It's a short time difference, but I wonder how much of it can be attributed to a shift in the generation being interviewed, since I'd imagine that younger people are more in favor of nuclear power than older people who might still have qualms associated with disasters they might've seen reporting on (regardless of how rational those concerns might be).
I don't know about others, but I have had a lot of stuff about nuclear power make its way into my YouTube feed in the last few years. Once I learned more about it, it is clear that it is by far the cleanest energy we currently know how to capture.
Everything has a footprint: solar power has panels and other components that last 10-30 years, hydroelectric is often terrible for local biodiversity, windmills have huge blades that wear out, etc. Nuclear creates far less waste and spent nuclear fuel can be recycled even.
I wish the US had gone all in on nuclear like France.
It'll cost several trillion dollars more to switch the US to nuclear electricity than it would to switch to renewable electricity. Those trillions of dollars could clean up a lot of waste if that is your primary concern.
Will we be able to replace current loads with renewable power?
All I know is that France has effectively been GHG neutral for decades because they invested in this. I know renewables have gotten way cheaper, but if GHG neutral is so achievable with them why haven't we just done it?
We are doing it. We're doing it at a rate of about 5% per year, and that rate is increasing every year. Given how big our grid is, 5% per year is pretty massive.
France gets a large portion of electricity from Nuclear, though the data I could find does not say France is GHG neutral.
The second largest source looks to be oil at around 35% [1]
This source, [2], goes on to state: "In 2022, France's power sector carbon emissions nearly reached 40 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e), down from a century-peak of over 50 million tons recorded in 2005"
That said, what I probably should have said is the capability to go GHG neutral. I believe that France has more domestic nuclear capacity than its domestic electrical conception.
Between those two, it's not obvious to me that France could enable more nuclear capacity to account for the rest of their energy needs.
I'm not sure I would even agree that GHG neutral is even a thing. Just because a person plants 1000 trees to account for emitting 10 tons of carbon today, the 10 tons of carbon were still emitted today while those trees need decades to even get close to break-even (and in the meantime they can burn, contribute to mono-cultures, possible not grow at all, be double sold as offsets, etc..)
More concretely, I think it's like calling a Geothermal plant GHG neutral if it powers a facility that pulls down as much carbon as the thermal plant emits. As an aggregate, there is actually a true net zero there, but the thermal plant is still a positive contributor to emissions.*
The first resource linked earlier states it pretty well:
"As a result of the 1974 decision, France now claims a substantial level of energy independence and an extremely low level of carbon dioxide emissions per capita from electricity generation, since over 80% of its electricity is from nuclear or hydro."
"an extremely low level of carbon dioxide emissions per capita" is AFAIK as good as it gets.
I'm not sure why/where the energy vs electricity different really matters here. Perhaps you can help me out?
Googling for some other numbers, it looks like France's total emissions are 270M tons, with an energy sector emitting 40M tons, even if that energy sector were zero'd out - France would still emit 230M tons of GHG.
*Low carbon != zero carbon output. This resource shows nuclear as being a very low carbon source of electricity, akin to wind and solar (and even less than geothermal, all quite surprising to me): https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/how-can-nuclear...
I think I might be extra sensitive to the phrase "GHG neutral", I believe that phrase is very often 100% PR and 0% reality.
because fossil fuel companies engage in grand fraud, for example they create astroturfing groups like 'citizens for responsible solar' which go around the country and file objection to every solar project that needs planning permission.
They got on-shore wind turbines banned in Britain. They got construction of solar panels banned on all land except low-grade non-agricultural land, so like steep hills of Scotland where it is impractical. The underground power cable to France was blocked because it would 'ruin the landscape'.
>but if GHG neutral is so achievable with them why haven't we just done it?
Because France's energy system is/was largely publicly run, and I expect the US coal lobby would have objected pretty strongly to direct competition against coal plants being paid for and subsidized by government money.
The fact that a few coal billionaires have any notable influence on public policy is a failing of democracy. They are literally poisoning the air we breathe and killing many thousands of people a year but our government is bribed to do what they want.
Can you provide a citation explaining why this a definite fact? Sounds very untrue considering we still have problems to solve to go 100% renewable which requires R&D
Do you have any research which supports those numbers? Because I haven't seen a single analysis of renewable energy which manages to come up with a plausible figure for solving the energy storage problem with realistic assumptions about overbuild (i.e. a pumped hydro storage system which only holds 1 day of energy isn't robust if you have a grid which doesn't have fossil fuel fallbacks).
The overnight cost of building nuclear is about $7000 / kW. Wind and solar are closer to $1500 / kW before taking storage into account. That's plenty of margin for a wide variety of storage solutions - including simply building a huge overcapacity and letting it idle, or doing carbon capture on a peaker gas plant.
But there isn't, is the thing. Nuclear might cost $7000/kW but it has a capacity factor of 80%[1]. Solar has a capacity factor of 25%. So while nuclear is closer to $8750/kW after capacity factor, solar is $6000/kW after capacity factor...before storage.
And storage doesn't have a simple analysis: you can only charge pumped hydro at a certain rate, so on any given day if you don't have excess solar, you might not fully recharge at all (and that's before the problems of storing exactly 1 day's worth of excess energy when you don't have a large, dispatchable fossil fuel grid to fall back on).
And how much is pumped hydro per kW, naively? Varies - an optimistic assessment is $1500 per kW, potentially as high as $5,505 per kW (in capex)[2].
Capacity factor is an energy 101 concept, and evaluating energy based on overnight capital costs plus capacity factor misses out on the an exceptional number of crucial factors: lifetime of capital, O&M, cost of capital, and these days, dispatchability and time of delivery.
The levelized cost of energy takes most of these into account (except dispatch), and shows that nuclear is >4x as expensive, when it gets built and not abandoned halfway through construction. This risk is significant for large projects, and why in 2008, utilities used lobbyists in state legislatures in Georgia and South Carolina to stick customers with the bill for failed construction projects, without which neither Vogtle nor VC Summer would have started. No sane investor would risk billions on new nuclear construction without placing the risk on others.
Real life deployments in free market systems like Texas' ERCOT shows that investors who put their own money on the line to generate electricity cheaply contrast heavily with regulated utilities which profit by rate-basing and therefor want electricity as expensive as possible. And when investors are putting their own money on the line to generate cheap electricity, they don't want to build nuclear or coal or hydro, they are massively investing in wind, solar, and battery storage.
> Capacity factor is an energy 101 concept, and evaluating energy based on overnight capital costs plus capacity factor misses out on the an exceptional number of crucial factors: lifetime of capital, O&M, cost of capital, and these days, dispatchability and time of delivery.
Oh, so like maybe throwing a quote about the cost of solar around without considering storage, capacity factor etc. you know - the $/kW numbers being cited above unsourced...might not be an honest way to talk about costs?
> dispatchability and time of delivery.
Seriously? You're going to argue that these aren't being fairly considered when I express skepticism that solar is "cheaper"?
Solar/wind is cheap as long as you still have something else to back it up when it fails. Battery is cheap and profitable as long as you're only building a couple minutes of capacity to play grid stabilizer/arbitrage games.
It's similar to the problem in privatized health insurance. It's very cheap and profitable to insure young healthy people. Especially when you can dump the responsibility of all the old and sick people on the government.
Of course investors invest in these things - they give quick, high returns on investment. That doesn't mean they're good for long-term stability.
Except we could have avoided enormous amounts of emissions if every first world country had followed France’s lead back in the 1970s. By the time renewables technology advances sufficiently (grid-scale storage is still a necessary but unsolved piece of the puzzle) we will have wasted a 50+ year hard start we could’ve had with nuclear.
Unfortunately most countries didn't follow France, and unless you have a time machine that is going to be quite difficult to change.
When it comes to climate change, the most important goal is to reduce emissions as quickly as possible. This means switching from 100 units gas to 90 units renewable 10 units gas in 5 years is way better than switching to 100 units nuclear in 15 years. If you figure out a solution to the remaining 10 units of gas somewhere within 100 years, you end up ahead!
> When it comes to climate change, the most important goal is to reduce emissions as quickly as possible. This means switching from 100 units gas to 90 units renewable 10 units gas in 5 years is way better than switching to 100 units nuclear in 15 years. If you figure out a solution to the remaining 10 units of gas somewhere within 100 years, you end up ahead!
This is an important refutation of "we need grid-scale storage before we can build out renewables". The total area under the curve is all that matters. 90% renewables + 10% gas can mean less overall emissions than 100% nuclear if it occurs sufficiently faster.
Yes, in 1980 or 2000 or 2010 or even maybe 2015 it would have been a fabulous idea to start a whole bunch more nuclear plants. But in 2023 we have better options.
We've been saying this for decades. It's still not true because we haven't figured out massively scalable grid scale energy storage. The only thing that gets close is PHES and we don't have enough of it.
> Except we could have avoided enormous amounts of emissions if every first world country had followed France’s lead back in the 1970s.
We should have, but we didn't, and we can't change the past, so it's irrelevant.
Not only can't we change the past, but it's an apples to oranges comparison to compare what we ought to have done in the past to what we ought to do today, given how drastically renewables have decreased in cost between the 1970s and the year 2023.
> By the time renewables technology advances sufficiently (grid-scale storage is still a necessary but unsolved piece of the puzzle) we will have wasted a 50+ year hard start we could’ve had with nuclear.
There is no need to wait for grid-scale storage. That piece of the puzzle can be added later to replace last mile gas peaker plants.
Every "pro nuclear" argument always seems to include some experimental technology that's either never been made cost effective or never made it out of the lab.
> components that last 10-30 years,
It's not like nuclear plants last forever. Most seem to run for about 50 years and then need another 50 to decontaminate.
The only reason there's not an existing industry to mass process old solar cells and windmill parts is that they've only recently started mass adoption - there weren't enough being decommissioned for an industry to exist around it yet.
But also, even if the fuel isn't optimally recycled, nuclear power is realistic. "Put it in a can and bury it under a mountain" is a sufficient waste disposal strategy for a pretty long time, and certainly much less damaging that the current fossil fuel "strategy" of "blast it all into the atmosphere and let God sort it out". The US produces about 18% of its energy from nuclear today, and generates about 2000 tons of waste per year. Presumably that means that going all-nuclear would generate about 11,000 tons per year. The Yucca Mountain facility alone had a capacity of 77,000 tons - so about 7 years' worth of powering the whole country.
Pre-war it only imported 17% from Russia, and like most European countries it has since switched to other suppliers. Turns out bringing LNG regasification plants online can be done in a few months, and plenty of countries are willing and able to supply that.
Yeah now we in Europe pay 3x more for energy that we used to, and the process of liquifying natural gas generates 2-se the emissions that we did when we got gas from pipeline. Shipping LNG around the world is a greenwashing disaster, it's like when Europe burns biomass from trees chopped in the amazon and calls it 'sustainable'
Electricity peaked in August 2022, and has returned pretty much back to pre-war levels. You might be paying 3x more, but your electricity provider definitely is not.
Besides, the claim I responded to was that the decline of nuclear in France led to a dependency on Russia for gas. The fact that Europe rapidly switched to LNG shows that this is not true, regardless of your opinion about anything else. Nobody is pretending that LNG is green, and biomass is heavily criticized for exactly that reason.
This was literally legislated by green party politicians. They passed a law mandating that the nuclear fleet must go from 75% to 50% of generation. They also forced the company that owns the fleet (EDF) to sell power at a loss to energy traders and placed a tax on all power bills that went directly to funding their renewable portfolio.
No. Kurzgesagt has a good video about this on YouTube. Launching nuclear waste into space is not even remotely cost effective (and launching it to the Sun is even worse).
(Suppose, as it hasn't been tested that the) SpaceX Starship can carry up to 100 tons of material to LEO. It costs 100 million USD per launch. (11,000 tons / 100 tons) * 100 million USD = 11 billion dollars. The US Department of Energy (DOE) has a budget of 149 billion, so under these pessimistic conditions it would cost around 7% of the budget. That's not good, but its not crazy either.
Elon Musk has stated that he thinks the cost of launching Starship will go down to 10 million per launch in the next 2-3 years (not sure if thats realistic). On the other hand, we probably don't want to unload a bunch of nuclear material in LEO, but much further away from Earth.
Just watched the Kurzgesagt video. They make the point that more radioactive material is put into the world by burning coal, which I think is a valid point. They use the Falcon 9 exclusively to calculate the cost of launching, and they never indicate in the video that the cost of putting 1 kg of material into space might go down. Falcon Heavy can already launch (reusable) 63.8 tons to LEO at a cost of 97 million, which is around 1500USD/kg instead of the 4000 they cite.
They also strangely compare it to the cost of the fissile material, which doesn't make any sense as the majority of the cost for a nuclear reactor is in safety precautions, not in the actual production of nuclear fuel.
In their sources they're a little less forward:
Electricity from nuclear reactors is produced for about $70 per MWh, which is 7 cents per kWh. The fuel costs represent just 0.46 cents per kWh or 6.5% of the total cost.
If we had to get rid of nuclear waste by putting it on rockets, causing fuel costs to rise 3.4 times to 1.57 cents per kWh, the total cost would be increased to 8.1 cents per kWh. This means the total cost becomes 16%
higher.
In the video they state "In 2021, we saw a record 135 launches into space. If we repurposed each of those rockets and filled them all with nuclear waste, the total amount that could be lifted into a Low Earth Orbit, which is the closest orbit above the atmosphere, is nearly 800 tonnes. "
And then they extrapolate this out to... forever, I guess? Either way there were 178 successful launches in 2022. There have already been 123 (successful) launches in 2023. Regardless it seems reasonable to expect this number to go up and the average tonnage per rocket to go up. It just seems strange to make this video that is very explicitly only about 2021 and to have the economics change so much even in 2 years. I would've preferred if they stated in the video that it doesn't make sense today, but it could in 5 or 50 years, and made more arguments in favor of storing it deep underground.
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The biggest risk (as another commenter mentioned) is the massive risk to the environment by trying to shoot it into space. If we really needed to get rid of it, we could bury it under a mountain for 100 years, dig it back up, and shoot it into space when the cost is much lower, and its much safer to launch.
Or just never launch it at all. I don't really buy the idea that burying nuclear waste in remote areas is dangerous. Critics say that the problem is that you have to keep waste contained continuously (say for the next 10,000 years) but I'm near certain we will have some way of truly getting rid of it in the next 500 years. Whether that's blasting it into space or reprocessing or something else entirely.
There's absolutely no reason you can't put it into Yucca mountain other than anti-nuclear 'nimbys' (in quotes because Yucca is nobody's backyard) -- but worst of all, it's an asinine point. Yucca Mountain is directly adjacent to the Nevada Test Site where the US has detonated 928 nuclear weapons, most of them underground. [1]
The Nevada Test Site is the most radiologically contaminated land on the face of the earth already. Honestly if any spent fuel leaked out it might reduce the average radioactivity at the NTS.
Excellent point, also I’d like to point out it buys us quite a bit of time to figure out how to create reactors that eat spent fuel and turn them into nothing, something the DOE has been researching for the last few years.
If your argument (or the argument you're standing by) says "the spent fuel can be recycled", but then you say "well even if we can't recycle it we can just bury it" (which by the by, is what happens a reasonable chunk of French nuclear waste), it makes your entire argument (or the argument you're standing by) sound... how do I put this.... juvenile.
We know it can be buried. That’s what we're arguing against.
What kind of mentality does it take to think that "aha! We can just bury it" is a gotcha response when someone says "but what about all the nuclear waste".
That's like saying "what should we do about plastic waste?" "Aha! We can bury it".
> so about 7 years' worth of powering the whole country
Wow, what a long term solution you hate there.
> less damaging that the current fossil fuel "strategy"
You realise that literally no one arguing against nuclear power, thinks fossil fuels are the alternative right?
What is it with nuclear proponents and ridiculous straw man arguments.
The point is this is tractable. Your argument is Sophist deconstructing the previous argument without contributing to the discussion by nitpicking points.
> What kind of mentality does it take to think that "aha! We can just bury it" is a gotcha response when someone says "but what about all the nuclear waste".
It's not a "gotcha" response - it's simply pointing out that "all" the nuclear waste is really not that much.
> That's like saying "what should we do about plastic waste?" "Aha! We can bury it".
No... because the whole point is the relative quantity. There's an absurd amount of plastic. Much, much, much more. And even collecting it into one place is hard, since it's in tiny bits in every room on the planet, whereas nuclear reactor byproducts tend to be centralized and easy to locate.
To put it into perspective, in 2021, the US generated ~1,800,000,000 tons of carbon (just the carbon part) from electricity generation. So yes, burying 11,000 tons per year would be far better than pumping 2B tons into the air and hoping for the best...
The problem with that comparison is that it's a political one, not an economic one - France's nuclear power has been largely publicly owned, whereas Germany's has been largely private, and what's more Merkel's energy policy 20 years ago took the Greens plan of "shut down nuclear and replace it all with renewables" and took out half of the renewables forcing the country to backfill with coal/gas. So the carbon intensity was a failure of politics.
I think it's kind of ironic, really - there are three arguments against nuclear (safety, cost, and political feasibility), and political feasibility is by far the biggest problem - safety is overblown (in no small part because right now we're using coal/gas which is toxic AF), cost is a genuine issue but frankly irrelevant if nuclear will genuinely speed up decarbonization (climate change is hella expensive), so the big problem with nuclear is that it's so easy to scuttle at any point with fearmongering, so if it delays renewables it could be literally worse than useless due to politics.
I guess that's why the US still stores a bunch of used fuel at reactors in concrete and steel vessels, with zero long term storage plans... because it's "easy".
We have had many long term storage options evaluated over the years, none more popularly known than Yucca mountain.
Every time the political parties exchange power, it either gets renewed or cancelled. According to the GAO, it is not for technical or other reasons, just purely political ones.
It's a lot easier than pumping pollution into the atmosphere where we all get to breathe it and it causes climate problems. But I guess you think that's a better solution.
Statements like this make me more nervous about the advocates of nuclear energy than of the mass adoption of nuclear energy itself.
In the simplest of terms: radioactive material emits energetic particles and photons. In itself, this is not much of a problem for naturally occurring radioactive materials since it is usually in low concentrations and captured by the crust of the Earth. The problem with radioactive materials used in reactors is that it has to be concentrated, otherwise the reaction rates would be too low to be useful.
Disposing of that nuclear waste isn't as simple as sticking it in a small box then burying the box in a hole. At the very least, you're going to want that hole to be geologically stable (to ensure nature doesn't interfere with how it is stored) and physically secure (to ensure humanity doesn't interfere with how it is stored). You're going to want to consider what is absorbing those emitted particles and photons, since you want to minimize how much is being absorbed by the nuclear waste stored alongside it.
So I hope you don't mind if I dismiss your claims that it is easily stored and put more faith in engineers and scientists who specialize in nuclear waste disposal. Sure, their systems may be over engineered and more expensive than they need to be. On the other hand, they have put a lot more thought into it.
It's not literally that simple, yes, but the general idea holds. Storing nuclear waste is trivial compared to any real energy problem, so conveying that sentiment through a simple statement makes sense.
Especially US and Canada which are huge and have uninhabited places (US) to literally most of the country which is devoid of population (Canada). Dumping the waste in a hole is almost certainly a feasible solution for a few centuries even if we switch to generating all of our energy from nuclear.
From a pro-nuke guy: no, it has not been shown. The vast majority of the nuclear fuel is low enriched Uranium, meaning U-238 makes 95% of it or more. A little is transmuted to Plutonium during operation, but more than 90% of the spent fuel is still U-238. We don't currently have the capability to burn that. We may have it one day, but that day is many decades in the future.
What nuclear recycling does is to extract unburned U-235 and plutonium from spent fuel. That can only be done once, after that the plutonium is too rich in Pu-240, and only the Pu-239 isotope is optimal for fission. So, those who say we can keep recycling spent fuel, either don't know the whole story, or choose not to tell it.
But many companies are working on developing fast reactors. These reactors can burn U-238. In principle they can burn it all. In reality, I think in the short term they'll burn just some part of it. For example, current nuclear plants can generate about 40 to 60 GW-day per ton of fuel. Various new plant proposals can go to 180 GWd/ton [1]; this is impressive, but it's not the factor of 20 you'd expect from fully burning all the uranium in the nuclear fuel. In the link I provided you'll see two reactor types with higher burnups; they are both envisioned to burn thorium. Fingers crossed, but thorium is much more unproven than uranium.
In any case, even when burning spent fuel will be possible, it will initially be economically non-profitable. And it will be so for decades.
