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The people who oppose nuclear power always point to the construction cost and long delays.
BUT.
The reason for the long and expensive construction has a lot to do with the people opposing the construction! We could build these reactors so much more cheaply and quickly (and more safely!) if we decided to!
This in an argument from unclean hands. Nuclear skeptics, like the ones given so much airtime in the linked article, have been very successful in driving up costs and adding delay. But these costs and delays are not intrinsic to the technology. It's not fair if I delay a thing for me to claim the thing has failed because it was late. No, it failed because I delayed it.
I wish the nuclear skeptics would apply their delay tactics to coal power plants, which spew staggering amounts of radionuclides over huge swaths of the world, not to mention their carbon emissions.
The delays on this project have nothing at all to do with people opposing nuclear construction.
The site welcomed more reactors. The results were approved under a new proces that was explicitly requested by the industry in order to expedite everything.
Nuclear is a big construction project, and suffers from the same big construction project cost disease that every other big construction project suffers from in the US. In addition, it suffers from needing absolutely massive amounts of custom, high precision welding, and high precision concrete pours unlike any other construction project. In addition to being some of the most complex projects ever designed, it requires a large amount of highly skilled labor really only gets used for this one purpose in our economy.
I wish nuclear proponents would recognize the inherent challenges of the problem, the inherent labor and construction efficiencies that made nuclear a good fit for the mid-20th century, but a less good fit for the 21st century when labor is much more valuable, and perhaps we should put it to more valuable purposes when we have far cheaper alternatives. Building buildings for manufacturing results in much better utilization of labor. A manufacturing facilities that produce 4 GW of solar/year is an exponential improvement over a 1GW nuclear reactor.
> I wish nuclear proponents would recognize the inherent challenges of the problem, the inherent labor and construction efficiencies that made nuclear a good fit for the mid-20th century
Yeah, this argument might hold water if there was nothing to compare to, but there is.
China stamps these things out of an assembly line. Every year they’re building multiple nuclear reactors, leaving us in the dust. You can’t make the argument that China’s reactors are unsafe, because they’ve had less accidents than us. To me it’s obvious that it’s not an insurmountable engineering problem.
Actually I think this is the perfect comparison to support my point, not refute it.
China does not suffer from construction cost disease like advanced Western countries do. Their cost of labor is lower.
And even France, which doesn't have construction cost disease as bad for the US for things like transit projects, does have this problem now as they try to build Flamanville and as was seen at Olkiluoto.
My hypothesis could definitely be wrong, perhaps it's just logistics and even with our high cost of labor we could still build nuclear economically in the US. But having read everything I can get my hands on about how to improve nuclear costs in the US, I'm sticking to my hypothesis until I get data that refutes it.
And it's not an engineering problem alone, though at Vogtle it's clear that part of the problem was engineering. EPC in general was a massive fail at Vogtle. But the partial design and bad design did not help either. This was the site where EPC thought the design was unconstructable, yet still powered thought to construct something else, and then had to get this new thing approved... Everybody working on it has been gearing up to sue each other at the end rather than trying to get it built.
China? Not really.
Started reactors: 2019: 3 reactors (Yangjiang-6, Tianwan-5 et Taishan-2) 2020: 1 (Fuqin-5) 2021: 1 (Hongyanhe-1) 2022: 3 (Fuqin-6) (Hongyanhe-6) (Fangchenggang-3)
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
This trend is old and clear: nuclear produces 6% of China's electricity with 50GW nominal electric power, long-term plans for future capacity are 120 to 150 GW by 2030 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China ) while China already has 253GW solar and 281GW wind (plan for combined solar and wind: 1,200 gigawatts by 2030) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_China ). In 2020 alone China added 71.6 GW windpower... Even taking into account the load factors (nuclear may reach .9 while wind-solar combined are at .3 to .5, mainly depending on the proportion of off-shore wind turbine power) this seems quite clear to me.
Isn't solar load factor 10% to 15%? And wind %30 to 45%?
I stopped following the improvements around 2019 when it became clear the issues were more social than technological, but that would be huge if wind load factors could reach 60%+,we wouldn't really need that much baseload.
The capacity factor for 1-axis tracking solar in desert locations is more like 30%. Offshore wind can be upwards of 60%. Also, those capacity factors are already taken into account when computing levelized cost of energy, so don't double count.
China is large enough to keep nuclear as an option, no matter the economic considerations, but the amount China builds barely makes a blip on the radar compared to renewables.
https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/06/renewables-in-china-tre...
They still haven't reached the same capacity as France, even after 20 years of rapid development. Also in the same country wind overtook nuclear in terms of GWh delivered around a decade ago, and the gap only widened with time.
Of course there are bold plans to accelerate nuclear even further, but at this rate it's doubtful it'll ever be a significant part of the electricity mix.
> China stamps these things out of an assembly line.
No it does not. Chinese nuclear reactors too are facing delays and cost overruns and they build a lot more of renewables than nuclear for the simple reason that it's much less expensive.
They're also building plenty of coal plants, too: https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/china-permits-two-....
The argument of "being left behind" is flimsy as it's more "China is catching up" as they provide more power to their numerous rural regions.
I would say the US generally has "enough" power (well enough is never enough) so that a trickle of expansion is fine. China needs to and is building en masse, it's just incredibly bad that so many of their new watts will be coal.
21st century china has a lot in common with early 20th western countries, namely cheap labor and the ability to push through people protests and regulations.
South Korea might be a closer comparison.
In South Korea those 'abilities' couldn't hide a nuclear scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal
More solar is better if it displaces fossil fuels, loads can be moved to coincide with sunshine, output can be cost effectively stored and/or the climate is co-operative.
Not all of these assumptions hold everywhere or every time.
The same caveats are also true of nuclear, and happen far more frequently for nuclear.
If we are serious about displacing fossil fuel use, and I am deadly serious about it, wind, solar, storage, demand response, new transmission, thermal storage, hydrogen for chemical process... all these things are deployable today at massive scale and should be quickly adopted. However, nuclear is further away and more expensive than we thought it was in 2008 when these reactors got started.
Back in the mid-2000s I was a huge proponent of nuclear. In the mid-2010s I change my tune because we had a ton of new data about nuclear being far more expensive than promised, and other tech had advanced massively. Nuclear has never advanced as a tech, it does not have a learning curve.
If we are going to reach a future with energy abundance, with clean tech, we need to invest in technologies with learning curves, that advance. Nuclear tech does not advance.
Is this inherent to the technology, or because so few nuclear reactors are being built? Is there anyone involved in the construction of the latest reactor that contributed to another one? You learn by doing, and there has been very little construction in the last decades.
Learning by doing has been tried many times, and it's never resulted in a learning rate where one could expect more than a small decrease in costs, and it has conclusively proven that even a halving of costs is probably out of the question.
Look at France in their first build out; subsequent reactors of the same design cost more than the first. And France was considered a success by most. The few buildouts that have seen cost decrease have never produced learning like you get in manufactured products.
I wish I had access to my bibliography right now for the papers on this, sorry I'm making statements without the research to back them up. But those that have looked into which technologies develop learning curves find that the learning curve is found early, and it tends to be tech wheee lots of the same small thing is made, with minimal customization at install.
Nuclear is inherently a big tech, with some customization for site install. Combined cycle gas turbines found some efficiency of scale by being small enough that they could have standardized plant designs that don't require design changes for the site (though it does limit which sites can install the designs). SMRs might change this for nuclear, but what people are calling "SMR" today is still is as big as 300MW, and it's hard to see how that could be standardized and manufactured. Nuclear does not scale down very well, which is why all these places are trying to pass off really big reactors as part of the SMR hype wave.
> I wish I had access to my bibliography right now for the papers on this,
Here is the most well-known: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
> Nuclear is inherently a big tech, with some customization for site install Russia has successful small floating power stations, that can just dock and power a nearby town. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov
There is nothing "inherently big" about nuclear
Sure, if you want expensive reactors. Much of the technological base on nuclear either:
1. Scales with square or cube laws.
2. Are essentially fixed.
A 100 MWe reactor requires a very similar amount of security as a 1600 MWe reactor, maintenance intervals are similar and so on.
Thus, it has been evident from the very first days that bigger is better, from an economic perspective because you get both a more efficient reactor and more output to spread the huge fixed costs on.
The problem has been that even the bigger reactors are hideously expensive. Nuclear power never breached the cusp where it would be worth it and today the cost to build new renewables are in the same range as the operations and maintenance cost of existing, paid off, nuclear plants. Let alone trying to build one.
A non-negligible fraction of the costs were hidden because the army paid for it in order to obtain, build and maintain atomic weapons. The French Court of audit (Cour des comptes) could not establish it, and had to guesstimate. The need for such weapons diminishes and transparency is getting better and better, therefore this trick is becoming obsolete.
I think every technology advances first, but then reaches a plateau. We build lots of houses, but they're not getting cheaper. Computers still are, but not as dramatically as they did during the 1990s (I think that's going to reach a plateau at some point). It's quite possible that nuclear has plateau'd.
I don't think it is fair to say that Nuclear technology has not advanced. There is a lot of excitement around small modular reactors now that are attempting to achieve some economies of scale. Yes, the aren't there yet, but the concept shows promise.
I do agree that the biggest threat to Nuclear at the moment isn't environmentalists or even NIMBY types, it is wind and solar getting so cheap and storage finally being deployed at scale that it will never be able to compete on price.
This is the nuclear industry's third attempt at "SMR". It is what they bounce to when the large-scale reactors get too expensive.
"THE FORGOTTEN HISTORY OF SMALL NUCLEAR REACTORS"
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc...
NuScale specific reading:
https://www.wired.com/story/the-dream-of-mini-nuclear-plants...
> The same caveats are also true of nuclear, and happen far more frequently for nuclear.
Out of interest, how do you find the issues to be more frequent for nuclear?
Around these parts we run nuclear for base load and it pretty much runs full tilt 24/7. There is of course scheduled downtime for service, etc.
There is unscheduled down time as well. Almost invariably the planned down time stretches out far longer than planned.
See the UK and France over the last few years for recent examples.
Here in Finland nuclear availability is over 90%. Admittedly this is better than in most other countries.
Solar load factor is 9% and wind 30%.
I got a bit suspicious when I could only find the most recent year figures for the Finnish power plants but having now found the life time figures they are still incredibly impressive at ~88% for Loviisa and ~92% for Olkiluoto.
In the UK you have multiple reactors with 68% Load Factor.
If I ever need to build a Nuclear Reactor I am definitely getting the Finns to run it.
And the off-shore wind currently being built is targeting +60% according to the manufacturers.
Nuclear tech does not advance
Do you think part of the reason is that dampened demand over the last few decades (due to NIMBY, Chernobyl, etc) deterred the technology from attracting more innovation and growing a bigger ecosystem?
> Nuclear tech does not advance.
Sure it does. New reactors are not the old designs.
> I wish nuclear proponents would recognize the inherent challenges of the problem
Nuclear proponents have been wailing at the top of their lungs about this since the time I could start reading newspapers.
The largest problem is the pipeline of industry needed to build these things. That was completely destroyed by the anti-nuclear zealot crowd, knowingly so and with purpose. They absolutely knew (and I read articles on it) that if they froze most new construction for just a couple decades, the entire industry would vaporize due to lack of of talent pool and experience.
Everyone was correct.
That means if you want nuclear now, we better start on those giant 15 year construction projects or we'll never get better. It will take a generation - at least - to restart an industry from pretty much zero. Hundreds of thousands of current 2 year olds need to be trained before we can even hope to make a dent in this problem 20 years later.
The pipeline wasn't destroyed by anti-nuclear zealots. What caused the termination of nuclear builds in the US had several interacting causes.
First, electrical energy demand suddenly stopped growing. It had been growing 6% or so per year, and extensions of that into the future called for enormous numbers of power plants. But that suddenly slowed/stopped, around the time of the energy crisis. It turns out trees don't grow to the sky.
Second, a new competitor arose: cogeneration. PURPA was passed in 1978 opening grids to non-utility generators. It required utilities to buy power from these generators, setting up a kind of market where new utility builds would compete with these sources. And lo and behold, power from cogeneration was way cheaper than from a new nuclear plant (cogeneration produces power from a fuel at 100% marginal efficiency). Since basically every industrial plant that uses process heat was a potential site for cogeneration, this was a lot of power that could be added to the grid.
Third, the initial wave of nuclear builds was coming in way over budget, in an earlier reverse echo of what's happened lately. Forbes in the 1980s famously had a cover story on it, calling it the worst management disaster in history.
All of these together slammed the lid on new nuclear construction in the US.
We don't have proven "far cheaper" alternatives. It is irresponsible to advocate for a fully solar/wind grid if we don't have a single working large scale example that is able to sustain, let's say, a city with 5M people 24/7, all-season (examples including hydro and geothermal don't count as many places can't depend on these).
Don't get me wrong, I love solar and wind and I highly encourage continued investment and buildup so we need less of other forms of energy. However, ignoring nuclear is the same, in practice, as supporting a hybrid fossil/renewables future. If you are fine betting on technological developments such as megascale batteries or other energy storage approaches, you should also be fine betting on the less impressive, incremental improvements needed for reducing nuclear plant costs.
The future will involve many different energy sources, and nuclear fission has to be one of them until we discover a new major energy source (hopefully fusion).
We do not have a working economic nuclear grid. So it is irresponsible to advocate a nuclear grid unless throwing hundreds of billions of taxpayer money at Bechtel and friends is your goal.
Most people right now are just trying to prevent nuclear reactors from being shut down. Despite being 30% of US energy it is 50% of our zero carbon energy. The west coast has done a good job decarbonizing without nuclear, and those numbers are more 10%/20%. Shutting down Diablo Canyon won't do much as the reactor provides <8% of Cal-ISO's energy portfolio (but <1% of emissions) and the change to gas has already been made but if you look at places like TVA (South) it is more 60%/80% (with hydro storage accounting for 80% of the green emissions). Mid-ITSO hasn't replaced their nuclear with renewables, nor has many other places.
Even if you don't believe nuclear is the way to go (which is fine) there is no doubt that when the plants have been decommissioned they have been replaced with fossil fuels. This is wild to the nuclear people. But it is why many (pro and anti-nuclear) people have started to advocate for a "fossil fuel first, nuclear second" strategy. After all, aren't we after carbon emissions? If that's our goal, then the conversation is just if we should build more or if renewables are enough. That's mundane, nuanced, and nit-picky. In this case the two groups shouldn't fight. They should form a coalition, at least for now, and be united against the fossil fuel industry (maybe there's a reason they fund Sierra Nevada). But if we're after cheaper electricity and don't care about carbon, then yeah I do think it makes sense to go after nuclear now and prioritize it. We just need to be clear on what our objectives are. Maybe we forget our actual goals because there's nothing "to do" when we agree and only when we disagree. But we shouldn't ignore our similarities. I for one am more concerned with the climate than a few dollars a year on my electric bill, as I know I pay far more than that for the carbon contamination.
I have never argued to close existing plants as long as they are safe and economical? Nice strawman you are arguing.
Simply take Germany, replaced both nuclear and black coal with renewables. That is what quite small subsidies managed on a greenfield market. In my perfect world Germany would have kept their nuclear and phased out the rest of the coal first.
Today the renewable market is mature and in the exponential scaling phase.
New build nuclear had its chance in 2005, in 2023 it is a laughable prospect.
Or simply have a read:
https://www.energyintel.com/00000180-f7a8-d67b-a3cd-f7faad65...
It's worse than that. We don't have commercial reactors capable of powering the world. Thermal burner reactors like this one, if scaled up to provide the world's 18 TW of primary energy consumption, would exhaust economical uranium resources in less than a decade.
> would exhaust economical uranium resources in less than a decade.
This doesn't seem right. Can you show your work? I'm assuming there's no recycling either? I feel like you're off by more than an order of magnitude.
Besides, who suggests using a single method to produce all the electricity? That seems a bit naive, doesn't it? Better to have a portfolio.
Recycling of spent thermal reactor fuel doesn't extend things much, since the breeding ratio of today's thermal reactors is much less than 1. CANDU might do a bit better.
The point is that existing nuclear reactors provide only a small fraction of world energy demand. A nuclear powered world has to power everything via nuclear energy, including transportation and industry. To ballpark this, we look at the primary (thermal) energy used by the world, 18 TW, and equate that to thermal energy produced by nuclear (3 GW(th) for a 1 GW(e) power plant.) This would be 6000 1 GW(e) power plants. These would use in excess of 1 million tonnes of natural uranium per year.
I'm asking for the math or a source, because I'm not able to verify your claim and it doesn't match my prior understanding. Especially the recycling comment, as utilization is quite low, allowing for massive amounts of reenrichment. It also doesn't match my understanding of the AP1000 which has a similar uranium consumption rate to CANDU 6. Not burnup, uranium consumption. The thermal energy estimate also seems naive and a bit obtuse as you're also including many things that one typically would not account for when discussing energy production. And again, it also seems naive to pigeon hole the entire world's energy consumption onto a single energy source, as if we did something similar for solar, hydro, oil, etc we'd find massively unsustainable numbers as well.
I want straight numbers and links, because something isn't adding up.
Well, let's pull up a first results from googling:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo...
5.5 million tonne resource, 70,000 tonne/year consumption in current reactors
If you object to the thermal energy estimate I encourage you to do better. You might also take into account that energy demand will naturally increase as the lesser developed world continues its rapid growth (much faster in percentage terms per year than in the West.)
I hope you are not referring to my comment, as I'm not advocating a fully nuclear grid. Instead, I'm advocating nuclear as the replacement for the energy needs that are beyond the reach of renewables in many places - for instance, nighttime consumption in areas without hydro potential.
