The problem with nuclear is that it likes to be big, which means big capital-intensive projects and therefore a slow iteration time. Even if there are some things that are superior about nuclear, like land and raw resource use, it's going to get run over by a fast-iterating solution with small minimum capital investment.
At this point solar+batteries is a cheaper option in almost all locations except perhaps places with low levels of sunlight combined with high demand, like maybe very high Northern latitudes.
Yup exactly. Why go through all that headache, which has existed with Nuclear since day 1, when we could just mass produce solar and plop it down on the infinite empty desert land out west.
Batteries are not cost or resource efficient for winter where I live. Less than 8 hours of sunlight is not enough to heat a house during the day let alone night. There simply isn't enough solar generation even when overprovisioned to last.
Drake Landing shows how you can shift heating from summer to winter. For twenty years it's been heating homes in Alberta, Canada. Though I see now, because it's a one-off, they are having trouble getting replacement parts :(.
How often/much do you realistically need to heat a house with high, quality, modern insulation? Does your house have triple-paned windows, a vestibule for each entryway, well insulated walls, attic, and roof, etc?
Also if we're talking about heating, there's also the possibility of geothermal heat pumps, which seem to work everywhere, and while they have a high one-time capital cost but I'm pretty sure can more or less keep trucking along providing unbelievably cheap heat pretty much forever - even if you have to replace components, you probably won't ever have to redig the shaft again, which is a huge factor in the cost.
How much is society willing to spend collectively to upgrade our housing stock for this? Not to mention triple-paned windows are not standard by any sufficiently large builder on new construction. Double-paned? Certainly.
Geothermal is great. But in an already built city, it's not feasible to install quickly. There is also a lack of legal framework or precedent in place to heat multiple properties from a single source. I tried very hard to obtain a quote for this and it was well over 50k for a single family home, and nobody would actually do it because of the big city I live in. Want a heat pump too? That's another 25k. Throwing down 100k up-front is not a reasonable request to a typical homeowner.
It's less "spend" as it is "invest". The problem with investment is the cost of capital. But if we're thinking of spending massive amounts of money for nuclear, capital must be very cheap indeed, and we absolutely must consider instead investing that in reducing our need for as much energy.
Geothermal is also a great shift for natural gas utilities. Delivery of weak heat sources to heat pumps is being explored in many areas.
Nuclear is the equivalent of throwing down 100k on a house for a massive custom-drilled ground-source heat pump solution. So in these difficult areas, we need to consider the alternatives.
It's not a reasonable request to a typical homeowner, but if we're looking at a path to a society-wide greener tomorrow, it's worth looking at.
I wonder how much upgraded insulation and geothermal heat pump(/district heating) could be paid for by the cost to build a new nuclear power plant - or even by the difference in cost to build that power plant versus to get sufficient solar and batteries to, in combination with the insulation, generate comparable temperature control.
But nuclear is not dispatchable either so what's your point? It's funny how everyone brings up the intermittance of solar and wind as a point how they can never work because they don't provide baseload and nuclear is the solution.
If you read opinions from operators and incident reports you'll find that large power plants like nuclear are actually a much bigger problem for network management, because if you have to take down a nuclear plant for some reason, you suddenly have a huge issue providing that electricity with fast dispatchable generation.
It's a fair point that nuclear (and all power plants) need maintenance windows where they come offline (and occasionally unplanned outages). But this is not the same as saying nuclear is not dispatchable, that's just incorrect.
nuclear isn't dispatch-able for a different reason: you don't turn it off. Nuclear is relatively expensive, and those expenses are roughly 100% capex cost, so if you consider a reactor with a 10 billion construction cost and a 50 year lifespan, every hour you turn off the reactor costs at least ~$25k (or more if you assume the reactor was intending to do better than break-even.
If by dispatch-able you mean something that can cheaply fill the gaps when wind/solar is not producing, then nuclear is not dispatch-able. For that purpose, we really only have fossil plants (and hydro in a few areas)
But if you compare the predictability of nuclear to that of wind/solar, nuclear is a lot easier to plan, and also requires way less (if any) contribution from other sources.
Also, I would argue that the current prices for building nuclear plants is at least 2-4x higher than they should be (depending on location).
