As far as I know there are also economic problems with nuclear. Nuclear power plants are enormous investments, then take decades to build and eventually decomission. If renewable energy gets efficient enough, nuclear is not worth the effort.
It’s actually pretty easy to build a nuclear reactor, but is as expensive to make it safe today as it is to maintain a Windows NT 4.0 server in 2021 when it comes to making it regulatory compliant.
Also when comparing nuclear to “renewable” energy, you are really comparing distributed low density investments with monolithic ones. Nuclear is 1e6 the energy density of chemical reactions. And wind/solar is basically heat exchangers positioned 8 light minutes from the nuclear reactor. The Sun incidentally, is just as renewable as that Uranium we are discussing.
What really boggles my physicist brain is how we expect a bunch of volatile solar and wind stitched together with fragile infrastructure and lithium piles to ever become a stable base load alternative. I put my hope on the Engineers knowing better than me :)
> What really boggles my physicist brain is how we expect a bunch of volatile solar and wind stitched together with fragile infrastructure and lithium piles to ever become a stable base load alternative. I put my hope on the Engineers knowing better than me :)
I don't work in this field, but I'd have a bunch of basic assumption you could dismantle:
1. We need a solid power grid, anyway, you know, for transporting electricity where it's needed. So shouldn't that stitching be quite solid anyway? Also, at a national level, I'd imagine solar and wind probably have rather solid statistical patterns, and those random factors can be abstracted away to a degree (the whole "what happens when the wind is not blowing?" - kind of hard to have the wind stop blowing all over 300k sqkm, all at once :-) ).
2. Once that power grid is solid, does it matter how small and distributed those solar and wind patches are?
3. I don't think Lithium-Ion is the only/main energy storage tech being investigated/invested in for grid purposes. And why couldn't it become a solid alternative for base load? Are base load-capacity energy storage facilities not competitive with gas/nuclear/coal power plants, factoring in pollution or other risks?
Imagine how overbuilt and under utilized a communications network would have to be in order for it to work the same way people imagine solar and wind power can be transported across the country.
Networks offer the best return on investment when they are fully utilized not sitting idle.
Aren't communication networks also overbuilt and underutilized ? After all that's why retail ISPs oversubscribe so much, and why we had issues at the start of the lockdowns.
If anything, communication networks are even spikier, which means that they need to be more overprovisioned than a power grid.
The economic problems are tied directly to policy problems, like the broken regulatory structure. For instance, as I understand it, a nuclear plant that began construction 10 years ago and is ready to go online by the standards when it began construction has to comply with all regulations created since. This makes creating new plants very expensive.
> It turns out that the main reason for spiraling nuclear plant construction bills is soft costs, the indirect expenses related to activities such as engineering design, purchasing, planning, scheduling and — ironically — estimating and cost control.
> These indirect expenses accounted for 72 percent of the increase seen in reactor construction costs between 1976 and 1987, a period in which the amount of money needed for containment buildings rose by almost 118 percent.
It would depend heavily on the reactor design. Smaller more modularized reactors can probably be built much cheaper with economies of scale by widespread installation. Renewables have hard limits as to how efficient they can ever be and they started out expensive too and heavily subsidized by government.
This is the real issue. It's 3x as expensive as other renewables. Every dollar of subsidy producing 1 MWh of nuclear could provide 3 MWh of solar or wind.
Added to which, being a baseload power source is not nearly as useful as being dispatchable (like hydro and natural gas are), and it's insanely capital intensive (which leads to cost overruns - see hinkley point c, corruption & fat profit margins).
It's got real lobbying muscle though, especially from defense and military.
"Dispatchable plants have varying startup times. The fastest plants to dispatch are hydroelectric power plants and natural gas power plants. For example, the 1,728 MW Dinorwig pumped storage power plant can reach full output in 16 seconds.[4] Although theoretically dispatchable, coal and nuclear thermal plants are designed to run as base load power plants and may take hours or sometimes days to cycle off and then back on again."
"Dispatchable generation refers to sources of electricity that can be dispatched on demand at the request of power grid operators, according to market needs. Dispatchable generators can adjust their power output according to an order.[1] Non-dispatchable renewable energy sources such as wind power and solar photovoltaic (PV) power cannot be controlled by operators."
"Dispatchable fuel resources include nuclear, coal and natural gas. These fuel sources are highly reliable because each fuel is a constant supply. These are known as baseload resources."
>Dispatchable generation refers to sources of electricity that can be dispatched on demand at the request of power grid operators
Precisely. It's not "on demand" if it takes a day to ramp up production and another day to ramp it down. It's on yesterday's demand, which is f***ing useless.
This contrasts with gas peaker plants which can scale up in seconds. These are known as "dispatchable".
>Nuclear stands out as clean, dispatchable firm power, says Kwarteng
Quoting an offhand comment from an idiotic energy minister trying to justify a boondoggle plant on a nuclear propaganda website isn't as convincing as you seem to think it is.
On demand doesn't mean instantly. Even gas peaker plants aren't instant, they can take 15 minutes to warm up and connect to the grid.
If the sun is down no amount of calling up a solar farm will increase output, if the wind isn't blowing or if it's blowing too strongly no amount of pleading will increase the output of an off-shore wind farm. This is because they aren't dispatchable. This is not the case with Nuclear.
Nuclear can do load following, they do it in France. How else do you think they balance a grid which has 70% Nuclear? They use reactors with grey rods which can reduce the reactivity in the reactor without distorting the shape of the reaction.
