In an other article is mentioned that the new reactors will have 300MW capacity, so 6 new reactors will replace 2 old ones that are due to be shut down.
"Macron’s proposed six new “mini-reactors” run on technology that is billed to be less powerful but also less complex to produce and run than conventional reactors. Industry analysts say they help to keep France’s industrial competitiveness given that prototypes are already being developed in China, Russia, the US and Japan."
* replace the oldest massive plants with EPRs (hoping that the construction of the next ones will be less chaotic than the first two in England and Northen France) to maintain domestic production capacity
* build expertise on small modular reactors for exports and additional capacity where it make sense.
And interesting challenge will be to make SMRs safe enough to sell them to "post-developing" countries without any experience of nuclear-monitoring.
Also, the whole "nuclear is both a long term matter that requires multi-decade planning AND an electoral hot-button in France that is sure to split the country in two unreconcilable block every five years" thing.
France’s oldest operating reactors are in the 900 MWe range, so more like 3. Their newer fleet is 1300 and 1450 (now 1500) MWe, plus the 1600 MWe EPR under construction at Flamanville.
The 300 MWe NuWard really only makes sense as an export product, even if they build a couple in France. Framatome and EDF are working on an EPR-2 that is meant to be more efficient and inexpensive to build, and I hope that means it will be a bit scaled down from the EPR, which is frankly too large for many electric grids, and takes far too long to construct.
No one in the private sector has much faith that any decade-long giga-reactor project (in the West) will come to fruition, let alone the multiple projects needed to leverage assembly-line economies.
A rejigged submarine reactor already has those economies, and might have a better chance of producing profit within five years.
It should be noted that nuclear is a significant export business for France, their companies routinely bid for contracts to build new plants elsewhere (UK etc). This is probably a significant factor in Macron's steering, considering the hunger for economic growth post-Covid.
Except during hot summers or cold winters, when they often have to reduce the outputs of the reactors, and import huge amounts of solar and wind power from Germany.
They had to turn off a few reactors during the recent summer heatwaves because their environmental laws prevent them from heating rivers beyond a set point. But I don't think there was a technical issue, which may rather be caused by draught.
We’ve known what to do with nuclear waste for a very long time. In the US at least, its more a question of politics and funding.
Basically, we can:
* Bury all of it (deep geological repository, bore holes)
* Reprocess fuel, take out the remaining U and/or built-up Pu, and then dispose of the small amount of fission products remaining
* Keep storing it in casks at plant sites or regionally consolidated ISFSIs (like [1])
All options are feasible; the first seems to be cheaper. Nobody seems to want a geological repository for nuclear waste in their backyard, even if it’s quite safe.
In Germany, nuclear waste from one of the first storage sites that was deemed "safe" in the 60s already needs to be recovered at great cost[1]. Sticking a few million tons of nuclear waste into the ground and hoping it will never come into contact with ground water is not a great plan IMHO. That stuff has the potential to render drinking water reserves unusable for millenia, so no wonder no one wants that in their own backyard. And storing it above ground seems quite difficult too judging by the issues in Fukushima and Chernobyl. Even Tepco couldn't come up with a better solution for some of the waste than "Let's drain it into the ocean where it'll be diluted".
I think the main problem with your argument is that it seems to appeal to the idea that because some German people in the 60s failed to correctly establish the longterm stability of a German mine, that it basically can't be done and we can't improve on what happened in the 60s, so we should simply not use nuclear power at all.
The other is that however bad those things are, or could be, global warming is still orders of magnitude worse. These very German arguments against nuclear power don't make sense at all.
We already have dozens (hundreds?) of contaminated sites worldwide e.g. in Russia, China, the US, Japan, ... It's not a problem exclusive to Germany, in general most countries seem to be unable to come up with a viable long-term strategy for nuclear waste disposal. Maybe it's possible to dispose of nuclear fuel in a responsible way, but my hopes that this will happen are very low judging by all the nasty things we did to the environment in the last century.
Overall I'm pretty confident that in a few centuries (or even decades) people will see all of these strategies as really foolish (burying radioactive waste across hundreds of sites around the globe, dumping billions of tons of waste into the oceans, polluting the atmosphere, ...).
> Overall I'm pretty confident that in a few centuries (or even decades) people will see all of these strategies as really foolish (burying radioactive waste across hundreds of sites around the globe, dumping billions of tons of waste into the oceans, polluting the atmosphere, ...).
I have my own biases, but I am fairly confident that people of the future will come to a much different conclusion.
Every form of power generation has byproducts and waste. Many of these (even for renewables) are nasty, toxic substances. Nuclear seems to have one of the best ratios of waste to electric production of any form of power generation, including very low lifetime CO2 generation. I would hope the future people of earth are far more aghast that people kept doing things like burning coal (and then dumping the fly ash in places that contaminate groundwater) instead of building alternate sources of baseload generation.
Massive exageration by several orders of magnitude.
They say in the link you provided it is less than 126000 barrel containers of material. Even if you overestimate at 400 litres per container (they will probably be some sort of sarcophagus vessel) that is about 50k tonnes of material, for more than 30 years of operation. That sounds pretty efficient to me.
Edit: misread that you were refering to the material specifically stored in Asse II
The US alone produces several thousand tons of nuclear waste per year. If you take into account the waste associated with dismantling power plants it's easily tenfold. Multiply by all the countries that use nuclear energy and a few million tons over 50-100 years is no exaggeration, probably more of a conservative estimate I'd say.
Uranium is 19 times more dense than water. 2000 tons of nuclear waste means 100 cubic meters. 100 cubic meters means a 40 foot + 20 foots containers. That is the highly radioactive waste produced by the US each year. This powers 20% of the US. Of course, actual storage would be in some caskets, so a higher volume, but that is the radioactive material volume.
There are ~450 reactors in the world with the US operating close to 100. You don't get to millions of tons.
Plants themselves are producing lower radiation materials, that don't need those iconic caskets or the extreme care. They wuldn't melt down or anything. This is from day to day operation (gloves, suits, containers) and decomissioning.
Burying it seems to make sense and I know it’s done a lot - but is there any risk it would be crushed and leak? I mean a once in a 10,000 year event. And if it does leak, what would the consequences be?
Whatever we do it's always possible. The consequences would be a place similarly dangerous to the natural nuclear reactors that are already found in parts of the world.
If burying it and hoping that we figure it out in the future is our best option, I’d say we haven’t figured out the problem just yet. I was hoping that I was out of the tech loop and that there was some new way of storing them “safely” for a few years until they are no harm anymore.
Consideriour examples of Fukushima, Chernobyl and such, why do we keep thinking we would do better in the future with this problem. If anything humanity is not to be trusted with making decisions for the greater good (just look at how all first world countries hoarded COVID vaccines in a protectionist, short sighted way).
Regarding 1. so far several of the bury all of it projects have had significant issues (water ingress etc.) Things are definitely not as straight forward as you make it out to be.
Reprocessing will produce lots of low to moderately radioactive waste which also has to be stored.
And the 3rd solution is not really a long time solution, nobody can confirm the safety for a 100 years let alone several 1000.
You forgot option 4. drop it into the subduction zone in the ocean.
This and your first option aren't super popular in part because the waste itself isn't exactly waste and has valuable parts that could be extracted and no one wants to make that too hard to recover later.
Global warming effects are global, non-linear and there are still many unknowns, which makes it more riskier. Nuclear waste is only local and the harm is much better known. Also nuclear energy is anti-fragile (more disasters means saver plants).
