Yada yada yada. Renewables are intermittent and cannot be trusted. We need nuclear. Sure, just that it's not even remotely price competitive despite decades of R&D and subsidies and nobody wants Nuclear in their back yard.
What they miss entirely is building an international electrical grid that can deal with intermittency of any energy source (even nuclear reactors go down for half years at a time). Why does Chile want to provide power to Asia, rather than the US (or in fact any of the countries along the pacific coastline)? Just as transportation infrastructure (containers, highways, trains etc) liberalised and reduced the cost of international trade, a grid would do the same to energy.
Great international electrical grids is what we really need. Then let the market solve for who, where and what supplies the power (with the right incentives of course)...
High-voltage direct current connections have a loss in the order of 3.5%/1000km (that's approximately 10% loss per 3000km). China is operating several power lines at even higher voltages because that makes it more efficient. The loss for direct current depends on the square of the current, so you really want to reduce the current (which transmitting the same power at a higher voltage does).
The message here is not "we need nuclear", but rather "we need clean reliable energy sources to complement wind/solar." If we can at least agree on what problem we're trying to solve, then we can rationally weigh the tradeoffs of nuclear against other expensive energy sources (like geothermal and carbon storage) that satisfy the requirement.
Building new transmission lines is quite difficult, especially in the USA.
Hydro is a cheap and clean energy source that complements wind and solar just fine. There is high variability in solar if your expecting 100% of solar power to be consumed, if you accept most solar power is going to be wasted because it’s still cheap at twice the price then things start to very very different.
2X = 4c/kWh solar + batteries + wind + hydro solves the grid just about everywhere. US might only get 6.6% of annual electricity from hydro, but it’s already a huge grid scale battery storing up extremely intermittent rain into dependable power. 6.6% 100% of the time is already an 80+% solution 5% of the time.
We want some dams for water storage and flood control, having hydro power in those locations doesn’t add new environmental concerns. Small dams don’t produce significant power and can be removed. It is worth considering larger dams, but I doubt people are going to be willing to remove any major US dams any time soon.
The problem with hydro is that there are draughts. Is global warming going to make that better? Nuclear can run fine in rain or shine. Hydro should be put in the same category as wind and solar.
A a general rule, places where droughts are a problem don’t get enough precipitation to generate significant hydropower.
That said, when you start talking 0.01% edge cases plenty of options open up. Burning fossil fuels at that scale for example is nowhere near a significant CO2 source compared to current releases. I fully expect hospitals to have backup generators and that’s not a significant issue.
Droughts are supposed to get worse with global warming. If that is the case then places where they are not currently a problem could become a problem.
I have no issues using hydro, I just don't think it should be placed in the reliable category. I think coal, gas, nuclear, etc should be in that category.
That might be your gut feeling, but the utter simplicity of hydro made it vastly more reliable than those options you mention. Individual coal, gas, nuclear etc all needs to be regularly taken offline due to various issues from mechanical faults to weather and supply chain issues. As demonstrated by the multiple recent power outages in Texas coal, gas, and nuclear even have dependencies to the weather and the wider electric grid which will take them down at the same time.
Of course total capacity on an annual basis basis varies. But we care about the ability to reliably produce power when necessary far more than maximum capacity across months. Markets adjust to supply limits on an annual basis far more easily than a power outage.
We don’t need extra hydro, we need to reserve what’s already built as a monumental self filling battery.
Also, moving solar power from California to Washington state and hydro from Washington state to California is cheaper than building excess generating capacity in each state. It’s already part of the same transition grid, transmission capacity is simply insufficient right now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss...
Hydro currently produces ~7% of US electricity. Things like pumped hydro and conservation are just a smaller nice to have part of the picture, they're not the solution.
CA uses ~15GW of gas power when the sun turns off at 6pm. It still uses 8-10GW of gas during the day when the sun is shining. That gas is going to increase another 2GW when Diablo canyon is switched off. During the day while solar is running it additionally imports 4-6GW from the NW and SW interchanges. When the sun turns off at 6pm it jumps up to 8GW sometimes more of imported electricity.
Meanwhile during the afternoon and evening the NW region is generating 20GW with fossil gas and coal power. While only managing to generate 16GW at these same peaks with its hydro power.
There is not enough hydro to do this, and you can't build more. CA is a power hungry state that has outsourced much of its pollution to other states. This is a result of targeting renewables rather than targeting clean power. It needs to build firm clean power, whatever form that takes. Targets should be for CO2 emissions. Not for some favored technology.
You misunderstood, the day to day solution is batteries. Hydropower is for when your not getting enough sunlight in the day not when the sun goes down at night.
Currently, 5% of all solar power generated in California is wasted and that number keeps increasing because people just keep adding more solar. Storage is currently cost effective, and it’s only getting cheaper. More storage means building even more solar is again cost effective until eventually the grid ends up looking very different.
Not following how this would work. So overnight demand of the NW and CAL looks to be ~60GW. Assuming you can get 20GW of hydro between the two (which is a bit above current peaks) as your supplement.
So you'd need enough solar to on the cloudiest of days to both keep things running with daytime demand in NW and CAL while still providing enough excess to (picking some numbers) charge up ~30% of the batteries, while the hydro runs to supplement charging the other ~30% of charge, so that overnight the 60% of charge can be drained in conjunction with the 20GW of hydro continuing to run. Why even rely on hydro if solar can still do all this, just build even more solar.
Seems shaky and fragile. And this is before you even get to solving the rest of North America.
You need to expand the maximum capacity of hydroelectric generation not the average capacity which means zero new dams. As a sanity check if hydro can average 7% of US electricity 100% of the time that’s equivalent to 70% of US electricity 10% of the time.
To greatly simplify if daytime demand is 200GW and nighttime demand is 100GW. You build enough solar to in theory provide 600GW in optimal conditions and 60GW in the worst case accepting most of that is wasted. Still 90% of the time they provide 300+GW in the day which can charge batteries to provide 100GW at night. Which means 90% of days hydro is producing ~0 electricity.
The other 10% of the time solar is producing between 300GW and 60GW in the day. If it’s 299GW then hydro needs to supplement 1GW at night. If it’s only 60GW then hydro needs to supplement 140GW in the day and 100GW that night.
