We have a bunch of full-scale 24/7 low-carbon success stories (France, Ontario, Finland, Sweden) that rely heavily on nuclear. It's abundantly clear that nuclear is a climate champion when comparing live carbon emissions data on this map [1]. Compare Germany (who is phasing out nuclear) to nuclear-dominant France.
And before anyone says nuclear is too expensive, know that nuclear costs today are about on par with all other future low-carbon grid proposals. While wind and solar generators are dirt cheap, adding the extra transmissions lines, vast energy storage, smart grids, etc. adds $40-$60/MWh when done at levels that actually decarbonize, which makes nuclear already competitive.
Right now the dirt cheap renewables are riding on the back of a natural gas powered grid that can handle their intermittency, (except sometimes in California).
All you said is true, but I wouldn't still bet against the renewables because we're probably very early in the cost-curve of storage still. In the last 10 years lithium batteries have become 10x cheaper for example. Nuclear was by far our best technical option for the last 20 years. I'm not so sure about the next 20 though.
I ran the math this week on powering the house off-grid with solar and batteries. We even have a stream going through the property that could easily power all our needs throughout the year. The solar install is just so much simpler and lower maintenance though. With current available batteries going 100% solar already has a positive return on ~12k€ total investment. But it still makes more sense to only do a 1 to 3k€ investment in solar with no batteries, even giving away the rest of the power to the power company as we have no net-meetering. If we had net-meetering for the next 5 years it would boost the solar installs while the batteries keep going down in price. Within 10 years we can cover all the rooftops with solar. And with the distributed generation and storage we'd probably need less of a grid than we have now, not more.
The battery/solar/storage costs are near material costs already. And the material costs are artificially low. If you wanted to scale up production to match demand, prices will have to increase so that mines can extract worse ores in harder to reach places.
From what I've seen there's enough known advancements coming to make the cost of the type of lithium battery I'd need to at least half of what it is right now. There's also the growing market for second-lives of EV batteries. So I expect to turn the house effectively off-grid within 5 years, keeping the traditional grid as backup and occasional filler. In rural areas with crappy power that's an improvement over the existing grid. Even today if I valued the insurance against power cuts enough to buy a generator just doing the battery install today would make sense instead. From what I've read lithium itself is plentiful, it's the other stuff that goes into batteries, and is actively being engineered out, that's a problem, like cobalt. So I wouldn't bet for a rise in the price of the needed raw materials, but insight into the cost curves of mining would be cool to see.
I think the point he is making is that battery metals as a commodity have been unusually cheap. As have a lot of commodities for a while now. Commodity prices are expected by many to go up as demand increases. It’s why people are investing in companies that mine battery metals. As that happens the input costs of batteries will increase and given how massive the component of batteries is in the wind/solar green grid scenario that could change the economics considerably.
FWIW uranium is also expected by many to undergo a big surge in price in the next few years with refueling contracts coming due in the US and the growth of nuclear overseas. But the fuel costs for a nuclear plant are a much smaller component compared to other sources, and I am guessing also compared to the battery metals component of the alternate solar/wind/battery/new grid system.
Yes, and I replied to that. The used materials are changing. The hard ones for lithium chemistries are being replaced and there are more storage technologies than lithium. Given all the ways to improve/grow both mining and the chemistries of batteries and new storage technologies I wouldn't bet against the reduction of cost of storing electrical energy as demand increases.
In this case it included only one of two vehicles and only part of the heat as we use wood as well. The impact of vehicles depends on where they are during the day. If they're at home you can put in more solar without more batteries as you'll just charge them directly. For winter heat the panel orientation is important so the winter drop isn't as severe when the sun is low. If you want 100% electric winter heat then sizing the array for that and having excess power in summer shouldn't be that much of a penalty as the battery is what is expensive and winter heat doesn't require any more of it. You'll just end up gifting the power company more power during the summer time, which will help with the electric load of all the air conditioning. Investing in insulation and a heat pump may be better though.
If renewables growth continues and expands (as in the multi Trillion Green Deal lol), different nuclear thrusts will probably not require any government assistance or support. The money making potential will completely outweigh any other concerns like high capital costs and risk. It's getting there. A carbon tax would be the cherry on top.
> different nuclear thrusts will probably not require any government assistance or support
The 2 recent projects in the US came about because of loan guarantees passed under Obama, a form of subsidy. Both have been miserable financial failures going 2-3x over budget on money and time. One was cancelled after spending $9b on a hole in the ground, the other should be coming online soon.
Given how badly the projects went no utility in their right mind would order a reactor without even more subsidy to remove risk.
There are also other forms of subsidy, notably the $450m per reactor cap on liability. That's a $3b/yr subsidy to the industry.
NREL Grand Challenges in the Science of Wind Energy
As for comparing with nuclear for the past two years (2018 2019) capacity factor of nuclear power in France has been around 70% mainly due to maintenance according to RTE (1)
For reference best UK offshore wind farm had 55.3% capacity factor in 2019 and UK offshore wind average capacity factor was 40.6% in 2019 (2)
Well, unless they installed the power near point of use there would still be blackouts for power line distribution issues due to fire danger. I'm a nuclear proponent, because I believe it can be as safe (safer than coal and carbon free), but multi-GW plants have their downsides as well.
Last night's issue was not curtailed transmission capacity, there simply isn't enough electricity for everyone in the western US to run their air conditioners at these temperatures.
That's interesting that you tie it to the region, rather than the state. I was wondering why they had to shed load when the demand according to the CAISO dashboard was only about 90% of the all-time record demand (which was set in 2006).
California imports a lot of electricity (18% of consumption at this moment) so we can be affected by what's going on in nearby states (particularly in the Pacific NW where we draw a lot of hydropower from).
Installed generating capacity is probably down from 2006 too. Electricity usage is flat or declining and old coal power stations have been phased out in CA.
Also because nuclear operators are completely incompetent and can’t manage their investment without catastrophic construction issues.. a good friend of mine was involved in trying to fix San Onofre after their failed turbine upgrade. It would be good for the future of the industry if they didn’t keep having billion dollar safety critical mistakes.
I think it was the steam generator, not the turbine. Or maybe both? The failed steam generator is an incredible story. And the litigation on with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) is also interesting. But terrible for the industry.
It's important to distinguish between energy and capacity. And recognize the operating flexibility of different resources. While if a 1/4 of the CapEx for renewables were invested in fission, California would have more capacity, the energy cost would also increase. Fission has considerable operating expenses, which is why it has been displaced by both gas generation and renewable generation throughout the United States.
