Punchline is at ~12:45 for anyone who doesn't want to watch a bunch of stuff about voting.
Basically you can only compare (or add, or subtract) percentages if the quantities they represent are exactly equal. And since the quantities of power production change from year to year, they're doing the same thing he's complaining about.
Skipped to 12:45, still talking about voting. Something about voting by party vs by candidate and that being why the math with percentages didn't work out in the earlier example, which seems to be context I'm missing from the previous 12 minutes.
While usually people use percentages in the wrong way, in this case they used and compared them the appropriate way.
Percentage here is used as a ratio of total output and a decline in that ratio over time is a decline in role. Exactly what the articles headline asserts. It doesn't matter that nuclear may have grown in absolute numbers. The assertion is that its role has declined which is true.
It's still a bit sketchy because total output matters in a world where we push for more efficient use of power.
Could we put enough fancy light bulbs and triple glazed windows and heat pumps out there to run everything on nuclear (I am biased against nuclear but I'm also biased against coal externalities) and solar/wind? What's our shortfall? In this case it's not the % of nuclear I care about. It's how much base load it can provide.
Bad budgeting is one of my peeves about software and so I get a little grumpy when I see it happening elsewhere.
We need to build all forms of renewable energy and stop falling into the trap of "Build X not Y" where X and Y are one of solar/wind/hydro/nuclear. One form is insufficient.
Nothing will get accomplished with this climate 'whataboutism' type of argument. (I'm making a comparison to whataboutism, I recognize the difference)
When you have two solutions to a problem and one works very well and the other does not and only makes headlines with cost overruns and delays then surely you should "build X, not Y".
I know a lot of HN readers don't like this, but the debate is over. Nuclear lost, renewables won. Get over it.
What makes you think this is a one solution problem? Very few things in life are black & white. Life comes in shades of gray and problems with multiple solutions(more or less optimal for the time when the decision is taken).
Every type of energy comes with downsides:
-Solar - storage and delivery infrastructure costs
-Wind - same as above
-Hydro - same as above + if you build many/too big you change the center of mass leading to changes in the planets rotation speed
-Coal/gas/any fuel burned to produce energy - Usually cheaper than other to buil but produces a lot of pollution
-Nuclear - Build cost + waste disposal
Any kind of energy storage you use for any of the above will need to be recycled at some point. I would count this as a downside for any solution that requires storage to handle peak usage and can't be ramped up.
Edit:Some typos(most likely missed some) and formatting
> What makes you think this is a one solution problem?
I don't think that. I think Solar + Wind complement each other nicely. I think hydro can be good if the circumstances allow it. I think we'll need to explore a variety of storage technologies, better grids and demand side management to complement wind+solar.
I just don't think that an extra expensive technology with plenty of problems is contributing anything.
All intermittent sources dependent on weather is not a diverse energy mix.
Also, hydro is not only scarce but awful for the local habitat and extremely dangerous. An improper or unplanned decommissioning could kill millions of people.
Our current battery technology is just completely incapable of transitioning us to a %100 renewable grid at current costs and densities. Closing down nuclear plants and replacing them with a mix of renewables and lignite coal plants as we've seen in Germany has been both an ecological and economic disaster. Nuclear fission is a proven baseload power today, whereas getting renewables to cover baseload power globally requires technologies we haven't even invented yet, let alone mass manufactured.
"A cost-optimal wind-solar mix with storage reaches cost-competitiveness with a nuclear fission plant providing baseload electricity at a cost of $0.075/kWh27 at an energy storage capacity cost of $10-20/kWh. To reach cost-competitiveness with a peaker natural gas plant at $0.077/kWh, energy storage capacity costs must instead fall below $5/kWh."
"The largest announced storage system, comprising more than 18,000 Li-ion batteries, is being built in Long Beach for Southern California Edison by AES Corp. When it’s completed, in 2021, it will be capable of running at 100 megawatts for 4 hours. But that energy total of 400 megawatt-hours is still two orders of magnitude lower than what a large Asian city would need if deprived of its intermittent supply. For example, just 2 GW for two days comes to 96 gigawatt-hours.
We have to scale up storage, but how? Sodium-sulfur batteries have higher energy density than Li-ion ones, but hot liquid metal is a most inconvenient electrolyte. Flow batteries, which store energy directly in the electrolyte, are still in an early stage of deployment. Supercapacitors can’t provide electricity over a long enough time. And compressed air and flywheels, the perennial favorites of popular journalism, have made it into only a dozen or so small and midsize installations. We could use solar electricity to electrolyze water and store the hydrogen, but still, a hydrogen-based economy is not imminent.
And so when going big we must still rely on a technology introduced in the 1890s: pumped storage. You build one reservoir high up, link it with pipes to another one lower down and use cheaper, nighttime electricity to pump water uphill so that it can turn turbines during times of peak demand. Pumped storage accounts for more than 99 percent of the world’s storage capacity, but inevitably, it entails energy loss on the order of 25 percent. Many installations have short-term capacities in excess of 1 GW—the largest one is about 3 GW—and more than one would be needed for a megacity completely dependent on solar and wind generation.
But most megacities are nowhere near the steep escarpments or deep-cut mountain valleys you’d need for pumped storage. Many, including Shanghai, Kolkata, and Karachi, are on coastal plains. They could rely on pumped storage only if it were provided through long-distance transmission. The need for more compact, more flexible, larger-scale, less costly electricity storage is self-evident. But the miracle has been slow in coming."
"Given the magnitude of the battery material demand growth across all scenarios, global production capacity for Li, Co, and Ni (black lines in Fig. 3) will have to increase drastically (see Supplementary Tables 9 and 10). For Li and Co, demand could outgrow current production capacities even before 2025. For Ni, the situation appears to be less dramatic, although by 2040 EV batteries alone could consume as much as the global primary Ni production in 2019. Other battery materials could be supplied without exceeding existing production capacities (Supplementary Tables 9 and 10), although supplie...
I was downvoted too. For promoting multiple types of renewable energy over a single one. My guess is it's just the anti-nuclear ones that are doing the "build only x, not y"
> a lot of HN readers don't like this, but the debate is over. [...] Get over it.
Very dismissive, but I recognize your name as a German journalist, which explains a thing or two. (We share an acquaintance actually and I generally like your work in the security sphere.) I'm also living in Germany and the political environment is exactly like that: there's no point trying to change the public opinion which is wayyyyy negative about nuclear (to the point where many restaurants had stickers on the door "shut down <insert name of nearest plant>!" without being afraid of losing customers). But not everyone in the world is that level of misinformed. There is still a chance to save some emissions elsewhere in the world, even if it's administratively difficult because governments are usually elected for periods shorter than it takes to build, let alone operate and turn a profit on, one of these power plants. Doesn't mean that, with enough information about safety and proper cost calculations, some countries are still likely to vote a government into power that continues to permit the operation of a nuclear power plant within their borders. Let's not give up just yet. Or if you're personally against it, then just say so and bring real arguments instead of pretending everyone except HN is already against it.
What Fukushima mainly highlighted is that humans are too stupid to self-regulate, which is a necessary requirement to running these nuclear reactors safely. There were many prior safety concerns that were ignored, and all that in a country experienced with nuclear power.
If they didn't manage to ensure that they were operating their plants safely, I don't know why I should trust my local regulatory bodies to.
That is common tone, isn't it? The Soviets were quite experienced with nuclear reactors as well, and yet Chernobyl violated their own rule and regulations during design and construction. And operations. And since this happened already it will happen again.
I changed my mind on nuclear power so, now I see it as an important stop gap to transform our electricity production to renewables. Existing nuclear power plants would allow us to phase out fossil fuel now. And they would buy us time to figure out storage for renewables. New nuclear plants won't help, so, their construction time is simply too long.
Nuclear was in ill repute before Fukushima. The only reason Fukushima even happened was because we stopped building new nuclear plants to replace the old ones decades ago.
Why is it that one disaster every other decade for nuclear is enough to terminate progress and innovation altogether? It's unreasonable. When rockets explode or planes crash, even when people die during launches or takeoff, we don't stop trying to improve on them. We don't give up on the tech. Something about nuclear strikes irrational fear in the general public.
911 was about $30B. Fukushima was about $1T and counting.
We have alternatives to nuclear that don't make the state-backed insurance worthwhile, not so much to air travel - where state-backed last resort insurance is available.
This NY Times article claims 9/11 total costs were $3.3 trillion, including $55B in physical damage, $123B in economic impact, $589B in Homeland security spending, $1.6T in war funding, $867B in veterans care and future costs associated:
At any rate, Fukushima was caused by a tsunami. It's clearly not the same risk factor to place nuclear reactors in say, the deserts of Australia, Nevada, or New Mexico versus the shoreline of Japan. We don't launch rockets from heavily populated downtown areas either for the same reason. As an engineer, you gotta think in trade-offs and reality.
Nuclear is a truly unlimited energy source. As a species, we have to master this technology in a safe way if we ever want to advance to the next level. We're never going to be a space-faring species on wind and solar alone. Solar and wind are fair-weather friends.
Only if the decay product is not itself radioactive. I could alternate between alpha decay and something nastier. And if it’s radium then even alpha decay is a problem because it can be aspirated.
I'd pick the occasional localized radioactive hazard over global destruction caused by anthropogenic climate change. That is if we even had such disasters again with current generation nuclear tech.
Have you seen how much radiation from Fukushima has sailed out to sea? It's bad.
I really think we need to ban building heavy industry next to bodies of water or high in critical watersheds. We have enough transit infrastructure now that we should be looking at the precautionary principle when zoning for things that can get a free ride on the wind or waterways and therefore spread over heavily populated or critical nature corridors just due to inability to stop a problem the moment it is detected. It's designed for making a company's biggest mistakes into everybody's problem instead of theirs.
> Have you seen how much radiation from Fukushima has sailed out to sea?
Actually, Wikipedia tells me they've resumed fishing the sea next to Fukushima as of three years ago
> In February 2018, Japan renewed the export of fish caught off Fukushima's nearshore zone. According to prefecture officials, no seafood had been found with radiation levels exceeding Japan safety standards since April 2015.
Seawater contamination seems to be back to safe levels two months later.
I'm no expert on seawater contamination or anything, perhaps it's the case that the two big nuclear disasters known to mankind had a combined effect on sea life greater than the fossil fuel plants and dams for hydro. But then please do make that argument rather than a vague exclamation about "have you seen how much".
Go live in an airplane crash for a couple of months and then let's talk again about whether we should continue to operate them? Or is the exhaust of a coal plant -- oh wait, that's worldwide, you're already more likely to get all sorts of stuff from air pollution -- a better comparison? This line of reasoning makes no sense to me.
Question: how much is building new nuclear plants about producing nuclear weapons?
Is that still important? In the UK we’re spending an INSANE amount of money on a new reactor and I’m wondering if that has anything to do with the government’s motivation.
People who decide to build new plants make their decision not from concerns about climate change, but economics. Building a new nuclear plant would be like building a new coal plant, but worse because by the time it's complete the economics will be even poorer in comparison. Nuclear just doesn't make economic sense on any measure: cost per GW, time to complete, up front cost, regulatory difficulty, etc.
So as much a nuclear advocates wish more nuclear plants would be built, unless they want to provide significant subsidies, it's just not going to happen. For the same reason you don't shop around by finding the highest price you can... no one is looking to throw away money. Energy is energy.. no one cares about the type of plant it came from.
Bingo. Nuclear is just ridiculously expensive compared to Wind/Solar. You could overbuild 2-3x and maybe even add batteries.
Big honking power plants of all flavors are just not economically viable. The SMR thing might work, but it'll have to do better than wind+solar+batteries which have enormous economies of scale.
> Bingo. Nuclear is just ridiculously expensive compared to Wind/Solar. You could overbuild 2-3x and maybe even add batteries.
Batteries will never have sufficient capacity to delivery any meaningful amount of storage. This is why any realistic plan for a wind + solar grid assumes some silver bullet will solve the storage problem: synthetic methane, hydrogen, thermal batteries, something else.
But who knows if any of those will actually pan out. California has already hit saturation with solar power. Adding more solar only marginally displaces carbon emissions. As far as actual decarbonization goes, nuclear is more valuable than raw generation figures present because this power is generated 24/7.
Pumped hydroelectric has good capacity, but doesn't scale well. The right geography is the main limiting factor, accessibility is a second. The places with good hydroelectric potential tend to be very remote, in the mountains. It's extremely hard to do large earthmoving and concrete construction in remote places. The places that have simultaneously the right topology and relatively easy accessibility are limited.
Pumped thermal storage has no geographic limits. The idea is: compress argon, transfer the heat to thermal store, expand the argon back to the starting pressure to recover some work, then transfer the "cold" to another thermal store. For long term storage, use very cheap materials, like rocks, for the thermal stores. To discharge, reverse the flow, so argon is cooled, then compressed, then heated, then expanded. All this can be done with existing technologies and with a round trip efficiency of perhaps 60%.
> Batteries will never have sufficient capacity to delivery any meaningful amount of storage.
What physical limit prevents this?
It would be expensive, but cheaper than building nuclear power plants, especially the breeder reactors that would be needed for a fully nuclear world economy.
However, I'm surprised that it's not done to expand the military. It's really weird that someone is being forced to work for the sake of the entire planet when every other nation is trying to wiggle itself out of its responsibility.
One of the advantages of nuclear, though, is land-area required. Nuclear takes about a third as much land as solar, and a fifth as much as wind, meaning that it can more easily scale up if energy needs outstrip available land for energy production without reverting to the equally land-efficient methods of coal and gas.
That said, improvements in the transmission grid might be able to remedy that issue, honestly not sure.
This is very interesting to me. On of my (perhaps irrational) fears with solar and wind is how much land it potentially could take to supply power. I live in a very sparsely populated state because my greatest joy in life is being as far as possible from "civilization." I spend a lot of my free time traveling through craggy jeep trails to visit obscure locations (and photograph them.)
If nuclear takes, hypothetically, 200 acres to build a power plant, containment, and all the supporting services necessary to generate enough power to feed a city, and solar takes 600 acres to generate an equal amount (and be much safer as well) I'm ok with that compromise, but I would have expected that the ratio would be much higher. Can you tell me where the ratios you have quoted come from?
I'm on the same page in terms of pro-solar, but I also think having nuclear ready to go is a nice fallback (e.g. if rare earth metals for solar and batteries become prohibitively expensive or embargoed).
Ah, honest mistake, lithium (not rare earths) is the metal that the US doesn't have a sufficient stockpile of. The rest of the point should still stand though, essentially having an energy grid that can react to supply shocks.
And lithium isn't needed for solar either. Lithium is used in one variety of storage, but there are thousands of different battery chemistries, and many different non-battery energy storage technologies. The "it can't do it" argument needs to show that they ALL fail, alone or in combination. That's a very tall order, especially when some storage technologies use cheap materials like steel and rocks.
>...I would have expected that the ratio would be much higher.
And you are right - the land needed to actually generate the power is much different than that ratio.
The strata report is also counting the land use for transmission lines which is a big part of the land use for any power source and makes the land use for different power sources look much more similar than they are.
From the report:
>...Because nuclear energy accounted for 19.55 percent of the nation’s electricity production in 2015, approximately 938,388 acres of land were used to transmit nuclear energy in 2015, or 10.312 acres per megawatt.
So of the 12 acres they attribute per megawatt for nuclear, 10 acres of that is for transmission lines which are going to be needed no matter the source of power.
The report gives an example later:
>...The Arkansas Nuclear One Station requires only 1,100 acres (1.7 square miles) to produce 1,800 megawatts operating at a 90 percent capacity factor. A study by Entergy Arkansas estimates that for modern wind and solar plants operating at the same capacity, they would require 108,000 acres (169 square miles) and 13,320 acres (21 square miles) of land respectively to produce the same amount of power.
As another data point, in a report on the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, PG&E reported:
>...To build the equivalent of a 1,000-Mw nuclear plant, a solar park would require 11,000 acres of PV solar panels and a wind farm would need 50,000 acres of wind turbines. By contrast, Diablo Canyon is able to produce twice as much power (2300 Mw) in a footprint of approximately 545 acres.
1) Disrupt the nuclear construction contracting process. Until fleet contractors like Bechtel et al are stopped from parasitizing the industry, it's going nowhete due to spiralling costs.
2) Lower the cost of reinforced concrete.
3) Close the fuel cycle.
3 is technically feasible, 2 isn't very sexy, but possible. 1 seems insurmountable.
The only way it works is if the power consumer owns the entire lifecycle (construction, ongoing O&M, etc) (the US Navy, for example). There is absolutely no way any commercial power purchase agreement buyer is going to spec nuclear when they can get renewables backed by storage for pennies per kwh [1], both of which have install lead times measured in months (versus a decade for nuclear).
Tesla committed to having the Hornsdale Power Reserve built in 100 days or it was free [2]. That is what nuclear is up against. Please don't argue base load; there is no need for base load, only diverse firm dispatchable generation assets [3], robust transmission, and demand response for non-essential industrial loads.
There isn't remotely enough storage available to make wind and solar feasible. To put this in perspective, the world consumes 60 TWh of electricity daily, about 2.5 TWh per hour. We have only a couple GWh of battery storage. Hydroelectric provides more, but that's harder to scale because you need the right geography.
Once solar saturates daytime demand, provisioning further solar power doesn't contribute to decarbonization. This is why nuclear is really the only known path to decarbonization. Maybe we'll figure out scalable ways to provision hundreds of terawatt hours of storage, but we might be waiting a long time.
https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/uploads/ee2523dc632c9b01df... ("Australia is the sunniest country in
the world and one of the windiest.
Australia’s potential for renewable
energy generation is 500 times
greater than current power
generation capacity.")
https://www.afdb.org/en/news-and-events/why-africa-is-the-ne... ("Africa has an almost unlimited potential of solar capacity (10 TW), abundant hydro (350 GW), wind (110 GW), and geothermal energy sources (15 GW). The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) estimates that renewable energy capacity in Africa could reach 310 GW by 2030; which would put the continent at the forefront of renewable energy generation globally.")
Neither of these articles offers a detailed plan on how this storage will be provisioned. The second doesn't even mention storage at all, only that Europe has enough wind power to power the whole world. Sure, but that's not very useful if that power isn't delivered when you need it.
I like framing the problem in this term. Our ultimate goal is decarbonization: $1 million per gram of C02 emitted unless equivalent mass is sequestered.
Do we have a realistic plan to built a wind and solar grid under that market? I don't think so, wind and solar are useful for taking a bite out of natural gas but not actually serving as the backbone of an electrical grid. The amount of storage necessary to decarbonize with wind and solar is not feasible, and essentially amounts to betting on some future invention of a cheap mass energy storage device that works everywhere.
By comparison we have demonstrable examples of countries going 80+% nuclear, and the US is already at 20% nuclear power generation. Building four nuclear plants for each existing plant is a lot more achievable of a goal than first building a massive amount of solar and wind, and building extensive HVDC transmission, and building tens of Terawatt hours worth of storage. The first step in the latter is cheaper than building nuclear, it's the other two steps that are wildly expensive if they're even possible. If we actually enacted a binding rule of zero emissions by 2050 people would start building nuclear power plants.
* In 2020, the U.S. had over 23.2 GW of capacity in energy storage compared to 1,100 GW of total installed generation capacity.
* Globally, installed energy storage capacity totaled 173.6 GW.
* 1,355 energy storage projects were operational globally in 2020, with 11 projects under construction. 40% of operational projects are located in the U.S.
* California leads the U.S. in energy storage with 215 operational projects (4.2 GW), followed by Hawaii, New York, and Texas.
"Two of the planned 10 MW batteries are up and running already, with a total of 10 expected online by year's end, Vavrik said. That means that BRP and Key Capture are running neck and neck for operational capacity in Texas. The title of biggest battery operator in the state could change hands repeatedly based on the order in which those companies' projects wrap up.
The broader story is that multiple experienced energy investors are converging on Texas simultaneously. The interconnection queue contains more than two dozen batteries that are each larger than 100 megawatts; some go up to 300, 400, even 500 megawatts."
Yes you're missing the point. Most of that storage is hydro and there's a huge gulf between what's required to cover prolonged lulls in such as weeks as was observed recently in Texas and regularly elsewhere - and to peak shave, regulate frequency, and cover until CCGTs can spin up as we have now. Until we start getting to the multi-GWh scale it's a nonstarter.
Again, you either think climate change is an existential problem in which case relying on magic pixiedust in the future is an absurd, or you don't. There's no two ways about it.
To put these in perspective, the US consumes 500 GWh of electricity every hour. Of the 23 GWh of existing storage, 20 GWh come in the form of hydroelectricity. 100 MWh of storage only amounts to 1.4 seconds of electricity storage. We don't need megawatt hours worth of storage. We don't need gigawatt hours worth of storage. We need terawatt hours worth of storage. We're 6+ orders of magnitude off between the amount of storage necessary, and the storage we can feasibly build.
One day of power storage would be 12 TWh (using the 500 GW number in the post I responded to). That’s ~2.7 orders of magnitude time larger than the cited current installed storage, which isn’t even remotely 6+ orders of magnitude.
Even if you entirely ignore that hydro component and only look at the 3 GWh number, that’s still only ~3.6 orders of magnitude less than what we’d need for a whole day with no power generation whatsoever.
Their numbers are talking about enough storage to maintain current usage for half a year.
To your second comment: spanning a continent does actually help with solar, since the sun is up at different times on the two coasts - that buys you several extra hours of power each day. Also obstructive weather patterns tend to not reach that far.
1. Weeklong disruptions are a thing and would occur in the event of month long plumes from forest fires, major volcanic activity or other long tail natural disasters.
2. Relying on such a tightly coupled national grid as required to deploy that storage is a recipe for disaster in the event of any war or unconventional conflict. A few shut down transmission lines or stations could cripple entire national economy.
3. Overbuilding completely ignores the very real human and environmental costs of doing so. Rare earths are not very green, forced labor as used by much of the solar industry not very humane. You are condemning millions today to hypothetical harm to thousands tomorrow. It's insanity.
> That’s ~2.7 orders of magnitude time larger than the cited current installed storage, which isn’t even remotely 6+ orders of magnitude.
But almost all (~95%) of the installed grid storage capacity is in hydroelectric storage. The above commenter is posting in terms of battery storage in the 100MWh range. We would indeed need 6 orders of magnitude larger than this even to just have 1 day's worth of storage. Hundred megawatt hours vs a dozen Terawatt hours.
Also, the amount of storage could be substantially more than a day in a predominantly wind + solar grid. Part of variability is mostly daily, with the sun going up and down. But both solar and wind are also affected by weather. That requires much more substantial amounts of storage to get the grid through consistent days of reduced production. Estimates to provide a 100% carbon-free grid with renewables go as high as 3 weeks [1]
It says that 3 weeks of power storage would be required in total absence of a serious overhaul in transmission capabilities. I had assumed that was a clear, if unspoken, assumption when I was discussion continent scale entities.
Also, the poster you originally responded to was discussing the literal dozens of installations that singlehandedly meet the 100 MWh mark. HN guidelines require that I assume this was a simple failure of reading comprehension.
Even a much more modest goal of provisioning a single day of storage would entail 11.5TWh of storage. Dozens of 100 MWh facilities is still in the single digit GWh range. That's six orders of magnitude. And this isn't even taking into account handling heating, industrial use, and all the other forms of tapping into fossil fuel energy besides electricity.
Global daily electricity consumption is 60TWh per day. And that's only Electricity consumption. Total energy consumption is more than 100TWh per day. The duration of storage to fulfill 100% of this demand with renewables varies depending on energy mix, long distance transmission, and more but is usually in the range of at least one day's worth of storage.
The point is that dozens of 100MWh stations is basically nothing. You'd need millions of these sites to make renewables a feasible primary source of energy. Our current technology is not sufficient to make energy storage available to make grid storage viable.
Yes a dozen 100GWh facilities is 1.2 GWh, and that's an order of magnitude less in difference, I don't doubt your ability to multiple by factors of ten.
For long-tail adverse events? It's easy to engineer power distribution systems for the average case, but unless we accept occasional brownouts as a cost of doing business, we need to build robustness into our generation fleet. Let's say we get another Krakatoa-scale eruption that reduces insolation (and thus drops solar & wind output while increasing heating demand). Some amount of firm generation (hydro, gas peaker, nuclear) is insurance against correlated failure in the global climate system.
"Accept brownouts" really just means "keep using fossil fuels" people don't accept brownouts, they buy generators. At this point, it's better to just keep burning natural gas since combined cycle plants are 1.5-2x more efficient than diesel generators.
Hydroelectric is geographically limited, you can just build dams where people need additional power.
That leaves nuclear. And since nuclear costs just as much to run 100% of the time as it does to run part of the time it makes no sense to use it as a peaker. Just run it 24/7, and install less intermittent sources.
The Tesla giga factory is making 20 gWh per year. 10 factories for 5 years and we have 1tWh. And we would need to massively scale up battery production anyway for electric cars in a nuclear scenario. And remember that those batteries are one of the easiest technologies to deploy. You don't need much more than a grid connection, a substation and a concerete pad.
We have methane seeping through thawing permafrost today. We can't delay decarbonizing our energy mix for technologies we haven't even invented yet, let alone mass produced.
Yes that is the point, it's basic risk management. Betting the farm on future breakthroughs if you consider climate change to be an existential threat is being on fire and waiting for the fire department because you don't wan't to get your soiled jumping to a pond nearby.
Nuclear is by far the best technology we have today so we should go with it until we have better options in our hand.
What isn't surprising, because up to now, grid storage was only profitable in very few niche cases, and for a very short time. Besides, there has been no government program to invest on those.
So you are saying that there is some business that has always been certain to lose money, and had never had government help, and nobody ever invested on it. And you are using this fact to suggest that in the near future, when that business will become needed and profitable, nobody will invest on it either... what isn't a conclusion one can make.
Actual experts have studied this. Full decarbonization by 2050 with <2% GPD spending per year. No new, and phasing out existing nuclear. Overprovision renewables and produce carbon neutral synthetic fuels with excess power production. Nuclear will never power chainsaws which many across the world depend on.
This is a terrible article. It's basically a single chart showing (what I can only assume) projected energy demand in the USA for a 5-day period in March, and some dispatch figures between various energy sources, and a couple of random generic infographics. Zero explanation of:
- where those demand projections came from
- the feasibility of building capacity for the projected
dispatch
- the cost of doing so
I'm not saying that the premise/conclusion is wrong, just that this article in particular adds nothing to the discussion. I can only hope that the linked reports actually address those questions.
The associated report does have more details whether or not you agree with them. The article is more of a summary.
re: demand projections
"the carbon neutral and carbon negative scenarios were required to meet the same demand for energy services, for daily life and industrial production as the business as usual reference case from the EIA's Annual Energy Outlook and used its assumptions for population, for GDP and industrial production. So that's very much nothing changes in the world except for the energy system... kind of a view. And the modeling only allows technologies that are commercial today or that have been demonstrated at large pilot scale today. So in effect, I think that really sets a pretty high bar because in reality, I would expect a number of those things to change over the next 30 years. For example, I would expect probably lower population growth than EIA projects and considerably lower demand for energy services and industrial production as a result of a slowing economy. And I would have said that before we have the added effects of the pandemic. "
re:feasibility
"I think at it's core backcasting is about trying to understand what's entailed in the physical transformation. So the legacy of this work is in that discussion about feeling like that's the analysis that's needed. Not necessarily understanding what does a carbon tax do on the margin or what to other approaches do sort of in the short term and in the macroeconomic system. But really understanding how many more widgets do we need and how quickly do they need to be deployed if you don't want to do early retirement. So that context of the questions we're trying to answer really sets up the insights that come from backcasting. So one of the things we think a lot about is stock turnover. So sort of one of our modeling principles is that we don't do early retirement of any resources except for potentially an electricity supply. So for things like light-duty vehicles or industrial boilers, we really need to understand how long do those resources typically stay online? And that means if it's a 15-year turnover rate for something like a furnace or maybe it's a 30-year turnover rate for something like an industrial boiler."
re:cost
"And we find that that case at a net cost of 0.4 percent of GDP in 2050 is able to achieve carbon neutrality. So that 0.4 percent of GDP in 2050 over the reference case, it really represents some major shifts in terms of monetary flows. So we're spending $950 billion on efficiency, new supply for low carbon solutions, and we're saving $800 billion on fossil fuels that are no longer being burned. So our analysis really only looks at the energy costs for the total system for that transition. We're not accounting for things like co-benefits or economic benefits from the avoided damage of climate change or other potential impacts, as well as potential health or environmental benefits. That total energy spending declines from about five percent of GDP for the energy system today to around four percent in 2050. "
-quotes from podcast linked in first article
1. Renewables are only pennies per KWh because their intermittency, and the carbon costs backups required due to it, isn't being priced in.
