.

Because Nuclear isn't 100% of all power output. Of course it can't ramp up from, say 20% to 100%.

And yet, it does ramp up quickly.

> It doesn't ramp as fast as gas plants and gas plants don't ramp as fast as batteries.

5% of rated power per minute is plenty fast. Not as fast as gas plants, true. And for batteries... There's this funny little things of: there are literally no batteries at scale required by demand spikes. And won't be in any near future.

Meanwhile if you followed the links, you could see the graph showing how nuclear power plants go from ~650 MW to ~1400MW to meat demand (which is mostly predictable day to day).

How many batteries you need to have extra ~800 MW per plant every day? And how many renewable sources to provide that excess?

(Edit: largest energy storage seems to be Ouarzazate Solar Power Station with 510 MW of storage, thermal storage. Everything else is lower. To keep up with a single nuclear plant in the report you'd need two of those)

> Just like you'd do with excess renewables.

Except, for "excess renewables" you need to both overbuild them significantly more, and provide significantly more batteries because besides fast load following (which they can't do, and nuclear can) their base load is literally zero (and it's never zero with nuclear unless you take the plant completely offline).

Spikes occur at various timescales. There are seasonal spikes (due to heating/AC), daily spikes (more power in morning and evening), and spikes on the millisecond to minute level due to random chance. Nuclear can't deal with the short spikes, and while it can deal with the long spikes, it's not efficient to do so since roughly 100% of the costs of nuclear are initial construction and personnel so running at reduced power levels doesn't save any cost.

Batteries already exist that handle demand spikes on the shorter timescales (e.g. in Australia). and hydro is currently the best for medium timescale storage (that said there's a bunch of R&D currently into better grid batteries since they have very different performance requirements than portable batteries since weight and volume don't matter, just cost and cycles).

Nuclear is pretty much the worst tech to overbuild because it's already expensive and it's price per kwh goes way up if you use it infrequently.

> Spikes occur at various timescales. There are seasonal spikes (due to heating/AC), daily spikes (more power in morning and evening), and spikes on the millisecond to minute level due to random chance.

The first two are easily handled by nuclear (which you'd know if you read the report).

Literally nothing can handle "millisecond spikes due to random chance".

Renewables like solar and wind can't really handle any of the three because their power generation is intermittent. So you have to overbuild both them and their storage.

> Batteries already exist that handle demand spikes on the shorter timescales (e.g. in Australia).

Of course they don't exist. Not anywhere near the scale required.

> and hydro is currently the best for medium timescale storage

Ah yes, hydro. That is so easily available and easy to build just about anywhere, and on the required scale.

> Nuclear is pretty much the worst tech to overbuild because it's already expensive and it's price per kwh goes way up if you use it infrequently.

Of course it's the best tech to "overbuild" (because you don't need to overbuild much).

Once again:

- it's the highest energy density we know

- it's stable power generation (not intermittent like most renewables)

- it requires significantly less storage (because it can scale up quickly: most renewables can't even handle daily power spikes)

- it requires significantly less area to build

- the costs for renewables somehow never include the costs for the required overbuilding and the costs for required storage.

Again: in the report you can see just one of the power plants easily scale from 650MW to 1400 MW during the day. And that's for power plants built 45 years ago. What are your renewable + battery solutions capable of that, and their cost?

> The first two are easily handled by nuclear

I never said or implied otherwise.

> Literally nothing can handle "millisecond spikes due to random chance".

Batteries can (see https://energytransition.org/2015/06/batteries-stabilize-the...)

> Of course they don't exist.

Wrong. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/08/australia-switches-on-victor...

> That is so easily available and easy to build just about anywhere, and on the required scale.

I know, right! It's so cool! https://www.energy.gov/eere/water/hydropower-program

> because you don't need to overbuild much).

Based on variation of demand, you need to overbuild any source by at least 50% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...

> it's the highest energy density we know

Doesn't matter at all. We don't pay by land used, we pay by total cost.

> it's stable power generation

True. That's why it makes sense to have for baseload (but is stupid to overbuild)

> it requires significantly less storage

Not really since no one would ever build a purely nuclear grid because it would cost way too much.

> it requires significantly less area to build

Again. Irrelevant

> the costs for renewables somehow never include the costs for the required overbuilding and the costs for required storage.

That's because the amount of overbuilding and storage needed depend strongly on a bunch of factors and aren't that useful.

Using https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e... as a source for LCOE numbers by power plant type (there may be a better one). Solar has LCOE of (very roughly) $70/MWH while nuclear has LCOE of roughly $175 if you ignore nuclear's decommissioning and operational costs (which are both significant and would almost certainly push the figure up to over $200).

This yields a pure nuclear grid cost of approximately $85B. Alternatively, you can overbuild solar and wind by 3x and have a couple days of storage (which is doable with hydro), and you come out ahead.

What I said was the Nuclear can run at 100% all the time to account for peaks with little to no impact on the amount of nuclear fuel used. I see it as a super win.

> nuclear doesn't.

nuclear "battery" storage is the uranium or plutonium inside the plant.

>Batteries are getting cheaper, but they're not being produced on the scale necessary to supplant base load power

Snowy 2. Fengning.

I did the math on this myself earlier to understand the problem. Solar is VERY expensive if you include storage, if you can even get it. We will need natural gas and coal until we do. In the future I expect that this will change as battery production gets off the ground at the scale we need. But that will take a lot of time we don't have.

Nuclear makes a lot of sense if we want to be off coal and natural gas in the next 5-10 years. If we want to burn fossil fuels until 2060 then solar and wind are okay I guess. There is a reason that fossil fuel companies lobby heavily against nuclear and fund immense campaigns against it. It's a direct competitor. Solar and battery on the other hand are just barely off the ground right now.

Nuclear reactors typically take about 100 months to build--and that's just the construction phase, not the pre-construction design and permitting--so no, they won't help in the next 5 - 10 years.

1. https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/nuclear-construction-ti...

The article you posted said 6-8 years. 100 months is in the US due to the legal and political climate that supports fossil fuel generation. In the US there is even backlash against wind power of all things... It's part of the reason why nuclear plants are built so large in the US.

This is one problem I have with anti-nuclear propaganda. It uses the fact that it's been so successful at destroying nuclear power, as evidence that it's right in the first place.

In Poland literally overbuilding wind/solar by 10x would not sustain consumption on multiple days in December or January.

Just use the existing fossil fuels plants on those days and build some extra capacity for carbon sequestration...

Are there any realistic carbon sequestration methodologies (other than planting trees) that scale?

planting trees isn't a realistic carbon sequestration. it just delays when the carbon is released (dead decaying tree). The only proper carbon sequestration is to capture it and stick it back in the ground from where it came. there's obvious challenges with that.

Standing forests are perpetual carbon storage. At some point a given area of forest reaches maturity/stability and the rate of tree decay is more or less matched by the rate of tree growth. Once in a while the forest burns down, grows back and reaches maturity again, and once again becomes stored carbon. On average, an area of land that is forest will be carbon storage (as well as wildlife habitat etc).

Trees are great: solar-powered, recursive, self-assembling, carbon sequestration tech.

Forests can't be the only solution to carbon, because of the scale of emissions, but they can be a fraction of the solution.

You're describing temporary storage. That's very different from sequestration. If you don't do something like bury charcoal, it's more or less irrelevant to trying to drain a continuing large supply of carbon.

I agree with your reply. As long as the amount of stored carbon by the forest increases, it is a valid form of carbon sequestration, and, IMHO, the most beautiful.

Regarding other methods, people should Google for: norway carbon sequestration. Note: The volumes are very limited -- not enough to burn coal as your primary energy source, then capture all the CO2 and pump it underground.

To be clear, I am not shilling for non-forest/peat based carbon sequestration. To me, it is mostly a green washing game by big oil, gas, and utility firms to delay action and avoid responsibility.

They all scale if somebody goes and scale them up.

It just a money problem, if the technology has money momentum scaling up issues will also be solved with the same momentum. The collective west just decided nope on nuclear. Which i think will not bite them in their asses now that China and Russia are moving forward.

I'd say that the immediate problem is the electricity generation.

There is no reason at all to scale carbon capture before the electricity generation is mostly carbon-free. As there is no reason at all to scale storage before most of the generation is intermittent.

What leads to ignorant people deciding that since nobody is doing it, it must be impossible.

If you're only using the carbon-intensive power sources as backup power for calm cloudy days, then you don't necessarily need great sequestration -- the expensive crappy natural gas sequestration plants "work" but you wouldn't want to run your whole grid with them. They'll do just fine in a low-carbon world;

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/6/1/17416444...

Pity they can't just connect to their neighbors grids then.

Funny you should say that: Poland installed 4.9 GW of solar in 2022 [0] compared to 5.3 GW capacity (nominal) of nuclear connected to the grid worldwide in 2021[1].

For many years, this has been a debate about nuclear’s supposedly huge potential in the face of actually existing solar and wind capacity running circles around actually existing nuclear.

0. https://notesfrompoland.com/2022/12/20/poland-has-installed-...

1. https://www.world-nuclear.org/world-nuclear-performance-repo...

What is installed in one year has little relevance to what eventual installed capacity will be for solar/wind/nuclear. Once solar/wind becomes a larger amount of installed capacity the immense problems with storage will likely become a huge limiting factor. Have you considered how much storage poland (or any country with large seasonal variation in sun/wind) would actually need for having 50% of it's capacity in solar?

5.3GW global nuclear power capacity globally seems off. Individual plants are on the order of 1-5GW

edit: checked your source and it in fact says global operating nuclear comes to around 370GW which makes more sense. Not making a comment on your point, the numbers just seemed off in my experience

> Poland installed 4.9 GW of solar in 2022 [0] compared to 5.3 GW capacity (nominal) of nuclear connected to the grid worldwide in 2021[1].

This will not extrapolate linearly into the future though. The grid is already being destabilized by all the local generation of solar (most of the installations are on roofs of people's homes). This caused the government to change the law on how much it's paying the individual producers who sell their excess electricity to the grid and now, you're getting paid the actual, momentary price of kWh (which means that, on sunny days, you'll be paid hardly anything at all), instead of a fixed sum that was paid out before. This decreases the profitability of new solar installations by a lot.

That's a political choice being made by those who oppose renewables. It's not a limitation of the technology.

It's not opposition, it's just not overpaying any more.

> Funny you should say that: Poland installed 4.9 GW of solar in 2022 [0] compared to 5.3 GW capacity (nominal) of nuclear connected to the grid worldwide in 2021[1].