But not for centuries. That's important. Naysayers will try to convince you that spent fuel will be a problem for ten thousand years. But that is only assuming that we freeze all progress to where we are today. Why such an assumption?
If you were to place a bet where you miraculously wake up in the future 200 years from now, would you wager that we won't be able to burn the 20'th and 21'st century spent nuclear fuel, or that we will be able to?
Why isn't the spent nuclear fuel used to conductively pre-heat the water going to the turbine? Then less energy would be required to convert it to steam, making the whole plant more efficient.
The steam water is a closed loop. It's boiled, passes through the turbine, condensed back to water, and boiled again. It's already "hot" and doesn't need pre-heating.
I also think that fast reactors are the answer, and we just have to get over the "proliferation" worry. I mean with all the sanctions the world has imposed we have been unable to prevent Iran, North Korea, other countries from conducting entrichment operations and building weapons. The cat is out of the bag.
And the cat most certainly is not out of the bag. If you split the nuclear era in the first 3 decades and the next 5, then by 1975 seven nations got the bomb: the US, the USSR, the UK, France, China, Israel and India. After that, only three nations did (South Africa, Pakistan and North Korea) and one gave them up eventually.
Iran figured out that they can play their cards better if the do not acquire the bomb, but only enrich enough uranium to be able to do that. Many other nations are only "a screwdriver's turn away" from building a bomb, Japan first among them. So much so that there is the concept of "Japan option", or nuclear latency [1]. These countries have looked into the pros and cons of possessing nuclear weapons and decided that it's better for them not to build the bomb, but be able to do that at a moment's notice. In particular, if China were to invade Taiwan, you can be sure than both Japan and South Korea would have the bomb in less than one year, and this is something that the Chinese planners are well aware of. If Japan and South Korea already had the bomb, then it would be much less of a deterrent for China to invade Taiwan.
We need to start thinking of proliferation as good and desirable thing. Just imagine if instead of long wars in Iraq and Afganistan they had nuclear weapons and delivered retaliatory strike to USA when they were invaded.
I'm still so sad that John Kerry had the Integral Fast Reactor funding killed. On-site electro-processing avoided all the scary things about reprocessing being enrichment (and often being off-site). Very fail-safe design. We'd already done prototyping with Experimental Breeder Reactor II. Huge loss to not have the government doing this pioneering. They more than anyone have to be leading the charge; the commercial space is aligned to such a more limited perspective. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
A variety of derivative designs have kicked around & a bunch seemed like they were going to get built. Recently GE Hitachi & one of their derived PRISM designs & TerraPower travelling wave folks agreed to try something in Wyoming, but there've been so many similar such plans that've fallen through that I'm not holding my breath.
> Every "pro nuclear" argument always seems to include some experimental technology that's either never been made cost effective or never made it out of the lab
To be fair, the same is true of pro-renewable arguments. Storage is always hand waved away with pumped hydro (not enough suitable reservoirs), "molten salt!", some wild globe-spanning HVDC network or an absolutely unfathomable amount of chemical batteries.
Energy is a really difficult problem and we have no obvious solutions.
> To be fair, the same is true of pro-renewable arguments.
Do some people claim the solution is non-existent (at scale) solutions? Sure. Does it come up anywhere near as often as "we just need <insert Nuclear technology that's never proven reliable/commercially viable>"? Not in my experience.
> Storage is always hand waved away with pumped hydro (not enough suitable reservoirs)
Keep in mind that "how do we power the world" isn't a US-centric problem. ~35% of Switzerland's electricity is already generated from pumped hydro.
> Energy is a really difficult problem and we have no obvious solutions.
It's so difficult that South Australia (a state with a relatively small economy - about on par with South Dakota, with double the population) went from 1% to more than 70% electricity generated from renewables (wind and solar), in the space of 15 years.
> an absolutely unfathomable amount of chemical batteries
I wanted to come back to this after talking about South Australia. SA hit 70% renewables, with less than 1% accounted for by battery storage.
Renewable energy has increased exponentially in technological advances and installed capacity in the last few decades, and while some people may be pinning their hopes and dreams on as-yet-unproven "renewable" pipe dreams like world-wide HVDC networks, there are real-world technologies out there doing what opponents have claimed for years, is impractical (it was claimed for a long time that renewables could at best provide 20% of South Australia's power needs).
> Keep in mind that "how do we power the world" isn't a US-centric problem. ~35% of Switzerland's electricity is already generated from pumped hydro
I'm from Sweden. Lots of hydro, but even the hydro we have is controversial as it has destroyed habitats. Even if we added storage capability to existing hydro, it's not enough to run the whole country through the winter.
I live in Japan now. Absolutely zero natural resources for storage, so it's a country which after Fukushima has invested lots in coal, and the world's largest car manufacturer is investing in hydrogen (which COULD be generated from renewables but we all know the fossil fuels will win in cost)
> SA hit 70% renewables, with less than 1% accounted for by battery storage
That's awesome! We should all use renewables as much as we can to remove as much fossil fuels as we can. But as with many problems, after the first 90%, comes the remaining 90%.
> there are real-world technologies out there doing what opponents have claimed for years, is impractical
I want to see a 100% renewable grid, complete with transport and heavy industry (not some off-grid house or tropical island). I really do. Please show me it. We NEED this. I still don't see it.
Japan does fuel reprocessing for its nuclear reactors, my understanding is that this allows them to just not need to import any more uranium. I believe there is still some waste product at the end of all of this, but it is a very manageable amount of it? That's my understanding at least.
Not because they want to. Japan is what you or I might call "seismically active", so picking a place that's going to be secure for 100K years is even harder than other places.
They determined in the 90's that MOX reprocessing costs 4x what it would cost to bury the stuff.. by 2017 the price had quadrupled again from the '94 cost.
My understanding is the reprocessing is more about trying to recover uranium and have a somewhat closed cycle rather than constantly try and import uranium from mines? But my understanding is limited
I'm not an expert but my understanding is that MOX reprocessing does produce usable fuel, yes - but the point I was highlighting is that it's ridiculously expensive to do so.
Japan has never had nuclear final repository for obvious NIMBY and anti nuclear reason. Nuclear fuel cycle has been considered to the way to process nuclear "waste" in nuclear strategy. Fast reactor wasn't a thing but people thought it will be made in the future. Saving fuel is an another reason of course.
Japan's fast reactor Monju is failed and there's no realistic plan to have a new one. Other western countries' projects had stopped. The cycle is now almost broken, but govt still need to say that it's in progress because it's terrible to say that we run nuclear plants but we don't have repository.
I don't disagree with what you've said, but in many ways I think it's "too late" for nuclear. There was a good article I read recently that made the argument that the gargantuan cost of nuclear, coupled with long regulatory lead times and lots of local opposition make it much too slow to deploy, when we need drastic changes ASAP.
Deployment of solar and wind is just much faster and ends up being much more cost competitive. "Overbuilding" renewables, coupled with multiple storage technologies, is a better option than nuclear at this point.
This doesn't make sense. I suppose it depends what your goals are? It might be "too late" if your goal is to stay below N degrees, but that doesn't mean you should give up on it. It could still be the way to prevent N + 1 degrees.
> Deployment of solar and wind is just much faster and ends up being much more cost competitive.
There's literally nothing stopping us from building _both_ solar+wind and nuclear. There's no shortage of construction workers or materials. And it avoids the need to build large, expensive, and relatively short-lived (and resource-intensive) battery installations that are needed to displace fossil fuel-based energy generation. Solar and wind have an 80/20 problem, and nuclear easily slots in as a great solution for that 20%.
> There's no shortage of construction workers or materials.
In many countries there is a shortage, actually. Especially for construction workers.
And a big limiting factor is the lack of money: money isn't unlimited and you can only spend each dollar once. You have to choose, so better spend it on the option with the biggest impact.
While true, there's a question of why would you bother if you can build nuclear? 60-70% of my states' electricity use is 24/7 constant. Outside of that number, the downward slope between maxium and minimums is very long, and very slow and mostly at night. Nuclear plants are easily variable in fuel burn over these sorts of rates.
The problem with solar and wind is that they can trip offline from the grid very quickly, so the entire question is whether you can plausibly backstop the grid for long enough without the need to spin up an extra powerplant.
With a frontloaded capex asset like nuclear, once you are building it there's a big question as to how much value you get from not using it - i.e. the main benefit of solar and wind is if with storage they stop you needing to build a new nuclear plant.
I would contend that the storage answer is very inadequate: it's not nearly good enough to have a grid which is only running with 1 day worth of banked power when you could have much longer periods of underproduction (which is the way most solar/wind storage solutions are presented). To safely have a distributed grid, you need months worth of stored power to average out the fluctuations. Storage just isn't cheap enough at that scale compared to nuclear reactors.
We have finite resources, and that is the main argument against nuclear. If cost was no object, if we could pay lackadaisical EPC to waste billions and throw timelines off track, if we could bankrupt more design firms like Westinghouse due to complete incompetence in delivery of design, sure, why not just fritter our finite labor pool and resources away.
But if want to be effective as possible at fighting climate change, we need to Marshall our resources as if we were at war, and put all the effort into the most effective routes.
> There was a good article I read recently that made the argument that the gargantuan cost of nuclear, coupled with long regulatory lead times and lots of local opposition make it much too slow to deploy, when we need drastic changes ASAP.
Fixing the regulations and committing to a large scale construction of at least 1,000 nuclear power plants in the United States could solve these problems pretty easily.
Nobody has a single proposal on what regulation to fix, or even the more basic problem of what regulations are unnecessary.
However, if you look into detail at what happened at Vogtle, you find absolutely incompetent management that thought they could just ignore all the basic quality requirements and get away with it. Leading to massive delays, etc. etc. etc.
Regulations are a red herring, IMHO. Idiotic construction companies are however a huge problem, as are absolutely idiotic design companies like Westinghouse, which many times delivered "unconstructable" plans!
Ironically if there was more regulations, and plans were required to be checked by regulators both for safety as well as constructability, perhaps these projects could have been completed closer to on time and on budget.
But that's just because of all the people working on these things, only the regulators are doing their job as if they were accountable entities, and the utility, the EPC, and the designer are all looking simply to pass the buck and hope that in the eventual lawsuit they can take minimal damages.
On average the US has commissioned more than one nuclear powered naval submarine or aircraft carrier every year. There’s no fundamental reason we can’t also cost-effectively build on land.
Brian Potter’s “Construction Physics” substack has a series of articles about the cost issues with nuclear power:
All in all, the issues with nuclear construction are largely down to regulation, and can be overcome through massive economies of scale. Building 1000 nuclear power plants within the next ten years is achievable if the United States, to use your words, “[marshalls] our resources as if we were at war”. The primary reason this hasn’t happened already are (a) activists like you spent the last half century trying to prevent it, eroding the practical expertise necessary and (b) natural gas is still probably more cost effective.
Fun fact: if everyone in earth had the same carbon footprint as folks in France, we could bring the entire third world up to first world living standards without increasing the world’s total carbon emissions.
I don't really feel the need to shut down nuclear stuff, but my impression from the past couple of years of these discussions is that nuclear is not only super costly, but logistically very hard (ignoring regulatory environment issues! Just logistics), and is just super hard to pull off. Meanwhile lots of other things have shown up, are very cheap, don't necessarily require huge water inputs, etc.
France is the nuclear success story, of course! But the irony is that these power generators can only make money when used at 80-90% capacity. France's reactors don't get that high, and so they're quite a money pit. There's the argument that "losing money" generating power is fine (we don't expect to make money on libraries or streets), but it's important when people argue about regulation being the problem. The most open and willing ecosystem for nuclear power is one that exists due to massive state subsidies.
Yeah lots of renewables aren't 100%, but power is power is power, and it feels like doing a bunch of easy stuff that also happens to make money for private actors (sidestepping some of the trickiness of larger gov't-funded projects) is a thing that our modern society is well oriented towards.
EDIT: to be clear, if there was a huge pro-nuclear movement that showed up tomorrow that could get things done, I'd be all for it. I just like the idea of doing easy things that are accepted by wide swaths of the population rather than just sitting around lamenting that people are "being irrational" or w/e
Yeah… there was one movie star who was heavily influenced by a movie she was in and became an activist against nuclear despite not having any background in nuclear power. Yet, ironically, many environmental movements and organizations hopped on her[1] bandwagon. Most have realized the error in judgement. Better late than never.
She raised the anti-nuke monster that is only now being neutralized.
Let’s consider, that France is importing power from Germany, since at times more then half of it’s nuclear power plants are off-line. Many for months on end, due to their dated and complex technology and lately corrosion problems. Some during the dry summers months, since not enough water is available for cooling.
Edit: Added english article. Thanks for the downvotes.
I didn't disagree with the comment, but I fear that pro-nuclear advocates have become almost as irrational as the far more irrational anti-nuclear advocates that they fight against all the time. Wrestling with pigs makes you muddy too, after all.
Disclaimer: I wouldn't consider myself anti-nuclear according to any of the standard anti-nuke arguments, and was extremely pro-nuclear power in the US in the 2000s. However the experiences of advanced economies with very high productivity and labor costs (France, US, Finland) have completely soured me on the possibility of nuclear in the future, as the tech doesn't work that well and is very expensive. Even the country very best at construction, China, is only planning another 50GW or so, which is a tiny tiny fraction of any other new energy source that they are investing in. And if the best in the world at large construction projects is only putting in a token effort, I don't know why we in the US, who suck at large construction, should attempt more boondoggles. And in researching the history of nuclear, I find that it has always been this way, not so great. I think it only gets ardent supporters these days because of its prominence in SF.
> since at times more then half of it’s nuclear power plants are off-line
Happened a few times only in 2022 because of covid + an issue affecting many plants being discovered as far as I know. Now being fixed. Otherwise worked pretty well for decades.
NREs being extremely often at <50% capacity, even practically zero in windless nights, is expected behavior.
Because it's a ridiculous comment. France has been relying on nuclear power for a huge chunk of their national energy use for over 50 years. France is nuclear power greatest success story. The amount years of improved air quality, the enormous amount of CO2 prevented, the relative political independence of France, all of these are taken for granted without measure. And then the counter argument is that they recently stopped? How is that an argument against nuclear power?
The reason they're relying on German coal right now is because they stopped building new nuclear plants because gas was too cheap, there was too much geopolitical stability for it to be strategically advantageous and it was not politically attractive to spend money on. None of these are arguments against nuclear, but the results of short sighted decisions. Nuclear is only more expensive than gas if you don't count the effect on climate, the dependence on oil producing nations, the health effects of airborne particles.
France is a nuclear success story, but they're also a good indicator that even when you're all bought in, there are logistics difficulties that come from your power generation being centralized to certain locations.
France has like 80% nuclear power, and most of the nuclear plants are actually underutilized! Why would France not use the plants at 100%? Because electricity is kind of fungible, except at massive scales where it totally isn't, and you can't "just" have power generated in the south be used in the north.
Nuclear is more expensive than gas, but once again it is worth pointing out that it is more expensive than solar and wind! Does this mean that we can replace all of the reactors with solar or wind? Obviously not. But if you're sitting there trying to produce energy in places that are not as close to the existing reactors, building energy production facilities that don't take decades to build (for "building big things takes time" reasons) and can work without a constant inflow of water (which is a practical and real concern for these power plants).
But that's the point, really. Nuclear reactors are not economical if you're not really going for it, so in an environment where you are relying heavily on nuclear reactors, suddenly your entire endeavor is not very practical without massive state aid.
This is less of a problem in other places that have less nuclear power setup because they can be used to cover the baseline. Now, EDF is turning off reactors over the weekend cuz the power isn't needed, and in periods of high demand EDF doesn't actually have the capacity, because they don't have much peak generation!
Building more nuclear plants to cover peaks would make everything even more expensive, And decomissioning reactors entirely would cause their own massive issues because, again, electricity generation is not fungible.
One would (correctly!) point that most renewables don't help with peak generation either, and you would be right. But if you're planning on decomissioning a nuclear power plant, replacing some of that capacity with renewables at least gets your operating costs down. And energy storage solutions that are more fungible... well... you walk and chew bubble gum. Use what you have, and build what makes sense. Just in 2023 your choices for clean power generation for energy storage are vast.
Ridiculous? Well, pardon me. This wasn't meant to be an argument against nuclear power, hopefully obvious when read calmly, but rather a statement of facts. I didn't want the nuke cheerleading go on without pointing out some inconvenient details.
It's a complex topic, and I appreciate the more detailed responses about the french situation.
Edit: Let me add the fact, that France seems to have trouble training enough personnel for these highly complex plants, rightfully so to protect the environment from the dangers of radiation. Considering the demographics of Europe in general, that is a troubling development for maintenance of these power plants decades into the future.
In my opinion even though indeed you present facts neutrally, your choice of facts seemed intended to make it seem as though nuclear reactors being turned off is somehow something generally a problem with nuclear reactors.
In the same line of reasoning as before, if France and the rest of the world had continued their investment in a thriving nuclear industry then getting new talent might not have been such a pressing issue.
Such a success story that their nuclear company, EDF, had to be nationalized and is so indebted that they can not finance new nuclear without state aid.
>(Montel) French utility EDF is unable to self-finance the construction of new nuclear reactors due to its EUR 65bn debt and so needs state funding, CEO Luc Remont told a hearing of France’s lower house on Wednesday.
Meanwhile Germany and the US is making billions by auctioning the right to build off-shore wind.
> Germany’s first dynamic bidding process, covering four offshore wind zones with a combined capacity of 7 GW, has generated EUR 12.6 billion in proceeds, according to the Federal Network Agency.
I have a hard time seeing France as a success story to emulate today. Choosing nuclear was the right choose to gain energy independence in the 70s, today the equivalent choice are renewables.
Such a success story that France didn't buy oil/gas from abroad to generate electricity worth 120B euro a year for 40 years in a row. Who cares about the financial management vehicle of the operation is 65B short at the end of those 40 years?
The wind farms are awesome, and I'm super happy that the current economic and geopolitical climate and the technological advancements are making them possible and financially attractive to build. But in the end success is measured in TWh delivered. And France has been delivering 300TWh+/y of clean electricity for 40 years straight. And the 7GW that's gonna deliver ~20TWh/year is cool, but we need a whole lot more of it before it can be deemed as much a success as France's nuclear endeavour has been.
Exactly as I said. Nuclear was the right choice in the 70s. At that time the climate as a question did not exist, it was only about energy independence.
Today the equivalent choice when rebuilding our energy systems are renewables.
Case in point, already in 2021 renewables delivered more TWh globally per year than all existing nuclear [1], we are still early in the buildout. The tender in 2024/25 for German north sea wind auctions will be ~10 GW. [2]
Nice thanks, that's a really cool graph. It is very promising and I like how windmill farms can probably be constructed to be a little bit more resistant to sabotage than nuclear power plants are, should it ever come to that level of strain.
And enough water IS available for cooling. The output was only reduced in some power plants because the temperature difference between river inlet and river outlet was too big, which could cause issues to animals in the water. This was less than 0.2% of the total electricity produced by nuclear in 2022. There is an easy fix though: cooling towers.
Just a nitpick on the "half its power plants are offline" bit - Macron administration decided to finally retrofit a lot of the reactors and thus they've been offline during a critical time (with climate change - fueled heatwaves and Russia/Ukraine war). They likely decided for a drastic move since the legislature is no longer centrist majority.
I don't think France's nuclear situation is as dire, but it does expose some of nuclear's weaknesses: need for fresh water, and maintenance (which was overdue).
France going nuclear [1]: "France’s championing of nuclear power as a way of ensuring its energy sovereignty sounds great. But a group of researchers says it's a red herring given France imports all its uranium."
The push for nuclear in the US is a strategic maneuver to increase our position in Africa. It is not about increasing "clean" energy production. What else can you make with uranium and plutonium?? Hmm...
Further, France is slowing nuclear power generation due to heat waves [2]. Further evidence that the nuclear path is not a scalable, viable solution. Meaning, it's a bad idea to invest nuclear energy, let alone for the purpose of transitioning off fossil fuels.
Why would you not build new reactors at sites that account for the changed climate, maybe with adjacent cooling lakes?
Yes, Uranium is imported but fuel costs and volume is a pretty irrelevant factor with nuclear energy. You can buy it somewhere else in strategic quantities and store it at home. But sure, there can be short term difficulties.
>> The 17-point partisan difference on nuclear power is smaller than those for other energy sources, including fossil fuel sources such as offshore oil and gas drilling (48 points) and coal mining (47 points).
