That nuclear plant was designed to withstand pretty serious attacks and natural disasters. In fact it was designed to withstand and airplane crashing into it.
They could be construed to advocate for more decentralized power production in order to be less vulnerable to targeted strikes in times of conflict. That doesn't rule out decentralized nuclear power production, though that has its fair share of trade-offs and unknowns. Depending on how one weighs those it might end up implying less nuclear.
Decentralized power generation is something we all need. Too bad so many politicians, especially Gavin Newsom FFS, are deep in the bockets of the utility companies who refuse to invest in it.
Why? Nuclear plants are extremely valuable targets for at least two reasons:
1. Destroying them can cause great environmental damage. People are going to be afraid of something like intentionally caused Chornobyl, which gives the attacker a lot of leverage.
2. Nuclear plant is a very centralized energy source, which means a huge disruption when one of them is hit.
I can't think of any other industrial complex that makes a country that vulnerable in case of a war.
Well, it goes to show that if you're a neighbor of Russia you have to be either a member of NATO, or have nuclear deterrence - it looks like that's the only thing that keeps Russians in their borders.
Putin decided to go to the Nazi Germany playbook and turn the Russian language into a casus beli to invade countries, as he could claim Russian speakers are in danger and he would proceed to annex land (Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine).
For now. A NATO left behind by a hypothetical second Trump administration might be a much less effective deterrent. With two nuclear powers on the continent and one latent nuclear power (Germany) and none in the east save Russia, things might get very interesting for a while if that came to pass.
That's signaling intention to uphold NATO by that particular congress, not something that would prevent a US government from bringing it down. If a US president were only to make it known that he or she would actively resist giving the required orders to fulfill NATO commitments in a crisis, I think the alliance in its current form would be walking dead from that point forward. There is considerable public doubt already as to whether the US would honor their commitment to wage a nuclear war over NATO matters and that's the keystone of the whole alliance. If Russia were to attack a NATO member and win the gamble, I'd expect a massive shift of power on the continent and a great loss of US soft power in Europe (at the least).
I have read an argument that this does not solve much, because "as commander-in-chief, Trump could (and likely would) simply refuse to order the military to come to the aid of NATO allies in the event of a Russian attack."
Well if Trump chooses to give the lead to China, that's certainly an option - the US can't be the leader of the free world, get all the perks, and then choose just the nice parts of it.
I mean, he can try, but I don't think it would work well.
Yep, russia wants war, look at how close they put their country to NATO... oh wait.
Ukraine is for russia the same as what cuba was for US... but back then, people did diplomacy and war was avoided... here they tried in instanbul, johnson and the rest told zelensky not to sign, and here we are
Except NATO and its primary members have a history of extreme military aggression (Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan) while Cuba just wanted to host nukes to prevent another bay of pigs type invasion.
So... are we going to count the wars russia started vs the wars US&allies started?
Genocide is a strong word... how many dead people count as a genocide? Because if russia applies the same rules as US, 500k dead children are worth it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM0uvgHKZe8 ... in a war half a planet away from USA.
> So... are we going to count the wars russia started vs the wars US&allies started?
Oh men, Russia used genocide even without war. Holodomor for example, as a way to kill millions of ethnic groups, or just the simple destruction of cultural landmarks like in Finland where they even razed cemeteries.
> Genocide is a strong word... how many dead people count as a genocide?
You need to educate yourself about genocide[0], it's not about number of people, or killing, it's about the actions with the intent to bring suffering to a group a people in an attempt to make them disappear.
Putin is wanted by the ICC for kidnapping and filtering Ukrainian children, one of the most disgusting crimes against humanity and constitutes one of the crimes genocide.
Despite the fact that the US has been involved in wars, none of them had the sickening intent of making a group of people disappear just because they exist, and erase their culture. If you want to look at that intent you need to observe Nazi Germany, Holodomor, Chechen war, that's what genocide looks like.
Holomodor was done by a different country, many many years ago... this is like mentioning the genocide of native americans in usa.
ICC is a political entity, and noone actually cares about it. It has no real power except for small countries that are bullied by nato and it's allies. They can't even prosecute ordinary american soldiers, what are they going to do against putin? - https://www.france24.com/en/20180910-usa-trump-threatens-arr...
> sickening intent of making a group of people disappear just because they exist, and erase their culture
Wait, so when is convinient for Russia they are the rightful heirs of USSR, but when it's about the bad things, it's a different country?
That's not how that works, you can't cherry-pick what you get. And the Chechnya genocide was also a different country?
> ICC is a political entity, and noone actually cares about it.
Is that the new Russian narrative? Then why can't Putin even go to South Africa or Brazil without being arrested? These are BRICS countries by the way!
Yep, after someone organizes a coup there to overthrow the government and replace them with a pro-nato one.
And the non-nato states and up like syria, libya, iraq and afghanistan. I live in a shitty small EU state, and even we had soldiers occupying afghanistan and still have them in syria. No wonder the rest of the world hates us.
NATO is an alliance of countries that feel they need protection. Why don't you question Russia's foreign policy with its neighbors? Why hasn't Russia established good relationships with those countries, instead of placing corrupt puppets as a way to control them?
Anyway, sovereign countries, like Ukraine, are free to make their choices, if they want to join NATO, and if they have the requirements, they should be able to join - it isn't NATO enforcing themselves onto others, lie Russia as done for decades.
> Ukraine is for russia the same as what cuba was for US...
I really can't see that logic: when did the US invade Cuba and stated it was US land all along because ethnic Americans were being prosecuted by cubans?
So NATO bombing of yugoslavia was protection of nato countries? Oh no, wait, it was a direct agression by nato. ...because of fighting with a terrorist group.
Where's the protection from the nato countries?
> Why hasn't Russia established good relationships with those countries, instead of placing corrupt puppets as a way to control them?
The puppets that won the elections and US had to organize a coup to remove? Victoria Nuland was literally giving away cookies there.
Yes, cuba is free to make their choice to be friendly with the soviet union and station missles there. But this was enough for usa to plan a fals flag attack and start a war with cuba: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods Luckily back then, diplomacy prevailed, and there was no war there.. but it was close. The embargo is still in play though,... There should be a vote in the UN against the embargo or something... oh wait, there was: https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/11/1143112 Just look at the results.
> So NATO bombing of yugoslavia was protection of nato countries? Oh no, wait, it was a direct agression by nato. ...because of fighting with a terrorist group.
NATO bombing Yugoslavia was because there was another genocide in the making (people seem to forget those, how they start and what it leads to). Guess who was against the intervention in the Security Council? Russia and China.
> The puppets that won the elections and US had to organize a coup to remove? Victoria Nuland was literally giving away cookies there.
Here comes the conspiracy theory, that a civil revolution after a president defraud their population with promises to try to join the EU, suddenly did a 180 turn in exchange for Russian cash - what a shock that people revolted.
> Yes, cuba is free to make their choice to be friendly with the soviet union and station missles there.
No one is placing nukes in Ukraine - yet apparently, they should now. Comparing Cuba in the 60's to Ukraine in 2023 is one of the most absurd pieces of Russian propaganda, only beaten by comparing Ukraine to Israel.