Cheap gas is also the primary driver behind flattening carbon emissions in the USA. As we switch from coal (820 gCO₂-eq/kWh) to fracked gas (490 gCO₂-eq/kWh), our carbon emissions could fall by a lot.
But gas is a a climate wolf in climate sheep's clothing. The end destination (490) is wholly incompatible with all the IPCC low-carbon scenarios that actually mitigate climate change. So we're kind of lulled into a false sense of success as we shut down vast quantities of coal (yay) but also actually low carbon nuclear (11 gCO₂-eq/kWh) (boo) and replace it directly with gas.
(And I do mean directly. When Indian Point shut down in NY earlier this year, NY subtracted 1016.1 MW of low-carbon nuclear capacity and added 1016.1 MW of high-carbon fossil gas [1]!)
We need carbon pricing so we actually add market value to things that are actually low carbon. Shutting down nuclear to replace with gas is so backwards.
There's a growing move towards new (HFO-1234yf [1]) refrigerants (for AC/HVAC) because a lot of the current ones (R-134a, Freon [2]) aren't good for climate change. We went to the current ones to fix the problem of the old ones (R-12 [3]) with the o-zone layer.
The shorter lifetime is taken into account when measuring its global warming potential in CO2 equivalent. In absolute terms, atmospheric methane is responsible for about half as much radiative forcing as CO2, so it's is crucial to battle methane emissions just as much.
> Some gases, again like methane, break down over time, and their heat absorption, or GWP, over the next 20 years is a bigger multiple of CO2 than their heat absorption will be over 100 or 500 years. Values of GWP are estimated and updated for each time frame as methods improve.
> Shutting down nuclear to replace with gas is so backwards.
This is the highly-regulated free-market at work. Based on price signals (created by incredible market distortion), gas is less expensive than nuclear. Fans of fission should lobby for (modest) carbon taxes and to end the exemption of fracking from the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts. With those two changes, very quickly the tables would turn.
We need international carbon pricing too. Make it fair. Any country not charging the minimum gets that added to import taxes at all participating counties. Increase the price yearly too.
There’s no energy source that doesn’t have serious environmental trade-offs, with the possible exception of geothermal. Hydro destroys river habitats, wind kills birds especially raptors at an absurd rate, solar only works for a couple decades and leaves you with nasty waste, hydrocarbons release CO2 and nastier things besides, and nuclear’s environmental drawbacks are well known.
So unless we want to advocate for a mass human die off such that our energy needs have no appreciable footprint, we need to recognize that there will be serious trade-offs and deal with it.
I don't know how scalable it is, but isn't concentrated solar power fairly environmentally benign? That system uses mirrors and lenses to boil water and generate steam. The steam drives turbines attached to generators.
There are certainly some environmental effects, as described at:
The problem with solar, regardless of how it's harvested, is that it's a very diffuse energy source. So you inevitably end up with a relatively high material footprint.
- High land use (low energy density). This has both economic and ecological cost/impact. It might be ok in the SW US, but likely unacceptable elsewhere.
- Becomes less effective the further you get from the equator.
- Energy storage is a problem at night time, and also cloudy days.
Nuclear's environmental drawbacks are well known numerically but not by the general public. By TWh generated, their overall impact on land use and waste generation is astoundingly small because they leverage nuclear forces and E=MC². 2,000,000x less nuclear fuel is required to make a kWh than chemical fuel (fossil, biofuel, or storage in batteries).
Fossil and biofuel kills 8,000,000 people/yr from air pollution. Add in climate change and who knows. Meanwhile nuclear power stations have caused Chernobyl and Fukushima, which were devastating locally but have had surprisingly little radiological impact [1,2].
The thesis of the recent Michael Moore film "Planet of the Humans" [3] talks about human die-outs and serious trade-offs. I like your perspective of accepting trade-offs. This is very reasonable. Another recent film, Juice [4] is kind of the optimistic mirror of the Moore doco.
Planet of the humans oddly makes almost no reference to nuclear as an option. It's just never explored.
This seems like an intentional omission to go along with the rest of the doc's tone. I suppose making it into a marketing piece for nuclear wouldn't be good branding for Moore, either.
I never fact checked that movie on its critiques of wind and solar. Though I’ve seen some reports that would partly corroborate some of thrust of their claims elsewhere. I doubt it’s as black and white as they put it.
That said it annoyed me that the movie spent a lot of time in Vermont and not once acknowledge that Vermont gets 70% of its electricity from clean nuclear power at the Vermont Yankee plant. And this particular plant is targeted for shutdown by environmental groups for a long time. This contradiction needs to be seriously dealt with and was ignored by the movie.
The movie really basically boiled down to wind/solar is a scam and we can’t possibly think of any other solution (cough nuclear cough) so we need to reduce our use magically and oh I guess somehow tell the rest of the developing world to stop developing. This doesn’t work. It’s not a solution.
What you say was true in 2008. But Vermont Yankee shut down in 2014. Bernie Sanders and many other anti-nuclear campaigners fought for its early closure, in part because of low fracked gas prices (among other things).
What about biomass gasification? The fuel source is self replicating and solar powered (plants). It's carbon negative, as one of the byproducts is biochar, a.k.a. char-ash, which can be buried in the soil (terra preta) in a manner that not only locks away atmospheric carbon, but also improves the soil composition (more friability, absorption of nutrients and micro biodiversity). It also is a good use of dead standing biomass that would otherwise decompose into methane and carbon dioxide, or result in forest fires.
If your energy source works by combining C with O₂ to make CO₂, water, and energy, there will be a concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere that is incompatible with solving climate change, even if it gets pulled out at some later time. It's the equilibrium concentration that matters.
Low-carbon, non-combustion sources (wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, nuclear, tidal) are the only way to go.
The CO2 is pulled out of the air by plants, during gasification you convert some of this biomass into CO2, water and energy, by burning the syngas; and some you leave behind as biochar. This biochar gets buried into the soil, creating the equilibrium deficit that you're looking for. Biochar is also estimated to be stable for some 10,000 years...thus its pretty much the only reversal to mining coal that we have.
Not using the biomass results in methane, which is estimated to be 86 times worse (as a greenhouse gas compared to CO2 alone) for our atmosphere than CO2 alone.
When I saw the Greenland study on HN[1] last night, all I could think is how much more worse does it have to get before we refocus on building fission plants and doubling-down on fusion research investment?
Unfortunately the economics of natural gas make it a steep hill to climb even if the politics and public sentiment changed on nuclear. To me, fission really seems like the only rational solution to the climate crisis that we can implement starting tomorrow.
We probably do need either carbon taxes or heavy fission plant construction subsidies (easier to implement than carbon tax and most of the negative economic incentive is the capital-intensive upfront costs - nuclear is significantly cheaper than gas at the 35-40 year plant life mark).
