"Capacity additions of renewables need to triple from 2022 levels by 2030, reaching around 1 200 GW annually, representing on average 90% of new generation capacity each year"
Can someone provide more context? The United States already produces a lot of electricity so the “new” electricity is likely a small fraction of the existing amount. That’s why it’s always the feel good headline of “new electricity”
Today new electricity is tomorrow old electricity. We are playing the long game here.
A sub-1.5 degree scenario (I initially wrote credible but who am I kidding there is no credible sub-1.5 degree scenario) requires significant energy for both transportation and decarbonisation. This energy needs to be produced without emitting more carbon. That requires massive investment in non-carbon emitting energy production now.
In 2022 American production of coal generated electricity was down to 854 terawatt hours from its peak of 2,016 terawatt hours in 2007. It's declining even more this year:
In our March Short-Term Energy Outlook, we forecast the wind share of the U.S. generation mix will increase from 11% last year to 12% this year. We forecast that the solar share will grow to 5% in 2023, up from 4% last year. The natural gas share of generation is forecast to remain unchanged from last year (39%); the coal share of generation is forecast to decline from 20% last year to 17% in 2023.
This is a dramatic decline in coal as a percentage of the electricity mix and in absolute consumption terms.
There's a graph of historical American electrical sources here going back to 1950:
You can see how the big brown wedge at the bottom (coal) peaked and then declined. Replacing coal was financially attractive in the US because the bulk of coal plants were already decades old by 2007 and starting to reach natural end-of-life. It will take longer for global coal consumption to decline because other parts of the world have built more coal plants in more recent years, and the purely financial breakeven point for plant replacement (neglecting pollution externalities) is further in the future.
The role of gas in replacing coal in the US is now diminishing and could be over in the coming years. The FERC "Energy Infrastructure Update for December 2022" [1] reports that between 2021 Jan - 2022 Dec Wind and Solar additions exceeded those of Natural gas. FERC also predicts that between Jan 2023 and Dec 2025 Natural Gas will add a net amount of 511MW of generating capacity. This compares with 18211 MW of Wind and 74642 MW of Solar. These are listed as "High Probability" additions, which I've been unable to find a description for.
Globally the situation is bad. China and India may decarbonise faster than they are. However, if the world continues increasing how much solar and wind can be installed, hopefully the situation improves.
Whilst it's a drop in the bucket, the previously coal dominated Australia electricity sector is seeing a steep decline in coal generation [2], showing it is possible.
Because to eliminate non-sustainable baseload power the US electricity grid doesn't have enough cheap local energy storage, transmission losses are significant over inter-regional distances, and we don't have enough cross-continent transmission capacity.
Right now there's no sustainable source for baseload power. Perhaps SPARC/ARC will change that in 20 years, or perhaps continuing advances in energy storage will let us store excess energy while the sun shines and the wind blows and use that stored energy as reliable baseload power.
Wind power is really cheap. Electrical utilities are now comfortable with it and don't consider it an experimental technology. The profit margins are quite healthy. As soon as there's an economically profitable way to store 120 hours of regional electricity usage, most utilities will jump towards that over continuing to buy expensive fuel for their current baseload plants. Right now the marginal costs of natural gas and coal power are cheaper than energy storage, and the service / operational risks are well known and well-controlled vs. the scary operational unknowns of advanced energy storage solutions. Not talking about environmental risks; utility companies don't really give a damn about those, even if a lot of their employees personally do.
Still, it's depressing and confusing that we know the stakes and are still putting money into the status quo (natural gas) instead of racing to solve these problems. I get that people need power now and not later, but power companies are also supposed to be thinking long-term, and their new natural gas plants may very well be stranded assets or simply banned in the next 10-20 years.
I'll repost this from another comment reply as it indicates that, in the US, money is not going to natural gas for electricity generation:
The FERC "Energy Infrastructure Update for December 2022" [1] reports that between 2021 Jan - 2022 Dec Wind and Solar additions exceeded those of Natural gas. FERC also predicts that between Jan 2023 and Dec 2025 Natural Gas will add a net amount of 511MW of generating capacity. This compares with 18211 MW of Wind and 74642 MW of Solar. These are listed as "High Probability" additions, which I've been unable to find a description for.
> we don't have enough cross-continent transmission capacity
There's a simple reason for that - it costs roughly $1 million per mile to build new transmission and requires lawyers and real estate people working in multiple jurisdictions. Only the largest of utilities are able to afford this investment and commit the required resources.
Even that's not enough - you still need to solve the so-called Community Energy Storage problem. You need a buffer between the generation and consumption of power so that they can vary from one another. That's even more investment.
> Right now there's no sustainable source for baseload power.
To push back on this, there is a centurys' old technology for this in hydro. There's also an emerging field of geothermal.
The Pacific Northwest (both sides of the border) has an abundance of hydropower that was installed decades ago and provides clean, reliable, baseload power.
Geothermal has its challenges, especially at utility scale where geographic location is important and not typically close to population centers. On a smaller scale it is not geographically a problem, but not as economically viable for individual homeowners. It makes more sense when a large corporate is investing in it [1].
Hydropower is generally renewable but really is not considered sustainable. I know I slipped that in and moved the goalpost because TFA is titled "renewable" but I said "sustainable" on purpose. So your comments on hydro are fair, and I'm glad you brought it up because it's an important discussion to be had.
Geothermal completely slipped my mind! facepalm Obviously the consensus view is that geothermal is sustainable. I have some mild concerns about how many years a installation in a non-geologically/thermally active area can run before it changes the temperature of its lithic heat sink enough to significantly reduce power output, but many installations are proving the success of the technology overall, and that's more an economic challenge (lifetime/ROI of installation) than a question of sustainability.
> Hydropower is generally renewable but really is not considered sustainable.
Unfamiliar readers have to note that here sustainable is not used in its normal meaning but in the one used by some environmentalists. Hydropower can definitely be sustained indefinitely. It does cause flooding in some area previously I flooded and disturbs fish which some people view as an issue.
It’s really hard to have a good discussion about climate change because some people constantly push unrelated agenda into the mix.
That’s exactly what sustainable means: “able to be maintained at a certain rate or level”.
And even in the specific meaning you are pushing, the actual impact of hydro is questionable. Until you take a die hard position that no ecosystem whatsoever should be disturbed the benefit vs loss analysis is more than compelling.
To push back on the push back, being in Quebec, I always thought we were safe because of the Hydro (we're at 98% Hydro power - really this and the abundant supply of water are why I still stay here), but it looks like we're hitting the limit and will have trouble meeting demand in 10 years time [0], especially considering exports to New York and other northeast states.
Also, dams are expensive. You're looking at $2B per project, at least here, and you need to flood an immense amount of land.
Really, we should get over our paranoia and lift the artificial hurdles on nuclear so the plants can be built faster and cheaper. Or, at least in the states, bite the bullet and leverage your extensive gas fields to develop a solar industry [1]
Thanks for linking those sources. I think this is the key part of the article:
> increased demand over the coming years, including data centres, cryptocurrency miners and greenhouses.
Price them out. Don't give sweetheart deals to uses that aren't beneficial to the local economy. Additionally, these uses don't necessitate baseload. Crypto should be using cheap, renewable variable power sources. I'm genuinely curious what greenhouses means in this case. Heating indoor crops in the winter? Geothermal would be more effective for this. [1]
These have to be manned? Like 24/7 or...how much human labor is involved here? What % of salmon make it into human hands and through these tubes?
Earlier attempts at fish ladders saw rates as low as like 3% for certain species of fish, per ladder/dam. Even if 50% of salmon got up them, if they have to pass 5 of them on the way to the spawning ground that meant 97% of salmon wouldn't make to the spawning grounds.
Also, obviously, the ecological effects aren't just "tasty fish can't make babies". The impact on seasonal floodplains and sedimentation is huge by itself.
I do refuse to. I understand the statistics favor fission's overall safety record, but I've read Voices from Chernobyl[0] and I'm not okay with the costs of what happens when control is lost / the facility is subjected to violence. I'm not okay with how long an area is uninhabitable after a major contamination, and how food grown around Chernobyl continued(s?) to poison unknowing people around Europe for many years and this contamination is covered up by Putin's henchman in Belarus[0]. I do understand that it's better than coal after factoring in all effects of air pollution. But I don't believe that's the dichotomy when we have other options to invest in wind and solar, which carry infinitely less risk.
