[HN Gopher] Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
___________________________________________________________________
Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
Author : gumby
Score : 311 points
Date : 2022-06-15 14:38 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| unchocked wrote:
| I will hazard that the problems with nuclear are not
| technological but political, and the economic problems with
| nuclear are there because of political reasons.
|
| France gets ~75% of its power from nuclear, safely and
| economically. France inhabits the same physical world as the rest
| of us, but is different politically.
|
| If there were a will, there would be a way. If the environmental
| movement had paid more attention to James Hansen's testimony in
| 1989 than it did to Chernobyl in 1986 then we would be living in
| a different world.
|
| There is no amount of damage from nuclear accidents that will be
| worse than what we are suffering from climate change, with no end
| in sight. Proliferation is another story, but how's that going
| anyway...?
| Joeri wrote:
| You don't have to hazard. This subject has been studied
| extensively and there are clear answers.
|
| The high cost of nuclear is due to the inherent complexity of
| nuclear power plants, and the rise in particular is principally
| due to a nuclear industry that no longer knows how to construct
| plants affordably, with increased regulatory compliance a minor
| contributor.
|
| Source: https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118
|
| The result of that high cost is that nuclear is a lot more
| expensive to build than renewables for the same amount of
| energy. This difference is growing and not shrinking, because
| the solar and wind industries keep getting better at cheaply
| rolling out capacity.
|
| Source: https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
|
| Because most of a nuclear project's cost is upfront, earned
| back over the lifetime of the plant, a profitable project has
| to be able to assume it can outcompete renewables + storage
| over multiple decades. This already is not the case today, and
| less so in the coming years. No private business can make these
| numbers work, so no private business is willing to fund a
| nuclear plant without subsidies. Renewables however can and are
| being funded privately to a large degree, because they turn a
| profit more quickly and can be built in smaller increments.
|
| Subsidies come out of taxes, which means the money can't be
| spent on something else. Government budgets are already
| stressed. Between the choice of a largely privately funded
| solar/wind/hydrogen/storage path and a mostly government-funded
| nuclear path governments around the world are choosing the
| cheaper option.
|
| And yes, there is the public perception of nuclear which
| doesn't help. But people are also opposed to solar and wind
| projects. NIMBY is always a thing. Besides, even if you could
| convince people of the safety of nuclear energy, the numbers
| still wouldn't work out.
|
| There are challenges to rolling out solar and wind at scale
| with grid redesign and hydrogen storage and distribution, but
| nuclear at scale has similarly sized problems. TANSTAAFL when
| it comes to energy production.
| dukoid wrote:
| If you can't insure something reasonably it's not economical.
| The risk is just externalized.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| If fossil and biofuel had to insure against air pollution
| health effects they directly cause (8 million deaths/yr
| according to WHO), and climate change, then clean/carbon-free
| nuclear fission would absolutely dominate today.
| legulere wrote:
| > the economic problems with nuclear are there because of
| political reasons. France gets ~75% of its power from nuclear,
| safely and economically.
|
| EDF, Areva have a long history of bailouts, buyouts and
| subsidies by the French government. You are right that it's a
| political decision that France has so much nuclear, but it is
| not an economical one.
|
| Even though they decided to replace old reactors with new ones,
| they do not manage to build enough reactors fast enough and
| especially not economically. Flamanville has a budget overrun
| of around 500% and time overrun of around 300%.
|
| Nuclear is neither fast nor economical enough to be built. Only
| building renewables can help push down CO2 emissions fast and
| cheap enough.
| adrianN wrote:
| France is currently not building enough reactors to replace
| those that will need to be shut down due to age in the near
| future. They would need to build a lot more if they wanted to
| satisfy demand for heating and transportation. I assume they
| have good reasons not to build more reactors.
| BenoitP wrote:
| 6 + an additional 8 are being planned at the moment. It is
| still dependent on legislative elections (starting this
| weekend), and on the EU energy taxonomy (currently going
| final rounds in the EU parliament)
|
| Both should be sort of ok, fingers crossed.
|
| But this is only replacement. If we're serious and want to
| reduce iron ore with hydrogen for our steel needs, and use
| the same electrolytic hydrogen for fertilizers, we would need
| to build about 50 of them.
|
| The technology is there, but yes, it is more of a political
| issue in France as well.
| adrianN wrote:
| France has over fifty nuclear plants, most of them older
| than 40 years. You probably want to replace most of them in
| the next twenty years or so. Since building one can easily
| take a decade or two from planning to power output, you
| would want to have a couple of dozen in the planning stage
| right now if you expect to continue producing the same
| amount of power. Since only about a third of France's
| primary power consumption is satisfied by nuclear,
| realistically they'd need to drastically increase the
| number of reactors in the next decades to reach climate
| goals.