For those against nuclear, feel free to give an example of a working large scale (supporting 5M+ people 24/7, all seasons) solar/wind deployment in continental Europe with zero dependence on fossil or nuclear.
Nuclear is just horrible for filling in the gaps when renewables aren't available. Nuclear needs to run near continuously to even approach (if not reach) being economic. As a fill-in source, the cost will inflate massively, to the point that (for example) combined cycle plants burning green hydrogen would be far cheaper.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding how power grids work. They are generally not monopolistic markets anymore.
The problem is that renewables and nuclear are economically incompatible. They compete for the slice that is the cheapest and most inflexible, both requiring dispatchable power to fill the gaps. Renewables easily win this battle as the cost for new built renewables are in the same range as operations and maintenance for paid off nuclear plants.
For nuclear this inflexibility comes from pure economics. It is economic suicide to build a new plant and operate it at 100%, now try operating it at less than 50% on average. Or even worse only nights without wind like you propose.
There are no fully renewable grids yet, 70% is trivially possible as it us already in use, but we see no issues building them.
> For nuclear this inflexibility comes from pure economics. It is economic suicide to build a new plant and operate it at 100%, now try operating it at less than 50% on average. Or even worse only nights without wind like you propose.
Agree, this mode of operating NPPs wouldn't be economically feasible.
Also, IIRC, running a NPP with load following would generally lead to significantly more wear and tear and thus maintenance costs. Which is why it wouldn't be done this way.
So why not run the NPP as baseload (say instead of coal powerplants) and then renewables like wind/solar (on top of that flat line of generation), which can easily be turned off/on according to current demand? Whenever high renewables generation coincides with a peak in demand, it's a win. Whenever renewable generation diverges from demand it's either turned off or as much of it as possible is stored. Having storage capacity for electricity, to compensate just the day/night demand fluctuation during a 24h day with stored renewable energy is far more easily done than trying to get to 100 % renewable generation. Especially since solar generation is ~ 1/20 in winter vs summer in some regions.
Seems like the obvious way to do it (to me at least), unless one is completely against nuclear power generation.
This mode would obviously make it somewhat more economically challenging for the renewable operators, since their capacity factors would be reduced.
It all comes down to the fundamental challenge that renewables introduce additional fluctuation which has to be compensated somehow. Ways to do this are: throwing away excess generation, following load via flexible demand, modulating fossil plants, adding more storage capacity.
The thing is: storage capacity for seasonal fluctuation which is going to significantly increase (due to heating and other processes becoming more electrified) is nowhere near. Even storage capacity for just 2 weeks of electricity is huge.
Let's say Germany quadruples it's 2022 wind generation capacity, then in the three Dunkelflaute weeks 48-50 of 2022 [1] (when they had ~ 22 % renewable share, mostly wind) there'd now be 100 % renewables. But in the meantime demand in winter might well go up 20-30 GW due to electrification of heating and other uses. Now there's still a gap between demand and renewable generation of say 30 GW that needs to be filled. Let's say the Dunkelflaute lasts not three weeks but 10 days.
30 GW x 10 days = 7.2 x 10^9 kWh
That's the equivalent of ~ 103,000,000 EV batteries with 70 kWh each. And each one of them would need to be 100 % charged before the 10 days Dunkelflaute and it couldn't be used for anything else during the 10 days and it'd be empty afterwards.
This amount of storiage isn't going to happen in the next 15 years.
I assume the actual way situations like this will be dealt with in Germany is: high electricity demand industries will be shut down during such times, home heating will be turned down, coal fired plants will be brought back online, less trains will run, and so on.
So it'd maybe look like a "80 % renewable grid". But in reality it could better be described as "electricity demand reduced to match renewable generation".
[1] https://energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?...
Power grids operate like marginal cost markets. Why would I as a consumer buy more expensive nuclear power when abundant renewables are available?
That is why the comment started with, (knowing you are not the same person as GP):
> I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding how power grids work. They are generally not monopolistic markets anymore.
In a monopolistic market what you propose is how it worked. The government/utility decided what power generation it wanted and the customers paid the resulting electricity rates without any choice.
Given the possibility of cheap distributed generation today what will happen if you force nuclear costs on consumers is that they will build local renewable generation and lower their grid utilization. Like we see with rooftop solar, just on a much grander scale.
The end result is again a marginal price market, but now with added inefficiencies.
> Power grids operate like marginal cost markets. Why would I as a consumer buy more expensive nuclear power when abundant renewables are available?
I think this is an incomplete description of the system.
The missing element here is the fact that independently of what an individual electricity customer (private/commercial/..) chooses to do, the government/burocracy still ultimately mandates for grid operators, utilities and power companies to operate their technology in such a way that the grid can remain stable and deliver enough electricity to power (practically) all uses, whatever they might be at a certain point in time, even when renewable generation is at only say 15 % of max capacity.
This makes companies build/maintain (and get paid for) backup powerplants. They're needed and maintained for stability reasons, (pretty much) regardless of their cost of electricity generation per kWh. The market price is not really relevant, since grid stability is hugely more important to everyone (individual persons, businesses, political parties) than spot market price.
> Given the possibility of cheap distributed generation today what will happen if you force nuclear costs on consumers is that they will build local renewable generation and lower their grid utilization.
Applauding cheap distributed generation of fluctuating renewables (note: I'm in favour of their deployment) without mentioning that there are times when they simply don't deliver, so that other (flexible, reliable) sources have to fill in paints an incomplete picture. Without the fossil/nuclear backup plants the spot price would skyrocket to a degree such that everyone in posession of a smart meter and flexible price contract (and withouts state subsidized electricity) would just stop consuming because a kWh might suddenly cost a few $/€.
The market might be the market. But the grid is a technical system and its stability is a parameter which most prioritize higher than cost/kWh, which is why it's a hidden cost, that's not directly attributable to renewables and so as long as the grid cannot deliver 100 % renewables at _all_ times, "cheap renewable electricity", that's cheaper than fossil/nuclear is a somewhat naive take.
Imagine customers getting to choose between 2 different electricity contracts:
A) 100 % renewable electricity; subject to availability; gets delivered according to current generation; if demand exceeds generation, every customer gets curtailed to a fraction of their actual demand, according to their usual consumption so that demand=generation
B) 24/7 electricity; varying percentage of renewables; some nuclear/gas/coal in the mix
How low would you have to set the price/kWh of A relative to B for getting say even just 1 % of customers? 1/5? 1/10?
Now would any company running such a 100 % renewable fleet and offering A contracts have an easy time running their business with economic success, because "renewable generation is so much cheaper than fossil/nuclear"?
Yes, marginal cost/kWh of nuclear/fossil might be higher than wind/solar. The reason is obvious: they provide stability/reliability for the grid, so until the grid is 100 % renewable, 1 nuclear/fossil kWh is simply more valuable than 1 renewable kWh.
What do people do who "build local renewable generation and lower their grid utilization", when their own generation doesn't meet their demand because it's winter? Right, they draw power from the grid, from some gas/coal/nuclear plant.
> The missing element here is the fact that independently of what an individual electricity customer (private/commercial/..) chooses to do, the government/burocracy still ultimately mandates for grid operators, utilities and power companies to operate their technology in such a way that the grid can remain stable and deliver enough electricity to power (practically) all uses, whatever they might be at a certain point in time, even when renewable generation is at only say 15 % of max capacity.
> This makes companies build/maintain (and get paid for) backup powerplants. They're needed and maintained for stability reasons, (pretty much) regardless of their cost of electricity generation per kWh. The market price is not really relevant, since grid stability is hugely more important to everyone (individual persons, businesses, political parties) than spot market price.
Yes, in for example Sweden these extra costs borne by all consumers for reserves and balancing markets are in the range of $0.0X cents/kWh delivered. You are not financing a nuclear plant with that.
> Applauding cheap distributed generation of fluctuating renewables (note: I'm in favour of their deployment) without mentioning that there are times when they simply don't deliver, so that other (flexible, reliable) sources have to fill in paints an incomplete picture. Without the fossil/nuclear backup plants the spot price would skyrocket to a degree such that everyone in posession of a smart meter and flexible price contract (and withouts state subsidized electricity) would just stop consuming because a kWh might suddenly cost a few $/€.
Why would a consumer that decided to sidestep the grid care? They care about the average price of all their consumed energy, not the fluctuations. Peak shaving is already a market. Although mostly to sidestep infrastructure costs related to upgrading grid size.
> A) 100 % renewable electricity; subject to availability; gets delivered according to current generation; if demand exceeds generation, every customer gets curtailed to a fraction of their actual demand, according to their usual consumption so that demand=generation
> B) 24/7 electricity; varying percentage of renewables; some nuclear/gas/coal in the mix
Consumers choose a mixture of A and B, because the grid is not only renewables. We will likely need gas backup for another decade or so. Perfect is the enemy of good. Your view of the grid is from the 70s, when "baseload" was the god. That is not the case anymore.
Grids are dynamic and driven by price signals. All price fluctuations are business opportunities. With the marginal pricing model we have today, nuclear requires the whole sale average prices over a year to be ~$120-200/MWh, I and everyone except people advocating for nuclear find such prices unacceptable. That is Ukrainian war gas crisis prices locked in until the plant is paid off, who wants that?
Thus the discussion inevitably spirals into "grid costs", "backups" and what else. Because lets through government actions force nuclear to exist to get a better number on your pet metric of "actual price". All while the world moves on.
I think you haven't had a read, it was linked in the comment you replied to but I can give it to you again:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
Read and come back, stop thinking we live in the 70s.
> Yes, in for example Sweden these extra costs borne by all consumers for reserves and balancing markets are in the range of $0.0X cents/kWh delivered. You are not financing a nuclear plant with that.
Whatever the ascribed fee/kWh for financing backup power plants that's written on some electric power bill might be, (whether it's 0.05 $/kWh or 0.20 $/kWh) it's completely irrelevant. If there's a backup plant being maintained and run somewhere in your country (or the neighbouring), the people are somehow paying for it. If the fee on the electricity bill is too low to actually cover all the costs, then it's still payed for by the people, through taxes or other fees or whatever. Doesn't matter at all. The backup plant, be it nuclear or fossil, is being financed. Why is that? Because people don't want rolling blackouts and politicians know that.
> Why would a consumer that decided to sidestep the grid care? They care about the average price of all their consumed energy, not the fluctuations. Peak shaving is already a market. Although mostly to sidestep infrastructure costs related to upgrading grid size.
If by sidestepping the grid you mean an almost/entirely self-sufficient household (all year, not just summer), then we're talking about which percentage of households of the northern hemisphere? Is it 1 % or 0.1 % or 0.01 %? These aren't the people who'd care, true. But the issue is obviously not with them but with the other ~ 99.x %.
My impression is, you're failing to see, just how high spot prices and thus peaks in a flexibly priced contract would jump, if your grid were underpowered by let's say 30 % of actual demand. The only reason you're not seeing such high prices, is because those fossil/nuclear plants are somewhere (either in your country or in some neighbouring) ready to run. Nobody knows just how high the price/kWh would spike, were there a few days with just 70 % of electricity available compared to the usual demand curve (in some country where heating is electricity based). But it would either need to settle damn high, so that only consumers who're willing to pay a lot, still actually consume while enough others are effectively deterred from consuming by the high price so that reduced demand=generation. Either that, or you'll have rolling blackouts or some other intervention to reduce demand, which effectively violates the way that people/businesses in prospering countries are used to operating, i.e. drawing as much power as they see fit, whenever they see fit.
I'm happy to learn about other ways of meeting consumers needs, when dealing with a "significantly less renewable electricity available than urgent demand and regrettably no backup power plants" situation.
I very much doubt people would settle with regularly being in the situation of either (A) being priced out of using electricity or (B) having to turn off their heat pumps or aircon and not use their kitchen stoves during certain hours. No, they'd tell their politicians to (C) bring those fossil/nuclear plants online "chop-chop".
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> Consumers choose a mixture of A and B, because the grid is not only renewables.
No. Noone is actually choosing or would choose A, not even partially. Or can you name an instance when someone did not do XY (drive their EV, go by train, heat/AC their home, cook some food, ..) which they really wanted to do, because there wasn't enough electricity available in that moment? And no, when someone chooses to charge their EV a little less or accepts a waiting time for their EV to be charged to then make their trip doesn't count, because they were obviously flexible enough. Sure, many industries now closely watch electricity prices and sometimes throttle/halt production. Doesn't count either, when choosing operating times according to electricity prices is part of the business model.
> We will likely need gas backup for another decade or so.
Absolutely. It simply wouldn't work without them, or rather: people will vote whoever would get enough such plants running again, were there any shortage and they wouldn't care about their state spending billions to get it done.
> Your view of the grid is from the 70s, when "baseload" was the god. That is not the case anymore.
Not really, I think. Baseload is not the god, it never was. Stability is, and always was. My view of the grid is about stability and the simple fact, that people just wouldn't accept if the gaps that renewable sources leave (until they're overbuilt 3x .. 4x ..? and there's enough storage) weren't filled in by fossil/nuclear generation.
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> With the marginal pricing model we have today, nuclear requires the whole sale average prices over a year to be ~$120-200/MWh, I and everyone except people advocating for nuclear find such prices unacceptable. That is Ukrainian war gas crisis prices locked in until the plant is paid off, who wants that?
I doubt we'll see electricity prices fall in the next 10 years.
Looks like in Germany people won't be able to blame it on "nuclear generation clogging the net" then.
> Thus the discussion inevitably spirals into "grid costs", "backups" and what else. Because lets through government actions force nuclear to exist to get a better number on your pet metric of "actual price". All while the world moves on.
As to "world moves on". Well, you wrote it yourself: "We will likely need gas backup for another decade or so."
I think our grids will cling to gas powered plants for quite a bit longer than that.
Interestingly, according to some institute, "researchers found that new gas-fired power plants with an installed capacity of 23 GW must be built by 2030."
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-new-energy-tar...
Newly built gas plants ... I don't think they'll only be run for ten years.
> Read and come back, stop thinking we live in the 70s.
> https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
Thanks for reminding me. Quite a few pages there. Did you read them all?
I like this nicely cushioned quote from the chapter "D. RAW MATERIAL DEMAND FOR 100% RENEWABLE ENERGY SYSTEMS" (p. 78191):
> All in all, there appears to be reason for moderate optimism that material criticalities will not represent an unsurmountable roadblock towards the transition to 100% RE systems. However, it is also clear that it will be a formidable challenge to ensure the timely availability of resources while simultaneously minimizing the negative impacts of extraction on humans and the environment. This needs to be a focus of upcoming research.
Reminds me of all the stubborn renewable optimists who IMO do the world a disservice by neglecting the inevitability of degrowth.
$5M a year, to be in standby during the winter, easily converted to synthetic oil if carbon prices ever becomes prohibitive:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlshamn_Power_Station
Which nuclear plant did you want to finance for $5M a year?
Seriously? This comparison of cost to a NPP is obviously flawed.
Why?
Because a NPP wouldn't be run just for backup but continuously. Let's assume the 1 GW fossil plant runs a mere 3 weeks per year. That's a capacity factor of 0.058 and it'd generate 504 GWh per year.
The NPP would run with a capacity factor of say 0.90 so at 1 GW it'd deliver 7.9 TWh.
That's a factor of 15.5 more electricity delivered than the fossil plant.
Consequently, to have the same cost/KWh, the NPP could cost 15.5 x $5M = $77.5M per year. Electricity cost would be: $0.01/KWh
I don't know your source for the operating costs of the oil plant, but I assume it's in USD.
According to [1] in the US, the NPPs generated electricity at a cost of (note how I didn't even pick the much lower number of 21 USD/MWh in recent years): 37 USD/MWh = 0.037 USD/KWh
Comparison
Fossil: $0.01/KWh
Nuclear: $0.037/KWh (or more recently $0.021/KWh)
So the cost wouldn't be dramatically higher with the nuclear plant and it'd still leave a huge margin to Swedish household electricity prices of > $0.20/KWh.
Also the nuclear plant would emit much less CO2 per KWh than the oil plant, and who knows how long we'll wait to see efuels be used for this purpose.
The point I wanted to make is not: "Backup plants have to be nuclear plants."
But rather: "As long as there is a certain base load on the grid, that's requested by consumers all year round (which will always be the case), it is a viable option to partially provide this with nuclear power plants."
And to me it makes more sense than what Germany is doing right now, basically replacing nuclear generation with a little bit of wind and lots of coal in the winter. Even if Germany had had double the wind generation in 2022, from Jan-Mar & Oct-Dec, renewables would only have delivered ~ 100 % of demand during 2 weeks. 2 weeks out of 26. They'll have to continue burning gas/coal for some time to come. Especially with progressing electrification and increasing demand.
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As to:
> .. if carbon prices ever becomes prohibitive:
CO2 prices are laughable and even the planned progression is. And with all the exceptions for big industry even more so.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184754/cost-of-nuclear-e...
> Because a NPP wouldn't be run just for backup but continuously. Let's assume the 1 GW fossil plant runs a mere 3 weeks per year. That's a capacity factor of 0.058 and it'd generate 504 GWh per year.
But then the nuclear power needs dispatchable power to cover the gaps! Just like renewables do, while also getting undercut by renewables. Which means it is getting priced out of the market, because as you just said, the measly $5M a year to be in standby is laughable compared to nuclear costs.
That is why dispatchable plants are usually gas plants, low capital costs, high running costs.
> So the cost wouldn't be dramatically higher with the nuclear plant and it'd still leave a huge margin to Swedish household electricity prices of > $0.20/KWh.