> He was producing stool 25 to 30 times a day. With blood and mucous. His skin started cracking on his arms and legs. He became covered with boils. When he turned his head, there'd be a clump of hair left on the pillow. I tried joking: "It's convenient, you don't need a comb." Soon they cut all their hair. I did it for him myself. While I was there with him, they wouldn't, but when I left—they photographed him. Without any clothes. Naked. One thin little sheet on top of him. I changed that little sheet every day, and every day by evening it was covered in blood. I pick him up, and there are pieces of his skin on my hand, they stick to my hands. I ask him: "Love. Help me. Prop yourself up on your arm, your elbow, as much as you can, I'll smooth out your bedding, get the knots and folds out." Any little knot, that was already a wound on him. I clipped my nails down till they bled so I wouldn't accidentally cut him. None of the nurses could approach him; if they needed anything they'd call me. [After he died] They had to cut up the formal wear, too, because they couldn't get it on him, there wasn't a whole body to put it on. It was all—wounds. The last two days in the hospital—I'd lift his arm, and meanwhile the bone is shaking, just sort of dangling, the body has gone away from it. Pieces of his lungs, of his liver, were coming out of his mouth. He was choking on his internal organs. I'd wrap my hand in a bandage and put it in his mouth, take out all that stuff. It's impossible to talk about. It's impossible to write about. And even to live through. It was all mine. My love. They couldn't get a single pair of shoes to fit him. They buried him barefoot.
...
After that, in the maternity ward, the skin started coming off my hands. My veins swelled up. And I was so indifferent to everything. I didn't want to get out of bed. [Cries] I'd get to the hospital and then turn around. By then I was pregnant myself.
N.B.: The baby she was pregnant with, due to extremely rapid cellular growth, saved her from the radiation she received from performing bedside hospital care for her late husband, because the baby absorbed most of the radioactive elements. After his birth, the child Andrei died as a young schoolboy, essentially sacrificing his life for his mother, after spending half his life sick, reportedly very ill two weeks every month.
> In Belarus, very little has changed since these interviews were conducted. Back in 1996, Aleksandr Lukashenka was the lesser-known of Europe's "last two dictators." Now Slobodan Milosevic is on trial at The Hague and Lukashenka has pride of place. He stifles any attempt at free speech and his political opponents continue to "disappear." On the Chernobyl front, Lukashenka has encouraged studies arguing that the land is increasingly safe and that more and more of it should be brought back into agricultural rotation. In 1999, the physicist Yuri Bandazhevsky, a friend and colleague of Vasily Borisovich N...
It sounds gruesome sure, but coal mines have had more gruesome accidents.
They do say that newer nuclear plants simply will not have a Chernobyl or Fukushima style meltdown by the way they’re designed. How to prove that conclusively - that may be tough
> They do say that newer nuclear plants simply will not have a Chernobyl or Fukushima style meltdown by the way they’re designed.
No nuclear plant other than Chernobyl has ever had the possibility of a meltdown like the one Chernobyl had. As I posted upthread, Chernobyl is not a good proxy for any commercial reactor that has ever been built.
Older plants do have the same decay heat removal failure mode that Fukushima has, but avoiding it is easy: don't put the backup power and switchgear where it might get flooded. (I am still surprised that the designers of that particular reactor at Fukushima missed this--particularly since other similar reactors on the same site did not.) Newer designs avoid that failure mode by having the coolant circulate by natural convection, so even with all power off, cooling flow still continues and decay heat still gets removed. This has been well understood for several decades (and US nuclear submarines have been using this capability for that long--they do it to remain quiet by avoiding the noise of coolant pumps, but the decay heat removal protection remains the same).
If French nuclear power plants are getting bombed, then France is in a full scale war. Since they have nuclear weapons I think the limited radioactivity from power plant bombing will be a minor problem compared to mushroom clouds over large cities. So people not realize large nuclear arsenals still exist?
I'm completely ignorant about nuclear power plants, so forgive me if this is a stupid question, but when we say that nuclear power plants today don't have the possibility of a similar meltdown, are we taking into account actions of an adversary?
For instance, if someone dropped a sufficiently-sized bomb on a well-designed, modern nuclear power plant, would it melt down?
> if someone dropped a sufficiently-sized bomb on a well-designed, modern nuclear power plant, would it melt down?
No. It would just shut down. A big enough bomb could potentially spread some radioactive material around the plant area, but any adversary with access to a bomb that big and the ability to deliver it anywhere they chose could do much, much more damage by targeting other places.
> potentially spread some radioactive material around the plant area
I mean, I may be totally misunderstanding this. I thought this is what contaminated Europe's farmland more than the meltdown itself. Am I wrong?
I'm not sure it's appropriate to just hand-wave it away. Pretty much all the farmland bombed across EU since WW2 could be used for agriculture shortly after each war ended. Whereas plenty of farmland still shouldn't be used today after being contaminated by "some radioactive material" that was spread around by Chernobyl.
There's been some renewed analysis of this with the ongoing war in Ukraine which points to situations where more modern nuclear plants could indeed still be significantly worse than wind/solar:
> Nuclear plants use a number of auxiliary safety systems, such as diesel generators and external grid connections, to keep reactors cool. Zaporizhzhia also uses a spray pond, a reservoir in which hot water from inside the plant is cooled. If those systems failed, then the nuclear reactor would heat up swiftly, triggering a nuclear meltdown.
> “The main danger here is damage to the systems needed to keep the fuel in the reactor cool – external power lines, emergency diesel generators, equipment to dissipate heat from the reactor core,” Acton said. “In a war, repairing this equipment or implementing countermeasures could be impossible. In the worst case, the fuel could melt and spread large amounts of radioactivity into the environment.”
> I thought this is what contaminated Europe's farmland more than the meltdown itself. Am I wrong?
What contaminated the surrounding farmland was the release of gaseous fission products from the reactor due to a hydrogen gas explosion caused by the completely insane and clueless way that the plant operators were running an experimental procedure, which went out of control. That happened even before the reactor itself melted down.
As just noted, the explosion was not a nuclear explosion and did not involve a nuclear reaction running out of control; it was an explosion of hydrogen gas released inside the reactor. However, because the plant was built without a secondary containment structure (which is one key design flaw that no other country has ever built into a nuclear reactor), the explosion, since it disrupted the structure of the reactor core, released various gaseous fission products that were dangerously radioactive, over a wide area. If there had been secondary containment, the explosion and the radioactive materials would have been contained inside it and would not have contaminated the surrounding environment.
In short, there are at least two key factors that were necessary to create the Chernobyl situation that do not apply to any commercial reactor that any other country has ever built: running clueless experimental procedures on a reactor, and not having any secondary containment.
As for potential dangers from reactors in Ukraine, that's because Ukraine is a war zone. I don't think we should restrict commercial reactor construction in the US because Ukraine is a war zone. Certainly no other country in the world has restricted the building of nuclear reactors based on that kind of logic. France was invaded in WW II, but still makes the majority of its electricity using nuclear reactors today.
Chernobyl is not a good proxy for any commercial nuclear reactor. It was built by the Soviet Union for experimental purposes with a flagrant disregard for even minimal safety standards, even given the knowledge at the time. No other country has ever tried anything even remotely similar.
That said, even counting Chernobyl, the harm done by nuclear reactors per unit of energy generated is orders of magnitude smaller than the harm done by fossil fuels. [1]
> wind and solar, which carry infinitely less risk
This is nonsense. Nothing is zero risk. Per unit of energy generated, wind and solar are comparable to nuclear in terms of overall harm done. [1] In other words, they have about equal risk. They certainly do not have "infinitely less" risk.
Vs. fossil fuels is a red herring, the debate is whether or not fission is sustainable for the environment.
Statistically, you’re right. But the potential harm from a nuclear event is clearly infinitely greater than wind and solar. Chernobyl’s fallout restricted farming on 10,000 farms in the UK and affected 4 million sheep exceeding EU becquerel limits at the time. In the UK. In total a land area about the quarter of the size of California was contaminated with over 37 becquerel of radiation.
Statistically, it doesn’t happen. But the risk IS THERE. Wind power can’t take half of California's agriculture out of the picture over night.
You can’t say fission and wind have similar risk at the tail ends.
As someone who's been to Chernobyl, you're right. Terrible proxy.
Here's what's not: maximum risk. When something goes very wrong - and it will - the maximum damage is insane. This is why I'm against nuclear.
Oh you say, but what about this awesome new reactor, and it's got 4 domes and can withstand an earthquake and it falls into a pool of molten lava because it's on top of a volcano?
Here's the thing - you don't know what can happen. You can have the world's 2nd best army surround it and make it purposefully melt down and pollute half of europe. You can have a crazy florida christian elected by alligators and decide to pave the roads with spent fuel rods. You can have him fake all safety checks and pocket the money, till it blows up.
Your "risk per unit of energy" assumes risk is some small constant block of jello. It's not. The risk is "increased predictable risk of cancer from breathing worse air" versus "well, we didn't know a tsunami was going to hit Illinois after a lake overflowed after russia blew up their under-ocean nuclear missle sub off the coast of texas because they missed the ash tray.
Risk is not Jello. Risk is either "we're royally screwed for 10k years" or risk is "this isn't good"
Here's what I always find funny when guys like you have something happen, where they explain it's not the fault of their little plan. They give an explanation for how it happened, and expect people to say "oh, clearly that's the fault of the russian sub blowing up, not your awesome safety plan." Why would anyone think the Proud Boys would all get jobs at a nuclear plant as safety inspectors in a planned coordinated attack to make a blue state unlivable? Who would think of that - it's not your fault buddy.