Now in the real world things aren’t that simple. Hydro isn’t a light switch, and wind is part of the equation etc, but as a first order approximation it works especially as you can use hydro to charge the same batteries that solar or wind would.
You say expand to 70% for 10% of the time. You mean you want to multiply several times over the number of generator halls, penstocks, turbines, generators, and water outflow from existing hydro schemes? There isn't the space for all that. And the cost would be astronomical. Plus the environmental impact of having several times the outflow from most dams at full power would be incredible. You could maybe at a stretch 1.5x it across the US on average. But most plans to expand hydro scheme output around the developed world get met with incredible resistance.
Increasing peak flow from dams is actually great for the environment as flooding is part of the natural ecosystem, this actually doesn’t go far enough to simulate natural variability.
Also, dams don’t operate anywhere close to 100% 24/7, what I am describing is generally closer to a 2x increase in maximum generating capacity than 10x which isn’t free but the value of electricity produced would be vastly high more than making up for these costs.
I don’t get objections like this: There isn't the space for all that. That’s not an inherent limitation, people built these dams in the first place, we can remove them and build a new structure if that’s what it takes. Don’t flood properties downstream is a perfectly reasonable limitation, don’t build any new infrastructure isn’t. 2019 we produced 100x as much solar power as in 2009, change happens.
Based on my research liquid air batteries seem to be the best complement to wind and solar. The cost is comparable to pumped hydro and has no geographic restrictions. You can solve the rest of the problem with enough interconnections across the grid.
In theory they might be a great solution, but it’s still very experimental. That said, the technology is currently much worse than generally described. Going from 25% to 50% AC to AC efficiency is straightforward, but getting 70% requires a “low grade” heat source in other words it’s not actually 70% efficient it’s converting a stream of thermal energy into electricity alongside the stated 50% efficiency.
New studies are showing that hydro is not as clean as we once thought and may be producing large amounts of methane (due to anaerobic breakdown of organic materials in flood basins), which is orders of magnitude worse than CO2 per unit volume for greenhouse effects in the short-to-medium term.
The fact that a problem already exists in nature does not justify further exacerbating the problem.
Their net climate change impact can only be considered close to zero when considered as offset fossil-fuel based sources. If they're emitting large amounts of methane and CO2 (until we get net 0 concrete), it seems extremely unlikely that the impact is close to 0.
They don’t make it worse because dams aren’t generating organic matter. Organic matter that falls into rivers is going to break down either way, and in a free flowing river it’s often going to break down where the water slows down in estuaries. Essentially you need to subtract the methane that would have been produced in other locations.
In terms of concrete, the percentage of concrete produced worldwide that ends up in dams is minuscule. Only 34 states even have any hydroelectric dams. The US alone is producing 90 million metric tons per year, look for the most recent large hydroelectric dam in the US it wasn’t produced in 2021, or 2020, or 2019, or …
As a former linear corridor permitting attorney who is married to a current linear corridor permitting attorney, I can tell you with confidence that there is no universe where we build any meaningful amount of new energy transmission in the PNW USA. We can't get a single powerline across the Cascades, much less the dozens we would need for this kind of grid resiliency. The current suite of environmental laws are an effective veto on significant new development through federal lands.
Could just avoid all of that by going underwater along the coast. But yes, good point in that power grid lines are as controversial and politically fraught as nuclear power...
California in recent years has been racking up a number of wildfires started by powerlines, both residential and interstate high tension lines. Granted, the PNW has a completely different ecological/rain story than California, but to say there's zero environmental impact (risk) is probably inaccurate
You also need to cut big grassy "highways" through otherwise undisturbed forest, and run roads through there, so that the trees can be trimmed back (ideally annually, but realistically every 3-5 years) it's pretty disruptive ingress of human culture into otherwise undisturbed wild forest.
I'm pro more infrastructure, but there's a lot to be considered here, you're introducing humans, effectively forever, to previously (and increasingly rare) untamed wild lands. Once that infrastructure is approved and built, it is almost never recalled
Last year one of the fires was blamed on a metal hook wearing through after 75 years in the field. It seems like doing a slightly better job at maintenance might be possible.
Climate change politics in a nutshell. At some point, some large group of people is going to have to do something they very much don't want to do, and guess what? They resist doing it.
The video profiles the EU's efforts to do exactly this. One example used is how Spain (geographically blessed with solar power), and Denmark (geographically blessed with wind), can both use France's nuclear power as a buffer between them to smooth out the peaks/throughs in their output, and therefore are able to invest in more renewable power.
Interconnected grids that straddle national borders are absolutely essential to increasing the amount of renewable energy we can build. The technical limitations are easy to overcome (especially for neighboring countries). The barriers are purely political, as this system requires a common electricity market on the grid, and co-operation between national governments.
Hopefully North America can get it's crap together on this. As it stands right now, the USA can't even get a common grid within it's own nation. Maine voters just rejected an interconnection from Hydro-Quebec. Which is disappointing since Quebec is blessed with near perfect geography for hydro-electric, and can no longer expand this energy production since it's capacity outstrips the demand.
> Maine voters just rejected an interconnection from Hydro-Quebec. Which is disappointing since Quebec is blessed with near perfect geography for hydro-electric, and can no longer expand this energy production since it's capacity outstrips the demand.
That's completely crazy. HQ's offer was something like 5 cents per KW/h. That's 3 times less than what New England is paying for right now with natural gas.
Based on everything I’ve read from actual Maine voters on that topic, they did so for good reasons. An interconnect with Hydro-Quebec can happen, if you find a way to bring Maine voters on board and that is a solvable problem. But if you treat their concerns as unimportant and you throw around words like “grand scheme of things”, then yeah, they will continue to reject Hydro-Quebec.
Part of politics is coalition building. If you can’t do it then you get what you get.
There was a North Africa project to power Europe using this approach called Desertec. Here's a fairly negative review of what happened.
https://www.ecomena.org/desertec/
One issue is that they tried to set up an export system for solar electricity before they ensured that the local economies would have priority access to reliable power, that may have been a central problem.
