It's so frustrating seeing nuclear pitted against renewables, while fossil fuel powerplants are still operating/being built, whose baseline power could be replaced by nuclear.
But somehow the idea took hold that nuclear would be built instead of solar, and not instead of coal.
Coal was already in reasonably widespread use in industrial processes 200 years ago, and produced unpaid-for externalities then just as it does now (actually worse ones, presumably, given that air quality was not yet regulated in any meaningful way).
I’m not saying the parent is necessarily wrong, but given the recency of the industrial revolution and the length of time between which it “began” and when many of the most useful industrial applications for coal were discovered, I can’t take it at face value “centuries” is correct. It might be close to correct, it might be technically correct, but it’s not merely an pedantic point: his comment reads as hyperbole because of the vagueness of what centuries even means here. Even if it has been technically two centuries, century plural technically, that’s overstating his case. Overstating your case is a good way to get people to turn off to what you are saying if they perceive it that way.
A lot of the coal used in Swedish metal-working (up to relatively late, but I don't actually have dates, here, gut feel is 18050s) was charcoal, rather than mined coal. With quite advanced cooperatives[1] producing the charcoal for the mining/refining cooperatives[1].
[1] Somewhat loose translation of "kolare" and "bergslag", here.
Please don’t fall for the villianization that the media adopt to push an agenda.
Energy is a fundamental need for society to flourish.
Fossil fuels have one of the highest energy densities and hence have been used for ages. We have much to be thankful for thanks to fossil fuels being around.
We are in a position today to bring change and I’m all for that. Losing sight of the benefits of energy simply because some sources have a negative connotation attached sets us up for failure.
I didn’t say it’s wrong. I said it villianizes those fuels.
We needed fuels as a society for those 3000 mile flights over the pacific that ships your iPhone here.
Energy “subsidies” are a strategic investment in securing your lifestyle. Just look at Europe right now as they head into winter with sky high natural gas prices. They’d go ahead an strike any deal that secures their supplies so they do t freeze half to death like they did with Russia.
Energy is a strategic asset and simply saying “it gets subsidized” makes it sound like charity.
Oh, i didn't miss that part, i think you may have missed my assertion that Energy is crucial to flourish. One may see a society "Flourish" by innovating their way out of an unsustainable path.
Everything we consider advanced tech today is built on an economy made possible by vast, cheap and accessible energy sources such as the ones we're dissing.
I agree that we need to stop using energy sources in a way that threatens our existence. But i assert that there are massive benefits we have to be thankful for as well.
It's not "you first". There are perfectly good replacements available, we just need governments to invest heavily on replacing them instead of using that money to maintain the status quo.
I've already substantially changed my lifestyle to be more sustainable.
I don't own a car, I don't eat meat, I consume very little and try to buy used things instead, I repair all my things as much as possible, I try to steer my investments away from anything close to fossil fuels.
I do everything you just listed. But that was by choice, and I know people who won't want to e.g. ever give up eating meat.
We have to accommodate these lifestyles (and build tech to make it more sustainable) - people generally don't want to go 'backwards', even if you or I don't perceive that as a problem.
Ultimately it's irrelevant, because both of our lifestyles are still heavily carbon negative without offsets. We both own a computer or live in a house I assume? That's why I'm sceptical of the "just live more sustainable" movement.
Our lifestyle is sustainable. It just doesn't scale for 10 billion people. The only problem what we have is the amount of people. We can do something against it, but we won't.
what both? Any existing prediction says that the Earth won't support more than 10 billion people. Our life is much more "sustainable" now than before. Yes we still have a lot to do, we will always have, but gosh, we are simply too many. I can't believe in a COPXX if birth control isn't part of the solution.
>Energy is a fundamental need for society to flourish.
Energy is needed for basic modern services.
Humans have survived a long time without electricity. It could be simpler to 'go without' or 'find a workaround' for a lot of conveniences if we were serious at combating climate change.
Not for eight billion people. Just look at what happens when we stop loading trucks for a little while. Now imagine if you expanded all that "going without" to everything that uses energy. You'd have days at most before mass chaos.
In what condition? Without the energy of the fossil fuel, lots of the energy came from human labor. Without it, we wouldn't have gotten rid of slavery. Most people were doing a manual labor, which is also more discriminatory to the weaker ones (e.g. woman)
So your just suggesting we go back to the middle ages? No, thank you.
> Fossil fuels have one of the highest energy densities and hence have been used for ages. We have much to be thankful for thanks to fossil fuels being around.
With renewables baseline doesn’t make sense. Nuclear doesn’t combine well with renewables, not in a way that would complete the picture. Meaning: you can’t build something that works with only those two building blocks. Even more: baseline is not at all needed with renewables.
Renewables need to be combined with power sources that can be turned on and off quickly and on demand. Nuclear emphatically cannot provide that.
Talking about baseline power – as if that‘s needed – is highly misleading in that context.
Maybe they should work on a nuclear plant that can be turned on and off quickly then.
The basic nuclear value proposition is [negligible fuel -> enough energy to power a country]. We should be exploring the options, vigorously. There will be less pollution than the alternatives where [large amounts of stuff -> enough energy to power part of a country].
The whole reason why nuclear energy is not because it technically is inferior, but, rather, the NIMBY mentality of nuclear energy at large. Many people see the consequences of mishandled nuclear energy and immediately see this as a eventual reality for all nuclear plants.
We suck at risk assessment. We fret about radiation whilst fossil fuelled power plants have been releasing radionuclides and particles in the open air for about a century.
Coal based irradiation is slow and wide. It does not have the potential to render a concentrated area semi-permanently uninhabitable. There is nothing irrational about watching a relatable peer's life investment crash to a value of zero and deciding you want none of that kind of risk.
This argument does not make a lot of sense without detailing which power sources that can turn on and off quickly you are talking about. The only ones I can think of are hydro and gas-powered thermal? So you want natural gas over nuclear?
On the other hand, your comment presumes that there is such a thing as too much power. Once hydrolyzers mature, we could use all of the current renewable power in Europe just for producing hydrogen for steel production to replace coal there.
They probably want Hydrogen or synthetic Methane (from electrolysis Hydrogen and atmospheric CO2) instead of natural gas. Power2Gas is a promising technology for long term storage of energy.
Gas and nuclear can’t replace each other. So that instead I’m your sentence is completely misplaced.
We certainly need gas in the short term. Sure. But you can’t let nuclear take over the role of gas (and other potential on demand power sources, pumped hydro and maybe batteries in the future). That just doesn’t work.
Also, I‘m all for producing an overabundance of power and using that in a meaningful way. But that’s not the issue we are talking about here. Baseline framing of the current problem we are facing makes no sense and that is my point.
In addition to hydro and fossil fuels, (most) energy storage setups are quickly dispatchable.
I don’t think the question is “is natural gas better than nuclear?”. It’s more “nuclear isn’t quickly dispatchable, which is what we need”. It’s not that gas is better than nuclear, it’s that they solve two different problems. Solar and wind need something to fill gaps when production fluctuates. Today that can be hydro or fossil fuels. In the near future, that will also be storage. For the foreseeable future, nuclear can’t fill that role.
Demand response is an interesting concept, and a subset of researchers have been pushing it for years. I’m skeptical that the economics would work out (large fixed costs mean that there’s pressure to run 24/7 and eat the high electricity prices), but I’d be happy to be proven wrong. That said, it doesn’t fix the fundamental problem that sometimes the wind dies at night, and something needs to turn on in the next 5 minutes or streetlights start going out. Right now, nuclear isn’t capable of filling that niche.
> “nuclear isn’t quickly dispatchable, which is what we need”
> something needs to turn on in the next 5 minutes or streetlights start going out. Right now, nuclear isn’t capable of filling that niche.
Depends on the reactor. A single ~1GW reactor should be able to adjust its output up by 150MW or so in 5 minutes. If you have multiple that number multiplies obviously.
For example a typical reactor in France with a max output of 1300MW can be adjusted all the way down to 400MW within 30 minutes (and up to max 1300MW output from minimumn 400MW in the same time). If they could not do that there is no way France could generate 70%+ of their electricity with nuclear.
(obviously the reactor has to be designed with the goal of being adjustable for it to be able to do this. France started to do this in the 80s)
edit: Though because the vast majority of the costs of running a nuclear power plant is in building/maintaining it and running it at max vs min output costs the same amount of money most owners want to run their reactor at max output always.
France and Germany stabilize each other's nets. There actually isn't really a "French" or "German net" anymore as all European countries are very tightly connected nowadays.
> All the nuclear supply has already been sold and is being constantly used 100% of the time. It never makes sense to turn off the nuclear power plant.
Which will be less and less the case for the European nuclear champions whose plants are approaching their 40-50 years lifespan of commercial support and safe operations (or so I am told) and it's going to cost a lot to replace them, more than going full renewables apparently.
In Belgium, at some points we had to shut down offshore wind turbines because there was not enough demand on the grid and turning off and on our nuclear plants would take too much time.
Gas plants don't have that problem (or so they say). So we are building some to compensate until we have enough renewables to shut them off for good.
Also, SMR are gaining tractions so who knows.
Disclaimer: I hear both sides, one claiming we don't need nuclear to reach our emissions carbon target and the other claiming we need classic nuclear plants to manage climate change and I don't know who's right.
> All the nuclear supply has already been sold and is being constantly used 100% of the time.
This couldn't be further from the truth, at least for France: hover over the lower graphs to animate the source upper graph here:
https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/FR
Every single day nuclear oscillates between 60% and 80%, in strong anti-correlation with wind, solar and border exchanges.
With hydro and pumped storage, this margin is well enough for attending to peak demand. And it is economically viable; This is the thing about nuclear: it costs practically the same wether you're at 20% or 95% of the plant's capacity. You consume your fuel faster, but it is only a small fraction of the cost (15% IIRC). And you still get 0 CO2 emission.
And with current gas prices this is the cheapest solution we have at the moment. (not the cheapest in terms of political will, but educating masses can solve that)
If you're at 20% capacity it costs about 5x as much as when you're at 100% capacity. With nuclear almost all the cost is in building (and decommissioning) the plant.
> We are not even remotely close to living in a "We have too much power" world
Not a "world", but this happens locally in Europe due to wind/solar momentarily producing more than demand. There have been instances with negative prices.
Anecdotally, one mitigation seems to be adjusting the local base voltage to 220V so that peaks due to solar stay below 240V (or something like that).
Nuclear can, at least theoretically, be throttled hour-by-hour over the day to compensate wind, although hydro is probably more cost-effective if available.
Working in the strategy back office of a one of the worlds largest producer of renewable power, I feel I have a reasonable grasp of the problem here. Not sure what background you believe I am missing.
The point I was trying to make in my second paragraph is that when hydrolyzers get sufficiently cheap that you can buy enough to cover your peak over-production and let them idle when you are missing power, then you have effectively moved the elasticity from the production side to the demand side -- and then slow baseload does not require you to derate down your renewables.
This is far from the situation today where hydrolyzers are so expensive that you need to run them at pretty high utilization to make the economics work out.
The question is: given that we MUST be reducing our CO2 output extremely quickly (5% a year, equivalent to an additional COVID19 crisis every year), what are the chances for your magical cheap hydrolyzers to 1° be developed 2° be deployed at scale before large parts of the world dive into climatic chaos?
BTW there is a very efficient way to run hydrolyzers at 95%: run them on nuclear power. Problem solved?
If batteries fill the need we can ramp up production of batteries. Lithium ion in the short term, and flow batteries or other utility scale batteries (Eg iron air), in the medium to long term.
There are multiple utility scale competing battery technologies becoming quite mature and Thats a good thing. Especially if one or more of them are viable.
It’s almost certainly easier and faster to scale battery tech than it has been nuclear.
> If batteries fill the need we can ramp up production of batteries.
No we can't. Not in the amounts required. We're not talking about 100kW Tesla batteries.
> There are multiple utility scale competing battery technologies becoming quite mature
You mean, there are multiple competing battery technologies that are barely at the theoretical level with multiple significant challenges and no implementations beyond theoretical or impractical for the use case in question.
Flow batteries: low energy density, requires large tanks to be anywhere useful. Low charge and discharge rates, so are not practical for load following applications
Iron-air: only theoretical so far with first small plant potentially in operation by 2023, and its efficiency is yet to be seen (so far it's mostly marketing materials and hype).
> t’s almost certainly easier and faster to scale battery tech than it has been nuclear.
Ah yes, it's certainly easier to scale non-existent and non-scalable tech.
Solar and wind do not have the required energy density and will never be viable without nuclear. The alternative is to keep burning fossil fuels and blow past 3C because we are already locked into 2C+ of warming with no viable path to large scale atmospheric carbon and methane removal.
First, you can't predict solar or wind days ahead in the same way you can't predict rain, days ahead. There are "weather forecasts", not cloud reading.
Second. Even if you knew two days ahead about wind speed fluctuations that lasted for 10 to 20 minutes. What, then? You can't inform the population there will be 10 minute outages, in advance, or ask them to turn off appliances for exactly 10 minutes, in advance.
Solar and wind aren't reliable. The plan is to turn on thermal plants when the wind stops blowing. In my very humble opinion, solar and wind aren't THE long term future of energy production. They have their uses, but the way it is being marketed obeys to political discourse, not reality.
On a technical note, the first point is not really true. Using atmospheric models like WRF get you pretty good irradiance forecasts that are roughly proportional to PV output. I (very briefly) worked with a group doing just that for power companies in the southwest, and it was pretty decent out to 5 days or so. It eventually got picked up into another program [1] that would contract out to big PV installations.
> First, you can't predict solar or wind days ahead in the same way you can't predict rain, days ahead. There are "weather forecasts", not cloud reading.
You can. And there is companies specialized in that for the Wind and solar industry. [1]
The reason is pretty simple: Weather variability tend to be high at the local level but pretty predictable at the national level (the energy grid level).
And to answer to the original post, yes Nuclear energy can also be fine grained controlled to compensate the renewable energy intermittency. It is done every day in France. It can be done yes, Is it efficient ? Not really.
I don't understand. One of the benefits of nuclear is that it can be turned on and off quite easily. There are several mechanisms to throttle on and off the reaction.
Capital expense for nuclear is so high that to be economical you need to run the plants at full power as much a possible. So while you can regulate them (slowly, there is quite a bit of thermal inertia in the system), it's much cheaper to regulate the renewables.
Is this a new thing? In France, the nuclear plants built between 1960 and 1980 have throttling but it takes more than 20hrs to cool down, making it inefficient to stop at night (hence over-provisioning overnight leading to price shifts to encourage people to run water boilers and washing machines at night).
Sure, but you don’t want to do that. Nuclear is monstrously expensive already. For it to have any chance of being economically viable at all you have to run it all the time. It doesn’t make sense as an on-demand power source.
Nuclear is totally economically viable. It's not viable in the current regulatorily climate. Investing $1 billion in a nuclear plant that will return profits for 80 years is an easy financial decision. Investing $1 billion in a nuclear plant that will be shut down by moonbats every 4 years when the next batch of princess unicorns is voted into office is not economically viable.