That includes the transmission grid and energy tax, wholesale prices before the pandemic and gas crisis were $0.02-0.04/kWh. The Swedish prices are now back down to $0.04-0.08/kWh, mostly driven by gas prices in continental Europe.
> But rather: "As long as there is a certain base load on the grid, that's requested by consumers all year round (which will always be the case), it is a viable option to partially provide this with nuclear power plants."
Which will get priced out of the market every single time renewables can fill the need, which is easily above 70% of the time, add some hydro and we are easily above 95%.
It is extra telling that you use marginal costs of paid off plants. Of course we should run those as long as possible!
The costs for new built nuclear are $0.12 - 0.2/kWh. Do me a favor and compare that to the current whole sale prices in Sweden at the tail end of an energy crisis. Does that look favorably? Or do you suppose that a new built nuclear power plant will appear out of thin air? "It's cheap when it's done!!!!" Well, someone gotta pay to build it.
That measly $5M ain't gonna save you here!
Edit - A post appeared on the front page:
The duck in the room - the end of baseload
> And what do you do then with baseload plants? By their very nature, they are supposed never to stop generating… But what if they are no longer needed for 6, 8 or 12 hours every day for 6 to 9 months of the year? Some of the base load plants (like French nuclear) have some flexibility to vary their generation, but definitely not from 0 to 100% every day! And their economic model will be shot to pieces if they make no money whatsoever half, or even a quarter of the time.
https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/the-duck-in-the-room-the...
> But then the nuclear power needs dispatchable power to cover the gaps! Just like renewables do, while also getting undercut by renewables.
Of course it does. But no, not "just like renewables do".
Why? Because unlike with wind (calm) and solar (clouds) where the gaps are not known months ahead, most of the (1.00 - 0.90 = 0.10) outage time of a nuclear plant will be known beforehand and planned for accordingly. Yes, even when the rivers are too warm or carry too little water, that'll be known quite some time beforehand.
If you don't see the difference there, you don't want to see it.
> Which means it is getting priced out of the market, ..
Let's see how long we're going to have to wait until we see France's NPPs being priced out of the market by wind/solar/gas in the winter. Because as long as these NPPs are being needed urgently some time of the year (which is mostly going to be winter), they might well be priced out of the market in summer or whenever there's lots of wind, but they'll still be kept running.
I think we're going to need quite some patience to witness France's NPPs being shut down and decommissioned for reasons other than safety/EOL.
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> That includes the transmission grid and energy tax, wholesale prices before the pandemic and gas crisis were $0.02-0.04/kWh. The Swedish prices are now back down to $0.04-0.08/kWh, mostly driven by gas prices in continental Europe.
Not sure if we're talking about the same prices here. I was referring to end consumer/household prices [1] (range € 0.17-0.24), not the prices at the commercial market.
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> Which will get priced out of the market every single time renewables can fill the need, which is easily above 70% of the time, add some hydro and we are easily above 95%.
The criterion for keeping a NPP ready to run likely isn't if the NPP is being priced out of the market for x < 100 % of time/year but rather 100 % plus safety margin. If officials can't guarantee enough electricity 100 % of time when they shut down a NPP, they won't do it (unless they're reckless).
As to "add some hydro" .. yeah, it's so easy. You just need to say the magic words and "poof", here's your dam and hydro powerplant.
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> It is extra telling that you use marginal costs of paid off plants. Of course we should run those as long as possible!
Agree. So maybe we were indeed writing past eachother.
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> The costs for new built nuclear are $0.12 - 0.2/kWh. Do me a favor and compare that to the current whole sale prices in Sweden at the tail end of an energy crisis. Does that look favorably?
It might not look favorable right now. I would not bet on electricity prices staying where they are. I'd rather bet on them catching up (at least to some degree) with nuclear over the next few years.
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From your linked article:
> Solar capacity is growing by leaps and bounds, and it’s not going to stop anytime soon.
That remains to be seen. One can already observe that in some cases fixed installations (on buildings) are prioritized to be mounted vertically (instead of at an optimum angle for noon), and facing not south but rather east and west to generate less electricity at noon and more in the morning/evening.
We'll be seeing more of that I guess.
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> if you have an easily accessible surplus of a highly useful resource (energy), can you find any use for it that can generate a profit? There is absolutely no doubt that the answer is yes. Storage and hydrogen are just the simplest, most centralized answers, but I have no doubt that entrepreneurs will find zillions of ways to use energy available, even if for short periods, to make something valuable of it.
The author doesn't seem to be versed with the hydrogen/electrolysis tech. If the "duck" at noon lasts for 5 hours that's 5/24 = 0.21, not a capacity factor to run almost any kind of industrial process economically where you need quite some capex to set it up.
Storing electricity is just difficult. Otherwise it'd have been solved in a cheap way for ages.
And just using gigantic amounts of energy when it's available isn't easy either. It means partially sacrificing other goals a person/business might want to achieve.
When there are more EVs, those might charge mostly during "duck" time. But that means you can't drive during that time. We'll see to what degree people are willing to plan their day around charging their EVs when they have lots of other plans and things to do.
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In case you didn't read the comments below the article by "Dan G", they contain good counter arguments to the author's points, thankfully the latter even admits this.
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[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/418124/electricity-price...
> nuclear fission has to be one of them
Unless for example green hydrogen manufacture, storage, and peaker plants are shown to be cheaper. Let's see in 10 years.
That would have to almost be a literal miracle given the round trip thermodynamic efficiency limit.
Not really. For long term storage, the cost of a unit of energy storage capacity becomes more important than the round trip efficiency. This is all the more the case when the cost of the input energy declines.
For seasonal storage, hydrogen is vastly better than batteries, even with a RTE of 40%. That's because the cost of an underground hydrogen storage cavern can be as little as $1 per kWh of storage capacity.
But the units of energy you need to store are directly related to your efficiency.
Efficiency of the discharge part, yes. But that's a less than factor of 2 effect that can't overcome the two orders of magnitude superiority over batteries in cost per unit of storage capacity.
Compared to batteries maybe, but that’s not the only alternative, and isn’t even the main alternative for long term storage.
Hydro being the simplest long term alternative.
Even if we stay with batteries, they’re price is continuing to trend down. That two order of magnitude you quote is only going to get smaller. What can’t be overcome is again the thermodynamic limit.
I'm merely pointing out that this thermodynamic handwaving doesn't demonstrate what you appear to be claiming it demonstrates.
What is this other technology, btw? Be specific and quantitative here.
We have gotten on a discussion of storage, which is a little afield of the original point, an alternative to nuclear fission for meeting our energy demand. That, and not storage specifically, is the actual target:
- Build out solar and wind to cover the winter usage, not the summer usage (the cost with them not running is longer payback period, they do not have negative energy prices).
- Build pumped hydro storage for longer term storage
- Build more hydro
- Change how you use hydro: use them as your "peaker" to handle when the sun and wind go offline
- No city/state/country is an island, build more HVDC connecting countries, especially EAST-WEST so that even when the sun has set here we have an extra hour or two of solar from the west.
- Build batteries for short term usage (see the Horndale battery in Australia for incredible short payback periods)
- Store heat/cold when you have the renewable and then use it as heat/cold.
- And build nuclear it's great baseload, if you can afford the actual price after the massive overruns.
But again, before we start coming up with new use-cases for hydrogen, we need to solve the 90 million tonnes annually made directly from fossil fuels. Until that's done, hydrogen remains a GHG problem, not a GHG solution.
I don't see how is that relevant. When for example PV energy is abundant and cheap enough to power green hydrogen manufacture, then it's a game of scale, not thermodynamical efficiency.
We should be so lucky as to have so much excess energy to throw away freely of green hydrogen.
But that future is nowhere in sight.
For starters we currently have 90 million tones of H2 that is made from fossil fuels. We should focus on making that green before we consider NEW use cases for it.
As for what to do with the excess energy:
1. Store it in hydro 2. Make water.
#2 is real informative. To make 1 kg of H2 you need ~9kg of pure water (let’s call it 10 for simplicity) and 50-65kWh of electricity. To make those 10 kg of water by desalinating seawater you need 0.035 kWh.
So instead of creating 1 kg of hydrogen, we could create 13,800-18,000 kg of pure water.
Given all the water problems we’re having, that might be a smarter use of that energy.
Every time the spot price goes to 0 or less we are throwing energy away. This is already happening. Every time we could be instead generating hydrogen, or desalinating water, whatever we are not doing right now. But with the ensuing enormouos rise in PV and wind this will get much much worse. Eventually something will use that energy. Why not generate supply for the time when sun is not shining? I don't really care if it's hydrogen, ammonia (easier to store) or pumped hydro (probably best, but not enough capacity possible) or something else.
Also not every country has access to sea and while here in EU the energy markets are interconnected, it's not perfect. And some countries have enough water, no need to desalinate.
The difference is that energy prices don’t go below 0 for solar. They go below zero for coal, gas, and nuclear since you can’t shut the plants down on a whim. But you can with solar. You aren’t throwing energy away by turn off panels or stopping turbines, the wind blows and the sun shines for free, whether or not we capture it. The concept that energy price can go negative only comes into the picture because of things like gas, coal, and nuclear where we have to active produce heat to turn into electricity.
As for ammonia being easy to store. Yes, but only compared to hydrogen. But now you have a highly toxic gas. And, creating ammonia from hydrogen is another extremely energy intensive process.
> But you can with solar. You aren’t throwing energy away by turn off panels or stopping turbines, the wind blows and the sun shines for free, whether or not we capture it.
We are throwing away the electricity that would be created if we could use it at the time. So, in the name of optimal utilization of resources, we should be using it.
> But now you have a highly toxic gas.
Working with which we do have decades of experiences.
It’s hard to say it’s optimal to build a whole hydrogen/ammonia production and distribution network to capture some excess energy.
Those things have serious costs, and that time and money could be better spent on a problem that is more important to solve. Again, that energy doesn’t cost anything to produce.
Don’t confuse optimal with maximal.
> decades of experience.
Yes, and the first rule of safe design is to not use toxic or harmful chemical if you can avoid it. And in this case we can.
> Don’t confuse optimal with maximal.
I'm not, we won't be able to utilize all of installed PV when it's producing max power. Currently at around 300GWp yearly added capacity and rising. But also I'm not saying hydrogen/ammonia production and storage is the only option we have. I just don't see many others.
> And in this case we can.
Sure we can. How?
> Sure we can. How?
By not making ammonia.
> we won't be able to utilise all of installed PV when it's producing max power.
I don't see that as a problem. Underutilised it will extend it's payback period, but they are already so cheap by comparison to any other option. There isn't a startup/shutdown cost, and there isn't an operating/fuel cost (the sun shines and the wind blows for free).
We should be focusing on adding storage for cases when we may not have it in the future, and not because we have more than we need now. If we have more than we need now, that's not really a problem that needs solving. Take the money we'd spend on that and build more renewables; there's still plenty of places in the world (US included) that are still burning coal. Taking those plants offline is a bigger win than storing excess energy that we get for free (minus a longer payback period on the equipment).
So before we talk about storage, I'd argue for 2 changes:
1. Simply overbuild the hell out of solar and wind. Build it out so that they handle the winter demands, the price is already so low, and in the summer when we have all that excess energy we won't have to worry about storing it for later.
2. Change usage pattern. This is both a supply and demand problem. People already are used to not running their dishwasher/laundry during peak times, "peak times" will simply change. So if you have a lot of solar and wind, you'll want to do those at noon rather than at night. Same for other high energy draw activities.
Storage will depend on how long you need it in the future, and what you will use it for.
- Heating and cooling short term: Use thermal storage to store "heat" or "cold" then pull from that during the rest of the day as you need it. Think water heaters, bricks for heat storage, or phase change materials for "cold" storage.
- For short term there's batteries (for a great payback period see Hornsdale Power Reserve).
- If you have hydro, or are connected to neighbours which do, change how that's operated (it's only at ~40% capacity) so that you store the excess green energy in them, and run them when solar and wind go offline.
- Build pumped storage between two artificial basins (cover them with solar panels to help with evaporation).
- And worst case, you end up in a situation where you have to turn on some natural gas peaking plants to cover a shortfall. But if we get to the point where potentially running a fossil fuel peaking plant is the biggest of our concerns, we have won 99% of the battle.
> Take the money we'd spend on that and build more renewables; there's still plenty of places in the world (US included) that are still burning coal. Taking those plants offline is a bigger win than storing excess energy that we get for free (minus a longer payback period on the equipment).
> Simply overbuild the hell out of solar and wind. Build it out so that they handle the winter demands
How do you propose replacing coal with renewables without storage? Here in the EU, in winter there is no way to power national grids from PV (with the possible exception of PIGS) and a few landlocked countries can't have enough wind power (also often the wind just does not blow enough even for offshore production). Currently there is a mix of sources including coal, gas, nuclear, hydro, biomass etc. There is also a strong national bias so even as a small country you can't be completely dependent on other countries for power.
> So if you have a lot of solar and wind, you'll want to do those at noon rather than at night. Same for other high energy draw activities.
Or we could power night activities with the PV from west, but there is only Morocco/Western Sahara and then the ocean. But people still want to cook food and watch TV in the evening and they will not change that, so we will need short term storage. That's probably not even an big issue though.
> Build pumped storage between two artificial basins
We do have a few here, here is the biggest one: https://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%8Cierny_V%C3%A1h_(vodn%C3%...
it's impressive, but also easy to see the limits: you need suitable geology and geography and without that can't reach sufficient capacity.
> A manufacturing facilities that produce 4 GW of solar/year is an exponential improvement over a 1GW nuclear reactor.
Except that 1GW of nuclear capacity means up to 900MW of production in practice, while 1GW of solar means 100MW.
Nuclear stops for maintenance, refuelling and repairs. A well maintained plant can operate for 60 years or more.
Solar stops at night, slows down on cloudy days, and so on. Panels degrade and have to be replaced after 20 years or so.
Non-hydro renewables only beat nuclear when you conveniently forget storage, which is insanely expensive, and when you look at nominal capacity, not actual production.
Just go look at https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR : currently, wind is barely producing anything across Europe. Germany has 67GW of wind capacity, yet they're producing a laughable 7.4 GW. It's been that way for *WEEKS*. You can't possibly store weeks of production.
> Solar stops at night, slows down on cloudy days, and so on.
All of which is already accounted for, so you're double-counting
> Panels degrade and have to be replaced after 20 years or so.
Most of the ones I've seen have 25 year guarantees; historically they've lasted longer, but I don't know how much the manufacturing etc. has changed so I'm not sure how strongly to predict extra years of life beyond such guarantees.
> Non-hydro renewables only beat nuclear when you conveniently forget storage, which is insanely expensive, and when you look at nominal capacity, not actual production.
1) Hydro is a storage system as well as a source
2) Even with li-ion backing it's cost-comparable to nuclear, and li-ion is one of the more expensive PWh-scale options
3) The current pricing is for digging up rocks and applying enough chemistry to make them batteries; recycling is expected to be much cheaper once scaled up.
(I'll grant that recycling is an "if and when", if you like; but the other points stand without needing any support)
This is reasonable. Nuclear is still valuable though. It still works after a week of bad weather that would badly affect wind or solar.
Regarding renewables: are we held back by solar panel manufacturing? I thought the constantly falling prices are a sign that the panels are abundant. I think serious utility use of solar is held back more by the cost of storage. If we speak about best allocation of scarce labor, maybe battery manufacturing would have more impact.
Thermal storage (mirrors hearing rocks or melting salts) is also pretty material- and labor-intensive, even though it likely would require slightly less demanding processes of laying concrete and welding steel than a nuclear installation.
> Regarding renewables: are we held back by solar panel manufacturing?
I would say yes, tentatively.
Looking at the growth rate[0], and given the capacity factor in practice appears to be 10%, the current estimated manufacturing rate of 316 GW in this calendar year implies 31.6 GW of average output, multiply that by a lifespan of 25 years to get the steady-state level and it's 790 GW — nice, but well short of the ~2 TW of current electricity usage, and ideally the post-scarcity solarpunk future has far more electricity available as most of the world doesn't currently get aircon, electric heating, home freezers, cars (batteries or hydrogen argument is irrelevant as both need electricity), and we also electrify steel and other chemical processes.
Assuming current estimated growth rate continues as an exponential, new PV factories start changing from "well obviously we should build it" to "hmm, let's think carefully" some time around 2027.
Storage is definitely a factor currently, but a lot of battery factories are scheduled to come online in the next few years and I expect the situation to improve considerably.
I watched a representation of an mining industry insider ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgOEGKDVvsg ) some months ago who makes the point that all these projections are completely unrealistic because of mining constraints. He says/shows that you need an order of magnitude (I think) more ore of many elements and this is impossible because:
1) The Mining industry is incredible mature and there are no easy disruptive technologies on the horizon.
2) Even if there was the will to do it, new capacities take at least ten years to go live and he does not even see any relevant increased investment in the sector, never mind concrete projects.
Mark P. Mills [1] may be a number of things but he is absolutely not by any means a "mining industry insider".
He is a senior fellow for a think tank that claims as axiomatic that the popular conception of climate change as posing an existential threat to modern civilization is not supported by climate science or economics.
It comes as no surprise that he repeatedly makes presentations aimed to undercut transition to green energy.
Regardless of the truth of his position though he is clearly no expert on the mining industry.
My friend who works at the mines says the same thing. But maybe this is just a meme in the industry.
My main point here is that Mills was described as a mining industry insider when his own Bio and presentations makes it clear he is not.
Mills makes a number of statments so I'm unsure what "the same thing is" .. but as far as the two points raised in the GP comment go:
1) Rio Tinto has 'recently' improved throughput using semi autonomous Haulpaks, trains, plants [1] and 'proved' that this works to the order of some ~ 800 million tonne per annum. They also have well advanced plans for a very different type of mining operation for a USD $64 billion copper resource in the US .. should that go ahead.