2. Look at Texas's recent "hiccup" around Feb 15 and compare it to year before. Wind dropped to <10% reliable capacity and it was almost all picked up by gas/coal. The drop wind/solar production starts a week before the cold snap that disrupted everything else.
Hornsdale power reserve derives most of it's revenue from selling ancillary services, it does not provide energy. Hornsdale's success is not foreshadowing a battery revolution unfortunately.
The reason nuclear costs so much is because we've stopped building plants. There's no industry anymore, let alone economies of scale. It's a fallacious argument to say it costs too much. If we went all in on nuclear to tackle climate change the costs would quickly collapse. After all, they were built in the 70s and dramatically decarbonized the industry at the time.
For example, EnergyAustralia just announced that they're pulling forward the retirement of Yallourn coal powered station by four years [1], and building a 350MW utility scale energy system to absorb and discharge renewable power to offset the coal plant being retired:
"Under the agreement, EnergyAustralia will retire Yallourn in mid-2028 and build new storage capacity through a 350 MW, four-hour, utility-scale battery project that will be completed by 2026. This ensures energy storage is built to firm increased renewable energy in Victoria, before Yallourn exits the system.
EnergyAustralia’s goal is to be carbon neutral by 2050. Yallourn’s retirement will reduce the company’s emissions profile by 60 per cent, accelerating the pathway towards achieving this ambition."
As we speak (mid day local Victoria time), renewables are providing 48% of total electrical demand in Victoria [2].
"But what is clear is that there is a massive shift happening here. Coal is on the way out, as is “baseload” gas, and wind and solar and storage facilities, particularly battery storage, are on the way in. And many of the biggest batteries are being planned at the sites of coal and gas generators already closed or expected to close in coming years or decades."
"The sizes it is mooting are up to 500MW (and maybe two hours storage) for Liddell, 250MW and four hours storage at Torrens (1,000MWh), and 200MW and four hours storage (800MWh) at Loy Yang A. The final call on storage duration will be determined by the sort of market opportunities it sees for the batteries in the different states – longer for storing excess wind and solar, shorter for grid security services."
Good developments, but we cannot wait for them. Even the coal grids are falling apart now, and building gas to replace them is not sane.
On the other hand, once they're available, switching to them is perfectly fine, and the 50+ lifetime of LWRs exists for a reason. Maybe we will even have workable fusion by then.
It appears the NuScale pilot project is floundering. They announced cost raising about 50% and about a 3 year delay. Several of the utility customers have backed out of the project as a result, putting it on iffy grounds.
Is this doable? What's keeping it up? Is it anything artificial, like a business cartel or something similar? If not, lowering the price would practically mean subsidies.
Cost of materials (e.g. sand) are going up, plus the "nuclear grade" upcharge. Add a 2x to 4x multiplier for "accidents" that require demolition and rework. :)
No it is the steam turbine (& associated heat exchangers) that makes the economics of the lwr impossible. It is what made the economics of the old-school coal burning power plants impossible in most places compared to the methane fueled gas turbine not to mention wind and other renewables.
The power density of a gas turbine is so much greater than that of a steam turbine that a closed-cycle gas turbine powerset for a sodium cooled fast reactor would fit in the employee break room of the turbine hall of an lwr. Running at higher temperatures with liquid metal, molten salt, or gas-cooled reactors poses many practical problems, but means building a machine that processes more energy with less mass thus drastically lower capital cost.
Also, a big reason LWRs use so much reinforced concrete is that they have huge containment domes. The reason they're so big is that the water is pressurized at around 100 atmospheres, and if there's a pipe break it'll flash into steam at a thousand times the volume. You need plenty of space for the steam to expand inside containment.
A molten salt reactor is at atmospheric pressure and has nothing to cause a chemical explosion. You still need containment, but you don't need to contain a large empty space.
A supercritical CO2 turbine runs at 1000+ psi but if the pipes broke and the CO2 sprayed out into that salt, you might get an overpressure around 10 psi in a not-too-big confinement because the volume of working fluid is tiny.
The advantage of combustion turbines is that there is much less transfer of heat across fluid/solid interfaces. In a simple cycle combustion turbine, no such transfer is needed. The heat is generated by combustion in the working fluid, which carries away the waste heat after expansion. Combined cycle does add a steam bottoming cycle that needs heat exchangers (before and after) and cooling towers, but most of the power is still coming from the combustion turbine, so the steam part is much smaller than in a pure steam plant of the same rated power.
Fine then provide the subsidies. We spend trillions on boondoggle military projects without concrete return to society. I think the livability of the planet is basic to having an economic system to point to as an excuse.
The best solution would be to provide a broad carbon price. That way subsidy would be applied to renewables, nuclear, insulating your house or things that haven't been invented yet.
I'm just not convinced that renewables are going to live up to their promise as a total solution sans nuclear. I think having some investment in nuclear is inevitable and I would rather build out excess capacity and be wrong and not need it than be right and have to play catch up.
We already have substantial investment in nuclear if we want or not. We still have to throw money at this radioactive pile of waste for decades and you still have to get rid of the old reactors which are still there.
Renewables are getting better and cheaper fast and if you have you're not convinced by that, I see no reasonable argument for nuclear.
It's not a bad idea to focus on renewables. But the budget is merely limited by full employment.
Think of it this way. If unemployment/underemployment is high then it's like having random people sitting in a bar doing nothing. A government official comes to the bar and sees people doing nothing and tells then what to do. What's being lost by telling these people to do something? The biggest loss is that these people could have done something even better than what the government came up with, however they are in a bar doing nothing, clearly nobody needs them right now.
The question is, does the nuclear industry actually generate jobs that would lower unemployment? Is the type of person that is qualified to work on a nuclear reactor unemployed? I am leaning toward no, I simply cannot imagine the highly vocal trump supporter base being filled with academics in hard sciences. If we are going to do a nuclear jobs program it might backfire because it fails to employ the right people.
It's not "people doing something". To make power plants you need factories running. Produce steel, specialized metals, concrete, refine silica sand, produce electronics... You need mines for the base materials, and factories producing mining equipment. You need some rare earth metals, potentially. You need chemical plants too. And of course power and water input for the manufacturing sector.
All of which is nontrivial amount of investment nobody does where there is unemployment, because it's cheaper to do it in China as the base and subcomponents are already there... (there's also unemployment)
It depends, economically speaking, renewables are superior. However, you need to convince people who don't believe in climate change and only see the downsides of the new tech that is being pushed.
AS the private sector is already convinced, I don't see much problems there. There is only the remaining resistance in old fossil and nuclear with a small and desperate astroturf campaign (http://www.tmia.com/old-website/News/AstroTurf.htm). The energy issue in the always outraged population which became so prominent in the recent years is a tiny problem compared to what really drives them forward. Just hand them out their own solar collectors with some edgy claims on it ;)
That is absolutely the right idea, the question is, what boondoggles should we put our money into? If we carefully choose the right boondoggle we might even get something out of it. If you want to go down the path of nuclear power then you must consider a strategy that involves the construction of hundreds of new reactors, preferably continuously so that you don't run into the "build everything, then nothing and once you want to build again everyone has retired" problem.
Keeping nuclear power safe is very easy, you just have to decommission old power plants that aren't up to modern standards. That's all it would have taken to prevent Chernobyl and Fukushima. So why on earth do we build nuclear power plants that are difficult to rebuild? Why did we believe that immature technology is going to be enough for the next 50 years? You need to build more, to replace the crappy old power plants, you need to build more, to expand the fleet, you need to build more, to update previously built plants to a new safety standard, you need to build more, just to maintain a workforce.
It's done all the time with solar power and wind. Build it for 20+ years, if new tech comes out you just replace the old tech once it proves uneconomical.
My personal favorite boondoggles are still housing, internet, electric grid and road maintenance. We really need to put pressure on the job market through fiscal stimulus. That pressure will force companies to wake up and actually do something productive.
Currently the most subsidized energy is fossil fuels. My own government is a very vocal about climate change, but they still pay millions in order for fossil fuel plants to stand ready in case demand exceeds that of the production from wind.
I understand people dislike when nuclear get subsidies, but its nowhere as bad as the amount of subsidies we pay right now to fossil fuels. We need to stop throwing money at fossil fuels. I rather have my tax money go to batteries or nuclear than fossil fuels disguised as "reserve energy".
The prohibitive cost of nuclear plants is driven by policy- not economics. Obviously the world built a plethora of economically feasible nuclear power plants in the 1960s. It's not like we collectively lost that technology.
Instead what happened is that anti-nuclear activists put up arbitrary regulatory barriers to construction. Three-Mile Island provided the political catalyst for a massive regulatory burden on new construction. Most of these burdens have an at best minor impact on safety, but at the cost of astronomical impact on cost.
Now maybe you can debate about whether loosening nuclear regulations to decrease cost is acceptable or not. But at the very least that's at least a debate we should be having. It's certainly the case that a lot of people will die from unmitigated climate change. Not to mention the enormous economic and environmental toll. Against that, I would gladly trade off a Three-Mile Island incident every decade or so.
> The prohibitive cost of nuclear plants is driven by policy- not economics.
So, what was the policy that caused Vogtle 3/4 and the Summer plants to go so wildly over budget? Was there a policy for Westinghouse to screw up badly? And similarly for Flamanville 3, and the new plants they're trying to build in the UK.
The argument for "less regulation" is really the argument "who needs expensive containment and emergency systems, because radiation is no big deal".
>Back at the start of 2017, Bitcoin was using 6.6 terawatt-hours of power a year. In October 2020, that was up to 67 terawatt-hours. Now a few months later, it has nearly doubled to 121 terawatt-hours, the Cambridge researchers found, enough to run their entire university for nearly 700 years.
I'm not sure which issue is more polarizing on HN: nuclear power or Bitcoin.
So fission power is easy: I know this will upset the nuclear fanboys on HN but (IMHO) it has no future. And it's not because the technology can't be safe. It's because humans ultimately can't be trusted with:
- Acquiring, extracting and storing the fuel;
- Dealing with the toxic byproducts (eg UF6);
- Maintaining the plants to a sufficient degree of safety on thin profit margins that are the norm for utilities;
- The failure modes are awful; and
- Dealing with the waste.
Governments currently cover some or all of these to some degree so I'm not sure we're seeing anything close to the true cost of nuclear power factoring in the above. Nuclear power thus far seems to have been far more of a political statement than an economic choice.
As for fusion power, that's more murky. I really hope there's commercially viable fusion power in our future but... I'm not yet convinced there will be.
Fusion works for stars because the process happens really slowly (per unit mass) and the masses are so large that gravity contains the "mess".
Heating a fluid to 100M+ Kelvin is always going to have turbulence issues and we don't have a good story for containing the neutrons without destroying our containment vessel. I believe He3 fusion would be (mostly?) aneutronic but... He3 is super-rare (for us here on Earth).
I believe solar has the brightest future. When (not if) getting stuff in orbit is sufficiently cheap that we have industry and permanent residence off Earth then solar is an amazing option. I've seen one estimate that a solar collector in space produces about 7 times the power of an Earth-bound one (night/day cycles, no weather, no atmospheric interference).
In all seriousness, that is a pretty terrifying industrial project. I'm not sure how you'd make the failsafes strong enough to match the risk of cooking thousands of people alive.
I imagine a large solar power-sat in orbit could be easily crippled by missiles launched from outside its aim-zone, or even well-aimed orbital debris being slung around.
I'd worry more about such an installation being hacked/sabotaged by someone who doesn't care if the billions-of-dollars investment gets turned into confetti within a few hours.
This is why software is kept out of control systems whenever possible.
“They hacked the web interface that tells me how much power the diagnostic thinks is being generated so now it doesn’t agree with the receiver” isn’t as scary as “they redirected the death ray to a nearby city”.
That's why the microwaves approach might be preferable to the laser approach: "Safe, low intensity levels hardly stronger than the midday sun. Birds and planes wouldn’t notice much of anything flying across their paths."
The power density wouldn't be near that bad. From geostationary, the footprint would be several square miles, and birds could fly through the beam without harm. Even getting that much focus from phased-array transmitters would require a reference signal from the ground, so if the beam went astray it would spread out much more.
Despite the low power density the ground station would still be cheap, since it'd mostly be wire antenna.
> The long wavelength of the microwave requires a long antenna, and allows power to be beamed through the Earth’s atmosphere, rain or shine, at safe, low intensity levels hardly stronger than the midday sun. Birds and planes wouldn’t notice much of anything flying across their paths.
It doesn't look like they mention a specific wavelength in the article, but the reference to "long wavelength" and "long antenna" seems to imply frequencies much lower than what I'd consider microwave.
Generally, the lower the frequency is, the less harm it causes to living things. Though I either way I wouldn't want to live right next to the ground station. I suppose it would be similar to living right next to a radio transmission tower or a radar station.
I generally expect sub 100 MHz to be called radio rather than microwave, but I shouldn’t make assumptions.
So you need a quarter wave to be longer than a building to make it not a concern, practically it needs to be much longer if you’re sending serious power and want to keep the density down.
Let’s aim for a 1 km long antenna in space with voltage high enough that ohmic losses are not a concern, or a very large superconducting antenna and all of the apparatus that goes with it. Millions of volts likes to arc when you have debris just floating around everywhere in space. Superconducting is much more attractive regardless of the extra apparatus.
I don’t see many points of concern, though you could still damage infrastructure if you aren’t constantly aligned. Blowing up terrestrial grids isn’t as bad as cooking people alive.
It would still be the most dangerous thing we've ever put in space by a pretty wide margin. Keep space filled exclusively with small tin cans is not an accident and not entirely due to technical or economic limitations. It is a very sensitive political area. Putting anything that could be dangerous in orbit makes it dangerous to everyone. So your adversary across the ocean blows up a reactor? Cool. As long as they don't blow me up.
> It would still be the most dangerous thing we've ever put in space by a pretty wide margin.
I don't know about that. We set off a 1.4 megaton nuclear warhead in space back in 1962 just to see what would happen. (What happened is that we created a temporary radiation belt, knocked out a bunch of satellites, damaged some of the electrical and communication infrastructure in Hawaii, and caused some impressive light shows.)
I guess we do not. The only things one might want to export from space to Earth are things that absolutely cannot be made on Earth. Everything else would almost certainly be produced cheaper on Earth.
As other commenters note, there are methods of getting power down from orbit and I understand them to be viable, at least in theory.
But my point was primarily as a means of producing energy for industries and people that are stationed off Earth. For a space habitat, solar is just ridiculously good compared to the alternatives.
Creative ideas and all, but we're already struggling to build, transport and store enough solar energy down here on earth. I'm guessing that in the timeframe this needs to deliver the cc mitigating benefits, this might be less feasible...
It seems like it would be easier and substantially cheaper to take existing fracking/drilling tech and go for deep-well geothermal, rather than trying to launch a Dyson swarm.
Why not both ? :) Also you don't necessarily need to dismantle all planets during Dyson swarm construction- you can keep a few as a historical curiosity. Sure, it's horribly inefficiency use of mass but still. :)
I've had this argument so many times in that last month... renewables outside of hydro are just not viable as baseline power until batteries improve cost and density by several orders of magnitudes. Nuclear fission is really the only choice we have right now. We can't avoid climate change by relying on technologies like fusion power & next gen batteries that haven't even been invented yet, let alone mass manufactured.
There are people more knowledgeable then me who have made these points better than I could, I'd recommend Vaclav Smil as a great source on this. The problem is that his material makes for grim reading, and I think many people researching this subject are drawn to techno optimism even when the numbers don't add up because the subject as a whole is so grim.
It's from 2007 and will not get an update since the author has died. I do like it for taking a quantitative approach even though the assumptions used are increasingly outdated.
Here's the summary page where the author asked if the UK could supply its energy needs from renewables alone:
However, he assumed that utility scale solar farms would be using 10% efficient panels. 20% are now widely available. So let's make these two quick edits:
- Assume that solar farms provide double the energy from doubled panel efficiency.
- Drop biomass, because it's unneeded with better solar farms.
With these changes the renewable energy supply of 206 kWh/person/day exceeds modeled demand of 195 kWh/person/day. Making some other simple updates like assuming that car transportation is mostly electrified would further increase the margin of safety.
Also, the current generation of EVs will provide a substantial amount of flexibility resulting in £billions of savings for the UK grid and consumers (see https://www.kaluza.com/blog-busting-the-myth-ev-smart-chargi...). The addition of Vehicle-to-Grid chargers will further allow increased renewables.
With the cost of these technologies decreasing, the importance of nuclear power will reduce over time.
Jean-Marc Jancovici is a French engineer/entrepreneur who study energy and climate change for about 30 years.
There is a single talk I know he gave in China that is in English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRC5-hAbUGA
Unfortunately most other talks are in French(auto subtitles maybe).
His style is a little arrogant and may hit a nerve. But past this, all he says is backed by research and physics.
He says renewable can't provide the level of energy we have without decreasing drastically our consumption.
And nuclear fission is the only path we have to reduce our CO2 emissions.
I would love renewable or fusion to cover all our needs, and keep my comfortable life as it is today.
But I didn't find any inspiring talks or readings so far to balance his arguments.
> I would love renewable or fusion to cover all our needs, and keep my comfortable life as it is today
I've been reading Jason Hickel's book "Less is More" [1], which talks a bit about energy use, in general, and how it must be reduced, regardless of what technologies we wind up with. And one of his points is examining how much energy is just flat-out wasted. ~50% of food is just wasted, for example—whether because it's ugly, or left in a refrigerator too long, and rots. Think about how most American cities are designed, and how it's just normal for most Americans to own and drive personal vehicles for hours each day. Those resources and the energy needed to extract those resources is largely just unnecessarily wasted.
Consider countries like Costa Rica, Finland, Taiwan, etc., where quality of life is better than in the US. Life expectancy is higher. Infant mortality is lower. Education is better. And they need a tiny fraction of the energy the U.S. does. Clearly there's room for a lot of improvement with how we use energy.
This is similar to the point Vaclav Smil makes when he looks at our dismal prospects for decarbonization, if humanity is going to survive, then we are simply going to have to consume less. I think this concept of reduced consumption is in conflict with a system of high inequality today that is often justified by the prospect of (slowing) growth.
For whatever reason people have a hard time hearing this. I've similarly had the same argument over and over again.
Also for whatever reason people love to talk about how mining trucks will become EVs, and they always link me to the same Komatsu truck which they claim is an EV, but actually has a diesel engine and uses an electric power transmission.
You're assuming "batteries" which is just wrong. There are a lot of economical grid-scale power storage systems. Batteries are low-latency storage used to stabilize load - they are expensive because they are so quick to change the power they provide. Frequency, voltage, current, whatever you need a battery can provide in milliseconds. But you don't want to run it for days.
If you want to store power overnight you want kinetic storage, or possibly power to gas. There are lots of technologies available. Some of them are cheaper than nuclear, but none of them are economical yet because there is no market for day-to-week-scale storage until solar/wind start to approach 50% of the power mix.
Building pumped hydro is not going to suddenly be more feasible or cheaper as demand for it increases. What else can store energy for more than a week at a cost that approaches reasonable?
> You're assuming "batteries" which is just wrong. [...] you want kinetic storage, or possibly power to gas.
...neither of which are cheaper than batteries or we'd be doing that
Yes, we are doing pumped hydro, but only in a few convenient locations. I recently watched a video about Ireland's new pumped storage facility[1], it mentions some pretty tight constraints for what we currently consider economical (e.g. hill slope). Bill Gates' new book[2] doesn't go into as much detail but also doesn't sound like we got this figured out any better than batteries, basically saying we need breakthroughs or this is going to simply be a prohibitively expensive undertaking for non-rich countries. Specifically about hydrogen (the "to gas" option that has the most buzz at least) [2] says that there are high losses in conversion (without saying how much) as well as hydrogen leaking from metal tanks and electrolyzers being very expensive. There's hope for breakthroughs but.. they do have to happen in order for it to be better (cheaper) than today's batteries.
At a bare minimum, it's not obvious that what GP wrote is "just wrong". This isn't something we have a definite answer to.
> At a bare minimum, it's not obvious that what GP wrote is "just wrong". This isn't something we have a definite answer to.
I agree that we don't have definite answers, but that's why what the GP wrote is just wrong. They're reducing a very complicated set of technologies to the economics of lithium ion batteries. While yes, pumped hydro is something of a cop-out, it's clear there are a variety of techs that are cheaper than lithium ion.
The economics of this are also a little unclear to me. In the presence of sustained negative electricity prices, it seems obvious in principle that lots of storage technologies would suddenly become economical. But it's hard to imagine how that would work given the way we currently finance these things. (And by extension, it's not clear to me that this is actually a technical problem so much as a political one.)
In terms of scaling up, renewables + batteries seems to have a clearer logistical and economic path. Batteries can be mass produced and we need to increase production capacity anyway for electric cars. And there is already a massive industry around battery technology from consumer electronics. Solar panels in particular are ridiculously modular and offshore wind can rely on existing oil industry experience.
I just don't see a similar pathway for nuclear? Particularly in less stable parts of the world without an existing industry.
The nuclear waste argument is a purely American one. European countries (France specifically) have a multi-reactor chain where each successive step uses the "waste" from the last step. While this doesn't eliminate the need for long-term storage completely, it does reduce the potency of the leftovers since they're not being discarded after using ~3% of their total stored energy (a la the US).
Additionally, fission isn't the only way to get energy out of uranium. Nuclear batteries, such as the ones powering Curiosity and Perseverance, can't melt down like a traditional reactor and will continue working until all the energy stored inside it is gone. This is the type of nuclear power I'd like to see gain prevalence for many reasons, foremost of which is the ability for each household to have its own source of electricity independent of a power grid.
Solar in space is all well and good, but without a way to beam that power back to Earth, a space-based solar collector is as useful as if nothing were there at all.
> foremost of which is the ability for each household to have its own source of electricity independent of a power grid.
While I’m all in favour of each home (or apartment block) being energy independent, I very much do not want widespread access to even RTG material.
Consider: average power use is about 1 kW, 1000 J/s, and that the “dead in 1-2 days with treatment” radiation absorbed dose is merely 30 J/kg, so any domestic power supply is capable of killing an adult in 2-3 seconds of full exposure… or, more likely, a tiny flake imbibed or inhaled due to either malice or incompetence would have the same effect during one night of sleep.
> Solar in space is all well and good, but without a way to beam that power back to Earth, a space-based solar collector is as useful as if nothing were there at all.
I’m definitely against beamed power, at least until we get a single planetary government.
Anything which beams with a higher power flux than sunlight is a potential weapon. Anything which isn’t, requires so much more land than PV that it’s always better to use PV even when you have to put the PV in your nearest desert and beam it to you from there using whatever future tech you’re thinking of to get from orbit.
(I assume one world government would mean that government could authorise itself to build a weapon pointed at itself without having to worry it might be secretly planning to shoot itself; I don’t see how either the USA or Russia could ever trust the other if either built one).
So what you're saying isn't entirely true. I believe you're referring to spent fuel processing, which is just one part of it.
I specifically mentioned UF6 (uranium hexaflouride) as a hazardous byproduct of centrifuge enrichment. Now France (and some other countries, including the US up until 2018 at least) do process UF6, but only to put it into a more stable form (eg UF4). That more stable form still requires long term storage.
The finns building a long-term storage site for waste produced domestically does not equate to their being no global issue with long-term nuclear waste sequestration. There absolutely is.
The only two other sites that have ever actively taken in waste, Gorleben and Morsleben in Germany, are now closed and both have severe site stability issues requiring ongoing remediation into the billions of euros to ensure the sites don't fail.
This project has definitively proved that it's a political problem and not a technical one. The solution is to build a deep unmarked hole and bury it, duh.
I think it's not that controversial of a statement to say that the main problem with nuclear energy in general is political. As evidenced by the fact that this thread exists and full of people who are trying really hard to find problems with our only extant technology for carbon-free large-scale energy production. And that we keep shutting down perfectly good nuclear power plants. There's just no basis on fact here.
LFTR addresses almost all of those issues that you cite. Those are "old nuclear". Proliferation (doesn't make weapons isotopes as part of its fuel cycle), 99% fuel use and breeding (even can use old "spent fuel"), low/zero meltdown risk with a simple plug that melts and liquid fuel, scalable, startable/stoppable quickly.
But I agree that fission (and fusion currently) is current noncompetitive and not worth investment (aside from research) until the economies of scale that solar/wind/battery are currently undergoing stabilize or plateau.
>It's because humans ultimately can't be trusted with
You can already see what effect nuclear has when the safety is not done well (Chernobyl and Fukusima). But even those cases kill less people than coal done well.
These arguments are all moot. Even assuming that humans can't be trusted with each of these points, then still you are exchanging hypothetical lives and hypothetical damage to the environment for real lives and real damage to the environment.
Who cares about storing fuel and toxic byproducts perpetually? We are destroying our environment right now. It's ridiculous we're even still having these conversations.
It doesn't matter if fission has a future, we could start to build a hundred power plants today, and the first ones would be finished in 5 years, and it would fucking save our planet.
Yes and the fatal accident rate for commercial airlines, based on some quick googling, is 0.27 incidents per million flights.
We’ve had at least 3 nuclear disasters (Chernobyl, Fukushima and There Mile Island) and Google suggests there are 440 reactors in the world (current; so add a few more for decommissioned).
Of those, only Chernobyl can be reasonably compared to the loss of life of an airline crash.
Three Mile Island wasn't even a disaster, except for the wallets of the investors.
Working at Fukushima for 40 years was safer than your average construction job, even if you worked during the disaster.
And if you have to unfairly compare nuclear safety to airliners, also consider that airliner disasters have become 40 times less frequent than they were when Chernobyl happened.
And humanity is greatly affected by the loss of use of a patch of land? I'm saying it's inconsequential.
How many people are dying from coal plants? How many are dying from the exhausts of ICE cars. How many more from the rising tides, the swelling storms and the blistering droughts?
Again, I will observe that even though more people will most certainly die from solar and wind installations due to falls and machinery accidents, there is no catastrophic downside. So as much as I think Ansel Adams (37-year board member Of the Sierra Club) was right, that nuclear is a great solution, it simply isn't worth the political capital at this point in history. You'll have to wait until the uninformed die out, which will take longer than evolution.
Good catch, corrected. He was a member of the board of directors for 37 years. I apologize, I'm recalling from his autobiography, which I read about 23 years ago, on loan from a friend.
Nuclear was still well ahead in 2019 with 2657 TWh vs. 2103 TWh for wind and solar (699 solar, 1404 wind). But if these relative growth rates continue it will take only 3.3 years for solar + wind generation to eclipse nuclear generation globally ((2657 - 2103) / 170).
Hydropower is still the far-and-away leader of non-fossil electricity generation at 4306 TWh in 2019 (106 TWh growth over 2018):
And how much of that _generated_ electricity from solar and wind is actually produced on demand?
Electricity generated from nuclear power can follow the load, neither wind nor solar can do that meaning you will _always_ need backup power plants.
Germany has 50% renewable energy in its electricity mix, yet their greenhouse gas emissions in the energy sector are seven(!) times as compared to France.
There is a reason why China is nuclear power plants like crazy. They understand that electricity is worthless if it can’t be produced on demand.
China has significantly reduced its nuclear ambitions over time. Back in 2009 it planned to have 86 GW of installed nuclear capacity by 2020. It actually reached 47.5 GW in 2020. See this recent post and its children for citations:
China is the world's leader in building new nuclear reactors. And in building new solar farms. And in building new wind farms. China is the world's biggest energy producer, so it is going to lead on a lot of absolute energy measures.
China can build reactors cheaper than the West, but it can also build solar farms cheaper than the West. China is adding output from renewables faster than from nuclear projects.
I don't particularly want to defend China, but at least they have contributed to the fundamental "victory" economics of solar being able to challenge natural gas.
And yes they are totalitarian, but at least they have some awareness of GHG emissions and are executing on alternative energies and EV and battery production and research.