There’s very little storage cost as the fuel can be burned til there is nothing radioactive left.
Nuclear doesn’t produce radioactive materials it reduces radioactivity. If you mix the spent fuel from a heavy water reactor back into the ore, it’s radioactivity will have been reduced.
While you can burn the fuel until very few long-lived isotopes are left we don't do that currently. Nuclear reactors also turn relatively harmless Uranium into much more active elements. Just mixing the waste back into the rocks you got the Uranium from is not a safe storage method.
We don't do that currently because there hasn't been a new plant built in 50 years and the designs of the old plants were specifically engineered to make materials for nuclear weapons.
If there wasn't a huge stigma against nuclear energy they would be making advancements, but nobody is going to fund advancements while there is no guarantee they will be allowed to apply them.
What would happen to the JavaScript language if every year half of congress gave speeches condemning JavaScript and calling for a prohibition against any new JavaScript code? How many new people would bother learning JavaScript.
Indeed the regulatory climate is missing to put the costs of handling nuclear waste onto the producers. I doubt it would be economically viable to operate a nuclear plant if those costs were fully factored in.
I'm an advocate for nuclear power, but I have to point out that this isn't actually true. A nuclear plant can load-follow to a certain extent if it is designed to do so, but if you reduce the power output of a nuclear reactor below a certain threshold then the reactor will need a decent period of time (around a day) to cool down before it can be started up again.
The fundamental problem is nuclear physics itself. Running a nuclear reactor produces Xenon-135, which has a huge potential to soak up neutrons, and therefore given half a chance will try to shut down the nuclear reaction. When the reactor is going full pelt, then there are enough neutrons flying around to burn up the Xenon, and all is good. When you reduce power output, then there is still a large amount of Xenon in the reactor, and it will soak up lots of the neutrons and reactivity of the reactor, shutting the reaction down. The Xenon takes about a day to decay by itself down to a level where it is safe to restart the reactor again. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon-135 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_poison
One of the contributing factors towards the Chernobyl accident was the reactor controllers trying to overcome the effects of Xenon by pulling the control rods of the reactor out. This made the reactor highly unstable, because as the reaction rate increases the Xenon will be burned off increasing the reactivity, which can lead to the reaction ramping up very quickly.
For that we should look at what baseline is. Ideally all our power sources would adjust instantaneously to demand. In reality that is not possible. Traditionally, power plants which can be run constantly at fixed output (i.e. coal plants, nuclear power plants), have been cheaper to operate, so we used those for "baseline" power and more expensive adjustable plants (e.g. gas turbines) to follow the load.
However, the new reality is that wind/solar are cheaper than the old baseline plants. Now wind/solar do not supply us a with a constant power like those old baseline plants, but instead with variable supply as well. So we still need fast adjustable sources (or storage), which now even out both variable supply and demand. By over provisioning (and net interconnectivity) we can reduce the need for adjustable sources. Essentially if you have enough renewable sources to cover the high demands at low wind/sun you can always turn off the sources when you overshoot and because they are cheap it is economical unfeasible.
> By over provisioning (and net interconnectivity) we can reduce the need for adjustable sources. Essentially if you have enough renewable sources to cover the high demands at low wind/sun you can always turn off the sources when you overshoot and because they are cheap it is economical unfeasible.
Overprovisioning by how much? Currently ( at least since a month or so) across Europe there's a meteorological phenomenon that makes for cold temperatures, lower than usual wind speeds, and clouds. 2 out of the 3 main renewable power sources ( solar, wind, tidal) are heavily impacted ( wind most of all iirc) and producing less electricity than usual, while people need to warm themselves. And this is expected to continue into the winter.
To combat such a scenario if everyone was on renewables+storage+interconnects, you'd have to built massive storage ( which we don't have the tech/space for) or massive interconnects from really far away places like Africa.
IIRC correctly we'd need to overprovision by more than 100%, and huge storage too. Is it less expensive then? Also what has the least impact on the environment? On space and material requirements given the required massive overall of the grid (to move power across continents)?
> the new reality is that wind/solar are cheaper than the old baseline plants
Not if you take into account land use. A single nuclear plant can supply about a GW of electrical power. The equivalent capacity in wind and solar--even without taking into account the overprovisioning that, as you note, is required because of the lack of reliability of those sources--takes up far more land than that nuclear plant. That has a huge environmental impact that nobody takes into account when figuring the actual cost of wind and solar--though of course the same people are quite happy to hunt down every last little environmental impact of nuclear and point out how it increases the actual cost.
(The requirement for massive amounts of storage, which others have pointed out, is another environmental impact of wind and solar that nobody takes into account when figuring the actual cost.)
Nuclear changes the game completely. Think of the most audacious, energy intensive expense of effort that’s deemed infeasible today?
Let’s consider something like desalinating water from the pacific and continuously pumping it inland to the Australian Outback or the middle of the Sahara.
With an investment in Nuclear, hypothetically, it’s cheaper. Present nuclear reactors have a high cost of operation simply because they’re aligned to energy consumption and regulatory patterns not suited to them.
Also, Small Modular Reactors are a thing. They’re available today for use and that’s what France is going all in on, but in the US, the first entity to try will be sued to the ground.
You have your enormous electric desalination plant, or metal smelter. It needs cheap electricity to be profitable, but there is cheap enough electricity during the day to be feasible. As a result, coal is now dirt cheap. You build a coal plant to keep working at night.
Renewables and gas are not enough either: you need lots of storage anyway. Plus, at this point you’ve lost the plot because you are still burning fossil fuels. Without nuclear there is no scenario in which we stop carbon emissions without seriously decreasing energy consumption (about an order of magnitude in 50 years) or paying significantly more (tens of billions per year) and relying on hypothetical future technologies.
The arguments against nuclear are not really technical, and are overall incompatible with our energy supply getting rid of fossil fuel in the near term.
> Renewables need to be combined with power sources that can be turned on and off quickly and on demand. Nuclear emphatically cannot provide that.
That's true of current nuclear, but it's not an intrinsic property of nuclear power. Proposed plants that use molten salt as a working fluid, for example, give you the option to run the plant all the time, but at any given time either use the heat in the molten salt for power generation immediately, or move the molten salt into a storage tank for later use. Molten salt is already used this way in concentrated solar plants, and works fine for that purpose.
If what we have is electricity, turning it into heat to turn it back into electricity again is very inefficient. If what we have is heat and we're going to turn it into electricity anyway, storing it as heat for now and turning it into electricity later is much better, and comparatively trivial to do. That somewhat limits the applications, though, with concentrated solar being the only obvious renewable one. Solar PV and wind don't generate electricity from heat.
Well you are just proposing to use molten salt as energy storage, but if we have efficient storage we don't need nuclear because we can charge the storage much cheaper and environmentally friendlier using renewables.
As a side note, every time someone points out the shortcomings of nuclear power plants (not easily adjustable, huge investment costs/expensive, storage ...) there's the replies about, "but those new future plants that we are researching will solve all this". We don't know if reality will actually deliver on those promises (nuclear has quite a history of broken promises), especially if we are talking about acting fast.
Yes, this is energy storage, but a big tank to put salt in has the potential to be considerably cheaper than lithium ion cells.
To your second point: all technologies have the property that we can't know for sure if they'll deliver on their promises without trying them, and the very reason we don't know in the case of nuclear is because opponents of nuclear power undermine attempts to try out novel architectures, pointing to limitations in current technologies as justification.
Interesting article. It shows that since nuclear is at least 3x faster to respond than wind power in France at the time of the study, its response time is more than adequate as a major part of the energy mix. However, even in France with their dozens of reactors, it is not fast enough to respond to more than 2/3 of peak demand changes (100MW/min of their peak 150MW/min change in demand).
It seems obvious that it's extremely useful to be able to produce so much electricity and reduce the need for fast switching power by 2/3. Surely 100MW/min of fast switching energy storage is not without its own massive environmental footprint, something that significantly reduces the calculated impact of nuclear.
If we could ramp up construction of solar, wind, and long range transmission capabilities to the point where they could effectively respond to all demand, we would not need to have a conversation. But in the midst of worldwide supply chain disruptions that will likely last for years, it seems irresponsible, even extremely irresponsible, to push aside the parallelization of additional low emission energy production capabilities. Seeing as this is all very time sensitive at this point, and the consequences of failure are likely a widespread collapse of society and suffering for generations.
I made one major error there. Since the article is based on actual performance rather than an intimate knowledge of France's grid capabilities, it is wrong to presume that their historical 100MW/min ramp up was the best they could do, rather than all that was required and basically just an algorithmic artifact. I got that in the comparison to wind, but somehow missed it in comparison to their total fast switch requirements.
Eh no I think. If you have a robust power storage mechanism, say pumped hydro, batteries, etc, you can run the nuclear continuously while having capacity to supplement renewables.
Or combined with variable sources - say green hydrogen production. Produce too much, push energy into electrolysis, produce too little and turn that off.
>Nuclear emphatically cannot provide that.
This is a falsehood. Nuclear plants can and do load-follow.
They typically are run as close to 100% as possible because so much of the cost of the plant is divorced from the power output at any one time. Framed a different way, they are somewhat more expensive to idle or run at lower utilization fractions than other sources of electricity. But they certainly can (and do) operate this way when needed.
So the power supply used to change the speed of nuclear warships from bare steerageway to 30+kts rather quickly is not responsive to changes in demand? Friend you seem to have some conceptual errors.
There is a lot of things you need to do if you take a plant out of operation, and there is a significant amount of decay heat from fission products that does require external power (basically what caused fukashima's fires) to cool over days if you turn a plant off, but you are oversimplifying solved engineering challenges to present them as intractable challenges.
Its not directly a technological problem, its an economic problem. Even the optimistic side of the cost analysis for nuclear power must assume that the reactors are operating at full power as much as possible.
The operating cost is essentially independent of power output.
Nuclear works fine with renewables. Use nuclear for the minimum demand level, since it's cheaper than batteries per kWh. Build enough solar on top to cover the extra demand during the day. For remaining discrepancies with demand, build the cheapest combination of storage, excess production, and load-following by nuclear (which is perfectly capable of that with modern reactors). Wind adds some randomization but on the other hand it's less likely to go down all at once over a whole continent, so probably doesn't hurt if the grid is large enough.
This assumes your goal is to meet energy demands reliably with clean power at the lowest possible overall system cost. If instead your goal is to maximize wind/solar no matter what, then of course nuclear doesn't fit in.
Nuclear emphatically can provide enough scaling to follow the broad diurnal solar cycle and the duck curve.
> Historically, nuclear power plants were built as baseload plants, without load following capability to keep the design simple. Their startup or shutdown took many hours as they were designed to operate at maximum power, and heating up steam generators to the desired temperature took time.[2]
> Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope. Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode and so participate in the primary and secondary frequency control.
Also this is what we are capable of now. Imagine what we could do with advances in thermal storage. Nuclear has one huge advantage over other power sources: you can simply throw more power at the problem. E2E efficiency is less of a factor when you have excess capacity you can't otherwise do anything with.
I imagine nuclear + solar + wind + battery setups like Tesla's grid batteries would work just fine, anyone with enough knowledge of nuclear grid power that can chime in?
Instead of being combined with power sources that can be turned on and off quickly on demand, they can be overbuilt and combined with power sinks that can be turned on and off to keep demand stable. grid controlled EV chargers and bitcoin mining are two such sinks.
Are you really saying nuclear + renewables in a grid is less feasible than renewables alone? Please cite some source. At a surface level, the amount of battery capacity needed to deal with power droughts with renewables would be far less with nuclear power present.
Saying that fossil fuels + renewables works well doesn't really have a place in a dialog about the best way to eliminate fossil fuels.
"Renewables need to be combined with power sources that can be turned on and off quickly and on demand. Nuclear emphatically cannot provide that."
There is an illogical assumption underlying this claim - if both power sources are zero-carbon, why does it matter which one we turn off? Why do have to turn off nuclear instead of disconnecting a wind turbine? What difference does it make?
> Even more: baseline is not at all needed with renewables.
What?
> Renewables need to be combined with power sources that can be turned on and off quickly and on demand. Nuclear emphatically cannot provide that.
--- start quote ---
Modern nuclear plans with light water reactors are designed to have strong manoeuvring capabilities. Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode, i.e. they participate in the primary and secondary frequency control, and some units follow a variable load programme with one or two large power changes per day
The minimum requirements for the manoeuvrability capabilities of modern reactors are defined by the utilities requirements that are based on the requirements of the grid operators. For example, according to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100 % of its rated power Pr, with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% of Pr per minute
Most of the modern designs implement even higher manoeuvrability capabilities, with the possibility of planned and unplanned load-following in a wide power range and with ramps of 5% Pr per minute
> But somehow the idea took hold that nuclear would be built instead of solar, and not instead of coal.
Nobody wants to admit they are still considering coal, but everyone wants to take credit for blocking nuclear and building renewables. So at a glance it seems like it's nuclear vs renewables, when it's always been nuclear vs coal.
The problem is that hardly anybody does a clear cost calculation of a nuclear powerplant.
We know roughtly what it costs to build solar or wind. There is a bit of subsidies and commercial parties take care of the rest. In the short term we need natural gas as a backup for solar and wind. But even that is not hard to build.
And then we have nuclear. Projects that are late, projects cost way more than projected. Building a nuclear powerplant takes so much time that financing the project is almost impossible.
Today, nuclear is just not a practical option. We need to build as much non-fossil capacity as we can and as quick as we can.
In future, we have to solve the storage problem for wind and solar. If that becomes a problem, then nuclear may make a comeback. At least, if somebody can figure out how to accurately project the cost and construction time.
Neither the technology nor the fuel for nuclear plants are abundant or renewable. For example, can Iran build its own reactors? No. Can Somalia run its hypothetical reactors? No. Can Syria import enriched uranium? No. Can we have reactors without them blowing up every 50 years? No. Do we have a solution for containing nuclear waste without leaks and without ruining the local communities? No.
Enough with this joke of pitching nuclear as a viable alternative. I get it that technologists love it because it will enable them to rule over the developing countries and it will open many high paid jobs but let’s stop pretending. Nuclear is what oil was 100 years ago.
Nuclear is essentially my canary in the coal mine for whether an American politician is taking climate change specifically seriously. If they’re not, then pretending to care is most likely cover for a whole bunch of other stupid crap.
Unfortunately proliferation actually is a solid argument against nuclear fission outside of countries that are already nuclear-capable, but the major powers that are don’t really have that excuse.
Rare earth metals are currently required inputs for wind to produce magnets and solar to produce photovoltaics. It’s not exactly abundant or renewable.
Sure but wouldn’t we need to mine exponentially less uranium? How many tons of neodymium need to be mined for wind turbines to produce the equivalent output of a nuclear reactor, for example.
That's an interesting question, actually, and the numbers seem difficult to come by. A master's thesis from 2011 says[0]:
"data on the amount of rare earths in wind turbines vary, ranging from 0.2 to 3.3 kg of neodymium content per kW of rated capacity"
For comparison, a nuclear power station generates[1]:
"24,000,000 kWh from 1 kg of uranium-235"
So, taking the lower estimate for the neodymium content, the wind turbine would have to produce energy for 0.2 x 24,000,000 hours to be as efficient in terms of mass. That's about 548 years. Even with recycling, that's a longer term commitment than some nuclear waste storage proposals, although with less of a proliferation risk.
