I moved to Germany this year from Canada, and I've been incredibly impressed with the speed and aggressiveness with which Germany has been pursuing renewable energy sources[1]. This is great news because it's happening despite the fact that Germany is really not an ideally situated country for any of the major renewable energy sources, so these advances are applicable to other countries in ways that e.g. the experiences in Denmark or South Australia might not.
The buildout of renewable energy sources in Germany has been so widespread and so successful that they're no longer the interesting part of the problem. Now that the electrical grid here is averaging 60-70% renewable electricity in any month of the year, the limiting factors now are energy storage, and long-distance flexible transmission of electricity.
Transmission lines are a not-so-sexy, but totally vital part of running a grid with so much intermittent electricity production that's only accurately forcastable a few days in advance. There's been a lot of HVDC lines build connecting Germany to the UK and various scandinavian countries, but one of the biggest things we're still waiting on is a new link from the north of the country to the south. The south has more solar resources, and the north has more wind resources, so there needs to be way more capacity to share.
Storage is going to be a very hard problem to tackle and has a less clear path forward. Batteries are going to play an important role, but in the near term they're likely only to be valuable for smoothing out supply and demand over a two to three day window.
Something that doesn't get discussed very much though is how much bio-gas Germany generates. German farmer collective, landfill operators, and wastewater operators actually make quite a bit of money by using specialized bacteria to compost organic material and generate methane.
Bio-gas is responsible for around 8-9% of German electricity generation. It's currently used in a very consistent way, with the same amount being burned nearly every hour of every day, but eventually when wind, solar, battery, and HVDC electricity sources are able to take over most day-to-day electricity needs, this bio-gas could instead be stored and used as a backup power source, as well as being sold to industry for hard-to-electrify industrial processes.
Afterall, if all that gas were stored instead of used up immediately, it'd only take 11-12 days of storage to store enough gas to power the whole grid for a day. This is really important, because the amount of solar and wind energy being produced can vary huge amounts from week-to-week.
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[1] Yes, I know, Germany made a gigantic mistake decomissioning their nuclear reactors early. I strongly disagree with that choice, and I think there's a deeply rooted misunderstanding and fear of nuclear power in this country which is a big shame. Despite this, good progress is being made however.
Nuclear isn't profitable. Renewables have plummeted in cost making nuclear cost prohibitive, and let's face it, if they're ever built it'll probably be too little too late.
First of all, nuclear is very expensive, but most of that cost is in the original construction, of the reactor. In the wake of Fukushima, Germany decomissioned many already built, mature reactors that could have continued to safely and cheaply operate for decades. Shutting down pre-existing reactors and justifying it with "well, building new reactors is expensive" is at best stupid.
Second of all, renewables are incredibly cheap when they're a minority of the grid. The problem is that if there's a shortfall of electricity, things get real expensive real fast. To make realistic grid-scale comparisons between renewables and nuclear power, you need to compare the cost of renewables-plus-storage against the cost of nuclear, and at that point things get a lot more nuanced and hard to compare.
For instance, solar PV is the cheapest electricity you can get, but in places with a lot of preexisting solar installation it's also some of the lowest value electricity. During the middle of a sunny summer day in Germany, electricity spot prices can go negative because so much solar is being produced, but then that same night, prices shoot up because suddenly all those PVs stop producing any electricity at all. It's a bit of a race to the bottom if you don't have storage to offset those swings.
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All that said, I'm of course a big fan of renewables and I'm glad Germany is investing in them, and I think there's a bright future ahead with them. But using the low cost of solar modules and wind turbines as an argument against keeping nuclear power stations online is silly -- especially when there's still coal plants operating in Germany.
I agree nuclear initial investment is high but it’s cheaper to maintain in the long run than renewables. The making of solar panels, wind turbines and hydroelectric power stations release more carbon in the athmosphere than nuclear sites. Making of this stuff, especially batteries for stocking, produce more poisonous material than any nuclear site will, and must be stocked underground with high risks. Exaust fission materials produced by humanity so far is so little that stocking isn’t a problem and in some kind of reactors can even be recycled! Renewables don’t guarantee power continuity, nuclear fission does. I can go on the whole day, renewables alone can’t power the ever increasing world need. A mix of nuclear reactors, even small, and renewables could
Economics of scale never worked out for nuclear. How many more hundreds of billions in of subsidies do you want to add to the fire to try "one more time"? Because this time it surely is different!
Nuclear economies of scale, in the very best cases, have been very low. See for example:
> The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing
> Drawing on largely unknown public records, the paper reveals for the first time both absolute as well as yearly and specific reactor costs and their evolution over time. Its most significant finding is that even this most successful nuclear scale-up was characterized by a substantial escalation of real-term construction costs.
There's a more exhaustive paper (by Lovering, maybe?) where it finds a few cases of economies of scale, e.g. South Korea, but the savings are really tiny compared to a tech with a real learning curve, like battery storage.
