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Comment by MichaelNolan | Hacker News Reader

If I was a betting man, I would put money down that Vogtle 4 is the last nuclear reactor that gets built in the US. Solar and batteries are just too cheap for nuclear to compete. The world will be installing a terawatt of solar capacity per year soon.

*excluding research or military reactors of course.

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One kilogram of uranium-235 (50 cm^3) can theoretically produce about 20 terajoules of energy. One square kilometer of solar panels can theoretically produce the same amount (as 50cm^3 U235) in a day. I'll take this bet.

Edit: Tried to edit the edit but somehow deleted the rest of the edit. It was something to the tune of how a big problem with renewables is the fact that peak solar production does not match peak energy consumption, and storage is very difficult, so realistically we'll need a wide variety of energy options to fully transition to renewables. Nuclear is reliable and to some degree adjustable, helping to alleviate the storage issue. Basically, it's my opinion that nuclear works well with other renewable sources, and a full renewable transition will certainly involve more of it.

We need two things:

- More energy

- Energy diversification

That includes nuclear, solar, and even more fossil fuels as we wean ourselves off of them.

Writing off any form of energy is ideological, not practical.

Agreed minus the fossil fuels bit. It's my belief we should not further scale that infrastructure.

Perhaps I fail to understand, but doesn't this comparison depend on a number of parameters such as the total reactor fuel load and enrichment, the burn rate, the cost of nuclear fuel, the cost of solar PV, the lifetimes of each system, and the relative process efficiencies (notably the cost of decommissioning nuclear)?

Otherwise you might as well say a teaspoon (or whatever) of water has as much potential fusion energy as 1 Kg U235 at a fraction of the price. ;-)

Yes, the amount of estimations I made to get to that number is absurd, and very much "best case" with no regard for inefficiencies (both nuclear and solar systems are currently leaving lots on the table).

Small nitpick: one teaspoon of water has much less potential fusion energy than 1 kg of U235, and actually much much less than 1g of U235, even allowing for fusion technology that does not exist and will not exist in 50 years.

Here's why.

The Sun transforms hydrogen into helium. But that's a fairly complex chain and nobody in the industry or academia is trying to replicate that.

When people talk about fusion, here's [1] the reactions they are considering.

The best yielding fusion reaction is deuterium-tritium and deuterium-helium3 [1]. Tritium and helium-3 virtually don't occur naturally on Earth, and deuterium is very rare, at about 0.02% of the hydrogen. A teaspoon of water contains about 0.5 grams of hydrogen, and out of that about 0.0001 grams of deuterium. Let's say that someone magically brings the necessary tritium or helium-3. How does that compare with 1 gram of U235?

The fission of 1 nucleus of U235 yields about 190 MeV of energy. 1 MeV is one megaelectronvolt, and is a unit of energy. It does not matter how it translates into joules or watt-hours. It is the unit used when talking about fission and fusion. So, 235 nucleons produce 190 MeV, which is about 0.8 MeV per nucleon.

The two reactions mentioned involve 5 nucleons and yield about 18 MeV, which means 3.6 MeV per nucleon or 4.5 times more per nucleon than U235.

So, even if all the hydrogen in the one teaspoon of water was Deuterium and Tritium, in the correct ratios to do the fusion, we'd get only 4.5 times more energy than from one gram of U235. In reality, from one teaspoon of water we'd extract a very tiny amount of deuterium that's usable, and we'd need to breed Tritium or Helium-3 separately. By the way, separating deuterium from water is a very expensive process. The Nazis tried to do it during WW2, and they were doing it in Norway. Once the British special forces destroyed the plant, the Nazis could not restart the heavy water production, and their atomic project basically stopped then and there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Criteria_and_ca...

The US doesn't lack space. But investors like a quick return on investment; meanwhile nuclear reactors only make sense if you bet on high electricity prices for the next ~70 years. The time a nuclear plant spends on construction and decommissioning is about the same as the total lifetime of a solar installation.

How about recognizing that externalities of letting corporations do whats best for their own short term profits are costly to society, and that having safe cheap constant power is a social good that makes having government run nuclear power be a good idea. how about we not let the same people that have spent the last 50 years knowingly destroy the environment and hide their culpability be the ones to make the decision.

how about we as a society finally fulfill the promise of power to cheap to meter that we were told back in nuclears golden age before the carbon industry start the smear campaign against nuclear.

> before the carbon industry start the smear campaign against nuclear.

The environmental Greens had a lot to do with the smear. Even recently, they were the ones who pushed for the shutdown of German nuclear power which ended up increasing German CO2 output.

> which ended up increasing German CO2 output.

That's temporary, soon that will go back down again

No need for pushing as the coalition of CDU/CSU and FDP had decided to shut down the reactors in Germany and had set the date.

That's true. And it was Green ministers that pushed to keep the last German NPPS running longer, as long as possible. It was also the Greens who sent the first German troops abroad under NATO mandates, so one can say tge reputation of the Greens is not always matched by their actions. They are very easy scape goats so.

Nuclear has a lot of externalities (residues, security, financing... usually paid and supported by others). You talk about nuclear like it was a small enterprise, when it's the very definition of "greedy corporation".

It's funny-and-sad to see the old behemoth of nuclear power begging for government support as they last chance to be alive.

On the contary i dont think businesses big or small should do it I think the government should do it as a public good. Free carbonless energy for the people.

Not unreasonable, but I would point out two options (not the only):

1) "Water batteries" - highly efficient (far more than the 'chemical' you are apparently referring to) & responsive

2) Methods for using 'renewables' to produce &/ support production of chemical fuels - with the added draw / potential goal of 'closing' the 'carbon cycle'

As to #2, one of the ideals that has been kicked around for decades is to do something like: use 'renewables' to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere and convert it into something like butanol, for example.

Now, last I was up-to-date on any of this sort of work (~10+ years ago), the economics were not favorable. Certain types of commodity chemical production with 'biological basis' (another type of renewable, typically) had much more favorable properties economically. And, indeed, you do see, for example, (thermo)plastic products made from chemicals like "PLA" increasingly. But, the "biofuels" concept is / was much more challenging, especially as "fracking" technology made great leaps etc.

Nuclear has its pros and cons - blanket disavowal is fatuous. Nevertheless, there are substantially more options, systems, technologies, etc. in development and production than are often discussed in too many of the pro-nuke(s) / no nuke(s) 'sniping' chains that have been prevalent in society & on the internet since I was a wee tyke myself.

> use 'renewables' to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere and convert it into something like butanol, for example.

are you referring to P2X? I think P2X is an awesome solution for existing infrastructure, but it's obviously not particularly efficient. I am excited about pumped storage as well, but my fear there is we'll run out of sites, and obviously the 80% efficiency is still not ideal.

By no means am I arguing nuclear is a one size fits all solution.

> 1) "Water batteries" - highly efficient (far more than the 'chemical' you are apparently referring to) & responsive

"Highly efficient" is very vague.

What matters here are the numbers:

W/$

J/$

% round trip losses

% losses per hour

Number of cycles before replacement needed

Response time

Do you have them?

Nuclear is baseload and is the exact opposite of "instantly fired up". Best tech for that is gas or battery.

Cant control rods can be lifted or inserted to meet demand?

There's typically a range of operation, so you can adjust a hundred MW but you can't drop to 0 or spin up from standstill without a time consuming process.

Edit: also, the economics are such that you rarely want to drop load from a nuclear plant unless it's offline or for system reasons. The fuel cost is negligible so you'd rather turn off your gas plant or lower the coal plant and save on those fuels.

That assume we still allow coal, oil or gas power plant to exist in the power grid. We should probably not assume that to be the case, especially after the temperatures rises to a break point and some of the major climate change crisis occurs.

None of the commercially available (Western) reactor designs today are fast load followers, so you are dependent on having gas or hydro when you project for new nuclear power plants. That's one part of the reason why this stuff is politically charged.

From what I understand it's not a theoretical constraint, but mostly a lack of enough commercial interest for any other design. But it is what it is.

> Cant control rods can be lifted or inserted to meet demand?

Thermally it is difficult to dial a reactor up and down. Generally the way nuclear power is modified is by not-sending the steam to generators through a by-pass and quenching their heat in some fashion.

So thermal generation stays at 100% (or whatever), but electrical generation output can be dropped.

They can, though it depends a little on the plant design.

It just doesn't make any sense to use reliable nuclear as the "backup" to unreliable renewables.

Because this "backup" is already CO2 free. It is also reliable. And cheap to run. So just run it all the time (nuclear tends to have >90% capacity factor).

You then simply don't need the "primary".

Usually you'd vary the concentration of boric acid being injected in the reactor's core instead, since that doesn't involve wear and tear on safety-critical elements of the reactor.

Nuclear reactors absolutely can vary their output to match demand, this is what France has been doing for 50+ years (and what Germany was doing before switching back to coal). It's not as reactive as coal/gas, but you can still vary within 30-100% of output power at a speed of 5% change per minute. Way more than enough to react to 1-day-ahead forecasted supply/demand, and way more than enough to react minute-by-minute if you've got a tiny bit of storage to stabilize the grid's frequency (e.g. pumped hydro).

It is a hugely complicated system where reactors which are earlier in their fuel cycle ramp more leaving the later ones to run at 100% around the clock.

Ramping once is easy. Ramping continuously through the entire fuel cycle requires a meticulously planned fleet.

France is balancing their reactors with a massive amount of water power, so they are not doing it alone on the reactor side. But I think France is indeed one of the countries with the highest relative amount of nuclear in the grid. Germany went never over 30% nuclear in the mix, so demand matching was way less of a problem. But also, both countries tried to make demand mostly constant like with pushing inefficient heating systems which would consume electricity at night.

This is very far off from working well together with a mostly renewable grid, where renewables can cover 100% of the load on most days, but there are larger gaps to be quickly filled.

A nuke operated at 50% of capacity costs the same as one operating at 100%. Thus, power from it at 50% costs twice as much per kWh. But nukes are already not competitive even at 100%, and get less so with each passing day.

There is a line of reasoning that baseload is a billing and profit construction, an artifice of the needs of coal-fired and nuclear power.

There is nothing innately wrong with over building renewable and storage, and a transmission network.

It's an argument about economics, not physics.

Can you realistically overbuild solar and wind in a way that works in winter? Here's Terence Eden in the UK, and his graph of rooftop solar[1] showing peak around 400kWh/month in summer and trough around 50kWh/month in darkest December - that's a difference of ~8x which might be possible...

But that's averaged over the month, what about a run of December days with heavy cloud cover, misty foggy atmosphere, still air, maybe some Icelandic volcano soot in the atmosphere, what's the worst we'd have to plan for, and how much overprovisioning would that take?

[1] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/02/solar-update/

FWIW I have updated stats at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/04/3-years-of-domestic-solar-s...

They're also published as open data.

The dark and dreary days tend to be the ones with the most wind power. The tides around our coast are in constant motion.

But, the big challenge is still storage. Domestic solar panels provide 100% of our yearly electricity use. At the moment I can only store 4.8kWh of excess.

So we need to over provision and over store - hopefully both at the same time.

Same author: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/12/electricity-thats-too-cheap...

Wind is anticorrelated to sun and stronger in the north.

https://globalwindatlas.info/en

In the UK, given it's northern latitude and great wind resources, you'd be best overbuilding mostly wind.

Here's a worked example based on real weather data that suggests a wind capacity of double peak demand and converting about 8% of all demand with power-to-X would be the the low cost option.

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

That's absolutely true, but the economic argument still carries weight. How many acres of land, how many rare earth minerals, etc. are required to produce the load profile you need with batteries and renewables vs including baseload flat generation from nuclear? This is still an economic question but very relevant.

Literally no "rare earth minerals" are used in production of solar or batteries. Exactly zero.

Nor in wind turbines, if you don't use permanent magnet generators.

> One kilogram of uranium-235 (50 cm^3) can theoretically produce about 20 terajoules of energy. One square kilometer of solar panels can theoretically produce the same amount (as 50cm^3 U235) in a day.

Does the US have more 50cm^3 sized blocks of U235, or more square kilometers of land with low land values and high annual insolation?

There's an estimated 6 million tonnes of mineable uranium reserves in the world [0]. Of which 0.72% is U-235, so we have a worldwide reserve of 43200 tonnes, or 43.2 million Kg U-235.

Arizona is about 300k square kilometers. If we covered an area 10% the size of Arizona in solar panels, then they would have produced more energy than all the world's known U-235 in just four years. And would continue producing after those four years are up.

[0] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

> If we covered an area 10% the size of Arizona in solar panels

And what are the various Friends of Rare Bugs and Small Furry Animals groups doing in the meantime?

I joke, but even I would balk at the environmental impact of that. Certainly it's going to be greater than any equivalent nuclear installation.

> Of which 0.72% is U-235

Fortunately we're not limited to U-235. With breeder reactors, there's enough nuclear fuel to run human civilization for billions-with-a-b of years.

Cover 4,000 square miles of the USA in surface car parks[1] and that's freedom. Suggest covering 11,000 square miles of desert in solar panels which don't stop land being used for grazing or crop growing or insects or wildlife, and that's environmental distruction that "even" you would balk at.

[1] https://www.archdaily.com/976069/when-5-percent-of-the-unite...

Speaking of parking lots, it's not a terrible idea (and it's already been done before) to put solar panels above parking lots

False dichotomy.

The people who will be screaming about covering the desert with solar panels are exactly the same people who scream about covering the land with car parks.

Exactly.

The only energy source radical environmentalists like is one that exists only in a fantasy. As soon as it starts being built, it becomes evil.

Note that they're already up in arms about windmills killing birds.

Also, covering the desert is definitely going to change the local environment. At a minimum, every joule that goes into the power transmission lines is a joule that will not be available for use by the desert ecosystem.

The desert ecosystem wastes almost all of its incoming joules. The most valuable commodity in a desert is shade.

If you were a cactus you'd no doubt disagree.

And you have discussed this with a cactus? Or are you still just making things up?

I want to make clear that I am not arguing against solar. My belief is that nuclear is an important piece of a much larger puzzle. Wind is not reliable, and for solar to match the figures you provided, we would need to figure out storage, so lets diversify our portfolio :)

> Wind is not reliable

Surface wind is not reliable. I've seen proposals to put turbines on large kites or gliders tethered to the ground. There's pretty much always strong winds over most of the United States somewhere between the surface and 10000 feet.

Hmm what to do with the torque from the windmill though. Perhaps it could have counter rotating propellers to cancel it out. Otherwise it would entangle itself in the anchoring cable.

Also, a failure scenario would mean tonnes of windmill crashing down from high altitude. Hmmmmm

> Also, a failure scenario would mean tonnes of windmill crashing down from high altitude. Hmmmm

10000 feet is less than 2 miles. Even in high winds it wouldn't get more than a a couple or miles or so before hitting the ground.

There are plenty of places in the US where you could fly where it would be centered over a 6 mile diameter circle that contains no people or valuable buildings except for people and buildings that are part of the power facility.

Figuring out storage is hard if you think in terms of Lithium Ion grid-scale batteries, or mountains for pumped hydro, but[1] puts forward the idea of synthetic natural gas generated by solar panels. That can be pumped into existing national gas grids, existing gas storage, and sent into existing gas power stations to generate power in quiet times. The article says that solar power has dropped from $100/Watt in 1976 to $0.50/Watt by 2016, and that instead of slowing down as the low hanging fruit has been picked, that process is speeding up since 2011 when Solar started to become cheaper than other forms of power generation, which changed the feedback loops and is bringing in much more demand which brings more investment, research and production, than before when it was an expensive little-used alternative.

This is a linked graph of solar growth compared to International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook predictions: https://rameznaam.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IEA-Solar-G...

In each of 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, the IEA predicted deployment of solar would stop accelerating (line going up) and steady off into consistant growth (flatline on that graph). Every year they have been very quickly wrong, and the 2019 predition of flatline is so wrong that by 2021 actual production of 190GW was WAYYYY off the top of that chart. At this rate we may not need to figure out storage nearly as much as we think.

> "What people have missed is that reaching cost parity on fuel synthesis will unlock huge new demand centers [and trigger an acceleration in demand/investment/research/cost decline of solar created synthetic fuels]."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32197012 (article rather than comments)

Sure, if it pans out. I'm all for syngas if it can be produced somewhat efficiently at scale. But right now lithium batteries and hydro are proven technologies that can be utilized. That's the difference.

If the story I link below is real, synthetic propane could become the standard for energy storage. Extremely efficient production from electricity and direct fuel cells convert it back even more efficiently. Hank Hill would be so proud.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37218727

Compression of air in underground cavities

> Hydrostor, which is based in Toronto, is one of several startups working on fixing those problems. The company says it’s figured out a way to capture and reuse the heat generated when air is compressed, eliminating the need to burn gas. It’s also figured out a way to make the mechanics work in areas where caverns must be dug out of hard rock, rather than salt. <

https://www.latimes.com/environment/newsletter/2023-01-12/th...

The more I think about it, the more I'm starting to get of the opinion that this entire call or worry about "storage" when it comes to solar is a giant distraction.

