So, net, there is about a minute and a half of energy storage across the entire grid. (Most, about 90%, is pumped hydro, not battery). Of course, not really. Most regional areas have roughly 10-30 seconds until the gas peakers absolutely unequivocally must be turned on before brownouts occur.
Hours? Minutes? We are not talking about hours and minutes. We are talking about seconds.
Look at the price of a powerwall. That's for the energy needs of a residential home. What happens to your AWS bill if us-east-1 was to buy a powerwall? Let alone steel, chemical, paper, mineral processing industries. What would happen to our economy if capacity for every one of those was cut by 1/3rd (or more depending on local climate)? Never mind your power bill.
This is the problem that I have with these solar capacity discussions. The number on the tin misrepresents things in just such a fundamental way that these cost discussions don't make sense. The reason, of course, is because fossil fuels are the big batteries we turn on at night when solar is not working.
If you actually care about making the grid green, you must solve this problem. Either with transmission, with battery manufacturing (the cost and environment friendliness curve on that is a bit less rosy compared to solar power...), or with nuclear. There is simply no other way.
I think the idea that renewables have to be paired with large amounts of energy storage is not correct. In Ireland dispatchable power is used when wind is low. Natural gas, hydroelectric, HVDC, pumped storage. Lithium ion batteries are generally only used briefly while the gas power plant gets up to temperature because of their high cost. There are also HVDC interconnectors that allow excess wind to be exported to the UK and electricity to be imported from there when it is cheaper. They expect to be able to achieve 70-80% renewables using this system by 2030, and are currently at around 45%. From 2030 onwards the focus will be on decarbonising the remaining ~20% of electricity generation that is gas. How that will be done will depend mostly on how the technology matures in the meantime, but it will likely be replacing natural gas with hydrogen and biogas. Another option could be carbon capture. Or batteries if there is some technological breakthrough and the price of stored energy drops way below it's current 200euro/MWh price.
I also think that electricity grids are very complex and powering any large grid with 100% of any one source is impossible. As each energy source has different pros and cons, you'll generally always have a mix of different sources.
> I think the idea that renewables have to be paired with large amounts of energy storage is not correct. In Ireland dispatchable power is used when wind is low. Natural gas, hydroelectric, HVDC, pumped storage.
Natural gas is neither renewable nor emission-free when burning, albeit less than burning coal, for instance. About 117 pounds of CO2 are produced per million British thermal units (MMBtu) equivalent of natural gas compared with more than 200 pounds of CO2 per MMBtu of coal and more than 160 pounds per MMBtu of distillate fuel oil. Source: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/natural-gas-...
So while using natural gas is better than using coal, in the longer term we likely needs to reduce its usage and substitute with renewables too.
It takes about 1/10 or 1/20th the amount of time and 1/5th the cost to build equivalent solar production. It's better to start with that and let pumped storage, batteries and hydrogen play catch up than pay 5x more and wait 10-20x longer for equivalent levels of nuclear power production.
Right now we use so much natural gas that a GWh of solar or nuclear produced energy is essentially just a GWh of natural gas that never gets burned.
That GWh can be produced in two years less consistently or twenty years more consistently. Which do you choose?
Id take two years. Storage and demand shaping infrastructure will catch up.
>Storage and demand shaping infrastructure will catch up
Storage in particular could be MUCH cheaper. (And still be centralized to conserve public-utility oversight and dangers from all those saboteurs out there somewhere.)
Battery storage is VERY expensive and hard on the environment. I continue to see little attention being paid to merely simple gravity storage.
Yes, traditional large-scale pumped hydro exists (usually using expensive turbines to pump water uphill, like the plants used in the UK for decades to get past tea-time. There are many more in the U.S.) They're usually expensive (good for getting tax-payer dollars into constructor pockets) ... time-consuming as well ... and need a hill for a reservoir and a water-source. (Of course we have -all the time in the world- right?)
But on a large scale, electricity can also be stored much more simply and economically by moving VERY heavy weights uphill ... or lifting VERY heavy weights out of a hole. Already existing and proven steel cables can lift 'barrels' containing hundreds or thousands of tons of (very cheap) rocks. Construction times and $/MW cost savings over high-tech 'solutions'? might be 10-1000 times lower.
Let say a natural gas power plant has a life time expectancy of 20 years. If we say that in 20 years we can abandon natural gas with nuclear, then lets put that as a deadline for when the last natural gas power plant will be demolished.
We need to stop building new natural gas power plants and existing ones need to have a planned obsolescence so that investors know when their investment will no longer be worth anything.
gas power plant != natural gas power plant. Green hydrogen gas generated from excess renewables and biogas exist, and can often be used in existing power plants. Though they are expensive right now, we've no idea how the technology may evolve in the next few years.
In Ireland they are actually building natural gas power plants with the assumption they will be stop operation as little as 5 years and only used for emergency purposes from then on. This is because they are using OCGT gas turbines which were invented for use in 3rd world countries and are much cheaper than conventional CCGT gas turbines.
Also don't forget that nuclear power plants have to go offline for maintenance like everything else, and I'm not sure it will ever be financially viable to have redundant nuclear power plants. France recently had to take 50% of their power plants offline for a few months to fix cracks and Japan had to take all of them offline for a few years after Fukushima. Thats why it's necessary to have emergency backup power plants and right now these are typically gas.
Fun fact. Nuclear power can technically load follow. It just generally isn't a good idea because it isn't very cost effective to not be running your nuclear power plant at all times. Also fun fact, nuclear power is really useful for high energy intensive operations such as splitting oxygen and hydrogen atoms from one another.
Side note: The France story is much more complicated. It doesn't sell narratives well, but what can I say, truth is complicated. It's not going to fit into this comment, but it has to do with regulations, covid, Ukraine, Germany, lack of European self-sufficiency, economics, and so much more. It's best to not bring up France's recent nuclear fiasco unless you're willing to get into the weeds, because otherwise you'll just start a fight by anyone who knows a bit more but still not the full story (which means multiple people will argue confidently and a clusterfuck ensues). With no doubt, France has blame to play. But to give just a push to find more info, remember that inspections and maintenance are scheduled quite far in advance. That many had been pushed off because of a global pandemic, and then war broke out. One could say this was quite a series of unfortunate events. Yes, blame France, but placing all blame on France is like destroying all farms except for one and then blaming that farm for famine when it got overrun by pests (even if it was entirely that farmer's fault, was it?)
I think the point is that people often point to France as "look it works" (while simultaneously saying "there Germany terrible") when the reality is that no France doesn't just work (and yes failure modes are always about multiple disadvantages coincidences, all the other stuff is usually covered).
Saying France "works" or "doesn't work" isn't so straight forward, but I definitely lean more towards the "it works" side. I mean it is a net exporter of energy and is only rivaled by Sweden in terms of emissions per kWhr (Sweden has a lot of hydro, which is great, but not available to everyone. Can also be dangerous, see Banqiao, but that's not very relevant tbh). Germany on the other hand has 6x the emissions. They've been making great strides, but still have yet to be able to remove themselves from their coal and gas addictions (gas is potentially worse than typical accounting but let's use official numbers to keep fair). That is also what put them at the mercy of Russia (and consequently several other EU countries who depended on either Russia or Germany for power, which increased demand from French power), but also can be seen as a strategic move politically since trade partners are less likely to go to war but it can also be leverage. As you might see, this is in fact a pretty complicated clusterfuck. But we can all agree that German electricity is procured at 6x the emissions of French electricity. Success does depend upon which metrics you care about, but if we're talking climate, emissions are definitely one of the most important ones. A big issue is that Germany is often viewed as a mover and role model in the climate space but even by EU standards they are one of the worst offenders (doubly so if you bin the countries by economic size. i.e. Poorer countries have worse emissions). So I get why people push back against Germany because while we should congratulate them for their large rollout of renewables we should still criticize them for their emission levels and inability to actually match what others have done (even many with little to no nuclear, see UK)
You may find this site useful strictly for the electricity and subsequent emissions side. It'll be insufficient for total emissions though (as that includes many things beyond electricity) and certainly isn't adequate for understanding geopolitics or other things. I suggest poking around, using the emission tab per region (defaults on production) and also changing the time scale to at least 30 days to be a more accurate view of this specific question we're addressing.
I liked you first comment about things being complicated and that "good" or "bad" is difficult to tell because people will give more importance to the partial elements they see.
Unfortunately, you've done just that in this last comment.
One detail that I see too often with people advancing similar arguments than you here is that they just take two countries and compare them if it was two lab experiments done within the same conditions and repeated sufficiently to bring conclusive results.
There are plenty of elements about that: the way France and Germany are industrialised is pretty different so what worked/did not work for one does not mean it would have worked or not for the other, maybe if Germany would have followed the same path as France the German specificity would have made Germany emitting 8x more instead of 6x (or not, of course), maybe the German way had 60% chance of success and bad luck failed while the France way had 40% chance of success and lucky then they did not failed (not saying it's the case, just that it's tricky to pretend getting lessons from what happened), maybe one country had pushed itself in a corner and will struggle on the last few yards while the other had a worst initial score because they were paving the road (again, not saying it's the case), maybe the success of France relied on having Germany going that way (who knows how the French nuclear park would have evolved if they had Germany that would have provided electricity with exactly the same characteristics and fulfilling the same needs on the same market but having the same drawbacks on the same market), ...
It does not mean we cannot get lessons, but the lessons you bring (or the method itself) are just invalid: no, looking at the electricity map today is just not a way to conclude which strategy is the best. And everyone who reasons like that is just muddying the water rather than being helpful.
> Unfortunately, you've done just that in this last comment.
I think you're reading into my comment too much. I was just explaining some of (certainly not all) absurd amounts of complexity. I was very careful to frequently stress that there are many valid metrics to use to compare, and that none of them are complete. Even my statement is just some complexity and no conclusions.
Certainly I don't think France and Germany should have taken the same path. This is the specialization I was discussing.
> looking at the electricity map today is just not a way to conclude which strategy is the best.
Definitely not something I claimed. I even was careful to stress that this is a very limited metric. And of course not, because they're different countries. Specialization requires complementary strategies, coalitions. So I'm not sure why we'd measure at that abstract of a level (country to country with industry, energy, economics, and such) because you just can't. You can only compare parts at a time and even adding several dozen more metrics you won't be even remotely whole.
Sorry if I have misunderstood. But I still don't understand the reason you put the electricity map website and saying "I suggest poking around ... to be a more accurate view of this specific question we're addressing", this website is 100% useless for that discussion, due to effects I've mentioned.
You also said "we should still criticize them [germany] for their emission levels and inability to actually match what others have done ", which seems to be exactly what I was talking about: "inability to actually match what others have done" is pretty much saying that if 2 countries spend as much effort and goes into the same strategy, they will match.
Maybe you don't think like that (in which case, my bad), but a lot of people do and your previous comment is very not well written to not amplify this way of thinking by implying this logic is sound.
The website is purely to see electric energy production (note the care or words). It is but one of many metrics, which I think we both agree aren't even enough to adequately answer the question of "country emissions" but is the part of that conversation that most people are familiar with.
But I think we need context, as that's likely where things got lost. C0llusion's comment above my "fun fact" comment was the critical aspect. They got causality wrong in their final point. Last year (2022) France's output was ~70% of their 10 year average. I think they confused 50% with their goal for only 50% dependence on nuclear power. The cracks is also a bit weird because while not wrong, it isn't complete and not the causal issue since all nuclear power plants have cracks in the same way all damns do. Here's a "short" writeup by world nuclear[0]. It also briefly mentions how France wanted to be energy independent post oil crisis. But for complexity sake, we can't say counterfactually that Germany made the "wrong" move (or "right") one because you can make an argument about geopolitics and Germany's strategy. If their actions did starve off war then that's a better climate strategy. To complex for me to speculate tbh, just recognizing that it's part of the equation.
I think a big difference in our framing is that you're putting things as if there is a universally optimal strategy by a single nation. Even strictly just on the energy domain. The world is just too complex and it is a multi-agent system that isn't zero sum. Strategies don't work like that when there's so much coalition building. And it is hard for me to properly explain what I'm thinking in just a few comments. I think unfortunately I have a different view than most are used to and so I'm still trying to figure out how to handle the inference gap. I do sincerely appreciate the reinforcement and if you have any additional advice in how I can better communicate. I truly take this idea of complexity to heart, it is a core belief of mine. And if we're being honest, climate is one of the most complicated existential crises that humans have faced. Certainly no single person is able to understand even a relatively complete story except from orbit. But details matter so much that I think we do a great disservice ignoring the complexities (not just around climate). What I can't figure out how to communicate correctly yet is how to discuss a metric but not imply that it is the only thing we should look at. If you have any suggestions I'd really appreciate it. Not sure how to juggle a ton of things but pause to talk about one because talking about everything all at once is fucking chaotic and I'm already verbose as it is. I'm not sure how well this came off but I hope you can see that there's a communication breakdown (admittedly I'm not doing a great job).
> I think a big difference in our framing is that you're putting things as if there is a universally optimal strategy by a single nation.
That's exactly the opposite of my point. I explicitly say that nation A going into direction X may lead to nation B failing when going into direction Y while it would have succeed if nation A would not have gone into direction X.
As advice, I would say that you should not provide any "counterfactuals" to not-deep-details-enough, because those counterfactuals are also not-deep-details-enough. For example, in C0llusion's comments, you react on the causality error, which is just too simplistic anyway. But you react by opposing their not-deep-details-enough argument with a not-deep-details-enough argument. Both of these arguments are not useful. What you need to do is to show the complexity and why concluding while not having a deep enough overview is stupid. What you have done here in part of your comment is stepping down to their level and arguing with a similarly not-deep-details-enough argument as if this argument is somewhat not as bad. At least you could have added a lot of disclaimer around it, such as "please don't use this argument to jump to the opposite conclusion, as it is as bad, but as a naive example contradicting your logic ..."
> That's exactly the opposite of my point. I explicitly say that nation A going into direction X may lead to nation B failing when going into direction Y while it would have succeed if nation A would not have gone into direction X.
I guess I'm confused then because this still reads to me as if you're suggesting there's strictly competing strategies. I get that you are discussing different strategies but to me this reads as optimizing for independent strategies rather than optimizing for dependent ones (which is the usual common way people frame things: look at x country, copy their model; no other nuance needed).
> I would say that you should not provide any "counterfactuals"
I'm also confused because I don't know where I presented any counterfactuals. I know where I said we can't place counterfactuals with insufficient information, but not where I claimed a counterfactual.
Really I'm a bit confused because I didn't claim anything that isn't simply fact, the rest is just mentioning of variables not considered and that this is still an even incomplete picture.
> But you react by opposing their not-deep-details-enough argument with a not-deep-details-enough argument.
Yes. We're still operating from orbit. I'm responding to "look at this island" with "but consider the archipelago." I'm not sure what more you expect, as this is HN. We can get some nuance but even just saying to look in a broader sense (which we haven't even seen everything that's still highly important) takes so much writing. Compression is useful, but not when we don't agree we're working in compression or localized discussions. But abstract discussions can also be useful. The "detail" you're criticizing is different from the one I was: words are overloaded.
> What you need to do is to show the complexity and why concluding while not having a deep enough overview is stupid.
I simply do not have time to write a novel, and even if I wanted to could not do so on HN. I'm sorry, we can only discuss at high levels and specifics can only be localized. But resolution will always be fairly low. I am only trying to increase the scope of the discussion because I have faith in my fellow users to increase resolution on their own time.
> That GWh can be produced in two years less consistently or twenty years more consistently. Which do you choose?
Both.
Intermittent generation methods are more problematic the more of the grid you try to replace with them. You have solar generation during the day, you run your natural gas plants less during the day but still run them at night, great. Keep building solar until you can stop running them during the day at all. Installing that much capacity could take 20 years.
At that point you'd have to contend with what to do at night. But hey, by then the nuclear plants you started building today are online. You might also look into ways of speeding up the process, because it shouldn't take 20 years to do that.
>Natural gas is neither renewable nor emission-free when burning
Yes you are correct, in fact I actually addressed that in the later part of my comment
>From 2030 onwards the focus will be on decarbonising the remaining ~20% of electricity generation that is gas. How that will be done will depend mostly on how the technology matures in the meantime, but it will likely be replacing natural gas with hydrogen and biogas. Another option could be carbon capture. Or batteries if there is some technological breakthrough and the price of stored energy drops way below it's current 200euro/MWh price.
When picking fruit from a tree, It's usually best to start at the lower branches.
> When picking fruit from a tree, It's usually best to start at the lower branches.
No, when picking fruit its best to pick it in the order it ripens, and as it does so, irrespective of position on the tree.
It is generally easier and requires less special equipment to pick fruit from the lower branches, hence the metaphorical description of simple tasks as low-hanging fruit. The metaphor (while it may also indicate optimal ordering for some other tasks) is not about optimal ordering for picking fruit from a tree.
where solar is quoted at $1300/kwh and adding a battery that can store a little more than an hour of output brings that to around $1800/kwh. I see people quoting that one like it is gospel but that doesn’t seem to be enough storage. If you assume the system needs 12 hours of storage to get through the night you need 10 of those batteries and the cost is getting into the $3500/kwh range.
They quote the AP-1000 and NuScale around $6000. Solar looks cheaper now and maybe it is in the tropics but in the Northeast you are going to get a lot less power in the winter than summer so to keep the lights on all year you might need two of those solar installations (though I think the battery stays the same) and now you are getting around $5000/kwh so that gap with nuclear is getting smaller.
That estimate may be a bit pessimistic, but renewable advocates right now sound like the people who were saying nuclear would be “too cheap to meter.”
Now if you have excess capacity in the summer you could in principle use it for something but that is not trivial. If you use something half he year you basically double the capital cost. Do you hire workers to do nothing in the winter or do you lay them off? “Free” excess solar energy might be “free as in puppy” not “free as in beer.”
You're conflating electricity generation and total energy use. Yes, 13% is crap,
we're highly (and ridiculously) reliant on imported fossil fuels.
With respect to electricity generation then, Ireland is in the middle with 39% renewable electricity generation for 2022[0].
2022 was "less windy" than average by about 2%, and 2021 lower again by about 6%[1].
The grid currently can sustain 75% renewables, substantial upgrades are in progress (capacity and ROCOF related) to get that up to 95%.
This year (2023) was substantially better, in the first 10 months the average
contribution from wind alone was 33%[2], this month the wind generation record was broken also[3] (~4.6GW). Hydro and other sources top renewables up by another ~6% [4].
The nice thing about solar is it's very cheap, and as a grid provider you can just charge more for energy at night to disincentivize use when the sun is not shining. We do not actually need constant energy supply at all hours of the day and night and solar can cover a great deal of energy needs for very cheap. You can also deploy solar even on a large scale in very short time scales. Want to build nuclear? You start applying for permits today and by the time the earth has surpassed 2.0 degrees C of warming maybe you start generating electricity.
Even though I don't like natural gas for energy generation, let's say an area is currently being served by a natural gas plant. But now everyone wants electric cars and more power is needed. You can deploy a whole boatload of solar and use rate structuring to incentivize consumption in the day time (you charge your car at work). Now the gas plant spins up at night but it is only running half the time, and all day long people are using emission-free solar energy. And they aren't burning gasoline for their cars anymore. Plus if there is a power outage they can use their car as a home battery backup.
So yeah, I don't think it really makes any sense to say "we have 78 seconds of battery backup so solar is pointless". You can make a HUGE dent in people's energy-related carbon emissions if you install solar tomorrow. Or you can pay much more and install nuclear in 15 years. Maybe we should start building out nuclear now but it would absolutely not be to the exclusion of solar! Even if we built 1000 new nuclear power plants in the US we would still need lots of solar and wind energy.
I don't think they were saying solar is useless, but you underestimate how difficult it is to change peak load. Well a good start is actually smart systems within homes, for instance to avoid heating said home when nobody is present, or timing loads like car charging and dishwashers to be on that beat. That's great, but it's been proven these smart systems are very hard to roll out, no matter how much you try to say it's cheaper in the end. Well you can ignore all this and roll out significant pricing changes to coincide with peek production anyway, and quickly be met with two problems. The first are the people who say "fossils were better my energy was cheaper", good luck there. And you will also hear a large number of people say "well this is just a further tax against the poor who can't afford these systems, nice work, joe.", and honestly, they'd be right. A big thing we need if we want this energy transition to go well is a more local view, but also we could have solutions that don't depend on daylight to ease that transition.
Anyway, don't know where I was going with this but those are my two cents.
now I am wondering about the net social benefit of solar power disincentivizing third-shift (overnight) production. cheaper electricity during the day makes it relatively more expensive to operate heavy industry plants 24/7.
the heavy investment that goes into those plants incentives operators to drive (and staff) them 24/7, but there are hidden social costs (negative externalities) of having so many people out of diurnal rhythm. maybe massive solar power buildout, with sharply cheaper daytime electricity, would relieve people from working “graveyard shifts” – and maybe that’d be a good thing
I worked a graveyard shift at a factory in college one summer because it was the only job that I could really find after weeks of looking. I definitely feel for the people who did it for a living.
That said, the companies aren't going to just stop, they'll just charge higher prices. To stop producing in the third shift, they'll need to:
- add more daytime production lines, which means buying more floor space, possibly in a different location with new logistics to work out
- new capex for the new lines
- higher overhead because your newly expanded production lines are idle 30% of the time
- higher overhead from daily startup and shutdown times
This is all for companies where it is feasible to do so. Some plants measure startup and shutdown in hours, if not days. Doing a full cycle every day would mean redesigning their entire operation, if it is even possible to do so at all.
Even places like hospitals don't exactly get to choose to just turn off all the life support and lights at night.
>That's great, but it's been proven these smart systems are very hard to roll out, no matter how much you try to say it's cheaper
I thought the opposite was proven. E.g. When Germany produced a lot of variable output electricity they varied aluminum smelting rates accordingly. That was highly effective and not generally expected.
There's tons of low hanging fruit like that but if you listen to carbon or nuclear lobby propaganda theyre insistent that the only thing that can solve the problem is more lithium than exists in the entire world.
I'm talking specifically on an individual level. I'm not as versed in the industrial side of things as I should be, and sure, if we as a nation (I live in the US) came together and said "let's fix the overconsumption issues" we could do it practically overnight, but the reality is that to fix every home requires an absurd upfront investment very little people are willing to fund. Systematic change is hard. We're working on it, but it's hard.
We actually need constant energy supply at all hours of the day and night if we want to have a modern industrialized economy with factories and refineries operating around the clock. It's generally not practical to shut down those facilities just because electricity prices are temporarily high. So, in practice all of those industries will migrate to areas with cheap, reliable power (even if it's not "green"). This has obvious national security concerns in that it makes us dependent on unreliable imports for critical materials.
> We actually need constant energy supply at all hours of the day and night if we want to have a modern industrialized economy with factories and refineries operating around the clock.
We always need electricity available, but the demand is not constant and there are quite a few discretionary loads which can be run preferentially in the day time. We can expand our electrical capacity with clean solar energy in the day time, reducing the total need for existing polluting sources. Even if industrial factories run off of natural gas at night, a large installed base of solar will allow discretionary loads (home appliances, EV charging, etc) to run off of zero emissions solar when available. And even the industrial plants can utilize solar during the daytime, cutting their CO2 emissions related to energy use in half.
Base load is a term from the fossil/nuclear time. It is a pure statistical amount which designated how much "slow" sources (coal, nuclear) could be used because there is never less demand than the base load. And everything was done to push the base load up. But it never meant that it was sufficient to deliver the "base load". The power generation still hat to match any demand at any time. So everything else was done with "fast" and often more expensive plants like gas, water.
In the age of renewables, things have changed. If you have enough renewables to cover large parts of the electricity demand on average, then you will frequently produce 100% more of the maximum grid demand. In this situation, "base load" power plants don't make any sense at all. The new term is "residual load". This refers to the load at a point of time which cannot be delivered by renewables at that time. This can also vary between 0 and 100%. Which obviously requires different power plants, like gas, water.
> This refers to the load at a point of time which cannot be delivered by renewables at that time. This can also vary between 0 and 100%.
If you had a predominantly renewable grid, this would generally be 80-100%, because low generation could coincide with peak load. Which is extremely bad, because then you have to duplicate that proportion of generation capacity via some alternative even though it's only rarely needed. Or worse, it's needed a lot but it's fossil fuels.
Meanwhile you want some degree of energy storage, because if you have times when renewable generation is more than 100% of the load, you want to be able to use that power later and not just throw it away.
But then you're back to base load sources making sense. They reduce the amount of storage or peaker plants you need at night and the amount of renewable generation you need during the day.
They just don't make sense as more of the grid than there is "base load" for the same reason as always. Otherwise you'd have times where there is surplus "base load" generation and have to put that into energy storage, when it'd have been cheaper for that part of generation capacity to be renewables.
Call it what you want you still need an always available always there source of power to ensure demand is met. In the PNW hydro fills this role, elsewhere you will need something else and only nuclear really can fulfil that need
Only in the short term. It’s taking 10-15+ years to get nuclear online. Looking at the ramping up of battery production by you can build solar today, add batteries in 10 years and be much better off financially and environmentally.
Even China regularly spends 7+ years to build nuclear from the point where construction actually starts and even longer when you include planning.
Hand waving the cost there both financially and environmentally as well a “well we assume things will work out” - there will need to be battery storage in the 100s of gigawatt hours and it needs to be cheap reliable and durable
What if they don’t? There’s no assurances there will be magic battery tech
There is a reason China India Russia and others are still building nuclear plants
We don’t need magic battery tech. Current PV + Batteries can already 24/7 power cheaper than nuclear. It’s only vs fossil fuels where batteries have trouble.
China is building nuclear because they are building everything, but they are effectively building 3x as much solar and 7x as much wind because nuclear just costs more than any other option.
From 2020-2022 China increased generation power by:
51,600 GWh/year Nuclear
156,600 GWh/year Solar
357,500 GWh/year Wind
Currently they get as much power from solar as nuclear and twice as much from wind. In total they are 34% renewable vs 5% from nuclear. It’s the US that’s heavily invested in Nuclear not China.
umm that doesn't explain why they are building nuclear - could it be because they realize they need the ability to produce power at night and when the wind isn't blowing?
They are literally adding 18+X as much fossil fuel as nuclear over that time frame. That’s what’s proving nighttime power.
Adding more capacity is an all hands on deck situation for the China they are throwing everything at it. Nuclear is simply achieving the smallest gains because the ROI is low.
>> It's generally not practical to shut down those facilities just because electricity prices are temporarily high.
On the surface, that sounds logic. In reality so, that is exactly what happens: as short notice reaction by big consumers (reducing or increasing consumption as needed), planning in accordance with electricity exchanges... And that behaviour is actually pretty profitable, it contributes to grid stability, enables more flexibility on the consumption side and is technically possible in a surprising number of high consumption industries (paper, chemicals, graphite, steel...).
Yes, certainly I agree. Solar is the best option, for the first 60-70% penetration. I am, like most in this thread, very optimistic about solar. We are nowhere near that level of penetration in most regions. But after that 60-70%, adding more capacity just doesn't move the needle. Once you hit 100% for the day in solar, a spare panel doesn't help your nighttime situation.
So then what. You could overbuild solar, build distribution, build battery banks. I'm not wild about that. Mining for batteries is nasty business and we need all of the Lion we can get for electric mobility. Distribution? It's alright, but you run into problems -- like, what do you do when the sun goes down on the west coast? What do you do when a line goes down? Your system is larger, more centralized, more vulnerable.
Nuclear under the current regulatory regime is clearly a nonstarter. But the capex of nuclear is almost entirely artificial. Something much closer to "too cheap to meter" could be a reality. All it takes is a cultural willingness.
By the way, nuclear having an extraordinary capex makes it even tougher to compete with solar in the mix. Because your capacity factor goes way down if you are only generating at night. This is why we build oil and gas plants -- they're cheap. What we need is for nuclear to favorably compete with oil and gas. It does not need to compete with solar.
I have so many products now that are either built from the start or have gotten a software update to do the bulk of their routine power draw overnight. I scarcely need to use AC at all where I live and my heat is from gas. I expect peak usage hours have already shifted from daytime to nighttime in my own case, probably for at least a few others in the area as well.
If you looked at installed solar generation capacity 30 years ago then the situation would have looked hopeless too. But there has since been an exponential increase, driven by increases in both rate installation, and in our capacity to manufacture and install panels.
And there is every reason to think that we at the start of similar curve with battery storage right now (batteries are currently manufactured at a relatively small scale, with no major technological barriers to scaling up). Seasonal storage is another matter, but hourly/daily is well within reach.
Multiple solar farms have already been built that store 1/2 their daily output, the economics is already compelling.
Nobody is saying we have grid sufficient storage right now, but in terms of energy storage we’re a well over 30 minutes when you look at just existing capacity (25GWh not 10Gwh) + existing EV’s and that number is growing rapidly ~50% year over year.
So, manufacturing several hours of electricity storage over the next ~15 years is a completely reasonable goal. Further that’s all that’s required, we have carbon free dams supplying 7% of total electricity demand and days worth of total grid demand in energy storage, just time shifting that covers ~16% of nighttime demand. Similarly Solar can be shifted east/west to cover more of the duck curve.
Coal is already dead. We where at 51% coal in 2001 and hit 19.5% in 2022. Existing power plants keep aging and not being replaced.
People will bring storage online when it’s needed, but we don’t need it thus we don’t build it. So keep building Solar/Wind and soon enough storage will come online.
People build manufacturing capacity to come online when they predict demand will be high enough. So there isn’t lag involved with building capacity just viability.
As to solar it’s only 2.8% of total supply right now but it’s growing fast. That can ramp to ~20-40% without significant storage depending on how cheap solar becomes and how expensive storage stays and how much transmission capacity is available. The tipping point where daily rates are cheaper than nighttime rates will shift a lot of nighttime demand.
You don't have a good handle on how experience curves and exponential growth work.
Solar and storage were coming forever, because they cost too much and were rolled out too little. But eventually a tipping point is reached and suddenly prices collapse and deployment explodes. It's not that nothing was happening the long incubation period; the technology was working its way down the experience curve.
Solar has already passed the tipping point and battery storage is doing it right now.
How do you compare storage to that? What storage btw? Because all we have kind of suck for the grid usecase. So there is of course a ton of research for better suited batteries. But we haven't even started production on those.
Are you not underestimating the time to ramp up production? Exponential growth is not gonna save you short to mid term. Especially not compared to solar and wind which of course have huge storage implications.
> How do you compare storage to that? What storage btw?
Li-Ion production rates have also been growing exponentially since at least 2010[0].
> Especially not compared to solar and wind which of course have huge storage implications.
Not so: the absolute worst case for renewables is wasting some of their output when they produce more than needed and using the existing dispatchable power plants when they don't produce enough. This can be transitioned gradually or quickly as more storage comes online.
> The worst case is an unbalanced grid that leads to blackouts and/or disruptions. Not that we waste energy.
As the old gas plants don't magically cease to exist after N years, while this is technically correct it's about as important as pointing out the non-zero risk of a supervolcano blocking out 80% of sunlight worldwide for a decade.
> not with the expected increase in energy consumption
Energy consumption is always strictly limited by energy supply.
> And other sources that we do intend to shut down.
"We" "intend" many things, but if there's a danger of blackouts or brownouts, we find ways to keep power plants running longer because (despite appearances) the people in charge mostly aren't idiots, and the few exceptions (in this context, Texas) provide ample evidence to everyone else.
> Also depends on where you live.
Unless you mean the imminent danger of airstrikes to Ukrainian, Gazan, etc. power stations, that sentence fragment is too vague to communicate anything. And if you do, sure, but that's still an issue for literally all possible power plants given no structures are safe in war zones.
Anyway, I'm comforted to know that the magic hand of the market will solve this problem in the most efficient way and with a proper focus on the climate, as it always has.
We already have enough battery manufacturing capacity to build hours worth of grid storage over the next 5 years and more is coming online at double digit growth rates. What’s missing is the demand for grid batteries which is still relatively low.
Right now California only wastes ~5% of its solar output per year but most days don’t have a surplus. That’s not enough capacity for nighttime storage to be worth it, you need consistent daily oversupply before charging becomes “free”.
However, because of the demand curve batteries are viable for peaking power. Which is why some farms are built with “4h” aka 50% of daily output worth of battery storage. Thus we are past the initial tipping point of occasional viability where sometimes it’s a good idea. The big one is at roughly 5c/kWh where natural gas is no longer economically viable and the grid isn’t dependent on fossil fuels.
5c/kWh * 3,000 full discharge cycles ~= 150$/kWh total instillation cost including labor etc. Increase or decrease based on specific battery technology and it’s lifespan.
> We already have enough battery manufacturing capacity
It's amusing going back to HN threads from a few years ago and see people arguing that batteries are ruled out because we don't have enough battery building capacity.
I'm not sure what could lead a person to believe that new factories cannot be built.
Nuclear is also quite a lot more expensive than people sometimes calculate here.
It cost about 35 billion USD (total cost during build, no maintenance, no fuel)
At current potential earning rates of eg. max 10ct/kWh (Georgia) and 1100 MW peak continuous operation it will take 36 years to make the money back.
That is without just investing that 35 billion into something else or even adding maintenance and fuel cost which makes the entire project never return a profit.
Now in general I like machines, and nuclear reactors are fantastic engineering feats. I dislike the potential for a meltdown of course no matter how 'unlikely'
> and 1100 MW peak continuous operation it will take 36 years to make the money back
That total cost is for 2 reactors, not one. Vogtle 3 just started operating and Vogtle 4 will start in a few months. If you divide your 36 years by 2, you get 18 years.
Not only that but the cost to decommission one is absurdly high and I've read in previous articles that this cost isn't even a consideration at all when building a reactor. Like it's just completely unplanned for and often paid into by the taxpayer.
This is false for the US (and UK as the other commenter pointed out).
> In the USA, utilities are collecting 0.1 to 0.2 cents/kWh to fund decommissioning. They must then report regularly to the NRC on the status of their decommissioning funds. About two-thirds of the total estimated cost of decommissioning all US nuclear power reactors has already been collected, leaving a liability of about $9 billion to be covered over the remaining operating lives of about 100 reactors (on the basis of an average of $320 million per unit). NRC data for the end of 2018 indicated that there was a combined total of $64.7 billion held in the decommissioning trust funds covering the 119 operational and retired US nuclear power reactors.
In the UK, the decommissioning process is definitely considered for new nuclear reactors:
> The Funded Decommissioning Programme (FDP) ensures that the developer will meet the costs of decommissioning the plant and managing and disposing of its waste so that the taxpayer does not to bear the burden of these costs in future.
> Under the Energy Act 2008 operators of new nuclear power stations are required to have secure financing arrangements in place to meet the full costs of decommissioning and their full share of waste management and disposal costs. These arrangements are set out in a FDP.
But you will make the money back. This isn’t private industry. This is government. Many programs are ran at a loss, this however nets a sure profit in some time. Bonds can always be sold to take care of upfront costs.
> I dislike the potential for a meltdown of course no matter how 'unlikely'
Why? A meltdown is really not a big deal at all. If we're fine with burning coal we should be perfectly with a having a meltdown or two every few years (even if we 100% ignored climate change the degree of damage caused by either of those is not that different)
People think "meltdown" means Chernobyl. For those who don't know, a nuclear meltdown means the fuel inside the reactor overheated, (possibly permanently) damaging the reactor. It's essentially happened at some level three times in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_meltdown#Core_damage_e...
A meltdown essentially means an expensive remediation.
A Chernobyl style event in the west is extremely unlikely due to reactor design as well as the containment buildings. The closest western equivalent, Fukushima, did have a core meltdown. But the spread of radiation was actually caused by the spent fuel no longer able to be cooled, causing the rods to be exposed to air, which generated hydrogen, that then exploded. While a disaster, it wasn't Chernobyl style where the open reactor pumped out radiation continuously until it could be contained.
in addition; Chernobyl, three mile island, and fukushima were all early nuclear design. Construction began in 1972, 1968, and 1967.
The first nuclear reactor was built in 1942. We have more than 50 YEARS of technological advancement in nuclear design gained after any one of those reactors.
Modern reactors have made radical improvements. Imagine comparing the safety of a car from the 1960-70s to the safety of a modern car. They are NOT equivalent.
My car has 100kWh energy storage and spends most of the day plugged in. Discharging 20 kWh around the optimal storage point will not hurt the battery. If we reach 20 000 000 cars like that we have 400 000 000 kWh or 400 GWh at our disposable most of the time .
Cars alone could handle about an hour of the national grid, assuming that Energie intensive industries would not shut down temporary whenever the price of electricity is high/ predicted to be high.
With an installed solar capacity of 540 MW of PV, and a battery storage capacity of 225MW/1,140MWh (BYD ESS), the plant is designed to deliver 150 MW of dispatchable power from 5 am to 9.30 pm year-round to the national grid under a 20-year power purchase agreement with South Africa’s national power utility company, Eskom.
It's in MegaWatts not GigaWatts and delivers no power for seven and half hours every 24 hours.
That is not mimicing the stable baseload that nuclear (or a hydro electric pupmped storage dam) provides.
I'm not anti solar but a project such as your example has a long way to go to met the demands of a European country.
It's worth looking into how much of a dent it makes in South African energy demands.
Presumably all they would need to do here is change the ratios of solar and battery to achieve 24x7 dispatch. I presume the current arrangement is just more cost effective currently based on their needs but it does demonstrate there already are baseload style power purchase agreements occuring with combined renewables+storage facilities.
We’re likely to see another halving of battery costs within the next decade which will shift the economics further.
Perhaps with todays prices on large lithium storage which I documented elsewhere in this thread at ~$500/kWh installed for a real project in the United States. Most analysts expect that price halves to $250/kWh or lower in the next decade which radically changes the economics.
There are thousands of companies working on battery advancements within the entire stack right now.
Raw material mining, refinement of materials, recycling, cell chemistry, longevity, density improvements, pack improvements, battery managament systems, thermal systems, safety, packaging, kW scale home batteries, GW scale utility batteries, cars, trucks, buses, planes, trains, automobiles, ships. The amount of capital deployed is in the trillions of dollars.
> Look at the price of a powerwall. That's for the energy needs of a residential home. What happens to your AWS bill if us-east-1 was to buy a powerwall? Let alone steel, chemical, paper, mineral processing industries. What would happen to our economy if capacity for every one of those was cut by 1/3rd (or more depending on local climate)? Never mind your power bill.
Using powerwall as the price of stationary battery storage is like using the running cost of gas/petrol household generators as the cost of generating power at fossil fueled power plants. Powerwalls is not how industrial battery storage is done anywhere on the planet.
Every power generation technology needs ‘backup capacity’ and energy storage.
If your transmission line to your nuclear power station trips, you need reserve capacity elsewhere to serve the load.
Gas and coal generation all need storage to run reliably.
If you are going to be an armchair power system designer and you want to ‘gross up’ the cost of capacity and storage into the cost of renewable generation, then be consistent.
Solar is unique in that it reliably "trips" for extensive periods every day and seasonally. It is also unique in that it does not take fuel that can be stored.
Solar cannot act as the backup to a nuclear power plant. Whereas a nuclear power plant can (and does) act as the backup to solar.
