I would love to see them fund (and drastically cut back the red tape) for some of the newer reactor designs that are looking very promising, like Nuscale Power. I know they are working on new plant in Idaho, seems like it should be sped up. (currently looking at 2029 and 2030)
So your argument is that we should remove safety requirements for Nuclear until it kills as many per year as other energy sources?
Crazy requirements like being able to survive a 1-10000 earthquake and etc seem overly cumbersome until it happens. Sure a giant oil spill is not great but you were allowed to go to the Gulf of Mexico post-spill(s) and not so much for Chernobyl. So the DOE should keep its red tape so it can keep its (better than the military, see Spain) record with nuclear power.
at what point did I talk about removing safety requirements?
I said to reduce red tape. Things like peforming multiple regulatory approvals at the same time. (do you really need to wait for the environment review to finish before you start the reactor safety review?) Or pre-approve reactor designs, so they don't all have to be redone from scratch for every new reactor.
There is a TON of ways to speed up approvals in a way that don't comprimise safety.. but that was a great strawman agrument!
Somewhat disingenuous, you should take into account nuclear black swans which could easily make a whole state uninhabitable forever. That said, what I’ve read ( not much, haha ) about newer nuclear thorium tech seems to indicate this argument does not have a future…
I don't think it's disingenuous at all. The reality is more people are dying every day from pollution caused by fossil fuels than all nuclear power plant accidents combined.
The fact that pollution doesn't make a big boom pushes our animal instinct to focus on nuclear as dangerous but it's not even close.
The funniest thing is that climate change is now unavoidable and will make nuclear meltdowns even more likely because of the extreme weather events it will trigger. Now seems like the worst possible moment to remove safety restrictions...
Have you considered that increasing warm temperatures will increase conflict(1) causing people to have road rage? It is quite plausible that a nuclear engineer having a road rage incident is not paying attention and blows up a reactor. Presumably, with increasing temperature, the regulators also have increased chances of road rage causing them to ignore fatal flaws.
Not sure why the awfulness of oil means we have to go for the option that makes the earth uninhabitable if anything goes slightly wrong. False forced choice to satisfy nuke fantasies
Earth uninhabitable? No, every nuclear plant in the world failing at once wouldn't make 1% of the earth uninhabitable, cut the hyperbole.
Nuke fantasies? Vs what, the fantasy that somehow wind and solar are going to be always-on sources of energy? You need a reliable backup, right now it's either fossil fuels or nuclear. The fantasy is thinking that fossil fuels are safer than nuclear - they are not.
Yes but who is going to sign up to be the ones who end up with uninhabitable earth. You're thinking in generalizations, when always it will end up being in someone's backyard who doesn't want to live with the risk of losing their land for hundreds of years.
Every nuclear reactor on earth could simultaneously go critical and melt down and it would still be a tiny blip on the habitability of the planet as compared to the impact of global warming.
I'm a big supporter of solar power, but in 60 years most installs will be garbage. Not only will the cells themselves be much lower efficiency, but the conversion electronics is also failure prone over the 20-30 year timespan. I'm waiting for the breathless reporting of the "Solar Garbage Disaster", and other non-News.
In many places in the US, even in the East, you can buy land for $1000/acre.
An acre is 4046 square meters. A solar module is maybe $75 per square meter. If we cover half the acre with modules, the modules alone cost $150,000/acre. Now add in cost of mounting hardware and inverters.
Land cost is close to negligible for solar, unless you're building it in very expensive places. If land cost ever did become generally significant, PV would be so cheap it would already have driven all other energy sources off the market.
There is an active, open market in used solar panels. Sold panels do not stay in the dark long.
But putting solar on land need not interfere with other uses. Rather, solar increases the value of the land for the other uses; a roof lasts longer with solar on. On a parking lot solar provides shade and stops rain. On pasture or crop land, solar reduces heat and water stress, increasing yield and cutting irrigation demand. On a reservoir or canal, it reduces evaporation loss, and runs cooler, thus more efficiently.
Yes, but as I mentioned the high power support electronics won't last that long. Unless you want to use them as shelter, they are unlikely to be functional.
As far as efficiency I roughly agree. There's likely to be a 15-20% drop per 20 years so I think they'll still be 8-10% conversion efficient assuming they are clean and unbroken.
The competition is not just coal and gas but also solar / wind.
Solar and wind is the cheapest energy. Then gas, then coal then nuclear.
Yes, we should (and will, the trend makes it inevitable) replace coal and gas with solar and wind.
We should also replace the most expensive (nuclear) energy with cheap and clean solar and wind.
We're not grading on a curve here. It doesn't matter WHY nuclear is most expensive energy, it matters that it is and we have technology that is both cheaper and cleaner to replace it.
>It doesn't matter WHY nuclear is most expensive energy, it matters that it is and we have technology that is both cheaper and cleaner to replace it.
That is a absurd thing to say. If the reason is "because we intentionally made it that way" then of course it matters because we can address that reason with the (nearly free) stroke of a pen.
Corruption turns out to be quite hard to root out, particularly when it has been made wholly legal. Certainly, it takes more than a pen stroke.
And you won't bring down nuke cost without cutting out the corruption. And, even if you did, it would remain uncompetitive with the storage that will have been long since built out by the time you could bring one online.
Solar and wind are only the cheapest because we have dumped massive amounts of subsidies into them, and continue to do so at greater levels than nuclear.
No matter how much money we throw at them, though, they produce zero when the sun isnt shining or the wind isnt blowing.
Factor in the cost of batteries, and aside from a few exceptional locations, they aren't all that cheap anymore.
Unless grid scale storage is free, which it isn't ( and more to the point, it isn't technically possible with what we currently have), your equation is off.
Please don't break the site guidelines like this, regardless of how strongly you feel about energy sources. You can make your substantive points without name calling, swipes, and personal attacks.
As opposed to what exactly? Solar and wind have for years lived entirely by the largess of the federal government and chinese government's investments.
Nuclear hasn't, but WHY is very interesting. And the answer seems to be because there's a DOE regulation that says that the risk of death from nuclear power must be "As Low As Reasonably Achievable". In practice, this means that if nuclear power is cheaper than the alternatives, then you could be spending more on safety for the same price as its alternatives (never mind that nuclear is already safer than the alternatives), and so the price of nuclear goes up. And since this feedback loop is regulator-powered, there's a chance for them to go too far in the direction of "expensive safety" and make nuclear economically unreasonable and never recover. Which it did.
> NRC uses a cost/life of $9M when evaluating if new nuclear safety equipment is needed.
How much cost has been added to nuclear projects due to additional safety requirements? I think it's plausible to say "over 9 billion", as an extremely conservative estimate. Would you object to this? (That's the cost overrun for just one reactor, for context)
If so, that means that those additional safety regulations have reduced nuclear deaths in the US by at least 1000 deaths.
This does not seem plausible to me, as the worst case for a meltdown in the US with 70s-era designs is not "Chernobyl style uncontained accident" but instead something rather close to Fukushima or 3 Mile Island, purely due to containment structures. Given how many people died from radiation in the wake of Fukushima (literally one - and less than 100 estimated in the counterfactual scenario where there was no evacuation) and 3-Mile Island (zero confirmed), I think it's reasonable to say that there is no way for the NRC's regulations to have prevented even 1000 deaths over the past 50 years.
Chernobyl was uncontained, but is also estimated to eventually cause 27,000 cancer deaths. So a contained accident could be much better than that and still cause thousands of deaths.
And my point was that Chernobyl was not a reasonable point of comparison as all US power reactors have containment structures to the best of my knowledge.
No Three-Mile Island effects from massive venting of krypton gas, which runs downstream like fluffy water and shrouds riverside neighborhoods, are included in death estimates.
Pretty sad that the solar lobby is trying to destroy the credibility of nuclear. I hope we one day see a resurgence of nuclear, the drama and fear around it really shouldn't exist in 2022.
Solar is safe, cheap fusion at a distance. Nuclear is expensive, continually mismanaged local fission. Batteries are short duration fusion buffers. Batteries will be needed for EVs as well, so cost will continue to decline as manufacturing learning and capacity scales up. Enough sunlight hits the Earth every 30 minutes to power humanity’s energy needs for a year.
Keep existing nuclear plants running for as long as safely possible, for sure, but stop throwing good money after bad with new generators. Build batteries (including pumped hydro where able), renewables, and transmission. Throw in some demand response or load shifting for loads that can tolerate being scheduled around renewables production (Google does this for compute using ElectricityMap.org, and Nest does demand response in aggregate as a revenue source, when utilities send a signal to shed AC load temporarily on peak consumption days versus firing up gas peakers).
@mrits: Telling people what they want doesn’t work. If they want cars (they do), you sell them EVs. You use your margin to build out a global EV charging network and battery factories. I don’t live in traffic, that’s a choice for others to make. The world is full of space batteries can be installed out of the way to meet net zero goals. There is no such thing as an ideal world, just nudges of consumers towards more positive macro outcomes.
Nuclear science came into industrial scale in America and there has never been a fucked-up American accident. The accidents there have been have been minuscule and nobody should lose their shit over them. The ought to be understood as valuable part of the learning process of exactly how much safety must be made part of the design. Binary searching how much safety is truly best involves small accidents. Safety is expensive! Safety takes effort every instant!
Safety costs must be balanced against other considerations, but the biggest and most important is profit. There has to be a profit, it can be for the taxpayer, or the energy consumer, or the government, or the investors--hopefully some for all.
Profit is essential, you have to reap two seeds from planting one.
Hanford (in Washington) always sticks in my mind as the most fucked up. Oak ridge has had problems, three mile island too of course, but the reactions were commensurately paranoid. Hanford seems to be incapable of not occasionally poisoning people.
Hanford is definitely the worst, but that's because of its origins as the world's first plutonium production site (first reactor criticality in 1944). Unlike commercial reactors it had to chemically reprocess irradiated fuel because the whole point was extracting plutonium. They were running experiments at industrial scale as they sought better methods for plutonium (and later, uranium-233) extraction. It ran under extreme secrecy in its earlier years, meaning that even by the generally lax standards of pre-EPA chemical facilities it had little environmental/safety oversight.
Hanford only ever had one reactor that produced electricity, the N reactor, and that wasn't built until 1963:
Of course there's a worst one, there has to be. Well Hanford didn't principally produce energy, so much as just plutonium, so really its mission was weapon production. So now we're changing the subject a bit, no longer is it about electricity, but defense.
So we can address that immediately: without the Hanford site, Japan would not have surrendered without an invasion of the home islands. Maybe not even then. It was the "new and cruel bomb," as the Emperor of Japan described it while citing it as the reason for surrender in his speech. That "new and cruel" bomb meant an alternative to reenacting the Battle of Iwo Jima (which I would describe as "fucked up" for both sides without question) a thousand times. Battles to the last cartridge. Forgetting completely about the lives of Allied and Axis soldiers, you realize the death toll that would have on the civilians of Japan? They were on the hook for all kinds of atrocities all over Asia and the Pacific, in the context of total war they pissed off the rest of the world way too hard for the Allies to declare a truce. Just in Korea alone, the stories are just...let's not talk about that, let's stick to what is fucked up within nuclear science.
Japanese were subscribed to the idea that their genocide was preferable to surrender. So that's why the bomb, and by extension the Hanford site, were so important. In practice the nukes in Japan explosives second, fireworks first. Napalm was a much better explosive for the money, in terms of the destruction it could produce. The really bad bombings in WWII were in Tokyo and Dresden, a hundred thousand dead per bombing, a new climactic event called a "Firestorm," terrible burns, pavement getting goopy, high winds--I claim those bombings were worse. But they weren't as flamboyant as a star.
Japan, blockaded, would have had to surrender by year end, in any case. A Japan bereft of fuel imports could not maintain industrial output. Nuking them was a way to send a message to Stalin.
But nobody knew about that when Hanford was set up and running, before then.
The firestorms were horrendous for the population, which had no influence on leadership, and were anyway ineffective against industrial production, so were doubly pointless. Blockade was massively underused in the Pacific theater.
Recall the Battle of Carrhae? Recap: Crassus was at the head of a Roman legion inside Parthia (meaning "Persian"; modern-day Iran). Totally flat. Then they started getting shot with arrows. Crassus and his legion would march toward the archers, but as they got close, the archers would stop shooting long enough to take vehicles drawn by horses away from the Roman soldiers, until they were far enough they could resume shooting arrows. The battle is well-known, but the detail I'd like to call attention to is that in Suetonius's "The Twelve Caesars" (IIRC) it says when the soldiers figured out the heavy rain of arrows would never stop, the soldiers ordered Crassus to surrender. Screaming at him and threatening him! So that's what he ended up having to do. Mutiny is no joke.
That is my thesis for the Japanese surrender. Perhaps the military leadership was too nicely tucked into safe bunkers near anti-aircraft turrets (I don't know what Japan had, but Berlin had four of these and they worked great against bombers, really scared the birds away quite nicely, guaranteed Killed-in-Action if you got too close). Whatever, the military leadership could relax if all they had to fear was conventional warfare, whatever the hell that meant by that particular month of 1945.
But nukes changed everything. Wrath of GOD, basically. After one bomb, Japanese leadership I imagine asked their internal Manhattan Project--they were working on the atomic bomb too at the time--what was happening. Presumably they were told it was a one-off thing, because uranium was too difficult to make. What really changed the game was the second bomb, which meant America could mass-produce them--thanks to Hanford, in particular--and then it was like, are we going to get another one of these new and cruel bombs every three days indefinitely? Where are they going to drop them in the future? What are the consequences of the starburns on the survivors, are the ones that lived going to be recover their health...ever? Are they dropping the next one on the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, and killing Hirohito as promised to the people of America? WHY ARE THE GODS SO ANGRY AT US, WERE WE WORSHIPPING SATAN THE WHOLE TIME? WILL THE PEOPLE OF JAPAN MUTINY WHEN THEY SEE A STAR ABOVE TOKYO? WHAT DO JAPANESE PEOPLE DO WHEN THEY MUTINY, IT'S OBVIOUSLY GOING TO HAPPEN EVEN IF IT'S NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE, WHAT WILL THE PEOPLE DO TO US? WHY DIDN'T WE CAVE IN TO THAT BEAUTIFUL ULTIMATUM THREATENING TO BRING ABOUT OUR "PROMPT AND UTTER DESTRUCTION," WHAT A BEAUTIFUL GIFT, why didn't we listen and surrender like they asked?
(I claim writing in all caps like this is justified. That is the literary freedom I ask for, and the site allows it in theory. Not doing so does an injustice to the degree of alarm imminent destruction brings about. The inner monologue when that destruction makes itself known sounds something along the lines of "OH FUCK OH FUCK OH FUCK!". All caps in your inner monologue. That's just for your personal reference, haven't seen it well-portrayed in movies much. It's not like anything else, maybe someday you'll see for yourself, dear reader. I hope not.)
Surely you understand the difference between misery experienced by civilians, vs. direct threats to soldiers? And, the difference between soldiers physically on the same field as a commander, vs. soldiers in a military base near a firestorm far removed from an emperor in palace compound, or generals at a command center?
A blockade eliminating fuel imports would shortly eliminate ability to operate trucks, aircraft, factories, electric power generation systems, and shortly telephones, radio stations, and kitchens.
> there has never been a fucked-up American accident
That really depends on your definition of "fucked-up", but there is a long list of nuclear accidents in the US [0], among the more "fucked-up" ones were attempts to dispose of nearly a ton of left-over fissile material in mere landfills [1] and then ultimately losing track of them.
> there has never been a fucked-up American accident.
What are you smoking? This is blatantly false. We've absolutely had meltdowns, and come very damn close to real disaster (as in - evacuating a 20 mile radius including some 600,000 people close)
Nuclear has the potential to become very cheap. Much cheaper than solar. The only reason why it's currently more expensive is because of technology. But huge advancements are made every year. Give another 10 years and it will be much much cheaper. Currently a lot of country investing a lot in new nuclear plants.
Hard-core/irrational environmentalists hate pumped hydro and really any large hydro projects.
Some of this likely stems from a massive gaffe some years ago when California regulators demanded a certain percentage of state generation come from environmentally-friendly sources. PG&E laughed because it already had the largest hydroelectric portfolio in the US and didn't have to change anything. Democrat leadership, angry because they didn't find a way to punish the largest utility in the state, promptly recategorized large hydro as Very Naughty.
Does hydro have an environmental cost? Sure, so does everything. Is it a great way to generate and store electricity? Yes. Does that matter to lawmakers? No.
California state elected officials have always been massively solicitous toward PGE, undercutting continual efforts to establish Public Utility Districts that could provide reliable, cheap service. A Public Utility District does cover Sacramento, so legislators are relatively insulated from PGE abuses.
Any reliability coming to those municipal utilities would be due to PG&E's transmission system.
No municipals, even the biggest like LA's, tackles anything near the scale of even our smallest IOU. Most critics of the IOUs ignore the sheer scale and geographic challenges of running a service area larger than some states across many different types of terrain. Running retail distribution and metering isn't that hard when other people run the grid for you. PG&E, SCE, and SDG&E have lots of issues to be sure, but to compare them to SMUD or Modesto is far from apples to apples.
Solar however also takes up a lot of land whereas Nuclear does not. Not saying we should go all in on one or the other but that has to be a huge factor.
Solar and wind on a disused nuclear reservation can produce as much power as the nuke used to, or had been expected to produce if ever completed. The grid tie-ins come in handy.
For typical nuclear power plants the land usage isn't anywhere close to what you claim:
>...A typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear facility in the United States needs a little more than 1 square mile to operate. NEI says
wind farms require 360 times more land area to produce the same amount of electricity and solar photovoltaic plants require 75 times more space.
To put that in perspective, you would need more than 3 million solar panels to produce the same amount of power as a typical commercial reactor or more than 430 wind turbines (capacity factor not included).
Evidently my information was faulty. Pilots are advised to stay well outside the fenceline when flying below 1500 feet above ground level, but the sites are not so marked on the sectional charts.
It's anti nuclear round two. I hope we don't make the same mistake again. Last time organizations like green peace and sierra Nevada club took money from gas and oil to smear nuclear. The shame is because nuclear provides 50% of the US's zero carbon energy, despite only being 20% of production. So even if you believe we can do it without nuclear you should clearly want to keep these alive until that number is much smaller.
Do you have a reference about Greenpeace taking money from fossil fuels companies? I would be very interested to read it but I could not find anything in my search.
Greenpeace board members also benefited from PG&E's patronage. TL;DR: they were flown around on a junket on Frank Sinatra's private jet (!), entertainment provided by Danny Kaye, and then voted to support the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant...
You are literally making this comment on an article about how the nuclear industry needs a massive taxpayer funded bailout to stay cost competitive.
The "evil solar lobby" has been saying for quite some time that solar is much cheaper than nuclear and therefore should play a large role in the post carbon grid. This article seems to reinforce their claims. Do you have a rebuttal, or are you just trying to be contrarian because it makes you feel good?
The “massive taxpayer funded bailout” the nuclear industry wants is order of magnitude below what solar/wind/hydro get all the time. No wonder nuclear finds it hard to compete, when government subsidizes its competitors to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
Did you read the report or did you just read the headline? Your source is a report created by the nuclear energy lobby. This is quite literally the most biased source available. And even then, literally from their own data it shows that in 2015, of the total federal incentives dispersed, renewables got 16% vs 8% for nuclear. That hardly feels like "30 times the amount".
And this doesn't even account for the fact that "Renewables" is a bucket that consists of multiple technology types including solar, wind, biomass and storage. So if those were actually broken out into individual categories nuclear would be the biggest receiver of incentives of the bunch.
And digging even further. The biggest "incentive" that renewables received was in the "Tax Policy" category. This money is likely the tax incentives that are available to newly built projects. This money is not a government transfer, but rather a tax credit that a project developer users AFTER successfully building a project. These types of incentives are available to nuclear developers, but funnily enough, they received 0 in 2015. Considering these incentives are available to developers of both technology types, I think it is unfair to use them when comparing federal subsidies (after all, if the nuclear industry could actually build a power plant, they would also get this incentive).
However, when you look at the R&D column, which is a direct transfer of cash from the government to industry. Nuclear received over 2.5 times as much as renewables (85B vs 32B). This is even more of a travesty considering "Renewables" is a bucket of multiple technology types. So oddly enough, if I was to take away one thing from this report, it looks like we are not investing nearly enough in renewables R&D. Also, why is coal getting 43B, that sucks.
> While the reliability and 24-hour availability of power from a reactor is part of their appeal, the fact that the plants cannot easily be shut down and restarted means that they sometimes operate at a loss when there is ample supply on the market. That, he said, makes the DOE support program one of the only ways to keep some nuclear plants online as a carbon-free resource.
This is an interesting economic quirk I hadn’t thought about.
Solar energy is inherently variable as the sun rises and sets but also with weather changes. Nuclear is the opposite of variable, as it can’t be turned up or down quickly. Energy storage continues to be one of the big gaps in our clean energy strategy.
In the US, most of the pumped hydro energy storage was built during the nuclear build out (because of the operating characteristics you note above). While chemical energy storage is growing quickly in the US, pumped hydro energy storage remains dominant.
Pumped hydro is great, but we are in a situation where most obvious pumped-hydro stations have been already turned into pumped-hydro. The remaining areas have political / water issues, or insufficient geography.
Chemical storage doesn't seem like it'd operate anywhere close to pump-hydro scale, but chemical storage will be a component of frequency-regulation, and maybe anything involving 30-minutes or less of storage. This is still useful, but pumped hydro is so much bigger than all other forms, that its hard to imagine an adequate replacement moving forward.
CAES looks promising. Still smaller than pumped hydro, but there's more geography that works with it.
Globally there's about 9,000 gigawatt hours of pumped hydro, annually we produce about 1388.85 TWh worth of Ammonia (mostly for fertilizer) so chemical storage of electrical energy as green hydrogen/ammonia has a fairly clear growth path.
Interesting. I was under the impression that the control rods were always used to regulate the reaction. How were they used chiefly as a safety measure? Similarly what was used for controlling the rate of reaction when the primary purpose of the rods were purely for safety?
What I do know is that the older reactors weren't really the type that could "spin up" or "spin down". Control rods always existed on nuclear power plants, even the oldest designs.
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In any case: "Connecting" those rods up to a computer so that the reaction can get hotter or run cooler would be the basis for variable power output.
> Why do you think nuclear plants run at 100% capacity 24/7?
The primary reason would be economic. Fuel costs IIRC are really low but capital-expenses (especially safety engineering / politics / convincing the people nearby that the plant is safe) is so costly.
When you have cheap-fuel but expensive machines, it makes sense to run closer to 100%. If you have expensive fuel but cheap machines (ex: Gas turbines), it makes sense to run in a "peaker" fashion.