The risks of nuclear energy is far more favourable than global warming. Because of potential catastrophic outcomes of climate change I think we need to diversify our bets and include nuclear energy in our portfolio.
I agree that we need to diversify our power bets. However, it is prudent to evaluate our options and if necessary push one option over the other if we know the other has severe problems kicked into the future. For example, we incentivise Solar + Wind a lot more than we do already if the safety risk from Nuclear waste is too high.
As NASA explains, evidence for warming is via globally averaged parameters but some locations are getting cooler and some are getting warmer. Thus 'global warming effects' are not in fact global.
Reprocessing has been mostly blocked by the US due to proliferation concerns, but it reduces the problem enormously, since you then have new fuel plus some very nasty waste that decays on more human-friendly timescales.
For reference, the amount of the very nasty waste produced by a lifetime's electricity demand for an average European citizen (so you probably want to multiply by 2 or 3 for future usage), immobilised in glass, is about the size of a hockey puck. A very deadly hockey puck mind, a kill-you-from-twenty-paces hockey puck, but a solid hockey puck.
You know what we haven't figured out? How to even re-concentrate the several tonnes of dispersed waste product fossil fuels put into the atmosphere for the same number of kWh, not as an accident but as part of normal operations, and that's currently wreaking havoc everywhere.
She knows very well. However, there were protests against nuclear energy in Germany for quite some time. After the Fukushima incident they gained a lot more traction and pressure by the public and political opponents rose dramatically.
When the decision was put in place it was around 2011/12 iirc, back then the climate crisis debate was not nearly as big as it is today.
Also, burning coal is not the main target for the future of energy generation in Germany. The coal plants are just a side effect of the transition to a primarily renewable energy generation. Unfortunately due to coal energy companies having very close ties with the the ruling CDU Party, it's not surprising to see them get special treatment.
She knows, heck even the Swedish PM back in 1975 knew it (there's a TV clip of him laying it out).
Knowing what's best is way different from personal political goals though.
North/northwest Europe got pretty damn scared by the Chernobyl fallout (in practice many kinds of wild game was banned for sale for many years afterwards in some countries and we measured everything that could possibly be contaminated) and that scare runs deep for many still today.
(This is why you have the irony that the "green parties" in Europe are so damn anti-nuclear despite at least some of them realizing that you can't properly fight global warming without nuclear power)
Ukraine, the site of the probably the worst nuclear accident in history and a prime food producer, is suffering enormously from desertification due to burning fossil fuels.
Yes, she changed her stance after Fukushima when public opinion - which wasn't very pro nuclear to begin with - shifted rapidly in Germany. I would agree is was a populist move and not a move based on science.
However, she was hardly in a position where she would have lost office. The next federal election was 2 years away, and nuclear, while at the time an important topic that dominated the media of course, was hardly the only topic. Her party might have suffered a somewhat in the short term - in state elections for example - but it's rather unlikely her party would have "lost" the next federal election and she her office.
She also never expressed a strong pro-nuclear stance while Chancellor (and as far as I know not before that either), and certainly did not justify such a stance with her scientific background. While in office as Chancellor, she called nuclear a "bridge technology" that should be kept around a while longer until Germany can switch over to renewables at its own pace.
The decision to partly reverse the nuclear exit - and the exit was decided years before and was generally seen favorably by Germans - by delaying when nuclear power plants had to go offline - she never planned to build new plants, for example - was less of a declaration for nuclear and had more too do with appeasing the nuclear lobby, and the industry lobby which feared higher energy costs. And it wasn't a decision she was really making all by herself, there was a lot of pressure from within the elites of her own party (most of which do not hold any degrees in physics, just saying), aside from all the lobby pressure.
She might have thought and/or still may think of nuclear as favorable, be it because she has a PhD in what was called theoretical chemistry - tho it is more physics than chemistry what she did and concerned nuclear decay reactions/processes - or be it because years before she became chancellor she was Federal Minister for the Environment which includes "nuclear security and oversight", or be it just because any everybody kinda has an opinion. But regardless, she didn't express a very pro nuclear opinion, as you suggest.
Unless she declares herself now that she is not running for office anymore, we will not really know what she truly thinks about nuclear and why. Not that her opinion on the matter is particularly more important than the opinion of others...
> she didn't express a very pro nuclear opinion, as you suggest
New nuclear power plants were banned altogether. The agreement became law in 2002 (Atomgesetz). Angela Merkel, objected to the agreement, calling it a “destruction of national property” that would be revoked if the CDU came to power.
To be fair I only looked for 30 seconds and it is hardly a smoking gun to call not building nuclear power a destruction of national property as being 'pro nuclear'.
I do not recall she saying that in 2002 - when she was essentially the leader of the opposition. Do you have a public source for it? I am genuinely interested in reading/listening to her full statement.
>Die Begrenzung der Restlaufzeit der deutschen Atomkraftwerke käme einer Vernichtung von volkswirtschaftlichem Vermögen gleich.
Which translates to
>Limiting the remaining service life of German nuclear power plants would be equal to destroying national economic assets.
So her concern was about shutting down existing nuclear power plants earlier than initially planned. She kept true to her word, and reversed that, only to re-reverse herself after Fukushima.
That's however not necessarily a very pro-nuclear stance, more a pro-"let them continue printing money with their existing plants because they have been good friends to the CDU in the past" stance.
What she didn't say however is that she favored investing in more nuclear power generation and nuclear technology in general.
Before you continue to so giddily bash Germany, I would consider that the US in 2020 generated 60.3% of electrical energy from fossil fuels (19.3% of the total from "clean" coal, 40.3% was "clean" natural gas), 19.7% from nuclear, 19.8% from renewables[1].
Germany in 2020 had a mix of 36.0% from fossil fuels (24.3% of the total from "clean" coal, 11.7% from "clean" gas), 12.6% from nuclear, and 51.4% renewables[2].
Sure, I am not happy that Germany continues to burn so much fossil fuel either, but suggesting that Germany is particularly bad because it doesn't do as much nuclear is just not based in reality.
PS: In absolute numbers, the US produced 774 TWh of electrical energy using coal in 2020, Germany produced 118 TWh. That's 2.35 TWh per million people for the US, 1.41 TWh per million people in Germany. Or expressed yet differently, the US produced 1.67x the energy from coal per capita than Germany.
The question is what will happen when the nuclear power plans are decommissioned.
Keeping nuclear running and expanding it's role further could be used to replace fossil fuels while expanding renewables at the same time. In the long run, energy storage technology will improve, which will help overcome problem with unstable renewable sources, but I don't believe we will be there soon.
Nuclear isn't really good at covering temporarily for less production by solar and wind, because increasing and decreasing output levels of nuclear has a lot of latency... you cannot just flip a switch.
The answer to that could be burning things, along with better storage tech that you mentioned. Not necessarily fossil fuels, but biomass and gas (e.g. "cow farts"). Burning biomass, you can still stay neutral if done right, as the mass will use carbon when growing. Things like algae farming as a fast growing source of biomass may become important. With some additional tech you could filter out some carbon and other emissions and store what you filtered out, and have a negative emission balance considering the whole process.
Biomass and other renewables generally have the other positive aspect that research, development and installation is relatively cheap and quick compared to nuclear.
