All of this is talked about in the context of old school pressurized water reactors. Nothing about them is relevant to modern fourth generation options, which is what we should be researching and...
Exemplary
All of this is talked about in the context of old school pressurized water reactors. Nothing about them is relevant to modern fourth generation options, which is what we should be researching and building. For example, here's one nuclear power plant that is mobile and ready to roll off the line right now, no fancy R&D required. Here's another model ready to build in Toronto.
Frankly, all nuclear and climate activism in this space should be aimed at replacing every single water reactor on the planet with small modular reactor designs. I share the activist's disdain for those older plants, but not their aversion to nuclear power. When we have a 100KW plant packed into a shipping container with a 20 year service cycle able to be operated by high school graduates, we're done. Couple million bucks per power plant, which upends all of the economics discussed in this article and once economies of scale come into play it'll kick wind and solar's ass for pricing and pollution. This entire article is, frankly, a bullshit propaganda hit piece that shows the author knows nothing or is being intentionally disingenuous. I didn't even bother finishing it.
I'll ping @nukeman since he's an engineer in this field who knows about interesting projects.
Admiral Hyman Rickover (the father of the Nuclear Navy) had an interesting perspective on reactor design and development: An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic...
Exemplary
Admiral Hyman Rickover (the father of the Nuclear Navy) had an interesting perspective on reactor design and development:
While light water reactors have their issues, they are not these horrible pieces of machinery they are sometimes made out to be. Water, even at high pressures and moderately high temperatures, is a known substance, and relatively easy to work with (contrast with say, liquid sodium, or highly corrosive molten salts). PWRs and BWRs have accumulated decades of operating experience, and in the U.S., are seeing capacity factors of 90% or greater, that is, the reactor is producing full power 90% of the time. Which is impressive for any power source.
Now, that’s not to say I’m knocking Gen IV reactors. I’m not! There’s some very exciting and interesting designs coming down the pipeline. But there’s really only two classes which have significant historical development: sodium fast reactors and gas-cooled reactors. ThorCon is producing a molten salt reactor. Prior to the recent Chinese reactor (still undergoing testing), only three molten salt reactors had ever been built, all before 1970, and none capable of producing electricity. In addition to trying an underdeveloped reactor type, they are trying to go for a thorium fuel cycle. The current supply chain is geared for uranium, and there will be a significant cost with respect to developing the same level of production knowledge. The Chinese are doing it because they can throw money at it, but I doubt ThorCon can, and Kirk Sorensen has overhyped things in the past. But they have one idea that has merit…
Shipyards! In the 1970s, Westinghouse and Tenneco teamed up to form Offshore Power Systems, which was to build floating nuclear power plants, using a shipyard near Jacksonville. It would have been capable of building four plants per year, with two or more reactors in each. A extensive amount of studies, design work, and environmental impact assessments were done. They managed to get a license to build in 1982, but by then, the oil crisis slump and uncertainty after TMI had killed the demand. More info here.
Ultimately, cost arguments do still apply, even to Gen IV reactors. I think the companies with the best chance of success are the ones that have an assembly line with minimal site prep, using a relatively proven technology. My personal favorite is Ultra-Safe Nuclear Corporation, which uses a helium-cooled design. Their reactors are small (5-15 MWe), but that is a great spot for small Arctic towns, mining operations, military bases, etc. It is also capable of producing process heat. For something more conventional (Gen III+), I think GE-Hitachi is on the right track with their BWRX-300.
I think the most exciting things we can do right now involve making a power plant mobile. Build it as a ship, or a train car, or a shipping container, but get it moving. We're going to have...
I think the most exciting things we can do right now involve making a power plant mobile. Build it as a ship, or a train car, or a shipping container, but get it moving.
We're going to have refugee problems with climate change in the near future. Anything that fits into the footprint of a shipping container is cheaply mobile, and you can get them as hospitals, farms, data centers, workshops, homes, and generally anything else you would need in a refugee situation. All we're missing here is a mobile power component. Once we've got it, we can deploy a mobile civilian support infrastructure. That could make a very big difference.
It sounds like a fine mission for the US Navy as well. When Texas or other US coastal areas have power problems or get creamed by a hurricane we can park a plant offshore. It seems to have a lot of use cases and it definitely beats the pants off of big cement cooling towers.
The worst thing about the LWR is not the reactor but the steam turbine. People quit building coal burning power plants the same time they quit building LWRs and for the same reason.. That is,...
The worst thing about the LWR is not the reactor but the steam turbine.
People quit building coal burning power plants the same time they quit building LWRs and for the same reason.. That is, people figured out how to convert jet engines into gas turbine power plants that have more than 10x the power density of a steam turbine and thus have dramatically lower capital cost. Between the cost of the steam turbine and the associated heat exchangers (about as large as the reactor vessel) you’d have trouble competing with natural gas even if the reactor was free.
The most developed alternative is the liquid metal fast breeder reactor. Back in the day the assumption was an LMFBR was going to have a higher capital cost than a LWR but that they would work together with LWRs, perhaps one LMFBR would make fuel for 8 LWRs so the capital cost of the system as a whole wouldn’t increase so much
Because the LMFBR runs at higher temperatures people today think that one could be coupled to a Braxton cycle gas turbine, for instance, running on supercritical CO2, and for a system like that the turbine would fit in the employee break room of the turbine house of an LWR and the heat rejection system shrinks dramatically and it’s possible that such a reactor and heat handling system would be cheaper than an LWR.
Like the other gen4 reactors (all of which run at higher temperatures than the LWR) this is by no means a bird in the hand though.
I'm tired of listening to climate activists talk about nuclear power. They are the reason we stopped investing almost 40 years ago and they set us back decades in the fight against climate change....
I'm tired of listening to climate activists talk about nuclear power. They are the reason we stopped investing almost 40 years ago and they set us back decades in the fight against climate change.
Is nuclear power still a viable option to combat climate change? I don't know, but this particular group of people has already lost all credibility on the topic in my eyes.
I'm not taking a position here, but many of your points are about economic impacts and profitability. I suppose those are important in some respects, but I think it's important to realize that the...
I'm not taking a position here, but many of your points are about economic impacts and profitability. I suppose those are important in some respects, but I think it's important to realize that the reasons why they are not profitable are because they have higher costs than fossil fuel powered sources, which are artificially lower because it is sold without the full costs of their environmental impact.
While I'm sure that many, if not most people probably would prefer lower energy costs, the lack of sustainability is exactly why people want to move away from them. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
I struggle to understand your reply. EndGameOmega is arguing for renewables before nuclear. The (before fossil fuels) can be taken to be implied these days, in reasonable circles. How does...
I struggle to understand your reply. EndGameOmega is arguing for renewables before nuclear. The (before fossil fuels) can be taken to be implied these days, in reasonable circles.
How does sustainability factor into it, when the cheaper model that EndGameOmega is arguing for is (as I understand them) renewables? The argument is basically "fossils suck because they're unsustainable. Of the alternatives, nuclear and renewables, renewables are cheaper, so we can make that switch more easily by going for renewables.
I think the point is that you can’t exclusively rely on renewables. So whatever the other option is must be fossil fuels or nuclear. Nuclear, when done right, is cleaner.
I think the point is that you can’t exclusively rely on renewables. So whatever the other option is must be fossil fuels or nuclear. Nuclear, when done right, is cleaner.
Why can't you? Because storage is an insurmountable problem? Please... the article makes the case that baseload isn't what we need, it's flexibility. Which can come from batteries. Longer term...
Why can't you? Because storage is an insurmountable problem? Please... the article makes the case that baseload isn't what we need, it's flexibility. Which can come from batteries. Longer term storage for calm-and-dark times can be achieved by synthetic flammable gasses.
I don't agree with the statement of "can't", but we're not getting there so far. A few big generators power a country, seven mile boots it feels like It's more expensive and too late, but at the...
I don't agree with the statement of "can't", but we're not getting there so far. A few big generators power a country, seven mile boots it feels like
It's more expensive and too late, but at the current rate that might still be a win :(
Storage is manageable, but storage is only one component of solving the problem. Baseload is a component of flexibility. Why are synthetic flammable gasses preferable to nuclear?
Storage is manageable, but storage is only one component of solving the problem. Baseload is a component of flexibility. Why are synthetic flammable gasses preferable to nuclear?
Baseload is the exact opposite of flexibility. Baseload presumes (almost) continues operation. It's the minimum power that we need day and night. With the introduction of renewables, it occurs...
Baseload is the exact opposite of flexibility. Baseload presumes (almost) continues operation. It's the minimum power that we need day and night.
With the introduction of renewables, it occurs more and more where the supply of (almost free) renewable energy exceeds that of the demand. These moments are not season bound and occur throughout the year in many countries. At that point, there is no baseload.
The call for flexibility is to adjust to the new market, in which the supply of energy is highly variable. There are many ways to look for flexibility, the aforementioned storage is one of them. But baseload isn't one of them. Nuclear power as we know it today, only works as baseload. Unless a new reactor design is developed which allows for (cheap) flexible power output, nuclear has no future in our energy system.
Anything that makes the energy grid more durable and stable is, by definition, flexibility. Renewables are extremely sensitive to climate change. Generation 4 nuclear reactors - not so much. I'm...
Anything that makes the energy grid more durable and stable is, by definition, flexibility. Renewables are extremely sensitive to climate change. Generation 4 nuclear reactors - not so much. I'm not arguing against renewables. I just completely disagree that we can transition to 100% renewables plus energy storage. I don't think that practical or possible. Research into fusion may render renewables pointless. Nuclear is also critical for space travel and space exploration.
Just to clarify - our argument seems to actually boil down to: burning synthetic gasses vs nuclear? I want to make sure I understand the division. I'm not against energy storage or renewables.
Because for the longer term storage, it's better if they're cheap to set up but expensive to use, rather than expensive to set up but cheap to use. Synthetic gasses are power-hungry to make, but...
Because for the longer term storage, it's better if they're cheap to set up but expensive to use, rather than expensive to set up but cheap to use. Synthetic gasses are power-hungry to make, but can use existing infrastructure and storage, making them quite simple to set up. If you're building nuclear, but you're building them for those 2 weeks a year where renewables aren't up to the task, you're investing a lot of money for a very narrow gap in the market. Sure, you're also going to be running them the rest of the year as much as you can, but they're not going to be cost-competetive there, competing with renewables. They're only going to be cost competetive when renewables are out and short-term storage is depleted. And with the rest of the year not available to offset your investment, it's not looking great.
That doesn't mean you can't use nuclear power there. But IMO you need a justification that acknowledges that it's an economic loss.
Let me attempt to do so... A summary of the article is: nuclear is more expensive than renewables, will take too long to come online, and is not useful in a renewable-based grid because it...
Exemplary
You can be pro-nuclear, you should back those points up with substance though.
Let me attempt to do so...
A summary of the article is: nuclear is more expensive than renewables, will take too long to come online, and is not useful in a renewable-based grid because it provides baseload (poorly) rather than flexibility.
It’s true that nuclear power is more expensive per GW than wind and solar. Some of the specific arguments in the paper, though, are focussed on private financing, rather than overall cost. Insurance costs and higher interest rates due to risk of default are not relevant to governments. If nuclear power provides a net benefit, but is too expensive for private companies, then the state should be funding it. (I note that the paper explicitly declines to discuss China, the largest state funder of nuclear power)
So - does it provide a net benefit, even though it’s currently more expensive? I would argue yes - because it provides power when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. When the grid is primarily fossil fuels, like the US is currently, then this is mostly irrelevant - you can always generate more power from gas, and do it quickly and flexibly. When the grid becomes 100% non-fossil-fuel, then this is no longer possible.
This additional power can come from energy storage (e.g. pumped hydro, batteries, stored hydrogen, generated methane). According to their reference 12 (Shirizadeh et al, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3592447), France would need something like 17 TWh of storage. Haywood et al. in the original paper make a somewhat irrelevant argument that battery storage has become about ten times cheaper over the last decade. Fine - but France’s biggest battery storage facility is 61 MWh - suitable for grid stabilization, but many orders of magnitude less than what is needed for a country’s energy storage. Shirizadeh et al. propose that generated methane could be used for the bulk of this energy storage - but since methane is a considerably worse greenhouse gas than CO2 is, I’d be very reluctant to have it as part of a net-zero power infrastructure. And storing and using hydrogen as an alternative is hard and untested at significant scale - it leaks very easily, and is also a worse greenhouse gas than CO2. There are various options here, but none of them are great.
If you have nuclear power available, then the need for energy storage is reduced. This isn’t just the baseload argument that the paper dismisses, although obviously if a higher proportion of electricity is created from a non-variable source, then you need less energy storage to compensate for variability. But also, the paper doesn’t even mention using nuclear power for load-following (i.e. ramping it up and down as necessary to compensate for other power sources) even though that’s very useful for reducing storage requirements, and France is already doing it. In fact, the paper’s reference 13 (Shirizadeh and Quirion, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/am/pii/S0140988320303443) explicitly talks about using nuclear power for load-following in section 2.1.7, and even concludes in section 3.1.1 that using nuclear power for 10-30% of the share of power production is optimal! (Oh, and regarding the “nuclear power is less reliable because of climate change” - I haven’t read the referenced article because it’s behind a paywall, but the abstract estimates an annual energy loss from this of between 0.8% and 1.4%, which doesn’t seem to fundamentally change anything)
So, if nuclear power should be part of the optimal mix of non-fossil-fuel power generation, and governments should be investing in it - what about the “it takes too long to build” argument from the paper? It’s true that I don’t have much faith that a new nuclear power station could be built in 10 years or less, and so wouldn’t help with reaching our 2030 carbon reduction goals. But, I’m not confident that we’ll reach those goals anyway, and I’d rather have more non-fossil fuels becoming available, so hopefully we can hit the 2040, 2050, etc. goals.
Pages 17-18. "Battery capacity ranges from 7.6 to more than 279 𝐺𝑊h𝑒 ... and methanation ranges from 7 to 33.5 𝑇𝑊h". The median is about 17 TWh. I don't know the details of their model, but it's...
Where do you get 17TWh from? I don't see that in the paper. For reference, France uses about 1.2 TWh/day. 17TWh of storage would be 2 full weeks assuming literally zero power generation anywhere, including the surrounding countries. Short of an apocalypse, I don't think that's reasonable.
Pages 17-18. "Battery capacity ranges from 7.6 to more than 279 𝐺𝑊h𝑒 ... and methanation ranges from 7 to 33.5 𝑇𝑊h". The median is about 17 TWh. I don't know the details of their model, but it's not actually that huge if you compare it to the levels of natural gas storage that already exist and would need to be replaced with non-fossil-fuel alternatives.
You say these options aren't great, but don't elaborate.
I'm not saying that large-scale energy storage is impossible, or that we won't have to do it. I am saying that it's hard, and the technologies involved are currently either too small scale (batteries, fun things like raising and dropping concrete blocks or compressed air), limited in available sites (hydro storage), have associated greenhouse gas risks (methanation), or are promising but scaling them up will be hard (hydrogen, and I don't know much about synthetic propane but it also seems to be mostly experimental at the moment). We need to do all of those things; as well as demand shaping and better interconnects; but none of it is a straightforward "we can easily build lots more of these using existing known technology". I think it's a false dichotomy to pit "cheap easy energy storage" (or "cheap renewables ignoring storage") against "expensive tricky nuclear power" - they're both hard!
They seem completely reasonable and doable, given we're already constructing them and this trend is growing
I'm afraid the paper you've linked is too expensive for me... I do recall reading about a hydrogen storage facility in Utah (https://www.powermag.com/massive-utah-hydrogen-storage-project-garners-finalized-504m-doe-loan-guarantee/) which will be 300 GWh once it's in operation, and will be the biggest yet. That's great - but it doesn't exist yet, we'll need lots more like that, and there are only so many salt mines available.
Even if I agree that some online nuclear might be a good idea (and I don't disagree) the amount doesn't need to be large.