235U may have an impressive energy density, but uranium ore contains very little natural uranium and natural uranium contains very little 235U. According to this back-of-the-envelope calculation [1], a typical energy density of uranium ore is only around 1400 MJ/kg, so only 60 times higher than that of coal.
To convert that into the (slightly more clumsy) units of my post above, 1400 MJ is about 390 kWh (which is a lot smaller than 24 million). Even taking the upper estimate of neodymium content then, 3.3 x 390 hours is only 54 days.
I don't know how much ore needs to be dug up to extract 1 kg of neodymium, but one site boasts 7% rare earth content in the material it processes[0] so there might need to be a 14x scale factor to avoid comparing apples to ore ranges.
54 days x 14 is 2 years, which should be well under the average life time of a turbine, even before recycling is taken into account. We do have to also consider the capacity factor of wind turbines, though (not just their rated capacity), which "range from 0.26 to 0.52" according to a recent factsheet[1], so that might bump the estimate to 8 years.
"Unlike the wind power and EV sectors, the solar PV industry isn’t reliant on rare earth materials. Instead, solar cells use a range of minor metals including silicon, indium, gallium, selenium, cadmium, and tellurium."
Don‘t forget all the CO2 emitted a) at mining and enriching uranium and b) in storing nuclear waste for 100000 years and c) in tearing down highly radioactive retired nuclear power plants. In Germany we started tearing down the GDRs only nuclear power plant in the early 90s and we‘re still not done. 30+ years of daily ops of a highly specialised destruction company operating heavy machinery requiring insulation from radiation. And 1000s of tons more radioactive waste that needs to be shipped around the country. Well, only 20 plants more to go, now that we exited. Somehow people who claim nuclear to be green only look at the CO2 emissions when ready made enriched uranium goes in and burnt fuel comes out. We need to look at the full life cycle of both the plants and the nuclear fuel though, and then nuclear energy‘s CO2 emissions are far far away frm being green.
CO2 is only emitted during mining and refining because the grid itself isn't clean. The same thing is true of solar panels and batteries until the grid is made green. But you can't say "we can't make green tech because it would produce CO2" as it completely ignores the lifetime of things.
> in storing nuclear waste for 100000 years
That's a red herring. You only need to store nuclear waste for around 100 years (or less) before it can be treated as "low level nuclear waste" of which tons of it is generated as byproducts of the medical industry. It doesn't need to be sequestered away, it can be buried safely like all the rest of the low level waste. At that point it's more toxic than it is radioactive so it just needs to be buried in a way that it won't enter the water table.
> In Germany we started tearing down the GDRs only nuclear power plant in the early 90s and we‘re still not done.
Germany is also building tons of highly polluting (and radioactive waste pumped into the air) lignite coal power plants because they shot themselves in the foot by shutting down their very successful nuclear industry. They should look to France for an example on how one should treat nuclear power.
oh yeah, the French are so confident with their nuclear power plants they built many of them on their eastern border (with mostly west winds blowing any fall out nicely into Belgium and Germany)
No, they're not what-about answers. They're cause and effect. Germany's coal sector is growing BECAUSE of shutting down it's nuclear sector.
The other points are simply false (nuclear waste isn't dangerous for nearly as long, and his CO2 comment is actually a "what-about" complaint as a reason to not want nuclear power).
Yep. And now you'll be spewing slightly radioactive exhaust into the atmosphere after burning Russian gas. Whoop-te-do, very green indeed, congratulations, you "won". You also get to pay twice as much for electricity as the French, because the French aren't as easily fooled. And the gap will widen - the French are building more reactors.
Nuclear fuel is incredibly abundant. People talk about the small amounts of nuclear fuel available but completely ignore how energy dense it is. You need very little of it. There's vastly more energy in nuclear ore in the ground than there is even coal and oil combined in the ground.
Do you have a source for this? To my knowledge, uranium would run out in a decade or two if one would use it to supply 100% of the world primary energy consumption [1]. Coal is obviously way more abundant.
Pop science articles like that mistake "proven reserves" with "how much is actually in the ground". When geopolitics talks they look at proven reserves as that's how much we know is available and accessible in the short term, but it's not how much is actually available.
Proven reserves expand whenever there is a shortage as effort is made to find additional amounts of the stuff. Additionally, most countries in the world don't even bother to look as they don't have nuclear technology of their own and there is so little demand for it.
This is why for example we keep finding additional coal and oil as known reserves run out.
I would argue that 2009 is not very much out of date when it comes to geology research. The sources also agree with each other:
Scientific American: "According to the NEA, identified uranium resources total 5.5 million metric tons, and an additional 10.5 million metric tons remain undiscovered"
World Nuclear Association: 8 million tonnes "reasonably assured and inferred resources".
This does not change the conclusion that the uranium would run out in less than 20 years if used to supply 100% of the earth's primary energy consumption.
Your article also mentions the solution to the fuel problem: Not throwing away almost all the energy, but instead using breeder reactors to extract it.
if we are in a position where civilian targets are getting bombed we have other problems. not mention in said "war" if we are reliant on green energy we will certainly lose to whoever bombed our power plants.
If the assumption is that the major world powers don't cooperate enough to tackle a global existential crisis then we're fucked even without someone bombing a nuclear power plant.
Nuclear is currently the only viable option for buying enough time to address all the other negative consequence of 2C+ of warming. All the other plans currently on the table are accelerating us towards 3C of warming and that essentially means human civilization as we now know it is over.
They're not "nuke plants". "nuke" is a word that means "nuclear weapons".
Secondly, they're heavily surrounded by highly reinforced concrete with extremely high levels of security. The furthest any activist with a bomb belt could get is jumping a fence and getting immediately caught. Even if they could drive a truck through the front gate and set off a car bomb, they're not getting through the extremely thick concrete.
Read between the lines. It's not about the best solution(s), it's about _their_ solution. Nuclear solves the problem they champion, which means, it negates the need for their efforts and existence (economic). Ironically, the rejection of nuclear as a viable option seems to be the result of a psychological existential threat to the supposed "elite" of our world.
The mask is off. Protecting the future of humanity isn't the goal; it's protecting their own egos.
I think you could make the same argument against nuclear advocates. Ego based focus on the "best" option and endless ad-hominem against proponents of good options. When actually the best option is one that is politically possible.
Also, the green zone is managed by the British Government rather than the UN who are fairly supportive of nuclear. Nuclear is politically viable in the UK so it gets built. Onshore turbines in South-East England are not politically viable so they don't get built and we go offshore instead. The objective should be to stop climate change rather than chase optimal technology.
The reason nuclear is unpopular is that it is expensive. It's more expensive than coal and gas typically. It's also very slow to deploy. A decade is nothing. We'll hit 2035 when several countries are planning to be 100% renewable powered in about 13 years. That's not a lot of time to build a meaningful amount of nuclear plants. Nuclear plants coming online recently are not great examples of speedily execution on a tight budget either. Despite this, there are still a quite a few under construction (around 50 world wide). It's their financial performance relative to renewables that determines if we end up with more of them.
The word baseload always comes up in these discussions but its meaning never really gets specified in a very satisfying way. For example in GW needed for how long (i.e. GWH). Having such a number would facilitate a discussion about alternate ways how we would get that power more cheaply. That's not a debate nuclear proponents like having because it focuses attention on poor financial performance of nuclear relative to just about anything else.
The simple reality driving a lot of the decision making is that you simply get more GWH per $ with solar and wind. And not just a little bit; the difference is massive. And you get it much quicker too. And it's far less risky from a political point of view.
So instead of getting say 8GW with a very big nuclear plant costing maybe 30-40 billion and taking two decades to get built and planned with lots of uncertainty around the process, you can have 30-40 GW online two years from now for about the same amount of money. That's based on a price of 5000$/kw for recent offshore wind installations. A couple of hundred GW of wind came online over the last few years. The investments in renewables are massive and for good reasons: it delivers results quickly and prices are trending down.
Offshore wind is actually relatively expensive compared to solar and onshore wind. But also relatively reliable. People put solar on their roofs for less (2-3k/kw) and solar plants are even cheaper but of course less stable sources of power. Add batteries to the mix and other forms of storage (ammonia, hydrogen, thermal mass, pumped hydro, etc.) and there is no lack of a "baseload" that can't be planned for and mitigated. It will have a price and a certain capacity and that's what needs to be debated in Glasgow. It's a conference about allocating massive amounts of money in the next decades. The stakes are high both in financial terms and in the outcomes.
Nuclear might be part of this if the price is right. But the whole nuclear or nothing attitude is just not a very productive argument. Many countries that have the option are still doing some nuclear of course. But far less than what they are allocating for wind and solar (in dollars and planned GWH capacity).
Not everything is about price, and it shouldn't be. If it were, we'd have stayed with coal and gas a few decades ago.
As i mentioned elsewhere, much of Europe is currently facing an ongoing wind shortfall ( since around a month ago and projected to continue into the winter), which is adding extra fuel to the ongoing energy crisis.
To cover such a potential future scenario with renewables only, you'd need to build absolutely massive storage, which would certainly change the costs.
But in any case, fuck the costs - investment is needed into more nuclear, different types of storage tech, more renewables, because this is a very serious issue and making the wrong decisions purely based on costs would be really sad.
This!
Almost all of the pro-nuclear crowd misses that nuclear is just too expensive.
Nobody brought a convincing argument why e.g. China wouldn't push Nuclear way more if nuclear would economically be viable - there are no "activists" over there that would stop them from building thousands of reactors.
Additionally, most calculations that result in somewhat competitive prices for nuclear energy dismiss the implied subsidies (state guarantees as nuclear plants are uninsurable, waste handling until eternity) which are massive.
China is also still building coal plants. But that doesn't mean they see that as the future either. Like everybody else, they are not putting all their eggs in one basket but at the same time they like wind and solar a lot more than nuclear and coal. The bulk of their investments are going towards those at this point.
> The reason nuclear is unpopular is that it is expensive. It's more expensive than coal and gas typically.
It wouldn't be if coal and gas were forced to completely capture their carbon externalities-- (e.g. recapture and storage).
Since much of the energy we get from burning coal just comes from liberating the carbon from a nice stored form in the first place, I wouldn't even assume that in a no-carbon-externality-world if coal was even an energy source at all.
Have you not considered that the groups of people coming up with these policies have a much higher level view and are much more qualified to make these decisions than you eating Cheetos in your gaming chair.
The original title "Message: Nuclear must be represented at COP26, says World Nuclear Association" reminds of meme "The cat is being starved, according to cat".
Nuclear is not a palatable political solution for a lot of people and it is easily simpler to reject the proliferation of such materials. The current 'theater' from a geopolitical standpoint for nuclear is China and it does not appear to be succeeding well. I don't expect France to succeed given all that has occurred.
Smaller nuclear devices will need constant care and monitoring that it is highly likely people will need to 'grow with' such devices. I dont think the will UN back something without a proof of concept which could delay adoption years.
It's not palatable because of poor education. We need to be including nuclear in the list of green technologies in basic school science textbooks. We don't.
Stronger controls on education about the nuclear industry is not the magic pill for success. The magic pill in my estimation is trust and time without accidents.
Currently Macron is trying to promote 'french nuclear power plants' and 'small nuclear reactors' across the globe. Both geopolitical opponents and activists are agains this.
I think this is a more complicated issue than most people seem to think it is.
Very few countries have knowledge in nuclear technology while they have decades of knowledge in other green technologies. So it’s only natural that there is a severe push from European countries to make sure Nuclear doesn’t become a “green” source of energy because our industries are build upon wind and solar, and if we start using Nuclear as a viable alternative then all that industry money will go to China rather than our local production industry. So there is a monetary issue.
There is also a democratic issue. The overwhelming majority of Europeans are against nuclear power and if you consider our current unstable political climate, I think nobody will want the “elite” to start pushing a technology that is genuinely seen as much more dangerous than coal. What I think a lot of Nuclear supports fail to grasp is that it doesn’t matter if Nuclear is safer or better solution if that’s not what people think it is. A good example that Americans might better understand is the covid vaccine and how irrational your country has been in accepting it. That’s how the EU is with Nuclear, and pushing it could quite literally end up toppling governments.
I’m personally not convinced Nuclear is the “right” solution. It may be the only real way to solve the climate crisis, but it’s only safe when you have a stable government that maintains it in a sane manner. I don’t think we can be sure that we are going to have such governments in 25 years. So it’s not that I don’t trust the technology, it’s that I don’t trust us to handle it.
The issue isn't whether nuclear energy is complicated, but whether it's part of the discussion. Of course it has to be part of the discussion, so this makes COP look less serious, as it seems like they are catering more to Green movement politics than to fossil fuel alternatives.
I’m not sure people view COP as serious in general. In my anecdotal experience, people sort of stopped thinking the political elite would solve this back in the 90’ies. And back then they managed to do something about the hole in the ozone layer. A hole that is bigger today than it was back then, prompting no action.
But you’re right of course. I was just getting into the myriad of reasons why some EU leaders actively work against Nuclear at places like COP.
My own country is actively lobbying against getting Nuclear recognised as green technology by the EU because wind and solar are major industries in Denmark.
The human death toll is no doubt greater from fossils, but it’s sort of like traffic safety isn’t it? Something we just live with.
In my part of Europe, anyone of my age or above still remembers Chernobyl and how we had to burn farming produce, clothes that had been drying outside and a range of other things, even here in Scandinavia because it wasn’t safe.
I don’t think you’re ever going to convince my generation and the ones that came before that Nuclear is a good idea. Because we lived through the risk of Europe becoming inhabitable due to human in competence.
If you don't think we will have stable governments in 25 years with nuclear technology then we definitely will not have stable governments with non-nuclear tech. Even 2C degrees of warming is going to create a whole bunch of economic and political instability because of mass migrations, food and water shortages, and escalating conflicts. This is the optimistic scenario and assumes everything goes according to plan and some magical negative carbon technologies are deployed alongside green and fossil tech (which is highly unlikely).
Nuclear is the only viable option. Everything else is certain disaster.
Easy to predict, once you get the notion that the real purpose of all this flailing is to disempower people, i.e., to change things so that ordinary people cannot buy and use as much electricity as they like, for that to be something for rich powerful people only.
Another year and the same old talking heads, literally screaming protestors and policy makers still unable to come up with realistic solutions other than screaming at each other.
At least the technologists and engineers at several companies and startups are doing something about it with real world solutions, products and ideas.
I won’t be surprised that next year the same people are going to have the same discussion and it will be a forever blame game until they miss their own unrealistic timelines.
I have respect for those who ‘do’ rather than those who continue talking, mocking, screaming or blaming others and repeat themselves without giving anything substantiative to contribute themselves to the problem.