There was a war against terrorists in kosovo. But because USA had interests there, they removed KLA from the terrorist list in 1998 and had nato, a supposedly defensive organization, attack another country. If nato cared about genocide and went on offense again, it'd be bombing israel right now, but noone cares about brown people.
> Here comes the conspiracy theory, that a civil revolution after a president defraud their population with promises to try to join the EU, suddenly did a 180 turn in exchange for Russian cash - what a shock that people revolted.
Yep, all grassroots movements, no external financing and help to opposition group, nope, Victoria Nuland was there just randomly giving out cookies to protesters. The same thing is happening in serbia right now, vucic won, due to many reasons, and protesters with maidan flags, paid by outsiders are parading down the streets of belgrade. But as with iran, we have to wait for 50-60 years for the documents to come out.
> No one is placing nukes in Ukraine - yet apparently, they should now. Comparing Cuba in the 60's to Ukraine in 2023 is one of the most absurd pieces of Russian propaganda, only beaten by comparing Ukraine to Israel.
Maybe not nukes yet, but weapons systems targeting russia are already placed all along the nato border towards russia. If nato built a base in ukraine, who know what they'd put there. If a bunch of nato countries didn't gang up and attack a random country every few years, there would maybe be a bit less of nato hate around the world.
Also Israel is a lot more efficient at killing minorities in their country (depending on if you look at palestine as a part of isreal or a separate state). But otherwise, not too different, especially after ukraine cluster bombed a christmas market and an iceskating ring just now. The only difference is, that someone helped the minority in ukraine, and middle eastern countries are still a bit on the edge about helping palestine.. but considering how many countries got scared and bailed just due to houthi rockets, we're not far from another, much larger war there too, and US is already overextended, having to buy their own AD missles from japan, since they can't produce enough. I'm lucky to live in a small and unimportant part of EU, but when shit hits the fan, it will hurt in EU and US too.
> There was a war against terrorists in kosovo. But because USA had interests there, they removed KLA from the terrorist list in 1998 and had nato, a supposedly defensive organization, attack another country. If nato cared about genocide and went on offense again, it'd be bombing israel right now, but noone cares about brown people.
Right because Israel has the same capacity Kosovo had... In case you forgot the last time before that event when there was an ongoing genocide in Europe, it led to WW2 - which didn't seem much of an interesting theme for Russia and China, two countries known for using genocide as a tool.
> Yep, all grassroots movements, no external financing and help to opposition group, nope, Victoria Nuland was there just randomly giving out cookies to protesters.
Ah yes, the ultimate russian propaganda piece - millions of Ukrainians revolted not because of a corrupt rug pull by their president who took money from the Kremlin, but from Victoria Nuland cookies.
I can't make this up. This level of child like narrative is embarrassing.
> Maybe not nukes yet, but weapons systems targeting russia are already placed all along the nato border towards russia. If nato built a base in ukraine, who know what they'd put there. If a bunch of nato countries didn't gang up and attack a random country every few years, there would maybe be a bit less of nato hate around the world.
Then maybe Russia should stop invading sovereign countries? If the only way for Putin to remain in power is to keep neighboring countries controlled by puppets and lower living standards than Russia, all to disguise his own incompetence and corruption, then maybe - just maybe - sovereign countries wanting to join NATO isn't that bad of a thing.
> Also Israel is a lot more efficient at killing minorities in their country
Oh boy, look at Russia numbers, they do it by the millions.
Spain does not have many reactors, five I think, making up ~20% of the total power generation of the country. They also source their fuel from other countries like France, UK, or Russia.
In contrast, the domestic renewable energy industry is growing steadily and is arguably one of the leaders among EU countries.
Sorry to be blunt, but the wind people are building wind, the solar people are building solar, the fossil fuels people are supporting that... and what are the nuclear people doing apart from posting on the Internet? AFAICT that's all they're doing.
I think the people building wind earn the name pro-wind, same for solar as pro-solar, etc. And they are largely focused on their own efforts, as it's a lot of work to build power plants. I don't think online posters deserve to be called pro- anything since they don't really do anything other than talk, and it's mostly negative FUD so if anything they're anti-.
The point I'm trying to make is that it seems that the people who claim to be pro-nuclear aren't actually in favor of nuclear, otherwise they'd be building it. Everyone else is building what they want, everyone except the supposed nuclear group.
Nuclear reactors in Spain are very old. They have been phased out for years, and the nuclear lobby fights to keep the reactors on. This after a recent extension from 2028 to 2035.
OTOH, fossil fuels are also being phased out. Coal is gone after years fighting the coal lobby. Fuel is also quite low. The remaining fossils are gas in combined cycle power plants, and they are lowest priority energy in the market, i.e. they only produce if all the other energies combined cannot produce enough.
We have one of the best energy grids of Europe, and probably of the world. Blackouts are very rare events, the country is blessed both in sun and wind, and this 2023 half the energy produced was CO2 free. I'm sure they will phase out nuclear and fossils correctly in the next 10-15 years.
I don't know about Spain, but I can tell you what is happening in Australia. We aren't phasing out anything. "Phasing out" implies decommissioning a money making machine, and I've yet to see that happen anywhere.
Yet, Australia looks like it will be one of the leaders in the changeover to renewables. Instead of "phasing out" we are replacing things when they no longer are making money. By chance and good luck most (all?) of our coal fired power stations were built decades ago, and so are becoming very expensive to maintain. Their private owners (who aren't about to take a loss for the public good and who would happily continue to pump out CO2 if it made a buck) are decommissioning them at a brisk pace.
Politicians on the left like to claim their policies has something to do the rapid change over. Politicians on the right like to claim they are holding it up or stopping it. The reality seems to be neither are having much effect on the outcome. It's all driven by money. That said, the politicians of both sides sold the then publicly owned generators to private equity a decade or two ago. We were given lots of reasons by the pollies (like promises of cheaper power), most of which turned out to bullshit. But it did make this money driven transition possible.
There are two reasons the coal fired stations are now making losses. One is the aforementioned "they are old" and hence getting expensive to maintain. But that doesn't explain why they are shutting down earlier than their planned lifetimes. The reason they are doing that is because renewables are economic poison for coal fired power stations. The planners counted on selling near 100% of the power they generated. But renewables are supplying 75% of the power (long term average of course, 150% in one hour and 0% in the next) in some parts of Australia. Coal plants can't vary their output fast enough to match indeterminacy of renewables, so they often find themselves pushing power into a market that is literally paying negative prices for it. Power prices go through the roof of course when renewables drop to 0%, but coal can't ramp up anywhere near quickly enough to take advantage of it. Instead, the gas peakers step in with their high priced generation. So coal can't win either way.
Turns out that's a death sentence for a coal fired plant that's expensive to maintain, in spite of the fact that it's repaid it's capital costs years ago. Nuclear has the same problems competing against renewables, but on steroids. The capital costs take decades to recoup even with the assumption will make money from most of the demand in the plants catchment, and it's so bad at varying it's output to meet demand Japan (which has a lot of nuclear) has more pumped storage per unit generation (to soak up the excess output) than anywhere else on the planet.