Another part of the solution surely will be to just use less energy, by investing in more efficient tech. Reducing energy consumption by merely 10% would essentially cover what nuclear in Germany produces now[0]. A lot of companies in Germany already started investing heavily into modernization to reduce their energy need, and this process is speeding up now. A lot of this effort is driven by public policy - from tax incentives to negative incentives in higher energy prices - but a lot is also driven by the realization of management that modernization efforts like this can massively drive down costs mid and long term while also ensuring the production facilities stay competitive with tech upgrades. Another way of policy incentives e.g. are the mandatory labeling of consumer goods in regard to energy consumption and efficiency, as consumers will use this information to buy stuff that's not only "better for the environment" than the competitor but also saves money on the electric bill. Right now, within the EU, such labeling is mostly for electric appliances, but it could be extended further to other areas like food or services, and could cover the entire life-cycle of a product including production and disposal, not just the time consumers operate it.
By the way, I am not generally opposed to nuclear, just opposed to nuclear how we do it now and did it in the past. For one, it's artificially made cheap by subsidies everywhere you look, and that artificially cheap price does not even include the additional costs of long term waste management. And then the plants are rather unsafe, not because they have to be, but because of policy failures. Things like building nuclear plants in regions prone to earthquakes and/or tsunamis, the French having to shut down a lot of their reactors every few summers because they'd be boiling their rivers if they didn't and of course incidents like Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island (thank the Air Force for having an airbase nearby which lead to TMI being build more sturdy than usual thus probably avoiding a really bad outcome), Windscale, etc... all that does not inspire confidence in me that humans and in particular politicians can manage the technology. When Belgium discovers "micro cracks" in high pressure boilers in nuclear power plants, and then their politicians almost immediately declare the plants to be still safe - in a timeframe where they surely cannot have thoroughly evaluated the findings - then that's not great already, then when I consider some people want to build massive nuclear power plants in areas of the world with far less stable societies than Belgium, I want to facepalm.
And on top of that nuclear is not renewable. The fuel has to come from somewhere, which doesn't bode well for energy independence. Right now, a forth of uranium is mined by Kazatomprom a quasi-state-owned company in Kazakhstan, which Freedom House rates a "consolidated authoritarian regime". Being dependent on Russia for gas isn't great; being dependent on Kazakhstan for nuclear full isn't great either.
Load-following in nuclear works to a very limited degree, sure, but
>These reactors have the capability to regularly vary their output between 30–100% of rated power, to maneuver power up or down by 2–5%/minute during load following activities
And even the BWR can maneuver only at 10% per minute (60-100%).
So first, you cannot just shut them (nearly) off when you don't need them. You will have to run them at 30% at least essentially all the time. Not great if your goal is to use solar/wind as the primary mode of generation.
Then 2% to 5% per minute in changes is high latency compared to alternatives. If you need 10%-20% more NOW because there e.g. was an unscheduled break in a football (soccer) game and everybody got up, turned on the lights and the coffee maker and whatever then you're out of luck because the latency is too big to cover those additional 20% in the time you need them. 20% would take up to 10 minutes for nuclear to adjust, 2 minutes at least, realistically something like 5 minutes. And by the time it adjusts your grid will have broken down and everybody will be sitting in the dark.
Load-following with nuclear plants only works well enough if you have a pretty good idea of when the load is going to change in advance. Which in many cases historically you did, and you had non-nuclear fallbacks to compensate for when you were a little or even a lot off. You had a pretty good idea because you could estimate both the demand as it progresses during a day and the generation too. E.g. you knew what a "normal work day in November with this weather forecast (cloudy average temp 8°C, here is how temps will likely develop during the day), sunrise 07:07, sunset 16:22" looks like with enough historical detail from similar past days to plan for it. With solar and wind, you still know that about the demand side, but you can be a lot less sure about the generation side.
That's why you usually use gas (and historically coal) "peakers"[1]. They were and are in use for when your estimates were off, even if your base load comes from the best load-following nuclear. They can be maneuvered a lot faster with demand, and can be (almost) shut down when not needed. And what you need in a wind/solar world in particular is true peakers not base load plants with limited load following capabilities.
People make a point about Germany because they made a populist political decision to close nuclear plants in 2015. At a point where it was evident that there future needs to be fossil free and with no real alternatives they decide to shut down their reactors.
In contrast, the US seized civilian nuclear power plants after three mile island, fifty years ago.
>People make a point about Germany because they made a populist political decision to close nuclear plants in 2015.
Well, in 2002. Really long before that, because nobody was allowed to build new ones in ages already. But 2002 formalized the ban into law. Then came Merkel and reversed the shortened service life times for existing reactors. And then in 2011 after Fukushima, she re-reverse it. (No idea where you got the 2015 from).
Germany still has running reactors, by the way. We did not just shut them all down, as you say. We shut down the very oldest ones still in operation, then shut down more and more in the time frame we originally planned to shut them down before Merkel's initial reversal and kept doing that for the last decade. The six remaining facilities will be gone by end of next year, tho. They will have been in production for at least 33 years each, at that point.
So we had a decade to get our shit together and replace the nuclear with something else sustainable. We fell short, but not that short.
>with no real alternatives
There are alternatives, real ones, proven working ones. A mix of less consumption, driven by more efficient tech, wind/solar/water as the work horse and biomass to compensate for "bad" weather and some storage for the worst case. We could be emission-neutral and nuclear-free now, while not significantly more expensive (we'd have had costs regardless of what we built, building new nuclear plants isn't free either, and we would have needed new ones if we went the nuclear route instead). If there had been the political will to actually do so in the Merkel government... And that doesn't even take into account the European grid and how European nations could bridge temporarily increased demand/temporarily lower productions of individual members.
Germany invested heavily into renewables at first, but this got more slow-paced recently, again thanks to some of Merkel's people, in particular Peter Altmaier who was "Secretary of the Economy" and considered his job to be a fulfillment center for old garde lobbyist needs.
Regardless, over half the electric energy production is now from renewables. So I guess, there is some light at the end of the tunnel.
Nuclear is being phased out by 2022. Coal by 2038, the majority of which is brown coal. The problem is Germany is phasing out nuclear power when they should phase out coal and its reliance on natural gas.
Yes and no. Yes, coal and other fossil fuels would be far more important to phase out in general than nuclear.
But the problem with the German nuclear plants is that they are old, old builds with old tech, and way past their expiration dates, even with the constant upgrades they received over the years. Every inspection in the last decade raised serious "wtf" moments (and inspections are rather lax and even more so before Fukushima). Nuclear can be reasonably safe if you take the time and money to make it so and don't build them in earthquake alley, but these particular ones stopped being safe a decade or more ago.
So you either have to spend serious coin (billions) to modernize the still existing ones, all the while you take them off grid for extended periods of time, or you have to spend serious coin (billions) to build new ones, which will take you like a decade before they go into production anyway. Nuclear is too expensive, frankly. Renewables today are already cheaper, if you also account for all direct, indirect and hidden subsidies each receives.
New or upgraded nuclear is not seen favorable by most (according to polls) Germans, me included. I'd rather see that money go to installing renewables capacity instead, and investing into renewables tech research.
But sure, if we actually had new-ish and safe reactors that could be safely operated for another 10 or 20 or whatever years, I'd personally say: go for it, keep them running for that time instead of coal and gas plants.
They saw fit to bring online a new Coal plant, replacing existing coal plants that they are old, old builds with old tech, and way past their expiration dates at a cost of serious coin (billions).
Billions quickly become very abstract things.
As part of its stimulus package, Germany intends to expand the role of green hydrogen to help end the country's reliance on coal. The government agreed on a plan on how to spend the €9 billion earmarked for the project.The plan, which could see hydrogen eventually make up about 10% of the country's total electricity capacity, was unveiled as part of a €130 billion ($147 billion) stimulus to help reboot the economy during the coronavirus pandemic. The hydrogen commitment is part of some €40 billion earmarked for climate-related spending.