If you have any numbers showing that US military reactors have economies of scale, I would love to see it. Not that we could use HEU in civilian reactors, but the construction lessons might be useful. I have never found a fan of US military reactors that could cite the cost numbers, and I have not been successful finding them either.
As for China, I don't know anybody that trusts their cost numbers. I prefer to look at where they are actually spending their money, and their planned nuclear build is absolutely a tiny tiny fraction of what their solar and wind numbers. And the plans for wind and solar are increasing year after year, whereas nuclear plans are staying steady.
France hasn’t built a plant in decades [1]. Nevertheless, in each deployment series, the last plants cost less than the first. The story you’re highlighting doesn’t dismiss economies of scale, but instead highlights higher-than-expected maintenance costs in fifty-year-old infrastructure.
(“Operating costs have remained remarkably flat” because those are experiencing scale effects.)
They have been trying to build a plant for a decade, and one could consider them to have finally built Olkiluoto in Finland, in what can only be considered a bit of a disaster.
I would like to see the data that in the US that a series of reactors saw economies of scale, and to what degree, and if that can overcome the initial underestimates of 2x-3x that are used to secure an initial decision to build.
> Selling to the world's least price sensitive customer
Doesn’t change that the Nth reactor is (in real dollars) cheaper than the (N - 1)th.
And civil nuclear reactors have had economies of scale demonstrated for decades [1]. The problem is we realise these at the scale of individual plants instead of across the production system.
Funny how back when renewables were expensive, these people said that the cost doesn't matter, but now that public investment has made them cheap, suddenly they're against any energy source that isn't profitable on it's own, even if it has useful properties for decarbonization.
This sort of cynical, tribal behaviour among people who claim to just want to stop climate change is pretty disappointing.
Back when renewables weren't cheap, I was cheering on nuclear, back in the 2000s. I was cheering on renewables to get cheaper, but I didn't think we should deploy a ton of renewables if nuclear could achieve the same carbon neutrality cheaper.
Now, in the year 2023, when batteries plus solar are cheaper than new nuclear, IMHO the only same thing to do is to deploy massive amounts of solar wind and batteries, and cheer on nuclear trying to get cheaper.
Demanding that we deploy a ton of expensive nuclear when we can't even reliably complete construction in the US is a fool's game. We don't have time to waste on nuclear, today.
Which is to say, there is definitely some tribalism, but nuclear advocates are the most tribal people I encounter in energy discussions. There doesn't even seem to be much understanding of current and past projects among nuclear's advocates.
Notice that I posted a 7 paragraph comment gushing about the great progress being made with renewable energy in Germany, and then attached a short footnote acknowledging "yeah I think a mistake was made with nuclear power but oh well", yet all the responses I've gotten are arguing about nuclear power.
Nowhere in my post did I say Germany should be be abandoning renewables or that they should be heavily focusing on nuclear power. I just said that I think it's a shame that they threw out perfectly good reactors long before they reached the end of their lifetime out of irrational fears.
Ah, I may have missed that in this long thread, and thought we were talking about new nuclear, apologies. But I also didn't mean to critique your comment, as much as riffing on it. I don't see the tribalism as much on HN or other forums, except for Twitter, wheee there appears to be a huuuuge amount of zealous advocates that seem impervious to stats, papers, and discussion.
Agreed that existing nuclear should stick around as long as maintenance doesn't get more costly than replacing with other options.
That'd be a particularly weird thing for me to do given that, as I said already in this very comment chain, I'm a Canadian living in Germany...
I mean, it's great that the USA might invest more in nuclear power, but throwing some peanuts towards new reactors doesn't really fix the fact that they're a massive laggard when it comes to reducing emissions.
There's a ton more work to be done than just building nuclear power plants.
Transportation and healthcare are extremely profitable things. The question is profit for whom, and who pays.
If we are talking about building a zero-carbon energy system, we should be talking about the lowest cost method of doing that, over times, taking into account externalities.
All the modeling of zero carbon energy systems finds that massive amounts of solar and wind are the backbone of energy generation. The amount of nuclear varies based on cost assumptions, and in particular if they use current battery costs and if they model the ever decreasing battery costs, but nuclear plays a very small role in the lowest cost zero-carbon grids of the future. A smaller role than it does today.
> Yes, I know, Germany made a gigantic mistake decomissioning their nuclear reactors early. I strongly disagree with that choice, and I think there's a deeply rooted misunderstanding and fear of nuclear power in this country which is a big shame. Despite this, good progress is being made however.
You're not from Bavaria, I take it? Here, to this day hunters and shroom gatherers have to scan their produce for radioactivity because of the aftereffect of Chernobyl [1], but also due to the aftereffects of worldwide nuclear weapon tests [2].
Besides: the three NPPs that were shut down this year only had 1.4GW each - and we're building ~2GW in renewables each month. The capacity of the NPPs has long since been replaced by renewables.