I'm grossing up to make the point that after about 60-70% solar penetration, the circle cannot be squared without massive investment either in batteries or in distribution, a fact which seems to never quite fully make it into cost comparisons between nuclear and solar such as those being made in this thread.
The usual dishonest argument nuclear advocates make is to assume batteries are used to get renewables to 100% of the grid. You are doing it there.
But batteries are not the ideal storage technology for all storage use cases. It turns out that e-fuels like hydrogen are much, MUCH better for some cases, like seasonal leveling, even though the round trip efficiency isn't great.
It will likely be the case that a 100% RE grid ends up being considerably cheaper than a nuclear powered grid.
Nuclear backing up solar is a completely stupid idea, btw. The economics don't work at all.
From the article, this new reactor is "estimated to cost more than $30 Billion." (Let's call it 30) & It generates 1,114 Mega Watts.
This article [1] says solar panels cost between $0.90 and $1.50 per watt. Let's go with $1/watt to keep the math easy, though I bet it's much cheaper by now, and especially at the scale we'll be buying them at.
So for $30 billion dollars, we can have 30 billion watts of solar, which is 30,000 mega watts, or 27x the amount of power of the new nuke. Obviously solar doesn't produce at night and it's seasonal.
So let's make it more useful.
I saw elsewhere in this thread to get an actual output number from solar you have to divide by 6 to account for night and seasonality. So that means to equal the 1,114 mega watts from the nuke, we need 6,6684 mega watts of solar. call it 7mW to keep the math easy.
So we use 7 billion dollars buying 7mW of solar.
We have a tidy $23 billion dollars left over to spend on storage.
This site [2] says grid scale storage costs something like $300/kWh. (I bet it's cheaper now, and cheaper at massive scale, but we'll go with that.)
So with our $23 billion left over dollars we go and buy 76.6 million kWh of storage (which is 76,666 MWh). So even when there is no sun coming in, our storage can maintain the 1,114 mega watts of output for something around 68 hours. That sounds like overkill, so it probably makes sense to spend more of the money on solar and less on storage, but you get the idea.
Also note for the same $30 billion dollars our solar + storage setup now has no running costs, no refuelling costs, no downtime due to refuelling and maintenance and no radioactive waste disposal problem.
Also note the $30 billion nuke plant is a single point of failure, and needs big lossy power transmission lines coming in/out to go useful places. I would be interested to see the numbers on how much of that 1,114 mW of nuke power winds up lost in transmission. The solar setup can be distributed all over, and can generate and store the power right where it's needed - on factories, houses, schools and where ever else needs power. Transmission loss of close to zero.
Nukes are awesome, but they're not even in the realm of making sense financially.
Year after year the price of solar and storage will go down again, then again, then again.
(Please point out any holes / problems in my math)
EDIT: as pointed out below the cost for grid scale storage is more like $500/kWh.
So for our $23 billion we can buy 46 million kWh of storage (46,000 mWh). So we can equal the nukes 1,114 mW output for about 41 hours. Still plenty
You are comparing to the worst case scenario of catastrophic nuclear overbudgeting. Normally nuclear plants don’t cost nearly as much.
Korea has built 5.6 GW Barakah NPP for about 25B dollars. It took less than 8 years. Russia is building its standard VVER-1200 reactors at about 10-15B for 2.4 GW
China is building its reactors at about 5B per 1.2 GW reactor.
These costs might fall further if standardized designs get deployed at larger scales, just like with solar.
Given steady and predictable generation regardless of weather and location that nuclear can provide, your numbers don’t look that impressive now, do they?
The thing you are missing is regulatory costs. All of those examples are great but they are not dealing with the United States regulatory frameworks. It’s extremely difficult to get Nuclear projects developed here.
Then that is an administrative obstacle, not technological. Nuclear power by itself shouldn't be (and isn't) that expensive and can be made much cheaper with standardized mass production.
It's a shame that Vogtle NPP is now made to be a poster child of "nuclear is inviably expensive organizational mess" argument whereas none of its problems are the technology's fault.
If we truly want to decarbonize, nuclear power is absolutely a part of the solution, together with renewables. Given the climate emergency that we are facing, ignoring nuclear’s massive benefits and not removing unnecessary obstacles from its way is almost criminal at this point.
I don’t see it happening in the United States. I’ll give a small example from my area of the country which is New England.
We had 5 Nuclear power plants (one each in ME, MA, NH, CT and VT) of which the last to be commissioned was in New Hampshire (Seabrook) in 1990. This took from the late 1960’s to 1990 to be commissioned with similar regulatory obstacles.
Since 1990 Maine Yankee shut down in 1997 due to NRC safety concerns and additional money required to fix them. The plant operated from 1972 to 1997. Vermont Yankee shut down in 2014 due to overwhelming public support for not renewing it’s license to operate. The plant operated from 1972 to 2014. Pilgrim in Plymouth Mass shut down in 2019 due to the cost of safety upgrades. The plant operated from 1972 to 2019. Two Nuclear plants remain at Seabrook NH and Waterford CT.
The New England energy market was deregulated in 1998 moving to a wholesale market run by New England ISO. Since 2000 older oil fired and coal fired generation plants have largely been replaced with Natural Gas. Recently renewables and net imports from other areas are trending higher. We have almost no coal or oil fired generation in the entire region today.
The stated plan for NE ISO is to continue to pursue renewables. No new Nuclear projects are on the horizon. The current remaining reactors make up approx. 20-30% of the regions baseload power and are nearing end of life.
The Nuclear plants require bailouts to continue to function. In 2019 CT mandated that half of the Waterford plants output was purchased for 10 years at 4.9 cents/kWh. While this increased customer bills initally, it recently saved money when Nat Gas spiked last year. It also saved a 25% spike in the regions total emissions if the plant were to close and be replaced by Nat Gas.
It would take a significant political shift — which would require a significant shift in public opinion about nuclear energy — for nuclear power to gain ground in the US. Nuclear energy needs to be not just tolerated, but desired as the energy source of the future, just as renewables have been over the last 50 years, with massive funding directed into R&D and subsidies for deployment. I don't think there's any disagreement with that.
What would be required is:
* A concerted effort to develop advanced nuclear reactor designs, particularly small modular reactors (SMRs).
* Streamlining the regulatory process and adjusting its risk tolerances to more reasonable levels.
* Subsidizing the deployment of advanced reactor types (e.g. SMRs) to create larger economies of scale.
This would all be an extremely expensive endeavor, but the payoff would be robust market for small modular nuclear reactors that offer increasingly cost-competitive energy as production scales.
Keep in mind that with nuclear, the overriding cost is manufacturing.
The fuel costs are almost zero the land use is negligible, and the pollution is minimal. And of course as a base load source, there is no need for storage, unlike with intermittent energy sources, which do require it.
Thats a good summary of what it would take but I really think the ship has sailed on Nuclear. I don’t think it will have a significant revival in the United States any time soon.
We did have a chance to be like France in the early 1970’s and we were trending that way as I outlined for the NE region.
For now the focus is all on renewables [wind, solar and lithium based storage]. Technology development is moving quickly and capital is being deployed.
The aging Nuclear, Oil and Coal plants continue to shut down or be propped up for a few years until renewables fully take over.
Don't know about the United States regulatory frameworks, but in Europe, building hydro power, or big wind farms for that matter is getting hard too. Both with local protests and regulatory requirements.
There is a lot of FUD about wind (less so for hydro which has some real issues) but the scale of the problems that can occur are orders of magnitude less than Nuclear.
This napkin math is so hand wavy and rudimentary that it pretty much means nothing. For starters, you took near the bottom range from your source, and omitted the 25% labor fee.
Also FFS were comparing a nuclear reactor to residential solar?! In what world is it a safe assumption that those figures scale? What happens when we start running out of rare earth metals?
Let’s just step away from this poorly thought out hypothetical…ask yourself why solar is barely producing any power. Theres a massive financial incentive here. Is everyone stupid? Are you a genius that noticed something everyone else missed?
> For starters, you took near the bottom range from your source, and omitted the 25% labor fee.
Here's the National Renewable Energy Laboratory site saying large solar farms are $1.06 per watt, fully installed and operational. [1]
Also the 2,245 mW solar farm of Bhadla Solar Park cost $2.175 billion [2]. Less that $1/watt. Let's just build three of those and we're good for our 7mW of solar, proven very doable.
> Also FFS were comparing a nuclear reactor to residential solar
No, we're comparing it to solar farms.
> Let’s just step away from this poorly thought out hypothetical…ask yourself why solar is barely producing any power. Theres a massive financial incentive here. Is everyone stupid? Are you a genius that noticed something everyone else missed?
The nuke we're talking about started construction more than 20 years ago. Obviously back then the calculation was very different. The value proposition for solar + storage is changing much, much faster than almost everyone realizes, and will continue to do so.
Also it would be good if you didn't resort to ad hominem attacks. If my "napkin math" is grossly wrong, please correct it. There is no need to attack me.
You’re comparing the largest solar plant in the world to a SINGLE reactor at a nuclear plant. You’re forgetting that solar plants are not able to produce anywhere near their nameplate capacity (and the fraction they do produce is not reliable). You misunderstood that the $30B figure is for two reactors, only one of which is operational atm. Solar farms have much shorter lifespans, and the panels are toxic and non recyclable.
Also why do we pretend that we can just magically clone 3x of the Bhadla plant from pakistan to the US for identical costs? Why do we assume we have infinite rare earth metals for panel/battery production?
Im down to have a discussion, but youre leaving so much out that its hard to take the argument seriously.
> You’re comparing the largest solar plant in the world to a SINGLE reactor at a nuclear plant.
I'm using that as an illustration of what is possible. You know, be inspired to do new and better things. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (in the US) says solar is $1.06/watt installed, today. Go with that if you don't want to believe the US can do things that other countries have already done.
> You’re forgetting that solar plants are not able to produce anywhere near their nameplate capacity (and the fraction they do produce is not reliable).
No I'm not. I very clearly show the fact that the nameplate number of solar needs to be divided by 6 to account for night and seasonality. Read the numbers again. I proposed installing 7mW of solar to "equal" 1,114 mW of nuke.
> You misunderstood that the $30B figure is for two reactors, only one of which is operational atm.
OK, so let's say it's $30 billion for 2,228mW of nuke capacity (even though the article clearly says it's more than $30 billion... but it doesn't say how much more).
So now we need 13,368 mW of Solar to allow for our nameplate capacity thing of 6 for solar, leaving only $16.7 billion for storage.
At $500 kWh as pointed out by another comment from a real installation that has happened, we can buy 33,400,000 kWh of storage (33,400 mWh), or enough to output the required 13,368 mW for about two and a half hours.
> Solar farms have much shorter lifespans
This [1] says most nuclear plants were designed for a thirty year lifespan, while new plants are more like 40-60. I couldn't find real-world numbers on the nuke being discussed in the article.
> the solar panels are toxic and non recyclable.
... ahh, are they as toxic and non recyclable as nuclear waste and the entire nuclear facility and the land it's built on? Also how much of that is recyclable?
Remember we're comparing the nuke to solar+storage here, so it is the comparison that is relevant.
> Also why do we pretend that we can just magically clone 3x of the Bhadla plant from pakistan to the US for identical costs?
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (that is .gov in the US) says installed solar farms are $1.06/watt installed, today. So we're not magically assuming anything.
> Why do we assume we have infinite rare earth metals for panel/battery production?
From this article [2] "A new report by the French Environment and Energy Management Agency (Ademe) shows that rare earth minerals are not widely used in solar energy and battery storage technologies. And despite their name, they aren't actually that rare at all."
Do you know something the French Environment and Energy Management Agency doesn't?
Please enlighten us.
> Im down to have a discussion, but youre leaving so much out that its hard to take the argument seriously.
I'm not leaving anything out, you're just conveniently ignoring parts of what I'm saying.
I understand nukes have made a lot of sense for a lot of years, and if we had built a ton of them in the 80s and 90s we'd be in a better position today. We didn't do that, and we shouldn't start building hundreds of billions of dollars worth of things in 2024 using assumptions and numbers from the 80s and 90s.
We need to realize the equation has shifted DRASTICALLY in those years, and it's going to continue to do so.
Look at the price of installed solar and installed storage capacity prices by year [3]. Where do you think they'll be in just five years before a single nuke is even approved?
Where do you think they'll be in 10 years before a single nuke is even built?
What do you think that will do to all my calculations above?
It feels like you want to spend decades building out new regular trains when other countries have tens of thousands of miles of bullet trains operating TODAY.
Skate to where the puck is going, not where it is now.
We have just barely started investing into the extremely large solar projects that could easily change that 1.6% figure you quoted. I also don’t know if that number included behind-the-meter residential solar which is mostly what we have in the United States right now.
As a small example of how renewables can change I would examine wind power in the UK.
The price for storage is closer to $500/kWh for the large utility scale projects using Teslas Megapacks and falling fast [1]. I wouldn’t be surprised to see $200-300 fairly soon (within the next 5 years). Tesla is only starting to seriously ramp up production on Megapacks. I couldn’t find reliable pricing for a project usings BYD’s new MC Cube system but Las Vegas is installing half a gigawatt hour worth of those units.
[1] 413 million dollars for 800,000 kWh = $516.25/kWh installed price.
coal 82.6, combined cycle 39.9, advanced nuclear 81.7, geothermal 37.6, biomass 90.1, onshore wind 40, offshore wind (that one was a surprise, since offshore wind should be quite cheap, mainly driven by capital cost of 104 USD per MWh) 105, solar 33.8, solar hybrid 49 and hydro 64.
It would require a radically new design that takes a lot of the cost out. You also have the spent fuel storage problem and the risk factors of a meltdown (however small) to tackle which are always working against you. Technology development in the Nuclear area is SLOW.
Now compare to batteries. There are thousands of companies working on new technology development.
It’s just a matter of brain power and capital working on the problems.
I don’t see a viable path forward for Nuclear at the current costs and with how dramatic the rise of renewables and battery storage is increasing.
Just starting build them at a much bigger scaled would probably result in significant decrease in costs on it's own. China, Korea and Russia somehow manage to build at much lower cost.
> risk factors of a meltdown (however small) to tackle which are always working against you. Technology development in the Nuclear area is SLOW.
True, then again these really aren't a big deal. Burning coal is about the same as having a Chernobyl size disaster every few year (even when we 100% ignore climate change) and most people don't seem to mind that much.
Yes, I'm sure governments are going to fork over a trillion dollars to demonstrate that this time, for sure, honest, nuclear costs will decline with experience. /s
The generic problem is that nuclear plants have to be big to amortize fixed costs (like personnel to operate and guard them), but if they're big they have lots of parts and more connections between parts, so to make them sufficiently reliable they need expensive careful construction. The more welds a NPP has, the more reliable each individual weld must be.
In contrast, something like a solar field, while it has lots of parts, doesn't depend on all those parts working for the field to work. It's by its nature highly redundant and fault tolerant. It also doesn't require supervision anywhere near the same extent as a nuclear plant.
This caught my eye: "Prior to Vogtle Unit 3, the last nuclear reactor to start in the United States was Watts Bar Unit 2 in Tennessee. Construction on Watts Bar 2 began in 1973 but was suspended in 1985. Work resumed in 2007, and the reactor came online in 2016."
I can't even imagine how you'd get the parts, and they probably can't change the plans either. Ok so I decided to look into it a bit more, and here are some interesting details from documents on the nrc.gov and EIA.gov:
Here's some context for what was happening in 1985, from the eia:
>"As a consequence of the identification of a large number of deficiencies shortly before the WBN Unit 1 license was expected to be issued, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) sent a letter to TVA [...]. In response to this letter, TVA developed a Nuclear Performance Plan (NPP) to address corporate and site-specific issues, establishing programs to address a wide variety of material, design, and programmatic deficiencies. WBN Unit 2 construction was suspended at about that time, with major structures in place and equipment such as reactor coolant system piping installed."
And while most of the documentation was very terse and spoke more about specific regulatory requirements that I don't understand, this is pretty interesting:
(From the nrc.gov)
>"The NRC staff reviewed TVA’s refurbishment program and found the following: (1) TVA was refurbishing or replacing most active components and instruments; (2) TVA had determined the potential degradation mechanism for each category of components, along with any contributing environmental factors; (3) the acceptance criteria were developed from the licensing basis, design specifications, and vendor specifications; (4) the proposed inspections and testing included in the program could be expected to identify degradation; and (5) refurbishment activities would be in accordance with applicable vendor and design specifications or requirements."
That sounds like a massive, massive amount of work. It explains why it took longer even if the reactor was apparently 60% completed.
(From the eia) :
>"That time, a study found Unit 2 to be effectively 60% complete with $1.7 billion invested. The study said the plant could be finished in five years at an additional cost of $2.5 billion"
> I can't even imagine how you'd get the parts, and they probably can't change the plans either.
One of the bullets on the box is that the AP1000 uses a fairly standardized design, unlike many prior designs which were mostly a patchwork of one-off designs. The AP1000 still being "in production" means parts are available.
I have no idea, but I would assume most parts are custom machined to spec. If that's true, you'd just need to find machine shops capable of making the parts.
> I have no idea, but I would assume most parts are custom machined to spec. If that's true, you'd just need to find machine shops capable of making the parts.
You call up your local nuclear reactor spare parts vendor and place an order. Then they figure out how to either source the part or manufacture it or substitute it.
No, really. Most places that sell nuclear fuel have a spare parts business too.
> Construction on Watts Bar 2 began in 1973 but was suspended in 1985. Work resumed in 2007, and the reactor came online in 2016.
That seems to be common with nuclear power plants. The latest one near where I live (Angra 3) has been under construction since 1984, and it should be complete in a few more years if it doesn't pause again; construction of the previous one (Angra 2), according to Wikipedia, started in 1976 and came online in 2001.
The first nuclear build out in the US was already in deep trouble before TMI. Nuclear costs were exploding, demand had stopped growing at the rates assumed for the nuclear plans (this helped drive WPPSS into bankruptcy), and with the passage of PURPA in 1978 grids were opened to non-utility suppliers.
The official numbers around radiation exposure from Three Mile Island claim minimal radiation exposure, yet studies have found numerous contradictory effects including 64% increased rates of cancer, > 50% increase in young infant mortality, and various other ill effects. [1] Studies have not been able to prove a causal link, but that's largely because they take, as an assumption, the correctness of the official numbers, making it essentially impossible to reject the null hypothesis or, in other words, prove a causal link.
There's a slew of studies mentioned in your link, not all aligned with some "official" policy of suppression - and they amount in total to tentative evidence of maybe something.
Statistically it's inconclusive whether slight increases in some zones from a bit below average to a bit above average cancer rates is linked to TMI or to stress and|or increased screening.
What is certain, beyond a doubt, is that within the last week an explosion at a nickel plant in Indonesia left at least 13 dead and 46 injured.
That's an example of the generally unreported and ongoing human cost of battery technology.
Note Well: I'm not pro nuclear OR anti battery - I am pragmatic about the real consequences of resource mining and extraction having been part of exploration geophysics and global resource mapping for several decades.
Are you suggesting that a death due to an explosion at a plant owned by "PT Indonesia Tsingshan Stainless Steel" counts against batteries, because some of them use nickel, but not nuclear plants, which pretty much require nickel-containing stainless steel for its anti-corrosion properties?
I'm stating that to date all mining and processing of resources involves deaths, multilations, long term disease, etc.
I'm asserting that to date the cumulative deaths from the nuclear power industry do not yet equal the deaths from a single Bhopal disaster (pesticide processing, half a million people exposed, many dead).
I'm putting forward as a simple fact that as wind, solar, batteries, etc continue to scale up from the small sliver of total global energy they currently are to ideally matching the current percentage of coal there will need to be a substantial increase in the tonnages of nickel, copper, lithium, and more that are mined, concentrated, processed and extracted and that comes with substantial increases in the wastes associated with these industries and the known risks to human life.
I would suggest that anybody making a human risk argument on any single portion of the energy industry look broadly at the risks across the board.
It's perfectly fine to chest beat about safety, I'm for it.
It's callously indifferent to only give a damn about a few deaths in a sector not approved while ignoring those in sectors liked.
Until we stop building and burning coal for power “radiation” is not an excuse because coal power puts off far more radiation then TMI ever did even with a partial meltdown
No one banned nuclear. But of course it is the only sensible reaction to such an incident to check your designs for faults and review all reactors under construction. And then decide whether it is prudent to continue with the construction and which changes would be required.
In effect they did through overzealous safety requirements (which made it more expensive compared to other forms of electricity generation)
this regulatory inconsistency is mostly irrational, because it's clear through other policies that society values safety much less in other policies (eg. driving, all the emissions from other sources, gun safety, etc)
of course regulations are not perfect mirrors of society's preferences, but it's close enough. (and of course society doesn't "has to be" consistent, but I would say a pretty vocal minority, perhaps even the majority wishes it to be so)
.
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that said, yes, if the world would order 1000+ nuclear power plants, all standardized, then we could have it cheaper, because then it would make sense to invest in automation, and maybe modular small reactors can already get enough traction. but since we are not ordering that many and even AP1000 is just a brand not really a standard, there's practically no economies of scale
Considering the potential damage, nuclear is right up there with aviation, medical and life science when it comes to safety standards. Because each and every incident can be traced back to ignoring whatever safety standards and practices where applicable at the time these accidents happened.
Someone would have to pay for those 1000 NPPs, and in the current market conditions no one is willing to, because the ROI isn't there. Even you said so, there is no NPP standard in place to begin with, so before those 1000 plants are ordered, this standard design has to defined, agreed upon and developed first. And that takes how long in your opinion?
>Because each and every incident can be traced back to ignoring whatever safety standards and practices where applicable at the time these accidents happened.
No they absolutely cannot. Many incidents happened due to yet unimagined failures. For example, KLM Flight 867, which lost all four engines due to a common mode failure (flying through ash clouds). The plane landed safely and safety standards were updated to provide guidance on avoiding, detecting, and reacting to ash ingestion.
TMI was a similar situation. At that point, nobody had really considered human factors engineering for nuclear plants. Nobody considered the risk of having a lamp that indicated that a valve had been asked to close instead of that it actually was closed.
One major challenge that aviation has handled better than nuclear and much better than chemical production is ensuring that issues get reported promptly and treated seriously. Aviation calls it "just culture", where mistakes and accidents are treated with retraining and lenience, but covering up issues is treated very harshly. This is absolutely necessary, otherwise you end up with major communications issues like we saw with MetEd during TMI or Tepco during Fukishima.
Ah I see. Let me write up a few thoughts about the "big 3" nuclear accidents.
Chernobyl was a very poor design, with a positive void coefficient of reactivity (i.e. temperature goes up, steam goes up, reactivity goes up, leading to runaway feedback) and no containment building. It was operated in a very poor manner as well, which was the principle cause of the failure. Some sources[1] claim that this poor design and unsafe operating conditions were well known to plant management and Soviet leadership, and were covered up in the name of Progress and production pressures. There was even a very similar accident that occurred during a very similar test in Leningrad in 1975, albeit with less extreme consequences, which was fully covered up, even from plant operators at other RBMK reactors.[2]
Fukushima was a pretty well designed and operated reactor, but the design basis did not consider the risk of a large tsunami, rather instead focusing on typhoons. Ironically, they actually removed a larger "natural sea wall" (i.e. a cliff) that would have protected the plant.[3] The big lesson learned here is to have prepositioned stocks of generators, batteries, replacement parts, etc close enough to the plant to be supplied promptly as needed, but far enough away to hopefully be excluded from any local disasters, aka the FLEX program.[4]
On the other hand, TMI was an accident in which the operators made the wrong call, primarily because they had been trained to be concerned about one specific danger ("going solid" and bursting the pressurizer, requiring less water injection), but really they were facing a totally different one (small break loss of cooling, requiring more high pressure water injection).[5] Interestingly, a very similar accident happened at Davis Besse in Ohio only a few years before, but without any major consequences, as the operations team recognized the mistake and resolved it, but these lessons learned were not well communicated to operators of other plants. This failure and others like it led to the establishment of WANO (international) and INPO (USA) which are organizations intended to help operators share experiences with each other in a timely and safe manner.[6][7]
After the Leningrad incident, the RBMK Chief Engineering organisation announced changes to the operating procedures taken this incident into account to all RMBK plants. Those procedures where never written, and none of the operators asked about them neither. That was pure negligence, and no cover up (the cover up was invented by the HBO series, no idea why). What is true so, is that the whole bureaucracy and organisation in the USSR let Chenobyl 4 get away with well known safety and regulation violations before the accident, and those regulation were extremely lax by modern standards to begin with.
An interesting bit about Fukushima is not the reactor design, there is apparently nothing inherently wrong with that, but rather the site. As you said, the seawall was too low, mainly because during the site development earthquakes of the magnitude that caused the tsunami where not considered despite geological proof to the contrary. That was negligence number one. Number two occured after simulations years before the tsunami predicted pretty exactly the magnitude of the earthquake and the height of the following tsunami. Despite being fully aware of that simulation, and the effects on the site, no measures where taken, e.g. updated procedures or a heigher sea wall or moving batteries and generators to higher ground.
The IAEA reports on both, Chernobyl (the IAEA report in English includes translations of the two Soviet ones, and man are those two damning even before you consider who wrote them) and Fukushima are very good reads, highly recommended if you didn't read them already.
The cleanup costs are high enough that you could have literally replaced the entire nuclear power plant fleet of Japan and built new ones. When it comes to nuclear safety, tear it up and build again is cheaper than any single accident. Nuclear power plant advocates don't seem to understand the magnitude of the failure of a nuclear power plant. It simply is unacceptable.
Potential damage is one thing, but for actual deaths coal is 1000 times more deadly per TWh than nuclear, so surely coal requires far more rigourous safety standards
You need to look at the potential consequences of an accident to determine how rigorous the safety standards should be. A metric such as deaths/TWh cannot answer that question and therefore should not be used to guide the answer.
You have to weigh the likelihood of potential harm. The liklihood of harm from the co2 pumped out by continued fossil fuel is far higher than some magical never before happened scenario
We're no longer talking about how rigorous the safety standards should be. Your claim was that deaths/TWh is a good metric to determine this, I disagreed and replied to that.
If nuclear power plants slowly created an exclusion zone around them that grows over time, then you would have a point since each individual plant would have a tiny exclusion zone, but the problem is that the accidents are the result of gross negligence in the cases of both Chernobyl and Fukushima. Arguing about modern safety standards is meaningless by the way. Back when the Fukushima accident happened, the Fukushima power plant was older than the one in Chernobyl. This tells us two things. People build unsafe nuclear power plant designs, even when safer ones are available and second, when regulations get stricter, the bad power plants stick around for decades until they fail. If you wanted to put nuclear power plants into the best spotlight possible, you would demand old power plants be replaced by new designs, since that massively reduces the risk of another accident that makes nuclear power look bad. However, what we hear all the time is that the nuclear power plant industry wants less safety regulations so that they can cheaply repeat mistakes of the past.
so yes, nuclear is (almost?) the safest, but the direction of causality is the opposite.
it's safe because we made it safe, because the inherent nature basically necessitates is (because it's a form of energy generation that is a lot more efficient in big plants, and because fissile material requires a very careful handling compared to - for example - coal, and therefore the cost-benefit trade-offs of making NPPs very safe is basically a no-brainer up to a point)
the problem is that it's hard to find this inflection point where "more safety against acute problems" actually leads to more harm from "chronic problems", basically where we are reducing the meltdown events so low that we end up suffocating in fly ash from coal power plants. (not to mention the secondary effects of "killing" the nuclear industry.)
Meltdown events have basically been zero on designs for decades. But we still have massive barriers against nuclear when even things like wind kill more.
Everyone talks about Fukushima and the half a dozen cancer cases. Nobody talks about the ten thousand that died from other effects from the earthquake, nobody talks about the thousands that died that year to produce the same amount of output from coal
Same with airline security. I get my toothpaste check Kes out because of the “potential” of some deaths, yet nobody stopped me driving to the airport that morning, and driving actually kills thousands in the US alone every month.
The reason for not talking about that is that it's not relevant for this discussion. Deaths due to the earthquake that are unrelated to the nuclear power plant do not help us to assess nor reduce nuclear accident risk.
Same goes for your airline security example. Car related accidents/attacks are unrelated to airplane accidents/attacks.
Yes, and the safety conscious approach is great, and aviation and medicine are a pretty good examples, they can be safe and cheap at the same time. (Notwithstanding the usual [and rightful!] grumbling about the FDA, and the Boeing/FAA MCAS fuckup.)
The ROI is not there because other forms of electricity generation didn't have to pay for most of their externalities[1], and people don't give a damn about actual safety profile, or mid-long term overall costs, it's simply the usual sentimentalism-theater.
> Oh think of the nuclear waste, oh think of the poor little spent fuel rods leaking into our puppies' drinking water, oh think of all the horrible unspeakable tragedies we will get when every Monday Chernobyl repeats but worse, Fridays are for Fukushimas, and the rest of the weekdays are for all the usual GreenPeace-made-up dangers. But of course instead currently, of course, we enjoy the peaceful and prosperous energy abundance granted to us by ... checks notes ... the same geniuses who delivered the just one-more-lane will solve the traffic jams for sure hit comedy series, the single-family house exclusive rated 10/10 absolute heavens on Earth[2], healthcare as an investment [3], but muh guns [4], and so on.
What are you even talking about? and what have guns to do with any of that? Or Greenpeace? After all, it is a well known fact that NPPs are uninsureable, always have been. Because insurance compabies are extremely good at running risk-premium-profit models, and those all tell the same thing: don't offer insurance for NPPs above very small amounts that are nowhere near enough to cover a serious accident.
I'm talking about the usual failure of policy-through-populism. Nuclear energy is in the same category as those I mentioned.
Uninsurable at what price? If NPPs work without insurance, maybe it's irrelevant anyway. (Especially since private parties hardly can just run their own NPPs, and states already run them or allow them to be run without insurance.)
That said I don't know whether residents near NPPs have a higher preimum because of the plant. Or even whether they can get policies from insurers. But if they can, then insurance already does underwrite some of the costs of potential accidents.
On nuclear construction cost increases, from Crowley and Griffith 1982, “US construction cost rise threatens nuclear option” (via @whatisnuclear):
"""
Ironically, some of the decisions that have been made in the name of improving safety margins for low probability events, may have reduced the safety margins for high probability events. The UE&C piping study uncovered numerous areas where the tolerances requested in the piping design documents might be appropriate for a machine shop oriented manufacturing operation, but are totally unrealistic for field construction.
"""
Also, skimming the list of USA incidents, there are a great deal of bullshit "incidents" in recent times. Most related to natural machanical breakdowns in non radioactive systems due to everything being operated decades past its expiration date. Wouldn't be happening if new NPPs had been built to replace these ancient designs.
Coal simply does not have the same risk profile so such a list does not exist.
>
Wouldn't be happening if new NPPs had been built to replace these ancient designs.
That's possible but the economics have to make sense as well. You would do well to try and extend the lifetime of a NPP and run it as an LTO NPP, this maximises profits if it is possible to run the plant past the lifetime it was originally designed for. Incremental upgrades are the way to go in such a case.
This is how a good culture of safety looks like. Treat small stuff seriously to prevent the big bad things. Similarly with aviation, and with medicine, etc.
Coal cause more cancer and pumps a huge amount of radioactive material into the sky but I've not seen anyone closing coal power stations to stop that. The fear of nuclear power is just one of those irrational fears..
Of course people want to close coal power stations too. One might argue about the relative timing, but the goal is to get rid of nuclear and coal.
And while a safely operating nuclear plant is actually pretty low on radiation, we unfortunately had severe incidents which released a lot of radiation. Here in Bavaria, the forests are still contaminated by the Chernobyl disaster. Wild boar meat still has to be checked for radiation and a lot of it destroyed as not fit for consumption. Never mind the meat which probably gets eaten unchecked.
Your comments are getting downvoted because they're breaking the site guidelines. Can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to them instead? We'd appreciate it. Note these:
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
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The funny thing is these effing boomers still protest against nuclear power at the end of University Avenue every month, as if this was somehow a relevant concern in 2023.
I remember when I lived there, they had to get a special exemption to use self-checkout machines made by 3M in the Berkeley library. I don't remember why 3M ended up on the bad boy list, probably something related to nuclear weapons though.
"The Peace and Justice Commission finds that it would violate the Nuclear Free Berkeley Act (NFBA) to approve a waiver of the law and contract with 3M Corporation for maintenance of the Library’s RFID system."
"Pursuant to B.M.C. Section 12.90.070, the City of Berkeley shall grant no contract to any person or business, which knowingly engages in work for nuclear weapons."
Sometimes, when your employer wants to fire you but doesn’t want you to be able to file for unemployment or accuse them of firing you for some legally impermissible reason, they just make it so miserable to keep working there that you end up quitting. There is a legal term for this: “constructive dismissal”. I hope the implied analogy is obvious.
Here is the best summary I can post quickly. Sorry for the source.
After the cooling water began to drain out of the broken pressure valve on the morning of March 28, 1979, emergency cooling pumps automatically went into operation. Left alone, these safety devices would have prevented the development of a larger crisis. However, human operators in the control room misread confusing and contradictory readings and shut off the emergency water system. The reactor was also shut down, but residual heat from the fission process was still being released. By early morning, the core had heated to over 4,000 degrees, just 1,000 degrees short of meltdown. In the meltdown scenario, the core melts, and deadly radiation drifts across the countryside, fatally sickening a potentially great number of people.
As the plant operators struggled to understand what had happened, the contaminated water was releasing radioactive gases throughout the plant. The radiation levels, though not immediately life-threatening, were dangerous, and the core cooked further as the contaminated water was contained and precautions were taken to protect the operators. Shortly after 8 a.m., word of the accident leaked to the outside world. The plant’s parent company, Metropolitan Edison, downplayed the crisis and claimed that no radiation had been detected off plant grounds, but the same day inspectors detected slightly increased levels of radiation nearby as a result of the contaminated water leak. Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh considered calling an evacuation.
Finally, at about 8 p.m., plant operators realized they needed to get water moving through the core again and restarted the pumps. The temperature began to drop, and pressure in the reactor was reduced. The reactor had come within less than an hour of a complete meltdown. More than half the core was destroyed or molten, but it had not broken its protective shell, and no radiation was escaping. The crisis was apparently over.
And total caoacity of zhose pales in comparison to wind, solar coal being built at the same time. Funny, the numbers are all there, all you have to do is comparing them to realize nuclear is far from growing.
It’s not nothing though. For the 8 nuclear plants the combined output will be 7GWe. That can power 50 million+ homes. That’s like a fifth of the population.
Are they building or are they "building" (as in, talking and planning and not actually building.)
India is famous for talking about nuclear. Building it, not as much. India gets 2x as much energy from PV as it does from nuclear, and the PV is growing rapidly.
Russia has 4 domestically under construction and about 17 actively under construction internationally. They are planning something like 29 more by 2050, though the jury is out on whether those will actually ever get completed.
But it is very nice that RosAtom seems to be one of the most competently run Russian Gov agencies.
Construction on WNP 3 & 5 began in 1977 in Elma, WA by Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS, AKA "Whoops!"). The plant is partially finished, and every decade or someone tries to get work started again. There is a business park at the base of the cooling tower, which reportedly held an overstock.com call center for a while. During Dieselgate, Volkswagen used the facility to house 10s of thousands of recalled vehicles. The tower is often used as a filming location, including adult films.
The A-35 (a highway in Quebec) has been under construction since 1966. When finished, it will be 34 miles/55 km long.
Two decades isn't very long for an infrastructure project, which is unfortunate since long-term planning benefits greatly from political stability, and many areas are seeing large shifts for the worse in that regard.
It’s an extremely poor example. It’s a multi phase project and for many years government didn’t provide any funding as it was not a priority. It’s not like they were actively trying to build it for 47 years, they built multiple small parts of it through multiple phases but they were never trying to build the whole thing. It was just not anything important to complete.
What if sections will be needed now, and it's easy enough to make a plan to eventually connect all of the parts as needed? Get the zoning work done to prevent anything over 2 stories tall being built over the planned route, and then build the various sections as needed/as budget is available. I'm not saying that's what happened, but I can see smart, modular, as-needed infrastructure projects being drawn out over decades like this.
China has had more than 150 modern bridges collapse. Some of them collapsed in less than a year. China is not building or maintaining bridges any better than the US.
The Brno main post office building here in the Czech Republic has been built as a modular structure that can be moved and reassembled once the new main railway station is completed.
That was in 1937 - the new main railway station does not exist yet (though it looks like it might actually be built this time) and post even moved out of the historic building last year. :P
Makes me wonder how much effort went into mothballing partial construction and then unwinding all of that to get it going again. Seems like it would have cost a lot.
A lot of the reason for the lengthy construction times in cathedrals and churches was the amount of hand-skilled craftsmanship associated with marble, wood, and stone carving and artistry.
That makes Gaudí's Sagrada Família look timely in comparison. Started in 1882, the final, final completion date was set back to 2040 due to the pandemic (Covid was mentioned. I imagine 1919 may have also contributed)
There must have been engineers who worked their entire careers on GE's "next gen" reactor or whatever they call it, and retired without seeing one built.
It seems like up-front monetary 'cost' is continually used to bash nuclear. And 100% from the perspective of human beings.
To put it into context, nuclear
* total human deaths due to nuclear since its inception is in the low thousands at worst, for the entire industry.
* total animal deaths due to nuclear since its inception is minimal, in fact, for example, wildlife around Chernobyl has flourished
* damage to the environment is minimal
* waste is tiny by volume, zero CO2, and can be buried deeply where no human will ever get to it.
Versus fossil fuels:
* has killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions of humans
* has killed millions if not hundreds of millions of animals through climate change, oil spillage, fires and so on
* has destroyed thousands of square miles of land for open cast mining, oil slicks, and so on
* waste dumps thousands of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every day plus other byproducts
So, what's the actual monetary cost of the usage of fossil fuels? How much money needs to be spent to mitigate climate change? Or figuring out how to de-extinct species? Or restoring habitats after cleaning up oil slicks? Or attempting to the put the land 'right' after open cast mining?
How much money are we going to spend on figuring out 'energy storage' for green power, when nuclear power is already stored in the uranium, in a tiny volume?
In fact how much money could we have saved by going long on nuclear in the 60s and 70s, had it not been for ill-educated, and ill-informed campaigns by CND and Greenpeace, for example? And how much better would the environment be right now?
>It seems like up-front monetary 'cost' is continually used to bash nuclear.
We certainly still need to get a handle on the cost of deploying nuclear because it is not sustainable the way we do it today
In 2022 Georgia Power got 23% of its power from nuclear, 1.9 gigawatts of capacity.
Since construction started, Georgia Power customers have been paying the construction costs (about 6%) and now that construction is complete the rest of the costs are now being added to customer bills. These are surcharges in addition to the actual cost of fuel and operations at the plant, so they're going to be paying per kWh as well.