2) New operations do typically take ten years to bring up to production from (say) exploration drilling to mine opening ... however that's very much the rythm of the domain, relatively steady demand and growth sees forward planners leaving new $360 million capital investments "uncommitted" as long as possible - when the last active resource tails off, a new one is bought online. There's no hard constraint that prevents them bought online faster other than fear of surplus crashing price - typically there are many potential green sites ready to be advanced through further exploration and into economic feasibily technical reports and intial prospectus raising (to meet mine plant costs). [2]
[1] https://www.riotinto.com/en/about/innovation/automation
[2] https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...
Thank you for that information.
I think he's underestimating the ability of the industry to go "hmm, we're short on X, but we can switch to an alternate chemistry that avoid using it at a slightly lower efficiency". This is already happening in the E-V market, and fixed batteries (home or grid) are even less space/weight constrained.
Also, when there is a demand the market finds a way.
These guys have been doomsaying about renewables for decades now and have been consistently wrong. https://zenmo.com/en/photovoltaic-growth-reality-versus-proj...
One can build storage with only common elements (see pumped thermal, pumped hydro).
The world makes about 2 BILLION tonnes of steel a year. Storage made from materials like that will not cause significantly increased mining.
Electric vehicles are key, because they lead to V2G: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid
Another issue is transmission. The best solar and wind sites are often not near existing transmission capacity.
I remember reading an article about how old coal mines and plants are getting second lives as solar or wind farms because they already have large transmission lines.
—-
Nuclear might have the same issue, since these days I would imagine it would be hard to get a plant approved near a highly populated area.
SpaceX cut the manufacturing cost of rockets by a factor of 10. Before reusability. With that, it's probably a factor of 100. Or more.
Challenges in technology can be overcome.
SpaceX can develop things by building them and then seeing if they fail catastrophically too often. Nuclear developers can't do that.
It's a bit more complicated because these things are coupled. I think people are trying to draw deep distinctions to have a clear and simple answer to why the cost of nuclear rose but it is quite a lot of things that contribute and feed one another over time. As an incomplete example: anti-nuclear sentiments can make a government reduce the number of reactors they order or even cancel projects, this can then increase the cost of other reactors as low order counts don't scale well, causing others to cancel or delay orders as prices were higher than expected, and so on. Do this over 40 years.
There isn't any one thing that killed nuclear in the US, but rather a lot of little things. There's the anti-nuclear sentiment, there is big oil/gas disinformation campaigns (their climate campaigns were about making doubt of everything but them), it was a drop in price of crude oil during the Regan/Bush era, it was a change in regulation after Chernobyl after 3-Mile and after Fukushima, a rise in fossil fuel subsidies when nuclear had none (Regan/Bush/Carter), a decrease in DOE research funding of reactors, and it was many more things. The story and history matters. The complexity matters because it didn't die overnight.
This is important to understand because it also means fixing a single thing won't change things. Political will and support does matter but only gets the ball rolling as it prioritizes it to let the experts fix things. But the complexity means it won't be resolved overnight were we to magically get 100% of people onboard and passionate.
I wish nuclear proponents as well as opponents would recognize the inherent complexities of these problems. The truth is that stories like this aren't unique to nuclear and our oversimplification prevents us from solving many of our critical issues these days. The world is complex and messy. But I guess it is easier to garner support (an important factor) if we over simplify things. I just wish that would be the hook rather than the full story that we passionately defend.
Where do you read about these challenges, particularly the kinds of skilled and precision labour you mention?
I wish nuclear opponents would perform a like for like analysis of non-nuclear vs nuclear.
- How much does it raise co2 parts per million when operational?
- How much does it raise co2 parts per million when being built?
- Full environmental cost of the entire supply including construction?
- Deaths during construction.
- Deaths in the general population from "emissions" or accidents.
- Deaths during use and maintenance.
- How much area does the site area?
- How much area lost to 'contamination'? Oil spills, coal slag piles [1], but for nuclear, nature does quite well after humans leave the area. What are the byproducts of producing turbine blades and solar panels, including the construction of new factories and all the transport of materials to those factories, and the emissions of those factories?
- Post-use recycling (solar panels after 20yrs, wind turbines when a blade breaks)
Nuclear power hasn't been industrialized until recently and even then there's not a huge effort towards that.
Imagine if every single modern plane built is a one-off ad-hoc design. I wonder how much they'd cost? Best example I can think of, but huge complexity, safety-critical, a similar lifespan, with on going maintenance.
> A manufacturing facilities that produce 4 GW of solar/year is an exponential improvement over a 1GW nuclear reactor.
How are they an "exponential" improvement?
There's a vast amount of digging in some out-of-sight out-of-mind country to get materials out of the ground, with sketchy practices, shipped across the sea in a diesel power ship, to be refined, consuming more power, day-in-day out. And then there's the solar panel recycling story that we haven't even figured out yet. [2]
And with wind turbines, we started off on the wrong foot there as well. [3]
Apparently we're in a critical climate emergency, but nuclear is "too costly". And 'green' solutions are seen to be greener than they actually are.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster 2. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-65602519 3. https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/can-wi...
Renewables lead on all these metrics.
People who support nuclear as anything more than a footnote in the future energy mix are, at best, looking at decades old data in an area that is famous for changing faster than even proponents expected.
> Renewables lead on all these metrics.
Do they? That's my question, "citation needed". I've yet to find empirical evidence of a like for like comparison of the full and complete lifecycle and supply chain of both. And that's in addition to environmental costs.
Nuclear: dig uranium out of the ground, refine it. Build power station building (pipes, concrete, etc.), maintenance (replacing mechanical parts, etc.). Decommissioning.
Renewable proponents always talk about the end product, the panels or turbines.
But not the continual manufacturing chain (new factories, consuming more raw materials and power), or the on going maintenance (how often do turbines fail, blades fail, panels fail), or the end-of-life recycling. Nuclear power stations are a one off. Wind turbines and solar panels are being manufactured continually, consuming huge amounts of raw materials and power before they even come online.
And don't forget storage of excess power for a rainy/dark/windless day. So then there's whole other supply chain and manufacturing processes for battery storage. Renewables on their own are no good for baseload because of the variability.
Can you name a single factor that isn't covered in great detail here, in this review of what life cycle analysis covered between 2009-2018 (edit to add some context, the cost of solar dropped 82% over that period)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266679242...
> local environmental conditions such as hydrology can influence operations and environmental impacts [13, 14]; population distribution and demand levels can do the same by shifting the burden of supply [15], [16], [17]; regional electricity mixes result in variable environmental impacts [18, 19]; fuel supply and distribution distances can amplify the impact of fuel transportation [20] but also the delivery of electricity to consumers [19]. Environmental releases from electricity generation depend on hourly, daily, and weekly demand cycles at subnational scales [3, 21]; seasonal cycles, both in environmental conditions and demand [22]; degradation of capital [19, 23]; and changes to the regional energy system, including fuel supply, production, and distribution [18]. Joint spatiotemporal factors are exemplified by supply and demand dynamics on the electric grid because interactions between consumers, power plants, transmission and distribution networks, and the fuel supply also depend on locations [18, 20, [23], [24], [25]]
That's the best article I've seen. Thanks.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266679242...
But... note in fig. 2 how the renewables just start at 'manufacture', not 'mining' -> 'transport' -> 'refining' -> 'transport' -> 'manufacture'
And how it also ends without '-> battery storage' and all the mining/transport/refining/manufacture that that entails.
Battery storage was not a thing before renewable energy sources, that must also be included in analysis like this. Prior to renewables some sort of pumped storage was being used in hydro projects, but nothing like the scale of battery storage we have now.
As I said in a previous comment, the supply chain (or whatever you want to call it) for renewables is far longer than is recognised.
The gorilla in the room is: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
And another big one hides behind him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid
There's entire documents linked there, comparing the ways that eutrophication is affected by different energy systems.
Normal people don't even know what eutrophication is, and they're not only measuring it, but having deep academic arguments about the best way to measure it correctly.
So it's bold to glance at an overview diagram and conclude that they've never realised that manufacturing a wind turbine involves mining and therefore GHG emissions. That's something you could read in a right-wing newspapers online comment section over 20 years ago so it's not news to professionals in the field.
edit to add quote from a random paper they reviewed:
> The major stages of a typical LCA study are raw material acquisition, component manufacture and assembling, production of functional unit, and deposal of the product.
Also, the bottom item on that same chart is "storage", both the creation and use of it. Storage, which gets covered even in the period between 2008-2019 when battery storage is fairly rare, because storage has been used alongside nuclear for decades.
> Nuclear power stations are a one off.
No? You still have to replace fuel, fix mechanical issues (if they are fixable). There are turbines in nuclear plants too. And another thing is that nuclear plants need highly competent and educated specialist workforce, and after that the very expensive decommissioning needs another specialist workforce, and so on.
Nuclear power stations are a one off build. I can’t think of two or more identical builds.
Are you talking stations (size of ground pads, number of toilets | parking bays) or reactors ?
( Hydro electric dams are largely "one off builds" - yet many share common turbine units and families )
Does that include the 25 reactors in South Korea that come from families such as OPR-1000 (basic), OPR-1000 (improved), APR-1400, etc?
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
The entire station. They're vast and substantial.
There are lots of identical VVER reactors, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER
Also RBMK (Chernobyl) was a serial production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK
and so on.
> - Full environmental cost of the entire supply including construction?
And also including dismantling and spent fuel/ contaminated material storage and disposal for unknown time to come. Also not only environmental, but social cost of creating a spent fuel site that does have to be cared for hundreds of years while bringing no benefit at all, with huge costs.
That BBC article is actually funny. There is no disaster, it's glass, aluminum and some metals, all of them eminently recyclable but since there was not a lot of PV panels until now it was not an issue. It will be an issue now and it will be solved, but it pales in comparison with other waste.
The solution to nuclear waste is simple. Build a single warehouse in the desert somewhere and keep it there until we use it as fuel later in breeder reactors. The waste is already in concrete casks. You basically just need a concrete pad for them to sit on. Hell, just build it at Area 52 or something. Or the existing WIPPS site where military nuclear waste is disposed of. It was originally meant for civilian waste as well anyways.
Lets say you insist we bury perfectly good U238. Fine, just expand WIPPs a bit. Or we can use deep borehole disposal to bury it several km underground in a seismically stable location. Done. No monitoring necessary. We know this will be fine because nature formed natural nuclear reactors in the ground billions of years ago and the 'waste' has moved less than a meter in billions of years. The dangerous part of the waste (fission products) will be gone in a few hundred years anyways. What is left after that needs to be ground up and eaten to be dangerous.
> until we use it as fuel later in breeder reactors
After approx 70 years and many projects there not a single industrial breeder reactor working satisfactorily.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Development_an...
?
The BN-600 and BN-800 are operating commercially today and they are looking to expand the design to the BN-1200.
Also, there's little need for breeders today because the overall percentage of energy we get from nuclear energy is low. In the future, if this expands is when we would need to deploy breeders. The casks that the waste is put in are rated for 100+ years and its trivial to swap containers.
The BN-600 had many problems (leaks) and is an obsolete version.
The most successful was its successor, the BN-800, but "problems ((...)) indicated a redesign was needed", and construction of it's successor (the BN-1200) was postponed many times (now 2035). Problems related to cost and process/security seem quite difficult to solve... Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-1200_reactor
Instead of deploying BNs Russians pause them and are back to the drawing board. The sole officially actively pursued (since 2021) pertinent design, BREST-OD-300 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BREST_(reactor) ), is a very different architecture (lead, not sodium, is the coolant) and will only (when completed, if ever) be a demonstrator (low power: 300MWe).
Hence: the is no satisfying industrial breeder reactor.
> there's little need for breeders today
The whole nuclear industry knows since the 1950's that breeding is the only way for nuclear to really gain momentum and this is sound from a strategic viewpoint (dependency towards uranium exporters). However after huge R&D efforts in many nations ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Development_an... )... there is no adequate reactor.
Are the BNs even licensable in the west?
Fast reactors have much larger concentrations of fissionable material in their cores (due to the lower fission cross section of fast neutrons vs. thermal neutrons.) Because they are critical on fast neutrons, presence of a moderator is not necessary for criticality. For these reasons, rearrangement of materials in a serious accident always has the possibility of reaching a prompt fast supercritical arrangement -- that is, a true nuclear bomb.
I have serious doubts that any of the BN reactors can make a safety case that would allow licensing in the west.
One can conceive of fast reactors that would be licensable (for example, molten chloride salt reactors, where the fuel is distributed uniformly in the salt) but these are just conceptual at this point.
> The whole nuclear industry knows since the 1950's that breeding is the only way for nuclear to really gain momentum
Breeders were being researched back then because it was thought that Uranium was much more scarce than it actually is. Because that is not the case, there was little reason to pursue the more complicated and expensive breeder tech.
We will eventually move in that direction yes but it's certainly not strictly necessary today. PWR/BWR is plenty good enough for the next 60 years. Plus commercially running PHWR reactors like CANDU can make use of natural Uranium and even Thorium.
No, because known accessible reserves are sufficient for at most 2 hundred years with the current fleet of reactors ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Peak_uranium ) , which produces approx 4.3% of the (worldwide) primary energy, and therefore at most 2% of the final energy.
In other words replacing fossil fuels with nuclear implies at the very least 10x the existing fleet, and known uranium reserves will then provide for 200/10 years, that is to say approx 20 years: investors will not be thrilled by this perspective!
Betting on new (now unknown) reserves isn't sound because an uranium bubble which peaked in 2007 triggered massive surveying... producing meager (15%) results. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_bubble_of_2007
AFAIK CANDU never industrially burnt thorium, please source (yes, it is in theory possible). CANDU is a dead-end, there is absolutely no project nor R&D towards it. Even Canada, which established and adopted it, now only tries to build non-CANDU reactors. Where is the company or even startup pushing CANDU, I don't know of any? 5 nations are CANDU users, not a single one builds more of it. It is not bad at all, but there are many criteria and it simply, right now, doesn't check the right cases.
I must say, your sole sourcing via wikipedia is not confidence inspiring. At least link the sources directly from the footnotes.
We're not going to 100% nuclear energy, at least not in the foreseeable future so the concerns of Uranium supplies is not material. We haven't looked very hard for it because you don't need much. Plus there's literally an inexhaustible supply in the Ocean. Yes, it would be an order of magnitude more expensive than current in-situ mining. But that's still fine because fuel costs are a tiny portion of O&M costs of NPPs.
Your sources on the the "meager 15% increase" is a gross mischaracterization of the source which says: "The world's known uranium resources increased 15% in two years to 2007 due to increased mineral exploration." I doubt we looked very hard due to the other facts linked in your sources saying that most plants already had long terms contracts and therefore did not need to go looking for new fuel sources.
> AFAIK CANDU never industrially burnt thorium, please source (yes, it is in theory possible).
This is true, the fuel characterization is happening right now at Idaho National Labs. I'm waiting for updates on this front. https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Clean-Core-prepares-...
> CANDU is a dead-end, there is absolutely no project nor R&D towards it.
This is not true. India is building 3 or 4 as we speak. https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
Canada has refurb projects going right now and the associated supply chains that would make new orders for CANDU very logical. There is very recent talks of this right now thanks in part to C4NE's release of the "The Case for CANDU" report which has caused a stir.
> your sole sourcing via wikipedia
IMHO the referenced articles adequately concisely describe the facts, and provide sources.
> there's literally an inexhaustible supply in the Ocean
We try to obtain uranium from seawater since the 70's, with (as with industrial breeder reactors) grand announcements from time to time. Net result: "pumping the seawater to extract this uranium would need more energy than what could be produced with the recuperated uranium". Source: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/jones-j2/docs/e...
> gross mischaracterization
Therefore, in your opinion, uranium mining operations weren't interested into launching surveying during a period of nearly exponential growth in the price of natural uranium because they already had customers? Let's see: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Uranium...
>> CANDU > India is building 3 or 4
Indeed, thank you, and a relaunch in Canada could trigger a renewed interest.
Your supply and demand link appears broken, perhaps you meant:
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...
In any case that's a secondary source, you're better off using the primary:
Uranium 2022: Resources, Production and Demand (aka U Redbook)
https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_79960/uranium-2022-resource...
although at 560+ pages it's perhaps doubtful you'd read that.
It's worthy of note that broadscale coarse uranium exploration gets "thrown in" with any airbourne geophysical survey that typical runs magnetic + radiometric sensors at the same time (saves fuel costs + 256 channel ground emissions give geologic structure via K + Th + U patterns )
https://www.ga.gov.au/ausgeonews/ausgeonews200812/radiometri...
It was mostly because they thought vastly more NPPs would be built than ended up being built.
> Build a single warehouse in the desert
There are countries with no desert and for some unknown reason most countries are not desperate to import spent fuel.
> You basically just need a concrete pad for them to sit on.
And the elements and radiation to take the 'concrete casks' apart and blow the bad stuff out.
All solutions to that are expensive and you have to monitor and fix leaks for a very long time. The deeper you bury it, the deeper you have to dig later to fix the leaks.
> will be gone in a few hundred years anyways
That's a lot of time (and associated costs) in human lifetimes.
It doesn't literally need to be a desert. Just somewhere with low population density. This isn't a final disposal site. Just a central monitored place to hold the waste in a warehouse before the fuel is recycled or buried. The casks are rated for 100+ years and if they wear out, it's easy to swap casks.
Deep borehole tech is readily available since America got so good at shale operations. It would be extremely cheap compared to building a huge underground facility like Finland is planning.