| lelag wrote:
| That's in large part due to the work of the german-influenced
| green movement which did manage to get France to stop
| building reactors for 30 years or so. In the meantime, the
| french nuclear industry lost the competency to build new one
| as demonstrated by the struggling EPR project in Normandy.
| But at least the many older reactors have been producing low-
| carbon power since then...
|
| Germany's electricity production has emitted about 8 times
| more CO2 emission than France over the last 30 years: I blame
| the german political ecologists for being directly
| responsible for a massive amount of our current ecological
| woes by demonising the nuclear industry and limiting it's
| spread across the world for the last 30 years.
|
| It's really a sad story to be so misguided to end up
| contributing to destroy the one thing you wanted to save...
| logifail wrote:
| > In the meantime, the french nuclear industry lost the
| competency to build new one as demonstrated by the
| struggling EPR project in Normandy.
|
| If the _French_ (of all people) can no longer get it
| together to build new reactors even remotely on time and on
| budget, then maybe we just need to be honest and give up on
| the "build lots of new nuclear plants, quickly" as a
| credible medium-term component of a plan to deal with
| climate change.
|
| "France's Flamanville 3 reactor will cost 300 million euros
| more than forecast and fuel loading is being pushed back by
| up to six months, EDF (EDF.PA) said on Wednesday, in the
| latest setback for a project already running more than a
| decade late.
|
| EDF now estimates the total cost of the project at 12.7
| billion euros ($14.42 billion). Its expected cost has more
| than quadrupled from the first estimate made in 2004."[0]
|
| [0] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edf-announces-
| new-de...
| lelag wrote:
| It's very possible that you are right, that it's too
| late, that we can't redevelop enough nuclear capacity in
| time, that we are doomed to see the world burn.
|
| That won't prevent me from blaming the anti-nuclear crowd
| that put us in that situation in the first place.
|
| Yes, nuclear is expensive, yes it can be messy but it was
| our best shot to produce abundant amount of low carbon
| power. All this talk about switching to wind and solar
| power omit the inconfortable fact that the current low
| prices for those technologies are low because we are
| using fossil fuel to make them.
|
| When you have to make advanced renewable tech with only
| renewable energy, you will see that it's no longer
| possible to make it economically either.
| ncmncm wrote:
| We are _not_ doomed to see the world burn. We know what
| to do: just build renewables. It is dishonest to claim
| that using carbon to build them is a problem. The more we
| build, the less carbon is used on them.
|
| When you need falsehoods to make your case, you have no
| case.
| lelag wrote:
| Falsehood ? What do you know about building windmills ?
|
| I admit that I don't myself know much, but I can tell you
| that you need at least:
|
| - A modern metallurgy industry using coal to make steal
|
| - Possibly a chemical industry to make composite material
|
| - A logistic industry to move components around the world
| using petrol (all the solar and wind renewable production
| is based in china)
|
| - Cement to build your fondation (using gas)
|
| Remove all this and try to build it locally and see how
| much they cost you...
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > A modern metallurgy industry using coal to make steal
|
| Nuclear reactors also require steel (and a chemical
| industry and cement) but fortunately that doesn't require
| coal:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/19/green-
| steel-...
| lelag wrote:
| Sure but that wasn't the point.
|
| The point is that those that claim that we can replace
| fossils fuel entirely by wind and solar based on the
| current price of wind and solar production produced by an
| industry doped with fossil fuels at every stage are
| deluding themselves.
| Jorge1o1 wrote:
| The reasons are political... just like in the United States.
|
| HBO with their Chernobyl miniseries single-handedly undid
| years of progress in the perception of nuclear energy.
| cycomanic wrote:
| According to perceptions and advertising about nuclear we
| should have unlimited power and everything from our cars to
| our stoves would be running of nuclear. All this should
| have been possible with just a containers worth of nuclear
| waste (experts in the 50s,60s seriously said operating a
| whole country of nuclear would result in maybe a ton of
| nuclear waste).
|
| Nuclear completely undelivered on this promise. Tschernobyl
| was just the nail in the coffin.
|
| On top of that has the nuclear industry been one of the
| strongest lobbying groups against wind and solar, mainly to
| protect their investments. I would argue on the whole we
| would have been much further in terms of renewable energy
| if it wasn't for the nuclear industry.
| jlkuester7 wrote:
| > HBO with their Chernobyl miniseries single-handedly undid
| years of progress
|
| Wait, seriously? That miniseries was not perfect, but I
| thought it did a pretty good job of pointing out the issues
| with Chernobyl were largely political and not technical.
| (Sure the RBMK reactors were flawed, that is a technical
| issue. But the only reason that escalated into a disaster
| was due to gross mismanagement and flagrant disregard of
| safety systems...)
| goodpoint wrote:
| Nuclear in inherently vulnerable to politics,
| mismanagement and attempts at cover-up. As it happened in
| Fukushima as well as Chernobyl.