But at what true cost has this “victory” come at when we know China is more than willing to look the other way when it comes to the environmental costs of mining those resources at least in the short term. https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-wrestles-with-the-toxic...
Some wind turbine generators use rare earth element permanent magnets, but they only account for 21% of the market. The rest use electromagnets. See Figure 37 in this report:
21% is rather significant if we're hoping to scale the installation of wind along with other renewables to entirely replace fossil fuels and nuclear. And of course there is just the regular mining of all the other resources needed to produce these renewables in the first place which might actually be the bigger problem in terms of scale.
"Leading manufacturers of large modern wind turbines, such as Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy and MHI Vestas Offshore Wind, use permanent magnet generators based on neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) in their advanced offshore wind turbines. " https://thinkrcg.com/rare-earth-metals-and-their-role-in-ren...
Our present use of fossil fuels is vast. The effort required to replace fossil fuels will likewise be vast. It includes a lot more mining for metals used in electric vehicles, regardless of whether those vehicles are charged by nuclear electricity or by renewables. It appears technically feasible to scale up metal extraction to the necessary level. Metal extraction has negative environmental impacts, but the impacts of continuing to burn fossil fuels are worse.
Absolutely agree that we need to move off fossil fuels so that to me is a given. And you're right that the problem is vast and will require a vast effort. But that is also the central problem. Renewable prices are coming down due to economies of scale and possibly due to externalities not being fully captured in the price (my main concern) but overall installation at this point is relatively small so it's easy to overlook it because the current prices are so attractive. So the question becomes do these economies of scale hold as we scale up to the necessary levels to replace fossil fuels and nuclear or is there some inflection point where the cost to the environment becomes too great to ignore before we even get there and we find ourselves needing to scramble to build nuclear?
Nuclear requires vastly more resources per kWh than wind, so we aren’t going to hit an inflection point where suddenly nuclear is better for the environment.
That’s largely because Coal had fallen off a cliff almost everywhere else. China got 80% of it’s power from coal in 2010 and that’s down to 57.7% in 2019.
This paints a rather distorted picture. a) Coal plants did not fall off a cliff in western nations by accident and b) upcoming new coal plants in china are huge.
Nuclear can’t follow the load without becoming vastly more expensive. France is heavily dependent on exporting subsidized electricity generated by nuclear at a loss and importing renewable and fossil fuel generated electricity. But even with that massive exchange for load balancing they still have excess nuclear generation driving up costs. Just compare capacity factors between US and France to understand the true story.
It looks fine on paper, but France was dependent on other EU countries avoiding nuclear.
Actually France nuclear industry is harmed by the current chilliness of the EU, lead by germany, toward nuclear power generation. If EDF could choose, they would prefer a bigger market to export its technology inside the EU.
The problem of capacity factors of french nuclear reactors is caused by excess generation by renewables (mostly wind from north sea) that cannot be stopped and is sold at quasi negative rates. It's clear when you see the capacity factor has been decreasing for the last decades without much change in the number of reactors online in France.
Capacity factors have been improving in France as they scale back nuclear production from 87.9% nuclear and 13.9% mostly hydro renewables in 2004 vs to 71.7% nuclear and 21.3% renewables in 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France#I...
Looking at 2004 they used 8,204 kWh/Hab but produced 9,203, and thus needed to export an even larger fraction before wind/solar took off.
Positive next exports of subsidized nuclear power isn’t a good thing. It’s the same thing as US corn exports where the cost of production is larger than market rates and it’s government subsidies that keeping things going.
If what you say is true then yes, but it doesn't sound logical. Why would the French government take taxpayers' money, put that into nuclear facilities, then sell the surplus to other countries if it's such a clear loss of money? Wouldn't it be more economical to either have other types of energy production facilities or import the power instead?
I'm going to need sources, preferably Wikipedia or something similarly peer-reviewed (not a random blog or opinionated organisation), for this to make sense to me.
Why would the French government take taxpayers' money, put that into nuclear facilities, then sell the surplus to other countries if it's such a clear loss of money?
Nuclear isn't on demand power like natural gas or hydro. It is consistent (like coal, unlike solar or wind), but you can't turn it off when you don't need it! Ideally, you can pair it up with some batteries or pumped hydro to save the power you generate when it isn't in demand. Practically speaking, a nice mix of different sources can cover for each's weaknesses.
It is to a point possible to follow the load with a nuclear power plant by changing moderator setup, but only base load and not peak. Blocks cannot be easily stopped and started, but they can be throttled enough to handle the changes in demand. It is hour-scale tuning.
Just to add a bit of context: 50% sounds great, but Germany uses ~3.7PWh of energy only 0.6PWh of which is electricity. Renewable energy production is 8% of energy consumption. No large-scale storage needed if 92% of your energy can be generated from fossil fuels on demand. So far so good, but we have much more than 92% of the work still ahead of us since it will become harder as we need storage and use up the available physical space.
Keep in mind that hydropower is extremely disruptive to the water ecosystem up and downstream of the facility, destroying habitats and biodiversity. Definitely not the type of side effects you'd consider OK if it's your mission to combat the effects of climate change...
As water becomes more scarce hydro power is also creating geopolitical instability that threatens war. Look at the Ethiopian dam project that threatens to dry out the nile, or Chinese dam projects that threaten to cut off agricultural water to some of the most populated regions in India.
With glaciers and mountain snowcaps melting, I'd guess that developing countries would continue to invest in hydrological engineering projects. They give electricity, yes, but they also help prevent flooding, and provide year-round water for irrigation and cities.
The slow spring melt of mountain snow turns into a sudden post-storm flood, if the temperatures are warm enough...
Hydro seems to also have bad implications for wildlife habitat. Here in the Northwest US, there is a lot of desire to remove some dams to restore salmon habitat. I'm not quite sure if this is because these old dams were built before habitat preservation was a major consideration, or if it's an irreconcilable problem.
I never understand people who oppose hydropower on an environmental basis. Here is the fact. A lake made by a hydroelectric dam is not much different from a naturally formed, river fed lake. Different river fed lakes have existed for billions of years. Yes, they fill with silt over time. No, the sky does not fall. See Stanley Pool for an example of a natural lake fed by a major river, i.e. the Congo.
I don't think anyone opposes hydropower due to reservoirs, the concern is lifecycle species like salmon that are born at the headwaters of rivers, live their adult life in the ocean, and return to headwaters to reproduce. Dams get in the way, and the kill rate of dams even with ladders is enormous. The other big concern I see is access, e.g. canoeing or kayaking rivers, destroying fishing spots, culturally significant sites, etc.
There's another thing that destroys rivers: drying out. Not helped with rising average temperatures...
On the other hand with enough investment you can build artificial lakes instead. However, current economy does not value the abovementioned things enough to build artificial lakes.
The problem in the PNW is that these lakes are bad habitat for our native salmon. The more dams we make, the less habitat there is for the salmon. It's not a matter of "oh we just don't like them on principal." Rather, they tore down the dam in Elwha because it eliminated what was previously a thriving spawning ground and replaced it with a silty lake full of invasive species.
Everything is interconnected, and it's a really typical technocratic attitude to say that it's fine in isolation. "Who gives a shit? It's just a bunch of fish." Analytical people eschew context. Analysis is about reducing everything to components. And guess what -- it has led us astray here.
It turns out in the PNW that salmon are a major part of the food chain for a lot of animals, and our hydropower efforts are suppressing that food chain. It's also making it really hard to find enough salmon to fish for ourselves.
You'll see similar problems with the Colorado River. The Hoover Dam has basically destroyed all the downstream ecosystems that relied on the water to create their living conditions. It's an ecological disaster in slow motion.
> that salmon are a major part of the food chain for a lot of animals
The rivers in the PNW tend to be nutrient poor, because they're mountain runoff. I've read that salmon swimming upstream and dying are a major provider of nutrients for the upstream ecosystem.
If you compare hydro to nuclear, we can dump nuclear waste in a hole in the middle of the desert that is mostly dead. All the US nuclear waste fits in a football field at a depth less than 10 yards. Hydro harms living ecosystems with areas far far greater than that required for nuclear waste storage. We are talking about country wide scales.
Yes. The Elwah dam they tore down recently was built long ago before conservation was much of a concern. More to the point: it wasn't really economical to keep such small scale hydro going.
The large dams on the Columbia and Snake are fairly safe from being eliminated, even if they do cause some habitat loss.
I think with the Snake River, the issue is that the river is used to ship grain on barges for export. If they instead had to use trucking, the prices wouldn't be competitive, and would lead to higher emissions.
Dams have a life expectancy of 50-100 years. Globally, most dams are past their life expectancy. If they don't abruptly fail, then they eventually silt up and become useless.
Has anyone ever done an actual detailed comparison of unsubsidized nuclear vs. unsubsidized wind/solar? I’d love to see a breakdown of not just dollar costs, but environmental impacts like how much land is required, wildlife affected, supplies acquisition, lifetime of the equipment, disposal of waste/worn out parts, etc.
This was downvoted but the reality in Germany is that this is literally happening. I'm in some Fridays for Future chats and coal gets them going, but nuclear is worse. There's a reason Germany phases out nuclear fission before fossil fuels. It blows my mind and my german colleagues are in favor of continuing to decommission nuclear plants. When pressed specifically, they do concede that perhaps it's not the best idea to do it in this order, but they're not against the plans either.
Meanwhile 92% of Germany's energy consumption is still fossil fuels, but at least it won't be nuclear!
I have a very stupid naive question: can a green grid supply enough energy to power a hadron collider, that kind of huge scientific R&D things ? It seems wind and solar can provide for the normal grid but what about industries hungry for a lot of throughtput ? Huge batteries ? How does it work ?
In my very child-like view of how electricity works you need sustained massive input to feed massive machines.
Like we need boosters that are really powerful to lift us off from earth's gravity well, that's why we can't hook up our space shuttles to an outlet in the wall because it doesn't deliver enough raw power.
I mean, yeah, you do. Why wouldn't renewables be able to power a grid that runs those things? CERN doesn't have an on-site power plant - it just hooks into the European grid via a French substation (it also has a connection to a Swiss substation as a partial backup, but it isn't used during normal operation).
CERN is like any other big customer of the grid. They have very specialized technology on their premises but they shouldn't have to really care how the electricity they consume is generated. The point of "the grid" is that it is able to serve all the customers plugged into it. If "the green grid" isn't able to serve CERN, then it will have failed many other customers as well.
> The point of "the grid" is that it is able to serve all the customers plugged into it.
Ah, thanks. I somehow thought they'd be more special than this and required more attention. I think it's because of pop scifi tv show where scientists do some experiments and the building gets dark half the time after that because “of the enormous amount of energy required to teleport this cat in time or behind the wall“.
> During LHC operations, the CERN site draws roughly 200 MW of electrical power from the French electrical grid, which, for comparison, is about one-third the energy consumption of the city of Geneva; the LHC accelerator and detectors draw about 120 MW thereof.[34] Each day of its operation generates 140 terabytes of data.[35]
For an industry or science experiment which needs a large burst of power - big enough that the electricity grid can't normally supply it - you'd usually have a large bank of capacitors. You charge those capacitors slowly over time and then discharge all the energy you stored in them quickly.
Alternatively, you can tell the grid operator that you're about to draw more power (probably paying them for the privilege), and they can in turn pay some standby generation to turn on at the same time.
I don't know whether the Large Hadron Collider needs this.
Other than that, electricity is electricity for the most part. It's all run through transformers to have the same voltage and frequency.
Some generation sources are also good because you can turn them on and off quickly (dispatchability), or because they help to keep the grid A.C. frequency and voltage stable. Batteries are also great for both of these. Usually the grid operator pays some generators to provide these services.
Nuclear power (in its current form) is extremely impractical compared to wind and solar.
1. It is obviously dangerous, requiring extreme safety measures.
2. It requires large amounts of water.
3. It is unpopular.
4. It is so complex that building plants regularly exceeds budgets (there is little repetition and thus little learning)
5. It requires ridiculous storage/transport protocols for spent fuel. In Fukushima, one of the biggest concern was the spent fuel pool. That stuff is so hot, you cannot safely move it across the country and thus it has to accumulate on-site.
Compare this to solar and battery storage: You can literally build a factory for both in the same ten or more years it takes to build the nuclear power plant. There is absolutely no physical reason not to produce 100 times as many batteries and solar panels as we do now. Resources are abundant (you can replace rare materials at a slight cost of efficiency).
We are not at the point where we can use 100% solar/wind yet but the path is clear. On the other hand, we might be able to do the same with safe and efficient nuclear power, but that path is much less clear. Molten salt? Micro plants? Thorium? There is no one out there doing any of that fancy new stuff in practice, sonny bet is on mass-scale of solar, wind, and batteries.
Yep, the environmental movement successfully dragged its heels for 40 years until something other than nuclear became viable. It's a pity, because if we just hadn't stopped rolling out nuclear 40 years ago, and had merely continued at the same pace, our grid would be 100% nuclear today. Not 20 years from now if we hurry, today. One can only imagine the CO2 we wouldn't have had to remove from the atmosphere. What's done is done, though, and I'm glad there is finally a way forward that meets with their approval.
The largest problem of nuclear price is the price of construction. Construction doesn’t keep up with efficiency gains in the rest of the economy and as a result gets more and more expensive.
Yes, and cleaning up the excess CO2 will be even more expensive, not to mention the unrecoverable damage to ecosystems, even more expensive to paper over.
But they got theirs and in 25 years will be gone.
This is why every cost argument as well as CO2 pricing scheme fails, and why were in the dire straits now.
Without the high price of construction, nuke wouldn't happen at all, in the US. The cost overruns are the gravy train for corruption that motivates the whole process. Cut off cost overruns and corruption, and all the appeal at high levels dries up. Other countries have other dynamics. Small-scale nukes are locked institutionally in competition with big corruption nukes, so at a disadvantage.
Solar and wind start producing competitive power immediately. There is much less room there for corruption, but the immediate income from output drives investment.
I really don't see how you can blame environmentalists? Are you saying it was those meddling environmentalists that kept nuclear from dominating... in every country (except maybe france)?
I think the reality is fossil fuel was damn cheap and nuclear was not.
Decades ago, Greenpeace ran an extremely successful campaign to block nuclear plant construction, and to force nonsensical regulations on existing plants.
I imagine they wouldn’t have done so if global warming was well-understood back then.
Roofing is the second most dangerous profession in the US. I’m sure solar panels have also killed more people than nuclear incidents.
As for pollution? All energy sources pollute. Nuclear is better than coal. I don’t know how it compares to solar + wind + batteries + hydro, but those last two are definitely big sources of pollution, and batteries are obviously creating more waste by volume than nuclear.
This is a fact that it seems impossible to convince people of (though maybe France was successful), so within the constraints of current politics it might as well not be true.
The problem of renewables is not the power they can produce, but how to handle intermittency. Better electricity networks are one part of the solution, batteries can be as well.
Even with 50% renewables Germany has one of the most stable electricity networks in the world.
Also in the traditional base-peaked system you still need peeking power plants and you have problems with weather effects (in summer water in rivers can get too warm to use it or dry up, in winter it can freeze)
> Safety is not about deaths alone. You can’t ignore the massive costs and [...]
Actually, if we're talking about safety, we can. There are some good total cost analyses, since governments also want to know how power can be produced most cheaply. The US and UK both published reports about this with somewhat varying (but ballpark similar) numbers. But anyway, we were talking about safety.
> [...] and negative personal effects
Okay, please bring on the stats then. I agree that this is relevant to the safety discussion and, thus, the discussion whether we should use nuclear fission going forward, but I never see anyone cite comparative stats on displacement, illnesses, etc. All I ever see is that nuclear kills very, very few people per TWh compared to current energy sources, making it seem very attractive to build as a replacement when looking at this metric. You'd have to have a huge number of people falling ill or being displaced (but not dying) due to nuclear disasters or uranium mining to make it better than our current energy sources.
> Compare this to solar and battery storage: You can literally build a factory for both in the same ten or more years it takes to build the nuclear power plant. There is absolutely no physical reason not to produce 100 times as many batteries and solar panels as we do now. Resources are abundant (you can replace rare materials at a slight cost of efficiency).
Let's do the numbers. Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada costed $5B. Nuclear costs something like $6B per installed GW. Gigafactory can produce 35 GWh of storage per year, which is just over one day of storage for a single nuclear reactor.
Now, how much these batteries cost? Let's be generous to Tesla, and assume that unit price will be around $100/kWh. That means that the Gigafactory can produce $3.5B worth of batteries per year.
Suppose you have $6B dollars. What would you rather buy, 2 years worth of entire output of Tesla Gigafactory, that would give you 3 days worth of storage at 1GW output, and which would still require spending additional billions on building primary generation (solar and wind), or one nuclear reactor that would give you the same 1GW for next 50 years, with very low operational costs?
Primary battery storage simply doesn't make economic sense at grid scale at the moment. This is not to say that renewables are stupid, or that batteries are useless. It's just the idea of using wind/solar + batteries as a base load just doesn't make sense at current level of technology, and this is why nobody is actually doing it, or planning to do it. If, or when it starts to make sense, you'll see entrepreneurs invest billions in buying up batteries and setting up battery farms. However, this does not make sense now, and will not make sense for probably at least another decade.
Your numbers are not quite accurate. A real world example in the suggests more like $7.5B / Gw for a new nuclear plant and a whopping total of $27B. Gigafactory construction was finished after two years. A nuclear power plant takes at least a decade in practice. So right now that leaves $22B for producing batteries and solar power/wind. The latter costs about $.3/W So $1B gives you 3GW of peak power. You can have ten time the output and produce batteries for $12B over eight years before the nuclear power plant even starts production.
I genuinely wonder what makes you say it's dangerous, let alone "obviously dangerous". I'm sure you've seen people cite the statistics about safe energy sources. What makes you think those are all wrong to the point that it's obvious?
You can't just put that at number 1 and then ignore it in the rest of the comment. It would be a big revelation and we need to update books if you know something about nuclear fission accidents that others don't.
Funnily enough most of these issues people mention with renewables are the same ones Britain faced introducing nuclear power! They coped by shaping demand with variable electrify tarrifs, creating the world's largest electrical vehicle fleet (milk floats) and charging them off-peak, encouraging storage heaters and electric water cylinders in houses and building pumped storage hydro. What goes around comes around. If you want hope for the future look at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruachan_Power_Station
>Today, nuclear power supplies about 10% of the world’s energy, down from 13% in 2010. Its use might continue to fall, although it will remain a part of the global energy mix for many decades, with a role in decarbonizing energy supplies as the fossil-fuel age comes to a close.
An overly optimistic statement if every I saw one. China is a case in point,they're bringing more and more fossil-fuelled power stations online by the year.
And at that rate, the rest of the world risks being left behind in energy poverty or becoming dependent on China et al for their energy needs.
Regardless of what you think about new nuclear's potential, we need to protect and upgrade (and possibly even resurrect recently-mothballed) existing nuclear power plants.
"Oh, we're going to replace that nuclear power plant with wind and solar!"
Oh, really?
Are you going to do that AFTER phasing out fossil fuel plants or BEFORE? Because if it's before, you're making the case that climate change is a lower priority than retiring the cleanest and one of the cheapest and safest power sources humankind has ever developed. Because you could ALWAYS choose to just replace those fossil power plants with wind and solar and batteries instead, but you're making the decision to keep that fossil fuel plant running longer than it needs to.
Similar argument for getting rid of existing hydroelectric dams.
And I'm talking about long existing plants, here. All those cement emissions (and reservoir emissions for hydro) already happened and were "paid for." We need to protect all near-zero energy sources until the last fossil power plant on the continent is decommissioned. Then go ahead and retire your nuclear or hydro power plant.
(Addressed to no one in particular, but these arguments in favor of premature retiring of functioning clean energy power plants are widespread and it ticks me off. Plus, retiring them early also increases the cost of electricity, which slows electrification. I bet electric cars would be a LOT more popular--and fossil fuel cars less popular--in Germany if their electricity price weren't so insane.)
There's also the touchy issue of storing spent nuclear fuel and contaminated hardware. Ignoring the problem presents a hidden cost and safety risks.
Still on safety: nuclear enthusiasts often equate that reliable under nominal conditions implies reliable in practice. As if negligence and stupidity weren't factors in the real world.
Back to your point: we need to collectively admit that climate change relates to our practice of postponing the costs of pollution -- a massive economic externality that needs correction. The solutions are expensive and require commitment.
Storing spent nuclear fuel (etc) is not a "hidden" cost. It's actually included in the cost of nuclear fuel, at least in the US.
Fukushima, for all the flaws (including some paranoia that led to unnecessary evacuations, etc), still didn't kill anyone even though thousands of people died in the tsunami. That's how safe nuclear is.
That's not a compelling argument, when the premise is misleading. While you (and others) split hairs over what "kill" means, people actually die from it.
"Psychological effect" is not very convincing, especially since much of the psychological effect is due to paranoid over-zealous evacuations. Nuclear being blamed for the psychological problems caused by people (including officials in particular) being irrationally afraid of nuclear. People directly die from natural gas explosions or falling off roofs installing solar panels pretty regularly.
There was an actual tsunami that killed thousands of people directly. And worsened, slightly by climate change ocean level rise (by us refusing to decommission fossil fuel plants).
If we scale up nuclear by 10 times, so that all power generation is handled by nuclear power plants, and we are extremely unlucky that we have 10 Fukushimas every year, and even if you count all the 1700 (non-radiation-related) death/Fukushima, we are still at 17,000 death/year, which is significantly lower than the number of death caused by fossil fuel power generation. (A quick Google search yielded 8.7 million/year).
Hell, even if you count all the people that have to evacuate for each Fukushima, we are still only at 4 million people moved/year vs. 8.7 million people death/year with fossil fuel power generation.
There are three more things to keep in mind:
1. I don't think we will have anywhere near 10 Fukushimas every year.
2. A lot of those stressed related death and evacuations are due to overly precautionary measures.
3. Death is much worse than having to relocate.
Yes, nuclear power generation does kill. However, the point is, it is significantly safer than fossil fuel.
If I am not mistaken, this is a massive under-estimation of the number of deaths related to fossil fuel, as I do not think it includes things like victims of freak weather events (droughts, hurricanes, heat waves) that are a consequence of burning fossil fuels. AFAIK the 8 million figure includes only deaths from direct pollution.
This is pointless. Everything we do kills people. The choice we can make is between something that kills more and something that kills less, amongst other tradeoffs. Quantifying the number of deaths or cancers in this case tells you nothing relevant to make a decision or risk assessment: what are the costs of the alternatives?
The problem with pressurised water reactors is that failure is a very low probability but potentially very large consequences event. The advantage of fossil fuels (for public acceptance) is whilst the risk and the number of deaths are much higher (by a couple of orders of magnitude), the effects are spread out across space and time, and so are easy to ignore in our daily lives.
All this is a tragic misunderstanding of the situation we’re in. Ultimately, 100% renewables is a worthy goal. In the short to long term, shutting down nuclear power plants means burning fossil fuel. Climate is already spiralling out of control. The time to clean up our acts was 50 years ago, and now every decade we spend burning gas, oil, and coal is something we will pay dearly.
So yeah, nuclear is not ideal. It’s still part of the best strategy we have to produce clean energy.
> The choice we can make is between something that kills more and something that kills less, amongst other tradeoffs.
> Quantifying the number of deaths or cancers in this case tells you nothing relevant to make a decision or risk assessment
The two conflicting viewpoints posited in the same paragraph, seems ironic. The first is the issue, but requires veracity. The second is nonsensical. Humans make these decisions every day.
This is not contradictory. If you want to compare two solutions, you need to have a number for both. So in itself a number you assign to nuclear energy is useless (for the purpose of demonstrating that nuclear is either terrible or bad as an energy production source), unless you contrast it with the equivalent for the alternative.
Humans make a lot of stupid decisions rooted in gut feeling and prejudice all the time. A small subset of these decisions involve long-term industrial strategy at a national level or the life of millions of people. For these decisions we ought to do better.
The US has been using order-of-magnitude the same amount of nuclear power since the 80s. This has been a non-issue for longer than most HN commentators have been alive.
If politicians ever decide it has become an issue, the storage facility can be constructed.
WIPP exists[0]. This is just for weapons waste (which is a much higher concern btw). But honestly storing waste material on site isn't that big of a deal. The DOE has also invented significantly better storage systems in the last 50 years but simulations and small scale testing do not count as proven enough for large scale testing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But there are other deep geological repositories around the world.[1]
Nuclear power is only as safe as the people who are involved in it. In this case, the Fukushima power plant wasn't funded like it should have been because people weren't interested in nuclear power. Turns out that's both extremely dangerous and hard to control.
Also, what do you mean by paranoia and unnecessary evacuations? Nobody could even guess what was going to happen. When will explosions happen? How many? What direction will the wind blow? The power plant was out of control. The US government didn't assist with evacuations until AFTER the first release which spread contamination south hitting Tokyo, and east hitting their own USS Ronald Reagan.
Paranoid? Unnecessary? Sorry, that's a cruel thing to say to those who were contaminated.
> Paranoid? Unnecessary? Sorry, that's a cruel thing to say to those who were contaminated.
And it’s cruel to move thousands of people by force (and some of them died in the process). This is just an appeal to emotions, please don’t do that. There is already plenty to discuss about the effect of low-level radiation and risk assessments. Everybody is contaminated with radionuclides, there are numbers you can use to show that this specific contamination was more important than different background levels. Looking at those numbers show that the exclusion zone was vastly over-estimated.
You mean that Fukushima never killed anyone during normal operations? Because people died during the evacuation, a worker died due to lung cancer attributed to the disaster (it's mentioned in the article), and we are not sure if there will be any further deaths due to radiation exposure.
Someone heard they'd need to hire a cleanup contractor and saw nothing but piles of money. No way it will cost anywhere near that much just to make the area safe. Most of the contamination was in water that's already gone to the ocean and raised the ocean's background by an utterly negligible amount.
> However, I dispute calling nuclear "one of the cheapest and safest power sources humankind has ever developed".
I'd rewrite it as
> one of the safest power sources humankind has ever developed[0]
because this is difficult to dispute. Cost is a more complicated matter and depends what you're counting and how you're comparing. Are you including tragedy of the commons? I.e. carbon emissions, mining, storage (batteries, waste, etc), land usage, etc. If any of these are included in the costs the price changes quite a bit and I'd argue it is not in good faith to compare solar and wind to hydro, coal, nuclear, etc if you don't include battery storage/costs because intermittent energy isn't equal to continuous (unless you over allocate).
To continue along the line of the gp the worst case estimates of nuclear deaths (including future deaths) is still lower than 8 years of of coal in the US using the best case stats. If we use more reliable data (the consensus from the UN and other independent studies) even including future deaths are lower than a single year of coal's best case in the US. So how much do you value human life? Because we're talking about 81 people[1] (4k if we assume we don't get better at treating cancer over the next 20 years) vs 39k PER YEAR (low 7.5k high 42k per year US coal particulate related deaths). Let that sink in again: 31 people died immediately from Chernobyl, an additional 50 due to Chernobyl, 0 from 3 Mile Island, and 0 Fukushima. Those are the deaths of nuclear power.
> The order of magnitude of Fukushima ...
> Still on safety: nuclear enthusiasts often equate that reliable under nominal conditions implies reliable in practice. As if negligence and stupidity weren't factors in the real world.
I'm often frustrated by Fukushima being brought up and people implying that it came down to human stupidity. Yes, that was a factor, but there was a much larger and significantly more important factor. The earthquake that caused the tsunami was the largest in recorded (by actual measurement) history (for Japan) and the 4th largest EVER recorded. The second largest recorded was an 8.5 in 1896 and the second largest theorized was an 8.9 in the year 869. Remember this is not linear growth. Based on this the likelihood of an earthquake and tsunami like that happening within the lifetime of the powerplant was incredibly low. Were the earthquake an 8.5 Fukushima wouldn't have happened. It is an absurd statement to chock this up to human fault. We're talking about an absurdly rare and freak event, and no one died.
As to the cost of the cleanup (which includes tsunami cleanup as well as radiation fwiw), well we could make it a lot cheaper if we reduced the acceptable levels of early death by radiation. The hard part is that there may or may not be small radioactive particulate on the ground and this could get introduced into water or food (getting inside the body). Letting people move back would still likely result in less deaths than coal does per year. I'm not advocating for this, I think that'd be insane, but why is this insane? Why is pumping out more coal not more insane? What's the difference? We're talking about human lives and livelihood here. When it is more humane to send people back to live in a radioactive zone than keeping coal plants online, maybe we should re-question our priors. What issue are we trying to solve? Because if it is saving human lives we're doing a pretty bang up job. If it is cost, ditto. If it is climate, ditto.