Buddy, your logic, is that of a smart 14yo. The world does not care how, why, it just does it's random crap. There's nothing you can do about that, and nothing you can do to predict things. You do have to design safety for an unpredictable scenario causing maximum possible damage though. And that means nuclear power is not safe until we have a reactor that cannot destroy and irradiate tens of miles around it, even if someone tries to make it do that on purpose.
So are you going to ignore the maximum risk of other major industrial plants, or do you demand all of those be shut down too?
Please understand that coal has irradiated tons of land too, and in a way we can't even evacuate from. The maximum damage from coal is enormous even ignoring CO2.
Please show a coal plant that irradiated an area as large and as badly as Chernobyl or Japan. The radiation from what coal plant, is being eaten in fish caught across an ocean?
What you're saying is a lot of matches lit around the world is the same as a nuclear bomb going off in NYC because it's the same amount of energy released in little fireballs.
You get it - right? Do you? Chernobyl will happen again - for some reason. Imagine it happening in the middle of the US, and 1/3 of the country not being livable for 10k years. That's the maximum damage from nuclear.
France has lots of reactors. What happens when Hungary's dictator joins Russia, and sends two hundred dispursive cruise missles at 5 reactors in France? Yes, this can happen. It almost happened in Ukraine recently - have you, umm, read Any news in the last year? Big panic in all of Europe.
You know how you are warned not to eat too much of some types of fish that come from the sea because of getting too much mercury? That is due to mostly mercury from burning coal. If coal was discovered today and people tried to create coal burning power plants in the US there is no way they would be approved with all of the problems with burning coal.
You know how fish caught in the US across the ocean from Japan were irradiated after their reactor meltdown? You should read about that.
We are comparing risk when something goes wrong. Your risk is.... "Don't eat more than two pounds of ocean fish per week." Chernobyl risk is 1000mi^2 is uninhabitable for 10000 years, and a radioactive cloud rained on half of Europe.
Do you remember last year when the entire EU was freaked out because the Russians were bombing a nuclear powerplant, cutting off it's coolant path, and a meltdown would have caused most of Ukraine, and half of Europe to be irradiated?
But yeah, that's the same as your fish thing. It's easy to think like that when you're on a comfortable sofa and not at risk of this. Until the political climate changes or a natural disaster happens - and then you are. But you aren't with coal. With coal, you have predictability, known ways to mitigate, and it's slow so you can adapt.
Both are bad. One is dangerous, unpredictable, and risky.
It's not the output from one plant, it's the amount you get from a big pile of coal plants versus the same amount of nuclear power, even with a very high projection of nuclear plant release.
The coal plants release radiation at a moderate speed but never stop.
> two hundred dispursive cruise missles
Lol okay dude, cruise missiles don't have to aim at nuclear plants to do the same damage.
light background radiation, present already everywhere is not the same as chernobyl (1000sqmi), where no one can live for 10000 years. i didn't think my matches example could possibly not be understood by even a talking monkey, but here we are.
a cruise missle does not damage an area of 1000 miles^2 for 10000 years. it blows up a part of a building. I have to ask - I thought the demographic here was older proffessionals. How did you find yourself here from the high school edgy teen subreddit?
Vs. fossil fuels is a red herring, the debate is whether or not fission is sustainable for the environment. That’s not an argument for “fission is ecologically sustainable”, that’s an argument for “even though it’s not, we should still build dams and fission power plants anyways”.
Which is a fine argument. It’s just a different debate.
> Here's the thing - you don't know what can happen.
With this attitude towards risk, we should outlaw all energy sources. And everything else, for that matter.
> You can have the world's 2nd best army surround it and make it purposefully melt down and pollute half of europe.
I've already responded to this elsewhere in this thread. We should not be restricting what we build in the US because Ukraine is currently a war zone. (As I pointed out elsewhere in the thread, France gets the majority of electricity from nuclear even though it was invaded in WW II.)
> Your "risk per unit of energy" assumes risk is some small constant block of jello.
It does no such thing. What it does do is force people to look at the actual cumulative harms over time objectively, instead of fixating on particular one-off incidents and ignoring other long-term effects just because they take time to accumulate. If you think it's perfectly OK to kill millions of people over time by air pollution, while protesting vehemently about thousands of people killed by one particular accident and its aftermath, even though it was the only such accident over the same time period that millions of people were killed by air pollution, you are the one who has an irrational attitude towards risk.
The way you write this makes it sound like you care about the single solitary stories, but the huge numbers of people harmed by the lack of nuclear power doesn't matter to you because it's to many people to think about.
All other forms of power have killed far far far more people. But the one dramatic story is what you care about?
In total a land area about the quarter of the size of California was contaminated with over 37 becquerel of radiation due to Chernobyl, including 10,000 farms in the UK alone.
The solitary story was to get people to read the book. The debate is if fission is sustainable for the environment. I talked about contaminated agriculture and how much that was covered up and missing in the statistics — people still living in contaminated land and eating contaminated food today.
“The huge numbers of people” is what I’m concerned about and why I advocate for wind and solar. I’m not in favor of the fossil fuel status quo. The radiation and pollution from coal ash and effects of global warming on agriculture are massive. But that’s not an argument for “fission is ecologically sustainable”, that’s an argument for “even though it’s not, we should still build dams and fission power plants anyways”. Which is a fine argument. It’s just a different one.
A fission disaster or attack on a fission plant can take half of Californias agriculture out of the picture over night.
You can’t say fission and wind have similar risk at the tail ends. Yeah, statistically it hasn’t happened, but the risk exists.
Besides, new fission plants will take 20 years to build and by then we'll have actually clean baseload energy from fusion reactors. This video[0] is from 7 years ago, but it provides an amazing breakdown of the physics of fusion energy. The timeline and physics predicted in the lecture have come to pass perfectly since then, and SPARC is on track to produce true net positive energy in 2025. ARC will be capable of providing electricity to the grid within 10-12 years, far faster than a fission reactor could get online in the USA.
I'm not proposing shutting down existing plants. I'm opposing beginning new 20 year construction projects in the USA for new fission plants vs. investing in:
It's the "perfect world" people who think fission plants will never contaminate 100,000 sq. km. of farmland ever again. I'm personally okay with spending a little more money on developing storage technologies. However, I'd also like to quote myself again:
> That’s not an argument for “fission is ecologically sustainable”, that’s an argument for “even though it’s not, we should still build dams and fission power plants anyways”. Which is a fine argument. It’s just a different one.
> I'm not proposing shutting down existing plants.
This makes no sense if you actually believe the "Chernobyl comparison" claims you have been making. If those claims were actually true, you should be arguing for shutting down every nuclear reactor on the planet, right now. So why aren't you arguing for that? (To be clear, I would still disagree with you, but at least you would be taking a consistent position.)
OTOH, if you are reasonable enough to admit that your "Chernobyl comparison" claims do not justify shutting down existing plants, then they don't justify building new plants either. Existing plants are going to be higher risk than any new plants we build in any of the areas you have been posting about.
Sure, I support eventually decommissioning existing fission power plants. When there's something installed to take their place, like stationary electrical storage facilities, solid oxide fuel cells, pumped hydro, fusion power plants, literally anything.
Not just creating energy shortages by removing fission with no backup plan for base power.
There is a difference between spending 20% more on a new storage technology over a new fission power plant, vs. 120% costs to remove something that's working and replace it with something new. That money can do a lot of good elsewhere.
> I support eventually decommissioning existing fission power plants.
But that's inconsistent with the "Chernobyl" rhetoric you have been using elsewhere in this discussion. If every fission plant is a potential Chernobyl, how can you possibly justify waiting to decommission any of them?
Of course, if you don't actually believe the "Chernobyl" rhetoric you have been using, then it makes sense that you would be reasonable about existing fission plants. But then you should also be reasonable about building new ones.
> There is a difference between spending 20% more on a new storage technology over a new fission power plant
What magic "storage technology" is this that will make it unnecessary to build more fission plants as base load power? Please enlighten me.
I think you need to improve your understanding of the basic physical facts that underlie the limitations on any "storage technology" other than fuel.
> how can you possibly justify waiting to decommission any of them
I’m pro nuclear. But I think they’re choosing the lesser of two evils. (I agree with you that replacing derelict plants with modern ones drastically improves everyone’s safety, but I don’t think they’re arguing in bad faith.)
It seems illogical to me too for "taking a long time to decommission old plants" to be a lesser evil compared to other power generation at the same time that new nuclear plants are a very large evil compared to other power generation. Those two things should be pretty close to each other. Either both should be wildly unacceptable, or both should be lesser evils, or one should be a somewhat lesser evil and the other a somewhat greater but not enormous evil.
If you believe every nuclear power plant is a latent Chernobyl, reducing their absolute number is the priority. In that world, given a choice between a fixed and declining number of old plants, or, a potentially-rising number of new plants, the first is safer. (If you never build new plants, the upper limit is known. If you permit new construction, even with demolition, the limit is unbounded.)
Of course, as you point out, treating all plants equivalently like this isn’t substantiated by the data. But within that toy model, the conclusion holds.