Unfortunately many leftists are more interested in manipulating green energy to meet their unrelated political goals than solving global warming. If a green power project does not also bring about an international dictatorship of the proletariat to free the world from corporate oppression, they are happy to block it. They never mention that their obstructionism is an affirmative vote in favor of our current unsustainable practices.
In this case, the article's author is worried that Desertec, while much cleaner, and a clear environmental win, could replicate some of the political dynamics of oil extraction in the middle east.
He pretends that he would like to see "decentralized small-scale projects that can be democratically managed and controlled by local communities that promote energy autonomy". But has this been created? No. By opposing actual real projects, he is voting to keep extracting and burning oil. With this article, he is actively promoting oil and the dictatorships propped up by it, while pretending to fight against injustice.
So we just have to be ok creating new systems that reproduce the extractive, abusive relationships between Europe and Africa that existed in the past (and continue to exist today)?
Build a conveyor belt that literally transmits the solar resources of African countries to Europe that does not guarantee that Africans actually benefit from the transaction?
The climate crisis should not be used as an excuse for rich countries to plunder underdeveloped ones.
Yes, it's a pretty common phenomenon. Placing ideology before practical results doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Just build the system, please.
There is however a way for an industrialized nation to partner with a developing country for such projects in a mutually beneficial manner, rather than using the strict old-school colonial plantation model.
For example, I note that Saudi Arabia's role in the global oil market - which was due to the USA's investment in Saudi Arabia - has done far more to drive local development than the French 'partnership' with Niger's uranium mines has done to drive the development of that country. Niger supplies about a third of France's uranium, but get basically nothing in return:
> "According to the World Bank, around 60 percent of Nigeriens live below the national poverty line. With a per capita income of $420, Niger is one of the world’s poorest nations. In 2016, it ranked 187 out of 188 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index."
I get the sense that China is offering better deals to African nations than Europe or the USA is, but that's very iffy too.
> For example, I note that Saudi Arabia's role in the global oil market - which was due to the USA's investment in Saudi Arabia - has done far more to drive local development than the French 'partnership' with Niger's uranium mines has done to drive the development of that country. Niger supplies about a third of France's uranium, but get basically nothing in return:
Every country in the world needs oil. You can buy refined oil products at every corner store of the planet. SA's oil is also easy to extract, so it's a rather low tech operation.
It's not the case with uranium. There are very few buyers and the tech required to mine and handle it as well as to use it isn't widespread. Without France buying and funding the mine it it's questionable whether there would be a mine at all.
For a solar farm, every country with a coastline and useable land will be offered a chance to bid and the lowest bidder will get the contract.
> Sure, just that it's not even remotely price competitive despite decades of R&D and subsidies
There are rather clear signs [0] of political interference in the price of nuclear. It might be the only technology I've ever seen where the learning curve suddenly inverted.
The demand isn't even that we have to go nuclear at all costs, it is just ... if the global warming people are serious then a Fukushima every 40 years is nothing and we should be letting cheap nuclear (the safest, cleanest, most reliable form of energy we know of) take over. Instead it is being held to impossible safety standards and we're using coal (basically the least safe, most polluting form of energy we know about). This is madness.
Renewables are acceptable to me personally now the price has come down, but it is hard to overlook that places that go renewable all end up in the headlines for an energy crisis a few years later. Wind power is cheap but it isn't reliable.
That's a weird paper.. no mention of Chernobyl, Three-Mile Island or any of the other major meltdowns or near catastrophes in the 1970s/1980s.
Perhaps the cheaper generation of nuclear plants were inherently unsafe, hence the more expensive costs going forward, necessitating a new learning curve as we "overbuilt" the plants to avoid thousand-square mile exclusion zones?
Even taking that on as a given (which, I mean, yeah pretty reasonable to tighten standards) ... that should be a step change as new standards are bought in, not a linear uptrend. Then the downwards sloping learning curve should resume.
This seems to largely be because we build new designs for almost every reactor, and change the regulation faster than projects get finished, so they have to get refitted part way through. The regulatory framework also makes it infeasible to finance small reactors.
If we could build the same design over and over in a bunch of locations, with a common regulatory regime it would be much cheaper and much faster.
That nuclear is slow and expensive to build is an artifact of infrequency and bad regulation.
I'm not so sure that's the case. I think the big push now in France and China could open the path to more nuclear elsewhere. I also think that if places start to have issues with grid stability or intermittency of power, they'll be inclined to give it a second look. That said, there could be some heretofore unexpected leap forward in battery tech, but that's not necessarily going to happen.
The political situation in all of the West is moving rapidly and in unexpected ways lately, so the realm of what's possible could easily change.
Alright, I'm game. Assuming that you truly have to pick 2:
We very simply must go towards clean/carbon-free as much as we can, so that's my #1 pick.
It must be economically viable for it to, you know, actually happen, so that's #2.
Pretty easy then, actually: our energy sources must be dependent on weather. Sucks, but it is what it is. The choice is even easier when you think about the fact that going this route is with the purpose of avoiding even more extreme/unpredictable weather. If we want stable weather, we must go with energy sources that are dependent on weather; the weather being stable is important to using sources that are dependent on weather.
Bottom line: lean hard into solar and wind, and go really hard into better energy storage tech.
>and go really hard into better energy storage tech.
Yes! Building dam's/silos (pumping water up when energy is available drain it when it's not) no need to build them 'into' rivers, artificial fjords where current is strong, batteries/hydrogen where nothing else is viable, create heat pumping into the ground, pump it up when no heat from other sources are available etc.
It is so very obvious to me that there's one way forward: on the smallest levels possible, replace what energy production a given area can with some sort of creative renewable(s) implementation. And over time, replace fossil fuels not from the top down, but from the bottom up. Essentially a modular grid of small, bespoke-for-its-area energy producers.
One thing I've heard Saul Griffith[1] talk about is instead of thinking traditionally about supply-side electricity as this paper does, think instead about an "internet of electricity" where all the distributed producers and consumers of electricity work together to balance a "smart grid". Household or community solar, utilities, even your car's (gigantic) battery would all work together to provide stability and resilience. This would require "grid neutrality" where no one's electron's are favored above others the same way no one's packets are valued above others in the internet. Seems like a smart idea given how distributed the grid is becoming.
> I wonder what portion of the reading population recognizes that all roads for ‘clean firm’ power lead to nuclear.
