I’m liberal, I agree with the right that nuclear power is the only path to replace nuclear, I agree with the left that climate change is a major problem and that nuclear power has risks. I disagree with the right heavily about the security risks of nuclear. They feel extremely overblown. But the track record of renewables is that they fail to offset fossil fuels in any meaningful way. We take it as an accomplishment when a single random day in a country is 100% renewable. Meanwhile France is nearly 100% fossil free energy every single day of the year. And when Germany cut back on nuclear, renewables fail to absorb that and fossil fuel use went up. So our choice is to focus on political problems and fix those but they feel intractable so people focus on the positives of renewables and because it’s “easier” (no messy / scary political issues) but ignore the fundamental technical difficulties of using renewables to replace fossil fuels. Yeah sure, nuclear has lots of problems and risks. Most of the cost issues are self-imposed. Cleanup costs fail to be factored in for political reasons but at the same time it’s not trillions of dollars per plant and we also do have enough research to know there’s reasonable paths that we’ll get to of building reactors that can’t melt down.
re security concerns, take for example North Korea which has been nearly globally embargoed but yet still has built successful nuclear weapons. They struggle with ICBMs because that’s what it would take. By comparison, Iran has been subjected to all kinds of targeted military and covert action to sabotage their nuclear program. By all accounts those actions have kind of been successful in the sense that experts agree it’s going to take Iran longer to create those weapons, but it’s a question of if not when. That’s why I’m so frustrated by critics of Obama’s Iran deal. The 0 tolerance approach is not going to work and the Obama deal had the best concessions from Iran that we’re going to get - it’s not going to be better when Iran actually has nuclear weapons. And Iranians have AFAIK been very honest players in terms of at least trying to stick to the Iran nuclear deal even after Trump blew it up. The primary problem there is that Iran is a geopolitical enemy of Israel which complicates things a lot (a stronger Iran that a nuclear deal allowed for is a problem for other security issues in the region). But notice how none of those issues have anything to do with enrichment capabilities of civilian nuclear reactors. And generating fissile material is not the bottleneck for building those weapons. So it’s all silly FUD-driven BS we pick up from movies and imagining things than actual problems on the ground.
> But the track record of renewables is that they fail to offset fossil fuels in any meaningful way.
Renewables have been well over half of new power generation capacity for the last couple of years. But it'll take many years before the relative changes look significant in absolute numbers.
But you get how big of a failure that is for climate change right? Like we’ve been doing this for some 20 years now and renewables still don’t have any real answer for storage which is what would be needed to meaningfully increase that absolute number further. And you need way more than half of new power generation capacity to actually meaningfully shift the mix. It needs to be above 100% because we have a fuckton of already existing power generation capacity and all that power generation is a problem because it needs replacement and we can’t wait for plants to simply age out and get replaced with new installations. We’re waaay past that point.
And again, you can’t get there because of storage and storage is an intractable technical problem where “just throw batteries at it” is a flippant answer. We grow battery energy density very slowly. It’s expected to double by 2030 and triply by 2040. But our energy demands grow very quickly & we’re talking about a world where most people don’t actually have as cheap easy access to energy as we take for granted in the West. We also are talking about using a significant chunk of that capacity and using it to replace existing cars (which don’t get me wrong - you 100% need batteries for cars because it’s the only way to connect renewables to automotive). Then you’ve got shipping which everyone ignores and I don’t see a path forward there except to have nuclear reactors on commercial ships going all over the place (but that would 100% require molten salt or other reactors that can’t melt down).
In absolute terms we've accomplished very little in 20 years. But 2023 is way ahead of 2003 in three significant ways.
1) EV's have a TCO lower than gasoline vehicles.
2) Renewable power generation is cheaper than fossil power generation.
3) Heat pumps are cheaper than fossil heating
In 2003 nobody ever thought that we would ever get to this stage. Everybody assumed that we'd need massive subsidies to switch to carbon free sources. They were hopeful that once we got to mass scale rollout that the prices would be competitive but getting below parity was seen as completely unrealistic.
Well we did need quite substantial subsidies to get there so that part wasn’t wrong. And heat pumps are orthogonal to this. Like the stuff that’s happening now with heat pumps is exciting and I hope the ideas pan out but that feels orthogonal. I’m sure getting below parity was the primary concern but that was just the first one with storage being an even bigger second hurdle that hasn’t been cleared and we don’t know if we can clear. Like making enough batteries to sustain EV manufacturing & replace all existing vehicles is already a challenge. I’m sure we can muster it but grid-scale storage is an order magnitude larger problem than that. Renewables have all these order of magnitude technical scaling problems that nuclear doesn’t seem to have. The biggest technical scaling problem for nuclear is building a reactor that physically can’t melt down. We’ve been doing research on that with threadbare funding for a long time. If we meaningfully invested in it we could do it. Hell, China is targetting to build a production 370 MW molten salt reactors by 2030. Nuclear is really where we should be investing R&D dollars at government scale because that resolves self-imposed regulatory hurdles. Private investments seem to be generally sufficient for solar and wind.
In 2003 a huge proportion of people including many scientists and engineers believed that modern society is impossible without fossil fuels and that fossil depletion would inevitably lead to collapse if climate change didn’t first.
Remember sites like The Oil Drum and dieoff.org? Where we are today was considered laughably impossible and those arguments came with pages of calculations.
We are on track for what might be peak CO2 emission this decade. At that point we will start moving in the right direction emission wise. This is not good enough to avoid some amount of dangerous climate change, but it’s better than the doom scenarios of 20 years ago.
GDP is decoupling from carbon emissions too, which is massively important.
Now it seems we’re back to the big existential risks being war and awful politics with the latter driven by social media algorithms that prioritize the most toxic ideas for “engagement.” (Unless you buy AI doom. I don’t.)
Fission is expensive - there is unlikely to be a world where everything is nuclear. There might be more of it, but the price point might not be great.
Storage has lots of options, for example, batteries, pressure, gravity (incl. underground).
Things like shipping could run perhaps on other fuels and planes will be on high energy density fossil fuel (or synthetic) for a while (at least long haul).
There’s nothing intrinsically expensive about fission. It’s all regulatory, a not insignificant amount of which is driven by hypothetical rather than realized fears. And what a movement of goal posts. When people said that renewables were too expensive and we should direct research R&D dollars to nuclear, the issue was nuclear safety. Now that renewables are cheap after 2 decades of substantial R&D investment, the argument is “why invest in nuclear - renewables are cheaper”. But renewables are still only cheaper because they’re not being asked to do base load replacement. So from that perspective renewables are still more expensive because storage costs are excluded. And from that perspective it still doesn’t matter because it’ll take forever to build enough generation and storage capacity for renewables that in the same time we could be dropping a bunch of nuclear GW power plants all over the place.
Even today fission and renewables have very similar generation prices. And no, it’ll be a long time before batteries are a solution to the energy density needs for grid scale solar to truly allow replacement and shuttering of fossil fuel plants (automotive electrification is going to eat up a huge amount of battery manufacturing capacity world wide).
You can look at the cost trajectories of various energy production technologies through time - the one for fission does not look encouraging. Interesting that you see costs for fission and renewable as very similar. Data I have seen has huge differences.(https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/publications/no-2021-01-empiricall...)
Where did I advocate batteries as only storage? There are many options.
I might potentially be better to put more money into fusion rather than chase fission for anything beyond materials, medical, research, and weapons applications.
Huh? Space costs didn’t go down because it was being applied in the wrong places on the wrong things. Yet the right investment by Musk applied in the right way caused space costs to plummet (well technically it started off with the Xprize trying to stimulate that space although not sure if that had any real effect). Why do you think that nuclear is some special snowflake of a technology that doesn’t get cheaper the more we do it? We don’t really build very many nuclear plants in an effective way and the only licensed design in America is a design from the 70s. SMNRs are an interesting idea worth exploring. I think molten salt would be too. The government should be pushing many players to design plants and put them through testing and then qualify some of them and commit to building like 500 of a given design and make sure each subsequent plant is built with the first design + learnings from the previous design that can reduce cost.
Yes, some new nuclear technology might shift cost curves, but other sources are already cheaper.
Nuclear never had a strong fall costs that is what makes it a tougher thing because you likely need a change in technology.
There are some reasonably well understood cost evolution in technology.
Wanting to spend huge amounts of money in the hope that the economics will somehow work out is not an easy proposition when other things are already cheap.
Yes, nuclear power has gotten more expensive with time but even still, today, in absolute terms, $/khw is competitive.
> Grid-level system costs for intermittent renewables are large ($8-$50/MWh) but depend on country, context and technology (onshore wind < offshore wind < solar PV). Nuclear system costs are $1-3/MWh.