> That's a lot of time (and associated costs) in human lifetimes.
Again, no monitoring necessary once you bury it several km underground and fill the channel with concrete.
> And also including dismantling and spent fuel/ contaminated material storage and disposal for unknown time to come. Also not only environmental, but social cost of creating a spent fuel site that does have to be cared for hundreds of years while bringing no benefit at all, with huge costs.
Indeed. Decommissioning a nuclear power station is a serious task. But the waste fuel can just be buried somewhere where humans aren't. It's really not a problem. If people are too stupid to read 'stay away' signs, there's not much hope for us. After all, people manage not to fall off cliffs every day that have signs saying 'warning cliff'. It's not difficult.
Given the return of animals to Chernobyl and Fukushima, is that really such a high price to pay? Animals are largely unaffected, and we're the ones messing up the planet.
It really is a problem though. You still have to monitor and fix the facilities for hundreds of years.
> when we have far cheaper alternatives.
the far cheaper alternatives that actually provide no 24/7 power, consume massive amounts of lands, and also have a non-nill carbon footprint once you take everything in account
These are all tendentious talking points that have been well debunked. They can provide 24/7 power when paired with storage (like pumped hydro at $300/kWh of capacity), the land use is no serious problem, and the carbon footprint of nuclear is much higher when you include all the CO2 emitted by fossil plants while waiting 10 years for the nuclear plant to come online.
> the land use is no serious problem
... especially as offshore wind often is the biggest reserve. Even better: no large vessel can navigate in an offshore wind-turbines field, which becomes a near-sanctuary.
> the land use is no serious problem,
Gotta love the complete double standard at play. The ridiculously small amount of land that needs to host radioactive material post use is a problem for people who hate nuclear but they never have any issue with huge swaths of lands being used for windmills and solar farms.
There's definitely truth to this and not. It's rather complicated. I don't want to get into arguments which will happen no matter what I say, so I'm just going to link three things and let the data speak for itself.
[0] is the cost of energy by year. We notice that nuclear is the only one to increase and coal is stable while everything else decreases. As time goes by, things usually get cheaper, so we have to ask what's unique to nuclear.
[1] Shows a graph of the decarbonization process of countries' energy sectors. I suggest including: US, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, and China.
[2] is a near real time map of energy production and tells you where the energy portfolio, its carbon intensity per source, and if the region imports/exports that electricity. All these matter.
So we should all keep these things in mind when discussing energy because carbon is a critical part. This is HN, people are familiar with how to read data, right? Let's not fight, and let's try to start any discussion with some facts that are inarguable. This is just data.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/decarbonizing-energy-progress
> We notice that nuclear is the only one to increase
“ France and South Korea were at least able to keep prices and construction times constant.”
“ those countries that were able to avoid price surges are countries that do not stand out in regulating nuclear power less, but in standardizing the construction of reactors more.”
Source will be appreciated as the claims seem to be false according to quick search.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-19/french-wi...
The person you're replying to quoted from the worldindata article that I linked which has a source (and many others) to a more thorough study. As to France's (your [2]) there was a perfect storm of bad events. Due to covid many repairs and typical maintenance things got pushed back. Alone it would have only resulted in a slight increase, but covid was also longer than many expected. But then the crisis in Ukraine happened and there was high demand for electricity. You have to remember that France is one of the largest exporters of electricity in all of Europe and often is the number one. Two black swan events. You can't use 2023 as a judgement for France's cost of power as it is a clear outlier event, as even indicated by your [2] source if you zoom out.
Also remember that like most western countries, France has not built a nuclear reactor in decades. Most of the build out was in the 80's and the most recent one began operation in 2002. In fact, only 4 built this century[0] (they're still 80's reactors too btw). Truthfully, they have gotten more expensive over time too and have a negative "learning curve". South Korea on the other hand did their build out in the 90's and has continued building new reactors, albeit at a slower rate than the initial build out. When you look at [0] for different countries compare construction vs operation times and look at that differential over different periods. That's an important clue.
I highly suggest reading that world in data link, as it has a lot to say and provides a ton of sources. It's nowhere near the full story and isn't even centered around nuclear, but these conversations should never be about nuclear alone. That's why I only posted data and am still not saying much. I more want people to look at the data, take care, __think__, and form conclusions from that. These pro vs anti conversations never work and are rather silly as they often are had between two non-experts who do not use concrete data or use very selective data. But we can at least start at the two important things and figure out if we need to dig deeper: trend of costs of sources and how successful different countries (with different strategies) have been at decarbonizing their electricity centers. I think the problem with energy questions is that we all care because this issue, but somehow let it fall off to the side when we discuss energy. So let's start there and make sure we agree on the facts. Then we can get nuanced and dig into the nitty gritty and discuss other things. Start with the carbon.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
Not quite true: there is no public opposition to anything in Russia let's say, and they build their nuclear plants for about that long. Belarusian NPP construction started in March 2011 and first reactor went online in November 2020, 9.5 years. Chernobyl NPP was probably built faster than it should've been given many issues they introduced in the process, and it took 7.5 years from commencement to first reactor going online, May 1970 to December 1977.
10 years down the road, there simply won't be a place for non-renewable power left on the market, apart from natural gas peaker plants for grid balancing. Too late to start any new ones.
As the price of photovoltaic continues strongly downward, all other energy sources will seem increasingly expensive. So much energy will be consumed during the day, and more and more nighttime energy use will be constrained. The traditional power sources like Coal, Nuclear, and Oil will be slowly decommissioned as they age, leading towards a reduction of base generation. Gas peakers will be used as needed when the base generation plus renewables don't meet demand. Over time, batteries will become a larger and highly predictable system to handle peak demands. The price of battery storage is plummeting too. Although there are open questions on if the improvements in battery tech will continue, if it does continue then in 30 to 40 years the cheapest way to sell peak power will be to buy it during photovoltaic abundance, store it in a battery, and then release it. At this point we will be able to stop using gas peakers.
Not true, for example Nizniy Novgorod NPP was cancelled despite being almost finished because of local radiophobic public movements. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%8C%D0%BA...
Yes that was in the democratic era...
Nuclear is a decade long planning
Doesn't work if the government changes hands every 4 years and comes with radical different ideas and starts reversing stuff from the previous government.
Totally different to China, with their 20 year plans, where they're committed to developing nuclear, are putting superior resources into it and are building at scale.
Every country with nuclear had a period where they went ahead and build a bunch.
Building one or two in isolation is just a gamble
This is not an accurate description in any way of the nuclear regulatory process. Presidential elections, even if they swapped parties every four years, do not result in massive regulatory changes.
The nuclear industry has no one but itself to blame for its failures and bankruptcies.
Just one example where a key investment gets blocked due to politics
Keystone XL pipeline halted after Biden blocks permit https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57422456
One presidency would approve it, the next one would disprove it
China relies on 5 year plans, and they still have to deal with a public that doesn’t just implicitly trust them to not be corrupt in the operation of a nuclear power plant. That delayed them at least 5 or so years in the current batch being built out.
Again, this isn’t intrinsic to the technology, we could be nuclear reactors on time and on budget if we decided to.
If we could decide to do that, what precise changes could we make?
I ask because I want nuclear to succeed, but see no path for what you say is possible. And I don't know a single person in the industry, or who is familiar with the failures, that sees the route to producing nuclear as cheaply as, say, China.
Then Russians will blow up a dam, so the reactor will run out of water for cooling and then run away into a Red Forest.
OR climate change will make a water pond dry, so you cannot even start the reactor.
OR terrorists will capture a reactor and mine it.
OR massive change in water weight due to climate change will create a massive earthquake.
Nuke plant aside, why would the Russians blow the main water supply to Crimea after only recently getting it back flowing? Or flood out the "Russian" side (their claim, not mine) of the area including their own troops? Especially when they could have just opened the gates. Guess I'm not understanding the logic or advantage here.
Not only have Russians flooded cities, they are also firing artillery into flooded areas to hamper rescue efforts: https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/16667845787473960...
If your mental model of the world sees Russia as a normal functional country instead of a terrorist state capable, willing and engaged in unrestricted warfare against civilians, then of course you'll find yourself in situations where you "don't understand" what's going on.
It's not possible to defend Crimea from land attacks, as demonstrated multiple times in history. Russians lost the hope to keep Crimea in their hands.
Distraction. Flooding. Can point fingers at Ukraine. Delays the counter offensive.
The operation is disinformation. They know that the world news will report "both sides blame the other" and that's all they need.
Russia has clearly demonstrated over the last year that their soldiers are disposable.
> The reason for the long and expensive construction has a lot to do with the people opposing the construction! We could build these reactors so much more cheaply and quickly (and more safely!) if we decided to!
This doesn't make sense, the roadblocks have been cleared at that point. Once they started constructing, what opposition is still there?
The industry has atrophied, I don't think we can be WWII bombers anymore either or if we wanted to it would take some time to gain momentum.
This is not really true. Here in the UK we have been building Hinkey C and no review/protest/faff has been permitted. I am not sure the US could do that because you have a constitution, where as in the UK the law is whatever parliament says. The reactor is still years behind schedule and over budget. And even when it was on-budget, it was hideously expensive.
If people still want nuclear, that is fine. But we have to be realistic and accept that it will take twice as much and cost a lot of money. Pretending otherwise just leads to bad decisions and worsens opposition in the long run.
> The reason for the long and expensive construction has a lot to do with the people opposing the construction! We could build these reactors so much more cheaply and quickly (and more safely!) if we decided to!
Citation required.
Another explanation is that is that they're so complicated and expensive that it results in the people involved in managing the construction being incentivized to make it more expensive. They to siphon off as much as possible, empire build and collect more power for themselves by spending more money. And if they come up with more possible risks to mitigate, they sell a more complex and costly system and get more money, while the people doing oversight don't want to be the one that said okay to not mitigating a risk that causes a major problem down the line--they're so complicated that the safest butt-covering is to just spend the money.
All of that is just organic, free-range American middle-management capitalism at work. No hippies required to make it expensive.
Take a look at California, at non-nuclear large construction projects. Do you think that the pervasive delays and cost overruns have nothing to do with many forces actively opposing (almost any) construction projects? Do you e.g. think that costs and delays of building a railway have much to do with inherent expenses and complexities of railway technology?
A lot of that has to do with pure NIMBYism and regulatory capture, and the bulk of the cost overruns are just contractors extracting what they can. Environmentalists are a useful weapon for them, and someone to conveniently blame. If you got rid of those laws it wouldn't get significantly cheaper.
How on earth is the US Navy managing its fleet of >64 nuclear powered submarines ?
Those reactors are small (compared to those exploited by the electronuclear industry), fully opaque (not monitored by the public, enabling various tricks and mishaps hiding), associated budgets are huge (totally out of the range of industrial civilian equipment), some of the main challenges (cooling down the reactor) is way more difficult (they are embarked into ships/subs, which are surrounded by vast amounts of water)...
The first EPR project in France (Flamanville-3) had problems documented in an official report (dubbed 'Folz', per the name of its main author), sadly AFAIK it wasn't translated into English: https://www.economie.gouv.fr/rapport-epr-flamanville
A piece about it: https://www.archyde.com/the-folz-report-draws-up-a-severe-as...
"the people opposing the construction" isn't a major cause.
Pertinent: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
It should be added that not even the French think nuclear will power the world. If they did, they would not have mothballed their fast reactor program (breeders being necessary for a world that gets most of its energy from nuclear.)
> The reason for the long and expensive construction has a lot to do with the people opposing the construction!
Citation needed.
> “argument from unclean hands”
Finally! I’ve been looking for the name of that concept.
My personal example is saying “Jumbo frames are a cheap way to get a 20% performance boost.”
The network team argued with me about how expensive it would be for so long that it actually became expensive and no longer worth it.
There is also the narrative vs facts problem.
"It takes forever to build a nuclear power plant and it is very expensive"
This is a narrative.
"Lets compare how MW capacity / day (how long it takes to build) across different energy sources"
These are facts.
If you can build 10 MW in 10 days vs 1200 MW in 365 days which one is better?
This is ridiculous reasoning. There is nothing that prevents you from building renewable sources in parallel.
There absolutely is, for example physics
Physics prevents us from building multiple renewable facilities at the same time? Do please explain. This sounds like utter bullshit.
“ The Public Interest Advocacy staff of the Georgia Public Service Commission warned back in 2008 that the costs could skyrocket. They advocated for a risk-sharing mechanism to incentivize Georgia Power to keep the construction costs down and opposed plans to bill customers for the Vogtle construction while it was underway.
Both proposals failed. Thanks to a 2009 state law, Georgia Power ratepayers are billed a monthly Nuclear Construction Cost Recovery fee. They will begin paying an additional monthly charge when each of the new Plant Vogtle units come online.”
If I were a Georgia Power customer I’d be livid. Why on Earth should I be on the hook for cost overruns instead of the company building the thing?
GP customer here.
They have a monopoly anyway, so they will recover costs one way or another anyway.
Also, we pay some of the lowest energy rates in the country so there's not much to be mad about. Overnight I pay $0.01/kwh ($0.03 if you include fees).
Lastly, why get mad when you can get solar.
Wow, I thought my $0.08/kWh in PNW was great.
Note that elif said "overnight" rate. I'm pretty sure they're on the EV rate plan from GA Power[1]. You only get that rate at night, and you pay a pretty punitive $0.21/kwh for any peak usage. As they mentioned, that's a pretty solid number for the marginal rate you'll pay for an extra kwh, but there are a number of base fees tacked on to that. I'm not on the EV plan, but my average out the door winter final rate is about $0.13/kwh and my summer rate ends up being more like $0.17/kwh.
[1] https://www.georgiapower.com/residential/billing-and-rate-pl...
Pff, your punitive 21¢/kWh is cheaper than our overnight 25¢/kWh or so in the Bay Area :P
Is night time energy still cheaper than day time? I thought that with the rise of cheap solar, day time energy would have been cheaper by now.
That also incentivizes home battery systems. Charge it up overnight and then use the battery power during peak times. It's a good deal for the power company if you do that too because it reduces amount of swing in the grid.
I modeled buying a few Tesla Powerwalls to do time of use shifting, and it didn't make any sense from an investment standpoint. It's a great incentive if you were buying the battery backup anyway, but not as an investment.
Yup during peak hours I'm usually pumping 3-5 kw to the grid. It's a win-win.
GA Power net metering is still limited access, right? Did you have to wait on a wait-list to get approved for it?
It also incentivises solar, which provides super cheap energy during the day.
It's worth noting that the "punitive" peak is only 5 hours, does not include weekends, and is only for 4 months out of the year.
And since it is during peak solar hours, I've never had to pay that rate once.
Oh, that makes more sense.
Still great for charging your EV overnight
Jesus. I pay 28c/kWh + 8c/kWh delivery (and many other fees that add to another 7c/kWh).
California costs are unhinged. I'm extremely excited to get my ducks in a row and move out.
These are MA prices.
Oops; wrong guess then. Still, that's extremely high and I'm glad it wasn't a destination on my list. I'm thinking of moving from CA to the southeast to escape the cost of living. Probably KY, TN, GA, SC, or NC.
If the US is so big on the free market, why are there monopolies everywhere? In Netherland I can choose who to buy my energy from (I buy mine from a company that provides only green energy).
It's offset by the fact that high energy consumption industry is moving to Georgia in a big way. Battery plants, car manufacturers, mattress factories, all sorts of well paying non-service industry non college degree positions that make for a robust diverse economy.
- https://www.georgiatrend.com/2023/03/29/2023-industry-outloo...
- https://www.selectgeorgia.com/discover-georgia/industries/
- https://gov.georgia.gov/press-releases/2023-01-19/gov-kemp-k...
The entity responsible for these overruns is the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They are the ones who should lose funding!
In what way? Be specific. I have never heard a single regulation that should change, and the AP1000 reactors at both Summer and Vogtle were approved under a new process pushed for by the nuclear industry.
In truth, basic incompetence from design to EPC has caused these disasters. And it's not just the US NRC, it's happened in Europe with France's EPR, too.
The NRC is a scapegoat for the incompetent, that don't want to look at the true sources of failure.
Here's a specific complaint about the application of a new and unnecessary airplane strike rule to an already approved design: https://atomicinsights.com/nrcs-imposition-of-aircraft-impac...
Personally, I think what will happen is that other countries like China and South Korea will build lots and lots of NPPs cheaply and quickly and the US will only consider making changes to the way things are done after looking incredibly inept in comparison. The NRC is only one of many things that needs to change.
This doesn't explain why the Vogtle AP1000s had cost/schedule overruns. You can blame the NRC rules for adding complexity and cost but you can't blame the NRC for the nuclear industry's wildly over-optimistic estimates.
According to that article, the airplane strike rule was added in 2009. The reactors began construction in 2013 with certain cost/schedule estimates. If the airplane strike rule significantly increased effort, that should have been accounted for before they actually started building. They had 4 years in advance to figure it out (or, if they couldn't figure it out in time, to postpone until they understood the consequences). After construction started the project kept slipping and costs kept going up for 10 years, despite the rules remaining the same since construction was actually under way.
It was one of many factors of course. There's plenty of blame to go around. Votgle is still a net societal good and will provide clean energy for 60 to 80 years.
They specifically asked the NRC if the new rule would apply to Votgle and were told it would not since the design was certified prior to the rule. Then the NRC changed their mind and incurred billions of dollars worth of delays and no one seems to blame the NRC for this unnecessary delay.
If it was one of many factors, perhaps you could document a factor that could actually serve as an explanation? Because as he explained that one can't.
Vogtle is a net negative compared to other approaches they could have, and should have, taken.