> capacity of the NPPs has long since been replaced by renewables
All while Germany continues burning Russian oil and coal [1].
Anti-nuclear pro-climate is oxymoronic. It’s also destructive in introducing irrelevant preferences into an important debate; if you get nukes then someone else gets solar panels and windmills ruining their view.
> if you get nukes then someone else gets solar panels and windmills ruining their view.
No view-ruining if you run offshore wind. Europe has a lot of potential there, even though the French have been ... slow in building that one out given their "cheap" nuclear.
>You're not from Bavaria, I take it? Here, to this day hunters and shroom gatherers have to scan their produce for radioactivity because of the aftereffect of Chernobyl.
“I read about a train derailment that killed people so I’ll never take public transit”
>The capacity of the NPPs has long since been replaced by renewables.
The two sources aren’t fungible unless the renewables are dams. Nuclear provides a reliable base load. Neither solar nor wind can do that. You need storage to make them reliable and that’s not even close to a solved problem.
> The two sources aren’t fungible unless the renewables are dams. Nuclear provides a reliable base load. Neither solar nor wind can do that.
That's only a question of a reliable, widespread grid. France, Portugal and Spain have almost consistent wind from the Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea, it's only a question of how much you want to invest into a truly European Grid.
There's other renewable sources that can be tapped. Running-water hydro provides constant baseload (with the exception of summer when rivers run dry, but there, solar fills the gap), geothermal energy is a massive reserve that's completely constant, biomass (aka burning cow dung and other compost gases) releases CO2 but it's better to have that CO2 than have the fermentation methane release into the atmosphere and you can store the gas in the regular gas grid storage to burn it in times of need, pumped hydro and distributed battery packs / EVs can provide peak regulation power...
And in any case: it makes sense to massively over-build wind and solar generation because air and maritime travel will need a massive amount of power-to-liquid synthfuel as there's no way to power either of these using conventional batteries.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Yes, 4000 becquerels of Cesium 137 per kg of mushroom sure does sound scary, especially if you're raised in the German media environment that constantly plays up the nuclear boogeyman.
Cesium 137 is a beta emitter and doesn't bioaccumulate in humans. Potassium in bananas has a similar radiological and chemical properties to cesium. A kilogram of bananas is around 250 Bq of naturally occurring radioactive potassium. I'd be a lot more worried about industrial chemicals that leeched into my wild mushrooms than I would about such low levels of cesium
If you ate 80,000 Bq worth of those mushrooms (i.e. you found and ate 20kg worth of the most radioactive mushrooms these people were able to find), you'd get a 1 millisievert radiation dose which is less than half of a normal person's yearly ambient radiation dose.
It's not that different from many other countries.
Atmospheric CO2 levels are often compared with pre-industrial (~1850). But for a long time after, emissions hardly moved the needle.
It's only in the last 2..3 decades that humanity put the bulk of GHG in the air. Mostly through population growth + increased productivity per capita.
So we've done the bulk of the environmental damage in just a few decades. Which is why 'hitting the brakes' NOW is so urgent.
On the bright side: with fast enough growth (which China is showing) a now-smallish % of renewables can become a big chunk of the overall picture in a short time.
If you want to know quantities emitted currently and up to now, your graph was great.
But I didn't ask about that, I asked about the trend, so in fact you replied to me with a misrepresentation. It was highly inaccurate, and to see you sling around accusations feels a tiny bit rude after what you're posted.
The graph I posted is better for recognizing the trend, where things will be in the future. Is goal a growing or shrinking component of the energy mix? Shrinking.
Absolutes do matter, but so do trends. And if we are talking about the future, the trends matter more than the absolutes of the current.
> if you want to know quantities emitted currently and up to now, your graph was great.
No, my graph would not be very useful for that. For that, you'd want the area under those curves, i.e. the sum of all historical emissions. My curve is just showing how much electricity in a given year is produced by which source. Total energy usage in China is growing very fast, and Coal is a big part of that.
> But I didn't ask about that, I asked about the trend, so in fact you replied to me with a misrepresentation.
No actually, the trend is that China's usage of coal is widespread and growing very fast.
Showing that the percentage of coal in their electricity mix is stable or shrinking only shows that the *acceleration* of coal usage in China is stable or negative, even if the trend is increasing usage.
China's coal plants are a temporary measure until they can get enough renewables built because they don't want to lose all the global manufacturing they do. They will shut them down as soon as they can. China knows it has a lot to lose from global warming since they have so many heavily populated cities built on the coast.
There, at that conference, China pledged CO2 emissions would peak by 2030. Xi said that China would “strictly control coal-fired power generation projects”.
Since then the country's been plagued by power shortages and has been building coal fired stations as a stop gap.
Coal and China is complicated - in the past two decades China has closed down a very large number of quite old and quite polluting coal stations that had high emmissions.