Or https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45436 which shows that nuclear remains cheaper than wind and waaay cheaper than solar in California. And wind/solar prices AFAIK don’t factor in the additional cost of storage since we don’t pair wind/solar generation capacity with matching storage requirements.
And in terms of why it’s gotten more expensive, part of that is naturally inflation. The other part is that nuclear keeps getting more regulations and we disinvest from building more. It’s the opposite of the Wright effect - when you build less of something and disinvest it gets more expensive to make. Some of the regulations are legit costs (e.g. making sure the plants remain safe and don’t melt down) but you’d be surprised at how much of it is BS driven by FUD (a not insignificant portion powered by FUD from fossil fuel companies who benefit from nuclear taking as long as possible).
It’s also amusing to me the overlap between “renewables need more investment to replace grid fossil fuels” and “fusion instead of fission” camps. Like yes, fusion is exciting and I hope we get there some day. And we criminally underfund investment into it at government scale in the same way as we do with fission. But fusion’s road is even harder and longer out. Like we still don’t know how to generate more energy than we consume. It’s strictly in the pure research phase and is many many decades away from starting production and will take an even longer time to build out large amounts of capacity.
Check the link I posted, it has storage cost curves, too,
Your second link has prices, not generation costs which is a much more difficult thing to compare. Inflation isn't specific to nuclear and regulations will continue to be part of nuclear.
Over time, cheaper generation should win out - absent interventions - so nuclear isn't in a great place to start.
> Your second link has prices, not generation costs which is a much more difficult thing to compare
What is your distinction of "generation costs" vs prices?
> Inflation isn't specific to nuclear and regulations will continue to be part of nuclear.
Inflation is a bit relevant in that the average nuclear power plant age is 42. Solar installations by comparisons are a lot more recent. That means that inflation has operated on a longer time period than for solar. And again, I said that's a small part. The primary driver is we've divested from building nuclear because of overblown fears around safety of operation or security or whatever other fear you may associate with nuclear.
As for "regulations will continue to be part of nuclear", that's why I'm saying. Part of investing in nuclear means organizing politically to remove the BS regulations and calling BS on things like security concerns which seem to be purely hypothetical.
> Over time, cheaper generation should win out - absent interventions - so nuclear isn't in a great place to start.
Huh? Like you're shifting the goal posts. It matters very little right now if the cost curve is better for solar. That's for 5-20 years from now and comparing it against a technology we've divested from is a false comparison. It's even more BS considering nuclear remains cheaper today even with effectively 0 investment (most funds have been going to maintenance only) and still remains cheaper than wind & solar. Nuclear can even outperform fossil fuels on price in some cases.
But again. Cost to generate the energy is ultimately a very myopic view because fossil fuels externalize the true cost substantially and literally anything is better. It's estimated to cost $200 trillion dollars to zero out human carbon emissions by 2050 & if we fail it'll cost the US alone ~14.5 trillion dollars in the next 50 years (which again involves on externalizing and ignoring the impact of climate change since the biggest impact to the US is illegal immigration but the biggest direct financial impact is not to the US). Climate-related disasters already cost the world ~$650 billion dollars anually. By comparison the costs associated with building and cleaning up a nuclear power plant and cleaning it up seem quite trivial. Sure at some point solar may get cheaper in absolute dollars to. But it all doesn't matter because the thing we need to get to is negative carbon emissions. Oh and btw. Solar won't be able to solve that. The energy required to start pulling carbon out of the air en masse will require huge energy production that really only a nuclear power plant can scale sufficiently well to handle.
Prices is typically meant to indicate where the market clears (if there is a market, if there are subsidies etc. it gets messy), but that is different from the cost of production (for example, from supply and demand).
If you believe regulations will be substantially reduced, fair enough, but is there legislation to that effect in the pipelines?
You continue to claim nuclear is cheaper, but that is certainly not how it plays out in places like France (or on average) - Californian prices are not the right measure there, nor hypothetical costs of nuclear.
You can allege that there will huge cost improvements on nuclear, but my point is that on other energy generation the costs are already down (without tinkering with discount factors because a lot went into operation with funding) and that technologies that are stagnant in costs tend to fail on that front. Changes to the technology as such (e.g., building different reactor types) could change that, but we don't know.
And, of course, solar could generate huge amounts of energy by, for example, plastering some large desert with it. That said, no-one is seeing solar as the only solution: wind, tidal, hydro, eventually fusion to name few. Some fission will be in the mix, too, because it is around or being build.
Because solar advocates have made nuclear so toxic that many politicians completely avoid it because their base and people like you claim that it’s unsafe, or it’s too expensive, and we should invest in solar instead. But solar doesn’t need government investment anymore - it had enough subsidies to get the market started & it’s self-sufficient (or it’s not & it’s been 20 years of wasted subsidies). That doesn’t change the calculus that nuclear has not seem a similar investment and we need bold government intervention to do something similar. But nuclear reactors can’t be subsidized in the sneaky way that solar panels were (using rooftop solar to seed demand for lots of panels until they got cheap enough for industrial applications). And people seem to really be against the government spending large sums of money on R&D. Of the DOE’s 148B budget:
~25B on nuclear weapons (likely maintaining our military arsenal)
~5B on nuclear energy
~27B on renewables
And nuclear requires waaaaaay more for R&D because it’s a more difficult energy source than solar which is scientifically more straightforward & more of an engineering problem that industry is well suited to solving.
No you can’t just plaster solar cells in the middle of some desert because while HVDC has gotten cheaper, it’s still quite expensive and even harder than nuclear tech in some ways to cost reduce. You want to minimize the distance between where you produce energy and where you consume it.
It doesn't matter whether policies etc. were right or fair in the past, the price points now matter. Same for what policies are feasible now.
If you need the power to remove carbon dioxide from the air, you do that where the power is. (And there is also chemical storage if you had to transport energy long distance - but a moot point).
Interesting how solar proponents have moving goalposts for nuclear. In the 90s when solar was too expensive, it was all about safety. Now when pricing for solar is more competitive it’s “oh but surely nuclear can’t be cheaper anymore” or “but solar costs are dropping way faster - that means solar will be more successful”. Aside: care to present any evidence that solar is actually cheaper than nuclear today or even projected out to 2030?
The problem is that solar capacity just grows too slowly. We’re growing solar manufacturing capacity as quickly as possible and still fossil fuels remains stubbornly the dominant fuel type for grid energy production in America and barely shifts regardless of how many renewables we add. So from the perspective of “we tried something maybe it’s not working” I’d rather look at the impact scaling up an energy source has on fossil fuels and all evidence suggest that solar has trouble taking over (fossil fuel use and solar energy generated seems uncorrelated whereas it is inversely correlated with nuclear which is what you want).
I linked to the costs data earlier (have a look at figure 1, for example. It includes cost projections, too).
Why are you so focused on solar, other things like wind are cheap, too? I couldn't care less about what particular energy source is used, I am just making a cost argument. No goal posts are being shifted by me. If you now want to discuss industrial capacity, then, sure, let's discuss how we can somehow build a few hundred nuclear power plants quickly but not expand wind, solar, geothermal or other things quickly.
If there already are cheap technologies, pushing for another one that isn't but might be is a tough proposition.
> The problem is that solar capacity just grows too slowly. We’re growing solar manufacturing capacity as quickly as possible and still fossil fuels
China built more wind and solar in the first nine months of 2023 than the sum total of all their nuclear reactors under construction, and they have 26. They are likely to build even more over the next nine months. Current estimates are that their emissions will begin a structural decline as soon as next year, because their renewable construction is outpacing demand. Your statement is so far off factually it’s not even in the same universe as reality.
The recent reduction in costs (past 20 years or so) for PV and batteries is almost entirely a function for forced labor (slavery) in China and Central Africa.
> Meanwhile France is nearly 100% fossil free energy every single day of the year.
I think this is endemic of your comment, every "fact" is fallacy or false. France is not near 100% fossils fuel free, nuclear is not that great at getting to 100% and would require massive amounts of storage, just like renewables. Here's France's actual mix:
> The electricity sector in France is dominated by its nuclear power, which accounted for 71.7% of total production in 2018, while renewables and fossil fuels accounted for 21.3% and 7.1%, respectively[1] (compare to 72.3% nuclear, 17.8% renewables and 8.6% fossil fuels in 2016).
Ok so 90% fossil free production year round every single day with a typical renewable contribution of ~20% that we observe anywhere with substantial renewable deployments. Who’s the one quibbling over facts? Storage is not needed for nuclear. Not sure where you’re getting that idea from. France is reliably the only developed country where most of the energy is produced without any fossil fuels and renewables are a relatively small part of that story.