At the same time Southern Company (parent of Georgia Power) shareholders are now receiving profits from the operations of Vogtle 3 while capital costs are recovered--IE they are not paying for the asset that they will own
This 10% increase in customer bills will result in the nuclear percentage as pat of GPC's mix increasing just a few percent. It would still be lower than either Gas/Oil or Coal as of 2022's numbers (in 2023 I believe it will be higher than coal, but that is because GPC is replacing coal with gas at a rapid rate)
If you replaced all fossil fuels with nuclear at the same cost structure, power bills in Georgia would increase many fold
I'm completely on board with nuclear, but we have to absolutely and totally rethink the designs we build, how we manage the projects, who owns them (private vs. public) and more
I believe that we need a Nuclear Corps of Engineers, a publicly funded, possibly international organization like the World Bank, dedicated solely to constructing modern reactors globally. This would bring economies of scale into play, making nuclear energy more economically viable and efficient.
The feasibility of such an endeavor is clear when we compare it to military spending or the costs of road construction and maintenance. Essential infrastructure often requires substantial investment, but the long-term benefits justify the expense.
The idea of for-profit nuclear power has proven to be less effective. It leads to fragmented, inefficient projects and prioritizes short-term gains over long-term sustainability and safety. A centralized, public approach like the Nuclear Corps would streamline production, enforce uniform safety standards, and reduce overall costs.
This shift is not just an economic imperative but a step towards a sustainable, cooperative global energy future. It's time to rethink our approach to nuclear energy, prioritizing global benefit over private profit.
I've wanted to see whether thorium reactors actually work or not. I suspect the lack of interest from western governments is because it isn't very useful for making bombs.
It isn't about "nuclear vs. fossil fuels" but about "nuclear and/or renewables?".
The amount of damage/victims linked to nuclear is a matter of debate, and a final count will only be possible after its very last hot waste will be cold.
Such dysfunctions of the Mega-Central-Omniscient-Organization are common to all political regimes, as shown by the Fukushima nuclear disaster: Japan isn't exactly a communist nation, and the Oganawa nuclear plant, closer to the tsunami, did not trigger a disaster thanks to a sole guy acting against the whole local Mega-Central-Omniscient-Organization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20...
A nuclear reactor built and used in such a context may trigger some bad events in way less than 23 years, as a mere few seconds are sufficient for it to do so.
How many batteries do we need to store the equivalent energy in 1kg of uranium or thorium? And how much mining is required obtain those materials and how much energy is required to refine those chemicals or elements? And repeat for the millions of solar panels and wind turbines. And shipping them around the world in diesel powered boats?
> How many batteries do we need to store the equivalent energy in 1kg of uranium
Energy density isn't, alone, determinant here.
The most determinant question is: after taking into account all measures aiming at reducing renewables' production 'intermittency' ('variability' is more adequate), which are: spreading a mix (wind, solar, geothermic...) of renewable sources on a continent, enhancing grid interconnections among nations for them so support each other (objective already very actively and more and more pursued in Europe), storing at continental-level renewables' over-productions (thanks to hydro, hydrogen...) and using it on a clean 'backup' compensating for renewables' 'intermittency', demand response...
... then how much energy do we need to store in order to compensate for any remaining 'intermittency'?
Given that the average electric car battery can power the average home for quite a while (days), and that other EV batteries will be online...
Moreover each year 7% to 10% of gridpower is in France (fully nuclearized) produced thanks to fossil fuel, and its electricity is low-emitting, giving a quite comfy last-resort.
> And how much mining is required obtain those materials
Those materials are recyclable and have substitutes.
Uranium isn't (in practice) recyclable and doesn't have any substitute: this is eternal mining of an ever-rarefied source.
> shipping them around the world in diesel powered boats?
This is a valid point, enforcing the need for each continent hosting cooperating nations to produce its own production units.
On the other hand uranium reserves at current conditions can provide for at best 200 years (more probably 130 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium ), therefore the conditions (price and emissions, as the raise as the ore grade lowers may quickly worsen if some 'nuclear renaissance' stems reactors building projects. Who will take the risk and invest?
The architecture I described does not imply that those batteries will be loaded by locally-installed solar panels. There will be a grid, as usual, carrying electricity produced by the described mix, mostly by industrial sites (in many geographical areas a large part of it will be offshore wind turbines fleets).
No: they are benefiting from it as they (most of the time) load their batteries when electricity is cheap, and discharge it into the grid when it is rare and therefore expensive.
On average the car autonomy already is way above the daily commute, and this margin is quickly growing.
There are more and more parking places (private and public) connected to the grid.
> No: they are benefiting from it as they (most of the time) load their batteries when electricity is cheap, and discharge it into the grid when it is rare and therefore expensive.
This would only work if the added charge on night-time electricity also accounts for battery cycling cost which I doubt it would.
Very low or even negative prices, during episodes of renewables overproduction (typically when wind blows or sun shines way over demand), are more and more common.
Reciprocally as more and more less tolerated grid backup (greenhouse-gas emitting fossils or dangerous nuclear) disappear episodes of under-production will be more common, and during those electricity price will soar.
It's not as much mining as you'd think -- it's not comparable to nuclear, sure, but I was surprised to learn, for example, the enormous difference between a fully decarbonized future vs. carbon present in terms of mining / extraction volume.
The actuarial account for fossil fuels is important, but I've come across this set of summary items many times and it ignores the positive effects of CO2, which have been substantial. This is a great benefit for many ecosystems and also improves crop yields, to your monetary cost point.
The overall phenomenon is well documented, so I'll give just one highly credible account: "The greening [over the last 35 years] represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States… Results showed that carbon dioxide fertilization explains 70 percent of the greening effect" - NASA Apr 2016, https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2436/co2-is-making-earth-green...
I'm not wanting to rehash the climate debate, nor am I implying how much it offsets negatives and would grant all of your points otherwise. I do think it's wise to do whatever we can to move towards cleaner carbon burning to remove toxic and particulate emissions, and limiting CO2 emissions as well, but also within fair economic tradeoffs. I also support developing nuclear, fission and fusion.
I see you've been massively down voted, even tho none of them can manage to even disagree with your facts. Regardless, I don't think greening offsets the millions that die from air pollution every year, not including any climate change effects.
I once saw a paper arguing that one of the deleterious effects of climate change over the next hundred years was the proliferation of poison ivy. They found that greening was occurring because of increased CO2 and temperature increase, and plucked out 'oh no, there'll be more poison ivy' as their topic.
I wouldn't disagree with the high mortality from pollution toxins. I've never looked closely, but also seems common sense.
As for how much greening benefits offset costs, I was mildly frustrated by the downvoting :) and went researching on the economic effects in particular. The only study I can find on CO₂ fertilization is recent and stunning:
"we apply the CO₂ fertilization effect... backwards to 1940, and, assuming no other limiting factors, find that CO₂ was the dominant driver of [American agriculture] yield growth"
As they note, the extrapolation is from a study period of 2014-2020, but it's expected they have underestimated the prior role of CO₂ fertilization, as CO₂ response becomes saturated as levels rise and that's not represented in their model.
This is 2021 research funded by DOE & USDA, run by NBER, with PIs from Harvard and Columbia who are well cited within their field of environmental economics. Given the pedigree and that conclusion, this should be front-page news in science mags at least. I couldn't find any reporting on it except for Epoch Times (https://www.theepochtimes.com/science/nasa-satellite-data-su...), which gets an eye-roll from me, but guess they got this one :)
I read the full thing. It's great. Crosses high-resolution satellite CO₂ anomaly observations (NASA OCO-2) with crop yield records, wind modeling, sensitivity testing on non-ag land and the result is broadly repeated: +1ppm CO₂ -> +~0.5-1% yield. CO₂ levels went from ~310-410ppm in that period.
If true, it seems at odds with the normal account that gave nitrogen fertilization the lead role for increasing crop yields this past century and lifting most of the world's population out of regular food insecurity, and the growth of our population into billions. Seems more likely both were necessary.
It also makes sense, as C3 plants (e.g. soy, wheat and most plants besides hot/dry grasses) respond positively to CO₂ partial-pressures up to 800-1000ppm. C4 low-CO₂ adapted corn also fertilizes, just to a lesser extent. The authors also note the negative effects of heat stress, but this wouldn't have been as significant in the extrapolation period.
From Epoch Times: “The paper’s first author, Taylor, said: 'We reiterate that climate change will have a large negative impact on agriculture in aggregate, especially in places exposed to extreme heat. And higher CO2 may even lower food nutrition. But the countervailing fertilization effect should also be taken into account.'”
the fact that oil spills sometimes happen doesn't seem to be any better of an argument than the one that nuclear meltdowns sometimes happen.
Nuclear fanboys need to accept the fact that so long as nuclear always costs multiples more than literally anything else, these things won't get built, no matter how carbon-clean and healthy they are.
Nuclear only costs more because of outdated and intentionally obstructive regulations lobbied for by the oil industry (who also funded environmental groups willing to hate nuclear btw). Even with the massive over regulation of nuclear power in the US, nuclear is STILL more cost effective in the long run, and has only not been done because the risk of the government deciding to shut down their project or add untenable barriers mid construction has been too great to risk it. And don't give me "levelized cost" bs, that is skewed unrealistically against nuclear.
Well, I believe the factual content of what you said, I'm just surprised you'd seriously use this as an argument in favour of nuclear power, because the fact that wildlife thrived is so intimately connected with the fact that a nuclear meltdown happened.
If radiation in the exclusion zone causes less damage than human habitation, what is the argument for maintaining the exclusion zone?
Bearing in mind that coal plants have a lot of negative health effects, so there needs to be an argument that life in the exclusion zone would be detectable worse than life near a coal plant.
Problem is that we don't build the damn things anymore, so each one is bespoke and expensive. Ideally we'd keep building them and develop the expertise and make it a more repeatable scalable process.
I worry instead that the lesson taken from this will be "nuclear is too expensive and ineffective".
MIT found that reusing a design made plants more expensive to build, not less, because of costly on-site last minute design changes.
Taking your point more charitably, it is indeed the lack of a sustainable nuclear energy industry that routinely builds plants that causes costs to skyrocket. There is a chicken and egg situation: nuclear projects don’t get funded because they’re too expensive, so there is no chance to develop expertise in how to build them cheaply, which causes the few that get greenlit to be built by rookie teams that make rookie mistakes that cause costs to skyrocket.
I clicked through to the actual study ( https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30458-X?_r... ) and I couldn't find a single sentence mentioning on-site last-minute design changes. I searched for "change" and tabbed through all of the results. The closest thing was mention of Westinghouse changing construction standards halfway through an ongoing project, which required many changes to the project design. But, that's one project.
So my question is: Is it possible that the MIT News Office can't understand MIT journal articles?
From the article's own summary: Our results point to a gap between expected and realized costs stemming from low resilience to time- and site-dependent construction conditions.
Guess that's where they took it from.
Skimming the paper it seems a large part of the issue is that it's difficult to mass produce something which needs to be integrated into a variable environment, and attempting to do so is detrimental compared to custom solutions.
This seems to mirror what I've found in the software world, where a custom integration is often much cheaper and easier to maintain than trying to manhandle some generic library/software to do what's needed.
There's got to be some middle ground between every reactor in the country being absolutely bespoke and on the other hand trying to build them in a factory like modular housing.
IIRC one of the big differences/problems is that every one of them have completely different control rooms and control systems. To the point that you cannot train on one reactor and walk into another and operate it. If we at least standardized that side of things, the cost of operations would surely come down
I also question (and happy to be enlightened about) how much the local project needs some massive change. That a pipe might need to be a few hundred yards longer to reach the river surely isn't so consequential that you can't reuse designs
These things are built on huge sites that could be completely leveled and turned into identical square clean pieces of dirt with massive empty land around them How much variation can there possibly be that can't be handled outside of the critical reactor design area
Yeah, I can't shake the feeling it should be possible to mass produce most of the difficult bits, and then have a per-site specific foundation of sorts.
Then again, perhaps it is one of those things where you actually need to make a few of 'em to gain experience.
“The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.
I'm not sure why you think that Exelon didn't consider regulatory risk as one of the things that made it not make sense for them. It was certainly a large factor.
The idea that existing nuclear power plants are losing money because they aren't operationally competitive with oil and gas does not square with the facts. The total cost of running a nuclear plant is 30% less than oil and gas per kilowatt-hour. And if all our nuclear plants weren't 50 years old and saddled with massive overregulation, the operation and maintenance of a nuclear plant would probably be equivalent to running a fossil fueled power plant, which would cut ANOTHER 30% off the cost of nuclear because fuel costs of fossil fueled power plants are 4 times the cost of nuclear fuel per kwh.
And as for construction costs, you can see that the massive increase in construction costs in the early 60s and 70s was because regulation required enormous increases in staffing, which ballooned labor costs.
And even so a nuclear plant should be expected to be profitable as long as you can manage to operate it for long enough without the government shutting you down (one of the major regulatory risks I mentioned).
Nuclear power plants in the past generally took 7 years to build and pay off in 16-24 years. While a natural gas plant can be built in 2 years and pay off in 8 years. Nuclear power plants are so cost effective tho, that if you can manage to run it for 17 years, you'll make more money than running a natural gas plant.
> I'm not sure why you think that Exelon didn't consider regulatory risk as one of the things that made it not make sense for them. It was certainly a large factor.
Who cares? That putative issue would be beating a dead horse. If it didn't make sense economically anyway, why worry about that?
> The idea that existing nuclear power plants are losing money because they aren't operationally competitive with oil and gas does not square with the facts.
Oil isn't in the picture (it's not used for any baseload power generation in the US, and precious little peaking). But gas is certainly an issue. There have been existing plants (not all of them, of course) that shut down because they could not make even an operating profit. TMI's other reactor was cash flow negative for six years before it was shut down, for example.
In any environment where existing plants are troubled, building new NPPs is obviously completely off the table economically. V. C. Summer was so out of the running it was better to write off the $9B spent so far on it than to complete it.
I'm ignoring your fantasizing, your wishful woulda-coulda-shoulda, and instead paying attention to what things actually cost. So, yes, the conversation is over.
How many hundreds of billions in subsidies would be required to once again, for the nth time since the 1950s prove that nuclear is truly dead outside of luxury niche applications like submarines?
Today renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels which in turn are cheaper than than nuclear. Through pure economic terms the world is steaming towards a new cheaper energy equilibrium based on renewable energy.
We are currently in the chaotic transitioning phase but that will of course shake out. Sprinkling some luxury nuclear in top will have miniscule effect.
Its pretty clear whats going to happen. Energy companies will provide the absolute minimum redundancies and will make formidable profits most years. Every 10-15 years there will be some catastrophic blackout due to unlikely weather events and everybody will scream murder. The energy companies will swear to do better and maybe some toothless regulations will be legislated. The politicians will be happy to be bought off by those companies since the next event will be most likely after they have left office, so its free money.
In countries with private energy generation perhaps. Energy production is at least partially nationalised (or at least heavily regulated) in a lot of the world, which puts those places in a much stronger position to plan for such events.
The nice thing about nationalized companies is that they're happy to spend your money on things you don't want! Given the choice, folks would rather pay $0.18/kWh for energy production (the average US rate) with 99.9% uptime than $0.30-0.40/kWh (the average Western European rate), even if that came with 99.99% uptime.
Nationalized industries are great for like 5-10 years, after which it becomes clear they have no ability to make effective plans or react to a changing market.
The Goverment power company here (bc Canada) is one of the best run in the world, with some of the cheapest rates (10c cad) and has been a public utility for over 60 years despite a previous conservative Goverment saddling it with 16 billion of extra costs due to grift
Norway also does great with its nationalized O&G
Nationalize industries can be fantastic with the public benefiting directly rather then a few select individuals.
Fix your public institutions instead of privatization
Pointing to the best run government power company says nothing about the average government run power company. And I don't know why you think cheap rates for a government power company are particularly special. The rates are subsidized by your taxes. What's the real cost? I bet its hard to even find out.
> a previous conservative Goverment saddling it with 16 billion of extra costs due to grift
Oh really? A government run monopoly being involved in grift? How surprising. Guess what? That's what happens with government run companies. You can't simply wish away the opposing party. And I bet the party you like best also does awful crap you conveniently ignore.
For every great nationalized business you can point out, I could point out 100 that are awful wastes of money.
lol no. BC Hydro is profitable and is not subsidized by taxes, usually turning a profit for the province. it did this for decades until the previous government decided to privatize power production and surprise surprise that saddled the crown corp with a ton of extra costs where if it had built out the capacity itself and not funnelled money to private companies who were doners.
in canada every province with private electricity company is being reamed with high energy prices. every province with a government run power company is not. the same seems to apply in the EU/UK.
nationalized companies run from amazing too crap but every time infrastructure or natural monopolies is privatized the consumer/citizen looses out. EVERY TIME. from parking in Chicago to PG&E in cali to the 409 in ontario - privatization never works out and to prevent abuse regulation is always imposed.
turns out when you grant a for profit company a monoply they take advantage. every time without fail.
so we have on one hand nationalized companies ranging from bad to great for society to private companies always being bad doing everything possible to extract money.
Turns out somethings will always be a monopoly - you eont get to have multiple roads or power lines to your home. Somethings are natural monopolies and turns out in those cases it’s better to have a Goverment provider a service with the objective or serving community/people then a company who’s only goal is maximizing profit.
Also turns out that competition doesn’t always lead to the best outcomes for a society see healthcare in America vs the rest of the world or that we are speed running the world into a climate disaster
No it doesn't "turn out" that way. It is a self fullfilling prophesy where a government either grants a monopoly to a private company or to itself. There is almost nothing that would actually be a monopoly without government protection.
> you eont get to have multiple roads or power lines to your home
Why the fuck not? You are asserting things that you clearly haven't thought much about. But I don't have time to try and change your mind. Your biases are clearly too ingrained.
It’s funny you talking about “bias” when you simply refuse to acknowledge natural monopolies which are a real thing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly and just presume they have to be “granted by the Goverment”
Because from the end of WW2 up to at least the 90s civilian nuclear was supported, often indirectly, by military programs (nuclear weapons). In France the Court of audit could not even assess it.
The value proposition for renewables left nukes far behind a long time ago. Nukes have no prospect of narrowing the gap even if they could be built and operated more cheaply, of which in any case no plausible signs are evident.
Wait, what? Other than solar (for obvious reasons), renewables can run 24/7/365, and that's extremely common; as an example, the Itaipu power plant has run continuously since 1984, and it only powered down once in 2009, when several of the transmission lines taking power from it failed at nearly the same time due to lightning.
Solar doesn't. Wind doesn't. Hydro does (usually). You know he was talking about solar and wind. Why are you being a turd? Hydro is tapped, we can't build significantly more hydro in this world.
I.e., with massive government subsidy, hidden behind opaque accounting.
China has constructed more solar and wind generating capacity in the past year than its entire fleet of nukes will produce after they have finished building them. China is less interested in power production from their nukes than strategic isotopes.
Solar and wind are now much cheaper than alternatives, even without subsidies. E.g. it is cheaper to build a new solar farm and switch over to it than to continue using an existing coal plant.
The only reason massive subsidies for renewables continue is to accelerate build-out to address the looming climate catastrophe. We need to ramp up to building out a TW of new renewable capacity every year.
In France this is false: nuclear always obtained heavily (albeit indirectly) subsidies: the R&D was public, it was built by a public monopoly using public money and money borrowed thanks to the state vouching for it...
No one was talking about France. angiosperm snarkily implied that Nuclear only works if its subsidized. He's clearly wrong. The fact that France does subsidize it isn't relevant. Nuclear in the US is not subsidized and yet is massively more cost effective than fossil fuel power plants.
The civilian nuclear industry stemmed from massive military investments, which were a way to subsidize it. "In the United States, the federal government has paid US$145 billion for energy subsidies to support R&D for nuclear power ($85 billion) and fossil fuels ($60 billion) from 1950 to 2016" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies_in_the_United...)
Cost effectiveness will be established after the last hot waste of the last decommissioned plant will be cold. In the meantime any serious accident or waste particle wandering around may induce costs.
Was the basic research funded by governments? Yes. Is subsidization necessary or even done for nuclear powerplants to be built and profitably run given that basic research as an already-existing stepping stone? No.
Thanks for the info. I did some more research and found out that Nuclear Power was indeed not subsidized from 1985 to 2000, but after 2000 some nuclear subsidies seem to have been created. However, while over 20% of the electricity in the US is produced by nuclear plants, only 1% of energy subsidies goes to nuclear, which looks like is approximately on par with subsidies for fossil fuel power.
I don't think we should be subsidizing power (or most things) but it seems disingenuous for an article to claim that nuclear power isn't viable because it gets subsidies, even tho fossil fuel gets at least as much subsidies per mwh as nuclear.
Nuclear power is not viable for a reason other than than it depends on subsidies. It is not viable because it costs overwhelmingly more both to build and to operate than the competition, with or without considering subsidies on either side, and has always produced exactly zero watts for many years after a project started.
Coal and oil still get huge subsidies, yet even with are not viable against solar and wind without.
I'd be very surprised if you could convince me that solar or wind could eliminate the need for the majority of our electricity to be generated by base-load systems like hydro, coal, oil, or nuclear. Do you know what the cost of solar power is if you factor in storage needs?
I heard or read somewhere that in China they had the same issue - like in every mega project, there are deadlines and ... well it doesn't really fare well. So the issue is real.
It's a pity -- if we had kept up the pace, we'd already have completely decarbonized our grid, but instead we are barely starting. Ah well. At least solar and wind finally became economical. Any path forward is a good path, even if it's 50 years late.
At the moment, coal and probably gas is more expensive than solar, purely due to the turbines and generators.
Nuclear relies on the same subsystems, and it’s unlikely they’ll get significantly cheaper any time soon.
Having said that, I think nuclear could be made cost-competitive with coal and natural gas, at least in theory. Also, it’s unclear that we’ll be able to build a reliable, net carbon negative power grid without a large number of nuclear plants.
Perhaps they were in France, where the plants are neither bespoke nor expensive.
They reuse blueprints, and make use of interchangeable parts, unlike the US nuclear. As a bonus, they can train people once, then transfer them between identical nuclear plants. Also, if there is a near miss at one plant, they apply the safety upgrades to the whole fleet.
I had a professor in an facilities course mention the improved level of industrialization of nuclear plant construction as a big reason why France managed to be successful with nuclear energy in a way that other countries have not. If so, is this one of those dreaded examples of the free market failing our actual best interests?
The French government, through the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives, played a key role in standardization of civilian nuclear plants and, to my knowledge, the United States had no true parallel and instead relied on private companies to figure that amongst themselves. We all know how that tends to turn out.
I actually thought nothing and was curious enough to ask for clarity, as clearly demonstrated. But if you're the type to read into the question what you want just so you can call me an "idiot", that makes you a pretty special type of asshole there buddy.
Your question was full of self righteous snark and your response to my question was as well. Trying to tell me you were just "curious" and "asking for clarity" is 100% bullshit and you know it. If you want to actually engage in a conversation, drop the snark and I'll be happy to have a pleasant conversation with you. Otherwise, I guess we'll both have to be assholes.
I still don't see you making any constructive comment. If you're going to, make it your next one please. If you want an answer to your original rhetorical-looking question. The answer is no.
How much did they cost in France? How much do they cost?
> They reuse blueprints, and make use of interchangeable parts, unlike the US nuclear. As a bonus, they can train people once, then transfer them between identical nuclear plants. Also, if there is a near miss at one plant, they apply the safety upgrades to the whole fleet.
That all sounds good as a first impression, but I've learned to ask: Are those the primary bottlenecks and costs?
I sometimes imagine how cool it would be if some of the worlds biggest billionaires got together and just did some crazy mega project and didn't care about profits.
This nuclear plant cost ~$34 billion USD. What if Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, and a few others just got together and built 10 or so nuclear power plants? I wonder if that could actually bring down the price to build them.
Money, at that scale at least, is pretty good at calculating business cases. And the money is on renewables, especially solar. And the solar Wp cost for modules is, with some special cause exceptions, following Moores law. Nuclear not so much, all those plants have is delays and cost over-runs.
The Money can see where renewables and storage are likely to be when any nuclear plant that could start to be built today would become available.
Nuclear plants have only ever been built where the customers can be forced to buy the power. No merchant nuclear plant, selling into a competitive market, has ever been built anywhere.
Both Ukraine and the Red Sea collapsing has produced ads for uranium mining in Saskatchewan, Canada. These kinds of ads don't run without government support; since public opinion is often extremely uninformed, I expect the pivot to nuclear to happen with or without pundits vocalizing their views.
"Machinery" (not including airplanes) is still one of the largest exports of the US. The list [1] of exports by size is:
Mineral fuels including oil: US$378.6 billion
Machinery including computers: $229.6 billion
Electrical machinery, equipment: $197.7 billion
Vehicles: $134.9 billion
Aircraft, spacecraft: $102.8 billion
Optical, technical, medical apparatus: $99.1 billion
Gems, precious metals: $92.5 billion
Pharmaceuticals: $83.5 billion
So the top 3 "non-aircraft" machinery categories are still exported at 5x the amount of aerospace. It seems like people [2] are still interested in the stuff the US manufactures.
Yes but Asia dominates the "building" category overall by a massive margin.
It's just true.
Pharmaceuticals, medical and gems are off topic.
I'm sure there's other small niches the US dominates in. But overall what I said is the objective truth no matter how much you desire it to be not true.
If Asia doesn't dominate a niche yet they are aggressively on track to dominate in the near future.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "building"? It's a nebulous term. If you mean building infrastructure, that's true, but also partly because the US invested heavily in the same type of infrastructure a generation or two prior. I would disagree with the pharmaceuticals because that is a manufacturing-intensive industry.
Throwing out gems (because that probably isn't a good case, like you said), it still amounts to over $1.2 trillion in exports. I'm sure other countries would love that kind of "niche" business.
Gems isn't good also because it's mostly aesthetic. No intrinsic utility other then being rare and pretty. You won't actually "improve" society with gems. It's hard to distill this in technical terms but I hope you're able to understand without the need to get pedantic.
Gemstones therefore are more of a reflection of countries with the ability to purchase the gemstones as an import and less of a reflection of the country actually exporting the gemstones. Right? If a country exports a huge amount of gemstones it means a lot of external countries have an abundance of economic output such that they can purchase frivolous goods that ultimately don't contribute much to the economy. North Korea doesn't purchase gemstones but maybe a rich country would. And the place where diamonds are mined are mostly from some poor countries in Africa.
>Can you elaborate on what you mean by "building"? It's a nebulous term.
Manufacturing and infrastructure I believe are the two words that cover it best off the top of my head but it's unnecessary to specify this to the level of pedantic detail you're going for here. I think those two terms are clear enough.
I think we both know, in general the direction China/Asia is going and where they're completely dominating the US. It's at a general tipping point now. Where one can say they're better than the US overall in the general area of infrastructure/manufacturing. Manufacturing is pretty broad and general and that's the right word to use because broadly and generally Asia is just ahead of the US in this matter.
The problem with these things is that even though it's obvious people still like to debate pedantic details in some vain attempt to use the pedantic details to obscure the obvious truth or even shift the advantage in the favor of the US. Why else would you bring up gemstones and pharmaceuticals?
I don't think I need to elaborate as you requested. You know what I'm talking about and deep down you most likely agree. The trouble here is less about getting at the most accurate truth and more about the inability to accept the truth.
It's a little strange that you dug your heels in on the gemstones because I was trying to be gracious and steelmanning your point by conceding that portion. But since you brought it up again, I'll explain why I think it's wrong. Gems are not just "mostly aesthetic". 80% or so of diamonds are used in industrial purposes, ie manufacturing. So if you concede that manufacturing is a good measure, by extension so are gems. The same holds for many other gems. E.g., rubies are used in lasers, continuous measuring machines (which are heavily used in aerospace) etc. Even if that wasn't the case, your take is overly utilitarian IMO. Under your logic, any type of art (movies, music, visual art) are worthless as exports because they are more aesthetic than functional. I don't think I want to live in a society that de-prioritizes art to that degree.
The rest of your post seems like a deflection because you can't seem to adequately illuminate your point. Asking for clarification is not being pedantic any more than hiding behind ambiguous terms makes for a convincing argument. I'm not, for one, saying the US manufactures more than Asia. But I'm also not in agreement that it's languishing, save for a single industry like aerospace. If you look at the actual data, there is still a fairly robust manufacturing base in America, especially for a service-oriented economy. You wrote a lot of words but didn't contribute much to the argument other than another vague diatribe when asked for a finer point, and that's often indicative of not having a thorough understanding.
>It's a little strange that you dug your heels in on the gemstones because I was trying to be gracious and steelmanning your point by conceding that portion.
It's False gracious-ism lol. You obviously believe you can win the argument without that so you gave it up. It was a deceptive gesture. Anyway. I'm not in this to win. I'm in it because I, in totality believe I'm right. So what does it matter if I use gemstones given that you already conceded that point? And like I said it was a false concession. You pretended to concede that point and I correctly responded as if you didn't concede.
>The rest of your post seems like a deflection because you can't seem to adequately illuminate your point.
I can't adequately illuminate my point. I concede to that. The statement "Asia is superior to the US in manufacturing and infrastructure" is a statement with so many fuzzy words I can't satisfy your pedantry. What is "manufacturing"? What is "superiority"? What is "Asia"? Am I referring to North Korea?
There is no study, no science on the face of this earth that can prove either side of this debate correct.
The most we can do is throw a bunch of random facts and tidbits at each other and never ultimately agree. Take your side foray into gemstones... Does diamonds represent all of gemstones? Also what about the proportional value of artificial diamonds vs. Mined diamonds? What about the amount of value involved in beauty vs. Manufacturing? You failed to acknowledge here that diamonds used in manufacturing are mostly manufactured themselves. How much of manufacturing does gemstones represent? We could dive deep into this useless pedantic branch of the debate and ultimately go nowhere.
But despite all of this, we both know what gemstones usually refers to a mined rock for beauty purposes. That was the industry referred to through the colloquial usage of the term gemstones. But there's an underlying strategy here where you can subtly switch definitions and use the pedantic definition without the other party realizing it. Anyway let's move off of gemstones like you originally conceded.
I value the human ability to know things and communicate vague and general concepts and things without fuzzy boundaries without the need to reference data or research. If you don't have the intellectual ability to do this then the only logical conclusion for you is to not even engage in this debate or any debate for that matter because no definitive conclusion is possible for most things of this nature.
I also concede that despite all of this fuzziness you are smart enough to know what I'm talking about and deep down you know I'm right.
Call it diatribe or whatever you want. The outcome of this conversation had a predictable end of going to a pedantic nowhere. I just took it to a different end here.
>If you look at the actual data, there is still a fairly robust manufacturing base in America, especially for a service-oriented economy.
So? You can make this statement and the following can still be true: Asia is far superior to the US when it comes to manufacturing and infrastructure.
Additionally the following statement can still be true: the past several decades American manufacturing and infrastructure has been in decline.
And this as well: America does not have the will or the manufacturing capability to replace it's energy infrastructure with nuclear.
Do we need to get into a overly detailed debate about this or is it just self evident that these statements are true? I think it's self evident. Again it's not really matter of truth, but more about accepting the truth.
I know what you mean but it's not that clear cut. Rockets? USA. Phones? Assembled in Asia but running iOS or Android. Electric cars? Tesla's still ahead. A lot of the move to China was a choice to have them do the work because they quoted cheaper, which is not irreversible.
It is clear. First of all you brought up Elon. That guy is an anomaly. If it wasn't for him both industries he's responsible for pushing forward would have been viciously surpassed ages ago.
Additionally byd will be surpassing Tesla soon. It's projected to in less than a year.
As for phones, the entire stack is owned by Asia. Software is the only thing we have left and most of it is open source.
Pretty clear cut from your examples. But also clear cut from common sense.
I suggest you find other examples to help detract from the obvious generality. Look into Tiny niches like precision and highly advanced bespoke manufacturing where the US still holds a shakey lead. These areas may help you construct an argument that looks effective but obviously isn't.
China is a paper tiger. It is amazing the credit the media gives them, but no surprise given the medias purpose is to create narratives rather than put light on truth. If China were as dominant as the media alleges Taiwan would have been invaded decades ago. The reality is big mighty China has one aircraft carrier that entered service just 5 years ago, and another one that is a renovated old soviet carrier. The vast bulk of their air force is a half century behind ours. Most other industries are similarly toothless when you dig into how they are actually comprised beyond their raw numbers.
I'm not talking about China alone. I'm talking about Asia. Which is China + Taiwan + Korea + Japan + Singapore, plus every major asian country.
Additionally the rivalry between the US and China is off topic I'm not talking about that.
My statement is, Asia is superior to the US in terms of Manufacturing/infrastructure. I can add more to that as well. In terms of ICs, Asia also dominates. The US is behind Asia on all three of these fronts. As a general statement this is still true. You didn't invalidate anything with your off topic comment here.
That being said, the united states is the dominant spender in terms of defense. They are number one on this front and in terms of technology. I don't think the world has ever seen a military industrial complex as massive and as advanced as the one the US has built. What you say here is true and it's major. It's not included in "manufacturing" but it's intimately connected and thus worth mentioning.
Why do you compare an entire continent to one country and also not count one of that country’s largest manufacturing cost centers as part of its manufacturing? Seems like cherry-picking.
Because at one point in time the US played the dominant role here, with output comparable to entire continents. Now with globalization that dominance has shifted to Asia.
So in essence if there is a place that will convert to majority nuclear power it's most likely going to be Asia that still has the capability to do this. I don't think it's likely for the US.
US still has the capability for sure. Look at this environment in this country. Most every consumer good produced imported here without having to bear the externalities of local manufacturing or resource extraction like localized pollution and diminished health outcomes. Most money is kept or invested here. Most of the world is trying to immigrate here. Realistically if push came to shove this is exactly where you’d expect a massive buildout to occur. Supply of materials is solved with massive globalized trade networks oriented towards ports in NY and CA. Supply of money is solved from both private investors and also the strings the federal reserve can uniquely pull. Supply of labor is also solved considering how much low skilled labor is available in central and south America that is able to be drawn upon in probably a years time or much less if such job opportunities present themselves. There is also a lot of low skilled labor in this country already kept idle, working service jobs like cashiers in towns that have little other work but such service jobs, in effect the town exists and demands labor yet produces nothing, and these sorts of places were ripe for building out defense industries in record time in the 1940s. We import skilled labor and knowledge workers from most other countries who struggle to offer them lifelong work locally.
To be specific it's airplane engines, 5th gen turbofan engines. China started building COMAC airplanes too, probably with questionable maintenance and serviceability story, that they can push with govt airlines. They are still having trouble with modern turbofan engines though.
Somehow all the articles criticizing Vogtle keep mentioning the cost overruns, the additional cost to consumers, but don't mention that in Georgia people pay less than the national average price per kWh (11 cents vs 12.7) while sunny California, for example pays about twice the average (24.3 cents per kWh). In my state, NY, where 2 reactors were decommissioned in 2020 and 2021, the average price is 22 cents per kWh.
Georgia has some of the largest coal plants in the country. The power company (Georgia Power, part of Southern Company) was allowed to pre-bill customers for the costs of the new plant well over a decade in advance. If you lived in Georgia before the new units came online, you paid to have them built but received no benefit from them. Investors in Southern Company received unwarranted protection from the consequences of poor project implementation and cost overruns on the back of the utility's customers.
I mean, all that data is also from when California and New York both had operational reactors.
In 2013, CA generated 17 out of 200 GW from nuclear. GA generated 32/120 GW. NY generated 44/136GW. So at least in the case of New York, it generated more power from nuclear as a percentage than GA, and had higher electricity prices, so there doesn't seem to be a correlation. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/state/
But the thing still remains: the supposed Vogtle 3/4 boondoggle of gazzilions of dollars of cost overruns did not result in consumers paying more for electricity. Sure, historically they used to pay less than the national average, but they continue to pay less than the national average, and by about the same amount. The cause could be regulation or deregulation, or better geographic position, or whatever. But the consumers are not paying more, after Vogtle 3, am I right?
One can look at the cost of the alternatives and see I'm speaking the truth. Also, demand didn't increase as much as the (likely fraudulent) projections used to justify Vogtle 3/4.
All the "nuclear renaissance" nuclear builds aside from Vogtle 3/4 were cancelled because the utilities realized the alternatives were much better economically. V. C. Summer was cancelled after dropping $9B on it. Even with that sunk cost, it still wasn't worth completing.
What happened between back then and now is two (well, three) things: fracking crashed the price of natural gas, demand didn't increase as much as utilities said it would, and then (later, after fracking) renewables also became much MUCH cheaper. One can excuse the nuclear industry for not seeing this would happen (or perhaps for not wanting to see that it would happen), but that doesn't change the fact that it did happen, and that the nuclear builds turned out to be economically unjustifiable.
Things got so bad for nuclear we were seeing already completed NPPs being shut down because they couldn't even make an operating profit! The other reactor at TMI had been cash flow negative for the last six years it was in operation, for example. In that sort of environment, building a new NPP (which would also have to amortized construction and financing costs) would be totally out of the question economically.
Comparing to the national average is clearly dishonest on your part, since those rates can differ for other reasons. What matters is the difference between what Georgia rate payers would pay with or without Vogtle 3/4.
What’s interesting about those numbers is that Georgia generates much more power per person than California or New York. Georgia has a population of 10 million. California is at 40
Million and New York 20 million.
This is the case for all public works projects. The red-tape overhead is crazy. Regulation is necessary but the bureaucratic maze that has to be negotiated is a huge problem. I worked on a public rail system and the down-time waiting for permission on everything was draining.
Safety and bureaucracy are orthogonal. Bureaucracy is a slowing force, which is sold as being correlated with safety. The more layers of abstraction needlessly added, the more likely there will be systems engineering failures.
I think you're betraying your bias here with the added term "needlessly". There is some (maybe even most) bureaucracy that is inefficiently applied, for sure. But it is meant to address some risk. Maybe it's a risk that you (personally) don't care about, or aren't even cognizant of, and that's when it becomes easy to declare it "needless." We should be looking to streamline our risk mitigation and align it with risks that the public cares about, not throw it out altogether.
You're betraying your bias by insinuating I suggested throwing out risk mitigation. I advocated for streamlined risk mitigation by highlighting the risk of unnecessary complexity.
Maybe you can point me to where you advocated for risk mitigation. Because you seemed to imply bureaucracy is sold as risk-mitigation under the mistaken assumption that it correlates with safety. Did I read it incorrectly and you are actually saying there is a truly positive correlation between safety and bureaucracy? Or maybe you have an opinion on what we should replace the current version with?
A true expert can streamline their industry every time. Simply because most people who make decisions on process are not experts in the relevant field, but expert administrators who often lazily apply existing policies to new concepts that they never got the training to understand or put into context.
Just look at any institutional review board: the breadth their expertise is always smaller than the relevant topics they will have to rule upon at the institution, and often that leads to a certain level of consternation, misplaced understanding of risk, and overall higher levels of inefficiency.
I have worked in a highly regulated industry before. I found the regulations that concerned me (safety critical software) to be quite good and rather too lax than too strict. I would be surprised if you could streamline nuclear power plant regulations by a lot without using losing safety.
They are subject to a regulatory ratchet that almost guarantees that you won't make a profit. I.e. if a new safety measure becomes "economically feasible" because you increased cost efficiency somewhere else then regulators would adjust their calculations in the future and make additional requirements because they would now be feasible. This can even lead to requirements changing during the construction time of a plant and require expensive retrofits.
Renewables kill orders of magnitude more people (just look at how many die from falling when installing wind turbines, it's not pretty) and render orders of magnitude more land uninhabitable. We have ludicrous double standards when it comes to safety.