I hope this means we can get the US government to continue to invest in nuclear. While it may not be the final step for human energy generation, it can be an effective stepping stone away from fossil fuels. My fear is the decreased reliance on coal and natural gas will cause unwanted political strife.
Although solar and wind are not at the capacity as nuclear is, it makes sense to continue to head in that direction. Consider this list, and how much coal is still in use.
Isn't identifying with "my party" part of what causes these sorts of splits down the middle? As opposed to considering everything an option to vote for if they announce plans that align with what one thinks is needed in the country/region it concerns
As long as closed primaries exist, it doesn't seem objectionable to me. I am just describing the reality of the American system.
I've never lived under any jurisdiction where any other party got more than like 15% of the vote so this is effectively the party that runs the elections I care about, the party that governs the place I live, the party I am registered as. I am describing a reality.
"I'm just describing reality" is what I hear an awful lot in response to "wouldn't it be better if we..."s. My issue with them is that it's not mutually exclusive. Just because you've got one realistic option per election (namely: second-worst, such that first-worst doesn't get to win) doesn't mean that the same party is always going to be "yours".
I think this line of thinking is part of the cause. It's compatible with "reality" to not think of either party as something one needs to be loyal to and, instead, look at your options. It's not a package deal
I'm registered as the party, it doesn't mean that I will always vote for them.
Personally, I don't think that specific minutia of phraseology ("my" vs. "registered as") are as productive of our political reality as you do. I think it has to do with FPTP voting.
> I'm registered as the party, it doesn't mean that I will always vote for them
Oh in that sense! I didn't read it that way, that makes more sense yes :) Wasn't trying to nitpick, the phrasing sounded like ballot loyalty to me, happy to be wrong
With First Past the Post voting there is really only "my party" and "the other one". You need to pick your party based on the menu they have offered. You like nuclear but not abortions? Tough, you need to pick which party is favorable overall.
I wonder what it would look like if we could allow more granular voting. However there are real benefits to having one guy in charge, so it isn't clear how particular decisions could be delegated well.
Observation: It seems like americans don't really care that much about electricity/energy production. If this post had been been up 12 hours earlier there would have been hundreds of comments by now.
North America has been pretty insulated from a lot of the global energy instability occuring in the aftermath of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine along with the coups in the Sahel.
Canada, US, and Mexico have enough resources and capital to be largely self sufficient, or fill any holes with imports from other American nations like Brazil or Venezuela.
Most of the Middle East's energy exports are sold to India, China, Japan, and South Korea and most of Europe's are sourced from a mix of North Africa, Eastern+Southern Europe, and the Middle East. This means Eurasia is heavily impacted by instability in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
The thing we really need is to just keep building plants. The problem nuclear power has faced is that since no industry which commonly exercises itself exists, the engineering experience and knowledge about how to run power plant construction projects hasn't matured - hence the cost overruns and delays.
Like the thing to do after the expense of the Vogtle project is to take the learned lessons there, and start working work on the next reactor (there were some really stupid things on that project too - i.e. commencing construction without finishing design work on the major components, which led to a lot of unnecessary rework).
There isn’t time for a “just keep working on the next reactor.” We have to decarbonize the entire economy in a ridiculously short time, and that means either (1) focusing on technologies that already have an exponential adoption/price curve, or (2) making decisive and massive investments in nuclear to get the technology onto such a curve. Anything else is going to be mostly irrelevant.
Berkshire Hathaway Energy said they would, from a financial point of view, never build a nuclear plant and keep increasing renewables. And they're not known to be bad capital allocators.
Buffet also said, "I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire's tax rate.” … “For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit."
From what I heard, they also make sense without subsidies (about the same as solar panels which everyone is throwing onto their roofs now, except an efficient unit doesn't cost millions to get started), but I suppose this guy's logic for "worth it" includes outperforming sticking his money into an index fund
Also, what surprised me to learn is how much money goes into subsidies for fossil fuel companies. I really didn't think they needed that
Oil also doesn't make sense without subsidies. If renewables are going to compete, they currently need subsidies. He's simply saying that they wouldn't cover their own costs without the credits. Not that the credits somehow pay for more than the price of the wind farm.
I'd expect that to be because of the current regulatory hurdles and associated costs. If policy shifts to make it easier (thus cheaper) to build, I'm sure berkshire would jump in.
There are a lot of countries that are building or have tried to build nuclear in the last ten years.
In the US, the major nuclear projects are long running boondoggles, going way over.
In France, nuclear is so expensive that the national electricity company had to be nationalized to avoid bankruptcy, and plants are being closed.
Finland's Olkiluoto plant is 10 years over-schedule and has 300% cost overrruns.
South Korea had major cost overruns and is set to close half their plants
China isn't kind enough to share cost figures, but has reduced planned plants by a major percentage, indicating that the investment return is not very good. They do not have regulatory hurdles.
Maybe the only country on earth capable of building competitive nuclear is Russia of all places. They steadily increase the number of plants under construction and do not see to go over-schedule, though we don't know what the budgets look like.
While the US has a bad reputation for make infrastructure building ability, it seems to be global problem.
>China isn't kind enough to share cost figures, but has reduced planned plants by a major percentage, indicating that the investment return is not very good. They do not have regulatory hurdles.
PRC is currently building indigenous nuclear relatively economically which appear to be performing around expectations. What happened / what PRC can't seem to do, like the west, is build _western_ nuclear tech economically. Nuclear ambition under 13th 5-year plan has been delayed largely due Fukushima reassessement and drama over western nuclear tech (French EPR / US AP1000 technical and political issues like US sanctions / Westinghouse bankruptcy) forcing PRC to switch to domestic tech. Current 14th 5-year plan still aiming for ~180-200 GWe by 2035 with ~150 reactors, which is in line with mid 2010s assessments. What is also happening is PRC scaling up coal and solar, due to geopolitics of rushing energy security and lower renewable costs, but not at the expense of nuclear rollout.
Subsidizing weapons would be incidental - no need for 150 reactors. US/USSR had <20 production reactors to make pu239 for 1000s of nuclear weapons. IIRC think current US projections of PRC nuclear proliferation is 1000-1500 weapons by 2030s, based on production from a few plants dedicated to nuclear production (404 and 821). If PRC wanted 1000s of nukes, it would be much more economical to build a few dedicated weapons-grade plutonium reactors, which won't be subject to civil regulatory concerns, i.e. multi year pause due to Fukushima. Parsimonious incentive for building 150 civilian reactors is because it's economically feasible there.
Nuclear has massive government subsidies. Most notably, construction contracts are structured such that cost overruns are borne by tax payers, not the builder. Also, clean up costs are covered by the tax payer.
> Also, clean up costs are covered by the tax payer.
Maybe you can provide a link.
Because here in the US that's not the case. For the Three Mile Island meltdown, the cleanup cost was about $1 billion, and the vast majority was born by the private corporations, not by the public. Here's a GAO quote [1]
During the period 1979 through 1981, five federal agencies committed $275 million for TMI related matters, but very little of this money had been used to directly offset cleanup expenditures. However, the current Administration commitment of $123 million for data acquisition and research and development could directly offset as much as $54 million of GPU-budgeted expenditures. Other reductions have occurred or are expected to occur as a result of Department of Energy involvement.
> Because here in the US that's not the case. For the Three Mile Island meltdown, the cleanup cost was about $1 billion, and the vast majority was born by the private corporations, not by the public.
That's called holding private corporations accountable for negligently contaminating the environment. There's a difference between the government paying to decom a well-run plant after 40-50 years, and sticking the taxpayer with cleaning up a mess that's not the public's responsibility.
That's all well and good except there's a nearly-zero number of nuclear plants being built. Which means there's a nearly-zero number of subsidies. You don't get in the business of building Widget X for the tax credits when nobody is asking for Widget X and Widget Y also gets tax credits and is being cranked out everywhere you look.
Don't forget that many nuclear plants have a guaranteed electricity price and demand.
Basically, if a nuke plant wants to operate, other plants will have to shut down to let them. And if the electricity price on the free market is below their guarantee, the government will pay the difference.
Probably too late to make much of a difference for climate change. We're just clawing our way back to our senses after decades of backwards movement caused by mostly well-intentioned protesters. Unfortunately, global warming did not wait for us to catch up. Whoops!
That's fine. I don't see why nuclear power should be viewed from a profit seeking lense. In the same way we pay 1T for Defense, 3T for medicare/medicaid/SS, i don't mind paying XT for Nuclear Power.
conspirary hat on: I think big city governments/urbanists/feds don't want nuclear since it would enable a large swathe of the country to continue suburban/rural lifestyles (SFH and electric cars powered by nuclear). I bet they were hoping high gas prices/high electric prices would force them back into dense urban areas (kind of a reverse white flight) where they can be "goverened", taxed and have their surplus "redistributed".
this is the worst conspiracy theory i've ever heard have you been to an american city?? they're terrible. there are like five habitable cities in the US, only one really good one which is not capable of building transit infrastructure at sane costs (cuomo train hall, no through running at penn station, the world's most expensive bridge per mile, 2nd avenue subway). oh and there's no housing so it's incredibly expensive to live in one of those five cities
Not really getting your priorities if you think the good one is one of the ones that is so hilariously expensive that even rent is obscene.
Also, NYCs transit system (and NYC in general) is in a state of decay. They've added the shiny new station in Manhattan, but the decay is so blatant over in Queens, ancient metro stations with flickering or broken lights, the few renovated stations being blatantly cheap jobs, it's pretty depressing to compare to the money they burned on some of the stations in recent years in Manhattan.
Someone certainly will be paying for it. I've lived in two locations where the utilities invested in nuclear and ratepayers get to pay for the difference between the cost of the energy and what they can sell it for. In Pittsburgh, we at least received some of the overpriced power we subsidized. In Atlanta, the nuclear plant is selling power to a different market, but we pay for it nonetheless.
Over the last few years, social media has been absolutely flooded with people claiming that nuclear is the "one weird trick THEY don't want you to know about" to solving climate change. It is supposed to solve every single problem, and probably even cure cancer in the process - often relying on theoretical or experimental concepts which have never been tried in practice.
Meanwhile, the reactors currently / recently constructed are massively over budget and years behind schedule. Nobody is willing to invest in them unless the government is willing to guarantee a massive subsidy on the electricity produced. Additional reactors will at best come online in a decade or two. And during all this solar and wind are rapidly increasing their market share while being weaned off the initial subsidies. Literally everyone wants to build it and in many areas we are now seeing problems because too many people are building it, leading to overcapacity.
Nuclear was a great idea in the 70s, but got a significant reputation hit due to high-profile nuclear incidents, cost overruns, and long construction delays. It was essentially killed by cheap coal becoming available with the rise of surface mining, just like coal is now being killed by cheap gas.
In 2023 the economic reality is that nuclear simply isn't a viable option anymore, and it would be quite foolish to rely on it to solve climate change in any way.
While this is the standard answer that people who have looked into it deeper give, it still surprises me.
The largest solar farm in the US is about 570 MW. Some have calculated that we're going to need to build two 400 MW farms every week for the next 30 years to reach a "middle-road renewable energy scenario." [1]
That's insane.
(Or we could be building one 400 MW solar farm and one 400 MW wind farm every week instead for 30 years. Point is, though, we're far from being able to do that.)
So we're still going to be struggling in 20 years. Wouldn't we be in a better position then if we had also started the process of building new nuclear plants 20 years prior? "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is today," etc.
> (Or we could be building one 400 MW solar farm and one 400 MW wind farm every week instead for 30 years. Point is, though, we're far from being able to do that.)
That's actually lower than what the USA is doing right now.
"The US solar industry installed 6.1 gigawatts-direct current (GWdc) of capacity in the first quarter of 2023"[0]
That is approx 469 MW of power being installed every week.
Sorry, I realize I was being confusing by measuring in 400 MW farms: the total required was 800 MW/week, which we're not hitting yet.
We are at the right order of magnitude, though, as you show. The question is whether we can hit the actual number required (which is close to double what we have now) and sustain it for another three decades.
You keep saying "sustain", but solar has been growing exponentially and there is still no sign of an inflection. "Sustaining" a rate of growth is the wrong concept to model it.
I disagree. Just because there's no sign of inflection yet in is earliest period of exponential growth doesn't mean that the conditions to keep building at this rate (or, rather, faster) will remain for another 30 years.
We're in a period with low-hanging fruit. Lots of available space. Lots of roofs that don't have don't panels yet. Lots of mines churning our rare elements.
What will happen as solar starts to saturate the market, and the price of electricity continues to fall (thus lowering the incentive to build more farms) while the available space shrinks and the number of rare elements decreases (increasing the cost of farms)?
I'm not saying this will happen, but it was mentioned in the Greens Dilemma article posted and, and is certainly worth thinking about.
So now you want to know for how long it can keep accelerating.
That one is a good question to ask. If the rate of change can be sustained is not. And by the way, linearly extrapolating the current rate of change into the future, like you did on your original comment is equality useless.
But yes, this one comment has a useful model. By the way, you can look how much rare earth elements are actually needed, how much mining them can grow, how much space are there for the panels, and how much the panel price can theoretically fall. I don't think anything I say will convince you, so yeah, go look, because your comment shows a lack of awareness of any of those factors.
But of course, it won't keep the exponential growth for 30 years. That would make the PV output orders of magnitude larger than our current energy consumption. If nothing yields by them, it will stop for lack of demand. Demanding it to keep going for that long is completely unreasonable.
I'm not asking how long it can keep accelerating. You keep making things overly-complicated.
We (per the estimates above) need to be installing about 800 MW of new renewable power generation every week every week for the next 30 years. We're currently at about 400 MW installed every week. So we need to grow to somewhere around or above that target, and then sustain that same rate for 30 years. (Or possibly fewer years if we are installing way above that rate.)
My question is simply, given that large rate of installation, can we actually sustain that rate for 30 years?
Presumably we will eventually be hitting that target rate, at least, and hopefully we will continue to do so for some time. But if markets don't continue to support installing solar at that same pace in 10 or 20 years, we won't hit our targets. That's all I'm saying.
So, you are asking if solar can technically replace all of our energy needs? In a time independent fashion?
That one has plenty of stuff written about. Yes, it can.
One other good question to ask is how much of it will be replaced on the next 5 or 10 years. That's where all the discussion is, because if it takes 30 years, we'd better also invest in alternatives, like nuclear.
(And wherever the price of electricity goes, the cost structure doesn't automatically change. Thus if the market stops supporting investing in solar in 10 years, everything except for natural gas and wind will be already bankrupt. Oh, and if the current changes on the cost structure continue for 10 years - there's some reason for them not to - you can cut wind from that list too. In other words, if you concern is about the cheapest form of generation becoming unprofitable, that automatically means we just don't really want more energy.)
The US installed 25.5GW of clean power generation capacity in 2022.[0] That's 490MW a week, so it isn't really all that insane. Meanwhile, the US is on pace to install 3GW of nuclear in 25 years.
Surely increasing the construction speed of renewables from 490MW to 800MW / week is easier than increasing the construction speed of nuclear from 2.3MW to 800MW / week?
In 2023 utility-scale solar generation capacity is expected to grow by 29 GW, and wind by 7.5 GW[1] - that's 700 MW per week, so we're almost on track already. (The EIA's "expectations" might be optimistic, but I don't think it's at all out of the question to roll out wind and solar on this scale.)
Not sure why you are downvoted, other than you used numbers and real data which contradicts a nuclear narrative.
The EIA can be trusted with their reports on actual numbers. But their projections are absolutely embarrassing and underestimate solar deployments so much that they have completely discredited the entire enterprise of projections. The graphics showing how embarrassing they are all use the IEA numbers, but the EIA projections are just as bad
It really depends on the cost. Whatever your analysis says, surely it says something different if the cost of solar goes down 90% over the next decade.
This type of innumeracy from nuclear advocates is rampant. It's not insane, you just put out a number that seems big, to you, and said "wow this must be impossible!"
Meanwhile, we deploy that all the time.
If nuclear advocates were better at numbers, maybe all the nuclear projects wouldn't be 2x-3x over budget and off schedule, and there would be more nuclear built.
Oh absolutely, but that's not going to make the comparison with solar and wind any better. It'd probably make carbon capture for gas a really interesting peaker solution, though!
Considering that during the 1970s nuclear boom a single plant still took a decade to construct, there is simply no way we could possibly have a "large fleet" in under a decade. The only country with the capability of doing so is China - and they are not going to be of much use to Western countries.
China's reluctance to invest as heavily in nuclear should be a clear sign that even with great competence at building nuclear, it's just not that attractive of a tech. It's barely functioning as a hedge, and is probably only being used for its side industries rather than as a serious power source.
If you look at large nations that have actually decarbed their grid, they do it with hydro first and nuclear second.
Show me even a medium sized nation that is predominantly powered by solar/wind and isn't utterly reliant on imports.
Nuclear is absolutely economically viable so long as you build one design several times and don't let regulators insist on crazy handycaps. That's how France, Sweden, Korea, China, and Japan successfully built out. Japan's median built time was 3.8 years during its build out. China builds plants today with $3000/kw capital costs which is as cheap as coal.
Nuclear technology is a proven solution despite all the mental gymnastics people do to insist otherwise.
> Meanwhile, the reactors currently / recently constructed are massively over budget and years behind schedule. Nobody is willing to invest in them unless the government is willing to guarantee a massive subsidy on the electricity produced.
The massive costs are entirely due to excessive regulations. In places and times where the rules are reasonable, plants get built on time and under budget.
Worked in nuclear power for five years and wish people could divorce themselves of bias when considering power. When you plug things in it has a cost greater than the dollars you are paying. In raw deaths per megawatt nuclear wins above all else. I'm not saying we should avoid solar and wind. I'm saying we should dive headlong into every form of power that seems a reasonable risk to human life and the environment before 1000+ human death wildfires, starvation, and every other natural disaster becomes common place. Belching coal exhaust or gas turbine exhaust into the air seems a careless act when I have personally sat inside, on top of, under, and to the side of nuclear reactors and have yet to fall over dead. Spent fuel can be handled and most import you don't need to breath it and it doesn't warm the planet. Everything has a cost and I would gladly bare the cost of nuclear for a world worth living in.
>In raw deaths per megawatt nuclear wins above all else.
Just a quibble here: your post is obviously pro-nuclear-power, however this sentence seems to claim that nuclear power causes more deaths than any other power source, which is not what I think you meant.
I believe the OP is saying that it "wins" by having the fewest deaths per TWh, and it does - it's the same as solar and wind. [1]
By far the worst is coal which [1] has conservatively at 25 deaths per TWh vs nuclear at 0.04.
The worst nuclear incident of all time killed 4000 people, and Fukushima killed exactly 1 person. The third-worst, Three Mile Island killed 0. This isn't even low sample size. Nuclear has generated 20% of the entire US power demand for decades.
Even if you attribute all the deaths from the bungled evacuation of Fukushima to nuclear power (2300), 10X more people would have died in the normal course of operating a coal power plant at the site over the course of the reactor's life (1485TWh from 1979 to 2011 @ 25 deaths/TWh = 37,000).
People need to be reasonable. If we want nuclear, the government will need to pay for it. Right now everyone's waiting for energy investors and the financial engineering that backs them to throw money into nuclear. It won't happen. We want rich people to throw their billions at nuclear for a return years and years from now, instead of spending it just slapping up some windmills and getting a return next month.
T Boone Pickens was one of the most conservative energy investors that ever lived, and he was slapping up windmills left and right. That won't stop until the tax payer agrees to insulate investors from any losses.
Everyone's saying, "We want nuclear." But when we give them the financial consequences of nuclear like we did at Vogtie, they get pissed. You can't have it both ways. You want it? Cool. Don't complain about being told you have to pay off your region's reactors.
A little more cooperation from everyone on the finances would go a long way here.
Fukushima is what happens when you get rid of the red tape, go look at the cause of the accident and you will see why the red tape exists [1].
The Japanese tax payer is still paying for this disaster, and the environment is paying in more ways imaginable, all of the cleanup operation so far has been running on fossil fuels and it's an significant amount of cleanup still going onto this day, hundreds of thousands of tons of top soil have been moved around the country and stored in disintegrating plastic bags which end up in rivers, for example.
People avoid buying produce and seafood from the area too which has had enormous impact on the economy and tens of thousands of people have been displaced with little to no compensation or anywhere to go.
You mean the disaster that killed between 0 (from radiation) and 2000 (from the evacuation) people? Compared do the literal millions that die every year from fossil fuel pollution?