I think we broadly agree on this. I am not arguing that nuclear can solve all our problems, or that it's generally better or cheaper than renewables. I am arguing against the "new nuclear is a costly and dangerous distraction" argument put forward in the linked paper. I think that some percentage of nuclear power is worthwhile to reduce the need for energy storage. In some areas, that doesn't require any new nuclear power plants, since there are sufficient modern plants already in existence; in some, it will.
I'm not the one you're replying to here in this comment, and I'm not invested enough to have an answer for every point you make, but I would like to discuss a few: Does this only consider making a...
I'm not the one you're replying to here in this comment, and I'm not invested enough to have an answer for every point you make, but I would like to discuss a few:
-Construction is fundamentally more expensive for nuclear.
Does this only consider making a new plant from scratch? I've heard that the costs can be significantly reduced by retrofitting existing fossil fuel plants, because nuclear is just how to make heat, and the existing coal etc plants already have the steam turbine stuff in place. It's definitely very expensive to set up from nothing, but I wonder if those costs could dramatically reduce if you have a structure that already has connection to the grid, already has access to water, already has the steam generation and turbine machinery needed to generate the electricity.
Nuclear waste is still an unsolved issue.
I'd like to know more about this, as everything I've seen recently from my favourite internet science communicators says otherwise. I believed nuclear waste to be a solved issue as of some decades ago. Can you point me to a source that says it's not, or otherwise help me define what "solved" looks like so I can understand how far away from a solution we currently are?
You also have proliferation risks, which are just getting worse as smaller countries build up their own refinement processes.
Does this imply that nuclear plants are fine for larger countries, but not okay for smaller countries? I'm not sure what to make of this. I'm getting the impression your argument here is conditional on location, e.g. "building nuclear plants is fine in USA but not fine in Iraq" -- but I feel like I might be misrepresenting your point here.
In general, I think I have the same vaguely held opinions as the person you replied to, but I'd love to be more informed so that I can change my mind, or have better defences for the opinions I hold.
The issue of nuclear waste is, I believe, heavily dependent on the country you're looking at. The US and Finland for example have near-uninhabitable wastes anyway, with stable geological...
The issue of nuclear waste is, I believe, heavily dependent on the country you're looking at. The US and Finland for example have near-uninhabitable wastes anyway, with stable geological formations that should contain the material until it is no longer meaningfully dangerous, and no one close enough to NIMBY you. Some other countries don't have that luxury, and I haven't heard that the US is taking other countries' nuclear waste. One problem of finding a site is that because you basically have to extrapolate quite far into the future, the size of the error bars on the statement "should contain the material" is either unacceptably large or functionally nonexistant, depending on who you ask. There's also the distinction of "do we know of a site" and "are we using such a site". If the former is acceptable for you to consider the problem solved, then there's a potential reason why someone else would say that it isn't solved yet.
The problem with proliferation is, vaguely, that depending on the exact reactor type it's either trivial or difficult-but-doable to extract weapons grade material. The "official" nuclear weapon states were supposed to help everyone else peacefully stand up nuclear power plants and provide them fuel, while ensuring these clients could not use those reactors to produce weapons. That didn't really happen, but the risk remains that if you build a reactor in another country, they could use that to create a nuclear weapon. Basically, if you wouldn't trust a country with a nuke, you probably shouldn't trust them with a NPP either. Though there are some ways you can ensure you don't give them a nuke. E.g. you can give them the fuel for a plant, but monitor the spent fuel to ensure no plutonium is extracted.
A lot of literature on renewables talks about grid-scale storage as if it was a bird in the hand. It’s like the literature where people in the 1950s thought that liquid metal fast breeders would...
A lot of literature on renewables talks about grid-scale storage as if it was a bird in the hand. It’s like the literature where people in the 1950s thought that liquid metal fast breeders would produce electricity “too cheap to meter”. In 10 or 20 years storage might be a reality (and solar+storage might really be cheap enough to stamp out everything else) but right now it is on the verge of reality.
For that matter I’ve seen a lot of renewable literature that’s gone off the deep end in terms of precision without accuracy. For instance I’ve seen papers that quote low prices for solar + storage although they don’t take into account geography: the biggest solar farm until very recently is in
which is in a desert in India that is close to the equator and one of the brightest spots on Earth. There’s no way that the economics are going to be the same in a place like Germany or Quebec.
For that matter solar and wind are major land uses that will run into opposition because of effects on wildlife. FOE is always producing reports about the local effects of the heat rejection system at Diablo Canyon on sea life which are real but you’d better believe that if you put out square miles of solar panels that will have a big effect on wildlife too. In many places renewable energy is “stranded” because of a lack of transmission lines and building more seems to run into the same kind of delays that nuclear power plants do.
As the old chinese proverb says: "The best time to build a nuclear power plant was 40 years ago. The second best time is now." I think the economics of it right now are problematic for sure, but...
As the old chinese proverb says: "The best time to build a nuclear power plant was 40 years ago. The second best time is now."
I think the economics of it right now are problematic for sure, but it's also worth mentioning that economics aren't set in stone. It's possible to make things less expensive, especially if there is renewed interest in the subject.
What makes you think these are at all the same people? If there's no justification there except your hunch that these are all three (pro-renewables, climate activists, anti-nuclear) green eco...
Exemplary
I'm tired of listening to climate activists talk about nuclear power. They are the reason we stopped investing almost 40 years ago and they set us back decades in the fight against climate change.
What makes you think these are at all the same people? If there's no justification there except your hunch that these are all three (pro-renewables, climate activists, anti-nuclear) green eco people and therefore a homogeneous bloc, then your argument is close to "well, if they're arguing for renewables, then I won't listen to them. I wonder why no one talks to me about renewables..."
Most people, myself included, do not have the time to evaluate every single argument on its own merits. Eventually, patterns emerge, and we begin to rely on those to make quicker assessments. It's...
Exemplary
Most people, myself included, do not have the time to evaluate every single argument on its own merits. Eventually, patterns emerge, and we begin to rely on those to make quicker assessments. It's how I know when a Republican politician starts to say something about gay or trans communities, I can safely disregard it as horseshit without actually having to engage with it. They've lost credibility in that field and they will have to work overtime if they ever want it back.
I totally agree. It also looks like a lot of people that are anti-nuclear have about the same level of knowledge about renewables. Solar panels and wind turbines don't work when it's cloudy and...
I totally agree. It also looks like a lot of people that are anti-nuclear have about the same level of knowledge about renewables. Solar panels and wind turbines don't work when it's cloudy and the wind doesn't blow. This gap needs to be filled in, and if it's not nuclear it will be coal plants.
Solar does work when it's cloudy. Not to counter your whole point but they are far more efficient today. They take less power, which facilitates the need for batteries, etc, to make up for...
Solar does work when it's cloudy. Not to counter your whole point but they are far more efficient today. They take less power, which facilitates the need for batteries, etc, to make up for changing conditions. However the needed accessories also mean more environmental impact.
Nuclear power plants aren't independent of environmental factors either. French reactors already had to shut down during heat waves because the rivers where they get their cooling water from dried...
Nuclear power plants aren't independent of environmental factors either. French reactors already had to shut down during heat waves because the rivers where they get their cooling water from dried up and/or were already too hot. Once the glaciers in the European Alps are gone, many rivers will regularly dry up completely as we've already seen. I assume other countries (will) face similar situations. This issue will only get worse with climate change, not better.
There will be weeks and months where nuclear power can't be used, and we will still have nights (no solar) and regions with no wind. So, regardless of our investments in new nuclear power plants, we have to figure out how to store energy and distribute it over long distances. This will cost a lot in research, development and new infrastructure. If we invest that money in more nuclear reactors, it will probably help sometimes, but it won't solve the issue of intermittent local power generation.
The French reactors shutting down has a lot to do with the environmental regulations for thermal pollution. Most units there do not have cooling towers, and so their effluent significantly heats...
The French reactors shutting down has a lot to do with the environmental regulations for thermal pollution. Most units there do not have cooling towers, and so their effluent significantly heats up the water. There are limits on how much they can do so, and in hotter weather, this constrains them to such a degree that it is necessary to shut down the reactor. In the 1980s, when the production reactors at Savannah River (where I work) were running, they had similar issues, with limits on power levels during the summer. Even in winter, they heated up the water so much, it was messing with the local alligators’ reproductive cycles.
Many modern reactor designs do not rely on water for cooling. You can use gasses, molten metals, and molten salts. Generation 4 reactors require more investment but do address the shortfalls of...
Many modern reactor designs do not rely on water for cooling. You can use gasses, molten metals, and molten salts. Generation 4 reactors require more investment but do address the shortfalls of existing reactors.
The primary cooling cycle is not what we're talking about. You need somewhere to dump the low grade waste heat that the condenser of the secondary cooling cycle produces. That's usually only...
The primary cooling cycle is not what we're talking about. You need somewhere to dump the low grade waste heat that the condenser of the secondary cooling cycle produces. That's usually only achievable by dumping it into a body of water or evaporating a lot of water.
Molten salt reactors do not necessarily need to dump heat into a body of water. There are concepts that include atmospheric radiation with recapture of more electricity resulting from this.
Molten salt reactors do not necessarily need to dump heat into a body of water. There are concepts that include atmospheric radiation with recapture of more electricity resulting from this.
I’ll add there are more alternatives available than just nuclear, solar, air, and coal. Even on the fossil fuel front, there are multiple alternatives to coal. And even “coal” is not a monolithic...
I’ll add there are more alternatives available than just nuclear, solar, air, and coal. Even on the fossil fuel front, there are multiple alternatives to coal. And even “coal” is not a monolithic thing, different sources and processes produce different outcomes.
It’s also I think disingenuous to dismiss the reasonable concerns of those who resist nuclear. Nuclear material is highly problematic in the wrong circumstances, and two recent disasters-fukushima and palestine, oh- demonstrate those circumstances are not terribly far fetched even for tech savvy “advanced” states/cultures.
The real issue has always been over consumption. I think most of us on tildes are quite alarmed about the still totally not abating trend of ever larger cars driven on bigger streets to bigger garages in bigger houses on bigger lots in bigger subdivisions further away from offices/markets/cafes housing ever bigger heaps of useless stuff. Let’s focus our energy on this trend first, maybe?
The article suggests hydrogen storage for those downtimes, which, while great, would mean we'd have to generate ~2x surplus during uptimes. It's certainly possible to engineer around, but it...
The article suggests hydrogen storage for those downtimes, which, while great, would mean we'd have to generate ~2x surplus during uptimes. It's certainly possible to engineer around, but it raises energy requirements quite a bit.
Luke Haywood, Marion Leroutier, Robert Pietzcker There has been a strong push to promote increased investments in new nuclear power as a strategy to decarbonize economies, especially in the...
Exemplary
Luke Haywood, Marion Leroutier, Robert Pietzcker
There has been a strong push to promote increased investments in new nuclear power as a strategy to decarbonize economies, especially in the European Union (EU) and the United States (US). The evidence base for these initiatives is poor. Investments in new nuclear power plants are bad for the climate due to high costs and long construction times
Given the urgency of climate change mitigation, which requires reducing emissions from the EU electricity grid to almost zero in the 2030s, preference should be given to the cheapest technology that can be deployed fastest.
On both costs and speed, renewable energy sources beat nuclear. Every euro invested in new nuclear plants thus delays decarbonization compared to investments in renewable power. In a decarbonizing world, delays increase CO2 emissions.
Our thoughts focus on new nuclear power plants (not phasing out existing plants) in the US and Europe.
We do not focus on China, where government-set electricity prices and subsidized capital costs make it more difficult to contrast the profitability of different types of energy sources.
Nuclear energy is expensive
In an international comparative assessment of construction cost overruns for electricity infrastructure, Sovacool et al.2 find that nuclear reactors are the investment type with the most frequent and largest cost overruns, alongside hydroelectric dams. 97% of the 180 nuclear reactor investment projects included in their analysis suffered cost overruns, with an average cost increase of 117% per project.
Construction cost
More recently, the current estimate of the construction costs of the French Flamanville project stands at €13.2 billion up from an initial €3.3 billion (figures that do not even include financing costs, which the French audit office estimated at €4.2 billion up from an initial €1.2 billion) and those of the recently opened Finish Olkiluoto at €11 billion instead of €3 billion.
Construction costs are driven by safety. Nuclear accidents remain a possibility—and damages may be global. The nuclear plants built relatively quickly in previous decades had lower safety requirements.
Capital cost
The cost of capital is a critical parameter for evaluating the viability of nuclear power. First, the very long construction times and delays generate particularly large financing costs for a given interest rate.
The French court of auditors estimates that the cost of the French nuclear power plant Flamanville will increase from €13.2 billion to €20 billion once financing costs and delays are taken into account.
Second, the historically high risk of default translates into higher interest rates.
Optimism regarding costs
The French grid operator RTE (Réseau de Transport d'Électricité) finds a power system including nuclear to be slightly cheaper than a system based purely on renewables in 2050. In their calculations, RTE assumes capital costs for new nuclear plants to be less than two-thirds of the estimated costs of the European pressurized reactor (EPR) plants in Finland and France. This optimism about cost reductions is contrary to experience of cost evolution for past nuclear reactor series in many countries of the world
Costs are not projected to come down very much even for the six new reactors planned to be built by 2035 (estimated to cost €52 billion in total, or €8.6 billion per reactor). The most recent EPR construction, Sizewell C in the United Kingdom, is also one of the most expensive projects at around €23 billion (£20 billion).
In a wide-ranging review of different technologies, Meng et al.9 find nuclear power to be a “notable exception” where progress is overestimated with actual costs consistently higher than expected. Small modular reactors (SMRs) may not be an exception: their advantages in terms of lower complexity may not translate into sound economics given lower energy production.
Nuclear power is not cost-competitive with renewables
Despite poor profitability, nuclear power is advanced as a good investment to fight climate change. The challenge for nuclear profitability does not come from coal or gas but from renewables. It is hard to overstate how strongly the costs of renewables have decreased
Baseload
First, can nuclear reliably produce baseload? Second, how valuable is baseload? Regarding the first question: nuclear is not entirely reliable. This was evident in France in late autumn of 2022: although the EU was in a period of limited electricity supply with frequent electricity price spikes above 3€/kWh, around half of France’s 56 reactors were unavailable due to planned and unplanned outages.
Flexibility
Flexibility rather than baseload production is required to balance an electricity system based on renewables. However, ramping-up a nuclear power plant is slow. Also, the cost composition of nuclear power does not fit the role of backup technology for power systems with high shares of wind and solar.
Such systems will have low electricity prices for a large part of the year and very high electricity prices for a few to several hundred hours of the year, leading to uncertain and strongly varying revenues for a backup technology.
Such a revenue profile is best suited for a technology with low capital costs and high variable costs—in a year with high demand, revenues will be higher, thus covering higher variable costs, and vice versa. Nuclear costs are mostly up front, so the technology is best suited for stable and predictable revenue streams.
While renewables’ production is variable, their generation can be matched to demand by storing renewable electricity in the form of hydrogen, using batteries or pumped hydro. Bloomberg reports that the price of battery storage has fallen from $1,220 to $132 per kWh between 2010 and 2021.
Beyond batteries, demand- and supply-side grid flexibility technologies can complement variable renewable energy sources at generally lower cost than fossil-fuel backup or bulk storage—consumers may also help reduce system costs by adapting their electricity consumption to the availability of renewable energy.
Taking into account wider economic impacts does not favor nuclear
The relatively low carbon emissions caused by operating new nuclear power plants are similar to those caused by wind and solar energy—hydro and bioenergy carbon footprints may be larger.
Nuclear waste
How should we account for nuclear waste? Nuclear waste is the unresolved problem of the nuclear industry. Cheap long-term storage for anthropogenic radioactive substances is elusive despite worldwide, decades-old efforts.
In absence of any proven low-cost permanent storage technology, nuclear waste will have to be retreated regularly and stored in facilities above the ground. Costs would arise for many thousands of years. The importance of costs and benefits for future generations in today’s decisions has been a controversial topic for climate change policy, and it appears even more relevant for nuclear waste.