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That being said: I've heard that older nuclear plants are "baseload" designs, in that they _CANNOT_ turn off or feasibly regulate their power output.
I mean, they obviously "can" turn off, they all have control rods for safety. But they're clearly not using them to regulate the power output.
>But they're clearly not using them to regulate the power output.
No, you heard wrong. They're often the last or second to last type of plant that's called upon to alter supply to match demand, but they don't run 100% 24/7.
They want to run them nearly 100% 24/7 for economic reasons though. Also what is the effect of regulating with control rods on the fuel, does it have an impact on how often the fuel needs to be changed?
>does it have an impact on how often the fuel needs to be changed
Yes, fissonable elements in the fuel are consumed in a manner that's proportional to output. So if you run at 25% output your fuel needs to be changed (example) every 4 years, if you run at 100% output your fuel needs to be changed every year.
But it is not 100% proportional, for example, 15% of the plant's output is required simply to run the plant's accessories. So it is advantageous to run at 100% output if you can.
Another comment in this thread, I can't find it now, said that lower output past a certain level did lead to having to change the fuel faster. I don't know who's correct but it feels strange that this would be a linear relationship, these kinds of things don't tend to work like that.
About 28% as of 2018[1], but there have been some advancements since then. Half of that cost is enrichment and fabrication, and disposal is a factor too. It costs a lot less to fuel nuclear plants than coal plants, but maintenance is more costly for nuclear. Pricing in externalities or requiring scrubbers makes coal FAR more expensive. Natural gas is really cheap right now so that is largely what is undercutting Nuclear for base load power. It's worth noting that historically natural gas production/use has been far more dangerous than nuclear and far less scrutinized by regulators.
Most nuclear power plants in the US fleet are not variable-output for design reasons. Mostly, both the reactor (see my other comment about neutron poisoning) and turbines are designed for safe operation at a fixed output and cannot operate at "partial" power for extended periods (in the turbines I think the problem is vibration and how it interacts with the bearing designs). A lot of this basically comes from these reactors having been designed without the benefit of computer modeling (everything had to be hand-calculated around a specific target output), newer designs based on computational modeling and optimization techniques achieve much larger safe/sustainable power ranges. Unfortunately we have very few reactors of modern design in the US.
I'm not an expert but my general understanding is that neutron poisoning is the big issue. Most reactors are designed around a careful balance of operating temperature and radiation field to mitigate neutron poisoning by the fuel, and operating outside of that balance will cause the problem to become progressively worse until the reaction is no longer self sustaining. So reactors have a "design power" and they can operate outside of that design power only for limited periods of time, while transitioning in and out of operation. Operating outside of the design power for too long causes thermal output to get lower and lower until the reactor just needs to be shut down while the operators wait out the half-life of the short-lived fuel products that cause poisoning, and then they can start it up again. I think this can be weeks so it's carefully avoided.
You are right about the (mostly Xenon-induced) neutron poisoning being a important design factor, but there's still quite a lot of margin you can use to modulate power (reducing boric acid concentration in water is the key factor here, so it will works better when the fuel has been renewed recently than just before you need to refuel).
I can hear the confusion in your writing and am thinking the same thing as you. The comment you're replying to seems almost artificial. The words refer to nuclear power but there's no sense of any understanding behind them.
Disclaimer - I only took one reactor course 17 years ago.
The rods soak up neutrons. the reactor is designed so that its power would increase if the rods weren't there. The rods are what keeps the k == 1 (basically how the neutrons change in time. K == 1 is no change).
So don't think of the rods as a throttle valve in your car, i.e. this throttle angle corresponds to this much torque and therefore power. The rods are best thought of as controlling the rate of change of reactor power.
This is why the reactor is built so that the neutrons increase when fully withdrawn - because you have to start it! If the reactor is being started, the rods are withdrawn until the power wanted is achieved. Then the rods are lowered.
Note this is a far more complicated problem; this is a very serious operation because at the very start, except for your neutron starter, you only have "prompt" neutrons that can very quickly cause an increase of power. Once the reactor has stabilized the "nuclear waste" inside it releases non-prompt neutrons that are part of the neutron budget and are easier to control.
So, while waste in the reactor is being accumulated and while the fuel burns up, the position of the rods to achieve stable power changes! Furthermore these changes are different in different parts of the reactor so each rod is individually changed (actually I think there are two sets of rods, not all of them are individually actuated)
I have a degree in Nuclear engineering, although I haven’t been practicing in a while. Your explanation is accurate and well described.
> actually I think there are two sets of rods, not all of them are individually actuated
commercial reactors have 5-10 “banks” arranged symmetrically, although only a subset of those are typically used during power operations [1], so you weren’t far off. Rods are rarely controlled individually, the only case that comes to mind is for identifying and then limiting the reactivity in a “leaker” fuel bundle (one where the cladding has been breached by a foreign object, so it is leaching contamination into the coolant - this is undesirable but expected).
[1]: edit for more information:
PWRs and BWRs differ substantially here:
PWRs primarily use boric acid in the coolant to limit reactivity at the beginning of a fuel cycle, which is diluted out over the course of the cycle. One bank of rods is used for fine reactivity control. This gives them a generally even power distribution across the reactor.
BWRs primarily use their control rods, so start the fuel cycle with substantially more inserted. A significant part of designing the fuel layout for a cycle is also designing the control rod patterns to be used over the cycle, to control excess reactivity while maximizing fuel use. Power distribution across the reactor can vary wildly, so it’s a much more challenging engineering problem.
I just remembered I actually have a detailed visualization illustrating (modeled) power distribution in a BWR. You can easily see where control rods are inserted and how that has shifted the power around. https://www.kmr.me/posts/coremap/#content
I'm not a nuclear reactor engineer etc, though it was my understanding that control rods in nuclear reactor have always been used to moderate the reaction to control power output, as well as being a critical safety component.
>>the fact that the plants cannot easily be shut down and restarted means that they sometimes operate at a loss when there is ample supply on the market
>This is an interesting economic quirk I hadn’t thought about.
this "quirk" should be a non-issue with a functioning energy market. if renewables are flooding the market with cheap electricity, but only during the day, and there's a massive deficit during the night, then the deficit would cause prices to go up and make the remaining generating capacity (natural gas, nuclear) more profitable.
> but only during the day, and there's a massive deficit during the night
Only if you assume the demand stays constant, but it doesn't; Demand is usually the highest when PV output is also the highest, the middle of the day when everybody is at work, using all kinds of electricity drawing machines.
Based upon the UK's National Grid Data (https://grid.iamkate.com/) I would disagree with you - It seems that peak demand lies at about 6PM, and solar peaks about 11:30AM - This leads to a significant increase in fossil fuel consumption around this time
The UK is a curious example to use for this, afaik a big part of that "peak demand" is people starting up their electric tea kettles in a phenomenon known as TV pickup [0]
For contrast, here are the stats for Germany [1] and the consumption peaks during the day contrast very well with the night consumption.
> Demand is usually the highest when PV output is also the highest
Not quite, the mismatch in timing between solar generation and energy demand has been called the "duck curve" [1][2]. Peak demand is normally in the evening when people are done with work [3].
> Demand is usually the highest when PV output is also the highest
In California, demand peaks are around 6-8pm, well past the peak of solar production. This disparity has a name, the "Duck Curve". You can view the near real-time power demand on the CAISO[1] website. Your region may have a similar way to see live demand.
Not really, the peak is around 6PM when people get home from work, turn on all their lights, tvs, appliances, etc. This will change as well with the push to fully electrify residential homes, which would mean very heavy electricity usage in the evening for heating, electric stoves for cooking, electric dryers, and electric cars being plugged in.
My energy bill went from $100/mo to over $1,000/mo for NO REASON..
My power was shut off in february because my regular energy bill literally went up 10X during that period (no change in use) -- and I was ~25 and it was the first downturn, and while I owned my house - I had to borrow money from parents to pay the fucking power bill due to enron shenanigans... (san jose ca, so not even super cold/winter conditions)
--
Look at fuel prices right now - same fuckery about today: When the war started and fuel went to $90/barrel - the gas pump first time ever went to $3/gallon...
And then when you try to go self-sufficient with EV, PV, & Batteries, the state of California attempts to pass legislation to tax your PV array. Goofy.
I haven't done much research about enron so I'm not going to comment on it, but your remark about "same fuckery about today" does not seem to check out. If you plot out spot crude and gasoline prices[1], you'll see they track pretty closely starting from when records began (1990s). Also, if you dump out the data and calculate the ratio of gas prices to crude prices (after converting 42 gal = 1bbl), you see it remains pretty steady across the years. For the latest available data the ratio was 1.267, and the average for all available data is 1.222. That's higher, but definitely not in line with the numbers you claim.
While you're speaking that SPOT crude remains relativistic constant/regular over time, may you please explain if this is true, what the cost increases at the pump are directly related to?
When I began driving, the spot price tracking you mention was the same, but the pump price was $.99/gallon for gas...
So, I admit I do not have an understanding of the reasons behind the price at the pump, but shouldn't that price match the same graph?
If not, please ELI5 how it now apparently costs 5X the cost to deliver gas to the pump?
Shouldnt any company be seeking economies at scale and more efficient everything - especially in OIL/GAS where they are really reliant on compute for the future success of their industry and the power of compute is 10,000X more powerful today than in 1990?
Yet - the pump always goes up...
(I'll go ahead and you're going to excuse it as "the cost of doing business/expenses have gone up)
If true, then why isn't toilet paper $50/roll? Trees are not going to replenish themselves at the same rate as our consumption... so shouldn't toilet paper be super expensive?
What is your opinion on the following video on the origins of oil and the origin of the term "Fossil Fuel" coined by Rockefeller:
1. your own article lists multiple non-eron related reasons for the crisis
2. AFAIK energy markets are the norm. state regulators might regulate the rates that retail customers pay, but the utilities are buying the electricity from the free market. Therefore the supply/demand dynamic when it comes to prices should already be factored in, which was why I was confused it was initially brought up.
>While you're speaking that SPOT crude remains relativistic constant/regular over time, may you please explain if this is true, what the cost increases at the pump are directly related to?
>When I began driving, the spot price tracking you mention was the same, but the pump price was $.99/gallon for gas...
obvious question: were you in the same state? taxes are baked into the gas price, so if you moved from texas to california, it wouldn't be surprising that your gas price went up for no reason.
>So, I admit I do not have an understanding of the reasons behind the price at the pump, but shouldn't that price match the same graph?
I went a step further and compared crude oil prices to retail gas prices (available from https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pri_gnd_dcus_nus_w.htm), and found that the ratio hovers at around 2, with that ratio being higher in the 80s/90s than today. While there's some fluctuation, it's nowhere close to the amounts implied by your anecdotes. Speaking of which, I find your anecdotes impossible to substantiate. Which state did you live in? When was "the war"?
>If true, then why isn't toilet paper $50/roll? Trees are not going to replenish themselves at the same rate as our consumption...
I'm not sure where you're getting that conclusion from, but pulpwood trees are effectively farmed. The growth cycles are longer than something like corn, but they're still planted/replenished at approximately the same rate they're cut. The deforestation stories you hear are largely from developing countries cutting down forest for development purposes.
But the ratio doesnt take into many factors such as inflation and actual wage-buying-power
So while the maths ratio sounds small... the Human ratio is much greater based on the buying power of a dollar-vs-salary of the avg buyer...
so while it may seem one-way, the reality for the buyer is much different...
Here is an anecdote:
My GF has worked at The French Laundry for several years...
The top rest in the world according to some...
She lives in Sonoma Ca and it costs her $5.19 per gallon of gas. She drives an modern car with good gas mileage.
She pays $70 to 3/4 fill her car and travels ~30 miles one way to commute to a job at the top restaurant in the world which pays her $12/hour.
The bill says "Service Included" which leads guests to believe that "TIP IS INCLUDED" -- and so people that pay $75,000 for a meal (including wine) often DONT TIP...
Because they believe that "Service" == "Tip" NOPE.
The point is, that her commute costs her ~half a weeks actual pay to pay for fuel.
The point being that we THINK that the ratio --> relation to buying power has been constant, or even better these days with higher wages, the reality in the wallet is not such.
Even with a great job, at one of the best companies in the world (supposedly) -- She still struggles with just filling her car with gas.
I agree. And I think that framing it as quirk(not by the OP but by the gentleman in the article) is disingenuous and being used to push for what just looks like more subsidies for private energy companies. It's hard to read the following and not feel a bit rankled.
>"Matt Crozat, senior director of policy development for the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), said the industry is "encouraged" by the creation of the credit program, but is still pushing for more permanent economic support."
The Nuclear Energy Institute looks like it's an just industry trade group that likely retains some powerful lobbyists.
> what just looks like more subsidies for private energy companies
I don't think there's a future where "energy policy" (a euphemism for subsidies/lobbying/permitting) ceases to exist.
If nuclear power is the least-worst of the industry trade groups, it should count for something.
However, it might behoove us to consider the wisdom in allowing the whims of "energy policy" to vaporize twenty-year, $10 billion infrastructure projects.
For basically every big factory it is not easy to stop and startup again. For example for a large metal melt factory it would take a year to shutoff and another year to startup. For large oil production facilities it takes at least one year to halt operations. That's why they have these huge silos. Thosr factories are build with constant production in mind.
Same thing for container ship logistics. A complex system that can take years to startup. Currently visible everywhere.
Having broadly-deployable (i.e. few geographic limitations), toggle-able, economically-productive ways to burn power that are carbon neutral or negative is the real solution.
There's no reason prices should ever be negative... except for a lack of power sinks. If there were intermittent hydrogen production facilities, or direct air capture of carbon + a carbon market that rewarded that, the intermittency accounting quirk would correct itself.
Those are probably good ideas but they're still not necessarily the cheapest options. They'll have capital costs to pay off over time like anything else, and if they only run half the time then the capital cost is doubled for the amount of output you get.
> direct air capture of carbon + a carbon market that rewarded that
That could be nice. Maybe if the DOE money helped with capital to build a direct air carbon capture system. Then the nuclear plants can sell credits to oil/gas based energy companies similar to how like Tesla sells its credits to other car manufacturers.
The problem isn't even shifting daytime generation to night; that is somewhat doable with energy storage. In Europe at least (and I assume much of the rest of the world) the problem is shifting summer production to winter.
UK demand in winter is nearly 2x higher than summer (and will grow even more with switching gas heating to heat pumps), at the same time solar output is ~10% of that at summer. Wind energy is higher but is unpredictable and in very cold snaps (when demand is greatest) tends to result in very low wind output.
This problem is the biggest one to solve (and not sure how solvable it is). In essence it's possible to smooth out daily output with renewables, but annual output is very difficult. You are talking TWhs of storage requirement.
We have lots of "solutions" (e.g., conventional batteries, flywheels, pumped hydro, etc), the critical question is cost. Where are the proven economical, grid-scale deployments of hydrogen storage? Last I checked, they were in their infancy, so while I'm rooting for it, characterizing hydrogen as a solution is facile.
There exist underground hydrogen storage caverns already. One was referenced elsewhere in the comments (supplying hydrogen to industrial users in the gulf states.) So, the technology exists. The major block for green hydrogen storage was the cost of electrolysers, but that is crashing now as well: China is selling alkaline electrolysers for under $300/kW. The hydrogen would be used in combined cycle plants. Hydrogen-burning combustion turbines have been available for 30 years.
You might be misled by the apparent absence of installations for hydrogen grid storage, but understand that as long as natural gas is being used, it makes little sense to use hydrogen instead. That doesn't mean hydrogen can't work, it just means that natural gas (without CO2 charges) is for the moment cheaper.
I'm aware of some storage caverns and have no doubts that the technology works, but everything I'm aware of suggests it's experimental with respect to the economics.
Experimental technology does not get billion-dollar orders.
Factories for iron-air storage are being built today, to start supplying grid-scale storage in 2023. Everybody knows the demand is there and will remain there, so there is plenty of capital for anything known to work. But it takes time to build out.
After costs shake out, build-out will concentrate on the cheapest alternatives, but everything already built will still work, and still be used, because the cost is capital cost. It will be a long time before the storage market is saturated and storage providers have to compete on prices.
It will be ready and waiting when the economic incentives needed to put it into place are there. These incentives by all evidence will be less than what would be needed to put nuclear into its place.
BTW, if you object to hydrogen on these grounds, you must also object to nuclear on these grounds, and more strongly. This is especially the case if you imagine a nuclear powered world economy. You need to imagine a jump in technology more radical than for hydrogen storage -- either massive scale up of seawater uranium extraction (many orders of magnitude, from gram scale to megaton scale) or use of breeder reactors instead of burner reactors.
We don't need to switch summer production to winter if we keep improving grid inter-connectors. We will still need a lot more storage though. And insulation.
Grid interconnection adds strategic risk, particularly for small countries. This is Europe's problem, particularly. It will be West Africa's, and South America's. China is building a submarine cable to South America for winter solar, but you may be sure they are also stockpiling coal for when the cable fails.
They all need enough storage to not need interconnection, and then rely on interconnection to reduce cost and drawdown from storage.
Most European connections to Africa have been cancelled as a consequence of massive photovoltaic cost reductions enabling local placement and overbuilding to compete. A few projects connecting Spain to African generation remain.
Probably the most effective use for African solar energy production will be synthesis of hydrocarbons to be delivered by supertanker to high latitudes in winter, and for aircraft fuel.
Right. Which means that transmission in Europe cannot be anything other than an ineffective solution to seasonal variation in solar generation. The seasonal variation in solar energy available to the European grid will be large, and one either uses storage to deal with that, has extremely large amounts of demand that could be dispatched on a seasonal basis, or just wastes most of the summer production. What would end up happening instead would be the excess and otherwise curtailed production would create an irresistible force driving something -- like hydrogen production -- to soak up that otherwise wasted output.
To be honest, a full anything grid would be a terrible idea. There's not a one size fits all energy solution. Different regions have different demands. They have different advantages and disadvantages. We also don't want to put all our eggs in one basket for energy security reasons.
I actually really like Japans system they had to inadvertently invent - the north part of the country and south operate on different power standards ( I believe the phase? ). This led to them building MASSIVE insanely high voltage DC to DC connections between the two grids so one side could still supply the other with power. But the other plus is that ( I believe ) one side can also not take the other out or draw too much power. China is investing heavily in super high voltage long distance power transfer and I suspect the US could do the same and use it to connect different areas of the country. Also much lower transmission losses.
A fully nuclear grid probably wouldn't make sense. France has a 60-70% nuclear electricity grid and manages just fine. Some of their reactors use grey rods which can be inserted into the core which have less effect than the normal control rods but don't distort the shape of the reaction as much as a partially inserted rod.
With a capacity factor of about 70% [1]. Compared to for example the US at 93.7%. That difference of 23% has to be taken out over the top of the already high cost of nuclear, which as we can see here still lose money at the higher level.
France has all sorts of problems and their grid would break regularly if they couldn't import energy during the Summer when their cooling water sources get too hot and they have to shut down all their reactors.
That's a completely separate issue. It would also be common to all thermoelectric powerplants placed in the same locations.
All sources of power can have engineering challenges. Like the recent Texas blackouts where equipment related to the gas supply stopped due to the cold weather.
"It would also be common to all thermoelectric powerplants placed in the same locations."
Common, but not the same. Nuclear power work efficiency (30-40%?) is typically lower than a gas turbine plant (60%?). So electrical watt for electrical watt, the nukes need far more cooling water.
Hu, a fully nuclear grid would be built to support the highest demand, and plants would be giving energy away when there is a surplus (or actually what would probably happen is that people would design plants that can economically load follow). So, that surplus could go into various liquid fuel's, or whatever.
Its something I've said before, you overbuild nukes, and use the excess capacity for water desalination, jet fuel production, CO2 recapture, or any other energy intensive process which creates a product that can be easily stored.
Nuclear energy is basically free once you have built the plant.
I agree - if having TOO MUCH power is the thing we are saying is a disadvantage of Nuclear that sounds like a pretty damn good problem to have. We just need to find some new creative ways to use that excess power.
Maybe an interesting way to do this would be to give "power" grants to local students or universities - applications could be sent in with proposals and test projects and then those who are accepted would get access to free power during excess times and maybe also some kind of warehouse like workspace / nearby location. Could be a huge educational benefit and drive innovation.
We already know what to do with excess power: capture carbon, electrolyse hydrogen, synthesize ammonia, kerosene, and methane, and refine aluminum; and charge storage systems. It takes time and capital to build all of those out: capital that nuke plant construction and refurbishing compete for.
It is a much, much better use of capital to build the others out, and the solar and wind, than to spend the money trying to bring those ramshackle contraptions out of retirement.
Its also an accounting misunderstanding. Nuclear power has huge fixed costs and negligible variable costs. If a station costs $1B/yr that's 3mil/day to keep running. If network power is cheap today and the plant will only make 2mil it is making a loss only if you distribute the fixed across evenly, its contribution margin still makes it worthwhile to run on those days as you aren't saving much money by turning it off.
Smaller plants combined with energy storage seems like it would help here. When prices go negative store the extra energy until prices also go back up.
If energy storage solutions were sufficient, there wouldn't be any negative priced energy!
Obviously, everyone who can store energy maxes out their battery banks during these times of negative-cost energy. The reason why prices are negative is because the sum of market participants still has a shortage of storage.
We have a shortage of storage because the amount of energy our grid uses is on a behemoth scale, barely comprehensible. Dozens-of-GW-hr pumped hydro stations fill up their storage to the brim on a constant basis.
We have a shortage of storage because it takes a long time to build out that much capacity. Until intermittent sources represent a much bigger piece of the pie, a renewable dollar has been much better spent on generating capacity.
As the fraction of capacity increases, the need for storage starts to rise. So, now we see big storage projects breaking ground, to come on line in the next few years. The amount of storage finally built will be astonishing to contemplate.
Energy storage is expensive. Nuclear is expensive. Solar and wind are cheap. If we are going to need energy storage regardless (we will), then why not combine it with the cheapest sources rather than the most expensive?
There's another factor in the equation that you're not considering. "How much battery storage". The equation is finding an optima on a(cost of nuclear) + b(cost of renewables) + c(cost of storage). Restricting the equation to just aN + c_NS vs bR + c_RS is rather absurd (only something laypeople do and not something people in the energy community do). But in that case we can easily see that c_N << c_R, since nuclear provides a baseline storage. This brings us back to using the systems to complement one another (aN + bR + cS). After all, the goal is to get zero emission energy at the cheapest value, not energy at the cheapest value.