This first thing we need to do is align the costs and incentives. What I mean by that is simply allow the market, or government, to dictate the real cost of providing electricity at night. If there are no solar panels (nighttime), and whatever grid-scale batteries are available cost 1$/kwh then so be it, charge that amount to the consumer. People will learn to forego "bathing" in electricity at night endlessly. For decades we've been spoiled with ridiculous "energy on a tap" that just gives us oodles at the flick of a switch, and we just need to take that away.

As a side-effect of this whole "switching off the endless tap", micro-grids are the future. Small communities with mini-grid-scale batteries and sharing of electricity will take over this stupid "national synchronized grid" idea that has gimped our ability to be agile wrt local energy generation.

Well, for one I (and I presume many other people) would not vote for a platform with such an extremist position.

Yes, imagine there was a governor whose position is "at night, everyone will be limited to no more than 100W." The best-case scenario for the governor would be that they're recalled quickly.

It would be more like "at night (or when there is little solar), you pay progressively more for your electricity." A lot of places do that already, you just do it to a slightly-palatable level instead of to the true cost. Partly because of, as you guys point out it's politically nonviable, but also partly because it's electricity from cheap coal as opposed to green solar + super expensive batteries.

"People will learn to forego "bathing" in electricity at night endlessly. For decades we've been spoiled with ridiculous "energy on a tap" that just gives us oodles at the flick of a switch, and we just need to take that away."

I take it you live somewhere warm in the winter. We are already looking at removing other heating options like propane and natural gas furnaces, coal and oil heating is mostly phased out, and burning wood isn't great for the environment either. So electrical heating is necessary anywhere where its normal to freeze for several months. Telling people to stop bathing in electricity at night when that what keeps them alive is bullshit.

"micro-grids are the future. Small communities with mini-grid-scale batteries and sharing of electricity will take over this stupid "national synchronized grid" idea that has gimped our ability to be agile wrt local energy generation."

Why don't you ask Texas residents how not being part of the national synchronized grid worked out for them 2 years ago?

> "Telling people to stop bathing in electricity at night when that what keeps them alive is bullshit."

I never said anything of the sort. You're taking a really bad-faith and extreme straw-man of what I said, and I refuse to participate.

It's normal in many very cold places to entirely switch off your heating overnight.

You heat your home up during the day and evening, and as you retire for the night it's switched off. With sufficient insulation and warm bedding you don't need active heating overnight.

So it's absolutely compatible with an electric supply that's heavily biased towards the daytime.

As an example, it may start becoming more economical to include heat-batteries (I forget the name) in house construction such that they retain heat and radiate it to maintain a not freezing ambient temperature inside a house. That, along with insulation, and some rather moderate changes to behaviour, could entirely eliminate the need for electricity-use during night time hours. We don't know what ingenious and wonderful things people may do when the real-cost of electricity at night is exposed to them.

Ya that's a level of unmitigated bull** where I live there is usually several days out of the year where the temperature is -40 (doesn't matter the units at that temperature it's the same) and massive wind chill. There's not really a reasonable way to heat a houseduring the day and have it remain warm with tempratures like that without major changes to the way houses are built.

This seems like the quintessential example of some Cali tech bro nor understanding that there is anyone outside of their little bubble and assui everyone just lives like them.

Perhaps a Cali tech bro, maybe a standard scandanavian in a passive energy house with tight seals, good insulation, triple glazing, large solar heated hot water tank to hold thermal energy during the night, etc.

There are people outside everbodies particular bubbles.

What percentage of the world's population lives at a place that goes to -40C ever in the year? That's like 0.000001% of the world's population (didn't confirm, thumb sucking).

I think you need to admit, "bro", that you're far from a standard case and that maybe you should suck it up and move to a more hospitable spot instead of forcing the rest of us to subsidize your extreme lifestyle choice at the expense of our environment which we "all" apparently care so much about.

At least I'm suggesting insulation, and alternative methods of heating as opposed to just saying we should chug gigawatts so your butt could be warm at -40C outside.

The cold places are usually extreme latitudes.

I live around 60 latitude and here during the winter it might not be even that cold (tho it can be -20 or -30C).

It’s that the amount of sunshine hours and the angle it shines at means that for about 3 months the PV production is essentially zero.

This is during the time the demand is highest.

Storing heat for a few hours can be done pretty easily and cheaply though. Indeed many houses already have technologies like water tanks and storage heaters that do this.

The future is the macro-grid: use electricity in northern hemisphere while it's summer in the southern hemisphere.

Pardon me, but there's zero future for the micro grids.

>For decades we've been spoiled with ridiculous "energy on a tap" that just gives us oodles at the flick of a switch, and we just need to take that away.

Why shouldn't I be able to have oodles of energy at the flick of a switch?

Why is it bad that people had more than 100 years of using energy at a reasonable price point? Why do you think it's good for the energy to become more expensive or not to be available at all?

We do need energy for everything.

As you're asking, the bulk of the world's population survives with a much lower energy per capita usage than, say, a median US citizen.

For the high energy consumers it's more a perceived need than an actual need.

Further, energy availability appears to work akin to road availability; if you build a six lane highway traffic expands to fill it.

The obvious reason for wanting lower global energy use at this particular point in time is reduce the still increasing by products of energy production, greenhouse gases.

Once the climate parameters return to safer values energy production without those side effects can expand .. while we look at addressing the unwanted toxic by products of our new sources of energy - less greenhouse gases, more acids and waste associated with nickel, copper, lithium, et al.

> Wind is not reliable

I think what you mean is that wind alone is not baseload, not that it is unreliable. It is quite reliable in that its availability is predictable such that it can be coordinated with storage to create virtual baseload. Therefore its failure modes are relatively mild in impact.

In contrast, large centralized plants (whether combustion or nuclear) have far more consequential failure modes - for example, losing 1GW of power with little notice, as can happen with these plants, is usually a grid emergency event.

Nuclear would be the worst technology for filling temporary gaps in the production of renewables. The ramping speed of nuclear reactors is limited, and they cannot be throttled below 40% output without shutting them down entirely for quite some time. On top of that, the main expense of nuclear reactors is building and maintaining them, so throttling a reactor is not reducing the costs. You really want to run a nuclear reactor with a high load.

French NPP can vary their power output 80% up or down in 30 min (https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_pilotable_d%27%C3...)

Fine, than they can go a bit lower still. But for a grid mainly powered by renewables, they would have to be able to go all the way down to 0, what is really not a practical option for nuclear reactors.

But there is another catch: nuclear is extremely expensive, even when run most of the time close to 100%. But any time you throttle the reactor, you are driving the costs up. Because most of the costs are in building and operating the reactor, less so in fuel.

It’s worth noting that the dichotomy you set up isn’t quite right. The land use for solar and wind isn’t an exclusionary zone. The area around a wind turbine can be used same as before (most often as farmland) without a negative impact on its productivity.

And the same is true for solar. In fact, a growing number of agro-voltaic projects are seeing a net positive on crop yields from solar panels due to the increased shading and decreased temperatures.

Is it possible for solar panels to be semi-transparent so crops can still thrive underneath?

Yes it is: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/07/02/transparent-solar-pan...

“Combining two usage modes based on Insolight’s optical micro-tracking technology, these modules focus light on high-efficiency solar cells,” Insolight said in a press release. “When aligned, the optical system can generate energy (E-MODE), but it is also possible to unalign it to ‘leak’ the light (MLT-MODE). The solar modules therefore act like a ‘smart’ shade adjusting the amount of light they let through.”

This makes it possible to optimize the photosynthesis of plants during the seasons and reduce the negative impact of high summer heat on the yields and quality of agricultural products, while recovering the rest of the light in the form of electricity. Starting from July, the panels will be tested for four years on a 165-square-meter surface area. They will replace protective plastic tunnels on strawberries and raspberries.

“Dynamically adjusting the light transmitted to the plants paves the way for increased protection from climate variations and possible increases in crop yields thanks to the matching of the light to the needs of the plants and the lowering of the temperature during heat waves via the shading effect,” said Bastien Christ, head of the berries and medicinal plants group at Agroscope.

A similar project using different module technology: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/10/31/baywa-re-starts-build...

That's not needed, just have gaps between the panels so they provide partial shade. Many food crops can't tolerate "full sun" well, and will grow perfectly fine even with partial illumination.

The logistics of trying to plant, maintain and harvest crops underneath a bunch of solar panels while also needing to deal with the subsequent issues of uneven runoff of water from rain make it seem impractical. Just cover parking lots, malls and supermarkets with them, we have plenty of those, and they're closer to where the electricity is needed than agricultural land.

We absolutely should cover those, but there is a lot of farmland. There may not be enough "mall-land"

Well, when i see solar panels atop every mall and commercial building, when every home has a solar roof, then i'll entertain chopping down wilderness or sacrificing farmland to the cause. I still see plent of bare rooftop to address first.

Well good job it's not your decision to make then.

If the economic benefits of adding solar to their farm outweighs the costs then farmers will start adding them to farms.

Literally nobody proposes "sacrificing" farmland.

I'm looking at a legal agreement on my desk to lease 120 acres of productive eastern Nebraska farmland to build a commercial scale solar project. The land would be taken out of production ("sacrificed") for the 50 year lease, with payments about twice what the land leases for for agriculture (soybeans).

It is very common. Farming is hard, margins slim at best. And farmers are given great leeway in how they may make money from land. Regulation is lax. Many fields have been turned from the production of food to the production of electricity, while countless factory rooftops sit covered only in tar and asphalt.

As soon as we stop using farmland to grow energy crops when the same area could give us 20x the energy using solar panels.

The home roofs are going to be done off the more expensive solar installations ($/kW) that we can build because they’re so small.

It’s also fascinating how quickly the Nirvana fallacy shows up when it’s time to talk about renewables. Supposedly chopping down forests for solar (which isn’t the main way of getting land) or the farmers choosing to put something on their land is top of mind. But chop those forests to make something else, or have the farmers grow super subsidized corn and there isn’t a peep.

You can make up whatever you like, saying "seems". Facts are better.

The fact is that agrivoltaics has been very successful, for reasons you probably would not guess in a wholesale void of facts. Looking up the facts, you could actually learn something.

Regardless of your opinion on this subject, agrivoltaics projects are being installed today at an increasing rate, and they’re going well, from what I’ve read. It’s not some theoretical proposal, it’s happening now. It’s likely that solar panels will be installed both in parking lots and over farmland.

I was thinking of you set the solar up high, to create a diet of canopy, then you might be able to grow a rain forest under it which doesn't like direct sunlight and would allow animal habitat...?

This reminded me of a solar project at a US airport [0]. They placed solar panels to make a covered parking lot. I think it was part of a larger plan to use panels for cover and/or over some of the vast spaces that the airport covers

"Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (AUS) and Austin Energy celebrate the completion of a new solar panel array constructed on the AUS campus that will produce 1.8 megawatts of locally-generated, renewable energy. ... With 6,642 solar panels spanning across a distance that is equal size to two football fields, the array on the top floor of the airport’s Blue Garage is the largest on-site renewable energy installation on the AUS campus. The panels offer shaded parking for Blue Garage customers and will generate enough solar energy to power up to 160 homes per year."

[0] https://www.austintexas.gov/news/austin-bergstrom-internatio...

I remember reading some article that said we could offset all of human emissions by painting Vermont stark white or something along those lines.

Covering a desert in solar panels seems like the exact opposite of that plan.

If you ignore all other variables, then of course the situation looks like what one variable would make it do.

Would covering a desert in solar panels cause more thermal solar absorption in that area than would otherwise happen? Yes.

But if we're optimizing for "offsetting the heating effect of human GHG emissions", then installing 4.5TW of solar (about 4x what has been installed worldwide to date) would have a much more positive effect.

The world currently has 1.1TW of solar installed, producing about 6% of all electricity. So our new installation would be on its own capable of supplying 25% of global electricity usage. The corresponding drop in GHG emissions from the shutdown of coal, gas, and oil power plants would far outweigh the fact that part of the desert has been turned black.

Has this actually been quantified? Earth's albedo is a critical factor in the portion of the sun's energy that is rejected into space, just as GHG incidence in the atmosphere is.

In theory, darkening a portion of the Earth with high albedo (snow, sand) is worse than darkening a portion of the Earth with low albedo (roads, roofs, forest). Then it should be better to use a greener area for solar panels so long as the capacity factors would be similar.

Millions of square kilometers of the arctic are being "darkened" by loss of sea ice. Nothing humans can do can approach even a tiny fraction of that.

Many people would argue that humans did cause this loss of sea ice.

Also I don't see how that justifies adding to the effect? Especially if we don't know can't compute the trade off? I'm sure someone has done that work but my it didn't immediately jump out at me during a cursory search.

Just the uncertainty in the ice cover prediction is orders of magnitude larger than any effect from adding any plausible amount of solar panels.

Inventing BS problems does not contribute to the discussion. Please stick to facts.

If you don't like discussion what are you doing here?

> Would covering a desert in solar panels cause more thermal solar absorption in that area than would otherwise happen? Yes.

This depends on the efficiency of the PV modules. When it's greater than the albedo of the desert, it will cool the desert, not warm it. Remember, the electrical energy produced isn't heat. It's turned to heat at the consumer, but that's true of electrical energy from a nuclear plant too. Oh, and did you know that nuclear plants also add 2x as much heat energy in the exhaust of their cooling system?

There is way way more uranium than that. It is surprisingly common. And harvesting it from seawater opens up a supply that dwarfs any mining concept.

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

>> Uranium is a naturally occurring element found in low levels within all rock, soil, and water. This is the highest-numbered element to be found naturally in significant quantities on earth. According to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation the normal concentration of uranium in soil is 300 μg/kg to 11.7 mg/kg. ... It is considered to be more plentiful than antimony, beryllium, cadmium, gold, mercury, silver, or tungsten and is about as abundant as tin, arsenic or molybdenum.

How uranium ore becomes fuel rods: (Actually a rather simple process imho.)

https://youtu.be/9x7DozCqLxU

https://youtu.be/c7ehyxRBMbw

Nuclear is renewable for the same reason geothermal is renewable, and you can get uranium out of seawater for the same price as mining it

https://www.tiktok.com/@nuclearsciencelover/video/7092135813...

Why do people bother mining it?

Because mining it is relatively cheap. So cheap, in fact, that it is economical to throw away >95% of the fuel rather than try to burn it all or recycle it.

Fuel costs are 10% of the cost of nuclear electricity. The vast majority is financing.

> The vast majority is financing.

The financing for nuclear is expensive primarily because:

1) The costs of construction are so high - so huge amounts of financing needed.

2) The amount of time before investors see any ROI is very long.

A long time ago, when electricity markets were fully monopolized end to end, the long-term ROI on nuclear and other generating assets was guaranteed by the government, and the financial risk was borne by society.

Now, electricity markets have been liberalized (at least at the generation level). Simultaneously, far less capital-intensive generation technologies have been created (renewables, combined-cycle gas, and increasingly storage). These technologies provide an earlier ROI for risk-averse capitalists.

And as Bent Flyvbjerg mentions in "How Big Things Get Done", projects that last for a very long time are all but guaranteed to encounter one or more black swan events and/or recessions.

Bent makes a sensible argument for SMR reactor technology in that book too.

> you can get uranium out of seawater for the same price as mining it

> Why do people bother mining it?

> Because mining it is relatively cheap.

Something does not add up here.

Mining exists and is cheap enough that there is no incentive to invest in something new, even if it might just as good. Particularly because "just as good" is rarely a good reason for changing and investing, it would have to be significantly better.

(Though I have no real opinion on whether seawater extraction really is just as good...somewhat dubios)

FWiW the latest in a long line of seawater extraction papers is (2020):

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/ta/d0ta0...

https://sci-hub.ru/10.1039/D0TA07180C

which has the weasel phrases

     uranium production costs could be reduced to $80.70–86.25 per kg of uranium with this fiber, which is similar to the uranium spot price of $86.68 per kg of uranium

and

    suggests the possibility of economically producing nuclear fuel from the ocean.

Not to disrespect their work, many small scale lab tests confidently assert that costs could be reduced and might possibly be economic.

The fine print is that so far no pilot plants exist and no estimates on the capital plant costs for industrial scale extraction to achieve the possible unit throughput prices as yet exist.

This may yet happen.

There may also be a slip between paper and industrial plant at scale.

> This may yet happen.

Yeah. But probably not for a long time as Uranium from present sources is cheap (enough) and plentiful (enough) and if that should ever get more expensive we can start looking at the huge stockpiles of 95% unspent fuel that we call "nuclear waste". Burning that would (a) give us a lot of electricity and (b) reduce the radioactivity of whatever is left dramatically.

To be clear: I'm not arguing for one or the other, I'm pointing out that one of the above statements doesn't align with the other.

If the other costs are equal (remember I said if) then extracting it from seawater would undoubtedly be easier overall simply because of abundance, and the non-destructive nature of collecting it would mean there's no issue with environmental challenges due to the destructive nature of mining.

Not really. If the costs are equal, then there is no point in investing in a new technology, new plants etc. that don't provide a competitive advantage.

What's the startup question again?

What about your new product is 10x better than the incumbent?

Not sure too many VCs have advised companies as follows: "Hey your new product is exactly as good as the incumbent, you have an absolute winner on your hands here. Where do we need to send the check?"

> What about your new product is 10x better than the incumbent?