It would take about 10x the amount of nuclear power plants that we currently have for global energy to be totally nuclear. If we therefore 10x every single nuclear reactor disaster from the past 70 years (~ how long since the first production plant came on line in the USSR), global deaths would be between between 80,000 and 40,000,000 (using the implausibly high Greenpeace estimate of Chernobyl associated deaths).
I think that all of those estimates are implausibly high, but even if we just take the 40,000,000 number, the most ridiculously, obviously wrong number, the estimated deaths every year from fossil fuel pollution (not climate change...direct particulate matter air pollution) is between 2 and 8 million every year. So go ahead, tell me again how we can't afford to relax safety standards on nuclear power.
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup, "In 2016, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry estimated the total cost of dealing with the Fukushima disaster at ¥21.5 trillion (US$187 billion)" (with breakdown following). Hyperbole does not serve to convince intelligent people of your point, much less your objectivity in the matter.
The trillion dollar cleanup was necessary because of the tsunami which killed 20,000 or more people. The Fukushima 1&3 hydrogen explosion didn't flatten half of the Japanese Pacific seaboard, the tsunami did.
I love how people just armchair from across the pacific that the nuclear incident was no big deal, don’t worry about it…I mean it didn’t even cost much ? Lol
Admiral Rickover (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover), the father of the nuclear navy would disagree with you, but probably in a much more nuanced way than direct contradiction.
It is not the red tape, but the difference between oversight and culture. You can not regulate safety and expect safety. Safety does not come from oversight. Safety comes from culture and a shared culture of responsibility for safety.
Therefore the adversarial nature of red tape, implying an entity that does taping and therefore bears primary responsibility for safety, encodes within it the set of incentives that will result in eventual doom because alignment is always for cheaper and not for the long term. Safety requires individual responsibility and therefore a culture of responsibility, not to shareholders or next quarters profits, but to a set of values such as safety and competence.
The end result is that if you are talking about red tape at all then you have not reached a state of understanding because you must breach the topic of culture and alignment. Capitalist alignment of nuclear energy directly results in disaster. A culture that venerates next quarters profits should not run 30 year+ programs for which failure can result in centuries of contamination.
A congress that asks for cheaper will get cheaper. Unfortunately what is cheap in dollars can be expensive in property, lives, and well-being. A simple word like cheaper is too naive.
Votgle 3 has been running for almost a month. It started construction August 26, 2009 and is finishing $17B over budget so far, total about $30B. It bankrupted "Westinghouse Electric Company".
Compared to the forever/oil wars it seems like a pretty good deal, to be honest.
If we had not invaded Iraq we could have built 30 Votgles. USA has spent 2-3 votgles on Ukraine so far since the war began.
People might not be aware, but the bulk of the support given to Ukraine has been military surplus gear, rather than cash. The US has sent tens of billions in cash for humanitarian and some military support as well, but the bulk of what’s counted in the $100B+ of aid has been in the form of weapons and ammunition and vehicles.
A lot of this is not inherent to building nuclear reactors. We've regulated nuclear power to the point where it's cost prohibitive. If we required every solar panel installer to have a phd, and only let them work 1 hr per day solar would be incredibly expensive too.
Imagine we were willing to accept the same death rate as natural gas. Reducing regulations to the point of having 100x more nuclear incidents. How much cheaper would they be to build?
The problem with nuclear accidents is the consequences can be so catosrophic that it's virtually impossible to accept failure. Irradiate a few hundred sqkm in an accident and you easily exceed every other expense of building the plant (being generous).
It's funny how usually people argue for more regulation of side effects, but as soon as nuclear gets involved it's the reverse. Nuclear must be absolutely safe, because no one but the government (and by extension, the general populace) can afford the expense of insuring it. Reducing regulation is tantamount to giving investors permission to pull as much money as they like out of the plant and leaving us with the risk.
We also know that corporations are going to be corporations. The business guys will eventually take the wheel and absent sufficient regulation they will inevitably cost-cut and corner-cut their way to disaster. It’s totally predictable.
If there is ever even a remote profit motive, everything, including safety, will eventually be thrown under the bus to maximize profit. It’s how all businesses are run.
If we had built 30 Votgles they wouldn't have cost $30B each. One of the huge problems with modern Nuclear plants is there is no economy of scale. They're all bespoke projects with fresh people re-learning the skills of the past. If they were being mass produced there would be an established industry with veterans working on most of the plants, saving enormous amounts of time and money.
This is where Wind and Solar are really winning. The industries building them are growing mature and as a result efficiency goes up and costs go down.
This was the promise of nuclear microreactors: that they could be mass produced in a factory and shipped where needed. But it seems like they're never going to get off of the ground.
Korea and China build nuclear at scale. It has not gotten cheaper for them. In china it has failed so spectacularly that they've now switched back to building more coal instead of nuclear. The reality is that politically required regulation makes nuclear completely uneconomical. The only solution is a political movement that lessens the regulatory burden.
Not sure why you're framing iraq and nuclear as either/or. The US is energy independent. The Iraq war was not necessary to secure our oil needs. There's no reason to believe we would've built more nuclear had it not happened.
Because it was a pointless war based on lies that stole $1T from the american people.
> Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
Obviously it was a pointless war. That doesn't mean that if it didn't happen we'd spend all the money that went to it on nuclear. If we spent a trillion more on renewables we'd be far further ahead than if that money went to nuclear.
If nuclear is going to happen it should be a campaign to improve & get better. Today & long term. Systems like Integral Fast Reactor & then PRISM & S-PRISM & so many others show huge promise at being absurdly safe & being able to help us burn existing waste, without having to deeply enrich: a huge win. But no one is going to foot the bill, no one is going to take risk on advanced nuclear, when we're not even sure about the plodding low effort ultra-lofi nuclear we still can't do cost effectively today.
I agree so much, this needs to be a bigger collectivized effort if it's going to happen. Ideally it should be something we can as a civilization improve on, where we keep improving together. Making a bunch of new proprietary designs then having 20 years of patent protection before anyone else can try & iterates or improve is a death knell for the industry as a whole. But no commercial entity is going to choose to participate in this prisoners dilemma today.
Always bring up the cost of nuclear power plants and the time to build them, but ignore that all the power plants built in the US in recent years use 1950s technology and are made expensive by 50 years of excessive regulation driven by fear.
Theoretically the regulation was known at bidding time and factored in. Or they didn't understand them and were caught by surprise. Or perhaps they did understand and lied by underbidding?
I was anti-nuke when I was younger but recognize we fucked up terribly by not getting nuclear right and have now cooked the planet.
The appealing solution (to me) is to get SMRs into play with their associated promises of cost control and safety. My understanding is the blocker is really the existing insiders of the nuclear industry who see it as a threat to their work.
I searched for info on the cost overruns and it appears that management failures contributed significantly. An anti-nuke lawsuit didn't help but appeared to be $1B in impact.
We see consistently that big projects never come in on time and budget, which is why SMRs are the only economical way forward.
To further your point, almost all nuclear power plants to date have essentially been customized, one-off projects built by inexperienced teams.
If we built exactly the same design tens to the low hundreds of times by the same handful of teams, the cost per unit would be dramatically lower. This is especially true of the modern, safer, and more cost effective designs.
Have any of these modern cost effective designs been built yet?
All of the third generation EPR projects being built in Europe have run hugely over budget. I really thought if anyone could build nuclear plants cost effectively it would have been France so it's really made me lose hope in nuclear power.
Wind and especially solar were massively subsidized for decades before accumulated innovations from the subsidized at-scale manufacturing, and economies of scale, pushed prices per unit down to levels that are competitive in the market.
What nuclear needs is massive subsidies, especially in reactors using small modular designs that are more amenable to mass-manufacturing techniques and transportability, and it needs them sustained for decades until the competitive forces of the large market for SMRs has brought the price of reactors down to levels where they're competitive in the market without subsidies, at which point the growth of privately funded nuclear power would be self-sustaining.
The question is will these massive subsidises be better spent on nuclear or renewables and storage?
Over the years nuclear has enjoyed enormous subsidies. If it were not for the huge decrease in costs for renewables over the past couple of decades and huge increase in cost for nuclear I’d be much more enthusiastic about nuclear power.
I’m completely against closing existing nuclear plants as they are doing in Germany. The big problem with new nuclear energy seems to be build cost so it makes sense to get as much as we can from existing plants.
But at the end of the day real resources matter. Where should labour effort be directed? Costs reflect that effort.
I’m not against nuclear but if redirecting effort (money, labour) from nuclear to renewables and storage seems likely to reduce co2 emissions faster then let’s redirect that effort. It’s fine for cool technologies to be abandoned when cheaper alternatives come along.
If it’s possible to come up with a far cheaper form of nuclear power then great! But it’s hard to compete with the big fusion reactor in the sky.
I don't think we can go wrong having more options, so yes I'd support giving nuclear the same amount of subsidization that solar/wind received, and targetting it at the SMR market to get the benefits of standardization and off-site construction.
The best case scenario is solar/wind, along with their associated storage systems, continuing to see rapid cost reductions, and nuclear, through SMRs, becoming vastly more affordable alongside them.
The two classes of electricity generators would each find ideal use-cases and produce an energy system that provides electricity at a lower cost than either could provide on their own.
To expand a bit more on nuclear: we've never made a good effort at bringing down its cost. The SMR option I outlined is the route to achieving that. Giant plants built mostly on-site just don't benefit from large markets the way transportable goods that can be built off-site do.
The SMR industry needs subsidies while in its embryonic stage to have a chance of showing what it can do, with respect to cost-effective electricity generation, when it's more developed.
Nuclear has been blocked in numerous places for decades—including in countries where it was successfully increasing electricity output—and the subsidies it's received have been nothing compared to those solar/wind receive(d).
The subsidies have also not been directed at the SMR market, which is the only one that has the potential to see exponentially declining costs like what's seen in wind/solar.
What about China? UAE? These countries actually know how to build large scale infrastructure projects and are highly successful building nuclear power plants.
Completely agree those costs are insane. The US cranked out the currently functional reactors at a fraction of the cost. We have collectively offshored all knowledge and skill on massive building projects and have become weak at dedicating ourselves to tackling complex projects. I don't have a solution to the human problem of building these things, but it is a human problem, not a problem of the technology. I would not be surprised if it is eventually found that oil and gas secretly crippled the building of all modern reactors to keep people dependent. Though incompetence is probably a more likely answer.
We have a simple problem. Either we shift our power supply to something that won't kill us or we all start getting used to the idea of living on a hostile planet. I feel that this problem should be taken on as seriously as defending against a hostile nation and pour the resources of the state into a solution. Only when we rebuild our knowledge and skill can we tackle this.
I have some hopes in small reactors we could factory build and crank out of an assembly line. But I think the politics of this are still too difficult to even matter. People would rather throw their hands in the air giving up and die in a fire than have the risk of radiation in their neighborhood. Only the kids growing up today watching the world end will probably get their will together to change what is happening. We have failed them
I treat public industry estimates of death from nuclear power which the same integrity I treat the fossil fuel industry reports on climate change. They are both intrinsically motivated to systematically deny the ill effects. And if you dig into the deaths you’ll find that basically any plausibly deniable cancer death is discounted. And accounting for disasters like Fukushima will try to discount deaths due to evacuation afterwards to bad policy arguing that somehow we should have let everyone to stay in the area be irradiated.
The estimates also suffer from minimization from bad human intuition - as there will be years of future deaths from Chernobyl and Fukushima but because they are both difficult to peg and small at any single point in time they get discounted.
In general the strategy is very similar in deniability effectiveness to the chemical industry in cancers and other illnesses from exposures from everything like pesticides to PFAs.
- "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
But even if we take that view, how many deaths would nuclear have to have caused to break even with fossil fuels? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... puts nuclear at 0.03 and hydropower at 1.3. So it is ~50 times less than hydro. That's a lot of wiggle room!
It was not big oil that pushed the anti-nuclear campaign. It was environmentalists. And they're still active today, sometimes pushing for solar. Sometimes fighting solar and windmills to protect wildlife.
Now I'm sure some oil and gas companies decided to fund some of these groups because they saw these people could be useful, but that doesn't mean the movement was astroturfing.
If big oil writes an environmental organization a check that doesn't make it astro turfing.
Astroturfing is pretending their is a movement when there isn't. The anti-nuclear movement was real, big oil just wrote some of them checks because they realized what was bad for nuclear was good for them.
Yep, and the major killer with Wind is people falling off of the turbines.
Hydro is extremely safe except for a handful mass casualty incidents that completely skew the numbers. Nuclear is in the same boat, with really just 1 significant incident.
I think if we're honest, it's obvious what the average voter is scared of. If you separate these deaths into workplace and bystander deaths it paints a different picture.
It's still clear that any form of fossil fuel is the loser. Sure, maybe in terms of bystander deaths solar or wind are slightly better than nuclear but both are orders of magnitude better than anything that involves burning. The amount of pollution and radiation that burning fossil fuels emits is orders of magnitude more harmful to the general public than anything that solar, wind or nuclear does.
We need to shift from thinking of solar/wind as "electricity sources" to thinking of them as "fuel sources". The marginal cost of producing a transferrable fuel from solar/wind is already lower than current electricity prices. The challenge is the capital expenses on equipment (hydrolyzers, fuel cell etc.)
Of course the article is just a puff public opinion piece. It doesn't change the economics:
Point ONE: nuclear is more expensive CURRENTLY that solar/wind. SOlar/Wind is currently the cheapest by far, and here's the scary thing for gas turbine: solar + storage is very close to druopping under gas combined cycle generation. Look up Lazard 2023 LCOE study. Solar/Wind have dropped to 24$ per MWHr. The cheapest nuclear produces is $141/MWHr. That's right, nuclear is almost 600% more expensive.
Point TWO: Say you miraculously got 100 billion dollars through congress for new plants to start immediate projects. Not a single reactor will come online for 10 years. Now, look at the cost improvement rate of solar, wind, and storage for the last 10 years. 10% year-on-year improvements or more. Even if we had half of that for the next 10 years (and there will be 10 more years of cost improvement), solar / wind very likely will be HALF the current cost.
So you'd have 100s of nuclear plants come online in 10 years generating electricity that costs 10-20x more than electricity from wind/solar. That simply is not a viable national power strategy.
If we had these plants already because construction started in the year 2000, that would probably be a different story.
The only hope for nuclear is probably in about 15-20 years where the cost improvement curves finally stabilize for wind/solar, and then a stable price point can be targeted with new nuclear designs. I personally think that only something like a novel MSR/LFTR which can scale down to mass producable sizes, uses all the fuel, breeds. doesn't have solid fuel rod reprocessing and waste transport/storage, and can use the Brayton cycle for more efficiency has a chance of competing with mature solar/wind.
Puff pieces like this are really about the current nuclear plants and keeping them on funding life support, which I generally support for now. The industry sees that Lazard LCOE curve just like any other person would: do you want to pay solar/wind costs for electricity, or 6x that for nuclear?
The existing nuclear industry can't survive without subsidies.
The final price does not depend only on the production price.
You cited Lazard 2023: if you read the firming intermittency price estimations, you figure out that solar and wind in the California grid costs 2/3 times more than when just considering the LCOE. Solar and wind production can be cheaper, but the final price is way higher, and it further increases when renewables take a larger share of the energy production.
1. "Cost estimates" are more expensive than solar/wind. You know what they are also more expensive than? The historical costs of ACTUAL 50-year-old plants.
2. Average construction time for a nuclear plant is 6-8 years, with many built in half that time. [1] You can build over half a dozen generations of nuclear power plants before my 401(k) matures.
Your cost comparison does not factor in the grid storage required to convert unreliable solar+wind into 24/7 power. You can only directly compare $/MWHr when the proportion of unreliable energy is small, and offsetting reliable sources (i.e. when the cost of electricity is roughly constant). When all generation is unreliable, there's a huge question mark - how long can the grid weather dark, windless days? What's an appropriate safety margin, and what happens when you breach it?
From your own source, the Lazard 2023 LCOE study: "Most LDES (long duration energy storage) technologies have not yet reached commercialization due to technology immaturity and, with limited deployments, seemingly none of the emerging LDES technologies have achieved the track record for performance required to be fully bankable."
Ideally we'd have a combined approach - nuclear base load, renewables and grid scale storage to reduce the number of expensive nukes we need. That way you'll always have at least some power. But we don't have grid storage yet. And without storage, there's not much point in offsetting the output of nuclear plants, since fuel costs are so minimal - you might as well run all the nukes full tilt, all the time. So really, the only sensible thing to do is build primarily nuclear, and renewables in proportion to our ability to deal with wildly fluctuating energy supply.
Doesn't really make up for the fact that nuclear is 6x more expensive than solar. I really think synthfuels or all the hydrogen stuff going on (or the CO2 --> propane story also on the board today) will far outperform nuclear in grid leveling/storage.
Nuclear simply needs a reset to figure out how to make it economical. I love nuclear power in theory, there is simply so many more orders of magnitude of energy density and long life that it has to be viable somehow.
Again, I'm in favor of keeping the current nuclear plants operational. But build out a substantial new build of nuclear plants? Absolutely not. Research reactors, long term R&D / national laboratory projects on advanced nuclear? 100% support it, to the tune of a billion per year or more.
I would say that 24/7 power you can have using real technology that actually exists today makes up for any claims you might make about "6x more expensive". More expensive than what? Magic non-existent grid storage?
It's all very well saying you think that "synthfuels" and "hydrogen stuff" WILL outperform nuclear, but the practical upshot is that you are arguing in favor of sitting around twiddling our thumbs hoping some new technology will save us, when we could be building nuclear plants. What do you suggest we do now that will substantially eat into fossil consumption?
Go ahead and pretend grid storage is some pretend technology and isn't in actual production use.
That is honestly unhinged, and if nuclear proponents thing grid storage is some far off technology, they are more divorced from th economic reality than I thought.
Nuclear is 141$ per mwhr. Solar +storage is $45. Solar/wind are $24.
This pattern of improvement isn't some new phenomenon, and you can't pretend these are made up figures. Is storage pricing new? Yeah. Is the cost of battery backup going to drop? Virtually guaranteed with new sodium ion techs and the other stuff in the pipeline.
Attitudes like this frankly just validate that the entire current generation of the nuclear industry simply has a flawed and obsolete structure and outlook. They are simply ossified in a huge regulatory capture wall.
Your bet is based off of magical batteries from the future. This is not at all a coherent counterargument to nuclear. Nevermind the very concept of having redundant systems, or admitting the possibility of nuclear getting cheaper.
You can easily be accused of Silicon Valley style innovation delusion. As if something being older or more "regulated" means it is bad. It is the same delusion that got Uber to lose billions until they changed the same per ride as any taxi company. In reality, facts don't care about how you think the world works.
How much of the current low cost is due to the currently low storage requirements? As the share of energy production from the unreliable renewables increases, the demand for storage will increase as well.
How do the costs compare when you factor in enough storage and overbuilding to reliably cover the inherently unpredicable generation downtimes?
If you don't take nuclear power seriously, you don't take climate change seriously. Period, dot, full stop. We should have gone all-in on nuclear in the 1970s and 1980s but for a few screeching NIMBY so-called "environmentalists."
Yes, if you screw up badly enough, you can have a disaster. If I drove drunk and ran my Jeep down a crowded city sidewalk, you would also have a disaster, but I would never be that negligent, callous, and stupid. The US Navy has run reactors for 65 years with a flawless safety record . . . it can be done.
Upvoting this because this is where I end up. Nobody proposing solar, wind and storage ever wants to back it up with hard numbers. They back it up with soft numbers - lies of omission.
"Look how expensive nuclear is compared to solar!" they say, ignoring capacity factors, reliability or storage. "Look how many gigawatts of batteries were installed last year" while ignoring that the energy-storage of those batteries is maybe 3 hours and the total power of batteries scales alongside energy.
"We'll just overbuild" they say, ignoring that the 4x the solar is now within a stone's throw of being the same capex as equivalent nuclear, but still needs storage.
Everyone has some just-so narrative which omits numbers. Because you can make green hydrogen they assume it must be cost-effective to do so. Because someone said "solar is cheap" they assume it must be too cheap to meter. As though you can wave away multiple 50% energy loss steps as insignificant.
I'm open to being convinced I'm wrong, but show me the numbers which prove it. Show me that you're talking about a today technology, not "by 2028 it's expected costs will reduce..." while saying nuclear will "take too long to build". Don't tell me power-to-methane exists, show me the numbers saying it works and include the costs of storing it (stored methane is superb on energy density for the grid, but about 30% efficient panels-to-power plant and has a cost per kWh in storage...and has a suspicious paucity of information surrounding operating costs of plants versus "future projections").