It's my understanding that the name Greenland was used to attract new settlers, not because it actually was a good description.
[From Wikipedia] The Saga of Erik the Red states: "In the summer, Erik left to settle in the country he had found, which he called Greenland, as he said people would be attracted there if it had a favorable name."
> After finding a habitable area and settling there, he named it Grœnland (translated as "Greenland"), supposedly in the hope that the pleasant name would attract settlers.[20][21][22] The Saga of Erik the Red states: "In the summer, Erik left to settle in the country he had found, which he called Greenland, as he said people would be attracted there if it had a favorable name."[23]
I can't dispute whether or not Erik engaged in marketing, but I wouldn't be surprised if he did. However his voyage was well into the start of the Medieval Warm Period[1], so I'll stand by my claim that there was less glaciation when he named the place.
Greenland's name was given by Eric the Red, who wanted fellow Norse to settle there. He being there because he got kicked out of Iceland.
Erik (according to popular legend) called the island Greenland and painted the island as being a wonderful place to settle.
It was slightly warmer than even today, but that was a localized warming, not Global. Greenland has had several cold and warm cycles over the past hundred millennia.
I'm glad we agree there was a heat anomaly in Greenland when it was named Greenland, which indicates the glaciers had receded.
Digging into that historical data further, what sourcing is there? The wiki page I already links indicates records for most of the world at the time were, well, awful. And that what we do know suggests it was similarly warm and dry in Asia, Africa, and South America.
Skepticalscience.com is a web cartoonist's blog, not a serious scientific source. That said even cartoonists can read and learn, so I'd be very interested in seeing his sources.
While greenland was warmer during the medieval warm period than immediately afterwards, its ice sheet is 400,000 years old. Saying they had "receded" is a stretch, and it is warmer today than it was then. The effect of the medieval warm period was localized to the north atlantic, while the rest of the world was colder, and the north atlantic is already substantially hotter today than it was then.
No, skepticalscience.com is a website created by a web dev cartoonist with absolutely no climatology background[1]. I'm also well aware that Greenland's ice sheet is a remnant of the Quaternary Glaciation[2]. What word would you prefer other than "receded" to say that the extent of the ice sheet was less in the 11th century than it was in the 9th or the 20th?
Also, in the opposite spirit of your opening sentence, let me advise you that "It really seems like you're just trolling" is a very weaselly way to insinuate bad faith, and you should try to do better. If you want to call me a liar or a fool just do it. I don't think you could support that accusation based on my use of sources like wikipedia because I am acting in good faith and a spirit of intellectual curiosity, but hey you do you.
He's an assistant professor of climate communication at George Mason University, and has coauthored several textbooks on climate change. https://communication.gmu.edu/people/jcook20
I'm not able to find any source describing the extent of Greenland's ice sheet during the medieval warm period. If you have one, you should post it. All I can find are temperature records which indicate greenland has been hotter than in the medieval warm period since the 1930s.
I have no idea what "assistant professor of climate communication" is supposed to mean, but it sounds like a journalism credential and not a scientific one. I'd wager it was granted in an honorary capacity on account of his website, not because of any scientific work.
I do find myself thinking though how would my intellectual heroes view that? What would Edsgar Dijkstra think of someone identifying as an "assistant professor of computing communication?" What would Richard Feynman think of someone identifying as an "assistant professor of physics communication?" While I can't be sure, abductive reasoning tells me their view would likely be dim to say the least.
Obvious troll is obvious. You can read his credentials, publications, and the courses he teaches from the page I linked. You're also demonstrating "ad hominem" in the purest form.
You ask for sources, I provide them, you ask for credentials, I provide them, but nothing seems to penetrate your awareness.
I'm a nuclear fission power plant designer. I write a lot about nuclear reactor development history and nuclear economics. One of the most interesting ways to decarbonize with nuclear fission at the scale and pace necessary is to use shipyards to serial construct GW-scale nuclear power plants on offshore floating platforms. This allows us to do Henry Ford serialization while capturing economies of scale. This method was very seriously considered in the 1970s and 1000 people built the production facility in Jacksonville, FL. It was called Offshore Power Systems (a joint venture between Westinghouse and the Newport News Shipyards) and there's a wonderful writeup about it in a 1975 New Yorker [1], plus my summary of it from earlier this year [2].
This form of nuclear production got an actual construction license from the NRC after incredible amounts of environmental study.
It may raise eyebrows, but consider that in deep water tsunamis are a few feet tall, earthquakes are non-existent, and huge ships like the Prelude are designed to handle category-5 cyclones. You also have infinite access to cooling water and can design in a sink-safe worst-case scenario with a engineered recovery operation.
If we were serious about decarbonizing right now and I were in charge, I think I would march over to S. Korea and try to get their world-class nuclear construction people (KEPCO) hooked up with their world-class shipyard people and just start hammering them out.
Let's not get stuck into one solution. Need to pursue several. Floating power plants are very promising as there is lots of shipbuilding capability and the worldwide commercial cargo fleet numbers in the tens of thousands of ships. This could scale pretty fast. I do dislike the idea of a power plant surrounded by salt water - it just doesn't help with the chemical/corrosion safety even if you can use as coolant for an extreme accident. Obviously, no earthquakes and less population in the area. But once the accident happens, you don't get to do mitigation like collecting the dust or pieces.
Another strong approach gaining traction is production in the 5-50MW range, with 100s/1000s/yr in the same way Boeing and Airbus build ~2000 wide body aircraft each year. Smaller reactors with lower power density can claim inherent safety with respect to various hazards - ie cannot meltdown through system failures.
Must move away from absolutist mind set with single solution and try lots of strategies. Many will be effective.
Yes SMRs look very promising and I believe NuScale has one commercial plant in the early stages of production but it won't even be finished until the end of the decade[1].
The optimal mix using today's technology seems like it would be traditional fission for baseload combined with (solar/wind + battery) / hydro for variable / peak grid load.
SMRs likely will suffer from diseconomies of scale. If economies of mass production make up for that, it will be awesome if not surprising.
That's why I like combining economies of scale with economies of mass production with large reactors built in shipyards. Decarbonizing requires many new TW of capacity. Exajoules is the unit of import.
I always wondered if the future was something even smaller scale than that.
Something the size of a chest freezer and rated maybe 100kW-- enough to run a few neigbouring homes, or a small office campus. Maybe it's a heat-decay product rather than a steam system, to reduce moving parts and breakdown risk. It's designed as a sealed, maintenance free unit that you dock in someone's shed, it runs for 5 years or whatever, the green "Change Reactor" light comes on, and you call the manufacturer to take it away and drop another one in place. (It could be properly deconstructed and refurbished by the manufacturer, like the old "disposable" cameras). It would probably output something like 240 or 480v natively to integrate in a similar way to rooftop solar.