They specifically asked the NRC if the new rule would apply to Votgle and were told it would not since the design was certified prior to the rule.
Where do you see that? According to the Rod Adams piece you linked above, the final design certification document for Vogtle included that new rule and it was completed in 2011:
"As it turned out, meeting the new rule ended up requiring three more iterations on the design document and raised several issues of contention including concerns about the revised heat transfer capacity, concerns about the innovative shield building construction process devised, and concerns about the validity of the testing regime for the steel concrete composite modules that make up the shield building.
Those and other related issues were not completely resolved until the issuance of the final design certification document in late 2011, more than 2.5 years after the PSC had approved the project using the previously approved design revision."
In 2014 Westinghouse was still touting high confidence in affordable, predictable construction for the AP1000:
https://web.archive.org/web/20141225195417/http://westinghou...
From the outset, the AP1000 PWR was designed to reduce capital costs and to be economically competitive with contemporary fossil-fueled plants. This requires lower overnight construction costs and higher confidence in the construction schedule.
The AP1000 plant reduces the amount of safety-grade equipment required by using passive safety systems. Consequently, less Seismic Category I building volume is required to house the safety equipment (approximately 45 percent less than a typical reactor). The AP1000 plant’s modular construction design further reduces the construction schedule and the construction risks, with work shifted to factories with their better quality and cost control as well as labor costs that are less than those at the construction site.
This also allows more work to be done in parallel. The use of heavy lift cranes enables an “open top” construction approach, which is effective in reducing construction time.
With new computer-modeling capabilities, Westinghouse is able to optimize and choreograph the construction plan of an AP1000 unit in advance by simulation. The result is a very high confidence in the construction schedule.
If the airplane strike rule had made that impossible, they shouldn't have been advertising the impossible. I'm not even confident that the airplane strike rule bears particular responsibility for the bad outcomes of this project, because large construction projects often run over schedule and budget even if the NRC never comes near them.
That specific part is not in the piece, you're right. I believe it was in an interview I listened to recently, I'll see if I can find it.
However, it is true that Votgle had already applied for a COL prior to the ruling being made and that the design was already certified by NRC. The fact that a senior NRC regulator said that Westinghouse should have changed their design beforehand according to a rule that didn't exist yet is... insane.
Not to mention that the head of the NRC at the time is publically for a global ban on nuclear energy, was the sole veto vote against Votgle, pushed for the new aircraft strike rules personally, and was asked to resign by several NRC commissioners due to his unprofessional behavior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Jaczko
Given how badly both AP1000 projects in the US have gone (the other project was cancelled after spending $9B on a hole in the ground) its extremely unlikely it or any other big reactors will ever be built here. All the previous AP1000 projects that were in the development pipeline were cancelled and no generator in their right mind would order one without the feds agreeing to take on construction risk.
Looks like the only game in town are SMRs and none of those are supposed to come online until 2030. But everything about them is highly speculative, who knows which ones will work or be economic. The costs of the one furthest ahead, NuScale, are already exploding and the power will be way more expensive than planned, even with big new money from the feds.
It's because we only build them one at a time, and after 40 years of hiatus. At which point nearly all of the expertise for building them has retired.
The problem is that environmentalists are fundamentally unserious about climate change. They pander to wishful thinking as hard as those who reject the existence of climate change. If we were really serious about it, we'd build 500 nuclear reactors all at once and demand they get built as fast as possible.
And it isn't even that expensive once you get down to it! How many nuclear reactors could we build for the price of the F-35 program? We could easily afford thousands of them if we really needed to.
So no, the problem is lack of willpower and seriousness, not cost.
The major issue with nuclear power is and always has been costs are just too damn high. What nobody talks about is increasing the efficiency of coal power plants significantly reduced their operating costs. The same was true of everything including hydro except nuclear which just kept getting more expensive compared to alternatives over time.
Coupling long plant lifespans with minimal growth in electricity demand for decades meant there was no incentives to build nuclear after it reached ~30% of total demand. It couldn’t pass that ~30% threshold because costs enter an exponential spiral of decreasing capacity factor meaning higher fees when it’s in operation.
PS: I say ~30% because the actual economics get really complicated that’s just what most countries seem to roughly settle on. Forecasting today out a full plants lifespan and I don’t think even 30% is still viable without massive subsidies.
It was actually natural gas fired plants that put the nails in the coffin for the "Nuclear Renaissance".
The important fact: a combined cycle natural gas power plant has a capital cost of about $1/watt, with a thermal efficiency of about 60% (LHV). Vogtle 3/4 are something like $15/W. And natural gas on the Henry Hub is $2.28/million BTU right now (at 60% efficiency, that's a fuel cost of $.013/kWh).
See also, setting up other critical infrastructure like new rocket launch sites. So called environmentalists have taken every chance to file lawsuits against the FAA and SpaceX regarding activity at Boca Chica, filing complaints about animals that were seen once in the area 40 years ago and complaining about pollution on the beach even though it was completely uncared for before the facility got going.
On the other hand, when the abnormally cold front hit the area, none of those groups were anywhere to be seen trying to help the turtles while SpaceX employees were out helping and had helped setup generators etc at nearby NGOs (where the turtles were kept) who actually do care about the environment.
Also, regarding the F35, it's also a nice example of how valuable mass production and continuous refinement can be. Despite its original obscene cost, the program by now has produced so many planes that per unit it's actually not that expensive relative to other modern jets, despite being much better than essentially all of them.
Aren’t those kind of environmental complaints usually by hostile competitors? For instance - Blue Origin hires a person/lawyer to set up an environmental impact complaint against SpaceX just to tie up resources?
I thought these kinds of things were generally all corporate shenanigans and bullshit? Maybe i have too much tin foil on.
You're not too far off, IIRC some of the complaints do seem to have an indirect link to competitors (eg donations to the organization) but I feel that the point against environmental organizations still stands for them to be hurting support for their own cause just to be a front for others to hinder competition.
Blaming environmentalists for the complete and utter failure of nuclear power plant EPCMs to actually build nuclear power plants seems pretty misguided.
Edit;
Environmentalists didn't bankrupt multiple international conglomerates and blow their construction schedule and budget by >100%. What part of this did Greenpeace influence; https://www.reuters.com/article/us-toshiba-accounting-westin...
Then why is the US one of the few nuclear countries that hasn’t build in years?
I saw a calculation that suggested that anti-nuclear campaigning has resulted in 1/3 of current emissions because it resulted in increased coal and gas use. That wouldn’t have happened if the environmental movement wasn’t so anti-nuclear.
That comes down to capacity factor + minimal increase in electricity demand.
The US can operate nuclear at 90+% capacity factors because it’s such a small fraction the overall grid. Seasonal, daily, and weekend dips in demand mean you just don’t want that much base load power. France could export power to other countries and still only hit 70% capacity factor which means your paying the exact same capital, and nearly identical operating costs driving up cost per kWh by about 30% on average except that cost isn’t spread evenly the marginal costs go up much faster.
To simplify if you hypothetically built 50GW and you’re paying 8c/kWh, the next 10GW is at 9c/kWh, the next 10GW at 10c/kWh, and it just keeps getting worse. Sure on average that’s 70GW for 8.42c/kWh but each new project just keeps looking like a worse deal.
> Seasonal, daily, and weekend dips in demand mean you just don’t want that much [nuclear] base load power
One problem is that the US regulatory agency doesn’t like load-following - apparently only one nuclear reactor in the states does it.
It is common in France to do load following i.e. using Nuclear not only for base load but varying load too:
This means that RTE can depend on flexible load following from the nuclear fleet to contribute to regulation in these three respects:
* Primary power regulation for system stability (when frequency varies, power must be automatically adjusted by the turbine).
* Secondary power regulation related to trading contracts.
* Adjusting power in response to demand (decrease from 100% during the day, down to 50% or less during the night, and respond to changes in renewable inputs to the grid, etc.).
PWR plants are very flexible at the beginning of their cycle, with fresh fuel and high reserve reactivity. An EdF reactor can reduce its power from 100% to 30% in 30 minutes. But when the fuel cycle is around 65% through these reactors are less flexible, and they take a rapidly diminishing part in the third, load-following, aspect above. When they are 90% through the fuel cycle, they only take part in frequency regulation, and essentially no power variation is allowed (unless necessary for safety). So at the very end of the cycle, they are run at steady power output and do not regulate or load-follow until the next refueling outage.
NuScale is supposed to be able to vary output too “plant incorporates unique features that enhance its ability to load follow” https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Example-of-NuScale-modul... and https://www.researchgate.net/publication/295114246_Integrati...
Comment was deleted :(
Load following is economic suicide when most of the costs are fixed, which is why nuclear plants tend to shy away from it.
Yep, load following designs cost more to build and operate, and operating at even lower capacity factor means fewer kWh/year to pay back those costs. The advantage is if your forced to curtail output less as you can more closely follow the demand curve, but that’s already a losing proposition without drastic decreases in power plant operating and construction costs.
I didn’t think about US grid isolation as a factor. I always imagined it as similar to Europe (lots of cities over the whole continent with lots of customers).
But in terms of cost, we need to compare to carbon neutral alternatives. Nuclear might be expensive, but that’s only compared to the status quo of coal and gas. I know renewables are getting better but storage is still an unsolved problem (financially speaking)
I'd love to see a source for that number, because you "seeing a calculation" isn't really enough to go by.. The US isn't "one of the few that hasn't built" either -Korea's had moderate success but nobody else outside of China can build the things, which doesn't bode well for what's being built in China.
Look at how Flamanville[1] and Hinckley[2] are going..
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edf-announces-new-de... - "The Flamanville EPR reactor, which is already a decade behind schedule and has been dogged by repeated cost overruns, is now expected to start operations in the first quarter of 2024 and cost 13.2 billion euros, EDF said."
[2] https://www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/3210705/cost-... - "Electricite de France said the cost of building its flagship Hinkley Point C nuclear power station in the UK is set to spiral further to £32 billion (US$38.5 billion) [..] The revised estimate is the latest indication of surging costs after the start of plant was delayed last year. In May, EDF raised the price tag to build the two reactors at Hinkley to £25 billion (US$30 billion) and £26 billion (US$31 billion). The plant is due to start in June 2027, but there is a risk of an additional delay of around 15 months."
You’ll note that the US can’t build subways or high speed rail either. Large construction projects tend to be disasters in the US, it’s not just nuclear plants.
When you only build them every few decades, you tend to consistently find yourself with managers who have no experience in the field.
New York builds quite a bit of subway. They've basically been doing it non stop for like a century now. Has only gotten more bogged down by bureaucracy and politics.
> Then why is the US one of the few nuclear countries that hasn’t build in years?
They haven't opened a new nuclear power plant in France in 20 years. Canada hasn't opened a new reactor in 30 years. UK in 28 years.
> I saw a calculation that suggested that anti-nuclear campaigning has resulted in 1/3 of current emissions because it resulted in increased coal and gas use
Seems like a pretty extraordinary claim, funny you didn't share the calculation with us to support the suggestion.
If we were really serious about climate change, we'd build a ton of wind and solar and batteries, plus a ton of new transmission to get electricity from the windy and sunny places to our cities.
That's currently the fastest way to cut our greenhouse gas emissions.
Renewable energy in the future is predicted that by 2024, solar capacity in the world will grow by 600 gigawatts (GW), almost double the installed total electricity capacity of Japan. Overall, renewable electricity is predicted to grow by 1 200 GW by 2024, the equivalent of the total electricity capacity of the US.
From a study on earth.org. Solar will also become 35% cheaper is expected by 2024.
Soon we will have too much solar. Which is a nice problem to have but still. In 2021 Dutch solar and wind produced >100% of the demand 0.4% of the time. In 2023 it's already 5%. It's not a disaster but the producers have to switch the plants off (due to negative el. prices). Which makes the business case worse - you are not making money at night, when it's cloudy or when it's too sunny. And they will add another ~7.5GW peak solar+wind this year (60% of demand)! Hopefully, someone can figure out what to do with all the extra energy (hydrogen? synthetic fuels?)
All this may become consistent: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...
If we were serious about doing it with renewables, we'd skip the batteries and build as much green hydrogen capacity as possible, plus hydrogen pipelines to move it around. People who bring up batteries have failed to realize that winter exists, and in winter you will need far more energy storage than you can possibly achieve with batteries.
The green hydrogen stuff is happening, (like hydrogen pipelines across the Mediterranean) but it's not really a competitor to batteries, but a complement.
The primary use will be chemical and industrial and a demand sink for renewable power, then any use as electricity peak fuel source will be a bonus rather than the main purpose.
This ignores the part where no amount of batteries can actually solve the peak and valleys of renewable energy. Even partially solving this requires a truly ridiculous quantity of batteries, and likely equally absurd amounts of raw materials to build all of this.
Ultimately, this is just another unsustainable idea likely motivated by people who own BEVs. Same story as those that went after mass transit in favor of more electric cars. It's a classic example of people who have hammers and see everything as a nail.
There's lots of different combinations of solar, wind, batteries that will solve it. The lowest cost one likely has lots of solar and wind, and a small amount of storage, but it varies by location.
Here's a worked example for Eastern India:
https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...
These people are simply lying. https://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/the-curse-of-the-d...
Real experiences have show you cannot do it. You will have periods of major blackouts.
> People who bring up batteries have failed to realize that winter exists
They really haven't, and you really need to stop being so abrasive.
I know you can do that, because you've managed it at least once with me on this topic.
[flagged]
Yikes, please don't post like this here. It's badly against the site guidelines.
If other people are wrong, the thing to do on HN is to respectfully and patiently explain how they are wrong, and to provide correct information. That way we can all learn something. If you don't want to do that, or don't have time, that's fine - but in that case please don't post until you do. Keep in mind that you're talking to thousands of readers and your impact on that silent audience is more important.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Which still doesn't solve the issue of intermittency at all.
https://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/the-curse-of-the-d...
Because Europe, when it comes to wind and solar, is under-equipped.
Dunkelflaute are not european-wide (as noted in the article you referenced it: north of Europe), therefore production units outside of this geographical zone (along with storage, backup and curtailment) are efficient ways to cope. We have to build them.
Moreover it "lasts up to 24 hours" (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute ).
> Most of these events occur from October to February; typically 50 to 150 hours per year, a single event usually lasts up to 24 hours.
You can't even quote honestly...
"it" is here a Dunkelflaute, and "lasts up to 24 hours" is a fact. 50 to 150 hours total in a year is the total.
Max 150 hours total during the course of 6 months, max 24 hours each, and in a small part of Europe: this is far from your "does not solve at all", indeed.
Nevermind I read that wrong.
In reality, dunkelflaute last significantly longer than 24 hours: https://www.hydro.org/powerhouse/article/tackling-the-dunkel...
> The chart shows that as many as 3.7% hours, which is equal to two weeks, of doldrums could occur during severe wind and solar droughts.
This is fundamentally a death knell for conventional battery storage solutions. This is also what I mean by environmentalists not even having a clue. They are as delusional as the people who don't believe in climate change at all.
> dunkelflaute last significantly longer than 24 hours
This study is local (to Minnesota). The smaller the studied zone, the higher the intermittency: nothing new here.
The answer I already wrote is also pertinent here;: aggregation is key. During a Dunkelflaute neighbors can provide (also: storage, backup and curtailment).
Therefore a way to considerably alleviate intermittency (even under Dunkelflaute) is to interconnect electrical zones (nations).
Those interconnections are already progressing because they are justified even without any renewable sources, in order to cope with problems and to optimize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_super_grid
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
> The result of the study, shown in Chart 3, reveals that most of Belgium’s neighboring countries faced dunkelflaute at the same time as Belgium.
https://vito.be/en/news/dunkelflaute-what-do-when-there-no-w...
Neighboring states are not a panacea. All nearby countries will suffer from dunkelflaute at similar times, and they are correlated to each other.
Note that no one is suggesting that you cannot rely on neighbors for power. Only that this does not solve the problem of intermittency entirely. Hence an additional system of hydrogen energy storage is necessary. Something every study even admits is basically necessary or at least highly desirable.
> Neighboring states are not a panacea > this does not solve the problem of intermittency entirely
Indeed, hence the title of the referenced study report: "European cooperation could provide more stable wind power". "more stable" isn't "perfectly stable".
As its contents shows 'neighbor' is to be understood as 'European-wide'.
There is no panacea/magic bullet/nirvana, each complex system uses many partial solutions, and is it true for the existing electrical grid system. Rejecting a partial solution because it doesn't solve the problem is a well-known trick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
Correlations between wind regimes is indeed a key, duly analyzed. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211... In this study the table 6 (associated to section 3.3.1) offers a re-insuring snapshot.
Green hydrogen (among other ways/vectors) is also part of the solution: using electricity overproduced by renewables in order to obtain hydrogen (water electrolysis) then use it as a backup.
According to some H-powered turbines aren't mature. This is just another joke: https://www.ge.com/gas-power/future-of-energy/hydrogen-fuele...
> Indeed, hence the title of the referenced study report: "European cooperation could provide more stable wind power". "more stable" isn't "perfectly stable". > > As its contents shows 'neighbor' is to be understood as 'European-wide'. > > There is no panacea/magic bullet/nirvana, each complex system uses many partial solutions, and is it true for the existing electrical grid system. Rejecting a partial solution because it doesn't solve the problem is a well-known trick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
Except no one has been promoting that argument at all! You’re been tilting at windmills this whole time. The point is that green hydrogen is necessary to fill the gaps between availability of wind and solar. It is not the only solution, but not having it is impossible.
> no one has been promoting that argument
You wrote (above) "Which still doesn't solve the issue of intermittency at all". As the study shows that spreading production units on the continent is a partial solution to intermittency it sounded to me as a nirvana fallacy.