So it's not a surprise to me that Spain is phasing out nuclear. We would be far better off climate wise if they didn't, but this isn't driven by climate or safety concerns. The decision is driven my money.
> making up ~20% of the total power generation of the country
> I think they will be fine
What? 20% is a lot. It'd be a big deal if somebody asked me to phase out 20% of my income, for example. It seems like the opposite of sensible public policy.
Phase out and replace. If your spouse asked you to phase out the 20% of your income which comes from [insert distasteful activity here] and replace it with [insert wholesome activity here], would that be a big deal to you?
There's nothing "distasteful" about nuclear power, and renewables are quite unreliable (they only work when there's a sun or wind), so what Spain is doing is just plain stupidity.
> once you have batteries or other long-term storage, but that's not good for your narrative, now is it?
Well, I'd love to see that happening in my lifetime (I just turned 40, so that leaves like 30-40 more years for some breakthrough to happen). For now it seems that the technology is simply not there yet.
EDIT: All of that is to say: I'd like for our policies to be based on the actual technology that we have, not on wishful thinking.
I have batteries in my home - 4.8kWh worth. The technology is very real.
But, also, we have to plan for tomorrow. We can predict with some degree of certainty how technology will develop. Tomorrow's computers are likely to be faster than today's; so we'll build a broadband network which is capable of exceeding today's demand.
It's the same with electricity. Nuclear has had decades to prove itself and come up short every single time. Solar and wind are exceeding expectations. Battery technology is rapidly evolving. Should we base our decisions on today's technology or tomorrow's?
Given how cheap 20kWh of battery is compared with the total cost of a house it’s shocking that there aren’t building requirements mandating that much storage.
Great investment, and no more power failures. But also, OP said this technology doesn't exist. You're pivoting to it exists but you can't afford it. Different question.
Downvoted because daring to say consumer power storage technology already exists conflicts with some sort of comforting folksy narrative that it doesn't? How is that in any way "Hacker" like? I thought we were supposed to be the bleeding edge types rapidly adopting the new toys. My bad? Downvote this too because "this isn't reddit" amIRight?
The distasteful part is that you leave a huge bill to future generations (best case) or leave their land uninhabitable (worst case). Take Sellafield in the UK, costs over 2 billion pounds per year for the foreseeable future and generates no power.
Sellafield also handles all waste from UK's nuclear plants. A site like that is needed whenever you have nuclear plants, bombs or not. In the US, the defence budget covers the storage of waste.
In Sweden the nuclear fund currently holds 7 billion and the estimated costs for storage are already at 12 billion euros and growing. Future taxpayers will pay the missing 5+ billion, but they will get no electricity from the plants that have been closed already.
France's EDF was recently nationalized for over 60 billion euros, which is also paid by taxpayers, not electricity bills.
Germanys taxpayers had to pay for the Asse II mine, long after the plants that produced the electricity that generated the waste were closed.
So as I said, best case you leave a large cost to future generations. We haven't seen a worst case yet but the fact that Saami people in Lapland had to feed their animals special food because 30 years after Chernobyl gives a hint about what a worst case could mean.
There are cheaper, safer, quicker and more stable options than nuclear, especially in Spain.
> Sellafield also handles all waste from UK's nuclear plants.
Let's see what you are trying to do here. If Sellafield handles both civilian and military waste, and Sellafield is bad, it follows that civilian nuclear waste is bad? That's your argument, right? And you see how it actually does not follow, logically speaking. It's like you saying this casino in Las Vegas is bad because there are lots of Mafia guys, and I say, yes, but at Carnegie Hall there are only musicians and ballerinas, and you say, sure but at at this Las Vegas casino there are musicians, ballerinas and Mafia guys, and it's a bad place, so Carnegie Hall must be a bad place too.
The vast majority of civilian nuclear power plants don't reprocess their spent fuel, and certainly not on site. They put the spent fuel first in some type of swimming pools with water, to allow them to cool down, and after a few years they put them in some dry casks.
The uranium from Sellafield was processed to extract the plutonium. That required huge amounts of chemicals, and there were some leaks. But those leaks are particular to the situation at Sellafield, and not relevant for the situation in Spain or other places that don't do reprocessing.
>If Sellafield handles both civilian and military waste, and Sellafield is bad, it follows that civilian nuclear waste is bad? That's your argument, right?
No my point is not about waste it's about cost. Every country that operates nuclear power hides costs from nuclear plants in other parts of their budget. Sellafield is just one example from the UK where we actually have numbers.
Countries that don't have a site like Sellafield must instead operate other storage facilities and handle unexpected costs related to them. Like Asse II in Germany or the 60 billion bailout of EDF in France or the underfinanced nuclear fund in Sweden, Rancho Seco in the US and so on.
Charting the actual true cost of nuclear power is difficult, but it's easy to see that there are large costs that are in fact hidden.
IMO this is very important to reveal, because many initiatives that could solve our problems are held back by the idea that they are "more expensive than nuclear", based on a fictional cost for nuclear.
Synthesized gas from renewables is an example that is very likely cheaper than nuclear as of 2023, even short-term.
The civilian nuclear reactor operators in the US used to have to pay to a waste disposal fund, that currently has more than $44 BN [1]. This is well above what one would need to do the job: the total cost of the WIPP, which is the disposal site for the military waste in the US [2] was/is $19 BN, and there's twice as much military waste as civilian waste.
> Countries that don't have a site like Sellafield must instead operate other storage facilities and handle unexpected costs related to them
Why? It's like saying that every state in the US needs to have a waste facility. One is enough. I don't see why every country in the EU that has nuclear power reactors needs its own long term disposal place. Finland built one, other countries could use it.
Plus, in the not so distant future we'll be able to significantly reduce the amount of high level waste by burning the actinides in it, and separating the unburned uranium (mainly U-238). This is not just pie in the sky, about 2 weeks ago Russia announced they have started manufacturing nuclear fuel with actinides extracted from waste [3].
>You mention underfunded, but not overfunded.
>The civilian nuclear reactor operators in the US used to have to pay to a waste disposal fund, that currently has more than $44 BN
The fund is supposed to finance Yucca Mountain but the current estimated cost of Yucca Mountain is over twice that at 96 bn:
So it seems the US fund is in fact massively underfunded, not overfunded, do you agree or am I missing something?
>It's like saying that every state in the US needs to have a waste facility. One is enough.
Every country that operates nuclear plants needs to manage the waste for at least a while. Currently most of them do so for the foreseeable future at the site where there is, or has ever been, a nuclear plant.
>Plus, in the not so distant future we'll be able to significantly reduce the amount of high level waste by burning the actinides in it
But if we can already now generate gas from solar panels cheaper than we can operate nuclear plants, why can't we put our efforts into that instead? Why does it HAVE to be nuclear at any cost?
An infrastructure that is massively overprovisioned from solar and other green sources and converts overproduction to gas whenever there is overproduction will be a gift to the future like hydropower dams have been (electricity-wise anyway). Once the investment is paid off it will keep giving cheap, reliable, distributed, failsafe electricity forever. That's better than even the most optimistic speculation for what can be done with nuclear.