I did consider it, I work in the energy industry after all. But even your equation over simplifies things considerably. Things like cost over time (batteries are likely to get much cheaper in the future, whereas solar and nuclear are not likely to decrease much), and deployment characteristics (much easier/cheaper for the grid to add small incremental solar+wind+storage deployments over time then to add large individual nuclear deployments once or twice a decade)
I am fully supportive of using whatever technology that gets us to a zero carbon grid as quickly as possible. And right now the most advanced research in this area is suggesting that renewables + storage is our best bet.
Why is solar not likely to decrease much? If the historical experience curve continues there's still room for a factor of several decrease in its cost.
In fact, cost of storage is expected to fall over the next following decade or two. Problem is, we needed to start solving climate 50 years ago. We don't have time to wait another 10 to 20 years. We now are forced to go the unoptimal route and more expensive.
But because generating capacity is now so cheap, we can afford expensive storage construction. Storage typically has very low operating cost, but is just now expensive to build. So, it will be cheaper to build storage later, but anything built this year will continue operating.
Solar is already dirt cheap, and there is not much more juice left to squeeze. We might get a little bit more cost reduction over the next decade, maybe somewhere in the 10-50% range, but this isn't much compared the multiple hundreds of % that we saw over the last two decades. Also, at least in the short term, we are seeing some increases in cost due to supply chain and inflation issues.
You're just repeating the assertion there. What fundamentally prevents the cost of solar from falling even more? This cost has to come from some irreducible input. Materials? Energy? Labor? Which is it?
As for cost of delivered energy from solar, there is a final reduction that can still be obtained even if the cost/watt were to plateau immediately: extension of the lifespan of the system. This could be obtained by, over time, identifying and addressing all the degradation modes of the components of the system.
Predicting the future is hard. You are asking a question that pretty much no one has a good answer to (at least no one who is being honest). Are permitting fees an irreducible input? Probably not. Are lawyers fees an irreducible input? Maybe but unlikely. Are project developer salaries an irreducible input? I have no idea.
But I also think you are mis-applying a mental model about the cost of manufactured goods to the cost of solar plant development. In a competitive free market, the cost of manufactured goods should eventually be reduced to a sum of their inputs plus any profit.
But solar development is inherently an exercise in value capture. The project developers are trying to capture as much value as possible for their investors. The only thing that matters is that solar stays competitive in the energy market. As long as that happens, someone somewhere in the value chain can try and capture more value as other costs decrease. For example, what is stopping land owners from raising rents for solar projects? Right now, land is relatively cheap because there is not a lot of competition for it. But there are only so many parcels that are near transmission lines with good geographical features, and I fully expect land prices to increase as solar penetration increases. But this is really just a guess.
If you are interested in current project cost breakdowns, figure 30 in this report does a pretty good job[1]. Module costs were the primary driver of cost reductions in the last 20 years. But they now account for only 40% of total project costs. So even if module prices fell by 50%, that would only result in a 20% decline in total project cost. While a 20% drop in prices would be nice, I don't think it really changes the math much with respect to nuclear (the math is already overwhelmingly in favor of solar).
Also, I do agree that the average lifespan of these systems are going to be much longer than 20 years and that has not been priced in. But I don't think that is going to really change things anytime soon. Financial models and risk models are incredibly crude instruments. Using them to model even 5 to 10 years in the future is already extending them well beyond what they were designed for. But we have to put an end date on these models because at some point every project is going to cease to exist. And 20 years is what the banks like, so that is what we use.
I was asking you to justify your statement. You don't get to make such an assertion then hide behind "prediction is hard" when asked to justify it.
I will note that there have been past attempts to call a floor in the cost of PV, for example the period from 2002-2007. That was not the floor.
Current cost breakdowns are nice, but don't show that costs can't be further reduced.
> For example, what is stopping land owners from raising rents for solar projects?
What stops them is the enormous quantity of land that's available. In the US, for example, land can be < 1% of the cost of a utility-scale PV installation.
I did justify my statement, but I will say it again. Solar project development is an exercise in value capture. As long as solar is cheap enough to compete in energy markets (which is currently the case), when some development costs go down, someone else in the value chain will try and find a way to increase their slice of the pie to try and compensate.
A good analogy is landlords. Why do they raise rents instead of decrease rents? Because they want to profit, and because their costs increase over time due to inflation, and because the market will let them.
Here is another fun one. What happens if/when interests rates go up? We are at record low rates, and most solar projects are debt financed? How will higher rates impact project costs? The obvious answer there is that costs will go up.
> In the US, for example, land can be < 1% of the cost of a utility-scale PV installation.
As I mentioned, that is the case now, but it will likely not be in the future. The number of sites close to existing transmission lines, with good geographical features requiring minimal grading, low flood risk, low wildfire risk, low hurricane risk, etc... are going to diminish quickly as saturation increases. And when it comes to land, costs can go from reasonable to painful real quickly.
I am certainly rooting for costs to go down, as I think that is better for humanity. But I am not betting on it. Why do you think they are going to go down? I don't think you have made a good case for lower costs other than that is what has happened in the past.
You make a good point about nuclear potentially requiring less storage since it (in theory) provides a constant power. Unfortunately, whilst nuclear power tends to be constant while it is on, it still goes down a lot either for servicing (planned or unplanned) or because of lack of cooling water (a problem that's going to get much worse due to climate change). Worse when there is a lack of cooling water it tends to affect lots of nuclear plants simultaneously (eg France).
So in total, Nuclear is just as reliant on grid inter-connectors as solar/wind to perform optimally.
The difference is that solar/wind are sooooo much cheaper you can now build solar/wind/interconnectors/storage and still come in cheaper than nuclear. No country in the world ever figured out how to build out nuclear power efficiently and in the last ten years the decline in solar/wind/storage costs has been astronomical.
That's why Nuclear is going nowhere. If we were to give storage plants subsidies at a level with what nuclear receives, there wouldn't even be a discussion about this.
Wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, hydro, storage. Plus some nuclear if it is already built. That is what folks are recommending. If new build nuclear can compete, then great. But right now it can't, and models show we can get there without it.
If we were to rely just on solar and wind, the low capacity factor would likely require massive grid storage. The only large scale grid storage we have at this point is pumped hydro and that isn't scalable. For example, one estimate is that for Germany to rely on solar and wind would require about 6,000 pumped storage plants which is literally 183 times their current capacity.
If making more grid storage was cheap and easy, we would have built it decades ago.
Overbuilding could alleviate some of this, particularly the natural variations in seasonal energy output, but obviously this would be a multiplier to the cost and it won't get more power from solar at night, etc.
As Bill Gates said in an interview: "…They have this statement that the cost of solar photovoltaic is the same as hydrocarbon’s. And that’s one of those misleadingly meaningless statements. What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what? The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this thing is. So false solutions like divestment or “Oh, it’s easy to do” hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated."
Gates is investing in 4th gen nuclear and energy storage companies so he is at least putting his money where his mouth is. The goal should be to decarbonize the electrical grid while maintaining the reliability we depend upon.
The cost of solar is now much better than hydrocarbon. And cost is still in free fall.
We don't have storage because we have not needed storage. Now that we are starting to need storage, storage is being built out. It will take time to build out, but the scale will be astonishing because the demand for it is very predictable and stable.
Gates is investing in nukes because it can be very profitable to make them. Not so much, using them. But there will always be pigeons.
>The cost of solar is now much better than hydrocarbon.
Kind of misleading to make a blanket statement like that since it obviously depends on what you are comparing. Consumer rooftop solar was, is, and will likely continue to be much more expensive than hydrocarbon. Solar at noon in Arizona in July is cheaper. Solar at 3:00 AM in Arizona in July doesn't exist. Solar + storage is right now pretty comparable to hydrocarbon prices.
>We don't have storage because we have not needed storage.
With daily and seasonable variations in demand and the need to shut down plants for maintenance, storage would always have been preferred to having to generally over build and running peaker plants, etc. So if it was cheap or easy, we would have built a lot more of it already. Though grid storage is absolutely needed to scale up intermittent sources.
>...It will take time to build out, but the scale will be astonishing because the demand for it is very predictable and stable.
Hope so.
>...Gates is investing in nukes because it can be very profitable to make them.
- You'll need to manufacture terawatt hours of batteries anyway to replace all the internal combustion cars on the road, regardless of whether you charge those cars with nuclear electricity or renewable electricity.
- Nuclear power plants make for very expensive peak generating resources. They're only affordable for covering the minimum ("baseload") demand that is always there on the electrical grid.
Consider demand on California's CAISO grid. On a hot summer day like 2019-08-15 air conditioning pushes the peak demand over 44 gigawatts. On the same day, the early predawn load is 20 gigawatts lower at 24 gigawatts. And on a cool day like 2022-02-06, the minimum demand is down to 16 gigawatts while the whole day average is well below 23. You can use the date picker to look at "Demand trend" for different days here:
Only ~16 gigawatts of generating output will definitely get consumed all the time, but you still need to plan for those hot days that need 44+ gigawatts. It's theoretically possible to build 45 GW of reactors and use the full capacity for just a few hours a year, but that's very expensive. It's much more economical to have only 16 GW of reactors and use other electricity sources to meet higher demand, but that's bad for the climate when "other sources" includes fossil fueled power plants like it currently does. Nuclear plus storage would be much more affordable than using 100% nuclear without storage, and it would be cleaner than using fossil fuel peakers.
Since power plants are already in the business of boiling water, I imagine that if it were a simple case of bypassing turbines and allowing the water to be cooled without generating electricity they would do so. Or perhaps such a solution is in fact feasible, but negative energy prices were not a practical problem when current plants were built
I have no expertise in this area so I don't really know, but i imagine dispersing 1GW of power over a wide area deep underground presents substantial challenges of its own
I think the answer is to use surplus energy to make and store hydrogen. The combine that with implementation of hydrogen powered vehicles in the large transport sector (trains and long haul trucks) would be a good way to store and make use of energy without building massive energy storage devices. Battery electric is already a bad fit for those sectors, since the heavy batteries significantly reduce useful transportation weight and long charging times mean expensive delays in moving goods. It would also help build out hydrogen distribution networks, which could be strategically installed at transportation hubs and along strategic routes to start, which then could be utilized by local transportation, making them more viable using hydrogen where battery electric isn’t as feasible (local buses and delivery trucks that can refill hydrogen in a few mins to run with minimal downtime).
They could store it in the form of digital energy (Bitcoin). With that you're able to capture what would otherwise be wasted energy.
"The gas, which would otherwise have been burned off, is instead routed to a bitcoin processor.
For years, oil and gas companies have struggled with the problem of what to do when they accidentally hit a natural gas formation while drilling for oil. Whereas oil can easily be trucked out to a remote destination, gas delivery requires a pipeline. If a drilling site is right next to a pipeline, they chuck the gas in and take whatever cash the buyer on the other end is willing to pay that day. But if it’s 20 miles from a pipeline, drillers often burn it off, or flare it. That is why you will typically see flames rising from oil fields.
The process reduces CO2-equivalent emissions by about 63% compared to continued flaring.."
And how do you convert back bitcoin into electricity ?
How do you turn money into energy ?
Can the FED print some money to fill back the empty oil fields ?
I'm not advocating for "use excess energy to mine bitcoin", but you don't need to convert it back into energy--the theoretical nuclear plant is calibrated so its power output is equal to the max power demand and any excess due to lower-than-max demand is channeled to bitcoin mining.
A better solution would be to interconnect the electricity grid with neighbouring grids. With sufficient size, time-dependent peaks and troughs would be smoothed out.
You're right, if the bitcoin is mined anyway. I'd argue that things like cryptocurrency, social media, Youtube, government spying, are best shutoff and the carbon kept underground.
Nuclear power plants are not "carbon free." They have significant operational needs (indirect emissions), making them of the most expensive sources of electricity available today, and by some estimates their indirect carbon footprint is enormous. Think about how many people have to be involved in their operation, versus the operation of a solar farm.
People like to make noise about the impact of mining the materials needed for solar. Well, what about the impact of mining and refining uranium?
Their cost of construction per GW is not competitive with wind and solar - it's typically thousands of euros per kw. Whereas wind and solar can go from construction to energy production (and carbon paypback) on a timescale of months, nukes take years to build.
How much of that economic cost is tied up in regulations and NIMBYism?
>Well, what about the impact of mining and refining uranium?
I'd be willing to wager significant money that on a MW for MW basis, the environmental impact is higher for solar just due to the energy density alone.
> People like to make noise about the impact of mining the materials needed for solar. Well, what about the impact of mining and refining uranium?
While I agree with you in general, the amount of uranium needed to run a power plant should be orders of magnitude smaller than is necessary to build and equivalent solar farm
> Nuclear power plants are not "carbon free." They have significant operational needs (indirect emissions), making them of the most expensive sources of electricity available today, and by some estimates their indirect carbon footprint is enormous
The United Nations Economic Commission For Europe released a report in 2021 on the life cycle emissions (including construction, operation, and decommissioning) of various power generation options and found nuclear to be the lowest overall at 5.5 gCO2eq/kWh [1].
Estimates of nuclear put the carbon footprint between 15-50gCO2/KWh, compared to about 450gCO2/KWh for gas
Both uranium mining and renewables mining have issues - I'm not going to debate or compare them because I don't know enough about the topic but due to the energy density of uranium I wouldn't be surprised if nuclear was better overall
Cost is the real issue - the cost and timescales of nuclear reactors are massive issues, and they are significantly worse short-term investments than wind and solar.
However, energy storage is not a solved problem, so until it is nuclear is not competing with wind and solar - it is competing with gas and coal, to which it has advantages in almost every category (excluding cost)
> Nuclear power [...] indirect carbon footprint is enormous
Do you have sources for this? I completely concur that nuclear energy is too expensive, problematic and by now much too late to help with the climate crisis, but from what I found it is quite competitive with wind and solar in total CO2 emissions per kwh of energy (the numbers I found were all between 5 and 25 gram Co2/kwh for these three, compared to >500 for any fossil alternative).
This makes sense to me since turbines and panels also need to be manufactured, transported and installed, after all...
I agree they must be taken into account, but the obvious counter is to take the cost of energy storage into account for solar/wind, which currently weakens its position significantly.
Long term that cost will go down, but it's always going to make the calculation much less simple than it seems at first glance, solar might be the cheapest form of power at the moment, but it's not the cheapest single source to run an electricity grid by a wide margin.
It gets much easier to think about if you picture the solar and wind owned by parties A, and storage and long-distance transmission by parties B. Then, it is just a matter of responding to spot price. The capital expenditure by A and B combined is less than for refurbishing existing nuke plants, never mind building new ones.
Interestingly, there is work being done to extract uranium from seawater, which while more expensive that mining at the moment, is starting to prove to be economically viable for certain reactors.
I see research from 2012 showing it's 10x the price of current methods but maybe the price could come down and then.... the usual nothing useful that ever comes of Nuclear research.
Solar is awesome in that yield scales with load peaks.
The problem with nuclear is an example of why deregulation was stupid. As a society of electricity consumers, we are sitting on lawn chairs on a railroad track with an electric train approaching us. It's obvious to anyone with a pulse that electric cars are ramping up and will displace the current fleet, and equally obvious that that operating model (plug in your car at night) will increase base load requirements.
So because we've detached planning from electrical generation and distribution, we have 50 different sets of cartels optimizing for short term returns on the spot market. The various electrical shit-shows in California and Texas are like failed-state levels of dysfunction. North of NYC, electrical supply rates are up 50% because we turned off a massive reactor complex and replaced it with volatile natural gas. We're decommissioning nuclear at a point in time just before we need it, environmentalists were bought by gas extraction people and Wall St. accounting is very bad at dealing with capital assets with 50-100 year lifecycles.
If you think about it the "energy storage" problem is absurd. Installing millions of inefficient distributed battery cells in potentially millions of buildings, for want of adequate electrical generation is beyond dumb, and the scale of waste and wasted value is staggering. It is solely a byproduct of a market designed to maximize producer profit.
And in some places in winter. And in some places in summer. Sometimes by HUGE multiples that operate inversely with the availability of solar power. For long periods that batteries struggle store power for.
Its a problem here in the US too, though probably to a lesser degree. South facing solar is the most efficient in total energy produced, but it starts to drop off just as A/C loads start to accelerate toward their peak.
West facing panels help, but the ROI isn't as good without variable energy pricing.
> We're decommissioning nuclear at a point in time just before we need it, environmentalists were bought by gas extraction people and Wall St.
It’s insane that the environmentalist movement is inadvertently supporting the fossil fuel industry due to their traditional stance on nuclear. Modern civilisation requires reliable base load and nuclear seems like the only viable option which satisfies both the reliability and globally accepted environmentally sustainable goals.
The environmental movement is 9/10ths feelings, and 1/10th science. A lot of environmentalists just don't like rural people so they do things like rail on and on about pickup trucks whilest on a plane bound for a European vacation. That three eyed fish on the Simpsons probably resulted in thousands of deaths due to the environmental folks choosing coal over nuclear. The goal is good vibes, not results.
> A lot of environmentalists just don't like rural people so they do things like rail on and on about pickup trucks
What? I don't think there are many environmentalists who "don't like rural people" and have a problem with pickup trucks used where they're appropriate ( like on a farm). In a country like the US, they're often abused as a suburban vehicle, which is a preposterous waste which deserves railing on against.
You may change my view today, but I have yet to meet a person who is passionate about pickup truck use, who will also decry air travel as a similar waste. I'm sure people like that exist, but I bet a lot of them don't use computers.
Hello! I use computers too much and decry air travel as massive waste as well as pickups. I've done so for a long time and most of my friends agree, and also use computers a lot.
Yep, the vast majority of trucks I see in my city are spotless and probably only used for commuting. It's far less environmentally and financially costly to drive around town with a car, but for whatever reason a lot people think that commuting in a truck is cooler so that's what they burn their money on. Some absurd percent of 4x4 vehicles, like 90%, have never been driven off road.
Conversely, there's a lot of overlap between environmentalists and people who like to go outside and get off the beaten path. Driving in remote areas a lot pretty much necessitates having a truck. I've never heard any animosity from environmentalists towards truck owners who actually use their truck for truck things.
Ahhh yes, the "for my cause and values it's OK and worth it, but for yours, not so much".
Even in this example alone you neglected to consider the number of trucks that are used to tow something. Say you need (or want!) to tow a heavy trailer once a month or every other month. Should you buy one vehicle that can do this, and then use it to commute 90% of the time, or should you buy two vehicles, and let one sit around unused most of the time?
Now what about the person that needs to haul some things? Surely a small trailer + SUV is superior to a truck? Not so fast: gotta store that trailer and be comfortable with it. My guess is for 95% of people, a truck for utility purposes is far superior.
Finally, newer trucks are actually surprisingly efficient. I just got 22mpg 360 miles round trip in my full ton pickup truck. Been shopping for minivans, aside from the rare hybrid minivan, they only get around 26mpg on highway.
> Should you buy one vehicle that can do this, and then use it to commute 90% of the time, or should you buy two vehicles, and let one sit around unused most of the time
Or maybe rent a vehicle if it's only for towing once every other month.. Unless renting costs upwards of 1k, it'd be many years before buying makes sense for usage once every other month.
In these types of conversations someone always brings up the idea of renting a vehicle instead of owning one that can do what you want to do "once a month". Renting a truck or SUV that can tow a decent amount of weight is expensive, if you can find it, and the friction of finding, renting, insuring, picking up, loading the truck, unloading, dropping off, dealing with things when you ding the vehicle, means you mostly won't do that activity. Once a year, rental makes sense. Once a month, nope.
This is where local swap or friend groups come in - there's certainly value being "The Guy With A Truck" if you're regularly lending it to people you know who need to do their one monthly thing.
e.g. I have a small fiesta - that's (nearly) perfect for my general use case, which is me commuting on my own, maybe a friend or two going out for lunch or whatever.
But a friend down the road has a jeep, I borrow that for camping (when I'm not going with them anyway) - same with "bulk" costco trips, or stopping by a landscaping store for garden stuff.
That makes it easier for him to justify keeping the jeep, especially as I'm not the only person who regularly takes advantage of it, while keeping costs down (I pay in gas and beer, no rental corporation skimming profits off the top).
Even regular cars get to the point of renting being too expensive vs. buying. Quite regularly.
I've been using carnextdoor.com.au for years when ever my motorbikes weren't enough to get around.
But if you're renting a car even for 1-2 days a week, it quickly cost as much it would have had for running costs and purchasing a car outright. The numbers below are all AUD.
I'm about to pick up a new Ute (Dmax XTerrain) thats going to cost $238 per week over 5 years for finance. With running costs on top of that I'm budgeting for $400 per week.
That's a rental car for 1.5-2 days.
Carnextdoor and rentals made sense when I didn't need a car weekly, just monthly. The new Ute is relatively inexpensive to run (4 cylinder turbo diesel), it's big, big compared to cars from Europe, not big for the US I'm sure.
But for me it definitely made sense to get a 4x4 that services all my needs rather than a 4x4 and another small car.
Admittedly I go camping a lot so my needs are a little different. And I have dogs now so going camping on my motorbikes isn't much of an option now.
Those are terrible mileage numbers for a modern gas vehicle, let's be clear. I recently averaged 37mpg with a 200hp VW in Comfort mode on a trip up and down CA 101.
I guess I wasn't clear, but what I meant by "using trucks for truck things" I meant things you can do with a truck but not a car. Towing, moving construction supplies around, and other such tasks are all valid reasons to own a truck since you can't practically do that with a car.
On the other hand, commuting through a city can be done just as well or better by a car in every sense. 22mpg is terrible mileage compared to a modern car and the fact that it seems good reinforces my point of how wasteful it is to commute in a truck.
Is it really that common to need to haul/tow stuff? I live in Europe, and the only people I know who need this regularly are tradespeople. Most people I know don't even have a car at all!
Also, 22mpg efficient. You gotta be kidding me. You should getting at least 35mpg before you can call yourself efficient. A Vauxhall Zafira (MPV) can do 41mpg. A smart car can do 67mpg.
Depends. Come live out west on some acreage, own a tractor, build stuff, etc. Pretty easy to end up in the place where it makes sense. All my neighbors have large trucks and a "legitimate" reason for them, as long as you consider living the life you want to live on the size of property you want to have, legitimate.
I’m not opposed to people living the life they want to live, but I do feel like environmental concerns should be figured in, and energy usage prioritised to the areas you care most about rather than just “it doesn’t matter how much energy I use if I’m doing something I want to do”
100% in agreement. Fuel should be much more expensive and should find remediation efforts as well as investigating / building out alternatives. The problem that I struggle with is that disproportionately harms poor people. I can afford to fill my tank at 10 bucks a gallon, my mom with a 35mpg Honda who commutes to her job from a suburb can’t.