Well let's just ignore the idea that mining megacorps operate in any way like a startup does. At the top of the uranium mining food chain, even a 1% reduction in costs (or increase in extraction) would be add around $13M a year to their revenue, so fuck it lets play hypoethetical.

If someone came along and said "hey we have a startup that's exactly as profitable as YouTube, but there's essentially no risk of people protesting our business and using ad-blockers to deprive us of revenue" the VC vultures would be on that shit like a fat kid on cake.

As I said before: seawater is ubiquitous and for the purposes of human scale, essentially limitless everywhere, unlike mined uranium which to be cost effective, is only mined in certain areas where the return is higher.

1. Not lower cost, same cost. Maybe.

2. Who said anything about no risk?

So we moved from using Twitter as a source to TikTok? We live in dark times...

You can also get the same information from here, which has an extensive reference section at the bottom. Disclosure: I wrote it.

https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html

Nice work. Do you know of any studies looking at the cost of powering the world that way? And the time need to transition?

I get the old man yells at sky reaction but it's just a short video... A snapshot of information which directly references with overlayed text a citation to the study he's discussing.

Not much different than most HN comments which 90% of the time are only one or two sentences.

None of this is true. Highly upvoted hn comments (the ones people read) bring receipts. This is just someone’s low effort opinion.

For what it’s worth, the cost to extract uranium from seawater is actually a very complicated subject. It is generally cited that the cost is approximately 2x the mining cost, but that’s based on estimates for seawater extraction.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280745206_Cost_Esti...

Well, at the very least give a short summary of what you are linking to.

TikTok is not credible. You can’t click the links or easily verify the conclusions. It’s the ultimate in trust me bro science.

>"or more square kilometers of land [...]"

Technically you need to factor in the fact that a nuclear plant can be built relatively near the places where its power will be consumed; some mass of solar power in Nevada is highly inefficient for powering New York or Virginia, even if you built HVDC lines to cut down on total line losses, so you'll need to pick land tracts reasonably near battery banks that would in turn be near cities.

Inventing imaginary problems does not contribute to the discussion. Please use facts.

Just as well New York and Virginia have oodles of open ocean right at their doorstep to run multi-gigawatt wind farms I guess huh?

Wind isn't reliable.

Yeah and all those people on the other side of the Appalachians can just take a hike, why do they need power anyway. They brought the problem on their selves with their dirty coal mining habits time for them to pay the price.

The comment I replied to talked about getting power from Nevada to New York. I'm not American so I had to look at a map but it seems like the other side of the Appalachians from New York is... Ohio?

Is there something about Ohio that means they have no atmospheric wind nor natural sunlight?

40 million acres are used to grow corn for ethanol. This is 162,000 square kilometers. This can produce 3.24 exajoules of energy.

Also, solar panels don't need any land. There are so many places we can install solar without 'consuming' land. They can be roofs, floating on tops of lakes and reservoirs with the added benefit of preventing evaporation, agrivoltaics combined with farmland, vertical panels, superfund sites, deserts, along the highways, etc.

For all the concern about land use for renewables, it really feels like subsidized ethanol has got to be the most wasteful use of energy investment dollars in terms of farmland used and every other possible metric. It's very interesting to think about using that money and land for other energy generation uses.

yes, biofuel is a colossally bad idea and it should have been obvious to everyone involved right from the start.

One counter point is that these fields can easily be turned into crops to feed the citizens of the country in an emergency. Solar panels not so much. Also, there was already infrastructure in place to easily maintain this energy source.

Not saying this is a reason to keep the subsidies, but I'm sure it made sense at the time.

The thing about mineral reserves is that they only make sense when you add the price-point to the number.

There is enough Uranium on the planet for a few centuries. Make it a few millennia if you breed it, and lots and lots of millennia if you expand your reactors to use other fuels. But most of it is way more expensive to get than what we use today... what actually makes very little difference for the final costs.

One kg of Uranium is significantly easier to transport compared to the solar energy obtained in a corner of Arizona or Utah though.

And what happens when it gets dark? Solar is cheap, storage is not.

The uranium can produce power when it's dark outside, unlike the solar panels. I wouldn't bet against clean energy that can produce on demand. We'll always need it from somewhere.

> One kilogram of uranium-235 (50 cm^3) can theoretically produce about 20 terajoules of energy.

That's missing the huge and expensive nuclear power plant around that kilogram of uranium.

If you don't account for the conversion device (for which solar is cheaper per GJ than nuclear power plants), then light is a much better medium: assuming 15% efficiency, which is a conservative estimate, solar panels can convert one kilogram of solar light (remember e=mc^2) into 13.5 terajoules of electricity.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1+kg+*+c%5E2+*+15%25+in...

The sun bombards our planet with around 61 metric tons of light per day:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2+*+pi+*+radius+of+eart...

Where the 6 kwh/m^2 come from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance#Irradiance_on...

Hey thanks for adding links to formulas. Great use of wolfram alpha imo.

I'm curious how the numbers stack up of completed plants - but I am not very good at math and don't have a great understanding of electricity units, especially at the grid scale and big numbers.

Any chance you could help compare the construction cost of this nuclear plant to another recently constructed solar or wind farm measured against... I guess capacity?

Given the intermittent nature of solar/wind, does capacity even make sense to compare in a context without supporting batteries?

I'll give it a shot but I am probably super wrong.

** Nuclear:

I'll use the plant from the article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...

Construction costs 18b USD (does that include loans?)

Nameplate capacity of 2302MW

Used capacity is 91% so 2094MW

$18b / nameplate capacity = $7.8 USD per rated W

$18b / used capacity = $8.60 per realized W

** Solar (excluding batteries):

I picked a relatively large, recent, US based solar farm from the list of plants in wikipedia

Agua Caliente Solar Project (2016) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agua_Caliente_Solar_Project

Construction costs 1.8b USD

Nameplate capacity of 290 MW

Used capacity is 28% so 81 MW

$1.8b / nameplate capacity = $6.2 USD per rated W

$1.8b / used capacity = $22 USD per realized W (that can't be right?)

** Note:

I don't know if my math is right, I don't know if the costs factor in loans, also the nameplate capacity for the nuclear plant is MWe and the solar plant is MWac so I am unsure how that works out.

Using Solar Star as another datapoint [1]. 579 MWac x 32.8% capacity factor ≈ 190.

I found mention of a bond issuance and someone purchasing the project here [2]. If it’s $1b, then it’s $5.26. If $2b then $10.53.

So they’re in the same ballpark. But one type of plant runs 20-30 years and the other for 50-80 years @ 90% capacity factor. The CANDU reactors are especially cool in that they can use natural uranium and refueled without a shutdown [3].

—- [1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Star [2] - https://www.sustainablebusiness.com/2013/06/1-billion-bond-o... [3] - https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/On-line_refueling_of...

One thing you didn't include: Opex, a solar farm is pretty low maintenance and requires zero fuel. A NPP is the opposite.

That's fair, I wonder if there are numbers on running costs.

I'm certain nuclear running costs would dwarf solar - I think solar just needs fresh water, cleaning and hardware maintenance (replacing inverters, and such).

Would be interesting to work the running costs into the "$ per realized W" calculation.

I'd also like to see how battery-backed solar compares. I assume the objective would be to solve the intermittency issue, but I am hopeful it would increase the capacity factor as well.

Another thing that's interesting to consider is multi-purpose energy utilization you get with nuclear - like desalination and hydrogen generation - though the latter is uneconomical because hydrogen produced from fossil fuels is much cheaper.

Had to dig in my comments, but there you go:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38303819

Self citing:

Better not use biased opinion pieces, when there numbers from government sources (US, but eho cares):

LCOE (total, incl. CAPEX, in USD per MWh):

coal 82.6, combined cycle 39.9, advanced nuclear 81.7, geothermal 37.6, biomass 90.1, onshore wind 40, offshore wind (that one was a surprise, since offshore wind should be quite cheap, mainly driven by capital cost of 104 USD per MWh) 105, solar 33.8, solar hybrid 49 and hydro 64.

Variable cost (same as above):

coal 23.7, combined cycle 27.7, adv. nuclear 10.3, geothermal 1.2, biomass 30, onshore wind 0, offshore wind 0, solar 0, solar hybrid 0, hydro 4.1

All number from here:

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation...., page 9.

Does the solar figure include the batteries?

It is very sad that nuclear is actually cheaper than coal.

> I picked a relatively large, recent, US based solar farm from the list of plants in wikipedia

> Agua Caliente Solar Project (2016)

Note that solar being cheaper than nuclear is a more recent phenomenon than 2016. The solar panel prices went from $0.63 to $0.26 in the time span between 2016 and 2022.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices?time=2002...

A better example is Spotsylvania Solar/Highlander Solar: https://www.sheppardmullin.com/assets/htmldocuments/PFI%2020...

Construction costs: $905m USD

Nameplate capacity: 618 MW

I couldn't find used capacity factors but Yuma is one of the sunniest counties in the USA while Spotsylvania county is further north and also has less sunny days. With an assumed capacity factor of 18%, one gets 111 MW.

$905m / nameplate capacity = $1.48 USD per rated W

$905m / used capacity = $8.24 USD per realized W

This year alone prices for solar panels have dropped by 30-40%. The biggest reason for prices not dropping for solar farms/large scale solar at the moment is that the supply of other equipment needed like transformers etc can't meet the demand with delivery times having reached 2+ years. So the prices for solar will likely drop another 40%-50% in the next 2-3 years at least in the rest of the world maybe not in the US because of trade wars/restrictions.

>That's missing the huge and expensive nuclear power plant around that kilogram of uranium.

Whereas I think you are missing the huge and expensive battery array for solar to be useful outside of peak times? And the fact that the best sites for solar are far away from the transmission network?

You dropped a decimal point. The 1 kg of sunlight at 15% efficiency produces 13.5 petajoules of electricity.

But remember that a square kilometer of solar panels needs maybe ten square kilometers of actual land. Anywhere other than at the equator, the panels need to be spaced far enough apart not to shadow each other. On a north-facing slop they would be even more spaced out. Do that in two dimensions, so they can track the sun, and keeping one square meter of panels perpendicular to the sun requires a suprisingly large footprint.

And trees. Clearcutting forests to make room for a solar panels just seems wrong, a Captain Planet style of evil. There are all sorts of places where the terrain just isnt suited.

Good thing that cube of uranium doesn’t need any extra space around it! We can just line them all up next to each other. Criticality accident? What’s that?

Clear cutting forest to put in solar isn’t likely to be cost-efficient. There’s plenty of shitty desert and mountainside land available.

It's not 10x. The optimal ground coverage ratio in the South even for tracking panels is like 30%: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0038092X2...

Most of the US isn't wooded. I don't think a significant number of projects propose clear-cutting to build solar farms. I don't know where that came from.

Try where i am, the pacific northwest. Its all mountains and trees. Large solar farms are always tricky, even residential rooftop solar often runs into issues with trees.

If only it were possible to transmit electricity from one place to another...

Seriously, while a lot has been written about the need to update the grid and install more long distance transmission lines to support renewables, even with the current grid it makes much more sense to install wind and solar in locations where it is more efficient and then transmit the electricity elsewhere. In Texas, most of the wind farms are in West Texas hundreds of miles away from Houston, for example.

This might be a controversial opinion: In many cases, it might be reasonable to clear cut 10 sq km for solar power. Pacific Northwest is enormous. There is plenty of undeveloped land that can be used for solar power. To be clear: I am not suggesting "cut down all of the tree for solar". I am saying: Choose 1/5/10 sq km plots, clear cut them, and install solar power. Ten to one hundred of these in the region would have minimal environmental impact, but very large impact to reduce use of hydrocarbons for electricity production.

Then you probably shouldn't build large solar farms. Leaves still a huge amount of area open on top of roofs, parking lots, streets which could be used for solar without cutting down a single tree. Though it somehow didn't prevent those roads and houses to be build :p And while I don't like cutting down trees, just fire protection - and that gets an even larger topic in the future - should tell you to cut down trees directly around houses, so rooftop solar should be possible in most places.

But the thing is: the pacific northwest should be ideal for wind power. So that would be the main emphasis. And then build a high power line to Nevada. Which delivers solar to the northwest and in the nights wind power to Nevada.

Germany already has a 1.4GW powerline to Norway operational, where we network the grid to optimize renewable utilization.

Nobody builds solar farms on "north-facing slopes". Nobody is making solar panels "track the sun". Nobody even proposes "clearcutting forests" for solar farms. Trolling is in strict violation of site guidelines.

Well, actually Florida (FPL) along I-10 is right now constructing new solar farms where there used to be forests. I'm not sure if what they did with the trees constitutes "clear cutting" but the solar panels are there now, and the trees are not. I've driven the route for many years. It was all forested.

Do you know if those forests were professionally managed for paper production? It might be private land, and it very likely legal.

True. There isn't any actual untouched forest land in north Florida. It's all been harvested and replanted many times. Almost certainly it was private sale or leased land. But those farm trees still produced more oxygen and stored more carbon than the solar panels will.

> But those farm trees still produced more oxygen and stored more carbon than the solar panels will.

If those solar panels replace a coal fired power plant, is that still true? I am unsure.

> Nobody is making solar panels "track the sun".

It's very common for utility-scale solar to use single-axis trackers (the panels move from pointing east to pointing west through the day), unlike small-scale solar which usually has fixed panels (normally pointing south or north depending on which hemisphere you're on). The gain from single-axis trackers is high enough and their cost is low enough (a single geared motor can move a whole row of panels) to make it cost-effective.

(I haven't, so far, seen any large photovoltaic solar power plant which uses two-axis trackers to really track the sun; but thermal solar power plants with a central tower need these two-axis trackers to aim each mirror at the correct angle.)

I think trackers are a thing of the past. The cost of solar panels has sunken so low, they come essentially for free in installations. A tracker would be way to expensive. Here in Germany, people even start covering north-facing roofs with solar, and of course even walls and fences, if they are roughly in the right direction.

I'm not sure about the other things but sun tracking tech for solar panels has been around for a long time and it's trivially easy to find through a search, such as [1].

"But there are also other ways to boost the energy production of solar panels – such as by tilting them to follow the Sun's path in the sky, similar to the way young sunflowers follow the sun from east to west during the day. Tracking technology, which is already in use on some land based solar arrays, helps increase the overall electricity production, as the panels constantly adjust to face the Sun."

1) www.bbc.com/future/article/20221116-the-floating-solar-panels-that-track-the-sun

Trackers are necessary if someone is doing math based on panels perpendicular to the sun. Of course they are rare, but are needed when doing the conversion. Whether the tracked pannel cast shadow, or more panels recieve less-than-direct sunlight, the math is the same.

And it is all irrelevant. There is an absolute overabundance of pasture land, so spacing panels out so the grass can grow between and under causes no difficulty.

One interesting point that I think is often missed, is that solar and wind produce energy roughly at an anticadence to each other and so storage is of significantly less of a requirement than one might imagine.

Can we not overbuild solar and wind such that the troughs are nearly good enough, combined with high voltage cross-regional transmission lines, and limited storage for buffer? Solar panels are absurdly cheap, and the world has a lot of equatorial desert.

Yes, we can, and will do. Solar is so cheap that 4x overbuild is still cheaper than nukes, and cost is still plummeting.

Nuclear is the way forward. It’s a damn shame hippies stopped us from leveraging it. We literally wouldn’t have climate change if we kept increasing nuclear power plants in the 70s. It’s just a no brainer. Solar and wind are great but the amount of power they generate may as well be 0 compared to nuclear.

> We literally wouldn’t have climate change if we kept increasing nuclear power plants in the 70s

I highly doubt this

Methane and coal is the largest driver of climate change

> Solar and wind are great but the amount of power they generate may as well be 0 compared to nuclear.

This is very untrue both measured in absolute numbers, and in cost/kwh. Nuclear is 2x solar and wind, both of which are decreasing in cost rapidly YoY. https://www.statista.com/statistics/194327/estimated-leveliz...

You're comparing a one-time-use resource in U235 vs. the land required for a solar plant, which will last indefinitely for all intents and purposes. Adding the "in a day" constraint is quite misleading in your comment when that is not the long-term limiting factor.

Let's not forget that the externalities of nuclear power are generally much more costly than solar / wind.

We need to move away from coal as soon as we can. Coal is worst CO2 pollutant and not that energy dense.

Move to a mixture of wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, nuclear - whatever makes sense.

When the last coal powered plant is shut off in US, we should celebrate that as a day off for everyone.

Have you seen the Lazard lcoe numbers? Nukes are 6x more expensive than wind solar.

And wind and especially solar have more economies of scale and materials research to make them even cheaper.

This comes from a LFTR fanboy. Boy howdy do I wish economical nuclear existed. But 6x as expensive? That ain't all red tape.

I think of course that LFTR has a path to cheaper nuclear with breeding and near waste elimination, full fuel use, safety, and scalability. But I don't think it will ever beat solar, especially once mature multifunction silicon perovskite cells or something like that and salt water batteries develop.

I hope to be proven wrong.nyclest power is so cool.

A little bit silly to compare the price of solar and batteries, which has been driven down due to extensive government subsidy, tax incentives, and massive economies of scale over the past few decades (including production in China), to the current estimated cost of nuclear plants that we have almost no experience building anymore.