I figure this can achieve a couple of goals:
* By keeping the scale small, we might be able to get the "worst case" risk profile to something people find palatable (they're okay with some medical facilities with X-ray and radioisotope therapy machines in their neighbourhood, but nobody wants to live next to Palo Verde)
* Transmission losses are minimized and putting much of the generation near demand reduces load on the grid itself if the demand estimates are faulty and we still need to pull peak power from elsewhere.
100 kW may make sense but as part of a large facility with maybe a few hundred of them. Distributing nuclear material so widely would be imprudent. The materials themselves are dangerous, there's no getting around that and there's real value in a minimum of centralization and control of the reactors in one place. A turbine generating half a gigawatt is also much more efficient (orders of magnitude) than 5000 turbines generating 100kw.
I wouldn't get hung up on transmission and distribution losses--they're something like 6%--and you're missing out on economies of scale with larger installations.
That's what was always so weird about rooftop solar: if solar is so great, why is there more interest in rooftop than large-scale farms? Especially when you look at the installation cost and sub-par location and orientation, rooftop solar is significantly worse than a farm. Transmission from a farm will be less than inefficiencies because of roof angle.
TBH, I'm astounded. I always went off a discussion we had in a 100-level physics class that basically boiled down to "We're considering deregulating the electrical market here, but any claims of choosing your electrical supplier is nonsense-- if you wanted to get electricity from one state over, you'd need to buy 6 units to get 1 at the point of consumption." I suspect it may be a combination of figures off by a few orders of magnitude and a worst-case of sending power 500km instead of 50.
OTOH, I am still interested in the grid-fragility aspect-- if the main grid is only carrying relatively low peak power needs, instead of the entire base load, won't we be able to better handle failures? Wouldn't extra redundancy be cheaper and easier to build?
> if you wanted to get electricity from one state over, you'd need to buy 6 units to get 1 at the point of consumption.
There's a chance you were talking about transmission of household voltage. What Ohm's Law does for long-distance energy transmission is amazing
Found this:
> For example, a 100 mi (160 km) span at 765 kV carrying 1000 MW of power can have losses of 1.1% to 0.5%.
And also
> As of 1980, the longest cost-effective distance for direct-current transmission was determined to be 7,000 kilometres (4,300 miles). For alternating current it was 4,000 kilometres (2,500 miles)
Russian Akademik Lomonosov [0] is already a working example of such technology (well, apart from it being "only" 0.3 GW). While I think this direction has certainly has its niche (somewhat similar to floating storage and regasification units), I don't think we should view it as a general replacement for ground-based plants. It's not only about economics (after all floating plant inevitably will cost more), but providing energy to users deep inside land mass.
- no one has yet solved the waste problem (okay, the US has ample free land, but the rest of the world does not!)
- the proliferation risk is not eliminated (and no, it's not only plutonium, but also ordinary uranium for dirty bombs to take care of, plus the risk of enrichment tech, as evidenced with Iran)
- uranium fuel is mined under incredibly exploitative conditions. Additionally the US doesn't have meaningful uranium reserves on their territory, dito for Europe. Does the world really want a repeat of the oil crises, with some random sheikhdom having the world by the proverbial balls?
- safety issues haven't been solved at all: terrorism (hijacked airplanes) remains a constant threat, operator error/sabotage is a risk, and capitalism leading to corner cutting in construction, operation and demolition is popping up every other year.
Fission is a dead end, the hope is solar, wind and battery storage.
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years"
While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amounts generated are manageable and in a relatively short amount of time we can use most of this "waste" to generate electricity.
>...- the proliferation risk is not eliminated (and no, it's not only plutonium, but also ordinary uranium for dirty bombs to take care of, plus the risk of enrichment tech, as evidenced with Iran)
This isn't really relevant for commercial nuclear power - no country has ever gotten a nuclear bomb from commercial nuclear reactors. No terrorist has ever gotten access to nuclear waste. There are lots easier ways for terrorists and countries to obtain nuclear material. (Nuclear designs like the Integral Fast Reactor keep everything on site (including reprocessing) so the terrorist threat would be even more unlikely.)
>..- uranium fuel is mined under incredibly exploitative conditions.
Better than mining rare earths or coal etc.
>...Additionally the US doesn't have meaningful uranium reserves on their territory,
With next gen breeder reactors, there is enough fuel for tens of thousands of years. (Or thorium reactors might be used, etc)
>...- safety issues haven't been solved at all:
Nuclear power has proven to be the safest form of mass power we have ever created. Yes, like any power source we should worry about terrorism, but that isn't unique to nuclear power.
>...Fission is a dead end, the hope is solar, wind and battery storage.
It is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. But what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. Is your fear of nuclear power so great that if you had to choose, you would prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?
Agreed, with modern reactor designs nuclear "waste" is a misnomer. The Dutch keep all of their nuclear waste in buildings open to the public for tours, buildings which also happen to house priceless artwork:
Given that two of the three countries with the highest known uranium reserves are Australia and Canada I'm not too worried about "random sheikhdom having the world by the proverbial balls"
> no one has yet solved the waste problem (okay, the US has ample free land, but the rest of the world does not!)
Waste is completely overblown as a problem. Solar and windmills have much lower energy density than fission. So your zero-carbon alternatives to storing fission waste somewhere are:
- Find even more land from somewhere for solar/wind farms, or
- Vastly reduce electricity consumption
Neither option really seems better than storing fission waste.
Mostly right but for the wrong reasons. Fission is on the way out as a widespread commercial scale power source buts that’s got everything to do with politics and economic up front costs and uncertainty of future electricity prices. The waste problem is only intractable because the politics are intractable, the technology part is not an issue. Political incentives simply are not set up to make it realistic for politicians to tackle the waste. Unless suddenly society becomes entirely populated by ultra rationalist super well educated people, there is no changing this current state.
Each time I listen to climate change scientists and consultants who talk about the numbers, I clearly see how people will die because of it, but it's crazy how powerless I feel about it.
It seems the only good to go about it is to educate people so that they can understand why their standard of living will be forcefully taken from them so that their children can live better lives.
Climate change is the worst punishment caused by individualism, even worse than inequality. I'm still staying optimistic, but in the end I think that carbon reductions will reduce the average standard of living of all humans on earth, and that's the most worrying fact, in my view.
Could someone who is more R-Wing than I am, please explain why you have an unshakable preference for fossil fuels?