In that time they've built a few nuclear stations, a lot of solar and hydro, and a number of larger more efficient coal stations that run cleaner.
So, they're still building coal, they've improved the situation wrt pollution from coal, they're committed to ending coal, that's not going to be easy.
China’s coal addiction puts spotlight on its climate ambitions before Cop28
That it will peak means that we are still adding, each year, even more greeenhouse gases than in the previous ones.
That is not directly what causes the warming. In simplified terms, we have excess of greenhouse gases, we keep more heat of what we receive from the sun than what we lose, and that is one of the forces behind global warming, hitting the 1.5ºC and so on. And CO2 remains in the atmosphere for 100-200 years after emitted.
So, this "peak", if achieved, means that we are still accelerating the problem. after we peak, we will keep adding roughly as much carbon as we did in previous years (that will keep be adding to the excess). We are not sensibly lowering the amount of extra greenhouse gases, we will still be growing what is up there for the foreseeable future. And as the planet warmed up, several feedback loops have been triggered that are adding their own quota of even more greenhouse gases, like permafrost thawing. And the extra fossil carbon that we kept adding to the system all this time will now keep circulating in the new carbon cycle, is not like after 200 years it will just vanish.
This is not "things are getting better", but at best "we will keep worsening things, but not so fast, maybe in a future"
Exactly! Peak gives a sense of relief.. Better is of course relative, should we be happy that we are no longer stepping further down on the gas pedal, but still going at dangerously high speed? When where we should really be is at least in full stop, preferable going in reverse..
Not to downplay, but when we peak, we’re long past peak per capita, so there’s hope that combined with peak population we would be on a path of increasing decrease. Half life of 120 years of athmosperic CO2 doesn’t make it an easy century. But which century was?
Unfortunately, it's not just CO2 that has an effect on climate... there's also other gases, particularly methane, that are relevant for climate change. And with the current warming going on, there will be not "just" the methane emissions from fermentation, cow farms and leaking natural gas pipelines, but also a ton of methane from currently thawing Russian permafrost, or methane clathrate deposits (which alone are estimated to hold more carbon than all other sources of fossil fuels combined).
It's an inflection point, not a zero point. GP's emphasis on the word "acceleration" above is to distinguish the two.
Rallying is an inflection point, turning the tide is a zero point. Rallies suffer from survivorship bias -- you don't hear praises and songs for the rallies that failed. It's not enough to assume blind hope, we have to recognize the forces stacked against us and be very strategic going forward. This requires massive sacrifice, including those comfortably sitting in the war rooms and atop guarded positions.
When a pendulum swings, consider the momentum as it passes over its equilibrium. We are approaching that equilibrium point, and if you look at global renewables deployment, EV uptake, and CO2/methane emissions reduction efforts, we are about to leave that equilibrium point headed in the other direction at full speed. Major sacrifice will not be needed, except perhaps with regards to meat consumption as the world gets wealthier.
Certainly, we should not rest on our laurels and should keep the pedal to the floor, but the data shows we are moving the needle.
> In this report, we find there is a 70% chance that emissions start falling in 2024 if current clean technology growth trends continue and some progress is made to cut non-CO2 emissions. This would make 2023 the year of peak emissions – meeting the IPCC deadline.
Your grasp of physics metaphors leaves a lot to be desired. That's not how momentum works. Plus, the pendulum reference implies swinging back across to net-positive carbon emissions, which I don't think is part of anyone's plan.
What we want is a critically damped system, that inflects ASAP and approaches zero the quickest. Again, this requires a better grasp of the issues than "EVs will save the world". Our conveniences are the problems that need solving. Everyone who has the systems view (as opposed to the extremely narrow economics view) says we need to radically restructure our society so that lifestyles can be sustainable. This includes removing the need for most people to drive or fly, period.
No, but there are many sources of emissions related to the sprawl of car-centric culture.
The connection with flying is just how much emissions can be attributed to one passenger in a plane compared to an equivalent drive. When you fly you're trading more emissions for speed and convenience in your travels. The classic quoted stat is that a single flight is worth about a year of driving at today's averages.
The point is that is not a turning point. We are still accelerating towards a wall, and maybe, just maybe, we will just go to at a constant speed in some years. It is not slowing down, is not turning back, and the natural world and climate system is crumbling down in front of us, in a steep way, this year in particular.
Heatwaves will start to kill people big time, The Ministry for the Future style, in the next few years if not this very one. But we keep accelerating.
Don’t be a doomer. I’m not sure what the intent is of your comment because what you’re saying is obvious to anyone who understands greenhouse gases and it’s pointlessly negative about one of the most important moments in the history of humanity since the Industrial Revolution started this
> And CO2 remains in the atmosphere for 100-200 years after emitted.