The real problem is energy production. So completely asinine to push for fleet electrification while base load is provided by coal and natural gas.
> The problem that I struggle with is that disproportionately harms poor people
I think the answer here is more general support for the poor. Progressive taxation, public transport, etc. That's politically difficult in the US of course. But it's surely the solution.
> The real problem is energy production.
That and energy consumption. IIRC the US consumes ~2x the energy per capita compared to Europe. Yes, we need greener production, but we could also do a lot by reducing consumptions.
Climate change disproportionately harms poor people. Environmental degradation in general disproportionately harms poor people.
Everything disproportionately harms poor people. It's practically the definition. To be poor is to have little power. So for any X you have less to bring to bear to avoid it.
They make you feel safer because you're in a bigger vehicle and higher off the road. Ironically they tend to roll more easily so are often more dangerous.
Very few people use them for "going off the beaten path" and would faint if you suggested them taking their freshly waxed lift kit truck down a dirt road where gravels flung back might hit their gorgeous paint job lol. Yeah I live in Texas and I know this as a fact. 90% of truck owners in the USA don't need a truck (no I'm not talking about commercial trucks so don't "whatabout" that)
The embedded energy of a second vehicle won't be made up for in a 10-20mpg improvement, except in very very niche cases.
The lifetime amount of fuel/electricity used by a vehicle generally accounts for only half of the total energy. The other half is in it's manufacturing and disposal/recycling.
And there's additional lost efficiency than just the mileage, because you're using twice the embedded energy and presumably aren't doubling the amount of driving you're doing.
Maybe rentals or sharing schemes work in some cases, but they present their own inefficiencies, like less than perfect allocation, and transferring vehicles back and forth for each switch.
But for the majority of cases, it's much more environmentally friendly to own one single vehicle that meets all of your needs, even if it's relatively inefficient.
The most efficient vehicle for any particular person is usually the one that's already been built. (Which is why cash for clunkers was actually a bailout with negative environmental impacts, despite its branding of improved efficiency.)
Why not? both cars will last roughly twice as long. Meaning if you can live with owning your cars twice as long there should be no extra embedded energy needed. (And one of the cars could even be an electric one you charge using ample solar powet
Because you're sitting on that embedded energy, at the opportunity cost of someone else not being able to use it.
So it's additional supply of both material and embedded energy that otherwise could go to someone else, or wouldn't need to be spent until you were sending you old car off to be salvaged.
There's a time value to it as well, just like with amortized financials.
Think of it this way: if everyone used that strategy, we'd have twice as big of a vehicle market, requiring twice as much material and energy.
Even if you expect each vehicle to last twice as long, it all has to be paid for with capital costs up front. Both your cash out of pocket, as well as manufacturing capacity and energy/resource extraction.
You might get effective use efficiency of 50% for twice as long, but the overall cost in dollars, energy, and emissions is much greater because of amortization.
They focus on ideal outcomes over what we can realistically accomplish - I've had plenty of discussions where people just ignore the trillions in infrastructure we have baked into steel and concrete, as well as people habits and lifestyle - folks honestly seem to think that with enough political will you can just turn all of that off in 2-5 years.
As with everything in society, we didn't get here overnight, and turning a vast ship takes time.
It would be super easy to turn off all fossil fuels. Just flick the switch and make do with what electricity generation is left. The question is just how much we're willing to pay. Taking most of civilization offline is a bit much to ask, obviously, so flicking the switch is off the table. That said, we could probably do it in less than 5 years of wartime effort.
This is just a completely imaginary attack on people you oppose. A textbook example of a "strawman argument".
The problems of pollution, climate change, etc are real. The science is clear.
Please don't make up an imaginary bad actor who has bad motivations for why they want to solve or improve some of these problems. This is a rhetoric device designed to distract people from the problems and solutions by getting them to dislike, distrust or hate the people trying to help.
Hydro causes massive environment destruction, takes up a large amount of area (typically the most agriculturally productive area at that), and can't just be thrown down anywhere.
> It’s insane that the environmentalist movement is inadvertently supporting the fossil fuel industry due to their traditional stance on nuclear.
The environmentalist movement, anti-nuke section, had little to nothing to do with the downfall of nuclear power. It was always and only economics, nothing else contributed to this. Nuclear is very complicated and thus very expensive, and this has nothing to do with regulations. Everything about generating power from nuclear is just expensive. If there was any opportunity to turn a profit with nuclear power, and I mean even the slightest margin of profit, you could not keep investors away, nor prevent nuclear power plants being built in every county in the country. There is a false narrative that supporters of nuclear energy seem to insist on perpetuating, which is that if the idiots would stop being so irrationally afraid of nuclear, we could have cheap, clean energy. This is a completely false position. The scardies have nothing to do with it. It is all and only economics that is killing nuclear power, and nothing else whatsoever enters into it.
Yep. Seems to be just a convenient excuse to hate on environmentalists, when nuclear power is just too damn expensive (and also takes too long to build), especially today when there are cheaper alternatives.
I was all for nuclear power myself before I started seeing how infeasible it was to get us to carbon neutral with them. I'm still fine with any new nuclear power plants that want to be built but it looks like pretty much no one wants to invest in them anymore anyway.
"The cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per megawatt hour (MWh), the WNISR said, while onshore wind power comes in at $29–$56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112 and $189."
"Capital flows reflect that trend. In 2018, China invested $91 billion in renewables but just $6.5 billion in nuclear."[1]
"Nuclear power plant construction costs—mainly materials, labor, and engineering—rose by 185 percent between 2000 and 2007. More recently, costs have been increasing even faster: In mid-March, Progress Energy informed state regulators that the twin 1,100 MW nuclear plants it intends to build in Florida would cost $14 billion, which “triples estimates the utility offered little more than a year ago.”
Jim Harding, former direc tor of power planning and forecasting for Seattle City Light, estimates that nuclear plants constructed today would provide electricity at between 12 and 17 cents per kilowatt-hour. To put this cost into perspective, the average U.S. electricity price in 2006 was 8.9 cents per kWh, and well-placed wind turbines can produce electricity for less than 5 cents per kWh."[2]
"Study claims that investment in a new 1GW nuclear power plant leads to average losses of approximately 4.8 billion euros." [3]
Cost is not everything though - Nuclear also produces extremely consistent and reliable power. That in it of itself can be a double edged sword in that if we do not have a way to store the excess then it is "wasted" in some ways. But it also has big advantages in certain situations. If there is a decent sized natural disaster or war or some other thing that temporarily interrupts solar or wind power then the increased cost of nuclear power becomes much more attractive. Those situations may be rare but I still maintain we are best off with many different sources working simultaneously.
Again, I have no problem with new nuclear plants being pursued, and there are some benefits to it that solar and wind do not (namely consistency, like you said). But the investment just isn't there in a significant amount. Without people willing to put the money into it, they're not going to be built.
When money is not an obstacle, new nuclear plants are built. I expect US Navy will continue to commission and operate nuclear-powered fleet until bovines return.
Sadly, unless our future energy requirements have been vastly underestimated, economics is also going to make commercial-grade fusion unattainable. Like fission, it's development ultimately requires the vast sums only wealthy nations can provide. But even once fusion is achieved beyond breaking even, only those same wealthy nations will be able to pay, more likely massively subsidize, before any fusion power plant could dream about existing.
This is why I think society should abandon centralizing power generation and require all structures to generate they're own green power. While massively less efficient than centralized power generation and distribution, with clean energy generation like solar & wind, and necessary optimizations such as more efficient climate control, we can afford to be less efficient.
I hear people say this but I also almost never meet environmentalists who are super against nuclear power. Most will say they of course prefer something extra clean like solar or geothermal but nuclear is usually the sort of middle of the road option in those circles. And many of the less idealistic I have met also think it is our only real solution.
> The problem with nuclear is an example of why deregulation was stupid.
There was never a deregulation that happened. In fact deregulation is what's needed to revive nuclear power. Competition in the power market is illegal in most states.
I think the residents of texas that had no power for days, or $15k residential bills would disagree with you. In fact, my co-worker in MN had their natural gas rates go up a very noticable jump this year due to losses the company had in texas (and having to buy gas at super inflated peak rates when many texas pumping stations had to power down, since they weren't winterized to save some money.)
The parent you are responding to is talking about deregulation in a different context and with a different purpose. Regulation and deregulation are both broad terms and talking about one does not requisite jumping to a different topic. Doing so just means we'll fight all day because you can find examples on both sides where they had disastrous effects. We need to be more nuanced than this. I'll also argue that the parent should be more specific to avoid these types of responses too.
Can you elaborate on what nuclear regulations were lifted and how that contributed to the Texas power outage? This isn't rhetorical, I'm genuinely curious.
Nuclear regulations had nothing to do with it. Texas had very few regulations for oil/gas and for power plant winter weatherization hence the grid failed. Overall the grid is fine, but it can't handle a freak winter weather event like that, and it still can't. It has handled many summer heat events just fine (I know I've lived here for almost 15 years). Regulations are the obvious factor that lead to the failure, ERCOT has been warned (and in turn warned the politicians) about the dangers multiple times and the politicians will not pass legislation and money to fix the issue.
I can tell you in New York, utilities were compelled to divest from power production. Your state may vary.
Similar to the charter school scam, the scrappy upstarts bonded out lots of debt to buy up power plants and subsequently became a powerful lobby to keep their cartel tight.
Some of the remaining municipal energy co-op utilities were exempted from deregulation, and all of them have lower cost structures.
I know Massachusetts is a similar story, not sure about others.
Take the money from public education and fund vouchers. Those vouchers aren't going to get you into the good private school, you'll need money on top of the voucher for that. They get you in the school that prepares your for life in prison. https://time.com/101440/new-orleans-charter-schools-shouldnt...
If you look at the economic backgrounds and general location of students you will find that is the true predictor of educational outcomes (on average) rather than whether that child is at a charter or public school.
Floating tax exempt bonds, skimming the cream with building construction/rehab and fees, and then using the different vehicles to monetize building deprecation. Then you hire young and dumb teachers as cheaply as possible and keep costs down with turnover.
Most of them are structured like real estate syndicates. It’s basically like building a strip mall or franchise hotel, except you have a captive customer and can leave the local taxpayer holding the bag. The educational mission is mostly a secondary concern. There are exceptions.
What do you mean by captive customer? My understanding was that they were all about “parent choice”, so parents can choose to send their kids to either charter schools or public schools, and the schools only get federal money proportionate to the number enrolled. Presumably parents would not tend to keep their kids in a school with high teacher turnover.
N.b. I don’t have kids, so this is mostly academic for me, no pun intended
Charter schools are private and per child offer no education advantages over public school. There are -plenty- public schools that achieve better results. The idea that there is something inherently wrong with public education is a myth pursued by the elite (read top 0.1%) to persuade the general public to do away with the public education system so that only private schools will exist and they can prevent the public from becoming too educated and questioning the status quo and with the added advantage of lowering their tax bills.
Nuclear power hasn't been deregulated, but grid generation and planning for the large part has.
As a result of that deregulation, the grid is often optimizing for cost, instead of reliability, which can lead to problems. Saving 5% on your power bill is great, but it's less great if the consequence is, say, not having any power one week of the year.
>environmentalists were bought by gas extraction people
In the US, opposition to nuclear energy is more like opposition to homeless shelters - people don't want the plants near them. I don't think environmentlists are that powerful politically as to significantly impact the trajectory of nuclear power policies in the US, otherwise, they would have the power to significantly impact climate change policies too.
Besides, what I have seen is that environmentalists are pretty divided in term of nuclear energy. There are strong opponents like green peace and Sierra clubs, there are strong supporters and there are many who are ambivalent. This further reduces their political power as a group.
I think nuclear energy supporters should stop blaming environmentalists as they are pretty much non-factor if they want nuclear power.
There's tons of FUD about nuclear waste, including with respect to environmental impacts. I think environmentalists have been coming around to nuclear, but I'm pretty sure that's a more recent development. At least my perception circa 10 years ago was that environmentalists were largely (if not overwhelmingly) opposed to nuclear. Certainly for a long while, environmentalists worked (perhaps unwittingly) with the fossil fuel industry to promote personal responsibility and lifestyle campaigns ("everyone needs to go vegan", "we just need more recycling", "get rid of SUVs", etc) rather than substantial energy reforms (like nuclear or carbon tax).
Environmentalists are not against Nuclear generally - they are just against the shitty ways governments have stored the waste in the past. When a government cheaps out and ships the waste to some far off pacific island and does not invest as much as it should building a proper containment setup and then it all leaks into the ocean it becomes a big problem for everyone and then environmentalists are of course pissed. When done properly I would guess the majority would be relatively fine with it (although they may still prefer cleaner options).
> Nuclear power is dirty, dangerous and expensive. Say no to new nukes.
>
> Nuclear energy has no place in a safe, clean, sustainable future. Nuclear energy is both expensive and dangerous, and just because nuclear pollution is invisible doesn’t mean it’s clean. Renewable energy is better for the environment, the economy, and doesn’t come with the risk of a nuclear meltdown.
The Sierra Club's [2]:
> The Sierra Club continues to oppose construction of any new commercial nuclear fission power plants. Further, the Sierra Club supports the systematic reduction of society's dependence on nuclear fission as a source of electric power and recommends a phased closure and decommissioning of operating commercial nuclear fission electric power reactors.
> It's obvious to anyone with a pulse that electric cars are ramping up and will displace the current fleet, and equally obvious that that operating model (plug in your car at night) will increase base load requirements.
It strikes me that transitioning to electric cars could become less viable the more we rely on renewables+batteries, as grid scale battery storage could hugely exacerbate shortages of battery materials.
Though on the other hand grid batteries would also spur more research into battery tech which could change the game for both grid & mobile batteries.
It seems like a huge gamble commiting to grid storage in the hopes of big innovations down the road instead of doubling down on baseload nuclear.
> Solar is awesome in that yield scales with load peaks.
No, this is the opposite of what is true. In most places, load peaks in the evening, just as the sun sets.
Looking up the data [1], the more nuanced answer is that load peaks in in the evening in the fall, winter, and spring. Only in the summer does solar energy match load.
If anyone wants another example, this has data for Australia [1]. Power usage consistently peaks in the late afternoon, typically as everyone ends work for the day [2][3]. Unsurprisingly, this is also around when the price spikes.
It's worth pointing out AEMO's demand is for the grid, and residential solar typically does not show up on the grid. OpenNEM[1] uses estimates of residential solar to approximate the full load.
> Nuclear is the opposite of variable, as it can’t be turned up or down quickly.
It's not as clear cut. Cold start up and shut down of nuclear reactors take time, but there's lot of in between and nuclear still has quite a lot of flexibility: for instance, you can quickly modulate the power output down to 50% without special considerations (you can also go lower, but then it starts using the uranium quicker[1]), or you can even go off while staying hot and in pressure, which means only the fission divergence needs to be redone, this is usually done during the week-end.
And keep in mind that modern (= high yield) fossil plants also have limited flexibility: a supercritical coal plant takes a lot of time to warm up, and so does a CCGT.
[1]: or more precisely, since the power is controlled by top-down control rods, you end up burning uranium in the bottom more than in the top, which means replacing the fuel earlier.
It's a bit more nuanced than that. Nuclear plants can alter their output by more aggressively cooling the reactor. This wastes heat, but can be used to curb electrical output in a pinch. But it doesn't reduce operating costs like running a gas plant for reduced hours. The overwhelming majority of nuclear power's cost lies in construction, and reducing output doesn't result in any savings.
If there were any, yes, in principle. Attempts at molten-salt storage (which would be even more useful for solar) have run into corrosion and leakage problems.
It's a big headache and one of the most annoying things about armchair energy planners who think solar can solve everything. It should surprise nobody that energy planning is very difficult.
Nuclear reactions can be modulated quickly, they just aren't designed to and are prevented from doing so due to red tape. It's economically tricky because the fixed costs of a nuclear plant mean you don't want to underutilize it now, but you can make them variable.
As power autarky and energy stability is a major backbone of economic and defense capabilities a mere billion here or there should be absolutely worth it. You need an energy source mix in the end, and this is part of that.
>Nuclear is the opposite of variable, as it can’t be turned up or down quickly.
As far as electrical output is concerned, nuclear power is just as variable as any other turbine based power generation system. Just divert the steam away from the turbines and you are no longer making electricity. Therefore, through creative plumbing, you could easily adjust the amount of power generated by controlling how much steam is going to the turbine. The issue is that while you are diverting steam, you are wasting money by running the reactor.
I wonder if someone made a machine that did carbon removal whose only inputs is power AND there was a bounty paid to remove carbon if you could install them onsite at power plants to deal with this
Great idea if it worked at all decently - any excess power could go directly toward removing atmospheric carbon. Or some other environmental process that is beneficial. Water purification? Climate modeling datacenters?
You don't have to actually remove carbon with excess power. In fact that would be bad environmentally since all you accomplish is removing carbon but you still have process inefficiency. Your statement is globally equivalent to doing something that would be done anyway but is tolerant to interruptions. There are power consumers that can do this and they have a power preferential rate (i.e. they're willing to shut down when the power company calls).
Also, what you're saying can be done by, for example, electrolysis of water to make hydrogen. I'm currently working on fuel cells that can be operated in reverse; that is they generate electricity from fossil fuels when needed (at very high efficiency) but absorb excess electricity by producing hydrogen.
Really what you're proposing is accomplished more efficiently by stored energy. The problem is that we've tapped out the easy ways to redistribute load, or store energy decades ago.
Not just storage, but transmission. From what I understand were far from a plant on the east coast being able to fill needs on the West. Interstate and international transmission lines would solve a lot of problems easier than more storage.
We already have pretty good long distance transmission lines (HVDC lines are commonly used today in both remote areas and in undersea lines, there's even a 53 mile long line from SF to Pittsburgh under the Bay). But there's always going to be some point at which it's more economical to build up local power generation along distances. We really don't want to be pumping gigawatts over fire prone areas, for example.
We are going to need to figure out how to handle more intense seasonal weather in the south east US. Florida has already done a decent job hardening their transmission lines and making sure their grids can stand up to cat 5 storms (the way they weathered Irma was incredible, compared to Maria in Puerto Rico just weeks later) but transmission lines are easier to replace than generators.
You need both, because long-distance transmission is subject to interruption.
Then, transmitted power is cheaper, but storage serves when transmission drops. The effect is amplified when transmission is from or through another country.
Lots of things the government pays for though is not supposed to be hugely profitable - no one questions why we have Fire departments for example and they are a huge "loss" when everyone is just sitting around.
The power not stored though is of course still just a problem in general for efficiency sake - I wonder if there is something we could pair with nuclear plants that would use the otherwise wasted energy to accomplish something productive.
Which is why most countries turning to intermittent renewables are using gas as backup, and why without massive energy storage (TWh), we're screwed using those.
Meanwhile the entirety of fusion energy sciences is ~450 M USD, which is about 1% of DoE's entire budget. Inertial confinement fusion (listed under nuclear weapons stockpile maintenance) is 530 M USD.
For that fusion budget you could develop very viable commercial molten salt (or molten salt cooled) nuclear reactors.
Fusion has no practice reason to exist compare to advanced fission. The improvements in energy density are not really relevant factor at that scale, meaning the difference from oil to fission, and oil to fusion doesn't really gain you much.
Fusion fuel cost over the long term is likely more expensive then a fission fast breeder (not to mention a potential of thorium thermal breeder).
Is a fusion reactor going to be cheaper to build then a advanced fission reactor? Not from anything know so far. Advanced fission concept are viable with pretty normal tubes pretty industrial steels or at most advanced aerospace materials. Any fission reactors actually consider would have waste more complex and expensive parts.
The nuclear waste argument is sometimes made in favor of fusion but with the right kind of fission reactor this problem and issue that has very viable practical solutions and storage for a few hundred years is viable.
Sometimes nuclear proliferation is held up as a reason why fusion is good, but that argument doesn't really work either once you think threw it. Access neutrons of fusion can certainty be used for all kind of things.
Are fusion reactors inherently safer? That's questionable. To come up with a scenario where a modern molten salt breeder (or even molten salt reactor) leads to massive safety hazards for anything outside the exclusion zone is very hard to imagine.
The scenarios you have to come up with for both fusion or advanced fission to be massive safety concerns are both possible and incredibly unlikely.
My approach would be to do something like NASA did for Commercial and Crew, have competitive fixed price competition between a group of providers and offer the 2-3 winners of them at least 2 deployments.
>For that fusion budget you could develop very viable commercial molten salt (or molten salt cooled) nuclear reactors.
Could you, though? Look at the "Nuclear Energy" category. It is entirely devoted to fission reactor research and has a 1.85 Bn USD budget. That's a SPARC every year. Where are the LFTRs on the grid?
Nukes are mature tech. No surprises coming. They are not getting cheaper. If you got approval to build one, you would get no power for ten years, minimum.
A billion dollars buys a GW of solar panel generating capacity today. Another billion buys plenty of storage. No NRC approval, no containment vessel, no disaster plan. You can start generating power almost immediately, while you are still building out. Prices continue falling the whole time you are building, so the last panel you put up costs half what the first did. It all fits well within the exclusion zone of a typical nuke reservation. You can put up wind turbines too. And keep adding panels, paying for them with income from ones already up.
I think you are mixing up standard light water technology with nuclear power.
A common mistake but also complete nonsense.
I would highly advice you actually study nuclear power and nuclear reactor technology.
I believe the same as you do now because I was ignorant about the technology, the I actually engaged with it.
> If you got approval to build one, you would get no power for ten years, minimum.
Again, this is not even true for PWRs if you built more then 1 every other decade.
And the type of reactors I am talking about are totally different and require less then 10% the amount of resources and far smaller build project. They have no cooling towers and don't use any low heat steam power.
A single factory mass producing nuclear modular nuclear vessels has a far higher potential energy density then anything else imaginable. The first principles are not really in question.
Well to be fair I don't think anyone is even remotely close to a viable on grid Fusion Reactor. It's a meme at this point but we're still several decades away from that point. Does more budget help that? My understanding is that most of the problems are around building sufficiently small and powerful Magnets and "Fusion" budget doesn't help solve the problems in that space.
High field magnets do enable potentially economically viable designs. There are still engineering challenges that require effort. Materials will be in high neutron flux and high thermal gradients for years.
Throwing money at problems warms up the industries around them. No one will get good at making HTS tapes unless they can pay to keep the lights on. Also, the plasma physics research is far from complete. Study of burning plasmas (coming with ITER) and different configurations of optimized stellarators (coming never?) are important places to shine the flashlight on.
We aren't on the home stretch, but that isn't a reason to stop, slow down, or even not speed up.
>We aren't on the home stretch, but that isn't a reason to stop, slow down, or even not speed up.