We are zeroing in on free energy from renewables, so it isn't economics - not any longer. With that past us, why do folks on the right even care where we get our energy from?
If the argument is jobs - well, that's a weak argument because the only job fields that either party cares about are those that can be leveraged for politics.
If the jobs argument includes thwarting disruptive technologies to prop up legacy industries - well, that doesn't sound very Keynesian to me.
Even so, I'll accept the jobs argument. I would love to see Appalachian coal regions become a mecca for renewable manufacturing. I'd love to see N.Dakota oil workers own massive energy generating coops (or whatever someone who actually groks energy comes up with). I'd be happy to see my tax dollars fund the heck out that. So whatever your jobs[1] complaint is, assume I accept it and agree to subsidize worthwhile substitutes.
Once jobs and economics is off the table, why are you still attached to fossil fuels?
Renewables don't provide constant power without city-scale energy storage, which doesn't exist (yet) at any reasonable price point. Solar for example won't provide power after sunset or on cloudy days.
Because you can't rely on renewables to provide power throughout every day/year, you need to have natural gas/coal/nuclear available. Those have very high fixed costs (other than natural gas), but very low marginal costs, so once you have built them it is cheaper to just use them than to build additional renewable power infrastructure.
I can accept that if we include the trend that combinations of renewable tech are clearly closing those gaps.
It seems reasonable that policy discussions about future energy should be increasingly dominated by renewables. That the worth of fossil fuels will steadily diminish toward a niche value ought to be a universally accepted understanding.
>It is impossible to actually run a grid off a renewable (esp. Solar) energy power-plant in any stable manner.
I agreed with that before Tesla's Big Battery experiment - and that leveraged established tech. I can't wait to see how sodium or one of the other, in-dev materials eventually supplant lithium, on a massive scale.
Tesla's battery isn't really grid-scale energy storage of the kind you'd need to do 100% renewables. It's more for smoothing out fluctuations in the grid than for filling in for intermittent sources when conditions are poor.
If the gamble on renewables works out, it will be because of geological hydrogen energy storage. That's the only way to get country-days worth of storage at a price that's actually feasible (if it works in practise like it does on paper).
> It is impossible to actually run a grid off a renewable
It is equally impossible to run a grid from only nuclear power. These assets can't "load follow" which is why in the US the 1970s build-out of nuclear power was contemporaneous with the build-out of pumped hydro storage.
If the topic here is still "not R-wing enough", Nuclear power is something that Republicans generally agree with increasing more so than Democrats [1].
It's still lower than I'd prefer, further nuclear power research seems by far the best way to truly go off fossil fuels long term (even with the improvements in batteries, we are several orders of magnitude away from it actually being realistic to build them for power grid scale energy storing).
New reactor designs can go 72 hours [2] without any human interaction, which avoids much of the natural disaster concerns, such as requiring generators for cooling, which is what caused the major problems in Fukushima.
>Nuclear energy serves the purpose of acting as the filler for the delta between the peak and trough.
No. Just. No.
It's incredibly stupid and inefficient to use nuclear as a peak power plant. Due to the huge CAPEX reasonable power system should use nuclear for base load and maximize capacity factor as much as possible.
Yes, there are experiments on maneuvering nuclear plants, but: a) usually maneuvering range is relatively small (60-80% from max output) b) latency is still too big when compared to gas plants and hydroelectric storage. There are some micro-nuclear plant designs, which would be more flexible and more suitable for this scenario, but they are mostly just paper reactors.
> Renewables don't provide constant power without city-scale energy storage, which doesn't exist (yet) at any reasonable price point.
I think that depends on the shape of the infrastructure. Super-dense cities seem like the least accommodating to near-future renewable/storage tech. Suburbs and rural areas seem like a much better fit to deploy the tech as it matures - which is happening fast.
Its not that I lean right but the real bitch is "ENERGY DENSITY" and Geographic specificity of Wind and Solar.
Also a little understanding about the grid, dynamic generation and duck curve convinced me that we need predictable generation. I am not for FOSSIL FUELS, its just that Nuclear and ONG are the real choices. Solar in American South West and Wind at the foot of Rockies and Southern Plains make general sense, but the usually they are far away from Cities.
Long story short - there may be lobbyists running around doing naughty stuff, the general bigger problems are Physics, Geography and "existing" technology - Battery Storage.
Ten to fifteen years ago, I felt we were, at best, 100 years from minimal fossil fuel use. Today, I think it's 40 years.
Note: I'm specifically picking on fossil fuels because I'm still holding out hope for safer, smaller-scale nuclear tech. I can't tell how realistic that is tho.
Regarding your observations: They seem to indicate (or at least allow) that there's low-hanging fruit, that we ought to be grabbing now.
Gen4 Nuclear and possible Fusion reactors will power the world. Sodium Batteries or some other breakthrough will be need Li will not do on Battery front.
Solar and Wind will have limited impact. Disposing Solar panels and Wind mills after their useful life is going to be its own TOXIC Waste problem.
Wind and solar are both very predictable on a day-ahead basis. Though both offer a lower capacity value than fuel-based generation and energy storage (pumped hydro and batteries).
The Duck Curve convinced me of something different -- that flat-rate power prices don't send the appropriate price signal to the market. Supply and demand should be balanced through price signals like most everything else in the economy. And then let the free market figure it out.
> We are zeroing in on free energy from renewables...
The right wing tends to believe that if a problem can be solved by an individual then there is no need for a government response.
If the assumptions in your question were true, you, WarOnPrivacy, could become a billionaire by outcompeting fossil fuel plants. Therefore no political action is needed.
More accurately, the high price of nuclear, is causing its woes. Everything else is simply cheaper. It's simple economics. Nuclear just is too darn expensive. There are a lot of other arguments but $ per kwh it just does not add up for nuclear.
The three last nuclear reactors have taken up to double the time of the previous ones between construction start and producing power. The last one took ten years, instead of mostly 5 years for the previous ones.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] thread[1] https://www.electricitymap.org/map
And before anyone says nuclear is too expensive, know that nuclear costs today are about on par with all other future low-carbon grid proposals. While wind and solar generators are dirt cheap, adding the extra transmissions lines, vast energy storage, smart grids, etc. adds $40-$60/MWh when done at levels that actually decarbonize, which makes nuclear already competitive.
Right now the dirt cheap renewables are riding on the back of a natural gas powered grid that can handle their intermittency, (except sometimes in California).