I said "Renewables kill orders of magnitude more people" and I was right. My post is right there, lol, ironic that you wanted to talk about "baldfaced lies".
That's the failed project OP blithely elided over as:
- "Two other Westinghouse AP1000 reactors were planned for a nuclear power plant in South Carolina, but construction was halted in 2017."
I'm really, really strongly in favor of nuclear fission power; but the American attempts this decade, and this company in particular, have been a grotesque failure. We really seem to have forgotten how to build things.
He has shook up and revitalized two industries and proven his ability to execute and get people motivated to do significant work with physics and manufacturing and project management that are complex. It doesn’t seem that far fetched to me and aligns with his sustainable energy focus but downvoters seem to disagree!
He paid other people to shake up and revitalize two industries with his dad's minecraft money and probably told them "why don't you do it this way" a few times
Based on everything he has said to date, he would just cover a few square km with solar. In that one talk he said building enough solar to power the entire world is similar in effort to all the cars that have ever been built. So we can certainly do it.
Also doesn’t he already own a solar company? Tesla is already a battery company. They do sell industrial cells. But I hear they have a bad track record of not delivering to spec.
This is always the case when you build large one-off projects.
If you continue to build reactors non-stop you'll learn how to make the process more efficient and be able to make better estimates.
Surely we software developers should appreciate how hard making accurate estimates is? And this isn't a 2 week sprint we're talking about, but a gigantic engineering project.
These were not one-off reactors, it's just that the first ones went so poorly that everything else was cancelled. There were four that were started at roughly the same time. There were many other sites getting order ready.
Westinghouse used a new regulatory process that had been created specifically at the request of industry to speed the design and build of AP1000s. Despite this, Westinghouse did not deliver constructible designs, and the contractor soldiered on with on site modifications. Westinghouse screwed up so bad that they nearly bankrupted Toshiba, their owner.
So we have two failed holes in the ground at Summer in South Carolina, something like a $10B monument to corruption, with utility execs going to jail for their fraudulent reports.
All the other sites that were eyeing AP1000s to replace aging reactors have now backed out. The disaster was too big. What exec wants to go to jail for a nuclear reactor? What exec wants to lose their job for greenlighting what has a not-insignificant chance of bankrupting the entire utility.
Nuclear is too risky, but public perception is off, it's not running reactors that have the risk, it's the financial risk to anybody who wants to build one.
We learned that the economics were so poor that all future projects stopped their plans.
There were supposed to be advantages to building four at once, in that there would be some economy of scale. The AP1000 were also supppsed to be somewhat "modular" to avoid on site custom builds. None of this worked out as planned.
If we wanted nuclear to be a part of the energy transition, we didn't need two new reactors every decade or even four, we needed something like 5-20 per year. However, the experience of building the AP1000 has soured the market.
If we are going to build more nuclear, now is the time because we have the most knowledable workforce right now, but the benefit of building nuclear looks so small in comparison to the cost and the risks that it seems unlikely.
Major major support from the government is needed (and it's there from DoE's Loan Programs Office, run by a huge nuclear fan), but you also need utilities who want to place orders. And that second part is hard to create.
The US is one of the 22 signatories of the COP28 pledge to triple nuclear capacity by 2050.
With the failure of Germany's Energiewende, countries have drastically re-evaluated their nuclear stances.
France just did an about-face and cancelled their plans to drastically reduce nuclear capacity or even get out of nuclear entirely. Instead they are now investing into a nuclear renaissance.
Poland is getting into nuclear power big time, they are buying reactors from South Korea (and possibly also the US).
The Finnish Green Party has recently come out to endorse nuclear power.
Japan, who was also getting out of nuclear power after Fukushima has also made an about face and is now going to reactivate more plants and even build new ones.
Pretty much all relevant ceuntries also pleged to triple renewable capacity in 8 years, which seems mostly doable, while with the typical (western) construction timelines for nuclear they would have to pretty much start tendering the new plants now, while currently mostly only vague promises exist.
China, which the country building the most nuclear right now, is falling behind its own plans and downscaling its nuclear ambitions in favour of renewables.
So, all the statistics about installed capacity of NPPs, wind, solar, hydro, coal and so on are wrong? Because those numbers show everywhere renewables outpace nuclear by orders of magnitude, including China.
Nuclear is getting installed for sure. Just orders of magnitude less than renewables, and it is more expebsive. And the vast majority of new NPPs replace those being shut down, meaning the new net nuclear capacity is much less than the new NPPs total capacity. This shows cleary, if you were willing to look at the numbers, in which direction the funding goes.
1. To my "I've head rumors that you can do both" you replied "I heard facts that people don't so."
Glad we are now agreed that your comment was not true, and mine was true. Doing "more" of one does not imply one is not doing the other at all.
2. It's not "orders of magnitude less" once you account for capacity factors.
And once again: the nuclear under-investment of the last few decades is well known, and so that is what we are seeing in the stats now. The policy shifts just started happening at earliest a year ago, most this year. While nuclear doesn't take nearly as long as anti-nuclear advocates claim, it also doesn't happen in a few months either.
PV load factor for utility scale solar was 16%. China installed 230 GW, Europe 75 GW and the US 40 GW -> 55 GW incl. load factor and excluding the rest of the world
Wind:
Let's use 40% as a load factor, which seems reasonable. Globally, around 100 GW added -> net 40 GW
NPP grid connections in 2022 (if you have 2023 numbers, please share them): 8.3 GW, with a load factor of aeound 80% for 2022 -> 6.6 GW. At the same 2.2 GW,
around 1.8 GW of NPPs were shut down, resulting a net gain of 4.8 GW.
In total we have 90 GW of wind solar vs. not even 7 GW of nuclear. Excluding load factors we have 440 GW of wind and solar vs. 8.3 GW of nuclear globally. In the western world, those numbers fall even more towards wind and solar.
And looking at estimates until 2035, these numbers are looking even worse for nuclear.
So no, countries are not doing both, countries, especially in Asia, are very, very slowly adding new NPPs while overall net added nuclear capacity is negligible and barely replacing shut down reactors.
In other words, one year worth of new NPPs is added every two weeks using wind and solar.
All my numbers above are including load factors... And I never said nuclear projects don't exist, only that their net added capacity is negligible compared to wind and solar. And that those historical numbers show us that the investment money is mainly going into wind and solar instead of nuclear, and did for years now.
You could accept these facts as reality, which would make this whole discussion a lot less frustrating... Or at least engage with the numbers, which you didn't neither...
> All my numbers above are including load factors...
Nope.
>>> Excluding load factors we have 440 GW of wind and solar vs. 8.3 GW
> I never said nuclear projects don't exist
Yes you did.
>>> I've heard rumors that you can do both at the same time.
>> I heard facts that people don't so.
> only that their net added capacity is negligible compared to wind and solar.
Nope, see above. But they are also not negligible.
> ...and did for years now.
And I've told you a number of times now that the historical under-investment in nuclear the last few decades or so is a well-known fact that in no way contradicts the fact that policy has now changed.
Linearly projecting a past trend into the future is ... unwise. Particularly if there has been a major policy shift. Which there has.
Arguing that the policy shift that just happened hasn't happened because it had no effect in the past is even less wise.
It’s hard to see how these non-binding pledges mean anything. France, in particular, already generates ~75% of their electricity with nuclear. They’re really going to triple that and generate 225% of their current generation? The US is going to go from a small handful of planned reactors to hundreds? Where is the money for this coming from?
Most of these countries are implementing policies.
France had a law to slowly phase out nuclear and switch to renewables. They've rescinded that law and instead passed legislation to build more nuclear plants, and make building those plants easier, putting into action Macron's call for a "nuclear renaissance". Also extending the life of existing plants.
Japan, site of the second worst nuclear accident, had all, then most of its reactors shuttered (after political pressure). They are now reactivating more and more of them, have rescinded the policy to get out of nuclear and instead are planning to build more plants.
Poland is getting into nuclear power in big way. They currently don't have any and have just approved building 24 small reactors at six sites. I think they're also in talks with the US's Westinghouse to build more.
Ukraine, site of the worst accident in history, continues to operate its plants, and is talking with Rolls-Royce to convert some of their coal plants to nuclear. Rolls-Royce wants to build these reactors in a factory (economies of scale!) and ship them to sites. There are a lot of coal power plants that either already are decommissioned or soon will be. So quite the market for mass-produced reactors.
The US just approved the first new kind of nuclear reactor in 50 years, a molten fluoride salt-cooled reactor. China just gave an operation license for their first molten salt reactor (completed ahead of time), and their pebble bed reactor started delivering electricity to the grid this year.
France has a fleet of 56 reactors, about 14 of which are scheduled to be decommissioned in the 2030s or before. They currently plan to build 6 more reactors and “possibly” another 8 by 2050, which seems more like maintenance than expansion. By contrast, France constructed all of its current 56 reactors over a 15-year period, and the current plans do not look remotely comparable to that effort.
Japan generated 30% of its electricity from nuclear before 2011, and is now aspirationally hoping to generate 20% by 2030 when considering decommissioned reactors and restarts.
Poland has two planned reactors with construction targeted to begin in 2026 and a couple of additional proposed reactors. There are some plans to deploy SMRs in Poland, but the reactors aren’t even in the design stage yet and I can’t determine how many GW these small reactors will actually produce in total. I also can’t figure out where Rolls Royce is in the product cycle, except that they’re still somewhere in the design stage. Any deployments in Ukraine seem likely to be decades out.
The Hermes molten salt reactor looks pretty great, but it won’t generate electricity and the Hermes 2 project will also be a 28MW test reactor. I’m
very bullish on this sort of research, including the SMR stuff, since — unlike the 1970s-era plants being built, it at least has the potential to take off. But it’s all very much at the research and design stage: actual commercial production may be decades out. Who knows where battery storage tech will be in two decades.
Anyway, nobody claimed that this was in advanced stages, how could it be?
Just two years ago, pretty much everybody was getting out of nuclear, some more quickly, some more slowly, but the direction had been consistent for the last two decades or so. Then Ukraine happened, and the house of card that was the German Energiewende, built on a solid foundation of cheap Russian gas, collapsed.
Not sure how quickly you expect turnarounds in energy policy to happen, but let's just sat that the Energiewende was made officially announced in the 1990s. And look how far we've gotten.
I personally find the development in the last year, year and a half remarkable quick.
Lifetime extensions do not result in additional capacity.
Regarding the Energiewende, the initial plan from the SPD-Green government was decent. It was then revised, before being rushed in again by a CDU/CSU-FDP government after Fukushima. By the way, no new reactors were planned during that time anyway.
And please, do everyone a favour, look up the numbers of reactors under construction, reactors planned and proposed, the number of planned shut downs, the corresponding capacities and then compare those to the nameplate capacity of other sources going online.
And yes, I know the load factor for solar and wind is lower. But what these numbers tell you is, that the money does not go nuclear, not even close.
And all that is before we talk actual costs, construction times and delays.
- comparison of net additional capacities: total name plate capacity of new NPPs being build + total nameplate capacity of new NPPs planned and proposed - nameplate capacity going offline vs. new solar + wind capacity being installed, do that on a yearly basis intil, say, 2035
Run the math, provide sources for the numbers, come back and share the result and your interpretation of it. Takes about max. an hour if you don't where to look for input data yet, much less if you do already.
Glad we agree that so far there was no nuclear build out, anywhere!
Edit: COP28 agreed on triplong renewable capacity to 11 TW by 2030. If we consider pledges for future NPPs, I think it is just fair to do the same when it comes to renewables, right?
There was quite a bit of nuclear built. For example France nuclearized its electricity grid.
In the last 20 years, policy shifted away from nuclear and there was very little built.
This hasn’t been in dispute in the least bit.
Just now we have witnessed a policy shift by most countries where nuclear is or was relevant back towards nuclear.
To argue that this policy shift hasn’t happened because we didn’t see its effects in the last 20 years seems weird, unless there was some important time travel news I missed.
To argue that the policy shift hasn’t happened because we haven’t seen new nuclear plants pop up since the few weeks or months since the shifts happened and were announced is also…odd.
And you seem to be under this impression that for nuclear to be built up, renewables must somehow be reduced.
There was no real build out since the, what, 80s? And no projection I have found hinted at one in the future. If those policy changes are supossed to any effect by 2035, those new NPPs would have to be at least in planning stage by now, which they are not.
Unless you assume all those future reactors are magically planned, approved, built and connected at a fraction of the time all others are. In which case, please specify how exactly that is aupposed to happen. Otherwise, all you have is claims, unfounded ones at that, and pipedreams.
The projections you read are the ones that precede the current policy shift.
> If those policy changes are supossed to any effect by 2035
They are not. 2050 is the target date for tripling.
> those new NPPs would have to be at least in planning stage by now, which they are not
A lot of the policy changes just happened this year. Some announcements were made this month. OK, no new plants were built in the last 3 weeks. You win.
How long are these lifetime extensions? A solid 20 year extension still has them closing by ~2050s which is about how far the construction plans I listed go.
The difference is that there are many cheaper viable alternatives to the firm power that nuclear provides, including renewables+batteries ($60/MWh and dropping) and enhanced geothermal ($80/MWh and dropping). Heck, even natural gas combined-cycle + carbon capture/storage is cheaper on an LCOE basis (~$60/MWh) than nuclear ($180/MWh and rising) [1]. It would be great if nuclear could be cost competitive for equivalently firm power, but its costs are increasing, not decreasing.
In contrast, the only real alternative to air travel for high speed transportation between Northern and Southern CA is high speed rail. The "Hyperloop" has been exposed (charitably) as a failure, and personal vehicle travel (even electrified) is not an equivalent to HSR in a state as big as CA.
None of that is to say that the CA HSR project has been well planned/executed or that the costs have been well estimated. But that doesn't obviate the need for high speed ground transport in the state.
They took the cost to build Vogtle, which is one of the most or even the most expensive outlier in terms of time/cost overruns of all time, and decided to make that the baseline for "the cost of nuclear power".
When the average time to build a nuclear reactor in the world has consistently been around 7.5 years. For the last 50 years, and also for the ones that came online in 2022, lest you think these were just the bygone good old days.
And since financing (i.e. interest) is the primary cost of nuclear (~50%), time is money.
Hinkley and Flamanville are examples of the EPR, a brand new reactor type that is both at the start of its learning curve, always problematic, and also apparently a design that is particularly difficult to build. And both Europe and the US haven't really built any nuclear plants for quite a long time, so the know-how to build them is just not there. Oh, and the regulators sometimes change regulations after parts of the plants have been built so they have to tear down what they have built and start again.
These are obviously all solvable problems, and mostly solvable by just building more. The problem is that we didn't build enough. Just build more.
Construction time is misleading. It takes a few days to a couple of weeks to build a wind turbine, but at least in Germany a wind turbine construction project takes more than five years.
So what better estimate would you suggest? What nuclear power plants where built in the last decade or so, for how much do they sell their power? How big will their decomissioning costs be per MWh?
We were talking about cost, and cost is directly proportional to construction time because financing (interest) is the primary cost of nuclear power plant construction.
It’sa lot harder to find investors for a project that takes 20+ years from planning to first income than for a project that takes seven and a half years.
I’m still waiting for better cost estimates than what Lazard gives.
Even going by that ridiculously oversimplified calculation, and taking best-case numbers 0.75*$141 (10 years from first concrete poured to grid connection vs your 7.5 years average) is still barely competitive with worst-case Wind+Storage and more expensive than solar as Lazard estimates. And those are proven numbers from real projects not some pie in the sky guesstimates.
Oh, and the plant will still be cost effective, apparently, even with those delays.
Oh, and the solar numbers include sufficient batter storage? I saw something about 4h for half the capacity on some of the graphs. Most didn't explain at all.
As I said above, where you didn't believe me, construction times are misleading. First concrete poured was 2013. If you don't like the numbers, please suggest a better cost estimate. As it is, nuclear seems to be expensive.
I have a very strong impression that the perpetual money pits of California (rail, the amount spent on homelessness without progress, etc.) aren’t bugs but features… for someone. That money is going into someone’s pocket.
Sure does! That's why I used "electeds" rather than "representatives", to make really clear the connection.
On the other hand, the state is losing population on an absolute basis (and relatively even more so against a backdrop of national growth). So some folks are voting with their feet. I'm eagerly awaiting the day when I'm free enough to do the same.
I’d agree with you with the caveat that such public support is mediated by regulatory capture on all sides and from all quarters: outside the government by industry and lobbyists, within the government by elected officials, and adjacent to/despite the government by a public apathetic to such issues and/or voting against its own shared/collective interests in favor of individual interests. Participation in local and state politics even in California is not common beyond voting, which is a low bar to clear. Much of media messaging in the area of referendums is focused on niche issues and special interests, and serves to highlight and promote those issues to convert NIMBYs to YIMBYs or vice-versa on those specific narrow issues. Agreement in broad terms like you mention is hard to achieve due to the difficulty in drafting referendum legislation texts such that they will withstand a challenge by the state attorney general as well as state Supreme Court, as well as having the resulting referendum achieve enough signatures to make it on the ballot and have enough recognition and support by voters to actually pass and become law.
One key difference that I do like about the CA referendum process is that laws passed by referendum in California are equal to the state constitution and require 2/3 supermajority in state congress to modify or change, just like the state constitution itself. This avoids many attempts by legislature to foil or spoil the will of the voters’ referendums, in contrast to other state referendum processes which are only considered a law passed by other means and are usually able to be modified by simple majority.
A) Idealistic voters with little interest in detail or execution.
B) Hard working state employees executing in an ineffective way because they are working on over constrained problems with conflicting and sometime impossible goals.
C) A number of opportunists that take advantage of poor rulemaking and bureaucratic disorganization.
For what it is worth, I dont think corruption is a major driver of problems, but bad policy detached from the practical considerations.
One simple example is SF parks maintenance:
The city wants to keep invasive species out, so it has staff to remove them. The city also believes in livable wages, so the workers make >100K. Residents dont like pesticides, so the workers must hand weed. Hand weeding doesnt work, so the City periodically also pays outside consultants to come in and take care of the invasives (with pesticides and low paid workers).
These small examples are extremely frustrating as a tax payer. What is the solution to these examples, or does one just try to ignore it as a price of living in that society?
Frustrating indeed. I don't think there is a quick fix to create a political culture among voters and representatives that cares about fiscal responsibility.
One consideration is having a broader tax base so that voters have more skin in the game.
For example, taxes in Houston are less progressive than SF, but SF city budget per resident is more than 500% that of Huston.
How do we get to a more decisive government that doesn't try to make everything a priority (especially things that are at odds with each other)? Is it to reduce direct participation and rely on representation (remove public hearings)?
The $1.7M public toilet was a painful example showing how far off the rails we are. Should auditors and controllers have some teeth? What would they be?
If I was a betting man, I would put money down that Vogtle 4 is the last nuclear reactor that gets built in the US. Solar and batteries are just too cheap for nuclear to compete. The world will be installing a terawatt of solar capacity per year soon.
*excluding research or military reactors of course.
One kilogram of uranium-235 (50 cm^3) can theoretically produce about 20 terajoules of energy. One square kilometer of solar panels can theoretically produce the same amount (as 50cm^3 U235) in a day. I'll take this bet.
Edit: Tried to edit the edit but somehow deleted the rest of the edit. It was something to the tune of how a big problem with renewables is the fact that peak solar production does not match peak energy consumption, and storage is very difficult, so realistically we'll need a wide variety of energy options to fully transition to renewables. Nuclear is reliable and to some degree adjustable, helping to alleviate the storage issue. Basically, it's my opinion that nuclear works well with other renewable sources, and a full renewable transition will certainly involve more of it.
> One kilogram of uranium-235 (50 cm^3) can theoretically produce about 20 terajoules of energy. One square kilometer of solar panels can theoretically produce the same amount (as 50cm^3 U235) in a day.
Does the US have more 50cm^3 sized blocks of U235, or more square kilometers of land with low land values and high annual insolation?
There's an estimated 6 million tonnes of mineable uranium reserves in the world [0]. Of which 0.72% is U-235, so we have a worldwide reserve of 43200 tonnes, or 43.2 million Kg U-235.
Arizona is about 300k square kilometers. If we covered an area 10% the size of Arizona in solar panels, then they would have produced more energy than all the world's known U-235 in just four years. And would continue producing after those four years are up.
>> Uranium is a naturally occurring element found in low levels within all rock, soil, and water. This is the highest-numbered element to be found naturally in significant quantities on earth. According to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation the normal concentration of uranium in soil is 300 μg/kg to 11.7 mg/kg. ... It is considered to be more plentiful than antimony, beryllium, cadmium, gold, mercury, silver, or tungsten and is about as abundant as tin, arsenic or molybdenum.
How uranium ore becomes fuel rods: (Actually a rather simple process imho.)
Because mining it is relatively cheap. So cheap, in fact, that it is economical to throw away >95% of the fuel rather than try to burn it all or recycle it.
Fuel costs are 10% of the cost of nuclear electricity. The vast majority is financing.
Mining exists and is cheap enough that there is no incentive to invest in something new, even if it might just as good. Particularly because "just as good" is rarely a good reason for changing and investing, it would have to be significantly better.
(Though I have no real opinion on whether seawater extraction really is just as good...somewhat dubios)
uranium production costs could be reduced to $80.70–86.25 per kg of uranium with this fiber, which is similar to the uranium spot price of $86.68 per kg of uranium
and
suggests the possibility of economically producing nuclear fuel from the ocean.
Not to disrespect their work, many small scale lab tests confidently assert that costs could be reduced and might possibly be economic.
The fine print is that so far no pilot plants exist and no estimates on the capital plant costs for industrial scale extraction to achieve the possible unit throughput prices as yet exist.
This may yet happen.
There may also be a slip between paper and industrial plant at scale.
Yeah. But probably not for a long time as Uranium from present sources is cheap (enough) and plentiful (enough) and if that should ever get more expensive we can start looking at the huge stockpiles of 95% unspent fuel that we call "nuclear waste". Burning that would (a) give us a lot of electricity and (b) reduce the radioactivity of whatever is left dramatically.
To be clear: I'm not arguing for one or the other, I'm pointing out that one of the above statements doesn't align with the other.
If the other costs are equal (remember I said if) then extracting it from seawater would undoubtedly be easier overall simply because of abundance, and the non-destructive nature of collecting it would mean there's no issue with environmental challenges due to the destructive nature of mining.
Not really. If the costs are equal, then there is no point in investing in a new technology, new plants etc. that don't provide a competitive advantage.
What's the startup question again?
What about your new product is 10x better than the incumbent?
Not sure too many VCs have advised companies as follows: "Hey your new product is exactly as good as the incumbent, you have an absolute winner on your hands here. Where do we need to send the check?"
> What about your new product is 10x better than the incumbent?
Well let's just ignore the idea that mining megacorps operate in any way like a startup does. At the top of the uranium mining food chain, even a 1% reduction in costs (or increase in extraction) would be add around $13M a year to their revenue, so fuck it lets play hypoethetical.
If someone came along and said "hey we have a startup that's exactly as profitable as YouTube, but there's essentially no risk of people protesting our business and using ad-blockers to deprive us of revenue" the VC vultures would be on that shit like a fat kid on cake.
As I said before: seawater is ubiquitous and for the purposes of human scale, essentially limitless everywhere, unlike mined uranium which to be cost effective, is only mined in certain areas where the return is higher.
The financing for nuclear is expensive primarily because:
1) The costs of construction are so high - so huge amounts of financing needed.
2) The amount of time before investors see any ROI is very long.
A long time ago, when electricity markets were fully monopolized end to end, the long-term ROI on nuclear and other generating assets was guaranteed by the government, and the financial risk was borne by society.
Now, electricity markets have been liberalized (at least at the generation level). Simultaneously, far less capital-intensive generation technologies have been created (renewables, combined-cycle gas, and increasingly storage). These technologies provide an earlier ROI for risk-averse capitalists.
And as Bent Flyvbjerg mentions in "How Big Things Get Done", projects that last for a very long time are all but guaranteed to encounter one or more black swan events and/or recessions.
Bent makes a sensible argument for SMR reactor technology in that book too.
I get the old man yells at sky reaction but it's just a short video... A snapshot of information which directly references with overlayed text a citation to the study he's discussing.
Not much different than most HN comments which 90% of the time are only one or two sentences.
None of this is true. Highly upvoted hn comments (the ones people read) bring receipts. This is just someone’s low effort opinion.
For what it’s worth, the cost to extract uranium from seawater is actually a very complicated subject. It is generally cited that the cost is approximately 2x the mining cost, but that’s based on estimates for seawater extraction.
It’s worth noting that the dichotomy you set up isn’t quite right. The land use for solar and wind isn’t an exclusionary zone. The area around a wind turbine can be used same as before (most often as farmland) without a negative impact on its productivity.
And the same is true for solar. In fact, a growing number of agro-voltaic projects are seeing a net positive on crop yields from solar panels due to the increased shading and decreased temperatures.
This reminded me of a solar project at a US airport [0]. They placed solar panels to make a covered parking lot. I think it was part of a larger plan to use panels for cover and/or over some of the vast spaces that the airport covers
"Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (AUS) and Austin Energy celebrate the completion of a new solar panel array constructed on the AUS campus that will produce 1.8 megawatts of locally-generated, renewable energy.
...
With 6,642 solar panels spanning across a distance that is equal size to two football fields, the array on the top floor of the airport’s Blue Garage is the largest on-site renewable energy installation on the AUS campus. The panels offer shaded parking for Blue Garage customers and will generate enough solar energy to power up to 160 homes per year."
I was thinking of you set the solar up high, to create a diet of canopy, then you might be able to grow a rain forest under it which doesn't like direct sunlight and would allow animal habitat...?
“Combining two usage modes based on Insolight’s optical micro-tracking technology, these modules focus light on high-efficiency solar cells,” Insolight said in a press release. “When aligned, the optical system can generate energy (E-MODE), but it is also possible to unalign it to ‘leak’ the light (MLT-MODE). The solar modules therefore act like a ‘smart’ shade adjusting the amount of light they let through.”
This makes it possible to optimize the photosynthesis of plants during the seasons and reduce the negative impact of high summer heat on the yields and quality of agricultural products, while recovering the rest of the light in the form of electricity. Starting from July, the panels will be tested for four years on a 165-square-meter surface area. They will replace protective plastic tunnels on strawberries and raspberries.
“Dynamically adjusting the light transmitted to the plants paves the way for increased protection from climate variations and possible increases in crop yields thanks to the matching of the light to the needs of the plants and the lowering of the temperature during heat waves via the shading effect,” said Bastien Christ, head of the berries and medicinal plants group at Agroscope.
The logistics of trying to plant, maintain and harvest crops underneath a bunch of solar panels while also needing to deal with the subsequent issues of uneven runoff of water from rain make it seem impractical. Just cover parking lots, malls and supermarkets with them, we have plenty of those, and they're closer to where the electricity is needed than agricultural land.
Regardless of your opinion on this subject, agrivoltaics projects are being installed today at an increasing rate, and they’re going well, from what I’ve read. It’s not some theoretical proposal, it’s happening now. It’s likely that solar panels will be installed both in parking lots and over farmland.
You can make up whatever you like, saying "seems". Facts are better.
The fact is that agrivoltaics has been very successful, for reasons you probably would not guess in a wholesale void of facts. Looking up the facts, you could actually learn something.
Well, when i see solar panels atop every mall and commercial building, when every home has a solar roof, then i'll entertain chopping down wilderness or sacrificing farmland to the cause. I still see plent of bare rooftop to address first.
The home roofs are going to be done off the more expensive solar installations ($/kW) that we can build because they’re so small.
It’s also fascinating how quickly the Nirvana fallacy shows up when it’s time to talk about renewables. Supposedly chopping down forests for solar (which isn’t the main way of getting land) or the farmers choosing to put something on their land is top of mind. But chop those forests to make something else, or have the farmers grow super subsidized corn and there isn’t a peep.
I'm looking at a legal agreement on my desk to lease 120 acres of productive eastern Nebraska farmland to build a commercial scale solar project. The land would be taken out of production ("sacrificed") for the 50 year lease, with payments about twice what the land leases for for agriculture (soybeans).
It is very common. Farming is hard, margins slim at best. And farmers are given great leeway in how they may make money from land. Regulation is lax. Many fields have been turned from the production of food to the production of electricity, while countless factory rooftops sit covered only in tar and asphalt.
That's not needed, just have gaps between the panels so they provide partial shade. Many food crops can't tolerate "full sun" well, and will grow perfectly fine even with partial illumination.
I want to make clear that I am not arguing against solar. My belief is that nuclear is an important piece of a much larger puzzle. Wind is not reliable, and for solar to match the figures you provided, we would need to figure out storage, so lets diversify our portfolio :)
Figuring out storage is hard if you think in terms of Lithium Ion grid-scale batteries, or mountains for pumped hydro, but[1] puts forward the idea of synthetic natural gas generated by solar panels. That can be pumped into existing national gas grids, existing gas storage, and sent into existing gas power stations to generate power in quiet times. The article says that solar power has dropped from $100/Watt in 1976 to $0.50/Watt by 2016, and that instead of slowing down as the low hanging fruit has been picked, that process is speeding up since 2011 when Solar started to become cheaper than other forms of power generation, which changed the feedback loops and is bringing in much more demand which brings more investment, research and production, than before when it was an expensive little-used alternative.
In each of 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, the IEA predicted deployment of solar would stop accelerating (line going up) and steady off into consistant growth (flatline on that graph). Every year they have been very quickly wrong, and the 2019 predition of flatline is so wrong that by 2021 actual production of 190GW was WAYYYY off the top of that chart. At this rate we may not need to figure out storage nearly as much as we think.
> "What people have missed is that reaching cost parity on fuel synthesis will unlock huge new demand centers [and trigger an acceleration in demand/investment/research/cost decline of solar created synthetic fuels]."
Sure, if it pans out. I'm all for syngas if it can be produced somewhat efficiently at scale. But right now lithium batteries and hydro are proven technologies that can be utilized. That's the difference.
If the story I link below is real, synthetic propane could become the standard for energy storage. Extremely efficient production from electricity and direct fuel cells convert it back even more efficiently. Hank Hill would be so proud.
Nuclear would be the worst technology for filling temporary gaps in the production of renewables. The ramping speed of nuclear reactors is limited, and they cannot be throttled below 40% output without shutting them down entirely for quite some time. On top of that, the main expense of nuclear reactors is building and maintaining them, so throttling a reactor is not reducing the costs. You really want to run a nuclear reactor with a high load.
Fine, than they can go a bit lower still. But for a grid mainly powered by renewables, they would have to be able to go all the way down to 0, what is really not a practical option for nuclear reactors.
But there is another catch: nuclear is extremely expensive, even when run most of the time close to 100%. But any time you throttle the reactor, you are driving the costs up. Because most of the costs are in building and operating the reactor, less so in fuel.
I think what you mean is that wind alone is not baseload, not that it is unreliable. It is quite reliable in that its availability is predictable such that it can be coordinated with storage to create virtual baseload. Therefore its failure modes are relatively mild in impact.
In contrast, large centralized plants (whether combustion or nuclear) have far more consequential failure modes - for example, losing 1GW of power with little notice, as can happen with these plants, is usually a grid emergency event.
> Hydrostor, which is based in Toronto, is one of several startups working on fixing those problems. The company says it’s figured out a way to capture and reuse the heat generated when air is compressed, eliminating the need to burn gas. It’s also figured out a way to make the mechanics work in areas where caverns must be dug out of hard rock, rather than salt. <
The more I think about it, the more I'm starting to get of the opinion that this entire call or worry about "storage" when it comes to solar is a giant distraction.
This first thing we need to do is align the costs and incentives. What I mean by that is simply allow the market, or government, to dictate the real cost of providing electricity at night. If there are no solar panels (nighttime), and whatever grid-scale batteries are available cost 1$/kwh then so be it, charge that amount to the consumer. People will learn to forego "bathing" in electricity at night endlessly. For decades we've been spoiled with ridiculous "energy on a tap" that just gives us oodles at the flick of a switch, and we just need to take that away.
As a side-effect of this whole "switching off the endless tap", micro-grids are the future. Small communities with mini-grid-scale batteries and sharing of electricity will take over this stupid "national synchronized grid" idea that has gimped our ability to be agile wrt local energy generation.
"People will learn to forego "bathing" in electricity at night endlessly. For decades we've been spoiled with ridiculous "energy on a tap" that just gives us oodles at the flick of a switch, and we just need to take that away."
I take it you live somewhere warm in the winter. We are already looking at removing other heating options like propane and natural gas furnaces, coal and oil heating is mostly phased out, and burning wood isn't great for the environment either. So electrical heating is necessary anywhere where its normal to freeze for several months. Telling people to stop bathing in electricity at night when that what keeps them alive is bullshit.
"micro-grids are the future. Small communities with mini-grid-scale batteries and sharing of electricity will take over this stupid "national synchronized grid" idea that has gimped our ability to be agile wrt local energy generation."
Why don't you ask Texas residents how not being part of the national synchronized grid worked out for them 2 years ago?
Storing heat for a few hours can be done pretty easily and cheaply though. Indeed many houses already have technologies like water tanks and storage heaters that do this.
It's normal in many very cold places to entirely switch off your heating overnight.
You heat your home up during the day and evening, and as you retire for the night it's switched off. With sufficient insulation and warm bedding you don't need active heating overnight.
So it's absolutely compatible with an electric supply that's heavily biased towards the daytime.
As an example, it may start becoming more economical to include heat-batteries (I forget the name) in house construction such that they retain heat and radiate it to maintain a not freezing ambient temperature inside a house. That, along with insulation, and some rather moderate changes to behaviour, could entirely eliminate the need for electricity-use during night time hours. We don't know what ingenious and wonderful things people may do when the real-cost of electricity at night is exposed to them.
Ya that's a level of unmitigated bull** where I live there is usually several days out of the year where the temperature is -40 (doesn't matter the units at that temperature it's the same) and massive wind chill. There's not really a reasonable way to heat a houseduring the day and have it remain warm with tempratures like that without major changes to the way houses are built.
This seems like the quintessential example of some Cali tech bro nor understanding that there is anyone outside of their little bubble and assui everyone just lives like them.
Perhaps a Cali tech bro, maybe a standard scandanavian in a passive energy house with tight seals, good insulation, triple glazing, large solar heated hot water tank to hold thermal energy during the night, etc.
There are people outside everbodies particular bubbles.
What percentage of the world's population lives at a place that goes to -40C ever in the year? That's like 0.000001% of the world's population (didn't confirm, thumb sucking).
I think you need to admit, "bro", that you're far from a standard case and that maybe you should suck it up and move to a more hospitable spot instead of forcing the rest of us to subsidize your extreme lifestyle choice at the expense of our environment which we "all" apparently care so much about.
At least I'm suggesting insulation, and alternative methods of heating as opposed to just saying we should chug gigawatts so your butt could be warm at -40C outside.
Yes, imagine there was a governor whose position is "at night, everyone will be limited to no more than 100W." The best-case scenario for the governor would be that they're recalled quickly.
It would be more like "at night (or when there is little solar), you pay progressively more for your electricity." A lot of places do that already, you just do it to a slightly-palatable level instead of to the true cost. Partly because of, as you guys point out it's politically nonviable, but also partly because it's electricity from cheap coal as opposed to green solar + super expensive batteries.
>For decades we've been spoiled with ridiculous "energy on a tap" that just gives us oodles at the flick of a switch, and we just need to take that away.
Why shouldn't I be able to have oodles of energy at the flick of a switch?
Why is it bad that people had more than 100 years of using energy at a reasonable price point? Why do you think it's good for the energy to become more expensive or not to be available at all?
As you're asking, the bulk of the world's population survives with a much lower energy per capita usage than, say, a median US citizen.
For the high energy consumers it's more a perceived need than an actual need.
Further, energy availability appears to work akin to road availability; if you build a six lane highway traffic expands to fill it.
The obvious reason for wanting lower global energy use at this particular point in time is reduce the still increasing by products of energy production, greenhouse gases.
Once the climate parameters return to safer values energy production without those side effects can expand .. while we look at addressing the unwanted toxic by products of our new sources of energy - less greenhouse gases, more acids and waste associated with nickel, copper, lithium, et al.
Surface wind is not reliable. I've seen proposals to put turbines on large kites or gliders tethered to the ground. There's pretty much always strong winds over most of the United States somewhere between the surface and 10000 feet.
Hmm what to do with the torque from the windmill though. Perhaps it could have counter rotating propellers to cancel it out. Otherwise it would entangle itself in the anchoring cable.
Also, a failure scenario would mean tonnes of windmill crashing down from high altitude. Hmmmmm
> Also, a failure scenario would mean tonnes of windmill crashing down from high altitude. Hmmmm
10000 feet is less than 2 miles. Even in high winds it wouldn't get more than a a couple or miles or so before hitting the ground.
There are plenty of places in the US where you could fly where it would be centered over a 6 mile diameter circle that contains no people or valuable buildings except for people and buildings that are part of the power facility.
40 million acres are used to grow corn for ethanol. This is 162,000 square kilometers. This can produce 3.24 exajoules of energy.
Also, solar panels don't need any land. There are so many places we can install solar without 'consuming' land. They can be roofs, floating on tops of lakes and reservoirs with the added benefit of preventing evaporation, agrivoltaics combined with farmland, vertical panels, superfund sites, deserts, along the highways, etc.
For all the concern about land use for renewables, it really feels like subsidized ethanol has got to be the most wasteful use of energy investment dollars in terms of farmland used and every other possible metric. It's very interesting to think about using that money and land for other energy generation uses.
One counter point is that these fields can easily be turned into crops to feed the citizens of the country in an emergency. Solar panels not so much. Also, there was already infrastructure in place to easily maintain this energy source.
Not saying this is a reason to keep the subsidies, but I'm sure it made sense at the time.
Technically you need to factor in the fact that a nuclear plant can be built relatively near the places where its power will be consumed; some mass of solar power in Nevada is highly inefficient for powering New York or Virginia, even if you built HVDC lines to cut down on total line losses, so you'll need to pick land tracts reasonably near battery banks that would in turn be near cities.
Yeah and all those people on the other side of the Appalachians can just take a hike, why do they need power anyway. They brought the problem on their selves with their dirty coal mining habits time for them to pay the price.
The comment I replied to talked about getting power from Nevada to New York. I'm not American so I had to look at a map but it seems like the other side of the Appalachians from New York is... Ohio?
Is there something about Ohio that means they have no atmospheric wind nor natural sunlight?
Cover 4,000 square miles of the USA in surface car parks[1] and that's freedom. Suggest covering 11,000 square miles of desert in solar panels which don't stop land being used for grazing or crop growing or insects or wildlife, and that's environmental distruction that "even" you would balk at.
The people who will be screaming about covering the desert with solar panels are exactly the same people who scream about covering the land with car parks.
Exactly.
The only energy source radical environmentalists like is one that exists only in a fantasy. As soon as it starts being built, it becomes evil.
Note that they're already up in arms about windmills killing birds.
Also, covering the desert is definitely going to change the local environment. At a minimum, every joule that goes into the power transmission lines is a joule that will not be available for use by the desert ecosystem.
The thing about mineral reserves is that they only make sense when you add the price-point to the number.