Uranium
Uranium mining causes pollution and radioactive exposure. As a report of the EU’s Scientific Committee on Health, Environmental and Emerging Risks notes, “almost 100% of the total eco-toxicity and human toxicity impacts over the whole nuclear life cycle is connected to mining and milling ... While mining and milling is regulated [within the EU], 90% of what the EU need globally comes from 7 countries (none in Europe).”
In Niger, for example, the systematic neglect of health and safety procedures in countries producing uranium for EU consumption persists despite evidence of “grave environmental impacts and rampant institutional failures.”
Armed conflict
The continued development of nuclear energy could contribute to the risk of proliferation of nuclear weapons, as well as the risk of nuclear power plants being targeted in armed conflict, a permanent risk in Ukraine today.
Building new nuclear takes time we do not have
The business case and economics may be poor, but in light of the very real threat of climate catastrophe, should we not invest in all alternatives to fossil fuels? The problem is that building nuclear plants is slow and delivery is uncertain. Even the International Atomic Energy Agency and Nuclear Energy Agency—organizations promoting the use of nuclear energy—assume construction times of around one decade.
Whereas renewables can come online in a fraction of that time. Given lags in planning and regulatory approval, any new nuclear plants would come online too late to help decarbonize our economies on time.
Time frame appears optimistic
All recent nuclear new-builds in Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries have been seriously delayed—
Olkiluoto took 16 years instead of five.
Flamanville is over 11 years behind schedule.
The 5th and 6th EPR plants offer a similarly bleak picture: plans to build Hinkley Point C were first announced in 2008, with an aim of going online in the early 2020s. Grid connection is now planned for 2026.
For Sizewell C, community consultation began in 2012, the planning application was submitted in 2020, and the reactor is expected to become operational in 2032.
Given these time horizons, delays, and associated cost overruns, investments in nuclear power appear to be very dangerous bets in light of the need to quickly reduce EU power sector emissions by 2030 and to close to zero before 2040 in line with climate objectives.
In solving the climate crisis, new nuclear is a costly and dangerous distraction
With ample time, it may be possible to build nuclear power to the highest safety standards and remain economical even taking into account costs of storing nuclear waste for thousands of years.
Relying on nuclear new-builds to achieve the EU climate targets is virtually impossible
Even under very optimistic assumptions, new nuclear in France will only start providing low-emission electricity in 2035—too late for the much faster reductions of power sector emissions required by the EU climate targets. And what would happen if there is further delay, as was the case for all recent nuclear constructions in OECD countries?
In a decarbonizing world, delays in nuclear constructions translate to increased emissions. If governments and economic actors believe that nuclear power will come online at a certain date, they will not make alternative plans, and without alternative plans, the current carbon-intensive electricity system will remain in place—rendering climate targets unachievable.
Activists/activism is/are like accelerators/gas pedals. Activism should be temporary (i.e. applied with sense and when necessary) with stable reasoning and experience as the bedrock. Individuals who can easily tunnelize their worldview should be discouraged to involve themselves in activism till they learn how to slow down or use brakes metaphorically speaking. Without which they are most likely to trash the car basing themselves on trends leaving it irrevocably damaged.
Science is dull, bland and twisted. Its difficult to grasp the sense of what it tells us. It may take months/years to perform an experiment but it may even take more to understand what the results are conveying. It takes reasoning and experience to understand and distill wisdom. It takes time. It takes patience.
I think what the authors are suggesting in this article is that it is better to use what we have established than what we haven't established as much. Given our targets/objectives which we need to achieve within a time frame, methods of energy generation and supply which we already know about with fewer workable and understood assumptions (which could be manageably course corrected) are better than those which we need to study more since setting up a framework with these means inclusion of many unstudied/unknown assumptions which could result in consequences which may be potentially devastating.
Here's some stable reasoning for you. Using just USA plants. Alta, third largest onshore wind in the world, at 1.5GW capacity....produced about 3366 GWh of power in 2018. In the realm of top...
Exemplary
Here's some stable reasoning for you. Using just USA plants.
Alta, third largest onshore wind in the world, at 1.5GW capacity....produced about 3366 GWh of power in 2018.
In the realm of top producers, that puts it pretty firmly in the range of a small coal power plant like Flint Creek.
Now go here, and sort by annual generation. Scroll all the way down until you find Alta. Now total up the coal power that needs replaced in between.
The largest coal plant in that list alone, has an annual generation of 18,325 GWh. So you need 6 more of the largest on and offshore wind projects in the world to replace the capacity of that single plant. I'll leave it as an excersize for the reader to total the rest.
All those nuclear plants will eventually need to be decomissioned as well. Building their replacements as we go is gonna be a lot less painful long term.
I'm not a big fan of this style of argument. It's reductive and basically eliminates all nuance from the equation. How much would it cost? Dunno. How long would it take? Dunno. I can flip this...
Exemplary
I'm not a big fan of this style of argument. It's reductive and basically eliminates all nuance from the equation. How much would it cost? Dunno. How long would it take? Dunno. I can flip this around and give a quick ballpark estimate of how many nuclear power plants you'd need. The result is basically a doomer outlook of "it's literally impossible to fix the problem we're in", which is neither helpful nor true.
Now, just for completeness, here's the flipside argument: Nuclear plants are expensive, and you're going to need a lot of them. The US currently produces roughly 4222TWh anuallly from fossil sources (data from here, scavenged together). Dividing that number by the nameplate capacity of Vogtle 3&4, you'd arrive at the staggering number of 131 times. You'd need to build 262 Vogtle reactors, to the tune of $4.5 trillion. Sounds just as impossible as what you described? Can't blame you. Before you start negotiating: I can already hear that there'll be economies of scale of building 260 identical reactors. Let's not go there, because we didn't go into similar arguments in favor of renewables either. Fair's fair, ok?
Ok, now that we're entirely convinced that nothing can be done, maybe we should take a step back and stop with silly arguments that try to solve the problem in one fell swoop. These arguments are not helpful in figuring out what we should do.
My arguement is simple: Don't be dismissive of new nuclear or renewables. Turns out we can build both, and they're rarely competing for the same sites. And we should building out wind, solar,...
My arguement is simple: Don't be dismissive of new nuclear or renewables. Turns out we can build both, and they're rarely competing for the same sites. And we should building out wind, solar, geothermal, and nuclear as fast as we reasonably can to do exactly that: Shut coal out.
I have just as many nutjobs arguing against new nuclear as I see fighting against offshore wind and I hate both camps.
But they are competing for the same money! If you've got $100 billion to decarbonize your grid, you can either build ~3 nuclear power plants or i-don't-even-know-how-many wind turbines. The OP...
But they are competing for the same money! If you've got $100 billion to decarbonize your grid, you can either build ~3 nuclear power plants or i-don't-even-know-how-many wind turbines. The OP article makes the evidenced and reasoned case that you're going to get more bang for your buck using renewables, thus displacing more coal using the same amount of resources. Unless your resources are endless, I think that's a good argument for which energy source should take precedence.
Now, if that argument ever turns around, and we run into a situation where the projected most economical solution for a projected power grid issue in $NPP_construction_time$ years is a NPP, then build the damn thing. Currently, that doesn't seem the case, and the arguments that lead to that conclusion get quite far into the weeds - see e.g. the OP article for what's arguably just a surface level look.
About $3.4B to build a 1.5 GW offshore wind farm Hornsea One) About $20B to build a comparably rated nuclear plant. What that 5x the cost gets you is about 4x the amount of electricity. That's not...
But they are competing for the same money!
About $3.4B to build a 1.5 GW offshore wind farm Hornsea One)
About $20B to build a comparably rated nuclear plant. What that 5x the cost gets you is about 4x the amount of electricity. That's not that far off.
Because those are rated peak capacities. And a nuclear system can run near peak, indefinitely. While a wind system might get you peak capacity a fraction of the time.
The reality is spend money on both so you can cover each other's weaknesses.
the cost of nuclear plants would go down more than solar/wind would when you bring economics of scale, Also not an either/or situation, it's a do both situation. We should keep building solar,...
the cost of nuclear plants would go down more than solar/wind would when you bring economics of scale, Also not an either/or situation, it's a do both situation. We should keep building solar, wind, and nuclear power generating facilities.
For the record, to fill the entire power generating void with atla like plants would cost 1.8trillon. but takes up 32000 acres compared to the 3200 of the vogtle site. We would require an area 4 times the size of Rhode island (or slightly more than Connecticut in wind mill farms to out put enough power.
So again, this requires solar, wind and nuclear to fill in the fossil fuel void. It's going to be dependent on the area for which one is most viable.
Quick clarification, because people are often quite worried about the land use of wind power: The actual land lost is very minimal. The reason wind turbines are built spread out is to capture more...
Quick clarification, because people are often quite worried about the land use of wind power: The actual land lost is very minimal. The reason wind turbines are built spread out is to capture more energy, but the ground in between is not lost. Sure, you maybe don't want to build housing there, but there's nothing stopping you from using the land for forestry or agriculture. The actual land lost is minimal, and liable to decrease as turbines get bigger.
From an agricultural or industrial land standpoint yeah. But from a habitat destruction standpoint it’s still problematic. I imagine there’s a decent amount of road infra you need to continue...
The reason wind turbines are built spread out is to capture more energy, but the ground in between is not lost.
From an agricultural or industrial land standpoint yeah. But from a habitat destruction standpoint it’s still problematic. I imagine there’s a decent amount of road infra you need to continue servicing those windmills as well.
Depends on how extensive the road infrastructure is to begin with. In the link above you can see that the power plants are mostly quite close to existing roads. (To be clear, the fragmented plots...
Depends on how extensive the road infrastructure is to begin with. In the link above you can see that the power plants are mostly quite close to existing roads. (To be clear, the fragmented plots is just how "old-growth" farmland looks here, that's not the wind plant's doing)
And there's no doubt in my mind that basically any country has enough space to put enough wind turbines. Even if you rule out ecologically valuable undeveloped land; and if you rule out built-up areas. Most of Germany e.g. is farmland, where road access is already given. Some more heavily used forests also have roads available. The US has vast swathes of deserts or farmlands that can be used for almost-free.
Great, now I'm imagining a wind turbine with a ring adapter on ground level to fit a center-pivot irrigation system. Probably smarter to put the wind turbines in between the circles, but now that idea is stuck in my head.
$4.5 trillion is about a year’s worth of the U.S. federal budget. Spread out the construction costs over 10-20 years, and that does start to look doable cost-wise.
$4.5 trillion is about a year’s worth of the U.S. federal budget. Spread out the construction costs over 10-20 years, and that does start to look doable cost-wise.
It absolutely is. It's a big effort, but many countries already have significant renewable fractions, meaning it isn't exactly impossible to make a dent.
It absolutely is. It's a big effort, but many countries already have significant renewable fractions, meaning it isn't exactly impossible to make a dent.
Absolutely. Personally, I'm quite firmly in camp renewables for many of the positions raised in the article. People who aren't terribly involved in the conversation and who just think NPPs are a...
Individuals who can easily tunnelize their worldview should be discouraged to involve themselves in activism till they learn how to slow down or use brakes metaphorically speaking. Without which they are most likely to trash the car basing themselves on trends leaving it irrevocably damaged.
Absolutely. Personally, I'm quite firmly in camp renewables for many of the positions raised in the article. People who aren't terribly involved in the conversation and who just think NPPs are a neat, compact way of solving all our problems will often strawman that position as "afraid of chernobyl? Don't you know nuclear waste isn't barrels of green goop?", and that's kind of frustrating. Now, I'm not an expert on power grids, NPPs or renewables in a professional sense, but it's near the top of the list of other topics I keep informed on, so I'm a bit beyond the point of thinking of nuclear waste as green goo. Sadly the conversation in mainstream platforms is quite removed from that in the better-informed circles I also monitor. It's why I usually don't engage much here in these topics.
It can be frustrating. I quite like the idea of small form reactors to keep local grids going, but there's so many moving parts socially to those. Renewables are kicking ass, I just wonder how...
It can be frustrating. I quite like the idea of small form reactors to keep local grids going, but there's so many moving parts socially to those.
Renewables are kicking ass, I just wonder how somewhere like the UK can flex for anything though?
We're going to need to start looking at global grids if we need true flexibility surely?
The UK is pretty windy, isn't it? And I'd be surprised if they didn't have a few depleted natural gas fields that would make for good storage sites. That's a good starting point. I'm not sure to...
Renewables are kicking ass, I just wonder how somewhere like the UK can flex for anything though?
The UK is pretty windy, isn't it? And I'd be surprised if they didn't have a few depleted natural gas fields that would make for good storage sites. That's a good starting point.
I'm not sure to what degree it's feasible, but I'm kinda enamored with the idea of running lots of economies on a renewables + short-term batteries + (synthetic methane on residual natural gas infrastructure for longer-term storage). That part is well supported and definitely feasible. The pert that springs from my fantasy is trading synthetic gas to balance supply and demand globally. Britain used most of their stored gas and are looking at a shortage? Call the swedes, I hear their wind power plants have been generating lots of excess electricity this year. Send some over by pipeline or by ship, and it's sorted. That kinda thing. Sending electricity directly is appealing for its conceptual simplicity (same as nuclear btw) but I'm not sure it's necessarily the best tool for the job. I fear transmission losses are going to make that very difficult at the distances you'd need to do it, to substantially decorrelate the weather-bound producers within a grid.
Aaaand you run into all of these international relations issues that we're trying to get out of; like the country on the other end of the wire being a terrorist state involved in an illegal annexation of a neighboring country. Or the neo-colonialism that'd be entailed by solarizing the sahara. Best to keep flexible here, either by massively interconnecting the world (i.e. instead of a few long-distance connections, you'd build up an entire network, so you can always buy from someone else) but that's a massive infrastructure effort; or by sticking to more flexible forms of trade, like ship-based trade of gasses. Since that doesn't scale to the size of national energy consumption too well, each country should still strive to at least mostly fill its own energy requirements using domestic renewable generation.
Our seas certainly are! We're just getting shot of some legislation that stops wind farms on-land as well. So hopefully we'll see more of them. If only we didn't have political stupidity in the...
The UK is pretty windy, isn't it? And I'd be surprised if they didn't have a few depleted natural gas fields that would make for good storage sites. That's a good starting point.
Our seas certainly are! We're just getting shot of some legislation that stops wind farms on-land as well. So hopefully we'll see more of them.
I'm not sure to what degree it's feasible, but I'm kinda enamored with the idea of running lots of economies on a renewables + short-term batteries + (synthetic methane on residual natural gas infrastructure for longer-term storage). That part is well supported and definitely feasible. The pert that springs from my fantasy is trading synthetic gas to balance supply and demand globally. Britain used most of their stored gas and are looking at a shortage? Call the swedes, I hear their wind power plants have been generating lots of excess electricity this year. Send some over by pipeline or by ship, and it's sorted. That kinda thing. Sending electricity directly is appealing for its conceptual simplicity (same as nuclear btw) but I'm not sure it's necessarily the best tool for the job. I fear transmission losses are going to make that very difficult at the distances you'd need to do it, to substantially decorrelate the weather-bound producers within a grid.
If only we didn't have political stupidity in the way of that!
The reality is, our political figures at the moment see all these problems and they're desperately trying to figure it out, and getting most of it wrong. Where most nations put a cap on their energy firms gouging people... the UK decided to give them a tax break instead. Yay.
Aaaand you run into all of these international relations issues that we're trying to get out of; like the country on the other end of the wire being a terrorist state involved in an illegal annexation of a neighboring country. Or the neo-colonialism that'd be entailed by solarizing the sahara. Best to keep flexible here, either by massively interconnecting the world (i.e. instead of a few long-distance connections, you'd build up an entire network, so you can always buy from someone else) but that's a massive infrastructure effort; or by sticking to more flexible forms of trade, like ship-based trade of gasses. Since that doesn't scale to the size of national energy consumption too well, each country should still strive to at least mostly fill its own energy requirements using domestic renewable generation.