The paper highlights at least 2 other possible roads. The point that we need to understand the need, compare the options, and invest in at least one of them.
>California has committed to achieve a net-zero carbon economy by 2045.
While turning off their only nuclear reactors.
>California will need to rely primarily on forms of energy that do not emit
greenhouse gases.
Generated by equipment produced by burning lots of coal in China.
I scrolled down a bit more and saw nuclear as a growing share on their graphs. Remind me again how many plants are even as far as the planning stage in California?
Democrats will do what they always do - virtue signal on climate change and go back to their Range Rovers, mansions, and private jets.
For Gavin Newsom, there is no need to take action, he need only announce that California will be at zero-emissions at some point in the future after he has left office.
In the near future you will see Biden release capacity from the strategic oil reserve and/or call for gas taxes to be reduced...the increases in the price of gas will otherwise result in a Republican sweep in midterms next year.
So, the reality is Democrats making more CO2 soon, and doing nothing later.
I didn’t see hydroelectric power mentioned in a quick skim. Perhaps I missed it?
There’s not enough hydroelectric power, but wind and solar can be thought of as a way of conserving it for when it’s most needed. It might be interesting to see how the numbers work out if the Pacific Northwest is included.
Pervasive drought conditions can make the reliability of hydroelectric somewhat problematic, as it can't be completely cut off and saved for peak demand, thanks to downstream (over)subscription of the water supply and minimum flow requirements.
1) Extrememly high construction costs and cost overruns.
2) Requires more cooling water than any other power source.
3) Highly radioactive 'spent fuel' must be stored indefinitely.
4) Uranium ore mining and processing consumes significant energy, of the fossil fuel form typically.
5) Catastrophic failure scenarios (Fukushima, Chernobyl).
6) Major security issues with high costs.
7) Poor compatibility with intermittent and varying energy sources (i.e. solar, wind), as does coal.
Note the 'modular' concept is just as bad, as you still have all the security costs, waste storage costs, cooling issues, etc. just distributed in more locations.
All in all the nuclear experiment looks like a complete failure, and yes you can use solar/wind/storage at scale to generate all the electrical power required for human civilization - and yes, shutting down all the nuclear power plants in earthquake zones makes perfect sense.
As far as the 'you're exaggerating risks' comments, well, then, let's see the repeal of Price Anderson accident indemnity, which would require the owners and operators of nuclear power plants to pay full costs for disasters. Investors would flee en masse if that happened, of course.
I agree but Uranium has 1.000.000x the energy density of oil and 1.000.000.000x that of batteries.
If we are to stand any chance of avoiding the tail end of a net hubbert curve we need nuclear.
Fusion, thorium and 4th gen fission (France has cancelled both the super-phenix project and the modern revival of that initiative) are nowhere near realistic and/or deterministic dates, so we have to go with the 100 years of Uranium we have left.
This is the only descision where I'm against, but for, at the same time. There is no alternative except permanent crisis until civilization returns to the stone age.
Coming down from the massive bubble created by stored sunlight (coal, oil and gas) is not going to be a smooth ride any way we turn it.
Even the limit oft cited of "100 years" only refers to current proven mines. It does not include any estimated reserves and the results of additional prospecting.
There are large swaths of nations that have never even been prospected for Uranium deposits.
Energy density doesn't seem all that relevant as long as you have a decent area collection system. Indeed, high energy density can create more problems than it solves (major problems with confining D-T fusion comes to mind).
I also have no doubts about running human civilization on sunlight and wind as long as you have robust electrical storage / chemical conversion / distribution systems. By conversion I mean using sunlight to reduce H2O to H2, then CO2 to CH4 or longer hydrocarbons. Notably this also works for fertilizer production, i.e. nitrogen + hydrogen -> NH3 etc.
Building millions of solar panels is an ecological disaster waiting to happen.
...not only for the destruction of natural habitats, but the CO2 emitted in manufacturing and replacing all those panels, and the garbage disaster of disposing of them.
This does not include the energy needed to mine and manufacture the raw materials needed to build the solar panels. Most of those rare-earth elements in photovoltaics comes from vast mining operations in China.
> 1) Extrememly high construction costs and cost overruns
This is like pushing someone off a cliff and then accusing them of being clumsy.
We MAKE nuclear plant construction expensive. We shut down storage facilities, we ban transport of fuel, we have environmental groups file lawsuits for even aspect of the environmental review, we have local mom's groups protest and sue for everything under the sun... we force reactors to meet 1970s rules on safety that no longer have meaning - we have local politicians rally and protest and cut funding whenever they can.
WE MAKE NUCLEAR EXPENSIVE.
China builds identical Gen III+ nuclear reactors for less than one-tenth the price - using Western construction companies. ...and they currently have 24 One Gigawatt plants under construction and due to complete this decade.
> 2) Requires more cooling water than any other power source
This isn't a severe problem. I'm not even sure why this is on your list. The water "used" by the reactor isn't consumed in any way. It goes in one side, and comes right back out the other side of the reactor chamber.
> 3) Highly radioactive 'spent fuel' must be stored indefinitely.
One barrel of spent fuel per reactor per year. That's it. You could put all the spent fuel from ALL the US reactors, even if we went to 100% nuclear in the ONE facility in Yucca Mountain. It's safe, geologically stable, and has more than enough space. This is not a science or engineering problem. This is a public ignorance problem.
> 4) Uranium ore mining and processing consumes significant energy, of the fossil fuel form typically.
Per unit of energy produced, it consumes far less than the manufacture of solar panels, wind turbines, hydro dams, or any other power source. This argument is a positive for nuclear.
This is like comparing leeches to penicillin. Fukushima and Chernobyl were designed in the 1950s. They were both the first generation of reactors which had poor safety designs. Today's GenIII+ reactors have passive safety systems that mean you need to actively keep the reactor from turning off. If the plant losses power, or is attacked by terrorists, or the entire population turns into zombies - the reactor turns off. These passive safety systems are now standard on all new reactors. The containment pool is so safe these days, that divers actually dive in the - you can literally swim in them.
> 6) Major security issues with high costs.