> So it seems the US fund is in fact massively underfunded, not overfunded, do you agree or am I missing something?
Let's take that 96 billion at face value. I don't see why it needs to be so many times higher than WIPP, that handles more waste, but whatever, it's the official estimate of the DOE, from 2008.
Here's another statement from the DOE in 2011, stating that they find the current fee (0.1 cents per kWh) to be adequate.
The fee put on hold in 2017 due to a Federal Court ruling that the Government can't collect that fee and do nothing with it. If the Yuca Montain repository project is restarted, then one can see the fee being reinstated, and there's a good chance the fee that was uncollected over the last 7 years will be collected in arrears.
> Why does it HAVE to be nuclear at any cost?
It looks to me it's the other way round. I never heard a pro-nuclear guy (I'm one) saying don't build solar or wind. It's the anti-nuclear guys (presumaby you're one) that say "DO NOT BUILD NUCLEAR". Or am I missing something?
>It looks to me it's the other way round. I never heard a pro-nuclear guy (I'm one) saying don't build solar or wind. It's the anti-nuclear guys (presumaby you're one) that say "DO NOT BUILD NUCLEAR". Or am I missing something?
That's true, I'm basically saying do not build nuclear. But I feel like I have investigated it with an open mind, looked at the facts and reached the logical conclusion that spending money on nuclear infrastructure is a mistake.
Basically I am convinced that we can add more stable energy with less downsides in shorter time to the grid using other means than building nuclear plants. And the money we need to do that comes from the same purse that finances nuclear.
But here we were not talking about building new nuclear. We were talking about discontinuing existing nuclear.
In my state, New York, they decommissioned two perfectly good gigawatt reactors in 2020 and 2021. The idea was to replace them with renewables. Guess what? They build 3 natural gas power plants and replaced 2 GW worth of zero carbon electricity with 1.8 GW worth of emissions.
> As a result of the permanent shutdown of the plant, three new natural-gas fired power plants: Bayonne Energy Center, CPV Valley Energy Center, and Cricket Valley Energy Center were built, with a total capacity of 1.8 GW, replacing 90% of the 2.0 GW of carbon-free electricity previously generated by the plant. As a consequence, New York is expected to struggle to meet its climate goals.
>But here we were not talking about building new nuclear. We were talking about discontinuing existing nuclear.
That's a fair point. The main argument in support of nuclear I can agree with is that once you've had nuclear operations in the country, you have to pay for it whether you continue or not, so you might as well continue. Some profit is better than no profit.
But even that argument depends on whether existing nuclear plants are in fact profitable, so it is still important to find all the hidden costs.
Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting anyone ever replaces nuclear with fossil fuels. That said, Indian Point is interesting:
Entergy (the operator) cited sustained low market prices for electricity as the reason for the closure of the plant. But the average price of electricity in NYC has been 50% higher since about 2010 than it was for the 3 decades before 2010.
Why is an old nuclear plant unprofitable after 40 years despite electricity prices being higher than ever? One explanation could be that it was in fact never profitable, but the true costs haven't been accounted for until now. "We assumed the problem would go away but it hasn't and now it's kind of expensive".
This explanation also fits for France, who recently increased their state-dictated prices for nuclear from 44 euros per MWh to 70. Nuclear power estimates seems to get more expensive over time - which makes no sense unless the true costs were actually unknown/ignored when the initial estimates were made.
That's the theory that makes the most sense to me at the moment anyway, even though it might be a bit speculative.
If New York starts synthesizing hydrogen, they can use the new gas plants with up to 50% hydrogen in the mix with little or no alteration. At least that's something...
I perceive some double standards here. For green hydrogen to be economic, you need a 10x reduction in production cost. Would you treat the following hypotheticals as equivalent?
1. If green hydrogen were 10x cheaper to make then ...
2. If nuclear reactors were 10x cheaper to build then ...
I think we have passed the threshold for production cost. According to this overview [1] solar was at 1 cent per kwh a few years ago and panels are even cheaper now.
Hydrogen can be created at 80% efficiency, so it seems like we should be able to generate hydrogen for somewhere around 2 cents per kWh once the investment in electrolysers are paid off. Converting the hydrogen back to electricity triples that but even 6 cents is cheaper than nuclear.
Also, you wouldn't need to actually build solar specifically for this purpose. You could have the electrolysers run whenever the market conditions provide cheap electricity for any reason. Windy nights, warm winters, cold summers, economic downtimes, whatever - generate cheap gas to use later.
And again, this infrastructure will never get more expensive in the future. There are no leaking storage sites that have to be sanitized (Asse II), no cracks in reactors that cost billions to fix (France) no Sellafields, Fukushimas or Chernobyls will ever happen related to hydrogen.
If I interpret your question correctly you're basically saying "If nuclear was as cheap as green hydrogen, would I consider nuclear then"? The answer to that is no, I wouldn't, because I think that the orders of magnitude larger risks for unknown costs with nuclear also have to be considered.
Even if nuclear was half as expensive as green hydrogen to operate it would be better to go for hydrogen, and since it seems likely that nuclear is instead the MORE expensive one, the choice should be very easy.
At the very least I think the moment is ripe for a budget the size of a typical nuclear power plant to be spent on making a few large scale hydrogen facilities. Try it out at scale. It will take a few years but far less time than building a new reactor.
> you're basically saying "If nuclear was as cheap as green hydrogen, would I consider nuclear then"?
No, that's not what I was saying.
What I was saying is: both green hydrogen and nuclear are technologies that are currently too expensive compared to what the market can bear. But technology can evolve. If the cost of nuclear went down by a factor of 10, would you become a proponent of nuclear technology? What if it went down by a factor of 100? Is there any level where you would?
If not, and you concede that there's no way for you to change your mind, why are you trying to change my mind? Why are you debating? It does not seem honest to me to engage in a debate where your position is that you would never change your mind, but expect the other guy to be willing to change theirs.
Edit (to answer because we reached max depth limit): There's nothing for me to change my mind, I already think nuclear is too expensive to build. Here's my statement on HN a few days ago:
But does nuclear have the potential to become 10, 100 or 1000 times cheaper? I think so. Just 3 weeks ago Kairos received an NRC permission to build a pilot FLiBe reactor.
>If not, and you concede that there's no way for you to change your mind, why are you trying to change my mind?
I'm trying to change your mind because I honestly believe you are mistaken in your position on nuclear. Also because you are arguing well and seemingly in good faith, which I appreciate. We all have biases and you might show me my blind spots, it's important to challenge oneself.
If the truth turns out to be that nuclear is entirely safe and the cheapest option available, I wouldn't be opposed to it. I have seen absolutely nothing anywhere to indicate that this is the case.
Now, if the truth turns out to be that it is both much more expensive than we have been told, more so than many alternatives, as well as famously risky, would you stop supporting nuclear? If not, why?
I have found many many sources that indicate that the second scenario is true, but none that indicate that the first scenario is true. I sincerely hope that's the only reason why I have my opinion.
It’s a much larger share of the power generation of Catalonia. Is this really about nuclear power or undermining the economic self-sufficiency of a separatist region?