Yes, I also think that green hydrogen will be a major component of the solution (along with V2G), and never denied it.
Now you're playing semantics games. Saying "it does not solve the issue of intermittency at all" does not mean it cannot be a partial solution. The main point is that hydrogen does solve the issue, as a full solution, whereas all the others are just partial solutions.
IMHO "it does not solve the issue of intermittency at all" is a nirvana fallacy.
Reducing the effects of intermittency on production by bumping up the throughput of interconnections (in order to aggregate production on a vast geographical scale) which are otherwise needed (continuity of service and optimization) will be very useful because:
- many sectors (industry, agriculture...) need hydrogen, which is nowadays obtained through dirty processes => green hydrogen will be in high demand (not only for grid backup)
- storing huge amounts of hydrogen isn't possible right now (progress towards salt caverns storage is slow) and may never be
Wrong. It solves it completely if you wanted to. This is Ludditism, pure and simple.
> - storing huge amounts of hydrogen isn't possible right now (progress towards salt caverns storage is slow) and may never be
Wrong. We have been doing this for decades. This is a solved problem. You are utterly misinformed here.
> It solves it completely
Source?
Reality: not a single nation enjoys an 100% hydrogen electricity grid backup system.
>> storing huge amounts of hydrogen isn't possible right now > We have been doing this for decades
Source?
Reality: not a single nation stores hydrogen in huge amounts for its electricity backup system. Those as mere pilot projects, such as https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/08/04/worlds-largest-underg...
Costs for nuclear don't really benefit that much from economies of scale, each installation has to be heavily reinforced and the required equipment is very expensive (you really don't want primary coolent pumps to ever fail, so they're over-engineered to essentially eliminate accidental failure - although exceptional situations e.g. Fukushima are still always a possibility). Also, the global uranium fuel pipeline is limited (US imports most of its uranium fuel doesn't it?).
Building 500 1 gigawatt solar/storage plants would be much cheaper - by at least a factor of ten - and could be done much faster.
1 gigawatt solar is not the same as 1 gigawatt nuclear though. Also, building solar in Alaska or in Northern Canada would be a waste of money.
But yes, a solar power plant is cheap and can be implemented almost instantly, it is a huge advantage.
The right comparison is roughly 4GW of solar plus 6-12GWh of storage for 1GW of nuclear, but even then nuclear is about 2x as expensive.
>4GW of solar plus 6-12GWh
It will use a lot of land and I'm not sure if anyone ever did 6GWh storage, not even mentioning 12 GWh. The Li-ion battery technology that is currently being used for storage is very expensive and will last maybe 15 years at best before becoming chemical waste, while the nuke is normally planned to last 60+ years.
And that is just to match 1GW of nuke. Now, if you want 100GW, you multiply that by 100. Now solar isn't looking all that advantageous or even technologically feasible (with storage factored in) to me.
I don't think you have a good idea of scale here 4GW of solar and 12 GWh of storage are a tiny fraction of what we produce every year, barely worth mention.
Whereas even a single GW of new nuclear is newsworthy because it was such a monumental effort, over budget and behind schedule by factors of 2-4x
Wind, solar, and storage get delivered on time, under budget, and at a scale that nuclear can not even dream of achieving for decades. Claiming that 100GW/year of nuclear is even in the realm of possibility is beyond delusional, whereas 400 GW/year of solar is close to happening, and we will deploying TW/year in the 2030s, before a second site of nuclear could even come online in the US.
Land for solar is similarly a red herring. Solar "land use" is easily dual purpose, if need be, but it need not be. Using even a fraction of land that we currently use to grow corn for ethanol would completely power all of our transportation.
According to a recent report, there was only 13.4 GWh of grid storage in the US 2022.
Even with projected growth, each addition 12 GWh is not trivial.
https://www.smart-energy.com/regional-news/north-america/us-...
12 GWh is a fraction of a single factory's output from a single year. We are producing >50GWh total for storage per year, and the only reason more of it isn't going to the grid is that grid storage is a much less lucrative use of our storage capacity compare to cars, which have higher margins.
The entire industry is growing at 10x capacity every five years!
Don't forget that this single 1GW of nuclear took more than a decade.
We simply can not scale nuclear to meet our needs, it is not a technology that scales well at all.
For example, we have roughly 100GW of reactors in the US rapidly reaching their end of life. Even if the industry put all its effort in rebuilding fast enough to replace existing reactors, it would require a scale up that we can't possibly imagine right now. Meanwhile, we are already scaling storage, by building factory after factory.
> The entire industry is growing at 10x capacity every five years!
Grid storage is projected only to grow 10-17 GWh per year according to the aforementioned article.
Is that anywhere enough, if the aim is to decarbonise?
And there's zero new expected nuclear after vogtle 4...
If we add 10-17GWh in 2023, it would be foolish to think we will add the same amount in 2024. The amount added per year will grow too.
We are at the beginning of the logistic curve, where growth is exponential. A few years ago, there wasn't even a single GWh on the grid.
For more than a century we have balanced the grid by keeping energy stored in fuel; as we switch to cheap renewables, that's the only time that grid storage becomes necessary, and you have to get to pretty high levels of renewables before it makes economic sense to add storage. So the market is small now, and will grow. Until then, those lithium ion batteries are being shoved into cars, because car makers can not acquire them fast enough to meet demand.
There are several other very promising and quickly advancing battery technologies as well, based on iron or sodium instead of lithium. We will see which get cheap, but until there's high amounts of renewables.
> If we add 10-17GWh in 2023, it would be foolish to think we will add the same amount in 2024. The amount added per year will grow too.
According to the Woodmac report I referenced, the amount of grid storage added yearly is going down.
12 GWh in 2023 10 GWh in 2024
Based on what do you think the report is wrong and where is the exponential growth in grid storage going to come from?
Now be honest and tell us what Woodmac is projecting for storage by 2030. I'll wait.
Why are you asking me? I am not Woodmac. Furthermore, their projections only go to 2027.
I’m sure they will commission a custom report for you if you compensate them enough.
Either way, 2030 grid storage projections are highly speculative. Projections for the next five years are based on announced and planned projects. Nobody is announcing or even planning 2030 deployments yet.
Besides that, what’s your point? Are you trying to say that the previously touted exponential growth is only going to start after 2027? In 2030 perhaps?
As an aside I find it amusing that you or somebody else downvoted me for quoting a report and asking where the exponential growth that contradicts the report findings are going to come from.
Kinda; cars need to decarbonise as well as the grid, so the batteries are still really important even if none end up on the grid for whatever reason.
Casually suggesting we add the equivalent of our nation's supply of grid battery storage to get the equivalent of a single nuclear plants worth of energy is a new one.
In an industry that is an exponential growth phase, and basically a side product where the majority of its product goes into cars, yes, this is indeed a very casual suggestion.
Far more causal than the suggestion of building a single new GW-scale reactor, when they have just proven to have a 50% success rate on build, and come in several times over budget and behind schedule.
Until the nuclear industry shoulders the construction risk themselves, there's little chance of another utility making the decision to build a new reactor.
Is it?
Given how fast reactors are getting built in the US, I'd say the batteries look like they're already doing much better than the reactors.
Of course, both can change as the number are, while interesting, small.
Even if we really could ramp up those factories and the corresponding mines for all the battery materials, those batteries will last maybe 10 ish years. Then they need to be recycled and we have basically no capacity for that today. A nuclear plant can easily go for 60 to 80 years with good maintenance.
> Then they need to be recycled and we have basically no capacity for that today
Do you have any reason to believe making a batteries starting with batteries will be harder than making batteries starting with rocks?
What do you mean "even if"? Can you name a single battery factory that has seen delays of cost overruns like nuclear regularly has? Can you point to a single investor that's willing to back new nuclear in the US like they are backing new battery factories all over?
Your usage of numbers is off and extremely biased. Warranties for grid storage batteries are already longer than 10 years, and they don't suddenly stop working, they just experience finished capacity over time. Whereas 80 years for nuclear has no basis in reality, and most are getting shut down at forty due to excessive costs to continue operation.
This sort of rose-colored view of nuclear, cherry picking the very best case from one's imagination, and then taking the very worst possible estimate of the comparator, is the type of self-deception that results in nuclear losing again and again. Without a clear view of why these projects fail, and what they actually can deliver, the entire industry has lost any credibility.
> Can you name a single battery factory that has seen delays of cost overruns like nuclear regularly has? Can you point to a single investor that's willing to back new nuclear in the US like they are backing new battery factories all over?
I mean, those aren't the important parts in my view but yes to both. Berlin gigafactory had significant delays and the proposed expansion is on indefinite hold. Bill Gates is a large backer in Terrapower and they have a pilot plant planned in Wyoming. But I'm sure you will simply move the goal posts.
> Warranties for grid storage batteries are already longer than 10 years, and they don't suddenly stop working, they just experience finished capacity over time
I did say ten-ish, and good luck collecting on those warranties since the battery manufacturer corps are pretty ephemeral. Also, I kind of doubt operators will want to keep old batteries in their facilities since you're at increased risk for fires and those tend to be pretty dramatic in BES stations. Especially since in theory newer batteries should be better and cheaper right?
As for the 60-80 year lifetime, the Gen II plants that are worth keeping around are just now getting close to their 60 year birthdays. Most of the shut down plants in the US are gen I with small capacities, usually less than 200 MW. And the ones that aren't often fell to local and private interests that wanted them gone for other reasons. The problem with nuclear in the US is not a technical one but a socio-political one. I have no idea if the turning tide of sentiment will be able to fix these issues but I find more people are coming around fairly recently. Thank god for France, South Korea, and China.
We're building batteries and panels at scale now? When did that start?
The US will add more nameplate power capacity of batteries to the grid this year than it will new gas generators:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/us-will-see-more-new...
(Noting of course that power characteristics of entirely different tools can be an apples an oranges comparison... but look at solar versus fossil fuel generators in that.)
Depends on the definition of scale, but the 2010s was where it was in GW added every year:
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/04/17/the-world-installed-2...
And are "we" building that capacity? Who is "we" for you?
There are two definitions of "we" in the studies I linked, one for the US and one for the world.
What definition of "we" did we have in mind, and if you have a different one why didn't you state what you mean instead of asking questions that have clear answers?
Define "at scale".
If you take into account load factor, you will need closer to 2,000 such solar plants. And you need far more land too. Also, you’ll end up being most of them in deserts, far away from any human habitations. So you will then build a vast network of power distribution.
Now, to be fair, we could do that. It will just need trillions of dollars, and will have its own set of huge complications. It’s mostly just a fantasy that this will be all that much more cheaper.
I'm not quite sure what your 2000 could be referring to.
If it's land use, that's off by orders of magnitude.
Nuclear at this site: 3100 acres [1], 1/3 of which is a nature preserve, so 2000 acres. It will be 4.5GW at 90% capacity factor, so roughly 500 acres/GW.
NREL puts the least land efficient solar PV at 6.1 acres/MW [2], which with a 0.2 capacity factor corresponds to 30500 acres/GW.
This is a factor of 61 for land use, which is nowhere near the 2000, but I'm not sure if that's what you were talking about.
But land use is not a concern for powering the US by solar. It doesn't take that much land, and even the land it does use is easy to use simultaneously for pretty much anything else.
You talk about "trillions of dollars" as if we should be scared of big numbers, but for some reason forget that it would be far more trillions of dollars just to continue with our current system! That's a very biased way to look at things. And if we were to use nuclear instead of fossil fuels like we do now, it would be far more trillions.
Seriously, this is just one GW at a cost of $15B. Average US load is ~500GW, but will be much higher in the future after the energy transition. A nuclear grid is easily a $15T prospect! And that's without the absolutely massive amount of storage that nuclear needs in order to deal with load following.
[1] https://www.bechtel.com/projects/plant-vogtle-units-3-4/
It comes from 20% capacity factor versus 90% capacity factor. Replacing 500 GW of nuclear will vaguely require 2,000 GW of solar.
The problem is you want to build it in the southwest of the US, and has a long ways to go to reach the rest of the US. That will be a challenge.
If you think nuclear has a load-following problem, you have no idea how big the problem for solar will be!
And cost will go down, not up when we build more. The cost is because we build them so slow and only one at a time. If we built 500 at once, cost per GW will drop dramatic. Anti-nuclear people are just being dishonest about economics. Ultimately, even if we had to spend a few trillion dollars on this, it will still save money in the long run.
> Anti-nuclear people are just being dishonest about economics. Ultimately, even if we had to spend a few trillion dollars on this, it will still save money in the long run.
On the contrary, the only people who are being dishonest about nuclear are those advocating for a large nuclear build!
Use your own numbers here, actually run them, and you will see that nuclear is more expensive than solar, and indeed even more expensive than solar plus storage at today's prices for storage.
Your assertion that building hundreds of nuclear reactors at once will decrease prices drastically has been proven decisively wrong, again and again
But in contrast, building lots of solar and storage has proven to decrease costs of these technologies over decades.
Literally ever testable assertion in your comment is false, based on thoughts from behind rose-colored glasses from more than a decade ago. It's time to revisit the data and the numbers and see where the world's technology is on costs.
"A few trillion dollars" is enough for a global HVDC grid sufficient for global energy demand (why yes, I did do the maths, it's in an old comment of mine somewhere on here), and you previously gave me a link saying a hydrogen pipe was x10 cheaper, and electrolysis doesn't care if its nuclear or PV, and PV is much cheaper than nuclear per MWh when you don't have to add on the storage which you obviously don't in this scenario because that would be double-counting.
And the US already has north-south lines (with a Texas-shaped asterisk), so even without a global grid the "winter?" question is: what's the capacity of those lines and substations, and how much loss are people willing to face when the price at the plant is only 1-2¢/kWh.
First of all, that is unlikely to ever happen. It is likely geopolitically impossible. But also it is very fragile as you still do not have any real backup power generation. Ultimately, it will make more sense to build system of hydrogen distribution and storage. As you already known, this is 10x cheaper than your HVDC idea.
> But also it is very fragile as you still do not have any real backup power generation
Don't need one. Always light somewhere.
Have repeatedly agreed about the political difficulties here since before you created your account.
Just need the ability to have one part of the world be able to power the rest of it at any given time...
I've had similar conversations before this website. I know what I'm talking about here. What you're suggesting is the same story of massive overprovisioning. Just build making times more renewable energy than we need, and a ridiculously large supergrid to use it all.
The problem ultimately is that it is incredibly expensive, and worse you will end up wasting the vast majority of your energy production. The alternative solution, of using hydrogen energy storage, eliminates this problem, and makes any hypothetical solution more efficient.
And in the end, this is also a zero emissions solution. And works entirely with renewable energy. Like seriously, why do you oppose a solution that flat out works? Are you really that prideful that you cannot let go of your ideas?
> Just need the ability to have one part of the world be able to power the rest of it at any given time...
which we do
> I've had similar conversations before this website.
The meme with Principal Skiner asking "am I out of touch? no it's everyone else who is wrong" comes to mind
> I know what I'm talking about here.
no you don't
> What you're suggesting is the same story of massive overprovisioning.
no i'm not
> Just build making times more renewable energy than we need, and a ridiculously large supergrid to use it all.
not ridiculous; probably politically unviable, but I've done the maths and it's fine from a simple engineering POV
0.5-2.2¢/kWh even if such a grid needs to be given a trillion dollar overhaul every decade, not that you have shown any capacity to integrate new information in this topic…
> The problem ultimately is that it is incredibly expensive, and worse you will end up wasting the vast majority of your energy production.
even a genuinely global (40,000 km) multi-TW grid is cheaper than nuclear, and even bog-standard current HVDC (where you'd be making it of thousands of different segments with combined cross section of 1-2 m^2 instead of a more efficient configuration) isn't a majority of the power being lost, it's at most half.
Also, looking up the best-case efficiency of hydrogen fuel cells[1] and electrolysis[0], you get the same losses as for the dumbest possible HVDC solution, even if h2 transport is lossless (which it isn't).
> The alternative solution, of using hydrogen energy storage, eliminates this problem, and makes any hypothetical solution more efficient.
An alternative solution. One of many.
> Like seriously, why do you oppose a solution that flat out works? Are you really that prideful that you cannot let go of your ideas?
I'm not, you are.
"Look in a mirror".
[0] 84% last year, and higher numbers are misrepresentation https://www.sunfire.de/en/news/detail/worlds-largest-high-te...
[1] 85% when waste heat is captured for use in co-generation, but only 60% directly, which matters a lot for transport
Like I said elsewhere, what you’re proposing is geopolitically impossible. And the type of overprovisioning need to even come close to solving means you are wasting the vast majority of your power. Ironically, this gives you basically free energy for hydrogen production, rendering all of your counter arguments against it invalid. It’s just a doubling down of the same delusion idea you’ve been peddling for multiple posts now. It’s time to get real.
Not to mention no one has ever built a ocean spanning HVDC line, nor have you seriously calculated how much resources it will take. The alternative is already proven to work and has no such problematic weaknesses. Your opposition to it is just stubbornness.
Finally, as fuel cells are electrochemical systems, they will continue to reach higher efficiencies, eventually approaching 100%. Even now, SOFCs can exceed 70% and even higher if waste heat is used to power a gas turbine. By the time you get around to building the HVDC system of your dreams, the efficiency of the alternative will render it obsolete.
It is cheaper, and more and more solar, wind, batteries, and hvdc lines are built everyday.
It's not just environmentalists, but environmental regulation that is used by anti-nuclear opponents to stall, slow down, and halt all nuclear development.
Also the whole blowing up and contaminating square miles of planet surface, every so often thing.