If we embarked on a sustained plan to invest in nuclear the way we have in solar and wind, nuclear's all-in cost would be far cheaper. I guarantee it.

And I “guarantee” the opposite. Nuclear is fundamentally massive complicated technology that just wouldn’t benefit from cost reductions due to manufacturing scale in the same degree. Solar is so so simple in comparison, that’s why it’s gotten so cheap and will continue to get cheaper. Maybe after 10 years of massively scaled nuke production we get costs down 2-4x . That would be nice but solar is down 30x and still dropping.

Exactly. Furthermore, it's not like we can go back 40 years and make stronger investments in nuclear from back then. The need to decarbonize is so massive right now that it doesn't make sense to invest a ton in technology that will only be "ready" in 2055. By that time renewables (and the storage infrastructure that will be required) will have an insurmountable lead unless large scale fusion becomes viable.

No. The US has subsidized the hell out of nuclear historically [1] and also in recent years [2]. Without subsidies, commercial nuclear development would never have happened in the first place and we would be shutting down plants faster than we already are because of economics. This also excludes all the VC money that has flowed into nuclear startups.

[1] https://www.gao.gov/products/emd-79-52

[2] https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-establishes-6-billion-pr...

You are probably right, but only in the short term. Long term, there will be the political will for projects that require 10-100x our current power production, and nuclear will look attractive again. Alternatively, the renewables curve may flatten before we are fully decarbonized simply because the maintenance and materials don't scale well. Nuclear is expensive up front, but maintenance requires far fewer (albeit more specialized) personnel and way less material per kwh.

When people want 10-100x our current power production, they will build 10-100x solar and wind, because they are massively cheaper. Nukes have only ever got more expensive.

Nukes might make sense on the moon.

Ignores context, diminishing returns, the lack of viable storage options at that scale (or even the current one). Gonna still put my money on the proven tech for 10-100x projects - its a social choice to make it expensive.

Right now little is spent on storage because dollars are overwhelmingly better spent building out generating capacity, even in places where noontime generation exceeds demand. When there is a strict excess of renewable generation, it will be time to begin building out storage. We have myriad viable storage options. Costs for storage are still falling fast.

That doesn't make sense, do you have data for that? Best I can find is that we (the US) has the ability to store somewhere around 1% of our generation capacity, rounding up. Here in California we spend absurd amounts maintaining gas plants that only run during high demand periods, despite only having 6.6GW worth of storage for a state using 300 TWh per year. We are only 13% to our 2045 goal, so if it was cost-effective to do, we would already be doing it.

Without the storage, all of that day time generation is pointless, we need either gas or nuclear at night anyways, so the cost isn't really affected.

Moreso, solar and wind are too predictable. How Big Things Get Done ranks them up with road construction as top projects that barely go over budget. If you expect to spend $100 million on solar or wind, then it’s probably going to cost <$110 million. Meanwhile other projects could go 2, 3, 7x over budget, time or money or both.

Someone who builds a solar array will be able to go directly to build another, not have to lick their wounds and repair their reputation or business.

I would take that bet. Nuclear tech will also continue to improve.

Nuclear does not seem to be on the mass production curve that solar and batteries are.

Even if you could design a reactor that itself can be mass produced at that scale, you still need to do the same with selecting and getting environmental and public safety approval for installation sites and production, transportation, and disposal of the fuel and waste.

I'm not against nuclear from a technological perspective, but I just don't see it being economically competitive with effectively printable devices like solar and batteries given the current direction of the cost curves on each.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1129876/china-nuclear-po...

How do costs compare? What's the site approval process like in China vs the US?

Compare this graph with more than nuclear, and notice how lagging nuclear is compared to any other renewable.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-energy-consumption

Nuclear might not be able to compete in the U.S. and Europe, but that’s largely because of a ridiculous regulatory regime and has very little to do with the actual tech.

People love to say it, but is there evidence? I've never seen it - which doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but that this claim needs it.

Nuclear was much cheaper in the 1970s and early 80s: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Overnight-Construction-C...

This wasn't just due to regulatory influence, it was also due to economies of scale. But the two are related, more regulation results in fewer builds. Fewer builds reduces economies of scale and thus increases costs. Which results in even fewer nuclear builds, and so on.

In other words, nuke cost has only ever increased, however much was built.

On a per-MW basis nuclear power dropped in cost during the 1950s. See the small blue dots round the late 1950s and early 60s? Compare that with the cluster of red dots.

Early, low-hanging fruit?

That, and larger plants. Things like concrete containment vessels have costs relative to the surface area of a hemisphere, while power output scales with the volume. But the big driver was economies of scale. Building multiple copies of the same or similar design means you can have longer production runs of steam generators, pressure vessels, turbines, etc.

I.e., cost has risen monotonically since the 1950s.

Incorrect, it fell from the 1950s through the 1960s.

I.e., cost has risen monotonically since the '60s. Costs were all over the map in the 50s.

In the early days, vendors didn't know how much NPPs would cost, so they priced them to sell, so they could gain that data. Later prices reflected that experience.

One can view the increase over time of nuclear costs as the replacement of wishful thinking with actual experience.

Thanks for the paper. Quick summary (of a quick read): Most research has studied US and France; this paper adds other countries. Costs have greatly increased in US and France, but not always in other countries. They've decreased recently in South Korea.

> (economies of scale)

Why do you blame economies of scale? The paper doesn't say that, afaict.

Also they say, "increased environmental and safety regulation ... may have led to cost increases", which does not sound conclusive.

Also, I think we really need to be talking about lifetime cost, including construction, operation, and decommissioning. In many things, spending more up front reduces later costs.

We can thank the hippies of the 60s and 70s for all their anti-nuclear silliness for making the nuclear industry heavily over regulated.

There was also the Soviet nuclear fireworks project in the 80s that didn’t help much.

And then it took until the 90s to have an actual imopact on policy. It always puzzles how people get even the most basic timelines wrong.

You have to to be honest. They were able to push for stronger regulations not because politics mainly listens to hippies. Stronger regulations were prudent considering the safety levels of the earlier reactor design. Without those regulations, many more cheap, but less safe reactors might have been built. Of which more had gone bad over years.

So yes, if you will, thank the hippies for preventing several nuclear incidents.

China has installed more renewable energy than the rest of the world put together last year. I'm pretty sure we can rule out any "ridiculous regulatory regime" issues there.

They’re also building a lot of nuclear: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1129876/china-nuclear-po...

China is barely building nuclear anymore. China added more wind and solar the past nine months than all of its nuclear reactors under construction will provide. Yes, that includes capacity factor. https://twitter.com/yo_ean/status/1718633487454904718

A moderate civilian nuclear supply chain and skills base helps keep a lid on the maintenance and construction of nuclear submarines, carriers and nuclear bombs.

If you’re going to try to determine how China is approaching nuclear power, it’s probably more useful to look at data related to that [0], instead of drawing conclusions from tangential data.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

The point I was making is that China isn't inclined to do things just to appease some regulatory requirement. They are also building an incredible amount of Coal power.

Ah, I think there’s a misunderstanding of the parent comment. They aren’t necessarily saying that the problem is pro-renewable regulation, just that there are heavy (safety) barriers for nuclear.

Yeah, the safety standards for nuclear reactors exaggerate the dangers compared to the alternatives that are suitable for base load generation

The Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act exists precisely because sophisticated private insurers run a mile from fully insuring against these dangers.

Until the subsidy is repealed and taxpayers stops insuring it, the industry's frequent claims of its own safety ring kind of hollow.

It's particularly galling to see them cynically demand that safety regulations be watered down to bring down costs while the act still exists. Imagine if we made taxpayers responsible for cleaning up oil spills.

> Imagine if we made taxpayers responsible for cleaning up oil spills.

We are. Then we try to go after the companies but it all depends on their corporate structure and in what legislature.

- For a ship not exceeding 5,000 gross tonnage, liability is limited to 4.51 million SDR (US$5.78 million)

- For a ship 5,000 to 140,000 gross tonnage: liability is limited to 4.51 million SDR plus 631 SDR for each additional gross tonne over 5,000

- For a ship over 140,000 gross tonnage: liability is limited to 89.77 million SDR (US$119.39 million)

https://www.imo.org/en/About/Conventions/Pages/International...

In the past we have accepted this socialized cost as a requirement for a world fueled by fossil fuels, which of course will change as we transition away.

Slave labor is always cheap. https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ILAB/images/storyboar...

Batteries are nowhere near able to meet any energy storage demands of the grid.

The simple question to ask yourself is why do battery installations always get quoted in units of power - GW - and not units of energy, GWH - which is what we actually use?

(The answer is: because they're terrible for it. Batteries hold about 3x they're rated power value as energy - which means the 10 GW or whatever someone quotes is good for about 3 hours at that output. Great for grid stability, expensive and useless for long term storage).

> The simple question to ask yourself is why do battery installations always get quoted in units of power - GW - and not units of energy, GWH - which is what we actually use?

For the same reason gas power plants and hydroelectric power plants are quoted in MW units, and not on the size of their fuel tanks or reservoir volume (converted to MWh as appropriate): it's the most important number for balancing the grid. If you have 90 GW of power demand on the grid at a given moment, you need 90 GW of power generation on the grid at that same moment (simplifying a bit, since transmission constraints mean you also need some of that power generation to be at specific places).

Thus answering the challenge: they're not storage. They're grid stabilization utilities. Because no one expects to run them for more then 30 minutes to an hour while they bring dispatchable generation online.

Which means they're irrelevant to the idea of grid scale energy storage, because they don't meaningfully store anything.

Last year you said they couldn't even meet enough demand for the grid. Now it is 30 minutes to an hour. Next year it will be hours.

How does it feel when the Overton windows moves while nuclear is stuck in the past?

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

Because as we all know, the grid is supplied by exactly 1 powerplant, with one energy source, at all times. /s

The insane thing is that it is so efficient that it doesn't need to be on that mass production curve to be competitive. It is competitive even in the somewhat insane way we build it now.

However, we have a number of companies working on building reactors in factories. Rolls-Royce for example is talking to Ukraine to upgrade some of their old (not sure if already decommissioned) coal plants to nuclear with small, factory-built nuclear reactors.

For that to happen in the US, (1) we need to focus on more numerous, smaller modular reactors, (2) the NRC needs certification timeliness requirements forced on it (and more funding if there's an actual lack of resources), and (3) specific project requirements need to be frozen before construction (no more up-requiring mid-construction).

Modular reactors are the solution to not having enough capital or a long enough timeframe to launch and fund megaprojects at a pace that creates economies of scale anymore, which is exactly the US problem.

> NRC needs certification timeliness requirements forced on it

That's going to be tough: What happens if the day comes and they don't yet know? They can't just approve it, so just deny it?

The government should cover the losses of the investors.

Various agencies are constantly missing FOIA deadlines, and often the only way to get them to actually do the jobs they are legally required to do is to sue them in court, asking for both the information and to have court costs covered.

Even if you could pass that legislation, which seems very unlikely, that doesn't solve the problem. The employees of the regulators aren't personally liable, and in many respects don't individually control the schedule. The investors also cause delays - and would now have an incentive to do that - and in many cases the/an investor is the government. Also, good luck explaining to taxpayers the $10 billion payout.

Right, the employees would have to be liable to their bosses. Their bosses would have to be answering up the chain, to congress and the president.

Presumably, for a regulatory agency to be held to a deadline, they would need to outline up front (or with reasonable notice) all of the things they would need to know and the inspections they would have to make. Those time tables would have to be defined early on.

This is where the idea breaks down.

    How does a regulator devise a fixed schedule to regulate a novel technology?

    How do you hold government employees accountable without upsetting powerful interests like politicians and unions, or get staffing funded properly on demand?

    How do you even get the government to hold itself accountable on something like this when the DOD can't even *complete a clean audit*?

We'll probably just keep winging it, badly.

> We'll probably just keep winging it, badly.

I'm not sure we are 'winging it' at all, or doing badly. It may just be an irreduceable problem.

Nuclear has only ever gotten more cost inefficient. What makes you think that will change?

Nuclear was cheaper when more of it was built [1]. Economies of scale make things cheaper. A production run of 40 steam generators is a lot cheaper than 4 steam generators.

Proponents of a primarily solar + wind grid are betting on a breakthrough in energy storage. If that breakthrough does not transpire, we'll either have to give up on stopping carbon emissions or use nuclear power.

1. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Overnight-Construction-C...

Converting atmospheric CO2 into fuels could contribute to this effort. But bacterial and plant-based fuel production may still be more economical and produce fewer overall emissions than even a solar array and a carbon capture plant.

Converting atmospheric CO2 into hydrocarbon fuels requires hydrogen as an input, so it'd probably be easier to just store the hydrogen directly. Right now, almost all hydrogen is produced through steam reformation [1] which emits CO2. Electrolysis is inefficient and corrosion of electrodes makes it expensive and hard to scale. Capturing atmospheric CO2 is similarly difficult. Carbon Dioxide is at very low concentrations in the atmosphere so it takes a really long time to sequester meaningful amounts of it. Similar issue with biomass: it produces energy very slowly and doesn't have the scale required.

There's a reason why plans for a primarily renewable grid assume that compressed air, synthetic ammonia, giant flywheels, or something else will provide storage for orders of magnitude cheaper than batteries: because existing storage systems aren't capable of meeting the storage demands of intermittent generation. Will one of these systems deliver a storage breakthrough? Maybe. But it's not wise to bet the future of your electrical grid on a technological breakthrough that hasn't happened yet.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming

I love the improvement implied by "continue to improve" in the face of all evidence that shows fission is a uniquely impractical source of energy that has done nothing but get more and more expensive.

So the first nuke power reactor went live in 1951.

In the 72 years since then, in what meaningful ways has "Nuclear tech" improved?

It's not cheaper to build.

It's not cheaper to operate.

It's not cheaper to dispose of the waste.

It's not cheaper to decommission.

It's not faster to build.

> The new 1,114 megawatt (MW) Unit 3 reactor joins two existing reactors

It's indeed not a lot. At a great cost. That kind of is the point. Nuclear is very costly.

Solar, wind, battery storage, and other cheap alternatives are indeed being rolled out at a plural orders of magnitude larger scale.

Nuclear is costly _now_*. It wasn't getting built, for years. There is so much energy to be had from that, and cost learning curves can come down. France's ("small") modular reactors, SMR, they even aim to sell internationally, in their 2030 plan, are a model. To China no less.

China also builds nuclear reactors, and we can't fall behind them. I cannot abide an SMR gap.

> China also builds nuclear reactors, and we can't fall behind them

I, uh, have some uncomfortable news for you.

China are currently building 22 nuclear reactors [1]

China installed 230GW of solar and wind in 2023 [2]

China has over 40,000kms of High Speed Rail, and continues to expand [3]

By any measure, you're falling way behind them.

[1] https://www.economist.com/china/2023/11/30/china-is-building...

[2] https://www.asiafinancial.com/china-seen-installing-230-gw-o...

[3] https://www.statista.com/topics/7534/high-speed-rail-in-chin...

Last I checked they're also outcompeting everyone in new coal plants https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...

If I'm up against you in a beer drinking contest and I drink more beer AND more whisky than you... I still win the beer drinking contest.

Complete non-sequitur. OP said "China is building nuclear", not "China is building more nuclear than wind/solar".

Their capacity factors are getting ever lower and at the same time they added more renewables than the growth for the electricity grid.

In other words, their CO2 emissions are set for structural decline simply by the amount of renewables being built. China is way ahead of the west.

https://theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carbon-e...

Some parts of the west already did that years ago in electricity production. For example carbon free electricity production shares in France (88%), Sweden (98%), Finland (90%), etc.

Though there is still a lot of work to do to go fully CO2 neutral due to cars, trucks, ships, planes, fertiliser production, etc.

My concern is that, since it's harmful to the planet and they're on track to be the largest economy, their absolute coal output is more relevant to the rest of the world than what percentage of its respective GDP it is. I don't necessarily blame them since their main priority is their own growth, but we're relying on their good will in 2030 without any way to enforce reduction if they change their mind.

> 230GW of solar and wind in 2023

Nameplate capacity. For actual average output, divide by 6.

And it doesn't even deliver that 1/6th consistently, so you unless you want blackouts you also need an alternative that delivers power reliably.

What I mean is China are installing vastly more solar than any other country. i.e the person I'm replying to is falling behind, which they didn't want to.

Nuclear power seems like a good option for non-military boats too, like container ships and oil tankers. It's already a very well proven maritime technology.

That was tried, nuclear reactors on civilian ships, and found to be a stupid idea. Too expensive and no real benefit over ship engines. By the way, tha vast majority of military ships and boats are not nuclear powered.

Aside from the environmental benefit right? Don’t lots of large ships burn cheaper fuel higher in pollutants when on unregulated wafers?

Ships and planes together account for single digit percentages of global fossil fuel use and emissions.

It’s almost all cars, trucks, and electric power, so those are the things it makes the most sense to worry about as opposed to things that are much harder to decarbonize and account for less emissions.

Is ship pollution really that negligible?[0] To be clear though the entire world is dependent on trans ocean shipping, it cannot be kneecapped for environmental purposes, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a relevant part of the issue.

[0] https://www.transportenvironment.org/wp-content/uploads/2023...

And a great deal of what's sent by ship is... fossil fuels!