The Green party in France is as divided on this question as in Germany. The current impulse is led by the current center-right government. Germany, with the same kind of government, decided to go all in for gaz (mainly from Russia).
Excellent news, hopefully other European countries will follow that example. Especially Germany should immediately rethink and stop phasing out their remaining operational nuclear power plants.
Nuclear power has some issues which need to be addressed on the political and social level as well as the technological. Waste disposal, proliferation, safety. However, looking forward, it is hard to see any competition as a robust, always available, all weather, conpact, baseline power source. This is especially true if climate change degrades solar and wind farm performance by disrupting weather patterns.
France reprocesses spent fuel, already has the bomb, and has one of the best safety records of any operator, with no serious accidents.
Nuclear is more expensive comparing watts to watts, but Europe is learning the hard way that, without useful storage (the situation today), more than one watt nominal renewable generating capacity is necessary to reliably replace one watt from a thermal plant.
yes, yes, not an operator - the point is, whenever they have an inkling that something remotely dirty might happen, they run for the sea. Supposedly they don't do it anymore, but personally I wouldn't trust the French MoD to tell me the time of day - they have a massive history of lies, deceit, and coverups.
You appear to be conflating nuclear power with nuclear weapons. These are not the same technology, although both do involve the fission of the atomic nucleus.
Over the decades that the French (and other European nations) have been using said nuclear power, how have they been dealing with waste disposal, proliferation and safety? I do not ever recall the French having a safety problem.
None of those are the real issues with nuclear. The real issue is that it's too expensive. And no, it's not too expensive because of unnecessary regulations.
It's too expensive in two senses. First, it is too expensive now per unit of fossil CO2 displaced. Second, in the end game of a 0% fossil economy, it's too expensive vs. non-nuclear alternatives.
France has heavily invested in nuclear power in the last 60 years. And nuclear in France is extremely costly (budget overruns, etc). So they desperately need someone with money to be able to go on with nuclear energy...
(but well, I much prefer more (safe, not the old junk plant 40km from where I live) nuclear power than inhaling the particles emitted by burned coal).
Of course they do. They have a tight grip on most fuel mines from their previous colonies, where they exploit workers and the countries economy to keep energy prices low. [1]
I think nuclear can be part of a healthy energy diet, but not at the expense of less privileged countries.
That's not necessarily why though is it. You've elevated it unilaterally and without justification to the Singular Cause, with a nice use of "of course" to really hammer it home. It's poor form.
Does anyone have real source or more information regarding the cost of the steam side of a nuclear power plant? Combined Cycle Gas has taken over due to the easy mechanical energy from the Brayton cycle reducing the size of the steam side but it would be nice to see the some actual data on the costs instead of Hacker News level certainty of "The number I typically hear is that it's $1-2W to build"
Articles like this miss the main point and instead focus on culture war material. There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear.
The issues aren't safety, waste, and environments opposition. There are plenty of climate hawks that support nuclear too. It's all excessive costs.
They briefly mention the cooling retrofits for Diablo Canyon in San Lui Obispo, but they don't mention that they bids from Bechtel to simply build a modern cooling system were all billions of dollars of expense. Just the cooling system is more expensive than alternatives.
And this is a trend we will see in the future. For primary generation of electrons, steam based thermodynamic cycles are pretty much obsolete. The number I typically hear is that it's $1-2W to build, say, a cooling system for coal steam. A nuclear plants cooling is pretty much identical. Solar and wind are going to undercut that cost very soon.
So the name of the game is now storage. Attaching four hours of storage to a solar generation farm, just enough to get through the duck curve, is now slightly cheaper than coal.
The best estimate of what the cheapest possible future grid looks like is: solar/wind capacity at 4x of total demand (thermal generators are roughly at 2x on the current grid), with 3-4 days of storage. This translates to world with abundant energy, at certain times, that's generated at zero marginal cost. There are still lots of transmission costs however. The future of energy is all about spatial and temporal arbitrage of renewable electrons.
Not as much of an issue in Europe, where the waste heat can be used for district heating, where there is plenty of water, and generally lower temperatures.
The fact is that nuclear is extremely expensive, and only gets built where there's huge government subsidy. The subsidy that renewables get pales in comparison to nuclear subsidy. Take the UK for example. Here we have a relatively free market in electricity generation. It's been possible for decades for a private company to build a nuclear power station, but nobody has. The only ones planned or built have enormous subsidies where the government has run roughshod over the free market. Nuclear just doesn't make economic sense.
Nuclear energy is only relatively expensive because we don't price the cost of global warming, environmental degradation and air pollution into fossil fuels at all. It's a market failure, but not of nuclear energy.
We already have electrical grid scale storage with methane which is one of the possible power to gas implementations [0]. It's just nobody does it because it is cheaper to get it out of the ground.
Sure, the efficiency isn't as good as batteries, but wikipedia shows nuclear being over 3x as expensive as wind/solar [1]. Power to gas using wind/solar can definitely be done cheaper than that.
Wikipedia shows nuclear in France at EUR 70/MWh, and solar without storage at around EUR 50/MWh. Storage will make it easily more expensive than nuclear plants. Remember, Europe is farther north and less insolated than California, Hawaii or Morocco, where solar PV might achieve $30-40/MWh.
It's difficult to work out the cost of nuclear in France because the electricity industry is so intertwined with the state. For example, how much does their insurance cost? I bet they're effectively insured by state which doesn't show up in the figures. Also, the only country in the world that actually has a long-term solution for nuclear waste is Finland. To their credit, the Finns have built a storage facility that can remain intact for the necessary 10,000 years. The French have no long term nuclear waste storage, they're just kicking the can down the road, as is every other country except Finland.
No, that is exactly the opposite of true. Competition is specifically with fossil fuels because it's not always windy and it's not always sunny. We need renewables, obviously, but we need nuclear as well to provide baseload.
To address the baseload question. Baseload for a period is the level below which demand doesn't drop. Baseload isn't a relevant figure if you're running a power network. The job of a grid operator is to make sure supply matches demand from second to second. What happens is that the grid operator uses the cheapest marginal electricity first, which is always renewables, then if there's still a gap it's filled with power from a gas power station. That gap is continuously varying, and gas power is needed because it can continuously vary in response. The point is that baseload isn't a relevant concept in balancing the grid, it's all about matching supply with demand.
Ok but we need a grid without natural gas if we're going to fix climate change. Baseload is a relevant figure if we're designing that new grid. Grid-scale multi-day battery storage is expensive, and possibly even infeasible, so we might be best off using nuclear for baseload, with renewables and battery balancing on top of that.
To take the USA for example, it'll play out like this. As more and more renewables are built there will be periods where the amount of renewable electricity will exceed demand. During these periods, electricity will be very cheap and will be used to create hydrogen. The existing natural gas storage and pipework will be used for hydrogen instead, and hydrogen turbines / fuel cells will be built. So the natural gas infrastructure will be taken over by hydrogen, generated from renewable electricity. This gradual takeover will extend to heating. Natural gas boilers in homes / buildings will be converted to hydrogen, and so in the end the USA will end up with zero carbon emissions for electricity and heating.
Sounds good, but has anyone done this in production anywhere, and if so, what did it cost?
Hydrogen has a habit of leaking through anything and embrittling metals, so it may not be a trivial task. According to the Dept. of Energy, converting pipelines to carry pure hydrogen will require "substantial modification."
So to address the point of renewables and storage. Storage of the electricity produced by renewables is only needed when it exceeds demand. The UK is part of a European grid, and so a wind farm in Scotland only needs to store electricity if the whole of Europe is already running on 100% renewable. We've not reached that level so far, and won't for quite a while.