Of course. Think of it in terms of cui bono. You're on the precipice of convincing a bunch of folks they should shut down their economies and give you trillions of dollars to send to your donors as you please. Then a guy comes along and says that your shit won't work (which will be amply demonstrated in Europe this coming winter) and offers something that actually does work. It's like that meme - the guy will fly straight through the window for suggesting such foolishness. They never were interested in solving the problem, they're interested in trillions of dollars that they'll get control over because the problem exists.
Common sense. We could solve climate and achieve net zero carbon in a decade if we focused on 4th gen nuclear. But that's not as profitable to the aforementioned donors, so it ain't happening.
He did say South Australia, which is investing heavily into renewables and battery storage. The thing is that Australia has a huge coal lobby (being one of the biggest producers in the world) and the current conservative government is essentially in bed with them. Incidentally Australia is also one of the biggest producers of Uranium.
It's like California shutting down their nuclear plant. Well, OK it imports 30% of it's electricity from the rest of the grid already, so that can go up to 40%. Utah will add another gas plant, turn that on at night, and California can claim that it has replaced nuclear with solar. Both of them are pulling from the same grid and electricity is fungible.
So adding unreliable renewables to a grid is not an impressive achievement as long as you have a reliable source on the same grid. This is why I asked for examples of countries.
To switch entirely to wind or solar, you have to spend a lot on battery tech or other energy storage, and those costs dwarf the costs of the solar panels or wind turbines, and that is ultimately what determines whether something is feasible to scale up to the entire grid.
Your data actually directly disproves your argument. The highest number on that list which isn't hydropower or geothermal is 15% wind power in Scotland.
Look, wind power needs to grow at an exponential rate the next decade in order to meet current projections for how much wind power we need. But it's not doing that, instead it's slowing down.
The primary reason being wind power developers have for the last decade been just as bad as the fossile fuel industry when it comes to being a bunch of greedy a*holes that steamroll over local opinions, rights of indigenous people, and conservation of natural habitats.
Did you know that 50% of the largest on-land wind park in Europe may need to be disassembled and removed? It was recently ruled by grand assembly in Norwegian supreme court that its construction violates article 27 of the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, i.e. it was found to be a violation of the fundamental human rights of the indigenous people.
Can you share what is your storage solution that will be needed to make renewables without coal and gas practical? Where can I see storage handling gigawatthours to terawatthours in the real world?
Or are you relying on some magical technology we don't have?
I have read in theglobeandmail forums comments from some people who think that building battery parks is a great idea, and that it is a huge oversight that solar + batteries aren't pushed as the final solution to all energy needs in Canada.
And they seem as sincere as they are earnest.
It is very hard to argue with that logic. Where do we start? Just saying batteries are really expensive doesn't reach people who want a perfect magic solution.
I mean batteries might work! My problems with that approach is that:
1) Batteries are in everything. If we want to go from fossil fuels to renewables + batteries, at the same time as we go from ICE cars to BEVs, that's going to be a lot of batteries. Does the world have enough raw materials and batteries to do that?
Back of the envelope: My country consumes 77 TWh yearly or about 212 GWh per day (assuming it is evenly distributed). To cover day-to-night cycle, would we need 100 to 150 GWh of batteries? That's a lot of batteries (seem like yearly production of whole world but I can't find good source) and 10 % of our GDP in current battery prices.
2) If we're saying "renewables are cheaper", are we really adding the cost of storage?
What a dissappointment. Nuclear (of some kind, hoping for Fusion later) is a key component of any plan to stop global warming. Solar and Wind can get you to a greater than 50% green power production, but as you get closer to 100% you need exponentially more and more production and more and more transmission lines to handle dips and avoid blackouts from rare situations. You need a power generation source that is consistent.
At some point in the future we may have enough battery production for grid energy storage such that nuclear is not needed, but we are a long long way from that. Battery supply is growing rapidly, but not nearly rapidly enough.
We make millions/billions of high tech phones, battery is just peanuts compare to this, it was a problem of right kind of tech , which I think current gen battery tech have achieved and also price point requirement is also achieved, very soon, once all usual suspects starts manufacturing the same, sky will only be the limit.
So a lot of the discussions here are around EU or US opinions about nuclear power. The problem is something entirely different.
India and China will move to emphatically reject coal restrictions during COP26. Remember India has probably some of the largest investments in renewable rightnow. But I dont think people outside of these countries have even an idea of the amount of hunger for power that is being generated as huge populations start clawing out of hunger and poverty.
3 years back, there were 240 million Indians who had NO electricity - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-01-24/living-in...
So talking about pollution in this context is only solvable through large sources of clean power. We dont have enough land in India to support renewables for 1.3 billion people. Neither does China. Europe ? Very easily so.
Coal ban is not an option. Unless nuclear power and technology transfer is on the table.
As you accurately describe the threat is mass conflict and disorder. Why do you willingly support that or changing the narrative?
Global instability is likely to lead to more conflict and war without any guarantees of end. A vast population reduction of vulnerable people for a lot of people IS extinction.
I’m sure where you got that impression. But language matters and the worst case outcome isn’t a situation that “kills humanity”. I was asking for clarification in case there was something I was missing in terms of impact that would actually lead to extinction, which by definition means a complete end to all human life.
> To me it seems like the worst case is probably human deaths in the hundreds of millions, not extinction.
I think this underestimates the societal repercussions of an initial set of hundreds of millions of deaths.
Millions of deaths probably means billions of refugees looking for new places to live, probably in places that are already struggling with the changes themselves.
China's nuclear power plants come from the US. Westinghouse's bankruptcy set back the targets for many years.
Of course, the big problem is also geopolitical concerns here.
I would say that India is in a better position here (on geopolitics), however the tech transfer from US even to India has been iffy at best.
Here's a bigger problem - India has set a goal to switch to electrical vehicles by 2030. If that happens, all gasoline/petrol/diesel consumption will switch to coal.
Which means that switching to EV will double India's pollution norms.
Unless nuclear power takes over.
Actually the majority of China's nuclear power plants are a local design based on French technology (there's been a long term cooperation with France, which has built a couple of nuclear power plants there, including recently)
China's reliance on US tech for nuclear is over. Now they're using French tech domestically manufactured for their current gen reactors, and building next gen reactors with their own tech.
What about drilling for geothermal energy? And what about thermal fusion which is upcoming? For what do we need fission any longer, except to bridge the time up to availability of fusion?
As long there is no good concept for the nuclear waste, that long nuclear shouldn't be praised as solution to anything, except for bridging.
There have been news on here, for a newly developed technique to "recycle" and/or to "treat" the nuclear waste by utilizing a collider. May be this is an solution for the nuclear industry? Safety of the power plants is, I think, comparably given by learnings of the accidents in history. Which shows quite a lot of incidences..
It's difficult. Me dunna want to have the power to decide on here.
> And what about thermal fusion which is upcoming?
Fusion is great, and we are making good progress. It could plausibly change everything in a couple of decades. But it is not available today, so we cannot rely on it. That’s the thing when you follow the latest r&d developments: we talk about a technology well before it is useable, so all we can use at a given moment are mature technologies that are old news.
Example with fusion: we’ve been talking about ITER for 20 years, but it’s not finished building yet. Other developments like spherical tokamaks and stellarators are nowhere near prototypes at the industrial scale.
If we are serious about climate change, we need to act now, which means putting in place solutions based on technologies that are already mature and useable. Waiting 10 years for the next fancy energy source with blockchain, or the mythical carbon capture solution (which cannot possibly work with anything resembling the current markets) is reckless.
> There have been news on here, for a newly developed technique to "recycle" and/or to "treat" the nuclear waste by utilizing a collider.
There are much better and cheaper ways of doing that, using breeder reactors. We’re further along the readiness path than with fusion, but they still require some engineering before we can build them.
Definitely. It’s most of the time fait to say that it will be available some day, but there always are a lot of kinks to iron out between the scientific idea and the useable implementation.
Yes.. it's just, the times changed. ITER has been planned a long time ago (narrator makes a gesture of a looooong beard)
Just the findings of warm superconductors in 2018, let the development advance in much more speeedy manner. Atm, approx 40 startups (yes, most of them are new and poshy) have been founded, which already are building demonstrations and most of them are in stealth Modus. Others are already valued with 5 Billions getting a lot of venture. Chinese are just about to get it done - one's even don't hear anything about that here. The British having good progress.
But, me personally, I'm placing my odds on MIT having functional Demonstrator by 2025.
I'm looking forward. BITCOIN mining for less than a penny :)
Unpopular opinion in this thread but ... I don't want a world with nuclear. That makes me anxious. It's not if there will be a problem, but when.
I'd rather the world spend money on batteries and solar/wind energy, like South Australia. And by focusing on that technology, the market will drive innovation in that class of renewables. That technology is reusable in other applications, like domestic (rooftop), EVs and Space.
I understand the anxiety, and I suppose you've already weighted the pro / cons argument ; however, I'm curious about the psychology - and please don't read that as whataboutism.
So, how do you feel about the present problems with our current carbon heavy energy productions ? Are you less anxious about deaths from coal and every catastrophe related to climate change (heat waves, floods, mass exiles, civil wars, etc...) because they feel further in the future than the possibility of an accident at a power plant next close to home ?
I get that those can be blown out of proportion too ; and I get that using death/kWh is rather inhumane as a metric ; and I get that living in a country that had ~70% of it's electricity coming from very-much-non-exploding plants colors my thinking.
It's more long term thinking from me: I know that we can reach 100% renewables in 20 or so years, but I'd rather that it's wind/solar/hydro than something like nuclear, that is more volatile in nature and requires continuous maintenance from a capable overseer.
For example, what if a negligent person is promoted to maintenance overseer at a power plant that's several cities across? I have no control over that at all. I'm literally in the passenger seat with nuclear. I have to trust that a handful of people in charge of that plant are exceptional at their job, otherwise we all have a really bad day, and there are no safeguards or precautions that any of us can put in place that will protect us from a meltdown. That's a source of anxiety for me.
Worst case solar power disaster, the lights go out or something like that and I don't personally get seriously hurt.
The problem is that "100% renewable in 20 years" is practically impossible. It might be technically possible, but for various political reasons I think 20 years is far too optimistic. Even 50 years is. The only realistic option I see it nuclear power, although it's kind of too late for that really (should have done this 20 years ago).
> I have to trust that a handful of people in charge of that plant are exceptional at their job, otherwise we all have a really bad day, and there are no safeguards or precautions that any of us can put in place that will protect us from a meltdown.
It's not that bad; you can design systems with safeguards in place to prevent Chernobyl-like idiocy from happening, and modern reactors will just shutdown instead of meltdown on cooling problems. Also remember that both the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents actually had very low casualties and injuries, comparatively speaking.
Loss of control is always scary; that is why airplanes are more "scary" than cars, even though cars are far more dangerous. This is something education can help with. I appreciate it can feel scary but if it's not actually then, well... I don't think we can make such important decisions on the basis of feelings, even though I don't want to dismiss them.
Ok, I get the problem with "surrending control." Although, to be fair, we all do it constantly.
What if a bad actors at your local water plant decides to poison your tap water ? Or at the local Coke factory, to poison your local Coke ? What if your next plane pilot is suicidal ? Etc...
As stated in xkcd, that fact that most people are not homicidal psychopath is an often forgotten element of our safety system.
I am a fan of nuclear energy for various reasons, and it's obvious that the safety and waste problems can be solved with new technology like small modular reactors with inherently safe designs.
However, even I realize that nuclear energy is not viable to significantly combat climate change due to the following reasons:
* The technology is not there yet. There are a lot of promising companies that are trying to solve the safety problem, and there is a lot of research on how to better deal with the waste, but due to the inherent dangers it will take decades to prove these designs are safe, work as intended and can be produced at a significant scale at the promised cost. Sadly, we don't have decades, we need to start replacing coal right now.
* nuclear energy is way to expensive. Wind and solar are much cheaper. current numbers are roughly 50% cheaper for renewables, and while lots of companies promise cheaper nuclear design, these claims are unproven and the renewables are also still significantly improving in cost. The nuclear cost models I've seen also ignore most of the storage and security cost for handling the waste for millenia. There are cheaper alternatives with existing and proven technology. Power to gas for example has an efficiency of roughly 50%. which funny enough corresponds to its cost advantage over nuclear. simply building a lot more wind and solar capacity and using power to gas to fill existing gas storage systems with excess energy from renewables has roughly the same cost as nuclear, without the safety and proliferation headache, and the added advantage of long term storage.
* proliferation. even if we could solve the problem of safeguarding thousands of SMR in developed countries, you can't just export them to every country on earth. however, that's a requirement for replacing coal, as those countries need to reduce emissions, too.
So yeah, I'd love molten salt SMR to be a thing, and they probably will be in some applications in developed countries in 10-20 years, but the value of this to combat climate change is minimal and people who think otherwise are ignoring the previously mentioned facts.
> * nuclear energy is way to expensive. Wind and solar are much cheaper. current numbers are roughly 50% cheaper for renewables, and while lots of companies promise cheaper nuclear design, these claims are unproven and the renewables are also still significantly improving in cost. The nuclear cost models I've seen also ignore most of the storage and security cost for handling the waste for millenia. There are cheaper alternatives with existing and proven technology. Power to gas for example has an efficiency of roughly 50%. which funny enough corresponds to its cost advantage over nuclear. simply building a lot more wind and solar capacity and using power to gas to fill existing gas storage systems with excess energy from renewables has roughly the same cost as nuclear, without the safety and proliferation headache, and the added advantage of long term storage.
Wind and solar aren't that much cheaper (or actually usually much more expensive), when you include the batteries that are required for them to operate as the entire grid. Right now they can only displace SOME not ALL of the energy generation of a country (unless you have huge natural resources of hydro or geothermal energy that can act as that base load). Nuclear is needed for that baseload, or tons and tons of batteries. Taken in that respect Nuclear is cheaper than solar and wind, for that purpose. Grids will eventually need to go somewhere around 80% solar/wind and 20% nuclear/geothermal/hydro (+/- 15%).
You do realize that batteries are not the only method of energy storage? In fact, there are lots of better ways to store excess energy from renewables over longer periods of time, but power to gas was mentioned as an example that works everywhere, and can use abundant existing storage and distribution systems.
Lets add a reference to get some actual numbers to play with: The US Energy Information Administration has published a report reasoning about the levelized cost of electricity (LCOS) for new power plants of different energy sources [1]. According to page 8 of this report, the LCOS of one megawatt hour of nuclear energy is around 69 USD, while solar is around 33 USD and onshore wind is 37 USD.
If you factor in a 50% loss in converting the renewable energy to gas and back to electricity you end up in the same ball park as nuclear, but without the proliferation, safety, and waste problems.
> I am a fan of nuclear energy for various reasons, and it's obvious that the safety and waste problems can be solved
No you don't from your arguments.
> The technology is not there yet. There are a lot of promising companies that are trying to solve the safety problem.[...], we don't have decades, we need to start replacing coal right now.
That's bullshit. Even nuclear reactors designs from the 70s are statistically safer than coal. And kill a lot less than coal.
> * nuclear energy is way to expensive.
France had one of the cheapest electricity in Europe for 3 decades. Cheaper than anything produced by renewable right now. Nuclear is cheap but at the condition of government loans at very low interest rate and for multiple decades. That's has been analysed and reported many times already.