With less than 30 hours of sunshine in December it contributes to the grid amount known as "fuck all": https://i.imgur.com/QVNpl06.png Capacity was over 10GW at this point.

It was installed only because of net metering policies, so you generate energy in summer when it does not really matter, and receive it in winter where there's lack of it. Bad policy.

Even wind generally fares better: https://i.imgur.com/2R2nfF2.png 1,3 GW out of ~8GW capacity.

On the other hand, the 5,3GW of nuclear capacity displaces 10x more fossils, because it's actually 5,3GW you can generally count on.

>For many years, this has been a debate about nuclear’s supposedly huge potential in the face of actually existing solar and wind capacity running circles around actually existing nuclear.

Yet, we install tens or hundreds of solar "capacity" that end up not generating any power or overgenerating when we have too much of it. It's pointless, especially in our climate.

The batteries are going to get better and cheaper so much faster than you think. It will seem obvious in hindsight!

I'm not sure thats true, it kind of depends on what the 10x is based on, but regardless its not realy a sensible grid mix:

https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...

32% solar and 60% wind, with an overbuild of 2.5x peak demand each (so 5x peak combined) is the cheapest option, according to the above analysis, filling the remaining 8% with other low carbon options.

In practice, this site shows you need to have ability to fulfill pretty much 100% of your demand via gas alone: https://i.imgur.com/TKGbsHK.png

There's zero chance, just politically, that anyone in this country will agree on additional gas dependency. Does this "cheapest option" actually includes cost of 30GW gas plants anyway?

Anyway I don't see any actual numbers on this page so it's hard for me to treat this seriously. "Cost comparison" only talks about whether "could POLAND run by only building new solar, wind and batteries?" which is very not interesting to me compared to having 30-50% of nuclear generation.

Its not a gas dependency. It's synthesised within your own borders from the overprovisioned solar and wind.

The model has several conservative assumptions that mean no power is imported as fuel or via cross border wires.

Thats fine, its just a model, the main point is that even with those constraints, renewables can provide 92% of power directly, and provide the power to meet the other 8% too. In Poland! (many other countries are more blessed with renewables).

As of 2020, South Korea generated 29% of electricity from nuclear, while solar and wind together amounted to 4%:

https://ember-climate.org/app/uploads/2022/02/Global-Electri...

I'd gladly take expensive nuclear power that exists over non-existing cheap renewables. (Of course, renewables are great, I'm totally rooting for them. I just wish that they are actually, you know, available, instead of being only theoretically available and being used as a rhetorical device against nuclear power.)

Also you omitted some relevant details on South Korean politics: the previous president Moon (2017-2022) and his party was staunchly anti-nuclear and tried hard to phase it out, for the sake of the "environment." Which predictably resulted in continued usage of fossil fuels, which these idiots see as a lesser evil.

(Sadly, his successor, the sitting president Yoon, is a raging buffoon. I mean, he muttered "Wouldn't it be fucking embarrassing for Biden" in front of reporters, what more do you want. Being pro-nuclear is probably the only positive thing I can say of him, but I'm not really counting on that - Yoon being such an idiot, there's a very good chance his policies would be put in reverse by whoever succeeds him.)

> Of course, renewables are great, I'm totally rooting for them. I just wish that they are actually, you know, available, instead of being only theoretically available and being used as a rhetorical device against nuclear power.

They are actually available, maybe Korea just doesn't want to build them? They don't play that well with constant output systems like nuclear so it would make nuclear unprofitable in the longer run. Although this obviously depends on the energy mix, maybe up until a certain percentage renewables would be fine for example.

Tell me more about these available renewable energy sources that work when the sun doesn’t shine, the wind doesn’t blow and aren’t dependent on local geographical features being available.

I have a hard time seeing how this is relevant for what I wrote. Can you doublecheck to be sure you didn't misunderstand the context?

Admittedly the grandparent is somewhat ambiguous about what constitutes availability, but my point was that widely available renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, are intermittent.

That's why we have grids and storage. Perhaps you should investigate those before making definitive statements about what renewables can and can't do.

We have very little storage and the grids require electricity generation from something. With lots of HVDC connections we could conceivably move enormous amounts of electricity around on a continental scale and thereby reduce the need for storage. That would be great...

...but it still won't be enough. We need something that can produce power when renewables can't.

Sure, they're intermittent which is a downside but they still compete away constant output sources. I didn't mention it in my previous reply but it is possible to vary the output to a certain extent (depending on the technology), the problem is that the economics assume a pretty constant output. This equation doesn't add up in certain places anymore. Therefore I expect that we will have a lot fewer constant output energy sources and a lot more variable energy sources. This will be combined with a certain amount of storage, fossil fuel backup plants, systems to timeshift our energy consumption, probably more usage of district heating/cooling systems and a lot of other stuff of course.

It has been a long time since such a day existed. You are talking about a situation that is mostly theoretical. I could come around and claim that nuclear is also totally unreliable, with all the maintenance necessary and the cooling issues, especially in a heating world. Bullshit? Not exactly. Look at the issues France has been having with their reactors in the last 10 years, importing vast amounts of electricity from Germany.

Your example of South Korea, a country with a good record on nuclear power, and a new government with a pro nuclear stance is still aiming to add 2 or 3 times more renewable power than nuclear between now and 2036.

They also intend to make 10% of their power from hydrogen/ammonia which is presumably going to be generated from some combination of nuclear and renewables when demand isn't peaking.

Nuclear fission power apologists frequently make a claim like this when trying to establish why costs are so high (it doesn't necessarily explain why cost overruns are so high, as presumably the regulation set is known at the time of project initiation).

If this were the / a major factor in cost competitiveness, we'd expect to see much higher uptake of nuclear fission power plants in places where, as you might say, those things are disregarded (to varying degrees).

I don't believe that's the case, but can't find convincing data one way or the other.

I wonder if there are examples of massive cost overrun / delayed commissioning nuclear fission plants - say Hinkley in the UK - that could be pointed at to substantiate the 'process and regulatory approval' costs, where those process and regulations changed after the initial cost calculations.

> If this were the / a major factor in cost competitiveness, we'd expect to see much higher uptake of nuclear fission power plants in places where, as you might say, those things are disregarded (to varying degrees).

Aircraft carriers and submarines.

I STM reading (via HN!) that submarine nuke plants are designed not to require (or even have the affordances for) significant maintenance — that when they are “done” (fuel spent?) the power plant is discarded. If this is in fact the case I can imagine it would make for a more reliable and less expensive device.

The economics of nuclear powered subs is quite different from a commercial product. But it’s interesting to consider.

(And just for fun: imagine what effect a “right to repair” law would have…)

Good points.

In addition, military spend capabilities will more readily compensate for the other two sides of the project management triangle. And AIUI a lot of those systems, once initial development occurred, were cookie-cutter / evolutionary designs.

I also understand the mini-reactors for seafaring vessels are much less efficient - but they don't need to be hugely efficient, primarily for the reason you mention.

In any case, I expect the regulatory-driven quality of those devices is ridiculously high. Well the USA systems at least -- obviously Russia had a much less pleasant experience with small reactors on submarines.

Yes, the cost per MWh must be insane. Any nation building nuclear-powered subs and carriers have essentially unlimited R&D and construction budgets.

that only further proves the point, those cases may have more lax safety thresholds but they still wind up wildly over budget all the time.

>If this were the / a major factor in cost competitiveness, we'd expect to see much higher uptake of nuclear fission power plants in places where, as you might say, those things are disregarded (to varying degrees).

Historically NPT treaty prevented a lot of those countries from pursuing peaceful nuclear energy.

Sure, but the NPT(T) can't explain this.

I'll reiterate my earlier two claims slightly more succinctly:

a) we should see a strong correlation between nation states with laxer attitudes towards safety AND more fission nuclear power plants brought online on budget and on time.

b) absent regulation changes through the life of any given project, we should expect to see any given plant brought online on budget and on time.

I don't believe we have a wealth of examples of the latter, and for the former the semi-obvious candidate would be China, however:

" ... China’s government has become more cautious about nuclear power [...]. The target in the 13th five year plan was only 58 gigawatts by 2020, and, as of April 2022, China is yet to reach that capacity target. Judging by what is under construction, China will miss the target of 70 gigawatts by 2025 as well.

"Many Chinese nuclear plants have been delayed and construction costs have exceeded initial estimates."

Citing: https://www.colorado.edu/cas/2022/04/12/even-china-cannot-re...

>"Many Chinese nuclear plants have been delayed and construction costs have exceeded initial estimates."

Important to note reasons for targets being unmet, apart from safety reevaluation delays due to Fukushima Daiichi (PRC laxer but not that lax on nuclear safety), delays and over cost can be attributed to foreign nuclear tech - french EPR underperforming, US AP1000s trouble with Westinghouse and sanctions against China General Nuclear as part of tech war. Recent indigenous CPR1000 plants post above drama have rolled out according to expectations. A lot can be explained by nuclear simply being hard, and domestic regulation around nuclear power in western countries capable of infra exports led to them consistently underdeliver. NPT and moat around nuclear tech also prevents many countries from indigenous nuclear power development. Few countries have the resources and expertise regardless of NPT to pursue indigenous nuclear power programs at all, but so far PRC plants with indigenous tech is performing alright. Other consideration is simpler and scalable renewable tech costs coming way down. Renewables are over performing while nuclear now performing at about expectations.

About delays and cost overruns, I highly recommend that people read about the Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant in Finland. The delays and cost overruns are totally insane, yet they claim (on Wiki):

    Even taking into account all OL3 construction delays the long term LCOE target for all three plants is 30 EUR/MWh. LCOE for the OL3 reactor alone is estimated at 42 EUR/MWh.

My "envelope maths" tells me that generating electricity from OL3 is twice the cost of OL1+OL2: 18 EUR/MWh vs 42 EUR/MWh.

The main Wiki article includes a long list of reasons for delays and cost overruns.

The construction project also included very long term, underground storage. On YouTube, you can find a great, if slightly creepy, documentary about it called "Into Eternity".

The French tax payers have through EDF taken a loss of €5-10B on Olkiluoto 3.

Definitely cheap, if you make someone else pay.

EDF was not involved in building Olkiluoto.

EDF bought the bankrupt carcass of Areva to preserve the French nuclear industry. The construction is kept in a separate company, but the French bore the losses.

> but the French bore the losses.