So? The industry, shipping, agreed on standards and a plan to reduce CO2 emissions. And if you think nuclear power plants on civilian cargo vessels are a good idea,consider the following:

- costs for a single ship reactor (shipping is extremely price and cost sensitive)

- time, and lost revenue (a ship not carrying cargo is only costing money, see above) for refuelling

- piracy and terrorism (I am not really convinced risking having some pirate group somewhere capture nuclear reactor is a good idea)

Also, shipping doesn't have a reputation for operating in the bright sunshine of law and regulation, with expert leadership and engineering. We're not talking about the US Navy building and operating nuclear submarines, led by Navy officers, who have gone through extensive training, have years of experience, a culture of competency, etc.

Just pointing out a benefit when it was said there was none, I agree with all your points here.

Or just the attacks by the Houthi in the Red Sea the past month.

Imagine one target being nuclear powered.

> was tried, nuclear reactors on civilian ships, and found to be a stupid idea

We only did a demo ship, which was combination cargo and passenger. The principal cost was being rejected from ports for their lacking acceptance procedures, a first-mover cost. Nuclear shipping has never been “found to be a stupid idea.” It was simply never explored.

It was, up to the point the only German nuclear powered vessel was a cargo ship. It was tried in the heyday of nuclear power, and didn't go anywhere. So yes, civilian nuclear ships have been tried and found to be expensive, not feasible and a dead end, or, if you use different words, stupid.

> the only German nuclear powered vessel was a cargo ship

I was referring to the NS Savannah [1]. Put her engine and crew requirements on a modern supertanker and you have an economically viable, environmentally friendly ship.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah

The only nation that has experience with civilian, nuclear powered vessels today is Russia with its fleet of icebreakers. And let's be realistic, military maritime reactor tech will never see use in civilian vessels, same as military jet engines, those purely developed for milotary purposes, don't see civilian use neither.

And the latest Russian buold programm delivered:

- Artika, laid down in 2013 and delivered in 2017, entry into service delayed from 2019 to 2020 and again to 2021 due damages during trials

- Sibir was laid down in 2015 and delivered operationally in 2022

- Ural was laid down in 2016 and entered service in 2022

- Yakutia was laid down in 2020, planned entry into service is 2024

- Chukotka was laid down end of 2020, planned entry into service is 2026

Source: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-...

That's it for civilian nuclear vessels. Meanwhile, in 2022 (a slow year apparently), 182 tankers, 350 container vessels and 69 car transporters were ordered. I didn't find actual deliveries after cursory search.

Source: https://insights.clarksons.net/2022-shipbuilding-review/

As for the small, mass producable reactors needed for civilian use:

"At the moment, several technology providers are dealing with manufacturing of prototypes, the development processes of which are at different levels of maturity, envisaging more or less a decade before completing proof of concepts."

Source: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/maritime-industry-exp...

The first source also has this to say about NS Savannah and the Herman Otto Hahn:

Development of nuclear merchant ships began in the 1950s but on the whole has not been commercially successful. The 22,000 tonne US-built NS Savannah, was commissioned in 1962 and decommissioned eight years later. The reactor used 4.2% and 4.6% enriched uranium. It was a technical success, but not economically viable. It had a 74 MWt reactor delivering 16.4 MW to the propeller, but the reactor was uprated to 80 MWt in 1964. The German-built 15,000 tonne Otto Hahn cargo ship and research facility sailed some 650,000 nautical miles on 126 voyages in 10 years without any technical problems. It had a 36 MWt reactor delivering 8 MW to the propeller. However, it proved too expensive to operate and in 1982 it was converted to diesel.

Meanwhile, the US Navy has nuclear subs and aircraft carriers, but all other nuclear surface vessels have been retired.

In short, we are at least ten years away from a suitable proof of concept reactor design (tue NS Savannah one already showed to be not economical), let alone from having an industrial base to build hundreds of those each and every year.

And therein lies the big problem with nuclear power: it is too expensive and takes too much time to be of any good short term. And if we managed to find a solution short term, and in a lot of cases we already have technical solitions that are deployed, we don't need nuclear mid to long term anymore.

What counts as 'explored'? Full production? A demo ship is a signal of exploration.

What are other options for ships if fossil fuels were phased out?

Big batteries? https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-07-28/making-waves-e...

Hydrogen fuel? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen-powered_ship

Yeah, those options seem simpler.

Sustainable fuels. It's the solution long haul aviation is coalescing around.

Synthetic fuel has a lot of difficulties. One, it requires hydrogen as an input which is typically produced through steam reformation [1], a process that emits CO2. Electrolysis is less efficient and hard to scale as equipment is subject to intense corrosion.

Second, CO2 is at very low concentrations in the atmosphere. Direct atmospheric carbon sequestration is expensive and slow. The biggest startup in the synthetic fuel business is behind schedule and is struggling to solve these two main challenges [2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming

2. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/25/1050899/promethe...

Ammonia?

Ammonia also requires hydrogen as an input. Ammonia is essentially a storage mechanism for hydrogen, eliminating the need for cryogenic or compressed storage. Basically, you need to find a carbon-neutral alternative to the Haber process [1] to produce ammonia as fuel.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

Which we have already. And that wouod be a great solution to the problem of storing electricity / energy. And it could even use, partially, existing gas infrastructure. Green hydrogen absolutey is a thing, bow we just need to deploy it at scale.

No, almost all of our ammonia is produced via the Haber process which emits carbon dioxide. Less than a tenth of one percent of our hydrogen is produced via green hydrogen:

> As of 2021, green hydrogen accounted for less than 0.04% of total hydrogen production. Its cost relative to hydrogen derived from fossil fuels is the main reason green hydrogen is in less demand. For example, hydrogen produced by electrolysis powered by solar power was about 25 times more expensive than that derived from hydrocarbons in 2018.

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

I said we mist roll it out at scale, didn't I? The tech is there, and it works, now we have to build it.

You know, like Musk did with EVs and charging networks.

And as per the article, it's 25 times more expensive than existing hydrogen sources.

By comparison, the economics nuclear powered ships are not that much worse than conventional propulsion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah#Economics_of_nucle...

Of course not. The right mix is important.

But honestly, I reached the point where I claim the same "just build it" approach the pro-nuclear crowd is using regardless of data and facta. Especially since I know from a project I was involved in before COVID hit, that green hydrogen produced PV is absolutely feasible and commercially viable. To do so at tue scale needed requires political action and subsidies, and the tech has still a lot of room for improvement. I say this is good news.

> Especially since I know from a project I was involved in before COVID hit, that green hydrogen produced PV is absolutely feasible and commercially viable.

It'd be really great to link to that project and actually demonstrate this claim of commercial viability. We have at least one demonstration of a nuclear powered merchant ship operating over the span of a decade. Can we say the same for a green-fuel powered vessel?

Regarding a ship running on LNG:

https://www.ship-technology.com/projects/viking-energy-cargo...

The same vessel will be launched early next year with an ammonia fuel cell.

LNG can be produced using green energy, the actual engine doesn't care how the fuel was produced.

Regarding the green hydrogen project: it was a proposed pilot production site to produce green hydrogen. And the business case was actually positive. No idea where that project is now, tuey needed EU funding and that was hard to come by during Covid. And after, I stopped being a freelance consultant.

Ships running off natural gas are nothing new. LNG carriers have been propelled by natural gas for decades. The real challenge is producing carbon-neutral natural gas, which your link says nothing about.

Synthetic natural gas has all the same problems as green hydrogen, with the added challenge of sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. It's only been cheaply produced using byproduct CO2 from industrial processes. Which isn't actually carbon-neutral, it's just using CO2 that would have been released into the atmosphere anyway.

There you go:

https://www.valves-community.com/en/cryogenic-air-gases/synt...

But honestly, why am I doing your internet searches for you? And why don't you know any of this already?

That plant is not sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide. It's using waste carbon dioxide from a nearby biomass plant. This is far less challenging than removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

But unfortunately this method does not scale. The amount of fuel produced would be limited by the amount of carbon sequestered by plants. You'd be cutting down forests faster than they replenish if you tried to fuel cargo ships with this method.

> And why don't you know any of this already?

I do, and unlike you I understand how existing power to gas prototypes are using biomass or industrial byproduct CO2 rather than direct atmospheric sequesteration. This is sidestepping the most challenging part of producing synthetic hydrocarbons on a large scale.

Prometheus Fuels are the main player in attempting to solve direct atmospheric sequesteration of carbon dioxide. But they've still not delivered on that objective.

And the last small scale nuclear reactor project, NuScale, was completely cancelled. So the amount of power produced by this reactor type seems rather limited, trending to zero even. And guess what, we need snall reactors to power ships, reactors we don't have (no, those half dozen Russian ones don't count).

See how this game can be olqyed in both directions? Difference being, all the real money, and industry, is going for green fuels and not nuclear power when it comes to ships. I tend to believe those people.

NuScale wasn't building maritime propulsion.

Again, how many ships have been powered by green fuels? How many have been powered nuclear reactors? One of those is infinitely larger than the other. One of these technologies has over half a century of real world usage.

Comparing white papers about synthetic fuels with the cost history of actual nuclear powered ships that were built and operated for a decade or longer is comparing apples to oranges.

You just don't get it, do you? There is no readily available reactor tech suitable for commercial maritime use at the moment, none.

We do have technology so to produce green fuel for ships, and the whole shipping industry, from carriers to builders, is pursuing that in their goal of carbon neutral in 2050.

Of course there is still the possibility of those people being oart of a grand anti-nuclear conspiracy. Or they analyzed the tech and costs and came to an informed solution, one that is now global policy. You pick.

> There is no readily available reactor tech suitable for commercial maritime use at the moment, none.

You realize there's a nuclear powered cargo ship in operation right now: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevmorput

This technology not only exists, it's being used presently. And that's on top of the other three nuclear cargo ships that were previously built. We still have those proven designs.

> We do have technology so to produce green fuel for ships, and the whole shipping industry,

We do not. Existing synthetic gas plants are not capturing CO2 from the atmosphere. They are either using biomass or industrial byproduct CO2. The former of which does not scale, the latter is not truly carbon free it's just using carbon that would have been released into the atmosphere anyway. Neither is a pathway to producing green fuels at scale. Startups are pursuing atmospheric carbon sequestration, but it's proven elusive so far.

Solutions for green hydrogen generation from sea water do exist, and are even competitive depending on volume produced. One (!) nuclear powered cargo vessel, built as a specialized ship for fleet support in the Russian arctic seaa and capable of going through 1.5 meters of ice (thus requiring the power output of a nuclear power plant, same reason Russian icebreakers use NPPs) and bein used for supply missions to the Russian naval base in Murmansk, doesn't really count.

Again, those other cargo ships, NS Savannah, Otto Hahn and the Japanese one, were all economical failures, the Japanese one was even a technological failure. That makes a grand total of around 7 civilian maritime NPPs in operation, all Russian, with less than one built per year. Global shipping needs hundreds of those, at cost point competitive with alternatives to be viable. That tech, or capacity to build those numbers, simply doesn't exist. heck, that is even mentioned as a direct quote in the Reuters article that is being paraded around.

They were economic failures relative to fossil fuel powered ships - not relative to green fuels powered ships.

Again, if you're going to say that civilian nuclear maritime propulsion doesn't exist, because there have only been 7 such ships built by four different countries then green fuels powered cargo ships don't exist either. Again, how many cargo ships have been powered by green fuels? How many have operated for more than a decade?

Oh dear god, I just lost a considerable amount of brain cells...

A couple of questions, answer those or just, pardon my French, shut up:

How do you think all those hundreds of nuclear ship reactors will be built yearly?

Have you heard of NOx catalysts?

Are you aware of the possibility to generate hydrogen through electrolysis?

Hoe do you square the fact that litterally nobody in the shipping industries is making the case for nuclrar powered cargo vessels?

> Hoe [sic] do you square the fact that litterally [sic] nobody in the shipping industries is making the case for nuclrar [sic] powered cargo vessels?

Literally nobody, huh? https://maritime-executive.com/article/abs-completes-groundb...

One study that didn't make it into shippings decarbonization initiative...

Any "brilliant" thoughts on zhe other questions? Or the fact that your articke ends with pointing out nuclear propulsion was considered promising in the 50s and was a dead end ultimately?

If you want to play the game of digging up studies that didn't go anywhere, I need some time so. Just from top of my head:

flying wing passanger aircraft, that was something! Even Airbus launched studies into it, and man was it promising!

Green fuel ships exist now. They're still in the early stages but plenty of big names in the business are putting their weight behind then.

Plenty of "normal" ships are already hybrid electric like trains, so swapping out the diesel generator isn't particularly a science project and doesn't affect the already electric propellors.

You mostly need a financial incentive to burn clean methanol, ammonia or whatever. That's the hard part.

List some examples of cargo ships powered by green fuels that are presently in operation. Not small prototype ships, but green fuel powered ships comparable in capacity to the NS Savannah and other nuclear powered civilian ships: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#Ci...

The first Maersk Methanol powered cargo ship just rolled off the production line:

https://www.marinelink.com/news/maersks-first-teu-methanolfu...

And all the ships they've ordered since 2021 can run on methanol:

https://www.maersk.com/news/articles/2023/12/07/maersk-to-de...

What does Maersk know about shipping or ship building, those bloody amateurs? /s

Liquified Gas can be produced using green energy, Natural gas was produced via "green energy" a very very very long time ago.

There are several green gas projects under way - capital plants take time - eg. the Gibson Island project won't be online and producing until 2026.

https://fortescue.com/what-we-do/our-projects/gibson-island

Synthetic methane is limited by the sources of carbon dioxide. Existing prototypes use either biomass or industrial byproducts for concentrated CO2. This is not available at scale. Biomass does not grow fast enough to sequester enough carbon.

Prometheus Fuels is the main player trying to do direct atmospheric sequesteration. But they've not succeeded yet.

Interesting but tangential to Gibson Island and other Fortescue Future projects as they're not attempting to sequester carbon or use biomass.

Andrew Forrest [1] has laid out plans to dramatically increase global green hydrogen production on the back of western australia's mining of close to a billion tonnes of iron ore per year (ie. experience of industry at large scale).

https://fortescue.com/what-we-do/green-energy-research/green...

The aim is to do whatever required to directly fuel existing mining truck fleets and bulk carriers.

[1] https://youtu.be/h1Y22iC90Xo?t=331

Yes and while it may be early days for green hydrogen, it once was for solar and wind as well. And as it did with solar the European Union is leading the way in developing policy frameworks that will grow the industry.

https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/energy-systems-integratio...

The Haber process only produces CO2 if you consider the steam reformation to generate the feed hydrogen to be part of the Haber process. Technically, the Haber process itself is carbon-neutral, it's just that the hydrogen feedstock is almost never carbon neutral at the current time.

In the context of hydrogen storage, was it not obvious what "ammonia" refers to?

We do not need an alternative to the Haber process, the idea is to use electrolysis to produce hydrogen from sea water. There is room for improvement in the process but the technology is old and well understood.

There are other ways to store hydrogen, and it's far from certain ammonia will win out in the marketplace, but there are no serious alternatives to hydrogen as an energy carrier in the long term for this application. Everything else is just impractical and even more expensive.

Just like flight fuel, it has seen little change because it is quite heavily subsidized in its current form. The day we collectively stop and start taxing it like other fuels, the market will change overnight.

We need to massively scale up green hydrogen production under basically any scenario where climate change is avoided. Hydrogen is an input for many industrial and agricultural processes.

Biofuels do not require hydrogen or atmospheric CO2 capture, well beyond growing plants.

Also something I learned recently is that the idea that biofuels are a no go because they compete with food is a simplistic deflection. Looking at Brazil as an example the biofuel crops like sugarcane and groundnuts are grown in marginal land in the south that wasn't being used for agriculture. The main driver of Amazonian deforestation is cattle ranching.

Biofuels produced by growing plants is limited by the available biomass. Brazil powers it's automobiles with biofuel, but not ships. And more importantly, Brazil is a huge country with massive amounts of arable land.

Isn't this "technically accurate", but also misleading? The list of ships (1) isn't that long, and almost all of them had random other issues that made using them as a 1:1 comparison not really that useful.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#Civi...

The NS Savannah [1] was indeed a marketing stunt. But in the 1960s climate change wasn't really an issue. If you have to ship bulk cargo across the Pacific, nuclear is largely your only option. Hydrogen is another potential choice, but you'd need a carbon neutral way of producing that option. Electrolysis isn't efficient, and steam reformation emits carbon dioxide.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah

Given that we ship cargo in incredible amounts across all oceans, ranging from liquids, bulk to containers and cars everyday with zero nuclear-powered carho vessels, calling nuclear your only option is odd.

In case it wasn't clear, I'm talking about carbon-free propulsion options. Batteries don't have the energy capacity required for long distance shipping, and their weight is a big issue for ships. 300 mile range is fine for an EV, it's not for a ship.

That's what IRENA worked out in the frame of the initiative to decarbonise ocean shipping by 2050 when it comes to fuel:

>> In the short term, advanced biofuels will play a key role in the reduction of CO2 emissions. In the medium and long-term, green hydrogen-based fuels are set to be the backbone for the sector’s decarbonisation.