The arguments being made here are often absurd. There is no question that nuclear is clean and safe. The question is about cost, how much you value human life, how much you value carbon, and how much you value pollution. But if you think lives are cheap, climate change isn't real, and (not or) pollution isn't a big deal, then yeah, continue fighting against nuclear because it is costly.
I don't know about you but I would rather a power plant's exhaust would be contained in small rods rather than dispersed globally and embedded as microparticles in my lungs.
Moreover, it's the environmental activists who prevent the construction and operation of long term storage sites for spent fuel, and in general threaten the industry, disincentivizing the development of new reactors designed to reduce waste. You don't get to do that and also complain that the storage problem isn't being solved at the same time.
Also...how about oil spills? How much money, adjusted for inflation over time, have we dumped into cleaning that shit up over and over? And speaking of costs, what's the cost of entire cities being underwater in a decade or two?
Ok, so solar and wind are great, but now you're building massive batteries to store the energy at night. That's expensive, no?
Pound for pound, nuclear seems like the most effective option we have at the moment. If fossil fuels were priced according to how much damage they are actually causing the planet, nuclear would seem pretty cheap too. The only reason nuclear even seems remotely expensive is because we're (stupidly) letting markets dictate the price of fossil fuels.
>Ok, so solar and wind are great, but now you're building massive batteries to store the energy at night.
Also production of solar panels is quite far from being "green" as well. Luckily most of solar production is handled by China, a country with quite lax environmental standards, so most of the HN crowd does not feel the environmental impact from it.
While this thread makes some fair points, one that is missed is that safety is only one part of the reason [1] nuclear power is the most expensive way to generate electricity, and always has been. "Power too cheap to meter," never materialized, not even remotely.
Proponents for nuclear power will extoll its virtues while completely ignoring the bottom line: if nuclear power were economically viable, nothing, nothing whatsoever could prevent the mass adoption and proliferation of nuclear energy. Energy is enterprise, and enterprise requires investors. So without investors, or with only investors that leave the public holding the bag of paying massive subsidies for construction of nuclear plants, storage of waste and plant decommissioning, all the while charging that same public a premium for electricity, nuclear power plants won't get built and many that did and do were and are abandoned thanks to cost overruns.
IMO, the solution is staring us in the face: decentralize power generation by requiring all new buildings, houses, structures, anything built that needs power, to generate their own electricity on site. If every artificial surface everywhere that got sun was covered in PV, power would be far cheaper than centralizing the generation of everyone's electricity in hundreds of (initially) $20B nuclear power plants.
Solar panels, which we have built millions of, are on a learning curve. The more we build, the cheaper they get. Storage is still a problem, but that too can handled in a distributed manner where the learning curve can be applied.
Nuclear, which we have built 100s of, never got to a critical mass where the cost started going down. Nuclear plants are just not built on time and budget. The alternatives to nuclear aren't going to be easy, but humanity has been trying to get nuclear to work for over 50 years and has failed.
I think you missed one of my main points: "The only reason nuclear even seems remotely expensive is because we're (stupidly) letting markets dictate the price of fossil fuels."
Nuclear IS economically viable. We just haven't figured it out yet. I know that sounds snarky, but it's as close to the truth as we can possibly get. If fossil fuels were priced according to their known externalities, not just based on supply/demand, nuclear would be astronomically cheap by comparison.
The problem is the economy itself is completely ignoring the costs of the alternatives to nuclear. We all know how bad fossil fuels are, but we haven't priced that knowledge into their cost. They are not cheaper than nuclear, we are simply lying to ourselves. This in itself highlights a very huge flaw in capitalist markets.
Granted, this is somewhat independent of solar vs nuclear, which is an entire discussion in itself.
Free market is good and subsidies are bad, says the person advocating for distortion of market conditions to favor certain technologies that the free market doesn't want (that much).
If only the government made the stupid investors understand which technologies are cheaper...
---
If renewables are as cheap as advertised they'll sweep the market on their own. But it seems to me that claims of cheap storage are just as far fetched as those of cheap nuclear, despite tons of subsidies and support that renewables get.
Wind and solar are never going to power literally everything everywhere all the time. The sun and wind are not evenly distributed, and no amount of storage or transmission will economically fix that, ever. You'll have several different power sources for different needs, and I find it hard to prefer fracking and coal burning to modern nuclear.
> Ok, so solar and wind are great, but now you're building massive batteries to store the energy at night. That's expensive, no?
Yes, but remember that any nuclear plant whose construction is started now will not be available for about 10 years. So it will be competing with the storage technologies of maybe 8 years from now. Given the rate of improvement in cost, it's very likely IMO that nuclear will be more expensive than just synthesizing the equivalent baseload source from renewables and storage.
I'm not convinced there aren't hidden costs with wind and solar, such as finding the land to put them on or the complexity of storing energy for night time usage or cloudy days or lack of wind etc.
What I do know is nuclear is able to power our collective needs just fine, day and night, RIGHT NOW and all we need to do is build the fucking things. So, let's build them...now.
Renewables are still an unknown, nuclear is not, and I'm not comfortable staking the future of the planet on "wellll, it will probably be fine in 10 years."
Land cost is computable and is not a showstopper (particularly in the US).
Storage is addressed at that modeling site. In particular, a mix of energy storage technologies appears to be very useful (not just batteries). A key is to note that a simple cycle turbine power plant is 5% of the capital cost of a nuclear plant per kW. So, if we had to totally back up the grid with hydrogen-burning turbines that could, in a rare pinch, supply 100% of the demand, it still would be cheap compared to supplying that same power with nuclear power plants.
Even the oft-cited $200 billion is an exaggeration. Bear in mind these figures from from politicians, nowhere near this amount has actually been spent. As far a figures for the money actually spent, let's go with your own source:
> In 2016, University of Oxford researcher and author Peter Wynn Kirby wrote that the government had allocated the equivalent of US$15 billion for the regional cleanup
Let's see if we can get more recent sources on spending related to Fukushima. Form a 2020 article [1]
> Since fiscal 2014, it has set aside about 35 billion yen annually for the interim storage facilities. The funds come from revenues earmarked for nuclear energy-related projects in the special account.
> But expenditures concerning the storage facilities are running a lot higher than initially envisaged.
> An estimate released in late 2016 by the Ministry of Trade, Economy and Industry showed that the project will eventually cost 1.6 trillion yen, compared with an initial projection of 1.1 trillion yen.
> The government has allocated an additional 12 billion yen annually for the storage facility project since fiscal 2017.
Okay, so the Japanese government is saying that it'll cost 1.6 trillion yen (about $15 billion dollars) total. They're actually spending 35 + 12 = 47 billion yen annually, which is ~$433 million. $15 billion over 30 years is a big bill. But amortized over the hundreds of nuclear power plants in existence, it adds little to the overall cost of nuclear power.
> $15 billion over 30 years is a big bill. But amortized over the hundreds of nuclear power plants in existence, it adds little to the overall cost of nuclear power.
That’s spreading the cost of one plant, once incident. There are a lot more plants and Japan isn’t the most geologically stable place. It has had its share of accidents too.
I wouldn’t be betting against more accidents in the next 30 years.
> That’s spreading the cost of one plant, once incident. There are a lot more plants and Japan isn’t the most geologically stable place.
I think it would be worth comparing to the costs of incidents with other energy forms. Deepwater Horizon comes to mind with a cost 2 or 3 times that number (not counting fines). To say nothing of all the spills/incidents we don't hear about with tankers spilling/leaking on the open waters, just far enough away nobody notices.
Yes, but the cost is spread out over all the nuclear plants in operation. Nuclear energy already provides 10% of the world's nuclear power. We currently average one significant nuclear catastrophe every 20 years. $15 billion every 2 years is a miniscule cost relative to the amount of power nuclear energy provides.
And that's assuming newer plants don't have any improved safety over Fukushima. We already feature secondary containment, which would have prevent Chernobyl from being nearly as bad as it was, the Soviets just didn't build secondary containment. The reality is that we only have one instance of a meltdown breaching secondary containment in over 70 years of nuclear power operation.
And lastly, all this needs to be viewed relative to the ecological impact of covering several percent of the Earth's land surface in solar panels, and the environmental damage from fossil fuels that will be necessary until effective energy storage is developed.
> There's also the touchy issue of storing spent nuclear fuel and contaminated hardware. Ignoring the problem presents a hidden cost and safety risks.
Is it really that big of a problem? Sure, the cost of dealing with these is not negligible but in the end, it is just a matter of digging a hole in a deserted place and putting things there. It is dangerous stuff and is to be handled with care, but we deal with dangerous stuff all the times: explosives, toxic chemicals, weapons, ... and nuclear waste is not that high on the list.
The usual argument is that nuclear waste can stay hot for thousands of years. In fact, while true, the kind of stuff that stays radioactive on these time scales tends to be weak, The most concerning elements are usually those with decades-long half lives. Compare to stable but toxic elements like mercury that last forever.
Also worth noting that coal contains long lived radioactive elements that end up in the atmosphere after being burned. So, coal plants also produce nuclear waste, but instead of having it conveniently stored in a specialized facility, it is released in the atmosphere to be stored into your lungs. As I said, long life elements are weak, so it is not that much of a problem, but it is not a reason to do the worst thing that can possibly be done with these.
And while we keep talking about waste, this is only waste because we don't use it. Radioactive "waste" is made of rare elements that produce energy, and maybe a treasure for future generations.
Right. People need to check up on the latest Nuclear advancements. We're getting quite good at refining waste products down to safe enough levels of radioactivity, and then we can even further utilize the remaining waste in other applications.
It's not like we've hit a dead end with nuclear research, people have just seen too much Chernobyl stuff and cast a large net on the whole science.
it is literally impossible for renewables to replace fossil fuels given current technology and anything on the horizon for at least the next decade, probably much longer.
So that leaves...Nuclear.
So again, why are you fear-mongering about how "dangerous" nuclear is when it's a tiny tiny fraction of the real danger of fossil fuels?
I thought climate change was like an urgent crisis or something....?
I think the question is whether renewables should replace nuclear or fossil fuels first. The top level comment isn't talking about replacing fossil fuels with nuclear.
Renewables CANNOT replace nuclear OR fossil fuels. It's literally impossible based on current or any near-term technology.
We are being told on the one hand that climate change is an existential threat to tens (hundreds?) of millions of people. Oh but actually we can just refuse to decarbonize our energy production because maybe someday 10, 20, 50 or 100 years from now there's a true "green" renewable energy I guess.
No sir, YOU have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Note that you are not claiming that they could be competitive, but that they could not do it at all, regardless of price. This is clearly nonsense.
Please feel free to point me to any developed country that has successfully replaced fossil fuel and nuclear baseload generation with renewables and energy storage.
I'll save you the time. No one has done it. And no, not because evil mustachio-twirling Koch brothers are pulling the strings. Because the technology does not exist at scale to do this.
Or do you want to continue with your speculative science fiction daydreams?
Your argument is "it hasn't happened yet, therefore it cannot happen". This argument proves entirely too much; it implies no technological change can ever occur. To make this argument, you have to demonstrate that the situations in which the change did not occur are the same in all important respects as the current situation. And you cannot do that. Here's what's different.
(1) The cost of renewables has crashed, especially in the last decade. In the case of PV, by nearly an order of magnitude. This is an extreme rate of change for an energy technology.
(2) The cost of storage has also fallen rapidly, and continues to fall.
(3) Market conditions are now beginning to favor installation of storage, as they didn't before (when there's enough dispatchable gas on the grid vs. renewables storage doesn't pay off.)
(4) The existing infrastructure was largely installed at times when renewables were not competitive. However, it won't be ripped out until it becomes uneconomical to operate it (which means ignoring its capital cost). So observing that the source are still being used doesn't imply renewables are not winning.
(5) Fossil fuels have not, and still large are not, being taxed at a level appropriate for the damage they are going to do. Renewables don't have to beat fossil fuels unburdened by CO2 taxes (although we may have waited long enough with CO2 taxes that they may increasingly do so, at least in some market conditions). CO2 taxes will rise to the level needed to push fossil fuels entirely out of the market, and then the question becomes "which is cheaper, nuclear or renewables (or, possibly, fossil fuels with CCS)"?
(6) Once fossil fuels are out of the way, it is crystal clear from the data that absent some technological breakthroughs, new nuclear power plants are grossly uncompetitive vs. renewables. This (and not ludicrous conspiracy theory) is why you're seeing massive installation of renewables around the world, and nuclear installs are gasping for breath.
> although it's more than just using Li-ion batteries.
It'd probably be helpful to elaborate, rather than just insist that the above commenter is wrong and loosely suggest at other solutions.
Things like hydrogen storage, synthetic methane, and thermal storage remain in the prototyping phase. I think it's not correct to say that they can, seeing as there isn't even a commercial market for these technologies let alone one that we know will scale. By comparison countries have already powered >80% of their electricity with nuclear.
It's clear than nuclear power can completely replace fossil fuels. Renewables might be able to replace it, but that's a gamble based on assuming a new storage solution will work excellent. Not just better, but truly blows-everything-else-out-of-the-water phenomenal. When the stakes at play are stopping climate change, this is a very risky assumption to make.
Really? What company can I call up and buy 50 GWh of storage from? That's only 6 minutes worth of storage for the USA.
I'd say if we could provision 1 hour's worth of storage over the span of a decade, that'd amount to a demonstration of economic feasibility. But few of these upcoming technologies are making it out of the prototyping stage, let alone commerical success on this scale.
There isn't a company you can call up because projects of this magnitude aren't quoted over the phone to internet forums users.
50 GWh is stored in ~30,000 barrels of synthetic fuel. GWh is an incomplete way to specify storage, there are different technologies for the different ways storage may be needed, depending on what resources are on the grid: short term to handle the peaks of everyone microwaving their breakfast and coffee at 7am or long term storage to handle a once every few decades event like a Texas snow storm.
No one is presently making these because the policy of the grid was developed around power plants that dig stuff out of the ground and burn it - the markets are based on bidding with the assumption every power plant will have a marginal cost of generation relative to the cost of its fuel. This policy doesn't reflect the nature of renewables which besides their capital cost have very low to 0 marginal cost of production. This has disrupted the energy markets in many ways and policy is still being developed to incentivize storage capacity.
The point is that saying "No one is presently making these" on one hand, and claiming that they're within existing industrial capacity is contradictory. Energy markets like Hawaii and California are already hitting situations where energy cost is near zero due to overproduction from intermittent sources. But the promise that entrepreneurs will store this energy and put it back on the grid later has yet to pan out - contrary to the insistence of storage evangelists, hydrogen storage, synthetic methane, thermal batteries, and whatnot are a lot harder to build than one might think.
It's not contradictory. The storage is not being done now not because it's impossible, but because the market conditions that would cause it (specifically, high carbon taxes) aren't there yet. Something like pumped thermal storage requires no new technology. It's just putting together things we can already build.
I'm glad you can google "energy storage" and click on one of the first links but literally none of these are currently capable of replacing baseload nuclear and fossil fuel energy generation.
You can listen to the people who work in this industry and have studied it deeply or you can keep googling furiously for webpages that support your magical thinking.
I didn't "furiously google" anything I "calmly referenced" some of the MANY notes I have from following articles, podcasts, and journals in this field, which I have spent most of my career in.
In fact, I didn't see ANY links from you supporting your nonsense about renewables not working, despite them working in many places across the globe.
>literally none of these are currently capable of replacing baseload nuclear and fossil fuel energy generation.
Literally STORAGE will never replace GENERATION, they are two different concepts which most people understand but you apparently don't. STORAGE can supplement INTERMITTENT GENERATION to create DISPATCHABLE GENERATION for far cheaper than nuclear plants.
About 1/5th of US energy usage is renewable. That means we can shutdown 1/5th of nonrenewable plants or shutdown all nonrenewables 1/5th of the time, real answer somewhere in between. The top level post recommends doing this only to carbon sources and leaving nuclear alone.
There are good arguments for and against pivoting to nuclear right now. But there is an (I think) unquestionable position presented here that we shouldn't be pivoting away from nuclear and shutting down plants.
It is highly relevant, because renewables are not presently capable of replacing fossil fuels. And they won't be until massive energy storage systems, literally thousands of times better than what we have now, is developed. California, Hawaii, and other places are already hitting saturated electricity markets during the daytime. Companies aren't starting to install storage, as renewable evangelists promised.
Th fact that California only has 1.5 GWh of storage is precisely the reason why wind and solar cannot form the primary source of energy. Who cares if the state met it's storage goals if the storage goals were tiny?
That's not 1.5GWh energy stored, it's 1.5GW output from storage systems (output is the key metric because the storage systems aren't very rapid discharge, and the key factor in adequacy isn't how much energy is stored but how much power can be delivered from storage when other systems aren't delivering. And it's not just about meeting current targets but the rapid pace of new storage coming online.
Absolutely none of this changes the undeniable fact that "storage" is incapable of meeting the demands of baseload power generation currently provided by Nuclear and fossil fuels.
We aren't anywhere close and won't be for many years which is why it's so absolutely ridiculous how green activists implicitly endorse using coal, natural gas and other fossil fuels which kill tens of thousands of people every year and are cooking the planet, when we have nuclear, which kills no one, and does not contribute substantively to climate change.
It's almost like the activists care more about posturing and magical thinking than they do "saving the planet"...
That's not actually the key figure of merit, the problem isn't how long stored sources can be used but peak output.
> 1.5GW for 10 minutes? 15 minutes?
All of it for longer than that (none of the various utility-scale sources have a discharge that quickly), which is why power and not energy is the thing that is targeted. But it varies (utility-scale battery systems have a different profile [and differing within that by specific battery tech] than thermal storage which has a different profile than pumped hydro, etc.)
> Watts isn't a unit of storage
No, it's a unit of power, and the main problem right now is being able to meet needed output levels when other sources are offline. The concern is the depth of the trough that storage can handle, you need breadth too, so a substantial level of that comes inherently with depth, and the main concern is short-term variation.
> That's not actually the key figure of merit, the problem isn't how long stored sources can be used but peak output.
That is exactly the problem. Yes, output matter, too, but capacity is the main figure people are interested in. If storage system A can output 1.5 GW but only for 1 hour, and system B can output 1.5 GW but for 10 hours then these are very different systems.
> All of it for longer than that
And how long is it? Basically we're trying to find the area of rectangle. You're providing the height, but staying conspicuously mum about the width.
> The concern is the depth of the trough that storage can handle, you need breadth too, so a substantial level of that comes inherently with depth, and the main concern is short-term variation.
No, the concern is both depth and breadth. It's easy to build a battery system that puts out a lot of energy for a short period of time. It's hard to build a battery system that puts out a lot of energy for 12 hours.
The cost of Fukushima has to be measured against the benefit, IE the cost per gigawatt-hour of power created. FYI, the estimated cost is about $200 billion per the Japanese government:
So, to obtain a real comparison between the two, you'd have to add up the total costs of cleanup, environmental damage, health damage to people and animals, and all the other total costs of both fossil fuels generation and nuclear power.
Hint: Whether you're looking at total cost of ownership per gigawatt hour or cost to produce electricity per GWh, nuclear is cheaper.
>There's also the touchy issue of storing spent nuclear fuel and contaminated hardware.
Not as touchy as you think. Most of the contaminated materials that exist are from nuclear weapons production, which is a completely separate problem from power plants. Right now, those power plants (at least in the US) are mostly storing their spent fuel in dry casks on site with few or no problems.
The amount of dry cask storage needed fits within the boundaries of those sites so far.... IE, spent fuel is not a huge volume of material.
> nuclear enthusiasts often equate that reliable under nominal conditions implies reliable in practice. As if negligence and stupidity weren't factors in the real world.
This statement can apply to any real world engineering endeavor. You don't eliminate risk in a large project anyway. You anticipate it and mitigate it. You assume things will go wrong and make sure when they do that nothing particularly bad happens. That's just good design.
I'm not against solar and wind. We actually COULD do 100% solar, wind, and storage. See here: https://model.energy
However, it's going to take much longer if we start with phasing out nuclear before fossil, which means spewing massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. We can't afford that time.
If it costs more money to keep these dinosaurs running than installing solar and wind and batteries to replace natural gas and coal, then... you're wasting money on nuclear.
"Old nuclear" is fundamentally not cost competitive with current solar/wind, and it's only going to get much much worse in the next decade, especially if perovskites hit mainstream utility solar and cheap grid storage (such as that military salt water battery or increasing-density LFP) becomes a reality.
The barrage of hydrogen, nuclear, and synthetic fuel stories is indicative of the desperation of the market reality of solar/wind/electric vehicle/battery economics to oil/gas/nuclear/ICE.
Once the price curves flatten out, then maybe next-gen hydro/nuclear/geothermal can chase a stable price point. I do think nuclear can still beat solar/wind once the economics of those stabilize and with the right regulatory, after all I'm a LFTR stan.
"Old Nuclear" plants will be propped up by the military that want their weapons grade isotopes.
Storage with solar is currently generally economical competitive for about 75% of output for 4hrs, with a charge cycle per day.
In order to replace fossil fuels using wind and storage you would need significant more than 4 hours, using a much slower charge cycle. If we want to have something like 1 week of storage, with an expected charge cycle of 2 weeks (ie one week where the wind is producing more than the grid, followed by one week where it is producing less), we are talking about 42x in capacity, and the investment will get repaid 14x slower for each dollar invested.
Prices will need to drop and production will need to be heavily increased before batteries is viable for wind, and until then more fossil fueled power plants is being built in order to match the capacity of wind.
If I had to choose between battery and nuclear, my choice is neither. Simply ban fossil fuels while we wait for people to make up their mind.
> "Old nuclear" is fundamentally not cost competitive with current solar/wind,
That's like saying that someone who owns 90% of a publicly traded company is worth $9 billion just because the stock has a market cap of $10 billion. If they'd actually try to cash that stock, they'd run out of buyers and the stock price would go way, way down.
Solar and wind are great now, because we can pick a random spot and build it without needing storage and don't have many people objecting to it. (Yes, the lawsuits are there already, but so far we've only gotten to the low hanging fruit. It'll get much worse before we're anywhere near 50% green energy.) It's cheap if you just look at the cost of the pure panels/turbines.
The earth has a finite amount of habitable land. If you start filling that up with solar panels, land price will increase because you have to buy it from people that wanted to plant crops there or live there. A few countries like the USA and Argentina have it easy, but most places don't have large swathes of land laying around completely unused with wind and sun aplenty.
We currently use about 162 PWh worldwide, only 27 of which is electricity[1]. We're barely starting to make a dent in electricity production and what you hear left and right is "not in my backyard" and "not on my the neighbor's roof that I have to look at every day" (--my dad). We'd barely have the space if people wouldn't complain, let alone if we can only build it away from civilization. And that's replacing electricity production alone, we haven't really started on transportation, making things (cement, steel, plastics, ...), growing things (fertilizer, cow farts), and heating/cooling. What's more: due to only replacing a tiny percentage of electricity production with solar and wind, we aren't yet seeing the need for large scale energy storage, which seems like it will easily triple the cost with current technology (my takeaway from [2], p. 76).
You might counter with putting the stuff on sea instead to avoid the finite land issue. The primary problem there is that this is not where people live, increasing the cost of construction, maintenance, and energy transportation. For example, wind on sea is about as expensive as nuclear (I should start keeping notes on which sources I looked at before and copy-paste texts instead of memorize and reiterate). Solar I don't know, but for some reason we're not doing that on the same scale as wind, presumably for a good reason. There just aren't any easy shortcuts here, only compromises.
Let's not dismiss fission energy just yet. It might seem expensive today, but between a known ~2x price increase (iirc going full nuclear would increase the energy price by that much from today's price, though France has me wondering if I might be misremembering) and a larger cost if you do solar/wind+batteries+need-to-win-lots-of-lawsuits-for-space (which works out to be about 3x for just the hardware, using today's technology), I'll have fission reactors please. Until we have better tech, let's get started with the current tech and hope it becomes obsolete and we get cheaper energy with a sunk cost rather than not try because we might sink some cost.
> That's like saying that someone who owns 90% of a publicly traded company is worth $9 billion just because the stock has a market cap of $10 billion. If they'd actually try to cash that stock, they'd run out of buyers and the stock price would go way, way down.
So the objection is that the larger the share of renewable electricity, the higher the electricity price? I'm sure you can see why this is not really a problem? Because the higher the electricity price the more profitable it becomes to invest in renewable electricity. In fact, what currently is stalling the build-out of renewables in many European markets is that electricity prices have plummeted.
> A few countries like the USA and Argentina have it easy, but most places don't have large swathes of land laying around completely unused with wind and sun aplenty.
Most countries don't have large uranium deposits either. Importation and exportation solves such problems.
> What's more: due to only replacing a tiny percentage of electricity production with solar and wind, we aren't yet seeing the need for large scale energy storage, which seems like it will easily triple the cost with current technology (my takeaway from [2], p. 76).
44.6% of Germany's power production comes from renewables and it is not seeing any need for large-scale energy storage [1]. The need for large-scale energy storage may not materialize since fluctuations in power production will be matched by fluctuations in power consumption. In other words, there is no God-given right to mine Bitcoins 24/7 at a constant and minimal electricity price.
> You might counter with putting the stuff on sea instead to avoid the finite land issue. The primary problem there is that this is not where people live, increasing the cost of construction, maintenance, and energy transportation.
Most people don't live near nuclear power plants either.
> For example, wind on sea is about as expensive as nuclear (I should start keeping notes on which sources I looked at before and copy-paste texts instead of memorize and reiterate).
According to LAZARD 14.0, offshore wind costs on average $86/MWh to produce compared to $129-$198/MWh for nuclear [2]. And for offshore wind, costs keep falling while they are stagnant or increasing for nuclear.
> I'll have fission reactors please.
Then I hope you and like-minded are willing to finance the costs of new nuclear power yourselves, because I don't want my taxpayer money to be wasted on any more nuclear boondoggles.
> > [...] most places don't have large swathes of land laying around completely unused with wind and sun aplenty.
> Most countries don't have large uranium deposits either. Importation and exportation solves such problems.
To an extent, yes, but uranium doesn't leak out of your rail car the way that electricity is lost when you try to transport it. The choice is between power lines or converting it (with losses) in order to have a physical thing, like hydrogen, that can be transported.
> it is not seeing any need for large-scale energy storage [1].
Statement not found in citation. Also, they're at 8%, you found a source for electricity (not power). From my other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26405701 "Germany uses ~3.7PWh of energy only 0.6PWh of which is electricity [...] No large-scale storage needed if 92% of your energy can be generated from fossil fuels on demand."
> Most people don't live near nuclear power plants either.
https://www.powerplantmaps.com/nuclear.html Without checking each individual one, notice how they typically are within regular electricity transportation distance of the next major city (<100km, often <50km). This matches what I'm seeing when looking at the distances of wind built into the sea (mostly <50km off shore, virtually always within 100km).
> nuclear boondoggles
I'm not sure why I bothered replying actually, you've already dug in your heels. When I read this last bit, I figured I might as well stop here and regret spending those 20 minutes checking stuff (and so indeed I didn't bother checking your costs for offshore wind and the argument about me paying for it - in fact I pay for a lot of shit that other people don't, like Climeworks, because yeah I do actually care and we'll need all the tech we can get).
> To an extent, yes, but uranium doesn't leak out of your rail car the way that electricity is lost when you try to transport it. The choice is between power lines or converting it (with losses) in order to have a physical thing, like hydrogen, that can be transported.
Long-distance transportation of electricity is feasible; transmission losses are about 3% per 1,000 km for high-voltage lines https://iea-etsap.org/E-TechDS/PDF/E12_el-t&d_KV_Apr2014_GSO.... Morocco and other North African countries are building massive solar farms to export electricity to Europe.
> Statement not found in citation. Also, they're at 8%, you found a source for electricity (not power). From my other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26405701 "Germany uses ~3.7PWh of energy only 0.6PWh of which is electricity [...] No large-scale storage needed if 92% of your energy can be generated from fossil fuels on demand."