I know, my point is that EDF is not related to that.

> EDF bought the bankrupt carcass of Areva to preserve the French nuclear industry.

Some parts were sent in other entities, like Framatome.

Framatome is owned by EDF.

> Framatome (French pronunciation: [fʁamatɔm]) is a French nuclear reactor business.[1] It is owned by Électricité de France (EDF) (75.5%), Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (19.5%), and Assystem (5%).

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

When every easily verifiable statement turns out to be a lie like this one, is it any wonder nobody believes you about the ones that aren't?

Excuse me, but have we discussed in the past? You seem to be extremely antagonistic, and I don't exactly know why.

You seem to be expecting people to treat your lies and propaganda as if it's being stated in good faith and I don't exactly know why.

The long term waste repository is a separate project, it is not included in the same project. The LCOE does include it however, as financing waste storage is mandated in the law. I think what makes the LCOE so low is the fact that the plant vendor offered the construction as a turnkey solution with them covering the risk of overruns. So the price paid by the plant owner does not cover all the construction costs. In fact it's less than half of the costs.

edit: less than half

That argument doesn't make sense. Nuclear power plants are capital intensive; countries that would have a higher tolerance for safety and environmental shortfalls would find nuclear power too capital intensive to be financially viable.

All? And all equally?

That's where the original argument fails to compel.

There's ~ 50 countries with nuclear reactors, and about 30 with nuclear power plants. (Australia's an example of having one reactor, for research, but not wanting any for power production.)

Anyway, it's unlikely those 32 countries that have nuclear fission power plant, which presumably is a subset of countries that could build them today, all have near-identical regulatory / process requirements that in turn are the reason they're uneconomical to build there.

> it doesn't necessarily explain why cost overruns are so high

Few projects means little standardization and shaky forecasts.

>main problem with nuke

Is waste. The main problem is waste, we need to store it somewhere and it’s never in my backyard

It's absolutely not. Waste is a solved problem, you bury it VERY deep using the same borehole technology currently used for fracking. And I think you grossly overestimate the amount of waste a nuclear plant generates.

Here's a source (also check the sourced on the video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uU3kLBo_ruo

The problem is more likely PERCEPTION of nuclear waste.

"PERCEPTION" == politics, which is very much not a solved problem. It's the same reason we can't tax carbon emissions to properly account for its externalities.

That is not solving the problem. That is hiding it. Our civilization needs to move beyond the caveman level thinking that burying somethibg in the ground is solving it. Solar panels are highly recyclable. We are figuring out how to recycle the composite materials used for windmill blades. We need to move to a circular economy.

> That is not solving the problem. That is hiding it. Our civilization needs to move beyond the caveman level thinking that burying somethibg in the ground is solving it.

It came out of the ground, if we put it back there then how have we made things worse than they were? There are natural nuclear reactors in places untouched by humans.

> Solar panels are highly recyclable.

Really? At what energy cost?

> We are figuring out how to recycle the composite materials used for windmill blades.

Which is a fancy way of saying we can't and don't currently recycle them. There are reasonably advanced plans for reprocessing nuclear waste too.

> We need to move to a circular economy.

Fundamentally impossible. We need to keep pollution at manageable levels and expand into the universe. The environmental impact of nuclear waste is tiny in comparison to virtually everything else we do in everyday life; it should be a long long way down the list of concerns.

When it was in the ground, it was greatly diluted and bound in rocks. Now it has been highly concentrated and ground up several times. Lead also came from the ground, doesn't mean that it is harmless to live near a dumpsite for lead. Your argument is bullshit.

> It came out of the ground, if we put it back there then how have we made things worse than they were? There are natural nuclear reactors in places untouched by humans.

This is facile. Plutonium 240 isn't uranium 238. Nor is Cs, Tc, Pu241 etc.

You can just say you're not remotely interested in truth or reality. It's simpler for everyone.

It’s really not build costs alone that make nuclear expensive. Just as an example, you’re looking at roughly 500 employees per GW of capacity. Assuming they cost 100k/y including benefits that’s ~50 million per year or roughly 0.6c/kWh. Multiply that by * 50 years and your talking 2.5 billion over the plants lifetime just for the workers.

Ore is cheap, natural uranium is still cheap, enriched uranium isn’t, and making fuel rods isn’t. Insurance, land, replacement equipment, decommissioning, etc it all adds up.

People love to talk about how cheap various aspects of nuclear power are compared to other types of energy, but it’s the total costs that matter not just individual parts in isolation. Small modular reactors still need cooling, they still need turbines, workers, spent fuel cooling ponds and processing, security, etc etc.

There are plenty of communities that would be happy to see hundreds of jobs that they could expect to last for an entire working lifetime.

Which also applies to renewables.

Actually it applies even more, because renewables are decentralised and small scale, so there's a wide range of jobs from house-level local installations to international infrastructure.

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

Jobs for 500 people vs cheaper electricity for 1 million people which allows them to spend more money elsewhere and thus also creates jobs. The second option might seem roughly equal, except those new jobs are creating value and thus society is better off with increased efficiency.

Of course those benefits aren’t spread equally, but being poor today is still better than being poor 500 years ago. Hopefully being poor in 500 years will be a similar improvement.

I really hope the mini nuclear reactors that are planned take off and you can just order them for residential power generation.

It is astonishing the amount of red-tape when it comes to nuclear power, just because of all the FUD pushed by environmental groups, when it is the cleanest form of energy in the world.

This doesn't even begin to get into the cost of handling the waste. Which 70 years latter, the US still has seemingly never once found a long term answer to, as far as I am aware.

Personally I would really like to see ambitious high tech safe nuclear options be a thing, and to have thoughtful long term handling plans.

The Integral Fast Reactor getting canceled (1994) seems a real shame to me. A safe cheap transuranic-burning-capable low-proliferation-concern breeder sodium fast reactor could help us greatly deal with waste, could be gamechanger. But perhaps it was too soon, that it would have only been another mark against ambitious nuclear. GE Hitachi has kept the plans updated & moving along, which is interesting. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor

And TerraPower has recently reached out expressing interest in working together towards an IFR inspired design. https://neutronbytes.com/2022/02/03/terrapower-teams-up-with...

But given costs as is, focus on being extremely cheap not advanced makes some sense, albeit it sort of also feels like it limits the potential, & keeps us from addressing actual real total costs.

> Which 70 years latter, the US still has seemingly never once found a long term answer to, as far as I am aware.

That's primarily a political issue rather than a technical one.

What countries have done the best job at tackling nuclear waste? What power-generating corporations have done the best job at owning their waste? And how many have been able to responsibly do so without it turning into a vast political issue?

The US may be fucked & awful here, but I cannot imagine the rest of the world is particularly less fucked or less awful. I'm sure some folks have not gotten quite so tied up in this question, but I also don't have high confidence they have been paranoid & political enough about how properly they ought to be dealing with waste that will live for hundreds of thousand of years. If they have to come deal with really awful problems in 20k years, at enormous expense, well, that factors against the advantage of nuclear power too.

Finland is probably the most advanced with regards to permanent geological storage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYpiK3W-g_0

Nuclear waste? Why not reprocess like France?

Heritage Foundation (!) agrees: https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/recycling-nu...

The bulk of the words in my post described not just high-enrichment reprocessing like France (with proliferation risk), but a far far far more capable & interesting ability to just burn a wide variety of transuranic nuclear wastes & to have a broader MOX reprocessing. That doesn't highly resemble the process of making nuclear bombs. Please, read my IFR wikipedia link, I'll wait!

So far breeder reactors have been some of the least economic energy-generation systems on the planet. We also attempted them only in the most limited window of time, long ago, when nuclear was so young, and have never tried again. It seems unlikely cost will really come down (unless we actually factor in the network-externalities of dealing with the waste, which so far no one has ever had to face). I think a lot on the sharp-as-a-tack Charles Stross's Nothing like this will be built again, which isn't a breeder reactor but speaks to a more ambitious & open ended time. And I semi-weap for a humanity that cannot experiment, cannot try great things, that is market driven, risk-averse, & rational to a fault, at the cost of ignoring so much potential. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/rants/nothing-l...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Development_...

"Never been tried again"

There has barely been a break and all of them failed just as abysmally.

Renewables are not readily available when the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing.

EDIT: the link to the Texas winter crisis of 2021 was here, but it's unrelated.

Yet the first paragraph states that lack of winter preparedness was the cause and not renewable as initially claimed by some. I'm not sure what your point is here..

IEEFA is neither independent nor a serious research organization. The fact that they pretend to be only undermines their credibility.

The paper you link to is a joke.

They claim a cost of utility scale solar as $17 / MWh and then claim a cost of utility scale solar with battery as $22 / MWh.

How much battery backup does that $5 / MWh provide? it doesn't say, but the answer is only a few minutes.

Look at the chart of page 28 of planned installations where it shows 22 GW standalone storage being added for 60 GW of solar and wind. That means the standalone storage being installed can provide 20 minutes of backup power for the renewable resources being installed.

The cost of a renewable system with battery backup that can guarantee power for even 24 hours would probably be at least 10X the cost of bare solar, so in the neighborhood of $200 / MWh, or quadruple the target cost of NuScale (based on the chart in this paper).

Guaranteeing power for 24 hours is not acceptable though. A system like that would have regular blackouts given the normal variability in solar and wind.

Unless someone is quoting a price on guaranteed sustained power delivery they are not serious. Try selling your electricity to a data center or any other commercial buyer and see how far you get.

You appear to be disagreeing with the numbers they cite from NREL.

https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2021/utility-scale_pv-plus-...

> The utility-scale PV-plus-battery technology represents a DC-coupled system (defined in the figure below), in which one-axis tracking PV and 4-hour lithium-ion battery storage share a single bidirectional inverter. The PV-plus-battery technology is represented as having a 130-MWDC PV array, a 50-MWAC battery (with 4-hour duration), and a shared 100-MWAC inverter. Therefore, the PV component has a DC-to-AC ratio (or inverter loading ratio [ILR]) of 1.3, which is the same as for utility-scale PV in the 2021 ATB. The assumed relative sizing is consistent with existing (but limited) data for online and proposed utility-scale PV-plus-battery systems—whose inverter characteristics (shared vs. separate) are not well known.

That very closely matches the ratio in the rollout they provide from the Berkley interconnection queue research. You don't just keep adding batteries, you add more renewable generation at the same time to maximize cost effectiveness.