Agreed, I'm very pro fusion but at this point you have companies like Commonwealth Fusion that have raised multibillion dollar amounts on their own so maybe that's a more viable path than DOE/NSF Grants to Universities?
It is quite exciting to see CFS' series B funding. I worry about commercializing too soon because companies need to turn a profit. The publicly funded fusion scientists and engineers are quite good at what they do and could efficiently spend money on research and new machines until the blueprint for a reactor is ready. The benefit of public programs is that they don't need to make quarterly profits and some problems are bigger than a year.
CFS has a path to be profitable even if they don't make a blueprint for reactors. Research needs high field magnets and they're positioning themselves to be the supplier of them.
> I worry about commercializing too soon because companies need to turn a profit
Is this really the case though when Tech Startups routinely go public without ever turning a profit and with no clear vision on how they eventually will?
I don't fully understand it, but I think the answer is usually some form of "attention economy". Also, I'm not sure how often startups get 1.8 Bn USD in series B. That sounds like a lot.
It is, anyway, a lot to waste. It is not unusual for very large investments to yield zero. Any Tokamak effort will necessarily be one of those, because operating a plant would cost far more than the similarly-rated fission plant, and those are markedly uncompetitive.
But none of the money will vanish: every penny goes into a ready pocket.
It explains how those boondoggles get the investment they do.
A nuke industry without pervasive corruption would have very different economics. But corruption is very hard to root out, particularly when it has instead been made wholly legal.
Great chart. Here is the source copied from the higher resolution version found on reddit, for those curious:
U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration, 1976. "Fusion power by magnetic confinement: Program plan"
ERDA report ERDA-76/110. Also published as S.O. Dean (1998), J. Fus. Energy 17(4), 263-287, doi:10.1023/A:1021815909065
The graph was taken from PPPL FIRE's 1976 report, freely available here:
Obviously the 1976 chart did not have inflation data from 1976 to 1998, so you can see why we are below Logic I even though the budget is close to 500 M.
The entire PPPL FIRE site is a treat for anyone with some time on their hands.
Is this really accurate though? Afaik there are fundamental engineering and physics barriers that need to be solved to get there? How is this funding broken down, what constitutes "Fusion Funding" in the first place?
In my comment I mentioned Magnets being a current barrier, in that case funding in Materials Science or EE would be more relevant and the 500M Fusion Funding number is irrelevant.
Check out my cousin comment. The PPPL FIRE 1976 report starting around page 30 addresses these questions. Also the PPPL FIRE site (also linked) has many resources that highlight areas of research.
Plasma physics is a large task in fusion energy science, but it is not the only task. FES being the motivator of those materials research ventures means money in FES goes into those areas.
More money definitely is not going to hurt in developing fusion. I am surprised nooone has been able to get a more significant portion of the militaries funding going directly making fusion reactors workable - it seems like they could be a huge strategic advantage militarily. A submarine or spacecraft using a fusion reactor that also was able to output clean water for its occupants seems like a pretty damn nice win win. And certainly the military must also have tons of other needs for reliable, uninterruptible energy production.
The military is not funding fusion generation because current planned designs will never produce any viable power. (Actually all of inertial confinement is really military, but is about nuclear weapons research.)
If the money poured into fusion for the past N decades had gone into solar and storage, good cheap solar panels would have come out decades earlier, and we would have already built out our clean power system. But the fossil companies did not want that.
There will never be a commercially competitive Tokamak fusion power plant.
The Navy did fund electrostatic fusion designs for a few decades. Considering any plasma physicist could have told you it was a fool's errand 60 years ago I'm not sure I would trust the military's judgment on what future energy sources warrant research.
Also, some tips on making convincing arguments: making baseless and unfounded speculations on alternate histories with not even a whiff of empiricism is not going to convince anyone. Additionally, saying "something won't work" without articulating why it won't work isn't helpful.
I've heard the power density arguments. It's a 40 year old argument that does not hold up in a world with HTS magnets and optimized stellarators.
HTS or stellarators don't have a damned thing to do with those power density limits of DT fusion reactors. Those limits come from power/area on the walls, and they'd still exist even with much higher magnetic fields and plasma beta.
Yes, you can increase power density with sufficiently neat plasma physics.
But no, the fundamental limit on power density in DT fusion doesn't come from plasma physics, it comes from engineering (specifically, limits on power/area on the first wall, coupled with minimum reactor size set by the cross section of neutrons w. blanket materials). You might have a sufficiently sucky design that can't even reach that limit, but once you reach it all the improvement in plasma physics or magnetic fields you can imagine doesn't help.
>If the money poured into fusion for the past N decades had gone into solar and storage, good cheap solar panels would have come out decades earlier, and we would have already built out our clean power system.
Panels have been viable for decades already. Storage is an entirely different problem.
>But the fossil companies did not want that.
Then they would really hate Fusion which would probably put every energy company on the planet out of business.
>There will never be a commercially competitive Tokamak fusion power plant.
A Tokamak fusion plant would necessarily be, at best, an order of magnitude more expensive to build and operate than a fission plant of equal capacity. Fission is already not competitive, and gets less so every year.
It is not bold to say, about relative costs, that (n > 1) implies (10n > 1), when n is itself reliably increasing.
Well reading Government reports is not a great interest of mine, particularly ones that are nearly 50 years old, I'm just skeptical that they could accurately plot the development of the technology when here we are 50 years later with fundamental Plasma Physics and Materials Science problems that need to be solved for the tech to work. I doubt that just blanket more funding would have allowed them to be solved 30 years faster.
It would be akin to AI researchers saying that if only they had more funding they could create an AGI this decade despite fundamental unknowns about how to build something like that in the first place.
I'm so confused here. You asked for a breakdown of what technologies needed to be developed (invested in) and I gave you the exact breakdown.
You doubt that investment wouldn't accelerate the development of those areas? So HTS discoveries and mass production fall out of the sky? No, they take money. Given money they, demonstrably, are developed.
HTS is the sexy success story because it has been critical path, but other areas of engineering research have been known and the critical path for development has not changed in 50 years.
Also, PPPL's 1976 report is a report to the government and public. It was not written by bureaucrats.
Yes, ITER contributions make up 220 M USD of the 450 M USD that is the Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) budget under the DoE.
Most of that is paid in-kind, which means domestic manufacturing of components sent to ITER, so it's a bit like a stimulus. The US has also (famously) regularly failed to put in what they budget for, even in the past ten years having some years where they contribute less than half of what they agreed to.
Interesting side note. There is a new reactor coming online in the next year or two close to Savannah, GA (Plant Vogtle)...which has resulted in the air quality of Carroll County, GA getting much cleaner. Yates and Wansley have burned through coal stockpiles, one is now moth balled, the other is on nat gas and will be fully decommissioned when Vogtle 3? comes on line.
Vogtle 3-4
https://www.georgiapower.com/company/plant-vogtle.html
At ~$14B for ~2GW, that is very expensive power. It will soon be markedly uncompetitive as solar/wind/storage come online, and the reactors will end up shut down early, never having made back their (outrageous) capital cost.
Do I need to look up for you how much pumped-hydro storage is already online? Or list a dozen other technologies also under large-scale construction? You could look that up yourself, if you cared.
Hydro storage is a completely different animal than native hydro generation.
A reservoir for the latter requires a river collecting water from a large area watershed, and a dam lower down backing water up the river course.
Hydro storage requires only an elevated basin, and a pipe (penstock) leading up to it from a ready source of water -- even groundwater -- no watershed needed. Such basins are legion, and filling them typically discomfits no one.
The problem nuclear has is that if you build something that can last literally half a century and more, the operational environment has changed so much.
People consider 'nuclear' to be nuclear built many decades ago with technology principles from even a few decades earlier.
Building something that has such long term aspirations is inherently problematic.
At the same time, if you turn them off, how much of the replacement will be fossil?
If you actually had a carbon price, would they still not be competitive?
Nuclear is truly in a sad state. And those reactors if turned down can't easily be replaced with any next generation designs because they don't exist as a practical product right now.
I think in 100 years people will laugh at as saying things like 'They had all the technology needed back then, why did they use it so badly'? I think that future will be nuclear fission powered, and not sun and solar powered.
They really need to pick a utilization level and then just send everything to batteries. Massive generation linked with instant availability to smooth out the peaks and furrows. Really at this point, every power generation site needs batteries.
For traditional nuclear that probably true. The energy market doesn't reward stable. You really want to peak when wind/solar are gone or usage is high.
Next generation has two approaches, some try to be very adaptable, scaling up and down quickly. Its not like nuclear isn't capable of that if you have the right reactor. But of course you would prefer to run at 100% most of the time.
Other companies basically use a solar salt coolant loop as a heat sink and battery. Basically reusing the technology from Concentrated Solar Plants.
Moltex Energy for example basically expect basically a default 1h battery and then depending on the costumer and where you deploy it you can have a larger battery and a bigger turbine. You should be able to basically mix and match the size of your heat battery and your turbine.
I could also imagine something like Form Energy Iron batteries just sitting right next to a nuclear plant and simply charging those and saving energy in the form as electricity instead of in heat.
"I think that future will be nuclear fission powered, and not sun and solar powered. "
Every life on earth, was always sun powered. I doubt that fundamentally changes.
"They had all the technology needed back then, why did they use it so badly'?"
But I agree to that. The technology is there.
Did you know, that you can make batteries in bulk with no rare elements, with just iron, copper and saltwater?
And also, that you can transport electricity over long distances and that we have abundance of sunny desserts?
(and many more concepts of solar power generating, than just solar panels)
But sure, alternativly we can also build thousands of nuclear reactors, that contaminate their environment for a long time if they fail badly. I mean, fission is an quite awesome technology, which at some point of progress probably can handled safely under normal circumstances. But just because of unsolved human social dynamics alone (aka terrorism), it is maybe not very wise to scale them up and spread them everywhere.
But whether solar or nuclear - the main problems that remain, are that in most parts of the world, it is still way cheaper to just burn coal and oil.
But Jimmy Carter was a trained nuclear engineer. He was well qualified to understand their true value. Or lack of it. He put solar panels up on the White House roof. Reagan scrapped them.
Reagan, of course, was not qualified to understand much of anything besides PR. But did, that.
What matters is not what the president believes but what the people he represents believes and gives him votes.
Are we seriously gone pretend things like putting solar panel on the white house and putting so much emphasis on that was more likely to save CO2 anytime soon?
And it was in fact under Nixon and more under Carter that a number of nuclear efforts were stopped and replaced with things that had absolutely no chance of having great returns anytime soon.
I'm not saying Reagan was better, he clearly didn't turn that ship around. But the assertion that if it wasn't for him we would live in a CO2 free paradise because of carters investment in solar is totally delusional.
> Every life on earth, was always sun powered. I doubt that fundamentally changes.
I am clearly talking about electricity generation on earth. Seem like a totally unnecessary thing to say as you knew very well in what context I said it.
> But I agree to that. The technology is there.
There is a very large gap been established principles science and commercial license.
> Did you know, that you can make batteries in bulk with no rare elements, with just iron, copper and saltwater?
Yes I know all about companies like Form Energy and many other battery startups.
But if we are actually honest, most of those are not deployed. Most grid batteries deployed today are still Li-Ion.
> And also, that you can transport electricity over long distances and that we have abundance of sunny desserts?
Yes, but all those things come at a cost. Localized energy presentation has been the principle and it made a lots of sense. Starting to in far more long distance energy line and local distribution of that energy had a number of disadvantages.
> But whether solar or nuclear - the main problems that remain, are that in most parts of the world, it is still way cheaper to just burn coal and oil.
That is why I fundamentally believe in nuclear, based on first principles it has the potential to be cheaper. There is no inherent reason a nuclear plant need to be more expensive then coal plant. And nuclear fuel should be cheaper then coal in the long term.
Nuclear plants can be put on a ship or floating platform and put right next to most of the large coast bound cities in Asia. Alternatively you can just go to a place with a coal plant put a nuclear plant there instead.
I just don't see those nations build a distributed networks of solar and wind and battery connected across long distances.
Places like Indonesia are massively expanding with coal, their population lives on the coast.
"But if we are actually honest, most of those are not deployed. Most grid batteries deployed today are still Li-Ion"
Because the price of lithium was low enough, to not bother. Now that has changed, so they will become broadly avaiable very soon. And it is not like there is any technological brakethrough required. You can build and order them today. It is more about adopting production processes to it, to make them cheaper than lithium based batteries.
But I heard the argument too often, that batteries are not a solution, because of rare earth elements, which is why I brought it up.
"Yes, but all those things come at a cost. "
And yes, they do. The price for renewables is a massive investment in the grid. And the price for nuclear is safety. As far as I know, no private insurance company is willing to take that risk, which is why the states have to step in.
The worst thing that can happen with batteries is a fire (and most saltwater based batteries are actually quite fire proof)
The worst thing that can happen with a swimming nuclear plant is widespread contamination for decades.
It is still advised against eating too many mushrooms or boar meat in my area (central europe), because of one incident 35 years ago, happening 1000 km away.
> it is not like there is any technological brakethrough required.
Just like there isn't in advanced nuclear and yet you 100% believe that will happen but reject that the same can happen in nuclear.
Funny how that works. Both relay on a advanced chemical process that have to be correctly controlled.
The advantage is that a few 1000 nuclear plants can power the whole world, when we are talking about Form Energy style batteries we literally need 1000000s large locations to provide the kind of stability need for a global grid that only gets powered by solar/wind.
What happens when a volcano darkness the sun for a few weeks? Everything including transportation will be standing still. You better have a few weeks of backup energy. Storing the global need for 1 weeks worth of energy alone is almost unimaginable task. Specially once all flight transportation and industrial heat 100% depend on availability of electricity.
> It is still advised against eating too many mushrooms or boar meat in my area (central europe), because of one incident 35 years ago, happening 1000 km away.
Yes and that is total nonsense pushed by vastly overzealous over-reaction and fear mongering driven by absurd low tolerance level having been written into law to make nuclear almost impossibly expensive.
I'm central European and I have eat a lot of boar meat and I'm fine.
The actual reality is far more people have been killed by oil, gas and coal then nuclear, its not even close. The single largest nuclear accident in the history of the earth lead to the premature death of about 1500 people based on the best most authoritative report.
And of course that design has literally nothing to do with the designs I'm advocating. Its like saying 'don't ever get into a plain, somebody once build a zeppelin and wanted to fly it by making a hole in the hull and light they hydrogen stream out on fire'.
Go and actually study advanced modern nuclear reactors and tell me how they can lead to mass death. I would argue to come up with a viable case for major damage you would basically need terrorist working together with 2 massive natural disasters and even then its likely gone kill less people then a gas pipeline explosion.
Its nothing but fear mongering about technology people don't understand. Molten Salt reactor can not even produce a reaction like happen at Fukushima let alone the what happened Chernobyl.
And my point is this could have been done 40 years ago nuclear and we would be a n far better position regarding climate change. It could have been done 30 years ago after Kyoto protocols. It could have been done 20 years ago when everybody started to take it seriously.
And if nuclear had really involved at all since the 1970s nobody would even think about deploying solar and wind.
Next generation nuclear plant based on first principle analysis have no reason to be more expensive. The reality is such plants can run with little human intervention for potentially decades and the total land and materials requirements are not very large.
The fuel has the potential to be essentially free as thorium is a waste product and if you can run on natural uranium its also basically free.
The key is reducing the total investment to build a plant and the time it takes to build it. Both are very likely if you build plants that are only 1/10 the size and require far less safety and cooling equipment while being able to run on commercial turbines from gas and coal.
"The only one currently under construction – the Vogtle plant in Georgia – is years behind schedule and roughly $14 billion over the original budget."
How does this happen, it is incredible to me how government contracts are allowed to overrun like this, where is the punishment for the original bidder. Same question applies to things like the F-35, the whole contract bidding process to government entities appears to be a grift.
The punishment is that one of the principals, Westinghouse Electric Company, has declared bankruptcy and 2 of the construction contractors, Chicago Bridge & Iron Company and Fluor, have been kicked out of the project.
Unfortunately, it's often the case that the executives who made the bad decisions of these companies escape with golden parachutes while the employees lose their jobs.
A lot of it is bad government specs. So the government lacks a good idea of what it needs in advance, but buys something anyway. Then any change costs extra money.
That's just regular anti-government FUD. In those specific cases, Westinghouse shat the bed so much it cost Toshiba, which acquired them, billions and almost bankruptcy ( Westinghouse did go bust).
If we just assume the over-budget of $14 billion that would give us 13 GW of solar, and nuclear fanboys still thinks nuclear is viable option? And the nuclear plant is only 2.3GW. Seriously nuclear has to die, it is ridiculously expensive even in the best case scenario, it's a no brainer.
The Energy Information Administration regularly produces forecasts for levelized cost of electricity ($/MWh). You can see the present forecast here, which makes projections for plants entering service in 2026 (see table 1b):
In 2018 the LCOE for new nuclear built in 2022 was estimated at $92.60/MWh while that from solar PV was estimated at $63.20 (before tax credits) or $49.90 (after tax credits).
The newer report with projections for 2026 shows that both nuclear and solar PV get tax credits, and at that time the nuclear tax credit is actually larger. The after-tax LCOE is $30.43 for solar PV and $70.59 for nuclear.
The earliest report in this series was from 2016. The AP1000 reactors currently under construction in the US started building before 2016, back when solar was considerably more expensive. The decision to build new AP1000 reactors was economically rational given the then-current costs of solar and the then-projected costs of new reactors. The reactor projects went tremendously over budget and utility scale PV costs subsequently plummeted, so building new reactors in South Carolina today would be a much more dubious choice, but I don't fault the decisions made back then.
In 2020 in the United States, utility scale solar PV had a capacity factor of 24% while nuclear power had a 92% capacity factor:
Generating solar or wind power does not take the land out of use.
Both are compatible with agriculture. Agricultural productivity under partial solar cover is higher than without, for less water input. Pasture is probably the easiest to make compatible, and there is a very great deal of pasture, although little of it is irrigated. The prospect of less irrigation need will drive solar onto more intensive cropland.
Maybe in an ideal world, but I think it would require way more coordination and upkeep than you are giving credit for in order to do that at the scale required. Way easier to maintain a couple dozen distributed nuke plants with wind and solar to handle daytime peaks and residential, personal use where appropriate.
What matters is cost, and the cost picture is crystal-clear: Nukes are very expensive, and not getting any less so. Solar/wind/storage cost is much lower and still plummeting.
$1 for construction, $2 for corruption. Enriching the corrupt pays long-term dividends -- in increased corruption. Rich, corrupt people buy politicians to seed more corrupt projects.
Solar and wind seem, thus far, relatively immune to corruption. Most storage methods should be, too. It seems to be because easy estimation of incremental cost leaves little scope for corruption.
> Solyndra executives misled federal officials to obtain $535 million in government-backed loans, with the help of former President Barack Obama's White House.
I haven't heard of much large scale wind projects. Most smaller scale corruption happens at the local level and rarely makes the news.
But the Wikipedia page does not in fact include any "misled federal officials" language, quoted above as if it were from there. It says, instead, "Ultimately, none of the investigations of Solyndra found any evidence of wrongdoing or undue political influence." Sometimes a business failure is just a business failure. I have not heard of any multi-billion dollar solar failures or cost overruns as are the norm for nukes.
Most wind projects are large scale, yet buy their turbines on the open market. Again, I have not heard of any big cost overruns or non-delivery.
Solar concentrator projects have not paid back investment because they have turned out to be uncompetitive, same as Solyndra, undercut by the staggering fall in cost of conventional photovoltaics. Their natural value would be for process heat, which I have not heard of being tried.
As cheap storage comes online, power becomes fully fungible, albeit at a discount because storage round-trip efficiency, and long-distance transmission, have losses. But control systems can take all of that into account, in real time, maximizing profits for the best operators.
Being slow to start up will be a huge competitive disadvantage. Most storage providers will need a stock of front-end batteries, but there might need to be regulatory support for baseline capacity storage.
Establishing a modest carbon tax and reinvestment by DOE (or even a new department of clean energy) would produce billions of dollars every year for clean nuclear and wind/solar. Yet we keep doing the same old thing and expecting a different result. We don't need bandaids, we need a plan.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 314 ms ] threadOr when you're stuck running on 1960s technology because nothing new has been built in 60 years.
Crazy requirements like being able to survive a 1-10000 earthquake and etc seem overly cumbersome until it happens. Sure a giant oil spill is not great but you were allowed to go to the Gulf of Mexico post-spill(s) and not so much for Chernobyl. So the DOE should keep its red tape so it can keep its (better than the military, see Spain) record with nuclear power.
I said to reduce red tape. Things like peforming multiple regulatory approvals at the same time. (do you really need to wait for the environment review to finish before you start the reactor safety review?) Or pre-approve reactor designs, so they don't all have to be redone from scratch for every new reactor.
There is a TON of ways to speed up approvals in a way that don't comprimise safety.. but that was a great strawman agrument!
The fact that pollution doesn't make a big boom pushes our animal instinct to focus on nuclear as dangerous but it's not even close.
1: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=heat...
Compare nuclear to wind and solar and try to find any case it makes sense in.
Earth uninhabitable? No, every nuclear plant in the world failing at once wouldn't make 1% of the earth uninhabitable, cut the hyperbole.
Nuke fantasies? Vs what, the fantasy that somehow wind and solar are going to be always-on sources of energy? You need a reliable backup, right now it's either fossil fuels or nuclear. The fantasy is thinking that fossil fuels are safer than nuclear - they are not.
An acre is 4046 square meters. A solar module is maybe $75 per square meter. If we cover half the acre with modules, the modules alone cost $150,000/acre. Now add in cost of mounting hardware and inverters.
Land cost is close to negligible for solar, unless you're building it in very expensive places. If land cost ever did become generally significant, PV would be so cheap it would already have driven all other energy sources off the market.
But putting solar on land need not interfere with other uses. Rather, solar increases the value of the land for the other uses; a roof lasts longer with solar on. On a parking lot solar provides shade and stops rain. On pasture or crop land, solar reduces heat and water stress, increasing yield and cutting irrigation demand. On a reservoir or canal, it reduces evaporation loss, and runs cooler, thus more efficiently.
As far as efficiency I roughly agree. There's likely to be a 15-20% drop per 20 years so I think they'll still be 8-10% conversion efficient assuming they are clean and unbroken.
Solar and wind is the cheapest energy. Then gas, then coal then nuclear.
Yes, we should (and will, the trend makes it inevitable) replace coal and gas with solar and wind.
We should also replace the most expensive (nuclear) energy with cheap and clean solar and wind.