There is enough Uranium on the planet for a few centuries. Make it a few millennia if you breed it, and lots and lots of millennia if you expand your reactors to use other fuels. But most of it is way more expensive to get than what we use today... what actually makes very little difference for the final costs.
If you ignore all other variables, then of course the situation looks like what one variable would make it do.
Would covering a desert in solar panels cause more thermal solar absorption in that area than would otherwise happen? Yes.
But if we're optimizing for "offsetting the heating effect of human GHG emissions", then installing 4.5TW of solar (about 4x what has been installed worldwide to date) would have a much more positive effect.
The world currently has 1.1TW of solar installed, producing about 6% of all electricity. So our new installation would be on its own capable of supplying 25% of global electricity usage. The corresponding drop in GHG emissions from the shutdown of coal, gas, and oil power plants would far outweigh the fact that part of the desert has been turned black.
> Would covering a desert in solar panels cause more thermal solar absorption in that area than would otherwise happen? Yes.
This depends on the efficiency of the PV modules. When it's greater than the albedo of the desert, it will cool the desert, not warm it. Remember, the electrical energy produced isn't heat. It's turned to heat at the consumer, but that's true of electrical energy from a nuclear plant too. Oh, and did you know that nuclear plants also add 2x as much heat energy in the exhaust of their cooling system?
Has this actually been quantified? Earth's albedo is a critical factor in the portion of the sun's energy that is rejected into space, just as GHG incidence in the atmosphere is.
In theory, darkening a portion of the Earth with high albedo (snow, sand) is worse than darkening a portion of the Earth with low albedo (roads, roofs, forest). Then it should be better to use a greener area for solar panels so long as the capacity factors would be similar.
Many people would argue that humans did cause this loss of sea ice.
Also I don't see how that justifies adding to the effect? Especially if we don't know can't compute the trade off? I'm sure someone has done that work but my it didn't immediately jump out at me during a cursory search.
> One kilogram of uranium-235 (50 cm^3) can theoretically produce about 20 terajoules of energy.
That's missing the huge and expensive nuclear power plant around that kilogram of uranium.
If you don't account for the conversion device (for which solar is cheaper per GJ than nuclear power plants), then light is a much better medium: assuming 15% efficiency, which is a conservative estimate, solar panels can convert one kilogram of solar light (remember e=mc^2) into 13.5 terajoules of electricity.
I'm curious how the numbers stack up of completed plants - but I am not very good at math and don't have a great understanding of electricity units, especially at the grid scale and big numbers.
Any chance you could help compare the construction cost of this nuclear plant to another recently constructed solar or wind farm measured against... I guess capacity?
Given the intermittent nature of solar/wind, does capacity even make sense to compare in a context without supporting batteries?
I'll give it a shot but I am probably super wrong.
$1.8b / used capacity = $22 USD per realized W (that can't be right?)
**
Note:
I don't know if my math is right, I don't know if the costs factor in loans, also the nameplate capacity for the nuclear plant is MWe and the solar plant is MWac so I am unsure how that works out.
Using Solar Star as another datapoint [1]. 579 MWac x 32.8% capacity factor ≈ 190.
I found mention of a bond issuance and someone purchasing the project here [2]. If it’s $1b, then it’s $5.26. If $2b then $10.53.
So they’re in the same ballpark. But one type of plant runs 20-30 years and the other for 50-80 years @ 90% capacity factor. The CANDU reactors are especially cool in that they can use natural uranium and refueled without a shutdown [3].
> I picked a relatively large, recent, US based solar farm from the list of plants in wikipedia
> Agua Caliente Solar Project (2016)
Note that solar being cheaper than nuclear is a more recent phenomenon than 2016. The solar panel prices went from $0.63 to $0.26 in the time span between 2016 and 2022.
I couldn't find used capacity factors but Yuma is one of the sunniest counties in the USA while Spotsylvania county is further north and also has less sunny days. With an assumed capacity factor of 18%, one gets 111 MW.
$905m / nameplate capacity = $1.48 USD per rated W
This year alone prices for solar panels have dropped by 30-40%. The biggest reason for prices not dropping for solar farms/large scale solar at the moment is that the supply of other equipment needed like transformers etc can't meet the demand with delivery times having reached 2+ years. So the prices for solar will likely drop another 40%-50% in the next 2-3 years at least in the rest of the world maybe not in the US because of trade wars/restrictions.
That's fair, I wonder if there are numbers on running costs.
I'm certain nuclear running costs would dwarf solar - I think solar just needs fresh water, cleaning and hardware maintenance (replacing inverters, and such).
Would be interesting to work the running costs into the "$ per realized W" calculation.
I'd also like to see how battery-backed solar compares. I assume the objective would be to solve the intermittency issue, but I am hopeful it would increase the capacity factor as well.
Another thing that's interesting to consider is multi-purpose energy utilization you get with nuclear - like desalination and hydrogen generation - though the latter is uneconomical because hydrogen produced from fossil fuels is much cheaper.
Better not use biased opinion pieces, when there numbers from government sources (US, but eho cares):
LCOE (total, incl. CAPEX, in USD per MWh):
coal 82.6, combined cycle 39.9, advanced nuclear 81.7, geothermal 37.6, biomass 90.1, onshore wind 40, offshore wind (that one was a surprise, since offshore wind should be quite cheap, mainly driven by capital cost of 104 USD per MWh) 105, solar 33.8, solar hybrid 49 and hydro 64.
>That's missing the huge and expensive nuclear power plant around that kilogram of uranium.
Whereas I think you are missing the huge and expensive battery array for solar to be useful outside of peak times? And the fact that the best sites for solar are far away from the transmission network?
Not unreasonable, but I would point out two options (not the only):
1) "Water batteries" - highly efficient (far more than the 'chemical' you are apparently referring to) & responsive
2) Methods for using 'renewables' to produce &/ support production of chemical fuels - with the added draw / potential goal of 'closing' the 'carbon cycle'
As to #2, one of the ideals that has been kicked around for decades is to do something like: use 'renewables' to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere and convert it into something like butanol, for example.
Now, last I was up-to-date on any of this sort of work (~10+ years ago), the economics were not favorable. Certain types of commodity chemical production with 'biological basis' (another type of renewable, typically) had much more favorable properties economically. And, indeed, you do see, for example, (thermo)plastic products made from chemicals like "PLA" increasingly. But, the "biofuels" concept is / was much more challenging, especially as "fracking" technology made great leaps etc.
Nuclear has its pros and cons - blanket disavowal is fatuous. Nevertheless, there are substantially more options, systems, technologies, etc. in development and production than are often discussed in too many of the pro-nuke(s) / no nuke(s) 'sniping' chains that have been prevalent in society & on the internet since I was a wee tyke myself.
> use 'renewables' to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere and convert it into something like butanol, for example.
are you referring to P2X? I think P2X is an awesome solution for existing infrastructure, but it's obviously not particularly efficient. I am excited about pumped storage as well, but my fear there is we'll run out of sites, and obviously the 80% efficiency is still not ideal.
By no means am I arguing nuclear is a one size fits all solution.
The US doesn't lack space. But investors like a quick return on investment; meanwhile nuclear reactors only make sense if you bet on high electricity prices for the next ~70 years. The time a nuclear plant spends on construction and decommissioning is about the same as the total lifetime of a solar installation.
How about recognizing that externalities of letting corporations do whats best for their own short term profits are costly to society, and that having safe cheap constant power is a social good that makes having government run nuclear power be a good idea. how about we not let the same people that have spent the last 50 years knowingly destroy the environment and hide their culpability be the ones to make the decision.
how about we as a society finally fulfill the promise of power to cheap to meter that we were told back in nuclears golden age before the carbon industry start the smear campaign against nuclear.
Nuclear has a lot of externalities (residues, security, financing... usually paid and supported by others). You talk about nuclear like it was a small enterprise, when it's the very definition of "greedy corporation".
It's funny-and-sad to see the old behemoth of nuclear power begging for government support as they last chance to be alive.
On the contary i dont think businesses big or small should do it I think the government should do it as a public good. Free carbonless energy for the people.
> before the carbon industry start the smear campaign against nuclear.
The environmental Greens had a lot to do with the smear. Even recently, they were the ones who pushed for the shutdown of German nuclear power which ended up increasing German CO2 output.
That's true. And it was Green ministers that pushed to keep the last German NPPS running longer, as long as possible. It was also the Greens who sent the first German troops abroad under NATO mandates, so one can say tge reputation of the Greens is not always matched by their actions. They are very easy scape goats so.
Can you realistically overbuild solar and wind in a way that works in winter? Here's Terence Eden in the UK, and his graph of rooftop solar[1] showing peak around 400kWh/month in summer and trough around 50kWh/month in darkest December - that's a difference of ~8x which might be possible...
But that's averaged over the month, what about a run of December days with heavy cloud cover, misty foggy atmosphere, still air, maybe some Icelandic volcano soot in the atmosphere, what's the worst we'd have to plan for, and how much overprovisioning would that take?
The dark and dreary days tend to be the ones with the most wind power. The tides around our coast are in constant motion.
But, the big challenge is still storage. Domestic solar panels provide 100% of our yearly electricity use. At the moment I can only store 4.8kWh of excess.
So we need to over provision and over store - hopefully both at the same time.
In the UK, given it's northern latitude and great wind resources, you'd be best overbuilding mostly wind.
Here's a worked example based on real weather data that suggests a wind capacity of double peak demand and converting about 8% of all demand with power-to-X would be the the low cost option.
That's absolutely true, but the economic argument still carries weight. How many acres of land, how many rare earth minerals, etc. are required to produce the load profile you need with batteries and renewables vs including baseload flat generation from nuclear? This is still an economic question but very relevant.
There's typically a range of operation, so you can adjust a hundred MW but you can't drop to 0 or spin up from standstill without a time consuming process.
Edit: also, the economics are such that you rarely want to drop load from a nuclear plant unless it's offline or for system reasons. The fuel cost is negligible so you'd rather turn off your gas plant or lower the coal plant and save on those fuels.
That assume we still allow coal, oil or gas power plant to exist in the power grid. We should probably not assume that to be the case, especially after the temperatures rises to a break point and some of the major climate change crisis occurs.
None of the commercially available (Western) reactor designs today are fast load followers, so you are dependent on having gas or hydro when you project for new nuclear power plants. That's one part of the reason why this stuff is politically charged.
From what I understand it's not a theoretical constraint, but mostly a lack of enough commercial interest for any other design. But it is what it is.
> Cant control rods can be lifted or inserted to meet demand?
Thermally it is difficult to dial a reactor up and down. Generally the way nuclear power is modified is by not-sending the steam to generators through a by-pass and quenching their heat in some fashion.
So thermal generation stays at 100% (or whatever), but electrical generation output can be dropped.
They can, though it depends a little on the plant design.
It just doesn't make any sense to use reliable nuclear as the "backup" to unreliable renewables.
Because this "backup" is already CO2 free. It is also reliable. And cheap to run. So just run it all the time (nuclear tends to have >90% capacity factor).
Usually you'd vary the concentration of boric acid being injected in the reactor's core instead, since that doesn't involve wear and tear on safety-critical elements of the reactor.
Nuclear reactors absolutely can vary their output to match demand, this is what France has been doing for 50+ years (and what Germany was doing before switching back to coal). It's not as reactive as coal/gas, but you can still vary within 30-100% of output power at a speed of 5% change per minute. Way more than enough to react to 1-day-ahead forecasted supply/demand, and way more than enough to react minute-by-minute if you've got a tiny bit of storage to stabilize the grid's frequency (e.g. pumped hydro).
France is balancing their reactors with a massive amount of water power, so they are not doing it alone on the reactor side. But I think France is indeed one of the countries with the highest relative amount of nuclear in the grid. Germany went never over 30% nuclear in the mix, so demand matching was way less of a problem. But also, both countries tried to make demand mostly constant like with pushing inefficient heating systems which would consume electricity at night.
This is very far off from working well together with a mostly renewable grid, where renewables can cover 100% of the load on most days, but there are larger gaps to be quickly filled.
It is a hugely complicated system where reactors which are earlier in their fuel cycle ramp more leaving the later ones to run at 100% around the clock.
Ramping once is easy. Ramping continuously through the entire fuel cycle requires a meticulously planned fleet.
A nuke operated at 50% of capacity costs the same as one operating at 100%. Thus, power from it at 50% costs twice as much per kWh. But nukes are already not competitive even at 100%, and get less so with each passing day.
Perhaps I fail to understand, but doesn't this comparison depend on a number of parameters such as the total reactor fuel load and enrichment, the burn rate, the cost of nuclear fuel, the cost of solar PV, the lifetimes of each system, and the relative process efficiencies (notably the cost of decommissioning nuclear)?
Otherwise you might as well say a teaspoon (or whatever) of water has as much potential fusion energy as 1 Kg U235 at a fraction of the price. ;-)
Yes, the amount of estimations I made to get to that number is absurd, and very much "best case" with no regard for inefficiencies (both nuclear and solar systems are currently leaving lots on the table).
Small nitpick: one teaspoon of water has much less potential fusion energy than 1 kg of U235, and actually much much less than 1g of U235, even allowing for fusion technology that does not exist and will not exist in 50 years.
Here's why.
The Sun transforms hydrogen into helium. But that's a fairly complex chain and nobody in the industry or academia is trying to replicate that.
When people talk about fusion, here's [1] the reactions they are considering.
The best yielding fusion reaction is deuterium-tritium and deuterium-helium3 [1]. Tritium and helium-3 virtually don't occur naturally on Earth, and deuterium is very rare, at about 0.02% of the hydrogen. A teaspoon of water contains about 0.5 grams of hydrogen, and out of that about 0.0001 grams of deuterium. Let's say that someone magically brings the necessary tritium or helium-3. How does that compare with 1 gram of U235?
The fission of 1 nucleus of U235 yields about 190 MeV of energy. 1 MeV is one megaelectronvolt, and is a unit of energy. It does not matter how it translates into joules or watt-hours. It is the unit used when talking about fission and fusion. So, 235 nucleons produce 190 MeV, which is about 0.8 MeV per nucleon.
The two reactions mentioned involve 5 nucleons and yield about 18 MeV, which means 3.6 MeV per nucleon or 4.5 times more per nucleon than U235.
So, even if all the hydrogen in the one teaspoon of water was Deuterium and Tritium, in the correct ratios to do the fusion, we'd get only 4.5 times more energy than from one gram of U235. In reality, from one teaspoon of water we'd extract a very tiny amount of deuterium that's usable, and we'd need to breed Tritium or Helium-3 separately. By the way, separating deuterium from water is a very expensive process. The Nazis tried to do it during WW2, and they were doing it in Norway. Once the British special forces destroyed the plant, the Nazis could not restart the heavy water production, and their atomic project basically stopped then and there.
One interesting point that I think is often missed, is that solar and wind produce energy roughly at an anticadence to each other and so storage is of significantly less of a requirement than one might imagine.
But remember that a square kilometer of solar panels needs maybe ten square kilometers of actual land. Anywhere other than at the equator, the panels need to be spaced far enough apart not to shadow each other. On a north-facing slop they would be even more spaced out. Do that in two dimensions, so they can track the sun, and keeping one square meter of panels perpendicular to the sun requires a suprisingly large footprint.
And trees. Clearcutting forests to make room for a solar panels just seems wrong, a Captain Planet style of evil. There are all sorts of places where the terrain just isnt suited.
Most of the US isn't wooded. I don't think a significant number of projects propose clear-cutting to build solar farms. I don't know where that came from.
Try where i am, the pacific northwest. Its all mountains and trees. Large solar farms are always tricky, even residential rooftop solar often runs into issues with trees.
If only it were possible to transmit electricity from one place to another...
Seriously, while a lot has been written about the need to update the grid and install more long distance transmission lines to support renewables, even with the current grid it makes much more sense to install wind and solar in locations where it is more efficient and then transmit the electricity elsewhere. In Texas, most of the wind farms are in West Texas hundreds of miles away from Houston, for example.
Then you probably shouldn't build large solar farms. Leaves still a huge amount of area open on top of roofs, parking lots, streets which could be used for solar without cutting down a single tree. Though it somehow didn't prevent those roads and houses to be build :p
And while I don't like cutting down trees, just fire protection - and that gets an even larger topic in the future - should tell you to cut down trees directly around houses, so rooftop solar should be possible in most places.
But the thing is: the pacific northwest should be ideal for wind power. So that would be the main emphasis. And then build a high power line to Nevada. Which delivers solar to the northwest and in the nights wind power to Nevada.
Germany already has a 1.4GW powerline to Norway operational, where we network the grid to optimize renewable utilization.
This might be a controversial opinion: In many cases, it might be reasonable to clear cut 10 sq km for solar power. Pacific Northwest is enormous. There is plenty of undeveloped land that can be used for solar power. To be clear: I am not suggesting "cut down all of the tree for solar". I am saying: Choose 1/5/10 sq km plots, clear cut them, and install solar power. Ten to one hundred of these in the region would have minimal environmental impact, but very large impact to reduce use of hydrocarbons for electricity production.
Nobody builds solar farms on "north-facing slopes". Nobody is making solar panels "track the sun". Nobody even proposes "clearcutting forests" for solar farms. Trolling is in strict violation of site guidelines.
It's very common for utility-scale solar to use single-axis trackers (the panels move from pointing east to pointing west through the day), unlike small-scale solar which usually has fixed panels (normally pointing south or north depending on which hemisphere you're on). The gain from single-axis trackers is high enough and their cost is low enough (a single geared motor can move a whole row of panels) to make it cost-effective.
(I haven't, so far, seen any large photovoltaic solar power plant which uses two-axis trackers to really track the sun; but thermal solar power plants with a central tower need these two-axis trackers to aim each mirror at the correct angle.)
I think trackers are a thing of the past. The cost of solar panels has sunken so low, they come essentially for free in installations. A tracker would be way to expensive. Here in Germany, people even start covering north-facing roofs with solar, and of course even walls and fences, if they are roughly in the right direction.
Well, actually Florida (FPL) along I-10 is right now constructing new solar farms where there used to be forests. I'm not sure if what they did with the trees constitutes "clear cutting" but the solar panels are there now, and the trees are not. I've driven the route for many years. It was all forested.
True. There isn't any actual untouched forest land in north Florida. It's all been harvested and replanted many times. Almost certainly it was private sale or leased land. But those farm trees still produced more oxygen and stored more carbon than the solar panels will.
I'm not sure about the other things but sun tracking tech for solar panels has been around for a long time and it's trivially easy to find through a search, such as [1].
"But there are also other ways to boost the energy production of solar panels – such as by tilting them to follow the Sun's path in the sky, similar to the way young sunflowers follow the sun from east to west during the day. Tracking technology, which is already in use on some land based solar arrays, helps increase the overall electricity production, as the panels constantly adjust to face the Sun."
Trackers are necessary if someone is doing math based on panels perpendicular to the sun. Of course they are rare, but are needed when doing the conversion. Whether the tracked pannel cast shadow, or more panels recieve less-than-direct sunlight, the math is the same.
And it is all irrelevant. There is an absolute overabundance of pasture land, so spacing panels out so the grass can grow between and under causes no difficulty.
Good thing that cube of uranium doesn’t need any extra space around it! We can just line them all up next to each other. Criticality accident? What’s that?
Clear cutting forest to put in solar isn’t likely to be cost-efficient. There’s plenty of shitty desert and mountainside land available.
Nuclear is the way forward. It’s a damn shame hippies stopped us from leveraging it. We literally wouldn’t have climate change if we kept increasing nuclear power plants in the 70s. It’s just a no brainer. Solar and wind are great but the amount of power they generate may as well be 0 compared to nuclear.
The uranium can produce power when it's dark outside, unlike the solar panels. I wouldn't bet against clean energy that can produce on demand. We'll always need it from somewhere.
You're comparing a one-time-use resource in U235 vs. the land required for a solar plant, which will last indefinitely for all intents and purposes. Adding the "in a day" constraint is quite misleading in your comment when that is not the long-term limiting factor.
Let's not forget that the externalities of nuclear power are generally much more costly than solar / wind.
Have you seen the Lazard lcoe numbers? Nukes are 6x more expensive than wind solar.
And wind and especially solar have more economies of scale and materials research to make them even cheaper.
This comes from a LFTR fanboy. Boy howdy do I wish economical nuclear existed. But 6x as expensive? That ain't all red tape.
I think of course that LFTR has a path to cheaper nuclear with breeding and near waste elimination, full fuel use, safety, and scalability. But I don't think it will ever beat solar, especially once mature multifunction silicon perovskite cells or something like that and salt water batteries develop.
I hope to be proven wrong.nyclest power is so cool.
Can we not overbuild solar and wind such that the troughs are nearly good enough, combined with high voltage cross-regional transmission lines, and limited storage for buffer? Solar panels are absurdly cheap, and the world has a lot of equatorial desert.
A little bit silly to compare the price of solar and batteries, which has been driven down due to extensive government subsidy, tax incentives, and massive economies of scale over the past few decades (including production in China), to the current estimated cost of nuclear plants that we have almost no experience building anymore.
If we embarked on a sustained plan to invest in nuclear the way we have in solar and wind, nuclear's all-in cost would be far cheaper. I guarantee it.
And I “guarantee” the opposite. Nuclear is fundamentally massive complicated technology that just wouldn’t benefit from cost reductions due to manufacturing scale in the same degree. Solar is so so simple in comparison, that’s why it’s gotten so cheap and will continue to get cheaper.
Maybe after 10 years of massively scaled nuke production we get costs down 2-4x . That would be nice but solar is down 30x and still dropping.
Exactly. Furthermore, it's not like we can go back 40 years and make stronger investments in nuclear from back then. The need to decarbonize is so massive right now that it doesn't make sense to invest a ton in technology that will only be "ready" in 2055. By that time renewables (and the storage infrastructure that will be required) will have an insurmountable lead unless large scale fusion becomes viable.
No. The US has subsidized the hell out of nuclear historically [1] and also in recent years [2]. Without subsidies, commercial nuclear development would never have happened in the first place and we would be shutting down plants faster than we already are because of economics. This also excludes all the VC money that has flowed into nuclear startups.
You are probably right, but only in the short term. Long term, there will be the political will for projects that require 10-100x our current power production, and nuclear will look attractive again. Alternatively, the renewables curve may flatten before we are fully decarbonized simply because the maintenance and materials don't scale well. Nuclear is expensive up front, but maintenance requires far fewer (albeit more specialized) personnel and way less material per kwh.
When people want 10-100x our current power production, they will build 10-100x solar and wind, because they are massively cheaper. Nukes have only ever got more expensive.
Ignores context, diminishing returns, the lack of viable storage options at that scale (or even the current one). Gonna still put my money on the proven tech for 10-100x projects - its a social choice to make it expensive.
Right now little is spent on storage because dollars are overwhelmingly better spent building out generating capacity, even in places where noontime generation exceeds demand. When there is a strict excess of renewable generation, it will be time to begin building out storage. We have myriad viable storage options. Costs for storage are still falling fast.
That doesn't make sense, do you have data for that? Best I can find is that we (the US) has the ability to store somewhere around 1% of our generation capacity, rounding up. Here in California we spend absurd amounts maintaining gas plants that only run during high demand periods, despite only having 6.6GW worth of storage for a state using 300 TWh per year. We are only 13% to our 2045 goal, so if it was cost-effective to do, we would already be doing it.
Without the storage, all of that day time generation is pointless, we need either gas or nuclear at night anyways, so the cost isn't really affected.
Moreso, solar and wind are too predictable. How Big Things Get Done ranks them up with road construction as top projects that barely go over budget. If you expect to spend $100 million on solar or wind, then it’s probably going to cost <$110 million. Meanwhile other projects could go 2, 3, 7x over budget, time or money or both.
Someone who builds a solar array will be able to go directly to build another, not have to lick their wounds and repair their reputation or business.
Nuclear does not seem to be on the mass production curve that solar and batteries are.
Even if you could design a reactor that itself can be mass produced at that scale, you still need to do the same with selecting and getting environmental and public safety approval for installation sites and production, transportation, and disposal of the fuel and waste.
I'm not against nuclear from a technological perspective, but I just don't see it being economically competitive with effectively printable devices like solar and batteries given the current direction of the cost curves on each.
Nuclear might not be able to compete in the U.S. and Europe, but that’s largely because of a ridiculous regulatory regime and has very little to do with the actual tech.
China has installed more renewable energy than the rest of the world put together last year. I'm pretty sure we can rule out any "ridiculous regulatory regime" issues there.
China is barely building nuclear anymore. China added more wind and solar the past nine months than all of its nuclear reactors under construction will provide. Yes, that includes capacity factor.
https://twitter.com/yo_ean/status/1718633487454904718
A moderate civilian nuclear supply chain and skills base helps keep a lid on the maintenance and construction of nuclear submarines, carriers and nuclear bombs.
If you’re going to try to determine how China is approaching nuclear power, it’s probably more useful to look at data related to that [0], instead of drawing conclusions from tangential data.
The point I was making is that China isn't inclined to do things just to appease some regulatory requirement. They are also building an incredible amount of Coal power.
Ah, I think there’s a misunderstanding of the parent comment. They aren’t necessarily saying that the problem is pro-renewable regulation, just that there are heavy (safety) barriers for nuclear.
The Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act exists precisely because sophisticated private insurers run a mile from fully insuring against these dangers.
Until the subsidy is repealed and taxpayers stops insuring it, the industry's frequent claims of its own safety ring kind of hollow.
It's particularly galling to see them cynically demand that safety regulations be watered down to bring down costs while the act still exists. Imagine if we made taxpayers responsible for cleaning up oil spills.
In the past we have accepted this socialized cost as a requirement for a world fueled by fossil fuels, which of course will change as we transition away.
This wasn't just due to regulatory influence, it was also due to economies of scale. But the two are related, more regulation results in fewer builds. Fewer builds reduces economies of scale and thus increases costs. Which results in even fewer nuclear builds, and so on.
Thanks for the paper. Quick summary (of a quick read): Most research has studied US and France; this paper adds other countries. Costs have greatly increased in US and France, but not always in other countries. They've decreased recently in South Korea.
> (economies of scale)
Why do you blame economies of scale? The paper doesn't say that, afaict.
Also they say, "increased environmental and safety regulation ... may have led to cost increases", which does not sound conclusive.
Also, I think we really need to be talking about lifetime cost, including construction, operation, and decommissioning. In many things, spending more up front reduces later costs.
On a per-MW basis nuclear power dropped in cost during the 1950s. See the small blue dots round the late 1950s and early 60s? Compare that with the cluster of red dots.
That, and larger plants. Things like concrete containment vessels have costs relative to the surface area of a hemisphere, while power output scales with the volume. But the big driver was economies of scale. Building multiple copies of the same or similar design means you can have longer production runs of steam generators, pressure vessels, turbines, etc.
In the early days, vendors didn't know how much NPPs would cost, so they priced them to sell, so they could gain that data. Later prices reflected that experience.
One can view the increase over time of nuclear costs as the replacement of wishful thinking with actual experience.
You have to to be honest. They were able to push for stronger regulations not because politics mainly listens to hippies. Stronger regulations were prudent considering the safety levels of the earlier reactor design. Without those regulations, many more cheap, but less safe reactors might have been built. Of which more had gone bad over years.
So yes, if you will, thank the hippies for preventing several nuclear incidents.
Batteries are nowhere near able to meet any energy storage demands of the grid.
The simple question to ask yourself is why do battery installations always get quoted in units of power - GW - and not units of energy, GWH - which is what we actually use?
(The answer is: because they're terrible for it. Batteries hold about 3x they're rated power value as energy - which means the 10 GW or whatever someone quotes is good for about 3 hours at that output. Great for grid stability, expensive and useless for long term storage).
> The simple question to ask yourself is why do battery installations always get quoted in units of power - GW - and not units of energy, GWH - which is what we actually use?
For the same reason gas power plants and hydroelectric power plants are quoted in MW units, and not on the size of their fuel tanks or reservoir volume (converted to MWh as appropriate): it's the most important number for balancing the grid. If you have 90 GW of power demand on the grid at a given moment, you need 90 GW of power generation on the grid at that same moment (simplifying a bit, since transmission constraints mean you also need some of that power generation to be at specific places).
Thus answering the challenge: they're not storage. They're grid stabilization utilities. Because no one expects to run them for more then 30 minutes to an hour while they bring dispatchable generation online.
Which means they're irrelevant to the idea of grid scale energy storage, because they don't meaningfully store anything.
The insane thing is that it is so efficient that it doesn't need to be on that mass production curve to be competitive. It is competitive even in the somewhat insane way we build it now.
However, we have a number of companies working on building reactors in factories. Rolls-Royce for example is talking to Ukraine to upgrade some of their old (not sure if already decommissioned) coal plants to nuclear with small, factory-built nuclear reactors.
For that to happen in the US, (1) we need to focus on more numerous, smaller modular reactors, (2) the NRC needs certification timeliness requirements forced on it (and more funding if there's an actual lack of resources), and (3) specific project requirements need to be frozen before construction (no more up-requiring mid-construction).
Modular reactors are the solution to not having enough capital or a long enough timeframe to launch and fund megaprojects at a pace that creates economies of scale anymore, which is exactly the US problem.
The government should cover the losses of the investors.
Various agencies are constantly missing FOIA deadlines, and often the only way to get them to actually do the jobs they are legally required to do is to sue them in court, asking for both the information and to have court costs covered.
Even if you could pass that legislation, which seems very unlikely, that doesn't solve the problem. The employees of the regulators aren't personally liable, and in many respects don't individually control the schedule. The investors also cause delays - and would now have an incentive to do that - and in many cases the/an investor is the government. Also, good luck explaining to taxpayers the $10 billion payout.
Right, the employees would have to be liable to their bosses. Their bosses would have to be answering up the chain, to congress and the president.
Presumably, for a regulatory agency to be held to a deadline, they would need to outline up front (or with reasonable notice) all of the things they would need to know and the inspections they would have to make. Those time tables would have to be defined early on.
This is where the idea breaks down.
How does a regulator devise a fixed schedule to regulate a novel technology?
How do you hold government employees accountable without upsetting powerful interests like politicians and unions, or get staffing funded properly on demand?
How do you even get the government to hold itself accountable on something like this when the DOD can't even *complete a clean audit*?
I love the improvement implied by "continue to improve" in the face of all evidence that shows fission is a uniquely impractical source of energy that has done nothing but get more and more expensive.
Nuclear was cheaper when more of it was built [1]. Economies of scale make things cheaper. A production run of 40 steam generators is a lot cheaper than 4 steam generators.
Proponents of a primarily solar + wind grid are betting on a breakthrough in energy storage. If that breakthrough does not transpire, we'll either have to give up on stopping carbon emissions or use nuclear power.
Converting atmospheric CO2 into fuels could contribute to this effort. But bacterial and plant-based fuel production may still be more economical and produce fewer overall emissions than even a solar array and a carbon capture plant.
Converting atmospheric CO2 into hydrocarbon fuels requires hydrogen as an input, so it'd probably be easier to just store the hydrogen directly. Right now, almost all hydrogen is produced through steam reformation [1] which emits CO2. Electrolysis is inefficient and corrosion of electrodes makes it expensive and hard to scale. Capturing atmospheric CO2 is similarly difficult. Carbon Dioxide is at very low concentrations in the atmosphere so it takes a really long time to sequester meaningful amounts of it. Similar issue with biomass: it produces energy very slowly and doesn't have the scale required.
There's a reason why plans for a primarily renewable grid assume that compressed air, synthetic ammonia, giant flywheels, or something else will provide storage for orders of magnitude cheaper than batteries: because existing storage systems aren't capable of meeting the storage demands of intermittent generation. Will one of these systems deliver a storage breakthrough? Maybe. But it's not wise to bet the future of your electrical grid on a technological breakthrough that hasn't happened yet.
Nuclear is costly _now_*. It wasn't getting built, for years. There is so much energy to be had from that, and cost learning curves can come down. France's ("small") modular reactors, SMR, they even aim to sell internationally, in their 2030 plan, are a model. To China no less.
China also builds nuclear reactors, and we can't fall behind them. I cannot abide an SMR gap.
My concern is that, since it's harmful to the planet and they're on track to be the largest economy, their absolute coal output is more relevant to the rest of the world than what percentage of its respective GDP it is. I don't necessarily blame them since their main priority is their own growth, but we're relying on their good will in 2030 without any way to enforce reduction if they change their mind.
Some parts of the west already did that years ago in electricity production. For example carbon free electricity production shares in France (88%), Sweden (98%), Finland (90%), etc.
Though there is still a lot of work to do to go fully CO2 neutral due to cars, trucks, ships, planes, fertiliser production, etc.
What I mean is China are installing vastly more solar than any other country. i.e the person I'm replying to is falling behind, which they didn't want to.
Nuclear power seems like a good option for non-military boats too, like container ships and oil tankers. It's already a very well proven maritime technology.
That was tried, nuclear reactors on civilian ships, and found to be a stupid idea. Too expensive and no real benefit over ship engines. By the way, tha vast majority of military ships and boats are not nuclear powered.
Synthetic fuel has a lot of difficulties. One, it requires hydrogen as an input which is typically produced through steam reformation [1], a process that emits CO2. Electrolysis is less efficient and hard to scale as equipment is subject to intense corrosion.
Second, CO2 is at very low concentrations in the atmosphere. Direct atmospheric carbon sequestration is expensive and slow. The biggest startup in the synthetic fuel business is behind schedule and is struggling to solve these two main challenges [2].
We need to massively scale up green hydrogen production under basically any scenario where climate change is avoided. Hydrogen is an input for many industrial and agricultural processes.
Biofuels do not require hydrogen or atmospheric CO2 capture, well beyond growing plants.
Also something I learned recently is that the idea that biofuels are a no go because they compete with food is a simplistic deflection. Looking at Brazil as an example the biofuel crops like sugarcane and groundnuts are grown in marginal land in the south that wasn't being used for agriculture. The main driver of Amazonian deforestation is cattle ranching.
Biofuels produced by growing plants is limited by the available biomass. Brazil powers it's automobiles with biofuel, but not ships. And more importantly, Brazil is a huge country with massive amounts of arable land.
Ammonia also requires hydrogen as an input. Ammonia is essentially a storage mechanism for hydrogen, eliminating the need for cryogenic or compressed storage. Basically, you need to find a carbon-neutral alternative to the Haber process [1] to produce ammonia as fuel.
The Haber process only produces CO2 if you consider the steam reformation to generate the feed hydrogen to be part of the Haber process. Technically, the Haber process itself is carbon-neutral, it's just that the hydrogen feedstock is almost never carbon neutral at the current time.
In the context of hydrogen storage, was it not obvious what "ammonia" refers to?
We do not need an alternative to the Haber process, the idea is to use electrolysis to produce hydrogen from sea water. There is room for improvement in the process but the technology is old and well understood.
There are other ways to store hydrogen, and it's far from certain ammonia will win out in the marketplace, but there are no serious alternatives to hydrogen as an energy carrier in the long term for this application. Everything else is just impractical and even more expensive.
Just like flight fuel, it has seen little change because it is quite heavily subsidized in its current form. The day we collectively stop and start taxing it like other fuels, the market will change overnight.
Which we have already. And that wouod be a great solution to the problem of storing electricity / energy. And it could even use, partially, existing gas infrastructure. Green hydrogen absolutey is a thing, bow we just need to deploy it at scale.
No, almost all of our ammonia is produced via the Haber process which emits carbon dioxide. Less than a tenth of one percent of our hydrogen is produced via green hydrogen:
> As of 2021, green hydrogen accounted for less than 0.04% of total hydrogen production. Its cost relative to hydrogen derived from fossil fuels is the main reason green hydrogen is in less demand. For example, hydrogen produced by electrolysis powered by solar power was about 25 times more expensive than that derived from hydrocarbons in 2018.
But honestly, I reached the point where I claim the same "just build it" approach the pro-nuclear crowd is using regardless of data and facta. Especially since I know from a project I was involved in before COVID hit, that green hydrogen produced PV is absolutely feasible and commercially viable. To do so at tue scale needed requires political action and subsidies, and the tech has still a lot of room for improvement. I say this is good news.
> Especially since I know from a project I was involved in before COVID hit, that green hydrogen produced PV is absolutely feasible and commercially viable.
It'd be really great to link to that project and actually demonstrate this claim of commercial viability. We have at least one demonstration of a nuclear powered merchant ship operating over the span of a decade. Can we say the same for a green-fuel powered vessel?
The same vessel will be launched early next year with an ammonia fuel cell.
LNG can be produced using green energy, the actual engine doesn't care how the fuel was produced.
Regarding the green hydrogen project: it was a proposed pilot production site to produce green hydrogen. And the business case was actually positive. No idea where that project is now, tuey needed EU funding and that was hard to come by during Covid. And after, I stopped being a freelance consultant.
Synthetic methane is limited by the sources of carbon dioxide. Existing prototypes use either biomass or industrial byproducts for concentrated CO2. This is not available at scale. Biomass does not grow fast enough to sequester enough carbon.
Prometheus Fuels is the main player trying to do direct atmospheric sequesteration. But they've not succeeded yet.
Interesting but tangential to Gibson Island and other Fortescue Future projects as they're not attempting to sequester carbon or use biomass.
Andrew Forrest [1] has laid out plans to dramatically increase global green hydrogen production on the back of western australia's mining of close to a billion tonnes of iron ore per year (ie. experience of industry at large scale).
Ships running off natural gas are nothing new. LNG carriers have been propelled by natural gas for decades. The real challenge is producing carbon-neutral natural gas, which your link says nothing about.
Synthetic natural gas has all the same problems as green hydrogen, with the added challenge of sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. It's only been cheaply produced using byproduct CO2 from industrial processes. Which isn't actually carbon-neutral, it's just using CO2 that would have been released into the atmosphere anyway.
That plant is not sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide. It's using waste carbon dioxide from a nearby biomass plant. This is far less challenging than removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
But unfortunately this method does not scale. The amount of fuel produced would be limited by the amount of carbon sequestered by plants. You'd be cutting down forests faster than they replenish if you tried to fuel cargo ships with this method.
> And why don't you know any of this already?
I do, and unlike you I understand how existing power to gas prototypes are using biomass or industrial byproduct CO2 rather than direct atmospheric sequesteration. This is sidestepping the most challenging part of producing synthetic hydrocarbons on a large scale.
Prometheus Fuels are the main player in attempting to solve direct atmospheric sequesteration of carbon dioxide. But they've still not delivered on that objective.
And the last small scale nuclear reactor project, NuScale, was completely cancelled. So the amount of power produced by this reactor type seems rather limited, trending to zero even. And guess what, we need snall reactors to power ships, reactors we don't have (no, those half dozen Russian ones don't count).
See how this game can be olqyed in both directions? Difference being, all the real money, and industry, is going for green fuels and not nuclear power when it comes to ships. I tend to believe those people.
Again, how many ships have been powered by green fuels? How many have been powered nuclear reactors? One of those is infinitely larger than the other. One of these technologies has over half a century of real world usage.
Comparing white papers about synthetic fuels with the cost history of actual nuclear powered ships that were built and operated for a decade or longer is comparing apples to oranges.
Green fuel ships exist now. They're still in the early stages but plenty of big names in the business are putting their weight behind then.