That's where we run into the issue. I couldn't imagine China or Russia ever playing ball on non-domestic support where it doesn't benefit them and only them. Let alone any nation that's been shagged over hard in the past 3-400 years by the West.
It's tough. But I can only see nuclear (Small form) as a way to ease those localise, domestic production issues IF combined with renewables. I'd love a global system, but we're not collectively grown-up enough for that.
I mean, if you've got enough money to fix the problem using nuclear, then you probably also have enough money to fix the problem using renewables+storage. I'm not going to repeat the entire...
I mean, if you've got enough money to fix the problem using nuclear, then you probably also have enough money to fix the problem using renewables+storage. I'm not going to repeat the entire argument of the article, but renewables have the benefit of being much easier to get going on, they go online faster, they're cheaper. Then once you start hitting semi-regular oversaturation from renewables, which for most countries is still a ways away, then's when you first need serious amounts of storage.
And even if you take an extra decade then to figure out how to store power effectively... I think it's safe to assume you can always buy fuels on the global markets. If humanity has any sense, most of that will be carbon neutral in 20 years.
TBH I'm unsure of how to feel about SMRs. I think the idea of modularization is a step in the right direction of making NPPs cost competetive, but I also think that by the time SMRs come online, the gap will have widened even more and I don't think SMRs will achieve such great savings. They also multiply many of the operations-related problems and costs of NPPs. The centralization of conventional NPPs has its own economies of scale. More generally, I'm skeptical of the potential of any future technology to contribute meaningfully to the solution of the climate crisis. If we can't build it now, we probably can't afford to wait for it. That doesn't mean I don't want these technologies researched: Some address other problems (growing energy need once the climate crisis is solved; nuclear waste incineration), while others (e.g. sodium based battery chemistries) promise to be online in time to help, and present a cheaper and more scalable alternative to current technologies. But I think it's absolutely unconscionable to have your entire current contribution to the climate crisis be "well, we're researching a wunderwaffe technology that will surely turn the tide when if it comes online". (To be clear, I'm not accusing you of that.) These technologies need to stay in the territory of "nice to have" and the actual deployment of production-ready solutions needs to be a solid enough foundation already. If the money says that in your current situation, that solution is a NPP, then go ahead.
Aye. Seems like these decisions always come down to capital and cash, and that feels so infuriating given that it goes beyond those things as well right? Good chat dude, you've given me a fair bit...
Aye. Seems like these decisions always come down to capital and cash, and that feels so infuriating given that it goes beyond those things as well right?
Good chat dude, you've given me a fair bit to research and think about!
I'm not sure how to parse the "capital and cash" comment. Is it that you find this view of the problem reductive? I mean, capital and cash are ultimately just abstractions of our limited resources...
I'm not sure how to parse the "capital and cash" comment. Is it that you find this view of the problem reductive?
I mean, capital and cash are ultimately just abstractions of our limited resources - limited raw materials, limited R&D, limited labor, limited production infrastructure. And within those limits, I and the article would argue that we'd get farther by using renewables. That doesn't imply a total divestment of nuclear, not by a long shot. Lots of human capital is specialized in that sector, and it's wasteful to tell a nuclear engineer to start working on wind power projects. Regardless, sticker price is a good approximation of how much of it we could make, resulting market flexibilities notwithstanding. It also ignores more strategic concerns: Maybe you want access to nuclear weapons; energy autonomy; or export energy; or maybe you want to keep key industries alive even if they aren't cost competetive now.
So, if your comment is coming from a PoV of criticising capitalism and the way we do business these days, I think the problem goes beyond that: How we allocate limited resources is not to blame for our resources being limited, and the advantage of renewables over nuclear or the other way around does not care about your political ideology. If on the other hand your frustration is one of "come on, it's just money, and not even thaaaat much, there's billions of lives at stake", then I absolutely agree; every government needs to start shelling out stupid amounts of money and invest it in the projects that reduce fossil fuel usage the most. And I have precious little patience for politicians or voters who blocked relevant investments over the last 20 years. Germany could be running on fully electrified luxury gay renewable communism by now, if not for Merkel.
Too abstracted to be meaningful anymore. Did that $1B GDP come from the making of a giant movie that contributed bupkis to industrial output and infrastructure? Or did it come from mining and...
I mean, capital and cash are ultimately just abstractions of our limited resources
Too abstracted to be meaningful anymore.
Did that $1B GDP come from the making of a giant movie that contributed bupkis to industrial output and infrastructure?
Or did it come from mining and manufacturing?
A digitized IP-based economy is a poor metric for available societal resources.
I wouldn't assume that's even renewable - ignoring the synthesis problem, methane itself is a potent greenhouse gas and fugitive emissions are common on natural gas infrastructure. Given that...
(synthetic methane on residual natural gas infrastructure for longer-term storage).
I wouldn't assume that's even renewable - ignoring the synthesis problem, methane itself is a potent greenhouse gas and fugitive emissions are common on natural gas infrastructure. Given that methane has a GWP of 81, a more eco-friendly option would be e.g. synthetic propane (which has a GWP of 0.072, i.e. it's ~14x less bad per gram than CO2, so if it leaks it basically doesn't matter) although I don't know if propane would be compatible with residual natural gas infrastructure (apparently: not without modifications, possibly yes with modifications).
I agree that's a potential problem. Though I don't see us keeping the natural gas infrastructure in it's entire breadth with it's millions of domestic connections. The only consumers will be power...
I agree that's a potential problem. Though I don't see us keeping the natural gas infrastructure in it's entire breadth with it's millions of domestic connections. The only consumers will be power plants and industrial customers. I'm not sure whether that would functionally eliminate the leakage problem, but it would certainly reduce the scale.
The leakage problem is a matter of costs - if methane is 80x as bad as CO2 (methane breaks down faster, so that's not entirely true, but it's still an order of magnitude worse), then even 1% of...
The leakage problem is a matter of costs - if methane is 80x as bad as CO2 (methane breaks down faster, so that's not entirely true, but it's still an order of magnitude worse), then even 1% of the methane leaking will nearly double emissions. But the actual monetary cost is 1% higher fuel costs, and methane isn't remotely expensive enough for that to matter. If methane was expensive then it wouldn't be used for heating in the first place, so the entire setup was built from the ground up to not care whether a little methane is leaked.
AIUI the #1 source of methane leakage is pipes - making them completely airtight gets really expensive really fast, and basically everything using methane will have a ton of piping.
In the first quote "...cheapest technology that can be deployed fastest" That seems like a short-term and not really thought-out solution. Who buys the cheapest thing if they want long-term and...
In the first quote "...cheapest technology that can be deployed fastest"
That seems like a short-term and not really thought-out solution. Who buys the cheapest thing if they want long-term and dependable/reliable solution?
I don't see how it should be either/or even with costs involved. It's expensive, so what? There's a case to be made that we made our bed and it's going to cost us. All hands on deck. I'm also...
I don't see how it should be either/or even with costs involved.
It's expensive, so what? There's a case to be made that we made our bed and it's going to cost us. All hands on deck.
I'm also missing how renewables are space hogs, something severely limited in small Netherlands, and how rare earth minerals required for all these photovoltaic systems and windmills will sustain us long term.
This article/study doesn't convince me, but I'll be the first to admit that I'm no expert on the subject. I could be wrong in my assertions but I do feel both topics are an omission I'm not comfortable with.
Everybody is talking about additional power generation, but why not work on decreasing our electricity usage as well? There is so much energy that goes to waste such as having unnecessary lights...
Everybody is talking about additional power generation, but why not work on decreasing our electricity usage as well? There is so much energy that goes to waste such as having unnecessary lights on at night, or building megacities in the middle of the desert where air conditioning has to be running 24/7, etc.
I think the counter-argument is worth bringing up: Why not build out enough nuclear power infrastructure that electricity itself becomes so near-zero in cost that it is essentially free outside of...
I think the counter-argument is worth bringing up: Why not build out enough nuclear power infrastructure that electricity itself becomes so near-zero in cost that it is essentially free outside of industrial-scale use cases? It beats fighting human nature and trying to get everyone to use less. If we're smarter about this we can use more instead, an unbelievable amount more in fact, and with near-zero damage to the climate in the process. In fact there's a lot of carbon sequestration technology out there that isn't viable because it takes too much power to run - but with a nuclear power plant attached to everything that needs one, the words 'not enough power' stop being part of our vocabulary. We can vacuum that carbon right up. I'd rather go that route since trying to convince people to change basic human behaviors is an enterprise with a... dubious track record of success. When you start burning the rocks for power, you stop having power capacity problems.
Did you read the article? Even a very surface-level glance suggests that: and you think we should build so much as to make power basically free? That is not how that works.
Did you read the article? Even a very surface-level glance suggests that:
Nuclear energy is expensive
and you think we should build so much as to make power basically free? That is not how that works.
I did, up until I realized the economic foundation of their argument is divorced from reality. Nothing in that paper about costs is relevant to the technology I am talking about, and provided...
I did, up until I realized the economic foundation of their argument is divorced from reality. Nothing in that paper about costs is relevant to the technology I am talking about, and provided links to.
Nuclear power is not about pressurized water reactors anymore. It's like discussing transportation and basing your entire argument about transportation costs on nothing but data about semi trucks, when there's a galaxy of other technologies and designs at play like ships, planes, cars, trains, and bicycles. The author is being intentionally blind to the fourth generation options, which imo are the only options worth having a conversation about. We already know that the old-school plants aren't viable, but the arguments about them (which the article covers in depth and accurately) are not the whole story.
This is the way the green anti-nuclear camp attacks fourth generation technology. They know they haven't got a leg to stand on once gen4 is in the equation, and that's why there are literally hundreds of articles that paint gen4 with the same stigmas as gen3. It's a disingenuous argument based on lies of omission.
Apologies then, I didn't connect this comment to the comment somewhere else in the thread about Gen4 options. Without that context, I think you can understand how your comment seems quite divorced...
Apologies then, I didn't connect this comment to the comment somewhere else in the thread about Gen4 options. Without that context, I think you can understand how your comment seems quite divorced from the OP. Again, apologies.
As for Gen4 reactors themselves and how they fit in the equation, I'm tempted to say a lot of things I don't really want to spend the time to back up, at least not tonight, so I'll take a step back there. Maybe another day.
As for phrases like "intentionally blind" and "disingenuous", I'd caution against that kind of thinking for (imo) obvious reasons, unless you are very convinced that that's what's going on.
Well, I can't be sure, but it seems like every time I have this conversation online, it's usually because there's an article that says, "Nuclear power is so bad we should never touch it" or...
Well, I can't be sure, but it seems like every time I have this conversation online, it's usually because there's an article that says, "Nuclear power is so bad we should never touch it" or something along those lines - exactly as this article does. This is a well presented article with a lot of research - too much, methinks, for the authors to be ignorant of generation four's history or galaxy of possibilities. If the authors knew about that, why was it not included in their article? Simple - it invalidates their premise.
That argument is true for gen3. It is provably and factually not true for gen4. Using pressurized water in a nuclear plant is frankly batshit crazy and I'm amazed it became the 'standard' when the same man who invented that technology said 'oh by the way, here's a far better way to do it without all the risks.' The same man who created pressurized water reactors created molten salt reactors to replace them. We didn't listen to him.
The usual argument of gen4 is 'this is unproven technology that's never been done before and it'll cost a lot of R&D.' That chestnut is also more complicated than it looks. We did it in a garage in the 1960s, without computers or modern material science. That exact same model works just fine today, no further R&D required. Sure, there are some really crazy and forward thinking reactor designs out there for various forms of gen4 that actually will require that R&D money, but we do not need to have those designs to get started. They'll come from the profits of the basic design which is already proven.
Also, I've heard Kirk Sorenson (a subject matter expert on thorium molten salt) say that a billion dollars in funding would be overkill for his advanced molten salt reactor designs, and he's chasing a more advanced version than most. That means these insurmountable research costs are in fact less than the cost of a traditional nuclear power plant, and therefore even the R&D argument is not a very good one.
Wait for nukeman to chime in, you can take his word for it not mine, it's his field and I'm just someone who follows nuclear energy as a hobby.
I agree, and I'm a little disappointed by the responses. It's not about shifting use based on availability, it's about lowering the overall consumption. The fact of the matter is that there is no...
I agree, and I'm a little disappointed by the responses. It's not about shifting use based on availability, it's about lowering the overall consumption.
The fact of the matter is that there is no carbon-neutral energy sources. Renewable energy sources are much better, but they don't come without cost; solar panels need rare minerals, turbines are made of fiberglass composites that cannot be recycled, and so on. Entropy cannot be reversed.
Right now I'm sitting in an office with floor-to-ceiling windows that has two air conditioner units blasting the entire day and several rows of fluorescent lights on even though the sun is out. And it's far from the only business that does it. Some people are still lighting their houses with incandescent lightbulbs because they are unhappy with the 'character' of LED lights. My next door neighbors have pools and spas with heaters and pumps that consume hundreds or thousands of kilowatt hours every week - some of them use so much power that they use gas heating instead of electric which is cheaper for them but worse for the environment. When I leave this office, it will be in a car, but I'll be taking roads that hundreds of other cars will also be using at the exact same time.
There are so many ways to save energy but there is so little incentive to reduce it that it's practically nothing. Electricity costs, what, anywhere between, what, 3 and 10 kWh per dollar? So why not keep the air conditioner a few degrees lower than necessary, or keep the lights on when nobody's there, or use the TV as a noise generator, or run the washer and dryer for a single outfit. Why not buy this fast fashion top that took 5 kWh to produce, 100kWh to ship, and another hundred to get the raw materials that took another hundred to process. It doesn't matter that it'll start falling apart in just a few weeks, but will never biodegrade and will be another piece of trash in the landfill.
To some extent we are. But broadly, it's not happening more because its market solution is to increase the cost of electricity, which is a political nonstarter, and its non-market solution is for...
but why not work on decreasing our electricity usage as well?
To some extent we are. But broadly, it's not happening more because its market solution is to increase the cost of electricity, which is a political nonstarter, and its non-market solution is for government to tell businesses to not do stuff, which is politically hard and ideologically frowned upon - the ideology says that if the new behaviour was to businesses' benefit then they'd already be doing it.
It's a non-starter. We have growing needs for energy, with growing industrial needs and a warming planet where many places are increasingly lethal without air conditioning (wet bulb temperatures...
It's a non-starter. We have growing needs for energy, with growing industrial needs and a warming planet where many places are increasingly lethal without air conditioning (wet bulb temperatures beyond human tolerance). One clear upcoming concern is the gradual adoption of electric vehicles. A single car's battery can power a typical household for a weekend, and that will be recharged multiple times per week.
Meanwhile, the largest wind and solar plants are not even taking on average coal plants in terms of annual output.
That is an important conversation, but as long as we're talking solely about reducing, it's an orthogonal discussion IMO. It's also by itself entirely insufficient. Once you start talking about...
That is an important conversation, but as long as we're talking solely about reducing, it's an orthogonal discussion IMO. It's also by itself entirely insufficient. Once you start talking about demand-side flexibility, it's no longer entirely orthogonal: If you turn off energy-hungry industries in times of peak prices (which usually means low renewable generation), you're reducing the need to have expensive storage. There's a lot that can be done here that is conceptually quite complex once you go beyond large industrial consumers. The logistical hassle in making sure people turn on their washing machines and dish washers when the power grid would most prefer it is... well, formidable. Though there's electricity consumers that require less human intervention and could feasibly be controlled to adapt to price/supply fluctuations by electronics alone - such as ACs or electric car chargers.
It's a broad topic, to be sure, and it certainly is important. It doesn't get the public attention it needs, considering it's the part where the public needs to get involved. Meanwhile, how the sausage (electricity) is made can be mostly left to experts without the public being able to contribute meaningfully to that conversation (as long as the experts don't end up burning fossils because some MBA did the wrong kind of math).