Well, you wrote "due to only replacing a tiny percentage of electricity production with solar and wind, we aren't yet seeing the need for large scale energy storage" so the percentage of the electricity generated by renewables must be relevant. Is your claim that the need for large-scale storage will only arise when renewables stand for a large fraction of a country's total energy production? Currently, most countries have existing large-scale storage and distribution systems for fossil fuel. I imagine that they would need to be replaced with similar systems for electricity if most vehicles switches to electricity.
> > nuclear boondoggles
> I'm not sure why I bothered replying actually, you've already dug in your heels.
All recent nuclear projects in the West have been plagued by massive delays and cost overruns: Flamanville, Hinkley Point, Vogtle, and Olkiluoto. Those who have had to foot the bill for these failures are the taxpayers. At this point, it isn't unfair to ask those who think nuclear power is indispensable to risk their own money, rather than others.
> because I don't want my taxpayer money to be wasted on any more nuclear boondoggles.
What's your opinion of mask refusers?
How about people who don't actually refuse to wear a mask but who just sabotage all societal effort to encourage mask wearing?
> Most countries don't have large uranium deposits either. Importation and exportation solves such problems.
It's easier to import a few tons of Uranium fuel pellets every year than to export terawatts of energy.
I wish we'd just bill fossil fuel plants for their pollution. We'd quickly need new alternatives and instead of us simply telling you that renewables won't work as foreseen you could just run into the problem yourself.
I want to add that I and most pro-Nuke people I know also want renewables. In good wind places, wind is a huge win. In good solar places, solar is a huge win. A healthy grid definitely takes advantage of cheap renewables and ideally peakable businesses develop to more effectively utilize variable power.
We just don't think it's appropriate for everything. To have a 100% renewable grid requires renewables where they aren't a win and tons of storage, and there's a cost to all of this. Renewable isn't free or even non-polluting, it merely means limitless which nuclear effectively is as well.
Well I’m fine with that. I’m just arguing for replacing those fossil fuel plants first. We don’t have time or money (which is to say, productive capacity without significantly reducing quality of life somewhat for most of the population) or climate capacity to go the other way.
While I agree with you that shutting down existing nuclear plants, assuming they're in proper operating condition, is a bad idea vs the urgency of climate change.
But nuclear power has never been the ultra cheap clean power slam dunk you're portraying. I've been hopeful someone will come up with a clever innovation that changes the cost numbers, but so far every attempt has tanked.
With hydroelectric dams, there is an urgent motivation to bring many of them down: ecosystem collapse. It hurts to lose the storage capacity, but there's a growing awareness of just how severe the damage has been. I don't expect Grand Coulee to come down any time soon but talking with someone who does modeling related to this for NOAA made clear a lot of them are going away.
EXISTING nuclear is extremely cheap. Like solar and wind, the vast majority of the cost is the upfront building, and so it costs pennies to operate afterward.
And your comments about hydro dams is just proving my point about climate change just not being a major priority. Local concerns take precedence. It’s not that these local concerns shouldn’t matter, but folks just don’t seem to be willing to replace fossil fuels first. It shows how little most people really care, including (unfortunately) people who ostensibly ought to, like environmental activists and regulators and pro-environmental politicians. I really think Greta Thunberg was right about that.
No, local concerns are not dominating, and I don't think you can read this as some measure of relative prioritization like that. It's too complex to reduce to such a simple imagined dynamic. Understanding that sustainable ecology requires both removing some of these dams and addressing climate change is urgent is in fact possible simultaneously.
Then why are existing fossil fuel plants treated as a separate problem to be tackled later?
Greta is right. There are certain things about climate change that are complex. But the lack of sufficient action is not a complex mystery. It’s just not a priority.
Greta is right, and also smart in that she focuses her activism on the need for urgency without getting bogged down in advocating for a particular solution.
You have very strong expectations that the rest of the world should immediately follow your plans concerning fission. That's not the same thing, and you will get pushback. Getting pushback does not mean we're somehow evil people that don't prioritize this enough, it just means we disagree with you about the costs and best path forward given pragmatic realities.
Having worked in energy (and radiation) I've always been confused by the fact that the activists aren't aligned with the scientists. I have yet to meet a single climate scientist that is anti-nuclear. Most of them are shy about their support and will end up saying things like "but we can't get support for nuclear, so why even try?"
The only real argument against nuclear is cost. Safety it is number 1 (you can see numbers from my other post), emissions (lifetime) it is on par with solar and wind (without batteries), waste isn't as big of an issue as it is made to be (waste is magnitudes smaller than most people think and storing on site is perfectly acceptable), it is clearly environmentally friendly (low footprint, you can recycle fuel, most emissions are from construction). The only argument against it is cost. The only argument is that the cost of climate and human lives is low. I'm really frustrated with the misnomers people are making about this.
Again, it's just not true that existing nuclear is extremely cheap. States in the US have recently had to bailout nuclear plant operators because they are struggling to compete against solar, wind, and cheap natural gas (see Illinois and Ohio as examples). These plants were built 30+ years ago, but still struggle to operate profitably today! In the past 10 years, something like 20 plants have been decommissioned for cost reasons.
Now I totally agree that we should keep existing plants running for as long as possible for climate reasons. I am fine with subsidizing them to a certain extent because they produce carbon free power. But even the existing plants are expensive to run and you should acknowledge that instead of saying otherwise...
Not saying I disagree with the sentiment, but I think there are other environmental impacts to consider besides just climate change. Hydroelectric dams have in many cases destroyed complete ecosystems. There have been case studies of how getting rid of existing hydroelectric dams have revitalized otherwise decimated wildlife populations. Check out the Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River in Maine as an example.
Sure, and maybe there are good arguments for getting rid of nuclear, too. But I want it explained clearly and rationally to me why tackling climate change should be a secondary priority to (why it should wait for) addressing these other local issues FIRST. Because that’s implicitly what’s going on. And claim all you want that “we can do both simultaneously,” and I’ll be happy, but WHERE in the bill is it written to eliminate any fossil fuels on that grid at the same time as turning off these dams? And I’m not just talking about replacing the dam’s electricity. That is simply going nowhere from a climate perspective (ie it isn’t reducing emissions relative to inaction).
Are the hydro dams literally going to be turned off simultaneously (the same day) with shutting off all connected fossil fuel plants? Because if not, then it isn’t actually simultaneous.
> tackling climate change should be a secondary priority to (why it should wait for) addressing these other local issues FIRST
That is very much situational. A big part of why climate change is bad is because it will cause complete ecosystems to collapse. If dams or anything else accelerate that faster than climate change, there is an argument to be made that they should take higher priority. In the case of the Kennebec River that's exactly what happened.
> "Oh, we're going to replace that nuclear power plant with wind and solar!"
I hear you, so please don't misinterpret this comment.
Statistically speaking, I'd imagine that it's actually the increases in production via wind and solar that has in fact caused nuclear (as percentage) to fall. Coal, at least in the USA can't be much different than nuclear.
How much nuclear production has come online since 2010 (i.e., the article's reference point)? Now how many solar panels? Given the long lead time of nuclear (i.e., planning, approval, producing) it's hard to imagine it catching solar anytime soon.
Should nuclear press on regardless? Probably. If only because if nuclear can be the last 15% to 20% of steady output (read: not subject to weather and such) that'll be enough to prevent rolling blacksout and other events due to shortages.
So little nuclear has come online since 2010 partly because of fear-mongering from activists and people for the last 20 years complaining that Nuclear takes too long to build.
If only 20 years ago people realized all our climate and energy problems wouldn't be solved and we should build the safest, cleanest and only technology to prevent climate change caused by energy production...
No, it's because nuclear fell out of the running economically. In large part this was due to the steady advance in gas turbine (and combined cycle) power plants. The capital cost of these plants is just incredibly low, 10-20 times cheaper per kW than a nuclear plant.
If "activists" stopped spending all their time fear-mongering about how expensive, dangerous, and time-consuming nuclear is we could have had massive government subsidies to almost entirely end fossil fuel production for energy!
The "it's all the activist's fault" argument has long since become ludicrous. No, it's because the nuclear lied about how cheap it would be, then failed to execute properly.
The cost and timeline estimates for building new reactors at Vogtle and VC Summer were woefully lowballed.
The VC Summer project was ultimately cancelled in 2017, 4 years after construction started, with no reactor completed. $9 billion had already been spent. Utility executives criminally concealed the dire state of the project before it was cancelled.
"US utility boss pleads guilty to fraud over failed nuclear construction scheme"
With the guilty plea, Marsh admitted that he intentionally defrauded ratepayers by giving over-optimistic assessments of progress on the scheme so that his company could obtain rate increases from Scana’s customers and qualify for up to $2.2bn in tax credits.
After the scheme broke ground in March 2013, it suffered delays and cost overruns. By late 2016, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ), Marsh knew that efforts by engineer Westinghouse to improve the pace and productivity of the project were “woefully inadequate”.
...
Shortly after, Marsh fraudulently withheld this information from South Carolina’s utility regulator.
Also:
"US executive pleads guilty in nuclear project delay cover-up"
A former executive of South Carolina utility Scana Corp has pleaded guilty to his role in what investigators called a “breathtaking” conspiracy to hide unresolvable problems in a project to build a $10bn nuclear power plant.
Prosecutors said Byrne knew the scheme was hopelessly behind and over budget, but that his and co-conspirators’ deceptions allowed Scana to obtain rate increases from Scana’s customers to continue financing it.
There are no criminal charges I'm aware of in connection with the Vogtle project, but it seems to have been estimated with a similarly ludicrous degree of optimism. Construction started in March 2013. In 2014 Georgia Power was telling the public that its new reactors would be operating in 2017 and 2018 respectively.
Other than the oft-mentioned risks of nuclear, it is (1) not as cheap as you think and (2) not straightforward to maintain in a warming environment.
1. Nuclear power is far more expensive than renewables, due to the high costs for construction and dismantling. This does not dismiss your argument, because running a nuclear power plant is fairly cheap. The costs therefore speak towards keeping nuclear power plants running as long as they remain safe.
2. Existing nuclear power plants use huge quantities of fresh water for cooling. The required water quantity and temperature make nuclear power plants prone to droughts, which can cause shutdowns, and to flooding events, which can shut down or damage the plant. Both droughts and floods are increasing in frequency due to climate change. This speaks towards closing down power plants that are particularly vulnerable. In any case, grid operators need to be able to mitigate nuclear power plant outages. The cost of nuclear power is even less attractive when overcapacity is needed to accommodate potential outages.
Those 31 people really make a difference on, umm let me check [1], "three to four million deaths per year".
Not to dismiss undercounting in general. I may think that nuclear fission is a good option to expand today, but it's not like a religion that I identify with. It's possible I've been using wrong figures and therefore my conclusion is wrong. But then do point out where the missing deaths (or cancer cases, etc.) per produced TWh are or I will continue to believe it's better to expand nuclear fission than to keep using fossil fuels with vague hopes for "let's build solar and wind in undefined locations with magic storage technologies, and hopefully some breakthroughs here and there." (--most climate action plans that look beyond 2025)
Nuclear has its fair share of NIMBY-ism (especially regarding storage of waste), also benefits from "magic" energy storage technologies (so you can run them at higher efficiency) and is also reliant on breakthroughs (technological and regulatory) here and there to support many people's arguments why it's such great technology. If both solutions didn't have up and down-sides there wouldn't be such long discussions on HN about it.
If you are treating Soviet casualty reports at face value, I don't know what to say. Comparisons to coal and oil are not interesting; those sources will fall away as they become increasingly uncompetitive.
Wind is being installed all over the world in multi-use locations, including offshore shared with boats, and onshore shared with farms and ranches. There has been absolutely no shortage of viable sites, and there will not be.
Solar is also compatible with multiple uses, although there has been little need for it. Many locations benefit from solar roofing. I daresay you have seen plenty of parking lots roofed with solar, and a great many more without, yet. Similarly, hydro and municipal reservoirs, and canals, where reduced insolation means reduced evaporation. Anyone suggesting a shortage of sites that would actively welcome solar installations has no globe. Even on farmland, numerous crops benefit from partial shade. I haven't see that yet, because there has been absolutely no shortage of other sites.
Thus, "undefined locations" is not honest. We can easily see exactly where they are being installed, with no need to guess or wonder abstractly.
Multiple storage methods are known, all low-tech, with the only open question being which ones will end up cheapest to deploy. Underground compressed air and gravity storage have been demonstrated. Production of ammonia from air and water may end up, not cheapest, but most valuable.
I trust you will not repeat these canards. They do you no credit.
Nuclear is uncompetitive today, and getting moreso every day, as costs of wind and solar continue their free fall. Geothermal may ultimately come to challenge them, particularly for baseline load.
You can, if you like, think of geothermal as nuclear power without the huge decommissioning cost commitment.
It's quite disingenuous to project Chernobyl and Fukushima to modern reactors. When you hear about them, always remember that they were designed in 60s and represent the second generation of nuclear reactors. The nuclear technology came a LONG way since then and modern reactors are counted as generation 3+.
After Fukushima safety requirements for reactor designs have been revisited and what do you know? Modern VVER reactors satisfies them without any changes! I suspect other modern designs have performed similarly in this regard.
Also when you hear about issues with construction time/cost or about nuclear waste storage, examples are usually US-specific. There is also Olkiluoto plant, but its issues are more about building a new reactor design using an Agile-like methodology. Nuclear waste problem can be more or less solved with "burner" reactors and fuel recycling, the field in which Russia and France have promising advancements.
Should the old reactors be retired? Yes! Should we abandon the nuclear energy for fashionable renewables? Absolutely, no! At the very least until the storage problem will be properly solved.
Nuclear energy is very eco-friendly. Even when it catastrophically melts down / explodes Chernobyl-style -- the outcome is creation of "no humans allowed" nature reserves (exclusion zones), which are sorely needed.
We need nuclear because closing the gap between 80% and 100% clean energy will be much harder and more expensive without it. Comparing the cost of building energy sources today it may look that nuclear is more expensive than renewables, but that's because we are not counting the cost of the additional infrastructure needed by them, which rises exponentially with the share of renewables in the mix.
Also, no energy source is environmentally neutral. Building renewables and it's supporting infrastructure en masse will have a huge ecological impact. You can reduce that impact using nuclear energy (that also have it's impact on nature, but elsewhere). For example, nuclear power plants kill fish, wind turbines kill birds. By using both energy sources it's easier to limit building plants only in areas, where the impact will be low. We'll be still killing some birds and fish, but the chances that it's well within the ability of populations to recover will be much greater, than if we decided to focus on one source.
> We need nuclear because closing the gap between 80% and 100% clean energy
Nuclear would be terrible for this. The last 20% of demand not served by renewables is highly intermittent, a market for which nuclear would be a very poor solution. If one is not using nuclear for base load, one should not use nuclear at all.
While laws like the Price-Anderson Nuclear Indemnity Act [0] are still in place, good.
While it could never be proven, my suspicion is that this law has done more to hinder the adoption of newer, safer nuclear power plant designs over the years, than any other single thing.
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Percentages.
Stand-up Maths called this out recently and it's good to mention. I think this might be the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aokNwKx7gM8
Give me the output and our total consumption please.
Basically you can only compare (or add, or subtract) percentages if the quantities they represent are exactly equal. And since the quantities of power production change from year to year, they're doing the same thing he's complaining about.
Percentage here is used as a ratio of total output and a decline in that ratio over time is a decline in role. Exactly what the articles headline asserts. It doesn't matter that nuclear may have grown in absolute numbers. The assertion is that its role has declined which is true.
Could we put enough fancy light bulbs and triple glazed windows and heat pumps out there to run everything on nuclear (I am biased against nuclear but I'm also biased against coal externalities) and solar/wind? What's our shortfall? In this case it's not the % of nuclear I care about. It's how much base load it can provide.
Bad budgeting is one of my peeves about software and so I get a little grumpy when I see it happening elsewhere.
Nothing will get accomplished with this climate 'whataboutism' type of argument. (I'm making a comparison to whataboutism, I recognize the difference)
I know a lot of HN readers don't like this, but the debate is over. Nuclear lost, renewables won. Get over it.
Every type of energy comes with downsides:
-Solar - storage and delivery infrastructure costs
-Wind - same as above -Hydro - same as above + if you build many/too big you change the center of mass leading to changes in the planets rotation speed
-Coal/gas/any fuel burned to produce energy - Usually cheaper than other to buil but produces a lot of pollution
-Nuclear - Build cost + waste disposal
Any kind of energy storage you use for any of the above will need to be recycled at some point. I would count this as a downside for any solution that requires storage to handle peak usage and can't be ramped up.
Edit:Some typos(most likely missed some) and formatting
I don't think that. I think Solar + Wind complement each other nicely. I think hydro can be good if the circumstances allow it. I think we'll need to explore a variety of storage technologies, better grids and demand side management to complement wind+solar.
I just don't think that an extra expensive technology with plenty of problems is contributing anything.
Also, hydro is not only scarce but awful for the local habitat and extremely dangerous. An improper or unplanned decommissioning could kill millions of people.
"A cost-optimal wind-solar mix with storage reaches cost-competitiveness with a nuclear fission plant providing baseload electricity at a cost of $0.075/kWh27 at an energy storage capacity cost of $10-20/kWh. To reach cost-competitiveness with a peaker natural gas plant at $0.077/kWh, energy storage capacity costs must instead fall below $5/kWh."
https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9
"The largest announced storage system, comprising more than 18,000 Li-ion batteries, is being built in Long Beach for Southern California Edison by AES Corp. When it’s completed, in 2021, it will be capable of running at 100 megawatts for 4 hours. But that energy total of 400 megawatt-hours is still two orders of magnitude lower than what a large Asian city would need if deprived of its intermittent supply. For example, just 2 GW for two days comes to 96 gigawatt-hours.
We have to scale up storage, but how? Sodium-sulfur batteries have higher energy density than Li-ion ones, but hot liquid metal is a most inconvenient electrolyte. Flow batteries, which store energy directly in the electrolyte, are still in an early stage of deployment. Supercapacitors can’t provide electricity over a long enough time. And compressed air and flywheels, the perennial favorites of popular journalism, have made it into only a dozen or so small and midsize installations. We could use solar electricity to electrolyze water and store the hydrogen, but still, a hydrogen-based economy is not imminent.
And so when going big we must still rely on a technology introduced in the 1890s: pumped storage. You build one reservoir high up, link it with pipes to another one lower down and use cheaper, nighttime electricity to pump water uphill so that it can turn turbines during times of peak demand. Pumped storage accounts for more than 99 percent of the world’s storage capacity, but inevitably, it entails energy loss on the order of 25 percent. Many installations have short-term capacities in excess of 1 GW—the largest one is about 3 GW—and more than one would be needed for a megacity completely dependent on solar and wind generation.
But most megacities are nowhere near the steep escarpments or deep-cut mountain valleys you’d need for pumped storage. Many, including Shanghai, Kolkata, and Karachi, are on coastal plains. They could rely on pumped storage only if it were provided through long-distance transmission. The need for more compact, more flexible, larger-scale, less costly electricity storage is self-evident. But the miracle has been slow in coming."
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/batteries-need-t...
"Given the magnitude of the battery material demand growth across all scenarios, global production capacity for Li, Co, and Ni (black lines in Fig. 3) will have to increase drastically (see Supplementary Tables 9 and 10). For Li and Co, demand could outgrow current production capacities even before 2025. For Ni, the situation appears to be less dramatic, although by 2040 EV batteries alone could consume as much as the global primary Ni production in 2019. Other battery materials could be supplied without exceeding existing production capacities (Supplementary Tables 9 and 10), although supplie...
As a non-expert, the points here are compelling, so I'd appreciate that dialogue.
Very dismissive, but I recognize your name as a German journalist, which explains a thing or two. (We share an acquaintance actually and I generally like your work in the security sphere.) I'm also living in Germany and the political environment is exactly like that: there's no point trying to change the public opinion which is wayyyyy negative about nuclear (to the point where many restaurants had stickers on the door "shut down <insert name of nearest plant>!" without being afraid of losing customers). But not everyone in the world is that level of misinformed. There is still a chance to save some emissions elsewhere in the world, even if it's administratively difficult because governments are usually elected for periods shorter than it takes to build, let alone operate and turn a profit on, one of these power plants. Doesn't mean that, with enough information about safety and proper cost calculations, some countries are still likely to vote a government into power that continues to permit the operation of a nuclear power plant within their borders. Let's not give up just yet. Or if you're personally against it, then just say so and bring real arguments instead of pretending everyone except HN is already against it.
This is the level of understanding of Brexit voting stereotype.
• Only four newcomer countries are currently constructing nuclear power plants and all are plagued by financial difficulties and delays
• An econometric analysis suggests that countries classified as potential newcomers tend to be less democratic
• On the supply side, the dominant driving force is the geopolitical interests of countries that export nuclear power
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.74261...
If they didn't manage to ensure that they were operating their plants safely, I don't know why I should trust my local regulatory bodies to.
I changed my mind on nuclear power so, now I see it as an important stop gap to transform our electricity production to renewables. Existing nuclear power plants would allow us to phase out fossil fuel now. And they would buy us time to figure out storage for renewables. New nuclear plants won't help, so, their construction time is simply too long.
I think you meant, "That is a common theme, isn't it?"
This is completely comparable. The proper reaction to disaster is to reform, not to retreat.
We have alternatives to nuclear that don't make the state-backed insurance worthwhile, not so much to air travel - where state-backed last resort insurance is available.
Reuters claimed in 2016 that Japan claimed a cost of $188B for Fukushima: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tepco-fukushima-costs-idU...
This NY Times article claims 9/11 total costs were $3.3 trillion, including $55B in physical damage, $123B in economic impact, $589B in Homeland security spending, $1.6T in war funding, $867B in veterans care and future costs associated:
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011...
At any rate, Fukushima was caused by a tsunami. It's clearly not the same risk factor to place nuclear reactors in say, the deserts of Australia, Nevada, or New Mexico versus the shoreline of Japan. We don't launch rockets from heavily populated downtown areas either for the same reason. As an engineer, you gotta think in trade-offs and reality.
Nuclear is a truly unlimited energy source. As a species, we have to master this technology in a safe way if we ever want to advance to the next level. We're never going to be a space-faring species on wind and solar alone. Solar and wind are fair-weather friends.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment
Don't get me wrong, it has other problems but EROI ain't one of them.
I really think we need to ban building heavy industry next to bodies of water or high in critical watersheds. We have enough transit infrastructure now that we should be looking at the precautionary principle when zoning for things that can get a free ride on the wind or waterways and therefore spread over heavily populated or critical nature corridors just due to inability to stop a problem the moment it is detected. It's designed for making a company's biggest mistakes into everybody's problem instead of theirs.
Actually, Wikipedia tells me they've resumed fishing the sea next to Fukushima as of three years ago
> In February 2018, Japan renewed the export of fish caught off Fukushima's nearshore zone. According to prefecture officials, no seafood had been found with radiation levels exceeding Japan safety standards since April 2015.
And looking at a graph, it looks even less bad:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
Seawater contamination seems to be back to safe levels two months later.
I'm no expert on seawater contamination or anything, perhaps it's the case that the two big nuclear disasters known to mankind had a combined effect on sea life greater than the fossil fuel plants and dams for hydro. But then please do make that argument rather than a vague exclamation about "have you seen how much".
https://whalesandmarinefauna.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/nuc...
https://earthsky.org/earth/tracking-fukushima-radiation-acro...
When your externalities are global I don't think people really care quite so much about what happens to the locals.
Cesium ends up substituting for potassium, which means you ingest it and then have to worry about alpha decay.
[edit: although it seems the two isotopes are beta decay, but it's still being digested]
Is that still important? In the UK we’re spending an INSANE amount of money on a new reactor and I’m wondering if that has anything to do with the government’s motivation.
So as much a nuclear advocates wish more nuclear plants would be built, unless they want to provide significant subsidies, it's just not going to happen. For the same reason you don't shop around by finding the highest price you can... no one is looking to throw away money. Energy is energy.. no one cares about the type of plant it came from.
Big honking power plants of all flavors are just not economically viable. The SMR thing might work, but it'll have to do better than wind+solar+batteries which have enormous economies of scale.
RIP, only France did nuclear right :(
Batteries will never have sufficient capacity to delivery any meaningful amount of storage. This is why any realistic plan for a wind + solar grid assumes some silver bullet will solve the storage problem: synthetic methane, hydrogen, thermal batteries, something else.
But who knows if any of those will actually pan out. California has already hit saturation with solar power. Adding more solar only marginally displaces carbon emissions. As far as actual decarbonization goes, nuclear is more valuable than raw generation figures present because this power is generated 24/7.
> RIP, only France did nuclear right :(
And Belgium. And Slovakia. And China.
What physical limit prevents this?
It would be expensive, but cheaper than building nuclear power plants, especially the breeder reactors that would be needed for a fully nuclear world economy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/business/economy/china-so...
However, I'm surprised that it's not done to expand the military. It's really weird that someone is being forced to work for the sake of the entire planet when every other nation is trying to wiggle itself out of its responsibility.
That said, improvements in the transmission grid might be able to remedy that issue, honestly not sure.
If nuclear takes, hypothetically, 200 acres to build a power plant, containment, and all the supporting services necessary to generate enough power to feed a city, and solar takes 600 acres to generate an equal amount (and be much safer as well) I'm ok with that compromise, but I would have expected that the ratio would be much higher. Can you tell me where the ratios you have quoted come from?
I'm on the same page in terms of pro-solar, but I also think having nuclear ready to go is a nice fallback (e.g. if rare earth metals for solar and batteries become prohibitively expensive or embargoed).
And you are right - the land needed to actually generate the power is much different than that ratio.
The strata report is also counting the land use for transmission lines which is a big part of the land use for any power source and makes the land use for different power sources look much more similar than they are.
From the report:
>...Because nuclear energy accounted for 19.55 percent of the nation’s electricity production in 2015, approximately 938,388 acres of land were used to transmit nuclear energy in 2015, or 10.312 acres per megawatt.
So of the 12 acres they attribute per megawatt for nuclear, 10 acres of that is for transmission lines which are going to be needed no matter the source of power.
The report gives an example later:
>...The Arkansas Nuclear One Station requires only 1,100 acres (1.7 square miles) to produce 1,800 megawatts operating at a 90 percent capacity factor. A study by Entergy Arkansas estimates that for modern wind and solar plants operating at the same capacity, they would require 108,000 acres (169 square miles) and 13,320 acres (21 square miles) of land respectively to produce the same amount of power.
https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf
As another data point, in a report on the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, PG&E reported:
>...To build the equivalent of a 1,000-Mw nuclear plant, a solar park would require 11,000 acres of PV solar panels and a wind farm would need 50,000 acres of wind turbines. By contrast, Diablo Canyon is able to produce twice as much power (2300 Mw) in a footprint of approximately 545 acres.
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/hyman1/docs/may...
(Land use isn't the only factor obviously, but it is a factor.)
1) Disrupt the nuclear construction contracting process. Until fleet contractors like Bechtel et al are stopped from parasitizing the industry, it's going nowhete due to spiralling costs.
2) Lower the cost of reinforced concrete.
3) Close the fuel cycle.
3 is technically feasible, 2 isn't very sexy, but possible. 1 seems insurmountable.
Tesla committed to having the Hornsdale Power Reserve built in 100 days or it was free [2]. That is what nuclear is up against. Please don't argue base load; there is no need for base load, only diverse firm dispatchable generation assets [3], robust transmission, and demand response for non-essential industrial loads.
[1] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/solar-plus-storage-poised-t...
[2] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/11/28/167090...
[3] https://energypost.eu/dispelling-nuclear-baseload-myth-nothi...
Once solar saturates daytime demand, provisioning further solar power doesn't contribute to decarbonization. This is why nuclear is really the only known path to decarbonization. Maybe we'll figure out scalable ways to provision hundreds of terawatt hours of storage, but we might be waiting a long time.
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/europe-win... ("Europe has space for enough wind turbines to power the entire world, study finds")
https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/uploads/ee2523dc632c9b01df... ("Australia is the sunniest country in the world and one of the windiest. Australia’s potential for renewable energy generation is 500 times greater than current power generation capacity.")
https://www.afdb.org/en/news-and-events/why-africa-is-the-ne... ("Africa has an almost unlimited potential of solar capacity (10 TW), abundant hydro (350 GW), wind (110 GW), and geothermal energy sources (15 GW). The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) estimates that renewable energy capacity in Africa could reach 310 GW by 2030; which would put the continent at the forefront of renewable energy generation globally.")