Plenty of "normal" ships are already hybrid electric like trains, so swapping out the diesel generator isn't particularly a science project and doesn't affect the already electric propellors.
You mostly need a financial incentive to burn clean methanol, ammonia or whatever. That's the hard part.
You just don't get it, do you? There is no readily available reactor tech suitable for commercial maritime use at the moment, none.
We do have technology so to produce green fuel for ships, and the whole shipping industry, from carriers to builders, is pursuing that in their goal of carbon neutral in 2050.
Of course there is still the possibility of those people being oart of a grand anti-nuclear conspiracy. Or they analyzed the tech and costs and came to an informed solution, one that is now global policy. You pick.
Yes and while it may be early days for green hydrogen, it once was for solar and wind as well. And as it did with solar the European Union is leading the way in developing policy frameworks that will grow the industry.
So? The industry, shipping, agreed on standards and a plan to reduce CO2 emissions. And if you think nuclear power plants on civilian cargo vessels are a good idea,consider the following:
- costs for a single ship reactor (shipping is extremely price and cost sensitive)
- time, and lost revenue (a ship not carrying cargo is only costing money, see above) for refuelling
- piracy and terrorism (I am not really convinced risking having some pirate group somewhere capture nuclear reactor is a good idea)
Also, shipping doesn't have a reputation for operating in the bright sunshine of law and regulation, with expert leadership and engineering. We're not talking about the US Navy building and operating nuclear submarines, led by Navy officers, who have gone through extensive training, have years of experience, a culture of competency, etc.
Ships and planes together account for single digit percentages of global fossil fuel use and emissions.
It’s almost all cars, trucks, and electric power, so those are the things it makes the most sense to worry about as opposed to things that are much harder to decarbonize and account for less emissions.
Is ship pollution really that negligible?[0] To be clear though the entire world is dependent on trans ocean shipping, it cannot be kneecapped for environmental purposes, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a relevant part of the issue.
The NS Savannah [1] was indeed a marketing stunt. But in the 1960s climate change wasn't really an issue. If you have to ship bulk cargo across the Pacific, nuclear is largely your only option. Hydrogen is another potential choice, but you'd need a carbon neutral way of producing that option. Electrolysis isn't efficient, and steam reformation emits carbon dioxide.
Given that we ship cargo in incredible amounts across all oceans, ranging from liquids, bulk to containers and cars everyday with zero nuclear-powered carho vessels, calling nuclear your only option is odd.
In case it wasn't clear, I'm talking about carbon-free propulsion options. Batteries don't have the energy capacity required for long distance shipping, and their weight is a big issue for ships. 300 mile range is fine for an EV, it's not for a ship.
That's what IRENA worked out in the frame of the initiative to decarbonise ocean shipping by 2050 when it comes to fuel:
>> In the short term, advanced biofuels will play a key role in the reduction of CO2 emissions. In the medium and long-term, green hydrogen-based fuels are set to be the backbone for the sector’s decarbonisation.
Present biomass energy doesn't have remotely close to scale required to decarbonize ocean transportation. I'm sure the "advanced" part of advanced biomass assumes some mega-algae or something else that is far more productive than existing biomass, but if that technology hasn't been developed yet then you might as well just say nuclear fusion is the solution.
Hydrogen is currently produced via steam reformation [1], which emits carbon dioxide. Electrolysis is less efficient and corrosion of electrodes inhibits scale.
Nuclear maritime propulsion is far more mature than any of the alternatives. Submarines and warships have been using it for over half a century. Could a technological breakthrough create a better alternative? Maybe, but we can't move ships with potential technologies until said technologies make the transition from "potential" to "real".
Then go and get funding for it! Because apparently you know better than anyone else who was involved in defining this strategy. And given many, to domain experts, just hairbrained ideas get, or used to get, VC funding, it should be easy, right? And a tremendous market, just imagine what a hyper-unicorn one can build by having the monopoly on power the cargo vessels of the future!
Venture capitalists expect most of their bets to fail. It's very possible that none of their synthetic fuel startups will succeed. It is not at all reasonable to assume that a technological breakthrough will transpire just because venture capitalists are funding it. Otherwise, we should just sit back and let nuclear fusion solve climate change. Surely you don't think you know better than the VCs funding fusion, right?
The important bit is about the timeline: At least ten yeara to proof of concept.
There is no industrial base dor this at the moment. And then there is the IRENA commission, tasked with developing a strategy to decarbonize shipping, and they went with green fuel instead of nuclear. And that commission included ship builders, operators and other domain experts.
The International Renewable Energy Agency's [1] job is to advocate for more widespread adoption of wind and solar. Nuclear power threatens that objective. This is about as naive as trusting fossil fuel companies' paid-for scientists on climate change.
The IRENA page provided said information in an easier to digest form so.
The only source talking about nuclear reactors for civilian shipping was that Reuters article. Personally, I'd take exhaustive reports and internationally accepted strategies above some statement made towards Reuters.
Heavy oil ships are already being banned from numerous ports. That will only accelerate. Shipbuilders are gearing up to build anhydrous ammonia fueled replacements.
Anhydrous ammonia will be produced at massive scale in tropical synthesis facilities for delivery worldwide. This is why long-term storage is not considered important.
Not ships are banned, but usage of heavy fuel. That means the last few hundred miles ship goes using diesel. But in international waters any kind of fuel could be used.
Isn't this "technically accurate", but also misleading? The list of ships (1) isn't that long, and almost all of them had random other issues that made using them as a 1:1 comparison not really that useful.
Batteries don't have the required energy density to make electric transoceanic possible travel. They're also heavy and would drastically reduce the cargo capacity of ships. It'd be more effective to just put the nuclear reactors on the cargo ships. Nuclear maritime propulsion is much more mature than long-distance electric propulsion (diesel subs have used electricity, but only over short distances).
> ...no submarine technology is commercially feasible. It is too specialized.
Except that's demonstrably false. Many (most?) subs use nuclear propulsion, and there are civilian ships that use nuclear propulsion. The NS Savannah was operated successfully for a decade [1], and several Russian ice breakers for even longer than that.
The fact that organization with the explicit goal of lobbying for renewables [2] prefers green fuel does not make it the optimal choice. It's the optimal choice to advance that group's goal of promoting green fuel, because nuclear power at scale is a competition risk for wind and solar
NS Savannah (one has to wonder why nobody mentions the German Otto Hahn, but whatever), was decomissioned for economical reasons. Heck, the only nuclear powered vessels the US Navy has are carriers and subs, even the lastest British carriers aren't nuclear powered anymore.
All in all, besides the niche need of the Russians for nuclear powered icebreakers, there were three civilian nuclear ships: NS Savannah (economical failure), Otto Hahn (likewise and retrofitted with a diesel engine) and the Japanese one (forgot the name, but that was both a technological and economical disaster).
And that is ignoring the fact that naval nuclear reactors are among the most well guarded secrets a nation has, none of that tech will ever see civilian use for that alone (the current generation thaz is, the reactors used in the three vessels mentioned showed already to be unfeasible for commercial use).
Edit: Nuclear power is nowhere near to be a risk for wind and solar, wind alone adds multiple NPPs worth of capacity to the grid every month while the added net nuclear capacity is basically negligible for decades now. Nuclear is not, and won't be, built at scale in the next decades. Only potential exceptions are India (good, otherwise they would build coal plants) and China (purely political, and at the same time Chine is building even solar and wind power than nuclear).
Even just one example is an infinitely larger fleet of nuclear powered cargo ships than green-fuel powered cargo ships.
Nuclear maritime propulsion isn't exactly a mystery. The basic operating principle of both pressurized water reactors and lead cooled reactors are known. All of the West's main geopolitical rivals (Russia, China) already have nuclear powered submarines - I'm not sure how you think technology for nuclear powered cargo ships are going tip the balance militarily.
This is pointless. The reason no nation on earth will green ligjt the use of it military maritime reactor tech for commercial use simple: this tech is secret and nobody wants the knowledge of said tech fall into opposition hands. ITAR is childs play in comparison.
This means, new reactor tech needs to be developed from basically scratch. And no, the mere handful of Russian icebreakers, and that one cargo ship which is half an icebreaker, don't count. Not if we talk about thousand of commercial vessels in operation.
One last question: Do you think we are faster to develop and build the tech and infrastructure for green fuels (which are needed everywhere from ships to planes) or to develop and build the industrial base to produce hundreds of small scale maritime nuclear reactors (for we don't even have the reactor tech yet)?
Hundreds of maritime nuclear reactors are already in operation. And the technology has already been deployed to civilian ships by four different countries. Your statement that no nation will greenlight maritime nuclear propulsion for civilian use is just factually incorrect. Countries did approve the use of nuclear maritime propulsion in ships. You even listed three examples yourself - you disproved your own claim.
Nuclear maritime propulsion is demonstrably closer to production than synthetic fuels. The former has been used in hundreds of warships and four cargo ships over the span of half a century. The latter is currently only produced using concentrated CO2 from biomass or other industrial byproducts (which is not something available at scale), and are not used for maritime propulsion.
Why is it that, that people always underestimate the technical complexities of thise things.
a) military nuclear technology will never see civilian use, claiming otherwise is beyond naive and ignorant
b) civilian nuclear powered vessels have been tried and deemed uneconomical (no, one specialized cargo ship requiring the power from a nuclear reactor to break through 1.5 m of ice doesn't count...)
- so far a grand total of 600 maritime reactors (see point one for the military part) in history have been built globally, 400 or so of which are still in operation, in order to decarbonize global shipping that is close to the number of reactors needed yearly, and not even the military providers have the capacity to build that many (e.g. the Russians built, what, six of those since 2014!)
Again, we have four different countries that built civilian nuclear powered cargo ships. I don't doubt that designing maritime nuclear power for these ships was challenging. But it has already been done. The technology already does exist. The NS Savannah, Otto Hahn, and the Mutsu all used low enriched uranium in their reactors (as opposed to the highly enriched uranium used in military reactors). That's the main challenge in adapting nuclear power to civilian use, and it's already been solved.
By comparison, how many green fuel powered cargo ships have been in operation for over a decade? If hundreds of nuclear powered vessels operated for over half a century is too immature, then green fuel powered ships are even less mature that nuclear maritime propulsion.
The reason why I said "green fuel" as opposed to artificial natural gas is because hydrogen and ammonia are also potential examples of green fuel, in addition to artificial hydrocarbons.
Again, how many ships have been operated with green fuel? There are LNG powered ships, but none using LMG produced in a carbon free manner. As stated above, producing artificial hydrocarbons remains out of our capabilities. Existing power to gas prototypes are really just converting biomass to methane and that method is limited by biomass availability . There are smaller prototypes for hydrogen powered ships, but nowhere near the size of the NS Savannah and they haven't been operated for nearly as long. And I can find no examples of an ammonia powered ship.
Again, how many examples of green fuel powered cargo ships in commercial operation can you give? Not fossil fuel powered ships that can theoretically run off green fuel if we hand wave away the challenge of producing artificial methane. But ships actually using green fuel in the same vein that the NS Savannah actually used civilian nuclear maritime propulsion?
See, comment like that tell me you have no idea how a ship engine, or engines in general work. The problem to be solved is not the ships propulsion system, what stupidly keep repeating with nuclear reactors, but the source of the fuel for those engines we already have (developing new engines is happening day in day out, and that development will simply optimize for ammonia or hydrogen based fuels). A question which has almost zero to do with the question you so desperately want to have answered as some kind of, what, childish got ya?
I get it, you area NS Savannah and nuclear fanboy, reality so simply doesn't agree with you, nor do the relevant industries.
> developing new engines is happening day in day out, and that development will simply optimize for ammonia or hydrogen based fuels.
Meanwhile, we already have decades of operational experience with civilian nuclear maritime propulsion. It's objectively more mature technology than green fuel.
And for the record, I do indeed know hydrogen powered combustion engines work. Perhaps you're unaware that by virtue of hydrogen's much hotter combustion temperatures, it's hard to avoid producing nitrogen oxides (a greenhouse gas) as a byproduct in hydrogen combustion engines [1]. Hydrogen fuel cells are an alternative, but those have less power to volume ratios and have never been deployed at the scales required for nuclear maritime propulsion. Not only that, containing and plumbing all this liquid hydrogen is a challenge, too. There's more complexity than you think to make a hydrogen engine that doesn't emit greenhouse gases.
You just refuse to get it, don't you? We way more experience eunning everything from gas turbines to ship engines than we have running civilian nuclear powered ships, I hope I don't have to explain how many non-nuclear powered ahip we have, do I?
We also have more experience using biogas to be burned in combustion engines and turbines of any sort, as we do creating said biogas.
We also way more experience in creating sythetic fuels, and using electrolysis to create hydrogen out of sea water (green hydrogen).
Those are all solved problems, and thisbis not my opinion, as opossed to you, but facts confirmed by the very industries involved in ship building and shipping.
Really pointless to discuss with ignorant tech illiterates like you.
> I hope I don't have to explain how many non-nuclear powered ahip [sic] we have, do I?
And again, how many of those are using hydrogen, ammonia, or synthetic methane?
> We also way more experience in creating sythetic fuels, and using electrolysis to create hydrogen out of sea water (green hydrogen).
Absolutely not. Almost all synthetic fuels is using biomass as an input, which does not scale. And only tiny, tiny fraction of hydrogen is produced in a carbon neutral manner. Less than 0.05%: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_hydrogen
Again, if these are solved problem, show me the fleet of ships powered by hydrogen, ammonia, or synthetic methane.
Great idea. Now, either apply to YC with it or convince the shipping industry to revise their decarbonisation startegy by going full nuclear with nuclear charging vessels.
> was tried, nuclear reactors on civilian ships, and found to be a stupid idea
We only did a demo ship, which was combination cargo and passenger. The principal cost was being rejected from ports for their lacking acceptance procedures, a first-mover cost. Nuclear shipping has never been “found to be a stupid idea.” It was simply never explored.
It was, up to the point the only German nuclear powered vessel was a cargo ship. It was tried in the heyday of nuclear power, and didn't go anywhere. So yes, civilian nuclear ships have been tried and found to be expensive, not feasible and a dead end, or, if you use different words, stupid.
> the only German nuclear powered vessel was a cargo ship
I was referring to the NS Savannah [1]. Put her engine and crew requirements on a modern supertanker and you have an economically viable, environmentally friendly ship.
The only nation that has experience with civilian, nuclear powered vessels today is Russia with its fleet of icebreakers. And let's be realistic, military maritime reactor tech will never see use in civilian vessels, same as military jet engines, those purely developed for milotary purposes, don't see civilian use neither.
And the latest Russian buold programm delivered:
- Artika, laid down in 2013 and delivered in 2017, entry into service delayed from 2019 to 2020 and again to 2021 due damages during trials
- Sibir was laid down in 2015 and delivered operationally in 2022
- Ural was laid down in 2016 and entered service in 2022
- Yakutia was laid down in 2020, planned entry into service is 2024
- Chukotka was laid down end of 2020, planned entry into service is 2026
That's it for civilian nuclear vessels. Meanwhile, in 2022 (a slow year apparently), 182 tankers, 350 container vessels and 69 car transporters were ordered. I didn't find actual deliveries after cursory search.
As for the small, mass producable reactors needed for civilian use:
"At the moment, several technology providers are dealing with manufacturing of prototypes, the development processes of which are at different levels of maturity, envisaging more or less a decade before completing proof of concepts."
The first source also has this to say about NS Savannah and the Herman Otto Hahn:
Development of nuclear merchant ships began in the 1950s but on the whole has not been commercially successful. The 22,000 tonne US-built NS Savannah, was commissioned in 1962 and decommissioned eight years later. The reactor used 4.2% and 4.6% enriched uranium. It was a technical success, but not economically viable. It had a 74 MWt reactor delivering 16.4 MW to the propeller, but the reactor was uprated to 80 MWt in 1964. The German-built 15,000 tonne Otto Hahn cargo ship and research facility sailed some 650,000 nautical miles on 126 voyages in 10 years without any technical problems. It had a 36 MWt reactor delivering 8 MW to the propeller. However, it proved too expensive to operate and in 1982 it was converted to diesel.
Meanwhile, the US Navy has nuclear subs and aircraft carriers, but all other nuclear surface vessels have been retired.
In short, we are at least ten years away from a suitable proof of concept reactor design (tue NS Savannah one already showed to be not economical), let alone from having an industrial base to build hundreds of those each and every year.
And therein lies the big problem with nuclear power: it is too expensive and takes too much time to be of any good short term. And if we managed to find a solution short term, and in a lot of cases we already have technical solitions that are deployed, we don't need nuclear mid to long term anymore.
I think you are wrong for the reason parent stated. Safety and regulations for nuclear are just too high to be competitive with modular solar that can scale and has no nuclear waste issue that is still unsolved.
Perhaps, but so far in the US we still don't have any really large battery storage facilities connected to the grid. These will be necessary if want to have reliable base load capacity without building more nuclear or fossil fuel power plants. The largest battery storage facility being built right now only has 2165 MWh of capacity, which is a drop in the bucket relative to demand.
Battery prices keep falling, but the supply chain is still constrained and there are huge expenses involved in building storage facilities that go beyond the cost of the cells. Other storage systems such as pumped hydroelectric or electrolyzed hydrogen may play a role but aren't cheap either.
There's little reason to build massive batteries at one spot, unless you are repurposing an only transmission line.
Instead, a good chunk of grid storage is getting deployed right at the generation site of solar (and some wind), which allows more efficient use of that transmission line.
Instead, we should be looking for large amounts of total install. However, this still won't happen much until it's actually needed by the grid, which starts to happen at much higher amounts of renewable generation than most states are using.
The tech is there, it's being deployed at massive scale where needed, and it's dropping in cost as fast or faster than predicted.
The tech is not here. The scale of grid storage required to fulfill just diurnal storage - let alone days or weeks to offset seasonal variation - is far beyond what batteries can provide. To put this in perspective, the US alone uses 12 TWh of electricity per day. The world uses 60 TWh per day. Both of these figures are going to increase, as poorer countries develop and want amenities like air conditioning. Also, as transportation and industrial processes are electrified. By comparison, global battery production is around 500 GWh per year. Yes, this will increase. But most of that production is going to electronics and EVs, not grid storage.
This is why proponents of a primarily wind + solar grid assume that hydrogen, ammonia, compressed air, giant concrete weights, or something else will make energy storage nearly free. Delivering the required storage scale with existing technologies isn't feasible, so people just assume that some other heretofore unproven technology will be orders of magnitude better.
The point of the various 100% solar, wind, battery projections that exist is that no new tech is needed.
Things won't be 100% Solar, Wind, Battery because other minor techs like nuclear, hydro, tidal, biomass or whatever already exist to some degree and can be part of the system. But current solar, wind and battery tech is enough, we just need to build it. The first 80% is the easy bit, with the greates payback, so there's no need to wait around.
Batteries cannot feasibly achieve the scale required to even out diurnal, let alone seasonal, fluctuations. The amount of batteries produced is nowhere near enough to satisfy demands for grid storage, and it'd massively set back electric vehicle adoption. Even as battery production ramps up, it's mostly going to go the EVs. Furthermore, electricity demand is going to go up too as people move from gas heating to electric heating and combustion vehicles are replaced with EVs.
"No new tech is needed" is a pointless statement if it can't reach the required scale. You might as well say "just build more dams". We don't need any more wind or solar. Just build dams everywhere.
This sort of argument does not pay attention to numeracy or the existing plans for battery production within the 2020s.
We can't build more dams because there really is a hard limit on the geographical sites. With batteries, we already have commitments for factories to build 1TWh/year within the US alone by 2030. Worldwide production will be several times that.
Average US electricity production is 500GW, at 8-10 hours that's only 4TWh. With batteries lasting 20 years, only need 200GWh/year of production to fill that diurnal need.
Batteries are cheap and scaling at a scale that we couldn't dream of scaling our construction capacity. Our limited construction capacity should be reserved for high speed rail, subways, and housing in urban centers.
Battery production will increase, yes, but so will electricity demand as transportation, heating, and industrial processes are electrified. Right now electricity use is only 37% of total energy use [1].
> Average US electricity production is 500GW, at 8-10 hours that's only 4TWh
Again, it's 12 hours for diurnal storage not 8 hours. More than 12 hours during the winter, actually. And diurnal storage isn't the only type of storage that's necessary. Factor in storage to even out seasonal fluctuations and you're looking at days maybe even weeks of energy storage. And again, 500 GW is going to turn into 1,300 GW as the rest of our energy use is electrified.
Batteries don't last 20 years, not even close. Diurnal storage is going to be cycled daily. A typical lithium ion cell lasts 300-500 charge cycles [2]. You can prolong this by limiting depth of discharge but this has the side effect of reducing the usable capacity. Let's be generous and assume 2,000 cycles that's only 5 and a half years.
200 GWh per year is still a massive amount of batteries. We're talking about over a third of global battery production to provide 8 hours of storage for just one country. And again, in reality we need more than 8 hours of storage and batteries don't last nearly as long as you claim.
There's a reason why plans for a primarily renewable grid assume that compressed air, hydrogen, or something else will account for the majority of storage: batteries aren't available in sufficient quantity, and deploying grid storage at any significant scale will severely reduce availability of batteries for EVs.
In a decade of following plans for 100% renewable grids, compressed air has never made it as a conceivable solution. Similarly hydrogen almost never gets on the list, and it's only there assuming some sort of currently non-existent tech advances far in excess of what is ever allowed to batteries. And yet, batteries make the list on all these plans!
As for your link, this is just flat out misinformation for grid batteries. Might apply to phones:
> How Many Cycles Can You Get Out Of A Lithium-Ion Battery?
>A Lithium-Ion battery's average life span is 2 to 3 years or 300 to 500 charge cycles, whichever comes first. As we put it, a charging cycle is a duration of utilization when the battery is fully charged, completely drained, and wholly recharged.
Industrial grid storage is rated to daily discharge for more than 10 years, with warranties typically around 12-14 years and expected life far afterward. 5000-10,000 cycles is more realistic.
Every five years, battery production capacity is growing 10x, prices drop dramatically. What is this limit? What is the reason it's suddenly going to stop? There's no answer other that I can see other than "I thought this 10 years ago so it's probably true too."
Hydrogen (or e-fuels) make it into plenty of plans. The important point is that it's for the last part of the journey to 100% RE, and makes little sense as long as natural gas is still being used. But for that last part, it's likely to be very useful.
> Industrial grid storage is rated to daily discharge for more than 10 years, with warranties typically around 12-14 years and expected life far afterward. 5000-10,000 cycles is more realistic.
I'd be very, very interested in these lithium ion batteries that have a life span of 10,000 cycles. The only way this would be achieved is with a very small depth of discharge, which severely reduces usable storage. I at least provided a link to back up my claims, yet you accuse me of spreading misinformation despite not doing anything at all to back up yours. Alternative chemistries like lithium iron phosphate achieve 3,000 - 5,000 cycles [1] at 80% depth of discharge. They last 5-10 years, not 14 [2]. But that's a new batter chemistry with smaller share of the battery market than typical lithium ion, and they also have smaller capacities than lithium ion and lower max power output.
Batteries are already being bottlenecked by input materials. Manufacturing accounts for only a quarter of a battery's cost [3]. Scaling out batteries is already becoming a problem of resource extraction. Even if the manufacturing cost is optimized to zero, the cost of inputs are still there.
The cost of a new car went from a quarter of a million dollars in 1900 to $25,000 in 1920. Would it be reasonable to observe that the cost of a car was falling by a quarter every two decades and predict that a new car would cost $6,250 in 1940, $1,500 in 1960, and $100 by 2000? Why would this scaling stop? What's the limit? Why didn't cars keep dropping in price?
But if you still need to support the complete gas, hydro.... infrastructure for those few months when wind/solar/battery is not enough, how cheap are those renewables then really?
Gas plants have their main cost in running them. So if they only fill the gaps, their cost is reduced too. But yes, they are not to be considered "profitable" but rather as part of the infrastructure like powerlines. But as solar and wind costs only a fraction of gas when running, this is a good trade off.
The numbers in your post do not march your claim of the text not being there. Scaling production of existing tech 10-100x, or even 1000x, will surely result in new discovery too, but it we only need a few orders of magnitude increase in production, that's proof that the tech is there.
Compare this to nuclear. Let's increase our production levels 100x. Where does that leave us, assuming that it was magically economically acceptable to electricity customers to pay higher prices than necessary. 15 years for 2.2GW is about 150MW/year. 100x would be 15GW/year. That's nowhere close to being where we need for a full energy transition in the US.
Nuclear, if it figures out its huge problems with construction, will be a small player to help with climate change. But in the year 2023, we know the big players: solar, wind, and batteries. There's no more time for anybody else to scale to catch up. Nobody else has a tech that can compete with such fast dropping costs. The numbers and pace of change are hard to compete with.
> Compare this to nuclear. Let's increase our production levels 100x.
Nuclear power already produces 10% of the world's electricity [1]. A 100x increase leaves the world with 10 times as much electricity as is needed, all coming from a decarbonized energy source.
Wind and solar are cheap because we don't currently have to even out their intermittency. Take away peaker plants and then intermittent sources become way more challenging. Solar produces energy in a sinusoidal pattern daily, requiring at least 12 hours of storage for truly non-intermittent solar plants. It also fluctuates over the course of the year due to weather and inclination of the Earth [2]. Wind power similarly sees fluctuations over the course of the year [3].
A 100x increase would get us back to what we were building half a century ago. Current nuclear production has been nonexistent, which is why this one reactor is such big news.
Another big advantage of solar, and wind to some extent, is that is distributed. It provides resilience to the network. Nuclear produces a lot of power, sure, but it's one big fat single point of failure.
The grid is not a network. It's a large single frequency balanced power distribution machine. It is, in and of itself, _the_ single point of failure, and there are significant tradeoffs in having lots of small capacity generators vs. small amounts of large capacity generators connected to it.
There's this cry for absolutism in this thread that's just absurd, on both sides. You want a wide multiplicity of power generation plant sizes and technologies, for what should be, at this point in history, solidly obvious reasons.
So, you want lots of Nuclear _and_ Solar. Seeing the two as competing shows just how monopolized our energy markets truly are.
They are competing because each dollar is spent either on solar and wind or on something else. That dollar spent on solar or wind gets you much more power than any alternative. The advantage increases every year.
If you complete that thought to include both space and time, solar is present only during daylight whereas nuclear is distributed evenly right around the clock.
It's less either|or, more swings|roundabouts.
A pure solar solution requires (on the order of) 2x excess daylight production and 10 hours of offset storage to buffer against the night (and compensate for energy transfer (daylight power -> storage -> night time power) losses).
Solar is great, sure, but there's a long way to go to replace the energy production of fossil fuels, that comes with a lot of reqource mining and waste.
Somewhere in the middle is an optimal solution with much solar and wind, a little bit of nuclear OR gas fired OR <somethig steady> and a whole lot of varied storage (battery + gravity + thermal + green gases).
The 1TW prediction was for the whole world. I’d expect the US to settle somewhere in the high 10s to low 100s by 2030. The US added 23GW in 2023, and is expected to add 37GW in 2024.
Batteries haven't gotten cheap; unless we get some crazy breakthrough total wind and solar power production will probably peak within the next 20 years.
You don't even "need" crazy battery breakthroughs - you can just build more wind and solar than you need + enough transmission infrastructure so you can deliver it to where it's needed. Of course batteries are getting cheaper regardless.
It seems to me that having a couple of nuclear reactors as base load spread throughout the country would be more useful than having a massive spread out battery & solar infrastructure.
I mean as an example many companies, especially PG&E can't maintain adequate powerlines, who is banking on the fact that they'll do an even better job when we quintuple the amount of infrastructure and they have to develop a whole new domain of expertise based in battery technology.
Not to mention even the supposedly clean, solar and batteries, still have an enormous amount of carbon emissions involved in their supply chain, and need to be replaced on a fairly regular basis.
Grid level solar has batteries installed on site. The site acts as a power generator that sells energy to PG&E, they don’t manage it themselves.
If anything a solar field requires much less operation expertise and staff to manage than a nuclear power plant. And when it goes bad, it might leech some acid and heavy metals into the soil over years, not leave a 10k year radioactive exclusion zone.
Would you prefer PG&E defer critical maintenance on a field of solar panels or a nuclear plant?
That question dovetails into nuclear's biggest hurdle; the risk for catastrophe is high, both in reality and especially politically, so regulation is high, and thus the cost to build, operate, and decommission is immense.
Nuclear is extremely dependent on long distance power transmission. Nobody wants a reactor in the middle of a city, and 1-5 GW of power needs to be sent long distances before it’s used.
Solar on the other hand scales down to 50MW instillations just fine so you can put it near substations etc. Huge solar parks make sense in locations with lots of sunlight and cheap land, but they aren’t the only option just a trade off in terms of transmission costs vs generation costs.
There are no active nuclear power plants in Indiana. It had two planned plants that were cancelled in the 80s. Purdue has a very small power plant for research.
Closest is Braidwood which is ~60 miles from downtown.
NYC has large power plants in Manhattan (East River 1, 2, 6, and 7), Queens (650MW Astoria Energy II power station), and Brooklyn (Narrows 1–1 to 2-8) plus a few more.
Chinese nuclear is not competing very well. There's a minuscule amount of it planned, only like 50GW over the coming decades. This is not even a drop in the bucket compared to what China are doing with batteries, wind, and solar.
China built out 180-230 GW of solar last year. They deployed more in one year than the total installed base of nuclear that China is expected to have by 2030.
A lot, but none you ever wanted to listen to so far. Fact is, even China isn't massivley investing in NPPs, but rather wind and solar. I'll risk a guess and say that they have a plan to cope with a grid in a highly industrialized environment that trends more and more towards renewables.
All ears? Really? Ok, the solution lies in the grid and demand flexibility, combined storage, mainly batteries, and keeping existing NPPs running as long as possible to allow the above to catch up.
Feel free to google all of that, because I am tired of trying to explain that to people by now, sorry...
And the old tired mechanism of "we have some very rough ideas of technologies that might come together if developed, together with some techniques that have never really been tried and where it is unclear whether the market will accept them". This is obviously a done deal.
On the other hand we have: "there are these power plants we know how to build, because we have already built quite a lot of them. all we need to do is build more of them." That is insane crazy talk that could never possibly work.
And even better: "various countries have just committed to doing this, some have enacted laws, some have ordered plants, etc. All have changed policy". -> I cannot see the results RIGHT NOW, so it doesn't exist.
"there are these [energy storage plants] we know how to build, because we have already built quite a lot of them. all we need to do is build more of them."
energy storage is going to lag renewables because until you have enough renewables you don't have enough of a storage problem to solve.
Hmm...interesting article that talks about planned capacity for later this year, then projects future capacity based on those plans ... and gives the capacity of that future storage based on the planned installs in ... GW.
50GW, 88GW, it's all small potatoes compared to the hundreds of GW of annual additions for other technologies.
If nuclear could compete, China would be building the hell out of it, and selling it internationally. Getting other countries to use your nuclear supply chain for their electrical infrastructure is such a huge geopolitical win that if it were possible, it would be one of the key political and economic strategies of China.
If China, one of the few countries with a mastery of large construction projects, can't make nuclear cheap, what hope do more advanced economies have with their higher labor costs?
Those "hundreds" are nameplate capacities. For wind/solar you need to divide them by factor of 6 to even get to actual average production, as the capacity factor of wind/solar is below 15%, whereas for nuclear plants it is greater than 90%.
And of course average is not good enough for an electric grid, the variance is highly relevant. As my statistics professor used to quiet: if your left leg is standing in liquid nitrogen and your right leg is standing in boiling oil, you are enjoying a perfectly comfortable mean temperature.
Variance matters. A lot. In an electric grid, you need to be able to cover minimum requirements even when solar and wind are having a bad day or night.
China got their solar industry financed by German subsidies, and they have plentiful deserts with lots of sunshine. The Gobi desert is the place on earth with the most sunshine hours, apparently more than the Sahara(!). It would be insane for them to not take advantage of that to reduce their use of coal, now at what, 65%?
But they also apparently think that safe, reliable and cheap nuclear energy is an important part of their energy mix, otherwise they wouldn't be planning on tripling their generating capacity, would they now?
Evidently you missed the news that it turned out to be no catastrophe at all, but just a lot of hand-wringing and pearl-clutching over a clearly hoped-for catastrophe.
Yeah, evidently I missed the news that after 20 years of Energiewende, Germany has the 2nd most expensive AND the 2nd dirtiest electricity in Europe and that the old plan of "we'll use wind and solar when the wind blows and the sun shines, and when they do not <a miracle occurs>" really worked out perfectly, particularly when the miracle turned out to be "Russian gas" and exploded in our face, causing us to have to buy up essentially all the gas available on the open market at horrible expense after Russia started blackmailing us.
Note that "buying up all the gas on the open market" is not a strategy that too many countries can follow at once, hence other countries started to look elsewhere. For example, Japan, who were going to exit nuclear, and are now turning more and more of their old plants back on and have announced they will be building more (!), very specifically to replace reliance on LNG shipments.
And yeah, we got really, really lucky with the mild winter of 2022. Apparently not too many other countries think that "luck" is sound energy policy, but YMMV. Also slightly unpopular in the world is our tried and true method of "we'll lower emissions by pushing our economy into recession due to high energy costs". And the constitutional court also took a dim view of trying to hide all the extra costs off the main budget, so the real costs are only now starting to emerge. The farmer demos were probably just the start of the unrest when the pain gets passed onto the population. A population that already now thinks the getting out of nuclear was a mistake:
"Sechs von zehn Befragten (59 Prozent) im aktuellen DeutschlandTrend für das ARD-Morgenmagazin halten die Entscheidung der Politik für falsch,"
I am from Germany, and I am just replying for the record: You are just repeating right wing propaganda, which tries to paint black pictures about a policy they helped implementing. But the truth is, the current government was able to avoid a gas shortage after Russia had cut off deliveries to Germany and that was the only possible problematic point in the winter of 22. By now we have enough capacity to import LNG to avoid shortages while the Energiewende has take up speed again. It hasn't failed at all, but the previous government had tried the best to make it fail. But coal usage in Germany has still been on a historic low in 23.
Oh, and the grid in France managed to keep up only because Germany was propping it up as too many old nuclear reactors had to be taken off grid. Which caused a small uptake in German coal production. But in 23 the downward trend continued.
The fact that the left (my side, I have never voted for an even moderate right party in my life) won't let go of this purely ideologically driven energy policy that is proving disastrous and that 59% of the population (and rising) oppose maybe one of the reasons the current ruling coalition has fallen to 32% in the polls (those numbers match surprisingly well), and there is starting to be unrest in the streets.
For example the most recent demonstrations by farmers. They are supposed to pay billions of Euros extra for the Diesel fuel for their tractors because the constitutional court declared all the off-books vehicles the government tried to use to hide the subsidies for the energy crisis illegal. And so the government now has to actually account for all that money, and is scrambling to find places to cut in the budget. All the <a miracle occurs> little white lies are coming out. It's not pretty.
And the failed energy policy is also one of the primary reasons the really, really awful far right parties like the AfD have doubled from ~10% last election to 20% in current polls. That was one of the catastrophic results of this catastrophic energy policy that I didn't mention before, because I am not that interested in party politics.
"Die in weiten Teilen rechtsextreme AfD erzielt vor allem in Regionen gute Wahlergebnisse, in denen die Industrie wegen der Klimapolitik vor Umbrüchen steht."
The vast majority of AfD voters (75% according to stats I have seen) do not vote for the AfD because they are Nazis. They hold their noses at the awful ideology, but don't see an alternative to some of the awful policies being enacted.
And I am 100% in agreement with you that the moderate right like the CDU are just as much to blame as the current government. They had the chance to stop the madness, but instead they made a populistic calculation that keeping this irrational energy policy would keep them in power a little longer. Pathetic. Particularly pathetic because they knew it was wrong, whereas the Greens apparently believe their BS.
Now the CDU/CSU seems to be turning around (also pathetically) to be more pro-nuclear, conveniently "forgetting" that it was them that passed the current laws mandating getting out of nuclear, but at least they are providing an alternative to the current failed policies that isn't the AfD. Lesser of three evils, I guess.
Our catastrophic energy policy also contributed to the war in Ukraine, because Putin (incorrectly, it turned out, partly because Habeck did am amazing job of crisis management) assumed he could blackmail us into not supporting Ukraine.
You denounce what I write as "right wing propaganda", without being able to list a single thing about it that is wrong. Because it is not wrong. What I write is correct. When the only political parties telling the truth about an important subject are the far right, we are in serious trouble as a democracy. Serious, serious trouble.
I don't want the AfD. Please stop the madness that is bringing them to power.
I have already debunked the narrative about French reactors in '22 in detail elsewhere, here's the summary:
"The shutdowns for the inspections and maintenance were planned. Not for a single plant, for a lot of plants. The inspections found a problem. The shutdowns were extended so they could be fixed, in the original plants and in other plants that might also be affected.
The shutdowns, the inspections and the maintenance were planned.
What they found was obviously not planned. If you could plan for what you find during an inspection, you wouldn't need an inspection. That's why you inspect."
France was able to plan their inspections and routine maintenance for the summer, because nuclear can be planned, the capacity factor is generally >90%. Have you tried planning a storm? The capacity factor for wind/solar is <15%.
Well, if you are serious, lets start with reasonable discussions, not with propaganda. It isn't the politics of the current government which is a disaster, it was that of the previous ones. They killed nuclear, they curbed the switch to renewables and indeed, NS1 and NS2 were clearly built by Russia to allow the war in Ukraine. It was bizarre that German politics of that time agreed to that.
By the way, the farmers don't have to pay billions, it is several hundreds of millions. And this came also only because of the stupid "Schuldenbremse", which is a great way to ruin a country. Guess who is responsible of that.
And what you say about the French reactors doesn't invalidate what I wrote. They had to be taken down longer than planned, creating shortages. On top of that the fact, that in hot years, they just cannot run them fully through the summer due to lack of cooling. As summers will get hotter, France will have to quickly come up with some solutions.
I don't want the AfD to gain any power too, but the solution against that isn't telling more lies. It is telling less lies. But too many parties think it is a recipe for success to finger-point at the greens and tell propaganda which helps the AfD. And towards those 75% you claim which don't want to vote for Nazis, well, the bad news is, they do.
The thing is, all democratic parties have to perform better. But as long they prefer petty fights instead of working on solving the problems we have, the non-democratic parties are on a rise.
The French chose to take their reactors offline for maintenance. chose. And of course they are in a worse state than they should be because of decades-long underinvestment, including not building new ones. They need to build new ones to avoid these problems. Fortunately, that's what they are doing now.
Macron calls for nuclear 'renaissance' to end the France's reliance on fossil fuels
> but the solution against that isn't telling more lies.
Absolutely. Lies like claiming the Energiewende is a roaring success when the fact that it is not is clear to the entire world, including 59% of the German population. 2nd most expensive electricity, 2nd dirtiest electricity in the EU. After 20 years, not even halfway done, with no real idea how to accomplish the other half apart from <a miracle occurs>. When the French accomplished their CO2 free electrification in 20 years. And then dropped the ball by underinvesting.
And they also saved money by building some plants near rivers without cooling towers, which most thermal plants need and virtually all thermal plants in Germany, for example, have. This is just not a problem, we know how to build plants with cooling towers.