The nuclear industry isn't very good at making reactors, but nuclear fans are really good at making excuses. It's always someone else's fault.
That's a pretty facile analysis.
Comparable solar plant output (with storage for consistent delivery) seems to cost in the neighborhood of $1 billion per gigawatt. Vogtle's two 1GW reactors appear to be coming in at a total cost of $30 billion (and that's not counting long-term costs of hot 'spent' fuel rod management and uranium fuel sourcing), so $15 billion per gigawatt if I'm reading correctly.
https://commercialsolarguy.com/americas-first-gigawatt-solar...
Incidentally, the US federal government also provided $12 billion in loan guarantees to Vogtle, which counts as a pretty big subsidy.
Even with a few hours of storage, I doubt that solar/battery plant's combined capacity factor will exceed 50%. A well-managed nuclear plant can exceed 90% capacity factor and keeps working even when it is cloudy and raining for a week.
Who cares about capacity factor, just build more than enough solar/wind/battery/hvdc and transport it where needed. Faster, simpler, safer, cheaper.
Then you need to factor in the massive grid upgrades in the cost as well.
Anyway, nuclear mega projects are probably a thing of the past once mass produced small modular reactors come to market.
You realize they've been talking about small reactors as right around the corner for 30 years now.. also they have a whole host of complicated problems.
Let's say it was faster, simpler, safer, cheaper. I find the idea of making your energy systems entirely dependent on weather to be an odd choice when we are expecting global climate change now and in the future.
At the very least, it will make forecasting supply more difficult. At worst, what if there are major wind pattern shifts or catastrophic weather events that damage your dispersed energy harvesting machines? A nuclear plant is designed to survive a direct impact from an airliner but a hail storm can ruin a region's rooftop solar panels.
The key is over a large enough area and with enough integrated storage systems it all averages out. It ends up being a lot more decentralized and resilient.
It definitely won't be more resilient, that's silly. In no way will a weather based energy system be more resilient than one based on dispatchable energy sources. The best you can hope for is it to be only slightly less reliable. You can never be completely sure you've built enough storage in a certain area since you're relying on historical/statistical phenomenon like weather. And since you'll need a lot more transmission lines to move the energy from your turbines and panels to where people actually live, you're more exposed to failures along those corridors.
Like I said, over a large enough area and with storage, it averages out. The wind will blow, and the shine. More transmission lines allow routing around failure points.
Also the 'cloudy day disaster of 2034' sounds a lot better than the 'spent fuel pool disaster of 2034'
https://www.science.org/content/article/spent-fuel-fire-us-s...
> Like I said, over a large enough area and with storage, it averages out
Maybe, it's literally impossible to say. That's terrible design for something as critical as the national grid. People die when the power goes out.
Literally impossible to look at historical data over an area and calculate the size of system needed for reliable power as well as the amount of storage needed as well?
Utilities do that everyday. You should be careful saying something is ‘impossible’, more like you don’t understand.. that’s ok.
Past data does not predict the future, especially since we're expecting changes to the climate remember? Even if you're right "most" of the time, even a tenth of a percent system failure is terrible for something like the grid.
Get a battery for that tenth, or get two. It’s called a safety margin. In engineering it’s not difficult to design for.
I don't think you've grasped the sheer amount of energy storage that is necessary.
California already has 2% of it's 600 GWh per day consumption covered by batteries soooo around a 1.6 order of magnitude increase to get to 100%. Not that it's even necessary, just an example. Battery production at scale is just beginning right now anyways.
"just build more than enough solar/wind/battery/hvdc and transport it where needed. Faster, simpler, safer, cheaper."
Has anyone tried to calculate how much more is "more" and whether it is really faster, simpler, safer, cheaper etc.? At least region by region.
One counterexample. At least here in Europe, all plans to build massive solar plants in the Sahara and transmit the energy to Europe are facing the problem that a) it is not exactly fast, given that the Saharan desert is extremely hostile to human life, including that of the necessary workers, and the industrial base is far away, b) it is not that simple, given that distances involved are huge and there is a deep sea in the way, c) it is probably not safe, given that the North African countries are politically unstable and no one wants to be held hostage to yet another dictator threatening your energy supply (one Putin was enough), d) as a result of the previous factors, not cheap either.
There were plenty of other AP1000 projects in the US that never even got that far. The utilities (or their regulators) wisely gave up.
Amory Lovins has some choice words on AP1000, its cost, and its apologists. He's been a vocal critic of the nuclear industry for decades, and the rage of the nuclear fans against him has only increased as events have vindicated him.
https://www.energyintel.com/00000180-f7a8-d67b-a3cd-f7faad65...
> The costs of the one furthest ahead, NuScale, are already exploding and the power will be way more expensive than planned.
Not sure if you've heard - there was some inflation that hit the US back in 2022. Are you asking for NuScale to be immune to inflation? Even regular cars became more expensive.
In mid 2021, NuScale was estimating $58/mwh.. it's now $89/mwh. I don't think you can blame 'inflation' for a +50% increase in estimated power costs over the last 18 months.
> I don't think you can blame 'inflation' for a +50% increase in estimated power costs over the last 18 months.
Yes you can. One of the main costs in a project like this is the financing cost. Interest rates were nearly zero, now they are at 5%. Of course, NuScale would pay more than the rate published by the Fed, so, let's say they could secure financing in early 2022 at 4% and now they can at 9%. That's a steep increase.
The reason the rates went up is because the Fed is fighting inflation.
Just abject nonsense. If they were relying on 0% interest rates and no inflation for the next 10 years for the project to pencil, we should shut the whole thing down today.
Edit- just looked at their explanation and their discount rate only increased by 2%.
We should probably shut it all down today regardless. It actually increased from $58 to $119 but the IRA gave them a $30/mwh subsidy. So a 100% miss on price in only 18 months and we’re still nearly a decade before it’s planned to be operational:
https://ieefa.org/sites/default/files/inline-images/UAMPS-Nu...
> we should shut the whole thing down today.
Who is "we"? You are just a random guy on the internet. The people who actually invest money have a different opinion [1]:
“Despite the project’s rising costs, felt worldwide by all large energy projects due to interest rates increases and rapidly escalating inflation in commodities such as fabricated plate and structural steel, copper wire and cable, not seen for over 40 years, participants felt overwhelmingly that the CFPP remains viable and is a key energy resource for the future,” said Mason Baker, UAMPS CEO and General Manager.
As someone who’s done financial modeling for energy projects. If you miss by 100% before groundbreaking, management is incompetent or the engineers designing the thing are. With this track record, I’d bet $100 the $120/mwh unsubsidized rate (that’s already 100% higher than the rate published 18 months ago) is increased by another 100% before the first concrete is poured. Probably even odds that if they finish this project, they’re north of $300/mwh unsubsidized.
Its $89MWH with a $30MWH generation credit and a $1.4B subsidy (thanks Biden). This is all before construction has started, there will certainly be more cost inflation coming.
https://ieefa.org/resources/eye-popping-new-cost-estimates-r...
1.4B doesn't even offset the 2B they paid to the NRC to certify their technology. This is boring old PWR reactors too. It's ancient tech.
Fast construction is basically the point of SMRs so we will see if that pans out. Not that I expect them to nail it on the first try.
As an Atlanta resident, I LOVED when this was announced, and I'm thrilled to live in GA with this plant, and I hope to see more. Yeah, it's going to drive my bills up a few bucks for a while, but I get to know we're burning that much less coal and gas.
Why would it drive your bills up?
Nuclear is one of the very most expensive forms of new electricity.
There's basically zero chance that a new reactor of this style will be built, voluntarily. It took a massive amount of government backed insurance and loans to even make these possible, but no utility will be insane enough to try again without someone shouldering the construction cost risk.
Nuclear is only expensive compared to renewables if you ignore storage. Since storage is more expensive than nuclear (unless you have plenty of mountains and water to do pumped hydro), nuclear is actually cheaper than wind+solar in most places.
Nuclear is expensive compared to solar even if you add storage to the nuclear. Even if you ignore the storage and/or curtailment that nuclear needs in order to match demand on the grid.
nope
Because the price more than doubled to $30B.
Cost overruns, they got permission from the utility commission to raise rates to recoup.
Did a tour on some business of Vogtle-3/4 several years back. You have no idea how big or complex these things are until you see it up close. It feels like watching the pyramids go up. Just the amount of rebar on the ground was impressive. So happy to see it going into operation even with all the delays!
Really cool timelapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSEv_K9861E
Please more. And next time without so much wasted time. We don’t have much time.
If folks really cared about climate change we would building lots of these. The fact that we aren't is evidence that folks don’t truly care about solving anything … just want to push their own narrative.
'Folks' can't just will the economics of a building a nuclear plant into favourability. maybe if the US had a much different (e.g. China) style of government where a half trillion could be invested into nationalisation of energy production and complete overhaul of the grid. Otherwise anyone with capital would have to be crazy to put $10 billion into a nuclear project that won't be online for a decade and already won't be able to compete per kWh with renewables, when you could instead spread the investment out across a bunch of wind and solar projects that will be online in a couple years. Maybe things will change once renewables have saturated demand and we've hit hard limits regarding storage.
Solar/wind/battery/hvdc is more than capable to providing gigawatts of power, cheaper.
Nothing close to nuclear
Yesterday in California nuclear produced 54 GWh of energy - that's pretty good except solar/wind produced 237 and batteries 11. And the growth of both is only accelerating.
https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html#sectio...
So you're kind of right that nuclear isn't close to renewables..
Little ol Iowa has 12GW wind capacity! Around here thats > half our needs.
I mean, in 60-s and 70-s, France and US were stamping out nuclear reactors like hotdogs, building them literally by dozens. And they were moderately cheap. I don't know what happened afterwards, but now building a nuke plant has become a nightmare.
My dad was apart of that building boom (starting at Hanford). In 1986 or so, he went from making $200k/year as a contractor to…< $40k/year in Mississippi as an FTE for a newly built power station there (after being unemployed for 2 years).
There was a strong push by the government to build, and when that evaporated, all activity just stopped over night.
There were huge evolutions in the designs for safety (because of some big accidents), which I think did make them a lot more expensive. I’ve also heard stricter requirements for things like cooling can contribute - i.e. needing cooling towers instead of just rejecting waste heat into bodies of water, which is quite bad environmentally.
Can't even keep the ones already built open, like the one in Zion, IL.
There are plausible environmental reasons not to proliferate nuclear energy
> “They just want to have coal plants without coal,” he said. “We’ll never solve the climate problem that way.”
Given that the coal specifically (as well as oil and gas) is the problem, why is that bad? Coal plants without emissions sounds great!
Yes, replacing coal boilers with nuclear boilers seems like a total no-brainer. Which is why it probably will never happen.
It’ll never happen because coal plants are actually littered with radioisotopes from the coal ash. You could hook up a reactor to a coal plant’s turbine for cheap, but they would immediately violate regulations because of the existing levels of radiation.
Wait, what? In your mind a coal power plant is knee deep in coal ash, and there's radioactivity everywhere, or something like that?
Ever heard of the EPA [1]?
this is the same guy that compared small modular reactors to theranos
One of the opponents in the article says nuclear power is not a silver bullet. But that argument only makes sense if people are advocating nuclear power to the exclusion of other techniques to deal with renewable generation being unavailable. Are there many nuclear power advocates who oppose grid upgrades or moving energy use toward times of day when renewables are generating a surplus?
I concur that nuclear is not a silver bullet for only one reason: overproduction. If we had enough nuclear capacity to support the peak grid, we would have a huge surplus for the remaining 80% of the day.
In order for nuclear power to be a viable path toward decarbonization, it requires a coupling with: insanely large scale battery storage, global scale grid power redirection, a lot of dams which can act as peaker plants, a load generation which can scale with an economic model that makes sense (like server farms, crypto mines, etc which can be turned up or down on schedule) and/or an uninvented carbon-free peaker plant technology.
Personally, I think nukes and batteries are the most straightforward and developed combination, but any combination could also be viable just with more research and development, and without an obvious economic model for them to work.
overproduction is a feature. plenty of useful things to do at night. synth fuels, carbon capture, desal. mostly synth fuels though.
Charge electric cars
Isn't there a technology that makes fuels out of atmospheric carbon? That could use some of the overproduced cheap energy. Or use that energy to make hydrogen or what not. There are plenty of ways to use it indeed.
Those "neat things" are academic dreams not things which can roll off a 2023 assembly line with a clearly defined economic incentive.
Battery coupling is as close as you can bring nukes to a silver bullet, but that is a huge project on its own.
I don’t understand how they figure this is the first new reactor in the US in 40 years? The page that that assertion links to says that one of the reactors at Watts Bar came online in 2016, and the prior reactor there came online in 1996. And I know that there was at least one nuclear power plant that came online in the early 90s which is, urk, 30 years ago, but hey, still not 40.
Those Watts Bar reactors were previously the newest ones in the US. Both began construction in 1973:
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails....
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails....
I think that the headline is a half-garbled way to indicate that this reactor is the first one completed that began construction after the 1970s in the US. That interesting fact is omitted by the body of the story, which doesn't lay out the dates at all. I only knew this background because of my prior interest in the nuclear industry.
Watts Bar got approved an eternity ago and just got finished 30ish years late.
Vogtle 3 & 4 got approved recently, though I’m not sure the 40 years number is an apples-to-apples comparison.
The elephant’s foot in the room (see what I did there?) is that nuclear is just not cheap the way it used to be. It takes a lot of steel and a lot of concrete.
The reason we haven’t been building nuclear plants is that other plants, gas, wind, and solar, deliver way more power in way less time, and with a lesser quantum of plant size.
The fossil fuel consumption of a nuclear plant, while certainly less than coal, is still higher than wind or solar.
Nuclear offers a steady cheaper than solar base line of power. While gas has many advantages climate change isn't one of them.
Than solar, ok.
Than solar plus batteries, the numbers don't back you up on that (or no longer do).
The only thing more expensive than a nuclear reactor is a battery bank of the same capacity.
Now that’s just silly. Lots of things are more expensive than a nuclear reactor.
Grid-tied batteries are now about $300/kWh. Capitalized over 25 years, that adds 3.3 cents to peak (11AM) solar prices, which themselves can go negative at times (duck curve in action), and overall are 3-4 cents per kWh.
Nuclear (new) portends to cost between 7 and 20 cents per kWh according to Wikipedia.
Downvote me if you must, but the numbers are right there. Nuclear may have been the best option for a time, but that time has passed and is not coming back.
In some locations on an industrial scale.
For everyone else: The average solar panel cost is $3–$5 per watt or $15000–$20000 for a typical 5 kW system
This just shows that residential solar is kind of dumb. It's more gaming quirks of rate structures than it is producing cheap energy. Fortunately, there's more than enough room for large scale solar, installed at about $1/W.
2008 called. It wants its prices back.
A visit to sunelec.com or santansolar.com yields a litany of panels for sale well under $1/W. Half the offerings on Amazon are below $1/W as well.
As such, nowadays you should be paying no more than $10k for a 5kW system.
10k+install+taxes=15k-20k
"But why don't we pay it off in Canadian dollars and save ourselves some money?"
"Just so you know, if that's a route you want to follow, it's 50,000 American, It would be 70,000, roughly, Canadian dollars."
"How are we going to come up with $120,000?!"
according to the wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St... while they came online then, they were started in 1973
OK, so shouldn’t we then be benchmarking to Vogtle’s start of construction in 2009?
Attention headline writers: Cherry picking the start dates and commissioning dates doesn’t prove anything and just leads to madness.
> The lesson I think we should learn from this is: What works on the computer doesn’t work in the real world,
This seems to dovetail with Rickover’s “Paper Reactor” memo, that was referenced here, recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36080015
One of the things that I find fascinating about nuclear power is how it is insured (or was).
In the early 2000's I actually wrote the software that enabled this*.
There was a single insurance company, NEIL (Nuclear Electric Insurance Ltd) that wrote the policies for all of the nuclear power plants in the U.S.
This company was wholly owned by the energy companies, so they self-insured through cost-based rate hikes.
I got to see pictures of some of the claims that had been filed.
Let's just say... it still keeps me up at night.
Many things don't make it to the news.
* As an aside, one of the applications I wrote for them to track fires in plants still stands out as the single worst web app I've ever written. Visual Interdev with server events that reloaded the page every click and an OCX control with an animated fire. Omg.
Nuclear plants are complex, bespoke machines. This is the first new reactor complex in 40 years! It’s ludicrous to expect it would somehow be built on time and under budget.
If we can somehow start building several plants per year, then a supply chain will develop, skilled labour will be trained, and reusable parts and know how will emerge. But when you only build one thing every few decades, there are no economies of scale.
What about all the nuclear powered submarines and carriers? Don’t count?
A nuclear powered ship is overall more expensive to build+operate than a fossil fuel powered ship. And this is even when burning fairly expensive liquid fossil fuels. This is why most of the ships in the US Navy are not nuclear powered.
3 great articles about nuclear energy:
https://whatisnuclear.com/reactor_history.html
In 40 years? So roughly 2060?
Watts Bar #2 was the last one in the US to come online started construction in 1972 came online in 2016... These are the sorts of timelines that make these things hard sells to modern boardrooms and investment strategies.
Stopped in 1985, resumed in 2007
After the restart of construction it ended up being considerably more expensive than promised.
Some contributing factors: new regulations requiring partial redesign; global financial crisis; being Gen II and therefore highly impacted by brain drain
I think they mean it's been 40 years since a plant was built.
More.
Less.
It's a red flag when your power generation system needs more security than Fort Knox.
Too little, too late.
A pox on the house of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Even if you're a climate skeptic, what they've done to the country is absolutely criminal.
Crafted by Rajat
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