I think we're talking at cross-purposes. I'm saying that it's only when the supply from renewables exceeds total demand, you need storage. Otherwise if the supply from renewables doesn't meet demand then there's nothing left over to store, and you'd need to start burning gas.
Note that the end-game is that renewables become so pervasive that there are significant periods when renewable generation does exceed total demand, and then you generate hydrogen with it. That hydrogen then displaces the natural gas that's currently used, the storage / pipework infrastructure for natural gas being equally suitable for hydrogen.
I'd like to see a comparison of costs for the same result, though.
Indeed, it seems to me that comparisons tend to focus on the raw cost of producing 1 kWh, leaving aside the very important issue of reliability of production.
Cheaper is better, sure, but supply comes first.
I don't think that there currently is an alternative to nuclear to guarantee a large supply of low emission electricity. The best alternative is hydropower but it's very limited by geography.
So renewables and nuclear are actually complementary.
Ultimately the 100% renewable grid is backed up by something like hydrogen. The round trip efficiency is lousy, but it's not needed very often so that's not very important.
A combined cycle power plant has a cost per watt just 10% of that of a nuclear plant (and simple cycle, just 4-5%), so you can completely back up the grid with them and still come out cheaper than nuclear.
Renewables are very cheap if you want to improve your clean energy portion from let us say 11.2% to 12.9%. You don’t have to think about storage and it’s good enough for the next election. But what if we want go full carbon neutral by 2050?
Looking around the world it seems like it’s easy and cheap today to get to 30% or so solar and wind (averaged over 24-48h). Going beyond that gets a lot harder. You need storage, long range grid connects (e.g. HVDC), etc.
The actual practical max varies by location. Some places have a ton of solar or wind and some have poor conditions. There are regions with poor renewables and high population density. That would require long range grid connects but that in turn raises the bar for the regions from which they are drawing.
Batteries need to drop in price by at least another order of magnitude. They’ve already experienced almost Moore’s Law price drops for the past two decades so this is probably possible. The major cost now is manufacturing not materials and batteries are amenable to a lot of manufacturing automation.
Fossil fuels and nuclear power provide base load, which we need for a stable power system. Renewables do not. So if we want to elevate renewables to that of base load power sources, so they are functionally equivalent to nuclear/fossil, then we need to price in the cost of energy storage for days or weeks of no sun/wind to provide functional equivalence.
Base load can be provided by renewables + storage. There is no need for base load generators to supply base load demand.
Renewables and storage are also falling rapidly in cost. Any nuclear plant we start planning today will be competing with the cheap renewables and storage of decades hence, not just what's available at this instant.
Nuclear is expensive yes, not least because all decomissioning and cleanup costs are included in the price, which can't be said of any other power generation method. It also has an incredibly long lifespan ( decades, there are literally nuclear power plants constructed in the 1950s still operating today), and private companies tend to think much more short term than that. So yes, government subsidies are needed
According to your article, we're collecting a little less than half what we need, and "utilities are collecting 0.1 to 0.2 cents/kWh" for decommissioning. If we want to roll out a lot more nuclear, we can fully fund the decommissioning deposit, and it will add a whopping 0.2 cent/kWh to the energy cost.
We can be reasonably confident of that because decommissioning costs are falling:
>Whereas Germany has set aside €38 billion to decommission 17 nuclear reactors, and the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority estimates that clean-up of UK’s 17 nuclear sites will cost between €109‒250 billion over the next 120 years, France has set aside only €23 billion to decommissioning its 58 reactors. To put this in context, according to the European Commission,
> Soon EDF will have to start the biggest, most complex and costliest nuclear decommissioning and radioactive waste management programme on earth
Seems like it won't be enough, as german gouvernment reports estimate around 50 bln for less then a third of the french reactors.
That the same UK that almost constantly pulls in 2 GW of French nuclear, 16 GW of gas, and - if the cable to France breaks - coal at > £ 200 MWh, in a totally unremarkable September, not counting the gas used for heating which lead to several energy companies going bust because of a wind shortfall?
Incidentally, look up the radionuclide emissions of a coal (or even heavy oil) plant, such as the one used when the wind stopped blowing. They're literally only allowed because the radionuclide standards applied to fission aren't applied to coal.
And we all know how it's going to work from a financial point of view in Emmanuel Macon's world:
The projects will be funded with public debt (either directly or by providing state-backed loans that not be paid back for the most part), the profits will be private, and if a company fails, we will save their arse with public money again. Decommissioning and the long terms effects will also be left to the imagination of the reader, I mean, for taxpayers to pay.
Don't get me wrong here, this is not a rant against nuclear power, which is the least bad source of energy we have at the moment, this is a rant about France's neo-liberal tunnel vision that even the USA has been steering away from in the past decade.
What? EDF, the company that operates the nuclear power plants and sells the electricity, is majority state owned. Full cleanup and decomissioning costs are always included upfront in new nuclear projects, and are a part of the electricity price calculated for the plant.
Ever heard of project Hercules? It basically consist of chopping off EDF in bite-size pieces to satisfy the appetites of the European commission on competition and the free market.
To some extent that has already been done, with the "old" fully state-owned EDF having been chopped into Enedis and EDF, and this will continue.
Stating that "Full clean-up and decommissioning costs are always included upfront in new nuclear projects" is problematic considering that it has never been done, and the cost of storing by-products is made extraordinarily opaque with a combination of private actors (Orano for example) that are ridden with corruption issues.
Also, it is just completely wrong that the cost of electricity takes all this into account.
Let's say that there is a lot of debate around the issue :)
It's been a few years the government wanted to decouple the debt laden infrastructure and the retail parts (Hercule plan). Keep the former state-owned so that it can front the upcoming heavy investments and sell the retail activities to the private sector.
good. at least one decision that france won't regret. I wonder if we will also see Japan reap the fruits of going for hydrogen vs the electric zealots of automobile. my bet is yes they will and pretty soon 5-10years.
let's not forget that it is a bet that will never play for the wealth of the french citizen. While most of the country is relying on nuclear energy and produce more than enough energy, the cost for a french person is around 50% more than American. Because electricity prices are European-based... once again the proof that european nations are only sovereign to the extent of what Germany decides.
French Nuclear energy has bailed out Europe when then the wind isnt blowing more often than not. They generate about 45GW on average from nuclear and its constant and pretty reliable. A big chunk of that, maybe 10-15 GW is for export, primarily to the UK, Germany and Italy. The fuel is relatively cheap so they can run their reactors flat out and sell at any price. Its also one of the reasons why they have one of the lowest carbon emmission rates for a major economy in the world.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] threadhttps://www.usinenouvelle.com/editorial/pourquoi-les-mini-re...
"Macron’s proposed six new “mini-reactors” run on technology that is billed to be less powerful but also less complex to produce and run than conventional reactors. Industry analysts say they help to keep France’s industrial competitiveness given that prototypes are already being developed in China, Russia, the US and Japan."
* replace the oldest massive plants with EPRs (hoping that the construction of the next ones will be less chaotic than the first two in England and Northen France) to maintain domestic production capacity
* build expertise on small modular reactors for exports and additional capacity where it make sense.
And interesting challenge will be to make SMRs safe enough to sell them to "post-developing" countries without any experience of nuclear-monitoring.
Also, the whole "nuclear is both a long term matter that requires multi-decade planning AND an electoral hot-button in France that is sure to split the country in two unreconcilable block every five years" thing.
[1]: https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2021/10/07/nucleaire-...