My understanding is that methane is lighter than air, and circulates in the atmosphere until it breaks down (~12 years). CO2 is heavier than air, and readily dissolves itself in ocean water. In the pre-industrial era the oceans emitted carbon dioxide, to keep the plants on land alive. My earlier comment had a reference to estimates of how much CO2 is absorbed by the ocean: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20002823
Searching now, the officially-sanctioned estimates are that 30-40% of human CO2 emissions are rapidly captured by the ocean. If we instantly stopped all CO2 emissions, I think most of the excess atmospheric CO2 would be captured by the plants and the ocean over just a few years.
While this is true, it’s still a positive point. If you’re hurtling towards a wall in your car, you have to take your foot off the gas and hit the brakes.
I'm a little concerned about using IEA model analysis to address the question of timing, as these models do try to hit timing but in reality are still very uncertain that any analysis based on the timing is fun to talk about but holds no real value and, from the publications I've read, shouldn't be interpreted as such.
This isn't to discount policies or decisions based on the energy transition scenarios used here, I mean we need more and more effort to curb our GHG emissions, but I would advise against interpreting this dataset in this manner.
What the peak means is that economic growth will now decrease emissions.
There's a bunch of downright wrong thinking that we can somehow stop climate change with asceticism. But we can't. It's not a solution. It can at best do a marginal decrease in emissions, we need to eliminate and then start massive amounts of carbon removal, on the order of 5 gigatons per year.
We need to massively increase economic growth in order to save the environment, because the newer cleaner techs will create cheaper energy and massive economic growth as they massively reduce our environmental impact.
There's some sort of weird religious belief that economic growth is tied to environmental destruction, but it is not based in fact, merely faith. And it's a very harmful belief to actually improving the environment.
The growth I was talking about was more about the few billion people that have been dragged out of poverty and can now afford cars, AC, flying. I think that will out-emit anything the developed world does in going green.
I'm not so sure, because the question is how they will get their energy. Will it be from a big grid with natural gas powering it? Most likely not, because in developing areas it's going to be far far far cheaper to power a mini-split with a few cheap solar panels and a small battery than it will be to deploy a massive grid and all the maintenance, etc.
The cheapest new energy is carbon free, meaning that new load will be coming from zero carbon sources. As the cost curves change more, this trend will get even more extreme.
Right now in developed countries, there's enough entrenched interests, political propaganda, and an older set of decision makers in industry that we don't fully yet see how the technology landscape has changed. But in developing areas of the world, they won't be burdened by our same baggage.
> There's some sort of weird religious belief that economic growth is tied to environmental destruction, but it is not based in fact, merely faith. And it's a very harmful belief to actually improving the environment.
While I definitely agree with this, let's not pretend that the opposite state of mind (the free market will solve it!) isn't also a wildly destructive and misleading point-of-view when externalities aren't priced in to the economic costs of pollution.
However, I may not have the best perception of how the general public thinks. The older I get, the more I think "free market" is a completely incoherent concept that generally gets applied by its advocates to mean "tile the game in favor of me." I view all markets as mostly construction of culture and tradition, and what is "free" requires some conception of "freedom" and for some that means "freedom for me to exploit you" and for others it means "no laws except the special laws and police, for which I won't bother justifying why they are needed other than it feels right."
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadHow do you read a report modelling future emissions and conclude this?
Which is still to say that I don't buy it. https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2023
The buildout of renewable energy sources in Germany has been so widespread and so successful that they're no longer the interesting part of the problem. Now that the electrical grid here is averaging 60-70% renewable electricity in any month of the year, the limiting factors now are energy storage, and long-distance flexible transmission of electricity.
Transmission lines are a not-so-sexy, but totally vital part of running a grid with so much intermittent electricity production that's only accurately forcastable a few days in advance. There's been a lot of HVDC lines build connecting Germany to the UK and various scandinavian countries, but one of the biggest things we're still waiting on is a new link from the north of the country to the south. The south has more solar resources, and the north has more wind resources, so there needs to be way more capacity to share.
Storage is going to be a very hard problem to tackle and has a less clear path forward. Batteries are going to play an important role, but in the near term they're likely only to be valuable for smoothing out supply and demand over a two to three day window.
Something that doesn't get discussed very much though is how much bio-gas Germany generates. German farmer collective, landfill operators, and wastewater operators actually make quite a bit of money by using specialized bacteria to compost organic material and generate methane.
Bio-gas is responsible for around 8-9% of German electricity generation. It's currently used in a very consistent way, with the same amount being burned nearly every hour of every day, but eventually when wind, solar, battery, and HVDC electricity sources are able to take over most day-to-day electricity needs, this bio-gas could instead be stored and used as a backup power source, as well as being sold to industry for hard-to-electrify industrial processes.
Afterall, if all that gas were stored instead of used up immediately, it'd only take 11-12 days of storage to store enough gas to power the whole grid for a day. This is really important, because the amount of solar and wind energy being produced can vary huge amounts from week-to-week.
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[1] Yes, I know, Germany made a gigantic mistake decomissioning their nuclear reactors early. I strongly disagree with that choice, and I think there's a deeply rooted misunderstanding and fear of nuclear power in this country which is a big shame. Despite this, good progress is being made however.