Yes the first is safer but it's still wildly unsafe in this model. If you're not advocating very hard for rapid shutdowns then you're not being consistent.
The choice isn't between old nuclear and new nuclear. If those are the "two evils" then that's missing some important options.
Replacing existing reactors costs billions of dollars that can be spent on saving people from other issues like heart disease or put towards fusion development (we don't even really need fusion research anymore, SPARC/ARC are nearly proven). Replacing costs more per expected life saved than not building in the first place.
Replacing is like 5 times more expensive than building alternatives in the first place. The extra money can save people/environment in other ways.
The question was: If we take it as given that we shouldn't build new reactors because they're extremely dangerous, shouldn't we just as zealous about shutting down existing reactors?
If solar is cheaper than new nuclear plants that's cool and all but doesn't change the danger levels.
You’re not understanding. This is a discussion about baseload power.
Situation: We need more baseload power.
Option 1) Build a nuclear fission plant. Costs $10 billion.
Option 2) Build a combination of pumped water storage, solid oxide fuel cells, or battery storage to store excess wind and solar. Costs $12 billion.
Option 3) Tear down existing nuclear plants ($5 billion PER demolition), continue paying on their existing loans, and then build $12 billion of energy storage plus billions more additional wind and solar installation. Cost: $20 billion
For expected x lives/farmland saved, it may be reasonable to spend $2 billion more but not spend $10 billion more for the same effect. That’s not internally inconsistent, your view just doesn’t encapsulate the ability to spend the other $8 billion or so on medical advancements or environmental rehabilitation efforts or fusion development. Or it fails to acknowledge to difference in cost between decommissioning vs not building in the first place.
That all makes sense from a construction cost perspective.
But you were making an argument about how unholy dangerous nuclear plants are as a reason not to build them, barely even mentioning cost. If that danger is real it should be more important than those billions. There's also a fourth option of tearing down nuclear plants and replacing them with a mixture of wind solar and coal, to mitigate that enormous danger at a reduced cost.
If the danger isn't actually enough to motivate plan 3, then you were massively overselling it. Even more so if it's not enough to motivate the cheaper plan 4.
My thesis was "I don't consider nuclear to be sustainable. Here's why I think it's not sustainable." I wasn't saying "It's worse than coal.", I wasn't even saying "There are NO circumstances under which anyone should ever build more fission plants." - - I don't particularly have a strong opinion on whether coal or nuclear are worse but offhand I suspect the answer is coal -- it's definitely in the same broad category of causing non-remediateable pollution. So I probably wouldn't suggest spending a shitload of money to replace nuclear plants with something that's at least qualitatively similarly bad like coal.
I would suggest spending 20% more to get an actually sustainable solution to baseload power. But I would understand someone who says:
- 20% is way too low, actual cost would be much more
- 20% more isn't worth the benefits vs. what else we could spend the money on
- Even if fission isn't environmentally sustainable, we should still use it instead of coal
But arguments like these will not hold any water with me:
- Fission can't possibly poison land even though it has before
- Something that will eventually poison large amounts of land if neglected for 2,000 years is "environmentally sustainable"
- Fission is better than coal so you're not allowed to claim that fission isn't "sustainable" because that makes you an opponent to progress and we have tell ourselves lies about that to make progress happen.
> A fission disaster or attack on a fission plant can take half of Californias agriculture out of the picture over night.
Nonsense. I don't know where you are getting your information from, but it's fearmongering with no basis in fact.
> new fission plants will take 20 years to build
Newer designs have shorter build times since they are simpler and can be made smaller, with more components made in factories instead of fabricated on site. And even for older designs, the 20 years is not the time it actually takes to build them; that's a few years. The rest of the 20 years is the time required to overcome NIMBY lawsuits--if that is even possible. In fact it mostly hasn't been, which is why virtually no new nuclear plants have been built in the US for quite a while. But that's a political problem, not a technical problem.
> and by then we'll have actually clean baseload energy from fusion reactors
Practical fusion has been about 20 years away for the past 40 years or so. It would be very nice if we finally get it, but I would not bank on any claims about the timeline given past history in this area.
> The releases during the Chernobyl accident contaminated about 125,000 km2 of land in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia with radiocaesium levels greater than 37 kBq/m2
Land area of California: 423,971 km²
So, a third of the land area of California could be half of its agriculture affected and reach levels of radiation which trigger intervention actions in the EU. Obviously a lot of that can be remediated and put back into use in future years.
Your references are all about Chernobyl. But nobody is disputing what happened at Chernobyl. What we are disputing is your claim that any commercial fission reactor today is another possible Chernobyl. That claim is fearmongering with no basis in fact. And no amount of repetition of what happened at Chernobyl will change that.
You only have to look at the locations of nuke plants, prevailing wind patterns, and agricultural land use. Unless you're merely content letting the talking heads define what facts you should believe.
No, you only have to look at the factors involved in causing the Chernobyl accident, which are not shared by any commercial reactor any country other than the Soviet Union has ever built. Unless you're merely content to let FUD and baseless fearmongering define what you should believe.
But we already have a lot of natgas plants. I'm willing to bet that we could have handled all of our baseload requirements on all 3 mainland grids using the existing natgas plants as peakers.
Sure, once we hit 60% or so of our power from renewables we'll need to have a proper strategy for handling intermittency. But we're far from that number now.
Too meet our commitments, all natgas plants will need to be shut down or have carbon capture added by 2035. If you amortize your capital costs over 12 years instead of 50 years, that natgas plant doesn't look so cheap any more.
Isn't it infinitely more efficient than just letting the potential power be wasted? If supply surpasses demand eventually wind farms are shut down. That has to change, IMHO.
Yeah, we need to generate a lot of green hydrogen anyway, to decarbonise fertilizer, steel production, aviation fuel and a bunch of other stuff (Ideally we'd force fossil fuel producers, the number one users of hydrogen today, to replace their hydrogen with green hydrogen as part of the process of kick starting this).
And in that world, using some of your stored hydrogen or ammonia as emergy reserve makes sense, though you'd want to avoid actually using it too much as if you do then you'd probably have been better spending the money on more generation and/or batteries.
Industrial electrolysis is roughly 70% efficient. Generating electricity from it with a fuel cell is about 40%-60% efficient. There are (realistic) newer approaches to improve on this (up to 85% for fuel cells). And yes, it’s infinitely better than nothing.
> transmission losses are significant over inter-regional distances
Not necessarily: (ultra) high-voltage DC transmission lines have losses in the low single digit percentage per 1000km (~600mi).
This is not just theoretical either - for example, there is a transmission line over 3200km/2000mi with 12GW capacity in China for example (not under construction either but completed).
Why are we leaving nuclear out of the discussion? Its the perfect moderator for electricity consumption and its not carbon emitting, would this be a better solution to push out natural gas and coal more quickly?
It also doesn't have the same distribution problems
It really is... Unfortunately there's not perfect answer and any near term solutions will need to include a variety of sources. I also think we should be working on water pipelines as well. Energy preservation is another issue, and where Hydrogen is likely one of the better solutions... but that will require a combination of more effective water filtration and desalinization along with transportation of clean water nearer to where energy is generated.
We should definitely be breaking ground on more nuclear plants in more stable (geographically) locations. I'm less convinced that current solar tech is a better net good considering what goes into building the things. I have similar reservations on electric cars for that matter. I think the tech is very cool and we will go through a lot of revisions.
Of course I also have some skepticism on the eminent dangers of global warming or man's influence in part or whole. Considering there are relatively recent times (about 3-8k years ago) where the understood earth temperature was a bit higher than even the projections for the end of the next couple centuries at worst.
Edit: and I'm still waiting for the flying cars I was promised.
> As soon as there's an economically profitable way to store 120 hours of regional electricity usage, most utilities will jump towards that over continuing to buy expensive fuel for their current baseload plants.
You store excess energy in the form of hydrogen from electrolysis for that need. Rapid reductions in cost is making this inevitable. You can even convert existing natural gas plants to run on it. It is far and away the simplest and smartest solution for this problem.
IMO, this is the next intellectual showdown between people who have recognized the rapidly dropping cost of green energy technologies and its naysayers. We went through multiple years of what was basically outright denial over the cost of wind and solar. Even after they become cost-effective, certain people still denied it. Hydrogen is in the same boat. It is already at the point where it is competitive, and is only held back by people in outright denial.
> can even convert existing natural gas plants to run on it
Do you have more on this? I thought hydrogen generally required special treatment given its tendency to ruin metals. I’ve seen modern gas turbines marketed as being hydrogen compatible, but that comes at a cost and is not commonplace.
We will see blended gas turbines first, with gradual shifting to 100% hydrogen. It's likely that at least some components have to be replaced in order to allow for pure hydrogen combustion.
What a stupid thing to say. Of course these fuels are not edible. Back in the real world, 99% of global logistics, agriculture, and transportation rely on diesel and fuel oil. Baseline power generation requires fossil fuels.