I mean you get how nonsensical that argument is right? We don’t have solar cars either. Cars do not generate power. We’re talking about generation not consumption. We need electric cars for consumers and that’s orthogonal to how we generate electricity. The reason is that electric cars can take their energy needs equally well from energy generated by a coal plant, a nuclear power plant or solar. That’s why electrification is absolutely needed for climate change. It’s got massive difficulties obviously because it’s a huge load on the power grid (today’s grids wouldn’t be able to handle if everyone started driving electric). And electrification should also be used as a feedback mechanism where charging cars are used as distributed batteries to help solve the storage problem for renewables and that unfortunately isn’t happening on any real level.
I think we probably also need hydrogen fuel cells for fleet cars / trucking because they can eat the logistical and safety costs of storing hydrogen (hydrogen fuel cell consumer cars are a pipe dream IMO because you simply can’t have refilling stations scattered around everywhere - it’s massive explosion risk in population dense areas with untrained people dealing with it).
But if we’re talking about grid energy production, nuclear is the only real path for solving climate change. It sucks but that’s the reality.
I think you missed the point: without storage nuclear only gets to 70% of the grid, and 31% of the total energy demand. With enough storage to displace oil and gas demand, nuclear has no advantage. It's a pity that France never spent the money to migrate the non-grid portion of their economy to electricity, but that was probably a simple matter of the economics of nuclear never really panning out.
You get how automotive energy storage and grid scale energy storage are totally different right? Like a huge portion of oil consumption is automotive and shipping and that has 0 demands on the grid. Yes, we need storage solutions for portable energy and solar fails on that mark too (that’s why EVs are battery backed and don’t bother putting on solar panels to regenerate those batteries). So when we electrify automotive, energy requirement needs for cars are going to skyrocket. Solar can thankfully probably accommodate a huge part of that because we can time shift charging to happen during the day but that also means that a good chunk of solar energy construction is being dedicated to charging storage capacity we built and put into cars and not offsetting our already substantial and ever growing non-automotive grid energy needs.
I don’t know why you claim nuclear has no advantage if we’re talking about a country whose grid manages to achieve that only 10% of grid production is coming from fossil fuels. That’s a lot smaller storage problem to solve than the 60-80% that renewables has to solve (not to mention it needs to actually build that capacity which is going to take a long time because all the evidence is that that % mix by renewables grows very slowly over long periods of time).
You opened this thread with "I agree with the left that climate change is a major problem". Yet you are blind that in your canonical example of the effectiveness of nuclear, France, their energy is still mostly powered with fossil fuels. If France is the best example of success of nuclear I say it shows that nuclear is a failure as far as climate change is concerned. The French really tried in the 80s, but the outcome is a fairly nice train network with a 20% modal share, and more oil consumption today than when they started.
Now let's look to the future: solar is vastly cheaper and easier to install per TWh generated. It can be installed quickly and incrementally. Solar modules come in at around 1% of the cost per W of nuclear right now, and still decreasing, that's an enormous margin to work with: If you have a way to seasonally offset energy through efuels for ships and planes as you propose, and a fleet of EVs with 100kWh of storage, the effort to just solve the remaining grid fluctuations seems straightforward. Roughly speaking, without storage nuclear has no useful solution for transport, transport is the hardest part of emissions to mitigate, but any solution that uses nuclear derived electricity for transport will be far cheaper with renewables.
We have South Australia, which produced more low carbon energy this year from solar and wind than France did from nuclear, and without any significant storage as a counter example for your low carbon grid. It appears that the French model is harder to reproduce than the South Australian model, and the evidence is that it could be copied organically everywhere: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41971-7
You either seem to have a problem distinguishing grid-scale energy production from energy consumption or you're intentionally muddying the waters.
It kind of feels intentional because it'd be like me arguing that grid solar is pointless because ships still burn diesel. Like you get that at this point we need to get to negative emissions to start removing carbon from the atmosphere and carbon recapture is a really energy intensive process (you basically have to spend more to recapture than you spent burning in the first place & we've still today burn fucktons of fossil fuels).
Non-grid consumption is driven by many more use-cases. Even if you had 100% nuclear or 100% solar or 100% wind in the grid, you'd still see more oil consumption today than in the past simply because of transportation which even today is predominantly fossil fuel based. EV electrification will help bring that down & that's happening but you still have non-electric trains, planes, and shipping and we don't really know how to solve that for the latter 2 which are massive contributors (much more than cars).
In fact, if you look at your own graph, the share that is consumed by nuclear has a direct inverse correlation with fossil fuels. The same is not true for other fuel sources. If we get more solar, the percentage that fossil fuels takes up seems to be largely unmoved. If we get more nuclear, there's a direct reduction in fossil fuels. If we use less nuclear you see an uptick. The reason the numbers don't look as impressive for consumption is that there's a huge amount of fossil fuels being consumed that have nothing to do with the grid. But replacing fossil fuels in the grid is hugely important because otherwise your EV car would be an expensive toy and would be a marginal benefit to the environment (grid fossil fuel power plants are marginally better at generating electricity than your smaller car engine but it's like a small % improvement vs nuclear/solar/hydro/wind which all have 0 emissions generated per KWh).
It's fascinating that South Australia is the model you've chosen as "this can be replicated" when your talking about one of the most arid, deserted, and sparsely populated places in the world that has continuous sine shine year round. Like you get that's not actually a representative scenario right & renewables are hugely dependent on geographically specific conditions? Grid-scale renewables face substantial technical hurdles in addition to policy ones. Nuclear doesn't really have technical hurdles and faces much larger political and regulatory ones but given that the US has had a movement to impede civillian nuclear reactors globally, 32 countries are still operating 443 plants globally. We can always choose different policies and choose to build 5000 reactors even if we overbuild capacity and it costs us a lot of money. If we remain with the current status quo, solar will win in the long run, but that long run concerns me. Like I have doubts we'll get to 50% freedom from fossil fuels for production (not consumption - just production) by 2050 focusing on renewables like we have been. This is a problem because as mentioned all the investments we make in EVs are pointless if the grid itself isn't carbon free. It may make you feel good but it isn't solving the problem. And on the consumption side, we need to figure out how to switch all the largest ships to nuclear reactors cause I don't know what else solves that problem & that's a huge contributor. Plastics are another huge fossil fuel consumer and I don't know what to do there either. But none of that is relevant in the discussion of solar vs nuclear as a replacement strategy for existing fossil fuel dependence within the power grid.
Sure, but we’re still talking about 10% of fossil fuel needs. So we’re comparing ~60-80% fossil fuels vs 10%. That’s a major accomplishment difference. Also I hope you’d agree that the storage needed to replace 10% of fossil fuels is much less than the storage needed to replace 60-80% right?
Also, not sure if you’re aware, but most modern reactors don’t need storage. They can vary load generation dynamically and so don’t actually need storage. France’s reactors are all very old as they’ve been infected with the same disease of failing to take on large public works projects in a timely and cost efficient manner. It’s not as fuel efficient, but that matters very little for a nuclear plant in the grand scheme of things.
> It’s not as fuel efficient, but that matters very little for a nuclear plant in the grand scheme of things.
What matters is that the upfront capital costs of nuclear are so insanely high that any hour you’re not producing 100% you’re losing money you can’t afford to lose.
I’m not convinced that load following nuclear makes economic sense compared to next generation energy storage solution. Say Ambri’s molten metal batteries.
Nuclear had better pray that these energy storage solutions never become economically competitive, because if they do then solar/wind+storage will beat nuclear in almost every application. And if that’s the case, nuclear just won’t have the economies of scale necessary to be competitive at all.
Nuclear energy also has to pray that advanced geothermal doesn’t catch on, as it competes directly with nuclear, but has the benefit of being able to take direct advantage of skilled labour from the oil and gas industry that’s soon becoming increasingly redundant.
> any hour you’re not producing 100% you’re losing money you can’t afford to lose.
Yeah, electricity pricing for consumers is mismatched in terms of how energy demands work. Solar has the opposite problem where it may be unable to supply energy when you need it which is a much bigger problem - instead of losing money your energy grid goes down. Of we turn on peaker power plants because while batteries can weather short outages I don’t believe anyone has demonstrated running a grid off stored energy for any reasonable amount of time.
And again, I’m going to call it an unsubstantiated claim that hybrid nuclear plants that can scale energy output as needed are uneconomical. I know they’re slightly more expensive but I’m not aware of any data suggesting that it is actually intrinsically uneconomical. Same goes for any claims that solar or wind is cheaper than nuclear - all the data I’ve found had solar as way more expensive and wind as slightly more expensive vs nuclear.