I ran the math this week on powering the house off-grid with solar and batteries. We even have a stream going through the property that could easily power all our needs throughout the year. The solar install is just so much simpler and lower maintenance though. With current available batteries going 100% solar already has a positive return on ~12k€ total investment. But it still makes more sense to only do a 1 to 3k€ investment in solar with no batteries, even giving away the rest of the power to the power company as we have no net-meetering. If we had net-meetering for the next 5 years it would boost the solar installs while the batteries keep going down in price. Within 10 years we can cover all the rooftops with solar. And with the distributed generation and storage we'd probably need less of a grid than we have now, not more.
FWIW uranium is also expected by many to undergo a big surge in price in the next few years with refueling contracts coming due in the US and the growth of nuclear overseas. But the fuel costs for a nuclear plant are a much smaller component compared to other sources, and I am guessing also compared to the battery metals component of the alternate solar/wind/battery/new grid system.
Does this include your vehicles and winter heat?
The 2 recent projects in the US came about because of loan guarantees passed under Obama, a form of subsidy. Both have been miserable financial failures going 2-3x over budget on money and time. One was cancelled after spending $9b on a hole in the ground, the other should be coming online soon.
Given how badly the projects went no utility in their right mind would order a reactor without even more subsidy to remove risk.
There are also other forms of subsidy, notably the $450m per reactor cap on liability. That's a $3b/yr subsidy to the industry.
I recommend watching the two NREL videos on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58EYcYbRKqk
NREL Overview of Floating Offshore Wind
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdKvmwsFGPE
NREL Grand Challenges in the Science of Wind Energy
As for comparing with nuclear for the past two years (2018 2019) capacity factor of nuclear power in France has been around 70% mainly due to maintenance according to RTE (1)
For reference best UK offshore wind farm had 55.3% capacity factor in 2019 and UK offshore wind average capacity factor was 40.6% in 2019 (2)
(1) https://media.rte-france.com/bilan-electrique-2019-2/ 379.5 Twh produced, 63.1 GW installed, 68.7% capacity factor
(2) https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors
Not far from so-called "baseload".
Installed generating capacity is probably down from 2006 too. Electricity usage is flat or declining and old coal power stations have been phased out in CA.
edit: missing space between words.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/watchdog/sdut-san-...
But gas is a a climate wolf in climate sheep's clothing. The end destination (490) is wholly incompatible with all the IPCC low-carbon scenarios that actually mitigate climate change. So we're kind of lulled into a false sense of success as we shut down vast quantities of coal (yay) but also actually low carbon nuclear (11 gCO₂-eq/kWh) (boo) and replace it directly with gas.
(And I do mean directly. When Indian Point shut down in NY earlier this year, NY subtracted 1016.1 MW of low-carbon nuclear capacity and added 1016.1 MW of high-carbon fossil gas [1]!)
We need carbon pricing so we actually add market value to things that are actually low carbon. Shutting down nuclear to replace with gas is so backwards.
[1] See "capacity of electric power plants" spreadsheet from here: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data.php
As a now-deleted comment observed, gas wells often mean methane methane leaks as well. Methane is 84x worse than CO2 for global warming:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential
There's a growing move towards new (HFO-1234yf [1]) refrigerants (for AC/HVAC) because a lot of the current ones (R-134a, Freon [2]) aren't good for climate change. We went to the current ones to fix the problem of the old ones (R-12 [3]) with the o-zone layer.
* [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,3,3,3-Tetrafluoropropene
* [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1,1,1,2-Tetrafluoroethane
* [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichlorodifluoromethane
> Some gases, again like methane, break down over time, and their heat absorption, or GWP, over the next 20 years is a bigger multiple of CO2 than their heat absorption will be over 100 or 500 years. Values of GWP are estimated and updated for each time frame as methods improve.
This is the highly-regulated free-market at work. Based on price signals (created by incredible market distortion), gas is less expensive than nuclear. Fans of fission should lobby for (modest) carbon taxes and to end the exemption of fracking from the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts. With those two changes, very quickly the tables would turn.
So unless we want to advocate for a mass human die off such that our energy needs have no appreciable footprint, we need to recognize that there will be serious trade-offs and deal with it.
There are certainly some environmental effects, as described at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power#Envir...
But the basic model seems cleaner to me.
- High land use (low energy density). This has both economic and ecological cost/impact. It might be ok in the SW US, but likely unacceptable elsewhere.
- Becomes less effective the further you get from the equator.
- Energy storage is a problem at night time, and also cloudy days.
Fossil and biofuel kills 8,000,000 people/yr from air pollution. Add in climate change and who knows. Meanwhile nuclear power stations have caused Chernobyl and Fukushima, which were devastating locally but have had surprisingly little radiological impact [1,2].
[1] https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html
[2] https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/fukushima.html
The thesis of the recent Michael Moore film "Planet of the Humans" [3] talks about human die-outs and serious trade-offs. I like your perspective of accepting trade-offs. This is very reasonable. Another recent film, Juice [4] is kind of the optimistic mirror of the Moore doco.
[3] Full documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE
[4] Promo: http://juicethemovie.com/
This seems like an intentional omission to go along with the rest of the doc's tone. I suppose making it into a marketing piece for nuclear wouldn't be good branding for Moore, either.
That said it annoyed me that the movie spent a lot of time in Vermont and not once acknowledge that Vermont gets 70% of its electricity from clean nuclear power at the Vermont Yankee plant. And this particular plant is targeted for shutdown by environmental groups for a long time. This contradiction needs to be seriously dealt with and was ignored by the movie.
The movie really basically boiled down to wind/solar is a scam and we can’t possibly think of any other solution (cough nuclear cough) so we need to reduce our use magically and oh I guess somehow tell the rest of the developing world to stop developing. This doesn’t work. It’s not a solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_Yankee_Nuclear_Power_P...
Low-carbon, non-combustion sources (wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, nuclear, tidal) are the only way to go.
Not using the biomass results in methane, which is estimated to be 86 times worse (as a greenhouse gas compared to CO2 alone) for our atmosphere than CO2 alone.
Unfortunately the economics of natural gas make it a steep hill to climb even if the politics and public sentiment changed on nuclear. To me, fission really seems like the only rational solution to the climate crisis that we can implement starting tomorrow.
We probably do need either carbon taxes or heavy fission plant construction subsidies (easier to implement than carbon tax and most of the negative economic incentive is the capital-intensive upfront costs - nuclear is significantly cheaper than gas at the 35-40 year plant life mark).
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24165395
Edit: Covered in a reply, but for those who don't read it please understand I was referring to the Medieval Warm Period[1].
[1[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period
[From Wikipedia] The Saga of Erik the Red states: "In the summer, Erik left to settle in the country he had found, which he called Greenland, as he said people would be attracted there if it had a favorable name."