Oh you mean the Germany that had to turn to massive amounts of coal to keep up energy production in order to keep their people from starving because clean energy didn't pan out. Sounds like a great example especially when climate change is an existential threat to the entire human race.
Yeah Germany is doing pretty badly they are up and now at 25% coal [0]. Back when they had 12.6% nuclear energy in the mix, it was only 29% [1] coal. Back in those days Germany used to burn much less coal...
Your talking point was one of the outputs of that American shamefest I was referring to. They were furious at Germany and so said... what you just did.
The graph of Germany's energy mix over time doesnt quite tell the this story, however:
In fact it shows that nuclear power was never that relevant to Germany and that that loud hissy fit was about a change in < 5% of Germany's electricity mix. Why so controversial?
Well, the reason for this political shamefest are a bit murky - possibly military related - but one thing is certain: it had less than nothing to do with environmentalism. That was a cover.
I’m looking at your graph. If you go back to 2010 when Germany had 20 GW of nuclear production, keeping that capacity online could have replaced more than half of the coal power Germany generates today. Meanwhile natural gas has grown from 23.8 to 34.8 GW, significantly more than the meager reductions in coal generation over that period.
Nonetheless solar and wind have taken up the vast majority of the slack from decommissioned coal and nuclear power.
The narrative that coal substituted for nuclear power is a very blatant lie, and motivated more by political/military concerns rather than any concern for the environment.
> The narrative that coal substituted for nuclear power is a very blatant lie
It’s not a lie. Germany has decommissioned 20 GW of nuclear power since 2010, according to the statistics you provided. Over 37 GW of coal power remains online. If Germany kept the nuclear plants online, they could have instead decommissioned an additional 20 GW of coal power. But they didn’t. Which means 20 out of the 37 GW of German coal power is directly substituting for nuclear power.
Hey I remember seeing this before in another European country. Can't remember the name of it, decided to shut down nuclear, renewables didn't turn out, put them in a precarious position when the geopolitical situation changed. Can't remember exactly what happened after that. Anyway I am sure it all worked out fine in the end.
It's usually not that simple. Not all power sources are equal. Solar and wind, which Spain is focusing on, are very variable unlike geothermal and hydro for example. Nuclear and gas are very attractive for grid stability. Inter-connectors with other countries also help. Renewable + storage is going to get very exciting going forward, assuming we get battery storage less prone to fires.
How does that help stability? You still need the peakers, unless you propose building excess amounts at massive capital cost to be used for an hour or two a day
I meant you don't need to vary nuclear plants down when they're producing too much electricity, I guess that does mean you'd need to be over capacity as a matter of course.
This is a fucking stupid decision. Nuclear fuel is incredible and basically free when you factor in energy density. We have effectively unlimited uranium in the world. Nuclear waste disposal is a solved problem. This is just nonsense.
Maybe you live in another universe than I do but over here nuclear fuel is neither "basically free", nor is disposal of its waste products a solved problem. As another commentator mentioned[0], handling nuclear waste already cost and will continue to cost billions and these costs rarely, if ever, get factored into electricity prices.
It is though. Uranium is literally the majority of the earths mass under the crust. It produces so little waste relative to the space needed to store it, it’s basically negligible.
This is great news, Spain should be able to match the best solar installations in the US at 1.5 cents per kwh, which means that they can generate hydrogen and use hydrogen for electricity at a lower total cost than French nuclear power!
An additional benefit is that burning hydrogen returns water, which Spain regularly has a shortage of.
The political (not technical) decision to close nuclear power plants in Spain will accelerate the impoverishment that Spaniards are already suffering.
A few facts:
1) The cost of closing the plants will be 22600M€.
2) The demolition and recycling will emit 28MTn CO2 .
3) Siemens Gamesa (which manufactures wind turbines) is bankrupt, but the Government of Spain is subsidizing 600000€ for each worker that is not fired.
4) In Galicia and Asturias (areas in the north and northwest of Spain) forests are being cut to put wind turbines.
It is a subsidized business and economically they are not profitable.
102 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] thread1. Destroying them can cause great environmental damage. People are going to be afraid of something like intentionally caused Chornobyl, which gives the attacker a lot of leverage.
2. Nuclear plant is a very centralized energy source, which means a huge disruption when one of them is hit.
I can't think of any other industrial complex that makes a country that vulnerable in case of a war.
Putin decided to go to the Nazi Germany playbook and turn the Russian language into a casus beli to invade countries, as he could claim Russian speakers are in danger and he would proceed to annex land (Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine).
[1] https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/some-thoughts-on-where-the-war...
BTW, the linked article by Noah Smith is pretty interesting, IMHO.
I mean, he can try, but I don't think it would work well.
Ukraine is for russia the same as what cuba was for US... but back then, people did diplomacy and war was avoided... here they tried in instanbul, johnson and the rest told zelensky not to sign, and here we are
Genocide is a strong word... how many dead people count as a genocide? Because if russia applies the same rules as US, 500k dead children are worth it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM0uvgHKZe8 ... in a war half a planet away from USA.
Oh men, Russia used genocide even without war. Holodomor for example, as a way to kill millions of ethnic groups, or just the simple destruction of cultural landmarks like in Finland where they even razed cemeteries.
> Genocide is a strong word... how many dead people count as a genocide?
You need to educate yourself about genocide[0], it's not about number of people, or killing, it's about the actions with the intent to bring suffering to a group a people in an attempt to make them disappear.
Putin is wanted by the ICC for kidnapping and filtering Ukrainian children, one of the most disgusting crimes against humanity and constitutes one of the crimes genocide.
Despite the fact that the US has been involved in wars, none of them had the sickening intent of making a group of people disappear just because they exist, and erase their culture. If you want to look at that intent you need to observe Nazi Germany, Holodomor, Chechen war, that's what genocide looks like.
[0]https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml
ICC is a political entity, and noone actually cares about it. It has no real power except for small countries that are bullied by nato and it's allies. They can't even prosecute ordinary american soldiers, what are they going to do against putin? - https://www.france24.com/en/20180910-usa-trump-threatens-arr...
> sickening intent of making a group of people disappear just because they exist, and erase their culture
Like forbidding their language, burning their books, outlawing their religion and destroying their monuments? Oh wait, ukraine did that. https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-sure-doesnt-look-like-democ...
That's not how that works, you can't cherry-pick what you get. And the Chechnya genocide was also a different country?
> ICC is a political entity, and noone actually cares about it.
Is that the new Russian narrative? Then why can't Putin even go to South Africa or Brazil without being arrested? These are BRICS countries by the way!
And the non-nato states and up like syria, libya, iraq and afghanistan. I live in a shitty small EU state, and even we had soldiers occupying afghanistan and still have them in syria. No wonder the rest of the world hates us.
Anyway, sovereign countries, like Ukraine, are free to make their choices, if they want to join NATO, and if they have the requirements, they should be able to join - it isn't NATO enforcing themselves onto others, lie Russia as done for decades.
> Ukraine is for russia the same as what cuba was for US...
I really can't see that logic: when did the US invade Cuba and stated it was US land all along because ethnic Americans were being prosecuted by cubans?