We're not grading on a curve here. It doesn't matter WHY nuclear is most expensive energy, it matters that it is and we have technology that is both cheaper and cleaner to replace it.
That is a absurd thing to say. If the reason is "because we intentionally made it that way" then of course it matters because we can address that reason with the (nearly free) stroke of a pen.
And you won't bring down nuke cost without cutting out the corruption. And, even if you did, it would remain uncompetitive with the storage that will have been long since built out by the time you could bring one online.
No matter how much money we throw at them, though, they produce zero when the sun isnt shining or the wind isnt blowing.
Factor in the cost of batteries, and aside from a few exceptional locations, they aren't all that cheap anymore.
Factor in the cost of batteries and longer term storage and they're still going to be cheaper than new nuclear power plants.
We've had to ask you this many times already. Would you mind re-reading https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29450803 (Dec 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28460058 (Sept 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28460037 (Sept 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28459953 (Sept 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26930219 (April 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26930134 (April 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26930099 (April 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25339251 (Dec 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25339221 (Dec 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22658166 (March 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18500396 (Nov 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17822860 (Aug 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17812247 (Aug 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15938294 (Dec 2017)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13517109 (Jan 2017)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13436656 (Jan 2017)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11410709 (April 2016)
Nuclear hasn't. This alone condemns nuclear in the face of its constantly improving competitors.
https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop is a pretty interesting article.
How much cost has been added to nuclear projects due to additional safety requirements? I think it's plausible to say "over 9 billion", as an extremely conservative estimate. Would you object to this? (That's the cost overrun for just one reactor, for context)
If so, that means that those additional safety regulations have reduced nuclear deaths in the US by at least 1000 deaths.
This does not seem plausible to me, as the worst case for a meltdown in the US with 70s-era designs is not "Chernobyl style uncontained accident" but instead something rather close to Fukushima or 3 Mile Island, purely due to containment structures. Given how many people died from radiation in the wake of Fukushima (literally one - and less than 100 estimated in the counterfactual scenario where there was no evacuation) and 3-Mile Island (zero confirmed), I think it's reasonable to say that there is no way for the NRC's regulations to have prevented even 1000 deaths over the past 50 years.
https://allthingsnuclear.org/lgronlund/how-many-cancers-did-...
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Keep existing nuclear plants running for as long as safely possible, for sure, but stop throwing good money after bad with new generators. Build batteries (including pumped hydro where able), renewables, and transmission. Throw in some demand response or load shifting for loads that can tolerate being scheduled around renewables production (Google does this for compute using ElectricityMap.org, and Nest does demand response in aggregate as a revenue source, when utilities send a signal to shed AC load temporarily on peak consumption days versus firing up gas peakers).
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Edit: (HN throttling, can’t reply)
@mrits: Telling people what they want doesn’t work. If they want cars (they do), you sell them EVs. You use your margin to build out a global EV charging network and battery factories. I don’t live in traffic, that’s a choice for others to make. The world is full of space batteries can be installed out of the way to meet net zero goals. There is no such thing as an ideal world, just nudges of consumers towards more positive macro outcomes.
Safety costs must be balanced against other considerations, but the biggest and most important is profit. There has to be a profit, it can be for the taxpayer, or the energy consumer, or the government, or the investors--hopefully some for all.
Profit is essential, you have to reap two seeds from planting one.
Hanford only ever had one reactor that produced electricity, the N reactor, and that wasn't built until 1963:
https://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/NReactor
So we can address that immediately: without the Hanford site, Japan would not have surrendered without an invasion of the home islands. Maybe not even then. It was the "new and cruel bomb," as the Emperor of Japan described it while citing it as the reason for surrender in his speech. That "new and cruel" bomb meant an alternative to reenacting the Battle of Iwo Jima (which I would describe as "fucked up" for both sides without question) a thousand times. Battles to the last cartridge. Forgetting completely about the lives of Allied and Axis soldiers, you realize the death toll that would have on the civilians of Japan? They were on the hook for all kinds of atrocities all over Asia and the Pacific, in the context of total war they pissed off the rest of the world way too hard for the Allies to declare a truce. Just in Korea alone, the stories are just...let's not talk about that, let's stick to what is fucked up within nuclear science.
Japanese were subscribed to the idea that their genocide was preferable to surrender. So that's why the bomb, and by extension the Hanford site, were so important. In practice the nukes in Japan explosives second, fireworks first. Napalm was a much better explosive for the money, in terms of the destruction it could produce. The really bad bombings in WWII were in Tokyo and Dresden, a hundred thousand dead per bombing, a new climactic event called a "Firestorm," terrible burns, pavement getting goopy, high winds--I claim those bombings were worse. But they weren't as flamboyant as a star.
But nobody knew about that when Hanford was set up and running, before then.
The firestorms were horrendous for the population, which had no influence on leadership, and were anyway ineffective against industrial production, so were doubly pointless. Blockade was massively underused in the Pacific theater.
Recall the Battle of Carrhae? Recap: Crassus was at the head of a Roman legion inside Parthia (meaning "Persian"; modern-day Iran). Totally flat. Then they started getting shot with arrows. Crassus and his legion would march toward the archers, but as they got close, the archers would stop shooting long enough to take vehicles drawn by horses away from the Roman soldiers, until they were far enough they could resume shooting arrows. The battle is well-known, but the detail I'd like to call attention to is that in Suetonius's "The Twelve Caesars" (IIRC) it says when the soldiers figured out the heavy rain of arrows would never stop, the soldiers ordered Crassus to surrender. Screaming at him and threatening him! So that's what he ended up having to do. Mutiny is no joke.
That is my thesis for the Japanese surrender. Perhaps the military leadership was too nicely tucked into safe bunkers near anti-aircraft turrets (I don't know what Japan had, but Berlin had four of these and they worked great against bombers, really scared the birds away quite nicely, guaranteed Killed-in-Action if you got too close). Whatever, the military leadership could relax if all they had to fear was conventional warfare, whatever the hell that meant by that particular month of 1945.
But nukes changed everything. Wrath of GOD, basically. After one bomb, Japanese leadership I imagine asked their internal Manhattan Project--they were working on the atomic bomb too at the time--what was happening. Presumably they were told it was a one-off thing, because uranium was too difficult to make. What really changed the game was the second bomb, which meant America could mass-produce them--thanks to Hanford, in particular--and then it was like, are we going to get another one of these new and cruel bombs every three days indefinitely? Where are they going to drop them in the future? What are the consequences of the starburns on the survivors, are the ones that lived going to be recover their health...ever? Are they dropping the next one on the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, and killing Hirohito as promised to the people of America? WHY ARE THE GODS SO ANGRY AT US, WERE WE WORSHIPPING SATAN THE WHOLE TIME? WILL THE PEOPLE OF JAPAN MUTINY WHEN THEY SEE A STAR ABOVE TOKYO? WHAT DO JAPANESE PEOPLE DO WHEN THEY MUTINY, IT'S OBVIOUSLY GOING TO HAPPEN EVEN IF IT'S NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE, WHAT WILL THE PEOPLE DO TO US? WHY DIDN'T WE CAVE IN TO THAT BEAUTIFUL ULTIMATUM THREATENING TO BRING ABOUT OUR "PROMPT AND UTTER DESTRUCTION," WHAT A BEAUTIFUL GIFT, why didn't we listen and surrender like they asked?
(I claim writing in all caps like this is justified. That is the literary freedom I ask for, and the site allows it in theory. Not doing so does an injustice to the degree of alarm imminent destruction brings about. The inner monologue when that destruction makes itself known sounds something along the lines of "OH FUCK OH FUCK OH FUCK!". All caps in your inner monologue. That's just for your personal reference, haven't seen it well-portrayed in movies much. It's not like anything else, maybe someday you'll see for yourself, dear reader. I hope not.)
A blockade eliminating fuel imports would shortly eliminate ability to operate trucks, aircraft, factories, electric power generation systems, and shortly telephones, radio stations, and kitchens.
That really depends on your definition of "fucked-up", but there is a long list of nuclear accidents in the US [0], among the more "fucked-up" ones were attempts to dispose of nearly a ton of left-over fissile material in mere landfills [1] and then ultimately losing track of them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_accidents_in_t...
[1] https://thebulletin.org/2014/05/thorium-the-wonder-fuel-that...
And if you look at the list of causalities its very small amount.
What are you smoking? This is blatantly false. We've absolutely had meltdowns, and come very damn close to real disaster (as in - evacuating a 20 mile radius including some 600,000 people close)
That's what I'm smoking. For there to be a fucked-up American accident the accident has to actually happen.
Some of this likely stems from a massive gaffe some years ago when California regulators demanded a certain percentage of state generation come from environmentally-friendly sources. PG&E laughed because it already had the largest hydroelectric portfolio in the US and didn't have to change anything. Democrat leadership, angry because they didn't find a way to punish the largest utility in the state, promptly recategorized large hydro as Very Naughty.
Does hydro have an environmental cost? Sure, so does everything. Is it a great way to generate and store electricity? Yes. Does that matter to lawmakers? No.
No municipals, even the biggest like LA's, tackles anything near the scale of even our smallest IOU. Most critics of the IOUs ignore the sheer scale and geographic challenges of running a service area larger than some states across many different types of terrain. Running retail distribution and metering isn't that hard when other people run the grid for you. PG&E, SCE, and SDG&E have lots of issues to be sure, but to compare them to SMUD or Modesto is far from apples to apples.
>...A typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear facility in the United States needs a little more than 1 square mile to operate. NEI says wind farms require 360 times more land area to produce the same amount of electricity and solar photovoltaic plants require 75 times more space. To put that in perspective, you would need more than 3 million solar panels to produce the same amount of power as a typical commercial reactor or more than 430 wind turbines (capacity factor not included).
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/01/f58/Ultimate...
Are there countries where the land use for nuclear power is orders of magnitude larger?
Good times!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abalone_Alliance
The "evil solar lobby" has been saying for quite some time that solar is much cheaper than nuclear and therefore should play a large role in the post carbon grid. This article seems to reinforce their claims. Do you have a rebuttal, or are you just trying to be contrarian because it makes you feel good?
https://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/resources...
The “massive taxpayer funded bailout” the nuclear industry wants is order of magnitude below what solar/wind/hydro get all the time. No wonder nuclear finds it hard to compete, when government subsidizes its competitors to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
And this doesn't even account for the fact that "Renewables" is a bucket that consists of multiple technology types including solar, wind, biomass and storage. So if those were actually broken out into individual categories nuclear would be the biggest receiver of incentives of the bunch.
However, when you look at the R&D column, which is a direct transfer of cash from the government to industry. Nuclear received over 2.5 times as much as renewables (85B vs 32B). This is even more of a travesty considering "Renewables" is a bucket of multiple technology types. So oddly enough, if I was to take away one thing from this report, it looks like we are not investing nearly enough in renewables R&D. Also, why is coal getting 43B, that sucks.
This is an interesting economic quirk I hadn’t thought about.
Solar energy is inherently variable as the sun rises and sets but also with weather changes. Nuclear is the opposite of variable, as it can’t be turned up or down quickly. Energy storage continues to be one of the big gaps in our clean energy strategy.
Chemical storage doesn't seem like it'd operate anywhere close to pump-hydro scale, but chemical storage will be a component of frequency-regulation, and maybe anything involving 30-minutes or less of storage. This is still useful, but pumped hydro is so much bigger than all other forms, that its hard to imagine an adequate replacement moving forward.
CAES looks promising. Still smaller than pumped hydro, but there's more geography that works with it.
http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/
What I do know is that the older reactors weren't really the type that could "spin up" or "spin down". Control rods always existed on nuclear power plants, even the oldest designs.
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In any case: "Connecting" those rods up to a computer so that the reaction can get hotter or run cooler would be the basis for variable power output.
This has been done literally forever. Why do you think nuclear plants run at 100% capacity 24/7?
The primary reason would be economic. Fuel costs IIRC are really low but capital-expenses (especially safety engineering / politics / convincing the people nearby that the plant is safe) is so costly.
When you have cheap-fuel but expensive machines, it makes sense to run closer to 100%. If you have expensive fuel but cheap machines (ex: Gas turbines), it makes sense to run in a "peaker" fashion.
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That being said: I've heard that older nuclear plants are "baseload" designs, in that they _CANNOT_ turn off or feasibly regulate their power output.
I mean, they obviously "can" turn off, they all have control rods for safety. But they're clearly not using them to regulate the power output.
No, you heard wrong. They're often the last or second to last type of plant that's called upon to alter supply to match demand, but they don't run 100% 24/7.
Yes, fissonable elements in the fuel are consumed in a manner that's proportional to output. So if you run at 25% output your fuel needs to be changed (example) every 4 years, if you run at 100% output your fuel needs to be changed every year.
But it is not 100% proportional, for example, 15% of the plant's output is required simply to run the plant's accessories. So it is advantageous to run at 100% output if you can.
[1]http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph241/wang-k2/
The rods soak up neutrons. the reactor is designed so that its power would increase if the rods weren't there. The rods are what keeps the k == 1 (basically how the neutrons change in time. K == 1 is no change).
So don't think of the rods as a throttle valve in your car, i.e. this throttle angle corresponds to this much torque and therefore power. The rods are best thought of as controlling the rate of change of reactor power.
This is why the reactor is built so that the neutrons increase when fully withdrawn - because you have to start it! If the reactor is being started, the rods are withdrawn until the power wanted is achieved. Then the rods are lowered.
Note this is a far more complicated problem; this is a very serious operation because at the very start, except for your neutron starter, you only have "prompt" neutrons that can very quickly cause an increase of power. Once the reactor has stabilized the "nuclear waste" inside it releases non-prompt neutrons that are part of the neutron budget and are easier to control.
So, while waste in the reactor is being accumulated and while the fuel burns up, the position of the rods to achieve stable power changes! Furthermore these changes are different in different parts of the reactor so each rod is individually changed (actually I think there are two sets of rods, not all of them are individually actuated)
> actually I think there are two sets of rods, not all of them are individually actuated
commercial reactors have 5-10 “banks” arranged symmetrically, although only a subset of those are typically used during power operations [1], so you weren’t far off. Rods are rarely controlled individually, the only case that comes to mind is for identifying and then limiting the reactivity in a “leaker” fuel bundle (one where the cladding has been breached by a foreign object, so it is leaching contamination into the coolant - this is undesirable but expected).
[1]: edit for more information: PWRs and BWRs differ substantially here:
PWRs primarily use boric acid in the coolant to limit reactivity at the beginning of a fuel cycle, which is diluted out over the course of the cycle. One bank of rods is used for fine reactivity control. This gives them a generally even power distribution across the reactor.
BWRs primarily use their control rods, so start the fuel cycle with substantially more inserted. A significant part of designing the fuel layout for a cycle is also designing the control rod patterns to be used over the cycle, to control excess reactivity while maximizing fuel use. Power distribution across the reactor can vary wildly, so it’s a much more challenging engineering problem.
I just remembered I actually have a detailed visualization illustrating (modeled) power distribution in a BWR. You can easily see where control rods are inserted and how that has shifted the power around. https://www.kmr.me/posts/coremap/#content
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_rod
American nuclear submarines use them, as does France's power generating reactors.
>This is an interesting economic quirk I hadn’t thought about.
this "quirk" should be a non-issue with a functioning energy market. if renewables are flooding the market with cheap electricity, but only during the day, and there's a massive deficit during the night, then the deficit would cause prices to go up and make the remaining generating capacity (natural gas, nuclear) more profitable.
Only if you assume the demand stays constant, but it doesn't; Demand is usually the highest when PV output is also the highest, the middle of the day when everybody is at work, using all kinds of electricity drawing machines.
Especially if these plants produced a lot of pollution that was also not accounted for.
For contrast, here are the stats for Germany [1] and the consumption peaks during the day contrast very well with the night consumption.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup
[1] https://www.agora-energiewende.de/en/service/recent-electric...
Not quite, the mismatch in timing between solar generation and energy demand has been called the "duck curve" [1][2]. Peak demand is normally in the evening when people are done with work [3].
[1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/confronting-duck-curve-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
[3] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
In California, demand peaks are around 6-8pm, well past the peak of solar production. This disparity has a name, the "Duck Curve". You can view the near real-time power demand on the CAISO[1] website. Your region may have a similar way to see live demand.
[1] http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/ebf483/node/534
Look at ~2001/02 -- ENRON...
My energy bill went from $100/mo to over $1,000/mo for NO REASON..
My power was shut off in february because my regular energy bill literally went up 10X during that period (no change in use) -- and I was ~25 and it was the first downturn, and while I owned my house - I had to borrow money from parents to pay the fucking power bill due to enron shenanigans... (san jose ca, so not even super cold/winter conditions)
--
Look at fuel prices right now - same fuckery about today: When the war started and fuel went to $90/barrel - the gas pump first time ever went to $3/gallon...
Look at fuel prices today $92/barrel --
$5.19 at the pump.
Yeah - FN BS.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pri_spt_s1_d.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000%E2%80%9301_California_ele...
20X increase in energy costs at that time
---
ELI5:
While you're speaking that SPOT crude remains relativistic constant/regular over time, may you please explain if this is true, what the cost increases at the pump are directly related to?
When I began driving, the spot price tracking you mention was the same, but the pump price was $.99/gallon for gas...
So, I admit I do not have an understanding of the reasons behind the price at the pump, but shouldn't that price match the same graph?
If not, please ELI5 how it now apparently costs 5X the cost to deliver gas to the pump?
Shouldnt any company be seeking economies at scale and more efficient everything - especially in OIL/GAS where they are really reliant on compute for the future success of their industry and the power of compute is 10,000X more powerful today than in 1990?
Yet - the pump always goes up...
(I'll go ahead and you're going to excuse it as "the cost of doing business/expenses have gone up)
If true, then why isn't toilet paper $50/roll? Trees are not going to replenish themselves at the same rate as our consumption... so shouldn't toilet paper be super expensive?
What is your opinion on the following video on the origins of oil and the origin of the term "Fossil Fuel" coined by Rockefeller:
https://youtu.be/vdSjyvIHVLw
1. your own article lists multiple non-eron related reasons for the crisis
2. AFAIK energy markets are the norm. state regulators might regulate the rates that retail customers pay, but the utilities are buying the electricity from the free market. Therefore the supply/demand dynamic when it comes to prices should already be factored in, which was why I was confused it was initially brought up.
>While you're speaking that SPOT crude remains relativistic constant/regular over time, may you please explain if this is true, what the cost increases at the pump are directly related to?
helpful page from eia.gov: https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/gasdiesel/
>When I began driving, the spot price tracking you mention was the same, but the pump price was $.99/gallon for gas...
obvious question: were you in the same state? taxes are baked into the gas price, so if you moved from texas to california, it wouldn't be surprising that your gas price went up for no reason.
>So, I admit I do not have an understanding of the reasons behind the price at the pump, but shouldn't that price match the same graph?
I went a step further and compared crude oil prices to retail gas prices (available from https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pri_gnd_dcus_nus_w.htm), and found that the ratio hovers at around 2, with that ratio being higher in the 80s/90s than today. While there's some fluctuation, it's nowhere close to the amounts implied by your anecdotes. Speaking of which, I find your anecdotes impossible to substantiate. Which state did you live in? When was "the war"?
>If true, then why isn't toilet paper $50/roll? Trees are not going to replenish themselves at the same rate as our consumption...
I'm not sure where you're getting that conclusion from, but pulpwood trees are effectively farmed. The growth cycles are longer than something like corn, but they're still planted/replenished at approximately the same rate they're cut. The deforestation stories you hear are largely from developing countries cutting down forest for development purposes.
Thus, I am happy to capitulate and learn from your insights as well.
So while the maths ratio sounds small... the Human ratio is much greater based on the buying power of a dollar-vs-salary of the avg buyer...
so while it may seem one-way, the reality for the buyer is much different...
Here is an anecdote:
My GF has worked at The French Laundry for several years...
The top rest in the world according to some...
She lives in Sonoma Ca and it costs her $5.19 per gallon of gas. She drives an modern car with good gas mileage.
She pays $70 to 3/4 fill her car and travels ~30 miles one way to commute to a job at the top restaurant in the world which pays her $12/hour.
The bill says "Service Included" which leads guests to believe that "TIP IS INCLUDED" -- and so people that pay $75,000 for a meal (including wine) often DONT TIP...
Because they believe that "Service" == "Tip" NOPE.
The point is, that her commute costs her ~half a weeks actual pay to pay for fuel.
The point being that we THINK that the ratio --> relation to buying power has been constant, or even better these days with higher wages, the reality in the wallet is not such.
Even with a great job, at one of the best companies in the world (supposedly) -- She still struggles with just filling her car with gas.
Fuck big oil.
>"Matt Crozat, senior director of policy development for the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), said the industry is "encouraged" by the creation of the credit program, but is still pushing for more permanent economic support."
The Nuclear Energy Institute looks like it's an just industry trade group that likely retains some powerful lobbyists.
I don't think there's a future where "energy policy" (a euphemism for subsidies/lobbying/permitting) ceases to exist.
If nuclear power is the least-worst of the industry trade groups, it should count for something.
However, it might behoove us to consider the wisdom in allowing the whims of "energy policy" to vaporize twenty-year, $10 billion infrastructure projects.
There's no reason prices should ever be negative... except for a lack of power sinks. If there were intermittent hydrogen production facilities, or direct air capture of carbon + a carbon market that rewarded that, the intermittency accounting quirk would correct itself.
That could be nice. Maybe if the DOE money helped with capital to build a direct air carbon capture system. Then the nuclear plants can sell credits to oil/gas based energy companies similar to how like Tesla sells its credits to other car manufacturers.
UK demand in winter is nearly 2x higher than summer (and will grow even more with switching gas heating to heat pumps), at the same time solar output is ~10% of that at summer. Wind energy is higher but is unpredictable and in very cold snaps (when demand is greatest) tends to result in very low wind output.
This problem is the biggest one to solve (and not sure how solvable it is). In essence it's possible to smooth out daily output with renewables, but annual output is very difficult. You are talking TWhs of storage requirement.
You might be misled by the apparent absence of installations for hydrogen grid storage, but understand that as long as natural gas is being used, it makes little sense to use hydrogen instead. That doesn't mean hydrogen can't work, it just means that natural gas (without CO2 charges) is for the moment cheaper.
Factories for iron-air storage are being built today, to start supplying grid-scale storage in 2023. Everybody knows the demand is there and will remain there, so there is plenty of capital for anything known to work. But it takes time to build out.
After costs shake out, build-out will concentrate on the cheapest alternatives, but everything already built will still work, and still be used, because the cost is capital cost. It will be a long time before the storage market is saturated and storage providers have to compete on prices.