Is this a reference to possible theft of fissile material? Uranium fuel isn't kept in the plant, unless it's in the reactor. No one has ever broken into a facility to steal uranium to make a small dirty bomb (you cannot make real hydrogen bomb with uranium from a reactor). It would be easier to conduct a normal terrorist attack than to break into a nuclear plant, escape, and then assemble and deliver a bomb somewhere. This just isn't a very thoughtful idea. It would be easier to just shoot a bunch of people with a machine gun.
> 7) Poor compatibility with intermittent and varying energy sources (i.e. solar, wind), as does coal.
This is a commonly repeated lie. A nuclear plant can output whatever power is needed. There's no "compatibility" issue at all. The genesis of this notion is that once the Uranium is enriched, it's generating heat whether that's used or not - and that's true - but the point is the energy density of Uranium is so high, that this "waste" still makes it orders of magnitude more productive than any other source of energy.
> All in all the nuclear experiment looks like a complete failure
It looks more like the fearmongering has been a complete success. It's bizarre that people still believe the nonsense you posted here.
Very well stated! I wish I had read this before posting my reply to the parent comment. I had the same thoughts about 7), but I wasn't certain of the 'ramp-up/down' time for nuclear plants.
Exactly - the plants don't need to ramp up/down. They just throw away the output. ...which is fine because the main cost of the plant isn't the input resource of uranium (which is insane if you think about it).
> ‘Baseload power stations’ are inflexible in operation, in the sense that they are unsuitable for following the variations in demand and supply on timescales of minutes and hours, so they have to be supplemented with flexible peak-load and slightly flexible intermediate-load power stations.
As far as why nuclear plays poorly with solar, for example, consider a PV system that generates, at noon, 100% of demand. You'd want to shut down alternative power sources at this time - that's not efficient at all with nuclear or coal.
As far as safety, what are your thoughts on cancelling Price-Anderson accident indemnity laws, and having owners and operators of nuclear power plants accept full liability, no pass-on to the taxpayer?
You do not need to power down/up the nuclear plants at all. This is a myth. It is cheaper to just throw away any excess power it generates.
Uranium is so energy dense that it doesn't cost anything to do that. This is amazing when you think about it.
If you really want to capture it - create battery systems.
> what are your thoughts on cancelling Price-Anderson accident indemnity laws
One of the biggest challenges of nuclear plant construction is all the frivolous lawsuits, so I would really really want to know the exact details before making a determination on those laws. Often they are sold as "safety", but are really just ways to obstruct the process.
> 1) Extrememly high construction costs and cost overruns.
This is partly because nuclear is unfairly maligned and is forced to do things with 10x the safety requirements of (e.g.) coal and partly because we have not tried a nuclear rollout at 'scale' (i.e. multiples of a standardized system being planned for construction).
> 2) Requires more cooling water than any other power source.
Fair enough, but this hardly seems like a show-stopper, especially with improved recycling methods.
> 3) Highly radioactive 'spent fuel' must be stored indefinitely.
This seems like a small price to pay to implement a solution that would save tens of thousands+ lives per year (i.e. storing the highly radioactive after-products in the air, as with burning massive amounts of coal).
From [0]:
>> In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards.
An oversimplification, perhaps, but still valid, especially since new reactors have been designed to reuse spent fuel (hinted at in [0]) anyway and it wouldn't likely need to be permanent storage.
> 4) Uranium ore mining and processing consumes significant energy, of the fossil fuel form typically.
This is not unique to nuclear energy and it would obviously use less 'fossil fuel form' energy with every new plant brought online.
Also fair, but any major center of infrastructure should have high security. The security issues that are more unique to nuclear can/have be/been addressed in new reactor designs (different fuel types, reactors that can't cause meltdowns/explosive scenarios).
> 7) Poor compatibility with intermittent and varying energy sources (i.e. solar, wind), as does coal.
I'm pretty sure this will be the case for any large, power producing center. Any large-scale solar or wind project will include battery storage anyway, which would act as a transitional buffer between the sources.
France resuming nuclear power program, China is going to build 150 reactors, while Commieforina killing it's only nuclear reactor while suffering a power shortages. Well fucking done.
92 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadWhat they miss entirely is building an international electrical grid that can deal with intermittency of any energy source (even nuclear reactors go down for half years at a time). Why does Chile want to provide power to Asia, rather than the US (or in fact any of the countries along the pacific coastline)? Just as transportation infrastructure (containers, highways, trains etc) liberalised and reduced the cost of international trade, a grid would do the same to energy.
Great international electrical grids is what we really need. Then let the market solve for who, where and what supplies the power (with the right incentives of course)...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Ad...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...
Building new transmission lines is quite difficult, especially in the USA.
2X = 4c/kWh solar + batteries + wind + hydro solves the grid just about everywhere. US might only get 6.6% of annual electricity from hydro, but it’s already a huge grid scale battery storing up extremely intermittent rain into dependable power. 6.6% 100% of the time is already an 80+% solution 5% of the time.
Hydro has some serious downsides for the ecosystem of whatever watershed it bottles up. Maybe newer implementations solve that?
That said, when you start talking 0.01% edge cases plenty of options open up. Burning fossil fuels at that scale for example is nowhere near a significant CO2 source compared to current releases. I fully expect hospitals to have backup generators and that’s not a significant issue.
I have no issues using hydro, I just don't think it should be placed in the reliable category. I think coal, gas, nuclear, etc should be in that category.
Of course total capacity on an annual basis basis varies. But we care about the ability to reliably produce power when necessary far more than maximum capacity across months. Markets adjust to supply limits on an annual basis far more easily than a power outage.
Also, moving solar power from California to Washington state and hydro from Washington state to California is cheaper than building excess generating capacity in each state. It’s already part of the same transition grid, transmission capacity is simply insufficient right now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss...
CA uses ~15GW of gas power when the sun turns off at 6pm. It still uses 8-10GW of gas during the day when the sun is shining. That gas is going to increase another 2GW when Diablo canyon is switched off. During the day while solar is running it additionally imports 4-6GW from the NW and SW interchanges. When the sun turns off at 6pm it jumps up to 8GW sometimes more of imported electricity.
Meanwhile during the afternoon and evening the NW region is generating 20GW with fossil gas and coal power. While only managing to generate 16GW at these same peaks with its hydro power.