> After finding a habitable area and settling there, he named it Grœnland (translated as "Greenland"), supposedly in the hope that the pleasant name would attract settlers.[20][21][22] The Saga of Erik the Red states: "In the summer, Erik left to settle in the country he had found, which he called Greenland, as he said people would be attracted there if it had a favorable name."[23]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland#Etymology
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period
It was slightly warmer than even today, but that was a localized warming, not Global. Greenland has had several cold and warm cycles over the past hundred millennia.
The current temperature anomaly covers the entire earth. https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/map-blended-mn...
Digging into that historical data further, what sourcing is there? The wiki page I already links indicates records for most of the world at the time were, well, awful. And that what we do know suggests it was similarly warm and dry in Asia, Africa, and South America.
Skepticalscience.com is a web cartoonist's blog, not a serious scientific source. That said even cartoonists can read and learn, so I'd be very interested in seeing his sources.
While greenland was warmer during the medieval warm period than immediately afterwards, its ice sheet is 400,000 years old. Saying they had "receded" is a stretch, and it is warmer today than it was then. The effect of the medieval warm period was localized to the north atlantic, while the rest of the world was colder, and the north atlantic is already substantially hotter today than it was then.
Also, in the opposite spirit of your opening sentence, let me advise you that "It really seems like you're just trolling" is a very weaselly way to insinuate bad faith, and you should try to do better. If you want to call me a liar or a fool just do it. I don't think you could support that accusation based on my use of sources like wikipedia because I am acting in good faith and a spirit of intellectual curiosity, but hey you do you.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeptical_Science
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation
I'm not able to find any source describing the extent of Greenland's ice sheet during the medieval warm period. If you have one, you should post it. All I can find are temperature records which indicate greenland has been hotter than in the medieval warm period since the 1930s.
I do find myself thinking though how would my intellectual heroes view that? What would Edsgar Dijkstra think of someone identifying as an "assistant professor of computing communication?" What would Richard Feynman think of someone identifying as an "assistant professor of physics communication?" While I can't be sure, abductive reasoning tells me their view would likely be dim to say the least.
You ask for sources, I provide them, you ask for credentials, I provide them, but nothing seems to penetrate your awareness.
This form of nuclear production got an actual construction license from the NRC after incredible amounts of environmental study.
It may raise eyebrows, but consider that in deep water tsunamis are a few feet tall, earthquakes are non-existent, and huge ships like the Prelude are designed to handle category-5 cyclones. You also have infinite access to cooling water and can design in a sink-safe worst-case scenario with a engineered recovery operation.
If we were serious about decarbonizing right now and I were in charge, I think I would march over to S. Korea and try to get their world-class nuclear construction people (KEPCO) hooked up with their world-class shipyard people and just start hammering them out.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1975/05/12/the-atlantic-g...
[2] https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-01-26-offshore-power-sys...
Another strong approach gaining traction is production in the 5-50MW range, with 100s/1000s/yr in the same way Boeing and Airbus build ~2000 wide body aircraft each year. Smaller reactors with lower power density can claim inherent safety with respect to various hazards - ie cannot meltdown through system failures.
Must move away from absolutist mind set with single solution and try lots of strategies. Many will be effective.
The optimal mix using today's technology seems like it would be traditional fission for baseload combined with (solar/wind + battery) / hydro for variable / peak grid load.
[1] https://www.nuscalepower.com/projects/carbon-free-power-proj...
That's why I like combining economies of scale with economies of mass production with large reactors built in shipyards. Decarbonizing requires many new TW of capacity. Exajoules is the unit of import.
Something the size of a chest freezer and rated maybe 100kW-- enough to run a few neigbouring homes, or a small office campus. Maybe it's a heat-decay product rather than a steam system, to reduce moving parts and breakdown risk. It's designed as a sealed, maintenance free unit that you dock in someone's shed, it runs for 5 years or whatever, the green "Change Reactor" light comes on, and you call the manufacturer to take it away and drop another one in place. (It could be properly deconstructed and refurbished by the manufacturer, like the old "disposable" cameras). It would probably output something like 240 or 480v natively to integrate in a similar way to rooftop solar.
I figure this can achieve a couple of goals: * By keeping the scale small, we might be able to get the "worst case" risk profile to something people find palatable (they're okay with some medical facilities with X-ray and radioisotope therapy machines in their neighbourhood, but nobody wants to live next to Palo Verde)
* Transmission losses are minimized and putting much of the generation near demand reduces load on the grid itself if the demand estimates are faulty and we still need to pull peak power from elsewhere.
That's what was always so weird about rooftop solar: if solar is so great, why is there more interest in rooftop than large-scale farms? Especially when you look at the installation cost and sub-par location and orientation, rooftop solar is significantly worse than a farm. Transmission from a farm will be less than inefficiencies because of roof angle.
OTOH, I am still interested in the grid-fragility aspect-- if the main grid is only carrying relatively low peak power needs, instead of the entire base load, won't we be able to better handle failures? Wouldn't extra redundancy be cheaper and easier to build?
There's a chance you were talking about transmission of household voltage. What Ohm's Law does for long-distance energy transmission is amazing
Found this:
> For example, a 100 mi (160 km) span at 765 kV carrying 1000 MW of power can have losses of 1.1% to 0.5%.
And also
> As of 1980, the longest cost-effective distance for direct-current transmission was determined to be 7,000 kilometres (4,300 miles). For alternating current it was 4,000 kilometres (2,500 miles)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Lo...
We've had nuclear powered subs for decades now.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov
- no one has yet solved the waste problem (okay, the US has ample free land, but the rest of the world does not!)
- the proliferation risk is not eliminated (and no, it's not only plutonium, but also ordinary uranium for dirty bombs to take care of, plus the risk of enrichment tech, as evidenced with Iran)
- uranium fuel is mined under incredibly exploitative conditions. Additionally the US doesn't have meaningful uranium reserves on their territory, dito for Europe. Does the world really want a repeat of the oil crises, with some random sheikhdom having the world by the proverbial balls?
- safety issues haven't been solved at all: terrorism (hijacked airplanes) remains a constant threat, operator error/sabotage is a risk, and capitalism leading to corner cutting in construction, operation and demolition is popping up every other year.
Fission is a dead end, the hope is solar, wind and battery storage.
In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amounts generated are manageable and in a relatively short amount of time we can use most of this "waste" to generate electricity.
>...- the proliferation risk is not eliminated (and no, it's not only plutonium, but also ordinary uranium for dirty bombs to take care of, plus the risk of enrichment tech, as evidenced with Iran)
This isn't really relevant for commercial nuclear power - no country has ever gotten a nuclear bomb from commercial nuclear reactors. No terrorist has ever gotten access to nuclear waste. There are lots easier ways for terrorists and countries to obtain nuclear material. (Nuclear designs like the Integral Fast Reactor keep everything on site (including reprocessing) so the terrorist threat would be even more unlikely.)