BTW, if you object to hydrogen on these grounds, you must also object to nuclear on these grounds, and more strongly. This is especially the case if you imagine a nuclear powered world economy. You need to imagine a jump in technology more radical than for hydrogen storage -- either massive scale up of seawater uranium extraction (many orders of magnitude, from gram scale to megaton scale) or use of breeder reactors instead of burner reactors.
They all need enough storage to not need interconnection, and then rely on interconnection to reduce cost and drawdown from storage.
Probably the most effective use for African solar energy production will be synthesis of hydrocarbons to be delivered by supertanker to high latitudes in winter, and for aircraft fuel.
[1]: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...
All sources of power can have engineering challenges. Like the recent Texas blackouts where equipment related to the gas supply stopped due to the cold weather.
Common, but not the same. Nuclear power work efficiency (30-40%?) is typically lower than a gas turbine plant (60%?). So electrical watt for electrical watt, the nukes need far more cooling water.
Its something I've said before, you overbuild nukes, and use the excess capacity for water desalination, jet fuel production, CO2 recapture, or any other energy intensive process which creates a product that can be easily stored.
Nuclear energy is basically free once you have built the plant.
Maybe an interesting way to do this would be to give "power" grants to local students or universities - applications could be sent in with proposals and test projects and then those who are accepted would get access to free power during excess times and maybe also some kind of warehouse like workspace / nearby location. Could be a huge educational benefit and drive innovation.
It is a much, much better use of capital to build the others out, and the solar and wind, than to spend the money trying to bring those ramshackle contraptions out of retirement.
It used to be not-too-dishonest when compared to coal, but always was compared to hydro. Now we have solar and wind, besides.
Shocking.
Obviously, everyone who can store energy maxes out their battery banks during these times of negative-cost energy. The reason why prices are negative is because the sum of market participants still has a shortage of storage.
We have a shortage of storage because the amount of energy our grid uses is on a behemoth scale, barely comprehensible. Dozens-of-GW-hr pumped hydro stations fill up their storage to the brim on a constant basis.
That said, I'm not saying it'll completely solve the problem- just increase efficiency and reduce the problem.
As the fraction of capacity increases, the need for storage starts to rise. So, now we see big storage projects breaking ground, to come on line in the next few years. The amount of storage finally built will be astonishing to contemplate.
I am fully supportive of using whatever technology that gets us to a zero carbon grid as quickly as possible. And right now the most advanced research in this area is suggesting that renewables + storage is our best bet.
But because generating capacity is now so cheap, we can afford expensive storage construction. Storage typically has very low operating cost, but is just now expensive to build. So, it will be cheaper to build storage later, but anything built this year will continue operating.
As for cost of delivered energy from solar, there is a final reduction that can still be obtained even if the cost/watt were to plateau immediately: extension of the lifespan of the system. This could be obtained by, over time, identifying and addressing all the degradation modes of the components of the system.
But I also think you are mis-applying a mental model about the cost of manufactured goods to the cost of solar plant development. In a competitive free market, the cost of manufactured goods should eventually be reduced to a sum of their inputs plus any profit.
But solar development is inherently an exercise in value capture. The project developers are trying to capture as much value as possible for their investors. The only thing that matters is that solar stays competitive in the energy market. As long as that happens, someone somewhere in the value chain can try and capture more value as other costs decrease. For example, what is stopping land owners from raising rents for solar projects? Right now, land is relatively cheap because there is not a lot of competition for it. But there are only so many parcels that are near transmission lines with good geographical features, and I fully expect land prices to increase as solar penetration increases. But this is really just a guess.
If you are interested in current project cost breakdowns, figure 30 in this report does a pretty good job[1]. Module costs were the primary driver of cost reductions in the last 20 years. But they now account for only 40% of total project costs. So even if module prices fell by 50%, that would only result in a 20% decline in total project cost. While a 20% drop in prices would be nice, I don't think it really changes the math much with respect to nuclear (the math is already overwhelmingly in favor of solar).
Also, I do agree that the average lifespan of these systems are going to be much longer than 20 years and that has not been priced in. But I don't think that is going to really change things anytime soon. Financial models and risk models are incredibly crude instruments. Using them to model even 5 to 10 years in the future is already extending them well beyond what they were designed for. But we have to put an end date on these models because at some point every project is going to cease to exist. And 20 years is what the banks like, so that is what we use.
[1] https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/77324.pdf
I will note that there have been past attempts to call a floor in the cost of PV, for example the period from 2002-2007. That was not the floor.
Current cost breakdowns are nice, but don't show that costs can't be further reduced.
> For example, what is stopping land owners from raising rents for solar projects?
What stops them is the enormous quantity of land that's available. In the US, for example, land can be < 1% of the cost of a utility-scale PV installation.
A good analogy is landlords. Why do they raise rents instead of decrease rents? Because they want to profit, and because their costs increase over time due to inflation, and because the market will let them.
Here is another fun one. What happens if/when interests rates go up? We are at record low rates, and most solar projects are debt financed? How will higher rates impact project costs? The obvious answer there is that costs will go up.
> In the US, for example, land can be < 1% of the cost of a utility-scale PV installation.
As I mentioned, that is the case now, but it will likely not be in the future. The number of sites close to existing transmission lines, with good geographical features requiring minimal grading, low flood risk, low wildfire risk, low hurricane risk, etc... are going to diminish quickly as saturation increases. And when it comes to land, costs can go from reasonable to painful real quickly.
I am certainly rooting for costs to go down, as I think that is better for humanity. But I am not betting on it. Why do you think they are going to go down? I don't think you have made a good case for lower costs other than that is what has happened in the past.
So in total, Nuclear is just as reliant on grid inter-connectors as solar/wind to perform optimally.
The difference is that solar/wind are sooooo much cheaper you can now build solar/wind/interconnectors/storage and still come in cheaper than nuclear. No country in the world ever figured out how to build out nuclear power efficiently and in the last ten years the decline in solar/wind/storage costs has been astronomical.
That's why Nuclear is going nowhere. If we were to give storage plants subsidies at a level with what nuclear receives, there wouldn't even be a discussion about this.
If wind doesn't blow over Europe, you can have 15% overall capacity factor.
Wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, hydro, storage. Plus some nuclear if it is already built. That is what folks are recommending. If new build nuclear can compete, then great. But right now it can't, and models show we can get there without it.
Unclear what you are basing that on. Nuclear energy has by far the highest capacity factor of any energy source and its not even close:
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-power-most-reliab...
>...The difference is that solar/wind are sooooo much cheaper
The levelized cost for residential rooftop solar is higher than nuclear, but that cost doesn't matter?
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020
https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-leveliz...
Modern society is dependent on 100% reliable power. Even that relatively small blackout in Texas caused:
>...At least 246 people were killed directly or indirectly,[3] with some estimates as high as 702 killed as a result of the crisis.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
If we were to rely just on solar and wind, the low capacity factor would likely require massive grid storage. The only large scale grid storage we have at this point is pumped hydro and that isn't scalable. For example, one estimate is that for Germany to rely on solar and wind would require about 6,000 pumped storage plants which is literally 183 times their current capacity.
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/144985/1/cesifo1_wp5...
If making more grid storage was cheap and easy, we would have built it decades ago.
Overbuilding could alleviate some of this, particularly the natural variations in seasonal energy output, but obviously this would be a multiplier to the cost and it won't get more power from solar at night, etc.
As Bill Gates said in an interview: "…They have this statement that the cost of solar photovoltaic is the same as hydrocarbon’s. And that’s one of those misleadingly meaningless statements. What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what? The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this thing is. So false solutions like divestment or “Oh, it’s easy to do” hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated."
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need...
Gates is investing in 4th gen nuclear and energy storage companies so he is at least putting his money where his mouth is. The goal should be to decarbonize the electrical grid while maintaining the reliability we depend upon.
We don't have storage because we have not needed storage. Now that we are starting to need storage, storage is being built out. It will take time to build out, but the scale will be astonishing because the demand for it is very predictable and stable.
Gates is investing in nukes because it can be very profitable to make them. Not so much, using them. But there will always be pigeons.
Kind of misleading to make a blanket statement like that since it obviously depends on what you are comparing. Consumer rooftop solar was, is, and will likely continue to be much more expensive than hydrocarbon. Solar at noon in Arizona in July is cheaper. Solar at 3:00 AM in Arizona in July doesn't exist. Solar + storage is right now pretty comparable to hydrocarbon prices.
>We don't have storage because we have not needed storage.
With daily and seasonable variations in demand and the need to shut down plants for maintenance, storage would always have been preferred to having to generally over build and running peaker plants, etc. So if it was cheap or easy, we would have built a lot more of it already. Though grid storage is absolutely needed to scale up intermittent sources.
>...It will take time to build out, but the scale will be astonishing because the demand for it is very predictable and stable.
Hope so.
>...Gates is investing in nukes because it can be very profitable to make them.
That is an uncharitable interpretation.
They're cheap on sunny windy days. On a cold frosty night solar and wind are very expensive.
https://model.energy/
Why? Couldn't we just go all in on nuclear?
- You'll need to manufacture terawatt hours of batteries anyway to replace all the internal combustion cars on the road, regardless of whether you charge those cars with nuclear electricity or renewable electricity.
- Nuclear power plants make for very expensive peak generating resources. They're only affordable for covering the minimum ("baseload") demand that is always there on the electrical grid.
Consider demand on California's CAISO grid. On a hot summer day like 2019-08-15 air conditioning pushes the peak demand over 44 gigawatts. On the same day, the early predawn load is 20 gigawatts lower at 24 gigawatts. And on a cool day like 2022-02-06, the minimum demand is down to 16 gigawatts while the whole day average is well below 23. You can use the date picker to look at "Demand trend" for different days here:
http://www.caiso.com/todaysoutlook/pages/index.html
Only ~16 gigawatts of generating output will definitely get consumed all the time, but you still need to plan for those hot days that need 44+ gigawatts. It's theoretically possible to build 45 GW of reactors and use the full capacity for just a few hours a year, but that's very expensive. It's much more economical to have only 16 GW of reactors and use other electricity sources to meet higher demand, but that's bad for the climate when "other sources" includes fossil fueled power plants like it currently does. Nuclear plus storage would be much more affordable than using 100% nuclear without storage, and it would be cleaner than using fossil fuel peakers.
or maybe a small datacenter next to every nuclear plant that is doing some fancy modeling to further improve nuclear power plants?
“The high operating and maintenance costs of running a reactor can make them uneconomical in some markets”
And “sometimes they operate at a loss”
They’re specifically talking about operational costs and excluding upfront costs.
"The gas, which would otherwise have been burned off, is instead routed to a bitcoin processor.
For years, oil and gas companies have struggled with the problem of what to do when they accidentally hit a natural gas formation while drilling for oil. Whereas oil can easily be trucked out to a remote destination, gas delivery requires a pipeline. If a drilling site is right next to a pipeline, they chuck the gas in and take whatever cash the buyer on the other end is willing to pay that day. But if it’s 20 miles from a pipeline, drillers often burn it off, or flare it. That is why you will typically see flames rising from oil fields.
The process reduces CO2-equivalent emissions by about 63% compared to continued flaring.."
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/15/conocophillips-is-selling-ex...
A better solution would be to interconnect the electricity grid with neighbouring grids. With sufficient size, time-dependent peaks and troughs would be smoothed out.
People like to make noise about the impact of mining the materials needed for solar. Well, what about the impact of mining and refining uranium?
Their cost of construction per GW is not competitive with wind and solar - it's typically thousands of euros per kw. Whereas wind and solar can go from construction to energy production (and carbon paypback) on a timescale of months, nukes take years to build.
>Well, what about the impact of mining and refining uranium?
I'd be willing to wager significant money that on a MW for MW basis, the environmental impact is higher for solar just due to the energy density alone.
While I agree with you in general, the amount of uranium needed to run a power plant should be orders of magnitude smaller than is necessary to build and equivalent solar farm
But I do worry about the 8g/m^2 of cadmium mounted on top of houses some of which will burn down.
The United Nations Economic Commission For Europe released a report in 2021 on the life cycle emissions (including construction, operation, and decommissioning) of various power generation options and found nuclear to be the lowest overall at 5.5 gCO2eq/kWh [1].
[1] https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2021-10/LCA-2.pdf
Both uranium mining and renewables mining have issues - I'm not going to debate or compare them because I don't know enough about the topic but due to the energy density of uranium I wouldn't be surprised if nuclear was better overall
Cost is the real issue - the cost and timescales of nuclear reactors are massive issues, and they are significantly worse short-term investments than wind and solar.
However, energy storage is not a solved problem, so until it is nuclear is not competing with wind and solar - it is competing with gas and coal, to which it has advantages in almost every category (excluding cost)
Do you have sources for this? I completely concur that nuclear energy is too expensive, problematic and by now much too late to help with the climate crisis, but from what I found it is quite competitive with wind and solar in total CO2 emissions per kwh of energy (the numbers I found were all between 5 and 25 gram Co2/kwh for these three, compared to >500 for any fossil alternative).
This makes sense to me since turbines and panels also need to be manufactured, transported and installed, after all...
Long term that cost will go down, but it's always going to make the calculation much less simple than it seems at first glance, solar might be the cheapest form of power at the moment, but it's not the cheapest single source to run an electricity grid by a wide margin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Seawater_recove...
The problem with nuclear is an example of why deregulation was stupid. As a society of electricity consumers, we are sitting on lawn chairs on a railroad track with an electric train approaching us. It's obvious to anyone with a pulse that electric cars are ramping up and will displace the current fleet, and equally obvious that that operating model (plug in your car at night) will increase base load requirements.
So because we've detached planning from electrical generation and distribution, we have 50 different sets of cartels optimizing for short term returns on the spot market. The various electrical shit-shows in California and Texas are like failed-state levels of dysfunction. North of NYC, electrical supply rates are up 50% because we turned off a massive reactor complex and replaced it with volatile natural gas. We're decommissioning nuclear at a point in time just before we need it, environmentalists were bought by gas extraction people and Wall St. accounting is very bad at dealing with capital assets with 50-100 year lifecycles.
If you think about it the "energy storage" problem is absurd. Installing millions of inefficient distributed battery cells in potentially millions of buildings, for want of adequate electrical generation is beyond dumb, and the scale of waste and wasted value is staggering. It is solely a byproduct of a market designed to maximize producer profit.
This might be true in California but peak in Poland and many other places is after sun sets.
West facing panels help, but the ROI isn't as good without variable energy pricing.
It’s insane that the environmentalist movement is inadvertently supporting the fossil fuel industry due to their traditional stance on nuclear. Modern civilisation requires reliable base load and nuclear seems like the only viable option which satisfies both the reliability and globally accepted environmentally sustainable goals.
What? I don't think there are many environmentalists who "don't like rural people" and have a problem with pickup trucks used where they're appropriate ( like on a farm). In a country like the US, they're often abused as a suburban vehicle, which is a preposterous waste which deserves railing on against.
You can then safely lump that caricature in the same bucket as people with actual policy proposals, and ignore the latter outright.
Conversely, there's a lot of overlap between environmentalists and people who like to go outside and get off the beaten path. Driving in remote areas a lot pretty much necessitates having a truck. I've never heard any animosity from environmentalists towards truck owners who actually use their truck for truck things.
Even in this example alone you neglected to consider the number of trucks that are used to tow something. Say you need (or want!) to tow a heavy trailer once a month or every other month. Should you buy one vehicle that can do this, and then use it to commute 90% of the time, or should you buy two vehicles, and let one sit around unused most of the time?
Now what about the person that needs to haul some things? Surely a small trailer + SUV is superior to a truck? Not so fast: gotta store that trailer and be comfortable with it. My guess is for 95% of people, a truck for utility purposes is far superior.
Finally, newer trucks are actually surprisingly efficient. I just got 22mpg 360 miles round trip in my full ton pickup truck. Been shopping for minivans, aside from the rare hybrid minivan, they only get around 26mpg on highway.
Or maybe rent a vehicle if it's only for towing once every other month.. Unless renting costs upwards of 1k, it'd be many years before buying makes sense for usage once every other month.
e.g. I have a small fiesta - that's (nearly) perfect for my general use case, which is me commuting on my own, maybe a friend or two going out for lunch or whatever.
But a friend down the road has a jeep, I borrow that for camping (when I'm not going with them anyway) - same with "bulk" costco trips, or stopping by a landscaping store for garden stuff.
That makes it easier for him to justify keeping the jeep, especially as I'm not the only person who regularly takes advantage of it, while keeping costs down (I pay in gas and beer, no rental corporation skimming profits off the top).
I've been using carnextdoor.com.au for years when ever my motorbikes weren't enough to get around.
But if you're renting a car even for 1-2 days a week, it quickly cost as much it would have had for running costs and purchasing a car outright. The numbers below are all AUD.
I'm about to pick up a new Ute (Dmax XTerrain) thats going to cost $238 per week over 5 years for finance. With running costs on top of that I'm budgeting for $400 per week.
That's a rental car for 1.5-2 days.
Carnextdoor and rentals made sense when I didn't need a car weekly, just monthly. The new Ute is relatively inexpensive to run (4 cylinder turbo diesel), it's big, big compared to cars from Europe, not big for the US I'm sure.
But for me it definitely made sense to get a 4x4 that services all my needs rather than a 4x4 and another small car.
Admittedly I go camping a lot so my needs are a little different. And I have dogs now so going camping on my motorbikes isn't much of an option now.
On the other hand, commuting through a city can be done just as well or better by a car in every sense. 22mpg is terrible mileage compared to a modern car and the fact that it seems good reinforces my point of how wasteful it is to commute in a truck.
Also, 22mpg efficient. You gotta be kidding me. You should getting at least 35mpg before you can call yourself efficient. A Vauxhall Zafira (MPV) can do 41mpg. A smart car can do 67mpg.
The real problem is energy production. So completely asinine to push for fleet electrification while base load is provided by coal and natural gas.
I think the answer here is more general support for the poor. Progressive taxation, public transport, etc. That's politically difficult in the US of course. But it's surely the solution.
> The real problem is energy production.
That and energy consumption. IIRC the US consumes ~2x the energy per capita compared to Europe. Yes, we need greener production, but we could also do a lot by reducing consumptions.
Everything disproportionately harms poor people. It's practically the definition. To be poor is to have little power. So for any X you have less to bring to bear to avoid it.
The lifetime amount of fuel/electricity used by a vehicle generally accounts for only half of the total energy. The other half is in it's manufacturing and disposal/recycling.
And there's additional lost efficiency than just the mileage, because you're using twice the embedded energy and presumably aren't doubling the amount of driving you're doing.
Maybe rentals or sharing schemes work in some cases, but they present their own inefficiencies, like less than perfect allocation, and transferring vehicles back and forth for each switch.
But for the majority of cases, it's much more environmentally friendly to own one single vehicle that meets all of your needs, even if it's relatively inefficient.
The most efficient vehicle for any particular person is usually the one that's already been built. (Which is why cash for clunkers was actually a bailout with negative environmental impacts, despite its branding of improved efficiency.)
So it's additional supply of both material and embedded energy that otherwise could go to someone else, or wouldn't need to be spent until you were sending you old car off to be salvaged.
There's a time value to it as well, just like with amortized financials.
Think of it this way: if everyone used that strategy, we'd have twice as big of a vehicle market, requiring twice as much material and energy.
Even if you expect each vehicle to last twice as long, it all has to be paid for with capital costs up front. Both your cash out of pocket, as well as manufacturing capacity and energy/resource extraction.
You might get effective use efficiency of 50% for twice as long, but the overall cost in dollars, energy, and emissions is much greater because of amortization.
They focus on ideal outcomes over what we can realistically accomplish - I've had plenty of discussions where people just ignore the trillions in infrastructure we have baked into steel and concrete, as well as people habits and lifestyle - folks honestly seem to think that with enough political will you can just turn all of that off in 2-5 years.
As with everything in society, we didn't get here overnight, and turning a vast ship takes time.
The problems of pollution, climate change, etc are real. The science is clear.
Please don't make up an imaginary bad actor who has bad motivations for why they want to solve or improve some of these problems. This is a rhetoric device designed to distract people from the problems and solutions by getting them to dislike, distrust or hate the people trying to help.
Hydro?
The environmentalist movement, anti-nuke section, had little to nothing to do with the downfall of nuclear power. It was always and only economics, nothing else contributed to this. Nuclear is very complicated and thus very expensive, and this has nothing to do with regulations. Everything about generating power from nuclear is just expensive. If there was any opportunity to turn a profit with nuclear power, and I mean even the slightest margin of profit, you could not keep investors away, nor prevent nuclear power plants being built in every county in the country. There is a false narrative that supporters of nuclear energy seem to insist on perpetuating, which is that if the idiots would stop being so irrationally afraid of nuclear, we could have cheap, clean energy. This is a completely false position. The scardies have nothing to do with it. It is all and only economics that is killing nuclear power, and nothing else whatsoever enters into it.
I was all for nuclear power myself before I started seeing how infeasible it was to get us to carbon neutral with them. I'm still fine with any new nuclear power plants that want to be built but it looks like pretty much no one wants to invest in them anymore anyway.
"The cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per megawatt hour (MWh), the WNISR said, while onshore wind power comes in at $29–$56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112 and $189."
"Capital flows reflect that trend. In 2018, China invested $91 billion in renewables but just $6.5 billion in nuclear."[1]
"Nuclear power plant construction costs—mainly materials, labor, and engineering—rose by 185 percent between 2000 and 2007. More recently, costs have been increasing even faster: In mid-March, Progress Energy informed state regulators that the twin 1,100 MW nuclear plants it intends to build in Florida would cost $14 billion, which “triples estimates the utility offered little more than a year ago.”
Jim Harding, former direc tor of power planning and forecasting for Seattle City Light, estimates that nuclear plants constructed today would provide electricity at between 12 and 17 cents per kilowatt-hour. To put this cost into perspective, the average U.S. electricity price in 2006 was 8.9 cents per kWh, and well-placed wind turbines can produce electricity for less than 5 cents per kWh."[2]
"Study claims that investment in a new 1GW nuclear power plant leads to average losses of approximately 4.8 billion euros." [3]
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...
[2]: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/10-reasons-not-to-i...
[3]: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/07/24/nuclear-a-poor-invest...
Sadly, unless our future energy requirements have been vastly underestimated, economics is also going to make commercial-grade fusion unattainable. Like fission, it's development ultimately requires the vast sums only wealthy nations can provide. But even once fusion is achieved beyond breaking even, only those same wealthy nations will be able to pay, more likely massively subsidize, before any fusion power plant could dream about existing.
This is why I think society should abandon centralizing power generation and require all structures to generate they're own green power. While massively less efficient than centralized power generation and distribution, with clean energy generation like solar & wind, and necessary optimizations such as more efficient climate control, we can afford to be less efficient.