Where's the protection from the nato countries?
> Why hasn't Russia established good relationships with those countries, instead of placing corrupt puppets as a way to control them?
The puppets that won the elections and US had to organize a coup to remove? Victoria Nuland was literally giving away cookies there.
Yes, cuba is free to make their choice to be friendly with the soviet union and station missles there. But this was enough for usa to plan a fals flag attack and start a war with cuba: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods Luckily back then, diplomacy prevailed, and there was no war there.. but it was close. The embargo is still in play though,... There should be a vote in the UN against the embargo or something... oh wait, there was: https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/11/1143112 Just look at the results.
NATO bombing Yugoslavia was because there was another genocide in the making (people seem to forget those, how they start and what it leads to). Guess who was against the intervention in the Security Council? Russia and China.
> The puppets that won the elections and US had to organize a coup to remove? Victoria Nuland was literally giving away cookies there.
Here comes the conspiracy theory, that a civil revolution after a president defraud their population with promises to try to join the EU, suddenly did a 180 turn in exchange for Russian cash - what a shock that people revolted.
> Yes, cuba is free to make their choice to be friendly with the soviet union and station missles there.
No one is placing nukes in Ukraine - yet apparently, they should now. Comparing Cuba in the 60's to Ukraine in 2023 is one of the most absurd pieces of Russian propaganda, only beaten by comparing Ukraine to Israel.
> Here comes the conspiracy theory, that a civil revolution after a president defraud their population with promises to try to join the EU, suddenly did a 180 turn in exchange for Russian cash - what a shock that people revolted.
Yep, all grassroots movements, no external financing and help to opposition group, nope, Victoria Nuland was there just randomly giving out cookies to protesters. The same thing is happening in serbia right now, vucic won, due to many reasons, and protesters with maidan flags, paid by outsiders are parading down the streets of belgrade. But as with iran, we have to wait for 50-60 years for the documents to come out.
> No one is placing nukes in Ukraine - yet apparently, they should now. Comparing Cuba in the 60's to Ukraine in 2023 is one of the most absurd pieces of Russian propaganda, only beaten by comparing Ukraine to Israel.
Maybe not nukes yet, but weapons systems targeting russia are already placed all along the nato border towards russia. If nato built a base in ukraine, who know what they'd put there. If a bunch of nato countries didn't gang up and attack a random country every few years, there would maybe be a bit less of nato hate around the world.
Also Israel is a lot more efficient at killing minorities in their country (depending on if you look at palestine as a part of isreal or a separate state). But otherwise, not too different, especially after ukraine cluster bombed a christmas market and an iceskating ring just now. The only difference is, that someone helped the minority in ukraine, and middle eastern countries are still a bit on the edge about helping palestine.. but considering how many countries got scared and bailed just due to houthi rockets, we're not far from another, much larger war there too, and US is already overextended, having to buy their own AD missles from japan, since they can't produce enough. I'm lucky to live in a small and unimportant part of EU, but when shit hits the fan, it will hurt in EU and US too.
Right because Israel has the same capacity Kosovo had... In case you forgot the last time before that event when there was an ongoing genocide in Europe, it led to WW2 - which didn't seem much of an interesting theme for Russia and China, two countries known for using genocide as a tool.
> Yep, all grassroots movements, no external financing and help to opposition group, nope, Victoria Nuland was there just randomly giving out cookies to protesters.
Ah yes, the ultimate russian propaganda piece - millions of Ukrainians revolted not because of a corrupt rug pull by their president who took money from the Kremlin, but from Victoria Nuland cookies.
I can't make this up. This level of child like narrative is embarrassing.
> Maybe not nukes yet, but weapons systems targeting russia are already placed all along the nato border towards russia. If nato built a base in ukraine, who know what they'd put there. If a bunch of nato countries didn't gang up and attack a random country every few years, there would maybe be a bit less of nato hate around the world.
Then maybe Russia should stop invading sovereign countries? If the only way for Putin to remain in power is to keep neighboring countries controlled by puppets and lower living standards than Russia, all to disguise his own incompetence and corruption, then maybe - just maybe - sovereign countries wanting to join NATO isn't that bad of a thing.
> Also Israel is a lot more efficient at killing minorities in their country
Oh boy, look at Russia numbers, they do it by the millions.
We're done here.
In contrast, the domestic renewable energy industry is growing steadily and is arguably one of the leaders among EU countries.
I think they will be fine.
See the anti nuclear movements
The point I'm trying to make is that it seems that the people who claim to be pro-nuclear aren't actually in favor of nuclear, otherwise they'd be building it. Everyone else is building what they want, everyone except the supposed nuclear group.
OTOH, fossil fuels are also being phased out. Coal is gone after years fighting the coal lobby. Fuel is also quite low. The remaining fossils are gas in combined cycle power plants, and they are lowest priority energy in the market, i.e. they only produce if all the other energies combined cannot produce enough.
We have one of the best energy grids of Europe, and probably of the world. Blackouts are very rare events, the country is blessed both in sun and wind, and this 2023 half the energy produced was CO2 free. I'm sure they will phase out nuclear and fossils correctly in the next 10-15 years.
Yet, Australia looks like it will be one of the leaders in the changeover to renewables. Instead of "phasing out" we are replacing things when they no longer are making money. By chance and good luck most (all?) of our coal fired power stations were built decades ago, and so are becoming very expensive to maintain. Their private owners (who aren't about to take a loss for the public good and who would happily continue to pump out CO2 if it made a buck) are decommissioning them at a brisk pace.
Politicians on the left like to claim their policies has something to do the rapid change over. Politicians on the right like to claim they are holding it up or stopping it. The reality seems to be neither are having much effect on the outcome. It's all driven by money. That said, the politicians of both sides sold the then publicly owned generators to private equity a decade or two ago. We were given lots of reasons by the pollies (like promises of cheaper power), most of which turned out to bullshit. But it did make this money driven transition possible.
There are two reasons the coal fired stations are now making losses. One is the aforementioned "they are old" and hence getting expensive to maintain. But that doesn't explain why they are shutting down earlier than their planned lifetimes. The reason they are doing that is because renewables are economic poison for coal fired power stations. The planners counted on selling near 100% of the power they generated. But renewables are supplying 75% of the power (long term average of course, 150% in one hour and 0% in the next) in some parts of Australia. Coal plants can't vary their output fast enough to match indeterminacy of renewables, so they often find themselves pushing power into a market that is literally paying negative prices for it. Power prices go through the roof of course when renewables drop to 0%, but coal can't ramp up anywhere near quickly enough to take advantage of it. Instead, the gas peakers step in with their high priced generation. So coal can't win either way.
Turns out that's a death sentence for a coal fired plant that's expensive to maintain, in spite of the fact that it's repaid it's capital costs years ago. Nuclear has the same problems competing against renewables, but on steroids. The capital costs take decades to recoup even with the assumption will make money from most of the demand in the plants catchment, and it's so bad at varying it's output to meet demand Japan (which has a lot of nuclear) has more pumped storage per unit generation (to soak up the excess output) than anywhere else on the planet.