And I wouldn’t hold my breath on storage. I think we’re less likely to get a crazy new battery technology that solves all the things we need from it in a cheaper and safer way than nuclear research. There’s lots of crazy battery ideas but those ideas have been around for a long time and we have no indication that can scale. China is building a molten salt reactor right now. And additionally we don’t need government R&D dollars flowing into battery research as much as we need it flowing into figuring out how to make nuclear even safer and more economical. Normal market economics are already a big enough prize to cause private R&D dollars to go after that (batteries are everywhere and the essentially the same battery tech that’s in your smartphone is what’s in an EV which makes the market opportunity massive and obvious - that’s not as obviously clear for private investors for nuclear energy because it need regulatory approval to build a plant which means we don’t know how big that market would actually be). It’s not nuclear vs solar. It’s nuclear vs fossil fuels and renewables vs fossil fuels and so far fossil fuels has kicked renewables’ butt and had it butt kicked by nuclear. If this were a fight, where should the actual smart money be in terms of achieving net zero?
Nuclear is nowhere near as reliable as you are claiming. In 2022, more than half the French reactor fleet had to be taken offline at some stage or another - output over the year was 65% of the previous year. In August of that year, nuclear was delivering 40% of what would have been expected and the country ended up being the largest importer of electricity in Europe for the year.
There's been a recovery this year but that recovery has faltered last month with about a 15% unexpected fall in output.
Whenever France is hit by a heatwave, nuclear output drops significantly - the water of the rivers used for cooling/condensing becomes too warm to operate plants at full capacity safely.
And even with effective monopoly advantage, nuclear generation is a money pit - French government had to bail out EDF at the start of this year - taking on 65B euro of debt.
Yes, we've let global warming be so much of a problem that existing nuclear power plant designs are now struggling to get cool enough to operate. But heat engines aren't the only way to convert fissile energy into electricty. We should 100% be researching direct capture so that the ability to generate electricty is not bounded by our ability to cool the reactor. And yet even with all that, most of the electricity generated still remains fossil free.
> nuclear generation is a money pit - French government had to bail out EDF at the start of this year - taking on 65B euro of debt.
Power generation is a money pit period. California has to constantly bail out PG&E here too because of all the lawsuits about fires & I see this happen frequently all over the world. Pretending like large scale power generation isn't a substantial government problem and the free market can solve it by itself AFAICT is a complete pipe dream. Hell in California there's a massive fight now because California is having to alter the rules to support grid solar installations by making roof top solar less attractive & this is a common problem facing all grid operators. And honestly, 65B euro is a pittance to have such a major reduction in fossil fuels for the year. Think about it this way - would you add a $300B line item to the US budget to bail out nuclear if it meant that only 10% of grid energy would be generated by fossil fuels? Like that seems like a laughably small number. France has 56 nuclear reactors and the US has 96 spread across 60 plants despite being 5x the size. In France, fossil fuels have seen 0 growth in terms of TWh produced since the 80s & in fact a small dip. Nowhere else in the world is that true including Germany which invested in renewables early & by a lot.
Renewable energy is expanding rapidly enough to offset the production from both nuclear and fossil fuels. While acknowledging the temporary spikes in fossile energy sources due to the Ukraine conflict, the continued growth trend of renewables, as evident in the graph, suggests that these fluctuations will have minimal impact in the long term. For instance, projecting to 2030, the ascendancy of renewables appears to significantly outweigh these temporary variances.
> Many of the individuals or groups would deny vociferously that the motivations and logical fallacies that I’m going to attribute to them are accurate, even as they would feel a frisson of cognitive dissonance that tells them something is not quite right. In most cases, these people and groups believe that they are correct and that their positions are rational and carefully thought through
A sad realization in life is realizing regardless of how right one can be, the ones who are wrong many times fall into this, moreover sometimes as groups, reinforcing each other.
A sadder thing is realizing you suffer from it too.
So many nuclear proponents, including a large number of people here on HN, make the mistake of looking at relative costs and capabilities of power generation sources from 10 or even 5 years ago and then forming positions based on that. As the article points out, this is just straight-up bad thinking.
Any new nuclear project is realistically going to take a minimum of 6 years to reach commercial production, compared to about 2 for a large-scale renewable + storage project. So any honest evaluation needs to look at the trends and project them out to 2030, and then form a conclusion about which is the better choice. In most (not all) cases, renewable + storage wins easily.
> In most (not all) cases, renewable + storage wins easily.
We don't live in a free market.
As the article notes, coal towns - among other places - seem to be excited by SMNR.
I can easily see politicians earmarking billions for old coal plants to become SMNRs even if it doesn't make sense financially, and putting windmills or solar or whatever would be more economical, create more jobs, etc.
Where there's a political will, there's a way.
Economics only matter so much.
Think of the amount of value that can be created in a private company by the government overpaying a bit for electricity for SMNRs to be built.
When you're looking at that amount of wealth, someone is going to buy the right politicians.
This is how the system works. Not what actually makes physical sense.
You are doing the same thing I think, projecting past nuclear costs into the future, and assuming past cost reductions for solar and wind.
In any case, you are not correct about the timelines for renewable and storage. The average time to get an approved grid interconnect is 4 years. And all these power projects can take 5-8 years to deliver.
Fusion will be practical long before the problems of fission are solved. Obviously photovoltaic is amazing and batteries are on a beautiful cost curve to help us with storage and there's alway pumped water, etc
But fusion will take us to the stars, and depending on how small it can be, may help in lots of other applications
Fusion has fission's biggest problem, which is the creation of large amounts of low-grade nuclear waste in the form of activated, radiation weakened reactor parts.
Some of the more whackadoodle fusion plant designs (which nonetheless have millions in funding and early prototypes built) get around this by doing the fusion in a blanket of liquid metal, or by using aneutronic fusion (which requires ridiculously high temperatures), or by using the neutron activation to breed more fuel.
That isn't remotely close to fusion's biggest challenge. If you can generate 1 GWe for 30 years and deal with a small warehouse of low level waste for a few decades that is a nothingburger.
The biggest challenges to fusion is making a reactor quickly, cheaply, and with reasonable uptime / maintenance.
Don't forget making it safely. It's fairly easy to make something safe it everything goes perfectly. Making it safe in the context of human failings is a whole different thing.
Are we mixing up fusion and fission here? Fission has cost problems. Fusion doesn't have cost problems, it has viability problems. We still haven't even produced net positive energy. Then, if that milestone is reached, continuous production is going to be an engineering challenge. I'm optimistic that humanity will be able to get it working given enough time, but it's not a solution to any energy problem right now or the near or even middle future.
I don't see the difference between cost and viability. Of course we can fuse atoms. We've been doing it with regularity since the 50s. Of course we can use magnetic confinement to do it. The only reason we haven't burned a plasma in a magnetic confinement machine is because the machine to do it costs a lot of money. We don't have the industrial throughput as a society to make 1,000 megaprojects simultaneously. Whether you call that a cost problem or a viability problem is irrelevant.
There is a small, but influential component of the "oh my gerdz, carbon bad!" crowd that hate nuclear. They're careful not to argue on the merits, as they'd be exposed as the ridiculous supervillains that they are.
They don't want humanity to have absurd amounts of energy. They believe in an ascetic philosophy where, should there be any humans still around at all, they should be suffering with whatever the minimum amount of energy is that they can get away with. They don't want you to be able to drive anywhere. Small little walkable cities, that no one can hope to escape from.
Sure, but these people are a fringe group, and largely a caricature. Most people just want to be able to live a comfortable life and not damage the planet we live on in the process.
I guarantee you that if limitless, clean, cheap energy became the norm then the vast, vast majority of the world (and probably even these ascetics) would make use of it, and it would be beneficial for humanity.
Also - in the absence of such an energy source, minimising usage of polluting energy is a good move.
I see little evidence that they are a disavowed fringe group. I see alot of evidence that they're at the top, in control, and at least clever enough to dodge questions about their position on nuclear. That is, when they're not outright lying about it. It's not a new development, this was evident since at least the early 1990s.
> I guarantee you that if limitless, clean, cheap energy became the norm then the vast, vast majority of the world
But that's irrelevant. You speak as if "if this technology magically falls into our laps". Technology does not do that. It requires effort and money and time, and these people have done what they can to worm their way into positions where they're in charge of doling out those things.
There's another comment whining about how it would take at least "6" years to get moving with nuclear. This, to them, is an argument against. To me, it's an argument for even more hurry. If things take awhile to get moving, you don't put them off even longer.
Most people are so ignorant of all of this, that they exert absolutely no influence in one direction or the other. What they want will matter little in the end.
The article kind of answers its own question in 2 sentences:
> But gigawatt scale reactors are easy to turn into bespoke engineering megaprojects. Custom engineering for every site foregoes economies of manufacturing scale.