I think this second statement is based on outdated assumptions, or rather, assumptions. Nuclear plants don't usually ramp fast because they're usually not supposed to ramp fast, and they aren't...
Despite poor profitability, nuclear power is advanced as a good investment to fight climate change. However, today, the challenge for nuclear profitability does not come from coal or gas but from renewables. It is hard to overstate how strongly the costs of renewables have decreased (see Figure 1) . Few publications have anticipated these cost decreases, and public debate is often based on outdated cost assumptions.
...
However, ramping-up a nuclear power plant is slow. Also, the cost composition of nuclear power does not fit the role of backup technology for power systems with high shares of wind and solar. Such systems will have low electricity prices for a large part of the year and very high electricity prices for a few to several hundred hours of the year, leading to uncertain and strongly varying revenues for a backup technology.
I think this second statement is based on outdated assumptions, or rather, assumptions. Nuclear plants don't usually ramp fast because they're usually not supposed to ramp fast, and they aren't supposed to ramp fast in part because they don't ramp fast.
As an analogy, think of car engines. Some engines have high horsepower but low torque. That's good when you are up to speed and running fast. But you need lots of torque if you want to be Dominic Torreto and hault a bank vault through the streets with your suped up Dodge Charger. Nuclear plants are designed to run efficiently, and if the standard way they are going to be used is to run at a constant speed, then you don't design it to ramp fast, that'd be more expensive for no reason. But if you wanted to build reactors like that you could, and I think they do in places like France where there is a big enough share of nuclear power for it to make sense to have it act as demand response. Doing that incurs a penalty in down time, which is why its typically not desirable to do. As the article points out, peaker plants that turn on only during high demand generally work better when you have higher fuel costs and lower capital costs. But I want to talk about something else first.
More importantly, regarding the second question, flexibility rather than baseload production is required to balance an electricity system based on renewables.
I want to focus more on this for a second. This argument comes up sometimes, often in the form of "baseload is outdated, replaced by a need for flexibility". I think how its phrased in this article is important though, flexibility rather than baseload production is required to balance an electricity system based on renewables. Its a presupposed assumption that renewables should be maximzed first and then we decide how to deal with the leftovers. I think this is a better definition because it avoids saying "baseload is outdated", which is kind of misleading.
If you look at the electricity demand in the US on Sept. 2nd as an example, it swings from around 400,000 to 600,000 megawatt-hours per hour. So it looks like a raised cosine with a DC value of 500000 with an oscillation spanning 200000. You also see that there is a bit of a lag between when solar power ramps up and peaks and when demand ramps up and peaks.
So naively you might think that we should have some baseload power of about 400000 MW with 200000 MW of solar and some type of short term storage or demand response to shift that production peak over a couple hours to get generation to track as closely as possible with demand, and then fill in the gaps with a bit more storage. Theres also the matter of seasonal variation in demand requirements that seems to vary by something like 25% between summer and winter, so there is some capacity that needs to come on for part of the year.
If we assume that the trend of renewables pricing to keep falling we might as well just assume its negligible pricing, so the cost of electricity is dominated by the cost of storage, during whatever hours storage is needed. Looking at solar just because it is more consistent in its patterns, you get a decent amount of light from like 8 AM to 8 PM or so. If you overbuild so that you are getting enough power for the whole day through that time, then about 12 hours of the day your price is more or less set by the LCOE of solar and about 12 hours a day where prices are set by LCOS of your energy storage. Depending on wind power or hydro or geothermal or whatever else is used some percentage of that 12 hours of LCOS is actually not going to need storage, so there will be some factor from 0-1 capturing what percentage of time demand can be met without needing to draw on storage. Depending on your assumptions of how the grid is modelled and how you can move energy around that factor will change.
This writer seems to be in favor of a combination of demand response and batteries, from this quote:
While renewables’ production is variable, their generation can be matched to demand by storing renewable electricity in the form of hydrogen, using batteries or pumped hydro. Bloomberg reports that the price of battery storage has fallen from $1,220 to $132 per kWh between 2010 and 2021. Beyond batteries, demand- and supply-side grid flexibility technologies can complement variable renewable energy sources at generally lower cost than fossil-fuel backup or bulk storage—consumers may also help reduce system costs by adapting their electricity consumption to the availability of renewable energy.
So LCOS is something like $132/kWh, which is much better than 10 years ago, but is still more than the effectively zero we are considering for solar. And it's bigger than the $0.05/kWh price of renewables today. If we assume that this decline holds steady then we could maybe guess that in another 10 years LCOS will drop another factor of 10 to $1.32/kWh, and in another 10 years after that to ranges more in the cents/kWh range that makes renewables currently attractive. So maybe in 20 years this all works out. I don't know if that's a safe assumption, that doesn't consider the scaling of transmission or the different distribution of sources and how that changes the modelling of grid stability.
The idea of using demand response to change the shape of the demand curve might make it close and closer to matching the patterns of renewable generation, which introduces a pretty complicated parameter space to search through. I guess a statistician could maybe figure out that for a given LCOS and assuming a negiligble cost of direct renewables that whenever the variance throughout the day is greater than 20% of the average then the proportion of demand which needs to be met with storage is low enough that the higher cost of LCOS is countered by the low utilization, or something like that.
One thing I object to is a part in the middle where it talks about how nuclear is unsuited to the roll of a peaker plant because its mostly capital costs like paying off the interest, and for a peaker that's only online half the time you want something with high variable costs and not high fixed costs. Which is true and makes sense, but batteries are also a lot of fixed capital costs that you need to pay off. What's really good for peaking plants is natural gas, but we don't want to be using natural gas so the idea of wanting to choose an energy distribution that maximizes flexibility instead of baseload doesn't make much sense to me. Like, you can do it with lots of different energy sources, but if you say we should just be picking whatever is best for flexibility as a a guiding principle then you end up with fossil fuels, when we all agree that not having fossil fuels should be the top concern.
Like, lets say right now LCOS is $100/kwh and solar is $0/kwh and natural gas with CCS is like $50/kwh. So for 12 hours in the day solar has you covered, and for the the other times you either pay $100/kwh or $50/kwh depending on if you are using solar+storage or natural gas. The apparent economic choice is natural gas. On the whole its probably cheaper than if you had $50/kwh throughout the whole day, so you can say that solar+storage is the most economic when you are doing certain analysis, but solar+storage is kind of nebulous in what exactly that proportion is between the two. Are you storing 100% of the energy solar collects? In which case you are paying $0/kWh on energy and $100/kWh on storage for every kWh you produce? Or are you doing 70% at 0 and 30% stored at $100 for an average of $30/kWh?
This is a dynamic that I don't feel is appropriately captured in LCOE or LCOS analysis alone. Price is set by the last kw in a block. If you are trying to balance the grid on 15 minute blocks and you get like 80% of that from very cheap renewables and 20% from backup fossil fuels, the price is set by that fossil fuel, so renewables gets to pocket the difference, which makes it profitable, and that profit can be passed on to lower costs elsewhere, but what if everyone is selling low cost solar and there is no high price setter?
I think this is all very interesting to think about, while also still being insufficient to cover all the important considerations, but also completely irrelevant.
Given these time horizons, delays, and associated cost overruns, investments in nuclear power appear to be very dangerous bets in light of the need to quickly reduce EU power sector emissions by 2030 and to close to zero before 2040 in line with climate objectives.
This is an argument that was made back in like 2010 when the US and Germany and China all were in agreement to try and put a bunch of effort into bringing down the cost of renewables, and some were arguing nuclear power should have been included then. It was considered too late back then, but its like 13 years later now. If we had started back then there could be a lot of generation either online now or within a few years of completion. But if it was too late back then, then theres no reason to reconsider now, its even more too late now. And in 10 years if it turns out that there is a still a need for it, it will be even more too late. Anyone who has decided that never really needs to reconsider ever again, so this whole conversation is kind of a moot point.
That's not even considering the more complicated stuff like when this guy starts talking about far reaching economic impacts of environmental policy decisions like to what extent nuclear power has led to the economic costs of the fucking war in Ukraine, and I just don't know man. It's a good question and I'm just not qualified to guess at that, I don't know if anyone is qualified to answer that.
At a certain point every question that's really worth discussing boils down to some kind of value judgement that not everyone agrees upon, and when you reach that point there isn't really a scientific resolution, it's just people weighing different priorities more or less than others.
Regarding storage needs, it gets worse when it's not an even 12/12. In the wintertime, you've got maybe 9 solid hours of daylight to generate that needed power. Add in the loss from snow and cloud...
Regarding storage needs, it gets worse when it's not an even 12/12.
In the wintertime, you've got maybe 9 solid hours of daylight to generate that needed power. Add in the loss from snow and cloud cover, and you lose a lot of potential generation. On my 10 yr old solar system, I'll generate about 55KWh daily in May/June/July. I generate about 10KWh on a good day in December/January/February.
Power demands are also going to be higher because resistive heat is everywhere and is less efficient than air conditioners and heat pumps. I don't even wanna try to do the math for how much overbuilding would be needed to meet overnight winter demand.
Of course, we haven't even touched on how much of the USA still relies on fossil fuels for home heating directly, further putting load on the grid that we need to build additional capacity for.
It is interesting to read such a high quality anti-nuclear power article. In another life I used to read SlashDot, a lot. Almost everyone there was pro-nuclear power. I guess maybe that came from...
It is interesting to read such a high quality anti-nuclear power article.
In another life I used to read SlashDot, a lot.
Almost everyone there was pro-nuclear power. I guess maybe that came from either being nuclear professionals or sci-fi fans though maybe that intuition isn't fair. Regardless, few people every revealed their credentials as being adequate for the subject while not having a vested interest. There were always claims about modern and safer designs to wash away any counterpoints.
I am against nuclear power because there will always be nuclear waste with a half life of 10,000 years waiting to be a problem.
There will always be human error and mismanagement.
Rand McNally told the Japanese not to build the Fukishimi power plant on the site they chose. Yet they did it anyway. The Japanese have a much stronger sense of civic responsibility than Americans and a number of other cultures. I would hate to see the potential mismanagement possible in an America with many nuclear power plants.
There's finite money, I'm worried that fossil fuel companies will push "don't build renewables, we need that money to build nuclear!", and then 2 picoseconds before the nuke plant opens, they'll...
There's finite money, I'm worried that fossil fuel companies will push "don't build renewables, we need that money to build nuclear!", and then 2 picoseconds before the nuke plant opens, they'll push a nuclear fearmongering campaign to get the nuke plant shut down before it can displace any coal/gas.
These days, the fossil fuel folks (esp. natural gas) are promoting themselves as complementary to renewable (versus batteries/storage), and hardly even talking about nuclear. Given that there are...
These days, the fossil fuel folks (esp. natural gas) are promoting themselves as complementary to renewable (versus batteries/storage), and hardly even talking about nuclear. Given that there are hundreds of gigawatts of new coal/gas-fired power plants in the pipeline, at least some of that could be replaced by nuclear.
All of this is talked about in the context of old school pressurized water reactors. Nothing about them is relevant to modern fourth generation options, which is what we should be researching and building. For example, here's one nuclear power plant that is mobile and ready to roll off the line right now, no fancy R&D required. Here's another model ready to build in Toronto.
Frankly, all nuclear and climate activism in this space should be aimed at replacing every single water reactor on the planet with small modular reactor designs. I share the activist's disdain for those older plants, but not their aversion to nuclear power. When we have a 100KW plant packed into a shipping container with a 20 year service cycle able to be operated by high school graduates, we're done. Couple million bucks per power plant, which upends all of the economics discussed in this article and once economies of scale come into play it'll kick wind and solar's ass for pricing and pollution. This entire article is, frankly, a bullshit propaganda hit piece that shows the author knows nothing or is being intentionally disingenuous. I didn't even bother finishing it.
I'll ping @nukeman since he's an engineer in this field who knows about interesting projects.
Admiral Hyman Rickover (the father of the Nuclear Navy) had an interesting perspective on reactor design and development:
An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose (’omnibus reactor’). (7) Very little development is required. It will use mostly off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.
On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated.
While light water reactors have their issues, they are not these horrible pieces of machinery they are sometimes made out to be. Water, even at high pressures and moderately high temperatures, is a known substance, and relatively easy to work with (contrast with say, liquid sodium, or highly corrosive molten salts). PWRs and BWRs have accumulated decades of operating experience, and in the U.S., are seeing capacity factors of 90% or greater, that is, the reactor is producing full power 90% of the time. Which is impressive for any power source.
Now, that’s not to say I’m knocking Gen IV reactors. I’m not! There’s some very exciting and interesting designs coming down the pipeline. But there’s really only two classes which have significant historical development: sodium fast reactors and gas-cooled reactors. ThorCon is producing a molten salt reactor. Prior to the recent Chinese reactor (still undergoing testing), only three molten salt reactors had ever been built, all before 1970, and none capable of producing electricity. In addition to trying an underdeveloped reactor type, they are trying to go for a thorium fuel cycle. The current supply chain is geared for uranium, and there will be a significant cost with respect to developing the same level of production knowledge. The Chinese are doing it because they can throw money at it, but I doubt ThorCon can, and Kirk Sorensen has overhyped things in the past. But they have one idea that has merit…
Shipyards! In the 1970s, Westinghouse and Tenneco teamed up to form Offshore Power Systems, which was to build floating nuclear power plants, using a shipyard near Jacksonville. It would have been capable of building four plants per year, with two or more reactors in each. A extensive amount of studies, design work, and environmental impact assessments were done. They managed to get a license to build in 1982, but by then, the oil crisis slump and uncertainty after TMI had killed the demand. More info here.
Ultimately, cost arguments do still apply, even to Gen IV reactors. I think the companies with the best chance of success are the ones that have an assembly line with minimal site prep, using a relatively proven technology. My personal favorite is Ultra-Safe Nuclear Corporation, which uses a helium-cooled design. Their reactors are small (5-15 MWe), but that is a great spot for small Arctic towns, mining operations, military bases, etc. It is also capable of producing process heat. For something more conventional (Gen III+), I think GE-Hitachi is on the right track with their BWRX-300.
I think the most exciting things we can do right now involve making a power plant mobile. Build it as a ship, or a train car, or a shipping container, but get it moving.
We're going to have refugee problems with climate change in the near future. Anything that fits into the footprint of a shipping container is cheaply mobile, and you can get them as hospitals, farms, data centers, workshops, homes, and generally anything else you would need in a refugee situation. All we're missing here is a mobile power component. Once we've got it, we can deploy a mobile civilian support infrastructure. That could make a very big difference.
It sounds like a fine mission for the US Navy as well. When Texas or other US coastal areas have power problems or get creamed by a hurricane we can park a plant offshore. It seems to have a lot of use cases and it definitely beats the pants off of big cement cooling towers.
The worst thing about the LWR is not the reactor but the steam turbine.
People quit building coal burning power plants the same time they quit building LWRs and for the same reason.. That is, people figured out how to convert jet engines into gas turbine power plants that have more than 10x the power density of a steam turbine and thus have dramatically lower capital cost. Between the cost of the steam turbine and the associated heat exchangers (about as large as the reactor vessel) you’d have trouble competing with natural gas even if the reactor was free.
The most developed alternative is the liquid metal fast breeder reactor. Back in the day the assumption was an LMFBR was going to have a higher capital cost than a LWR but that they would work together with LWRs, perhaps one LMFBR would make fuel for 8 LWRs so the capital cost of the system as a whole wouldn’t increase so much
Because the LMFBR runs at higher temperatures people today think that one could be coupled to a Braxton cycle gas turbine, for instance, running on supercritical CO2, and for a system like that the turbine would fit in the employee break room of the turbine house of an LWR and the heat rejection system shrinks dramatically and it’s possible that such a reactor and heat handling system would be cheaper than an LWR.
Like the other gen4 reactors (all of which run at higher temperatures than the LWR) this is by no means a bird in the hand though.