Focusing on batteries is thinking too long-term IMO. If you have 50% renewables or less in the grid, you basically don't need batteries yet, and our deadline isn't time here but greenhouse gases emitted - getting to 50% renewables will give us more time to tackle the rest of our emissions. I expect nuclear to easily beat solar/wind+batteries for the last 10% of the grid, but frankly the last 10% of the grid almost doesn't matter - if we've reduce our emissions by 90%, then we have 10x the time to tackle the rest.
Of course, I've been wildly conflating electricity with all emissions, but I think the low-hanging fruit argument still applies.
But you can't run the grid on 50% renewables without solving storage. It's just not possible: the grid has to run. Peak usage isn't in the middle of the day, it's around 6-8pm when people are home. In winter that's pitch black, in summer depending where you are there's still very little solar output, so you better hope the wind is blowing. And it is...mostly, but not on demand.
Germany's power grid has started to struggle because they're at 30+% solar capacity, but not reliability - the grid can't sustain losing large swathes of generation capacity suddenly because a cloud passed overhead, or if a region is overcast that day then you've got to make up that shortfall - which you can do so long as you have basically the same installed capacity of gas, coal and oil on standby where they can just turn on an extra-turbine or boiler on demand.
But if you want to actually decarbonize, then you need to solve that problem. Otherwise you end up with the perverse situation that increased renewable investment necessitates new fossil fuel power plants, because you still need to backstop the intermittent sources.
The NSW Australian power grid has this problem right now: the reality is that no one wants to invest in fossil fuel power plants. Great! You'd say. But the grid actually does need a new reliable generator and power price pressure is a big political issue. Getting reliable watt-hours onto the grid - not more intermittents - needs to happen. The catch-22 is people rightly don't want to subsidize more fossil fuels, but the available renewable options are being installed anyway - but they won't solve the actual availability problem we have (and in a country with bush fires it's a big one - 3 months of summer with overcast skies along the east coast from smoke means no one's solar panels were working well, and grid-interconnects have limited capacity).
> But you can't run the grid on 50% renewables without solving storage.
Counter-example: Brazil's national grid routinely runs on over 85% renewables with essentially zero storage (there might be a couple of experimental battery storage units, but if any they're much less than 1%; and all it has of pumped hydro storage is one partial preliminary study of possible locations).
65% of Brazil's energy is coming from hydropower, which is extremely reliable, but geography dependent. When people make that statement, they're usually referring to wind + solar, which are intermittent.
> This right here is an example of a lie of omission: over what time frame?
Sorry about that. It's the average over a whole week (I looked at the weekly bulletin of a random week from last month, but they're all similar).
> With what renewable?
Around 62% hydro, 22% wind, and 1% solar (we're in winter right now, so we have less solar and more wind; on summer we'd have more solar and less wind).
> And they're also building a new nuclear reactor at their existing plant.
And that reactor is the main reason I'm very skeptical of nuclear power: it's been under construction for nearly 40 years, and it's still not near done. All the parts have already been bought and have been stored on site for a long time; just the upkeep to make sure none of these parts degrades while under storage is already a high cost.
I disagree with this 100%, the only people using numbers to mode future carbon-free grids are ending up on massive amounts of solar, wind, and storage, with a tiny bit of nuclear. But that nuclear is so difficult to build that the models that end up adding nuclear also have unrealistic costs and deployment timelines associated with it.
We have ~100 reactors in the US, nearly all are close to end of life. We would need to start building ~100 reactors today in order to keep the same amount of nuclear in the future. We have one, just one, nearing completion, and no more that have any chance of getting funded and starting construction within a few years. We are going to go through a long period with far less nuclear than we have today, if we ever get to a period with more nuclear than today. I doubt we ever will.
If you want numbers, check out Christopher Clack's modeling. It is by far the most detailed, and the most complete, and the most innovative.
But to say that nuclear advocates run the numbers is just false. They can't even run the numbers on their own construction plans, much less the numbers on the system level of what it would take to keep nuclear a significant part of our grid. Nuclear advocates are the least numerate folks in the energy business, again and again, since the big burst of reactors in the 70s.
They get 50% of their electricity from just wind. So that's the lower bound on what you can achieve in the real world today. Here's how you increase that without needing any storage technology:
(1) Be a very large land mass like the United States, where wind variability is more likely to cancel out.
(2) Add solar instead of only relying on wind. Solar cancels out wind variability because it's more windy when it isn't sunny.
(3) Overbuild by 2-3x, so that the troughs in energy aren't so bad. Even if you overbuild by this much, it's still a lot cheaper and faster to build out than nuclear.
(4) Import solar/wind from neighboring countries, losing only 10-15% due to resistivity.
I don't know exactly what % renewables you can achieve by picking all this low hanging fruit while still being cheaper than Nuclear. 80%? 99%? If you add solar and you overbuild and you have access to a large landmass like the US, you can probably get very, very high, with the last few % being powered by natural gas peaker plants as a temporary stop-gap until storage technology becomes good enough.
As a bonus, if you overbuild, you can sell surplus energy to Mexico and make money!
Denmark's electricity is almost three times more expensive than in France. Solar+wind does not cancel out variability. Backup is needed. LCOE does not mean lower prices. Higher shares of renewables drives up costs for the network to rebalance. Producing a lot of energy when it is not needed means producing low value energy. It really depends on the electricity mix.
Ah yes, some of the least effective propagandists (seriously, they fought coal for generations and the thing that actually broke its stranglehold was...fracking) were the reason, not the now well documented corporate giants injecting FUD about climate change into all media for decades.
This narrative seems to be popping up a bit recently, but mostly from folks who find it "deliciously ironic" (gross) or put "climate crisis" in quotes.
To be fair we still might have a crisis, but far less of one and far more easily addressed. With nuclear as the base of the power grid we’d just have to electrify cars and we’d be most of the way there.
The real catastrophe was that coal and not nuclear powered the ascent of Asia. If we hadn’t frozen nuclear power in the 70s it’s possible that there would have been a mature modular nuclear industry whose technology China and other Asian countries could have bought or copied instead of doubling global emissions in 15 years by massively scaling out coal.
Rooftop solar power is roughly as popular as puppies and kittens.
But the USA has very little of it because it’s expensive in the US (due mostly to regulation and utilities being obstructionist).
By contrast, rooftop solar is very cheap in Australia, so it’s everywhere.
Nuclear is safe and clean, but until it’s cheaper nobody is going to go near building any more of it, and the nuclear industry has been incapable so far of making it cheaper.
Is it cheaper in Australia because it’s publicly subsidized? From what I understand in the states the only reason it’s even remotely affordable is because it’s already subsidized.
The reason it's expensive in the US is all regulatory, and because of the ever changing patchwork of utility rules that make it economical or not to attach your own generation to the grid.
Last I heard, roughly 30% of the cost of solar in the US is spent merely on customer acquisition. Because the only forms that survive are those that swoop in when there's a window of economic plausibility for solar to work for homeowners, before the utility in a particular small area changes their mind and buys off the regulators to make it cost infeasible for homeowners to generate.
There's a huge advantage to the grid of having generation be more local: more than half of energy costs are transmission and distribution, and these are costs that utilities can reliable charge a profit for, so they try to make these costs as high as possible. When customers install their own solar, this reduces the peak daytime need for T&D, and the grid is sized for peak usage. So everyone would be better off with far more local solar, except for the utility.
Utilities don’t particularly like rooftop solar here either, but a combination of factors has meant that their efforts to stop rooftop solar have been less successful.
Now, the constituency of people with solar panels on their roofs is so large that it will be very politically difficult for the industry to turn back the clock.
The rules are far more uniform. In addition to more consistency from the utilities, there's also far more consistency with building codes and permitting. In the US, every little municipality does their own damn thing, on their own timeline, with whatever quirks exists within a small bureaucracy ruled by politicians elected by people that rarer even know their names.
Having more uniform rules across states and regions would reduce a lot of the overhead of installing residential solar.
> this reduces the peak daytime need for T&D, and the grid is sized for peak usage
Where I'm from, peak usage is on cold, dark, winter days. So there are no savings to the grid from locally generated solar as they still have to be fully dimensioned for a large load.
If the billing was honest, people with solar+local battery would have $0 bills throughout most of the year and then January hits and they get a $3000 bill for using the grid over the coldest, darkest 3 days.
I'm all for solar - every marginal reduction of fossil fuels used is a big win. We just have to be honest about the costs and challenges.
While the solar may be of relatively little use at that time a battery would still help shift the load around and reduce peak demands on the grid.
V2G would also really help in this scenario because of the sheer size of EV batteries. If you’re using them as home storage batteries once or twice a year it’s probably not going to hurt the lifespan too much.
> If you’re using them as home storage batteries once or twice a year it’s probably not going to hurt the lifespan too much.
For much of the world, the dim days of winter are much longer than a few days. Storage couldn't work for these places. Taking clean energy from distance places would be required.
Yes, I get that winter lasts for months and agree that you can't possibly store enough energy in chemical batteries to cover it all.
However, demand peaks by definition occur only for short periods, and shaving those peaks reduces the need for grid infrastructure compared to what you would need otherwise.
Maybe I'm misreading this, but the infrastructure couldn't be reduced. Battery storage acts as a filter, allowing you to optimize the transition for both sides of the duck curve [1], but reducing infrastructure, as in removing plants, can't be done somewhere that can have its power generation halved by a passing tropical storm.
If you're saying "reduce dirty power", then yes. :)
As a side note, here's some interesting graphs I just found:
> The nuclear industry has been incapable so far of making it cheaper.
The government has been incapable of not overregulating it into massive cost overruns. Nuclear is quite reasonably priced under reasonable regulatory regimes.
Stopping all production for a decade is also a great multiplier on the cost of regulations. Now we have lost institutional knowledge and need to figure out how to satisfy extra regulations.
If we had continued building plants at a steady rate the cost would not be nearly as high.
If someone rang me and asked a question like 'am I in favour of throwing vast sums of money towards research and build of nuclear power plants?', it'd be a resounding yes with a strict qualification of 'fusion, not fission'. (Neither word appears in TFA.)
I realise the distinction probably isn't well understood in the general population, but I'm confident a huge part of that is due to every news story conflating the two.
Fusion is a waste of money, it's hype is based on lies/mistruths and it's not going to work in time to address climate change.
In particular, they constantly conflate different definitions of energy. There's energy in/energy out, there's laser energy in/energy out (lasers currently being 0.5% efficient, so it's a lie of 2 orders of magnitude), there's energy in/out per pellet versus including warmup time, etc.
Even if fusion is possible within two decades, it might be prohibitively expensive to build for another decade or two, and we'd need to build a first commercial reactor before we can properly scale it, so I don't see fusion being possible before 2050.
So I'd rather that money be sent straight to fission plants, since we know they'll actually work on time.
I agree with the thrust of your arguments around fusion, though I would disagree on some of the conspiracy theory implications. Your pessimism may turn out to be well placed, but with the piddling amount of investment thrown into the subject, it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And that comes back to my point - I'd be very happy to have a lot more budget thrown at the problem, because a) it seems extremely unlikely at this point that the technology is outright infeasible, and b) the payoff will be monumental.
Your claim:
> So I'd rather that money be sent straight to fission plants, since we know they'll actually work on time.
is contra-indicated by reality, unfortunately.
(If you're going to drop phrases like 'if it's even possible', and 'might be expensive', and so on for your fusion predictions, I'll point at the actual failures of fission nuclear power plant deployments over the past few decades.)
Until recently they had some of the cheapest electricity in western Europe. But they haven't been building new plants for a while and it's gotten more expensive.
It's actually 70%. And recently a bit less because a lot of their ancient reactors were down for extensive maintenance in the middle of an energy crisis.
The reason their energy is not cheap is because nuclear is actually really expensive; also for the French. Instead of charging via electricity bills, the French just rolled that into their taxes. The energy bills don't quite cover the cost. The EDF, which runs their nuclear plants and is state owned, has a lot of debt, and has had some record losses recently. But it's OK; they are too big to fail and the French government will bail them out as needed as they have done for decades. At great cost to tax payers of course. But it keeps the electricity bills low.
The French have a nuclear industry for the same reason the US and the British and other nuclear powers do: it serves their military goals to have a functioning nuclear industry so they can maintain their status as a nuclear power. That means a lot of state funding has historically been available to keep these industries going. Without public funding, it's not really that attractive financially to be involved with nuclear.
I live in the spitting distance from the world's largest nuclear plant complex in the world. I do not live in a daily fear. In fact it's very easy to forget. The current government is very bullish on nuclear.
The government however is also betting on oil and gas and have recently annoucned, with funding from saudi arabia, the nation's largest oil refinary project. They are also redirecting funds from renewable energy like solar and wind to nuclear, citing fraud and immaturity of the technology. The plant operator has been under constant scrutiny from the locals for construction faults, waste fuel management, etc.
What people seem to forget here is that nuclear isn't a panacea. Just because a country builds nuclear doesn't mean it's succeeding at reducing carbon emmission. The world's 2nd largest, and also the fastest growing, nuclear energy producer by power is china, which still depends largely on coal for its electricity. Also consider nations too volatile to have nuclear power. If you argue that net zero is "impossible" without nuclear, you're basically arguing those countries don't deserve its existence.
Nuclear costs too much, but if small modular reactors can be built quickly and cheaply like what South Africa was trying with the Pebble bed modular reactor¹, (now those people are at X-energy² and Stratek Global), then it would be beneficial in the long run to have consistent output without the need for batteries and energy storage.
I think smaller reactors are a great idea. It allows us to iterate and learn. Also making many similar reactors will help drive down the costs more quickly due to economies of scale. I think the biggest mistake was stopping building. If we can slowly build small reactors constantly it will ensure that the knowledge stays fresh.
Ontario has recently started doing this and I think it is a great restart to the nuclear program (https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1003248/ontario-building-...). It may be a bit too late as it isn't expected to be done before the plants that currently provide 1/3 to 1/2 of our power (https://www.ieso.ca/power-data) hit end-of-life. But at least it is some progress to something that isn't just replacing them with natural gas.
I've done a complete 180 on nuclear power. I used to oppose it because of the problem of the waste.
However, the climate crisis overrides everything. If we're going to have even a chance of man being able to live relatively decently in the future, then we need to make some radical changes, and nuclear is an obvious source of energy that contributes far less to climate change.
So I've come to think that whatever the potential environmental hazards of nuclear waster, they are miniscule compared to the environmental disaster that we're currently in. Every tool we have to help mitigate that is essential.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadAverage US adults: 57% (43%)
Republican/Republican-leaning: 67% (53%)
Democrats/Democratic-leaning: 50% (37%)
Thanks, Vladimir Putin, for your continued efforts to make the world use less (Russian) fossil fuels.
Everything has a footprint: solar power has panels and other components that last 10-30 years, hydroelectric is often terrible for local biodiversity, windmills have huge blades that wear out, etc. Nuclear creates far less waste and spent nuclear fuel can be recycled even.
I wish the US had gone all in on nuclear like France.
All I know is that France has effectively been GHG neutral for decades because they invested in this. I know renewables have gotten way cheaper, but if GHG neutral is so achievable with them why haven't we just done it?
This graph is showing nuclear as being pretty flat GW production last 10 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...
The second largest source looks to be oil at around 35% [1]
This source, [2], goes on to state: "In 2022, France's power sector carbon emissions nearly reached 40 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e), down from a century-peak of over 50 million tons recorded in 2005"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France#/media/File:E...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290541/power-sector-car...
That said, what I probably should have said is the capability to go GHG neutral. I believe that France has more domestic nuclear capacity than its domestic electrical conception.
This resource describes France's nuclear sector as aging: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55259.
Between those two, it's not obvious to me that France could enable more nuclear capacity to account for the rest of their energy needs.
I'm not sure I would even agree that GHG neutral is even a thing. Just because a person plants 1000 trees to account for emitting 10 tons of carbon today, the 10 tons of carbon were still emitted today while those trees need decades to even get close to break-even (and in the meantime they can burn, contribute to mono-cultures, possible not grow at all, be double sold as offsets, etc..)
More concretely, I think it's like calling a Geothermal plant GHG neutral if it powers a facility that pulls down as much carbon as the thermal plant emits. As an aggregate, there is actually a true net zero there, but the thermal plant is still a positive contributor to emissions.*
The first resource linked earlier states it pretty well:
"As a result of the 1974 decision, France now claims a substantial level of energy independence and an extremely low level of carbon dioxide emissions per capita from electricity generation, since over 80% of its electricity is from nuclear or hydro."
"an extremely low level of carbon dioxide emissions per capita" is AFAIK as good as it gets.
I'm not sure why/where the energy vs electricity different really matters here. Perhaps you can help me out?
Googling for some other numbers, it looks like France's total emissions are 270M tons, with an energy sector emitting 40M tons, even if that energy sector were zero'd out - France would still emit 230M tons of GHG.
*Low carbon != zero carbon output. This resource shows nuclear as being a very low carbon source of electricity, akin to wind and solar (and even less than geothermal, all quite surprising to me): https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/how-can-nuclear...
I think I might be extra sensitive to the phrase "GHG neutral", I believe that phrase is very often 100% PR and 0% reality.
because fossil fuel companies engage in grand fraud, for example they create astroturfing groups like 'citizens for responsible solar' which go around the country and file objection to every solar project that needs planning permission.
They got on-shore wind turbines banned in Britain. They got construction of solar panels banned on all land except low-grade non-agricultural land, so like steep hills of Scotland where it is impractical. The underground power cable to France was blocked because it would 'ruin the landscape'.
Because France's energy system is/was largely publicly run, and I expect the US coal lobby would have objected pretty strongly to direct competition against coal plants being paid for and subsidized by government money.
And storage doesn't have a simple analysis: you can only charge pumped hydro at a certain rate, so on any given day if you don't have excess solar, you might not fully recharge at all (and that's before the problems of storing exactly 1 day's worth of excess energy when you don't have a large, dispatchable fossil fuel grid to fall back on).
And how much is pumped hydro per kW, naively? Varies - an optimistic assessment is $1500 per kW, potentially as high as $5,505 per kW (in capex)[2].
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2205429119
[2] https://www.hydroreview.com/business-finance/business/nrel-i...
The levelized cost of energy takes most of these into account (except dispatch), and shows that nuclear is >4x as expensive, when it gets built and not abandoned halfway through construction. This risk is significant for large projects, and why in 2008, utilities used lobbyists in state legislatures in Georgia and South Carolina to stick customers with the bill for failed construction projects, without which neither Vogtle nor VC Summer would have started. No sane investor would risk billions on new nuclear construction without placing the risk on others.
Real life deployments in free market systems like Texas' ERCOT shows that investors who put their own money on the line to generate electricity cheaply contrast heavily with regulated utilities which profit by rate-basing and therefor want electricity as expensive as possible. And when investors are putting their own money on the line to generate cheap electricity, they don't want to build nuclear or coal or hydro, they are massively investing in wind, solar, and battery storage.
Oh, so like maybe throwing a quote about the cost of solar around without considering storage, capacity factor etc. you know - the $/kW numbers being cited above unsourced...might not be an honest way to talk about costs?
> dispatchability and time of delivery.
Seriously? You're going to argue that these aren't being fairly considered when I express skepticism that solar is "cheaper"?
It's similar to the problem in privatized health insurance. It's very cheap and profitable to insure young healthy people. Especially when you can dump the responsibility of all the old and sick people on the government.
Of course investors invest in these things - they give quick, high returns on investment. That doesn't mean they're good for long-term stability.
When it comes to climate change, the most important goal is to reduce emissions as quickly as possible. This means switching from 100 units gas to 90 units renewable 10 units gas in 5 years is way better than switching to 100 units nuclear in 15 years. If you figure out a solution to the remaining 10 units of gas somewhere within 100 years, you end up ahead!
This is an important refutation of "we need grid-scale storage before we can build out renewables". The total area under the curve is all that matters. 90% renewables + 10% gas can mean less overall emissions than 100% nuclear if it occurs sufficiently faster.
We should have, but we didn't, and we can't change the past, so it's irrelevant.
Not only can't we change the past, but it's an apples to oranges comparison to compare what we ought to have done in the past to what we ought to do today, given how drastically renewables have decreased in cost between the 1970s and the year 2023.
> By the time renewables technology advances sufficiently (grid-scale storage is still a necessary but unsolved piece of the puzzle) we will have wasted a 50+ year hard start we could’ve had with nuclear.