There was never a deregulation that happened. In fact deregulation is what's needed to revive nuclear power. Competition in the power market is illegal in most states.
Similar to the charter school scam, the scrappy upstarts bonded out lots of debt to buy up power plants and subsequently became a powerful lobby to keep their cartel tight.
Some of the remaining municipal energy co-op utilities were exempted from deregulation, and all of them have lower cost structures.
I know Massachusetts is a similar story, not sure about others.
Most of them are structured like real estate syndicates. It’s basically like building a strip mall or franchise hotel, except you have a captive customer and can leave the local taxpayer holding the bag. The educational mission is mostly a secondary concern. There are exceptions.
N.b. I don’t have kids, so this is mostly academic for me, no pun intended
As a result of that deregulation, the grid is often optimizing for cost, instead of reliability, which can lead to problems. Saving 5% on your power bill is great, but it's less great if the consequence is, say, not having any power one week of the year.
In the US, opposition to nuclear energy is more like opposition to homeless shelters - people don't want the plants near them. I don't think environmentlists are that powerful politically as to significantly impact the trajectory of nuclear power policies in the US, otherwise, they would have the power to significantly impact climate change policies too.
Besides, what I have seen is that environmentalists are pretty divided in term of nuclear energy. There are strong opponents like green peace and Sierra clubs, there are strong supporters and there are many who are ambivalent. This further reduces their political power as a group.
I think nuclear energy supporters should stop blaming environmentalists as they are pretty much non-factor if they want nuclear power.
> Nuclear power is dirty, dangerous and expensive. Say no to new nukes. > > Nuclear energy has no place in a safe, clean, sustainable future. Nuclear energy is both expensive and dangerous, and just because nuclear pollution is invisible doesn’t mean it’s clean. Renewable energy is better for the environment, the economy, and doesn’t come with the risk of a nuclear meltdown.
The Sierra Club's [2]:
> The Sierra Club continues to oppose construction of any new commercial nuclear fission power plants. Further, the Sierra Club supports the systematic reduction of society's dependence on nuclear fission as a source of electric power and recommends a phased closure and decommissioning of operating commercial nuclear fission electric power reactors.
[1] https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/fighting-climate-chaos/issues...
[2] https://www.sierraclub.org/policy/energy/nuclear-power
It strikes me that transitioning to electric cars could become less viable the more we rely on renewables+batteries, as grid scale battery storage could hugely exacerbate shortages of battery materials.
Though on the other hand grid batteries would also spur more research into battery tech which could change the game for both grid & mobile batteries.
It seems like a huge gamble commiting to grid storage in the hopes of big innovations down the road instead of doubling down on baseload nuclear.
If you’re a courier or something you’re exempt.
No, this is the opposite of what is true. In most places, load peaks in the evening, just as the sun sets.
Looking up the data [1], the more nuanced answer is that load peaks in in the evening in the fall, winter, and spring. Only in the summer does solar energy match load.
1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
[1] https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-systems/electricity/national-e...
[2] https://i.imgur.com/60kGlIR.png
[3] https://i.imgur.com/nRjBjeN.png
[1]: https://opennem.org.au/
The issue is no states, cities, population want to issue permits to build them. Its political to the point no one will touch it.
It's not as clear cut. Cold start up and shut down of nuclear reactors take time, but there's lot of in between and nuclear still has quite a lot of flexibility: for instance, you can quickly modulate the power output down to 50% without special considerations (you can also go lower, but then it starts using the uranium quicker[1]), or you can even go off while staying hot and in pressure, which means only the fission divergence needs to be redone, this is usually done during the week-end.
And keep in mind that modern (= high yield) fossil plants also have limited flexibility: a supercritical coal plant takes a lot of time to warm up, and so does a CCGT.
[1]: or more precisely, since the power is controlled by top-down control rods, you end up burning uranium in the bottom more than in the top, which means replacing the fuel earlier.
As far as electrical output is concerned, nuclear power is just as variable as any other turbine based power generation system. Just divert the steam away from the turbines and you are no longer making electricity. Therefore, through creative plumbing, you could easily adjust the amount of power generated by controlling how much steam is going to the turbine. The issue is that while you are diverting steam, you are wasting money by running the reactor.
A nuclear reservation is generally a good place to lay out solar and wind arrays, whether the plant itself still operates or not.
Also, what you're saying can be done by, for example, electrolysis of water to make hydrogen. I'm currently working on fuel cells that can be operated in reverse; that is they generate electricity from fossil fuels when needed (at very high efficiency) but absorb excess electricity by producing hydrogen.
Really what you're proposing is accomplished more efficiently by stored energy. The problem is that we've tapped out the easy ways to redistribute load, or store energy decades ago.
We are going to need to figure out how to handle more intense seasonal weather in the south east US. Florida has already done a decent job hardening their transmission lines and making sure their grids can stand up to cat 5 storms (the way they weathered Irma was incredible, compared to Maria in Puerto Rico just weeks later) but transmission lines are easier to replace than generators.
Then, transmitted power is cheaper, but storage serves when transmission drops. The effect is amplified when transmission is from or through another country.
The power not stored though is of course still just a problem in general for efficiency sake - I wonder if there is something we could pair with nuclear plants that would use the otherwise wasted energy to accomplish something productive.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-06/fy-22-bud...
Fusion has no practice reason to exist compare to advanced fission. The improvements in energy density are not really relevant factor at that scale, meaning the difference from oil to fission, and oil to fusion doesn't really gain you much.
Fusion fuel cost over the long term is likely more expensive then a fission fast breeder (not to mention a potential of thorium thermal breeder).
Is a fusion reactor going to be cheaper to build then a advanced fission reactor? Not from anything know so far. Advanced fission concept are viable with pretty normal tubes pretty industrial steels or at most advanced aerospace materials. Any fission reactors actually consider would have waste more complex and expensive parts.
The nuclear waste argument is sometimes made in favor of fusion but with the right kind of fission reactor this problem and issue that has very viable practical solutions and storage for a few hundred years is viable.
Sometimes nuclear proliferation is held up as a reason why fusion is good, but that argument doesn't really work either once you think threw it. Access neutrons of fusion can certainty be used for all kind of things.
Are fusion reactors inherently safer? That's questionable. To come up with a scenario where a modern molten salt breeder (or even molten salt reactor) leads to massive safety hazards for anything outside the exclusion zone is very hard to imagine.
The scenarios you have to come up with for both fusion or advanced fission to be massive safety concerns are both possible and incredibly unlikely.
My approach would be to do something like NASA did for Commercial and Crew, have competitive fixed price competition between a group of providers and offer the 2-3 winners of them at least 2 deployments.
Could you, though? Look at the "Nuclear Energy" category. It is entirely devoted to fission reactor research and has a 1.85 Bn USD budget. That's a SPARC every year. Where are the LFTRs on the grid?
Advanced fission is, by contrast, just wildly uncompetitive, and getting more so every day.
What exactly is inherently expensive.
From first principle, total resources invested, advanced nuclear wins by a huge amount. The same goes for land use.
A single building with a modern nuclear reactor in it could replace a gigantic wind-farm.
A billion dollars buys a GW of solar panel generating capacity today. Another billion buys plenty of storage. No NRC approval, no containment vessel, no disaster plan. You can start generating power almost immediately, while you are still building out. Prices continue falling the whole time you are building, so the last panel you put up costs half what the first did. It all fits well within the exclusion zone of a typical nuke reservation. You can put up wind turbines too. And keep adding panels, paying for them with income from ones already up.
That is just complete nonsense.
I think you are mixing up standard light water technology with nuclear power.
A common mistake but also complete nonsense.
I would highly advice you actually study nuclear power and nuclear reactor technology.
I believe the same as you do now because I was ignorant about the technology, the I actually engaged with it.
> If you got approval to build one, you would get no power for ten years, minimum.
Again, this is not even true for PWRs if you built more then 1 every other decade.
And the type of reactors I am talking about are totally different and require less then 10% the amount of resources and far smaller build project. They have no cooling towers and don't use any low heat steam power.
A single factory mass producing nuclear modular nuclear vessels has a far higher potential energy density then anything else imaginable. The first principles are not really in question.
Throwing money at problems warms up the industries around them. No one will get good at making HTS tapes unless they can pay to keep the lights on. Also, the plasma physics research is far from complete. Study of burning plasmas (coming with ITER) and different configurations of optimized stellarators (coming never?) are important places to shine the flashlight on.
We aren't on the home stretch, but that isn't a reason to stop, slow down, or even not speed up.
Agreed, I'm very pro fusion but at this point you have companies like Commonwealth Fusion that have raised multibillion dollar amounts on their own so maybe that's a more viable path than DOE/NSF Grants to Universities?
CFS has a path to be profitable even if they don't make a blueprint for reactors. Research needs high field magnets and they're positioning themselves to be the supplier of them.
Is this really the case though when Tech Startups routinely go public without ever turning a profit and with no clear vision on how they eventually will?
But none of the money will vanish: every penny goes into a ready pocket.
A nuke industry without pervasive corruption would have very different economics. But corruption is very hard to root out, particularly when it has instead been made wholly legal.
If you never properly fund something then you shouldn't be surprised if it never happens.
https://fire.pppl.gov/us_fusion_plan_1976.pdf
Obviously the 1976 chart did not have inflation data from 1976 to 1998, so you can see why we are below Logic I even though the budget is close to 500 M.
The entire PPPL FIRE site is a treat for anyone with some time on their hands.
http://firefusionpower.org/
In my comment I mentioned Magnets being a current barrier, in that case funding in Materials Science or EE would be more relevant and the 500M Fusion Funding number is irrelevant.
Plasma physics is a large task in fusion energy science, but it is not the only task. FES being the motivator of those materials research ventures means money in FES goes into those areas.
If the money poured into fusion for the past N decades had gone into solar and storage, good cheap solar panels would have come out decades earlier, and we would have already built out our clean power system. But the fossil companies did not want that.
There will never be a commercially competitive Tokamak fusion power plant.
Also, some tips on making convincing arguments: making baseless and unfounded speculations on alternate histories with not even a whiff of empiricism is not going to convince anyone. Additionally, saying "something won't work" without articulating why it won't work isn't helpful.
I've heard the power density arguments. It's a 40 year old argument that does not hold up in a world with HTS magnets and optimized stellarators.
If you increase the power in the same vessel is that not increasing the power density?
But no, the fundamental limit on power density in DT fusion doesn't come from plasma physics, it comes from engineering (specifically, limits on power/area on the first wall, coupled with minimum reactor size set by the cross section of neutrons w. blanket materials). You might have a sufficiently sucky design that can't even reach that limit, but once you reach it all the improvement in plasma physics or magnetic fields you can imagine doesn't help.
Panels have been viable for decades already. Storage is an entirely different problem.
>But the fossil companies did not want that.
Then they would really hate Fusion which would probably put every energy company on the planet out of business.
>There will never be a commercially competitive Tokamak fusion power plant.
Seems a bold claim.
It is not bold to say, about relative costs, that (n > 1) implies (10n > 1), when n is itself reliably increasing.
It would be akin to AI researchers saying that if only they had more funding they could create an AGI this decade despite fundamental unknowns about how to build something like that in the first place.
You doubt that investment wouldn't accelerate the development of those areas? So HTS discoveries and mass production fall out of the sky? No, they take money. Given money they, demonstrably, are developed.
HTS is the sexy success story because it has been critical path, but other areas of engineering research have been known and the critical path for development has not changed in 50 years.
Also, PPPL's 1976 report is a report to the government and public. It was not written by bureaucrats.
Most of that is paid in-kind, which means domestic manufacturing of components sent to ITER, so it's a bit like a stimulus. The US has also (famously) regularly failed to put in what they budget for, even in the past ten years having some years where they contribute less than half of what they agreed to.
https://science.osti.gov/-/media/budget/pdf/sc-budget-reques...
86 M USD cash, 220 M USD in-kind. The 450 M USD FES budget does not include in-kind contributions. I don't actually understand the accounting here.
What is this mysterious storage that you speak of?
A reservoir for the latter requires a river collecting water from a large area watershed, and a dam lower down backing water up the river course.
Hydro storage requires only an elevated basin, and a pipe (penstock) leading up to it from a ready source of water -- even groundwater -- no watershed needed. Such basins are legion, and filling them typically discomfits no one.
People consider 'nuclear' to be nuclear built many decades ago with technology principles from even a few decades earlier.
Building something that has such long term aspirations is inherently problematic.
At the same time, if you turn them off, how much of the replacement will be fossil?
If you actually had a carbon price, would they still not be competitive?
Nuclear is truly in a sad state. And those reactors if turned down can't easily be replaced with any next generation designs because they don't exist as a practical product right now.
I think in 100 years people will laugh at as saying things like 'They had all the technology needed back then, why did they use it so badly'? I think that future will be nuclear fission powered, and not sun and solar powered.
Next generation has two approaches, some try to be very adaptable, scaling up and down quickly. Its not like nuclear isn't capable of that if you have the right reactor. But of course you would prefer to run at 100% most of the time.
Other companies basically use a solar salt coolant loop as a heat sink and battery. Basically reusing the technology from Concentrated Solar Plants.
Moltex Energy for example basically expect basically a default 1h battery and then depending on the costumer and where you deploy it you can have a larger battery and a bigger turbine. You should be able to basically mix and match the size of your heat battery and your turbine.
I could also imagine something like Form Energy Iron batteries just sitting right next to a nuclear plant and simply charging those and saving energy in the form as electricity instead of in heat.
Every life on earth, was always sun powered. I doubt that fundamentally changes.
"They had all the technology needed back then, why did they use it so badly'?"
But I agree to that. The technology is there.
Did you know, that you can make batteries in bulk with no rare elements, with just iron, copper and saltwater?
And also, that you can transport electricity over long distances and that we have abundance of sunny desserts?
(and many more concepts of solar power generating, than just solar panels)
But sure, alternativly we can also build thousands of nuclear reactors, that contaminate their environment for a long time if they fail badly. I mean, fission is an quite awesome technology, which at some point of progress probably can handled safely under normal circumstances. But just because of unsolved human social dynamics alone (aka terrorism), it is maybe not very wise to scale them up and spread them everywhere.
But whether solar or nuclear - the main problems that remain, are that in most parts of the world, it is still way cheaper to just burn coal and oil.
We would not have this problem today if Ronald Reagan and his political heirs had not killed alternative power investment decades back.
And solar and win power were simpy not ready, no matter what Reagan did.
The simple fact is, green CO-2 free power grids were possible, and they were done in the 80s by France.
The reality is both parties turned essentially anti-nuclear because of the backlash in the 70s.
But Jimmy Carter was a trained nuclear engineer. He was well qualified to understand their true value. Or lack of it. He put solar panels up on the White House roof. Reagan scrapped them.
Reagan, of course, was not qualified to understand much of anything besides PR. But did, that.
Are we seriously gone pretend things like putting solar panel on the white house and putting so much emphasis on that was more likely to save CO2 anytime soon?
And it was in fact under Nixon and more under Carter that a number of nuclear efforts were stopped and replaced with things that had absolutely no chance of having great returns anytime soon.
I'm not saying Reagan was better, he clearly didn't turn that ship around. But the assertion that if it wasn't for him we would live in a CO2 free paradise because of carters investment in solar is totally delusional.
I am clearly talking about electricity generation on earth. Seem like a totally unnecessary thing to say as you knew very well in what context I said it.
> But I agree to that. The technology is there.
There is a very large gap been established principles science and commercial license.
> Did you know, that you can make batteries in bulk with no rare elements, with just iron, copper and saltwater?
Yes I know all about companies like Form Energy and many other battery startups.
But if we are actually honest, most of those are not deployed. Most grid batteries deployed today are still Li-Ion.
> And also, that you can transport electricity over long distances and that we have abundance of sunny desserts?
Yes, but all those things come at a cost. Localized energy presentation has been the principle and it made a lots of sense. Starting to in far more long distance energy line and local distribution of that energy had a number of disadvantages.
> But whether solar or nuclear - the main problems that remain, are that in most parts of the world, it is still way cheaper to just burn coal and oil.
That is why I fundamentally believe in nuclear, based on first principles it has the potential to be cheaper. There is no inherent reason a nuclear plant need to be more expensive then coal plant. And nuclear fuel should be cheaper then coal in the long term.
Nuclear plants can be put on a ship or floating platform and put right next to most of the large coast bound cities in Asia. Alternatively you can just go to a place with a coal plant put a nuclear plant there instead.
I just don't see those nations build a distributed networks of solar and wind and battery connected across long distances.
Places like Indonesia are massively expanding with coal, their population lives on the coast.
Because the price of lithium was low enough, to not bother. Now that has changed, so they will become broadly avaiable very soon. And it is not like there is any technological brakethrough required. You can build and order them today. It is more about adopting production processes to it, to make them cheaper than lithium based batteries. But I heard the argument too often, that batteries are not a solution, because of rare earth elements, which is why I brought it up.
"Yes, but all those things come at a cost. "
And yes, they do. The price for renewables is a massive investment in the grid. And the price for nuclear is safety. As far as I know, no private insurance company is willing to take that risk, which is why the states have to step in.
The worst thing that can happen with batteries is a fire (and most saltwater based batteries are actually quite fire proof)
The worst thing that can happen with a swimming nuclear plant is widespread contamination for decades.
It is still advised against eating too many mushrooms or boar meat in my area (central europe), because of one incident 35 years ago, happening 1000 km away.
Just like there isn't in advanced nuclear and yet you 100% believe that will happen but reject that the same can happen in nuclear.
Funny how that works. Both relay on a advanced chemical process that have to be correctly controlled.
The advantage is that a few 1000 nuclear plants can power the whole world, when we are talking about Form Energy style batteries we literally need 1000000s large locations to provide the kind of stability need for a global grid that only gets powered by solar/wind.
What happens when a volcano darkness the sun for a few weeks? Everything including transportation will be standing still. You better have a few weeks of backup energy. Storing the global need for 1 weeks worth of energy alone is almost unimaginable task. Specially once all flight transportation and industrial heat 100% depend on availability of electricity.
> It is still advised against eating too many mushrooms or boar meat in my area (central europe), because of one incident 35 years ago, happening 1000 km away.
Yes and that is total nonsense pushed by vastly overzealous over-reaction and fear mongering driven by absurd low tolerance level having been written into law to make nuclear almost impossibly expensive.
I'm central European and I have eat a lot of boar meat and I'm fine.
The actual reality is far more people have been killed by oil, gas and coal then nuclear, its not even close. The single largest nuclear accident in the history of the earth lead to the premature death of about 1500 people based on the best most authoritative report.
And of course that design has literally nothing to do with the designs I'm advocating. Its like saying 'don't ever get into a plain, somebody once build a zeppelin and wanted to fly it by making a hole in the hull and light they hydrogen stream out on fire'.
Go and actually study advanced modern nuclear reactors and tell me how they can lead to mass death. I would argue to come up with a viable case for major damage you would basically need terrorist working together with 2 massive natural disasters and even then its likely gone kill less people then a gas pipeline explosion.
Its nothing but fear mongering about technology people don't understand. Molten Salt reactor can not even produce a reaction like happen at Fukushima let alone the what happened Chernobyl.
https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/origin-energy-to-b...
No sign of a nuclear reactor in sight.
So not very surprising they are not being built there.
Coal could be Nuclear too in this regard.
And if nuclear had really involved at all since the 1970s nobody would even think about deploying solar and wind.
Next generation nuclear plant based on first principle analysis have no reason to be more expensive. The reality is such plants can run with little human intervention for potentially decades and the total land and materials requirements are not very large.
The fuel has the potential to be essentially free as thorium is a waste product and if you can run on natural uranium its also basically free.
The key is reducing the total investment to build a plant and the time it takes to build it. Both are very likely if you build plants that are only 1/10 the size and require far less safety and cooling equipment while being able to run on commercial turbines from gas and coal.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil_C._Summer_Nuclear_Gener...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal
At the very least, you should compare life-cycle $/MWh, not $/GW.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
Looking at the older report from 2018, we can see costs for plants entering service in 2022:
https://web.archive.org/web/20181227232223/https://www.eia.g...
In 2018 the LCOE for new nuclear built in 2022 was estimated at $92.60/MWh while that from solar PV was estimated at $63.20 (before tax credits) or $49.90 (after tax credits).
The newer report with projections for 2026 shows that both nuclear and solar PV get tax credits, and at that time the nuclear tax credit is actually larger. The after-tax LCOE is $30.43 for solar PV and $70.59 for nuclear.
The earliest report in this series was from 2016. The AP1000 reactors currently under construction in the US started building before 2016, back when solar was considerably more expensive. The decision to build new AP1000 reactors was economically rational given the then-current costs of solar and the then-projected costs of new reactors. The reactor projects went tremendously over budget and utility scale PV costs subsequently plummeted, so building new reactors in South Carolina today would be a much more dubious choice, but I don't fault the decisions made back then.
In 2020 in the United States, utility scale solar PV had a capacity factor of 24% while nuclear power had a 92% capacity factor:
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
Both are compatible with agriculture. Agricultural productivity under partial solar cover is higher than without, for less water input. Pasture is probably the easiest to make compatible, and there is a very great deal of pasture, although little of it is irrigated. The prospect of less irrigation need will drive solar onto more intensive cropland.
Solar and wind seem, thus far, relatively immune to corruption. Most storage methods should be, too. It seems to be because easy estimation of incremental cost leaves little scope for corruption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra?oldformat=true
> Solyndra executives misled federal officials to obtain $535 million in government-backed loans, with the help of former President Barack Obama's White House.
I haven't heard of much large scale wind projects. Most smaller scale corruption happens at the local level and rarely makes the news.
But the Wikipedia page does not in fact include any "misled federal officials" language, quoted above as if it were from there. It says, instead, "Ultimately, none of the investigations of Solyndra found any evidence of wrongdoing or undue political influence." Sometimes a business failure is just a business failure. I have not heard of any multi-billion dollar solar failures or cost overruns as are the norm for nukes.
Most wind projects are large scale, yet buy their turbines on the open market. Again, I have not heard of any big cost overruns or non-delivery.
Solar concentrator projects have not paid back investment because they have turned out to be uncompetitive, same as Solyndra, undercut by the staggering fall in cost of conventional photovoltaics. Their natural value would be for process heat, which I have not heard of being tried.
The problem with current regulation is that power is treated like a fungible commodity when it is not.
Base load should be priced separately from peak and intermittent generation.
Being slow to start up will be a huge competitive disadvantage. Most storage providers will need a stock of front-end batteries, but there might need to be regulatory support for baseline capacity storage.
If it keeps on moving, regulate it.
If it stops moving, subsidize it.