I'm tired of listening to climate activists talk about nuclear power. They are the reason we stopped investing almost 40 years ago and they set us back decades in the fight against climate change.
Is nuclear power still a viable option to combat climate change? I don't know, but this particular group of people has already lost all credibility on the topic in my eyes.
I'm not taking a position here, but many of your points are about economic impacts and profitability. I suppose those are important in some respects, but I think it's important to realize that the reasons why they are not profitable are because they have higher costs than fossil fuel powered sources, which are artificially lower because it is sold without the full costs of their environmental impact.
While I'm sure that many, if not most people probably would prefer lower energy costs, the lack of sustainability is exactly why people want to move away from them. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
I get it, I'm just giving a different perspective. I'm not trying to argue for a specific point.
(paging @vektor)
I struggle to understand your reply. EndGameOmega is arguing for renewables before nuclear. The (before fossil fuels) can be taken to be implied these days, in reasonable circles.
How does sustainability factor into it, when the cheaper model that EndGameOmega is arguing for is (as I understand them) renewables? The argument is basically "fossils suck because they're unsustainable. Of the alternatives, nuclear and renewables, renewables are cheaper, so we can make that switch more easily by going for renewables.
I think the point is that you can’t exclusively rely on renewables. So whatever the other option is must be fossil fuels or nuclear. Nuclear, when done right, is cleaner.
Why can't you? Because storage is an insurmountable problem? Please... the article makes the case that baseload isn't what we need, it's flexibility. Which can come from batteries. Longer term storage for calm-and-dark times can be achieved by synthetic flammable gasses.
I don't agree with the statement of "can't", but we're not getting there so far. A few big generators power a country, seven mile boots it feels like
It's more expensive and too late, but at the current rate that might still be a win :(
Storage is manageable, but storage is only one component of solving the problem. Baseload is a component of flexibility. Why are synthetic flammable gasses preferable to nuclear?
Baseload is the exact opposite of flexibility. Baseload presumes (almost) continues operation. It's the minimum power that we need day and night.
With the introduction of renewables, it occurs more and more where the supply of (almost free) renewable energy exceeds that of the demand. These moments are not season bound and occur throughout the year in many countries. At that point, there is no baseload.
The call for flexibility is to adjust to the new market, in which the supply of energy is highly variable. There are many ways to look for flexibility, the aforementioned storage is one of them. But baseload isn't one of them. Nuclear power as we know it today, only works as baseload. Unless a new reactor design is developed which allows for (cheap) flexible power output, nuclear has no future in our energy system.
Anything that makes the energy grid more durable and stable is, by definition, flexibility. Renewables are extremely sensitive to climate change. Generation 4 nuclear reactors - not so much. I'm not arguing against renewables. I just completely disagree that we can transition to 100% renewables plus energy storage. I don't think that practical or possible. Research into fusion may render renewables pointless. Nuclear is also critical for space travel and space exploration.
Just to clarify - our argument seems to actually boil down to: burning synthetic gasses vs nuclear? I want to make sure I understand the division. I'm not against energy storage or renewables.
Because for the longer term storage, it's better if they're cheap to set up but expensive to use, rather than expensive to set up but cheap to use. Synthetic gasses are power-hungry to make, but can use existing infrastructure and storage, making them quite simple to set up. If you're building nuclear, but you're building them for those 2 weeks a year where renewables aren't up to the task, you're investing a lot of money for a very narrow gap in the market. Sure, you're also going to be running them the rest of the year as much as you can, but they're not going to be cost-competetive there, competing with renewables. They're only going to be cost competetive when renewables are out and short-term storage is depleted. And with the rest of the year not available to offset your investment, it's not looking great.
That doesn't mean you can't use nuclear power there. But IMO you need a justification that acknowledges that it's an economic loss.
Let me attempt to do so...
A summary of the article is: nuclear is more expensive than renewables, will take too long to come online, and is not useful in a renewable-based grid because it provides baseload (poorly) rather than flexibility.
It’s true that nuclear power is more expensive per GW than wind and solar. Some of the specific arguments in the paper, though, are focussed on private financing, rather than overall cost. Insurance costs and higher interest rates due to risk of default are not relevant to governments. If nuclear power provides a net benefit, but is too expensive for private companies, then the state should be funding it. (I note that the paper explicitly declines to discuss China, the largest state funder of nuclear power)
So - does it provide a net benefit, even though it’s currently more expensive? I would argue yes - because it provides power when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. When the grid is primarily fossil fuels, like the US is currently, then this is mostly irrelevant - you can always generate more power from gas, and do it quickly and flexibly. When the grid becomes 100% non-fossil-fuel, then this is no longer possible.
This additional power can come from energy storage (e.g. pumped hydro, batteries, stored hydrogen, generated methane). According to their reference 12 (Shirizadeh et al, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3592447), France would need something like 17 TWh of storage. Haywood et al. in the original paper make a somewhat irrelevant argument that battery storage has become about ten times cheaper over the last decade. Fine - but France’s biggest battery storage facility is 61 MWh - suitable for grid stabilization, but many orders of magnitude less than what is needed for a country’s energy storage. Shirizadeh et al. propose that generated methane could be used for the bulk of this energy storage - but since methane is a considerably worse greenhouse gas than CO2 is, I’d be very reluctant to have it as part of a net-zero power infrastructure. And storing and using hydrogen as an alternative is hard and untested at significant scale - it leaks very easily, and is also a worse greenhouse gas than CO2. There are various options here, but none of them are great.
If you have nuclear power available, then the need for energy storage is reduced. This isn’t just the baseload argument that the paper dismisses, although obviously if a higher proportion of electricity is created from a non-variable source, then you need less energy storage to compensate for variability. But also, the paper doesn’t even mention using nuclear power for load-following (i.e. ramping it up and down as necessary to compensate for other power sources) even though that’s very useful for reducing storage requirements, and France is already doing it. In fact, the paper’s reference 13 (Shirizadeh and Quirion, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/am/pii/S0140988320303443) explicitly talks about using nuclear power for load-following in section 2.1.7, and even concludes in section 3.1.1 that using nuclear power for 10-30% of the share of power production is optimal! (Oh, and regarding the “nuclear power is less reliable because of climate change” - I haven’t read the referenced article because it’s behind a paywall, but the abstract estimates an annual energy loss from this of between 0.8% and 1.4%, which doesn’t seem to fundamentally change anything)
So, if nuclear power should be part of the optimal mix of non-fossil-fuel power generation, and governments should be investing in it - what about the “it takes too long to build” argument from the paper? It’s true that I don’t have much faith that a new nuclear power station could be built in 10 years or less, and so wouldn’t help with reaching our 2030 carbon reduction goals. But, I’m not confident that we’ll reach those goals anyway, and I’d rather have more non-fossil fuels becoming available, so hopefully we can hit the 2040, 2050, etc. goals.
Pages 17-18. "Battery capacity ranges from 7.6 to more than 279 𝐺𝑊h𝑒 ... and methanation ranges from 7 to 33.5 𝑇𝑊h". The median is about 17 TWh. I don't know the details of their model, but it's not actually that huge if you compare it to the levels of natural gas storage that already exist and would need to be replaced with non-fossil-fuel alternatives.
I'm not saying that large-scale energy storage is impossible, or that we won't have to do it. I am saying that it's hard, and the technologies involved are currently either too small scale (batteries, fun things like raising and dropping concrete blocks or compressed air), limited in available sites (hydro storage), have associated greenhouse gas risks (methanation), or are promising but scaling them up will be hard (hydrogen, and I don't know much about synthetic propane but it also seems to be mostly experimental at the moment). We need to do all of those things; as well as demand shaping and better interconnects; but none of it is a straightforward "we can easily build lots more of these using existing known technology". I think it's a false dichotomy to pit "cheap easy energy storage" (or "cheap renewables ignoring storage") against "expensive tricky nuclear power" - they're both hard!
I'm afraid the paper you've linked is too expensive for me... I do recall reading about a hydrogen storage facility in Utah (https://www.powermag.com/massive-utah-hydrogen-storage-project-garners-finalized-504m-doe-loan-guarantee/) which will be 300 GWh once it's in operation, and will be the biggest yet. That's great - but it doesn't exist yet, we'll need lots more like that, and there are only so many salt mines available.
I think we broadly agree on this. I am not arguing that nuclear can solve all our problems, or that it's generally better or cheaper than renewables. I am arguing against the "new nuclear is a costly and dangerous distraction" argument put forward in the linked paper. I think that some percentage of nuclear power is worthwhile to reduce the need for energy storage. In some areas, that doesn't require any new nuclear power plants, since there are sufficient modern plants already in existence; in some, it will.
I'm not the one you're replying to here in this comment, and I'm not invested enough to have an answer for every point you make, but I would like to discuss a few:
Does this only consider making a new plant from scratch? I've heard that the costs can be significantly reduced by retrofitting existing fossil fuel plants, because nuclear is just how to make heat, and the existing coal etc plants already have the steam turbine stuff in place. It's definitely very expensive to set up from nothing, but I wonder if those costs could dramatically reduce if you have a structure that already has connection to the grid, already has access to water, already has the steam generation and turbine machinery needed to generate the electricity.
I'd like to know more about this, as everything I've seen recently from my favourite internet science communicators says otherwise. I believed nuclear waste to be a solved issue as of some decades ago. Can you point me to a source that says it's not, or otherwise help me define what "solved" looks like so I can understand how far away from a solution we currently are?
Does this imply that nuclear plants are fine for larger countries, but not okay for smaller countries? I'm not sure what to make of this. I'm getting the impression your argument here is conditional on location, e.g. "building nuclear plants is fine in USA but not fine in Iraq" -- but I feel like I might be misrepresenting your point here.
In general, I think I have the same vaguely held opinions as the person you replied to, but I'd love to be more informed so that I can change my mind, or have better defences for the opinions I hold.
The issue of nuclear waste is, I believe, heavily dependent on the country you're looking at. The US and Finland for example have near-uninhabitable wastes anyway, with stable geological formations that should contain the material until it is no longer meaningfully dangerous, and no one close enough to NIMBY you. Some other countries don't have that luxury, and I haven't heard that the US is taking other countries' nuclear waste. One problem of finding a site is that because you basically have to extrapolate quite far into the future, the size of the error bars on the statement "should contain the material" is either unacceptably large or functionally nonexistant, depending on who you ask. There's also the distinction of "do we know of a site" and "are we using such a site". If the former is acceptable for you to consider the problem solved, then there's a potential reason why someone else would say that it isn't solved yet.
The problem with proliferation is, vaguely, that depending on the exact reactor type it's either trivial or difficult-but-doable to extract weapons grade material. The "official" nuclear weapon states were supposed to help everyone else peacefully stand up nuclear power plants and provide them fuel, while ensuring these clients could not use those reactors to produce weapons. That didn't really happen, but the risk remains that if you build a reactor in another country, they could use that to create a nuclear weapon. Basically, if you wouldn't trust a country with a nuke, you probably shouldn't trust them with a NPP either. Though there are some ways you can ensure you don't give them a nuke. E.g. you can give them the fuel for a plant, but monitor the spent fuel to ensure no plutonium is extracted.
A lot of literature on renewables talks about grid-scale storage as if it was a bird in the hand. It’s like the literature where people in the 1950s thought that liquid metal fast breeders would produce electricity “too cheap to meter”. In 10 or 20 years storage might be a reality (and solar+storage might really be cheap enough to stamp out everything else) but right now it is on the verge of reality.
For that matter I’ve seen a lot of renewable literature that’s gone off the deep end in terms of precision without accuracy. For instance I’ve seen papers that quote low prices for solar + storage although they don’t take into account geography: the biggest solar farm until very recently is in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhadla_Solar_Park
which is in a desert in India that is close to the equator and one of the brightest spots on Earth. There’s no way that the economics are going to be the same in a place like Germany or Quebec.
For that matter solar and wind are major land uses that will run into opposition because of effects on wildlife. FOE is always producing reports about the local effects of the heat rejection system at Diablo Canyon on sea life which are real but you’d better believe that if you put out square miles of solar panels that will have a big effect on wildlife too. In many places renewable energy is “stranded” because of a lack of transmission lines and building more seems to run into the same kind of delays that nuclear power plants do.
Lol. I couldn't get past "fairly decent academic journal"
As the old chinese proverb says: "The best time to build a nuclear power plant was 40 years ago. The second best time is now."
I think the economics of it right now are problematic for sure, but it's also worth mentioning that economics aren't set in stone. It's possible to make things less expensive, especially if there is renewed interest in the subject.
What makes you think these are at all the same people? If there's no justification there except your hunch that these are all three (pro-renewables, climate activists, anti-nuclear) green eco people and therefore a homogeneous bloc, then your argument is close to "well, if they're arguing for renewables, then I won't listen to them. I wonder why no one talks to me about renewables..."
Most people, myself included, do not have the time to evaluate every single argument on its own merits. Eventually, patterns emerge, and we begin to rely on those to make quicker assessments. It's how I know when a Republican politician starts to say something about gay or trans communities, I can safely disregard it as horseshit without actually having to engage with it. They've lost credibility in that field and they will have to work overtime if they ever want it back.
I totally agree. It also looks like a lot of people that are anti-nuclear have about the same level of knowledge about renewables. Solar panels and wind turbines don't work when it's cloudy and the wind doesn't blow. This gap needs to be filled in, and if it's not nuclear it will be coal plants.
Solar does work when it's cloudy. Not to counter your whole point but they are far more efficient today. They take less power, which facilitates the need for batteries, etc, to make up for changing conditions. However the needed accessories also mean more environmental impact.
Nuclear power plants aren't independent of environmental factors either. French reactors already had to shut down during heat waves because the rivers where they get their cooling water from dried up and/or were already too hot. Once the glaciers in the European Alps are gone, many rivers will regularly dry up completely as we've already seen. I assume other countries (will) face similar situations. This issue will only get worse with climate change, not better.
There will be weeks and months where nuclear power can't be used, and we will still have nights (no solar) and regions with no wind. So, regardless of our investments in new nuclear power plants, we have to figure out how to store energy and distribute it over long distances. This will cost a lot in research, development and new infrastructure. If we invest that money in more nuclear reactors, it will probably help sometimes, but it won't solve the issue of intermittent local power generation.
The French reactors shutting down has a lot to do with the environmental regulations for thermal pollution. Most units there do not have cooling towers, and so their effluent significantly heats up the water. There are limits on how much they can do so, and in hotter weather, this constrains them to such a degree that it is necessary to shut down the reactor. In the 1980s, when the production reactors at Savannah River (where I work) were running, they had similar issues, with limits on power levels during the summer. Even in winter, they heated up the water so much, it was messing with the local alligators’ reproductive cycles.
Many modern reactor designs do not rely on water for cooling. You can use gasses, molten metals, and molten salts. Generation 4 reactors require more investment but do address the shortfalls of existing reactors.
The primary cooling cycle is not what we're talking about. You need somewhere to dump the low grade waste heat that the condenser of the secondary cooling cycle produces. That's usually only achievable by dumping it into a body of water or evaporating a lot of water.
Molten salt reactors do not necessarily need to dump heat into a body of water. There are concepts that include atmospheric radiation with recapture of more electricity resulting from this.
I’ll add there are more alternatives available than just nuclear, solar, air, and coal. Even on the fossil fuel front, there are multiple alternatives to coal. And even “coal” is not a monolithic thing, different sources and processes produce different outcomes.
It’s also I think disingenuous to dismiss the reasonable concerns of those who resist nuclear. Nuclear material is highly problematic in the wrong circumstances, and two recent disasters-fukushima and palestine, oh- demonstrate those circumstances are not terribly far fetched even for tech savvy “advanced” states/cultures.
The real issue has always been over consumption. I think most of us on tildes are quite alarmed about the still totally not abating trend of ever larger cars driven on bigger streets to bigger garages in bigger houses on bigger lots in bigger subdivisions further away from offices/markets/cafes housing ever bigger heaps of useless stuff. Let’s focus our energy on this trend first, maybe?