The 300 MWe NuWard really only makes sense as an export product, even if they build a couple in France. Framatome and EDF are working on an EPR-2 that is meant to be more efficient and inexpensive to build, and I hope that means it will be a bit scaled down from the EPR, which is frankly too large for many electric grids, and takes far too long to construct.
No one in the private sector has much faith that any decade-long giga-reactor project (in the West) will come to fruition, let alone the multiple projects needed to leverage assembly-line economies.
A rejigged submarine reactor already has those economies, and might have a better chance of producing profit within five years.
An existing nuclear site, with permits, security and likely communitity support is a great place to retire some old and build some new reactors.
FACT: France is the largest exporter of electricity in Europe [2].
[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-turns-electrici...
[2] https://www.enappsys.com/interconnectorreview/
What are the options and how bad/risky are they versus the impending climate change problem?
Or we could set aside a 1km square plot of uninhabitable desert to store it above ground.
Or we could just spread it around in a few different places like we do today.
Basically, we can:
* Bury all of it (deep geological repository, bore holes)
* Reprocess fuel, take out the remaining U and/or built-up Pu, and then dispose of the small amount of fission products remaining
* Keep storing it in casks at plant sites or regionally consolidated ISFSIs (like [1])
All options are feasible; the first seems to be cheaper. Nobody seems to want a geological repository for nuclear waste in their backyard, even if it’s quite safe.
[1] https://holtecinternational.com/products-and-services/hi-sto...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
The other is that however bad those things are, or could be, global warming is still orders of magnitude worse. These very German arguments against nuclear power don't make sense at all.
Overall I'm pretty confident that in a few centuries (or even decades) people will see all of these strategies as really foolish (burying radioactive waste across hundreds of sites around the globe, dumping billions of tons of waste into the oceans, polluting the atmosphere, ...).
I have my own biases, but I am fairly confident that people of the future will come to a much different conclusion.
Every form of power generation has byproducts and waste. Many of these (even for renewables) are nasty, toxic substances. Nuclear seems to have one of the best ratios of waste to electric production of any form of power generation, including very low lifetime CO2 generation. I would hope the future people of earth are far more aghast that people kept doing things like burning coal (and then dumping the fly ash in places that contaminate groundwater) instead of building alternate sources of baseload generation.
Massive exageration by several orders of magnitude.
They say in the link you provided it is less than 126000 barrel containers of material. Even if you overestimate at 400 litres per container (they will probably be some sort of sarcophagus vessel) that is about 50k tonnes of material, for more than 30 years of operation. That sounds pretty efficient to me.
Edit: misread that you were refering to the material specifically stored in Asse II
There are ~450 reactors in the world with the US operating close to 100. You don't get to millions of tons.
Plants themselves are producing lower radiation materials, that don't need those iconic caskets or the extreme care. They wuldn't melt down or anything. This is from day to day operation (gloves, suits, containers) and decomissioning.
Consideriour examples of Fukushima, Chernobyl and such, why do we keep thinking we would do better in the future with this problem. If anything humanity is not to be trusted with making decisions for the greater good (just look at how all first world countries hoarded COVID vaccines in a protectionist, short sighted way).
Reprocessing will produce lots of low to moderately radioactive waste which also has to be stored.
And the 3rd solution is not really a long time solution, nobody can confirm the safety for a 100 years let alone several 1000.
This and your first option aren't super popular in part because the waste itself isn't exactly waste and has valuable parts that could be extracted and no one wants to make that too hard to recover later.
The risks of nuclear energy is far more favourable than global warming. Because of potential catastrophic outcomes of climate change I think we need to diversify our bets and include nuclear energy in our portfolio.
For reference, the amount of the very nasty waste produced by a lifetime's electricity demand for an average European citizen (so you probably want to multiply by 2 or 3 for future usage), immobilised in glass, is about the size of a hockey puck. A very deadly hockey puck mind, a kill-you-from-twenty-paces hockey puck, but a solid hockey puck.
You know what we haven't figured out? How to even re-concentrate the several tonnes of dispersed waste product fossil fuels put into the atmosphere for the same number of kWh, not as an accident but as part of normal operations, and that's currently wreaking havoc everywhere.
When the decision was put in place it was around 2011/12 iirc, back then the climate crisis debate was not nearly as big as it is today.
Also, burning coal is not the main target for the future of energy generation in Germany. The coal plants are just a side effect of the transition to a primarily renewable energy generation. Unfortunately due to coal energy companies having very close ties with the the ruling CDU Party, it's not surprising to see them get special treatment.
Knowing what's best is way different from personal political goals though.
North/northwest Europe got pretty damn scared by the Chernobyl fallout (in practice many kinds of wild game was banned for sale for many years afterwards in some countries and we measured everything that could possibly be contaminated) and that scare runs deep for many still today.
(This is why you have the irony that the "green parties" in Europe are so damn anti-nuclear despite at least some of them realizing that you can't properly fight global warming without nuclear power)
Well, that's technically incorrect - you can still fight it, you just have to renounce some energy use (at worst).
If that's her calculation, she needs to redo it.
Physicists like power as much if not more than politicians.
An ambiguous statement in this context :)
However, she was hardly in a position where she would have lost office. The next federal election was 2 years away, and nuclear, while at the time an important topic that dominated the media of course, was hardly the only topic. Her party might have suffered a somewhat in the short term - in state elections for example - but it's rather unlikely her party would have "lost" the next federal election and she her office.
She also never expressed a strong pro-nuclear stance while Chancellor (and as far as I know not before that either), and certainly did not justify such a stance with her scientific background. While in office as Chancellor, she called nuclear a "bridge technology" that should be kept around a while longer until Germany can switch over to renewables at its own pace.
The decision to partly reverse the nuclear exit - and the exit was decided years before and was generally seen favorably by Germans - by delaying when nuclear power plants had to go offline - she never planned to build new plants, for example - was less of a declaration for nuclear and had more too do with appeasing the nuclear lobby, and the industry lobby which feared higher energy costs. And it wasn't a decision she was really making all by herself, there was a lot of pressure from within the elites of her own party (most of which do not hold any degrees in physics, just saying), aside from all the lobby pressure.
She might have thought and/or still may think of nuclear as favorable, be it because she has a PhD in what was called theoretical chemistry - tho it is more physics than chemistry what she did and concerned nuclear decay reactions/processes - or be it because years before she became chancellor she was Federal Minister for the Environment which includes "nuclear security and oversight", or be it just because any everybody kinda has an opinion. But regardless, she didn't express a very pro nuclear opinion, as you suggest.
Unless she declares herself now that she is not running for office anymore, we will not really know what she truly thinks about nuclear and why. Not that her opinion on the matter is particularly more important than the opinion of others...
New nuclear power plants were banned altogether. The agreement became law in 2002 (Atomgesetz). Angela Merkel, objected to the agreement, calling it a “destruction of national property” that would be revoked if the CDU came to power.
To be fair I only looked for 30 seconds and it is hardly a smoking gun to call not building nuclear power a destruction of national property as being 'pro nuclear'.
https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/konsens-bei-atomg...
Merkel, according to your Spiegel reference said:
>Die Begrenzung der Restlaufzeit der deutschen Atomkraftwerke käme einer Vernichtung von volkswirtschaftlichem Vermögen gleich.
Which translates to
>Limiting the remaining service life of German nuclear power plants would be equal to destroying national economic assets.
So her concern was about shutting down existing nuclear power plants earlier than initially planned. She kept true to her word, and reversed that, only to re-reverse herself after Fukushima.