There is no need to wait for grid-scale storage. That piece of the puzzle can be added later to replace last mile gas peaker plants.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37219148
Where has this shown to be realistic at scale?
Every "pro nuclear" argument always seems to include some experimental technology that's either never been made cost effective or never made it out of the lab.
> components that last 10-30 years,
It's not like nuclear plants last forever. Most seem to run for about 50 years and then need another 50 to decontaminate.
The only reason there's not an existing industry to mass process old solar cells and windmill parts is that they've only recently started mass adoption - there weren't enough being decommissioned for an industry to exist around it yet.
France.
But also, even if the fuel isn't optimally recycled, nuclear power is realistic. "Put it in a can and bury it under a mountain" is a sufficient waste disposal strategy for a pretty long time, and certainly much less damaging that the current fossil fuel "strategy" of "blast it all into the atmosphere and let God sort it out". The US produces about 18% of its energy from nuclear today, and generates about 2000 tons of waste per year. Presumably that means that going all-nuclear would generate about 11,000 tons per year. The Yucca Mountain facility alone had a capacity of 77,000 tons - so about 7 years' worth of powering the whole country.
Pre-war it only imported 17% from Russia, and like most European countries it has since switched to other suppliers. Turns out bringing LNG regasification plants online can be done in a few months, and plenty of countries are willing and able to supply that.
Besides, the claim I responded to was that the decline of nuclear in France led to a dependency on Russia for gas. The fact that Europe rapidly switched to LNG shows that this is not true, regardless of your opinion about anything else. Nobody is pretending that LNG is green, and biomass is heavily criticized for exactly that reason.
Thankfully, they have changed course since the war and are now planning a new nuclear buildout as well as have removed the 50% cap. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/french-parliament-votes...
It's simple in theory, not so much in practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
Rockets have this nasty habit where sometimes they blow up, and whatever they're carrying gets vaporised into the atmosphere.
(Suppose, as it hasn't been tested that the) SpaceX Starship can carry up to 100 tons of material to LEO. It costs 100 million USD per launch. (11,000 tons / 100 tons) * 100 million USD = 11 billion dollars. The US Department of Energy (DOE) has a budget of 149 billion, so under these pessimistic conditions it would cost around 7% of the budget. That's not good, but its not crazy either.
Elon Musk has stated that he thinks the cost of launching Starship will go down to 10 million per launch in the next 2-3 years (not sure if thats realistic). On the other hand, we probably don't want to unload a bunch of nuclear material in LEO, but much further away from Earth.
Just watched the Kurzgesagt video. They make the point that more radioactive material is put into the world by burning coal, which I think is a valid point. They use the Falcon 9 exclusively to calculate the cost of launching, and they never indicate in the video that the cost of putting 1 kg of material into space might go down. Falcon Heavy can already launch (reusable) 63.8 tons to LEO at a cost of 97 million, which is around 1500USD/kg instead of the 4000 they cite.
They also strangely compare it to the cost of the fissile material, which doesn't make any sense as the majority of the cost for a nuclear reactor is in safety precautions, not in the actual production of nuclear fuel.
In their sources they're a little less forward:
In the video they state "In 2021, we saw a record 135 launches into space. If we repurposed each of those rockets and filled them all with nuclear waste, the total amount that could be lifted into a Low Earth Orbit, which is the closest orbit above the atmosphere, is nearly 800 tonnes. "And then they extrapolate this out to... forever, I guess? Either way there were 178 successful launches in 2022. There have already been 123 (successful) launches in 2023. Regardless it seems reasonable to expect this number to go up and the average tonnage per rocket to go up. It just seems strange to make this video that is very explicitly only about 2021 and to have the economics change so much even in 2 years. I would've preferred if they stated in the video that it doesn't make sense today, but it could in 5 or 50 years, and made more arguments in favor of storing it deep underground.
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The biggest risk (as another commenter mentioned) is the massive risk to the environment by trying to shoot it into space. If we really needed to get rid of it, we could bury it under a mountain for 100 years, dig it back up, and shoot it into space when the cost is much lower, and its much safer to launch.
Or just never launch it at all. I don't really buy the idea that burying nuclear waste in remote areas is dangerous. Critics say that the problem is that you have to keep waste contained continuously (say for the next 10,000 years) but I'm near certain we will have some way of truly getting rid of it in the next 500 years. Whether that's blasting it into space or reprocessing or something else entirely.
The Nevada Test Site is the most radiologically contaminated land on the face of the earth already. Honestly if any spent fuel leaked out it might reduce the average radioactivity at the NTS.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_Test_Site
In practice, there's so little waste that nuclear plants are burying it on-site.
Not the ideal solution, but that's just how little waste there actually is.
We know it can be buried. That’s what we're arguing against.
What kind of mentality does it take to think that "aha! We can just bury it" is a gotcha response when someone says "but what about all the nuclear waste".
That's like saying "what should we do about plastic waste?" "Aha! We can bury it".
> so about 7 years' worth of powering the whole country
Wow, what a long term solution you hate there.
> less damaging that the current fossil fuel "strategy"
You realise that literally no one arguing against nuclear power, thinks fossil fuels are the alternative right?
What is it with nuclear proponents and ridiculous straw man arguments.
It's not a "gotcha" response - it's simply pointing out that "all" the nuclear waste is really not that much.
> That's like saying "what should we do about plastic waste?" "Aha! We can bury it".
No... because the whole point is the relative quantity. There's an absurd amount of plastic. Much, much, much more. And even collecting it into one place is hard, since it's in tiny bits in every room on the planet, whereas nuclear reactor byproducts tend to be centralized and easy to locate.
I think it's kind of ironic, really - there are three arguments against nuclear (safety, cost, and political feasibility), and political feasibility is by far the biggest problem - safety is overblown (in no small part because right now we're using coal/gas which is toxic AF), cost is a genuine issue but frankly irrelevant if nuclear will genuinely speed up decarbonization (climate change is hella expensive), so the big problem with nuclear is that it's so easy to scuttle at any point with fearmongering, so if it delays renewables it could be literally worse than useless due to politics.
The volume of waste is very small and is easily stored as is.
Every time the political parties exchange power, it either gets renewed or cancelled. According to the GAO, it is not for technical or other reasons, just purely political ones.
> You realise that literally no one arguing against nuclear power, thinks fossil fuels are the alternative right?
> What is it with nuclear proponents and ridiculous straw man arguments.
In the simplest of terms: radioactive material emits energetic particles and photons. In itself, this is not much of a problem for naturally occurring radioactive materials since it is usually in low concentrations and captured by the crust of the Earth. The problem with radioactive materials used in reactors is that it has to be concentrated, otherwise the reaction rates would be too low to be useful.
Disposing of that nuclear waste isn't as simple as sticking it in a small box then burying the box in a hole. At the very least, you're going to want that hole to be geologically stable (to ensure nature doesn't interfere with how it is stored) and physically secure (to ensure humanity doesn't interfere with how it is stored). You're going to want to consider what is absorbing those emitted particles and photons, since you want to minimize how much is being absorbed by the nuclear waste stored alongside it.
So I hope you don't mind if I dismiss your claims that it is easily stored and put more faith in engineers and scientists who specialize in nuclear waste disposal. Sure, their systems may be over engineered and more expensive than they need to be. On the other hand, they have put a lot more thought into it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnxksKmJa6U
From a pro-nuke guy: no, it has not been shown. The vast majority of the nuclear fuel is low enriched Uranium, meaning U-238 makes 95% of it or more. A little is transmuted to Plutonium during operation, but more than 90% of the spent fuel is still U-238. We don't currently have the capability to burn that. We may have it one day, but that day is many decades in the future.
What nuclear recycling does is to extract unburned U-235 and plutonium from spent fuel. That can only be done once, after that the plutonium is too rich in Pu-240, and only the Pu-239 isotope is optimal for fission. So, those who say we can keep recycling spent fuel, either don't know the whole story, or choose not to tell it.
But many companies are working on developing fast reactors. These reactors can burn U-238. In principle they can burn it all. In reality, I think in the short term they'll burn just some part of it. For example, current nuclear plants can generate about 40 to 60 GW-day per ton of fuel. Various new plant proposals can go to 180 GWd/ton [1]; this is impressive, but it's not the factor of 20 you'd expect from fully burning all the uranium in the nuclear fuel. In the link I provided you'll see two reactor types with higher burnups; they are both envisioned to burn thorium. Fingers crossed, but thorium is much more unproven than uranium.
In any case, even when burning spent fuel will be possible, it will initially be economically non-profitable. And it will be so for decades.
But not for centuries. That's important. Naysayers will try to convince you that spent fuel will be a problem for ten thousand years. But that is only assuming that we freeze all progress to where we are today. Why such an assumption?
If you were to place a bet where you miraculously wake up in the future 200 years from now, would you wager that we won't be able to burn the 20'th and 21'st century spent nuclear fuel, or that we will be able to?
[1] https://aris.iaea.org/sites/burnup.html
And the cat most certainly is not out of the bag. If you split the nuclear era in the first 3 decades and the next 5, then by 1975 seven nations got the bomb: the US, the USSR, the UK, France, China, Israel and India. After that, only three nations did (South Africa, Pakistan and North Korea) and one gave them up eventually.
Iran figured out that they can play their cards better if the do not acquire the bomb, but only enrich enough uranium to be able to do that. Many other nations are only "a screwdriver's turn away" from building a bomb, Japan first among them. So much so that there is the concept of "Japan option", or nuclear latency [1]. These countries have looked into the pros and cons of possessing nuclear weapons and decided that it's better for them not to build the bomb, but be able to do that at a moment's notice. In particular, if China were to invade Taiwan, you can be sure than both Japan and South Korea would have the bomb in less than one year, and this is something that the Chinese planners are well aware of. If Japan and South Korea already had the bomb, then it would be much less of a deterrent for China to invade Taiwan.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_latency
A variety of derivative designs have kicked around & a bunch seemed like they were going to get built. Recently GE Hitachi & one of their derived PRISM designs & TerraPower travelling wave folks agreed to try something in Wyoming, but there've been so many similar such plans that've fallen through that I'm not holding my breath.
To be fair, the same is true of pro-renewable arguments. Storage is always hand waved away with pumped hydro (not enough suitable reservoirs), "molten salt!", some wild globe-spanning HVDC network or an absolutely unfathomable amount of chemical batteries.
Energy is a really difficult problem and we have no obvious solutions.
Do some people claim the solution is non-existent (at scale) solutions? Sure. Does it come up anywhere near as often as "we just need <insert Nuclear technology that's never proven reliable/commercially viable>"? Not in my experience.
> Storage is always hand waved away with pumped hydro (not enough suitable reservoirs)
Keep in mind that "how do we power the world" isn't a US-centric problem. ~35% of Switzerland's electricity is already generated from pumped hydro.
> Energy is a really difficult problem and we have no obvious solutions.
It's so difficult that South Australia (a state with a relatively small economy - about on par with South Dakota, with double the population) went from 1% to more than 70% electricity generated from renewables (wind and solar), in the space of 15 years.
> an absolutely unfathomable amount of chemical batteries
I wanted to come back to this after talking about South Australia. SA hit 70% renewables, with less than 1% accounted for by battery storage.
Renewable energy has increased exponentially in technological advances and installed capacity in the last few decades, and while some people may be pinning their hopes and dreams on as-yet-unproven "renewable" pipe dreams like world-wide HVDC networks, there are real-world technologies out there doing what opponents have claimed for years, is impractical (it was claimed for a long time that renewables could at best provide 20% of South Australia's power needs).
Then our experiences are different, fine.
> Keep in mind that "how do we power the world" isn't a US-centric problem. ~35% of Switzerland's electricity is already generated from pumped hydro
I'm from Sweden. Lots of hydro, but even the hydro we have is controversial as it has destroyed habitats. Even if we added storage capability to existing hydro, it's not enough to run the whole country through the winter.
I live in Japan now. Absolutely zero natural resources for storage, so it's a country which after Fukushima has invested lots in coal, and the world's largest car manufacturer is investing in hydrogen (which COULD be generated from renewables but we all know the fossil fuels will win in cost)
> SA hit 70% renewables, with less than 1% accounted for by battery storage
That's awesome! We should all use renewables as much as we can to remove as much fossil fuels as we can. But as with many problems, after the first 90%, comes the remaining 90%.
> there are real-world technologies out there doing what opponents have claimed for years, is impractical
I want to see a 100% renewable grid, complete with transport and heavy industry (not some off-grid house or tropical island). I really do. Please show me it. We NEED this. I still don't see it.
They determined in the 90's that MOX reprocessing costs 4x what it would cost to bury the stuff.. by 2017 the price had quadrupled again from the '94 cost.
Japan's fast reactor Monju is failed and there's no realistic plan to have a new one. Other western countries' projects had stopped. The cycle is now almost broken, but govt still need to say that it's in progress because it's terrible to say that we run nuclear plants but we don't have repository.
Deployment of solar and wind is just much faster and ends up being much more cost competitive. "Overbuilding" renewables, coupled with multiple storage technologies, is a better option than nuclear at this point.
There's literally nothing stopping us from building _both_ solar+wind and nuclear. There's no shortage of construction workers or materials. And it avoids the need to build large, expensive, and relatively short-lived (and resource-intensive) battery installations that are needed to displace fossil fuel-based energy generation. Solar and wind have an 80/20 problem, and nuclear easily slots in as a great solution for that 20%.
In many countries there is a shortage, actually. Especially for construction workers.
And a big limiting factor is the lack of money: money isn't unlimited and you can only spend each dollar once. You have to choose, so better spend it on the option with the biggest impact.
The problem with solar and wind is that they can trip offline from the grid very quickly, so the entire question is whether you can plausibly backstop the grid for long enough without the need to spin up an extra powerplant.
With a frontloaded capex asset like nuclear, once you are building it there's a big question as to how much value you get from not using it - i.e. the main benefit of solar and wind is if with storage they stop you needing to build a new nuclear plant.
I would contend that the storage answer is very inadequate: it's not nearly good enough to have a grid which is only running with 1 day worth of banked power when you could have much longer periods of underproduction (which is the way most solar/wind storage solutions are presented). To safely have a distributed grid, you need months worth of stored power to average out the fluctuations. Storage just isn't cheap enough at that scale compared to nuclear reactors.
But if want to be effective as possible at fighting climate change, we need to Marshall our resources as if we were at war, and put all the effort into the most effective routes.
Fixing the regulations and committing to a large scale construction of at least 1,000 nuclear power plants in the United States could solve these problems pretty easily.
However, if you look into detail at what happened at Vogtle, you find absolutely incompetent management that thought they could just ignore all the basic quality requirements and get away with it. Leading to massive delays, etc. etc. etc.
Regulations are a red herring, IMHO. Idiotic construction companies are however a huge problem, as are absolutely idiotic design companies like Westinghouse, which many times delivered "unconstructable" plans!
Ironically if there was more regulations, and plans were required to be checked by regulators both for safety as well as constructability, perhaps these projects could have been completed closer to on time and on budget.
But that's just because of all the people working on these things, only the regulators are doing their job as if they were accountable entities, and the utility, the EPC, and the designer are all looking simply to pass the buck and hope that in the eventual lawsuit they can take minimal damages.
Brian Potter’s “Construction Physics” substack has a series of articles about the cost issues with nuclear power:
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...
All in all, the issues with nuclear construction are largely down to regulation, and can be overcome through massive economies of scale. Building 1000 nuclear power plants within the next ten years is achievable if the United States, to use your words, “[marshalls] our resources as if we were at war”. The primary reason this hasn’t happened already are (a) activists like you spent the last half century trying to prevent it, eroding the practical expertise necessary and (b) natural gas is still probably more cost effective.
This is because we over-regulate and have let all the nuclear talent die, while they have done the opposite.
It’s possible we just in the West don’t want to imagine it is.
So to with nuclear power and other long term projects. Just because we needed these things built yesterday should not stop us from building them now.
[1] https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...
France is the nuclear success story, of course! But the irony is that these power generators can only make money when used at 80-90% capacity. France's reactors don't get that high, and so they're quite a money pit. There's the argument that "losing money" generating power is fine (we don't expect to make money on libraries or streets), but it's important when people argue about regulation being the problem. The most open and willing ecosystem for nuclear power is one that exists due to massive state subsidies.
Yeah lots of renewables aren't 100%, but power is power is power, and it feels like doing a bunch of easy stuff that also happens to make money for private actors (sidestepping some of the trickiness of larger gov't-funded projects) is a thing that our modern society is well oriented towards.
EDIT: to be clear, if there was a huge pro-nuclear movement that showed up tomorrow that could get things done, I'd be all for it. I just like the idea of doing easy things that are accepted by wide swaths of the population rather than just sitting around lamenting that people are "being irrational" or w/e
She raised the anti-nuke monster that is only now being neutralized.
That’s forty years lost right there.
[1] Jane Fonda.
Edit: Added english article. Thanks for the downvotes.
[0]https://www.grs.de/en/news/situation-nuclear-power-plants-fr...
In German: [1]https://www.iwr.de/news/stromausfall-edf-abgeschaltete-atomk...
Edit: it was downvoted but seems to have come back up.
Disclaimer: I wouldn't consider myself anti-nuclear according to any of the standard anti-nuke arguments, and was extremely pro-nuclear power in the US in the 2000s. However the experiences of advanced economies with very high productivity and labor costs (France, US, Finland) have completely soured me on the possibility of nuclear in the future, as the tech doesn't work that well and is very expensive. Even the country very best at construction, China, is only planning another 50GW or so, which is a tiny tiny fraction of any other new energy source that they are investing in. And if the best in the world at large construction projects is only putting in a token effort, I don't know why we in the US, who suck at large construction, should attempt more boondoggles. And in researching the history of nuclear, I find that it has always been this way, not so great. I think it only gets ardent supporters these days because of its prominence in SF.
Happened a few times only in 2022 because of covid + an issue affecting many plants being discovered as far as I know. Now being fixed. Otherwise worked pretty well for decades.
NREs being extremely often at <50% capacity, even practically zero in windless nights, is expected behavior.
The reason they're relying on German coal right now is because they stopped building new nuclear plants because gas was too cheap, there was too much geopolitical stability for it to be strategically advantageous and it was not politically attractive to spend money on. None of these are arguments against nuclear, but the results of short sighted decisions. Nuclear is only more expensive than gas if you don't count the effect on climate, the dependence on oil producing nations, the health effects of airborne particles.
France has like 80% nuclear power, and most of the nuclear plants are actually underutilized! Why would France not use the plants at 100%? Because electricity is kind of fungible, except at massive scales where it totally isn't, and you can't "just" have power generated in the south be used in the north.
Nuclear is more expensive than gas, but once again it is worth pointing out that it is more expensive than solar and wind! Does this mean that we can replace all of the reactors with solar or wind? Obviously not. But if you're sitting there trying to produce energy in places that are not as close to the existing reactors, building energy production facilities that don't take decades to build (for "building big things takes time" reasons) and can work without a constant inflow of water (which is a practical and real concern for these power plants).
Because more electricity is needed in during certain times, like during the day or when it's winter.
This is less of a problem in other places that have less nuclear power setup because they can be used to cover the baseline. Now, EDF is turning off reactors over the weekend cuz the power isn't needed, and in periods of high demand EDF doesn't actually have the capacity, because they don't have much peak generation!
Building more nuclear plants to cover peaks would make everything even more expensive, And decomissioning reactors entirely would cause their own massive issues because, again, electricity generation is not fungible.
One would (correctly!) point that most renewables don't help with peak generation either, and you would be right. But if you're planning on decomissioning a nuclear power plant, replacing some of that capacity with renewables at least gets your operating costs down. And energy storage solutions that are more fungible... well... you walk and chew bubble gum. Use what you have, and build what makes sense. Just in 2023 your choices for clean power generation for energy storage are vast.
It's a complex topic, and I appreciate the more detailed responses about the french situation.
Edit: Let me add the fact, that France seems to have trouble training enough personnel for these highly complex plants, rightfully so to protect the environment from the dangers of radiation. Considering the demographics of Europe in general, that is a troubling development for maintenance of these power plants decades into the future.
You are excused.
In my opinion even though indeed you present facts neutrally, your choice of facts seemed intended to make it seem as though nuclear reactors being turned off is somehow something generally a problem with nuclear reactors.
In the same line of reasoning as before, if France and the rest of the world had continued their investment in a thriving nuclear industry then getting new talent might not have been such a pressing issue.