> Power to gas for example has an efficiency of roughly 50%.
There is today not a single installation world wide existing of power to gas to the scale it would be needed. And that would anhiliate any hypothetical cost of the renewable energy anyway.
One can be a fan of something without trying to blindly apply it to areas where it doesn't make sense.
> nuclear reactors designs from the 70s are statistically safer than coal. And kill a lot less than coal.
That's a strawman's argument, I'm not arguing for coal, I'm arguing for storage of renewables.
> France had one of the cheapest electricity in Europe for 3 decades [...] Nuclear is cheap [...]
That is simply false. The levelized cost of nuclear is about twice as high as that of solar or wind, see page 8 of the referenced EIA report [1].
> There is today not a single installation world wide existing of power to gas to the scale it would be needed
Again, strawman's argument. The discussion is about what should be built, not what has been built. There are already megawatt scale plants running for years without problems [2], and there are shipping container scale demonstrators for higher efficient versions [3]. So it's pretty obvious that the technology around power to gas is well understood, and ready for mass production and deployment.
> And that would anhiliate any hypothetical cost of the renewable energy anyway
Again, this is false. As explained above, nuclear energy is twice as expensive as renewables, and power to gas has an end to end loss of roughly 50%. So in reality, renewables + power to gas has roughly the same cost as nuclear, without the proliferation, safety, security, and waste problems. And as an added bonus every MWh you use while renewables are producing costs half of nuclear ;).
> One can be a fan of something without trying to blindly apply it to areas where it doesn't make sense.
Starting a discussion with a "I'm a huge fan" before spending the next 10 min to debunk the thing is not "being a fan of" but just a sign of being hypocritical, or manuipulative or both.
> That's a strawman's argument, I'm not arguing for coal, I'm arguing for storage of renewables.
Renewable alone (Without Coal or Gas) implies nationally to have close to 100% of the production capacity in storage alone (Battery, power2Gas or hydro storage) to compensate solar / wind intermittency. Which no country on Earth is able to do right now: not even close to, not even as a minor part of their production. That is the real straw-man argument.
Climate emergency need actions and solutions now, Nuclear is one of them. Dreams scenario where storage does everything renewable cannot do is not realist with the current technology available excepted in powerpoint bullshit slides.
And it will not for the next 20 years even with a Colosseum size investment.
> The levelized cost of nuclear is about twice as high as that of solar or wind, see page 8 of the referenced EIA report [1].
Solar and winds are currently highly subsidized and are still intermittent. With storage cost considered, any of their hypothetical advances goes into vapor.
At the opposite, France was producing electricity cheaper than its neighbours for around 30 years before photovoltaic and Wind power even became a thing.
> Again, strawman's argument. The discussion is about what should be built, not what has been built.
The discussion is about what can be and should be done now to reduce CO2 emission as fast as possible if we do not want get toasted in 20 years. Bcause in 20 years, it is already too late.
And the easy answer is built damn nuclear power plants and at the world scale. Not take 20 years to play with techs that are still on the design board: Power2Gas is one of them. And everything else is not scalable in term of storage.
> and power to gas has an end to end loss of roughly 50%
I do see power to gas as the last desperate attempt of the oil and gas industry to stay relevant in the next decade. Nothing more. For the rest it's a joke. It is a joke in term of investment, it is a joke in term of efficiency, it is a joke in term of economical viability. Hydrogen has its usage, but not as backbone of the power grid.
If everybody in the room agrees on the benefits, why not spend most of the discussion debating the drawbacks and the contentious points? That’s a very common situation in my professional life.
Usually the reason for this behaviour is that at least one of the parties is not interested in resolving any contentious points, but merely in "winning" the debate by focusing on arguments where they can exploit a weakness in the reasoning of their counterpart.
Usually it's best to not waste time on these people and simply ignore them, up until now I wasn't sure this was really the case, though.
I'm not debunking nuclear, I'm simply stating that just because you have a hammer climate change doesn't magically become a nail. Nuclear is great, but for the reasons I mentioned it is not suitable to combat climate change right now. I'm not advocating against nuclear, I'm simply saying that it's expensive, has problems other energy sources don't have, and relying on the building of new, safe, and cheap, designs will take way too long.
> Renewable alone (Without Coal or Gas) implies nationally to have close to 100% of the production capacity in storage alone (Battery, power2Gas or hydro storage) to compensate solar / wind intermittency. Which no country on Earth is able to do right now
again, straw man's argument. No country is close to 100% nuclear power either. France is pretty far, and they are sitting at less than 70%. and the reactors they are trying to build to increase this number are plagued by budget and timescale overruns of massive proportions. See the new safer EPR designs they have been trying to build since 2005, which are still not finished and have already consumed more than 300% of the initial projected cost [1]. it is delusional to believe we can somehow quickly scale nuclear power to the capacity needed to combat climate change.
cursing and claiming that things are a joke that have already been successfully demonstrated is not going to help make your point...
Things like power to gas would work economically because you buy cheap and sell high. The efficiency figure becomes less important if renewables are cheap and gas is expensive.
Something I’ve never understood about the anti-proliferation arguments of small reactors.
Ostensibly the reason why bad actors (“terrorists” etc [0]) don’t have nukes today is because it’s hard to enrich the fuel.
Because small reactors with safer designs often have a side effect of creating enriched fuel as intermediary product. (Meaning such designs would make it easier to enrich fuel than building thousands of centrifuges.)
So, we decide not to build them.
But, what’s stopping the bad actors from building the smaller reactors themselves, as an “easier than building thousands of centrifuges” method of enriching fuel?
In other words, why would preventing the bad guys from using such tech, be a reason for the good guys to avoid building such tech? If it really does make enriching fuel easier, couldn’t the bad guys just build the reactors themselves?
If we were serious about non-proliferation, and the breeder/thorium/molten-salt/etc designs make enriching fuel easier… wouldn’t the idea of a reactors be the thing we want to protect? Rather than just the physical reactors themselves?
[0] Substitute “bad guys” and “good guys” with whatever group you want, the point is the same.
1. Developed countries want to keep the developing country poor, by setting the narrative and keep nuclear: the cheapest/most efficient energy out of competitor's hand so they can stay poor.
2. Nuclear bomb ready country want to shut out every possibility for others to get a hands on them. Most nuclear warhead program started by using nuclear powerplant as disguise.
The environment problem is unsolvable because no one with the power want to solve them
I don't think the applications for nuclear energy were rejected for the reasons being implied by the original article. This article[1] mentions that they weren't accepted because they missed the submission deadline.
> According to Kirsty Gogan, cofounder of TerraPraxis and a senior climate and energy advisor to the U.K. government, “All three Green Zone applications by nuclear groups were rejected.” However, it seems some of that may be due to miscommunication regarding application deadlines for the COP26 Green Zone.
I couldn't find the original source for the miscommunication on application deadlines, hopefully someone can find it.
That's how you know none of this is real. If mankind was actually on the brink of extinction all options would be on the table. Especially one that offers free unlimited energy. Mankind does not have an energy generation problem. It only has an energy storage problem.
Agreed. It could also be real but no where near as serious as they are claiming. Mankind went from the first manned flight to footprints on the moon in 60 years. I'm not losing any sleep about a mathematically insignificant projection that may or may not lead to something 100 years from now. 100 years from now if they want terraforming to strictly regulate the climate it should be well within their capabilities.
Again, these people aren't serious. And their actions prove how the threat is either not real at all, or extremely distant to the point of being irrelevant for us.
If climate change wasn't a real threat... they would act as you said.
If climate change was a real threat to humanity... they would still act in spite of it. Tragedy of the commons. What is a better future? Having done your part, when nobody did, and facing a broken world with a broken economy OR Helped kill the world environment but playing an even field?
That has been China's stance all along, anyways.
The only reason to move toward "renewables" is to not depend on fossil fuel imports. It is about sovereignity, not about morality.
I don't disagree with any of that. People should pursue alternate energy sources. However world governments should not be putting their fingers on the scales in favor of green energy. Legislators who also just happen to have financial investments in these same new technologies. Yet another reason to be skeptical. Everyone points their fingers at the oil industry for the studies they fund, but Al Gore was a hair's width away from becoming the world's first green billionaire when he tried to pass a law forcing companies to exchange carbon credits and he was a 40% owner in carbon exchange network that would mediate it.
Green energy is making advancements. Unfortunately for them the fossil fuel industry continues to make advancements as well. Every year they get better at drilling, better at harvesting, better at converting from crude to fuel, better at burning, better at extracting energy from what is burned. At least a dozen different metrics get 2% better year over year which keeps fossil fuels competitive and makes it harder for other sources of energy to replace it.
Which is fine. It's all fine. I just want the best energy available. And the way our civilization has historically measured the "best" is through the free market. Green will win eventually. No need to rush it prematurely. It will happen.
COVID is a great example of how humanity adapts to danger. You lived through a global lockdown and the invention of an entirely new vaccination technology over the course of 8 months. Now you still feel the need to cling to the notion that we need to worry about a possible 1 degree change in climate 100 years from now? Let me guess, you probably watched 7 American cities burn to the ground and still believe Americans have no need for guns. Some people simply can not integrate new information.
That's how I interpreted it. If the end of the world was being triggered in 10 years we would use any and all options at our disposal, even experimental ones, all concurrently. We have enough labor and resources to go all in on energy production.
I think what you see, and quite likely misinterpret, is world leaders who are still waking up to the issue. I think most of them have not yet fully internalized what the climate crisis truly means (and even if they do, maybe some just are not able to care enough). It is good they at least are starting to do so, and I hope they won't lose momentum.
The climate crisis is likely the greatest challenge humankind has faced so far. I am starting to think that only true SF fans can actually process this information. It seems one needs to have thought about it for a while before being hit with this information (existential threat to our civilization), to be able to process it fast. SF may have provided people with the prerequisites to understand the situation. Or, alternatively, maybe people who are capable of thinking far into the future are drawn to SF.
I think rejecting the nuclear fission power is the mistake of the these times and we are already paying for it. If the world goes that direction we've been in a better place in terms of global warming.
I'm working for a non-profit that is heavily involved in COP, because I care about the planet and preserving the environment as much as possible for future generations. This news is very disheartening for me, because there is no way that humanity achieves a sustainable energy future without either nuclear or catastrophic declines in human population. Inside both my organization and other climate organizations, it seems that humanistic science and innovation are being rapidly replaced by a humanity-hating religion that cares more about virtue signaling than actual environmental outcomes.
If anyone knows of any innovative, outcome driven organizations or startups working on sustainable energy, including nuclear, that are hiring, feel free to share.
It’s very disappointing to hear that nuclear solutions were rejected. Reuters ran a story just earlier today about how nuclear is a key high tech solution for climate change: https://youtu.be/TNSaRJylY4A
Shame, I lived near windmills in the past and the moving shadow drove me crazy. The noise pollution wasn’t too bad compared to a busy highway. And they look so ugly.
Basically if you say to me that you care about climate change and then reject nuclear, I stop talking to you and taking you in any kind of seriously. Once you reject nuclear it’s just virtue signalling.
Yes, you can use simple methods like this in every facet of life to have perfect knowledge of all situations. It's truly a marvel that everyone doesn't know everything.
My favorite trick is if someone blinks twice in 10 seconds I know they ate something with garlic today.
People can reject nuclear without empty virtue signalling.
They may believe that non-nuclear alternatives are perfectly viable. "The sun provides enough energy to power the world's needs 30,000 times over"...and all that.
You might be mistaking disingenuousness with ignorance, or naiveté.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] threadBut this is a very defensive treatise. A bad look.
But somehow the idea took hold that nuclear would be built instead of solar, and not instead of coal.
I’m not saying the parent is necessarily wrong, but given the recency of the industrial revolution and the length of time between which it “began” and when many of the most useful industrial applications for coal were discovered, I can’t take it at face value “centuries” is correct. It might be close to correct, it might be technically correct, but it’s not merely an pedantic point: his comment reads as hyperbole because of the vagueness of what centuries even means here. Even if it has been technically two centuries, century plural technically, that’s overstating his case. Overstating your case is a good way to get people to turn off to what you are saying if they perceive it that way.
[1] Somewhat loose translation of "kolare" and "bergslag", here.
Energy is a fundamental need for society to flourish.
Fossil fuels have one of the highest energy densities and hence have been used for ages. We have much to be thankful for thanks to fossil fuels being around.
We are in a position today to bring change and I’m all for that. Losing sight of the benefits of energy simply because some sources have a negative connotation attached sets us up for failure.
We needed fuels as a society for those 3000 mile flights over the pacific that ships your iPhone here.
Energy “subsidies” are a strategic investment in securing your lifestyle. Just look at Europe right now as they head into winter with sky high natural gas prices. They’d go ahead an strike any deal that secures their supplies so they do t freeze half to death like they did with Russia.
Energy is a strategic asset and simply saying “it gets subsidized” makes it sound like charity.
Oh no, heavily polluting (and not only CO2) energy sources are being villanized...
Yes, yes, I am going to villanize Coal, which spews more radioactivity than nuclear.
Natural Gas, Gasoline, Oil, are "ok"ish. Not coal.
Everything we consider advanced tech today is built on an economy made possible by vast, cheap and accessible energy sources such as the ones we're dissing.
I agree that we need to stop using energy sources in a way that threatens our existence. But i assert that there are massive benefits we have to be thankful for as well.
I'd much rather find a way to maintain people's lifestyles, reduce emissions (and make it even better in the process).
I don't own a car, I don't eat meat, I consume very little and try to buy used things instead, I repair all my things as much as possible, I try to steer my investments away from anything close to fossil fuels.
Now you.
We have to accommodate these lifestyles (and build tech to make it more sustainable) - people generally don't want to go 'backwards', even if you or I don't perceive that as a problem.
Ultimately it's irrelevant, because both of our lifestyles are still heavily carbon negative without offsets. We both own a computer or live in a house I assume? That's why I'm sceptical of the "just live more sustainable" movement.
Comparing to gas burning power stations coal is very inefficient in terms of energy produced per per ton of CO2 emitted.
Energy is needed for basic modern services.
Humans have survived a long time without electricity. It could be simpler to 'go without' or 'find a workaround' for a lot of conveniences if we were serious at combating climate change.
We did an ok job with nuclear weapons but only just.
So your just suggesting we go back to the middle ages? No, thank you.
Well that's the question right? Without nuclear there may not be a middle ground as an option for a lot of people.
>So your just suggesting we go back to the middle ages? No, thank you.
I'm not suggesting anything, simply declaring it an option.
far lower than nuclear
What? The energy density of primordial fuels is six orders of magnitude higher!
Renewables need to be combined with power sources that can be turned on and off quickly and on demand. Nuclear emphatically cannot provide that.
Talking about baseline power – as if that‘s needed – is highly misleading in that context.
The basic nuclear value proposition is [negligible fuel -> enough energy to power a country]. We should be exploring the options, vigorously. There will be less pollution than the alternatives where [large amounts of stuff -> enough energy to power part of a country].
This idea that they can't is a weird meme in internet forums. The reason they don't is primarily economic, not technical.