That's however not necessarily a very pro-nuclear stance, more a pro-"let them continue printing money with their existing plants because they have been good friends to the CDU in the past" stance.
What she didn't say however is that she favored investing in more nuclear power generation and nuclear technology in general.
A physicist that likes power.
Germany in 2020 had a mix of 36.0% from fossil fuels (24.3% of the total from "clean" coal, 11.7% from "clean" gas), 12.6% from nuclear, and 51.4% renewables[2].
Sure, I am not happy that Germany continues to burn so much fossil fuel either, but suggesting that Germany is particularly bad because it doesn't do as much nuclear is just not based in reality.
PS: In absolute numbers, the US produced 774 TWh of electrical energy using coal in 2020, Germany produced 118 TWh. That's 2.35 TWh per million people for the US, 1.41 TWh per million people in Germany. Or expressed yet differently, the US produced 1.67x the energy from coal per capita than Germany.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
[2] https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...
Keeping nuclear running and expanding it's role further could be used to replace fossil fuels while expanding renewables at the same time. In the long run, energy storage technology will improve, which will help overcome problem with unstable renewable sources, but I don't believe we will be there soon.
The answer to that could be burning things, along with better storage tech that you mentioned. Not necessarily fossil fuels, but biomass and gas (e.g. "cow farts"). Burning biomass, you can still stay neutral if done right, as the mass will use carbon when growing. Things like algae farming as a fast growing source of biomass may become important. With some additional tech you could filter out some carbon and other emissions and store what you filtered out, and have a negative emission balance considering the whole process.
Biomass and other renewables generally have the other positive aspect that research, development and installation is relatively cheap and quick compared to nuclear.
Another part of the solution surely will be to just use less energy, by investing in more efficient tech. Reducing energy consumption by merely 10% would essentially cover what nuclear in Germany produces now[0]. A lot of companies in Germany already started investing heavily into modernization to reduce their energy need, and this process is speeding up now. A lot of this effort is driven by public policy - from tax incentives to negative incentives in higher energy prices - but a lot is also driven by the realization of management that modernization efforts like this can massively drive down costs mid and long term while also ensuring the production facilities stay competitive with tech upgrades. Another way of policy incentives e.g. are the mandatory labeling of consumer goods in regard to energy consumption and efficiency, as consumers will use this information to buy stuff that's not only "better for the environment" than the competitor but also saves money on the electric bill. Right now, within the EU, such labeling is mostly for electric appliances, but it could be extended further to other areas like food or services, and could cover the entire life-cycle of a product including production and disposal, not just the time consumers operate it.
By the way, I am not generally opposed to nuclear, just opposed to nuclear how we do it now and did it in the past. For one, it's artificially made cheap by subsidies everywhere you look, and that artificially cheap price does not even include the additional costs of long term waste management. And then the plants are rather unsafe, not because they have to be, but because of policy failures. Things like building nuclear plants in regions prone to earthquakes and/or tsunamis, the French having to shut down a lot of their reactors every few summers because they'd be boiling their rivers if they didn't and of course incidents like Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island (thank the Air Force for having an airbase nearby which lead to TMI being build more sturdy than usual thus probably avoiding a really bad outcome), Windscale, etc... all that does not inspire confidence in me that humans and in particular politicians can manage the technology. When Belgium discovers "micro cracks" in high pressure boilers in nuclear power plants, and then their politicians almost immediately declare the plants to be still safe - in a timeframe where they surely cannot have thoroughly evaluated the findings - then that's not great already, then when I consider some people want to build massive nuclear power plants in areas of the world with far less stable societies than Belgium, I want to facepalm.
And on top of that nuclear is not renewable. The fuel has to come from somewhere, which doesn't bode well for energy independence. Right now, a forth of uranium is mined by Kazatomprom a quasi-state-owned company in Kazakhstan, which Freedom House rates a "consolidated authoritarian regime". Being dependent on Russia for gas isn't great; being dependent on Kazakhstan for nuclear full isn't great either.
PS: I would ...
Third generation nuclear reactors in France do load following all year round, with great success: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant#Pre...
>These reactors have the capability to regularly vary their output between 30–100% of rated power, to maneuver power up or down by 2–5%/minute during load following activities
And even the BWR can maneuver only at 10% per minute (60-100%).
So first, you cannot just shut them (nearly) off when you don't need them. You will have to run them at 30% at least essentially all the time. Not great if your goal is to use solar/wind as the primary mode of generation.
Then 2% to 5% per minute in changes is high latency compared to alternatives. If you need 10%-20% more NOW because there e.g. was an unscheduled break in a football (soccer) game and everybody got up, turned on the lights and the coffee maker and whatever then you're out of luck because the latency is too big to cover those additional 20% in the time you need them. 20% would take up to 10 minutes for nuclear to adjust, 2 minutes at least, realistically something like 5 minutes. And by the time it adjusts your grid will have broken down and everybody will be sitting in the dark.
Load-following with nuclear plants only works well enough if you have a pretty good idea of when the load is going to change in advance. Which in many cases historically you did, and you had non-nuclear fallbacks to compensate for when you were a little or even a lot off. You had a pretty good idea because you could estimate both the demand as it progresses during a day and the generation too. E.g. you knew what a "normal work day in November with this weather forecast (cloudy average temp 8°C, here is how temps will likely develop during the day), sunrise 07:07, sunset 16:22" looks like with enough historical detail from similar past days to plan for it. With solar and wind, you still know that about the demand side, but you can be a lot less sure about the generation side.
That's why you usually use gas (and historically coal) "peakers"[1]. They were and are in use for when your estimates were off, even if your base load comes from the best load-following nuclear. They can be maneuvered a lot faster with demand, and can be (almost) shut down when not needed. And what you need in a wind/solar world in particular is true peakers not base load plants with limited load following capabilities.
Does this clarify what I meant?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaking_power_plant
In contrast, the US seized civilian nuclear power plants after three mile island, fifty years ago.
Well, in 2002. Really long before that, because nobody was allowed to build new ones in ages already. But 2002 formalized the ban into law. Then came Merkel and reversed the shortened service life times for existing reactors. And then in 2011 after Fukushima, she re-reverse it. (No idea where you got the 2015 from).
Germany still has running reactors, by the way. We did not just shut them all down, as you say. We shut down the very oldest ones still in operation, then shut down more and more in the time frame we originally planned to shut them down before Merkel's initial reversal and kept doing that for the last decade. The six remaining facilities will be gone by end of next year, tho. They will have been in production for at least 33 years each, at that point.
So we had a decade to get our shit together and replace the nuclear with something else sustainable. We fell short, but not that short.
>with no real alternatives
There are alternatives, real ones, proven working ones. A mix of less consumption, driven by more efficient tech, wind/solar/water as the work horse and biomass to compensate for "bad" weather and some storage for the worst case. We could be emission-neutral and nuclear-free now, while not significantly more expensive (we'd have had costs regardless of what we built, building new nuclear plants isn't free either, and we would have needed new ones if we went the nuclear route instead). If there had been the political will to actually do so in the Merkel government... And that doesn't even take into account the European grid and how European nations could bridge temporarily increased demand/temporarily lower productions of individual members.
Germany invested heavily into renewables at first, but this got more slow-paced recently, again thanks to some of Merkel's people, in particular Peter Altmaier who was "Secretary of the Economy" and considered his job to be a fulfillment center for old garde lobbyist needs.
Regardless, over half the electric energy production is now from renewables. So I guess, there is some light at the end of the tunnel.