Present biomass energy doesn't have remotely close to scale required to decarbonize ocean transportation. I'm sure the "advanced" part of advanced biomass assumes some mega-algae or something else that is far more productive than existing biomass, but if that technology hasn't been developed yet then you might as well just say nuclear fusion is the solution.

Hydrogen is currently produced via steam reformation [1], which emits carbon dioxide. Electrolysis is less efficient and corrosion of electrodes inhibits scale.

Nuclear maritime propulsion is far more mature than any of the alternatives. Submarines and warships have been using it for over half a century. Could a technological breakthrough create a better alternative? Maybe, but we can't move ships with potential technologies until said technologies make the transition from "potential" to "real".

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming

Then go and get funding for it! Because apparently you know better than anyone else who was involved in defining this strategy. And given many, to domain experts, just hairbrained ideas get, or used to get, VC funding, it should be easy, right? And a tremendous market, just imagine what a hyper-unicorn one can build by having the monopoly on power the cargo vessels of the future!

Venture capitalists expect most of their bets to fail. It's very possible that none of their synthetic fuel startups will succeed. It is not at all reasonable to assume that a technological breakthrough will transpire just because venture capitalists are funding it. Otherwise, we should just sit back and let nuclear fusion solve climate change. Surely you don't think you know better than the VCs funding fusion, right?

And for what it's worth, some shipbuilders are exploring nuclear cargo ships: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/maritime-industry-exp...

The important bit is about the timeline: At least ten yeara to proof of concept.

There is no industrial base dor this at the moment. And then there is the IRENA commission, tasked with developing a strategy to decarbonize shipping, and they went with green fuel instead of nuclear. And that commission included ship builders, operators and other domain experts.

The International Renewable Energy Agency's [1] job is to advocate for more widespread adoption of wind and solar. Nuclear power threatens that objective. This is about as naive as trusting fossil fuel companies' paid-for scientists on climate change.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Renewable_Energy...

Than take it from those folks:

https://cms.globalmaritimeforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/...

-> page 9 refernces the hydrogen and amonium based fuels

That was developed in the frame of this:

https://unctad.org/news/transport-newsletter-article-no-108-...

The IRENA page provided said information in an easier to digest form so.

The only source talking about nuclear reactors for civilian shipping was that Reuters article. Personally, I'd take exhaustive reports and internationally accepted strategies above some statement made towards Reuters.

You can create a fuel with solar energy and use it in the ship's engine. Hydrogen or whatever will be available.

But heavy oil is much cheaper and will be used forever untill gasoline/diesel cars/trucks will pass away.

Heavy oil ships are already being banned from numerous ports. That will only accelerate. Shipbuilders are gearing up to build anhydrous ammonia fueled replacements.

Anhydrous ammonia will be produced at massive scale in tropical synthesis facilities for delivery worldwide. This is why long-term storage is not considered important.

Not ships are banned, but usage of heavy fuel. That means the last few hundred miles ship goes using diesel. But in international waters any kind of fuel could be used.

And that is about to change as well.

There needs to be nuclear powered "oiler ships" that stay out at sea indefinitely and recharge passing by electric ships.

Great idea. Now, either apply to YC with it or convince the shipping industry to revise their decarbonisation startegy by going full nuclear with nuclear charging vessels.

Batteries don't have the required energy density to make electric transoceanic possible travel. They're also heavy and would drastically reduce the cargo capacity of ships. It'd be more effective to just put the nuclear reactors on the cargo ships. Nuclear maritime propulsion is much more mature than long-distance electric propulsion (diesel subs have used electricity, but only over short distances).

Not sure if two weeks and 2,800 km submerged count as short distance:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_212A_submarine

The reason why those systems aren't deployed to civilian surface ships is easy: cost.

New York City to Lisbon is 5,400 kilometers. So no, 2,800 km is not even far enough to cross the Atlantic let alone the Pacific.

That submarine also does not use batteries for energy storage, it uses hydrogen gas (almost certainly produced via steam reformation).

That sub cals uses fuel cells, because WW2 is over for quite a while and technology advanced.

But no, 2,800 km isn't short. Not feasible for commercial ise, sure, but then no submarine technology is commercially feasible. It is too specialized.

Hence, green fuel as the preferred, and most realistic, option to decarbonize shipping.

Green fuel has proven exceptionally difficult to manufacture, and companies promising to produce it are running far behind schedule: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/25/1050899/promethe...

> ...no submarine technology is commercially feasible. It is too specialized.

Except that's demonstrably false. Many (most?) subs use nuclear propulsion, and there are civilian ships that use nuclear propulsion. The NS Savannah was operated successfully for a decade [1], and several Russian ice breakers for even longer than that.

The fact that organization with the explicit goal of lobbying for renewables [2] prefers green fuel does not make it the optimal choice. It's the optimal choice to advance that group's goal of promoting green fuel, because nuclear power at scale is a competition risk for wind and solar

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Renewable_Energy...

NS Savannah (one has to wonder why nobody mentions the German Otto Hahn, but whatever), was decomissioned for economical reasons. Heck, the only nuclear powered vessels the US Navy has are carriers and subs, even the lastest British carriers aren't nuclear powered anymore.

All in all, besides the niche need of the Russians for nuclear powered icebreakers, there were three civilian nuclear ships: NS Savannah (economical failure), Otto Hahn (likewise and retrofitted with a diesel engine) and the Japanese one (forgot the name, but that was both a technological and economical disaster).

And that is ignoring the fact that naval nuclear reactors are among the most well guarded secrets a nation has, none of that tech will ever see civilian use for that alone (the current generation thaz is, the reactors used in the three vessels mentioned showed already to be unfeasible for commercial use).

Edit: Nuclear power is nowhere near to be a risk for wind and solar, wind alone adds multiple NPPs worth of capacity to the grid every month while the added net nuclear capacity is basically negligible for decades now. Nuclear is not, and won't be, built at scale in the next decades. Only potential exceptions are India (good, otherwise they would build coal plants) and China (purely political, and at the same time Chine is building even solar and wind power than nuclear).

There's also the Sevmorput: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevmorput

Even just one example is an infinitely larger fleet of nuclear powered cargo ships than green-fuel powered cargo ships.

Nuclear maritime propulsion isn't exactly a mystery. The basic operating principle of both pressurized water reactors and lead cooled reactors are known. All of the West's main geopolitical rivals (Russia, China) already have nuclear powered submarines - I'm not sure how you think technology for nuclear powered cargo ships are going tip the balance militarily.

This is pointless. The reason no nation on earth will green ligjt the use of it military maritime reactor tech for commercial use simple: this tech is secret and nobody wants the knowledge of said tech fall into opposition hands. ITAR is childs play in comparison.

This means, new reactor tech needs to be developed from basically scratch. And no, the mere handful of Russian icebreakers, and that one cargo ship which is half an icebreaker, don't count. Not if we talk about thousand of commercial vessels in operation.

One last question: Do you think we are faster to develop and build the tech and infrastructure for green fuels (which are needed everywhere from ships to planes) or to develop and build the industrial base to produce hundreds of small scale maritime nuclear reactors (for we don't even have the reactor tech yet)?

Hundreds of maritime nuclear reactors are already in operation. And the technology has already been deployed to civilian ships by four different countries. Your statement that no nation will greenlight maritime nuclear propulsion for civilian use is just factually incorrect. Countries did approve the use of nuclear maritime propulsion in ships. You even listed three examples yourself - you disproved your own claim.

Nuclear maritime propulsion is demonstrably closer to production than synthetic fuels. The former has been used in hundreds of warships and four cargo ships over the span of half a century. The latter is currently only produced using concentrated CO2 from biomass or other industrial byproducts (which is not something available at scale), and are not used for maritime propulsion.

Why is it that, that people always underestimate the technical complexities of thise things.

a) military nuclear technology will never see civilian use, claiming otherwise is beyond naive and ignorant

b) civilian nuclear powered vessels have been tried and deemed uneconomical (no, one specialized cargo ship requiring the power from a nuclear reactor to break through 1.5 m of ice doesn't count...)

- so far a grand total of 600 maritime reactors (see point one for the military part) in history have been built globally, 400 or so of which are still in operation, in order to decarbonize global shipping that is close to the number of reactors needed yearly, and not even the military providers have the capacity to build that many (e.g. the Russians built, what, six of those since 2014!)

You keep hand-waving all of that away...

Again, we have four different countries that built civilian nuclear powered cargo ships. I don't doubt that designing maritime nuclear power for these ships was challenging. But it has already been done. The technology already does exist. The NS Savannah, Otto Hahn, and the Mutsu all used low enriched uranium in their reactors (as opposed to the highly enriched uranium used in military reactors). That's the main challenge in adapting nuclear power to civilian use, and it's already been solved.

By comparison, how many green fuel powered cargo ships have been in operation for over a decade? If hundreds of nuclear powered vessels operated for over half a century is too immature, then green fuel powered ships are even less mature that nuclear maritime propulsion.

You have now idea how ship propulsion systems work, do you?

The reason why I said "green fuel" as opposed to artificial natural gas is because hydrogen and ammonia are also potential examples of green fuel, in addition to artificial hydrocarbons.

Again, how many ships have been operated with green fuel? There are LNG powered ships, but none using LMG produced in a carbon free manner. As stated above, producing artificial hydrocarbons remains out of our capabilities. Existing power to gas prototypes are really just converting biomass to methane and that method is limited by biomass availability . There are smaller prototypes for hydrogen powered ships, but nowhere near the size of the NS Savannah and they haven't been operated for nearly as long. And I can find no examples of an ammonia powered ship.

Again, how many examples of green fuel powered cargo ships in commercial operation can you give? Not fossil fuel powered ships that can theoretically run off green fuel if we hand wave away the challenge of producing artificial methane. But ships actually using green fuel in the same vein that the NS Savannah actually used civilian nuclear maritime propulsion?

See, comment like that tell me you have no idea how a ship engine, or engines in general work. The problem to be solved is not the ships propulsion system, what stupidly keep repeating with nuclear reactors, but the source of the fuel for those engines we already have (developing new engines is happening day in day out, and that development will simply optimize for ammonia or hydrogen based fuels). A question which has almost zero to do with the question you so desperately want to have answered as some kind of, what, childish got ya?

I get it, you area NS Savannah and nuclear fanboy, reality so simply doesn't agree with you, nor do the relevant industries.

> developing new engines is happening day in day out, and that development will simply optimize for ammonia or hydrogen based fuels.

Meanwhile, we already have decades of operational experience with civilian nuclear maritime propulsion. It's objectively more mature technology than green fuel.

And for the record, I do indeed know hydrogen powered combustion engines work. Perhaps you're unaware that by virtue of hydrogen's much hotter combustion temperatures, it's hard to avoid producing nitrogen oxides (a greenhouse gas) as a byproduct in hydrogen combustion engines [1]. Hydrogen fuel cells are an alternative, but those have less power to volume ratios and have never been deployed at the scales required for nuclear maritime propulsion. Not only that, containing and plumbing all this liquid hydrogen is a challenge, too. There's more complexity than you think to make a hydrogen engine that doesn't emit greenhouse gases.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_internal_combustion...

You just refuse to get it, don't you? We way more experience eunning everything from gas turbines to ship engines than we have running civilian nuclear powered ships, I hope I don't have to explain how many non-nuclear powered ahip we have, do I?

We also have more experience using biogas to be burned in combustion engines and turbines of any sort, as we do creating said biogas.

We also way more experience in creating sythetic fuels, and using electrolysis to create hydrogen out of sea water (green hydrogen).

Those are all solved problems, and thisbis not my opinion, as opossed to you, but facts confirmed by the very industries involved in ship building and shipping.

Really pointless to discuss with ignorant tech illiterates like you.

> I hope I don't have to explain how many non-nuclear powered ahip [sic] we have, do I?

And again, how many of those are using hydrogen, ammonia, or synthetic methane?

> We also way more experience in creating sythetic fuels, and using electrolysis to create hydrogen out of sea water (green hydrogen).

Absolutely not. Almost all synthetic fuels is using biomass as an input, which does not scale. And only tiny, tiny fraction of hydrogen is produced in a carbon neutral manner. Less than 0.05%: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_hydrogen

Again, if these are solved problem, show me the fleet of ships powered by hydrogen, ammonia, or synthetic methane.

I love the double standard!

Nuclear technology: if it isn't exactly the same thing we need, no matter how close, it doesn't exist.

Hydrogen etc.: we have a rough analogy and no real way of getting from there to here, therefore it is proven technology.

I recently got this excellent 1964 film showing the NS Savannah digitized from 16mm film in the National Archives vault. Very glorious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA8W2Xpz2hA

I'd bet you will be very wrong

I think you are wrong for the reason parent stated. Safety and regulations for nuclear are just too high to be competitive with modular solar that can scale and has no nuclear waste issue that is still unsolved.

do you have any info on the chemicals used in creating and disposing solar and batteries that would be involved in comparison?

Perhaps, but so far in the US we still don't have any really large battery storage facilities connected to the grid. These will be necessary if want to have reliable base load capacity without building more nuclear or fossil fuel power plants. The largest battery storage facility being built right now only has 2165 MWh of capacity, which is a drop in the bucket relative to demand.

https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/projects/edwards-sanborn-so...

Battery prices keep falling, but the supply chain is still constrained and there are huge expenses involved in building storage facilities that go beyond the cost of the cells. Other storage systems such as pumped hydroelectric or electrolyzed hydrogen may play a role but aren't cheap either.

There's little reason to build massive batteries at one spot, unless you are repurposing an only transmission line.

Instead, a good chunk of grid storage is getting deployed right at the generation site of solar (and some wind), which allows more efficient use of that transmission line.

Instead, we should be looking for large amounts of total install. However, this still won't happen much until it's actually needed by the grid, which starts to happen at much higher amounts of renewable generation than most states are using.

The tech is there, it's being deployed at massive scale where needed, and it's dropping in cost as fast or faster than predicted.

The tech is not here. The scale of grid storage required to fulfill just diurnal storage - let alone days or weeks to offset seasonal variation - is far beyond what batteries can provide. To put this in perspective, the US alone uses 12 TWh of electricity per day. The world uses 60 TWh per day. Both of these figures are going to increase, as poorer countries develop and want amenities like air conditioning. Also, as transportation and industrial processes are electrified. By comparison, global battery production is around 500 GWh per year. Yes, this will increase. But most of that production is going to electronics and EVs, not grid storage.

This is why proponents of a primarily wind + solar grid assume that hydrogen, ammonia, compressed air, giant concrete weights, or something else will make energy storage nearly free. Delivering the required storage scale with existing technologies isn't feasible, so people just assume that some other heretofore unproven technology will be orders of magnitude better.

The point of the various 100% solar, wind, battery projections that exist is that no new tech is needed.

Things won't be 100% Solar, Wind, Battery because other minor techs like nuclear, hydro, tidal, biomass or whatever already exist to some degree and can be part of the system. But current solar, wind and battery tech is enough, we just need to build it. The first 80% is the easy bit, with the greates payback, so there's no need to wait around.

Batteries cannot feasibly achieve the scale required to even out diurnal, let alone seasonal, fluctuations. The amount of batteries produced is nowhere near enough to satisfy demands for grid storage, and it'd massively set back electric vehicle adoption. Even as battery production ramps up, it's mostly going to go the EVs. Furthermore, electricity demand is going to go up too as people move from gas heating to electric heating and combustion vehicles are replaced with EVs.

"No new tech is needed" is a pointless statement if it can't reach the required scale. You might as well say "just build more dams". We don't need any more wind or solar. Just build dams everywhere.

This sort of argument does not pay attention to numeracy or the existing plans for battery production within the 2020s.

We can't build more dams because there really is a hard limit on the geographical sites. With batteries, we already have commitments for factories to build 1TWh/year within the US alone by 2030. Worldwide production will be several times that.

Average US electricity production is 500GW, at 8-10 hours that's only 4TWh. With batteries lasting 20 years, only need 200GWh/year of production to fill that diurnal need.

Batteries are cheap and scaling at a scale that we couldn't dream of scaling our construction capacity. Our limited construction capacity should be reserved for high speed rail, subways, and housing in urban centers.

Battery production will increase, yes, but so will electricity demand as transportation, heating, and industrial processes are electrified. Right now electricity use is only 37% of total energy use [1].

> Average US electricity production is 500GW, at 8-10 hours that's only 4TWh

Again, it's 12 hours for diurnal storage not 8 hours. More than 12 hours during the winter, actually. And diurnal storage isn't the only type of storage that's necessary. Factor in storage to even out seasonal fluctuations and you're looking at days maybe even weeks of energy storage. And again, 500 GW is going to turn into 1,300 GW as the rest of our energy use is electrified.

Batteries don't last 20 years, not even close. Diurnal storage is going to be cycled daily. A typical lithium ion cell lasts 300-500 charge cycles [2]. You can prolong this by limiting depth of discharge but this has the side effect of reducing the usable capacity. Let's be generous and assume 2,000 cycles that's only 5 and a half years.

200 GWh per year is still a massive amount of batteries. We're talking about over a third of global battery production to provide 8 hours of storage for just one country. And again, in reality we need more than 8 hours of storage and batteries don't last nearly as long as you claim.