It is too bad people can't eat your self-serving arrogance. We'd solve world hunger for 10,000 years.
part of this is that since renewable is free to run while fossil fuel isn't, renewable mostly runs at 100% availability with fossil fuel making up the gaps.
possibly poorly phrased, but what I meant is that you pretty much never turn your solar panel off, but if it is a sunny or windy day you will stop pumping natural gas into a gas generator.
Pushing electricity onto the grid does come with a cost though and if the electricity is pushed onto the grid at a time when it is not needed, you need to deal with it somehow. In some jurisdictions (parts of Australia) they cut you off from the grid if there is an overproduction of solar.
How do you reconcile that with the article's statement that renewable generation went from 22.7% in 2020 to 27.7% today? Five percent in 3 years seems quite significant.
In practice, the real number is probably closer to 36% than to 65% (and likely even lower).
Here's the problem: the article doesn't account for the capacity factors of the various new installed sources they mention [1]. A capacity factor is the actual electrical energy produced by a generating unit, divided by the maximum possible electrical energy that generating unit could have produced if it were operating continuously at full power. And under real-world conditions, most renewable energy sources produce at far below their theoretical capacity maximum.
For example: wind turbines have a capacity factor around 36%, and solar installations are under 25% [2]. If we apply these factors to correct the numbers in the article, the picture becomes much bleaker: the headline 1475 MW of new wind capacity drops to just 531 MW, while the headline 2530 MW of installed solar drops to 632 MW. Now let's generously assume that the 100 MW of hydro and 29 MW of biomass from the article both operate at a 100% capacity factor. Under those assumptions, total new installed renewable capacity drops from 4134 MW to 1292 MW — more than threefold. [3]
And of course, the real-world shortfall is even worse than this. Electricity markets need to clear continuously, and the capacity factor for solar when the sun isn't shining is not 25%, but 0%. That means if the hours of peak demand coincide with hours during which solar is offline (which they do during much of the year) there is no amount of solar you can install that will keep the grid online. To sum up: there is no way to escape the need for reliable baseload power. [4]
[1] At least, the article doesn't mention correcting for capacity factors. And the FERC source document it cites gives me a blank page when I click on it in Firefox, meaning there is no way to be sure whether anyone applied this correction. I'm assuming they didn't, because citing high "headline" capacity numbers like this is unfortunately very common in discussions about renewable energy sources.
If I’m reading your comment correctly, 24 minutes of added battery capacity is 1.6% of the number of minutes in a day, which is actually greater than the nameplate capacity increases in solar and wind. This seems more significant than you suggest.
I would also assume that 24 hours is more storage than is actually required given the mix of wind and solar and the geographical coverage of the grid.
How much battery storage, in minutes, is considered “enough”?
Do the battery figures include only batteries or other storage like pumped hydro?
I am not an expert and am interested in knowing why I’m wrong.
You would not use capacity factor to calculate capacity in the first place, it's the other way around. The 36% guestimate probably comes from somewhere besides these tables. The lower gas capacity factors you quoted are mostly a result of decisions not to run those plants rather than than the energy being intermittently unavailable as happens with solar and wind.
The commenter's point is that although we use the same capacity metric to describe on-demand and intermittently available power generation, it's not meaningful to compare the numbers directly without correction factors.
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[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 365 ms ] thread"Capacity additions of renewables need to triple from 2022 levels by 2030, reaching around 1 200 GW annually, representing on average 90% of new generation capacity each year"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...
The real problem is that we’re still using an incredible amount of coal globally.
A sub-1.5 degree scenario (I initially wrote credible but who am I kidding there is no credible sub-1.5 degree scenario) requires significant energy for both transportation and decarbonisation. This energy needs to be produced without emitting more carbon. That requires massive investment in non-carbon emitting energy production now.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55960
In our March Short-Term Energy Outlook, we forecast the wind share of the U.S. generation mix will increase from 11% last year to 12% this year. We forecast that the solar share will grow to 5% in 2023, up from 4% last year. The natural gas share of generation is forecast to remain unchanged from last year (39%); the coal share of generation is forecast to decline from 20% last year to 17% in 2023.
This is a dramatic decline in coal as a percentage of the electricity mix and in absolute consumption terms.
There's a graph of historical American electrical sources here going back to 1950:
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
You can see how the big brown wedge at the bottom (coal) peaked and then declined. Replacing coal was financially attractive in the US because the bulk of coal plants were already decades old by 2007 and starting to reach natural end-of-life. It will take longer for global coal consumption to decline because other parts of the world have built more coal plants in more recent years, and the purely financial breakeven point for plant replacement (neglecting pollution externalities) is further in the future.
Of course, I said “globally “ where those market forces aren’t the same.
https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-count...
Globally the situation is bad. China and India may decarbonise faster than they are. However, if the world continues increasing how much solar and wind can be installed, hopefully the situation improves.
Whilst it's a drop in the bucket, the previously coal dominated Australia electricity sector is seeing a steep decline in coal generation [2], showing it is possible.
1. https://cms.ferc.gov/media/energy-infrastructure-update-dece...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Australi...
Right now there's no sustainable source for baseload power. Perhaps SPARC/ARC will change that in 20 years, or perhaps continuing advances in energy storage will let us store excess energy while the sun shines and the wind blows and use that stored energy as reliable baseload power.
Wind power is really cheap. Electrical utilities are now comfortable with it and don't consider it an experimental technology. The profit margins are quite healthy. As soon as there's an economically profitable way to store 120 hours of regional electricity usage, most utilities will jump towards that over continuing to buy expensive fuel for their current baseload plants. Right now the marginal costs of natural gas and coal power are cheaper than energy storage, and the service / operational risks are well known and well-controlled vs. the scary operational unknowns of advanced energy storage solutions. Not talking about environmental risks; utility companies don't really give a damn about those, even if a lot of their employees personally do.
The FERC "Energy Infrastructure Update for December 2022" [1] reports that between 2021 Jan - 2022 Dec Wind and Solar additions exceeded those of Natural gas. FERC also predicts that between Jan 2023 and Dec 2025 Natural Gas will add a net amount of 511MW of generating capacity. This compares with 18211 MW of Wind and 74642 MW of Solar. These are listed as "High Probability" additions, which I've been unable to find a description for.
1. https://cms.ferc.gov/media/energy-infrastructure-update-dece...
There's a simple reason for that - it costs roughly $1 million per mile to build new transmission and requires lawyers and real estate people working in multiple jurisdictions. Only the largest of utilities are able to afford this investment and commit the required resources.
Even that's not enough - you still need to solve the so-called Community Energy Storage problem. You need a buffer between the generation and consumption of power so that they can vary from one another. That's even more investment.
To push back on this, there is a centurys' old technology for this in hydro. There's also an emerging field of geothermal.
The Pacific Northwest (both sides of the border) has an abundance of hydropower that was installed decades ago and provides clean, reliable, baseload power.
Geothermal has its challenges, especially at utility scale where geographic location is important and not typically close to population centers. On a smaller scale it is not geographically a problem, but not as economically viable for individual homeowners. It makes more sense when a large corporate is investing in it [1].
[1] https://news.microsoft.com/2022/04/20/microsoft-redmond-camp...
Geothermal completely slipped my mind! facepalm Obviously the consensus view is that geothermal is sustainable. I have some mild concerns about how many years a installation in a non-geologically/thermally active area can run before it changes the temperature of its lithic heat sink enough to significantly reduce power output, but many installations are proving the success of the technology overall, and that's more an economic challenge (lifetime/ROI of installation) than a question of sustainability.
Unfamiliar readers have to note that here sustainable is not used in its normal meaning but in the one used by some environmentalists. Hydropower can definitely be sustained indefinitely. It does cause flooding in some area previously I flooded and disturbs fish which some people view as an issue.
It’s really hard to have a good discussion about climate change because some people constantly push unrelated agenda into the mix.
That’s absolutely not what “sustainable” means.
The difference between “renewable” and “sustainable” isn’t a fringe concept. It’s been pretty well accepted for about 55 years now.
And even in the specific meaning you are pushing, the actual impact of hydro is questionable. Until you take a die hard position that no ecosystem whatsoever should be disturbed the benefit vs loss analysis is more than compelling.
Definition #2:
> the quality of not being harmful to the environment or depleting natural resources, and thereby supporting long-term ecological balance:
I would imagine this varies, but is a much smaller problem than e.g. heating up water habitats (data center cooling) or burning fossil fuels.
Also, dams are expensive. You're looking at $2B per project, at least here, and you need to flood an immense amount of land.
Really, we should get over our paranoia and lift the artificial hurdles on nuclear so the plants can be built faster and cheaper. Or, at least in the states, bite the bullet and leverage your extensive gas fields to develop a solar industry [1]
[0] https://www.electricityforum.com/news/canada-energy-shortage
[1] https://doomberg.substack.com/p/a-serious-proposal-on-us-ene...
> increased demand over the coming years, including data centres, cryptocurrency miners and greenhouses.