>(Montel) French utility EDF is unable to self-finance the construction of new nuclear reactors due to its EUR 65bn debt and so needs state funding, CEO Luc Remont told a hearing of France’s lower house on Wednesday.
https://www.montelnews.com/news/1511372/french-state-must-fu...
Meanwhile Germany and the US is making billions by auctioning the right to build off-shore wind.
> Germany’s first dynamic bidding process, covering four offshore wind zones with a combined capacity of 7 GW, has generated EUR 12.6 billion in proceeds, according to the Federal Network Agency.
https://www.offshorewind.biz/2023/07/12/breaking-germany-rak...
> U.S. Offshore Wind Power Auction Nets Record $4.37 Billion
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-offshore-wind-power-auction...
I have a hard time seeing France as a success story to emulate today. Choosing nuclear was the right choose to gain energy independence in the 70s, today the equivalent choice are renewables.
The wind farms are awesome, and I'm super happy that the current economic and geopolitical climate and the technological advancements are making them possible and financially attractive to build. But in the end success is measured in TWh delivered. And France has been delivering 300TWh+/y of clean electricity for 40 years straight. And the 7GW that's gonna deliver ~20TWh/year is cool, but we need a whole lot more of it before it can be deemed as much a success as France's nuclear endeavour has been.
Today the equivalent choice when rebuilding our energy systems are renewables.
Case in point, already in 2021 renewables delivered more TWh globally per year than all existing nuclear [1], we are still early in the buildout. The tender in 2024/25 for German north sea wind auctions will be ~10 GW. [2]
[1]: https://imgur.com/JYMNAWR
[2]: https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...
And, of course, they investigated why this happened, and it was because of anti-nuclear politics.
A Whole power plant with multiple reactors was closed to appease Germany, for example.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/interview/french-mp-...
And enough water IS available for cooling. The output was only reduced in some power plants because the temperature difference between river inlet and river outlet was too big, which could cause issues to animals in the water. This was less than 0.2% of the total electricity produced by nuclear in 2022. There is an easy fix though: cooling towers.
I don't think France's nuclear situation is as dire, but it does expose some of nuclear's weaknesses: need for fresh water, and maintenance (which was overdue).
The push for nuclear in the US is a strategic maneuver to increase our position in Africa. It is not about increasing "clean" energy production. What else can you make with uranium and plutonium?? Hmm...
Further, France is slowing nuclear power generation due to heat waves [2]. Further evidence that the nuclear path is not a scalable, viable solution. Meaning, it's a bad idea to invest nuclear energy, let alone for the purpose of transitioning off fossil fuels.
[1]https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20220223-does-nuclear-power-gua....
[2]https://efe.com/en/economia/2023-08-17/france-to-reduce-nucl...
Yes, Uranium is imported but fuel costs and volume is a pretty irrelevant factor with nuclear energy. You can buy it somewhere else in strategic quantities and store it at home. But sure, there can be short term difficulties.
>> The 17-point partisan difference on nuclear power is smaller than those for other energy sources, including fossil fuel sources such as offshore oil and gas drilling (48 points) and coal mining (47 points).
I hope this means we can get the US government to continue to invest in nuclear. While it may not be the final step for human energy generation, it can be an effective stepping stone away from fossil fuels. My fear is the decreased reliance on coal and natural gas will cause unwanted political strife.
Although solar and wind are not at the capacity as nuclear is, it makes sense to continue to head in that direction. Consider this list, and how much coal is still in use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_stations...
I've never lived under any jurisdiction where any other party got more than like 15% of the vote so this is effectively the party that runs the elections I care about, the party that governs the place I live, the party I am registered as. I am describing a reality.
I think this line of thinking is part of the cause. It's compatible with "reality" to not think of either party as something one needs to be loyal to and, instead, look at your options. It's not a package deal
Personally, I don't think that specific minutia of phraseology ("my" vs. "registered as") are as productive of our political reality as you do. I think it has to do with FPTP voting.
Oh in that sense! I didn't read it that way, that makes more sense yes :) Wasn't trying to nitpick, the phrasing sounded like ballot loyalty to me, happy to be wrong
I wonder what it would look like if we could allow more granular voting. However there are real benefits to having one guy in charge, so it isn't clear how particular decisions could be delegated well.
Based on this polling, it seems like the republican party would be the perfect one for you - but yes, agreed with overall point.
/A yuropean staying up late.
Canada, US, and Mexico have enough resources and capital to be largely self sufficient, or fill any holes with imports from other American nations like Brazil or Venezuela.
Most of the Middle East's energy exports are sold to India, China, Japan, and South Korea and most of Europe's are sourced from a mix of North Africa, Eastern+Southern Europe, and the Middle East. This means Eurasia is heavily impacted by instability in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
Like the thing to do after the expense of the Vogtle project is to take the learned lessons there, and start working work on the next reactor (there were some really stupid things on that project too - i.e. commencing construction without finishing design work on the major components, which led to a lot of unnecessary rework).
We’re going to need a ridiculous amount of electricity to fix the atmosphere.
Also, what surprised me to learn is how much money goes into subsidies for fossil fuel companies. I really didn't think they needed that
In the US, the major nuclear projects are long running boondoggles, going way over.
In France, nuclear is so expensive that the national electricity company had to be nationalized to avoid bankruptcy, and plants are being closed.
Finland's Olkiluoto plant is 10 years over-schedule and has 300% cost overrruns.
South Korea had major cost overruns and is set to close half their plants
China isn't kind enough to share cost figures, but has reduced planned plants by a major percentage, indicating that the investment return is not very good. They do not have regulatory hurdles.
Maybe the only country on earth capable of building competitive nuclear is Russia of all places. They steadily increase the number of plants under construction and do not see to go over-schedule, though we don't know what the budgets look like.
While the US has a bad reputation for make infrastructure building ability, it seems to be global problem.
PRC is currently building indigenous nuclear relatively economically which appear to be performing around expectations. What happened / what PRC can't seem to do, like the west, is build _western_ nuclear tech economically. Nuclear ambition under 13th 5-year plan has been delayed largely due Fukushima reassessement and drama over western nuclear tech (French EPR / US AP1000 technical and political issues like US sanctions / Westinghouse bankruptcy) forcing PRC to switch to domestic tech. Current 14th 5-year plan still aiming for ~180-200 GWe by 2035 with ~150 reactors, which is in line with mid 2010s assessments. What is also happening is PRC scaling up coal and solar, due to geopolitics of rushing energy security and lower renewable costs, but not at the expense of nuclear rollout.
Maybe you can provide a link.
Because here in the US that's not the case. For the Three Mile Island meltdown, the cleanup cost was about $1 billion, and the vast majority was born by the private corporations, not by the public. Here's a GAO quote [1]
[1] https://www.gao.gov/products/117345That's called holding private corporations accountable for negligently contaminating the environment. There's a difference between the government paying to decom a well-run plant after 40-50 years, and sticking the taxpayer with cleaning up a mess that's not the public's responsibility.
Basically, if a nuke plant wants to operate, other plants will have to shut down to let them. And if the electricity price on the free market is below their guarantee, the government will pay the difference.
The useful idiots of the coal/gas industry
conspirary hat on: I think big city governments/urbanists/feds don't want nuclear since it would enable a large swathe of the country to continue suburban/rural lifestyles (SFH and electric cars powered by nuclear). I bet they were hoping high gas prices/high electric prices would force them back into dense urban areas (kind of a reverse white flight) where they can be "goverened", taxed and have their surplus "redistributed".
conspirary hat off.
Also, NYCs transit system (and NYC in general) is in a state of decay. They've added the shiny new station in Manhattan, but the decay is so blatant over in Queens, ancient metro stations with flickering or broken lights, the few renovated stations being blatantly cheap jobs, it's pretty depressing to compare to the money they burned on some of the stations in recent years in Manhattan.
Over the last few years, social media has been absolutely flooded with people claiming that nuclear is the "one weird trick THEY don't want you to know about" to solving climate change. It is supposed to solve every single problem, and probably even cure cancer in the process - often relying on theoretical or experimental concepts which have never been tried in practice.
Meanwhile, the reactors currently / recently constructed are massively over budget and years behind schedule. Nobody is willing to invest in them unless the government is willing to guarantee a massive subsidy on the electricity produced. Additional reactors will at best come online in a decade or two. And during all this solar and wind are rapidly increasing their market share while being weaned off the initial subsidies. Literally everyone wants to build it and in many areas we are now seeing problems because too many people are building it, leading to overcapacity.
Nuclear was a great idea in the 70s, but got a significant reputation hit due to high-profile nuclear incidents, cost overruns, and long construction delays. It was essentially killed by cheap coal becoming available with the rise of surface mining, just like coal is now being killed by cheap gas.
In 2023 the economic reality is that nuclear simply isn't a viable option anymore, and it would be quite foolish to rely on it to solve climate change in any way.
The largest solar farm in the US is about 570 MW. Some have calculated that we're going to need to build two 400 MW farms every week for the next 30 years to reach a "middle-road renewable energy scenario." [1]
That's insane.
(Or we could be building one 400 MW solar farm and one 400 MW wind farm every week instead for 30 years. Point is, though, we're far from being able to do that.)
So we're still going to be struggling in 20 years. Wouldn't we be in a better position then if we had also started the process of building new nuclear plants 20 years prior? "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is today," etc.
1. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4443474
That's actually lower than what the USA is doing right now. "The US solar industry installed 6.1 gigawatts-direct current (GWdc) of capacity in the first quarter of 2023"[0]
That is approx 469 MW of power being installed every week.
[0]https://www.seia.org/us-solar-market-insight (first link I could find)
We are at the right order of magnitude, though, as you show. The question is whether we can hit the actual number required (which is close to double what we have now) and sustain it for another three decades.
You keep saying "sustain", but solar has been growing exponentially and there is still no sign of an inflection. "Sustaining" a rate of growth is the wrong concept to model it.
We're in a period with low-hanging fruit. Lots of available space. Lots of roofs that don't have don't panels yet. Lots of mines churning our rare elements.
What will happen as solar starts to saturate the market, and the price of electricity continues to fall (thus lowering the incentive to build more farms) while the available space shrinks and the number of rare elements decreases (increasing the cost of farms)?
I'm not saying this will happen, but it was mentioned in the Greens Dilemma article posted and, and is certainly worth thinking about.
That one is a good question to ask. If the rate of change can be sustained is not. And by the way, linearly extrapolating the current rate of change into the future, like you did on your original comment is equality useless.
But yes, this one comment has a useful model. By the way, you can look how much rare earth elements are actually needed, how much mining them can grow, how much space are there for the panels, and how much the panel price can theoretically fall. I don't think anything I say will convince you, so yeah, go look, because your comment shows a lack of awareness of any of those factors.
But of course, it won't keep the exponential growth for 30 years. That would make the PV output orders of magnitude larger than our current energy consumption. If nothing yields by them, it will stop for lack of demand. Demanding it to keep going for that long is completely unreasonable.
We (per the estimates above) need to be installing about 800 MW of new renewable power generation every week every week for the next 30 years. We're currently at about 400 MW installed every week. So we need to grow to somewhere around or above that target, and then sustain that same rate for 30 years. (Or possibly fewer years if we are installing way above that rate.)
My question is simply, given that large rate of installation, can we actually sustain that rate for 30 years?
Presumably we will eventually be hitting that target rate, at least, and hopefully we will continue to do so for some time. But if markets don't continue to support installing solar at that same pace in 10 or 20 years, we won't hit our targets. That's all I'm saying.
That one has plenty of stuff written about. Yes, it can.
One other good question to ask is how much of it will be replaced on the next 5 or 10 years. That's where all the discussion is, because if it takes 30 years, we'd better also invest in alternatives, like nuclear.
(And wherever the price of electricity goes, the cost structure doesn't automatically change. Thus if the market stops supporting investing in solar in 10 years, everything except for natural gas and wind will be already bankrupt. Oh, and if the current changes on the cost structure continue for 10 years - there's some reason for them not to - you can cut wind from that list too. In other words, if you concern is about the cheapest form of generation becoming unprofitable, that automatically means we just don't really want more energy.)
Yes. That's been my question from the very beginning of the thread. Glad we got there.
Surely increasing the construction speed of renewables from 490MW to 800MW / week is easier than increasing the construction speed of nuclear from 2.3MW to 800MW / week?
[0]: https://cleanpower.org/market-report-2022/
1. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/update/archive/febru...
The EIA can be trusted with their reports on actual numbers. But their projections are absolutely embarrassing and underestimate solar deployments so much that they have completely discredited the entire enterprise of projections. The graphics showing how embarrassing they are all use the IEA numbers, but the EIA projections are just as bad
https://www.bu.edu/eci/2021/11/10/signs-of-hope-reflections-...
This type of innumeracy from nuclear advocates is rampant. It's not insane, you just put out a number that seems big, to you, and said "wow this must be impossible!"
Meanwhile, we deploy that all the time.
If nuclear advocates were better at numbers, maybe all the nuclear projects wouldn't be 2x-3x over budget and off schedule, and there would be more nuclear built.
Well, no. It's double our current rate of deployment, and that doubled rate will need to be sustained for decades.
It's not "innumeracy" to say that's going to be hard. Not impossible, but hard, and we haven't yet demonstrated that we're going to do it.
Also, other countries have historically been able to build plants on reasonable timeframes and budgets.
If there was political will, we could have a large fleet of nuclear plants in under a decade.
Considering that during the 1970s nuclear boom a single plant still took a decade to construct, there is simply no way we could possibly have a "large fleet" in under a decade. The only country with the capability of doing so is China - and they are not going to be of much use to Western countries.
A reactor a year is a pathetic pace! 1GW/year! Even I f the US matched that, we will see most of our nuclear fleet age out before it was replaced.
For contrast, China is expected to be able to produce 6TWh/year of batteries in 2030, ~260 "gigafactories" worth:
https://source.benchmarkminerals.com/article/over-400-gigafa...
China's reluctance to invest as heavily in nuclear should be a clear sign that even with great competence at building nuclear, it's just not that attractive of a tech. It's barely functioning as a hedge, and is probably only being used for its side industries rather than as a serious power source.
Show me even a medium sized nation that is predominantly powered by solar/wind and isn't utterly reliant on imports.
Nuclear is absolutely economically viable so long as you build one design several times and don't let regulators insist on crazy handycaps. That's how France, Sweden, Korea, China, and Japan successfully built out. Japan's median built time was 3.8 years during its build out. China builds plants today with $3000/kw capital costs which is as cheap as coal.
Nuclear technology is a proven solution despite all the mental gymnastics people do to insist otherwise.
The massive costs are entirely due to excessive regulations. In places and times where the rules are reasonable, plants get built on time and under budget.
Just a quibble here: your post is obviously pro-nuclear-power, however this sentence seems to claim that nuclear power causes more deaths than any other power source, which is not what I think you meant.
By far the worst is coal which [1] has conservatively at 25 deaths per TWh vs nuclear at 0.04.
The worst nuclear incident of all time killed 4000 people, and Fukushima killed exactly 1 person. The third-worst, Three Mile Island killed 0. This isn't even low sample size. Nuclear has generated 20% of the entire US power demand for decades.
Even if you attribute all the deaths from the bungled evacuation of Fukushima to nuclear power (2300), 10X more people would have died in the normal course of operating a coal power plant at the site over the course of the reactor's life (1485TWh from 1979 to 2011 @ 25 deaths/TWh = 37,000).
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Look at the economic disaster that is Vogtie.
People need to be reasonable. If we want nuclear, the government will need to pay for it. Right now everyone's waiting for energy investors and the financial engineering that backs them to throw money into nuclear. It won't happen. We want rich people to throw their billions at nuclear for a return years and years from now, instead of spending it just slapping up some windmills and getting a return next month.
T Boone Pickens was one of the most conservative energy investors that ever lived, and he was slapping up windmills left and right. That won't stop until the tax payer agrees to insulate investors from any losses.
Everyone's saying, "We want nuclear." But when we give them the financial consequences of nuclear like we did at Vogtie, they get pissed. You can't have it both ways. You want it? Cool. Don't complain about being told you have to pay off your region's reactors.
A little more cooperation from everyone on the finances would go a long way here.
The Japanese tax payer is still paying for this disaster, and the environment is paying in more ways imaginable, all of the cleanup operation so far has been running on fossil fuels and it's an significant amount of cleanup still going onto this day, hundreds of thousands of tons of top soil have been moved around the country and stored in disintegrating plastic bags which end up in rivers, for example.
People avoid buying produce and seafood from the area too which has had enormous impact on the economy and tens of thousands of people have been displaced with little to no compensation or anywhere to go.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster#200...
It would take about 10x the amount of nuclear power plants that we currently have for global energy to be totally nuclear. If we therefore 10x every single nuclear reactor disaster from the past 70 years (~ how long since the first production plant came on line in the USSR), global deaths would be between between 80,000 and 40,000,000 (using the implausibly high Greenpeace estimate of Chernobyl associated deaths).
I think that all of those estimates are implausibly high, but even if we just take the 40,000,000 number, the most ridiculously, obviously wrong number, the estimated deaths every year from fossil fuel pollution (not climate change...direct particulate matter air pollution) is between 2 and 8 million every year. So go ahead, tell me again how we can't afford to relax safety standards on nuclear power.
https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/memagazineselect/arti...
JCER estimated from US$470b to US$660b
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clearing-the-radi...
The official govt estimates have risen from $50b to $100b to $200b and are probably too low.
Actual paid-out amounts after a decade were Y12.1tn - less than $90bn.
I love how people just armchair from across the pacific that the nuclear incident was no big deal, don’t worry about it…I mean it didn’t even cost much ? Lol
(In Japan's defense, the whole country is a fault line. But the US doesn't have that problem.)
It is not the red tape, but the difference between oversight and culture. You can not regulate safety and expect safety. Safety does not come from oversight. Safety comes from culture and a shared culture of responsibility for safety.
Therefore the adversarial nature of red tape, implying an entity that does taping and therefore bears primary responsibility for safety, encodes within it the set of incentives that will result in eventual doom because alignment is always for cheaper and not for the long term. Safety requires individual responsibility and therefore a culture of responsibility, not to shareholders or next quarters profits, but to a set of values such as safety and competence.
This hearing where the head of the nuclear navy tells congress about their philosophy of safety is very much worth a read: https://web.archive.org/web/20060629082752/https://www.navy....
The end result is that if you are talking about red tape at all then you have not reached a state of understanding because you must breach the topic of culture and alignment. Capitalist alignment of nuclear energy directly results in disaster. A culture that venerates next quarters profits should not run 30 year+ programs for which failure can result in centuries of contamination.
Do you want people cut from the same cloth that the people who run BP are cut from running nuclear? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill
A congress that asks for cheaper will get cheaper. Unfortunately what is cheap in dollars can be expensive in property, lives, and well-being. A simple word like cheaper is too naive.
Compared to the forever/oil wars it seems like a pretty good deal, to be honest.
If we had not invaded Iraq we could have built 30 Votgles. USA has spent 2-3 votgles on Ukraine so far since the war began.
We all know this isn't even remotely the case, right?
We'd still need a ton of oil...
Imagine we were willing to accept the same death rate as natural gas. Reducing regulations to the point of having 100x more nuclear incidents. How much cheaper would they be to build?
It's funny how usually people argue for more regulation of side effects, but as soon as nuclear gets involved it's the reverse. Nuclear must be absolutely safe, because no one but the government (and by extension, the general populace) can afford the expense of insuring it. Reducing regulation is tantamount to giving investors permission to pull as much money as they like out of the plant and leaving us with the risk.
If there is ever even a remote profit motive, everything, including safety, will eventually be thrown under the bus to maximize profit. It’s how all businesses are run.
This is where Wind and Solar are really winning. The industries building them are growing mature and as a result efficiency goes up and costs go down.
This was the promise of nuclear microreactors: that they could be mass produced in a factory and shipped where needed. But it seems like they're never going to get off of the ground.
https://archive.ph/W7JFd
Also note they're nowhere near as costly as Vogtle.
What does this mean? Are corporate structures (corporations, LLCs, etc.) insufficient as liability shields?
I agree so much, this needs to be a bigger collectivized effort if it's going to happen. Ideally it should be something we can as a civilization improve on, where we keep improving together. Making a bunch of new proprietary designs then having 20 years of patent protection before anyone else can try & iterates or improve is a death knell for the industry as a whole. But no commercial entity is going to choose to participate in this prisoners dilemma today.
Always bring up the cost of nuclear power plants and the time to build them, but ignore that all the power plants built in the US in recent years use 1950s technology and are made expensive by 50 years of excessive regulation driven by fear.