My core impression of the SMR enthusiasm was that it would be really great if we had a few factories pumping out "nuclear energy pods" on an assembly-line, and then those modules could be plopped down anywhere and plugged into the grid. Energy problem solved.
The issues with the economic inefficiency of smaller reactors could be solved with a sprinkling of Technology Dust from the Innovation Fairy.
How about an equally starry-eyed idea: We build out the grid worldwide, and then just build one giant reactor complex per continent; we get nuclear economy of scale, but we don't ship the reactors to different locations, we ship their energy output instead. As for any problems with economic inefficiency (or the limits of HVDC transmission lines) I again invoke the Innovation Fairy.
With small scale reactors in large numbers, you also drastically extend the surface area for problems like human errors or accidents, natural catastrophies or even manufactoring errors.
I dont thing SMRs are a good idea. Not to mention the waste...
I can think of even more problems. Off the top of my head: the manufacture of SMR modules would be, by design, centralized into a few large, well-funded entities needing lots of government permits. The probability of corruption, mismanagement, or political bikeshedding would be pretty high. In the worst case, SMRs would just take the various problems large reactor projects have and gather them into one manufacturing choke-point.
It’s power of the other kind driving this. Nuclear materials are controllable militarily and therefore nuclear power is controllable, and controlled by the existing geopolitical power structure. “We can supply your energy but we need to also provide a small military base to secure it. And don’t upset us or your lights go off” is very different to abundant and freely available
Clearly nuclear inputs and outputs are restricted to Permitted Countries.
Renewable energy inputs and hydrogen can be abundant and uncontrollable.
The nuclear industries links to militarism are incontestable.
Globally freely abundant energy cannot be solved unless you remove restrictions on nuclear inputs and outputs. If you retain control over them, maintain control over energy.
This logic isn’t discussed either due to a lack of understanding geopolitics, or wilfully ignoring the power and control implicit in nuclear power most likely due to a preference for being part of that power structure
There will be limited domestic support to invade someone over the manufacture of solar panels. The sun isn’t getting blocked by anyone either.
Your point reinforces the parent — geopolitical control is the reason for nuclear investment due to an inability to compete on manufacturing.
We rarely see the broader picture being discussed as the science and engineering is thought to dominate, but the problem is more geopolitical than people want to acknowledge.
We will solve clean energy if and only if we don’t lose control
Then buy them from China until you have diversified your supply chain.
This is the fundamental point, the US will avoid risking its hegemony ahead of burning the planet.
And in order to do that all sorts of intellectualising needs to occur about why solar/wind/hydrogen is worse than nuclear when they provide a clean solution based on globally abundant, clean, available, simple technologies.
You’re reinforcing the point, right? That it’s geopolitical concerns that dominate here.
If it will take a long time to transition to solar, you won’t be dependent on China tomorrow…
And by simple I mean so fundamental a source of energy that five year olds can understand them, and they don’t require mining, radioactive waste management solutions, military control, or improved safety engineering to avoid yet more Chernobyl and Fukushima’s, not to mention they don’t provide targets for conventional weapon attacks to escalate into nuclear disasters…. Oh, and they’re decentralised/easy to deploy.
Solar/Wind power are simple in those terms.
And turning excess energy into hydrogen for storage is also relatively a imple but requires investment to improve the economics.
But nuclear fanboys will fanboy because there is a fundamental power and control element as well as exciting physics involved.
And that’s fine, as arguments go, it’s just frustrating to see simple solutions avoided for political reasons, and roadblocks put up to justify nuclear expansion and investment.
You didn’t address any of the negative issues around nuclear but let me address your objections.
We already mine, process, and use a lot of silicon, it’s not a big deal.
People did die in Fukushima, and you ‘forgot’ to mention Chernobyl. And that’s 1 in 200 reactors globally melting down. You want more? What about the 160+ countries that don’t have nuclear? Not to mention the effects on the people that had to leave, or the life expectancy lost, economic costs of cleanup etc.
I think that addresses nuclear is the only tech of ‘necessary scale’ which is a nonsense argument.
Of course silicon requires mining, everything requires raw materials, the point is that it’s not a big deal.
The fanboy comment is because you’re making polemic statements and ignoring the points that run counter to your point of view, which now seems to be a waste of everyone’s time.
Solar, Wind, Hydrogen. Simple. Abundant. Largely ignored because of geopolitical power and control implicit in nuclear tech, and so folks will argue to their and other’s death to invest in nuclear over solar panels, windmills, and some hydrogen infrastructure.
That’s fine, just don’t waste people’s time arguing it’s economics or ecological or quicker. “I like nuclear” and “my country likes guns and military power” is the rational point here.
I think people get distracted by small, modular nukes we do have on spacecraft and the ones used in the navy for aircraft carriers and subs.
Those specialized applications get to ignore issues that are very important to terrestrial civilian application. For example certain kinds of maintenance is handled more frequently than is economically viable in non-military environments, while other kinds of maintenance (& refueling perhaps?) are not required as the entire device is disposed of at the end of life.
Also they are surrounded at all times by extremely armed guards :-).
This is the same kind of overfitting you see from tech enthusiasts who, say, look at a CPU with a high clock speed and assume X and Y, not realizing all the other aspects that go into the design of a full system. Or wild zomg claims about so-called AI.
For a post about how small reactors don't make sense economically, there's a lot of narrative and opinion and basically no useful numbers. You can spin any story/justification for your idea about reactors, but if the you can't base it on data, what's the point?
It's not about why they don't make sense, though it briefly reviews that and yes "economically" is a good one word summary of why they don't make sense.
The article is about why they remain popular despite not making sense.
This whole argument hinges on believing the opinion of the writer, who tries to assure you that he is very informed and you don't need any data to get in the way of the message.
While he may or may not be accurate in his assessment at this time, he manages to gloss over any number of historical factors that have brought us to this junction.
Continuing to invest in nuclear is a good idea. There is money to do so and yes, the military provides much of that. And they control an immense amount of fissile material. Wouldn't it be great if there was a future where that material, which has been mined at great cost, refined at immense cost and handled at astounding cost could be used to benefit the populace that have afforded it?
The huge arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world only has one way to make its exit. I'd rather we continued to work on an alternative.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadre security concerns, take for example North Korea which has been nearly globally embargoed but yet still has built successful nuclear weapons. They struggle with ICBMs because that’s what it would take. By comparison, Iran has been subjected to all kinds of targeted military and covert action to sabotage their nuclear program. By all accounts those actions have kind of been successful in the sense that experts agree it’s going to take Iran longer to create those weapons, but it’s a question of if not when. That’s why I’m so frustrated by critics of Obama’s Iran deal. The 0 tolerance approach is not going to work and the Obama deal had the best concessions from Iran that we’re going to get - it’s not going to be better when Iran actually has nuclear weapons. And Iranians have AFAIK been very honest players in terms of at least trying to stick to the Iran nuclear deal even after Trump blew it up. The primary problem there is that Iran is a geopolitical enemy of Israel which complicates things a lot (a stronger Iran that a nuclear deal allowed for is a problem for other security issues in the region). But notice how none of those issues have anything to do with enrichment capabilities of civilian nuclear reactors. And generating fissile material is not the bottleneck for building those weapons. So it’s all silly FUD-driven BS we pick up from movies and imagining things than actual problems on the ground.
Renewables have been well over half of new power generation capacity for the last couple of years. But it'll take many years before the relative changes look significant in absolute numbers.
And again, you can’t get there because of storage and storage is an intractable technical problem where “just throw batteries at it” is a flippant answer. We grow battery energy density very slowly. It’s expected to double by 2030 and triply by 2040. But our energy demands grow very quickly & we’re talking about a world where most people don’t actually have as cheap easy access to energy as we take for granted in the West. We also are talking about using a significant chunk of that capacity and using it to replace existing cars (which don’t get me wrong - you 100% need batteries for cars because it’s the only way to connect renewables to automotive). Then you’ve got shipping which everyone ignores and I don’t see a path forward there except to have nuclear reactors on commercial ships going all over the place (but that would 100% require molten salt or other reactors that can’t melt down).
1) EV's have a TCO lower than gasoline vehicles. 2) Renewable power generation is cheaper than fossil power generation. 3) Heat pumps are cheaper than fossil heating
In 2003 nobody ever thought that we would ever get to this stage. Everybody assumed that we'd need massive subsidies to switch to carbon free sources. They were hopeful that once we got to mass scale rollout that the prices would be competitive but getting below parity was seen as completely unrealistic.
Remember sites like The Oil Drum and dieoff.org? Where we are today was considered laughably impossible and those arguments came with pages of calculations.
We are on track for what might be peak CO2 emission this decade. At that point we will start moving in the right direction emission wise. This is not good enough to avoid some amount of dangerous climate change, but it’s better than the doom scenarios of 20 years ago.