This ratio is sometimes called "near firm" as it provides power when it is needed by the grid.

Well we'll just include an entire summer worth of storage for nuclear then, shall we?

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/climate-events-are-t...

Or alternatively we could acknowledge that using the existing fossil fuel infrastructure for 8000 hours over the next century for the tiny minority of countries without enough hydro even in the unlikely case storage never improves is preferable to using them for 80,000 hours while waiting for nuclear plants to be built.

Not even 24 hours of storage is necessary in the vast majority of the world: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z

Also in the article: "Utility-scale solar-plus-storage costs are about $45/MWh; wind power costs are $30/MWh; and stand-alone utility-scale solar costs are at $32/MWh"

Wikipedia has higher numbers, but still comparable. And "technology proponent says technology can achieve X" is a really bad selling point if another technology already delivers X, especially if the new technology is going to face social hurdles.

i don’t know if i believe the $45/MWh figure for solar+storage just yet. Maybe someday, maybe not far in the future, but grid scale storage isn’t scaled out that far in 2023 so far as i know.

Yeah; a home sized battery is about 33kWh. Assuming 3000 cycles, that’s 100MWh, lifetime.

If you know anyone selling that (installed, with solar panels) for $4500, I’d like to hear about it.

Here is some data from 2019 about cheap solar+storage. Per unit, it is always cheaper to build a factory than do home installation.

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/09/10/los-angeles-commissio...

That's 3000 cycles before it gets to 80% efficient. Also battery studies in EVs have shown the cycle count to vastly underestimate the degradation.

Yeah, but at about a cycle a day, that’s 10 years, which is when the warranty in all the other stuff gets dicey.

obviously this isn't installed, nor 4500, but in case you weren't aware of how close things are getting already:

https://signaturesolar.com/complete-all-in-one-off-grid-sola...

of course utility scale beats that handily.

I see a lot of solar+storage quotes that don't bother saying how much storage. Usually it's four hours of storage at most. That's enough to smooth out the duck curve and get your daytime demand covered, but not enough to get through a windless night.

Building enough nuclear for baseload demand, and enough solar+storage for the extra daytime demand, seems ideal to me until we get much cheaper scalable storage.

It's a great point. Even in my spot in northern California this winter, it's been so cloudy this year, I can't imaging an all solar+storage grid would have worked out well this year. In this case having electricity that costs 45% more when it's cloudy is a lot better than none at all. Actually this gave me an idea, it would be really neat to have an comprehensive simulator of power grids that incorporated weather, demand spikes etc. to play around with different energy source mix to get an idea of what actually works and when it fails as well as total cost, environmental impact etc.

> Even in my spot in northern California this winter, it's been so cloudy this year, I can't imaging an all solar+storage grid would have worked out well this year.

The electricity demand in the winter is much lower than the summer demand, especially in California due to residential AC.

> Actually this gave me an idea, it would be really neat to have an comprehensive simulator of power grids that incorporated weather, demand spikes etc. to play around with different energy source mix to get an idea of what actually works and when it fails as well as total cost, environmental impact etc.

There's a gentleman in Australia who does ~this for their market -- 5 hours of storage is enough to get to a 99% renewable grid there;

https://twitter.com/DavidOsmond8/status/1640959088887730176

With heat pumps coming online and gas being phased out that might not be true for very long. Also is 99% even close to good enough? That would be like 4 days a year without power right?

And induction cooktops, and home charging BEVs overnight…

my back of the envelope calculation based on current human energy usage and battery production, it would take more than 150 years to manufacture 5 hours storage capacity. Of course manufacturing capacity is increasing and efficiency improves with electrification, but so is energy consumption, plus you have to factor in battery replacements during that time... Ya its going be tough to do that.

It's a more complex calculation than that because not all the energy storage is going to use battery electric. Pumped storage hydro is often pointed to as one option for mass quantities over a long durations, and somewhat more esoteric stuff like low-friction flywheels comes up for "capacitor" type loads where what's needed is a cycle of a few minutes.

The advantage of the batteries is specifically in power density, which makes them suited for mobility and consumer convenience. But the more you get into seriously optimizing electrical storage for scale, the less it's going to be about one specific mode.

No offense to your envelope, but that feels like a silly assumption. We produced ~15GWH of batteries in 2010 and now that takes us something like 3 weeks? Planned capacity additions will make that a daily production amount by 2030, and each subsequent cell is cheaper than the one before. This also assumes Li Ion as the only game in town. Plenty of other more likely options (flow batteries, hydro, etc) are feasible on a 15-year horizon.

5 Hours of electricity is something like 13 TWh, so if we get to 5,500 GWh annual production by 2030, it would take ~2.5 years to provide 5 hours of global electricity storage. Handicap it all and double the electricity requirement and halve the annual production figures and it's still only 10 years' capacity to go to a 99% carbon-free grid.

No 13 TWh is just our current _electricity_ consumption for 5 hours. We are talking about replacing all energy consumption like heating with electric heat pumps etc. This would be closer to 100TWh. And google says our current production is around 600GWh of batteries per year. 91.89 TWh / 600 GWh/year = 153 years.

Yes there is pumped storage, but I wonder how much more of that there really is to develop? Plus damns are environmental disasters of their own. The other storage methods are speculative at best. I just wanted to push back a bit on the idea that "just" need solar + storage as many people seem to believe. It is a big ask, and I think we will need more. If we don't want gas plants, then nuclear could be a good option.

Nah, that's ignoring that this hypothetical is in a world with mostly renewable power generation. E.g. most of the energy in that mix you're referring to is oil/natural gas/coal -- and over half of that is lost before it reaches the first power pole or the drive wheels. Vastly more efficient electric devices will greatly reduce the amount of energy needed. E.g. a heat pump with COP of 4 needs 1/4th the energy as burning natural gas in a high-efficiency furnace. Yes it shifts that energy demand from natural gas to electricity, but total energy consumption still drops. Similarly, a gas Corolla getting 40mpg equals about 1.2 miles/kwh, whereas a Tesla Model Y is more like 3.5 miles/kwh, so again, even though there's an increase in electricity consumption, total energy consumption decreases by ~2/3.

My other point stands though -- even if you grant a much larger electricity demand, you can't just look at today's battery production capacity. There are pipeline projects that will 10x that by 2030 (which is what happened in the past 10 years). Even with pessimistic assumptions, you get to pretty reasonable time frames pretty quickly.

Yes efficiency improves with electrification (I said so above) but step back for a second. The premise of this was that 5 hours storage would be "good enough" but my original point is that with change in electricity usage brought on by bevs, heat pumps etc, that this may not be the case forever. What if it is 10 hours? Or 20? Also, you have to keep in mind developing countries rapidly growing energy demands. And yes, battery production will increase, probably exponentially.. until it doesn't, everything is an S-Curve in reality, so it all depends on what we can realistically produce.

> everything is an S-Curve in reality

The only thing that limits battery production is demand. There will be plenty of materials available and plenty of machine-makers exist. That S will go as big as we need.

That's the kind of logic that got us here.

The "there will be plenty of oil" logic got us here because it was right, so I'm not sure what you're implying. It doesn't reflect negatively on batteries unless ability to scale up is inherently bad, and I don't think it is.

The premise isn't that you'd just sit in the dark when there isn't enough renewable + storage -- you'd run nat gas peaker plants or some carbon-based source for those 1% of times when it's needed -- would still almost entirely decarbonize the grid.

How do you make it worthwhile for someone to have a natural gas peaker plant ready to run at any time for only 1% of hours in a year? Where does that cost figure in the tradeoff between renewables + batteries vs nuclear?

We have really good insight into week-ahead curves for wind and solar, and high quality prediction for day-ahead production, so it wouldn't need to be ready "at any time" like its usage would be a surprise. And you incentivize it like anything else, providing either a $/kwh figure that makes it economical for them to capture their costs or subsidize the construction and standby nature of them like we currently do with black start generators (https://www.kut.org/energy-environment/2021-08-05/if-the-tex...).

It's hard to make a reliable cost prediction comparing nuclear vs. wind/solar + batteries since we don't know how to build nuclear any more.

Vogtle 3/4 are going to cost maybe $40 billion when all's said and done? With OpEx, you get to something like $0.18/kwh. That's more than 5x the cost of unsubsidized wind or solar installations which would buy you a bunch of storage.

I agree the reserve mechanisms provide the incentive to pay generators to exist with an entire gas turbine, generator, switchgear, operations staff, health and safety staff, maintenance staff, transformer, interconnection, land, environmental permits, hr and accounting departments to be “available” but not generate except in the time that renewables can’t. The only difference in cost for the plant to exist and not run but be ready and to run is the cost of the fuel.

So we still have to pay for dispatchable generation if we want to have power on a calm cloudy day week. We can add that cost to the cost of the storage and overbuilding of capacity that allows solar or wind to deliver rated power overnight. Or live with blackouts

> The only difference in cost for the plant to exist and not run but be ready and to run is the cost of the fuel.

Which is over 50% of the cost of running a combined cycle plant (page 12: https://www.lazard.com/media/sptlfats/lazards-levelized-cost...) -- but also misses that you'd need far fewer plants if you build renewable + storage generation to match the 99% use case so the total cost spend on peakers would drop dramatically even if some were still needed to provide backup generation.

Also has the added benefit of almost entirely decarbonizing power generation.

> The electricity demand in the winter is much lower than the summer demand, especially in California due to residential AC.

My mom's house doesn't need A/C but it does need a lot of heat in the winter. We looked at moving her to solar/battery and an electric heat pump instead of her gas furnace. With even a tiny bit of trees nearby and otherwise pretty good exposure we were told it was going to be hard to make it worth it. Her demand in the winter would be pretty high.

We generate 3x our needs in summer; 1/3 of our needs in winter, when we are running electric air source heat pumps at 6000' in northern NM. If we had a passivhaus-level home, I think it could be possible to satisfy the winter heat requirements with the solar we have, but not with anything less (and even then, it would be challenging).

Interesting, I appreciate the information. What is the nominal capacity of your solar array?

6.7kW

We typically generate 800kW - 1300kW per month (more in the summer). Our panels are angled at 30 degrees to slightly preference winter generation.

Great, thanks!

there aren't windless night's when you increase the area you are looking at

Sure, but there are windless nights over fairly large areas sometimes, and the US is pretty bad at building long-distance transmission. Some projects have languished for decades.