Price them out. Don't give sweetheart deals to uses that aren't beneficial to the local economy. Additionally, these uses don't necessitate baseload. Crypto should be using cheap, renewable variable power sources. I'm genuinely curious what greenhouses means in this case. Heating indoor crops in the winter? Geothermal would be more effective for this. [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD_3_gsgsnk
Not to mention that the dams in Washington state do account for spawning/migration and slow down flows at certain points of the year.
Earlier attempts at fish ladders saw rates as low as like 3% for certain species of fish, per ladder/dam. Even if 50% of salmon got up them, if they have to pass 5 of them on the way to the spawning ground that meant 97% of salmon wouldn't make to the spawning grounds.
Also, obviously, the ecological effects aren't just "tasty fish can't make babies". The impact on seasonal floodplains and sedimentation is huge by itself.
Only if you refuse to consider nuclear as "sustainable", which makes no sense technically but unfortunately has a lot of political traction.
0: https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=EA979C3CF64D8EF8C12613A...
> He was producing stool 25 to 30 times a day. With blood and mucous. His skin started cracking on his arms and legs. He became covered with boils. When he turned his head, there'd be a clump of hair left on the pillow. I tried joking: "It's convenient, you don't need a comb." Soon they cut all their hair. I did it for him myself. While I was there with him, they wouldn't, but when I left—they photographed him. Without any clothes. Naked. One thin little sheet on top of him. I changed that little sheet every day, and every day by evening it was covered in blood. I pick him up, and there are pieces of his skin on my hand, they stick to my hands. I ask him: "Love. Help me. Prop yourself up on your arm, your elbow, as much as you can, I'll smooth out your bedding, get the knots and folds out." Any little knot, that was already a wound on him. I clipped my nails down till they bled so I wouldn't accidentally cut him. None of the nurses could approach him; if they needed anything they'd call me. [After he died] They had to cut up the formal wear, too, because they couldn't get it on him, there wasn't a whole body to put it on. It was all—wounds. The last two days in the hospital—I'd lift his arm, and meanwhile the bone is shaking, just sort of dangling, the body has gone away from it. Pieces of his lungs, of his liver, were coming out of his mouth. He was choking on his internal organs. I'd wrap my hand in a bandage and put it in his mouth, take out all that stuff. It's impossible to talk about. It's impossible to write about. And even to live through. It was all mine. My love. They couldn't get a single pair of shoes to fit him. They buried him barefoot.
...
After that, in the maternity ward, the skin started coming off my hands. My veins swelled up. And I was so indifferent to everything. I didn't want to get out of bed. [Cries] I'd get to the hospital and then turn around. By then I was pregnant myself.
N.B.: The baby she was pregnant with, due to extremely rapid cellular growth, saved her from the radiation she received from performing bedside hospital care for her late husband, because the baby absorbed most of the radioactive elements. After his birth, the child Andrei died as a young schoolboy, essentially sacrificing his life for his mother, after spending half his life sick, reportedly very ill two weeks every month.
> In Belarus, very little has changed since these interviews were conducted. Back in 1996, Aleksandr Lukashenka was the lesser-known of Europe's "last two dictators." Now Slobodan Milosevic is on trial at The Hague and Lukashenka has pride of place. He stifles any attempt at free speech and his political opponents continue to "disappear." On the Chernobyl front, Lukashenka has encouraged studies arguing that the land is increasingly safe and that more and more of it should be brought back into agricultural rotation. In 1999, the physicist Yuri Bandazhevsky, a friend and colleague of Vasily Borisovich N...
They do say that newer nuclear plants simply will not have a Chernobyl or Fukushima style meltdown by the way they’re designed. How to prove that conclusively - that may be tough
No nuclear plant other than Chernobyl has ever had the possibility of a meltdown like the one Chernobyl had. As I posted upthread, Chernobyl is not a good proxy for any commercial reactor that has ever been built.
Older plants do have the same decay heat removal failure mode that Fukushima has, but avoiding it is easy: don't put the backup power and switchgear where it might get flooded. (I am still surprised that the designers of that particular reactor at Fukushima missed this--particularly since other similar reactors on the same site did not.) Newer designs avoid that failure mode by having the coolant circulate by natural convection, so even with all power off, cooling flow still continues and decay heat still gets removed. This has been well understood for several decades (and US nuclear submarines have been using this capability for that long--they do it to remain quiet by avoiding the noise of coolant pumps, but the decay heat removal protection remains the same).
Anyway, if being attacked is a possibility, physical security for such plants isn't a hard problem.
For instance, if someone dropped a sufficiently-sized bomb on a well-designed, modern nuclear power plant, would it melt down?
No. It would just shut down. A big enough bomb could potentially spread some radioactive material around the plant area, but any adversary with access to a bomb that big and the ability to deliver it anywhere they chose could do much, much more damage by targeting other places.
I mean, I may be totally misunderstanding this. I thought this is what contaminated Europe's farmland more than the meltdown itself. Am I wrong?
I'm not sure it's appropriate to just hand-wave it away. Pretty much all the farmland bombed across EU since WW2 could be used for agriculture shortly after each war ended. Whereas plenty of farmland still shouldn't be used today after being contaminated by "some radioactive material" that was spread around by Chernobyl.
There's been some renewed analysis of this with the ongoing war in Ukraine which points to situations where more modern nuclear plants could indeed still be significantly worse than wind/solar:
> Nuclear plants use a number of auxiliary safety systems, such as diesel generators and external grid connections, to keep reactors cool. Zaporizhzhia also uses a spray pond, a reservoir in which hot water from inside the plant is cooled. If those systems failed, then the nuclear reactor would heat up swiftly, triggering a nuclear meltdown.
> “The main danger here is damage to the systems needed to keep the fuel in the reactor cool – external power lines, emergency diesel generators, equipment to dissipate heat from the reactor core,” Acton said. “In a war, repairing this equipment or implementing countermeasures could be impossible. In the worst case, the fuel could melt and spread large amounts of radioactivity into the environment.”
https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/18/europe/zaporizhzhia-nuclear-p...
What contaminated the surrounding farmland was the release of gaseous fission products from the reactor due to a hydrogen gas explosion caused by the completely insane and clueless way that the plant operators were running an experimental procedure, which went out of control. That happened even before the reactor itself melted down.
As just noted, the explosion was not a nuclear explosion and did not involve a nuclear reaction running out of control; it was an explosion of hydrogen gas released inside the reactor. However, because the plant was built without a secondary containment structure (which is one key design flaw that no other country has ever built into a nuclear reactor), the explosion, since it disrupted the structure of the reactor core, released various gaseous fission products that were dangerously radioactive, over a wide area. If there had been secondary containment, the explosion and the radioactive materials would have been contained inside it and would not have contaminated the surrounding environment.
In short, there are at least two key factors that were necessary to create the Chernobyl situation that do not apply to any commercial reactor that any other country has ever built: running clueless experimental procedures on a reactor, and not having any secondary containment.
As for potential dangers from reactors in Ukraine, that's because Ukraine is a war zone. I don't think we should restrict commercial reactor construction in the US because Ukraine is a war zone. Certainly no other country in the world has restricted the building of nuclear reactors based on that kind of logic. France was invaded in WW II, but still makes the majority of its electricity using nuclear reactors today.
Chernobyl is not a good proxy for any commercial nuclear reactor. It was built by the Soviet Union for experimental purposes with a flagrant disregard for even minimal safety standards, even given the knowledge at the time. No other country has ever tried anything even remotely similar.
That said, even counting Chernobyl, the harm done by nuclear reactors per unit of energy generated is orders of magnitude smaller than the harm done by fossil fuels. [1]
> wind and solar, which carry infinitely less risk
This is nonsense. Nothing is zero risk. Per unit of energy generated, wind and solar are comparable to nuclear in terms of overall harm done. [1] In other words, they have about equal risk. They certainly do not have "infinitely less" risk.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
Statistically, you’re right. But the potential harm from a nuclear event is clearly infinitely greater than wind and solar. Chernobyl’s fallout restricted farming on 10,000 farms in the UK and affected 4 million sheep exceeding EU becquerel limits at the time. In the UK. In total a land area about the quarter of the size of California was contaminated with over 37 becquerel of radiation.
Statistically, it doesn’t happen. But the risk IS THERE. Wind power can’t take half of California's agriculture out of the picture over night.
You can’t say fission and wind have similar risk at the tail ends.
Nonsense. Your posts about this are pure FUD. Chernobyl is simply not a valid case when assessing the risks of actual commercial nuclear plants.
Here's what's not: maximum risk. When something goes very wrong - and it will - the maximum damage is insane. This is why I'm against nuclear.
Oh you say, but what about this awesome new reactor, and it's got 4 domes and can withstand an earthquake and it falls into a pool of molten lava because it's on top of a volcano?
Here's the thing - you don't know what can happen. You can have the world's 2nd best army surround it and make it purposefully melt down and pollute half of europe. You can have a crazy florida christian elected by alligators and decide to pave the roads with spent fuel rods. You can have him fake all safety checks and pocket the money, till it blows up.