GDP is decoupling from carbon emissions too, which is massively important.
Now it seems we’re back to the big existential risks being war and awful politics with the latter driven by social media algorithms that prioritize the most toxic ideas for “engagement.” (Unless you buy AI doom. I don’t.)
Storage has lots of options, for example, batteries, pressure, gravity (incl. underground).
Things like shipping could run perhaps on other fuels and planes will be on high energy density fossil fuel (or synthetic) for a while (at least long haul).
Even today fission and renewables have very similar generation prices. And no, it’ll be a long time before batteries are a solution to the energy density needs for grid scale solar to truly allow replacement and shuttering of fossil fuel plants (automotive electrification is going to eat up a huge amount of battery manufacturing capacity world wide).
Where did I advocate batteries as only storage? There are many options.
I might potentially be better to put more money into fusion rather than chase fission for anything beyond materials, medical, research, and weapons applications.
Nuclear never had a strong fall costs that is what makes it a tougher thing because you likely need a change in technology.
There are some reasonably well understood cost evolution in technology.
Wanting to spend huge amounts of money in the hope that the economics will somehow work out is not an easy proposition when other things are already cheap.
Yes, nuclear power has gotten more expensive with time but even still, today, in absolute terms, $/khw is competitive.
> Grid-level system costs for intermittent renewables are large ($8-$50/MWh) but depend on country, context and technology (onshore wind < offshore wind < solar PV). Nuclear system costs are $1-3/MWh.
Or https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45436 which shows that nuclear remains cheaper than wind and waaay cheaper than solar in California. And wind/solar prices AFAIK don’t factor in the additional cost of storage since we don’t pair wind/solar generation capacity with matching storage requirements.
And in terms of why it’s gotten more expensive, part of that is naturally inflation. The other part is that nuclear keeps getting more regulations and we disinvest from building more. It’s the opposite of the Wright effect - when you build less of something and disinvest it gets more expensive to make. Some of the regulations are legit costs (e.g. making sure the plants remain safe and don’t melt down) but you’d be surprised at how much of it is BS driven by FUD (a not insignificant portion powered by FUD from fossil fuel companies who benefit from nuclear taking as long as possible).
It’s also amusing to me the overlap between “renewables need more investment to replace grid fossil fuels” and “fusion instead of fission” camps. Like yes, fusion is exciting and I hope we get there some day. And we criminally underfund investment into it at government scale in the same way as we do with fission. But fusion’s road is even harder and longer out. Like we still don’t know how to generate more energy than we consume. It’s strictly in the pure research phase and is many many decades away from starting production and will take an even longer time to build out large amounts of capacity.
Your second link has prices, not generation costs which is a much more difficult thing to compare. Inflation isn't specific to nuclear and regulations will continue to be part of nuclear.
Over time, cheaper generation should win out - absent interventions - so nuclear isn't in a great place to start.
What is your distinction of "generation costs" vs prices?
> Inflation isn't specific to nuclear and regulations will continue to be part of nuclear.
Inflation is a bit relevant in that the average nuclear power plant age is 42. Solar installations by comparisons are a lot more recent. That means that inflation has operated on a longer time period than for solar. And again, I said that's a small part. The primary driver is we've divested from building nuclear because of overblown fears around safety of operation or security or whatever other fear you may associate with nuclear.
As for "regulations will continue to be part of nuclear", that's why I'm saying. Part of investing in nuclear means organizing politically to remove the BS regulations and calling BS on things like security concerns which seem to be purely hypothetical.
> Over time, cheaper generation should win out - absent interventions - so nuclear isn't in a great place to start.
Huh? Like you're shifting the goal posts. It matters very little right now if the cost curve is better for solar. That's for 5-20 years from now and comparing it against a technology we've divested from is a false comparison. It's even more BS considering nuclear remains cheaper today even with effectively 0 investment (most funds have been going to maintenance only) and still remains cheaper than wind & solar. Nuclear can even outperform fossil fuels on price in some cases.
But again. Cost to generate the energy is ultimately a very myopic view because fossil fuels externalize the true cost substantially and literally anything is better. It's estimated to cost $200 trillion dollars to zero out human carbon emissions by 2050 & if we fail it'll cost the US alone ~14.5 trillion dollars in the next 50 years (which again involves on externalizing and ignoring the impact of climate change since the biggest impact to the US is illegal immigration but the biggest direct financial impact is not to the US). Climate-related disasters already cost the world ~$650 billion dollars anually. By comparison the costs associated with building and cleaning up a nuclear power plant and cleaning it up seem quite trivial. Sure at some point solar may get cheaper in absolute dollars to. But it all doesn't matter because the thing we need to get to is negative carbon emissions. Oh and btw. Solar won't be able to solve that. The energy required to start pulling carbon out of the air en masse will require huge energy production that really only a nuclear power plant can scale sufficiently well to handle.
If you believe regulations will be substantially reduced, fair enough, but is there legislation to that effect in the pipelines?
You continue to claim nuclear is cheaper, but that is certainly not how it plays out in places like France (or on average) - Californian prices are not the right measure there, nor hypothetical costs of nuclear.
You can allege that there will huge cost improvements on nuclear, but my point is that on other energy generation the costs are already down (without tinkering with discount factors because a lot went into operation with funding) and that technologies that are stagnant in costs tend to fail on that front. Changes to the technology as such (e.g., building different reactor types) could change that, but we don't know.
And, of course, solar could generate huge amounts of energy by, for example, plastering some large desert with it. That said, no-one is seeing solar as the only solution: wind, tidal, hydro, eventually fusion to name few. Some fission will be in the mix, too, because it is around or being build.
~25B on nuclear weapons (likely maintaining our military arsenal)
~5B on nuclear energy
~27B on renewables
And nuclear requires waaaaaay more for R&D because it’s a more difficult energy source than solar which is scientifically more straightforward & more of an engineering problem that industry is well suited to solving.
No you can’t just plaster solar cells in the middle of some desert because while HVDC has gotten cheaper, it’s still quite expensive and even harder than nuclear tech in some ways to cost reduce. You want to minimize the distance between where you produce energy and where you consume it.
If you need the power to remove carbon dioxide from the air, you do that where the power is. (And there is also chemical storage if you had to transport energy long distance - but a moot point).
The problem is that solar capacity just grows too slowly. We’re growing solar manufacturing capacity as quickly as possible and still fossil fuels remains stubbornly the dominant fuel type for grid energy production in America and barely shifts regardless of how many renewables we add. So from the perspective of “we tried something maybe it’s not working” I’d rather look at the impact scaling up an energy source has on fossil fuels and all evidence suggest that solar has trouble taking over (fossil fuel use and solar energy generated seems uncorrelated whereas it is inversely correlated with nuclear which is what you want).
Why are you so focused on solar, other things like wind are cheap, too? I couldn't care less about what particular energy source is used, I am just making a cost argument. No goal posts are being shifted by me. If you now want to discuss industrial capacity, then, sure, let's discuss how we can somehow build a few hundred nuclear power plants quickly but not expand wind, solar, geothermal or other things quickly.
If there already are cheap technologies, pushing for another one that isn't but might be is a tough proposition.
China built more wind and solar in the first nine months of 2023 than the sum total of all their nuclear reactors under construction, and they have 26. They are likely to build even more over the next nine months. Current estimates are that their emissions will begin a structural decline as soon as next year, because their renewable construction is outpacing demand. Your statement is so far off factually it’s not even in the same universe as reality.
https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ILAB/ILAB20210624 https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893...
I think this is endemic of your comment, every "fact" is fallacy or false. France is not near 100% fossils fuel free, nuclear is not that great at getting to 100% and would require massive amounts of storage, just like renewables. Here's France's actual mix:
> The electricity sector in France is dominated by its nuclear power, which accounted for 71.7% of total production in 2018, while renewables and fossil fuels accounted for 21.3% and 7.1%, respectively[1] (compare to 72.3% nuclear, 17.8% renewables and 8.6% fossil fuels in 2016).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France
I think we probably also need hydrogen fuel cells for fleet cars / trucking because they can eat the logistical and safety costs of storing hydrogen (hydrogen fuel cell consumer cars are a pipe dream IMO because you simply can’t have refilling stations scattered around everywhere - it’s massive explosion risk in population dense areas with untrained people dealing with it).
But if we’re talking about grid energy production, nuclear is the only real path for solving climate change. It sucks but that’s the reality.
I don’t know why you claim nuclear has no advantage if we’re talking about a country whose grid manages to achieve that only 10% of grid production is coming from fossil fuels. That’s a lot smaller storage problem to solve than the 60-80% that renewables has to solve (not to mention it needs to actually build that capacity which is going to take a long time because all the evidence is that that % mix by renewables grows very slowly over long periods of time).