Again, the German anti-nuclear-bubble likes to make a big deal about some French problems as somehow being a problem with nuclear-in-principle and thus nobody should invest in nuclear. When they are exactly the opposite: problems with underinvestment in nuclear, particularly over the last 20 years or so, where virtually no new plants were built. The solution is to, once again, invest more in nuclear.
> And towards those 75% you claim which don't want to vote for Nazis, well, the bad news is, they do.
You misconstrue what I wrote: large parts of the left denounce AfD voters as Nazis, and thus as people whose concerns do not matter. Just like you do. But that's not correct, 75% of AfD voters are not close to being Nazis and do not support the party's ideology. They are people who are not being listened to. And your solution is not to listen to them, because they are Nazis. Good luck with that, I am sure that will win them over to our side.
> The thing is, all democratic parties have to perform better.
Yes. For example drop policies that are clearly, obviously and painfully not working. As for example a "populist but irrational energy policy." (quote from the Forbes article below) And not denounce those who spell out the facts of this as nazis and the facts they present as right wing propaganda. Just a suggestion.
Once again, "populist and irrational energy policy".
"Distinguished Fellow at the Energy Policy Research Foundation and President of Strategic Energy and Economic Research. I spent nearly 30 years at MIT as a student and then researcher at the Energy Laboratory and Center for International Studies. I then spent several years at what is now IHS Global Insight and was chief energy economist."
And of course, all the countries that are turning back to nuclear: Japan, Poland, France, Sweden, Finland, etc. All Nazis?
You know the proverb about Nazis: You are either a good person and smart, then you cannot be a Nazi, or you can be smart and a Nazi, then you cannot be a good person, or a good person and a Nazi, then cannot be smart.
If you vote for the AfD, you know full well what ideology they stand for. Very best case, you are tacitely supportive, but more likely to be firmly in the AfD camp. Or just manipulated, and that's why propaganda is the right word to use.
And yes, a ton of the anti-renewables / pro-nuclear talking points in Germany are actually just that: right wing propaganda.
You wrote "billions". The one billion comes from the representative of the farmer. So my hundreds of millions is probably closest to the truth. But that has nothing to do with nuclear.
And the French took the reactors down because of required maintenance, part of it was unexpected after the found problems. But the main point is: they were down and France required imports to keep the grid up. You don't even comment on the cooling problems.
They "are" not building new ones. They fail to finish Flammaville so far. The president talks about plans, but until they become at least a construction project, don't talk about "are building". And even then, it would take like 20 years to finish those.
And once again, you are not even responding to my arguments about the Energiewende. You treat it as a failure while it is ongoing. Why it was delayed, I explained, but you ignore that. Are you really trying to tell me, that you are not an AfD supporter with your style and trail of argumentation.
And I simply stated, those people who vote for Nazis are voting for Nazis and there is no way around stating that.
I am not sure, why you claim I call anyone who supports nucler a Nazi, that was only said on those who vote for Nazis. I don't know who Michel Lynch votes for. His writing though has quite a few inaccuracies and I dispute some of his conclusions. But that is a factual difference.
And of course, your final sentence is absolutely polemic. I have not said anything in the direction. Why are you suggesting that?
By the way, your statement, that they are "turning back to nuclear" is quite inaccurate too. But the discussion so far hasn't been a very constructive one, so little reason to elaborate on that further that Finland did finish one reactor recently and at the same time cancelled the project tho bild another one...
"And they also saved money by building some plants near rivers without cooling towers, which most thermal plants need and virtually all thermal plants in Germany, for example, have. This is just not a problem, we know how to build plants with cooling towers."
From the post you replied to. Cooling is a non-issue. Under-investment in nuclear is an issue.
> I am not sure, why you claim I call anyone who supports nucler a Nazi
I can tell you why: because you denounced my factual post as "right wing propaganda", and me, by extension, a right wing propagandist. And that was essentially your entire reaction.
"Facts? Who cares, you are a nazi."
And of course the French aren't building the new reactors, yet. Their turnaround away from their mistaken anti-nuclear policy only happened in March this year.
> The president talks about plans
No, the president talks about government policy. And that government policy has been voted into law. March 2023.
> By the way, your statement, that they are "turning back to nuclear" is quite inaccurate too
How so?
> Finland
"In June 2019, the government announced a new energy policy with the objective of achieving carbon neutrality by 2035. The policy would see a complete phase-out of coal power by May 2029. In addition to the commissioning of two nuclear power reactors, the policy is supportive of operating lifetime extensions for existing reactors."
Hmm...
> cancelled the project tho bild another one...
You mean they cancelled their plans to build a reactor with Russia's Rossatom?
Now what might the reason for this be? Can't possibly have anything to do with, dunno, Russia? Always the disingenuous arguments.
And of course the new nuclear reactor they just turned on is already providing 40% of Finland's electricity.
Oh, I missed that one line in a rather busy post.
If you claim that cooling is a non-issue, you are lying. Some had to reduce power and also the maximum allowed river temperatures had to be adjusted. (https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/international/energie-t...)
I never called you a Nazi. Why misrepresent the facts? I only stated that your text reads like some right wing propaganda. Which it does. And not every right-wing person is a Nazi.
And wrt. to Finland I was talking about Block 4 of Olkiluoto. Block 3 went online this year. And yes, it delivers a significant part of the grid in Finland, which already has caused issues. Because Block 3 had to be pulled of the net several times - which immediately removes a large fraction of the grid power in an instant. That is why they currently keep a nearby coal power plant in hot standby to ensure grid stability.
> If you claim that cooling is a non-issue, you are lying.
No I am not. And please stop it with the personal attacks.
It is non-issue for nuclear. Because. We. Know. How. To. Build. Cooling. Towers.
If you cheap out and don't build a cooling tower, heat can become an issue.
If you build a car with an insufficient radiator, heat can also become an issue.
This is not an issue with cars in general, this is an issue with having a radiator that is too small. Because we know how to build cars that have large enough radiators.
And no, you did not write that what I wrote "reads like" right wing propaganda. You wrote that I was "repeating right wing propaganda". Ergo a right wing propagandist, ergo a nazi. Or someone who reads and listens to right wing propaganda and repeats it. Which is probably worse, because stupid and still a nazi.
Wrt. Finland: they hadn't even decided what type of reactor to build for Block 4, and due to the "special operation" those plans are now being given new priority, but not urgency (not needed yet).
And, if I read you correctly, you consider a power plant delivering lots of power a problem. Whatever. For a country that size, I personally also would have chosen a larger number of smaller reactors rather than one huge one. But that's their choice.
We were talking about the French power plants and they have a cooling problem as they were built with cooling by rivers. Yes you can build them differently, but they haven't. Actually you praised them for that. So now they have cooling problems. Which you denied. And showing that you were wrong about this statement, my conclusion that you were lying about that fact is a factual statement not a personal attack. Of course, now you are trying to move the goal post. The problem stands: several French (and also some Swiss) reactors had to be throttled as they couldn't be cooled enough in the hot dry summers. At least not without raising river temperatures to a point where the fish get killed.
> So now they have cooling problems. Which you denied.
Nope. I denied that this is in any way a problem of nuclear power, which is what you implied. It is not. Cooling is a problem of all thermal plants, and solved for all thermal plants by cooling towers.
This isn't that hard.
And where did I "praise them" for building power plants without cooling towers? You gotta stop making stuff up, really.
> At least not without raising river temperatures to a point where the fish get killed.
Reference for "killing fish". Or are you making things up again?
> And they also saved money by building some plants near rivers without cooling towers
I consider this a positive vote. But fine. If you didn't agree with the decision, it doesn't make a difference to the discussion. And when I was speaking about cooling problems, it was specifically about the French reactors. No where I implied that this is a fundamental problem to nuclear power. It is, however a problem of many current nuclear reactors. Never mention that of course cooling towers also require a lot of water that needs to be provide. Which might face the same problems as the river-based cooling.
With respect to the fish: basic biology. The normal limit for water temperature is like 25 degrees which is quite a lot for european rivers. Fish are very sensitive to the water temperature as high temperature reduces the oxygene content of water. Which is why there are often mass death of fishes in the summer in some places quite naturally. You cannot raise the water temperature much or you will do huge harm to those ecological systems. That is, why those limits exist. Note: the plants probably are not happy about too high temperatures either, but they won't quickly die from lack of oxygene.
Ok, when you are calling science "generalities and platitudes", you are making my point of your posts reading like right wing propaganda and also any more discussion is moot.
Yes, when water gets too hot, fish die. You need to be bit more specific than that. For example when the water we use to boil a fish (I prefer fried) is at a good 100ºC, that kills fish.
I have some doubts that the nuclear power plants raised the temperatures of the rivers to 100ºC.
To be relevant, you would have to have some precise figure as to what the official limits are, what the temperatures when fish (which types of fish?) actually start getting affected and how much, what temperatures the plants emit and how much those temperatures raise the temperature of the river.
And of course, all you actually have is more slander and denouncements. As usual.
"The country is part of the deregulated Nordic electricity system which faces shortages, especially in any dry years, when hydroelectric generation is curtailed. Finland is very short of power until Olkiluoto 3 is commissioned. Over 2009-2011 some two-thirds of imported electricity came from Russia, but this has decreased considerably since the completion of the Fenno-Skan 2800 MW HVDC link with Sweden."
> The vast majority of AfD voters (75% according to stats I have seen) do not vote for the AfD because they are Nazis. They hold their noses at the awful ideology, but don't see an alternative to some of the awful policies being enacted.
AfD voters are not literal Nazi party members, obviously, but it's definitely not the case that they're "holding their noses" at the ideology -- the (racist) ideology of AfD is fundamental to the entire platform of the party. In fact this kind of comment is just apologia: the only effect is that you end up validating and lending credence to that ideology.
--
FWIW, I'm very pro-nuclear, and I find Germany's general opposition to nuclear energy (Atomkraft? Nein Danke!) to be incoherent, basically stupid.
I don't know how many times this needs to be said: solar and wind and batteries can't provide consistent enough power, either for current or the growing energy needs, of the US or the world. Alternative power sources are required to maintain energy sufficiency into the future. Period. Ask any company that builds green energy if you don't believe me.
What's more ridiculous than this oversight is the idea that the cost of wind, solar, or batteries is somehow never going to go up. News flash: all advanced industrial processes that depend on a global supply chain are subject to price fluctuations.
>I don't know how many times this needs to be said
Zero. Few people are unaware that the sun doesnt shine at night. It never needed repeating.
What theyre less educated about is that pumped storage, hydrogen, batteries, solar/wind anticorrelation and demand shaping are, together, more than capable of accomodating renewable intermittency.
What's most ridiculous is that even the most expensive form of viable power storage (hydrogen) is still cheaper when paired with solar or wind than nuclear power is alone. This isnt to say that we should go all in on hydrogen/solar, just that nuclear power's cost is unconscionably high.
Indeed, if it werent for the nuclear military's reliance on civilian supply chains and skills it would never get built and the 'environmentalist nuclear' PR offensive of the last ~8 years that resonated with so many people wouldnt have happened.
The energy sector is still private. If green were cheaper, and more reliable, and gave a good return, it would be getting a bigger investment. But it's not, because it's not. Maybe in theoretical-perfect-future-world it's cheaper, but not today.
I work for an energy company that builds renewables. No we do not. I mean Jesus that's ridiculous. There's literally not capital for that, and the debt would be astronomical, to say nothing of legal, land access, problems with construction, contacts. But besides that there's different kinds of solar, and all kinds of specific issues with it, battery capacity being just one. Wind is a bigger opportunity and more commonly pursued, but has even more problems.
Making up shit just because you want it to be true isn't helping anybody.
> If I was a betting man, I would put money down that Vogtle 4 is the last nuclear reactor that gets built in the US. Solar and batteries are just too cheap for nuclear to compete.
On the contrary, solar and wind are _waaaaaay_ too expensive if you actually want your generation to be reliable. Just ask Texas.
“The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.
I was a nuclear engineer for eight years and I left the industry because I felt like I was taking crazy pills. Every time someone says "nuclear is the only practical solution for climate change, it's not possible to build solar or wind fast enough or cheaply enough", you can point them to this press release. All the nuclear supporters I know deal heavily in magical thinking, completely ignoring the factual reality of the industry.
I hear a lot of magical thinking about wind and solar too, with some magical pixie dust solving the intermittence problem but nothing practical being built at scale.
From the linked article, we get how much power it generates 1,114 MW (or 1.114 Gigawatts), how long it took to build that reactor (started in 2009, so 14 years), and how much it cost (planned $14 billion, final $30 billion):
> The new 1,114 megawatt (MW) Unit 3 reactor
> Construction at the two new reactor sites began in 2009. Originally expected to cost $14 billion and begin commercial operation in 2016 (Vogtle 3) and 2017 (Vogtle 4), the project ran into significant construction delays and cost overruns. The total cost of the project is now estimated at more than $30 billion.
Meanwhile:
"Utility-scale solar capacity in the U.S. electric power sector increased from 61 gigawatts (GW) in 2021 to 71 GW in 2022, according to data from our Electricity Power Monthly. Wind capacity grew from 133 GW in 2021 to 141 GW in 2022."[1]
So solar increased 10 Gigawatts last year and wind grew 8 Gigawatts. About 18x that one nuclear reactor we've managed to complete since 2016. In a single year.
Also wind and solar is cheaper than the cost of nuclear energy now:
"Nuclear energy is generally more expensive than wind and solar energy. The IEA report estimates the cost of electricity from new nuclear plants to be between $60 and $70 per MWh (megawatt-hour), while the cost of electricity from onshore wind and solar PV is estimated to be between $30 and $60 per MWh."[2]
So wind and solar is faster and cheaper. The only main benefit is a nuclear plant can still keep generating power in inclement weather (which is still important, but doesn't make it cheaper or faster than wind and solar).
> So solar increased 10 Gigawatts last year and wind grew 8 Gigawatts. About 18x that one nuclear reactor we've managed to complete since 2016. In a single year.
Nuclear capacity factors are over 90% [1]. Wind is around 30%, solar around 25%, so it’s really ~5 GW (solar and wind capacity added), vs. ~1 GW nuclear fission added (and we’re not trying that hard to build more nuclear plants).
It is quite hard to compare $60-70 for year-round super stable power to $30-60 for bursty power.
That being said, unless there is a huge regulatory shift it seems like nuclear won't get much cheaper and solar and wind will continue to do so, so comparing those numbers will get easier to compare as the costs spread further.
I mean, we know we can build nuclear plants quickly because we've done it before. It is physically possible. China and Korea can still do it today.
If you just mean the bureaucracy is impossible to defeat, it would just take political will. Which we are seeing more and more of recently. The first of a kind build is always slow.
Depends on what you mean by "we". China is doing it as we speak.
Also, "it's been done before" is a much better argument than "we think we can make these massive and untested changes to our society because my studies say so" like I see constantly from solar/wind maximalists on demand response, mass v2g, hyper connected grid, underground hydrogen battery etc, etc.
Seems to me the people saying solar and battery only future do not live in areas that can be cloudy for multiple weeks.
I didn’t run the math but I’m guessing it’s not feasible to build a battery pack large enough to ride out winter in some areas. The SF Bay Area, sure, but I suspect blackouts will be common in solar+battery only areas.
A preferred solution would be a mix of both with nuclear handling disruptions due to weather.
One technology for power generation should not “win”. Employing a variety of power generation methods will give you the most stable power grid.
Batteries are not for riding out winter, they're for evening out the daily load.
You have to overbuild renewables to handle seasonal variation, as well as make long-distance interconnects. Pumped hydro is also extremely interesting for obvious reasons.
Nuclear as it exists today is not cost competitive. But that's mostly an artificial problem caused by regulation. Can we solve that without sacrificing safety? Can we even solve it at all? Bloated regulatory agencies seem to have infiltrated and poisoned every aspect of society with no relief in sight.
Maybe it's a real problem caused by the physical realities of nuclear. Calling regulation an artificial cost is like calling sewage treatment an artificial cost of water.
> Bloated regulatory agencies seem to have infiltrated and poisoned every aspect of society with no relief in sight.
It's often repeated, including by a certain political grouping, but never established IME. Unregulated markets, such as cryptocurrency, privacy, etc. seem to cause most of the problems. The FAA, etc. do well IME. They fail when undermined by a political class that benefits from fraud (the same trying to prevent the IRS from collecting legitimate taxes.)
> Maybe it's a real problem caused by the physical realities of nuclear. Calling regulation an artificial cost is like calling sewage treatment an artificial cost of water.
That's just plain wrong. I don't know whether regulations in this case are bloat or not, but you're basically saying that regulations are never bloated, which is abjectly false.
>Unregulated markets, such as cryptocurrency, privacy, etc. seem to cause most of the problems.
Can you expand on this a bit? This feels a bit like a cause and effect confusion to me. Perhaps the unregulated markets are just where the "problematic" behavior moves, as it has been excluded from the regulated markets? Also, what does privacy have to do with this?
If there's any area to not skimp on safety regulations, I'd say nuclear is it. I think the alleged blight of "overregulation" has become a conservative mantra but without much basis in fact.
Or maybe I'm wrong. You seem to know a lot about nuclear regulation. Can you tell us a specific, unnecessary burdensome regulatory rule that you feel is holding back progress?
Not building out nuclear has an huge opportunity cost: fossil fuel plants kill people every day from pollution. Excessive nuclear safety regulations cost more lives than they save by slowing the transition away from fossil fuels.
(Example: the Vogtle plants were delayed in part because the NRC decided, after having previously approved the design of the plant, to change its mind and require that the plant be able to withstand a jetliner impact. https://www.ans.org/news/article-1646/root-cause-of-vogtle-a... )
> Excessive nuclear safety regulations cost more lives than they save by slowing the transition away from fossil fuels.
Maybe. It seems premature to reach that judgment. It depends how many lives regulations would save by hypothetically preventing nuclear catastrophe.
I agree with you about the problems of fossil fuel use. Nevertheless, I think those health dangers are more palatable to politicians and the general public because they are gradual and dispersed, and therefore ignorable; whereas even a single, mild nuclear incident would produce massive negative press.
> Can you tell us a specific, unnecessary burdensome regulatory rule that you feel is holding back progress?
+1. There are so much flamewar threads but I haven't seen a single technical discussion on a supposedly technical website. Recently I've seen a book review about it. [0] I haven't evaluated the merits of the author's arguments, so I can't say I endorse it unconditionally, but there's a lot of interesting food for thought.
In summary, the author's claims are that regulations are unnecessarily strict mainly because of the ALARA safety guidelines. For regulatory purposes, safety risks must be minimized to As Low As Reasonably Achievable. As a result, whenever a new technology becomes available, the safety standard also increases in responsive. By design, the cost is always high in spite of technological improvement.
> An example was a prohibition against multiplexing, resulting in thousands of sensor wires leading to a large space called a cable spreading room. Multiplexing would have cut the number of wires by orders of magnitude while at the same time providing better safety by multiple, redundant paths. A plant that required 670,000 yards of cable in 1973 required almost double that, 1,267,000, by 1978, whereas “the cabling requirement should have been dropping precipitously” given progress at the time in digital technology.
Sometimes the regulation involves considering certain failure modes that are physically impossible:
> Another example was the acceptance in 1972 of the Double-Ended-Guillotine-Break of the primary loop piping as a credible failure. In this scenario, a section of the piping instantaneously disappears. Steel cannot fail in this manner. As usual Ted Rockwell put it best, “We can’t simulate instantaneous double ended breaks because things don’t break that way.”
A related issue is that the currently accepted principle of radiation safety is a linear, no threshold model. All ionizing radiation is seen as harmful, no matter how low, in spite of the scientific evidence that suggests a low level of ionizing radiation has a negligible effect when it's within the DNA's self-repair capabilities. The result is that radiation safety regulations can often be unnecessarily strict across the entire discipline of nuclear science.
> A forklift at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory moved a small spent fuel cask from the storage pool to the hot cell. The cask had not been properly drained and some pool water was dribbled onto the blacktop along the way. [...] The Bannock Paving Company was hired to repave the entire road. Bannock used slag from the local phosphate plants as aggregate in the blacktop, which had proved to be highly satisfactory in many of the roads in the Pocatello, Idaho area. After the job was complete, it was learned that the aggregate was naturally high in thorium, and was more radioactive that the material that had been dug up, marked with the dreaded radiation symbol, and hauled away for expensive, long-term burial.
> [...]
> One the biggest labs is Argonne outside Chicago. At Argonne, they monitor people going in and out of some of the buildings for radiation contamination. The alarms are set so low that, if it’s raining, in coming people must wipe off their shoes after they walk across the wet parking lot. And you can still set off the alarm, which means everything comes to the halt while you wait for the Health Physics monitor to show up, wand you down, and pronounce you OK to come in. What has happened is that the rain has washed some of the naturally occurring radon daughters out of the air, and a few of these mostly alpha articles have stuck to your shoes. In other words, Argonne is monitoring rain water.
Yet another factor is that strict regulations on nuclear reactors makes research and development difficult, as they're subject to the same stringent regulations, including building a complete model of all possible failure modes.
> Many questions arise during NRC design review: how a plant will handle the failure of this valve or that pump, etc. A natural way to answer these questions would be to build a reactor and test it, and for the design application to be based in large part on data from actual tests. [...] But under NRC rules, you cannot build even a test reactor without a license, and you can’t get a license until all such questions are resolved.
Overall, the author argued that the current regulation is founded on the false promise that a nuclear power plant can never fail with an unrealistic safety target. Instead, radiation release should be accepted as an inevitable but very rare occurrence.
> Instead of selling a lie that a radiation release is impossible, the industry should communicate the truth: releases are rare, but they will happen; and they are bad, but not unthinkably bad. [...] Rather than saying “a [plane] crash will never happen,” they put data-collecting devices on every plane so that when one inevitably does crash, they can learn from it and improve. This is a healthy attitude towards risk that the nuclear industry should emulate.
What world do you live in that you don't see the burdensome regulation everywhere. Don't know anyone with a business? Never investigated how zoning works? Never filed taxes? Never used the healthcare system?
I've used all of these services and they all have problems. I can't say that those problems are due to "excessive regulation." In the case of healthcare, for example, most of the problems come from insurance companies who allegedly operate in the free market. I am strongly in favor of business, zoning, and environmental regulations because they provide valuable function.
Moreover, none of that is relevant to nuclear regulation. I asked for a specific example of an overly burdensome and unnecessary regulatory rule.
Using services is not the same as operating those services. I think if you could see the true costs that all the regulations bring, you might change your mind. And if you're happy to pay these costs you're most likely wealthy enough to be able to bear them.
Healthcare companies operate in an environment that is very much not a free market. For these companies, the regulatory burden is welcome as it is a high barrier to entry for new players. Read up on regulatory capture.
I'm aware of regulatory capture, thanks. You have not convinced me that this case applies sufficiently to the nuclear sector (which is after all the topic of conversation), where it has been claimed that unnecessary safety regulations are holding back progress.
As for other industries: sure, some regulations are put in place by the industry itself to preserve the status quo. And other regulations absolutely benefit society, even if they impose a cost to the industry. It's important to separate these two cases. What terrifies me is the lack of nuance in the conservative talking points about "reducing regulation," implying that all regulations are unnecessary obstacles that serve no valid purpose. If you want to reduce regulations, okay: tell me specific regulations that you feel cost more than they are worth to society. Don't just lecture me in general about, "Hey, regulatory capture is a thing." Those blanket arguments are unpersuasive and are often propagated by industry players seeking to free themselves of costly regulations, regardless of their value to society.
If we're talking about the US specifically, I can tell you that business and environmental regulations are vastly lighter than other Western nations. In if we compare the US regulatory framework to non-Western nations, we find that there is a tangible cost to lighter regulatory load, in terms of corruption, fraud, pollution, labor rights abuse.
I'm really just responding to your original statement of:
> I think the alleged blight of "overregulation" has become a conservative mantra but without much basis in fact.
Perhaps you were specifically referring to the case of Nuclear power, but it didn't seem that way. Especially when you mentioned Insurance companies being the problem in the medical industry, as if they somehow exist in their current form independently from the regulatory environment they have helped to craft.
I have no real opinion on where nuclear is overburdened by regulation.
> What terrifies me is the lack of nuance in the conservative talking points about "reducing regulation,"
I think this is really an issue of all issues in society today. Emphatic soundbites resonate with people, nuanced discussion does not. I'd think all politicians do this, and it's most notable when they're making statements about things we personally disagree on. If it's something we agree on, we happy to forgive and we "know" that the statement's lack of nuance is ok, because we don't want the message to be watered down.
Personally, I think there are many regulations that are good and well thought out, and many that are not. Industry typically does not bear the costs, they are passed on to the consumer. Sometimes this is good. Externalities should be priced in. Sometimes this is not so good, when you have a regulation for every edge case.
I'm not going to get into a debate on specific regulations. But if you don't believe there exists a lot of dumb regulations, just Google "weird regulations".
Pumped hydro used to exist here in Sweden during the 1970s. They were phased out because they are not cost competitive. They built nuclear power plants instead because those were cost competitive at that time.
It would be funny if the cost has switched between pumped hydro and nuclear, but I suspect they haven't. What really pushed out both were cheap natural gas and oil. Even now, new gas powered plants are being planned to be built within the next 5 years. I don't see a solutions to this without new regulation putting a clamp on the fossil fuels.
The one hope I have for pumped hydro is that our current hydropower fleet are outdated and far outside of minimum environmental standards. Combined they have managed to drive species to the brink of extinction, basically being large meat grinders for migrating fish. The solution of catching the offspring and fly them to Sweden to be implanted back into lakes is a terrible solution that have little to no scientific support. With the required investments into modernization, reverse hydro might not be too expensive to include, assuming again that the economics of the concept start to make sense.
grid-scale storage becomes more profitable when your primary energy production is more intermittent. current pv is something like 10× cheaper than nuclear before you factor in intermittency, and that opens up a huge market for grid-scale storage that didn't exist in the 01970s. pumped hydro was replaced by dispatchable gas, but gas is more expensive now, and batteries are cheaper
> current pv is something like 10× cheaper than nuclear
Maybe in nameplate numbers but not actual production in places like Sweden. Especially during the time the consumption is the highest (winter). The whole country is further north then the northern most point in US (excluding Alaska).
But in the places most of humanity lives (including pretty much all of US) solar works quite well just not once you go far enough north/south.
If you want to go renewables in a place like Sweden you go wind+hydro. Hydro is mostly built out already so that leaves wind.
agreed, in places like sweden pv is pretty limited. even the netherlands, the uk, and germany have remarkably little sun; pv capacity factors in all three countries are around 10%
If, as seems likely, solar and wind come to totally dominate all new energy construction, then it seems like state/provincial and federal governments will need to either legally mandate / highly incentivize the construction of new baseload by utilities, or build those plants themselves. We have the TVA but as much as I hope, I don't think we're getting a bunch more federally owned and operated power companies in the US.
what are you going to construct the new baseload from? nothing comes close to the cheapness of pv and wind. grid-scale energy storage, in the form of batteries, is already too cheap for coal and nuclear to compete with it on that basis, and it's just going to get cheaper as we climb down the learning curve
> Nuclear as it exists today is not cost competitive.
At the risk of stating the obvious, this notion entirely depends upon your definition of costs, and the definition of what is competitive. It's vastly more costly to society to have unreliable power (e.g., blackouts, brownouts, or weeks on end of lowered usage restrictions) than it is to have slightly more expensive electricity.
There is no rich country in the world with expensive energy.
Yes, I always want to scream “what about the quality of the power?” when people make claims about cost-competitiveness. Electricity is a commodity on the surface, but, as with many technologies, depending on the use case, differences in the qualities of the underlying source matter a great deal. Reduction of all costs to currency can be a damaging abstraction to impose on systems that inherently involve trade-offs between qualities.
You can't solve the variability of wind by overbuilding. Output can go down to <5% for more than a week several times a year. So the only way is storage. On a massive scale. Or having another source that makes sense to modulate. LNG is one (though carbon based).
Unlike nuclear, which is too expensive when you don't overbuild it, and becomes simply stupidly expensive if you contemplate overbuilding it.
Overbuilding nuclear is so preposterous that nuclear fans just pretend you magically don't need to, to prevent their fragile dream from being crushed by reality, and let them continue to steer at renewables and all the problems they face as every nation on earth builds then out at massive scale.
> Unlike nuclear, which is too expensive when you don't overbuild it, and becomes simply stupidly expensive if you contemplate overbuilding it.
> Overbuilding nuclear is so preposterous that nuclear fans just pretend you magically don't need to, to prevent their fragile dream from being crushed by reality, and let them continue to steer at renewables and all the problems they face as every nation on earth builds then out at massive scale.
Why would you need to overbuild nuclear power plants? Other than planning for future growth, but I don't think that's what people generally mean by overbuilding, it's more like avoiding "it's been cloudy/windless for a few weeks now so back to the 1800s it is."
negative lmps have long been a result of baseload plants exceeding demand at night; widespread deployment of pv has turned that on its head, because now it's midafternoon when prices go negative, but also in a sense exacerbated it. consequently, expect rapid development of grid-scale storage: pumped hydro and massive li-ion, of course, but also maybe centrifugal trompe isothermal air compression, sodium-ion batteries, or high-temperature liquid-metal batteries
I don't think nuclear should be overprovisioned, but it illustrates that nuclear also needs a plan B just like wind and solar does. IMO Plan B should be synthesized gas that has been generated when electricity was cheap due to overproduction or directly from cheap sources such as Solar.
Why Finland built a single huge reactor, so single point of failure, is a bit puzzling.
France has not invested in its nuclear fleet in ages, and deferred maintenance during COVID, so a lot more plants were in maintenance than usual. Fortunately they planned this for the summer, when energy consumption is low and renewable output high. Unfortunately the inspections found more than they were expecting, as inspections are wont to do at times. Otherwise you wouldn't need them.
Fortunately, there's a European electricity grid, and so for one year out of the last thirty or forty, France was a net importer of electricity rather than an exporter. In 2023 they're an exporter again.
And they are now in the process of correcting the underinvestment.
That’s not automatically true. As the price continues to drop even over building renewables can be cheaper than other options. Nuclear is very expensive so there’s a lot of wiggle room.
The price of solar panels is likely to fall to ever lower levels but the labor involved in installing them and the land they use up are much more likely to be the binding constraints in the future. Though we do have the twin strategies of building out the power grid to put solar generation in high availability areas and shifting electrical consumption to times of sunlight as mitigation.
It's easy if you add electrolysers to your imagination. :)
There are solar plants that deliver electricity for around 2 cents per kwh and the price is dropping.
Hydrogen can be generated from electricity at 80% efficiency, and gas can be converted back to electricity at 40% efficiency. This gives about 6-7 cents per kwh for solar even after conversion to a 24/365 stable baseload energy source.
This is cheaper than nuclear and works fine everywhere, even in northern europe.
(If you actually place the solar panels in northern europe as well - which you don't need to - most of the gas will be produced during summertime when the sun is up 18+ hours per day).
And still, PV generated electricity during these periods is priced cheaper on the spot market than nuclear. Funny, right? It is almost as if the parties investing billions and making billions selling and buying electricity figured out the financials behind all that.
> And still, PV generated electricity during these periods is priced cheaper on the spot market than nuclear.
I still don't understand what you're trying to say. It's priced at what the market is willing to pay regardless of the source. How is this relevant?
The variable costs for solar are insignificant so of course you're going to keep the panels turned on and sell the power.
In Northern Europe you can only make money from solar during summer/spring. If you had to overprovision by 10-30 times there is no way it would be financially viable (energy prices would be close to 0 during peaks and you would still barely produce any power during most of winter) without some sort of long term "storage" (maybe hydrogen or something)
Electricity is priced, at least last time I checked the European ones, at generating cost (variable cost excluding fix costs). Guess what forms of electricity generation have basically zero variable costs? Wind and solar. And guess what, those utility scale projects are calculated based on these conditions, and still profitable, even in winter.
The European electricity market, the Germany is connected to, prices electricity (or priced last time I checked, there might have been changes), like this (over symplified, so please read up the details yourself):
- generators provide capacity and nominate that capacity for future and as reserve capacity, the former is being priced using futures traded at an exchange, the latter is paid for by grid opertors to maintain grid stabilizyt
- consumers, the ones large enough to trade on the exchange, nominate consumption the same way, if they are able to take up load or shed load on short notice, they are paid for that the same way peaker plants mentioned above are paid for
- the balance between demand and supply for each period, day ahead for example, defines the exchange price (which results, sometimes, in negative prices and allows for speculation)
- producers get to produce as long as their variable production cost is below the exchange price in that period (CAPEX used to be excluded from that), that usually means that wind, solar and hydro get to deliver first, followed by coal, oil and nuclear with gas usually being to expensive for anything else other than peaker plants
So, this market is pricing electricity based on variable cost. Operators are including these market prices in their calculations, and that means that the majority of the build capacity is wind, solar and coal (and yes, brand new gas plants have never gone online because shutting them down before hand was cheaper).
TL/DR: Exchanges, aka the market, ignores fix costs while opertors don't.
Honestly, if you fail to understand that crucial market mechanism (for Europe with its integrated grid, the US is different) try to get aroind that first, it explains an aweful lot of how electricty production capacity is built. By the way, this market prevented outages very reliably.
> The European electricity market, the Germany is connected to, prices electricity (or priced last time I checked, there might have been changes), like this (over symplified, so please read up the details yourself):
I keep trying to say that this/market price isn't really relevant.
Nobody would invest in solar if it only produced as much as it does in December whole year long. If you overprovision enough that solar alone could satisfy any of meaningful proportion of total demand during winter that mean that prices during sunny summer/spring days would be approximately 0 which again makes investment unattractive.
> TL/DR: Exchanges, aka the market, ignores fix costs while opertors don't.
Perhaps. I don't see how the first half of this sentence is particularly relevant to this conversation and the second half is something I keep repeating over and over again.
> Honestly, if you fail to understand that crucial market mechanism
Well yes if you add gas, coal, wind etc. to the equation it changes this but that wasn't part of the initial argument. If you have more or less constant demand during the whole year (or especially if demand in winter is higher) solar capacity needs to be balanced out by gas/coal/etc. which is far from ideal. That doesn't seem to be likely to change in the foreseeable future (and to reiterate I'm talking specifically about the northern half of Europe.
That's tangential and doesn't change the fact that solar barely produces anything during winter if you go far enough north (and you don't have any way to store the produced power for at least 4-5months).
The answer to that is simple: powerlines, wind, hydro... No idea why people think solar has to be local, wind requires powerlines and nuclear for some reason isn't neither...
> answer to that is simple: powerlines, wind, hydro
Wind is still intermittent. Transmission and hydro expensive. The point still stands that marginal new power will become much more expensive before solar reaches anywhere close to sole source.
Who said anything about solar being single source??? And everything is expensive, the question is wether or not it is profitable. And politics aside, the financials have decided a long time ago on wind, solar and, sadly enough due to criminally underprized CO2 certificates, coal. New NPPs just barely replace capacity going offline, is always late and always above budget. And even if we ignore the net added capacity of new nuclear plants, the gross capacity being built pales in comparison to wind and solar.
Pushing nuclear power, for other than military or political reasons, is riding a dead horse.
Gas not so much, at least not in Europe. There the ranking (cheap to expensive) is: Solar and wind, coal, oil, nuclear and gas (roughly). Coal is that cheap because CO2 certificates are way underpriced.
It very obviously is. Solar power (and wind) are constrained by the planet’s insolation. Even assuming perfect efficiency, we start approaching diminishing returns based on power input within a century.
Now assume imperfect efficiency and resource constraints, and you see that cliff approach within decades. This is fine. It’s the law of diminishing marginal returns. It’s why a diversity of sources almost always beats monosourcing.
your projection that human world marketed energy consumption will increase by a factor of 1000× within a century may be correct, but it is far outside the range of mainstream predictions, and far faster than current growth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum... shows total energy supply (excluding agriculture) growing from 8700 million toe in 01990 to 14500 million toe in 02021, a 67% increase, or 1.66% per year. extrapolating that until 02123 we get only a factor of 5.4× growth, not the 1000× you're predicting
> projection that human world marketed energy consumption will increase by a factor of 1000× within a century may be correct
We currently produce about 2% [1] of the Earth’s insolation, or 6% of that which hits land. So you’re talking factors of 16 to 50, which at 2% growth means 140 years to the former. Again, assuming perfect efficiency and no clouds, et cetera.
If we assume 50% efficiency (still with no clouds) and covering half of all the Earth’s land in solar panels, we have about 70 years. It’s ludicrous to assume we won’t see diminishing marginal returns in a quarter of that time.
[1] 26 936 TWh [a] / (340 W/sqm [b] x 510mm sqkm x 1000 x 365 days x 24 hours)
14500 million toe per year is 19 terawatts, roughly world marketed energy consumption; 1000 watts per m² (nominal solar constant below the atmosphere) times 1.28 × 10¹⁴ m² (area of a circle with radius 6371km) is 128000 terawatts. 19 is 0.015% of 128000, not 2%. so why do your calculations differ? let's see
possibly by '510mm sqkm' you mean 510 million square kilometers, as opposed to, say, 510 millimeter square kilometers (which would work out to 510'000 m³). 510 million square kilometers is a good value for the surface area of earth (4πr² ≈ 510066 km²) and 340 watts per square meter is a reasonable estimate for 24-hour mean insolation, disregarding clouds. but 340 watts per square meter times 510 million square kilometers gives 173000 terawatts, higher than my estimate. in terawatt hours per year, that's 1.52 billion terawatt hours per year, which is definitely a lot more than 50 times 26936 terawatt hours
i think maybe your error there is that you were trying to convert from square kilometers to square meters by multiplying by 1000. but actually a square kilometer contains a million square meters, not a thousand. so you ended up calculating about 2% instead of about 0.002%, which is what your inputs give if calculated correctly
using the units(1) program from unix is a good way to avoid errors like this; in this case you can do the calculation as follows:
You have: 26936 TWh / (340W/m^2 * 4 pi earthradius^2 * 1 year)
You want: %
* 0.0017718851
/ 564.37068
however, you also made a smaller error in the opposite direction. the 26936 terawatt hours per year figure is only a small fraction of the total energy supply; as the paper you linked explains:
> Considering electrical energy, while 6,131 TWh of energy was produced in 1973, 26,936 TWh of electrical energy was produced in 2019 (IEA, 2021c).
that's only about 3 terawatts, not 19, because it excludes virtually the entire transport sector, coal consumption by steel mills, climate-control heat and process heat provided directly by fossil fuels, inefficiencies in the electrical generation process, etc. using the correct figure of 19 terawatts, we derive that world marketed energy consumption is currently 0.01% of global terrestrial insolation, including light that hits clouds and oceans but not including light absorbed or reflected by the atmosphere
growing energy consumption by this factor of 6700 at 1.66% per year would take 535 years, but in fact now that pv has dropped the cost of energy so dramatically, i expect energy production growth to speed up. also presumably there will be power-production satellites in solar orbit within decades, permitting progress past kardashev type 1
My broader point is this: as we deploy solar, mass production and learning curves will reduce costs. But diminishing returns will increase them. Given insolation is not limitless, we should see that curve stretch upwards and eventually intersect other power sources. To suggest otherwise is to say we should monosource solar.
yeah, eventually the humans will start to feel the limits of the terrestrial solar resource, but at well over 100 times current world marketed energy consumption, at which point they will have reached the energy intensity level you thought they were already at
> sounds like a kneejerk response. Got a source for it
If you have 120% solar capacity in the summer so you have 100% in the winter, that’s obviously going to be more expensive than just building 100%. This is basic utilisation.