Your "risk per unit of energy" assumes risk is some small constant block of jello. It's not. The risk is "increased predictable risk of cancer from breathing worse air" versus "well, we didn't know a tsunami was going to hit Illinois after a lake overflowed after russia blew up their under-ocean nuclear missle sub off the coast of texas because they missed the ash tray.
Risk is not Jello. Risk is either "we're royally screwed for 10k years" or risk is "this isn't good"
Here's what I always find funny when guys like you have something happen, where they explain it's not the fault of their little plan. They give an explanation for how it happened, and expect people to say "oh, clearly that's the fault of the russian sub blowing up, not your awesome safety plan." Why would anyone think the Proud Boys would all get jobs at a nuclear plant as safety inspectors in a planned coordinated attack to make a blue state unlivable? Who would think of that - it's not your fault buddy.
Buddy, your logic, is that of a smart 14yo. The world does not care how, why, it just does it's random crap. There's nothing you can do about that, and nothing you can do to predict things. You do have to design safety for an unpredictable scenario causing maximum possible damage though. And that means nuclear power is not safe until we have a reactor that cannot destroy and irradiate tens of miles around it, even if someone tries to make it do that on purpose.
Please understand that coal has irradiated tons of land too, and in a way we can't even evacuate from. The maximum damage from coal is enormous even ignoring CO2.
What you're saying is a lot of matches lit around the world is the same as a nuclear bomb going off in NYC because it's the same amount of energy released in little fireballs.
You get it - right? Do you? Chernobyl will happen again - for some reason. Imagine it happening in the middle of the US, and 1/3 of the country not being livable for 10k years. That's the maximum damage from nuclear.
France has lots of reactors. What happens when Hungary's dictator joins Russia, and sends two hundred dispursive cruise missles at 5 reactors in France? Yes, this can happen. It almost happened in Ukraine recently - have you, umm, read Any news in the last year? Big panic in all of Europe.
You don't know what can happen.
You do with coal.
We are comparing risk when something goes wrong. Your risk is.... "Don't eat more than two pounds of ocean fish per week." Chernobyl risk is 1000mi^2 is uninhabitable for 10000 years, and a radioactive cloud rained on half of Europe.
Do you remember last year when the entire EU was freaked out because the Russians were bombing a nuclear powerplant, cutting off it's coolant path, and a meltdown would have caused most of Ukraine, and half of Europe to be irradiated?
But yeah, that's the same as your fish thing. It's easy to think like that when you're on a comfortable sofa and not at risk of this. Until the political climate changes or a natural disaster happens - and then you are. But you aren't with coal. With coal, you have predictability, known ways to mitigate, and it's slow so you can adapt.
Both are bad. One is dangerous, unpredictable, and risky.
It's not the output from one plant, it's the amount you get from a big pile of coal plants versus the same amount of nuclear power, even with a very high projection of nuclear plant release.
The coal plants release radiation at a moderate speed but never stop.
> two hundred dispursive cruise missles
Lol okay dude, cruise missiles don't have to aim at nuclear plants to do the same damage.
light background radiation, present already everywhere is not the same as chernobyl (1000sqmi), where no one can live for 10000 years. i didn't think my matches example could possibly not be understood by even a talking monkey, but here we are.
a cruise missle does not damage an area of 1000 miles^2 for 10000 years. it blows up a part of a building. I have to ask - I thought the demographic here was older proffessionals. How did you find yourself here from the high school edgy teen subreddit?
A few big missiles can release as much radiation as chernobyl over a large area if that's what they're designed to do.
I hope insulting me makes your day better.
Which is a fine argument. It’s just a different debate.
With this attitude towards risk, we should outlaw all energy sources. And everything else, for that matter.
> You can have the world's 2nd best army surround it and make it purposefully melt down and pollute half of europe.
I've already responded to this elsewhere in this thread. We should not be restricting what we build in the US because Ukraine is currently a war zone. (As I pointed out elsewhere in the thread, France gets the majority of electricity from nuclear even though it was invaded in WW II.)
> Your "risk per unit of energy" assumes risk is some small constant block of jello.
It does no such thing. What it does do is force people to look at the actual cumulative harms over time objectively, instead of fixating on particular one-off incidents and ignoring other long-term effects just because they take time to accumulate. If you think it's perfectly OK to kill millions of people over time by air pollution, while protesting vehemently about thousands of people killed by one particular accident and its aftermath, even though it was the only such accident over the same time period that millions of people were killed by air pollution, you are the one who has an irrational attitude towards risk.
> nothing you can do to predict things
Nonsense.
All other forms of power have killed far far far more people. But the one dramatic story is what you care about?
The solitary story was to get people to read the book. The debate is if fission is sustainable for the environment. I talked about contaminated agriculture and how much that was covered up and missing in the statistics — people still living in contaminated land and eating contaminated food today.
“The huge numbers of people” is what I’m concerned about and why I advocate for wind and solar. I’m not in favor of the fossil fuel status quo. The radiation and pollution from coal ash and effects of global warming on agriculture are massive. But that’s not an argument for “fission is ecologically sustainable”, that’s an argument for “even though it’s not, we should still build dams and fission power plants anyways”. Which is a fine argument. It’s just a different one.
A fission disaster or attack on a fission plant can take half of Californias agriculture out of the picture over night.
You can’t say fission and wind have similar risk at the tail ends. Yeah, statistically it hasn’t happened, but the risk exists.
Besides, new fission plants will take 20 years to build and by then we'll have actually clean baseload energy from fusion reactors. This video[0] is from 7 years ago, but it provides an amazing breakdown of the physics of fusion energy. The timeline and physics predicted in the lecture have come to pass perfectly since then, and SPARC is on track to produce true net positive energy in 2025. ARC will be capable of providing electricity to the grid within 10-12 years, far faster than a fission reactor could get online in the USA.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4&t=2414s
But in the real world not building nuclear power causes actual real contamination from Coal and other fuels.
You can shut down the nuclear plants after you finished your wind/solar buildout. Not before.
Not to mention a grid with only wind/solar is impossible. Nuclear is a PERFECT complement for them!
You are being your own worse enemy by opposing nuclear. The exact thing you don't want is happening because you oppose the one thing that could help.
- Energy storage
- Energy transport
- Nuclear fusion, such as ARC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4&t=2414s
It's the "perfect world" people who think fission plants will never contaminate 100,000 sq. km. of farmland ever again. I'm personally okay with spending a little more money on developing storage technologies. However, I'd also like to quote myself again:
> That’s not an argument for “fission is ecologically sustainable”, that’s an argument for “even though it’s not, we should still build dams and fission power plants anyways”. Which is a fine argument. It’s just a different one.
This makes no sense if you actually believe the "Chernobyl comparison" claims you have been making. If those claims were actually true, you should be arguing for shutting down every nuclear reactor on the planet, right now. So why aren't you arguing for that? (To be clear, I would still disagree with you, but at least you would be taking a consistent position.)
OTOH, if you are reasonable enough to admit that your "Chernobyl comparison" claims do not justify shutting down existing plants, then they don't justify building new plants either. Existing plants are going to be higher risk than any new plants we build in any of the areas you have been posting about.
Not just creating energy shortages by removing fission with no backup plan for base power.
There is a difference between spending 20% more on a new storage technology over a new fission power plant, vs. 120% costs to remove something that's working and replace it with something new. That money can do a lot of good elsewhere.
But that's inconsistent with the "Chernobyl" rhetoric you have been using elsewhere in this discussion. If every fission plant is a potential Chernobyl, how can you possibly justify waiting to decommission any of them?
Of course, if you don't actually believe the "Chernobyl" rhetoric you have been using, then it makes sense that you would be reasonable about existing fission plants. But then you should also be reasonable about building new ones.
> There is a difference between spending 20% more on a new storage technology over a new fission power plant
What magic "storage technology" is this that will make it unnecessary to build more fission plants as base load power? Please enlighten me.
I think you need to improve your understanding of the basic physical facts that underlie the limitations on any "storage technology" other than fuel.
I’m pro nuclear. But I think they’re choosing the lesser of two evils. (I agree with you that replacing derelict plants with modern ones drastically improves everyone’s safety, but I don’t think they’re arguing in bad faith.)
It seems illogical to me too for "taking a long time to decommission old plants" to be a lesser evil compared to other power generation at the same time that new nuclear plants are a very large evil compared to other power generation. Those two things should be pretty close to each other. Either both should be wildly unacceptable, or both should be lesser evils, or one should be a somewhat lesser evil and the other a somewhat greater but not enormous evil.
Of course, as you point out, treating all plants equivalently like this isn’t substantiated by the data. But within that toy model, the conclusion holds.
The choice isn't between old nuclear and new nuclear. If those are the "two evils" then that's missing some important options.
Replacing is like 5 times more expensive than building alternatives in the first place. The extra money can save people/environment in other ways.
The question was: If we take it as given that we shouldn't build new reactors because they're extremely dangerous, shouldn't we just as zealous about shutting down existing reactors?
If solar is cheaper than new nuclear plants that's cool and all but doesn't change the danger levels.
Situation: We need more baseload power.
Option 1) Build a nuclear fission plant. Costs $10 billion.