Second of all, renewables are incredibly cheap when they're a minority of the grid. The problem is that if there's a shortfall of electricity, things get real expensive real fast. To make realistic grid-scale comparisons between renewables and nuclear power, you need to compare the cost of renewables-plus-storage against the cost of nuclear, and at that point things get a lot more nuanced and hard to compare.
For instance, solar PV is the cheapest electricity you can get, but in places with a lot of preexisting solar installation it's also some of the lowest value electricity. During the middle of a sunny summer day in Germany, electricity spot prices can go negative because so much solar is being produced, but then that same night, prices shoot up because suddenly all those PVs stop producing any electricity at all. It's a bit of a race to the bottom if you don't have storage to offset those swings.
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All that said, I'm of course a big fan of renewables and I'm glad Germany is investing in them, and I think there's a bright future ahead with them. But using the low cost of solar modules and wind turbines as an argument against keeping nuclear power stations online is silly -- especially when there's still coal plants operating in Germany.
We haven’t bothered with economies of scale with nuclear for decades.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
Source? Because they sure as hell pan out in the American military and Chinese civil fleets.
> How many more hundreds of billions in of subsidies do you want to add
Zero.
Instead, make permitting—particularly for new, safer plant types—faster. Not less rigorous. Faster.
> The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing
> Drawing on largely unknown public records, the paper reveals for the first time both absolute as well as yearly and specific reactor costs and their evolution over time. Its most significant finding is that even this most successful nuclear scale-up was characterized by a substantial escalation of real-term construction costs.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
There's a more exhaustive paper (by Lovering, maybe?) where it finds a few cases of economies of scale, e.g. South Korea, but the savings are really tiny compared to a tech with a real learning curve, like battery storage.
If you have any numbers showing that US military reactors have economies of scale, I would love to see it. Not that we could use HEU in civilian reactors, but the construction lessons might be useful. I have never found a fan of US military reactors that could cite the cost numbers, and I have not been successful finding them either.
As for China, I don't know anybody that trusts their cost numbers. I prefer to look at where they are actually spending their money, and their planned nuclear build is absolutely a tiny tiny fraction of what their solar and wind numbers. And the plans for wind and solar are increasing year after year, whereas nuclear plans are staying steady.
(“Operating costs have remained remarkably flat” because those are experiencing scale effects.)
[1] https://www.reuters.com/graphics/EUROPE-ENERGY/NUCLEARPOWER/...
I would like to see the data that in the US that a series of reactors saw economies of scale, and to what degree, and if that can overcome the initial underestimates of 2x-3x that are used to secure an initial decision to build.
Selling to the world's least price sensitive customer does not translate into competitive products on cutthroat markets.
> Zero.
Let's abolish the Price–Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act as well so nuclear plants have to pay the true cost of their insurance?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
Doesn’t change that the Nth reactor is (in real dollars) cheaper than the (N - 1)th.
And civil nuclear reactors have had economies of scale demonstrated for decades [1]. The problem is we realise these at the scale of individual plants instead of across the production system.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1058857
Neither are things like public transportation and healthcare either?
This sort of cynical, tribal behaviour among people who claim to just want to stop climate change is pretty disappointing.
Now, in the year 2023, when batteries plus solar are cheaper than new nuclear, IMHO the only same thing to do is to deploy massive amounts of solar wind and batteries, and cheer on nuclear trying to get cheaper.
Demanding that we deploy a ton of expensive nuclear when we can't even reliably complete construction in the US is a fool's game. We don't have time to waste on nuclear, today.
Which is to say, there is definitely some tribalism, but nuclear advocates are the most tribal people I encounter in energy discussions. There doesn't even seem to be much understanding of current and past projects among nuclear's advocates.
Nowhere in my post did I say Germany should be be abandoning renewables or that they should be heavily focusing on nuclear power. I just said that I think it's a shame that they threw out perfectly good reactors long before they reached the end of their lifetime out of irrational fears.
Agreed that existing nuclear should stick around as long as maintenance doesn't get more costly than replacing with other options.
Be sure to send Biden a card thanking him.
> Be sure to send Biden a card thanking him.
That'd be a particularly weird thing for me to do given that, as I said already in this very comment chain, I'm a Canadian living in Germany...
I mean, it's great that the USA might invest more in nuclear power, but throwing some peanuts towards new reactors doesn't really fix the fact that they're a massive laggard when it comes to reducing emissions.
There's a ton more work to be done than just building nuclear power plants.
Groups change you know.
If we are talking about building a zero-carbon energy system, we should be talking about the lowest cost method of doing that, over times, taking into account externalities.
All the modeling of zero carbon energy systems finds that massive amounts of solar and wind are the backbone of energy generation. The amount of nuclear varies based on cost assumptions, and in particular if they use current battery costs and if they model the ever decreasing battery costs, but nuclear plays a very small role in the lowest cost zero-carbon grids of the future. A smaller role than it does today.