On the other hand, your comment presumes that there is such a thing as too much power. Once hydrolyzers mature, we could use all of the current renewable power in Europe just for producing hydrogen for steel production to replace coal there.
We certainly need gas in the short term. Sure. But you can’t let nuclear take over the role of gas (and other potential on demand power sources, pumped hydro and maybe batteries in the future). That just doesn’t work.
Also, I‘m all for producing an overabundance of power and using that in a meaningful way. But that’s not the issue we are talking about here. Baseline framing of the current problem we are facing makes no sense and that is my point.
Nuclear and renewables don’t work well together.
If so, you've failed to convincingly articulate how. It's a meaningless assertion to me.
The power available from nuclear is useful full stop.
I don’t think the question is “is natural gas better than nuclear?”. It’s more “nuclear isn’t quickly dispatchable, which is what we need”. It’s not that gas is better than nuclear, it’s that they solve two different problems. Solar and wind need something to fill gaps when production fluctuates. Today that can be hydro or fossil fuels. In the near future, that will also be storage. For the foreseeable future, nuclear can’t fill that role.
Demand response is an interesting concept, and a subset of researchers have been pushing it for years. I’m skeptical that the economics would work out (large fixed costs mean that there’s pressure to run 24/7 and eat the high electricity prices), but I’d be happy to be proven wrong. That said, it doesn’t fix the fundamental problem that sometimes the wind dies at night, and something needs to turn on in the next 5 minutes or streetlights start going out. Right now, nuclear isn’t capable of filling that niche.
> something needs to turn on in the next 5 minutes or streetlights start going out. Right now, nuclear isn’t capable of filling that niche.
Depends on the reactor. A single ~1GW reactor should be able to adjust its output up by 150MW or so in 5 minutes. If you have multiple that number multiplies obviously.
For example a typical reactor in France with a max output of 1300MW can be adjusted all the way down to 400MW within 30 minutes (and up to max 1300MW output from minimumn 400MW in the same time). If they could not do that there is no way France could generate 70%+ of their electricity with nuclear.
(obviously the reactor has to be designed with the goal of being adjustable for it to be able to do this. France started to do this in the 80s)
edit: Though because the vast majority of the costs of running a nuclear power plant is in building/maintaining it and running it at max vs min output costs the same amount of money most owners want to run their reactor at max output always.
Ah yes. We already have enough storage capacity to provide for hundreds of megawatts of daily power fluctuation. See Figure E.2 https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/2011/load-following-npp...
But, very broadly and simplistically speaking.
We are not even remotely close to living in a "We have too much power" world. ( Markets will change drastically then.)
All the nuclear supply has already been sold and is being constantly used 100% of the time. It never makes sense to turn off the nuclear power plant.
There is more demand then that, not meeting the demand is catastrophic.
If a popular sports is on TV and halftime everybody boils water, or the wind is unexpectedly low, or some part of the grid is having trouble.
We must still meet the demand.
Turning on a gas plant is the cheapest solution we have at the moment.
Assuming the plant operations are running smoothly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Belgium#Hydro...
Which will be less and less the case for the European nuclear champions whose plants are approaching their 40-50 years lifespan of commercial support and safe operations (or so I am told) and it's going to cost a lot to replace them, more than going full renewables apparently.
In Belgium, at some points we had to shut down offshore wind turbines because there was not enough demand on the grid and turning off and on our nuclear plants would take too much time.
Gas plants don't have that problem (or so they say). So we are building some to compensate until we have enough renewables to shut them off for good.
Also, SMR are gaining tractions so who knows.
Disclaimer: I hear both sides, one claiming we don't need nuclear to reach our emissions carbon target and the other claiming we need classic nuclear plants to manage climate change and I don't know who's right.
This couldn't be further from the truth, at least for France: hover over the lower graphs to animate the source upper graph here: https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/FR
Every single day nuclear oscillates between 60% and 80%, in strong anti-correlation with wind, solar and border exchanges.
With hydro and pumped storage, this margin is well enough for attending to peak demand. And it is economically viable; This is the thing about nuclear: it costs practically the same wether you're at 20% or 95% of the plant's capacity. You consume your fuel faster, but it is only a small fraction of the cost (15% IIRC). And you still get 0 CO2 emission.
And with current gas prices this is the cheapest solution we have at the moment. (not the cheapest in terms of political will, but educating masses can solve that)
Not a "world", but this happens locally in Europe due to wind/solar momentarily producing more than demand. There have been instances with negative prices.
Anecdotally, one mitigation seems to be adjusting the local base voltage to 220V so that peaks due to solar stay below 240V (or something like that).
Nuclear can, at least theoretically, be throttled hour-by-hour over the day to compensate wind, although hydro is probably more cost-effective if available.
The point I was trying to make in my second paragraph is that when hydrolyzers get sufficiently cheap that you can buy enough to cover your peak over-production and let them idle when you are missing power, then you have effectively moved the elasticity from the production side to the demand side -- and then slow baseload does not require you to derate down your renewables.
This is far from the situation today where hydrolyzers are so expensive that you need to run them at pretty high utilization to make the economics work out.
BTW there is a very efficient way to run hydrolyzers at 95%: run them on nuclear power. Problem solved?
There are multiple utility scale competing battery technologies becoming quite mature and Thats a good thing. Especially if one or more of them are viable.
It’s almost certainly easier and faster to scale battery tech than it has been nuclear.
No we can't. Not in the amounts required. We're not talking about 100kW Tesla batteries.
> There are multiple utility scale competing battery technologies becoming quite mature
You mean, there are multiple competing battery technologies that are barely at the theoretical level with multiple significant challenges and no implementations beyond theoretical or impractical for the use case in question.
Flow batteries: low energy density, requires large tanks to be anywhere useful. Low charge and discharge rates, so are not practical for load following applications
Iron-air: only theoretical so far with first small plant potentially in operation by 2023, and its efficiency is yet to be seen (so far it's mostly marketing materials and hype).
> t’s almost certainly easier and faster to scale battery tech than it has been nuclear.
Ah yes, it's certainly easier to scale non-existent and non-scalable tech.
No they don’t. Wind and solar energy output can be very well predicted for hours and days ahead.
Second. Even if you knew two days ahead about wind speed fluctuations that lasted for 10 to 20 minutes. What, then? You can't inform the population there will be 10 minute outages, in advance, or ask them to turn off appliances for exactly 10 minutes, in advance.
Solar and wind aren't reliable. The plan is to turn on thermal plants when the wind stops blowing. In my very humble opinion, solar and wind aren't THE long term future of energy production. They have their uses, but the way it is being marketed obeys to political discourse, not reality.
[0] https://www2.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users/
[1] https://forecasting.energy.arizona.edu/sveri/
You can. And there is companies specialized in that for the Wind and solar industry. [1]
The reason is pretty simple: Weather variability tend to be high at the local level but pretty predictable at the national level (the energy grid level).
And to answer to the original post, yes Nuclear energy can also be fine grained controlled to compensate the renewable energy intermittency. It is done every day in France. It can be done yes, Is it efficient ? Not really.
[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_forecasting
The high cost in the west is lawsuits and storage facility closures, and outdated regulations.
Charging the electric car during the night sounds like a no brainer for me. Same goes for the water heaters.
The only heavy argument agaisnt nuclear is NIMBY.
Other countries can do the same if they build the option into their plant control (many do):
https://www.powermag.com/flexible-operation-of-nuclear-power...
Nuclear doesn’t produce radioactive materials it reduces radioactivity. If you mix the spent fuel from a heavy water reactor back into the ore, it’s radioactivity will have been reduced.
If there wasn't a huge stigma against nuclear energy they would be making advancements, but nobody is going to fund advancements while there is no guarantee they will be allowed to apply them.
What would happen to the JavaScript language if every year half of congress gave speeches condemning JavaScript and calling for a prohibition against any new JavaScript code? How many new people would bother learning JavaScript.
Tell me about the storage and disposal costs of all the solar cells and wind turbines.
Each power source has disadvantages, and this bickering isn't helping.
The fundamental problem is nuclear physics itself. Running a nuclear reactor produces Xenon-135, which has a huge potential to soak up neutrons, and therefore given half a chance will try to shut down the nuclear reaction. When the reactor is going full pelt, then there are enough neutrons flying around to burn up the Xenon, and all is good. When you reduce power output, then there is still a large amount of Xenon in the reactor, and it will soak up lots of the neutrons and reactivity of the reactor, shutting the reaction down. The Xenon takes about a day to decay by itself down to a level where it is safe to restart the reactor again. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon-135 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_poison
One of the contributing factors towards the Chernobyl accident was the reactor controllers trying to overcome the effects of Xenon by pulling the control rods of the reactor out. This made the reactor highly unstable, because as the reaction rate increases the Xenon will be burned off increasing the reactivity, which can lead to the reaction ramping up very quickly.
Why not? Unless you're ok with not having reliable baseline power at all.
However, the new reality is that wind/solar are cheaper than the old baseline plants. Now wind/solar do not supply us a with a constant power like those old baseline plants, but instead with variable supply as well. So we still need fast adjustable sources (or storage), which now even out both variable supply and demand. By over provisioning (and net interconnectivity) we can reduce the need for adjustable sources. Essentially if you have enough renewable sources to cover the high demands at low wind/sun you can always turn off the sources when you overshoot and because they are cheap it is economical unfeasible.
Overprovisioning by how much? Currently ( at least since a month or so) across Europe there's a meteorological phenomenon that makes for cold temperatures, lower than usual wind speeds, and clouds. 2 out of the 3 main renewable power sources ( solar, wind, tidal) are heavily impacted ( wind most of all iirc) and producing less electricity than usual, while people need to warm themselves. And this is expected to continue into the winter.
To combat such a scenario if everyone was on renewables+storage+interconnects, you'd have to built massive storage ( which we don't have the tech/space for) or massive interconnects from really far away places like Africa.
Not if you take into account land use. A single nuclear plant can supply about a GW of electrical power. The equivalent capacity in wind and solar--even without taking into account the overprovisioning that, as you note, is required because of the lack of reliability of those sources--takes up far more land than that nuclear plant. That has a huge environmental impact that nobody takes into account when figuring the actual cost of wind and solar--though of course the same people are quite happy to hunt down every last little environmental impact of nuclear and point out how it increases the actual cost.
(The requirement for massive amounts of storage, which others have pointed out, is another environmental impact of wind and solar that nobody takes into account when figuring the actual cost.)
Let’s consider something like desalinating water from the pacific and continuously pumping it inland to the Australian Outback or the middle of the Sahara.
With an investment in Nuclear, hypothetically, it’s cheaper. Present nuclear reactors have a high cost of operation simply because they’re aligned to energy consumption and regulatory patterns not suited to them.
Also, Small Modular Reactors are a thing. They’re available today for use and that’s what France is going all in on, but in the US, the first entity to try will be sued to the ground.
The arguments against nuclear are not really technical, and are overall incompatible with our energy supply getting rid of fossil fuel in the near term.
That's true of current nuclear, but it's not an intrinsic property of nuclear power. Proposed plants that use molten salt as a working fluid, for example, give you the option to run the plant all the time, but at any given time either use the heat in the molten salt for power generation immediately, or move the molten salt into a storage tank for later use. Molten salt is already used this way in concentrated solar plants, and works fine for that purpose.
As a side note, every time someone points out the shortcomings of nuclear power plants (not easily adjustable, huge investment costs/expensive, storage ...) there's the replies about, "but those new future plants that we are researching will solve all this". We don't know if reality will actually deliver on those promises (nuclear has quite a history of broken promises), especially if we are talking about acting fast.
To your second point: all technologies have the property that we can't know for sure if they'll deliver on their promises without trying them, and the very reason we don't know in the case of nuclear is because opponents of nuclear power undermine attempts to try out novel architectures, pointing to limitations in current technologies as justification.
Do most fossil fuel power plants currently serve that purpose? Only running when there is excess demand, instead of continuously?
As long as the answer is 'no', there is no reason to prefer them over nuclear (even ignoring the ways nuclear could be made to load-follow).
Nuclear can be throttled up at most within an hour? Down almost immediately I suspect.
It seems obvious that it's extremely useful to be able to produce so much electricity and reduce the need for fast switching power by 2/3. Surely 100MW/min of fast switching energy storage is not without its own massive environmental footprint, something that significantly reduces the calculated impact of nuclear.
If we could ramp up construction of solar, wind, and long range transmission capabilities to the point where they could effectively respond to all demand, we would not need to have a conversation. But in the midst of worldwide supply chain disruptions that will likely last for years, it seems irresponsible, even extremely irresponsible, to push aside the parallelization of additional low emission energy production capabilities. Seeing as this is all very time sensitive at this point, and the consequences of failure are likely a widespread collapse of society and suffering for generations.
They typically are run as close to 100% as possible because so much of the cost of the plant is divorced from the power output at any one time. Framed a different way, they are somewhat more expensive to idle or run at lower utilization fractions than other sources of electricity. But they certainly can (and do) operate this way when needed.
There is a lot of things you need to do if you take a plant out of operation, and there is a significant amount of decay heat from fission products that does require external power (basically what caused fukashima's fires) to cool over days if you turn a plant off, but you are oversimplifying solved engineering challenges to present them as intractable challenges.
The operating cost is essentially independent of power output.
This assumes your goal is to meet energy demands reliably with clean power at the lowest possible overall system cost. If instead your goal is to maximize wind/solar no matter what, then of course nuclear doesn't fit in.
> Historically, nuclear power plants were built as baseload plants, without load following capability to keep the design simple. Their startup or shutdown took many hours as they were designed to operate at maximum power, and heating up steam generators to the desired temperature took time.[2]
> Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope. Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode and so participate in the primary and secondary frequency control.
Also this is what we are capable of now. Imagine what we could do with advances in thermal storage. Nuclear has one huge advantage over other power sources: you can simply throw more power at the problem. E2E efficiency is less of a factor when you have excess capacity you can't otherwise do anything with.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant#N...
Saying that fossil fuels + renewables works well doesn't really have a place in a dialog about the best way to eliminate fossil fuels.
But of course this makes it even more expensive per MWh as the utilization drops but the mostly fixed costs don't.
There is an illogical assumption underlying this claim - if both power sources are zero-carbon, why does it matter which one we turn off? Why do have to turn off nuclear instead of disconnecting a wind turbine? What difference does it make?
What?
> Renewables need to be combined with power sources that can be turned on and off quickly and on demand. Nuclear emphatically cannot provide that.
--- start quote ---
Modern nuclear plans with light water reactors are designed to have strong manoeuvring capabilities. Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode, i.e. they participate in the primary and secondary frequency control, and some units follow a variable load programme with one or two large power changes per day
The minimum requirements for the manoeuvrability capabilities of modern reactors are defined by the utilities requirements that are based on the requirements of the grid operators. For example, according to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100 % of its rated power Pr, with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% of Pr per minute
Most of the modern designs implement even higher manoeuvrability capabilities, with the possibility of planned and unplanned load-following in a wide power range and with ramps of 5% Pr per minute
--- end quote ---
https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/2011/load-following-npp...