If the regulations for nuclear were to be scaled back to a point where the net average harm caused per GWh was just slightly less than for the alternatives, and if we allowed a free, competitive market for the construction, nuclear would become a lot cheaper than today.
> and also requires way less (if any) contribution from other sources.
This part is wrong. Electricity demand is varies about 50% over the course of the day and about 50% over the course of a year, so a 100% nuclear grid would only be operating at ~50% capacity which would double the costs.
On a local scale, renewables aren't predictable, but over large areas (e.g. US/EU), almost all of the variability cancels out (especially since wind and solar are anti-correlated with each other).
Both nuclear and solar/wind grids (or a combination of both) will require some amount of over-capacity/hydro storage/battery storage/gas-peaker plants to economically provide consistent power. My guess is that we'll settle on some combination of over-provisioned solar/wind for seasonal variation combined with hydro/gas for daily and battery for hourly and faster variation. (and possibly using demand side shaping like desalination/water heating to use excess energy).
I find it somewhat hard to believe that nuclear plants could easily be made dramatically cheaper and easier to build if regulation wasn't a problem because if that were the case, we would expect to see China and India building lots of nuclear reactors cheaply. There's obviously further room for reactor design optimization, but I don't think it's as simple as just blaming regulation.
>> and also requires way less (if any) contribution from other sources.
> This part is wrong.
France used to provide 75% of their electricity demand from Nuclear. Add their hydro power, and it was 85-90%. I'm not aware of any other country reaching similar figures using wind/solar, ever.
Some countries (like Denmark) have surpassed 50% from wind/solar, but at least in the case of Denmark, that relies heavily on supplementing it with hydropower from Norway/Sweden.
> On a local scale, renewables aren't predictable, but over large areas ....
The continent wide grid capacity needed for this is not only expensive, it's also fragile. If you add the extra grid costs to wind and solar, it's no longer very cheap.
Nuclear also benefits from a grid, but rely a lot less on it than wind/solar does. Even if you cut off the grid (due to an EU breakup, let's say), countries with nuclear power would be fine.
> I find it somewhat hard to believe that nuclear plants could easily be made dramatically cheaper
Almost anything of that sort CAN be made a lot cheaper, as long as a free market is allowed to operate and economies of scale are achieved. On top of that, technological progress makes it possible to get more from less over time (including safety).
As for China and India, well China IS building a lot more Nuclear than anyone else (probably everyone else combined). Cost estimations for them are uncertain, but seem cheaper than Korea. (Korean prices are assumed to be ~$40/MWh).
I believe that there is a lot left on the table in terms of efficiencies to be gained if competition and innovation across countries were encouraged, but even if you chose NOT to believe that, well at least nuclear has shown that it can deliver up to 75%.
Wind + solar has not shown anything similar, at least not yet.
Batteries aren't the solution to seasonal variation, are they? Discharging once a year means the batteries either need to be ultra-cheap or the electricity they provide would be very expensive. Batteries provide easy access and relatively efficient round trips, but at a high capital cost.
For me it is somewhat mysterious that wind/solar proponents view hydrogen (and methane/ammonia) as an unnecessary competing technology.
2) nuclear also needs dispatchable power, it doesn't work well if it needs to constantly ramp up and down. Batteries are vital to full nuclear for this exact reason.
Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) were supposed to address this concern. Unfortunately even with this strategy it doesn't seem to be able to compete cost-wise in the market.
I hope that can be worked out, as I think we'd be well-served by having as many eggs in our energy basket as possible.
SMRs are still huge compared to putting $10k worth of solar panels on a house.
They also require a lot of big expensive infrastructure like reprocessing facilities, expensive safety-escorted transportation, secure facilities, etc.
What I was really getting at was the effect that low incremental cost has on the evolution of the technology. A technology with low incremental unit cost can evolve very rapidly, while high unit cost capital-intensive technologies are slow to evolve. Which will win?
Some technologies are inherently high unit cost and capital-intensive. Aerospace is a classic example, and it's why we're still flying on 1970s-tech airplanes and why rockets are just now becoming reusable. Aerospace advances at a crawl because each unit is so expensive.
At this point solar+batteries is a cheaper option in almost all locations except perhaps places with low levels of sunlight combined with high demand, like maybe very high Northern latitudes.