There also really aren't windless nights 220m above ground level, or where the hub of a Haliade-X 14MW turbine sits - especially offshore.

you misunderstand how the "+4" storage design works for solar. a 1MW solar plant nameplate capacity will only produce 1M for an hour or two a day, the hours before and after that peak will be some fraction, the sum total off the area under the curve works out to between 3 and 5 hours depending on latitude and weather[1].

so when you design a utility solar system with "+4" storage, what you're really doing is creating a "one days worth of full production" buffer. that can be used to run the output at a fixed rate while the buffer builds and empties every day (its never that simple but thats the basic principle). for example a 100MW farm with 400MWH of storage can in the simplest sense produce 16MW constantly (all through the day and night). in practice there's plenty of other stuff on most grids so they don't do a full battery cycle every night, but rather use the buffer to be able to meet day ahead and dispatchability contracts for a very cloudy day or a lightly cloudy week.

now don't get me wrong, obviously that still doesn't put it in the same reliability category as nuclear, but it closes like 80% of the gap in practice. its not better, but it is clearly on track to be 'good enough'.

[1] https://www.nrel.gov/gis/assets/images/solar-annual-ghi-2018...

Anyone who don't include cost of seasonal storage in renewable pricing is malicious or stupid. That is what really matters, not the spot price. We use power in winters and nights.

Then again people freezing to death is certainly effective way to lower co2 emissions, maybe this is their hidden agenda.

Most battery storage being built (at least in the UK, which is the market I'm most aware of) isn't even 4 hours - it's generally 1 hour, moving towards 2. A lot was built to target the "dynamic containment" (frequency response) market primarily and not the daily peak/off-peak cycle.

It does seem a lot simpler to plop down a bunch of concrete in roughly the same area as today's fossil fuel plants take, compared to rewiring and repurposing a third of a country to get enough solar panels and wind turbines in place (the latter while keeping residence distance requirements in mind). Not sure if that is factored into the feasibility when people talk about how expensive it is.

I agree that it doesn't make economic sense in an ideal world with twice as much space per capita and/or a lot more time to find and purchase ideal nooks and crannies and wire them up, but that would require moving to planet B. Note I'm not talking about nearly-empty USA, Australia, northern Africa, etc. here; rather, take 2-3 random European countries (highest emissions per capita after north america, so you know, the place that needs to get change happening) and you're very unlikely to hit only ones where not most/all of the land already is already allocated to some purpose.

I also agree it's likely already too late to get started on new nuclear plants, like, it's nearly so late that we might as well just go solar and wind for the rest of the way. But I don't think it's quite at that point yet, considering for example that regions in southern germany with big-ish distance requirements for wind turbines are placing nearly none (and germany is not even one of the countries that I would count among those that are out of space), it's apparently that full already and they've got like 80% of the way to go in phasing out fossil fuels.

Honestly the main hope I have these days is solar panels on crop fields becoming a real thing. That would grant a level of scale (and somewhat protects from crop failure causes like hail and drought) that would make me see this energy transition as feasible without nuclear (pushing the recycling problem onto the next generation, but better to deal with a billion worn panels than a billion displaced people (both figures are figurative)), but so far there's little adoption.

We need a combination of the two. A single point of failure is not ideal design. One increasingly common weather event and your power grid loses a massive source of energy. Distributed energy is good because it allows life to continue, in a limited fashion.

For western europe at least, off shore wind is a great alternative, as are smaller wind turbines on farms. Much of western europe is in the path of the trade winds and so is a great place for wind power.

It is not too late for nuclear. Nuclear is an excellent stop-gap measure while we figure out how to transition to large-scale renewables.

I agree with you. As I said, it's not too late yet for it to make sense to break ground, but we love hugging deadlines it seems...

> you're very unlikely to hit only ones where not most/all of the land already is already allocated to some purpose

Thats is the wrong problem - numerous farmers in Britain want wind turbines, they want extra source of income and they are willing to put in their own money. They know the turbines dont take any land away from farming - only fraction of a percent.

They are not allowed to install wind turbines on their own land from their own money, because the british government has banned turbines over a certain, non-viable height, on land.

Even when you want a small turbines installed, it takes 4 years of planning permissions and legal battles.

If we allowed every farmer to install windfarm of their land without interference, we'd solve half the problem.

We are dooming ourselved to disaster out of purely aesthetic concerns.

They're also doing the same with the green belt, housing and businesses in general.

Farmers are being told they need to diversity but they can't have wind turbines, they can't have businesses that need any kind of premises, they can't build housing on their less productive land. Something has to give at some point.

Everyone agrees they need to do something but many governments are intent on doing nothing

I wish we could start a thread about all the problems in UK. From HN.

The major caveat with those numbers is that they ignore time and the knock-on costs from ignoring time.

Variable and uncertain power generation creates a problem on the electricity grid and the source of the problem does not pay for the solution. Everyone else does. Those energy costs you quote imply that variable generation (wind, solar) do not set the price of energy, which they do not.

The problem with computing a solution is that it depends on where you are, which season you are in and what the rest of the power grid looks like.

Indeed they ignore time; to build a nuclear power plant today means committing to a power generation price for 30 years or not making back your investment. You can see why no one is making that bet against solar + storage.

Let's look at cost per kWh. I know it's a trivial division by 1000, but people pay their utility bill by the kWh, not by the MWh.

So, in the first 2 months of 2023 the average American paid $0.17 per kWh [1], up from $0.15 one year before. Overall, a lot of people would be happy to pay $0.06/kWh. You are saying solar and wind could come at $0.045 and $0.03. That's great, but 2 cents per kWh is not really something people pay attention too all that much.

[1]https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...

Discussions about this topic tend to get a bit hand wavy very quickly and few people seem to be able to apply any rational system thinking to the whole debate. That's true for proponents and opponents. I've been reading through, and occasionally commenting on threads on this topic on hacker news for a while now. So, I've seen all the arguments. From both sides. There are usually a few bright people commenting but a lot of others seem to lose the ability to do math or conveniently reason under some closed world assumptions. Or just dismiss the notion of math entirely. Basically, anyone focusing on a single technology as a holy grail tpye solution is probably barking up the wrong tree. The notion of system thinking is having a mix of everything that's already being done and evolving that in a direction where less of it is going to involve fossil fuels.

Let's consider a few technologies that already exist (in addition to wind and solar) and work at scale or can be made to work at scale that can be freely combined with wind and solar.

- Pumped hydro. As of yet one of the most widely used energy storage on grids in e.g. the US. There's about 22 GW and about 0.5TWH of it on the grid. A lot of it was, ironically, installed decades ago when nuclear plants started coming online and something had to be done with the massive amounts of energy that they produced. It's relatively expensive and it can't be done everywhere. But it's proven technology and its there already. There are lots of smaller scale trials with all sorts of gravity batteries. Not all of them practical of course. Though using e.g. mine shafts seems like it should work.

- Cables. We can use cables to move power around by the GW. It's an old technology. Has been around for as long as we've had electricity. This can be done over thousands of kilometers using modern technology. Examples: cables are already running between Norway, Germany, and the UK and more are being planned between e.g. Morocco and the UK, Australia and Singapore. A single cable can provide roughly the capacity of a largish nuclear reactor. I think the Moroccon cables are going to be 1.8GW each for example. The current plan is to have four of those. Cables aren't cheap. But they are probably comparable to largish nuclear plants in terms of the amount of power they can move and in cost. And they last for a very long time once you have them. Great argument if you hear people make the point that the wind doesn't blow all the time and the sun doesn't come out in the winter. True locally but cables fix the locality problem. Cloudy UK can rely on sunny Morocco. Wind starved central Europe can use off shore wind.

- Geothermal. There are lots of places where people are already exploiting geothermal energy. It seems more interesting to use for heating than for electricity but both are a thing. Digging deep for higher temperature gradients is expensive. But there also are a few newer projects involving heat pumps that don't require that.

- Grid batteries. These are currently being deployed by the gwh and probably soon twh. This is a rapidly growing market. Mostly this seems to be with relatively expensive batteries that provide hours, not weeks of storage. But interest in much cheaper but more voluminous battery chemistries that might be used for longer term storage is picking up as well. Too early to pick any winners here but there's simply too much of this stuff going on to dismiss it.

- Domestic batteries and EV batteries. Love them or hate them, these are being mass produced and installed as well. Tens of millions of EVs are going to require batteries to be produced by the twh per year and that's going to be a reality within a decade. The volume of batteries on the road is soon going to exceed the yearly energy consumption in a lot of places. That would be a problem if those vehicles would be moving 100% of the time. Which of course they don't. Domestic batteries are not far behind this but those too are starting to add up as their cost is going down. So despite there being so much battery on the road, we may not actually have much of a case for vehicle to grid technology to actually tap into that reserve. Because we'll have plenty of other batteries permanently connected to the grid. Either way, hard to dismiss any storage that is going to measured in many twh.

None of thesse things of course are free and relying on them exclusively is not a solution. Especially considering that some of these are actually quite expensive. But the reality is we are already doing those at gw scale and soon at tw scale. And it's all happening on the same interconnected grid.

Cost is not a constant and there's a trend for mass production to get cost down for a lot of these things. This is true for nuclear as well. At least hypothetically because our current nuclear production capacity is too low to show any signs of a learning effect so far (if anything it seems to have gotten more expensive over time). But hypothetically cost would come down if we did more of it.

But the simple fact is that by virtue of people installing solar and wind at break neck speed there's going to be no shortage of vast amounts of excess power peaks that can be moved around and stored. Which does raise the question what the point is of focusing on expensive nuclear projects in a lot of places.

System thinking is the notion that we can use all of these solutions, and more, to create a highly resilient and robust, interconnected grid. Nuclear can certainly play a role in that and it looks like it will. But it's probably going to be a much smaller one than some people would like us to think.

> But the simple fact is that by virtue of people installing solar and wind at break neck speed there's going to be no shortage of vast amounts of excess power peaks that can be moved around and stored. Which does raise the question what the point is of focusing on expensive nuclear projects in a lot of places.

Here in the UK, our solar output varies hugely between summer and winter, and due to our climate we use a lot of heating during the winter. Currently in the form of gas heating, in the future presumably heat pumps.

And while batteries are workable to store daytime solar power for evening use, cycling the battery 365 times a year, summer-to-winter battery storage would only cycle once per year - making the capital cost 365x higher.

It's a shame nuclear is as expensive as it is, as a year-round zero-carbon power source would be a very convenient thing to have!