But the problem with the German nuclear plants is that they are old, old builds with old tech, and way past their expiration dates, even with the constant upgrades they received over the years. Every inspection in the last decade raised serious "wtf" moments (and inspections are rather lax and even more so before Fukushima). Nuclear can be reasonably safe if you take the time and money to make it so and don't build them in earthquake alley, but these particular ones stopped being safe a decade or more ago.
So you either have to spend serious coin (billions) to modernize the still existing ones, all the while you take them off grid for extended periods of time, or you have to spend serious coin (billions) to build new ones, which will take you like a decade before they go into production anyway. Nuclear is too expensive, frankly. Renewables today are already cheaper, if you also account for all direct, indirect and hidden subsidies each receives.
New or upgraded nuclear is not seen favorable by most (according to polls) Germans, me included. I'd rather see that money go to installing renewables capacity instead, and investing into renewables tech research.
But sure, if we actually had new-ish and safe reactors that could be safely operated for another 10 or 20 or whatever years, I'd personally say: go for it, keep them running for that time instead of coal and gas plants.
Germany is obviously unable to produce sufficient renewable energy. It's far too inelastic.
It's Germanys fault the electricity is so expensive.
Billions quickly become very abstract things.
As part of its stimulus package, Germany intends to expand the role of green hydrogen to help end the country's reliance on coal. The government agreed on a plan on how to spend the €9 billion earmarked for the project.The plan, which could see hydrogen eventually make up about 10% of the country's total electricity capacity, was unveiled as part of a €130 billion ($147 billion) stimulus to help reboot the economy during the coronavirus pandemic. The hydrogen commitment is part of some €40 billion earmarked for climate-related spending.
Nuclear is more expensive comparing watts to watts, but Europe is learning the hard way that, without useful storage (the situation today), more than one watt nominal renewable generating capacity is necessary to reliably replace one watt from a thermal plant.
Yeah, they make sure to do the dirty stuff on Pacific atolls, far from prying eyes.
yes, yes, not an operator - the point is, whenever they have an inkling that something remotely dirty might happen, they run for the sea. Supposedly they don't do it anymore, but personally I wouldn't trust the French MoD to tell me the time of day - they have a massive history of lies, deceit, and coverups.
(but well, I much prefer more (safe, not the old junk plant 40km from where I live) nuclear power than inhaling the particles emitted by burned coal).
I think nuclear can be part of a healthy energy diet, but not at the expense of less privileged countries.
[1] https://www.mo.be/en/opinie/france-destroys-north-niger-will...
It's fine confronting Areva, but pretending French energy policy is derivative of an African agenda is uninformed at best.
For example this top comment from "Activists who embrace nuclear power (newyorker.com)" talks about it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26213984
Articles like this miss the main point and instead focus on culture war material. There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear. The issues aren't safety, waste, and environments opposition. There are plenty of climate hawks that support nuclear too. It's all excessive costs.
They briefly mention the cooling retrofits for Diablo Canyon in San Lui Obispo, but they don't mention that they bids from Bechtel to simply build a modern cooling system were all billions of dollars of expense. Just the cooling system is more expensive than alternatives.
And this is a trend we will see in the future. For primary generation of electrons, steam based thermodynamic cycles are pretty much obsolete. The number I typically hear is that it's $1-2W to build, say, a cooling system for coal steam. A nuclear plants cooling is pretty much identical. Solar and wind are going to undercut that cost very soon.
So the name of the game is now storage. Attaching four hours of storage to a solar generation farm, just enough to get through the duck curve, is now slightly cheaper than coal.
The best estimate of what the cheapest possible future grid looks like is: solar/wind capacity at 4x of total demand (thermal generators are roughly at 2x on the current grid), with 3-4 days of storage. This translates to world with abundant energy, at certain times, that's generated at zero marginal cost. There are still lots of transmission costs however. The future of energy is all about spatial and temporal arbitrage of renewable electrons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
Sure, the efficiency isn't as good as batteries, but wikipedia shows nuclear being over 3x as expensive as wind/solar [1]. Power to gas using wind/solar can definitely be done cheaper than that.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28679985
[1] https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/
[2] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/04/22/submarine-cable-to-co...
[3] https://electrek.co/2021/09/27/the-worlds-longest-subsea-cab...
Smells like Desertec, but what the heck?
Hydrogen has a habit of leaking through anything and embrittling metals, so it may not be a trivial task. According to the Dept. of Energy, converting pipelines to carry pure hydrogen will require "substantial modification."
https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-pipelines
When supply exceeds demand, you could just "bleed it off" or reduce supply by decoupling generators.
Note that the end-game is that renewables become so pervasive that there are significant periods when renewable generation does exceed total demand, and then you generate hydrogen with it. That hydrogen then displaces the natural gas that's currently used, the storage / pipework infrastructure for natural gas being equally suitable for hydrogen.
Indeed, it seems to me that comparisons tend to focus on the raw cost of producing 1 kWh, leaving aside the very important issue of reliability of production.
Cheaper is better, sure, but supply comes first.
I don't think that there currently is an alternative to nuclear to guarantee a large supply of low emission electricity. The best alternative is hydropower but it's very limited by geography.
So renewables and nuclear are actually complementary.
[0]: https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-...
A combined cycle power plant has a cost per watt just 10% of that of a nuclear plant (and simple cycle, just 4-5%), so you can completely back up the grid with them and still come out cheaper than nuclear.
No, nuclear and renewables are not complementary. They are both inflexible.
The actual practical max varies by location. Some places have a ton of solar or wind and some have poor conditions. There are regions with poor renewables and high population density. That would require long range grid connects but that in turn raises the bar for the regions from which they are drawing.
Batteries need to drop in price by at least another order of magnitude. They’ve already experienced almost Moore’s Law price drops for the past two decades so this is probably possible. The major cost now is manufacturing not materials and batteries are amenable to a lot of manufacturing automation.
Renewables and storage are also falling rapidly in cost. Any nuclear plant we start planning today will be competing with the cheap renewables and storage of decades hence, not just what's available at this instant.
Where do you live that these costs are included in the price?
https://www.powermag.com/data-shows-nuclear-plant-decommissi...
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/01/us-nuclear-site-cleanup...
We can be reasonably confident of that because decommissioning costs are falling:
https://www.powermag.com/data-shows-nuclear-plant-decommissi...
> Soon EDF will have to start the biggest, most complex and costliest nuclear decommissioning and radioactive waste management programme on earth
Seems like it won't be enough, as german gouvernment reports estimate around 50 bln for less then a third of the french reactors.
Incidentally, look up the radionuclide emissions of a coal (or even heavy oil) plant, such as the one used when the wind stopped blowing. They're literally only allowed because the radionuclide standards applied to fission aren't applied to coal.
The projects will be funded with public debt (either directly or by providing state-backed loans that not be paid back for the most part), the profits will be private, and if a company fails, we will save their arse with public money again. Decommissioning and the long terms effects will also be left to the imagination of the reader, I mean, for taxpayers to pay.
Don't get me wrong here, this is not a rant against nuclear power, which is the least bad source of energy we have at the moment, this is a rant about France's neo-liberal tunnel vision that even the USA has been steering away from in the past decade.
To some extent that has already been done, with the "old" fully state-owned EDF having been chopped into Enedis and EDF, and this will continue.
Stating that "Full clean-up and decommissioning costs are always included upfront in new nuclear projects" is problematic considering that it has never been done, and the cost of storing by-products is made extraordinarily opaque with a combination of private actors (Orano for example) that are ridden with corruption issues. Also, it is just completely wrong that the cost of electricity takes all this into account.
Let's say that there is a lot of debate around the issue :)