There is not enough hydro to do this, and you can't build more. CA is a power hungry state that has outsourced much of its pollution to other states. This is a result of targeting renewables rather than targeting clean power. It needs to build firm clean power, whatever form that takes. Targets should be for CO2 emissions. Not for some favored technology.
Currently, 5% of all solar power generated in California is wasted and that number keeps increasing because people just keep adding more solar. Storage is currently cost effective, and it’s only getting cheaper. More storage means building even more solar is again cost effective until eventually the grid ends up looking very different.
So you'd need enough solar to on the cloudiest of days to both keep things running with daytime demand in NW and CAL while still providing enough excess to (picking some numbers) charge up ~30% of the batteries, while the hydro runs to supplement charging the other ~30% of charge, so that overnight the 60% of charge can be drained in conjunction with the 20GW of hydro continuing to run. Why even rely on hydro if solar can still do all this, just build even more solar.
Seems shaky and fragile. And this is before you even get to solving the rest of North America.
To greatly simplify if daytime demand is 200GW and nighttime demand is 100GW. You build enough solar to in theory provide 600GW in optimal conditions and 60GW in the worst case accepting most of that is wasted. Still 90% of the time they provide 300+GW in the day which can charge batteries to provide 100GW at night. Which means 90% of days hydro is producing ~0 electricity.
The other 10% of the time solar is producing between 300GW and 60GW in the day. If it’s 299GW then hydro needs to supplement 1GW at night. If it’s only 60GW then hydro needs to supplement 140GW in the day and 100GW that night.
Now in the real world things aren’t that simple. Hydro isn’t a light switch, and wind is part of the equation etc, but as a first order approximation it works especially as you can use hydro to charge the same batteries that solar or wind would.
Also, dams don’t operate anywhere close to 100% 24/7, what I am describing is generally closer to a 2x increase in maximum generating capacity than 10x which isn’t free but the value of electricity produced would be vastly high more than making up for these costs.
I don’t get objections like this: There isn't the space for all that. That’s not an inherent limitation, people built these dams in the first place, we can remove them and build a new structure if that’s what it takes. Don’t flood properties downstream is a perfectly reasonable limitation, don’t build any new infrastructure isn’t. 2019 we produced 100x as much solar power as in 2009, change happens.
Dams net climate change impact is very close to zero.
Their net climate change impact can only be considered close to zero when considered as offset fossil-fuel based sources. If they're emitting large amounts of methane and CO2 (until we get net 0 concrete), it seems extremely unlikely that the impact is close to 0.
In terms of concrete, the percentage of concrete produced worldwide that ends up in dams is minuscule. Only 34 states even have any hydroelectric dams. The US alone is producing 90 million metric tons per year, look for the most recent large hydroelectric dam in the US it wasn’t produced in 2021, or 2020, or 2019, or …
Not at a tractable price. Adding saltwater never makes things cheaper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise,_California
You also need to cut big grassy "highways" through otherwise undisturbed forest, and run roads through there, so that the trees can be trimmed back (ideally annually, but realistically every 3-5 years) it's pretty disruptive ingress of human culture into otherwise undisturbed wild forest.
I'm pro more infrastructure, but there's a lot to be considered here, you're introducing humans, effectively forever, to previously (and increasingly rare) untamed wild lands. Once that infrastructure is approved and built, it is almost never recalled
> run roads
Is that really necessary to trim every 3-5 years? One could helicopter workers in every 3-5 years.
> wildfires
I suspect that can be mitigated by devising automatic systems that are faster at shutting off the power should there be a break or fluctuation.
Also, wildfires are inevitable regardless.
Most importantly, one has to weigh the (small) issues with power lines with the environmental cost of not doing them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gacGuWjqKco
The video profiles the EU's efforts to do exactly this. One example used is how Spain (geographically blessed with solar power), and Denmark (geographically blessed with wind), can both use France's nuclear power as a buffer between them to smooth out the peaks/throughs in their output, and therefore are able to invest in more renewable power.
Interconnected grids that straddle national borders are absolutely essential to increasing the amount of renewable energy we can build. The technical limitations are easy to overcome (especially for neighboring countries). The barriers are purely political, as this system requires a common electricity market on the grid, and co-operation between national governments.
Hopefully North America can get it's crap together on this. As it stands right now, the USA can't even get a common grid within it's own nation. Maine voters just rejected an interconnection from Hydro-Quebec. Which is disappointing since Quebec is blessed with near perfect geography for hydro-electric, and can no longer expand this energy production since it's capacity outstrips the demand.
That's completely crazy. HQ's offer was something like 5 cents per KW/h. That's 3 times less than what New England is paying for right now with natural gas.
The lobbyists really did a great job here.
Part of politics is coalition building. If you can’t do it then you get what you get.
One issue is that they tried to set up an export system for solar electricity before they ensured that the local economies would have priority access to reliable power, that may have been a central problem.
In this case, the article's author is worried that Desertec, while much cleaner, and a clear environmental win, could replicate some of the political dynamics of oil extraction in the middle east.
He pretends that he would like to see "decentralized small-scale projects that can be democratically managed and controlled by local communities that promote energy autonomy". But has this been created? No. By opposing actual real projects, he is voting to keep extracting and burning oil. With this article, he is actively promoting oil and the dictatorships propped up by it, while pretending to fight against injustice.
Build a conveyor belt that literally transmits the solar resources of African countries to Europe that does not guarantee that Africans actually benefit from the transaction?
The climate crisis should not be used as an excuse for rich countries to plunder underdeveloped ones.
There is however a way for an industrialized nation to partner with a developing country for such projects in a mutually beneficial manner, rather than using the strict old-school colonial plantation model.
For example, I note that Saudi Arabia's role in the global oil market - which was due to the USA's investment in Saudi Arabia - has done far more to drive local development than the French 'partnership' with Niger's uranium mines has done to drive the development of that country. Niger supplies about a third of France's uranium, but get basically nothing in return:
> "According to the World Bank, around 60 percent of Nigeriens live below the national poverty line. With a per capita income of $420, Niger is one of the world’s poorest nations. In 2016, it ranked 187 out of 188 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index."
I get the sense that China is offering better deals to African nations than Europe or the USA is, but that's very iffy too.