"A small modular reactor should last a minimum of 60 years. Probably more, up to 100, frankly, if maintained properly. Wind and solar, after about 20 years you have to replace everything.”

I'm a big fan of the SMR concept, but this line about having to throw everything away for solar after 20 years is just wrong.

Can you elaborate? Is there a solar farm in prod right now older than 20 years that you know of? Im all for solar, and honestly didn't consider this angle..

The main reason why solar farms are replaced before 20 years are up is because modern panels are much more efficient than they were 20 years ago. By replacing the panels you can get 2-4x as much power in the same footprint and using the same infrastructure.

Wouldn't it be more cost-effective to put up the new panels somewhere else? Are panel costs such a negligible part of solar farm costs that expending doesn't make sense?

So you don't _have_ to replace everything. But there's a compelling economic argument in upgrading the components in the Solar array as better ones become available.

I guess you don't need permits for upgrading to newer components.

Eventually this pressure will go away though, as panels can only get so efficient. Future generations of panels are unlikely to make such big improvements.

And because thus is an economic pressure/incentive, its really the opposite of what the original quote was suggesting. In 20 years we throw it all away because there has been amazing improvements doesn't gel well with their "this will last 60 years" statement.

There's a panel in Germany that was in use for 36 years: https://www.presse.uni-oldenburg.de/einblicke/54/files/asset...

Efficiency went from 8.55% to 8.2%

The panels are often warrantied for 20-25 years. Most things outlast their warranty period. Inverters are less reliable, warranties are half that for residential stuff but commercial stuff will come with a service contract. Wires and racks can last quite a long time.

You don’t need anything else (e.g., a river to dump waste heat).

the older inverters tended to die after 10 years. But more recent ones are supposedly better, but they don't exist long enough to really produce statistics.

Is it 12 years? 15? 20? no one knows. But since most warranties are 10 years, its safe to assume they easily get there, or it would become too expensive for the manufacturer

Windmill technician IS the largest growing job in the US this year

That does seem exaggerated, though people throw around 25yr as a standard lifetime for PV[1] (with an approx. degradation of 1% output per year). 20-25yr for a wind turbine also looks believable (pretty good given that's not solid state like the PV).

1: https://energy.mit.edu/news/study-even-short-lived-solar-pan...

PV is now being sold with a 25-year warranty - it'll still have at least 80% capacity after that time.

As the article rightly points out, it often just makes more economic sense to replace them earlier due to improvements in panel technology. There isn't really a technical reason to replace them.

Modern panels, such as the ones I just purchased, are warrantied for 92% original efficiency after 25 years

There are panels in NREL's PV Lifetime Project that are on pace to have 80% rated output after 200 years. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/81172.pdf

PV "lifetime" is overblown fossil industry propaganda. It does not factor into any economic decision.

Well, maybe 30 years rather than 20, but they do degrade.

See: https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2022/aging-gracefully-how...

"A major question in the solar energy industry is exactly how much we should expect solar modules to degrade each year...and when they will eventually degrade so much that they no longer produce adequate power...For modules built today, it is probably 30 years."

I wonder if those guys have ever met the people from the other side of the NREL office who are running the PV Lifetime project. They have commercial, non-research panels in the field that are aging much less than 0.5% per year.

That stat is when they think it'll drop below 80% of original production, not when it needs scrapped.

..same way as the steam generator, turbines, bearings, etc. etc. in a thermal generator need replacing.

Except a quarter of the cost.

It's also irrelevant. Cost of maintenance and service lifetime are built into the price/MWh.

If nuclear technology improves in efficiency as much as solar has, we'll want to replace the SMRs also in 20 years. Check out this amazing graph [1] of solar efficiency improvements from 1976 to the present. I wonder which kind of cells are on typical roofs.

1. https://www.nrel.gov/pv/cell-efficiency.html - high resolution at https://www.nrel.gov/pv/assets/pdfs/best-research-cell-effic...

All estimates for the cost of nuclear power are based on limiting what you actually pay for to a small fragment of the true cost and leaving the unknown to future taxpayers.

This is even formalized in international agreements. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Civil_Lia...)

This means that any and all estimates of prices per MWh are, and can never be anything but, fictional. Including this one.

Even then, it's still far more expensive than renewables.

If you had to use renewables for base load power generation, they'd be a lot more expensive, as you'd need massive overcapacity (and probably batteries / pumped storage too) to compensate for periods of low generation.

So build the overcapacity. It will still be cheaper.

That may be true but they would still have the advantage that if the operator goes belly-up you close the doors and the costs stop.

You don't force hundreds of generations to pay for the decision, which is what we are actually doing with nuclear.

So, as someone who works in the energy industry, what is "base load generation" to you?

It is an "always on" source?

Why does a particular fuel type need to be always on?

Base load power is a concept that doesn’t make sense with renewables.

It’s a concept that was created for nuclear, because it has a very similar problem as renewables: the cost lies in building the generating capacity, not in using it. For nuclear to be cheap it needs to get used 100% also in the night and during the weekend. In a purely nuclear power net you also need overcapacity to be able to generate maximum load.

> they'd be a lot more expensive

Citation needed. Large energy grids have plenty of capacity to transfer electricity across countries if not whole continents and balance out production and usage. Industrial loads (and various consumer loads) have been adaptive for decades.

> All estimates for the cost of nuclear power are based on [...] leaving the unknown to future taxpayers.

That's true for any kind of power and, more generally, for any kind of human activity.

You don't pay the real cost when you wear a pfc coat. You don't pay the real cost for the plastic-wrapped takeout you buy. You don't pay the real cost for the co2-emitting taxi you hail. You don't pay the real cost for the industrial agriculture you rely on. You don't pay the real cost for the water you drink.

Accounting is not meant to measure "real costs, it's just a short-term measure of human activity.

So what's the real future cost of a photovoltaic panel then? Will there be people alive in 100 years that need to spend money on my panel or something really bad happens?

Is your solar panel built using power from solar panels? Where were the required ores mined, and what pollution did it generate? Was the ground fully cleaned and the environment fully restored? What impact did that have on populations, and what impact did the new activity of these populations have? Were there any effluents produced in the manufacturing of your solar panels, and how were they treated?

Once your solar panel reaches its end of life, who will collect it for recycling? How efficient is the recycling? How much power does that recycling cost, and how is it produced? Are there parts that are deemed uneconomical to reprocess into new solar panels and used for other activities?

Looking at the current state of e-waste, I'm not sure the outlook 100 years from now is great.

>That's true for any kind of power and, more generally, for any kind of human activity.

You're thinking philosophically perhaps? :)

I mean what you have to pay, financially, to be clear. In the sense that when you don't want to pay for more solar power, you close the plant and stop paying.

That's not an option for nuclear power plants. All closed nuclear power plants are still costing money.

> You're thinking philosophically perhaps? :)

I'm using the very same definition you used.

If we take one example I gave, there is $0 in the cost a taxi ride provisioned to pay for insurance losses related to climate change, current or future.

>I'm using the very same definition you used.

>If we take one example I gave, there is $0 in the cost a taxi ride provisioned to pay for insurance losses related to climate change, current or future.

That is not the same definition. To continue the metaphor, I'm talking only about the money you have to pay to the taxi driver according to the meter. :)

Nobody knows how to turn off the meter on a "nuclear taxi". Someone has to pay it even after the taxi has been demolished, the driver has retired, and the passenger is dead.

> Nobody knows how to turn off the meter on a "nuclear taxi". Someone has to pay it even after the taxi has been demolished, the driver has retired, and the passenger is dead.

The same is true for a regular taxi. No one is going to put carbon back into the ground when you kick the bucket, and no one can put a price on the actual cost.

>The same is true for a regular taxi.

No, for "regular taxis" you just stop paying after you have closed the plant.

Meaning, again, that if a normal power plant operator goes belly up, you can just leave the power plants in place. Nobody has to pay anything. When the same happens for nuclear, taxpayers have to pay.

The carbon released by your normal power plant doesn't vanish as the plant closes. And someone is definitely paying for that (e.g. [1]). That's more or less equivalent to the good old times of nuclear industry dumping their waste at sea.

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/07/climate-change-is-making-som...

>The carbon released by your normal power plant doesn't vanish as the plant closes.

It actually does, the forests in the US alone absorb carbon equivalent to the emissions from over 100 average coal plants per year. The lifetime emissions from a plant operating for 50 years is gone in 6 months after closing, one might say.

Power plants only account for 1/4 of emissions so the blame for global warming will mainly land on other sources.

Unlike the trillion dollars and counting that are currently being caused by only two nuclear plants and nothing but them.

> It actually does [...] The lifetime emissions from a plant operating for 50 years is gone in 6 months after closing, one might say.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_at...

From an accounting pov, carbon capture is extremely scarce. If we mark it as an offset to, power plants (or taxis, or whatever), it won't be available for other essential activities. That's probably the most extreme cost we can imagine now.

> the blame for global warming will mainly land on other sources.

Atmospheric greenhouse gasses are fungible, there is no difference between power plants and any other source from that point of view. 1/4th of emissions is one of the largest budgets, and there's no reason for it to exist, considering we know how to have carbon-free power without much sacrifices.

I'm positively surprised you are not being downvoted to hell in this place.

Every time I read about SMRs the idea sounds fantastic. But, until a company actually starts building SMRs it is just a grift. The first company to actually build a usable SMR will have customers lined up at the door. No need to advertise to the public how neat your plans for SMRs are. Save that for investors. Just start building and testing. This technology is like landing and reusing rockets. It will completely change the calculus for choosing fission.

You need to be able to build them for a reasonable price.

NuScale can build them.

The line is almost no one.

It needs to be a lot cheaper.

NuScale hasn't built anything.

They are building one in China

https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newsmilestone-for-chinas-ac...

https://nucleus.iaea.org/sites/INPRO/df13/Presentations/011_...

Like Nuscale’s reactor is is a PWR with the steam generators built into the pressure vessel.

Site preparation is underway in Ontario for a BWRX-300

https://www.ans.org/news/article-4697/contract-for-darlingto...

Seems like a giant waste of time.

Solar/wind is already cheap. Makes sense to focus efforts on storage and intelligent live balancing

e.g. Discharge EV batteries into the ~1 hour peak per day

Much can be gained from just smoothing things out

that's a selfish way of thinking

you miss the bigger picture

we must continue innovate to keep shrinking it further so we could:

- use the tech on the moon

- use the tech on a spaceship for space exploration

- use it to deploy quick energy stations on foreign planets

Also immediate uses:

- useful for regions in the world with poor infrastructure, no need generation/storage, you got it ready to deploy all in one

Of course i am clueless and dreaming, but that's the point of human evolution, keep dreaming and never stagnate, push forward, ascend the collective, wherever we end up going

The survival of humankind

> the point of human evolution

there is no purpose behind human evolution, or any natural evolutionary process. There are selection pressures, and there are outcomes.