There's a reason why plans for a primarily renewable grid assume that compressed air, hydrogen, or something else will account for the majority of storage: batteries aren't available in sufficient quantity, and deploying grid storage at any significant scale will severely reduce availability of batteries for EVs.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States

2. https://au.renogy.com/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about....

In a decade of following plans for 100% renewable grids, compressed air has never made it as a conceivable solution. Similarly hydrogen almost never gets on the list, and it's only there assuming some sort of currently non-existent tech advances far in excess of what is ever allowed to batteries. And yet, batteries make the list on all these plans!

As for your link, this is just flat out misinformation for grid batteries. Might apply to phones:

> How Many Cycles Can You Get Out Of A Lithium-Ion Battery?

>A Lithium-Ion battery's average life span is 2 to 3 years or 300 to 500 charge cycles, whichever comes first. As we put it, a charging cycle is a duration of utilization when the battery is fully charged, completely drained, and wholly recharged.

Industrial grid storage is rated to daily discharge for more than 10 years, with warranties typically around 12-14 years and expected life far afterward. 5000-10,000 cycles is more realistic.

Every five years, battery production capacity is growing 10x, prices drop dramatically. What is this limit? What is the reason it's suddenly going to stop? There's no answer other that I can see other than "I thought this 10 years ago so it's probably true too."

> Industrial grid storage is rated to daily discharge for more than 10 years, with warranties typically around 12-14 years and expected life far afterward. 5000-10,000 cycles is more realistic.

I'd be very, very interested in these lithium ion batteries that have a life span of 10,000 cycles. The only way this would be achieved is with a very small depth of discharge, which severely reduces usable storage. I at least provided a link to back up my claims, yet you accuse me of spreading misinformation despite not doing anything at all to back up yours. Alternative chemistries like lithium iron phosphate achieve 3,000 - 5,000 cycles [1] at 80% depth of discharge. They last 5-10 years, not 14 [2]. But that's a new batter chemistry with smaller share of the battery market than typical lithium ion, and they also have smaller capacities than lithium ion and lower max power output.

Batteries are already being bottlenecked by input materials. Manufacturing accounts for only a quarter of a battery's cost [3]. Scaling out batteries is already becoming a problem of resource extraction. Even if the manufacturing cost is optimized to zero, the cost of inputs are still there.

The cost of a new car went from a quarter of a million dollars in 1900 to $25,000 in 1920. Would it be reasonable to observe that the cost of a car was falling by a quarter every two decades and predict that a new car would cost $6,250 in 1940, $1,500 in 1960, and $100 by 2000? Why would this scaling stop? What's the limit? Why didn't cars keep dropping in price?

1. https://ecotreelithium.co.uk/news/how-long-does-lifepo4-batt....

2. https://ecotreelithium.co.uk/news/how-long-does-lifepo4-batt....

3. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...

Hydrogen (or e-fuels) make it into plenty of plans. The important point is that it's for the last part of the journey to 100% RE, and makes little sense as long as natural gas is still being used. But for that last part, it's likely to be very useful.

But if you still need to support the complete gas, hydro.... infrastructure for those few months when wind/solar/battery is not enough, how cheap are those renewables then really?

Gas plants have their main cost in running them. So if they only fill the gaps, their cost is reduced too. But yes, they are not to be considered "profitable" but rather as part of the infrastructure like powerlines. But as solar and wind costs only a fraction of gas when running, this is a good trade off.

The numbers in your post do not march your claim of the text not being there. Scaling production of existing tech 10-100x, or even 1000x, will surely result in new discovery too, but it we only need a few orders of magnitude increase in production, that's proof that the tech is there.

Compare this to nuclear. Let's increase our production levels 100x. Where does that leave us, assuming that it was magically economically acceptable to electricity customers to pay higher prices than necessary. 15 years for 2.2GW is about 150MW/year. 100x would be 15GW/year. That's nowhere close to being where we need for a full energy transition in the US.

Nuclear, if it figures out its huge problems with construction, will be a small player to help with climate change. But in the year 2023, we know the big players: solar, wind, and batteries. There's no more time for anybody else to scale to catch up. Nobody else has a tech that can compete with such fast dropping costs. The numbers and pace of change are hard to compete with.

> Compare this to nuclear. Let's increase our production levels 100x.

Nuclear power already produces 10% of the world's electricity [1]. A 100x increase leaves the world with 10 times as much electricity as is needed, all coming from a decarbonized energy source.

Wind and solar are cheap because we don't currently have to even out their intermittency. Take away peaker plants and then intermittent sources become way more challenging. Solar produces energy in a sinusoidal pattern daily, requiring at least 12 hours of storage for truly non-intermittent solar plants. It also fluctuates over the course of the year due to weather and inclination of the Earth [2]. Wind power similarly sees fluctuations over the course of the year [3].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#Methods...

2. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Estimated-normalized-mon...

3. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/53637.pdf

A 100x increase would get us back to what we were building half a century ago. Current nuclear production has been nonexistent, which is why this one reactor is such big news.

adding this story as well = https://cleantechnica.com/2023/12/26/solar-panel-prices-down...

Another big advantage of solar, and wind to some extent, is that is distributed. It provides resilience to the network. Nuclear produces a lot of power, sure, but it's one big fat single point of failure.

If you complete that thought to include both space and time, solar is present only during daylight whereas nuclear is distributed evenly right around the clock.

It's less either|or, more swings|roundabouts.

A pure solar solution requires (on the order of) 2x excess daylight production and 10 hours of offset storage to buffer against the night (and compensate for energy transfer (daylight power -> storage -> night time power) losses).

Solar is great, sure, but there's a long way to go to replace the energy production of fossil fuels, that comes with a lot of reqource mining and waste.

Somewhere in the middle is an optimal solution with much solar and wind, a little bit of nuclear OR gas fired OR <somethig steady> and a whole lot of varied storage (battery + gravity + thermal + green gases).

The grid is not a network. It's a large single frequency balanced power distribution machine. It is, in and of itself, _the_ single point of failure, and there are significant tradeoffs in having lots of small capacity generators vs. small amounts of large capacity generators connected to it.

There's this cry for absolutism in this thread that's just absurd, on both sides. You want a wide multiplicity of power generation plant sizes and technologies, for what should be, at this point in history, solidly obvious reasons.

So, you want lots of Nuclear _and_ Solar. Seeing the two as competing shows just how monopolized our energy markets truly are.

They are competing because each dollar is spent either on solar and wind or on something else. That dollar spent on solar or wind gets you much more power than any alternative. The advantage increases every year.

I agree with the spirit of your post, but I would say 10s of GW per year, instead of 1 TW per year. Currently, the US is adding about 10 GW of new solar capacity per year. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2000-_Clean_power_install...

The 1TW prediction was for the whole world. I’d expect the US to settle somewhere in the high 10s to low 100s by 2030. The US added 23GW in 2023, and is expected to add 37GW in 2024.

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/pdf/steo_full.pdf

Batteries haven't gotten cheap; unless we get some crazy breakthrough total wind and solar power production will probably peak within the next 20 years.

We already had the crazy breakthrough, which is why solar and wind production are on an exponential growth curve.

You don't even "need" crazy battery breakthroughs - you can just build more wind and solar than you need + enough transmission infrastructure so you can deliver it to where it's needed. Of course batteries are getting cheaper regardless.

It seems to me that having a couple of nuclear reactors as base load spread throughout the country would be more useful than having a massive spread out battery & solar infrastructure.

I mean as an example many companies, especially PG&E can't maintain adequate powerlines, who is banking on the fact that they'll do an even better job when we quintuple the amount of infrastructure and they have to develop a whole new domain of expertise based in battery technology.

Not to mention even the supposedly clean, solar and batteries, still have an enormous amount of carbon emissions involved in their supply chain, and need to be replaced on a fairly regular basis.

Grid level solar has batteries installed on site. The site acts as a power generator that sells energy to PG&E, they don’t manage it themselves.

If anything a solar field requires much less operation expertise and staff to manage than a nuclear power plant. And when it goes bad, it might leech some acid and heavy metals into the soil over years, not leave a 10k year radioactive exclusion zone.

Nuclear is extremely dependent on long distance power transmission. Nobody wants a reactor in the middle of a city, and 1-5 GW of power needs to be sent long distances before it’s used.

Solar on the other hand scales down to 50MW instillations just fine so you can put it near substations etc. Huge solar parks make sense in locations with lots of sunlight and cheap land, but they aren’t the only option just a trade off in terms of transmission costs vs generation costs.

Chicago is mostly on nuclear and the reactor is quite close to the city, just over the Indiana border.

Closest is Braidwood which is ~60 miles from downtown.

NYC has large power plants in Manhattan (East River 1, 2, 6, and 7), Queens (650MW Astoria Energy II power station), and Brooklyn (Narrows 1–1 to 2-8) plus a few more.

There are no active nuclear power plants in Indiana. It had two planned plants that were cancelled in the 80s. Purdue has a very small power plant for research.

Would you prefer PG&E defer critical maintenance on a field of solar panels or a nuclear plant?

That question dovetails into nuclear's biggest hurdle; the risk for catastrophe is high, both in reality and especially politically, so regulation is high, and thus the cost to build, operate, and decommission is immense.

Are batteries really too cheap for nuclear to compete?

Too cheap for "American nuclear" to compete.

Chinese nuclear can compete just fine.

Chinese nuclear is not competing very well. There's a minuscule amount of it planned, only like 50GW over the coming decades. This is not even a drop in the bucket compared to what China are doing with batteries, wind, and solar.

It's 50GW more than anyone else though. There are some nuclear projects in US/UK but I'll eat my hat if they actually get built at all.

That's currently changing.

The catastrophe of Germany's "Energiewende" has made a lot of countries re-evaluate their nuclear strategy, culminating in the COP28 nuclear pledge.

Evidently you missed the news that it turned out to be no catastrophe at all, but just a lot of hand-wringing and pearl-clutching over a clearly hoped-for catastrophe.

Yeah, evidently I missed the news that after 20 years of Energiewende, Germany has the 2nd most expensive AND the 2nd dirtiest electricity in Europe and that the old plan of "we'll use wind and solar when the wind blows and the sun shines, and when they do not <a miracle occurs>" really worked out perfectly, particularly when the miracle turned out to be "Russian gas" and exploded in our face, causing us to have to buy up essentially all the gas available on the open market at horrible expense after Russia started blackmailing us.

Note that "buying up all the gas on the open market" is not a strategy that too many countries can follow at once, hence other countries started to look elsewhere. For example, Japan, who were going to exit nuclear, and are now turning more and more of their old plants back on and have announced they will be building more (!), very specifically to replace reliance on LNG shipments.

And yeah, we got really, really lucky with the mild winter of 2022. Apparently not too many other countries think that "luck" is sound energy policy, but YMMV. Also slightly unpopular in the world is our tried and true method of "we'll lower emissions by pushing our economy into recession due to high energy costs". And the constitutional court also took a dim view of trying to hide all the extra costs off the main budget, so the real costs are only now starting to emerge. The farmer demos were probably just the start of the unrest when the pain gets passed onto the population. A population that already now thinks the getting out of nuclear was a mistake:

"Sechs von zehn Befragten (59 Prozent) im aktuellen DeutschlandTrend für das ARD-Morgenmagazin halten die Entscheidung der Politik für falsch,"

https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/deutschlandtrend/deutschlan...

Meanwhile, the coalition that is pushing this through against the voters is now down to 32% in the polls.

But you're right, I really should have followed the news more!

The Tragedy of Germany’s Energy Experiment

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/opinion/nuclear-power-ger...

Germany’s Energiewende: A Disaster In The Making

https://www.thegwpf.org/publications/germanys-energiewende-a...

Germany’s Energy Disaster 20 Years Later

https://www.americanexperiment.org/germanys-energy-disaster-...

Germany’s Energy Crisis Dispels Several Myths

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaellynch/2022/08/31/germany...

"Much of its problem is self-inflicted and demonstrates the perils of populist but irrational energy policy."

You are right, I really should follow the news more!

I am from Germany, and I am just replying for the record: You are just repeating right wing propaganda, which tries to paint black pictures about a policy they helped implementing. But the truth is, the current government was able to avoid a gas shortage after Russia had cut off deliveries to Germany and that was the only possible problematic point in the winter of 22. By now we have enough capacity to import LNG to avoid shortages while the Energiewende has take up speed again. It hasn't failed at all, but the previous government had tried the best to make it fail. But coal usage in Germany has still been on a historic low in 23.

Oh, and the grid in France managed to keep up only because Germany was propping it up as too many old nuclear reactors had to be taken off grid. Which caused a small uptake in German coal production. But in 23 the downward trend continued.

I am also from Germany.

The fact that the left (my side, I have never voted for an even moderate right party in my life) won't let go of this purely ideologically driven energy policy that is proving disastrous and that 59% of the population (and rising) oppose maybe one of the reasons the current ruling coalition has fallen to 32% in the polls (those numbers match surprisingly well), and there is starting to be unrest in the streets.

For example the most recent demonstrations by farmers. They are supposed to pay billions of Euros extra for the Diesel fuel for their tractors because the constitutional court declared all the off-books vehicles the government tried to use to hide the subsidies for the energy crisis illegal. And so the government now has to actually account for all that money, and is scrambling to find places to cut in the budget. All the <a miracle occurs> little white lies are coming out. It's not pretty.

And the failed energy policy is also one of the primary reasons the really, really awful far right parties like the AfD have doubled from ~10% last election to 20% in current polls. That was one of the catastrophic results of this catastrophic energy policy that I didn't mention before, because I am not that interested in party politics.

"Die in weiten Teilen rechtsextreme AfD erzielt vor allem in Regionen gute Wahlergebnisse, in denen die Industrie wegen der Klimapolitik vor Umbrüchen steht."

https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/klimaziele-...

The vast majority of AfD voters (75% according to stats I have seen) do not vote for the AfD because they are Nazis. They hold their noses at the awful ideology, but don't see an alternative to some of the awful policies being enacted.

And I am 100% in agreement with you that the moderate right like the CDU are just as much to blame as the current government. They had the chance to stop the madness, but instead they made a populistic calculation that keeping this irrational energy policy would keep them in power a little longer. Pathetic. Particularly pathetic because they knew it was wrong, whereas the Greens apparently believe their BS.

Now the CDU/CSU seems to be turning around (also pathetically) to be more pro-nuclear, conveniently "forgetting" that it was them that passed the current laws mandating getting out of nuclear, but at least they are providing an alternative to the current failed policies that isn't the AfD. Lesser of three evils, I guess.

Our catastrophic energy policy also contributed to the war in Ukraine, because Putin (incorrectly, it turned out, partly because Habeck did am amazing job of crisis management) assumed he could blackmail us into not supporting Ukraine.

You denounce what I write as "right wing propaganda", without being able to list a single thing about it that is wrong. Because it is not wrong. What I write is correct. When the only political parties telling the truth about an important subject are the far right, we are in serious trouble as a democracy. Serious, serious trouble.

I don't want the AfD. Please stop the madness that is bringing them to power.

I have already debunked the narrative about French reactors in '22 in detail elsewhere, here's the summary:

"The shutdowns for the inspections and maintenance were planned. Not for a single plant, for a lot of plants. The inspections found a problem. The shutdowns were extended so they could be fixed, in the original plants and in other plants that might also be affected.

The shutdowns, the inspections and the maintenance were planned.

What they found was obviously not planned. If you could plan for what you find during an inspection, you wouldn't need an inspection. That's why you inspect."

France was able to plan their inspections and routine maintenance for the summer, because nuclear can be planned, the capacity factor is generally >90%. Have you tried planning a storm? The capacity factor for wind/solar is <15%.

Well, if you are serious, lets start with reasonable discussions, not with propaganda. It isn't the politics of the current government which is a disaster, it was that of the previous ones. They killed nuclear, they curbed the switch to renewables and indeed, NS1 and NS2 were clearly built by Russia to allow the war in Ukraine. It was bizarre that German politics of that time agreed to that.

By the way, the farmers don't have to pay billions, it is several hundreds of millions. And this came also only because of the stupid "Schuldenbremse", which is a great way to ruin a country. Guess who is responsible of that.

And what you say about the French reactors doesn't invalidate what I wrote. They had to be taken down longer than planned, creating shortages. On top of that the fact, that in hot years, they just cannot run them fully through the summer due to lack of cooling. As summers will get hotter, France will have to quickly come up with some solutions.

I don't want the AfD to gain any power too, but the solution against that isn't telling more lies. It is telling less lies. But too many parties think it is a recipe for success to finger-point at the greens and tell propaganda which helps the AfD. And towards those 75% you claim which don't want to vote for Nazis, well, the bad news is, they do.

The thing is, all democratic parties have to perform better. But as long they prefer petty fights instead of working on solving the problems we have, the non-democratic parties are on a rise.

> not with propaganda.

If you are serious, how about not labeling facts you don't like as "propaganda"? Just sayin'.

"Es stehe eine "Steuererhöhung in Höhe von einer Milliarde Euro" für die Landwirtschaft im Raum."

https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/deutschland/landwirts...

The French chose to take their reactors offline for maintenance. chose. And of course they are in a worse state than they should be because of decades-long underinvestment, including not building new ones. They need to build new ones to avoid these problems. Fortunately, that's what they are doing now.

Macron calls for nuclear 'renaissance' to end the France's reliance on fossil fuels

https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/02/11/macron-calls-for-n...