Nobody wants to admit they are still considering coal, but everyone wants to take credit for blocking nuclear and building renewables. So at a glance it seems like it's nuclear vs renewables, when it's always been nuclear vs coal.
We know roughtly what it costs to build solar or wind. There is a bit of subsidies and commercial parties take care of the rest. In the short term we need natural gas as a backup for solar and wind. But even that is not hard to build.
And then we have nuclear. Projects that are late, projects cost way more than projected. Building a nuclear powerplant takes so much time that financing the project is almost impossible.
Today, nuclear is just not a practical option. We need to build as much non-fossil capacity as we can and as quick as we can.
In future, we have to solve the storage problem for wind and solar. If that becomes a problem, then nuclear may make a comeback. At least, if somebody can figure out how to accurately project the cost and construction time.
https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/05/billion-dollar...
> And as the plant blows through deadlines, the cost has ballooned dramatically: An original price tag of $1.8 billion has swelled to $6.2 billion.
Enough with this joke of pitching nuclear as a viable alternative. I get it that technologists love it because it will enable them to rule over the developing countries and it will open many high paid jobs but let’s stop pretending. Nuclear is what oil was 100 years ago.
Unfortunately proliferation actually is a solid argument against nuclear fission outside of countries that are already nuclear-capable, but the major powers that are don’t really have that excuse.
"data on the amount of rare earths in wind turbines vary, ranging from 0.2 to 3.3 kg of neodymium content per kW of rated capacity"
For comparison, a nuclear power station generates[1]:
"24,000,000 kWh from 1 kg of uranium-235"
So, taking the lower estimate for the neodymium content, the wind turbine would have to produce energy for 0.2 x 24,000,000 hours to be as efficient in terms of mass. That's about 548 years. Even with recycling, that's a longer term commitment than some nuclear waste storage proposals, although with less of a proliferation risk.
[0] https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/153229259.pdf
[1] https://www.euronuclear.org/glossary/fuel-comparison/
[1] http://www.plux.co.uk/energy-density-of-uranium/
I don't know how much ore needs to be dug up to extract 1 kg of neodymium, but one site boasts 7% rare earth content in the material it processes[0] so there might need to be a 14x scale factor to avoid comparing apples to ore ranges.
54 days x 14 is 2 years, which should be well under the average life time of a turbine, even before recycling is taken into account. We do have to also consider the capacity factor of wind turbines, though (not just their rated capacity), which "range from 0.26 to 0.52" according to a recent factsheet[1], so that might bump the estimate to 8 years.
[0] https://mpmaterials.com/what-we-do/
[1] https://css.umich.edu/factsheets/wind-energy-factsheet
"Unlike the wind power and EV sectors, the solar PV industry isn’t reliant on rare earth materials. Instead, solar cells use a range of minor metals including silicon, indium, gallium, selenium, cadmium, and tellurium."
https://ratedpower.com/blog/rare-metals-photovoltaic/
> in storing nuclear waste for 100000 years
That's a red herring. You only need to store nuclear waste for around 100 years (or less) before it can be treated as "low level nuclear waste" of which tons of it is generated as byproducts of the medical industry. It doesn't need to be sequestered away, it can be buried safely like all the rest of the low level waste. At that point it's more toxic than it is radioactive so it just needs to be buried in a way that it won't enter the water table.
> In Germany we started tearing down the GDRs only nuclear power plant in the early 90s and we‘re still not done.
Germany is also building tons of highly polluting (and radioactive waste pumped into the air) lignite coal power plants because they shot themselves in the foot by shutting down their very successful nuclear industry. They should look to France for an example on how one should treat nuclear power.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Nuclear_...
And another version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nuclear_power_plants_map_...
The other points are simply false (nuclear waste isn't dangerous for nearly as long, and his CO2 comment is actually a "what-about" complaint as a reason to not want nuclear power).
As for the storage - Sahara, Gobi, Arizona - plenty of useless land where we can put a few football stadions full of nuclear waste.
Your plan to solve global warming is either based on and around nuclear power, or you do not have a plan to solve global warming.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo...
Proven reserves expand whenever there is a shortage as effort is made to find additional amounts of the stuff. Additionally, most countries in the world don't even bother to look as they don't have nuclear technology of their own and there is so little demand for it.
This is why for example we keep finding additional coal and oil as known reserves run out.
Here's some more info: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
Scientific American: "According to the NEA, identified uranium resources total 5.5 million metric tons, and an additional 10.5 million metric tons remain undiscovered"
World Nuclear Association: 8 million tonnes "reasonably assured and inferred resources".
This does not change the conclusion that the uranium would run out in less than 20 years if used to supply 100% of the earth's primary energy consumption.
Nuclear is currently the only viable option for buying enough time to address all the other negative consequence of 2C+ of warming. All the other plans currently on the table are accelerating us towards 3C of warming and that essentially means human civilization as we now know it is over.
Secondly, they're heavily surrounded by highly reinforced concrete with extremely high levels of security. The furthest any activist with a bomb belt could get is jumping a fence and getting immediately caught. Even if they could drive a truck through the front gate and set off a car bomb, they're not getting through the extremely thick concrete.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/iaf-to-start-training-for-stri...
The mask is off. Protecting the future of humanity isn't the goal; it's protecting their own egos.
Also, the green zone is managed by the British Government rather than the UN who are fairly supportive of nuclear. Nuclear is politically viable in the UK so it gets built. Onshore turbines in South-East England are not politically viable so they don't get built and we go offshore instead. The objective should be to stop climate change rather than chase optimal technology.
The word baseload always comes up in these discussions but its meaning never really gets specified in a very satisfying way. For example in GW needed for how long (i.e. GWH). Having such a number would facilitate a discussion about alternate ways how we would get that power more cheaply. That's not a debate nuclear proponents like having because it focuses attention on poor financial performance of nuclear relative to just about anything else.
The simple reality driving a lot of the decision making is that you simply get more GWH per $ with solar and wind. And not just a little bit; the difference is massive. And you get it much quicker too. And it's far less risky from a political point of view.
So instead of getting say 8GW with a very big nuclear plant costing maybe 30-40 billion and taking two decades to get built and planned with lots of uncertainty around the process, you can have 30-40 GW online two years from now for about the same amount of money. That's based on a price of 5000$/kw for recent offshore wind installations. A couple of hundred GW of wind came online over the last few years. The investments in renewables are massive and for good reasons: it delivers results quickly and prices are trending down.
Offshore wind is actually relatively expensive compared to solar and onshore wind. But also relatively reliable. People put solar on their roofs for less (2-3k/kw) and solar plants are even cheaper but of course less stable sources of power. Add batteries to the mix and other forms of storage (ammonia, hydrogen, thermal mass, pumped hydro, etc.) and there is no lack of a "baseload" that can't be planned for and mitigated. It will have a price and a certain capacity and that's what needs to be debated in Glasgow. It's a conference about allocating massive amounts of money in the next decades. The stakes are high both in financial terms and in the outcomes.
Nuclear might be part of this if the price is right. But the whole nuclear or nothing attitude is just not a very productive argument. Many countries that have the option are still doing some nuclear of course. But far less than what they are allocating for wind and solar (in dollars and planned GWH capacity).
As i mentioned elsewhere, much of Europe is currently facing an ongoing wind shortfall ( since around a month ago and projected to continue into the winter), which is adding extra fuel to the ongoing energy crisis.
To cover such a potential future scenario with renewables only, you'd need to build absolutely massive storage, which would certainly change the costs.
But in any case, fuck the costs - investment is needed into more nuclear, different types of storage tech, more renewables, because this is a very serious issue and making the wrong decisions purely based on costs would be really sad.
Additionally, most calculations that result in somewhat competitive prices for nuclear energy dismiss the implied subsidies (state guarantees as nuclear plants are uninsurable, waste handling until eternity) which are massive.
It wouldn't be if coal and gas were forced to completely capture their carbon externalities-- (e.g. recapture and storage).
Since much of the energy we get from burning coal just comes from liberating the carbon from a nice stored form in the first place, I wouldn't even assume that in a no-carbon-externality-world if coal was even an energy source at all.
Have you not considered that the groups of people coming up with these policies have a much higher level view and are much more qualified to make these decisions than you eating Cheetos in your gaming chair.
Smaller nuclear devices will need constant care and monitoring that it is highly likely people will need to 'grow with' such devices. I dont think the will UN back something without a proof of concept which could delay adoption years.
https://fortune.com/2021/10/12/nuclear-power-insulates-franc...
French problems in China nuclear reactor:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/business/china-nuclear-po...
https://weatherboy.com/as-chinese-nuclear-incident-unfolds-e...
There are multiple nuclear reactors being built in China at present.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
Very few countries have knowledge in nuclear technology while they have decades of knowledge in other green technologies. So it’s only natural that there is a severe push from European countries to make sure Nuclear doesn’t become a “green” source of energy because our industries are build upon wind and solar, and if we start using Nuclear as a viable alternative then all that industry money will go to China rather than our local production industry. So there is a monetary issue.
There is also a democratic issue. The overwhelming majority of Europeans are against nuclear power and if you consider our current unstable political climate, I think nobody will want the “elite” to start pushing a technology that is genuinely seen as much more dangerous than coal. What I think a lot of Nuclear supports fail to grasp is that it doesn’t matter if Nuclear is safer or better solution if that’s not what people think it is. A good example that Americans might better understand is the covid vaccine and how irrational your country has been in accepting it. That’s how the EU is with Nuclear, and pushing it could quite literally end up toppling governments.
I’m personally not convinced Nuclear is the “right” solution. It may be the only real way to solve the climate crisis, but it’s only safe when you have a stable government that maintains it in a sane manner. I don’t think we can be sure that we are going to have such governments in 25 years. So it’s not that I don’t trust the technology, it’s that I don’t trust us to handle it.
But you’re right of course. I was just getting into the myriad of reasons why some EU leaders actively work against Nuclear at places like COP.
My own country is actively lobbying against getting Nuclear recognised as green technology by the EU because wind and solar are major industries in Denmark.
Glossing over the human death toll caused by the other energy sources is not useful. It's not like the other sources are perfectly safe.
In my part of Europe, anyone of my age or above still remembers Chernobyl and how we had to burn farming produce, clothes that had been drying outside and a range of other things, even here in Scandinavia because it wasn’t safe.
I don’t think you’re ever going to convince my generation and the ones that came before that Nuclear is a good idea. Because we lived through the risk of Europe becoming inhabitable due to human in competence.
But maybe I’m wrong.
Nuclear is the only viable option. Everything else is certain disaster.
At least the technologists and engineers at several companies and startups are doing something about it with real world solutions, products and ideas.
I won’t be surprised that next year the same people are going to have the same discussion and it will be a forever blame game until they miss their own unrealistic timelines.
I have respect for those who ‘do’ rather than those who continue talking, mocking, screaming or blaming others and repeat themselves without giving anything substantiative to contribute themselves to the problem.
Your comment is too vague for me to understand.
Who is asking for trillions? Who is flying out of a window?
Governments and their owners/political donors.
> Who is flying out of a window?
Common sense. We could solve climate and achieve net zero carbon in a decade if we focused on 4th gen nuclear. But that's not as profitable to the aforementioned donors, so it ain't happening.
Anything else is too costly and too late.
(BTW, 10 countries are running on 95%-100% renewables now. Why can't the US?)
No country is actually running on solar and wind -- it's too variable.
Norway is running on Hydro, Iceland is running on geothermal.
And variability is easy to deal with: overbuild and/or storage. Southern Australia shows how it is done.
OK, GLWT.
> And variability is easy to deal with: overbuild and/or storage. Southern Australia shows how it is done.
Australian energy is 72% fossil fuel, 11% hydro, rest solar and wind.
https://www.worlddata.info/australia/australia/energy-consum...
So adding unreliable renewables to a grid is not an impressive achievement as long as you have a reliable source on the same grid. This is why I asked for examples of countries.
To switch entirely to wind or solar, you have to spend a lot on battery tech or other energy storage, and those costs dwarf the costs of the solar panels or wind turbines, and that is ultimately what determines whether something is feasible to scale up to the entire grid.
Look, wind power needs to grow at an exponential rate the next decade in order to meet current projections for how much wind power we need. But it's not doing that, instead it's slowing down.
The primary reason being wind power developers have for the last decade been just as bad as the fossile fuel industry when it comes to being a bunch of greedy a*holes that steamroll over local opinions, rights of indigenous people, and conservation of natural habitats.
Did you know that 50% of the largest on-land wind park in Europe may need to be disassembled and removed? It was recently ruled by grand assembly in Norwegian supreme court that its construction violates article 27 of the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, i.e. it was found to be a violation of the fundamental human rights of the indigenous people.
Do me a favor and google nuclear power plant opportunity cost and read.
Or are you relying on some magical technology we don't have?
And they seem as sincere as they are earnest. It is very hard to argue with that logic. Where do we start? Just saying batteries are really expensive doesn't reach people who want a perfect magic solution.
1) Batteries are in everything. If we want to go from fossil fuels to renewables + batteries, at the same time as we go from ICE cars to BEVs, that's going to be a lot of batteries. Does the world have enough raw materials and batteries to do that?
Back of the envelope: My country consumes 77 TWh yearly or about 212 GWh per day (assuming it is evenly distributed). To cover day-to-night cycle, would we need 100 to 150 GWh of batteries? That's a lot of batteries (seem like yearly production of whole world but I can't find good source) and 10 % of our GDP in current battery prices.
2) If we're saying "renewables are cheaper", are we really adding the cost of storage?
At some point in the future we may have enough battery production for grid energy storage such that nuclear is not needed, but we are a long long way from that. Battery supply is growing rapidly, but not nearly rapidly enough.
India and China will move to emphatically reject coal restrictions during COP26. Remember India has probably some of the largest investments in renewable rightnow. But I dont think people outside of these countries have even an idea of the amount of hunger for power that is being generated as huge populations start clawing out of hunger and poverty.
3 years back, there were 240 million Indians who had NO electricity - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-01-24/living-in... So talking about pollution in this context is only solvable through large sources of clean power. We dont have enough land in India to support renewables for 1.3 billion people. Neither does China. Europe ? Very easily so.
Coal ban is not an option. Unless nuclear power and technology transfer is on the table.
India and China have both rejected targets - https://www.ft.com/content/eef90c01-4cbe-48b7-8b2c-2beb398a4...
COP26 basically seems to be a non starter now. with coal being pushed back in and nuclear pushed back out.
What makes you say that? To me it seems like the worst case is probably human deaths in the hundreds of millions, not extinction.
Global instability is likely to lead to more conflict and war without any guarantees of end. A vast population reduction of vulnerable people for a lot of people IS extinction.
I’m sure where you got that impression. But language matters and the worst case outcome isn’t a situation that “kills humanity”. I was asking for clarification in case there was something I was missing in terms of impact that would actually lead to extinction, which by definition means a complete end to all human life.
i appreciate your language as well.
I think this underestimates the societal repercussions of an initial set of hundreds of millions of deaths.
Millions of deaths probably means billions of refugees looking for new places to live, probably in places that are already struggling with the changes themselves.
But as you mention the demand for energy is vast and they can't 'just' get rid of coal.