Superimposed on top of that are purposes that we define for ourselves, collectively and individually. Kennedy may have said "We choose to go to the moon", but we are also free to choose not to.

well.. earth is not an infinite resource, at some point our solar system will vanish

so that's suicide to decide to not engage with space exploration

Not convinced making decisions about what to put on the grid today based on moon and and foreign plants power is sensible.

>that's a selfish way of thinking

OK...

well you said "it's a waste of time"

which time?

what about the timeline after your existence?

To put this number into perspective:

> The average installed cost of wind projects in 2021 was $1,500/kW, down more than 40% since the peak in 2010. Lower installation costs lead to energy produced at a lower cost, with the average levelized cost of energy for utility-scale wind power down to $32/MW-hours in 2021.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/articles/land-based-wind-ma....

Double the price of wind energy.

Double the price at any location and any time? Or is that not an honest analysis.

These foolish projections never account for accidents, destroyed uninhabitable lands, or nuclear waste disposal which currently costs infinity in the USA since all waste is stored at reactors and guarded, forever.

You really have to be foolish to believe in nuclear power ...

For perspective, the current average residential price for electricity in the United States is about $0.168/kWh, or $168/MWh.

https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/AverageEnergyPrices...

Since I've been muzzled again, let me respond to those below here.

Yeah, that's what "residential cost" means.

And?

That's the price the consumer pays.

The $60/MWh quoted above is the price the utility would buy electricity.

Much different prices.

That's the price consumers pay, but not the cost of the utility's supply.

stull a valid point

Residential consumer price is made up of: generator cost and profit, transmission operator cost and profit, local distribution company cost and profit, retailer cost and profit if in a region that has virtual electricity resellers, and taxes. The "$60/MWh" refers only to generator cost.

Try installing a nuclear power plant on your roof. Solar PV is a bit easier to get accepted, and quicker to do.

Thank You HN. I had BWRX-300 research term on my list for weeks but never got around to it. It is also interesting there are other people with similar Interest on BWRX-300.

Well sure, once you dump the construction and clean up costs on we-the-idiot-herd it makes a really convincing economic argument...

Same goes for solar and wind...

Please. There are no insurance issues, no proliferation issues, no clean up issues. Everything fails gracefully. Nuclear, outside of edge cases, is a scam compared to battery firmed renewables.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-07-14/california...

https://resource-recycling.com/recycling/2022/04/05/feds-wan...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...

There are unaccounted for external costs in renewables, which are not accounted for in those numbers. Nuclear is the only energy source with all-in, full-lifecycle accounting.

…that is borne by Not The Entities Operating It. Which is a real problem when we’re talking about, at best, 300% premiums over the competing power suppliers. And at worst: $12-digit cleanups.

Are you talking about nuclear? The external costs are paid by the operator. They have to setup a fund to handle decommissioning and cleanup before even beginning operation, and the costs of that are worked into the total-cost-per-MWh numbers.

I don’t know how to answer something this disconnected from the actual practices of the industry.

The links you shared about solar panels don't paint a hugely worrying picture. The vast majority of materials in panels are inert, and newer panels are using less and less toxic materials like lead.

And all the talk about panels and wind turbine blades ending up in landfills sounds alarming, but these "big" numbers they spout need to be put in context. I'm betting it is just a tiny percentage on the total landfill generated by society, and the costs mentioned in those linked articles don't seem "unaccounted for", they seem pretty reasonable at a few dollars per panel.

But the thing is these materials represent a lot of greenhouse gases in their production. In the case of solar panels because of the whole industry related to their production, and in the case of wind because of the sheer amount of material, most of which is either (1) metals reduced with coke, or (2) concrete which outgassed massive amounts of CO2 when it set.

And they are not being reused or recycled.

Sure, it's not ideal, and it would be great if economical recycling techniques are developed, but over their lifetime they produce a whole lot less emissions than most of the alternatives.

If we're going to start counting CO2 emissions in the production of these things, surely every single energy generation technique looks pretty crummy as well.

Btw: I really want SMR to succeed. A mix of solar, wind, SMRs, and a smart grid seems like a great way to go.

You’re being disingenuous. Those are old links, and state of the art is that solar panels and wind turbines can be almost fully recyclable. And nuclear waste in the US is still kept in “temporary” storage cooling ponds indefinitely.

(Veolia and Siemens are the biggest players in this space, but there are many others who have established end of life supply chains for these products)

> Those are old links, and state of the art is that solar panels and wind turbines can be almost fully recyclable.

I had not heard that yet; was still under the impression that the blades and foundation (for wind turbines) and basically the entire solar panel are waste products. I'd be very happy to learn otherwise. Do you have a link, or can you quantify what 'almost fully' means, like it makes me think of >=90%, is that the case for both, including any required elements that we don't have in abundance on earth (ignoring the necessary batteries whose tech seems to be in flux anyway)?

> And nuclear waste in the US is still kept in “temporary” storage cooling ponds indefinitely

no, most of it is in dry storage casks, ambient air cooling

https://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-storage/diagram-typical...

Battery firmed renewables are a scam. There is no cost competitive large scale installation of such a thing.

The major difference is that nuclear waste ends up in rich countries' backyards, whereas heavy metals from construction and disposal of solar panels contaminate communities thousands of miles away. Out of sight, out of mind.

Nuclear waste from power plants is not a legitimate issue: https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/the-boring-truth-a..., https://zionlights.substack.com/p/everything-i-believed-abou....

Neither is waste from PV panels.

My understanding is that the heavy metals are almost entirely from thin film cadmium telluride panels. Not from the much more common silicon based panels which are made of silicon, glass and aluminum for the frame. About as safe materials as one could hope for. The regular panels do sometimes contain a little lead, but this is small amounts for solder which could quite easily be replaced by lead free solder.

Interesting, much cheaper than solar.

The article states the opposite?

"Utility-scale solar-plus-storage costs are about $45/MWh; wind power costs are $30/MWh; and stand-alone utility-scale solar costs are at $32/MWh, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis."

>a levelized cost

The LCOE "represents the average revenue per unit of electricity generated that would be required to recover the costs of building and operating a generating plant during an assumed financial life and duty cycle", and is calculated as the ratio between all the discounted costs over the lifetime of an electricity generating plant divided by a discounted sum of the actual energy amounts delivered. Inputs to LCOE are chosen by the estimator. They can include the cost of capital, decommissioning, fuel costs, fixed and variable operations and maintenance costs, financing costs, and an assumed utilization rate

I think solar should be a major part of any future energy generation regime, but I've also never seen an LCOE for solar that I actually believe. They also ignore the timing mismatch between generation and consumption (batteries help there, but even then, it's still a challenge to maintain an on-demand grid with solar).

Nuclear is fundamentally cheaper than nearly any other energy source. However our laws are backwards: regulators are required to increase safety standards for nuclear so long as it is cheaper, until the costs are brought up to par with other energy sources. As a result, nuclear is orders of magnitude safer than anything else, and burdens costs that other energy sources don't have to account for, yet it is perpetually no cheaper than coal or natural gas. It's blatant regulatory capture by fossil fuel in the name of "environmentalism."

It isnt the law making it expensive. It's capital costs.

It would be even more expensive if it didnt get a free ride on insurance - through disaster liability caps set at ~0.05% of the costs of one Fukushima.

But the point is those capital costs are so high because nuclear is required to meet a threshold of safety far, far in excess of any other energy source. There are instances of nuclear plants having to shield radiation to be lower than background levels. Which beyond being absolutely pointless, it adds weight, which adds concrete, which adds capital costs and CO2 emissions.

The only reason it exists at all is because it gets a free ride on insurance through the catastrophe liability cap.

IMHO it's a bit premature to talk about deregulating it without first making sure it shoulders full liability for the damage it would cause by neglecting important safety.

You can easily find the locations of coal power plants by looking at maps of cancer rates.

Nuclear is the only 'energy source' that is required to capture pretty much any of its externalities at all, so arguments that they don't capture all of them are a bit odd.

If it has a catastrophe liability cap how can it possibly be capturing all of its externalities?

Nuclear power never pays for disaster cleanup and still can't compete with renewables.

The real issue is the risk profile. When you build a new reactor, it's almost certainly going to be safe. But there is a small risk of a catastrophic outcome, where most of the damage is local or at most regional.

Normally this would be the kind of a situation where insurance is the right solution. But because the potential magnitude of the catastrophe is too great, the insurance sector is incapable of handling it. No one is willing to provide a sufficient insurance policy on a commercial basis.

Because the assets of the company operating the reactor are also insufficient in the worst case, that leaves the government as the ultimate insurer. And as with any insurer, they require you to take various steps to mitigate the risks.

> However our laws are backwards: regulators are required to increase safety standards for nuclear so long as it is cheaper, until the costs are brought up to par with other energy sources.

Any citation for that? It's a convenient villain to blame, but absent any proof regulators are deliberately trying to make nuclear less competitive, it seems much more plausible that regulations are driven by concern over accidents. If a wind turbine fails it doesn't make the entire region uninhabitable for decades.

They made it up. Similarly you frequently see claims on here that nuclear came to a standstill because of all the ignorant beatnicks, when in actual reality raw capitalism is why nuclear stalled: Endless disastrously expensive projects tainted the industry into picking everything but nuclear.

Nuclear is a fantastic base load. It is, done right, clean and safe. The weird pro-nuclear cult that spreads manufactured nonsense is just noise, however.

I did not make it up:

https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary/alara.html

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1610/ML16105A136.pdf

It’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s just the way some of the nuclear regulations are written. Operators are required to achieve radiation dose as low as reasonably achievable.

https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary/alara.html

ALARA/ALARP has been a standard for a long time. I think you could make the argument that “reasonably” has been ignored more recently.

Ultimately, it isn’t the sole reason for nuclear construction issues. All large infrastructure is prone to cost overruns, and in combination with a stringent regulatory environment that makes it even more likely to encounter schedule and budget problems.

> As a result, nuclear is orders of magnitude safer than anything else

How exactly is nuclear safer than solar or wind? Solar panels in particular are about as dangerous as an inert rock.