>..- uranium fuel is mined under incredibly exploitative conditions.
Better than mining rare earths or coal etc.
>...Additionally the US doesn't have meaningful uranium reserves on their territory,
With next gen breeder reactors, there is enough fuel for tens of thousands of years. (Or thorium reactors might be used, etc)
>...- safety issues haven't been solved at all:
Nuclear power has proven to be the safest form of mass power we have ever created. Yes, like any power source we should worry about terrorism, but that isn't unique to nuclear power.
>...Fission is a dead end, the hope is solar, wind and battery storage.
It is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. But what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. Is your fear of nuclear power so great that if you had to choose, you would prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?
https://www.covra.nl/en/radioactive-waste/the-art-of-preserv...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...
Waste is completely overblown as a problem. Solar and windmills have much lower energy density than fission. So your zero-carbon alternatives to storing fission waste somewhere are:
- Find even more land from somewhere for solar/wind farms, or
- Vastly reduce electricity consumption
Neither option really seems better than storing fission waste.
It seems the only good to go about it is to educate people so that they can understand why their standard of living will be forcefully taken from them so that their children can live better lives.
Climate change is the worst punishment caused by individualism, even worse than inequality. I'm still staying optimistic, but in the end I think that carbon reductions will reduce the average standard of living of all humans on earth, and that's the most worrying fact, in my view.
We are zeroing in on free energy from renewables, so it isn't economics - not any longer. With that past us, why do folks on the right even care where we get our energy from?
If the argument is jobs - well, that's a weak argument because the only job fields that either party cares about are those that can be leveraged for politics.
If the jobs argument includes thwarting disruptive technologies to prop up legacy industries - well, that doesn't sound very Keynesian to me.
Even so, I'll accept the jobs argument. I would love to see Appalachian coal regions become a mecca for renewable manufacturing. I'd love to see N.Dakota oil workers own massive energy generating coops (or whatever someone who actually groks energy comes up with). I'd be happy to see my tax dollars fund the heck out that. So whatever your jobs[1] complaint is, assume I accept it and agree to subsidize worthwhile substitutes.
Once jobs and economics is off the table, why are you still attached to fossil fuels?
[1] Shareholding isn't a job.
Because you can't rely on renewables to provide power throughout every day/year, you need to have natural gas/coal/nuclear available. Those have very high fixed costs (other than natural gas), but very low marginal costs, so once you have built them it is cheaper to just use them than to build additional renewable power infrastructure.
It seems reasonable that policy discussions about future energy should be increasingly dominated by renewables. That the worth of fossil fuels will steadily diminish toward a niche value ought to be a universally accepted understanding.
Nuclear energy serves the purpose of acting as the filler for the delta between the peak and trough.
I agreed with that before Tesla's Big Battery experiment - and that leveraged established tech. I can't wait to see how sodium or one of the other, in-dev materials eventually supplant lithium, on a massive scale.
Tesla's battery isn't really grid-scale energy storage of the kind you'd need to do 100% renewables. It's more for smoothing out fluctuations in the grid than for filling in for intermittent sources when conditions are poor.
If the gamble on renewables works out, it will be because of geological hydrogen energy storage. That's the only way to get country-days worth of storage at a price that's actually feasible (if it works in practise like it does on paper).
It is equally impossible to run a grid from only nuclear power. These assets can't "load follow" which is why in the US the 1970s build-out of nuclear power was contemporaneous with the build-out of pumped hydro storage.
https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-news-29-2-lo...
It's still lower than I'd prefer, further nuclear power research seems by far the best way to truly go off fossil fuels long term (even with the improvements in batteries, we are several orders of magnitude away from it actually being realistic to build them for power grid scale energy storing).
New reactor designs can go 72 hours [2] without any human interaction, which avoids much of the natural disaster concerns, such as requiring generators for cooling, which is what caused the major problems in Fukushima.
[1] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/4/23/1850729...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000
No. Just. No.
It's incredibly stupid and inefficient to use nuclear as a peak power plant. Due to the huge CAPEX reasonable power system should use nuclear for base load and maximize capacity factor as much as possible.
Yes, there are experiments on maneuvering nuclear plants, but: a) usually maneuvering range is relatively small (60-80% from max output) b) latency is still too big when compared to gas plants and hydroelectric storage. There are some micro-nuclear plant designs, which would be more flexible and more suitable for this scenario, but they are mostly just paper reactors.
I believe they meant the delta time between peaks, rather than the delta power between baseline and peak.
I think that depends on the shape of the infrastructure. Super-dense cities seem like the least accommodating to near-future renewable/storage tech. Suburbs and rural areas seem like a much better fit to deploy the tech as it matures - which is happening fast.
Also a little understanding about the grid, dynamic generation and duck curve convinced me that we need predictable generation. I am not for FOSSIL FUELS, its just that Nuclear and ONG are the real choices. Solar in American South West and Wind at the foot of Rockies and Southern Plains make general sense, but the usually they are far away from Cities.
Long story short - there may be lobbyists running around doing naughty stuff, the general bigger problems are Physics, Geography and "existing" technology - Battery Storage.
Note: I'm specifically picking on fossil fuels because I'm still holding out hope for safer, smaller-scale nuclear tech. I can't tell how realistic that is tho.
Regarding your observations: They seem to indicate (or at least allow) that there's low-hanging fruit, that we ought to be grabbing now.
Solar and Wind will have limited impact. Disposing Solar panels and Wind mills after their useful life is going to be its own TOXIC Waste problem.
Solar in space is an interesting idea too.
The Duck Curve convinced me of something different -- that flat-rate power prices don't send the appropriate price signal to the market. Supply and demand should be balanced through price signals like most everything else in the economy. And then let the free market figure it out.
The right wing tends to believe that if a problem can be solved by an individual then there is no need for a government response.
If the assumptions in your question were true, you, WarOnPrivacy, could become a billionaire by outcompeting fossil fuel plants. Therefore no political action is needed.
* we don’t build them at scale (takes too long to build one, require much engineering efforts to build each, complex permits to build each etc)
* opposition from locals/governments increase delays/risks and thus capital cost
* its cheaper to train/hire engineers/maintenance workers/construction workers when reactors are the same
Nuclear will be much cheaper when we start building many of them.
Cannot find the source now, I recall S Korea built each next power plant faster than the previous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_South_Korea
The three last nuclear reactors have taken up to double the time of the previous ones between construction start and producing power. The last one took ten years, instead of mostly 5 years for the previous ones.