The article suggests hydrogen storage for those downtimes, which, while great, would mean we'd have to generate ~2x surplus during uptimes. It's certainly possible to engineer around, but it raises energy requirements quite a bit.
The article does make a case for why nuclear might not be suitable for filling in.
Luke Haywood, Marion Leroutier, Robert Pietzcker
There has been a strong push to promote increased investments in new nuclear power as a strategy to decarbonize economies, especially in the European Union (EU) and the United States (US). The evidence base for these initiatives is poor. Investments in new nuclear power plants are bad for the climate due to high costs and long construction times
Nuclear energy is expensive
Construction cost
Capital cost
Optimism regarding costs
Nuclear power is not cost-competitive with renewables
Baseload
Flexibility
Taking into account wider economic impacts does not favor nuclear
Nuclear waste
Uranium
Armed conflict
Building new nuclear takes time we do not have
Time frame appears optimistic
In solving the climate crisis, new nuclear is a costly and dangerous distraction
Relying on nuclear new-builds to achieve the EU climate targets is virtually impossible
Activists/activism is/are like accelerators/gas pedals. Activism should be temporary (i.e. applied with sense and when necessary) with stable reasoning and experience as the bedrock. Individuals who can easily tunnelize their worldview should be discouraged to involve themselves in activism till they learn how to slow down or use brakes metaphorically speaking. Without which they are most likely to trash the car basing themselves on trends leaving it irrevocably damaged.
Science is dull, bland and twisted. Its difficult to grasp the sense of what it tells us. It may take months/years to perform an experiment but it may even take more to understand what the results are conveying. It takes reasoning and experience to understand and distill wisdom. It takes time. It takes patience.
I think what the authors are suggesting in this article is that it is better to use what we have established than what we haven't established as much. Given our targets/objectives which we need to achieve within a time frame, methods of energy generation and supply which we already know about with fewer workable and understood assumptions (which could be manageably course corrected) are better than those which we need to study more since setting up a framework with these means inclusion of many unstudied/unknown assumptions which could result in consequences which may be potentially devastating.
Here's some stable reasoning for you. Using just USA plants.
Alta, third largest onshore wind in the world, at 1.5GW capacity....produced about 3366 GWh of power in 2018.
In the realm of top producers, that puts it pretty firmly in the range of a small coal power plant like Flint Creek.
Now go here, and sort by annual generation. Scroll all the way down until you find Alta. Now total up the coal power that needs replaced in between.
The largest coal plant in that list alone, has an annual generation of 18,325 GWh. So you need 6 more of the largest on and offshore wind projects in the world to replace the capacity of that single plant. I'll leave it as an excersize for the reader to total the rest.
All those nuclear plants will eventually need to be decomissioned as well. Building their replacements as we go is gonna be a lot less painful long term.
I'm not a big fan of this style of argument. It's reductive and basically eliminates all nuance from the equation. How much would it cost? Dunno. How long would it take? Dunno. I can flip this around and give a quick ballpark estimate of how many nuclear power plants you'd need. The result is basically a doomer outlook of "it's literally impossible to fix the problem we're in", which is neither helpful nor true.
Now, just for completeness, here's the flipside argument: Nuclear plants are expensive, and you're going to need a lot of them. The US currently produces roughly 4222TWh anuallly from fossil sources (data from here, scavenged together). Dividing that number by the nameplate capacity of Vogtle 3&4, you'd arrive at the staggering number of 131 times. You'd need to build 262 Vogtle reactors, to the tune of $4.5 trillion. Sounds just as impossible as what you described? Can't blame you. Before you start negotiating: I can already hear that there'll be economies of scale of building 260 identical reactors. Let's not go there, because we didn't go into similar arguments in favor of renewables either. Fair's fair, ok?
Ok, now that we're entirely convinced that nothing can be done, maybe we should take a step back and stop with silly arguments that try to solve the problem in one fell swoop. These arguments are not helpful in figuring out what we should do.
My arguement is simple: Don't be dismissive of new nuclear or renewables. Turns out we can build both, and they're rarely competing for the same sites. And we should building out wind, solar, geothermal, and nuclear as fast as we reasonably can to do exactly that: Shut coal out.
I have just as many nutjobs arguing against new nuclear as I see fighting against offshore wind and I hate both camps.
But they are competing for the same money! If you've got $100 billion to decarbonize your grid, you can either build ~3 nuclear power plants or i-don't-even-know-how-many wind turbines. The OP article makes the evidenced and reasoned case that you're going to get more bang for your buck using renewables, thus displacing more coal using the same amount of resources. Unless your resources are endless, I think that's a good argument for which energy source should take precedence.
Now, if that argument ever turns around, and we run into a situation where the projected most economical solution for a projected power grid issue in $NPP_construction_time$ years is a NPP, then build the damn thing. Currently, that doesn't seem the case, and the arguments that lead to that conclusion get quite far into the weeds - see e.g. the OP article for what's arguably just a surface level look.
About $3.4B to build a 1.5 GW offshore wind farm Hornsea One)
About $20B to build a comparably rated nuclear plant. What that 5x the cost gets you is about 4x the amount of electricity. That's not that far off.
Because those are rated peak capacities. And a nuclear system can run near peak, indefinitely. While a wind system might get you peak capacity a fraction of the time.
The reality is spend money on both so you can cover each other's weaknesses.
the cost of nuclear plants would go down more than solar/wind would when you bring economics of scale, Also not an either/or situation, it's a do both situation. We should keep building solar, wind, and nuclear power generating facilities.
For the record, to fill the entire power generating void with atla like plants would cost 1.8trillon. but takes up 32000 acres compared to the 3200 of the vogtle site. We would require an area 4 times the size of Rhode island (or slightly more than Connecticut in wind mill farms to out put enough power.
So again, this requires solar, wind and nuclear to fill in the fossil fuel void. It's going to be dependent on the area for which one is most viable.
Quick clarification, because people are often quite worried about the land use of wind power: The actual land lost is very minimal. The reason wind turbines are built spread out is to capture more energy, but the ground in between is not lost. Sure, you maybe don't want to build housing there, but there's nothing stopping you from using the land for forestry or agriculture. The actual land lost is minimal, and liable to decrease as turbines get bigger.
For example, here you see the largest german on-shore wind power plant - I don't see giant swathes of land completely lost. I see the footprint of the masts with enough space to park a big vehicle next to.
From an agricultural or industrial land standpoint yeah. But from a habitat destruction standpoint it’s still problematic. I imagine there’s a decent amount of road infra you need to continue servicing those windmills as well.
Depends on how extensive the road infrastructure is to begin with. In the link above you can see that the power plants are mostly quite close to existing roads. (To be clear, the fragmented plots is just how "old-growth" farmland looks here, that's not the wind plant's doing)
And there's no doubt in my mind that basically any country has enough space to put enough wind turbines. Even if you rule out ecologically valuable undeveloped land; and if you rule out built-up areas. Most of Germany e.g. is farmland, where road access is already given. Some more heavily used forests also have roads available. The US has vast swathes of deserts or farmlands that can be used for almost-free.
Great, now I'm imagining a wind turbine with a ring adapter on ground level to fit a center-pivot irrigation system. Probably smarter to put the wind turbines in between the circles, but now that idea is stuck in my head.
$4.5 trillion is about a year’s worth of the U.S. federal budget. Spread out the construction costs over 10-20 years, and that does start to look doable cost-wise.
These arguments make me think it's not actually about the cost, just about the will.
It absolutely is. It's a big effort, but many countries already have significant renewable fractions, meaning it isn't exactly impossible to make a dent.
Absolutely. Personally, I'm quite firmly in camp renewables for many of the positions raised in the article. People who aren't terribly involved in the conversation and who just think NPPs are a neat, compact way of solving all our problems will often strawman that position as "afraid of chernobyl? Don't you know nuclear waste isn't barrels of green goop?", and that's kind of frustrating. Now, I'm not an expert on power grids, NPPs or renewables in a professional sense, but it's near the top of the list of other topics I keep informed on, so I'm a bit beyond the point of thinking of nuclear waste as green goo. Sadly the conversation in mainstream platforms is quite removed from that in the better-informed circles I also monitor. It's why I usually don't engage much here in these topics.
It can be frustrating. I quite like the idea of small form reactors to keep local grids going, but there's so many moving parts socially to those.
Renewables are kicking ass, I just wonder how somewhere like the UK can flex for anything though?
We're going to need to start looking at global grids if we need true flexibility surely?
The UK is pretty windy, isn't it? And I'd be surprised if they didn't have a few depleted natural gas fields that would make for good storage sites. That's a good starting point.
I'm not sure to what degree it's feasible, but I'm kinda enamored with the idea of running lots of economies on a renewables + short-term batteries + (synthetic methane on residual natural gas infrastructure for longer-term storage). That part is well supported and definitely feasible. The pert that springs from my fantasy is trading synthetic gas to balance supply and demand globally. Britain used most of their stored gas and are looking at a shortage? Call the swedes, I hear their wind power plants have been generating lots of excess electricity this year. Send some over by pipeline or by ship, and it's sorted. That kinda thing. Sending electricity directly is appealing for its conceptual simplicity (same as nuclear btw) but I'm not sure it's necessarily the best tool for the job. I fear transmission losses are going to make that very difficult at the distances you'd need to do it, to substantially decorrelate the weather-bound producers within a grid.
Aaaand you run into all of these international relations issues that we're trying to get out of; like the country on the other end of the wire being a terrorist state involved in an illegal annexation of a neighboring country. Or the neo-colonialism that'd be entailed by solarizing the sahara. Best to keep flexible here, either by massively interconnecting the world (i.e. instead of a few long-distance connections, you'd build up an entire network, so you can always buy from someone else) but that's a massive infrastructure effort; or by sticking to more flexible forms of trade, like ship-based trade of gasses. Since that doesn't scale to the size of national energy consumption too well, each country should still strive to at least mostly fill its own energy requirements using domestic renewable generation.
Our seas certainly are! We're just getting shot of some legislation that stops wind farms on-land as well. So hopefully we'll see more of them.
If only we didn't have political stupidity in the way of that!
The reality is, our political figures at the moment see all these problems and they're desperately trying to figure it out, and getting most of it wrong. Where most nations put a cap on their energy firms gouging people... the UK decided to give them a tax break instead. Yay.
That's where we run into the issue. I couldn't imagine China or Russia ever playing ball on non-domestic support where it doesn't benefit them and only them. Let alone any nation that's been shagged over hard in the past 3-400 years by the West.
It's tough. But I can only see nuclear (Small form) as a way to ease those localise, domestic production issues IF combined with renewables. I'd love a global system, but we're not collectively grown-up enough for that.
I mean, if you've got enough money to fix the problem using nuclear, then you probably also have enough money to fix the problem using renewables+storage. I'm not going to repeat the entire argument of the article, but renewables have the benefit of being much easier to get going on, they go online faster, they're cheaper. Then once you start hitting semi-regular oversaturation from renewables, which for most countries is still a ways away, then's when you first need serious amounts of storage.
And even if you take an extra decade then to figure out how to store power effectively... I think it's safe to assume you can always buy fuels on the global markets. If humanity has any sense, most of that will be carbon neutral in 20 years.
TBH I'm unsure of how to feel about SMRs. I think the idea of modularization is a step in the right direction of making NPPs cost competetive, but I also think that by the time SMRs come online, the gap will have widened even more and I don't think SMRs will achieve such great savings. They also multiply many of the operations-related problems and costs of NPPs. The centralization of conventional NPPs has its own economies of scale. More generally, I'm skeptical of the potential of any future technology to contribute meaningfully to the solution of the climate crisis. If we can't build it now, we probably can't afford to wait for it. That doesn't mean I don't want these technologies researched: Some address other problems (growing energy need once the climate crisis is solved; nuclear waste incineration), while others (e.g. sodium based battery chemistries) promise to be online in time to help, and present a cheaper and more scalable alternative to current technologies. But I think it's absolutely unconscionable to have your entire current contribution to the climate crisis be "well, we're researching a wunderwaffe technology that will surely turn the tide
whenif it comes online". (To be clear, I'm not accusing you of that.) These technologies need to stay in the territory of "nice to have" and the actual deployment of production-ready solutions needs to be a solid enough foundation already. If the money says that in your current situation, that solution is a NPP, then go ahead.Aye. Seems like these decisions always come down to capital and cash, and that feels so infuriating given that it goes beyond those things as well right?
Good chat dude, you've given me a fair bit to research and think about!
I'm not sure how to parse the "capital and cash" comment. Is it that you find this view of the problem reductive?
I mean, capital and cash are ultimately just abstractions of our limited resources - limited raw materials, limited R&D, limited labor, limited production infrastructure. And within those limits, I and the article would argue that we'd get farther by using renewables. That doesn't imply a total divestment of nuclear, not by a long shot. Lots of human capital is specialized in that sector, and it's wasteful to tell a nuclear engineer to start working on wind power projects. Regardless, sticker price is a good approximation of how much of it we could make, resulting market flexibilities notwithstanding. It also ignores more strategic concerns: Maybe you want access to nuclear weapons; energy autonomy; or export energy; or maybe you want to keep key industries alive even if they aren't cost competetive now.
So, if your comment is coming from a PoV of criticising capitalism and the way we do business these days, I think the problem goes beyond that: How we allocate limited resources is not to blame for our resources being limited, and the advantage of renewables over nuclear or the other way around does not care about your political ideology. If on the other hand your frustration is one of "come on, it's just money, and not even thaaaat much, there's billions of lives at stake", then I absolutely agree; every government needs to start shelling out stupid amounts of money and invest it in the projects that reduce fossil fuel usage the most. And I have precious little patience for politicians or voters who blocked relevant investments over the last 20 years. Germany could be running on fully electrified luxury gay renewable communism by now, if not for Merkel.
Too abstracted to be meaningful anymore.
Did that $1B GDP come from the making of a giant movie that contributed bupkis to industrial output and infrastructure?
Or did it come from mining and manufacturing?
A digitized IP-based economy is a poor metric for available societal resources.
I wouldn't assume that's even renewable - ignoring the synthesis problem, methane itself is a potent greenhouse gas and fugitive emissions are common on natural gas infrastructure. Given that methane has a GWP of 81, a more eco-friendly option would be e.g. synthetic propane (which has a GWP of 0.072, i.e. it's ~14x less bad per gram than CO2, so if it leaks it basically doesn't matter) although I don't know if propane would be compatible with residual natural gas infrastructure (apparently: not without modifications, possibly yes with modifications).
I agree that's a potential problem. Though I don't see us keeping the natural gas infrastructure in it's entire breadth with it's millions of domestic connections. The only consumers will be power plants and industrial customers. I'm not sure whether that would functionally eliminate the leakage problem, but it would certainly reduce the scale.
The leakage problem is a matter of costs - if methane is 80x as bad as CO2 (methane breaks down faster, so that's not entirely true, but it's still an order of magnitude worse), then even 1% of the methane leaking will nearly double emissions. But the actual monetary cost is 1% higher fuel costs, and methane isn't remotely expensive enough for that to matter. If methane was expensive then it wouldn't be used for heating in the first place, so the entire setup was built from the ground up to not care whether a little methane is leaked.
AIUI the #1 source of methane leakage is pipes - making them completely airtight gets really expensive really fast, and basically everything using methane will have a ton of piping.
In the first quote "...cheapest technology that can be deployed fastest"
That seems like a short-term and not really thought-out solution. Who buys the cheapest thing if they want long-term and dependable/reliable solution?
I don't see how it should be either/or even with costs involved.
It's expensive, so what? There's a case to be made that we made our bed and it's going to cost us. All hands on deck.
I'm also missing how renewables are space hogs, something severely limited in small Netherlands, and how rare earth minerals required for all these photovoltaic systems and windmills will sustain us long term.
This article/study doesn't convince me, but I'll be the first to admit that I'm no expert on the subject. I could be wrong in my assertions but I do feel both topics are an omission I'm not comfortable with.