> but the solution against that isn't telling more lies.

Absolutely. Lies like claiming the Energiewende is a roaring success when the fact that it is not is clear to the entire world, including 59% of the German population. 2nd most expensive electricity, 2nd dirtiest electricity in the EU. After 20 years, not even halfway done, with no real idea how to accomplish the other half apart from <a miracle occurs>. When the French accomplished their CO2 free electrification in 20 years. And then dropped the ball by underinvesting.

And they also saved money by building some plants near rivers without cooling towers, which most thermal plants need and virtually all thermal plants in Germany, for example, have. This is just not a problem, we know how to build plants with cooling towers.

Again, the German anti-nuclear-bubble likes to make a big deal about some French problems as somehow being a problem with nuclear-in-principle and thus nobody should invest in nuclear. When they are exactly the opposite: problems with underinvestment in nuclear, particularly over the last 20 years or so, where virtually no new plants were built. The solution is to, once again, invest more in nuclear.

> And towards those 75% you claim which don't want to vote for Nazis, well, the bad news is, they do.

You misconstrue what I wrote: large parts of the left denounce AfD voters as Nazis, and thus as people whose concerns do not matter. Just like you do. But that's not correct, 75% of AfD voters are not close to being Nazis and do not support the party's ideology. They are people who are not being listened to. And your solution is not to listen to them, because they are Nazis. Good luck with that, I am sure that will win them over to our side.

> The thing is, all democratic parties have to perform better.

Yes. For example drop policies that are clearly, obviously and painfully not working. As for example a "populist but irrational energy policy." (quote from the Forbes article below) And not denounce those who spell out the facts of this as nazis and the facts they present as right wing propaganda. Just a suggestion.

Once again, "populist and irrational energy policy".

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaellynch/2022/08/31/germany...

Written by Michael Lynch. Are you going to denounce him as a Nazi, too? And the serious analysis he did as "right wing propaganda"?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaellynch/

"Distinguished Fellow at the Energy Policy Research Foundation and President of Strategic Energy and Economic Research. I spent nearly 30 years at MIT as a student and then researcher at the Energy Laboratory and Center for International Studies. I then spent several years at what is now IHS Global Insight and was chief energy economist."

And of course, all the countries that are turning back to nuclear: Japan, Poland, France, Sweden, Finland, etc. All Nazis?

You wrote "billions". The one billion comes from the representative of the farmer. So my hundreds of millions is probably closest to the truth. But that has nothing to do with nuclear.

And the French took the reactors down because of required maintenance, part of it was unexpected after the found problems. But the main point is: they were down and France required imports to keep the grid up. You don't even comment on the cooling problems.

They "are" not building new ones. They fail to finish Flammaville so far. The president talks about plans, but until they become at least a construction project, don't talk about "are building". And even then, it would take like 20 years to finish those.

And once again, you are not even responding to my arguments about the Energiewende. You treat it as a failure while it is ongoing. Why it was delayed, I explained, but you ignore that. Are you really trying to tell me, that you are not an AfD supporter with your style and trail of argumentation.

And I simply stated, those people who vote for Nazis are voting for Nazis and there is no way around stating that.

I am not sure, why you claim I call anyone who supports nucler a Nazi, that was only said on those who vote for Nazis. I don't know who Michel Lynch votes for. His writing though has quite a few inaccuracies and I dispute some of his conclusions. But that is a factual difference.

And of course, your final sentence is absolutely polemic. I have not said anything in the direction. Why are you suggesting that?

By the way, your statement, that they are "turning back to nuclear" is quite inaccurate too. But the discussion so far hasn't been a very constructive one, so little reason to elaborate on that further that Finland did finish one reactor recently and at the same time cancelled the project tho bild another one...

> You don't even comment on the cooling problems

Hmm...

"And they also saved money by building some plants near rivers without cooling towers, which most thermal plants need and virtually all thermal plants in Germany, for example, have. This is just not a problem, we know how to build plants with cooling towers."

From the post you replied to. Cooling is a non-issue. Under-investment in nuclear is an issue.

> I am not sure, why you claim I call anyone who supports nucler a Nazi

I can tell you why: because you denounced my factual post as "right wing propaganda", and me, by extension, a right wing propagandist. And that was essentially your entire reaction.

"Facts? Who cares, you are a nazi."

And of course the French aren't building the new reactors, yet. Their turnaround away from their mistaken anti-nuclear policy only happened in March this year.

> The president talks about plans

No, the president talks about government policy. And that government policy has been voted into law. March 2023.

> By the way, your statement, that they are "turning back to nuclear" is quite inaccurate too

How so?

> Finland

"In June 2019, the government announced a new energy policy with the objective of achieving carbon neutrality by 2035. The policy would see a complete phase-out of coal power by May 2029. In addition to the commissioning of two nuclear power reactors, the policy is supportive of operating lifetime extensions for existing reactors."

Hmm...

> cancelled the project tho bild another one...

You mean they cancelled their plans to build a reactor with Russia's Rossatom?

Now what might the reason for this be? Can't possibly have anything to do with, dunno, Russia? Always the disingenuous arguments.

And of course the new nuclear reactor they just turned on is already providing 40% of Finland's electricity.

How many more of those do you reckon' they need?

Oh, I missed that one line in a rather busy post. If you claim that cooling is a non-issue, you are lying. Some had to reduce power and also the maximum allowed river temperatures had to be adjusted. (https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/international/energie-t...)

I never called you a Nazi. Why misrepresent the facts? I only stated that your text reads like some right wing propaganda. Which it does. And not every right-wing person is a Nazi.

And wrt. to Finland I was talking about Block 4 of Olkiluoto. Block 3 went online this year. And yes, it delivers a significant part of the grid in Finland, which already has caused issues. Because Block 3 had to be pulled of the net several times - which immediately removes a large fraction of the grid power in an instant. That is why they currently keep a nearby coal power plant in hot standby to ensure grid stability.

> If you claim that cooling is a non-issue, you are lying.

No I am not. And please stop it with the personal attacks.

It is non-issue for nuclear. Because. We. Know. How. To. Build. Cooling. Towers.

If you cheap out and don't build a cooling tower, heat can become an issue.

If you build a car with an insufficient radiator, heat can also become an issue.

This is not an issue with cars in general, this is an issue with having a radiator that is too small. Because we know how to build cars that have large enough radiators.

And no, you did not write that what I wrote "reads like" right wing propaganda. You wrote that I was "repeating right wing propaganda". Ergo a right wing propagandist, ergo a nazi. Or someone who reads and listens to right wing propaganda and repeats it. Which is probably worse, because stupid and still a nazi.

Wrt. Finland: they hadn't even decided what type of reactor to build for Block 4, and due to the "special operation" those plans are now being given new priority, but not urgency (not needed yet).

And, if I read you correctly, you consider a power plant delivering lots of power a problem. Whatever. For a country that size, I personally also would have chosen a larger number of smaller reactors rather than one huge one. But that's their choice.

We were talking about the French power plants and they have a cooling problem as they were built with cooling by rivers. Yes you can build them differently, but they haven't. Actually you praised them for that. So now they have cooling problems. Which you denied. And showing that you were wrong about this statement, my conclusion that you were lying about that fact is a factual statement not a personal attack. Of course, now you are trying to move the goal post. The problem stands: several French (and also some Swiss) reactors had to be throttled as they couldn't be cooled enough in the hot dry summers. At least not without raising river temperatures to a point where the fish get killed.

> So now they have cooling problems. Which you denied.

Nope. I denied that this is in any way a problem of nuclear power, which is what you implied. It is not. Cooling is a problem of all thermal plants, and solved for all thermal plants by cooling towers.

This isn't that hard.

And where did I "praise them" for building power plants without cooling towers? You gotta stop making stuff up, really.

> At least not without raising river temperatures to a point where the fish get killed.

Reference for "killing fish". Or are you making things up again?

You wrote:

> And they also saved money by building some plants near rivers without cooling towers

I consider this a positive vote. But fine. If you didn't agree with the decision, it doesn't make a difference to the discussion. And when I was speaking about cooling problems, it was specifically about the French reactors. No where I implied that this is a fundamental problem to nuclear power. It is, however a problem of many current nuclear reactors. Never mention that of course cooling towers also require a lot of water that needs to be provide. Which might face the same problems as the river-based cooling.

With respect to the fish: basic biology. The normal limit for water temperature is like 25 degrees which is quite a lot for european rivers. Fish are very sensitive to the water temperature as high temperature reduces the oxygene content of water. Which is why there are often mass death of fishes in the summer in some places quite naturally. You cannot raise the water temperature much or you will do huge harm to those ecological systems. That is, why those limits exist. Note: the plants probably are not happy about too high temperatures either, but they won't quickly die from lack of oxygene.

> I consider this a positive vote.

So you massively interpret (and misinterpret) what I write and then, purely on the basis of your interpretation, accuse my of lying. Precious.

You might want to look up what a "lie" is.

> And when I was speaking about cooling problems, it was specifically about the French reactors.

And when I responded, I was specific about this not being a problem with nuclear reactors in general because we know how to build cooling towers.

And yet you accuse me of lying.

> With respect to the fish: basic biology. [...]

OK, so you have nothing but generalities and platitudes, thanks for confirming.

Ok, when you are calling science "generalities and platitudes", you are making my point of your posts reading like right wing propaganda and also any more discussion is moot.

What you posted were generalities and platitudes.

Yes, when water gets too hot, fish die. You need to be bit more specific than that. For example when the water we use to boil a fish (I prefer fried) is at a good 100ºC, that kills fish.

I have some doubts that the nuclear power plants raised the temperatures of the rivers to 100ºC.

To be relevant, you would have to have some precise figure as to what the official limits are, what the temperatures when fish (which types of fish?) actually start getting affected and how much, what temperatures the plants emit and how much those temperatures raise the temperature of the river.

And of course, all you actually have is more slander and denouncements. As usual.

Speaking of Finland:

"The country is part of the deregulated Nordic electricity system which faces shortages, especially in any dry years, when hydroelectric generation is curtailed. Finland is very short of power until Olkiluoto 3 is commissioned. Over 2009-2011 some two-thirds of imported electricity came from Russia, but this has decreased considerably since the completion of the Fenno-Skan 2800 MW HVDC link with Sweden."

When you find you need to lie to make your case, you reveal you have no case.

So don't lie then.

I didn't.

You know the proverb about Nazis: You are either a good person and smart, then you cannot be a Nazi, or you can be smart and a Nazi, then you cannot be a good person, or a good person and a Nazi, then cannot be smart.

If you vote for the AfD, you know full well what ideology they stand for. Very best case, you are tacitely supportive, but more likely to be firmly in the AfD camp. Or just manipulated, and that's why propaganda is the right word to use.

And yes, a ton of the anti-renewables / pro-nuclear talking points in Germany are actually just that: right wing propaganda.

> The vast majority of AfD voters (75% according to stats I have seen) do not vote for the AfD because they are Nazis. They hold their noses at the awful ideology, but don't see an alternative to some of the awful policies being enacted.

AfD voters are not literal Nazi party members, obviously, but it's definitely not the case that they're "holding their noses" at the ideology -- the (racist) ideology of AfD is fundamental to the entire platform of the party. In fact this kind of comment is just apologia: the only effect is that you end up validating and lending credence to that ideology.

FWIW, I'm very pro-nuclear, and I find Germany's general opposition to nuclear energy (Atomkraft? Nein Danke!) to be incoherent, basically stupid.

"China has 55 plants with 57GW in operation, 22 under construction with 24 GW and more than 70 planned with 88GW."

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

So the current plans are for roughly tripling installed capacity.

China built out 180-230 GW of solar last year. They deployed more in one year than the total installed base of nuclear that China is expected to have by 2030.

Nameplate capacity. Divide by 6 to get average capacity. And then you need something to cover the variance at the low end, which tends to be zero.

Preferably something that's also CO2 free.

Ideas?

A lot, but none you ever wanted to listen to so far. Fact is, even China isn't massivley investing in NPPs, but rather wind and solar. I'll risk a guess and say that they have a plan to cope with a grid in a highly industrialized environment that trends more and more towards renewables.

Oh, non-intermittent CO2 free energy sources that we have now and can just build?

In the quantities required?

Why are we building out solar and wind then, this is so much better!

All ears!

All ears? Really? Ok, the solution lies in the grid and demand flexibility, combined storage, mainly batteries, and keeping existing NPPs running as long as possible to allow the above to catch up.

Feel free to google all of that, because I am tired of trying to explain that to people by now, sorry...

So it doesn't actually exist.

Thanks for clearing that up.

And the old tired mechanism of "we have some very rough ideas of technologies that might come together if developed, together with some techniques that have never really been tried and where it is unclear whether the market will accept them". This is obviously a done deal.

On the other hand we have: "there are these power plants we know how to build, because we have already built quite a lot of them. all we need to do is build more of them." That is insane crazy talk that could never possibly work.

And even better: "various countries have just committed to doing this, some have enacted laws, some have ordered plants, etc. All have changed policy". -> I cannot see the results RIGHT NOW, so it doesn't exist.

> By 2027, China is expected to have a total new energy storage capacity of 97 GW

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/Five-things-powerin...

"there are these [energy storage plants] we know how to build, because we have already built quite a lot of them. all we need to do is build more of them."

energy storage is going to lag renewables because until you have enough renewables you don't have enough of a storage problem to solve.

Hmm...interesting article that talks about planned capacity for later this year, then projects future capacity based on those plans ... and gives the capacity of that future storage based on the planned installs in ... GW.

Hmm...

50GW, 88GW, it's all small potatoes compared to the hundreds of GW of annual additions for other technologies.

If nuclear could compete, China would be building the hell out of it, and selling it internationally. Getting other countries to use your nuclear supply chain for their electrical infrastructure is such a huge geopolitical win that if it were possible, it would be one of the key political and economic strategies of China.

If China, one of the few countries with a mastery of large construction projects, can't make nuclear cheap, what hope do more advanced economies have with their higher labor costs?

Those "hundreds" are nameplate capacities. For wind/solar you need to divide them by factor of 6 to even get to actual average production, as the capacity factor of wind/solar is below 15%, whereas for nuclear plants it is greater than 90%.

And of course average is not good enough for an electric grid, the variance is highly relevant. As my statistics professor used to quiet: if your left leg is standing in liquid nitrogen and your right leg is standing in boiling oil, you are enjoying a perfectly comfortable mean temperature.

Variance matters. A lot. In an electric grid, you need to be able to cover minimum requirements even when solar and wind are having a bad day or night.

China got their solar industry financed by German subsidies, and they have plentiful deserts with lots of sunshine. The Gobi desert is the place on earth with the most sunshine hours, apparently more than the Sahara(!). It would be insane for them to not take advantage of that to reduce their use of coal, now at what, 65%?

But they also apparently think that safe, reliable and cheap nuclear energy is an important part of their energy mix, otherwise they wouldn't be planning on tripling their generating capacity, would they now?

I don't know how many times this needs to be said: solar and wind and batteries can't provide consistent enough power, either for current or the growing energy needs, of the US or the world. Alternative power sources are required to maintain energy sufficiency into the future. Period. Ask any company that builds green energy if you don't believe me.

What's more ridiculous than this oversight is the idea that the cost of wind, solar, or batteries is somehow never going to go up. News flash: all advanced industrial processes that depend on a global supply chain are subject to price fluctuations.

>I don't know how many times this needs to be said

Zero. Few people are unaware that the sun doesnt shine at night. It never needed repeating.

What theyre less educated about is that pumped storage, hydrogen, batteries, solar/wind anticorrelation and demand shaping are, together, more than capable of accomodating renewable intermittency.

What's most ridiculous is that even the most expensive form of viable power storage (hydrogen) is still cheaper when paired with solar or wind than nuclear power is alone. This isnt to say that we should go all in on hydrogen/solar, just that nuclear power's cost is unconscionably high.

Indeed, if it werent for the nuclear military's reliance on civilian supply chains and skills it would never get built and the 'environmentalist nuclear' PR offensive of the last ~8 years that resonated with so many people wouldnt have happened.

The energy sector is still private. If green were cheaper, and more reliable, and gave a good return, it would be getting a bigger investment. But it's not, because it's not. Maybe in theoretical-perfect-future-world it's cheaper, but not today.

This is because the producers are not paying (enough) for the waste they create.

Emissions or nuclear waste.

Seems like natural they would?

The growth of renewables is still on a nice exponential curve. We build solar literally add fast as we can scale production.

I work for an energy company that builds renewables. No we do not. I mean Jesus that's ridiculous. There's literally not capital for that, and the debt would be astronomical, to say nothing of legal, land access, problems with construction, contacts. But besides that there's different kinds of solar, and all kinds of specific issues with it, battery capacity being just one. Wind is a bigger opportunity and more commonly pursued, but has even more problems.

Making up shit just because you want it to be true isn't helping anybody.

Lack of capital is one of the limiting factors of scaling production...

> If I was a betting man, I would put money down that Vogtle 4 is the last nuclear reactor that gets built in the US. Solar and batteries are just too cheap for nuclear to compete.

On the contrary, solar and wind are _waaaaaay_ too expensive if you actually want your generation to be reliable. Just ask Texas.

Ah yes, Texas...

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4088

“The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.

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