You're not from Bavaria, I take it? Here, to this day hunters and shroom gatherers have to scan their produce for radioactivity because of the aftereffect of Chernobyl [1], but also due to the aftereffects of worldwide nuclear weapon tests [2].
Besides: the three NPPs that were shut down this year only had 1.4GW each - and we're building ~2GW in renewables each month. The capacity of the NPPs has long since been replaced by renewables.
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/bayern/bayern-pilze-radioaktiv-b...
[2] https://www.br.de/nachrichten/wissen/bayerns-wildschweine-vo...
All while Germany continues burning Russian oil and coal [1].
Anti-nuclear pro-climate is oxymoronic. It’s also destructive in introducing irrelevant preferences into an important debate; if you get nukes then someone else gets solar panels and windmills ruining their view.
[1] https://emlab.ucsb.edu/blog/out-phase-costs-and-benefits-ger...
No view-ruining if you run offshore wind. Europe has a lot of potential there, even though the French have been ... slow in building that one out given their "cheap" nuclear.
“I read about a train derailment that killed people so I’ll never take public transit”
>The capacity of the NPPs has long since been replaced by renewables.
The two sources aren’t fungible unless the renewables are dams. Nuclear provides a reliable base load. Neither solar nor wind can do that. You need storage to make them reliable and that’s not even close to a solved problem.
That's only a question of a reliable, widespread grid. France, Portugal and Spain have almost consistent wind from the Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea, it's only a question of how much you want to invest into a truly European Grid.
And in any case: it makes sense to massively over-build wind and solar generation because air and maritime travel will need a massive amount of power-to-liquid synthfuel as there's no way to power either of these using conventional batteries.
Cesium 137 is a beta emitter and doesn't bioaccumulate in humans. Potassium in bananas has a similar radiological and chemical properties to cesium. A kilogram of bananas is around 250 Bq of naturally occurring radioactive potassium. I'd be a lot more worried about industrial chemicals that leeched into my wild mushrooms than I would about such low levels of cesium
If you ate 80,000 Bq worth of those mushrooms (i.e. you found and ate 20kg worth of the most radioactive mushrooms these people were able to find), you'd get a 1 millisievert radiation dose which is less than half of a normal person's yearly ambient radiation dose.
20kg is a *lot* of mushrooms.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carb...
What's the trend there?
Atmospheric CO2 levels are often compared with pre-industrial (~1850). But for a long time after, emissions hardly moved the needle.
It's only in the last 2..3 decades that humanity put the bulk of GHG in the air. Mostly through population growth + increased productivity per capita.
So we've done the bulk of the environmental damage in just a few decades. Which is why 'hitting the brakes' NOW is so urgent.
On the bright side: with fast enough growth (which China is showing) a now-smallish % of renewables can become a big chunk of the overall picture in a short time.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-energy-source-sub
China says it will peak in 2030, but I suspect it will peak sooner than that, based on these trends
They can have a falling percentage of coal use, while still having a growing coal usage.
Here is the non-stacked chart of electricity production by source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
It does not look good.
But I didn't ask about that, I asked about the trend, so in fact you replied to me with a misrepresentation. It was highly inaccurate, and to see you sling around accusations feels a tiny bit rude after what you're posted.
The graph I posted is better for recognizing the trend, where things will be in the future. Is goal a growing or shrinking component of the energy mix? Shrinking.
Absolutes do matter, but so do trends. And if we are talking about the future, the trends matter more than the absolutes of the current.
No, my graph would not be very useful for that. For that, you'd want the area under those curves, i.e. the sum of all historical emissions. My curve is just showing how much electricity in a given year is produced by which source. Total energy usage in China is growing very fast, and Coal is a big part of that.
> But I didn't ask about that, I asked about the trend, so in fact you replied to me with a misrepresentation.
No actually, the trend is that China's usage of coal is widespread and growing very fast.
Showing that the percentage of coal in their electricity mix is stable or shrinking only shows that the *acceleration* of coal usage in China is stable or negative, even if the trend is increasing usage.
There, at that conference, China pledged CO2 emissions would peak by 2030. Xi said that China would “strictly control coal-fired power generation projects”.
Since then the country's been plagued by power shortages and has been building coal fired stations as a stop gap.
Coal and China is complicated - in the past two decades China has closed down a very large number of quite old and quite polluting coal stations that had high emmissions.
In that time they've built a few nuclear stations, a lot of solar and hydro, and a number of larger more efficient coal stations that run cleaner.
So, they're still building coal, they've improved the situation wrt pollution from coal, they're committed to ending coal, that's not going to be easy.
China’s coal addiction puts spotlight on its climate ambitions before Cop28
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/27/china-coal-add...