I was anti-nuke when I was younger but recognize we fucked up terribly by not getting nuclear right and have now cooked the planet.
The appealing solution (to me) is to get SMRs into play with their associated promises of cost control and safety. My understanding is the blocker is really the existing insiders of the nuclear industry who see it as a threat to their work.
That is what makes industries with heavy regulation such risky investments.
We see consistently that big projects never come in on time and budget, which is why SMRs are the only economical way forward.
If we built exactly the same design tens to the low hundreds of times by the same handful of teams, the cost per unit would be dramatically lower. This is especially true of the modern, safer, and more cost effective designs.
All of the third generation EPR projects being built in Europe have run hugely over budget. I really thought if anyone could build nuclear plants cost effectively it would have been France so it's really made me lose hope in nuclear power.
What nuclear needs is massive subsidies, especially in reactors using small modular designs that are more amenable to mass-manufacturing techniques and transportability, and it needs them sustained for decades until the competitive forces of the large market for SMRs has brought the price of reactors down to levels where they're competitive in the market without subsidies, at which point the growth of privately funded nuclear power would be self-sustaining.
Over the years nuclear has enjoyed enormous subsidies. If it were not for the huge decrease in costs for renewables over the past couple of decades and huge increase in cost for nuclear I’d be much more enthusiastic about nuclear power.
I can’t believe that people are still arguing against nuclear. It’s an extremely proven technology. It can be built fast, cheap and safely.
But at the end of the day real resources matter. Where should labour effort be directed? Costs reflect that effort.
I’m not against nuclear but if redirecting effort (money, labour) from nuclear to renewables and storage seems likely to reduce co2 emissions faster then let’s redirect that effort. It’s fine for cool technologies to be abandoned when cheaper alternatives come along.
If it’s possible to come up with a far cheaper form of nuclear power then great! But it’s hard to compete with the big fusion reactor in the sky.
The best case scenario is solar/wind, along with their associated storage systems, continuing to see rapid cost reductions, and nuclear, through SMRs, becoming vastly more affordable alongside them.
The two classes of electricity generators would each find ideal use-cases and produce an energy system that provides electricity at a lower cost than either could provide on their own.
To expand a bit more on nuclear: we've never made a good effort at bringing down its cost. The SMR option I outlined is the route to achieving that. Giant plants built mostly on-site just don't benefit from large markets the way transportable goods that can be built off-site do.
The SMR industry needs subsidies while in its embryonic stage to have a chance of showing what it can do, with respect to cost-effective electricity generation, when it's more developed.
The subsidies have also not been directed at the SMR market, which is the only one that has the potential to see exponentially declining costs like what's seen in wind/solar.
they're expensive because we can't build ANYTHING big in this country without cost overruns.
Maddening.
We have a simple problem. Either we shift our power supply to something that won't kill us or we all start getting used to the idea of living on a hostile planet. I feel that this problem should be taken on as seriously as defending against a hostile nation and pour the resources of the state into a solution. Only when we rebuild our knowledge and skill can we tackle this.
I have some hopes in small reactors we could factory build and crank out of an assembly line. But I think the politics of this are still too difficult to even matter. People would rather throw their hands in the air giving up and die in a fire than have the risk of radiation in their neighborhood. Only the kids growing up today watching the world end will probably get their will together to change what is happening. We have failed them
It goes into detail about the argument you are proposing.
The estimates also suffer from minimization from bad human intuition - as there will be years of future deaths from Chernobyl and Fukushima but because they are both difficult to peg and small at any single point in time they get discounted.
In general the strategy is very similar in deniability effectiveness to the chemical industry in cancers and other illnesses from exposures from everything like pesticides to PFAs.
that perception stuck
Now I'm sure some oil and gas companies decided to fund some of these groups because they saw these people could be useful, but that doesn't mean the movement was astroturfing.
Astroturfing is pretending their is a movement when there isn't. The anti-nuclear movement was real, big oil just wrote some of them checks because they realized what was bad for nuclear was good for them.
Nuclear is a good "filler" for environments that aren't conducive to other renewables.
Hydro is extremely safe except for a handful mass casualty incidents that completely skew the numbers. Nuclear is in the same boat, with really just 1 significant incident.
Point ONE: nuclear is more expensive CURRENTLY that solar/wind. SOlar/Wind is currently the cheapest by far, and here's the scary thing for gas turbine: solar + storage is very close to druopping under gas combined cycle generation. Look up Lazard 2023 LCOE study. Solar/Wind have dropped to 24$ per MWHr. The cheapest nuclear produces is $141/MWHr. That's right, nuclear is almost 600% more expensive.
Point TWO: Say you miraculously got 100 billion dollars through congress for new plants to start immediate projects. Not a single reactor will come online for 10 years. Now, look at the cost improvement rate of solar, wind, and storage for the last 10 years. 10% year-on-year improvements or more. Even if we had half of that for the next 10 years (and there will be 10 more years of cost improvement), solar / wind very likely will be HALF the current cost.
So you'd have 100s of nuclear plants come online in 10 years generating electricity that costs 10-20x more than electricity from wind/solar. That simply is not a viable national power strategy.
If we had these plants already because construction started in the year 2000, that would probably be a different story.
The only hope for nuclear is probably in about 15-20 years where the cost improvement curves finally stabilize for wind/solar, and then a stable price point can be targeted with new nuclear designs. I personally think that only something like a novel MSR/LFTR which can scale down to mass producable sizes, uses all the fuel, breeds. doesn't have solid fuel rod reprocessing and waste transport/storage, and can use the Brayton cycle for more efficiency has a chance of competing with mature solar/wind.
Puff pieces like this are really about the current nuclear plants and keeping them on funding life support, which I generally support for now. The industry sees that Lazard LCOE curve just like any other person would: do you want to pay solar/wind costs for electricity, or 6x that for nuclear?
The existing nuclear industry can't survive without subsidies.
1. "Cost estimates" are more expensive than solar/wind. You know what they are also more expensive than? The historical costs of ACTUAL 50-year-old plants.
2. Average construction time for a nuclear plant is 6-8 years, with many built in half that time. [1] You can build over half a dozen generations of nuclear power plants before my 401(k) matures.
[1] https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...
From your own source, the Lazard 2023 LCOE study: "Most LDES (long duration energy storage) technologies have not yet reached commercialization due to technology immaturity and, with limited deployments, seemingly none of the emerging LDES technologies have achieved the track record for performance required to be fully bankable."
Ideally we'd have a combined approach - nuclear base load, renewables and grid scale storage to reduce the number of expensive nukes we need. That way you'll always have at least some power. But we don't have grid storage yet. And without storage, there's not much point in offsetting the output of nuclear plants, since fuel costs are so minimal - you might as well run all the nukes full tilt, all the time. So really, the only sensible thing to do is build primarily nuclear, and renewables in proportion to our ability to deal with wildly fluctuating energy supply.
Nuclear simply needs a reset to figure out how to make it economical. I love nuclear power in theory, there is simply so many more orders of magnitude of energy density and long life that it has to be viable somehow.
Again, I'm in favor of keeping the current nuclear plants operational. But build out a substantial new build of nuclear plants? Absolutely not. Research reactors, long term R&D / national laboratory projects on advanced nuclear? 100% support it, to the tune of a billion per year or more.
It's all very well saying you think that "synthfuels" and "hydrogen stuff" WILL outperform nuclear, but the practical upshot is that you are arguing in favor of sitting around twiddling our thumbs hoping some new technology will save us, when we could be building nuclear plants. What do you suggest we do now that will substantially eat into fossil consumption?
That is honestly unhinged, and if nuclear proponents thing grid storage is some far off technology, they are more divorced from th economic reality than I thought.
Nuclear is 141$ per mwhr. Solar +storage is $45. Solar/wind are $24.
This pattern of improvement isn't some new phenomenon, and you can't pretend these are made up figures. Is storage pricing new? Yeah. Is the cost of battery backup going to drop? Virtually guaranteed with new sodium ion techs and the other stuff in the pipeline.
Attitudes like this frankly just validate that the entire current generation of the nuclear industry simply has a flawed and obsolete structure and outlook. They are simply ossified in a huge regulatory capture wall.
You can easily be accused of Silicon Valley style innovation delusion. As if something being older or more "regulated" means it is bad. It is the same delusion that got Uber to lose billions until they changed the same per ride as any taxi company. In reality, facts don't care about how you think the world works.
How do the costs compare when you factor in enough storage and overbuilding to reliably cover the inherently unpredicable generation downtimes?
"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today."
I assure you people 20 years from now will be posting the exact same sentiment - "we should have started building nuclear reactors in 2023".
Yes, if you screw up badly enough, you can have a disaster. If I drove drunk and ran my Jeep down a crowded city sidewalk, you would also have a disaster, but I would never be that negligent, callous, and stupid. The US Navy has run reactors for 65 years with a flawless safety record . . . it can be done.
"Look how expensive nuclear is compared to solar!" they say, ignoring capacity factors, reliability or storage. "Look how many gigawatts of batteries were installed last year" while ignoring that the energy-storage of those batteries is maybe 3 hours and the total power of batteries scales alongside energy.
"We'll just overbuild" they say, ignoring that the 4x the solar is now within a stone's throw of being the same capex as equivalent nuclear, but still needs storage.
Everyone has some just-so narrative which omits numbers. Because you can make green hydrogen they assume it must be cost-effective to do so. Because someone said "solar is cheap" they assume it must be too cheap to meter. As though you can wave away multiple 50% energy loss steps as insignificant.
I'm open to being convinced I'm wrong, but show me the numbers which prove it. Show me that you're talking about a today technology, not "by 2028 it's expected costs will reduce..." while saying nuclear will "take too long to build". Don't tell me power-to-methane exists, show me the numbers saying it works and include the costs of storing it (stored methane is superb on energy density for the grid, but about 30% efficient panels-to-power plant and has a cost per kWh in storage...and has a suspicious paucity of information surrounding operating costs of plants versus "future projections").
Of course, I've been wildly conflating electricity with all emissions, but I think the low-hanging fruit argument still applies.
Germany's power grid has started to struggle because they're at 30+% solar capacity, but not reliability - the grid can't sustain losing large swathes of generation capacity suddenly because a cloud passed overhead, or if a region is overcast that day then you've got to make up that shortfall - which you can do so long as you have basically the same installed capacity of gas, coal and oil on standby where they can just turn on an extra-turbine or boiler on demand.
But if you want to actually decarbonize, then you need to solve that problem. Otherwise you end up with the perverse situation that increased renewable investment necessitates new fossil fuel power plants, because you still need to backstop the intermittent sources.
The NSW Australian power grid has this problem right now: the reality is that no one wants to invest in fossil fuel power plants. Great! You'd say. But the grid actually does need a new reliable generator and power price pressure is a big political issue. Getting reliable watt-hours onto the grid - not more intermittents - needs to happen. The catch-22 is people rightly don't want to subsidize more fossil fuels, but the available renewable options are being installed anyway - but they won't solve the actual availability problem we have (and in a country with bush fires it's a big one - 3 months of summer with overcast skies along the east coast from smoke means no one's solar panels were working well, and grid-interconnects have limited capacity).
Counter-example: Brazil's national grid routinely runs on over 85% renewables with essentially zero storage (there might be a couple of experimental battery storage units, but if any they're much less than 1%; and all it has of pumped hydro storage is one partial preliminary study of possible locations).
Oh right - hydroelectricity. Providing 65% of it's total electricity.[1] Wind is 11% and solar is 2.5%.
And they're also building a new nuclear reactor at their existing plant.[2]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Brazil
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angra_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Sorry about that. It's the average over a whole week (I looked at the weekly bulletin of a random week from last month, but they're all similar).
> With what renewable?
Around 62% hydro, 22% wind, and 1% solar (we're in winter right now, so we have less solar and more wind; on summer we'd have more solar and less wind).
> And they're also building a new nuclear reactor at their existing plant.
And that reactor is the main reason I'm very skeptical of nuclear power: it's been under construction for nearly 40 years, and it's still not near done. All the parts have already been bought and have been stored on site for a long time; just the upkeep to make sure none of these parts degrades while under storage is already a high cost.
We have ~100 reactors in the US, nearly all are close to end of life. We would need to start building ~100 reactors today in order to keep the same amount of nuclear in the future. We have one, just one, nearing completion, and no more that have any chance of getting funded and starting construction within a few years. We are going to go through a long period with far less nuclear than we have today, if we ever get to a period with more nuclear than today. I doubt we ever will.
If you want numbers, check out Christopher Clack's modeling. It is by far the most detailed, and the most complete, and the most innovative.
But to say that nuclear advocates run the numbers is just false. They can't even run the numbers on their own construction plans, much less the numbers on the system level of what it would take to keep nuclear a significant part of our grid. Nuclear advocates are the least numerate folks in the energy business, again and again, since the big burst of reactors in the 70s.
For hard numbers, see real-world case studies like Denmark:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Denmark
They get 50% of their electricity from just wind. So that's the lower bound on what you can achieve in the real world today. Here's how you increase that without needing any storage technology:
(1) Be a very large land mass like the United States, where wind variability is more likely to cancel out.
(2) Add solar instead of only relying on wind. Solar cancels out wind variability because it's more windy when it isn't sunny.
(3) Overbuild by 2-3x, so that the troughs in energy aren't so bad. Even if you overbuild by this much, it's still a lot cheaper and faster to build out than nuclear.
(4) Import solar/wind from neighboring countries, losing only 10-15% due to resistivity.
I don't know exactly what % renewables you can achieve by picking all this low hanging fruit while still being cheaper than Nuclear. 80%? 99%? If you add solar and you overbuild and you have access to a large landmass like the US, you can probably get very, very high, with the last few % being powered by natural gas peaker plants as a temporary stop-gap until storage technology becomes good enough.
As a bonus, if you overbuild, you can sell surplus energy to Mexico and make money!
This narrative seems to be popping up a bit recently, but mostly from folks who find it "deliciously ironic" (gross) or put "climate crisis" in quotes.
The real catastrophe was that coal and not nuclear powered the ascent of Asia. If we hadn’t frozen nuclear power in the 70s it’s possible that there would have been a mature modular nuclear industry whose technology China and other Asian countries could have bought or copied instead of doubling global emissions in 15 years by massively scaling out coal.
Check out some of these graphs:
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
(I’m not claiming this makes the crisis uniquely their fault. It’s a global problem and virtually everyone has participated in creating it.)
But the USA has very little of it because it’s expensive in the US (due mostly to regulation and utilities being obstructionist).
By contrast, rooftop solar is very cheap in Australia, so it’s everywhere.
Nuclear is safe and clean, but until it’s cheaper nobody is going to go near building any more of it, and the nuclear industry has been incapable so far of making it cheaper.
The reason it's expensive in the US is all regulatory, and because of the ever changing patchwork of utility rules that make it economical or not to attach your own generation to the grid.
Last I heard, roughly 30% of the cost of solar in the US is spent merely on customer acquisition. Because the only forms that survive are those that swoop in when there's a window of economic plausibility for solar to work for homeowners, before the utility in a particular small area changes their mind and buys off the regulators to make it cost infeasible for homeowners to generate.
There's a huge advantage to the grid of having generation be more local: more than half of energy costs are transmission and distribution, and these are costs that utilities can reliable charge a profit for, so they try to make these costs as high as possible. When customers install their own solar, this reduces the peak daytime need for T&D, and the grid is sized for peak usage. So everyone would be better off with far more local solar, except for the utility.
Now, the constituency of people with solar panels on their roofs is so large that it will be very politically difficult for the industry to turn back the clock.
Having more uniform rules across states and regions would reduce a lot of the overhead of installing residential solar.
Where I'm from, peak usage is on cold, dark, winter days. So there are no savings to the grid from locally generated solar as they still have to be fully dimensioned for a large load.
If the billing was honest, people with solar+local battery would have $0 bills throughout most of the year and then January hits and they get a $3000 bill for using the grid over the coldest, darkest 3 days.
I'm all for solar - every marginal reduction of fossil fuels used is a big win. We just have to be honest about the costs and challenges.
V2G would also really help in this scenario because of the sheer size of EV batteries. If you’re using them as home storage batteries once or twice a year it’s probably not going to hurt the lifespan too much.
For much of the world, the dim days of winter are much longer than a few days. Storage couldn't work for these places. Taking clean energy from distance places would be required.
Yes, I get that winter lasts for months and agree that you can't possibly store enough energy in chemical batteries to cover it all.
However, demand peaks by definition occur only for short periods, and shaving those peaks reduces the need for grid infrastructure compared to what you would need otherwise.
Maybe I'm misreading this, but the infrastructure couldn't be reduced. Battery storage acts as a filter, allowing you to optimize the transition for both sides of the duck curve [1], but reducing infrastructure, as in removing plants, can't be done somewhere that can have its power generation halved by a passing tropical storm.
If you're saying "reduce dirty power", then yes. :)
As a side note, here's some interesting graphs I just found:
California: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/California-daily-power-g...
Germany: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Germany-daily-power-gene...
Everything is so flat in Germany! Including demand!
Today, while there are still some subsidies available the unsubsidised costs are so low it makes financial sense even without them.
The government has been incapable of not overregulating it into massive cost overruns. Nuclear is quite reasonably priced under reasonable regulatory regimes.
If we had continued building plants at a steady rate the cost would not be nearly as high.
I realise the distinction probably isn't well understood in the general population, but I'm confident a huge part of that is due to every news story conflating the two.
In particular, they constantly conflate different definitions of energy. There's energy in/energy out, there's laser energy in/energy out (lasers currently being 0.5% efficient, so it's a lie of 2 orders of magnitude), there's energy in/out per pellet versus including warmup time, etc.
Even if fusion is possible within two decades, it might be prohibitively expensive to build for another decade or two, and we'd need to build a first commercial reactor before we can properly scale it, so I don't see fusion being possible before 2050.
So I'd rather that money be sent straight to fission plants, since we know they'll actually work on time.
And that comes back to my point - I'd be very happy to have a lot more budget thrown at the problem, because a) it seems extremely unlikely at this point that the technology is outright infeasible, and b) the payoff will be monumental.
Your claim:
> So I'd rather that money be sent straight to fission plants, since we know they'll actually work on time.
is contra-indicated by reality, unfortunately.
(If you're going to drop phrases like 'if it's even possible', and 'might be expensive', and so on for your fusion predictions, I'll point at the actual failures of fission nuclear power plant deployments over the past few decades.)
The reason their energy is not cheap is because nuclear is actually really expensive; also for the French. Instead of charging via electricity bills, the French just rolled that into their taxes. The energy bills don't quite cover the cost. The EDF, which runs their nuclear plants and is state owned, has a lot of debt, and has had some record losses recently. But it's OK; they are too big to fail and the French government will bail them out as needed as they have done for decades. At great cost to tax payers of course. But it keeps the electricity bills low.
The French have a nuclear industry for the same reason the US and the British and other nuclear powers do: it serves their military goals to have a functioning nuclear industry so they can maintain their status as a nuclear power. That means a lot of state funding has historically been available to keep these industries going. Without public funding, it's not really that attractive financially to be involved with nuclear.
The government however is also betting on oil and gas and have recently annoucned, with funding from saudi arabia, the nation's largest oil refinary project. They are also redirecting funds from renewable energy like solar and wind to nuclear, citing fraud and immaturity of the technology. The plant operator has been under constant scrutiny from the locals for construction faults, waste fuel management, etc.
What people seem to forget here is that nuclear isn't a panacea. Just because a country builds nuclear doesn't mean it's succeeding at reducing carbon emmission. The world's 2nd largest, and also the fastest growing, nuclear energy producer by power is china, which still depends largely on coal for its electricity. Also consider nations too volatile to have nuclear power. If you argue that net zero is "impossible" without nuclear, you're basically arguing those countries don't deserve its existence.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_modular_reactor
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-energy
Ontario has recently started doing this and I think it is a great restart to the nuclear program (https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1003248/ontario-building-...). It may be a bit too late as it isn't expected to be done before the plants that currently provide 1/3 to 1/2 of our power (https://www.ieso.ca/power-data) hit end-of-life. But at least it is some progress to something that isn't just replacing them with natural gas.
However, the climate crisis overrides everything. If we're going to have even a chance of man being able to live relatively decently in the future, then we need to make some radical changes, and nuclear is an obvious source of energy that contributes far less to climate change.
So I've come to think that whatever the potential environmental hazards of nuclear waster, they are miniscule compared to the environmental disaster that we're currently in. Every tool we have to help mitigate that is essential.