Do we have a realistic plan to built a wind and solar grid under that market? I don't think so, wind and solar are useful for taking a bite out of natural gas but not actually serving as the backbone of an electrical grid. The amount of storage necessary to decarbonize with wind and solar is not feasible, and essentially amounts to betting on some future invention of a cheap mass energy storage device that works everywhere.
By comparison we have demonstrable examples of countries going 80+% nuclear, and the US is already at 20% nuclear power generation. Building four nuclear plants for each existing plant is a lot more achievable of a goal than first building a massive amount of solar and wind, and building extensive HVDC transmission, and building tens of Terawatt hours worth of storage. The first step in the latter is cheaper than building nuclear, it's the other two steps that are wildly expensive if they're even possible. If we actually enacted a binding rule of zero emissions by 2050 people would start building nuclear power plants.
http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-grid-energy-storage-facts...
* In 2020, the U.S. had over 23.2 GW of capacity in energy storage compared to 1,100 GW of total installed generation capacity.
* Globally, installed energy storage capacity totaled 173.6 GW.
* 1,355 energy storage projects were operational globally in 2020, with 11 projects under construction. 40% of operational projects are located in the U.S.
* California leads the U.S. in energy storage with 215 operational projects (4.2 GW), followed by Hawaii, New York, and Texas.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/broad-reach-pow...
"Two of the planned 10 MW batteries are up and running already, with a total of 10 expected online by year's end, Vavrik said. That means that BRP and Key Capture are running neck and neck for operational capacity in Texas. The title of biggest battery operator in the state could change hands repeatedly based on the order in which those companies' projects wrap up.
The broader story is that multiple experienced energy investors are converging on Texas simultaneously. The interconnection queue contains more than two dozen batteries that are each larger than 100 megawatts; some go up to 300, 400, even 500 megawatts."
Again, you either think climate change is an existential problem in which case relying on magic pixiedust in the future is an absurd, or you don't. There's no two ways about it.
Spanning a continent only helps wind power and not solar power.
Even if you entirely ignore that hydro component and only look at the 3 GWh number, that’s still only ~3.6 orders of magnitude less than what we’d need for a whole day with no power generation whatsoever.
Their numbers are talking about enough storage to maintain current usage for half a year.
To your second comment: spanning a continent does actually help with solar, since the sun is up at different times on the two coasts - that buys you several extra hours of power each day. Also obstructive weather patterns tend to not reach that far.
2. Relying on such a tightly coupled national grid as required to deploy that storage is a recipe for disaster in the event of any war or unconventional conflict. A few shut down transmission lines or stations could cripple entire national economy.
3. Overbuilding completely ignores the very real human and environmental costs of doing so. Rare earths are not very green, forced labor as used by much of the solar industry not very humane. You are condemning millions today to hypothetical harm to thousands tomorrow. It's insanity.
But almost all (~95%) of the installed grid storage capacity is in hydroelectric storage. The above commenter is posting in terms of battery storage in the 100MWh range. We would indeed need 6 orders of magnitude larger than this even to just have 1 day's worth of storage. Hundred megawatt hours vs a dozen Terawatt hours.
Also, the amount of storage could be substantially more than a day in a predominantly wind + solar grid. Part of variability is mostly daily, with the sun going up and down. But both solar and wind are also affected by weather. That requires much more substantial amounts of storage to get the grid through consistent days of reduced production. Estimates to provide a 100% carbon-free grid with renewables go as high as 3 weeks [1]
It says that 3 weeks of power storage would be required in total absence of a serious overhaul in transmission capabilities. I had assumed that was a clear, if unspoken, assumption when I was discussion continent scale entities.
Also, the poster you originally responded to was discussing the literal dozens of installations that singlehandedly meet the 100 MWh mark. HN guidelines require that I assume this was a simple failure of reading comprehension.
Where on earth is six orders of magnitude coming from? You’re off by a factor of a hundred.
The point is that dozens of 100MWh stations is basically nothing. You'd need millions of these sites to make renewables a feasible primary source of energy. Our current technology is not sufficient to make energy storage available to make grid storage viable.
Yes a dozen 100GWh facilities is 1.2 GWh, and that's an order of magnitude less in difference, I don't doubt your ability to multiple by factors of ten.
Hydroelectric is geographically limited, you can just build dams where people need additional power.
That leaves nuclear. And since nuclear costs just as much to run 100% of the time as it does to run part of the time it makes no sense to use it as a peaker. Just run it 24/7, and install less intermittent sources.
The single salt formation near Delta Utah could store enough hydrogen to supply the entire US electricity demand for 30 hours.
Nuclear is by far the best technology we have today so we should go with it until we have better options in our hand.
So you are saying that there is some business that has always been certain to lose money, and had never had government help, and nobody ever invested on it. And you are using this fact to suggest that in the near future, when that business will become needed and profitable, nobody will invest on it either... what isn't a conclusion one can make.
https://www.evolved.energy/post/2016/02/16/deep-decarbonizat...
- where those demand projections came from
- the feasibility of building capacity for the projected dispatch
- the cost of doing so
I'm not saying that the premise/conclusion is wrong, just that this article in particular adds nothing to the discussion. I can only hope that the linked reports actually address those questions.
re: demand projections "the carbon neutral and carbon negative scenarios were required to meet the same demand for energy services, for daily life and industrial production as the business as usual reference case from the EIA's Annual Energy Outlook and used its assumptions for population, for GDP and industrial production. So that's very much nothing changes in the world except for the energy system... kind of a view. And the modeling only allows technologies that are commercial today or that have been demonstrated at large pilot scale today. So in effect, I think that really sets a pretty high bar because in reality, I would expect a number of those things to change over the next 30 years. For example, I would expect probably lower population growth than EIA projects and considerably lower demand for energy services and industrial production as a result of a slowing economy. And I would have said that before we have the added effects of the pandemic. " re:feasibility "I think at it's core backcasting is about trying to understand what's entailed in the physical transformation. So the legacy of this work is in that discussion about feeling like that's the analysis that's needed. Not necessarily understanding what does a carbon tax do on the margin or what to other approaches do sort of in the short term and in the macroeconomic system. But really understanding how many more widgets do we need and how quickly do they need to be deployed if you don't want to do early retirement. So that context of the questions we're trying to answer really sets up the insights that come from backcasting. So one of the things we think a lot about is stock turnover. So sort of one of our modeling principles is that we don't do early retirement of any resources except for potentially an electricity supply. So for things like light-duty vehicles or industrial boilers, we really need to understand how long do those resources typically stay online? And that means if it's a 15-year turnover rate for something like a furnace or maybe it's a 30-year turnover rate for something like an industrial boiler."
re:cost "And we find that that case at a net cost of 0.4 percent of GDP in 2050 is able to achieve carbon neutrality. So that 0.4 percent of GDP in 2050 over the reference case, it really represents some major shifts in terms of monetary flows. So we're spending $950 billion on efficiency, new supply for low carbon solutions, and we're saving $800 billion on fossil fuels that are no longer being burned. So our analysis really only looks at the energy costs for the total system for that transition. We're not accounting for things like co-benefits or economic benefits from the avoided damage of climate change or other potential impacts, as well as potential health or environmental benefits. That total energy spending declines from about five percent of GDP for the energy system today to around four percent in 2050. " -quotes from podcast linked in first article
https://www.unsdsn.org/Zero-Carbon-Action-Plan
https://irp-cdn.multiscreensite.com/6f2c9f57/files/uploaded/...
2. Look at Texas's recent "hiccup" around Feb 15 and compare it to year before. Wind dropped to <10% reliable capacity and it was almost all picked up by gas/coal. The drop wind/solar production starts a week before the cold snap that disrupted everything else.
https://www.eia.gov/beta/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/e...
https://www.wsj.com./articles/texas-spins-into-the-wind-1161...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-political-making-of-a-texas...
The reason nuclear costs so much is because we've stopped building plants. There's no industry anymore, let alone economies of scale. It's a fallacious argument to say it costs too much. If we went all in on nuclear to tackle climate change the costs would quickly collapse. After all, they were built in the 70s and dramatically decarbonized the industry at the time.
For example, EnergyAustralia just announced that they're pulling forward the retirement of Yallourn coal powered station by four years [1], and building a 350MW utility scale energy system to absorb and discharge renewable power to offset the coal plant being retired:
"Under the agreement, EnergyAustralia will retire Yallourn in mid-2028 and build new storage capacity through a 350 MW, four-hour, utility-scale battery project that will be completed by 2026. This ensures energy storage is built to firm increased renewable energy in Victoria, before Yallourn exits the system.
EnergyAustralia’s goal is to be carbon neutral by 2050. Yallourn’s retirement will reduce the company’s emissions profile by 60 per cent, accelerating the pathway towards achieving this ambition."
As we speak (mid day local Victoria time), renewables are providing 48% of total electrical demand in Victoria [2].
[1] https://www.energyaustralia.com.au/about-us/energy-generatio...
[2] https://opennem.org.au/energy/vic1/?range=1d&interval=30m
"But what is clear is that there is a massive shift happening here. Coal is on the way out, as is “baseload” gas, and wind and solar and storage facilities, particularly battery storage, are on the way in. And many of the biggest batteries are being planned at the sites of coal and gas generators already closed or expected to close in coming years or decades."
"The sizes it is mooting are up to 500MW (and maybe two hours storage) for Liddell, 250MW and four hours storage at Torrens (1,000MWh), and 200MW and four hours storage (800MWh) at Loy Yang A. The final call on storage duration will be determined by the sort of market opportunities it sees for the batteries in the different states – longer for storing excess wind and solar, shorter for grid security services."
On the other hand, once they're available, switching to them is perfectly fine, and the 50+ lifetime of LWRs exists for a reason. Maybe we will even have workable fusion by then.
Is this doable? What's keeping it up? Is it anything artificial, like a business cartel or something similar? If not, lowering the price would practically mean subsidies.
The power density of a gas turbine is so much greater than that of a steam turbine that a closed-cycle gas turbine powerset for a sodium cooled fast reactor would fit in the employee break room of the turbine hall of an lwr. Running at higher temperatures with liquid metal, molten salt, or gas-cooled reactors poses many practical problems, but means building a machine that processes more energy with less mass thus drastically lower capital cost.
A molten salt reactor is at atmospheric pressure and has nothing to cause a chemical explosion. You still need containment, but you don't need to contain a large empty space.
A supercritical CO2 turbine runs at 1000+ psi but if the pipes broke and the CO2 sprayed out into that salt, you might get an overpressure around 10 psi in a not-too-big confinement because the volume of working fluid is tiny.
Renewables are getting better and cheaper fast and if you have you're not convinced by that, I see no reasonable argument for nuclear.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22146...
Think of it this way. If unemployment/underemployment is high then it's like having random people sitting in a bar doing nothing. A government official comes to the bar and sees people doing nothing and tells then what to do. What's being lost by telling these people to do something? The biggest loss is that these people could have done something even better than what the government came up with, however they are in a bar doing nothing, clearly nobody needs them right now.
The question is, does the nuclear industry actually generate jobs that would lower unemployment? Is the type of person that is qualified to work on a nuclear reactor unemployed? I am leaning toward no, I simply cannot imagine the highly vocal trump supporter base being filled with academics in hard sciences. If we are going to do a nuclear jobs program it might backfire because it fails to employ the right people.
All of which is nontrivial amount of investment nobody does where there is unemployment, because it's cheaper to do it in China as the base and subcomponents are already there... (there's also unemployment)
Trap of deindustrialization runs deep.
Keeping nuclear power safe is very easy, you just have to decommission old power plants that aren't up to modern standards. That's all it would have taken to prevent Chernobyl and Fukushima. So why on earth do we build nuclear power plants that are difficult to rebuild? Why did we believe that immature technology is going to be enough for the next 50 years? You need to build more, to replace the crappy old power plants, you need to build more, to expand the fleet, you need to build more, to update previously built plants to a new safety standard, you need to build more, just to maintain a workforce.
It's done all the time with solar power and wind. Build it for 20+ years, if new tech comes out you just replace the old tech once it proves uneconomical.
My personal favorite boondoggles are still housing, internet, electric grid and road maintenance. We really need to put pressure on the job market through fiscal stimulus. That pressure will force companies to wake up and actually do something productive.
Solar and wind are ONLY cheap if you ignore the costs for backup power plants and extra landlines.
We have the highest electricity prices in Germany worldwide. I really wished people stopped claiming renewables are cheap, they are not.
> https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/
I understand people dislike when nuclear get subsidies, but its nowhere as bad as the amount of subsidies we pay right now to fossil fuels. We need to stop throwing money at fossil fuels. I rather have my tax money go to batteries or nuclear than fossil fuels disguised as "reserve energy".
Instead what happened is that anti-nuclear activists put up arbitrary regulatory barriers to construction. Three-Mile Island provided the political catalyst for a massive regulatory burden on new construction. Most of these burdens have an at best minor impact on safety, but at the cost of astronomical impact on cost.
Now maybe you can debate about whether loosening nuclear regulations to decrease cost is acceptable or not. But at the very least that's at least a debate we should be having. It's certainly the case that a lot of people will die from unmitigated climate change. Not to mention the enormous economic and environmental toll. Against that, I would gladly trade off a Three-Mile Island incident every decade or so.
So, what was the policy that caused Vogtle 3/4 and the Summer plants to go so wildly over budget? Was there a policy for Westinghouse to screw up badly? And similarly for Flamanville 3, and the new plants they're trying to build in the UK.
The argument for "less regulation" is really the argument "who needs expensive containment and emergency systems, because radiation is no big deal".
https://www.dw.com/en/why-does-bitcoin-need-more-energy-than...
>Back at the start of 2017, Bitcoin was using 6.6 terawatt-hours of power a year. In October 2020, that was up to 67 terawatt-hours. Now a few months later, it has nearly doubled to 121 terawatt-hours, the Cambridge researchers found, enough to run their entire university for nearly 700 years.
So fission power is easy: I know this will upset the nuclear fanboys on HN but (IMHO) it has no future. And it's not because the technology can't be safe. It's because humans ultimately can't be trusted with:
- Acquiring, extracting and storing the fuel;
- Dealing with the toxic byproducts (eg UF6);
- Maintaining the plants to a sufficient degree of safety on thin profit margins that are the norm for utilities;
- The failure modes are awful; and
- Dealing with the waste.
Governments currently cover some or all of these to some degree so I'm not sure we're seeing anything close to the true cost of nuclear power factoring in the above. Nuclear power thus far seems to have been far more of a political statement than an economic choice.
As for fusion power, that's more murky. I really hope there's commercially viable fusion power in our future but... I'm not yet convinced there will be.
Fusion works for stars because the process happens really slowly (per unit mass) and the masses are so large that gravity contains the "mess".
Heating a fluid to 100M+ Kelvin is always going to have turbulence issues and we don't have a good story for containing the neutrons without destroying our containment vessel. I believe He3 fusion would be (mostly?) aneutronic but... He3 is super-rare (for us here on Earth).
I believe solar has the brightest future. When (not if) getting stuff in orbit is sufficiently cheap that we have industry and permanent residence off Earth then solar is an amazing option. I've seen one estimate that a solar collector in space produces about 7 times the power of an Earth-bound one (night/day cycles, no weather, no atmospheric interference).
Microwaves and lasers are the two options they describe.
In all seriousness, that is a pretty terrifying industrial project. I'm not sure how you'd make the failsafes strong enough to match the risk of cooking thousands of people alive.
I'd worry more about such an installation being hacked/sabotaged by someone who doesn't care if the billions-of-dollars investment gets turned into confetti within a few hours.
“They hacked the web interface that tells me how much power the diagnostic thinks is being generated so now it doesn’t agree with the receiver” isn’t as scary as “they redirected the death ray to a nearby city”.
Despite the low power density the ground station would still be cheap, since it'd mostly be wire antenna.
(Source: the book The Case for Space Solar Power)
It doesn't look like they mention a specific wavelength in the article, but the reference to "long wavelength" and "long antenna" seems to imply frequencies much lower than what I'd consider microwave.
Generally, the lower the frequency is, the less harm it causes to living things. Though I either way I wouldn't want to live right next to the ground station. I suppose it would be similar to living right next to a radio transmission tower or a radar station.
So you need a quarter wave to be longer than a building to make it not a concern, practically it needs to be much longer if you’re sending serious power and want to keep the density down.
Let’s aim for a 1 km long antenna in space with voltage high enough that ohmic losses are not a concern, or a very large superconducting antenna and all of the apparatus that goes with it. Millions of volts likes to arc when you have debris just floating around everywhere in space. Superconducting is much more attractive regardless of the extra apparatus.
I don’t see many points of concern, though you could still damage infrastructure if you aren’t constantly aligned. Blowing up terrestrial grids isn’t as bad as cooking people alive.
It would still be the most dangerous thing we've ever put in space by a pretty wide margin. Keep space filled exclusively with small tin cans is not an accident and not entirely due to technical or economic limitations. It is a very sensitive political area. Putting anything that could be dangerous in orbit makes it dangerous to everyone. So your adversary across the ocean blows up a reactor? Cool. As long as they don't blow me up.
I don't know about that. We set off a 1.4 megaton nuclear warhead in space back in 1962 just to see what would happen. (What happened is that we created a temporary radiation belt, knocked out a bunch of satellites, damaged some of the electrical and communication infrastructure in Hawaii, and caused some impressive light shows.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
Pump few gigawatts of microwaves over a country, and revert it to stone age in minutes.
But my point was primarily as a means of producing energy for industries and people that are stationed off Earth. For a space habitat, solar is just ridiculously good compared to the alternatives.
I also recommend looking through his list of books on the sidebar.
https://energypost.eu/dispelling-nuclear-baseload-myth-nothi...
Here's the summary page where the author asked if the UK could supply its energy needs from renewables alone:
http://www.withouthotair.com/c18/page_103.shtml
The answer was "not quite."
However, he assumed that utility scale solar farms would be using 10% efficient panels. 20% are now widely available. So let's make these two quick edits:
- Assume that solar farms provide double the energy from doubled panel efficiency.
- Drop biomass, because it's unneeded with better solar farms.
With these changes the renewable energy supply of 206 kWh/person/day exceeds modeled demand of 195 kWh/person/day. Making some other simple updates like assuming that car transportation is mostly electrified would further increase the margin of safety.
Also, the current generation of EVs will provide a substantial amount of flexibility resulting in £billions of savings for the UK grid and consumers (see https://www.kaluza.com/blog-busting-the-myth-ev-smart-chargi...). The addition of Vehicle-to-Grid chargers will further allow increased renewables.
With the cost of these technologies decreasing, the importance of nuclear power will reduce over time.
He says renewable can't provide the level of energy we have without decreasing drastically our consumption. And nuclear fission is the only path we have to reduce our CO2 emissions.
I would love renewable or fusion to cover all our needs, and keep my comfortable life as it is today. But I didn't find any inspiring talks or readings so far to balance his arguments.
I've been reading Jason Hickel's book "Less is More" [1], which talks a bit about energy use, in general, and how it must be reduced, regardless of what technologies we wind up with. And one of his points is examining how much energy is just flat-out wasted. ~50% of food is just wasted, for example—whether because it's ugly, or left in a refrigerator too long, and rots. Think about how most American cities are designed, and how it's just normal for most Americans to own and drive personal vehicles for hours each day. Those resources and the energy needed to extract those resources is largely just unnecessarily wasted.
Consider countries like Costa Rica, Finland, Taiwan, etc., where quality of life is better than in the US. Life expectancy is higher. Infant mortality is lower. Education is better. And they need a tiny fraction of the energy the U.S. does. Clearly there's room for a lot of improvement with how we use energy.
[1] https://www.jasonhickel.org/less-is-more
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/21/vaclav-smil-in...
Also for whatever reason people love to talk about how mining trucks will become EVs, and they always link me to the same Komatsu truck which they claim is an EV, but actually has a diesel engine and uses an electric power transmission.
If you want to store power overnight you want kinetic storage, or possibly power to gas. There are lots of technologies available. Some of them are cheaper than nuclear, but none of them are economical yet because there is no market for day-to-week-scale storage until solar/wind start to approach 50% of the power mix.
...neither of which are cheaper than batteries or we'd be doing that
Yes, we are doing pumped hydro, but only in a few convenient locations. I recently watched a video about Ireland's new pumped storage facility[1], it mentions some pretty tight constraints for what we currently consider economical (e.g. hill slope). Bill Gates' new book[2] doesn't go into as much detail but also doesn't sound like we got this figured out any better than batteries, basically saying we need breakthroughs or this is going to simply be a prohibitively expensive undertaking for non-rich countries. Specifically about hydrogen (the "to gas" option that has the most buzz at least) [2] says that there are high losses in conversion (without saying how much) as well as hydrogen leaking from metal tanks and electrolyzers being very expensive. There's hope for breakthroughs but.. they do have to happen in order for it to be better (cheaper) than today's batteries.
At a bare minimum, it's not obvious that what GP wrote is "just wrong". This isn't something we have a definite answer to.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSgd-QhLHRI
[2] "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need" ISBN 978-0-593-21577-7
I agree that we don't have definite answers, but that's why what the GP wrote is just wrong. They're reducing a very complicated set of technologies to the economics of lithium ion batteries. While yes, pumped hydro is something of a cop-out, it's clear there are a variety of techs that are cheaper than lithium ion.
The economics of this are also a little unclear to me. In the presence of sustained negative electricity prices, it seems obvious in principle that lots of storage technologies would suddenly become economical. But it's hard to imagine how that would work given the way we currently finance these things. (And by extension, it's not clear to me that this is actually a technical problem so much as a political one.)
I just don't see a similar pathway for nuclear? Particularly in less stable parts of the world without an existing industry.
This is an outrageous falsehood. Play with the numbers at this model site to see:
http://model.energy/
Also, why is energy density relevant for stationary storage? The cost of land to site batteries is trivial.
Carbon waste is worse than nuclear waste, yet is given a free pass because it floats and we can’t touch it or see it. But it is very real.
Additionally, fission isn't the only way to get energy out of uranium. Nuclear batteries, such as the ones powering Curiosity and Perseverance, can't melt down like a traditional reactor and will continue working until all the energy stored inside it is gone. This is the type of nuclear power I'd like to see gain prevalence for many reasons, foremost of which is the ability for each household to have its own source of electricity independent of a power grid.
Solar in space is all well and good, but without a way to beam that power back to Earth, a space-based solar collector is as useful as if nothing were there at all.
While I’m all in favour of each home (or apartment block) being energy independent, I very much do not want widespread access to even RTG material.
Consider: average power use is about 1 kW, 1000 J/s, and that the “dead in 1-2 days with treatment” radiation absorbed dose is merely 30 J/kg, so any domestic power supply is capable of killing an adult in 2-3 seconds of full exposure… or, more likely, a tiny flake imbibed or inhaled due to either malice or incompetence would have the same effect during one night of sleep.
> Solar in space is all well and good, but without a way to beam that power back to Earth, a space-based solar collector is as useful as if nothing were there at all.
I’m definitely against beamed power, at least until we get a single planetary government.
Anything which beams with a higher power flux than sunlight is a potential weapon. Anything which isn’t, requires so much more land than PV that it’s always better to use PV even when you have to put the PV in your nearest desert and beam it to you from there using whatever future tech you’re thinking of to get from orbit.
(I assume one world government would mean that government could authorise itself to build a weapon pointed at itself without having to worry it might be secretly planning to shoot itself; I don’t see how either the USA or Russia could ever trust the other if either built one).
I specifically mentioned UF6 (uranium hexaflouride) as a hazardous byproduct of centrifuge enrichment. Now France (and some other countries, including the US up until 2018 at least) do process UF6, but only to put it into a more stable form (eg UF4). That more stable form still requires long term storage.
There is no waste problem, stop spreading misinformation [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
The only site in the entire world currently intaking waste is WIPP, and it's been dogged by problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
The only two other sites that have ever actively taken in waste, Gorleben and Morsleben in Germany, are now closed and both have severe site stability issues requiring ongoing remediation into the billions of euros to ensure the sites don't fail.
I think it's not that controversial of a statement to say that the main problem with nuclear energy in general is political. As evidenced by the fact that this thread exists and full of people who are trying really hard to find problems with our only extant technology for carbon-free large-scale energy production. And that we keep shutting down perfectly good nuclear power plants. There's just no basis on fact here.
Meanwhile, the water is lapping at our feet.
But I agree that fission (and fusion currently) is current noncompetitive and not worth investment (aside from research) until the economies of scale that solar/wind/battery are currently undergoing stabilize or plateau.
You can already see what effect nuclear has when the safety is not done well (Chernobyl and Fukusima). But even those cases kill less people than coal done well.
Who cares about storing fuel and toxic byproducts perpetually? We are destroying our environment right now. It's ridiculous we're even still having these conversations.
It doesn't matter if fission has a future, we could start to build a hundred power plants today, and the first ones would be finished in 5 years, and it would fucking save our planet.
We’ve had at least 3 nuclear disasters (Chernobyl, Fukushima and There Mile Island) and Google suggests there are 440 reactors in the world (current; so add a few more for decommissioned).
Everything is about tradeoffs, and the collective decision to keep coal, with all its attendant problems, is a worse tradeoff.
Three Mile Island wasn't even a disaster, except for the wallets of the investors.
Working at Fukushima for 40 years was safer than your average construction job, even if you worked during the disaster.
And if you have to unfairly compare nuclear safety to airliners, also consider that airliner disasters have become 40 times less frequent than they were when Chernobyl happened.
How many people are dying from coal plants? How many are dying from the exhausts of ICE cars. How many more from the rising tides, the swelling storms and the blistering droughts?
...and every time there's the same litany of poorly researched talking points repeated ad infinitum.
Almost nobody ever points out the systemic risks of highly centralized power plants in case of war or civil war or terrorism.
I thought that was interesting, but I checked and no, Ansel Adams was not president of the Sierra Club.
https://www.world-nuclear.org/our-association/publications/g...
Global wind and solar generation increased by 265 TWh in 2019:
https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/global-wind-and-solar-ener...
Nuclear was still well ahead in 2019 with 2657 TWh vs. 2103 TWh for wind and solar (699 solar, 1404 wind). But if these relative growth rates continue it will take only 3.3 years for solar + wind generation to eclipse nuclear generation globally ((2657 - 2103) / 170).
Hydropower is still the far-and-away leader of non-fossil electricity generation at 4306 TWh in 2019 (106 TWh growth over 2018):
https://www.hydropower.org/news/invest-in-hydropower-to-tack...
But it's a lot harder to build new hydro projects than new wind or solar projects.
Electricity generated from nuclear power can follow the load, neither wind nor solar can do that meaning you will _always_ need backup power plants.
Germany has 50% renewable energy in its electricity mix, yet their greenhouse gas emissions in the energy sector are seven(!) times as compared to France.
There is a reason why China is nuclear power plants like crazy. They understand that electricity is worthless if it can’t be produced on demand.
> https://twitter.com/YanQinyq/status/1368830510210899968
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26216394
China is the world's leader in building new nuclear reactors. And in building new solar farms. And in building new wind farms. China is the world's biggest energy producer, so it is going to lead on a lot of absolute energy measures.
China can build reactors cheaper than the West, but it can also build solar farms cheaper than the West. China is adding output from renewables faster than from nuclear projects.
And yes they are totalitarian, but at least they have some awareness of GHG emissions and are executing on alternative energies and EV and battery production and research.
Some wind turbine generators use rare earth element permanent magnets, but they only account for 21% of the market. The rest use electromagnets. See Figure 37 in this report:
"IRENA Future of Wind (2019)"
https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication...
"Leading manufacturers of large modern wind turbines, such as Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy and MHI Vestas Offshore Wind, use permanent magnet generators based on neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) in their advanced offshore wind turbines. " https://thinkrcg.com/rare-earth-metals-and-their-role-in-ren...
It looks fine on paper, but France was dependent on other EU countries avoiding nuclear.
The problem of capacity factors of french nuclear reactors is caused by excess generation by renewables (mostly wind from north sea) that cannot be stopped and is sold at quasi negative rates. It's clear when you see the capacity factor has been decreasing for the last decades without much change in the number of reactors online in France.
Looking at 2004 they used 8,204 kWh/Hab but produced 9,203, and thus needed to export an even larger fraction before wind/solar took off.