Also, diminishing returns: the most-productive spots for solar will be built out first.
As the seasonality of power becomes more and more pronounced, it'll make more and more sense to make seasonal loads. Cheap to build but electrically expensive to operate manufacturing processes that take advantage of borderline free power in the summer months that don't have much capex to amortize in the winters.
> You said it stops being cheap - does it? Compared to alternatives?
“As cheap.” Solar will keep getting cheaper until saturation, then overshoot while it gets a bit more expensive. The equilibrium will shift from time to time as technology advances. But there are fundamental limits, and power demand is only going to grow.
Depends on the latitude and weather patterns. For instance you might need 25 (or much more) higher capacity to generate as much power in December as you would in May in most of Northern Europe (that should be pretty obvious though).
for long-term storage it might be better to convert the hydrogen to something more easily storable, such as propane or octane, or to make a different electrolytic product such as aluminum
yes, that's mentioned in the comment i was replying to, but while it's appealing in some ways, i feel that it is not as appealing as the options i mentioned for reasons of accident hazard, noxious combustion products, lower density, and risk of corrosion
There's also a possibility of using methanol, which is not as dangerous as ammonia. This would involve some complexity:
1) Have CO2 storage.
2) Make hydrogen by electrolysis. Store the oxygen.
3) The hydrogen is reacted with CO2 to make methanol, which is easily stored.
4) When power is needed, use the oxygen from 2) and the methanol from 3) in an Allam-cycle turbine. The CO2 of combustion is easily separated and put back into CO2 storage.
One ends up needed long term storage of CO2, oxygen, and methanol, but this could be easier than storing hydrogen, especially if the CO2 and oxygen can be liquefied and there are no salt formations to make H2 storage easy.
I keep hearing that it's not cost effective anymore, to slow etc. but if it's actually mostly regulation that's hindering the built out (regardless of the risks) shouldn't China with their impressive portfolio of warpspeed megaprojects have been an ideal example of scaling the next generation of this tech?
prc is hedging their bets by building some new reactors, but it's not competitive with pv and wind (which they are building far more of), even at the dismal capacity factors they've achieved so far for reasons I'm unclear on (possibly a shortage of hvdc transmission capacity)
21 reactors under construction even with a short build time of 7 years is just 3 finished per year, and with China having ~15x the population of Germany that would amount to 0,2 reactors finishing per year in Germany. Multiplied with 1,4 GW that would add ~0,3 GW capacity resulting in about 2,5 TWh additional electricity generated per year which is 0,5% of annual current german demand. Do that for 20 years and you'd be at 10% of current electricity demand or about 5-7% of the demand in 20 years from now - or in other words micro-optimisation.
Interesting. 21 doesn't seem like much compared to the 300+ there's been in US, 330 in China, 170 in EU etc, until you see theres zero retired units in china compared to large amounts in the rest of the world.
Still though. 21 seems to indicate they are actually betting on something else.
China is betting on all the things at once: they're the world leader in building out new solar, new wind, new nuclear and new coal power simultaneously.
One benefit of building excess capacity of renewables - free electricity to power your automobile. If we actually priced excess energy smartly people would charge their cars in the daytime and spend ~ 0 to drive most of the year.
Electricity demand isn't that simple, it's not like Sheetz dropping the price of gas to $1.776/gallon on the 4th of July and having to bag the pumps within the hour [0].
Electricity is quite interesting as a market because it's truly the logical endpoint of just-in-time manufacturing: the time between generation and consumption is measured not on the order of months, weeks, days, or even hours, but in milliseconds. It travels at 300,000 km per second/186,000 miles per second [1], which is incomprehensibly fast (it's fast enough to cross the widest span of the continental US, 4,799 km/2,892 miles, over 60 times in a single second).
As such, in order to maintain 50/60 Hz at nominal voltages and amperages (and that frequency is very important - in a 60 Hz system, 59.4 Hz is "we have 5 minutes before the entire grid blows up and plunges us into a 3+ month blackout" level bad [2]), utility companies aren't in the power generation business so much as they are in the predictions business. They have to take everything into account, from the weather to consumer purchasing habits, to determine exactly how much power needs to be generated at any given moment or the whole grid will collapse. That wide area synchronous grids like the UCTE (continental Europe) and Eastern Interconnection (eastern US) are able to operate is a testament to human ingenuity, as these really are quite fragile machines.
All this to say that you can't just "make power free when there's excess and people will magically use it up". Even if we can reliably predict excesses, people won't really be able to take advantage of it unless their schedule lends itself to it (e.g. being able to plug their car into a charger at work that only turns on when there's an excess), but even then, when done on a large scale, this only makes the predictions even harder for utility companies to plan around (think: thundering herd problem but on a national scale). At a macro level, it just doesn't work.
With electric cars, demand is that simple. They can be hooked up to the grid and charge whenever the prices drop down to zero. This is already done. And then it is an individual decisions to either just use the charge to drive or even put part of it back into the grid or for you own home usage, when the grid prices are high. And more and more houses start to have battery storage.
It's not that the agencies regulating nuclear are bloated but that they're given a mandate that nuclear must be as safe as possible rather than being held to some finite standard of safety.
> Nuclear as it exists today is not cost competitive. But that's mostly an artificial problem caused by regulation.
Is it regulation or a lack of scale? The US has launched 2 reactors in the last 2.5 decades. I'm guessing there was a lot of stuff - materials, processes, documentation, etc - developed from scratch specifically for those plants. It might get cheaper if we can start re-using that stuff.
> Seems to me the people saying solar and battery only future do not live in areas that can be cloudy for multiple weeks.
Or we've researched it and understand the basics of solar technology.
In sunny California solar has a capacity factor of around 25%. In Germany, which is prone to many cloudy days this drops to around 10%. So yes cloudy days have an impact but do not entirely eliminate solar from contention and certainly don't require enough battery capacity to last all winter.
In terms of capital costs solar is around $1 per watt while nuclear is around $10. Combined cycle gas plants are roughly the same as solar. It takes a bit more than a year to build a solar farm, while a new nuclear plant you're looking at a decade. ROI on solar is on the scale of 1 to 2 years. Nuclear will be shockingly lucky to have even started construction in that period.
When we look at the levelized, unsubsidized cost of energy (https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april...) we get a range of $24 to $96 per MWh for utility scale solar, while nuclear is $141 to $221 and combined cycle gas plants at $39 to $101.
And the trend lines strongly favor solar + storage.
Is it any wonder investors are reluctant to fund nuclear projects? For the same amount financed I can build 10x the capacity, have half the marginal cost of production, and see nothing but upside in 2 years.
Places like Singapore that lack land suitable for utility scale solar will need to look to other solutions including nuclear. For the rest of us the decision is not difficult.
Seems to me you are unaware of basic facts of the matter while you make naive criticisms of solar investment due to a personal affinity for nuclear technology.
You both raise good points. Yes solar is getting cheaper but economical and environmentally friendly long term storage (order of several days or even a month worth of energy for a hundred million people) is far from a solved problem.
> In sunny California solar has as capacity factor of around 25%. In Germany, which is prone to many cloudy days this drops to around 10%. So yes cloudy days have an impact but do not entirely eliminate solar from contention and certainly don't require enough battery capacity to last all winter.
In Croatia yearly capacity factor is around 15%, but the problem is it varies wildly throughout the year. In summer we get up to 300 hours of sunlight per month, in winter less than 50. So yes, on paper the capacity might be enough, but one needs to have the ability to store the massive amount of energy inter-seasonally.
> In summer we get up to 300 hours of sunlight per month, in winter less than 50. So yes, on paper the capacity might be enough, but one needs to have the ability to store the massive amount of energy inter-seasonally.
Or overbuild by a factor of 6x or whatever relative to summer loads, which is probably less expensive than long term battery storage.
There can still be periods of several weeks with very little sunlight. And energy demands will be massive if we switch all heating to heat pumps instead of natural gas which we mostly now use.
What actually helps us during winter is hydro and wind power. And Krško nuclear power plant.
This is a good quality post except for the dig in the last paragraph.
I would, however, be curious if you can run the numbers for the UK or Germany. How much solar and battery would you need to be able to have no brownouts during winter?
Trying some very rough numbers myself:
Currently Germany seems to use around 3.3 trillion kwh[1] of energy per year. Likely around 300 billion kwh for December.
Having a look, the solar irradiance in the sunnier parts of Germany in December seems to be around 20-30 kwh/m^2.[2]
Cheap PV solar is generally around 30% efficient and 1.5m^2 costs around £91 retail[3].
So the order of magnitude solar cost needed for Germany in December to not need more than a week's storage is probably around €2 trillion. Amortised over 20 years that's €200 billion per year...
This doesnt take into account many things like installation and maintenance and the reduced prices from not buying retail, but it still seems pretty doable, though noticeably higher than current spend of around €100 billion/year. (Which is also roughly what you'd get with French style nuclear)
Cost of solar in isolation is meaningless. You need to factor in the cost of dealing with its intermittency, i.e. no power at night, variable power during daylight.
You don't need to 'ride out winter'; there's a sweet spot around 100-hour storage where you can unlock a huge amount of grid resiliency and decarbonization (you can keep as many dispatchable gas plants sitting nearly-always-idle to address risk of any freak long-tail events.)
Nuclear power plants are currently too expensive to not be used at 100% all the time (except when you need to perform maintenance). Some nuclear power plants are designed to be able to load follow, but in practice they don't do it.
Batteries will never be cheap enough to allow for seasonal storage. They are good for day-to-night storage. For seasonal fluctuations, the best you can do is natural gas. If we convert all our energy to solar, wind, hydro, and natural gas for peaker plants, we'd be comfortably net negative. In fact, right now in the US the CO2 absorption by forests is equal to all the emissions produced by the natural gas power plants (which are mostly used full time, not in peaker mode). Of course, the US produces a lot of emissions from transportation and industry. But they can be electrified in time, and the coal power plants can be eliminated, and the natural gas plants kept as peaker plants only.
The path to net zero, or net negative, does not strictly speaking need nuclear energy.
I personally am a huge fan of nuclear, but I acknowledge that it is not really needed to fight climate change.
> Nuclear power plants are currently too expensive to not be used at 100% all the time (except when you need to perform maintenance).
France has been load following with their nuclear plants for decades. They have to as they have so much of it. The reactors in Germany also did/do the same.
The reactors in Finland also started to do that too during this summer as we are having more and more wind (and a new 1600MW nuclear reactor) and a huge chunk is sold on the spot market (so if nobody bought your nuclear power you are not allowed to send it to the grid). Basically leaving ramping down your production as the only choice.
France has a lot of water power which helps with balancing the grid and Germany never had more than 30% of nuclear in the mix, so basically little load following was required. Also, both countries, as most industry nations, tried hard to shape the consumption to be constant over time. Like extra cheap electricity in the night which lead to heating systems which would electrically heat up over night and dispense the heat during the day. Also, the European grid helps a lot with balancing, electricity is constantly traded and exchanged between the countries.
i agree with almost everything in your cogent and well-informed comment, with only two exceptions:
- forests can only increase in biomass up to some relatively low limit; you may be correct that in the usa they currently absorb more than gas plants emit, but that is not a sustainable situation, unless you start cutting them down and sequestering the carbon
- you can get pretty far covering seasonal fluctuations with simple overprovisioning
also i think you're not taking into account the likely advent of mass production of synfuel
> unless you start cutting them down and sequestering the carbon
We actually do that all the time: we cut down trees and make houses. Here's a number from the US Forest Service [1] that as of 2009 the US was using 187 million m3 of solid wood products.
> you can get pretty far covering seasonal fluctuations with simple overprovisioning
Fully agree.
> likely advent of mass production of synfuel
I'm extremely pessimistic about that. The best hope is for hydrogen, but even that looks all but hopeless to me, if you don't count "blue hydrogen".
187 million m³ of solid wood products is on the order of 187 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, which is an insignificantly small number in this context
currently we need to sequester 950 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, or about 300 gigatonnes of carbon, to get back to pre-industrial levels. this number increases by 40 gigatonnes carbon dioxide or 13 gigatonnes carbon per year
so roughly we need to sequester 1500 times as much carbon dioxide as the us forest service number, every year. so if the usa builds enough wood housing and other buildings for 450 billion people next year, and another 450 billion people the year after that, and so on indefinitely, that would compensate for current carbon emissions
but this is not a plausible plan
by contrast, direct air capture followed by injection into the crust where carbonatation of olivine and similar minerals sequesters the carbon is a plausible plan, but one that will require a lot of energy
why are you extremely pessimistic about mass production of synfuel? fischer-tropsch produced 25% of germany's wartime automotive fuel, though of course that was starting from coal rather than carbon dioxide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces...
I don't think like that, and nobody thinks like that.
The first target before we think about getting back to preindustrial levels, is to get to net zero by 2050. If you start measuring things against a goal that's too distant in the future, you just give up.
Ok, if we talk net zero, then the what does it take the US to do that? The US is not the entire globe. Currently the US emits about 6.34 gigatons of CO2-equivalent and absorbs about 754 megatons for a net of 5.59 gigatons CO2e [1]. The emissions from natural gas power generation are at 743 megatons [2]. If we could eliminate all other emissions except for the ones from the natural gas power plants, we'd already be slightly net negative. If we could keep the existing natural gas power plants, but run them only as peaker plants, we'd be well into negative territory.
You are saying that 754 megatons is not sustainable without some program of carbon sequestration. I pointed out that 14 years ago the US consumed 187 million m3 of solid wood, which is of the order of 187 megatons of CO2 sequestration. Or about 25% of the annual CO2 absorption by all the US forests and grasslands. To me that sounds like a pretty huge rotation speed, and certainly sustainable in the long run.
> by contrast, direct air capture followed by injection into the crust where carbonatation of olivine and similar minerals sequesters the carbon is a plausible plan
It's a plausible plan, but that's about it. The facts on the ground are that we don't do it for some reason. Most likely there are some serious obstacles. Which ones, I don't know. But I know that lots of things that look plausible on paper don't look so good in practice.
The same with synfuels. Where are they? Yes, there are startups, I know about the HN startup Prometheus. But for the time being, it's all pie in the sky. How much synfuel is being produced now? The wikipedia page [3] does not seem to be very up to date, which is a bad sign in itself, it means nothing of note has happened lately. But they quote a worldwide capacity of 240000 barrels per day. You can compare that with the crude oil production of 80 million bpd. And of course, that worldwide capacity of 240k bpd is mostly high carbon intensity. The low carbon intensity fraction of that is probably negligible.
The fact that Germany used the Fischer-Tropsch process in WW2 is not that relevant. Yes, it shows the technology exists, but it doesn't show it is economical in the current market conditions. And something that's not profitable is not getting built. And once it gets built, you always need to ask yourself, how long will it take us to go from where we are to where we want to be. How long does it take you to go from 1000 bpd to 100000000 bpd? Is it years, decades, or centuries? Do we see the current growth rate to allow us to create even some optimistic predictions that we'll get to some meaningful number in a few decades? If not, then there's no reason to be optimist.
> The first target before we think about getting back to preindustrial levels, is to get to net zero by 2050.
yes, getting to net zero is what my calculations of 13 gigatonnes of carbon per year are based on. i didn't base any calculations on the 950 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide to get back to preindustrial levels
however, a crucial point that i was missing was that your 187 million m³ was annual consumption of solid wood products; you just said 'as of 2009 the US was using 187 million m3 of solid wood products', with no denominator. but on checking out the usda link, it says
> In 2006, an estimated 6.8 billion ft³ (187.5 million m³) of solid wood products were consumed in the United States, down slightly from 2005 but more than twice the consumption in 1950.
that is, 188 million m³ of solid wood was consumed per year; that's not the total amount sequestered in the existing housing stock for 300 million people, which is how i interpreted your comment
a crucial question missing here is how long the relevant carbon stays sequestered for; if the houses get demolished ten years later and the wood rots, we've made the problem worse rather than better. but maybe it all ends up in landfills and stays there for centuries, in which case it's making a quite significant contribution to direct air capture of carbon dioxide from natural gas plants, not an insignificantly small one as i had said
(still, i don't think it'll be competitive with point-source capture from the gas peaker flue. some form of direct air capture is probably necessary for the mobile emissions sources that will run off synfuel and for drawing down the existing excess atmospheric carbon, but it can't compete with point-source capture where applicable)
> The facts on the ground are that we don't do [direct air capture and mineral carbonatation sequestration] for some reason. Most likely there are some serious obstacles. Which ones, I don't know.
you're in luck! i do know, and i can tell you:
1. there's currently no global incentive structure to do this. the carbon-offset market is currently mostly paying people to not burn fossil fuels they were threatening to burn, chop down trees they were threatening to chop down, or paying people to plant trees which might possibly sequester the paid-for amount of carbon if they somehow live to maturity and then happen to get chopped down and buried. this depresses the price of carbon offsets to the point where you can't make money sequestering carbon. for the first time last year at cop27 we got a global diplomatic agreement to set up a global carbon trading system, but governments will probably continue to fuck it up for decades, because it's a global prisoner's dilemma problem
2. specifically with respect to direct air capture (as opposed to ccs in general), point-source capture is immensely cheaper because the flue gas is 80000+ ppm carbon dioxide instead of 450 ppm, it's just hot. so, at scale, flue-gas capture will precede direct air capture by quite a long time, though there are lots of promising dac experiments which will eventually be crucial to reversing climate change. some of them involve planting forests, cutting them down, burning the wood, and using point-source capture approaches on the flue gases.
3. direct air capture requires a lot of energy, like about 10% of current world marketed energy consumption, and energy is still expensive, because pv panels have only been cheap for five years now, so most of world marketed energy consumption still is not pv. even point-source capture requires very significant investment. as pv displaces thermal power plants, electric motors displace internal combustion engines, and the much cheaper synfuels replace fossil fuels for the remaining heat engines, we'll see a dramatic boom in world energy consumption unlike anything in the last 200 years, stimulated by dropping prices. this will make carbon dioxide sequestration significantly more affordable, which greatly eases the prisoner's-dilemma problem
4. mineral carbonatation experiments are still in the pilot-plant stages; there's no question that it solves the problem (chemical weathering has been well understood for decades), but the question is, what's the cheapest safe way to do it
> The same with synfuels. (...) it shows the technology exists, but it doesn't show it is economical in the current market conditions.
i would go further: synfuels are clearly not economical in current market conditions. they are currently too expensive to compete with fossil fuels, because there isn't yet enough pv installed to meet energy demand, so you still have to pay fossil-fuel prices for your pv megawatt-hours. that's going to change over the next decade. as pv grows to dominate the energy ecosystem, energy prices will continue to drop, and as the most accessible deposits of fossil fuels are gradually exhausted, fossil-fuel prices will continue to rise, so synfuels will become the cheapest option for heat engines
there's a certain amount of risky innovation between here and there: how fast will energy prices drop? this depends on the details of how world war iii unfolds. how much demand for liquid fuels will remain? what's the most efficient way to harness intermittent pv power for process plants like fischer-tropsch? which process will turn out to be the most profitable? will ai discover radical new processes?
but it's clear why synfuels aren't competitive today, and it's clear we're headed for synfuels replacing fossil fuels, in decades, not years or centuries
> I don't think like that, and nobody thinks like that.
some of us do, and that's why humans can now speak with those not present without making a sound, why they can fly through the sky like birds, and why human life expectancy at birth is 73 years now instead of 24. join us and we can solve these problems sooner
> point-source capture is immensely cheaper because ...
But then, why stop there? Why not make hydrogen from CH4 at the point of extraction and pump the CO2 back into the ground right there? Then sent the hydrogen via the pipe system as a drop-in replacement for the CH4.
> synfuels are clearly not economical in current market conditions. they are currently too expensive to compete with fossil fuels, because there isn't yet enough pv installed to meet energy demand
There's a big assumption there, that the energy cost for synfuels dominate the capital costs. I doubt that. I recently did a back of the envelope for the Carlsbad desalination plant in San Diego. It turns out that the capital cost is at least twice higher than the cost of the electricity, so even if you can purchase electricity for free, you reduce the total cost of desalination by less than 30%.
I'd venture to say that capital costs for synfuel plans are significantly higher than the capital cost of a desalination plant, although the electricity input is also higher. But even if it turns out the capital and operation costs are, let's say half the cost of the electricity, it's still not going to work. I googled recently and found that Porsche invested in a synfuel plant in Chile. It appears to be a PR stunt, they call their synfuel e-fuel, and are scared to death of a ban on ICE cars starting in 2035 in Europe. So, they are trying to push the narrative that "e-fuels" can become a viable alternative to EV vehicles. And for now the cost of their e-fuel is about $40 per gallon. For comparison today's average gasoline price in the US is $3.12, and that includes distribution and taxes.
Porsche thinks they can bring the cost of e-fuel down to some reasonable level. But here's the thing: 90% of Porsche buyers are not sensitive to the price of gasoline. They would probably be ok with a $20/gallon price, in a world where non-e-fuels are banned, if they get to keep their beloved 911.
Do I see a path from $40/gallon to $4/gallon? I wish you good luck, but even with free electricity, I can't see that happening in a few decades.
The good news is that it’s very possible to “run the math,” and people run power generation capacity expansion models and production cost/dispatch models to look at these things. And then 15-25 years of solar irradiance and other weather data, at hourly resolution or shorter intervals, is available for most of the world.
Maybe the general public extrapolates from their own experience, but grid planners and researchers do much more than that.
Dunkelflaute (dark and calm) is indeed a real problem for a renewable-only future. If you want to maintain current reliability statistics with solar/wind only, you need to overbuild both storage and generation to such an extreme level that it might not be cost competitive in the end. You'll end up building your entire grid for the 100 year dunkelflaute event even though 90%+ of it will be idle most of the time, or you'll keep a bunch of gas plants idling to pick up the load in that case.
Really we need to crack better storage. Improvements in hydrogen electrolysis or direct air to fuel could do it, but there are non-trivial technology hurdles there as well.
I'm holding out hope for deep sea geothermal ala Peter Watts' Behemoth. Perhaps we can exploit the temperature difference between geothermal vents and the surrounding water to get stable and green base-load power.
It doesn't make any sense to use nuclear as a standby source of power. Nuclear costs pretty much the same whether you use it or not, so it doesn't make any sense to build it and leave it off.
So if you build a nuclear power plant, save yourself the cost of whatever else you wanted to use as a primary source.
I think I never, ever heard or read anyone saying this, and I think I follow/participate in the debates, before it was cool and everywhere.
Renewable people rather sound like this:
"Employing a variety of power generation methods will give you the most stable power grid."
Where of course quite many "green" people don't want nuclear at all in the mix. Rather more of long distance energy transport (HVDC). And otherwise any option that works and does not pollute, or pollutes less.
(And personally I am not antinuclear as long as the alternative are fossil fuels, so they should be used as a transition technology and long term rather reserved for other application, like powering things in space and remote important sites)
I'd love to know what you're reading and who you're talking to. I regularly and often speak to and read comments by people who insist on a solar+battery only future. I'd like to be a part of the communities you're describing.
There should be a "roof-tile" mandated on every single structure built which captures weather information for every single structure. And that structure should be able to be read by any device which states in a standard format the sunlight avg per N, rainfall avg per N and temp. (air quality adds cost, but should also be there (staring at Purple's horrific pricing)
Edit to add: "Whether Information"
Big Brother: "was @dang there?"
Smart-Tile (as played by Marissa Tomai: "Look, my coverage is limited. I can tell you weather... weather... but I can't whether this or whether that. you'll have ta pay"
Nuclear is already about 20% of US electricity generation. I don't think many people are suggesting taking that offline. When people are talking about being all solar, wind and storage they are talking about _new_ generation. So the eventual solution would still be a mix of all of those.
Dunkelflauten can be dealt with by burning an e-fuel like hydrogen.
A simple combustion turbine power plant is maybe 1/20th the cost per W of Vogtle 3/4. So one could completely back up the grid with hydrogen burning turbines at a small fraction of the capital cost of powering that grid with nukes.
Using nuclear to handle rare disruptions is ridiculous, as the cost per kWh would be astronomical, far higher than the cost per kWh from nukes used for baseload.
Yeah and solar and wind are perfect for baseline load but you need something that can react to demand changes like how NG or Coal production can by simply burning more / less fuel.
There are clever ways to store / "shed" excess capacity for the inverse but it'd still be better to be able to adjust capacity in real time.
I think solar+battery usually also involves overbuilding the solar capacity by a lot and running some HVDC lines. A mix with nuclear and wind seems smart to me, but I wouldn't be shocked if some cloudy places successfully manage solar+batteries in combination with HVDC and/or having some easily-curtailed industries in the area.
Solar+battery isn't sufficient in all places indeed. But those places are usually great for wind. With solar+battery+wind+other renewables+grid, the solution becomes rather easy. Toss in some gas until the battery capacities have grown enough. But nuclear is the worst thing to put into this mix due to its nature.
The people saying that might live far from the equator, where wind power helps balance solar in winter but people in general live fairly near it and energy intensive industry will migrate in that direction to follow the cheap power.
> Seems to me the people saying solar and battery only future do not live in areas that can be cloudy for multiple weeks.
This isn't a big problem. Wind is negatively correlated with solar, and electricity can be sent across long distances (intra- or inter-country) with minimal loss, and overbuilding eliminates a lot of the variability issues. Variability across geographies and across modes cancels out.
Nuclear is pretty good, but solar and wind is simply better. Way cheaper and quicker to implement, less resistance from NIMBYs who have an irrational fear of leaks, less valid concerns of enabling nuclear weapons proliferation, less technical know-how requirement. It's the most brain-dead obvious calculus if you know the actual facts, costs and trade-offs.
And time is of the essence. Eliminating 80-90% of emissions in 4 years (with only solar and wind and without batteries, yes this is possible whilst being cheaper than nuclear) means less emissions than eliminating 100% of emissions in 20 years with nuclear.
Yes, but not strongly. It is definitely a problem, as seen in Texas on cold mornings where solar isn't getting much light, winds are still, and people need heat.
Right, and that's why it's infeasible to get 100% from renewables without storage, but we're not going for 100%, we're going for 80-90%. The objective is to address climate change, and to do that we need to minimize the area under the curve of emissions from now onwards. Renewables in my view is more effective at achieving this objective (with the added bonus of being cheaper).
While in the long term we do have to achieve net 100%, the mid-term goal which is absolutely achievable with the current state of the marked is indeed 90%. While working towards that we can start to see which technology emerges to cover the last 10%. And probably there isn't a miracle technology needed, just plain improvements in the storage sector and a good mix of several approaches.
Yes, we need a mix of technologies. But at the current state of things, nuclear shouldn't be something to invest into. Yes, existing reactors should be used for their full life time, but there is far too much speaking against building new ones.
Sure, I am always strongly in favor of doing R&D on alternative technologies. But it also is important to understand that this takes a lot of time. But we need to get our grid quickly off fossil fuels and for that we need to use the thechnologies which can be rolled out now. Which would be the renewables.
But any R&D we do now could come handy for the last step, to get the grid fully carbon neutral.
Or for niche uses, such as military naval propulsion, space, and actinide destruction.
Technologies with multiple uses beyond nuclear would also be worth looking at. A very interesting one is CO2 turbines, which could be much smaller (and cheaper) than steam turbines. These are available, but have not been pushed to their optimized limits like steam turbines have.
Other than the practical reality of it being expensive to construct nuclear facilities (which may or may not be solvable), what is speaking against building new ones?
- it takes way to long to finish them, renewables can be set up much quicker
- as they are too expensive, they are binding money which could be used more efficiently somewhere else.
- we haven't solved the waste problem
- nuclear is the worst companion to renewables, as nuclear power plants are limited in their regulation capacity and you cannot afford to keep them not running at a high load or the electrictiy would become even more expensive.
As exciting as this should be, the soaring cost overruns on this project means we Georgians have been left holding the bag. There’s now a “Nuclear Construction Cost Recovery” line item on my bill, so electricity costs more rather than less.
Unfortunately, this more the rule than the exception. Same thing happened on Long Island, NY with Lilco's Shoreham reactor that took years to build (construction was riddled with all sorts of problems, theft, etc.)and when finally finished, people realized if something went wrong, the narrow, 128 mile island would be impossible to evacuate. After completion, it was never put online and despite the mass incompetence, no one was fired. In fact, management bonuses were as big as ever. Rate payers on LI are still paying for this debacle 40 years later thanks to then Gov. Mario Cuomo. LI utilities, like many utilities, are so poorly managed.
Arguably, the benefit is "less coal and CO2 in your family's lungs".
The military doesn't make you money, it makes you safe. The post office doesn't make you money, it ensures communication and logistics. Roads don't make you money, they undergird the economy.
Nuclear power doesn't save you money on your power bill. It establishes energy independence for our country and clean power for our atmosphere.
Try and imagine how much solar/wind and grid-scale energy storage that money could have bought …
I don’t think nuclear power is the future. In my country, 7% of the time electricity prices are like 1 cent or even negative. Try to run your nuclear reactor at a profit in this environment.
"In 1989, Korea began construction on their first domestically developed OPR-1000 design... Twelve reactors of this standard design began construction between 1989 and 2008, and their costs declined in a stable manner... representing a 13% cost decline (1% annualized)." (Lovering 2016)
The problem is, even after reaping this cost decline, totaling 50%, nuclear power is still noncompetitive in South Korea. They were built for energy independence after oil shock, not for cheap electricity.
Same source as you (Lovering 2016), the Koreans built several 1 GW plants for an overnight cost of 2 Billion USD per plant or less in many cases. A seriously impressive feat. The graph seems to show a far greater cost decline than 13%.
The Koreans just recently ousted an administration that was overtly hostile to nuclear energy and had declared a phase out. Now they are planning on increasing the share of nuclear electricity to 35%. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/South-Korea-incr...
There's no Federal agency that can decree that sort of policy. Coal generator retirement happens on a state-by-state or even business-by-business basis.
Some states are going to cling to coal power past its economically rational lifespan because important parts of state politics are linked to coal businesses. States where coal retires for economic reasons will go for least-cost replacement (a blend of solar, wind, and natural gas). States where environmental concerns trump cost concerns have little if any coal generating capacity left to replace at this point.
There is potential in the federally owned TVA which has around 35 GW in its portfolio. Also Georgia has a lot of coal and is the state with these new NPPs.
Plus the federal government doesn't need to mandate it. It can simply incentivize these plants to be built like it did with Solar/Wind.
MSRs look nice on paper but we don’t have any experience building them. It would take a gigantic up front investment to work out the real world issues and commercialize a technology that has a lot of novel aspects like handling radioactive molten salt.
Meanwhile that same money would buy loads more power in solar/wind and batteries, which are proven technologies that are getting progressively cheaper.
An alternate timeline where we do MSRs in the 1950s and phase out coal by 1990 would have been possible but we didn’t do that and there are better alternatives now.
I have not seen any evidence that solar+wind will provide a proper base load of electricity, and it looks like MSR and its variants will give people the electricity they need.
While nuclear plants do pair well with storage (many pumped hydro storage stations were built to pair with nuclear plants), the idea that they cannot load follow is a myth. It is simply more economical for them to run at full load since fuel cost is a very small portion of nuclear operating expenses.
It will likely take a minimum of ten years to get a non light water reactor certified by the NRC. And that is very optimistic. Then you have to build the first of a kind plant which is always more expensive and takes longer. Then you have to get good at operating these new kinds of plants.
It's true that MSR and Breeder reactors have lots of potential benefits over traditional LWRs but the truth is, LWRs are more than good enough for right now and we literally can't build enough of them if even if we tried.
You wouldn't want to power all of human society off of LWRs simply because they only access ~5% of the energy in the fuel. But we're so far away from that being a constraint. Build LWRs today and keep developing Breeder/MSR tech.
Yes, it's old news. It's not solar/wind so it's not a priority for EIA et al.
More recent news in nuclear power is commercial operation of a high temperature gas-cooled pebble-bed reactor in China. Their first HTR-PM reactor went online a couple weeks ago[1].
Not actually both "robust passive safety systems", but the original safety systems in Fermi's reactor were certainly robust.
> In case of emergency, such as Weil becoming incapacitated or failure of the automatic control rod, Norman Hilberry stood on the balcony with an improbable nuclear safety device: an axe. In an emergency, he would cut a rope that ran up to the balcony, releasing another emergency control rod into the pile. The last line of defense consisted of a "liquid-control squad" that stood on a platform, ready to flood the pile with a cadmium-salt solution. Taken together, these safety precautions were a strange combination of the high-tech and the ad hoc.
> The first EPR unit to start construction, at Olkiluoto in Finland, originally intended to be commissioned in 2009, started commercial operation in 2023, a delay of fourteen years.[3] The second EPR unit to start construction, at Flamanville in France, is also facing a decade-long delay in its commissioning (from 2013 to 2024).[4] Two units at Hinkley Point in the United Kingdom received final approval in September 2016; the first unit is expected to begin operating in 2027.[5][6]
1.1GW for 30 BILLION dollars? Jeez, that's an insane amount of money for this little power.
Probably pretty high cost per kWh, too, which has to be guaranteed by the government I guess.
For comparison in my country they built a 1,6GW off-shore windfarm in 2 years with 0 government subsidy.
I understand that a nuclear plant provides power 24/7, so it's not an entirely fair comparison. But the cost of nuclear power is just insane compared to wind and PV.
It's just setting up your country for higher energy cost than needed for the next 40 years, while the government takes all the risk.
I like to compare this to Site C in British Columbia
https://www.bchydro.com/energy-in-bc/projects/site_c.html#:~....
If you are lucky enough to be blessed with remote untapped rivers that can be dammed in somewhat unpopulated mountain valleys (that's another story again), it seems to be far cheaper and safer. I would imagine that Nuclear power's main issue is first and foremost cost. If you could pull off completely safe nuclear power, it just winds up costing too dang much.
It’s hard to compare given the intermittency, but I do agree the cost is a bit absurd. It’s painful because it doesn’t have to be this way but we’ve cornered ourselves via regulation into bad designs
It's a reactor design and project that started in 1976 and was delayed for tens of years at a time. It's not exactly the nuclear post child, but that is largely the problem with nuclear in the United States, it, as it currently stands, could not operate at an economy of scale. If the US committed to building say 3,000 of a standardized design across the US, things would likely be very different. (Even if it is not the latest and greatest design, or the most efficient design reactor. Just mass producing parts would drive down the cost.)
Basically, like my ex, it's a commitment issue and I hate this on again off again relationship we have that has me wasting money.
Edit based on the rest of the comments I'm going to stop cap a reddit cascade:
No I am not against solar.
I really want nuclear reactors and clean energy but I’m keenly aware that we are rushing headlong and with pathetic levels of self-control into AI.
A global environment filled with nuclear reactors and AIs operating only in the lower interests of individual nation states is a risk I haven’t seen much discussion about, but it’s not a great scenario.
There is a distinct possibility that no security system design will be impervious to AGI: a weird-to-consider existential risk.
It's fine to think about this scenario but I hate that people take this train of thought, dig their feet in, and block ANY progress forward based on "what ifs"
What if AGI + nuclear is our key to unlocking infinite potential? At least, to me, that's a more likely scenario than the Hollywood-inspired robots-enslave-the-human-race trope.
Could have been worse, hehe. Finland had a (in)famous nuclear power plant project which went years and billions over budget only to be effectively terminated after the Russian invasion of Ukraine (Rosatom was a major investor)
Pretend I’m country’s government A. Am I incentivized to make sure that country B doesn't get access to nuclear energy, since that is the precursor to a nuclear program? Therefore, I have to make sure that nuclear energy stays unpopular
Please correct me if I'm wrong but a) it's not possible to convert spent nuclear fuel into nuclear weapons (or am I misunderstanding your point?) and b) I'm pretty sure you can just Google how to make a nuclear bomb at this point so what are you really protecting against.
It is possible (especially if you have access to tritium for boosting), it's just more difficult.
Japan's reactor grade Pu stockpile, ostensibly for a now-cancelled fast reactor program, is likely there as deniable insurance in case the US withdraws the nuclear umbrella.
It would be great to get a straightforward assessment of the improvements in reactor tech in this new plant. "Passive safety features" sound pretty good to my untrained ear. But how much of this is marketing bullshytt?
AP1000 has a water tank above the reactor, and can cool itself for 72 hours without electrical power or human action. This design probably would've prevented the Fukushima meltdowns.
Ideally, reactors should be designed to transition all the way to air cooling without any help. The high temperature designs (e.g. TRISO and molten salt) should be able to do this, if we ever build them.
Since the usual arguments pro RE are being made: One of the main downsides of RE is
a) its need of fossil backup and b) profits of solar / wind goes into the pockets of its owners while
c) the costs of fossil backup and increased network capacities are to be borne by the general public so that
d) wealth is distributed from the bottom to the top whose
e) RE systems a being subsidized by the public too.
In conclusio, the bottom half pays for the profit of top earners who can afford to invest in RE. That’s the green „revolution“ for ya.
NRC missed one, eh? That's the thing with regulatory commissions, once you put them in you're never getting the thing done.
But we should always remember, regulations are written in blood.
But this is the classic technique of how to slow down something. Infiltrate by agreeing, and then kill it with committee. At least one W3C anti-ad group is currently hamstrung with this technique.
It's pretty good. And the best part is that the suckers you're exploiting will argue for you after a point because they'd have to justify why they couldn't get something done otherwise.
This is a win for the environment and for human rights. A lot of people on here are talking about how solar and wind are better alternatives. The problem with that is that they typically need to be stored in batteries made of cobalt. The vast majority of cobalt mines exist in the Congo where modern day slavery exists to extract it. This affects everything from your Tesla to your iPhone.
Let's do some math.
There is a total of around 10 GWh of deployed grid storage in the US.
The US consumed about 4,000 TWh of electricity in 2022.
(10GWh/ 4000TWh) * (31,536,000 seconds) == 78 seconds.
So, net, there is about a minute and a half of energy storage across the entire grid. (Most, about 90%, is pumped hydro, not battery). Of course, not really. Most regional areas have roughly 10-30 seconds until the gas peakers absolutely unequivocally must be turned on before brownouts occur.
Hours? Minutes? We are not talking about hours and minutes. We are talking about seconds.
Look at the price of a powerwall. That's for the energy needs of a residential home. What happens to your AWS bill if us-east-1 was to buy a powerwall? Let alone steel, chemical, paper, mineral processing industries. What would happen to our economy if capacity for every one of those was cut by 1/3rd (or more depending on local climate)? Never mind your power bill.
This is the problem that I have with these solar capacity discussions. The number on the tin misrepresents things in just such a fundamental way that these cost discussions don't make sense. The reason, of course, is because fossil fuels are the big batteries we turn on at night when solar is not working.
If you actually care about making the grid green, you must solve this problem. Either with transmission, with battery manufacturing (the cost and environment friendliness curve on that is a bit less rosy compared to solar power...), or with nuclear. There is simply no other way.