Option 2) Build a combination of pumped water storage, solid oxide fuel cells, or battery storage to store excess wind and solar. Costs $12 billion.
Option 3) Tear down existing nuclear plants ($5 billion PER demolition), continue paying on their existing loans, and then build $12 billion of energy storage plus billions more additional wind and solar installation. Cost: $20 billion
For expected x lives/farmland saved, it may be reasonable to spend $2 billion more but not spend $10 billion more for the same effect. That’s not internally inconsistent, your view just doesn’t encapsulate the ability to spend the other $8 billion or so on medical advancements or environmental rehabilitation efforts or fusion development. Or it fails to acknowledge to difference in cost between decommissioning vs not building in the first place.
But you were making an argument about how unholy dangerous nuclear plants are as a reason not to build them, barely even mentioning cost. If that danger is real it should be more important than those billions. There's also a fourth option of tearing down nuclear plants and replacing them with a mixture of wind solar and coal, to mitigate that enormous danger at a reduced cost.
If the danger isn't actually enough to motivate plan 3, then you were massively overselling it. Even more so if it's not enough to motivate the cheaper plan 4.
My thesis was "I don't consider nuclear to be sustainable. Here's why I think it's not sustainable." I wasn't saying "It's worse than coal.", I wasn't even saying "There are NO circumstances under which anyone should ever build more fission plants." - - I don't particularly have a strong opinion on whether coal or nuclear are worse but offhand I suspect the answer is coal -- it's definitely in the same broad category of causing non-remediateable pollution. So I probably wouldn't suggest spending a shitload of money to replace nuclear plants with something that's at least qualitatively similarly bad like coal.
I would suggest spending 20% more to get an actually sustainable solution to baseload power. But I would understand someone who says:
- 20% is way too low, actual cost would be much more
- 20% more isn't worth the benefits vs. what else we could spend the money on
- Even if fission isn't environmentally sustainable, we should still use it instead of coal
But arguments like these will not hold any water with me:
- Fission can't possibly poison land even though it has before
- Something that will eventually poison large amounts of land if neglected for 2,000 years is "environmentally sustainable"
- Fission is better than coal so you're not allowed to claim that fission isn't "sustainable" because that makes you an opponent to progress and we have tell ourselves lies about that to make progress happen.
Nonsense. I don't know where you are getting your information from, but it's fearmongering with no basis in fact.
> new fission plants will take 20 years to build
Newer designs have shorter build times since they are simpler and can be made smaller, with more components made in factories instead of fabricated on site. And even for older designs, the 20 years is not the time it actually takes to build them; that's a few years. The rest of the 20 years is the time required to overcome NIMBY lawsuits--if that is even possible. In fact it mostly hasn't been, which is why virtually no new nuclear plants have been built in the US for quite a while. But that's a political problem, not a technical problem.
> and by then we'll have actually clean baseload energy from fusion reactors
Practical fusion has been about 20 years away for the past 40 years or so. It would be very nice if we finally get it, but I would not bank on any claims about the timeline given past history in this area.
https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2019-12...
> The releases during the Chernobyl accident contaminated about 125,000 km2 of land in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia with radiocaesium levels greater than 37 kBq/m2
Land area of California: 423,971 km²
So, a third of the land area of California could be half of its agriculture affected and reach levels of radiation which trigger intervention actions in the EU. Obviously a lot of that can be remediated and put back into use in future years.
Sure, once we hit 60% or so of our power from renewables we'll need to have a proper strategy for handling intermittency. But we're far from that number now.
Too meet our commitments, all natgas plants will need to be shut down or have carbon capture added by 2035. If you amortize your capital costs over 12 years instead of 50 years, that natgas plant doesn't look so cheap any more.
https://www.ge.com/gas-power/future-of-energy/hydrogen-fuele...
https://www.iea.org/reports/electrolysers
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243512...
And in that world, using some of your stored hydrogen or ammonia as emergy reserve makes sense, though you'd want to avoid actually using it too much as if you do then you'd probably have been better spending the money on more generation and/or batteries.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell
Not necessarily: (ultra) high-voltage DC transmission lines have losses in the low single digit percentage per 1000km (~600mi).
This is not just theoretical either - for example, there is a transmission line over 3200km/2000mi with 12GW capacity in China for example (not under construction either but completed).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...
It also doesn't have the same distribution problems
We should definitely be breaking ground on more nuclear plants in more stable (geographically) locations. I'm less convinced that current solar tech is a better net good considering what goes into building the things. I have similar reservations on electric cars for that matter. I think the tech is very cool and we will go through a lot of revisions.
Of course I also have some skepticism on the eminent dangers of global warming or man's influence in part or whole. Considering there are relatively recent times (about 3-8k years ago) where the understood earth temperature was a bit higher than even the projections for the end of the next couple centuries at worst.
Edit: and I'm still waiting for the flying cars I was promised.
You store excess energy in the form of hydrogen from electrolysis for that need. Rapid reductions in cost is making this inevitable. You can even convert existing natural gas plants to run on it. It is far and away the simplest and smartest solution for this problem.
IMO, this is the next intellectual showdown between people who have recognized the rapidly dropping cost of green energy technologies and its naysayers. We went through multiple years of what was basically outright denial over the cost of wind and solar. Even after they become cost-effective, certain people still denied it. Hydrogen is in the same boat. It is already at the point where it is competitive, and is only held back by people in outright denial.
Do you have more on this? I thought hydrogen generally required special treatment given its tendency to ruin metals. I’ve seen modern gas turbines marketed as being hydrogen compatible, but that comes at a cost and is not commonplace.
We will see blended gas turbines first, with gradual shifting to 100% hydrogen. It's likely that at least some components have to be replaced in order to allow for pure hydrogen combustion.
There's been a recent flurry of sanity but even that is fought at every step.
e.g. the latest on Manchin trying to make it easier for fossil fuels
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/us/politics/biden-manchin...
I hope you're referring to the strangely popular misinformation that claims fossil fuels are a necessary component of fertilizer, which they aren't.
But if they were, it would be yet another good reason not to burn them to generate electricity when we have alternatives that are cheaper and cleaner.
It is too bad people can't eat your self-serving arrogance. We'd solve world hunger for 10,000 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Humans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE
glad to see it's not the majority of "renewables" and that they are mostly solar, wind and hydro.
Gonna take a while to change over
Here's the problem: the article doesn't account for the capacity factors of the various new installed sources they mention [1]. A capacity factor is the actual electrical energy produced by a generating unit, divided by the maximum possible electrical energy that generating unit could have produced if it were operating continuously at full power. And under real-world conditions, most renewable energy sources produce at far below their theoretical capacity maximum.
For example: wind turbines have a capacity factor around 36%, and solar installations are under 25% [2]. If we apply these factors to correct the numbers in the article, the picture becomes much bleaker: the headline 1475 MW of new wind capacity drops to just 531 MW, while the headline 2530 MW of installed solar drops to 632 MW. Now let's generously assume that the 100 MW of hydro and 29 MW of biomass from the article both operate at a 100% capacity factor. Under those assumptions, total new installed renewable capacity drops from 4134 MW to 1292 MW — more than threefold. [3]
And of course, the real-world shortfall is even worse than this. Electricity markets need to clear continuously, and the capacity factor for solar when the sun isn't shining is not 25%, but 0%. That means if the hours of peak demand coincide with hours during which solar is offline (which they do during much of the year) there is no amount of solar you can install that will keep the grid online. To sum up: there is no way to escape the need for reliable baseload power. [4]
[1] At least, the article doesn't mention correcting for capacity factors. And the FERC source document it cites gives me a blank page when I click on it in Firefox, meaning there is no way to be sure whether anyone applied this correction. I'm assuming they didn't, because citing high "headline" capacity numbers like this is unfortunately very common in discussions about renewable energy sources.
[2] Capacity factor numbers are for installations in the United States during 2022, from the Energy Information Administration: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
[3] From the article: 2530 MW of solar, 1475 MW of wind, 100 MW of new hydro, 29 MW of new biomass, 2259 MW of natural gas.
[4] Even battery installations don't get you there. Between 2022 and 2026, the US is expected to add only 24 minutes worth of battery storage to its grid. This includes residential, non-residential, and grid-scale installations. Sources: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/09/14/u-s-installed-a-recor... https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
I would also assume that 24 hours is more storage than is actually required given the mix of wind and solar and the geographical coverage of the grid.
How much battery storage, in minutes, is considered “enough”?
Do the battery figures include only batteries or other storage like pumped hydro?
I am not an expert and am interested in knowing why I’m wrong.
Depending on the type of gas power plant the capacity factor could be 56.7%, 13.7%, 13.6% or 18.8% based on https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph....
The energy infrastructure update released in Dec 2022, did not take capacity factor into account - https://cms.ferc.gov/media/energy-infrastructure-update-dece..., so this may be the case with the new dataset.
The commenter's point is that although we use the same capacity metric to describe on-demand and intermittently available power generation, it's not meaningful to compare the numbers directly without correction factors.