Everybody is talking about additional power generation, but why not work on decreasing our electricity usage as well? There is so much energy that goes to waste such as having unnecessary lights on at night, or building megacities in the middle of the desert where air conditioning has to be running 24/7, etc.
I think the counter-argument is worth bringing up: Why not build out enough nuclear power infrastructure that electricity itself becomes so near-zero in cost that it is essentially free outside of industrial-scale use cases? It beats fighting human nature and trying to get everyone to use less. If we're smarter about this we can use more instead, an unbelievable amount more in fact, and with near-zero damage to the climate in the process. In fact there's a lot of carbon sequestration technology out there that isn't viable because it takes too much power to run - but with a nuclear power plant attached to everything that needs one, the words 'not enough power' stop being part of our vocabulary. We can vacuum that carbon right up. I'd rather go that route since trying to convince people to change basic human behaviors is an enterprise with a... dubious track record of success. When you start burning the rocks for power, you stop having power capacity problems.
Did you read the article? Even a very surface-level glance suggests that:
and you think we should build so much as to make power basically free? That is not how that works.
I did, up until I realized the economic foundation of their argument is divorced from reality. Nothing in that paper about costs is relevant to the technology I am talking about, and provided links to.
Nuclear power is not about pressurized water reactors anymore. It's like discussing transportation and basing your entire argument about transportation costs on nothing but data about semi trucks, when there's a galaxy of other technologies and designs at play like ships, planes, cars, trains, and bicycles. The author is being intentionally blind to the fourth generation options, which imo are the only options worth having a conversation about. We already know that the old-school plants aren't viable, but the arguments about them (which the article covers in depth and accurately) are not the whole story.
This is the way the green anti-nuclear camp attacks fourth generation technology. They know they haven't got a leg to stand on once gen4 is in the equation, and that's why there are literally hundreds of articles that paint gen4 with the same stigmas as gen3. It's a disingenuous argument based on lies of omission.
Apologies then, I didn't connect this comment to the comment somewhere else in the thread about Gen4 options. Without that context, I think you can understand how your comment seems quite divorced from the OP. Again, apologies.
As for Gen4 reactors themselves and how they fit in the equation, I'm tempted to say a lot of things I don't really want to spend the time to back up, at least not tonight, so I'll take a step back there. Maybe another day.
As for phrases like "intentionally blind" and "disingenuous", I'd caution against that kind of thinking for (imo) obvious reasons, unless you are very convinced that that's what's going on.
Well, I can't be sure, but it seems like every time I have this conversation online, it's usually because there's an article that says, "Nuclear power is so bad we should never touch it" or something along those lines - exactly as this article does. This is a well presented article with a lot of research - too much, methinks, for the authors to be ignorant of generation four's history or galaxy of possibilities. If the authors knew about that, why was it not included in their article? Simple - it invalidates their premise.
That argument is true for gen3. It is provably and factually not true for gen4. Using pressurized water in a nuclear plant is frankly batshit crazy and I'm amazed it became the 'standard' when the same man who invented that technology said 'oh by the way, here's a far better way to do it without all the risks.' The same man who created pressurized water reactors created molten salt reactors to replace them. We didn't listen to him.
The usual argument of gen4 is 'this is unproven technology that's never been done before and it'll cost a lot of R&D.' That chestnut is also more complicated than it looks. We did it in a garage in the 1960s, without computers or modern material science. That exact same model works just fine today, no further R&D required. Sure, there are some really crazy and forward thinking reactor designs out there for various forms of gen4 that actually will require that R&D money, but we do not need to have those designs to get started. They'll come from the profits of the basic design which is already proven.
Also, I've heard Kirk Sorenson (a subject matter expert on thorium molten salt) say that a billion dollars in funding would be overkill for his advanced molten salt reactor designs, and he's chasing a more advanced version than most. That means these insurmountable research costs are in fact less than the cost of a traditional nuclear power plant, and therefore even the R&D argument is not a very good one.
Wait for nukeman to chime in, you can take his word for it not mine, it's his field and I'm just someone who follows nuclear energy as a hobby.
I agree, and I'm a little disappointed by the responses. It's not about shifting use based on availability, it's about lowering the overall consumption.
The fact of the matter is that there is no carbon-neutral energy sources. Renewable energy sources are much better, but they don't come without cost; solar panels need rare minerals, turbines are made of fiberglass composites that cannot be recycled, and so on. Entropy cannot be reversed.
Right now I'm sitting in an office with floor-to-ceiling windows that has two air conditioner units blasting the entire day and several rows of fluorescent lights on even though the sun is out. And it's far from the only business that does it. Some people are still lighting their houses with incandescent lightbulbs because they are unhappy with the 'character' of LED lights. My next door neighbors have pools and spas with heaters and pumps that consume hundreds or thousands of kilowatt hours every week - some of them use so much power that they use gas heating instead of electric which is cheaper for them but worse for the environment. When I leave this office, it will be in a car, but I'll be taking roads that hundreds of other cars will also be using at the exact same time.
There are so many ways to save energy but there is so little incentive to reduce it that it's practically nothing. Electricity costs, what, anywhere between, what, 3 and 10 kWh per dollar? So why not keep the air conditioner a few degrees lower than necessary, or keep the lights on when nobody's there, or use the TV as a noise generator, or run the washer and dryer for a single outfit. Why not buy this fast fashion top that took 5 kWh to produce, 100kWh to ship, and another hundred to get the raw materials that took another hundred to process. It doesn't matter that it'll start falling apart in just a few weeks, but will never biodegrade and will be another piece of trash in the landfill.
To some extent we are. But broadly, it's not happening more because its market solution is to increase the cost of electricity, which is a political nonstarter, and its non-market solution is for government to tell businesses to not do stuff, which is politically hard and ideologically frowned upon - the ideology says that if the new behaviour was to businesses' benefit then they'd already be doing it.
It's a non-starter. We have growing needs for energy, with growing industrial needs and a warming planet where many places are increasingly lethal without air conditioning (wet bulb temperatures beyond human tolerance). One clear upcoming concern is the gradual adoption of electric vehicles. A single car's battery can power a typical household for a weekend, and that will be recharged multiple times per week.
Meanwhile, the largest wind and solar plants are not even taking on average coal plants in terms of annual output.
That is an important conversation, but as long as we're talking solely about reducing, it's an orthogonal discussion IMO. It's also by itself entirely insufficient. Once you start talking about demand-side flexibility, it's no longer entirely orthogonal: If you turn off energy-hungry industries in times of peak prices (which usually means low renewable generation), you're reducing the need to have expensive storage. There's a lot that can be done here that is conceptually quite complex once you go beyond large industrial consumers. The logistical hassle in making sure people turn on their washing machines and dish washers when the power grid would most prefer it is... well, formidable. Though there's electricity consumers that require less human intervention and could feasibly be controlled to adapt to price/supply fluctuations by electronics alone - such as ACs or electric car chargers.
It's a broad topic, to be sure, and it certainly is important. It doesn't get the public attention it needs, considering it's the part where the public needs to get involved. Meanwhile, how the sausage (electricity) is made can be mostly left to experts without the public being able to contribute meaningfully to that conversation (as long as the experts don't end up burning fossils because some MBA did the wrong kind of math).
I think this second statement is based on outdated assumptions, or rather, assumptions. Nuclear plants don't usually ramp fast because they're usually not supposed to ramp fast, and they aren't supposed to ramp fast in part because they don't ramp fast.
As an analogy, think of car engines. Some engines have high horsepower but low torque. That's good when you are up to speed and running fast. But you need lots of torque if you want to be Dominic Torreto and hault a bank vault through the streets with your suped up Dodge Charger. Nuclear plants are designed to run efficiently, and if the standard way they are going to be used is to run at a constant speed, then you don't design it to ramp fast, that'd be more expensive for no reason. But if you wanted to build reactors like that you could, and I think they do in places like France where there is a big enough share of nuclear power for it to make sense to have it act as demand response. Doing that incurs a penalty in down time, which is why its typically not desirable to do. As the article points out, peaker plants that turn on only during high demand generally work better when you have higher fuel costs and lower capital costs. But I want to talk about something else first.
I want to focus more on this for a second. This argument comes up sometimes, often in the form of "baseload is outdated, replaced by a need for flexibility". I think how its phrased in this article is important though, flexibility rather than baseload production is required to balance an electricity system based on renewables. Its a presupposed assumption that renewables should be maximzed first and then we decide how to deal with the leftovers. I think this is a better definition because it avoids saying "baseload is outdated", which is kind of misleading.
If you look at the electricity demand in the US on Sept. 2nd as an example, it swings from around 400,000 to 600,000 megawatt-hours per hour. So it looks like a raised cosine with a DC value of 500000 with an oscillation spanning 200000. You also see that there is a bit of a lag between when solar power ramps up and peaks and when demand ramps up and peaks.
So naively you might think that we should have some baseload power of about 400000 MW with 200000 MW of solar and some type of short term storage or demand response to shift that production peak over a couple hours to get generation to track as closely as possible with demand, and then fill in the gaps with a bit more storage. Theres also the matter of seasonal variation in demand requirements that seems to vary by something like 25% between summer and winter, so there is some capacity that needs to come on for part of the year.
If we assume that the trend of renewables pricing to keep falling we might as well just assume its negligible pricing, so the cost of electricity is dominated by the cost of storage, during whatever hours storage is needed. Looking at solar just because it is more consistent in its patterns, you get a decent amount of light from like 8 AM to 8 PM or so. If you overbuild so that you are getting enough power for the whole day through that time, then about 12 hours of the day your price is more or less set by the LCOE of solar and about 12 hours a day where prices are set by LCOS of your energy storage. Depending on wind power or hydro or geothermal or whatever else is used some percentage of that 12 hours of LCOS is actually not going to need storage, so there will be some factor from 0-1 capturing what percentage of time demand can be met without needing to draw on storage. Depending on your assumptions of how the grid is modelled and how you can move energy around that factor will change.
This writer seems to be in favor of a combination of demand response and batteries, from this quote:
So LCOS is something like $132/kWh, which is much better than 10 years ago, but is still more than the effectively zero we are considering for solar. And it's bigger than the $0.05/kWh price of renewables today. If we assume that this decline holds steady then we could maybe guess that in another 10 years LCOS will drop another factor of 10 to $1.32/kWh, and in another 10 years after that to ranges more in the cents/kWh range that makes renewables currently attractive. So maybe in 20 years this all works out. I don't know if that's a safe assumption, that doesn't consider the scaling of transmission or the different distribution of sources and how that changes the modelling of grid stability.
The idea of using demand response to change the shape of the demand curve might make it close and closer to matching the patterns of renewable generation, which introduces a pretty complicated parameter space to search through. I guess a statistician could maybe figure out that for a given LCOS and assuming a negiligble cost of direct renewables that whenever the variance throughout the day is greater than 20% of the average then the proportion of demand which needs to be met with storage is low enough that the higher cost of LCOS is countered by the low utilization, or something like that.
One thing I object to is a part in the middle where it talks about how nuclear is unsuited to the roll of a peaker plant because its mostly capital costs like paying off the interest, and for a peaker that's only online half the time you want something with high variable costs and not high fixed costs. Which is true and makes sense, but batteries are also a lot of fixed capital costs that you need to pay off. What's really good for peaking plants is natural gas, but we don't want to be using natural gas so the idea of wanting to choose an energy distribution that maximizes flexibility instead of baseload doesn't make much sense to me. Like, you can do it with lots of different energy sources, but if you say we should just be picking whatever is best for flexibility as a a guiding principle then you end up with fossil fuels, when we all agree that not having fossil fuels should be the top concern.
Like, lets say right now LCOS is $100/kwh and solar is $0/kwh and natural gas with CCS is like $50/kwh. So for 12 hours in the day solar has you covered, and for the the other times you either pay $100/kwh or $50/kwh depending on if you are using solar+storage or natural gas. The apparent economic choice is natural gas. On the whole its probably cheaper than if you had $50/kwh throughout the whole day, so you can say that solar+storage is the most economic when you are doing certain analysis, but solar+storage is kind of nebulous in what exactly that proportion is between the two. Are you storing 100% of the energy solar collects? In which case you are paying $0/kWh on energy and $100/kWh on storage for every kWh you produce? Or are you doing 70% at 0 and 30% stored at $100 for an average of $30/kWh?
This is a dynamic that I don't feel is appropriately captured in LCOE or LCOS analysis alone. Price is set by the last kw in a block. If you are trying to balance the grid on 15 minute blocks and you get like 80% of that from very cheap renewables and 20% from backup fossil fuels, the price is set by that fossil fuel, so renewables gets to pocket the difference, which makes it profitable, and that profit can be passed on to lower costs elsewhere, but what if everyone is selling low cost solar and there is no high price setter?
I think this is all very interesting to think about, while also still being insufficient to cover all the important considerations, but also completely irrelevant.
This is an argument that was made back in like 2010 when the US and Germany and China all were in agreement to try and put a bunch of effort into bringing down the cost of renewables, and some were arguing nuclear power should have been included then. It was considered too late back then, but its like 13 years later now. If we had started back then there could be a lot of generation either online now or within a few years of completion. But if it was too late back then, then theres no reason to reconsider now, its even more too late now. And in 10 years if it turns out that there is a still a need for it, it will be even more too late. Anyone who has decided that never really needs to reconsider ever again, so this whole conversation is kind of a moot point.
That's not even considering the more complicated stuff like when this guy starts talking about far reaching economic impacts of environmental policy decisions like to what extent nuclear power has led to the economic costs of the fucking war in Ukraine, and I just don't know man. It's a good question and I'm just not qualified to guess at that, I don't know if anyone is qualified to answer that.
At a certain point every question that's really worth discussing boils down to some kind of value judgement that not everyone agrees upon, and when you reach that point there isn't really a scientific resolution, it's just people weighing different priorities more or less than others.
Regarding storage needs, it gets worse when it's not an even 12/12.
In the wintertime, you've got maybe 9 solid hours of daylight to generate that needed power. Add in the loss from snow and cloud cover, and you lose a lot of potential generation. On my 10 yr old solar system, I'll generate about 55KWh daily in May/June/July. I generate about 10KWh on a good day in December/January/February.
Power demands are also going to be higher because resistive heat is everywhere and is less efficient than air conditioners and heat pumps. I don't even wanna try to do the math for how much overbuilding would be needed to meet overnight winter demand.
Of course, we haven't even touched on how much of the USA still relies on fossil fuels for home heating directly, further putting load on the grid that we need to build additional capacity for.
It is interesting to read such a high quality anti-nuclear power article.
In another life I used to read SlashDot, a lot.
Almost everyone there was pro-nuclear power. I guess maybe that came from either being nuclear professionals or sci-fi fans though maybe that intuition isn't fair. Regardless, few people every revealed their credentials as being adequate for the subject while not having a vested interest. There were always claims about modern and safer designs to wash away any counterpoints.
I am against nuclear power because there will always be nuclear waste with a half life of 10,000 years waiting to be a problem.
There will always be human error and mismanagement.
Rand McNally told the Japanese not to build the Fukishimi power plant on the site they chose. Yet they did it anyway. The Japanese have a much stronger sense of civic responsibility than Americans and a number of other cultures. I would hate to see the potential mismanagement possible in an America with many nuclear power plants.
I've seen long form articles that list out a ton of issues with solar also. Making solar panels is not good for the environment.
... so what do we do?
Build nukes, build wind, build solar, build carbon capture, build EVs, build transit. Throw everything and the kitchen sink at climate change.
There's finite money, I'm worried that fossil fuel companies will push "don't build renewables, we need that money to build nuclear!", and then 2 picoseconds before the nuke plant opens, they'll push a nuclear fearmongering campaign to get the nuke plant shut down before it can displace any coal/gas.
These days, the fossil fuel folks (esp. natural gas) are promoting themselves as complementary to renewable (versus batteries/storage), and hardly even talking about nuclear. Given that there are hundreds of gigawatts of new coal/gas-fired power plants in the pipeline, at least some of that could be replaced by nuclear.