Every country in the world needs oil. You can buy refined oil products at every corner store of the planet. SA's oil is also easy to extract, so it's a rather low tech operation.
It's not the case with uranium. There are very few buyers and the tech required to mine and handle it as well as to use it isn't widespread. Without France buying and funding the mine it it's questionable whether there would be a mine at all.
For a solar farm, every country with a coastline and useable land will be offered a chance to bid and the lowest bidder will get the contract.
There are rather clear signs [0] of political interference in the price of nuclear. It might be the only technology I've ever seen where the learning curve suddenly inverted.
The demand isn't even that we have to go nuclear at all costs, it is just ... if the global warming people are serious then a Fukushima every 40 years is nothing and we should be letting cheap nuclear (the safest, cleanest, most reliable form of energy we know of) take over. Instead it is being held to impossible safety standards and we're using coal (basically the least safe, most polluting form of energy we know about). This is madness.
Renewables are acceptable to me personally now the price has come down, but it is hard to overlook that places that go renewable all end up in the headlines for an energy crisis a few years later. Wind power is cheap but it isn't reliable.
[0] https://cama.crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/publica...
Perhaps the cheaper generation of nuclear plants were inherently unsafe, hence the more expensive costs going forward, necessitating a new learning curve as we "overbuilt" the plants to avoid thousand-square mile exclusion zones?
- Not dependent on weather
- Economically viable
Pick 2
Nuclear and a mix of available sources (wind, water, ground etc)
- Not dependent on weather
Nuclear, ground and dam's (aka water batteries)
- Economically viable
Nuclear and a mix of available sources (wind, water, ground etc)
BTW: Nothing is carbon free AtM
That nuclear is slow and expensive to build is an artifact of infrequency and bad regulation.
This not being possible is why I said making nuclear economically viable is not politically viable.
The political situation in all of the West is moving rapidly and in unexpected ways lately, so the realm of what's possible could easily change.
We very simply must go towards clean/carbon-free as much as we can, so that's my #1 pick.
It must be economically viable for it to, you know, actually happen, so that's #2.
Pretty easy then, actually: our energy sources must be dependent on weather. Sucks, but it is what it is. The choice is even easier when you think about the fact that going this route is with the purpose of avoiding even more extreme/unpredictable weather. If we want stable weather, we must go with energy sources that are dependent on weather; the weather being stable is important to using sources that are dependent on weather.
Bottom line: lean hard into solar and wind, and go really hard into better energy storage tech.
Yes! Building dam's/silos (pumping water up when energy is available drain it when it's not) no need to build them 'into' rivers, artificial fjords where current is strong, batteries/hydrogen where nothing else is viable, create heat pumping into the ground, pump it up when no heat from other sources are available etc.
It is so very obvious to me that there's one way forward: on the smallest levels possible, replace what energy production a given area can with some sort of creative renewable(s) implementation. And over time, replace fossil fuels not from the top down, but from the bottom up. Essentially a modular grid of small, bespoke-for-its-area energy producers.
[1] https://www.otherlab.com/
Hydrogen production is largely a hydrocarbon byproduct (made from gas or biomass, which is burning organic matter).
Geothermal resources are not particularly plentiful, although there is certainly greater potential than our existing use.
After 15+ years of study, I’m convinced that nuclear is the only option for carbon emissions reduction at the scale that leadership hopes to achieve.
The paper highlights at least 2 other possible roads. The point that we need to understand the need, compare the options, and invest in at least one of them.
While turning off their only nuclear reactors.
>California will need to rely primarily on forms of energy that do not emit greenhouse gases.
Generated by equipment produced by burning lots of coal in China.
I scrolled down a bit more and saw nuclear as a growing share on their graphs. Remind me again how many plants are even as far as the planning stage in California?
For Gavin Newsom, there is no need to take action, he need only announce that California will be at zero-emissions at some point in the future after he has left office.
In the near future you will see Biden release capacity from the strategic oil reserve and/or call for gas taxes to be reduced...the increases in the price of gas will otherwise result in a Republican sweep in midterms next year.
So, the reality is Democrats making more CO2 soon, and doing nothing later.
There’s not enough hydroelectric power, but wind and solar can be thought of as a way of conserving it for when it’s most needed. It might be interesting to see how the numbers work out if the Pacific Northwest is included.
1) Extrememly high construction costs and cost overruns. 2) Requires more cooling water than any other power source. 3) Highly radioactive 'spent fuel' must be stored indefinitely. 4) Uranium ore mining and processing consumes significant energy, of the fossil fuel form typically. 5) Catastrophic failure scenarios (Fukushima, Chernobyl). 6) Major security issues with high costs. 7) Poor compatibility with intermittent and varying energy sources (i.e. solar, wind), as does coal.
Note the 'modular' concept is just as bad, as you still have all the security costs, waste storage costs, cooling issues, etc. just distributed in more locations.
All in all the nuclear experiment looks like a complete failure, and yes you can use solar/wind/storage at scale to generate all the electrical power required for human civilization - and yes, shutting down all the nuclear power plants in earthquake zones makes perfect sense.
As far as the 'you're exaggerating risks' comments, well, then, let's see the repeal of Price Anderson accident indemnity, which would require the owners and operators of nuclear power plants to pay full costs for disasters. Investors would flee en masse if that happened, of course.
If we are to stand any chance of avoiding the tail end of a net hubbert curve we need nuclear.
Fusion, thorium and 4th gen fission (France has cancelled both the super-phenix project and the modern revival of that initiative) are nowhere near realistic and/or deterministic dates, so we have to go with the 100 years of Uranium we have left.
This is the only descision where I'm against, but for, at the same time. There is no alternative except permanent crisis until civilization returns to the stone age.
Coming down from the massive bubble created by stored sunlight (coal, oil and gas) is not going to be a smooth ride any way we turn it.
FWIW it's really not clear that there's such a limit on the uranium supply. Could be 4 billion years with seawater harvesting and reprocessing, etc.
https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...
There are large swaths of nations that have never even been prospected for Uranium deposits.
Sea water extraction is not needed.