Now let's look to the future: solar is vastly cheaper and easier to install per TWh generated. It can be installed quickly and incrementally. Solar modules come in at around 1% of the cost per W of nuclear right now, and still decreasing, that's an enormous margin to work with: If you have a way to seasonally offset energy through efuels for ships and planes as you propose, and a fleet of EVs with 100kWh of storage, the effort to just solve the remaining grid fluctuations seems straightforward. Roughly speaking, without storage nuclear has no useful solution for transport, transport is the hardest part of emissions to mitigate, but any solution that uses nuclear derived electricity for transport will be far cheaper with renewables.
We have South Australia, which produced more low carbon energy this year from solar and wind than France did from nuclear, and without any significant storage as a counter example for your low carbon grid. It appears that the French model is harder to reproduce than the South Australian model, and the evidence is that it could be copied organically everywhere: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41971-7
It kind of feels intentional because it'd be like me arguing that grid solar is pointless because ships still burn diesel. Like you get that at this point we need to get to negative emissions to start removing carbon from the atmosphere and carbon recapture is a really energy intensive process (you basically have to spend more to recapture than you spent burning in the first place & we've still today burn fucktons of fossil fuels).
Non-grid consumption is driven by many more use-cases. Even if you had 100% nuclear or 100% solar or 100% wind in the grid, you'd still see more oil consumption today than in the past simply because of transportation which even today is predominantly fossil fuel based. EV electrification will help bring that down & that's happening but you still have non-electric trains, planes, and shipping and we don't really know how to solve that for the latter 2 which are massive contributors (much more than cars).
In fact, if you look at your own graph, the share that is consumed by nuclear has a direct inverse correlation with fossil fuels. The same is not true for other fuel sources. If we get more solar, the percentage that fossil fuels takes up seems to be largely unmoved. If we get more nuclear, there's a direct reduction in fossil fuels. If we use less nuclear you see an uptick. The reason the numbers don't look as impressive for consumption is that there's a huge amount of fossil fuels being consumed that have nothing to do with the grid. But replacing fossil fuels in the grid is hugely important because otherwise your EV car would be an expensive toy and would be a marginal benefit to the environment (grid fossil fuel power plants are marginally better at generating electricity than your smaller car engine but it's like a small % improvement vs nuclear/solar/hydro/wind which all have 0 emissions generated per KWh).
It's fascinating that South Australia is the model you've chosen as "this can be replicated" when your talking about one of the most arid, deserted, and sparsely populated places in the world that has continuous sine shine year round. Like you get that's not actually a representative scenario right & renewables are hugely dependent on geographically specific conditions? Grid-scale renewables face substantial technical hurdles in addition to policy ones. Nuclear doesn't really have technical hurdles and faces much larger political and regulatory ones but given that the US has had a movement to impede civillian nuclear reactors globally, 32 countries are still operating 443 plants globally. We can always choose different policies and choose to build 5000 reactors even if we overbuild capacity and it costs us a lot of money. If we remain with the current status quo, solar will win in the long run, but that long run concerns me. Like I have doubts we'll get to 50% freedom from fossil fuels for production (not consumption - just production) by 2050 focusing on renewables like we have been. This is a problem because as mentioned all the investments we make in EVs are pointless if the grid itself isn't carbon free. It may make you feel good but it isn't solving the problem. And on the consumption side, we need to figure out how to switch all the largest ships to nuclear reactors cause I don't know what else solves that problem & that's a huge contributor. Plastics are another huge fossil fuel consumer and I don't know what to do there either. But none of that is relevant in the discussion of solar vs nuclear as a replacement strategy for existing fossil fuel dependence within the power grid.
That 10 percent of fossil, plus the controllable hydro in France is working in tandem with the nuclear to match demand.
Remove that gas and hydro and a nuclear grid needs storage just as a mainly solar and wind grid does.
Yes in theory, if price is no object, both can just overbuild so much you avoid needing storage but that would be stupid.
Also, not sure if you’re aware, but most modern reactors don’t need storage. They can vary load generation dynamically and so don’t actually need storage. France’s reactors are all very old as they’ve been infected with the same disease of failing to take on large public works projects in a timely and cost efficient manner. It’s not as fuel efficient, but that matters very little for a nuclear plant in the grand scheme of things.
What matters is that the upfront capital costs of nuclear are so insanely high that any hour you’re not producing 100% you’re losing money you can’t afford to lose.
I’m not convinced that load following nuclear makes economic sense compared to next generation energy storage solution. Say Ambri’s molten metal batteries.
Nuclear had better pray that these energy storage solutions never become economically competitive, because if they do then solar/wind+storage will beat nuclear in almost every application. And if that’s the case, nuclear just won’t have the economies of scale necessary to be competitive at all.
Nuclear energy also has to pray that advanced geothermal doesn’t catch on, as it competes directly with nuclear, but has the benefit of being able to take direct advantage of skilled labour from the oil and gas industry that’s soon becoming increasingly redundant.
Yeah, electricity pricing for consumers is mismatched in terms of how energy demands work. Solar has the opposite problem where it may be unable to supply energy when you need it which is a much bigger problem - instead of losing money your energy grid goes down. Of we turn on peaker power plants because while batteries can weather short outages I don’t believe anyone has demonstrated running a grid off stored energy for any reasonable amount of time.
And again, I’m going to call it an unsubstantiated claim that hybrid nuclear plants that can scale energy output as needed are uneconomical. I know they’re slightly more expensive but I’m not aware of any data suggesting that it is actually intrinsically uneconomical. Same goes for any claims that solar or wind is cheaper than nuclear - all the data I’ve found had solar as way more expensive and wind as slightly more expensive vs nuclear.
And I wouldn’t hold my breath on storage. I think we’re less likely to get a crazy new battery technology that solves all the things we need from it in a cheaper and safer way than nuclear research. There’s lots of crazy battery ideas but those ideas have been around for a long time and we have no indication that can scale. China is building a molten salt reactor right now. And additionally we don’t need government R&D dollars flowing into battery research as much as we need it flowing into figuring out how to make nuclear even safer and more economical. Normal market economics are already a big enough prize to cause private R&D dollars to go after that (batteries are everywhere and the essentially the same battery tech that’s in your smartphone is what’s in an EV which makes the market opportunity massive and obvious - that’s not as obviously clear for private investors for nuclear energy because it need regulatory approval to build a plant which means we don’t know how big that market would actually be). It’s not nuclear vs solar. It’s nuclear vs fossil fuels and renewables vs fossil fuels and so far fossil fuels has kicked renewables’ butt and had it butt kicked by nuclear. If this were a fight, where should the actual smart money be in terms of achieving net zero?
There's been a recovery this year but that recovery has faltered last month with about a 15% unexpected fall in output.
Whenever France is hit by a heatwave, nuclear output drops significantly - the water of the rivers used for cooling/condensing becomes too warm to operate plants at full capacity safely.
And even with effective monopoly advantage, nuclear generation is a money pit - French government had to bail out EDF at the start of this year - taking on 65B euro of debt.
> nuclear generation is a money pit - French government had to bail out EDF at the start of this year - taking on 65B euro of debt.
Power generation is a money pit period. California has to constantly bail out PG&E here too because of all the lawsuits about fires & I see this happen frequently all over the world. Pretending like large scale power generation isn't a substantial government problem and the free market can solve it by itself AFAICT is a complete pipe dream. Hell in California there's a massive fight now because California is having to alter the rules to support grid solar installations by making roof top solar less attractive & this is a common problem facing all grid operators. And honestly, 65B euro is a pittance to have such a major reduction in fossil fuels for the year. Think about it this way - would you add a $300B line item to the US budget to bail out nuclear if it meant that only 10% of grid energy would be generated by fossil fuels? Like that seems like a laughably small number. France has 56 nuclear reactors and the US has 96 spread across 60 plants despite being 5x the size. In France, fossil fuels have seen 0 growth in terms of TWh produced since the 80s & in fact a small dip. Nowhere else in the world is that true including Germany which invested in renewables early & by a lot.
I've noticed this claim being made repeatedly, but it's simply not true. Germany is decreasing its fossile energy production long-term.
Please look at this very easy to understand graph:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/Fil...
Renewable energy is expanding rapidly enough to offset the production from both nuclear and fossil fuels. While acknowledging the temporary spikes in fossile energy sources due to the Ukraine conflict, the continued growth trend of renewables, as evident in the graph, suggests that these fluctuations will have minimal impact in the long term. For instance, projecting to 2030, the ascendancy of renewables appears to significantly outweigh these temporary variances.