|
| Because it's centralized, quite isolated from the public
| eye and with the potential to cause invisible
| environmental impact.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The Chernobyl miniseries greatly distorted the impact of
| the meltdown. They cited the "bridge of death" where
| everyone supposedly died. In reality there are zero known
| deaths among people who watched the meltdown from that
| overpass, and there's even interviews with people who
| were there. They cited a death estimate of 60,000 when
| reputable sources estimate 200-1,700 deaths.
| rectang wrote:
| > _gross mismanagement and flagrant disregard of safety
| systems..._
|
| Gross mismanagement and flagrant disregard of safety
| systems are inevitable, inherent features of power
| utilities. If your technology is disastrous without
| perfect handling, your technology is disastrous.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _your technology is disastrous without perfect
| handling, your technology is disastrous_
|
| Did we watch the same miniseries? Chernobyl went beyond
| gross negligence. To say nothing of perfection. In the
| reactor design, in its operation and in post-crisis
| management.
| ncmncm wrote:
| No, it was absolutely typical gross negligence, with
| unfortunately outsized consequences. Fukushima was
| exactly equal negligence, with absolutely expected
| consequences.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| They didn't need perfect handling, just halfway
| competent.
|
| But since the rest of the world doesn't build reactors of
| that type, and never built any without even a containment
| building AFAIK, it's not really applicable to modern
| nuclear power plant designs.
| pydry wrote:
| If something cant operate without lavish subsidies it
| automatically becomes political.
|
| E.g. Bill Gates' nuclear startup would be dead in the water
| without its subsidies. That makes it political.
| Retric wrote:
| The reasons are economic. France has been heavily
| subsidizing nuclear for years and can swap to cheaper
| alternatives for less money.
|
| It's not that nuclear is any worse, it's just that the
| alternatives got better.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Wind and solar got better, but it seems fundamentally
| problematic to me to suggest that those are the
| alternatives to nuclear. They're not.
|
| Fossil fuel is the alternative to nuclear (and possibly
| battery supported wind/solar) as the base load. Fossil
| fuels are fundamentally cheaper because they can more
| easily avoid paying the cost of their negative
| externalities than nuclear can. If we could actually
| internalize the negatives of fossil fuel burning (i.e. by
| carbon tax) then nuclear might actually be the most
| economical option for the base load with solar and wind
| picking up the slack.
| Retric wrote:
| Even with that line of thinking, France was well past the
| point of using Nukes for base load power.
|
| France had nuclear capacity factors around 70% when
| America and much of the worlds nuclear power plants where
| closer to 90%. It physically worked, but dramatically
| increased production cost per KWH.
|
| Assuming they cut back to 30% or even 40% of all
| electricity being supplied by nuclear that's still a
| significantly reduction.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Renewables + storage is the alternative to nukes. And,
| there is simply no contest. Nukes have been left far
| behind.
| adrianN wrote:
| Or perhaps the reasons are economical. Recently nuclear
| construction projects became a lot more expensive and took
| a lot longer than initially planned.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Some of those economical problems are burdened on the
| nuclear industry _because_ of political problems.
|
| For example, because everyone is terrified of nuclear,
| regulations may require an absurd level of safety
| expenses that no other energy producer is burdened with.
| If the political climate lead to burdening fossil fuel
| burners with costs to reduce their pollution and GHG
| emissions that directly and indirectly lead to orders of
| magnitude more deaths than nuclear ever has, then nuclear
| might actually be price competitive.
|
| As another example, since the Nuclear Regulatory
| Commission in the US started in 1975, they have never,
| not once, approved the construction of a new nuclear site
| in the US. They've approved expansion of existing sites,
| but never a new one. In fact, it was a huge deal when the
| NRC approved the expansion of a site several years ago,
| for the first time in 30 years,
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclear-
| license/nrc-a...
|
| How much pain and death is the NRC ultimately responsible
| for for holding nuclear energy to such a high safety
| standard that it's been literally impossible to build a
| new site for almost 50 years? Because all that means, is
| that we've burned drastically more fossil fuel than
| necessary over the past 50 years.
|
| Shame on the NRC and the US government for using
| irrational fear to protect the fossil fuel industry at
| the expense of nuclear energy. And shame on
| environmentalists for falling for the same trap and
| failing to think holistically and systemically.
| logifail wrote:
| > because everyone is terrified of nuclear, regulations
| may require an absurd level of safety expenses that no
| other energy producer is burdened with
|
| "The researchers start out with a historic analysis of
| plant construction in the US. The basic numbers are grim.
| The typical plant built after 1970 had a cost overrun of
| 241 percent--and that's not considering the financing
| costs of the construction delays [..] while safety
| regulations added to the costs, they were far from the
| primary factor [...] In the end, the conclusion is that
| there are no easy answers to how to make nuclear plant
| construction more efficient. And, until there are, it
| will continue to be badly undercut by both renewables and
| fossil fuel."[0]
|
| [0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-
| nuclear-plan...