I also have no doubts about running human civilization on sunlight and wind as long as you have robust electrical storage / chemical conversion / distribution systems. By conversion I mean using sunlight to reduce H2O to H2, then CO2 to CH4 or longer hydrocarbons. Notably this also works for fertilizer production, i.e. nitrogen + hydrogen -> NH3 etc.
...not only for the destruction of natural habitats, but the CO2 emitted in manufacturing and replacing all those panels, and the garbage disaster of disposing of them.
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1978pvse.conf..825L/abstra...
This is like pushing someone off a cliff and then accusing them of being clumsy.
We MAKE nuclear plant construction expensive. We shut down storage facilities, we ban transport of fuel, we have environmental groups file lawsuits for even aspect of the environmental review, we have local mom's groups protest and sue for everything under the sun... we force reactors to meet 1970s rules on safety that no longer have meaning - we have local politicians rally and protest and cut funding whenever they can.
WE MAKE NUCLEAR EXPENSIVE.
China builds identical Gen III+ nuclear reactors for less than one-tenth the price - using Western construction companies. ...and they currently have 24 One Gigawatt plants under construction and due to complete this decade.
> 2) Requires more cooling water than any other power source
This isn't a severe problem. I'm not even sure why this is on your list. The water "used" by the reactor isn't consumed in any way. It goes in one side, and comes right back out the other side of the reactor chamber.
> 3) Highly radioactive 'spent fuel' must be stored indefinitely.
One barrel of spent fuel per reactor per year. That's it. You could put all the spent fuel from ALL the US reactors, even if we went to 100% nuclear in the ONE facility in Yucca Mountain. It's safe, geologically stable, and has more than enough space. This is not a science or engineering problem. This is a public ignorance problem.
> 4) Uranium ore mining and processing consumes significant energy, of the fossil fuel form typically.
Per unit of energy produced, it consumes far less than the manufacture of solar panels, wind turbines, hydro dams, or any other power source. This argument is a positive for nuclear.
> 5) Catastrophic failure scenarios (Fukushima, Chernobyl).
This is like comparing leeches to penicillin. Fukushima and Chernobyl were designed in the 1950s. They were both the first generation of reactors which had poor safety designs. Today's GenIII+ reactors have passive safety systems that mean you need to actively keep the reactor from turning off. If the plant losses power, or is attacked by terrorists, or the entire population turns into zombies - the reactor turns off. These passive safety systems are now standard on all new reactors. The containment pool is so safe these days, that divers actually dive in the - you can literally swim in them.
> 6) Major security issues with high costs.
Is this a reference to possible theft of fissile material? Uranium fuel isn't kept in the plant, unless it's in the reactor. No one has ever broken into a facility to steal uranium to make a small dirty bomb (you cannot make real hydrogen bomb with uranium from a reactor). It would be easier to conduct a normal terrorist attack than to break into a nuclear plant, escape, and then assemble and deliver a bomb somewhere. This just isn't a very thoughtful idea. It would be easier to just shoot a bunch of people with a machine gun.
> 7) Poor compatibility with intermittent and varying energy sources (i.e. solar, wind), as does coal.
This is a commonly repeated lie. A nuclear plant can output whatever power is needed. There's no "compatibility" issue at all. The genesis of this notion is that once the Uranium is enriched, it's generating heat whether that's used or not - and that's true - but the point is the energy density of Uranium is so high, that this "waste" still makes it orders of magnitude more productive than any other source of energy.
> All in all the nuclear experiment looks like a complete failure
It looks more like the fearmongering has been a complete success. It's bizarre that people still believe the nonsense you posted here.
That is how insanely energy dense uranium is.
https://energypost.eu/dispelling-nuclear-baseload-myth-nothi...
> ‘Baseload power stations’ are inflexible in operation, in the sense that they are unsuitable for following the variations in demand and supply on timescales of minutes and hours, so they have to be supplemented with flexible peak-load and slightly flexible intermediate-load power stations.
As far as why nuclear plays poorly with solar, for example, consider a PV system that generates, at noon, 100% of demand. You'd want to shut down alternative power sources at this time - that's not efficient at all with nuclear or coal.
As far as safety, what are your thoughts on cancelling Price-Anderson accident indemnity laws, and having owners and operators of nuclear power plants accept full liability, no pass-on to the taxpayer?
Uranium is so energy dense that it doesn't cost anything to do that. This is amazing when you think about it.
If you really want to capture it - create battery systems.
> what are your thoughts on cancelling Price-Anderson accident indemnity laws
One of the biggest challenges of nuclear plant construction is all the frivolous lawsuits, so I would really really want to know the exact details before making a determination on those laws. Often they are sold as "safety", but are really just ways to obstruct the process.
Nuclear plants these days are incredibly safe.
This is partly because nuclear is unfairly maligned and is forced to do things with 10x the safety requirements of (e.g.) coal and partly because we have not tried a nuclear rollout at 'scale' (i.e. multiples of a standardized system being planned for construction).
> 2) Requires more cooling water than any other power source.
Fair enough, but this hardly seems like a show-stopper, especially with improved recycling methods.
> 3) Highly radioactive 'spent fuel' must be stored indefinitely.
This seems like a small price to pay to implement a solution that would save tens of thousands+ lives per year (i.e. storing the highly radioactive after-products in the air, as with burning massive amounts of coal).
From [0]: >> In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards.
An oversimplification, perhaps, but still valid, especially since new reactors have been designed to reuse spent fuel (hinted at in [0]) anyway and it wouldn't likely need to be permanent storage.
> 4) Uranium ore mining and processing consumes significant energy, of the fossil fuel form typically.
This is not unique to nuclear energy and it would obviously use less 'fossil fuel form' energy with every new plant brought online.
> 5) Catastrophic failure scenarios (Fukushima, Chernobyl)
Only if we stick to out-dated designs forever.
> 6) Major security issues with high costs.
Also fair, but any major center of infrastructure should have high security. The security issues that are more unique to nuclear can/have be/been addressed in new reactor designs (different fuel types, reactors that can't cause meltdowns/explosive scenarios).
> 7) Poor compatibility with intermittent and varying energy sources (i.e. solar, wind), as does coal.
I'm pretty sure this will be the case for any large, power producing center. Any large-scale solar or wind project will include battery storage anyway, which would act as a transitional buffer between the sources.
[0]: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...