PS: The graph makes it clear why things are improving, their simply cutting back on nuclear. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/FR_ELEC_...
> Since 1990, each year, France roughly exports 10% of its annual production. Its annual exchange sold has always remained positive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France#I...
I'm going to need sources, preferably Wikipedia or something similarly peer-reviewed (not a random blog or opinionated organisation), for this to make sense to me.
Because they've built them to serve peak demand.
[1]: https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-delectricit... look at 3 september 2018 for example, min is 36GW, max is 41GW, on one day.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany
The slow spring melt of mountain snow turns into a sudden post-storm flood, if the temperatures are warm enough...
On the other hand with enough investment you can build artificial lakes instead. However, current economy does not value the abovementioned things enough to build artificial lakes.
Everything is interconnected, and it's a really typical technocratic attitude to say that it's fine in isolation. "Who gives a shit? It's just a bunch of fish." Analytical people eschew context. Analysis is about reducing everything to components. And guess what -- it has led us astray here.
It turns out in the PNW that salmon are a major part of the food chain for a lot of animals, and our hydropower efforts are suppressing that food chain. It's also making it really hard to find enough salmon to fish for ourselves.
You'll see similar problems with the Colorado River. The Hoover Dam has basically destroyed all the downstream ecosystems that relied on the water to create their living conditions. It's an ecological disaster in slow motion.
The rivers in the PNW tend to be nutrient poor, because they're mountain runoff. I've read that salmon swimming upstream and dying are a major provider of nutrients for the upstream ecosystem.
The large dams on the Columbia and Snake are fairly safe from being eliminated, even if they do cause some habitat loss.
Turning them off while fry are heading downstream ought to help, some.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEo4NNo7oaM
Meanwhile 92% of Germany's energy consumption is still fossil fuels, but at least it won't be nuclear!
Why wouldn’t renewables be able to scale?
Like we need boosters that are really powerful to lift us off from earth's gravity well, that's why we can't hook up our space shuttles to an outlet in the wall because it doesn't deliver enough raw power.
Ah, thanks. I somehow thought they'd be more special than this and required more attention. I think it's because of pop scifi tv show where scientists do some experiments and the building gets dark half the time after that because “of the enormous amount of energy required to teleport this cat in time or behind the wall“.
> During LHC operations, the CERN site draws roughly 200 MW of electrical power from the French electrical grid, which, for comparison, is about one-third the energy consumption of the city of Geneva; the LHC accelerator and detectors draw about 120 MW thereof.[34] Each day of its operation generates 140 terabytes of data.[35]
Alternatively, you can tell the grid operator that you're about to draw more power (probably paying them for the privilege), and they can in turn pay some standby generation to turn on at the same time.
I don't know whether the Large Hadron Collider needs this.
Other than that, electricity is electricity for the most part. It's all run through transformers to have the same voltage and frequency.
Some generation sources are also good because you can turn them on and off quickly (dispatchability), or because they help to keep the grid A.C. frequency and voltage stable. Batteries are also great for both of these. Usually the grid operator pays some generators to provide these services.
1. It is obviously dangerous, requiring extreme safety measures.
2. It requires large amounts of water.
3. It is unpopular.
4. It is so complex that building plants regularly exceeds budgets (there is little repetition and thus little learning)
5. It requires ridiculous storage/transport protocols for spent fuel. In Fukushima, one of the biggest concern was the spent fuel pool. That stuff is so hot, you cannot safely move it across the country and thus it has to accumulate on-site.
Compare this to solar and battery storage: You can literally build a factory for both in the same ten or more years it takes to build the nuclear power plant. There is absolutely no physical reason not to produce 100 times as many batteries and solar panels as we do now. Resources are abundant (you can replace rare materials at a slight cost of efficiency).
We are not at the point where we can use 100% solar/wind yet but the path is clear. On the other hand, we might be able to do the same with safe and efficient nuclear power, but that path is much less clear. Molten salt? Micro plants? Thorium? There is no one out there doing any of that fancy new stuff in practice, sonny bet is on mass-scale of solar, wind, and batteries.
But they got theirs and in 25 years will be gone.
This is why every cost argument as well as CO2 pricing scheme fails, and why were in the dire straits now.
Solar and wind start producing competitive power immediately. There is much less room there for corruption, but the immediate income from output drives investment.
I think the reality is fossil fuel was damn cheap and nuclear was not.
I imagine they wouldn’t have done so if global warming was well-understood back then.
It’s hard to find global statistics, but 14 people were killed by wind turbines in 2011, in England alone:
https://www.quora.com/On-average-how-many-people-do-wind-tur...
Roofing is the second most dangerous profession in the US. I’m sure solar panels have also killed more people than nuclear incidents.
As for pollution? All energy sources pollute. Nuclear is better than coal. I don’t know how it compares to solar + wind + batteries + hydro, but those last two are definitely big sources of pollution, and batteries are obviously creating more waste by volume than nuclear.
No, renewables cannot provide all the power we need even if humanity scales down the energy use, which is not going to happen.
(Batteries, even sodium-sulfur, at these scales are impossibly expensive, same with pumped storage.)
The problem of renewables is not the power they can produce, but how to handle intermittency. Better electricity networks are one part of the solution, batteries can be as well.
Even with 50% renewables Germany has one of the most stable electricity networks in the world.
Also in the traditional base-peaked system you still need peeking power plants and you have problems with weather effects (in summer water in rivers can get too warm to use it or dry up, in winter it can freeze)
Actually, if we're talking about safety, we can. There are some good total cost analyses, since governments also want to know how power can be produced most cheaply. The US and UK both published reports about this with somewhat varying (but ballpark similar) numbers. But anyway, we were talking about safety.
> [...] and negative personal effects
Okay, please bring on the stats then. I agree that this is relevant to the safety discussion and, thus, the discussion whether we should use nuclear fission going forward, but I never see anyone cite comparative stats on displacement, illnesses, etc. All I ever see is that nuclear kills very, very few people per TWh compared to current energy sources, making it seem very attractive to build as a replacement when looking at this metric. You'd have to have a huge number of people falling ill or being displaced (but not dying) due to nuclear disasters or uranium mining to make it better than our current energy sources.
If nuclear were 10x safer but no cheaper, it would still be moribund.
If nuclear were 10x cheaper but no safer, it would be the dominant energy source on the planet.
Let's do the numbers. Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada costed $5B. Nuclear costs something like $6B per installed GW. Gigafactory can produce 35 GWh of storage per year, which is just over one day of storage for a single nuclear reactor.
Now, how much these batteries cost? Let's be generous to Tesla, and assume that unit price will be around $100/kWh. That means that the Gigafactory can produce $3.5B worth of batteries per year.
Suppose you have $6B dollars. What would you rather buy, 2 years worth of entire output of Tesla Gigafactory, that would give you 3 days worth of storage at 1GW output, and which would still require spending additional billions on building primary generation (solar and wind), or one nuclear reactor that would give you the same 1GW for next 50 years, with very low operational costs?
Primary battery storage simply doesn't make economic sense at grid scale at the moment. This is not to say that renewables are stupid, or that batteries are useless. It's just the idea of using wind/solar + batteries as a base load just doesn't make sense at current level of technology, and this is why nobody is actually doing it, or planning to do it. If, or when it starts to make sense, you'll see entrepreneurs invest billions in buying up batteries and setting up battery farms. However, this does not make sense now, and will not make sense for probably at least another decade.
You can't just put that at number 1 and then ignore it in the rest of the comment. It would be a big revelation and we need to update books if you know something about nuclear fission accidents that others don't.
An overly optimistic statement if every I saw one. China is a case in point,they're bringing more and more fossil-fuelled power stations online by the year.
And at that rate, the rest of the world risks being left behind in energy poverty or becoming dependent on China et al for their energy needs.
Wars have been fought over less.
"Oh, we're going to replace that nuclear power plant with wind and solar!"
Oh, really? Are you going to do that AFTER phasing out fossil fuel plants or BEFORE? Because if it's before, you're making the case that climate change is a lower priority than retiring the cleanest and one of the cheapest and safest power sources humankind has ever developed. Because you could ALWAYS choose to just replace those fossil power plants with wind and solar and batteries instead, but you're making the decision to keep that fossil fuel plant running longer than it needs to.
Similar argument for getting rid of existing hydroelectric dams.
And I'm talking about long existing plants, here. All those cement emissions (and reservoir emissions for hydro) already happened and were "paid for." We need to protect all near-zero energy sources until the last fossil power plant on the continent is decommissioned. Then go ahead and retire your nuclear or hydro power plant.
(Addressed to no one in particular, but these arguments in favor of premature retiring of functioning clean energy power plants are widespread and it ticks me off. Plus, retiring them early also increases the cost of electricity, which slows electrification. I bet electric cars would be a LOT more popular--and fossil fuel cars less popular--in Germany if their electricity price weren't so insane.)
However, I dispute calling nuclear "one of the cheapest and safest power sources humankind has ever developed".
The order of magnitude of Fukushima cleanup costs is $1 trillion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos...
There's also the touchy issue of storing spent nuclear fuel and contaminated hardware. Ignoring the problem presents a hidden cost and safety risks.
Still on safety: nuclear enthusiasts often equate that reliable under nominal conditions implies reliable in practice. As if negligence and stupidity weren't factors in the real world.
Back to your point: we need to collectively admit that climate change relates to our practice of postponing the costs of pollution -- a massive economic externality that needs correction. The solutions are expensive and require commitment.
Fukushima, for all the flaws (including some paranoia that led to unnecessary evacuations, etc), still didn't kill anyone even though thousands of people died in the tsunami. That's how safe nuclear is.
That's not a compelling argument, when the premise is misleading. While you (and others) split hairs over what "kill" means, people actually die from it.
https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/radiation-from-fukushima-disaste...
https://world.wng.org/2014/09/locals_suffer_long_term_effect...
There was an actual tsunami that killed thousands of people directly. And worsened, slightly by climate change ocean level rise (by us refusing to decommission fossil fuel plants).
Hell, even if you count all the people that have to evacuate for each Fukushima, we are still only at 4 million people moved/year vs. 8.7 million people death/year with fossil fuel power generation.
There are three more things to keep in mind:
1. I don't think we will have anywhere near 10 Fukushimas every year.
2. A lot of those stressed related death and evacuations are due to overly precautionary measures.
3. Death is much worse than having to relocate.
Yes, nuclear power generation does kill. However, the point is, it is significantly safer than fossil fuel.
The problem with pressurised water reactors is that failure is a very low probability but potentially very large consequences event. The advantage of fossil fuels (for public acceptance) is whilst the risk and the number of deaths are much higher (by a couple of orders of magnitude), the effects are spread out across space and time, and so are easy to ignore in our daily lives.
All this is a tragic misunderstanding of the situation we’re in. Ultimately, 100% renewables is a worthy goal. In the short to long term, shutting down nuclear power plants means burning fossil fuel. Climate is already spiralling out of control. The time to clean up our acts was 50 years ago, and now every decade we spend burning gas, oil, and coal is something we will pay dearly.
So yeah, nuclear is not ideal. It’s still part of the best strategy we have to produce clean energy.
> Quantifying the number of deaths or cancers in this case tells you nothing relevant to make a decision or risk assessment
The two conflicting viewpoints posited in the same paragraph, seems ironic. The first is the issue, but requires veracity. The second is nonsensical. Humans make these decisions every day.
Humans make a lot of stupid decisions rooted in gut feeling and prejudice all the time. A small subset of these decisions involve long-term industrial strategy at a national level or the life of millions of people. For these decisions we ought to do better.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
If politicians ever decide it has become an issue, the storage facility can be constructed.
But there are other deep geological repositories around the world.[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
Also, what do you mean by paranoia and unnecessary evacuations? Nobody could even guess what was going to happen. When will explosions happen? How many? What direction will the wind blow? The power plant was out of control. The US government didn't assist with evacuations until AFTER the first release which spread contamination south hitting Tokyo, and east hitting their own USS Ronald Reagan.
Paranoid? Unnecessary? Sorry, that's a cruel thing to say to those who were contaminated.
"That's how safe nuclear is."
And it’s cruel to move thousands of people by force (and some of them died in the process). This is just an appeal to emotions, please don’t do that. There is already plenty to discuss about the effect of low-level radiation and risk assessments. Everybody is contaminated with radionuclides, there are numbers you can use to show that this specific contamination was more important than different background levels. Looking at those numbers show that the exclusion zone was vastly over-estimated.
I'd rewrite it as
> one of the safest power sources humankind has ever developed[0]
because this is difficult to dispute. Cost is a more complicated matter and depends what you're counting and how you're comparing. Are you including tragedy of the commons? I.e. carbon emissions, mining, storage (batteries, waste, etc), land usage, etc. If any of these are included in the costs the price changes quite a bit and I'd argue it is not in good faith to compare solar and wind to hydro, coal, nuclear, etc if you don't include battery storage/costs because intermittent energy isn't equal to continuous (unless you over allocate).
To continue along the line of the gp the worst case estimates of nuclear deaths (including future deaths) is still lower than 8 years of of coal in the US using the best case stats. If we use more reliable data (the consensus from the UN and other independent studies) even including future deaths are lower than a single year of coal's best case in the US. So how much do you value human life? Because we're talking about 81 people[1] (4k if we assume we don't get better at treating cancer over the next 20 years) vs 39k PER YEAR (low 7.5k high 42k per year US coal particulate related deaths). Let that sink in again: 31 people died immediately from Chernobyl, an additional 50 due to Chernobyl, 0 from 3 Mile Island, and 0 Fukushima. Those are the deaths of nuclear power.
> The order of magnitude of Fukushima ...
> Still on safety: nuclear enthusiasts often equate that reliable under nominal conditions implies reliable in practice. As if negligence and stupidity weren't factors in the real world.
I'm often frustrated by Fukushima being brought up and people implying that it came down to human stupidity. Yes, that was a factor, but there was a much larger and significantly more important factor. The earthquake that caused the tsunami was the largest in recorded (by actual measurement) history (for Japan) and the 4th largest EVER recorded. The second largest recorded was an 8.5 in 1896 and the second largest theorized was an 8.9 in the year 869. Remember this is not linear growth. Based on this the likelihood of an earthquake and tsunami like that happening within the lifetime of the powerplant was incredibly low. Were the earthquake an 8.5 Fukushima wouldn't have happened. It is an absurd statement to chock this up to human fault. We're talking about an absurdly rare and freak event, and no one died.
As to the cost of the cleanup (which includes tsunami cleanup as well as radiation fwiw), well we could make it a lot cheaper if we reduced the acceptable levels of early death by radiation. The hard part is that there may or may not be small radioactive particulate on the ground and this could get introduced into water or food (getting inside the body). Letting people move back would still likely result in less deaths than coal does per year. I'm not advocating for this, I think that'd be insane, but why is this insane? Why is pumping out more coal not more insane? What's the difference? We're talking about human lives and livelihood here. When it is more humane to send people back to live in a radioactive zone than keeping coal plants online, maybe we should re-question our priors. What issue are we trying to solve? Because if it is saving human lives we're doing a pretty bang up job. If it is cost, ditto. If it is climate, ditto.
The arguments being made here are often absurd. There is no question that nuclear is clean and safe. The question is about cost, how much you value human life, how much you value carbon, and how much you value pollution. But if you think lives are cheap, climate change isn't real, and (not or) pollution isn't a big deal, then yeah, continue fighting against nuclear because it is costly.
[0] clusterfish ↗ Bringing up the cost of a nuclear disaster is like seeing a news report of an aircrash and concluding that cars are a safer means to travel. orthecreedence ↗ > Bringing up the cost of a nuclear disaster fuoqi ↗ >Ok, so solar and wind are great, but now you're building massive batteries to store the energy at night. Maursault ↗ While this thread makes some fair points, one that is missed is that safety is only one part of the reason [1] nuclear power is the most expensive way to generate electricity, and always has been. "Power too cheap to meter," never materialized, not even remotely. baix777 ↗ Solar panels, which we have built millions of, are on a learning curve. The more we build, the cheaper they get. Storage is still a problem, but that too can handled in a distributed manner where the learning curve can be applied. orthecreedence ↗ > if nuclear power were economically viable clusterfish ↗ Free market is good and subsidies are bad, says the person advocating for distortion of market conditions to favor certain technologies that the free market doesn't want (that much). pfdietz ↗ > Ok, so solar and wind are great, but now you're building massive batteries to store the energy at night. That's expensive, no? orthecreedence ↗ "The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago." pfdietz ↗ Land cost is computable and is not a showstopper (particularly in the US). orthecreedence ↗ I was unaware of hydrogen-fueled turbines or energy storage via electrolysis. I have some more research to do. Thank you. WalterBright ↗ It might be far cheaper and practical to just make an "exclusion zone" out of the areas around Fukushima rather than trying to clean them up. llsf ↗ France does recycle nuclear waste: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
The resulting waste is vitrified, and much smaller: https://www.world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-is-nuc... sir_bearington ↗ > The order of magnitude of Fukushima cleanup costs is $1 trillion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos... [deleted] ↗ (comment deleted) lostlogin ↗ > $15 billion over 30 years is a big bill. But amortized over the hundreds of nuclear power plants in existence, it adds little to the overall cost of nuclear power. to11mtm ↗ > That’s spreading the cost of one plant, once incident. There are a lot more plants and Japan isn’t the most geologically stable place. sir_bearington ↗ Yes, but the cost is spread out over all the nuclear plants in operation. Nuclear energy already provides 10% of the world's nuclear power. We currently average one significant nuclear catastrophe every 20 years. $15 billion every 2 years is a miniscule cost relative to the amount of power nuclear energy provides. GuB-42 ↗ > There's also the touchy issue of storing spent nuclear fuel and contaminated hardware. Ignoring the problem presents a hidden cost and safety risks. junon ↗ Right. People need to check up on the latest Nuclear advancements. We're getting quite good at refining waste products down to safe enough levels of radioactivity, and then we can even further utilize the remaining waste in other applications. jboog ↗ Why leave out the cost of fossil fuel power sources throughout history? pfdietz ↗ We leave that out because it's irrelevant to whether nuclear or renewables should be used to replace fossil fuels. jboog ↗ it is literally impossible for renewables to replace fossil fuels given current technology and anything on the horizon for at least the next decade, probably much longer. Stupulous ↗ I think the question is whether renewables should replace nuclear or fossil fuels first. The top level comment isn't talking about replacing fossil fuels with nuclear. jboog ↗ Renewables CANNOT replace nuclear OR fossil fuels. It's literally impossible based on current or any near-term technology. pfdietz ↗ > Renewables CANNOT replace nuclear OR fossil fuels. It's literally impossible based on current or any near-term technology. jboog ↗ You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. pfdietz ↗ No sir, YOU have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Note that you are not claiming that they could be competitive, but that they could not do it at all, regardless of price. This is clearly nonsense. [deleted] ↗ (comment deleted) jboog ↗ Please feel free to point me to any developed country that has successfully replaced fossil fuel and nuclear baseload generation with renewables and energy storage. bob29 ↗ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26404232 pfdietz ↗ The argument you make there is of course invalid. sir_bearington ↗ > although it's more than just using Li-ion batteries. bob29 ↗ https://energystorage.org/why-energy-storage/technologies/ sir_bearington ↗ Really? What company can I call up and buy 50 GWh of storage from? That's only 6 minutes worth of storage for the USA. bob29 ↗ There isn't a company you can call up because projects of this magnitude aren't quoted over the phone to internet forums users.
50 GWh is stored in ~30,000 barrels of synthetic fuel. GWh is an incomplete way to specify storage, there are different technologies for the different ways storage may be needed, depending on what resources are on the grid: short term to handle the peaks of everyone microwaving their breakfast and coffee at 7am or long term storage to handle a once every few decades event like a Texas snow storm. sir_bearington ↗ The point is that saying "No one is presently making these" on one hand, and claiming that they're within existing industrial capacity is contradictory. Energy markets like Hawaii and California are already hitting situations where energy cost is near zero due to overproduction from intermittent sources. But the promise that entrepreneurs will store this energy and put it back on the grid later has yet to pan out - contrary to the insistence of storage evangelists, hydrogen storage, synthetic methane, thermal batteries, and whatnot are a lot harder to build than one might think. pfdietz ↗ It's not contradictory. The storage is not being done now not because it's impossible, but because the market conditions that would cause it (specifically, high carbon taxes) aren't there yet. Something like pumped thermal storage requires no new technology. It's just putting together things we can already build. jboog ↗ I'm glad you can google "energy storage" and click on one of the first links but literally none of these are currently capable of replacing baseload nuclear and fossil fuel energy generation. bob29 ↗ I didn't "furiously google" anything I "calmly referenced" some of the MANY notes I have from following articles, podcasts, and journals in this field, which I have spent most of my career in. Stupulous ↗ About 1/5th of US energy usage is renewable. That means we can shutdown 1/5th of nonrenewable plants or shutdown all nonrenewables 1/5th of the time, real answer somewhere in between. The top level post recommends doing this only to carbon sources and leaving nuclear alone. sir_bearington ↗ It is highly relevant, because renewables are not presently capable of replacing fossil fuels. And they won't be until massive energy storage systems, literally thousands of times better than what we have now, is developed. California, Hawaii, and other places are already hitting saturated electricity markets during the daytime. Companies aren't starting to install storage, as renewable evangelists promised. dragonwriter ↗ > Companies aren't starting to install storage, as renewable evangelists promised. sir_bearington ↗ Th fact that California only has 1.5 GWh of storage is precisely the reason why wind and solar cannot form the primary source of energy. Who cares if the state met it's storage goals if the storage goals were tiny? dragonwriter ↗ That's not 1.5GWh energy stored, it's 1.5GW output from storage systems (output is the key metric because the storage systems aren't very rapid discharge, and the key factor in adequacy isn't how much energy is stored but how much power can be delivered from storage when other systems aren't delivering. And it's not just about meeting current targets but the rapid pace of new storage coming online. jboog ↗ Absolutely none of this changes the undeniable fact that "storage" is incapable of meeting the demands of baseload power generation currently provided by Nuclear and fossil fuels. sir_bearington ↗ > That's not 1.5GWh energy stored, it's 1.5GW output from storage systems dragonwriter ↗ > So how much is actually stored? sir_bearington ↗ > That's not actually the key figure of merit, the problem isn't how long stored sources can be used but peak output. Accujack ↗ Addressing your points in order:
Air pollution kills millions of people and costs trillions of dollars, every single year. Much of it is caused by burning fossils.
https://www.oecd.org/env/tools-evaluation/thecostofairpollut...
I don't know about you but I would rather a power plant's exhaust would be contained in small rods rather than dispersed globally and embedded as microparticles in my lungs.
Moreover, it's the environmental activists who prevent the construction and operation of long term storage sites for spent fuel, and in general threaten the industry, disincentivizing the development of new reactors designed to reduce waste. You don't get to do that and also complain that the storage problem isn't being solved at the same time.
Also...how about oil spills? How much money, adjusted for inflation over time, have we dumped into cleaning that shit up over and over? And speaking of costs, what's the cost of entire cities being underwater in a decade or two?
Ok, so solar and wind are great, but now you're building massive batteries to store the energy at night. That's expensive, no?
Pound for pound, nuclear seems like the most effective option we have at the moment. If fossil fuels were priced according to how much damage they are actually causing the planet, nuclear would seem pretty cheap too. The only reason nuclear even seems remotely expensive is because we're (stupidly) letting markets dictate the price of fossil fuels.
Also production of solar panels is quite far from being "green" as well. Luckily most of solar production is handled by China, a country with quite lax environmental standards, so most of the HN crowd does not feel the environmental impact from it.
Proponents for nuclear power will extoll its virtues while completely ignoring the bottom line: if nuclear power were economically viable, nothing, nothing whatsoever could prevent the mass adoption and proliferation of nuclear energy. Energy is enterprise, and enterprise requires investors. So without investors, or with only investors that leave the public holding the bag of paying massive subsidies for construction of nuclear plants, storage of waste and plant decommissioning, all the while charging that same public a premium for electricity, nuclear power plants won't get built and many that did and do were and are abandoned thanks to cost overruns.
IMO, the solution is staring us in the face: decentralize power generation by requiring all new buildings, houses, structures, anything built that needs power, to generate their own electricity on site. If every artificial surface everywhere that got sun was covered in PV, power would be far cheaper than centralizing the generation of everyone's electricity in hundreds of (initially) $20B nuclear power plants.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...
Nuclear, which we have built 100s of, never got to a critical mass where the cost started going down. Nuclear plants are just not built on time and budget. The alternatives to nuclear aren't going to be easy, but humanity has been trying to get nuclear to work for over 50 years and has failed.
I think you missed one of my main points: "The only reason nuclear even seems remotely expensive is because we're (stupidly) letting markets dictate the price of fossil fuels."
Nuclear IS economically viable. We just haven't figured it out yet. I know that sounds snarky, but it's as close to the truth as we can possibly get. If fossil fuels were priced according to their known externalities, not just based on supply/demand, nuclear would be astronomically cheap by comparison.
The problem is the economy itself is completely ignoring the costs of the alternatives to nuclear. We all know how bad fossil fuels are, but we haven't priced that knowledge into their cost. They are not cheaper than nuclear, we are simply lying to ourselves. This in itself highlights a very huge flaw in capitalist markets.
Granted, this is somewhat independent of solar vs nuclear, which is an entire discussion in itself.
If only the government made the stupid investors understand which technologies are cheaper...
---
If renewables are as cheap as advertised they'll sweep the market on their own. But it seems to me that claims of cheap storage are just as far fetched as those of cheap nuclear, despite tons of subsidies and support that renewables get.
Wind and solar are never going to power literally everything everywhere all the time. The sun and wind are not evenly distributed, and no amount of storage or transmission will economically fix that, ever. You'll have several different power sources for different needs, and I find it hard to prefer fracking and coal burning to modern nuclear.
Yes, but remember that any nuclear plant whose construction is started now will not be available for about 10 years. So it will be competing with the storage technologies of maybe 8 years from now. Given the rate of improvement in cost, it's very likely IMO that nuclear will be more expensive than just synthesizing the equivalent baseload source from renewables and storage.
https://model.energy/
I'm not convinced there aren't hidden costs with wind and solar, such as finding the land to put them on or the complexity of storing energy for night time usage or cloudy days or lack of wind etc.
What I do know is nuclear is able to power our collective needs just fine, day and night, RIGHT NOW and all we need to do is build the fucking things. So, let's build them...now.
Renewables are still an unknown, nuclear is not, and I'm not comfortable staking the future of the planet on "wellll, it will probably be fine in 10 years."
Storage is addressed at that modeling site. In particular, a mix of energy storage technologies appears to be very useful (not just batteries). A key is to note that a simple cycle turbine power plant is 5% of the capital cost of a nuclear plant per kW. So, if we had to totally back up the grid with hydrogen-burning turbines that could, in a rare pinch, supply 100% of the demand, it still would be cheap compared to supplying that same power with nuclear power plants.
Even the oft-cited $200 billion is an exaggeration. Bear in mind these figures from from politicians, nowhere near this amount has actually been spent. As far a figures for the money actually spent, let's go with your own source:
> In 2016, University of Oxford researcher and author Peter Wynn Kirby wrote that the government had allocated the equivalent of US$15 billion for the regional cleanup
Let's see if we can get more recent sources on spending related to Fukushima. Form a 2020 article [1]
> Since fiscal 2014, it has set aside about 35 billion yen annually for the interim storage facilities. The funds come from revenues earmarked for nuclear energy-related projects in the special account.
> But expenditures concerning the storage facilities are running a lot higher than initially envisaged.
> An estimate released in late 2016 by the Ministry of Trade, Economy and Industry showed that the project will eventually cost 1.6 trillion yen, compared with an initial projection of 1.1 trillion yen.
> The government has allocated an additional 12 billion yen annually for the storage facility project since fiscal 2017.
Okay, so the Japanese government is saying that it'll cost 1.6 trillion yen (about $15 billion dollars) total. They're actually spending 35 + 12 = 47 billion yen annually, which is ~$433 million. $15 billion over 30 years is a big bill. But amortized over the hundreds of nuclear power plants in existence, it adds little to the overall cost of nuclear power.
1. http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13225190
That’s spreading the cost of one plant, once incident. There are a lot more plants and Japan isn’t the most geologically stable place. It has had its share of accidents too. I wouldn’t be betting against more accidents in the next 30 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_nuclear_inc...