Of course, the big problem is also geopolitical concerns here.
I would say that India is in a better position here (on geopolitics), however the tech transfer from US even to India has been iffy at best.
Here's a bigger problem - India has set a goal to switch to electrical vehicles by 2030. If that happens, all gasoline/petrol/diesel consumption will switch to coal.
Which means that switching to EV will double India's pollution norms. Unless nuclear power takes over.
Eventually all countries will have the ability to make gen 5 reactors...but the COP26 is today. And we lost time.
That's the reason why coal usage will double or triple in the next 2 years primarily from India or China.
Why is nuclear the only alternative?
There have been news on here, for a newly developed technique to "recycle" and/or to "treat" the nuclear waste by utilizing a collider. May be this is an solution for the nuclear industry? Safety of the power plants is, I think, comparably given by learnings of the accidents in history. Which shows quite a lot of incidences.. It's difficult. Me dunna want to have the power to decide on here.
Except if there is a breakthrough, it will take so much time (if it works at all) that we will need new nuclear plants.
The safety and ecology of nuclear plants has been discussed to death. I much prefer to live near a nuclear plant than anything combustion.
Fusion is great, and we are making good progress. It could plausibly change everything in a couple of decades. But it is not available today, so we cannot rely on it. That’s the thing when you follow the latest r&d developments: we talk about a technology well before it is useable, so all we can use at a given moment are mature technologies that are old news.
Example with fusion: we’ve been talking about ITER for 20 years, but it’s not finished building yet. Other developments like spherical tokamaks and stellarators are nowhere near prototypes at the industrial scale.
If we are serious about climate change, we need to act now, which means putting in place solutions based on technologies that are already mature and useable. Waiting 10 years for the next fancy energy source with blockchain, or the mythical carbon capture solution (which cannot possibly work with anything resembling the current markets) is reckless.
> There have been news on here, for a newly developed technique to "recycle" and/or to "treat" the nuclear waste by utilizing a collider.
There are much better and cheaper ways of doing that, using breeder reactors. We’re further along the readiness path than with fusion, but they still require some engineering before we can build them.
I'm looking forward. BITCOIN mining for less than a penny :)
I'd rather the world spend money on batteries and solar/wind energy, like South Australia. And by focusing on that technology, the market will drive innovation in that class of renewables. That technology is reusable in other applications, like domestic (rooftop), EVs and Space.
So, how do you feel about the present problems with our current carbon heavy energy productions ? Are you less anxious about deaths from coal and every catastrophe related to climate change (heat waves, floods, mass exiles, civil wars, etc...) because they feel further in the future than the possibility of an accident at a power plant next close to home ?
I get that those can be blown out of proportion too ; and I get that using death/kWh is rather inhumane as a metric ; and I get that living in a country that had ~70% of it's electricity coming from very-much-non-exploding plants colors my thinking.
For example, what if a negligent person is promoted to maintenance overseer at a power plant that's several cities across? I have no control over that at all. I'm literally in the passenger seat with nuclear. I have to trust that a handful of people in charge of that plant are exceptional at their job, otherwise we all have a really bad day, and there are no safeguards or precautions that any of us can put in place that will protect us from a meltdown. That's a source of anxiety for me.
Worst case solar power disaster, the lights go out or something like that and I don't personally get seriously hurt.
> I have to trust that a handful of people in charge of that plant are exceptional at their job, otherwise we all have a really bad day, and there are no safeguards or precautions that any of us can put in place that will protect us from a meltdown.
It's not that bad; you can design systems with safeguards in place to prevent Chernobyl-like idiocy from happening, and modern reactors will just shutdown instead of meltdown on cooling problems. Also remember that both the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents actually had very low casualties and injuries, comparatively speaking.
Loss of control is always scary; that is why airplanes are more "scary" than cars, even though cars are far more dangerous. This is something education can help with. I appreciate it can feel scary but if it's not actually then, well... I don't think we can make such important decisions on the basis of feelings, even though I don't want to dismiss them.
What if a bad actors at your local water plant decides to poison your tap water ? Or at the local Coke factory, to poison your local Coke ? What if your next plane pilot is suicidal ? Etc...
As stated in xkcd, that fact that most people are not homicidal psychopath is an often forgotten element of our safety system.
However, even I realize that nuclear energy is not viable to significantly combat climate change due to the following reasons:
* The technology is not there yet. There are a lot of promising companies that are trying to solve the safety problem, and there is a lot of research on how to better deal with the waste, but due to the inherent dangers it will take decades to prove these designs are safe, work as intended and can be produced at a significant scale at the promised cost. Sadly, we don't have decades, we need to start replacing coal right now.
* nuclear energy is way to expensive. Wind and solar are much cheaper. current numbers are roughly 50% cheaper for renewables, and while lots of companies promise cheaper nuclear design, these claims are unproven and the renewables are also still significantly improving in cost. The nuclear cost models I've seen also ignore most of the storage and security cost for handling the waste for millenia. There are cheaper alternatives with existing and proven technology. Power to gas for example has an efficiency of roughly 50%. which funny enough corresponds to its cost advantage over nuclear. simply building a lot more wind and solar capacity and using power to gas to fill existing gas storage systems with excess energy from renewables has roughly the same cost as nuclear, without the safety and proliferation headache, and the added advantage of long term storage.
* proliferation. even if we could solve the problem of safeguarding thousands of SMR in developed countries, you can't just export them to every country on earth. however, that's a requirement for replacing coal, as those countries need to reduce emissions, too.
So yeah, I'd love molten salt SMR to be a thing, and they probably will be in some applications in developed countries in 10-20 years, but the value of this to combat climate change is minimal and people who think otherwise are ignoring the previously mentioned facts.
Wind and solar aren't that much cheaper (or actually usually much more expensive), when you include the batteries that are required for them to operate as the entire grid. Right now they can only displace SOME not ALL of the energy generation of a country (unless you have huge natural resources of hydro or geothermal energy that can act as that base load). Nuclear is needed for that baseload, or tons and tons of batteries. Taken in that respect Nuclear is cheaper than solar and wind, for that purpose. Grids will eventually need to go somewhere around 80% solar/wind and 20% nuclear/geothermal/hydro (+/- 15%).
Lets add a reference to get some actual numbers to play with: The US Energy Information Administration has published a report reasoning about the levelized cost of electricity (LCOS) for new power plants of different energy sources [1]. According to page 8 of this report, the LCOS of one megawatt hour of nuclear energy is around 69 USD, while solar is around 33 USD and onshore wind is 37 USD.
If you factor in a 50% loss in converting the renewable energy to gas and back to electricity you end up in the same ball park as nuclear, but without the proliferation, safety, and waste problems.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
No you don't from your arguments.
> The technology is not there yet. There are a lot of promising companies that are trying to solve the safety problem.[...], we don't have decades, we need to start replacing coal right now.
That's bullshit. Even nuclear reactors designs from the 70s are statistically safer than coal. And kill a lot less than coal.
> * nuclear energy is way to expensive.
France had one of the cheapest electricity in Europe for 3 decades. Cheaper than anything produced by renewable right now. Nuclear is cheap but at the condition of government loans at very low interest rate and for multiple decades. That's has been analysed and reported many times already.
> Power to gas for example has an efficiency of roughly 50%.
There is today not a single installation world wide existing of power to gas to the scale it would be needed. And that would anhiliate any hypothetical cost of the renewable energy anyway.
One can be a fan of something without trying to blindly apply it to areas where it doesn't make sense.
> nuclear reactors designs from the 70s are statistically safer than coal. And kill a lot less than coal.
That's a strawman's argument, I'm not arguing for coal, I'm arguing for storage of renewables.
> France had one of the cheapest electricity in Europe for 3 decades [...] Nuclear is cheap [...]
That is simply false. The levelized cost of nuclear is about twice as high as that of solar or wind, see page 8 of the referenced EIA report [1].
> There is today not a single installation world wide existing of power to gas to the scale it would be needed
Again, strawman's argument. The discussion is about what should be built, not what has been built. There are already megawatt scale plants running for years without problems [2], and there are shipping container scale demonstrators for higher efficient versions [3]. So it's pretty obvious that the technology around power to gas is well understood, and ready for mass production and deployment.
> And that would anhiliate any hypothetical cost of the renewable energy anyway
Again, this is false. As explained above, nuclear energy is twice as expensive as renewables, and power to gas has an end to end loss of roughly 50%. So in reality, renewables + power to gas has roughly the same cost as nuclear, without the proliferation, safety, security, and waste problems. And as an added bonus every MWh you use while renewables are producing costs half of nuclear ;).
[1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
[2] http://hybalance.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Large-scale-P...
[3] http://www.helmeth.eu/images/joomlaplates/documents/Publisha...
Starting a discussion with a "I'm a huge fan" before spending the next 10 min to debunk the thing is not "being a fan of" but just a sign of being hypocritical, or manuipulative or both.
> That's a strawman's argument, I'm not arguing for coal, I'm arguing for storage of renewables.
Renewable alone (Without Coal or Gas) implies nationally to have close to 100% of the production capacity in storage alone (Battery, power2Gas or hydro storage) to compensate solar / wind intermittency. Which no country on Earth is able to do right now: not even close to, not even as a minor part of their production. That is the real straw-man argument.
Climate emergency need actions and solutions now, Nuclear is one of them. Dreams scenario where storage does everything renewable cannot do is not realist with the current technology available excepted in powerpoint bullshit slides. And it will not for the next 20 years even with a Colosseum size investment.
> The levelized cost of nuclear is about twice as high as that of solar or wind, see page 8 of the referenced EIA report [1].
Solar and winds are currently highly subsidized and are still intermittent. With storage cost considered, any of their hypothetical advances goes into vapor.
At the opposite, France was producing electricity cheaper than its neighbours for around 30 years before photovoltaic and Wind power even became a thing.
> Again, strawman's argument. The discussion is about what should be built, not what has been built.
The discussion is about what can be and should be done now to reduce CO2 emission as fast as possible if we do not want get toasted in 20 years. Bcause in 20 years, it is already too late.
And the easy answer is built damn nuclear power plants and at the world scale. Not take 20 years to play with techs that are still on the design board: Power2Gas is one of them. And everything else is not scalable in term of storage.
> and power to gas has an end to end loss of roughly 50%
I do see power to gas as the last desperate attempt of the oil and gas industry to stay relevant in the next decade. Nothing more. For the rest it's a joke. It is a joke in term of investment, it is a joke in term of efficiency, it is a joke in term of economical viability. Hydrogen has its usage, but not as backbone of the power grid.
Usually it's best to not waste time on these people and simply ignore them, up until now I wasn't sure this was really the case, though.
> Renewable alone (Without Coal or Gas) implies nationally to have close to 100% of the production capacity in storage alone (Battery, power2Gas or hydro storage) to compensate solar / wind intermittency. Which no country on Earth is able to do right now
again, straw man's argument. No country is close to 100% nuclear power either. France is pretty far, and they are sitting at less than 70%. and the reactors they are trying to build to increase this number are plagued by budget and timescale overruns of massive proportions. See the new safer EPR designs they have been trying to build since 2005, which are still not finished and have already consumed more than 300% of the initial projected cost [1]. it is delusional to believe we can somehow quickly scale nuclear power to the capacity needed to combat climate change.
cursing and claiming that things are a joke that have already been successfully demonstrated is not going to help make your point...
[1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a33499619/fr...
Ostensibly the reason why bad actors (“terrorists” etc [0]) don’t have nukes today is because it’s hard to enrich the fuel.
Because small reactors with safer designs often have a side effect of creating enriched fuel as intermediary product. (Meaning such designs would make it easier to enrich fuel than building thousands of centrifuges.)
So, we decide not to build them.
But, what’s stopping the bad actors from building the smaller reactors themselves, as an “easier than building thousands of centrifuges” method of enriching fuel?
In other words, why would preventing the bad guys from using such tech, be a reason for the good guys to avoid building such tech? If it really does make enriching fuel easier, couldn’t the bad guys just build the reactors themselves?
If we were serious about non-proliferation, and the breeder/thorium/molten-salt/etc designs make enriching fuel easier… wouldn’t the idea of a reactors be the thing we want to protect? Rather than just the physical reactors themselves?
[0] Substitute “bad guys” and “good guys” with whatever group you want, the point is the same.
1. Developed countries want to keep the developing country poor, by setting the narrative and keep nuclear: the cheapest/most efficient energy out of competitor's hand so they can stay poor.
2. Nuclear bomb ready country want to shut out every possibility for others to get a hands on them. Most nuclear warhead program started by using nuclear powerplant as disguise.
The environment problem is unsolvable because no one with the power want to solve them
> According to Kirsty Gogan, cofounder of TerraPraxis and a senior climate and energy advisor to the U.K. government, “All three Green Zone applications by nuclear groups were rejected.” However, it seems some of that may be due to miscommunication regarding application deadlines for the COP26 Green Zone.
I couldn't find the original source for the miscommunication on application deadlines, hopefully someone can find it.
[1] https://www.ans.org/news/article-3188/controversy-over-nucle...
They simply want to use to genuine concern around climate to further their own ends.
Again, these people aren't serious. And their actions prove how the threat is either not real at all, or extremely distant to the point of being irrelevant for us.
If climate change wasn't a real threat... they would act as you said.
If climate change was a real threat to humanity... they would still act in spite of it. Tragedy of the commons. What is a better future? Having done your part, when nobody did, and facing a broken world with a broken economy OR Helped kill the world environment but playing an even field?
That has been China's stance all along, anyways.
The only reason to move toward "renewables" is to not depend on fossil fuel imports. It is about sovereignity, not about morality.
Green energy is making advancements. Unfortunately for them the fossil fuel industry continues to make advancements as well. Every year they get better at drilling, better at harvesting, better at converting from crude to fuel, better at burning, better at extracting energy from what is burned. At least a dozen different metrics get 2% better year over year which keeps fossil fuels competitive and makes it harder for other sources of energy to replace it.
Which is fine. It's all fine. I just want the best energy available. And the way our civilization has historically measured the "best" is through the free market. Green will win eventually. No need to rush it prematurely. It will happen.
No, humankind does not have an energy generation problem. The problem is the side effects of the methods used to generate the energy.
The existential risk is very real, but because it’s still far in the future, only very few people perceive it as such.
Covid is a great example of how incapable humans are to perceive dangers that are far in space and/or time.
The climate crisis is likely the greatest challenge humankind has faced so far. I am starting to think that only true SF fans can actually process this information. It seems one needs to have thought about it for a while before being hit with this information (existential threat to our civilization), to be able to process it fast. SF may have provided people with the prerequisites to understand the situation. Or, alternatively, maybe people who are capable of thinking far into the future are drawn to SF.
If anyone knows of any innovative, outcome driven organizations or startups working on sustainable energy, including nuclear, that are hiring, feel free to share.
My favorite trick is if someone blinks twice in 10 seconds I know they ate something with garlic today.
They may believe that non-nuclear alternatives are perfectly viable. "The sun provides enough energy to power the world's needs 30,000 times over"...and all that.
You might be mistaking disingenuousness with ignorance, or naiveté.