A sad realization in life is realizing regardless of how right one can be, the ones who are wrong many times fall into this, moreover sometimes as groups, reinforcing each other.
A sadder thing is realizing you suffer from it too.
Any new nuclear project is realistically going to take a minimum of 6 years to reach commercial production, compared to about 2 for a large-scale renewable + storage project. So any honest evaluation needs to look at the trends and project them out to 2030, and then form a conclusion about which is the better choice. In most (not all) cases, renewable + storage wins easily.
We don't live in a free market.
As the article notes, coal towns - among other places - seem to be excited by SMNR.
I can easily see politicians earmarking billions for old coal plants to become SMNRs even if it doesn't make sense financially, and putting windmills or solar or whatever would be more economical, create more jobs, etc.
Where there's a political will, there's a way.
Economics only matter so much.
Think of the amount of value that can be created in a private company by the government overpaying a bit for electricity for SMNRs to be built.
When you're looking at that amount of wealth, someone is going to buy the right politicians.
This is how the system works. Not what actually makes physical sense.
We act here in the same way we are doing with fossil energy: we live the good life now and let generations to come pay our bill.
Nuclear is the only way we can continue to sustain our growth-based society, no wonder billionaires are backing it up.
Instead we should face our responsibility and stop creating problems for our kids. Walk, don’t eat meat, be happy with what we have.
Which is optimistic. The current track record for the US is about 10 years: https://grist.org/energy/first-us-nuclear-reactor-40-years-o...
In any case, you are not correct about the timelines for renewable and storage. The average time to get an approved grid interconnect is 4 years. And all these power projects can take 5-8 years to deliver.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/climate/renewable-energy-...
Fantasy sources are always going to beat real sources. Realistically.
But fusion will take us to the stars, and depending on how small it can be, may help in lots of other applications
The biggest challenges to fusion is making a reactor quickly, cheaply, and with reasonable uptime / maintenance.
No silver bullet technology can fix that.
They don't want humanity to have absurd amounts of energy. They believe in an ascetic philosophy where, should there be any humans still around at all, they should be suffering with whatever the minimum amount of energy is that they can get away with. They don't want you to be able to drive anywhere. Small little walkable cities, that no one can hope to escape from.
I guarantee you that if limitless, clean, cheap energy became the norm then the vast, vast majority of the world (and probably even these ascetics) would make use of it, and it would be beneficial for humanity.
Also - in the absence of such an energy source, minimising usage of polluting energy is a good move.
I see little evidence that they are a disavowed fringe group. I see alot of evidence that they're at the top, in control, and at least clever enough to dodge questions about their position on nuclear. That is, when they're not outright lying about it. It's not a new development, this was evident since at least the early 1990s.
> I guarantee you that if limitless, clean, cheap energy became the norm then the vast, vast majority of the world
But that's irrelevant. You speak as if "if this technology magically falls into our laps". Technology does not do that. It requires effort and money and time, and these people have done what they can to worm their way into positions where they're in charge of doling out those things.
There's another comment whining about how it would take at least "6" years to get moving with nuclear. This, to them, is an argument against. To me, it's an argument for even more hurry. If things take awhile to get moving, you don't put them off even longer.
Most people are so ignorant of all of this, that they exert absolutely no influence in one direction or the other. What they want will matter little in the end.
> But gigawatt scale reactors are easy to turn into bespoke engineering megaprojects. Custom engineering for every site foregoes economies of manufacturing scale.
My core impression of the SMR enthusiasm was that it would be really great if we had a few factories pumping out "nuclear energy pods" on an assembly-line, and then those modules could be plopped down anywhere and plugged into the grid. Energy problem solved.
The issues with the economic inefficiency of smaller reactors could be solved with a sprinkling of Technology Dust from the Innovation Fairy.
How about an equally starry-eyed idea: We build out the grid worldwide, and then just build one giant reactor complex per continent; we get nuclear economy of scale, but we don't ship the reactors to different locations, we ship their energy output instead. As for any problems with economic inefficiency (or the limits of HVDC transmission lines) I again invoke the Innovation Fairy.
I dont thing SMRs are a good idea. Not to mention the waste...
Clearly nuclear inputs and outputs are restricted to Permitted Countries.
Renewable energy inputs and hydrogen can be abundant and uncontrollable.
The nuclear industries links to militarism are incontestable.
Globally freely abundant energy cannot be solved unless you remove restrictions on nuclear inputs and outputs. If you retain control over them, maintain control over energy.
This logic isn’t discussed either due to a lack of understanding geopolitics, or wilfully ignoring the power and control implicit in nuclear power most likely due to a preference for being part of that power structure
Solar cells are "controllable" too.
They're just controlled by China.
Your point reinforces the parent — geopolitical control is the reason for nuclear investment due to an inability to compete on manufacturing.
We rarely see the broader picture being discussed as the science and engineering is thought to dominate, but the problem is more geopolitical than people want to acknowledge.
We will solve clean energy if and only if we don’t lose control
The criticism is that nuclear plants take too long to build.
Building fabs to crank out semiconductor grade silicon by the square kilometer isn't going to happen overnight.
Not to mention that the process involves all manner of truly nasty chemicals and many tons of fresh water.
This is the fundamental point, the US will avoid risking its hegemony ahead of burning the planet.
And in order to do that all sorts of intellectualising needs to occur about why solar/wind/hydrogen is worse than nuclear when they provide a clean solution based on globally abundant, clean, available, simple technologies.
What if China decides to stop selling them to you?
> globally abundant, clean, available, simple technologies.
Patent nonsense.
Also, hydrogen is not an energy source to begin with. You have to use energy to make it.
If it will take a long time to transition to solar, you won’t be dependent on China tomorrow…
And by simple I mean so fundamental a source of energy that five year olds can understand them, and they don’t require mining, radioactive waste management solutions, military control, or improved safety engineering to avoid yet more Chernobyl and Fukushima’s, not to mention they don’t provide targets for conventional weapon attacks to escalate into nuclear disasters…. Oh, and they’re decentralised/easy to deploy.
Solar/Wind power are simple in those terms.
And turning excess energy into hydrogen for storage is also relatively a imple but requires investment to improve the economics.
But nuclear fanboys will fanboy because there is a fundamental power and control element as well as exciting physics involved.
And that’s fine, as arguments go, it’s just frustrating to see simple solutions avoided for political reasons, and roadblocks put up to justify nuclear expansion and investment.
2. Literally no one died from radiation at Fukushima.
3. "Nuclear fanboys" "fanboy" because it works at the necessary scale.
4. They "don't require mining"? Where do you think silicon comes from?
Someone's a "fanboy" here, all right. Hint: it's not me.
We already mine, process, and use a lot of silicon, it’s not a big deal.
People did die in Fukushima, and you ‘forgot’ to mention Chernobyl. And that’s 1 in 200 reactors globally melting down. You want more? What about the 160+ countries that don’t have nuclear? Not to mention the effects on the people that had to leave, or the life expectancy lost, economic costs of cleanup etc.
I think that addresses nuclear is the only tech of ‘necessary scale’ which is a nonsense argument.
Of course silicon requires mining, everything requires raw materials, the point is that it’s not a big deal.
The fanboy comment is because you’re making polemic statements and ignoring the points that run counter to your point of view, which now seems to be a waste of everyone’s time.
Solar, Wind, Hydrogen. Simple. Abundant. Largely ignored because of geopolitical power and control implicit in nuclear tech, and so folks will argue to their and other’s death to invest in nuclear over solar panels, windmills, and some hydrogen infrastructure.
That’s fine, just don’t waste people’s time arguing it’s economics or ecological or quicker. “I like nuclear” and “my country likes guns and military power” is the rational point here.
Those specialized applications get to ignore issues that are very important to terrestrial civilian application. For example certain kinds of maintenance is handled more frequently than is economically viable in non-military environments, while other kinds of maintenance (& refueling perhaps?) are not required as the entire device is disposed of at the end of life.
Also they are surrounded at all times by extremely armed guards :-).
This is the same kind of overfitting you see from tech enthusiasts who, say, look at a CPU with a high clock speed and assume X and Y, not realizing all the other aspects that go into the design of a full system. Or wild zomg claims about so-called AI.
The article is about why they remain popular despite not making sense.
While he may or may not be accurate in his assessment at this time, he manages to gloss over any number of historical factors that have brought us to this junction.
Continuing to invest in nuclear is a good idea. There is money to do so and yes, the military provides much of that. And they control an immense amount of fissile material. Wouldn't it be great if there was a future where that material, which has been mined at great cost, refined at immense cost and handled at astounding cost could be used to benefit the populace that have afforded it?
The huge arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world only has one way to make its exit. I'd rather we continued to work on an alternative.