I think it would be worth comparing to the costs of incidents with other energy forms. Deepwater Horizon comes to mind with a cost 2 or 3 times that number (not counting fines). To say nothing of all the spills/incidents we don't hear about with tankers spilling/leaking on the open waters, just far enough away nobody notices.
And that's assuming newer plants don't have any improved safety over Fukushima. We already feature secondary containment, which would have prevent Chernobyl from being nearly as bad as it was, the Soviets just didn't build secondary containment. The reality is that we only have one instance of a meltdown breaching secondary containment in over 70 years of nuclear power operation.
And lastly, all this needs to be viewed relative to the ecological impact of covering several percent of the Earth's land surface in solar panels, and the environmental damage from fossil fuels that will be necessary until effective energy storage is developed.
Is it really that big of a problem? Sure, the cost of dealing with these is not negligible but in the end, it is just a matter of digging a hole in a deserted place and putting things there. It is dangerous stuff and is to be handled with care, but we deal with dangerous stuff all the times: explosives, toxic chemicals, weapons, ... and nuclear waste is not that high on the list.
The usual argument is that nuclear waste can stay hot for thousands of years. In fact, while true, the kind of stuff that stays radioactive on these time scales tends to be weak, The most concerning elements are usually those with decades-long half lives. Compare to stable but toxic elements like mercury that last forever.
Also worth noting that coal contains long lived radioactive elements that end up in the atmosphere after being burned. So, coal plants also produce nuclear waste, but instead of having it conveniently stored in a specialized facility, it is released in the atmosphere to be stored into your lungs. As I said, long life elements are weak, so it is not that much of a problem, but it is not a reason to do the worst thing that can possibly be done with these.
And while we keep talking about waste, this is only waste because we don't use it. Radioactive "waste" is made of rare elements that produce energy, and maybe a treasure for future generations.
It's not like we've hit a dead end with nuclear research, people have just seen too much Chernobyl stuff and cast a large net on the whole science.
And deaths caused by fossil fuel emissions which is in the tens of thousands per year.
Fukushima and Chernobyl combined are a tiny fraction of FF emissions/deaths/costs.
So that leaves...Nuclear.
So again, why are you fear-mongering about how "dangerous" nuclear is when it's a tiny tiny fraction of the real danger of fossil fuels?
I thought climate change was like an urgent crisis or something....?
We are being told on the one hand that climate change is an existential threat to tens (hundreds?) of millions of people. Oh but actually we can just refuse to decarbonize our energy production because maybe someday 10, 20, 50 or 100 years from now there's a true "green" renewable energy I guess.
Nonsense. It's clear they can, although it's more than just using Li-ion batteries.
There is no way that renewable energy can replace baseload power generation of FF and natural gas given current technology.
All you have is magical thinking and science fiction.
I'll save you the time. No one has done it. And no, not because evil mustachio-twirling Koch brothers are pulling the strings. Because the technology does not exist at scale to do this.
Or do you want to continue with your speculative science fiction daydreams?
Your argument is "it hasn't happened yet, therefore it cannot happen". This argument proves entirely too much; it implies no technological change can ever occur. To make this argument, you have to demonstrate that the situations in which the change did not occur are the same in all important respects as the current situation. And you cannot do that. Here's what's different.
(1) The cost of renewables has crashed, especially in the last decade. In the case of PV, by nearly an order of magnitude. This is an extreme rate of change for an energy technology.
(2) The cost of storage has also fallen rapidly, and continues to fall.
(3) Market conditions are now beginning to favor installation of storage, as they didn't before (when there's enough dispatchable gas on the grid vs. renewables storage doesn't pay off.)
(4) The existing infrastructure was largely installed at times when renewables were not competitive. However, it won't be ripped out until it becomes uneconomical to operate it (which means ignoring its capital cost). So observing that the source are still being used doesn't imply renewables are not winning.
(5) Fossil fuels have not, and still large are not, being taxed at a level appropriate for the damage they are going to do. Renewables don't have to beat fossil fuels unburdened by CO2 taxes (although we may have waited long enough with CO2 taxes that they may increasingly do so, at least in some market conditions). CO2 taxes will rise to the level needed to push fossil fuels entirely out of the market, and then the question becomes "which is cheaper, nuclear or renewables (or, possibly, fossil fuels with CCS)"?
(6) Once fossil fuels are out of the way, it is crystal clear from the data that absent some technological breakthroughs, new nuclear power plants are grossly uncompetitive vs. renewables. This (and not ludicrous conspiracy theory) is why you're seeing massive installation of renewables around the world, and nuclear installs are gasping for breath.
It'd probably be helpful to elaborate, rather than just insist that the above commenter is wrong and loosely suggest at other solutions.
Things like hydrogen storage, synthetic methane, and thermal storage remain in the prototyping phase. I think it's not correct to say that they can, seeing as there isn't even a commercial market for these technologies let alone one that we know will scale. By comparison countries have already powered >80% of their electricity with nuclear.
It's clear than nuclear power can completely replace fossil fuels. Renewables might be able to replace it, but that's a gamble based on assuming a new storage solution will work excellent. Not just better, but truly blows-everything-else-out-of-the-water phenomenal. When the stakes at play are stopping climate change, this is a very risky assumption to make.
These technologies exist today and are based on sound thermodynamic principles and existing industrial capability.
I'd say if we could provision 1 hour's worth of storage over the span of a decade, that'd amount to a demonstration of economic feasibility. But few of these upcoming technologies are making it out of the prototyping stage, let alone commerical success on this scale.
No one is presently making these because the policy of the grid was developed around power plants that dig stuff out of the ground and burn it - the markets are based on bidding with the assumption every power plant will have a marginal cost of generation relative to the cost of its fuel. This policy doesn't reflect the nature of renewables which besides their capital cost have very low to 0 marginal cost of production. This has disrupted the energy markets in many ways and policy is still being developed to incentivize storage capacity.
You can listen to the people who work in this industry and have studied it deeply or you can keep googling furiously for webpages that support your magical thinking.
In fact, I didn't see ANY links from you supporting your nonsense about renewables not working, despite them working in many places across the globe.
>literally none of these are currently capable of replacing baseload nuclear and fossil fuel energy generation.
Literally STORAGE will never replace GENERATION, they are two different concepts which most people understand but you apparently don't. STORAGE can supplement INTERMITTENT GENERATION to create DISPATCHABLE GENERATION for far cheaper than nuclear plants.
There are good arguments for and against pivoting to nuclear right now. But there is an (I think) unquestionable position presented here that we shouldn't be pivoting away from nuclear and shutting down plants.
Yes, they are, at least in California which has an aggressive storage policy: https://blog.ucsusa.org/guest-commentary/five-facts-about-en...
We aren't anywhere close and won't be for many years which is why it's so absolutely ridiculous how green activists implicitly endorse using coal, natural gas and other fossil fuels which kill tens of thousands of people every year and are cooking the planet, when we have nuclear, which kills no one, and does not contribute substantively to climate change.
It's almost like the activists care more about posturing and magical thinking than they do "saving the planet"...
So how much is actually stored? 1.5GW for 10 minutes? 15 minutes? Watts isn't a unit of storage, watts per a unit of time is a unit of storage.
That's not actually the key figure of merit, the problem isn't how long stored sources can be used but peak output.
> 1.5GW for 10 minutes? 15 minutes?
All of it for longer than that (none of the various utility-scale sources have a discharge that quickly), which is why power and not energy is the thing that is targeted. But it varies (utility-scale battery systems have a different profile [and differing within that by specific battery tech] than thermal storage which has a different profile than pumped hydro, etc.)
> Watts isn't a unit of storage
No, it's a unit of power, and the main problem right now is being able to meet needed output levels when other sources are offline. The concern is the depth of the trough that storage can handle, you need breadth too, so a substantial level of that comes inherently with depth, and the main concern is short-term variation.
That is exactly the problem. Yes, output matter, too, but capacity is the main figure people are interested in. If storage system A can output 1.5 GW but only for 1 hour, and system B can output 1.5 GW but for 10 hours then these are very different systems.
> All of it for longer than that
And how long is it? Basically we're trying to find the area of rectangle. You're providing the height, but staying conspicuously mum about the width.
> The concern is the depth of the trough that storage can handle, you need breadth too, so a substantial level of that comes inherently with depth, and the main concern is short-term variation.
No, the concern is both depth and breadth. It's easy to build a battery system that puts out a lot of energy for a short period of time. It's hard to build a battery system that puts out a lot of energy for 12 hours.
The cost of Fukushima has to be measured against the benefit, IE the cost per gigawatt-hour of power created. FYI, the estimated cost is about $200 billion per the Japanese government:
https://apnews.com/article/d1b8322355f3f31109dd925900dff200
So, to obtain a real comparison between the two, you'd have to add up the total costs of cleanup, environmental damage, health damage to people and animals, and all the other total costs of both fossil fuels generation and nuclear power.
Hint: Whether you're looking at total cost of ownership per gigawatt hour or cost to produce electricity per GWh, nuclear is cheaper.
>There's also the touchy issue of storing spent nuclear fuel and contaminated hardware.
Not as touchy as you think. Most of the contaminated materials that exist are from nuclear weapons production, which is a completely separate problem from power plants. Right now, those power plants (at least in the US) are mostly storing their spent fuel in dry casks on site with few or no problems.
The amount of dry cask storage needed fits within the boundaries of those sites so far.... IE, spent fuel is not a huge volume of material.
> nuclear enthusiasts often equate that reliable under nominal conditions implies reliable in practice. As if negligence and stupidity weren't factors in the real world.
This statement can apply to any real world engineering endeavor. You don't eliminate risk in a large project anyway. You anticipate it and mitigate it. You assume things will go wrong and make sure when they do that nothing particularly bad happens. That's just good design.
https://asiatimes.com/2021/03/wind-and-solar-reliance-would-...
However, it's going to take much longer if we start with phasing out nuclear before fossil, which means spewing massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. We can't afford that time.
"Old nuclear" is fundamentally not cost competitive with current solar/wind, and it's only going to get much much worse in the next decade, especially if perovskites hit mainstream utility solar and cheap grid storage (such as that military salt water battery or increasing-density LFP) becomes a reality.
The barrage of hydrogen, nuclear, and synthetic fuel stories is indicative of the desperation of the market reality of solar/wind/electric vehicle/battery economics to oil/gas/nuclear/ICE.
Once the price curves flatten out, then maybe next-gen hydro/nuclear/geothermal can chase a stable price point. I do think nuclear can still beat solar/wind once the economics of those stabilize and with the right regulatory, after all I'm a LFTR stan.
"Old Nuclear" plants will be propped up by the military that want their weapons grade isotopes.
In order to replace fossil fuels using wind and storage you would need significant more than 4 hours, using a much slower charge cycle. If we want to have something like 1 week of storage, with an expected charge cycle of 2 weeks (ie one week where the wind is producing more than the grid, followed by one week where it is producing less), we are talking about 42x in capacity, and the investment will get repaid 14x slower for each dollar invested.
Prices will need to drop and production will need to be heavily increased before batteries is viable for wind, and until then more fossil fueled power plants is being built in order to match the capacity of wind.
If I had to choose between battery and nuclear, my choice is neither. Simply ban fossil fuels while we wait for people to make up their mind.
That's like saying that someone who owns 90% of a publicly traded company is worth $9 billion just because the stock has a market cap of $10 billion. If they'd actually try to cash that stock, they'd run out of buyers and the stock price would go way, way down.
Solar and wind are great now, because we can pick a random spot and build it without needing storage and don't have many people objecting to it. (Yes, the lawsuits are there already, but so far we've only gotten to the low hanging fruit. It'll get much worse before we're anywhere near 50% green energy.) It's cheap if you just look at the cost of the pure panels/turbines.
The earth has a finite amount of habitable land. If you start filling that up with solar panels, land price will increase because you have to buy it from people that wanted to plant crops there or live there. A few countries like the USA and Argentina have it easy, but most places don't have large swathes of land laying around completely unused with wind and sun aplenty.
We currently use about 162 PWh worldwide, only 27 of which is electricity[1]. We're barely starting to make a dent in electricity production and what you hear left and right is "not in my backyard" and "not on my the neighbor's roof that I have to look at every day" (--my dad). We'd barely have the space if people wouldn't complain, let alone if we can only build it away from civilization. And that's replacing electricity production alone, we haven't really started on transportation, making things (cement, steel, plastics, ...), growing things (fertilizer, cow farts), and heating/cooling. What's more: due to only replacing a tiny percentage of electricity production with solar and wind, we aren't yet seeing the need for large scale energy storage, which seems like it will easily triple the cost with current technology (my takeaway from [2], p. 76).
You might counter with putting the stuff on sea instead to avoid the finite land issue. The primary problem there is that this is not where people live, increasing the cost of construction, maintenance, and energy transportation. For example, wind on sea is about as expensive as nuclear (I should start keeping notes on which sources I looked at before and copy-paste texts instead of memorize and reiterate). Solar I don't know, but for some reason we're not doing that on the same scale as wind, presumably for a good reason. There just aren't any easy shortcuts here, only compromises.
Let's not dismiss fission energy just yet. It might seem expensive today, but between a known ~2x price increase (iirc going full nuclear would increase the energy price by that much from today's price, though France has me wondering if I might be misremembering) and a larger cost if you do solar/wind+batteries+need-to-win-lots-of-lawsuits-for-space (which works out to be about 3x for just the hardware, using today's technology), I'll have fission reactors please. Until we have better tech, let's get started with the current tech and hope it becomes obsolete and we get cheaper energy with a sunk cost rather than not try because we might sink some cost.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_energy
[2] How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need - Bill Gates - 2021
So the objection is that the larger the share of renewable electricity, the higher the electricity price? I'm sure you can see why this is not really a problem? Because the higher the electricity price the more profitable it becomes to invest in renewable electricity. In fact, what currently is stalling the build-out of renewables in many European markets is that electricity prices have plummeted.
> A few countries like the USA and Argentina have it easy, but most places don't have large swathes of land laying around completely unused with wind and sun aplenty.
Most countries don't have large uranium deposits either. Importation and exportation solves such problems.
> What's more: due to only replacing a tiny percentage of electricity production with solar and wind, we aren't yet seeing the need for large scale energy storage, which seems like it will easily triple the cost with current technology (my takeaway from [2], p. 76).
44.6% of Germany's power production comes from renewables and it is not seeing any need for large-scale energy storage [1]. The need for large-scale energy storage may not materialize since fluctuations in power production will be matched by fluctuations in power consumption. In other words, there is no God-given right to mine Bitcoins 24/7 at a constant and minimal electricity price.
> You might counter with putting the stuff on sea instead to avoid the finite land issue. The primary problem there is that this is not where people live, increasing the cost of construction, maintenance, and energy transportation.
Most people don't live near nuclear power plants either.
> For example, wind on sea is about as expensive as nuclear (I should start keeping notes on which sources I looked at before and copy-paste texts instead of memorize and reiterate).
According to LAZARD 14.0, offshore wind costs on average $86/MWh to produce compared to $129-$198/MWh for nuclear [2]. And for offshore wind, costs keep falling while they are stagnant or increasing for nuclear.
> I'll have fission reactors please.
Then I hope you and like-minded are willing to finance the costs of new nuclear power yourselves, because I don't want my taxpayer money to be wasted on any more nuclear boondoggles.
[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c... [2] https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-o...
OP is talking about generation costs. Up is bad.
> Most countries don't have large uranium deposits either. Importation and exportation solves such problems.
To an extent, yes, but uranium doesn't leak out of your rail car the way that electricity is lost when you try to transport it. The choice is between power lines or converting it (with losses) in order to have a physical thing, like hydrogen, that can be transported.
> it is not seeing any need for large-scale energy storage [1].
Statement not found in citation. Also, they're at 8%, you found a source for electricity (not power). From my other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26405701 "Germany uses ~3.7PWh of energy only 0.6PWh of which is electricity [...] No large-scale storage needed if 92% of your energy can be generated from fossil fuels on demand."
> Most people don't live near nuclear power plants either.
https://www.powerplantmaps.com/nuclear.html Without checking each individual one, notice how they typically are within regular electricity transportation distance of the next major city (<100km, often <50km). This matches what I'm seeing when looking at the distances of wind built into the sea (mostly <50km off shore, virtually always within 100km).
> nuclear boondoggles
I'm not sure why I bothered replying actually, you've already dug in your heels. When I read this last bit, I figured I might as well stop here and regret spending those 20 minutes checking stuff (and so indeed I didn't bother checking your costs for offshore wind and the argument about me paying for it - in fact I pay for a lot of shit that other people don't, like Climeworks, because yeah I do actually care and we'll need all the tech we can get).
Long-distance transportation of electricity is feasible; transmission losses are about 3% per 1,000 km for high-voltage lines https://iea-etsap.org/E-TechDS/PDF/E12_el-t&d_KV_Apr2014_GSO.... Morocco and other North African countries are building massive solar farms to export electricity to Europe.
> Statement not found in citation. Also, they're at 8%, you found a source for electricity (not power). From my other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26405701 "Germany uses ~3.7PWh of energy only 0.6PWh of which is electricity [...] No large-scale storage needed if 92% of your energy can be generated from fossil fuels on demand."
Well, you wrote "due to only replacing a tiny percentage of electricity production with solar and wind, we aren't yet seeing the need for large scale energy storage" so the percentage of the electricity generated by renewables must be relevant. Is your claim that the need for large-scale storage will only arise when renewables stand for a large fraction of a country's total energy production? Currently, most countries have existing large-scale storage and distribution systems for fossil fuel. I imagine that they would need to be replaced with similar systems for electricity if most vehicles switches to electricity.
> > nuclear boondoggles
> I'm not sure why I bothered replying actually, you've already dug in your heels.
All recent nuclear projects in the West have been plagued by massive delays and cost overruns: Flamanville, Hinkley Point, Vogtle, and Olkiluoto. Those who have had to foot the bill for these failures are the taxpayers. At this point, it isn't unfair to ask those who think nuclear power is indispensable to risk their own money, rather than others.
What's your opinion of mask refusers?
How about people who don't actually refuse to wear a mask but who just sabotage all societal effort to encourage mask wearing?
> Most countries don't have large uranium deposits either. Importation and exportation solves such problems.
It's easier to import a few tons of Uranium fuel pellets every year than to export terawatts of energy.
I wish we'd just bill fossil fuel plants for their pollution. We'd quickly need new alternatives and instead of us simply telling you that renewables won't work as foreseen you could just run into the problem yourself.
We just don't think it's appropriate for everything. To have a 100% renewable grid requires renewables where they aren't a win and tons of storage, and there's a cost to all of this. Renewable isn't free or even non-polluting, it merely means limitless which nuclear effectively is as well.
But nuclear power has never been the ultra cheap clean power slam dunk you're portraying. I've been hopeful someone will come up with a clever innovation that changes the cost numbers, but so far every attempt has tanked.
With hydroelectric dams, there is an urgent motivation to bring many of them down: ecosystem collapse. It hurts to lose the storage capacity, but there's a growing awareness of just how severe the damage has been. I don't expect Grand Coulee to come down any time soon but talking with someone who does modeling related to this for NOAA made clear a lot of them are going away.
And your comments about hydro dams is just proving my point about climate change just not being a major priority. Local concerns take precedence. It’s not that these local concerns shouldn’t matter, but folks just don’t seem to be willing to replace fossil fuels first. It shows how little most people really care, including (unfortunately) people who ostensibly ought to, like environmental activists and regulators and pro-environmental politicians. I really think Greta Thunberg was right about that.
Greta is right. There are certain things about climate change that are complex. But the lack of sufficient action is not a complex mystery. It’s just not a priority.
You have very strong expectations that the rest of the world should immediately follow your plans concerning fission. That's not the same thing, and you will get pushback. Getting pushback does not mean we're somehow evil people that don't prioritize this enough, it just means we disagree with you about the costs and best path forward given pragmatic realities.
Having worked in energy (and radiation) I've always been confused by the fact that the activists aren't aligned with the scientists. I have yet to meet a single climate scientist that is anti-nuclear. Most of them are shy about their support and will end up saying things like "but we can't get support for nuclear, so why even try?"
The only real argument against nuclear is cost. Safety it is number 1 (you can see numbers from my other post), emissions (lifetime) it is on par with solar and wind (without batteries), waste isn't as big of an issue as it is made to be (waste is magnitudes smaller than most people think and storing on site is perfectly acceptable), it is clearly environmentally friendly (low footprint, you can recycle fuel, most emissions are from construction). The only argument against it is cost. The only argument is that the cost of climate and human lives is low. I'm really frustrated with the misnomers people are making about this.
Now I totally agree that we should keep existing plants running for as long as possible for climate reasons. I am fine with subsidizing them to a certain extent because they produce carbon free power. But even the existing plants are expensive to run and you should acknowledge that instead of saying otherwise...
Are the hydro dams literally going to be turned off simultaneously (the same day) with shutting off all connected fossil fuel plants? Because if not, then it isn’t actually simultaneous.
That is very much situational. A big part of why climate change is bad is because it will cause complete ecosystems to collapse. If dams or anything else accelerate that faster than climate change, there is an argument to be made that they should take higher priority. In the case of the Kennebec River that's exactly what happened.
I hear you, so please don't misinterpret this comment.
Statistically speaking, I'd imagine that it's actually the increases in production via wind and solar that has in fact caused nuclear (as percentage) to fall. Coal, at least in the USA can't be much different than nuclear.
How much nuclear production has come online since 2010 (i.e., the article's reference point)? Now how many solar panels? Given the long lead time of nuclear (i.e., planning, approval, producing) it's hard to imagine it catching solar anytime soon.
Should nuclear press on regardless? Probably. If only because if nuclear can be the last 15% to 20% of steady output (read: not subject to weather and such) that'll be enough to prevent rolling blacksout and other events due to shortages.
If only 20 years ago people realized all our climate and energy problems wouldn't be solved and we should build the safest, cleanest and only technology to prevent climate change caused by energy production...
The VC Summer project was ultimately cancelled in 2017, 4 years after construction started, with no reactor completed. $9 billion had already been spent. Utility executives criminally concealed the dire state of the project before it was cancelled.
"US utility boss pleads guilty to fraud over failed nuclear construction scheme"
https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/news/us-utility-bos...
With the guilty plea, Marsh admitted that he intentionally defrauded ratepayers by giving over-optimistic assessments of progress on the scheme so that his company could obtain rate increases from Scana’s customers and qualify for up to $2.2bn in tax credits.
After the scheme broke ground in March 2013, it suffered delays and cost overruns. By late 2016, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ), Marsh knew that efforts by engineer Westinghouse to improve the pace and productivity of the project were “woefully inadequate”.
...
Shortly after, Marsh fraudulently withheld this information from South Carolina’s utility regulator.
Also:
"US executive pleads guilty in nuclear project delay cover-up"
https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/news/us-executive-p...
A former executive of South Carolina utility Scana Corp has pleaded guilty to his role in what investigators called a “breathtaking” conspiracy to hide unresolvable problems in a project to build a $10bn nuclear power plant.
Prosecutors said Byrne knew the scheme was hopelessly behind and over budget, but that his and co-conspirators’ deceptions allowed Scana to obtain rate increases from Scana’s customers to continue financing it.
There are no criminal charges I'm aware of in connection with the Vogtle project, but it seems to have been estimated with a similarly ludicrous degree of optimism. Construction started in March 2013. In 2014 Georgia Power was telling the public that its new reactors would be operating in 2017 and 2018 respectively.
"Vogtle 3 & 4 Project Overview (2014)"
https://web.archive.org/web/20140326153321/https://www.georg...
Here's a timeline of how Vogtle costs escalated through 2018:
https://www.powermag.com/how-the-vogtle-nuclear-expansions-c...
It went from an estimate of $15.5 billion in 2013 to $27 billion in 2018. Vogtle 3 may finally start this year if there aren't further delays.
This paper has some nice maps illustrating why Californians need to do some serious modeling before making electrification choices.
My favorites are:
Figure 2 - fixed monthly charge (showing CA undercharges for fixed infrastructure costs)
Figure 3 - marginal cost per residential KWh (showing CA recoups it in very-high rates)
Figure 9 - marginal profit over social cost (showing CA is super expensive, even post-carbon-tax)
1. Nuclear power is far more expensive than renewables, due to the high costs for construction and dismantling. This does not dismiss your argument, because running a nuclear power plant is fairly cheap. The costs therefore speak towards keeping nuclear power plants running as long as they remain safe.
2. Existing nuclear power plants use huge quantities of fresh water for cooling. The required water quantity and temperature make nuclear power plants prone to droughts, which can cause shutdowns, and to flooding events, which can shut down or damage the plant. Both droughts and floods are increasing in frequency due to climate change. This speaks towards closing down power plants that are particularly vulnerable. In any case, grid operators need to be able to mitigate nuclear power plant outages. The cost of nuclear power is even less attractive when overcapacity is needed to accommodate potential outages.
Undercounting casualties of nuke disasters has a long tradition.
Not to dismiss undercounting in general. I may think that nuclear fission is a good option to expand today, but it's not like a religion that I identify with. It's possible I've been using wrong figures and therefore my conclusion is wrong. But then do point out where the missing deaths (or cancer cases, etc.) per produced TWh are or I will continue to believe it's better to expand nuclear fission than to keep using fossil fuels with vague hopes for "let's build solar and wind in undefined locations with magic storage technologies, and hopefully some breakthroughs here and there." (--most climate action plans that look beyond 2025)
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy "Eliminating fossil fuels could cut premature deaths from air pollution by around two-thirds. That’s three to four million deaths per year."
Wind is being installed all over the world in multi-use locations, including offshore shared with boats, and onshore shared with farms and ranches. There has been absolutely no shortage of viable sites, and there will not be.
Solar is also compatible with multiple uses, although there has been little need for it. Many locations benefit from solar roofing. I daresay you have seen plenty of parking lots roofed with solar, and a great many more without, yet. Similarly, hydro and municipal reservoirs, and canals, where reduced insolation means reduced evaporation. Anyone suggesting a shortage of sites that would actively welcome solar installations has no globe. Even on farmland, numerous crops benefit from partial shade. I haven't see that yet, because there has been absolutely no shortage of other sites.
Thus, "undefined locations" is not honest. We can easily see exactly where they are being installed, with no need to guess or wonder abstractly.
Multiple storage methods are known, all low-tech, with the only open question being which ones will end up cheapest to deploy. Underground compressed air and gravity storage have been demonstrated. Production of ammonia from air and water may end up, not cheapest, but most valuable.
I trust you will not repeat these canards. They do you no credit.
Nuclear is uncompetitive today, and getting moreso every day, as costs of wind and solar continue their free fall. Geothermal may ultimately come to challenge them, particularly for baseline load.
You can, if you like, think of geothermal as nuclear power without the huge decommissioning cost commitment.
After Fukushima safety requirements for reactor designs have been revisited and what do you know? Modern VVER reactors satisfies them without any changes! I suspect other modern designs have performed similarly in this regard.
Also when you hear about issues with construction time/cost or about nuclear waste storage, examples are usually US-specific. There is also Olkiluoto plant, but its issues are more about building a new reactor design using an Agile-like methodology. Nuclear waste problem can be more or less solved with "burner" reactors and fuel recycling, the field in which Russia and France have promising advancements.
Should the old reactors be retired? Yes! Should we abandon the nuclear energy for fashionable renewables? Absolutely, no! At the very least until the storage problem will be properly solved.
Also, no energy source is environmentally neutral. Building renewables and it's supporting infrastructure en masse will have a huge ecological impact. You can reduce that impact using nuclear energy (that also have it's impact on nature, but elsewhere). For example, nuclear power plants kill fish, wind turbines kill birds. By using both energy sources it's easier to limit building plants only in areas, where the impact will be low. We'll be still killing some birds and fish, but the chances that it's well within the ability of populations to recover will be much greater, than if we decided to focus on one source.
We need nuclear because it saves nature.
Nuclear would be terrible for this. The last 20% of demand not served by renewables is highly intermittent, a market for which nuclear would be a very poor solution. If one is not using nuclear for base load, one should not use nuclear at all.
I recommend watching this https://youtu.be/Jzfpyo-q-RM for a pragmatic lense
Fossil fuels, even temporary, kills several magnitudes more people than nuclear
While it could never be proven, my suspicion is that this law has done more to hinder the adoption of newer, safer nuclear power plant designs over the years, than any other single thing.
[0]. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nucle...