So it's not a surprise to me that Spain is phasing out nuclear. We would be far better off climate wise if they didn't, but this isn't driven by climate or safety concerns. The decision is driven my money.
> I think they will be fine
What? 20% is a lot. It'd be a big deal if somebody asked me to phase out 20% of my income, for example. It seems like the opposite of sensible public policy.
Hate hate hate on all the either/or politics here. We need both (though increasingly less nuclear with time), and we needed it yesterday.
Well, I'd love to see that happening in my lifetime (I just turned 40, so that leaves like 30-40 more years for some breakthrough to happen). For now it seems that the technology is simply not there yet.
EDIT: All of that is to say: I'd like for our policies to be based on the actual technology that we have, not on wishful thinking.
But, also, we have to plan for tomorrow. We can predict with some degree of certainty how technology will develop. Tomorrow's computers are likely to be faster than today's; so we'll build a broadband network which is capable of exceeding today's demand.
It's the same with electricity. Nuclear has had decades to prove itself and come up short every single time. Solar and wind are exceeding expectations. Battery technology is rapidly evolving. Should we base our decisions on today's technology or tomorrow's?
https://www.ecodirect.com/FranklinWH-FHP-13-6-kWh-AC-Battery...
Tell me again how this technology hasn't happened yet?
$3600+/year.
Great investment, and no more power failures. But also, OP said this technology doesn't exist. You're pivoting to it exists but you can't afford it. Different question.
In Sweden the nuclear fund currently holds 7 billion and the estimated costs for storage are already at 12 billion euros and growing. Future taxpayers will pay the missing 5+ billion, but they will get no electricity from the plants that have been closed already.
France's EDF was recently nationalized for over 60 billion euros, which is also paid by taxpayers, not electricity bills.
Germanys taxpayers had to pay for the Asse II mine, long after the plants that produced the electricity that generated the waste were closed.
So as I said, best case you leave a large cost to future generations. We haven't seen a worst case yet but the fact that Saami people in Lapland had to feed their animals special food because 30 years after Chernobyl gives a hint about what a worst case could mean.
There are cheaper, safer, quicker and more stable options than nuclear, especially in Spain.
Let's see what you are trying to do here. If Sellafield handles both civilian and military waste, and Sellafield is bad, it follows that civilian nuclear waste is bad? That's your argument, right? And you see how it actually does not follow, logically speaking. It's like you saying this casino in Las Vegas is bad because there are lots of Mafia guys, and I say, yes, but at Carnegie Hall there are only musicians and ballerinas, and you say, sure but at at this Las Vegas casino there are musicians, ballerinas and Mafia guys, and it's a bad place, so Carnegie Hall must be a bad place too.
The vast majority of civilian nuclear power plants don't reprocess their spent fuel, and certainly not on site. They put the spent fuel first in some type of swimming pools with water, to allow them to cool down, and after a few years they put them in some dry casks.
The uranium from Sellafield was processed to extract the plutonium. That required huge amounts of chemicals, and there were some leaks. But those leaks are particular to the situation at Sellafield, and not relevant for the situation in Spain or other places that don't do reprocessing.
No my point is not about waste it's about cost. Every country that operates nuclear power hides costs from nuclear plants in other parts of their budget. Sellafield is just one example from the UK where we actually have numbers.
Countries that don't have a site like Sellafield must instead operate other storage facilities and handle unexpected costs related to them. Like Asse II in Germany or the 60 billion bailout of EDF in France or the underfinanced nuclear fund in Sweden, Rancho Seco in the US and so on.
Charting the actual true cost of nuclear power is difficult, but it's easy to see that there are large costs that are in fact hidden.
IMO this is very important to reveal, because many initiatives that could solve our problems are held back by the idea that they are "more expensive than nuclear", based on a fictional cost for nuclear.
Synthesized gas from renewables is an example that is very likely cheaper than nuclear as of 2023, even short-term.
The civilian nuclear reactor operators in the US used to have to pay to a waste disposal fund, that currently has more than $44 BN [1]. This is well above what one would need to do the job: the total cost of the WIPP, which is the disposal site for the military waste in the US [2] was/is $19 BN, and there's twice as much military waste as civilian waste.
> Countries that don't have a site like Sellafield must instead operate other storage facilities and handle unexpected costs related to them
Why? It's like saying that every state in the US needs to have a waste facility. One is enough. I don't see why every country in the EU that has nuclear power reactors needs its own long term disposal place. Finland built one, other countries could use it.
Plus, in the not so distant future we'll be able to significantly reduce the amount of high level waste by burning the actinides in it, and separating the unburned uranium (mainly U-238). This is not just pie in the sky, about 2 weeks ago Russia announced they have started manufacturing nuclear fuel with actinides extracted from waste [3].
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/18/nuclear-waste-why-theres-no-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
[3] https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Mixed-oxide-fuel-wit...
The fund is supposed to finance Yucca Mountain but the current estimated cost of Yucca Mountain is over twice that at 96 bn:
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/wr-yucca_mountain_cost_es....
Furthermore, those 44 billion won't even cover 10 years of the current running costs of handling waste, even accounting for interests.
https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/steep-costs-nuclear...
So it seems the US fund is in fact massively underfunded, not overfunded, do you agree or am I missing something?
>It's like saying that every state in the US needs to have a waste facility. One is enough.
Every country that operates nuclear plants needs to manage the waste for at least a while. Currently most of them do so for the foreseeable future at the site where there is, or has ever been, a nuclear plant.
>Plus, in the not so distant future we'll be able to significantly reduce the amount of high level waste by burning the actinides in it
But if we can already now generate gas from solar panels cheaper than we can operate nuclear plants, why can't we put our efforts into that instead? Why does it HAVE to be nuclear at any cost?
An infrastructure that is massively overprovisioned from solar and other green sources and converts overproduction to gas whenever there is overproduction will be a gift to the future like hydropower dams have been (electricity-wise anyway). Once the investment is paid off it will keep giving cheap, reliable, distributed, failsafe electricity forever. That's better than even the most optimistic speculation for what can be done with nuclear.
Let's take that 96 billion at face value. I don't see why it needs to be so many times higher than WIPP, that handles more waste, but whatever, it's the official estimate of the DOE, from 2008.
Here's another statement from the DOE in 2011, stating that they find the current fee (0.1 cents per kWh) to be adequate.
The fee put on hold in 2017 due to a Federal Court ruling that the Government can't collect that fee and do nothing with it. If the Yuca Montain repository project is restarted, then one can see the fee being reinstated, and there's a good chance the fee that was uncollected over the last 7 years will be collected in arrears.
> Why does it HAVE to be nuclear at any cost?
It looks to me it's the other way round. I never heard a pro-nuclear guy (I'm one) saying don't build solar or wind. It's the anti-nuclear guys (presumaby you're one) that say "DO NOT BUILD NUCLEAR". Or am I missing something?
That's true, I'm basically saying do not build nuclear. But I feel like I have investigated it with an open mind, looked at the facts and reached the logical conclusion that spending money on nuclear infrastructure is a mistake.