That is not directly what causes the warming. In simplified terms, we have excess of greenhouse gases, we keep more heat of what we receive from the sun than what we lose, and that is one of the forces behind global warming, hitting the 1.5ºC and so on. And CO2 remains in the atmosphere for 100-200 years after emitted.
So, this "peak", if achieved, means that we are still accelerating the problem. after we peak, we will keep adding roughly as much carbon as we did in previous years (that will keep be adding to the excess). We are not sensibly lowering the amount of extra greenhouse gases, we will still be growing what is up there for the foreseeable future. And as the planet warmed up, several feedback loops have been triggered that are adding their own quota of even more greenhouse gases, like permafrost thawing. And the extra fossil carbon that we kept adding to the system all this time will now keep circulating in the new carbon cycle, is not like after 200 years it will just vanish.
This is not "things are getting better", but at best "we will keep worsening things, but not so fast, maybe in a future"
Its the turn of the tide in a big battle, and we should be excited about it, and not minimize it.
Rallying is an inflection point, turning the tide is a zero point. Rallies suffer from survivorship bias -- you don't hear praises and songs for the rallies that failed. It's not enough to assume blind hope, we have to recognize the forces stacked against us and be very strategic going forward. This requires massive sacrifice, including those comfortably sitting in the war rooms and atop guarded positions.
Certainly, we should not rest on our laurels and should keep the pedal to the floor, but the data shows we are moving the needle.
> In this report, we find there is a 70% chance that emissions start falling in 2024 if current clean technology growth trends continue and some progress is made to cut non-CO2 emissions. This would make 2023 the year of peak emissions – meeting the IPCC deadline.
Let’s get to 100% as soon as possible.
What we want is a critically damped system, that inflects ASAP and approaches zero the quickest. Again, this requires a better grasp of the issues than "EVs will save the world". Our conveniences are the problems that need solving. Everyone who has the systems view (as opposed to the extremely narrow economics view) says we need to radically restructure our society so that lifestyles can be sustainable. This includes removing the need for most people to drive or fly, period.
The connection with flying is just how much emissions can be attributed to one passenger in a plane compared to an equivalent drive. When you fly you're trading more emissions for speed and convenience in your travels. The classic quoted stat is that a single flight is worth about a year of driving at today's averages.
Heatwaves will start to kill people big time, The Ministry for the Future style, in the next few years if not this very one. But we keep accelerating.
My understanding is that methane is lighter than air, and circulates in the atmosphere until it breaks down (~12 years). CO2 is heavier than air, and readily dissolves itself in ocean water. In the pre-industrial era the oceans emitted carbon dioxide, to keep the plants on land alive. My earlier comment had a reference to estimates of how much CO2 is absorbed by the ocean: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20002823
Searching now, the officially-sanctioned estimates are that 30-40% of human CO2 emissions are rapidly captured by the ocean. If we instantly stopped all CO2 emissions, I think most of the excess atmospheric CO2 would be captured by the plants and the ocean over just a few years.
I don't think the ocean was doing it with any kind of intention.
So at least we’ll be taking our foot off the gas.
This isn't to discount policies or decisions based on the energy transition scenarios used here, I mean we need more and more effort to curb our GHG emissions, but I would advise against interpreting this dataset in this manner.
There's a bunch of downright wrong thinking that we can somehow stop climate change with asceticism. But we can't. It's not a solution. It can at best do a marginal decrease in emissions, we need to eliminate and then start massive amounts of carbon removal, on the order of 5 gigatons per year.
We need to massively increase economic growth in order to save the environment, because the newer cleaner techs will create cheaper energy and massive economic growth as they massively reduce our environmental impact.
There's some sort of weird religious belief that economic growth is tied to environmental destruction, but it is not based in fact, merely faith. And it's a very harmful belief to actually improving the environment.
The cheapest new energy is carbon free, meaning that new load will be coming from zero carbon sources. As the cost curves change more, this trend will get even more extreme.
Right now in developed countries, there's enough entrenched interests, political propaganda, and an older set of decision makers in industry that we don't fully yet see how the technology landscape has changed. But in developing areas of the world, they won't be burdened by our same baggage.
While I definitely agree with this, let's not pretend that the opposite state of mind (the free market will solve it!) isn't also a wildly destructive and misleading point-of-view when externalities aren't priced in to the economic costs of pollution.
However, I may not have the best perception of how the general public thinks. The older I get, the more I think "free market" is a completely incoherent concept that generally gets applied by its advocates to mean "tile the game in favor of me." I view all markets as mostly construction of culture and tradition, and what is "free" requires some conception of "freedom" and for some that means "freedom for me to exploit you" and for others it means "no laws except the special laws and police, for which I won't bother justifying why they are needed other than it feels right."
If the emissions magically went to 0 now, would you still suggest that we scrub 5 gigatons per year ?
https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/graphics/
It's quite likely that our delayed reaction we will need to do 10-20GT/year for the second half of this century, indefinitely.