Very few people die in nuclear accidents, but quite a lot of construction workers end up falling off roofs while installing solar panels.

That's an interesting point. I think my view on this is that I think we've been pretty lucky with nuclear accidents thus far, and that we don't have nearly enough to data to conclude that we will continue to operate them as safely as we have thus far. A single bad nuclear accident affecting a major city would turn that statistic entirely on it's head for centuries worth of solar panel installation.

That amount to saying "I'm going to ignore all the evidence because I don't like the conclusion."

It's simply interpreting the data differently. Statistical conclusions always depend on your priors. We may also have a difference in risk tolerance. I'm willing to accept "accidents almost never happen" for something like air travel because the consequences are much less severe even if a worst-case accident does happen. I'm not nearly so willing accept even a small risk of nuclear accident because the consequences are so potentially awful (the worst case is not death IMO, but slow, painful radiation poisoning).

The worst nuclear power accident ever, Chornobyl took: knowingly unsafe design and a lot of very-very bad decisions to kill a few hundred directly and a few thousand indirectly.

The only two others that even come close: Fukushima - one death, TMI - 0 deaths.

So that's at most a few thousand deaths for something like 100 Million reactor hours (napkin math, don't cite).

There is plenty of data and the data says it's safe.

> So that's at most a few thousand deaths for something like 100 Million reactor hours (napkin math, don't cite).

Sounds about right, but when you factor in current designs and requirements it's 100x better.

LRF (large release frequencies) are required to be less than 1 in 1 000 000 per year of reactor operation [1], so roughly 10 billion reactor hours. The calculation of this considers at least 1 in 10 000 year levels of high winds and earthquakes [2].

Since the typical reactor is 1GW, so ~8TWh per year, and global energy consumption is ~23 000 TWh per year, we could use roughly 3000 reactors globally to meet most of our needs, which would put an event like this roughly every 100-1000 years.

[1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0909/ML090910608.pdf

[2] https://archive.opg.com/pdf_archive/Nuclear%20Licencing%20Do...

Also if your threat model is a one-in-10000 year freak event, you can have as many reactors as you want and it doesn’t increase the likelihood of a catastrophe.

Note, in comparison, dams have killed several orders of magnitude more people.

Just solar panel installers falling off roofs have killed more people so far.

Banqiao Dam failure alone killed an unknown number of people. The lower estimate is 26 000. The upper estimate is 240 000 people.

For Chernobyl the number is 4,000 deaths as the total number of projected deaths caused by the accident over the long term.

For Fukushima it's one direct death, and 2000 deaths due to evacuation.

Had we approached dams the way we approach nuclear power, not a single dam would be built in the world.

Also, ironically, the amount of greenhouse gases produced by the production of solar panels or wind turbines is quite large. And neither one recycles very well, so that can't be an amortized cost over multiple reuses.

Nuclear has this same issue too, although almost entirely from the concrete poured for the containment building. Small modular reactors should mitigate this.

When I built my system the greenhouse gasses released during manufacturing and transport were offset by 1.9 years worth of production. Out of a lifetime of 20-25 years. In my quite unfavorable latitude of 59. Since then I've seen data being quoted at somewhere between half and one year.

Those numbers seem low. I don’t doubt that’s what was quoted, but I don’t think they were fairly calculated. For example, a lot of times the greenhouse gases used in refining materials used to make panels are not included, on the assumption that they will be recycled. Turns out recycling is not economically worthwhile (mostly because of these externalized costs). But that’s most of the greenhouse gas emissions: turning silicon dioxide into pure silicon using coal.

Regardless it’s apples to oranges. You are comparing your solar output to the mix of fossil fuel power the grid supplies. But a small modular reactor would be a carbon-zero power source.

I don’t get why there is polarization between solar/wind and nuclear? I can’t put an SMR in my basement but I can put solar on the roof. Why not? It’s not even likely that my country will get an SMR.

Nuclear is also a very risky business (not in the sense of safety but in the sense of project delivery/nimby). So solar and wind are derisking weaning off fossil fuels.

Wrong comparison. You are neglecting the systemic risk of nuclear and ignoring that roofing is dangerous and needs to be done regardless of solar panels.

> Solar panels in particular are about as dangerous as an inert rock

just wait until they are abandoned by bankrupt companies and start to break down and all of the highly toxic substances they are made of leech into the ground water.

Nuclear has to be orders of magnitude safer because nuclear incidents have a way bigger economic impact. A gas plant or solar farm blowing up will be in the hundreds of millions of $, but Fukushima is counting in the hundreds of billions of $.

The nuclear industry has a history of creating plants which are "totally safe, really, you can trust me!" and ending up with really expensive accidents. If they can't get their shit together and get basically unlimited insurance for whatever accident might still happen, the government has to enforce safety rules for them so the taxpayers don't end up having to pay for their whoopsies over and over again.

Really expensive accidents that cost money and very few lives. Meanwhile, coal had gotten a pass on hundreds of years of added costs to healthcare and loss of life expectancy.

Very few lives because of the high standards, loads of luck and extraordinary courage of first responders.

Lets not forget the helicopter crews at Chernobyl knew they were flying to a certain, slow, painful death and did so without a complaint. Absent those heroes nuclear's mortality record would be much worse.

Chernobyl-style reactors haven’t been built for decades and the kind of failure that happened with it has long since been addressed. We even have designs where meltdowns are basically impossible.

I agree that the people who stepped up are heroes. I don’t agree that Chernobyl’s failure has any place in the discussion about the safety of modern nuclear plants.

Nuclear power is STILL orders of magnitude safer, even when you include nuclear disasters in that calculation. Things like Fukushima should be a once-and-done, never again accident, as all nuclear plants are retrofitted to prevent this failure mode. However even if you assume that such disasters will continue to happen with the same frequency, nuclear is still safer. By a factor of like 100x.

the nuclear industry has a history of creating the safest power source ever. that is just a fact.

as mentioned, everything fossil fuel related has a massively higher death and injury cost than nuclear.

the california wildfires caused by the criminally negligent failure to maintain power distribution systems killed more people and cost more money that Chernobyl (look it up).

There's no conspiracy here -- the nuclear safety is just so darn expensive, and for rational reasons.

It is safer, yes, but only once a lot of resources is spent on safety. So nuclear power generation is very inexpensive and expensive at the same time, depending on amount of effort put into its safety (with modern scientific knowledge on fission, I'd say like 90% of a reactor cost is ensuring its safety).

I honestly hoped that NuScale production could reduce some significant fraction of that safety costs by "commoditizing" the production. Kinda like airplanes are very safe in a big part because their production and maintenance processes are streamlined and actively practiced ("economy of scale").

You can read about the NRC's stance on requiring radiation to be "as low as is reasonably achievable" here:

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1610/ML16105A136.pdf

ALARA, in practice, has been interpreted by the NRC as to mean "radiation levels as low as can be achievable while still being competitive with alternative energy sources." Which means that the cost of nuclear goes up until it matches or exceeds traditional baseloads (coal, gas, etc.).

>Nuclear is fundamentally cheaper than nearly any other energy source.

It is not, the main costs are simply not included in the calculations. Operators are legally protected from most liabilities, and even setting liabilities aside they get bailed out if they fail to be profitable. You have to bail them out, there is no option not to. You can't simply turn off a nuclear power plant and leave it.

France recently had to bail out their nuclear operator to at least 50 bn euros. We reached the point where we're "the future" that had to pay for the energy that our parents got from nuclear. Our children will be the next to pay for it, and so on for centuries.

This means that even in a country that has had no disasters, nuclear power has operated under a cost model that was severely underestimated.

The cold truth is that nuclear power is not cheap even in a best-case scenario, and "not cheap" is the most precise estimate we are able to give.

I don’t know what your comparison is. Here solar is about half that. I even managed to install solar on my roof for about 35EUR/MWh.

I assume you mean with subsidies and grants.

No, this calculation was solely expected lifetime energy yield of the system divvied up by gear, installation and bureaucracy cost. I did not get any subsidy for building out the system.

I do get spot market feed in pricing + a very generous feed-in subsidy, but this only accounts for making my payback period shorter and was not included in the cost of energy calculation mentioned.

Solar power isn't available 24 hours per day so the LCOE (levelized cost of energy) for solar is claimed be be between $59 to $91 per MWh, see [1], lets say $75/MWh, already higher than the article's $60/MWh cost for nuclear.

However, nuclear power is available 24 hours a day every day, rain or shine, summer or winter. To reach this level of availability a PV system would need to have battery back up. Let's be conservative and say 10 hours of battery is enough. This won't be enough during a hurricane or harsh winter weather with no sun for days, but let's assume 10 hours of battery is enough.

Now how much does the PV system's battery cost? I don't have figures for a 10 hour battery system. I do have an estimate based on a review of research literature for 6 hours of battery storage. According to [2], a 6 hour system in 2030 may cost under $180/Kwh. However, we've been talking Mwh not Kwh so this is $180,000/Mwh.

Unless you don't care about electricity when the sun isn't shining, nuclear is much cheaper.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-leveliz...

[2] https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/79236.pdf

Now you are just arguing for sake of arguing. I was replying to your context free claim which was simply untrue.

If you go to system-level energy cost with the constraint that it has to cover demand all the time then of course you end up with different numbers.

For me, I have a battery system. With the LCOE of about 65EUR/MWh. It's good for 6h in the winter and combined with solar probably good for the entire summer.

Your numbers for battery cost are for installed capacity, but you are not using the battery one time, you cycle it thousands of times and therefore need to divide that 180k number by a number between 1000 and 10000 most likely.

Problem for people in my latitude is seasonal storage, I don't believe batteries will ever be an efficient solution for that.

GE is a multibillion dollar company. Something doesn't seem right if they are claiming they can deliver radically cheap energy. I mean, what shareholder or board member in the right mind is going to say, "Sure, let's kill our profits!" Or did I miss something obvious?

> GE is a multibillion dollar company. Something doesn’t seem right if they are claiming they can deliver radically cheap energy. I mean, what shareholder or board member in the right mind is going to say, “Sure, let’s kill our profits!” Or did I miss something obvious?

If GE equipment can deliver more efficiently than competitors, GE willexpand marketshare, and applications will expand based on the cheap energy. Also, GE is highly diversified, most of its businesses (like most businesses that aren’t selling energy, really) benefit from cheap energy.

Thank you for kindly explaining that I missed something obvious. :)

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