Basically I am convinced that we can add more stable energy with less downsides in shorter time to the grid using other means than building nuclear plants. And the money we need to do that comes from the same purse that finances nuclear.
But here we were not talking about building new nuclear. We were talking about discontinuing existing nuclear.
In my state, New York, they decommissioned two perfectly good gigawatt reactors in 2020 and 2021. The idea was to replace them with renewables. Guess what? They build 3 natural gas power plants and replaced 2 GW worth of zero carbon electricity with 1.8 GW worth of emissions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_CenterThat's a fair point. The main argument in support of nuclear I can agree with is that once you've had nuclear operations in the country, you have to pay for it whether you continue or not, so you might as well continue. Some profit is better than no profit.
But even that argument depends on whether existing nuclear plants are in fact profitable, so it is still important to find all the hidden costs.
Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting anyone ever replaces nuclear with fossil fuels. That said, Indian Point is interesting:
Entergy (the operator) cited sustained low market prices for electricity as the reason for the closure of the plant. But the average price of electricity in NYC has been 50% higher since about 2010 than it was for the 3 decades before 2010.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APUS12A72610
Why is an old nuclear plant unprofitable after 40 years despite electricity prices being higher than ever? One explanation could be that it was in fact never profitable, but the true costs haven't been accounted for until now. "We assumed the problem would go away but it hasn't and now it's kind of expensive".
This explanation also fits for France, who recently increased their state-dictated prices for nuclear from 44 euros per MWh to 70. Nuclear power estimates seems to get more expensive over time - which makes no sense unless the true costs were actually unknown/ignored when the initial estimates were made.
That's the theory that makes the most sense to me at the moment anyway, even though it might be a bit speculative.
If New York starts synthesizing hydrogen, they can use the new gas plants with up to 50% hydrogen in the mix with little or no alteration. At least that's something...
I perceive some double standards here. For green hydrogen to be economic, you need a 10x reduction in production cost. Would you treat the following hypotheticals as equivalent?
1. If green hydrogen were 10x cheaper to make then ... 2. If nuclear reactors were 10x cheaper to build then ...
Hydrogen can be created at 80% efficiency, so it seems like we should be able to generate hydrogen for somewhere around 2 cents per kWh once the investment in electrolysers are paid off. Converting the hydrogen back to electricity triples that but even 6 cents is cheaper than nuclear.
Also, you wouldn't need to actually build solar specifically for this purpose. You could have the electrolysers run whenever the market conditions provide cheap electricity for any reason. Windy nights, warm winters, cold summers, economic downtimes, whatever - generate cheap gas to use later.
And again, this infrastructure will never get more expensive in the future. There are no leaking storage sites that have to be sanitized (Asse II), no cracks in reactors that cost billions to fix (France) no Sellafields, Fukushimas or Chernobyls will ever happen related to hydrogen.
If I interpret your question correctly you're basically saying "If nuclear was as cheap as green hydrogen, would I consider nuclear then"? The answer to that is no, I wouldn't, because I think that the orders of magnitude larger risks for unknown costs with nuclear also have to be considered.
Even if nuclear was half as expensive as green hydrogen to operate it would be better to go for hydrogen, and since it seems likely that nuclear is instead the MORE expensive one, the choice should be very easy.
At the very least I think the moment is ripe for a budget the size of a typical nuclear power plant to be spent on making a few large scale hydrogen facilities. Try it out at scale. It will take a few years but far less time than building a new reactor.
[1] https://commercialsolarguy.com/lowest-solar-power-prices-in-...
No, that's not what I was saying.
What I was saying is: both green hydrogen and nuclear are technologies that are currently too expensive compared to what the market can bear. But technology can evolve. If the cost of nuclear went down by a factor of 10, would you become a proponent of nuclear technology? What if it went down by a factor of 100? Is there any level where you would?
If not, and you concede that there's no way for you to change your mind, why are you trying to change my mind? Why are you debating? It does not seem honest to me to engage in a debate where your position is that you would never change your mind, but expect the other guy to be willing to change theirs.
Edit (to answer because we reached max depth limit): There's nothing for me to change my mind, I already think nuclear is too expensive to build. Here's my statement on HN a few days ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38787356
But does nuclear have the potential to become 10, 100 or 1000 times cheaper? I think so. Just 3 weeks ago Kairos received an NRC permission to build a pilot FLiBe reactor.
https://www.powermag.com/kairos-hermes-secures-first-nrc-gre...
I'm trying to change your mind because I honestly believe you are mistaken in your position on nuclear. Also because you are arguing well and seemingly in good faith, which I appreciate. We all have biases and you might show me my blind spots, it's important to challenge oneself.
If the truth turns out to be that nuclear is entirely safe and the cheapest option available, I wouldn't be opposed to it. I have seen absolutely nothing anywhere to indicate that this is the case.
Now, if the truth turns out to be that it is both much more expensive than we have been told, more so than many alternatives, as well as famously risky, would you stop supporting nuclear? If not, why?
I have found many many sources that indicate that the second scenario is true, but none that indicate that the first scenario is true. I sincerely hope that's the only reason why I have my opinion.
And Spain has no need for nukes so why does it need a nuclear industry to provide industrial support for them? It's not Iran, Russia or America.
I bet the US military industrial complex will be salty though, exactly as they were with Germany when their bean counters ordered a nuclear phase out.
Oh you mean the Germany that had to turn to massive amounts of coal to keep up energy production in order to keep their people from starving because clean energy didn't pan out. Sounds like a great example especially when climate change is an existential threat to the entire human race.
[0] https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?l=en&...
[1] https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?l=en&...
The graph of Germany's energy mix over time doesnt quite tell the this story, however:
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/p...
In fact it shows that nuclear power was never that relevant to Germany and that that loud hissy fit was about a change in < 5% of Germany's electricity mix. Why so controversial?
Well, the reason for this political shamefest are a bit murky - possibly military related - but one thing is certain: it had less than nothing to do with environmentalism. That was a cover.
The narrative that coal substituted for nuclear power is a very blatant lie, and motivated more by political/military concerns rather than any concern for the environment.
It’s not a lie. Germany has decommissioned 20 GW of nuclear power since 2010, according to the statistics you provided. Over 37 GW of coal power remains online. If Germany kept the nuclear plants online, they could have instead decommissioned an additional 20 GW of coal power. But they didn’t. Which means 20 out of the 37 GW of German coal power is directly substituting for nuclear power.
If you can’t support peak load with nuclear you have to have variable load like gas or bio or pumped
You can have nuclear for the base load and anything else for the peak load, and it would be better than not having nuclear for the base load.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38819259
An additional benefit is that burning hydrogen returns water, which Spain regularly has a shortage of.
Didn't we learn anything from Germany?
A few facts:
1) The cost of closing the plants will be 22600M€.
2) The demolition and recycling will emit 28MTn CO2 .
3) Siemens Gamesa (which manufactures wind turbines) is bankrupt, but the Government of Spain is subsidizing 600000€ for each worker that is not fired.
4) In Galicia and Asturias (areas in the north and northwest of Spain) forests are being cut to put wind turbines.
It is a subsidized business and economically they are not profitable.
A disaster without equal.
- Charlie Munger