| ncmncm wrote:
| The cost overruns are inherent in the process. Actual
| cost is actual cost.
|
| Really, actual cost is _much more than_ reported cost,
| because disaster insurance and decommissioning are
| _always_ omitted from cost accounting.
| heretogetout wrote:
| The ascendancy of wind and cheap natural gas probably had a
| greater effect, considering the miniseries is only a couple
| years old.
| trashtester wrote:
| I suppose now that some of the sources of such gas is
| being cut, those French nuclear plants will be extremely
| profitable for a while.
| phh wrote:
| Even though there are political reasons, the biggest reason
| is... we had enough reactors for our own usage.
|
| We built them so fast, that even if we had cross-partisan
| will to keep forever using nuclear, we'd still have 30-40
| years of gap without making any new reactor. And after a
| generation of engineers, we need to make reactors again and
| we're basically doing it from scratch again.
|
| There are other reasons: people's fear of nuclear became
| quite real (either because of greenpeace, or local green
| political parties). There's also a bit of hubris I think,
| rather than making some "easy" "usual" reactor model, we
| decided to do our brand new own, which has its own cost: If
| Flamanville's EPR had succeeded, we would likely have made
| more reactors and we would already be producing >100% of
| nuclear power
| adrianN wrote:
| Only a third of France's primary power consumption comes
| from nuclear. That's a long way to go to carbon neutrality.
| rswskg wrote:
| Not including transport? That's awful.
| phh wrote:
| One third is including transport and heating.
| trashtester wrote:
| In other words, France needs to hurry up and double if
| not triple their nuclear capacity, so they can switch to
| electric cars and heating.
|
| Somewhere to the north-east of Strasbourg would be ideal,
| not only for the abundant water supply, but also because
| the location is ideal for export to places in Europe that
| have not invested enough in stable sources of energy,
| lately. And if France plans to import power when the wind
| is blowing in those countries, the grid capacity out of
| that area will be needed anyway.
| cycomanic wrote:
| France is not using their reactors economically. They have been
| told multiple times by the EU that the reserves that operators
| have to provide for decommissioning of plants are much too low.
| So this means that the government/the taxpayers have to foot
| the bill. And we have not even talk about long term storage
| cost which are typically never taken into account.
|
| So yes it is a political decision, France is willing to highly
| subsidise their nuclear industry.
| alar44 wrote:
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _have been told multiple times by the EU that the reserves
| that operators have to provide for decommissioning of plants
| are much too low_
|
| Why is the EU more trustworthy on these estimates than the
| French?
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| Well in fairness, the French government currently in power
| have an economic incentive to kick the can down the road to
| subsequent governments. Reduce reserve requirements now,
| next generation of taxpayers foot the bill later.
|
| Does the EU have an incentive to inflate the reserve
| requirement?
| syrrim wrote:
| The "EU" is just the client countries of the EU. Some
| countries neighbouring france are strongly against
| nuclear energy, and thus would have cause to exaggerate
| the costs.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| > France is willing to highly subsidise their nuclear
| industry.
|
| And most of the world is willing to subside Oil and Gas to
| the tune of $5.9 trillion in 2020 or about 6.8 percent of the
| _world's_ GDP. [0]
|
| Tax payer's money will be sunk anyway, choose your poison.
|
| [0] https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2021/09/23/
| Sti...
| fartsucker69 wrote:
| This is afaik true about nuclear power plants in general.
| They are one of the least cost-efficient energy generation
| sources out there because of their insane construction and
| running costs. In some countries they never make their money
| back, even if run by private companies, and only exist
| because of subsidies when they were built.
|
| However, they are by far the most practical and safe way to
| generate ludicrous amounts of environmentally friendly energy
| out of all technologies that we have available. Even solar
| can't match up. If you factor in the really long term cost on
| every country on this planet due to climate change for
| example, this footed bill is chump change.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Each dollar diverted from renewables to nukes brings
| climate catastrophe nearer.
|
| Starting a new nuke means burning coal for an extra decade,
| and at the end of that decade getting much less power per
| euro, displacing correspondingly less CO2, than if you had
| built out renewables instead.
|
| There is simply no contest.
|
| Even refurbishing a nuke instead of building out renewables
| is a losing proposition. Just continuing to operate a nuke
| instead of building out and then operating renewables is a
| losing proposition.
|
| The only legitimate use for keeping a nuke running is while
| you are waiting to bring enough renewables you are building
| online to wholly displace it, because what you are spending
| operating it is using up money that could be building more
| renewables.
|
| This is the magic of exponentially falling costs.
|
| At the point where enough spare renewable generating
| capacity is available to charge storage, it will be time to
| start building out increasingly cheap storage.
| pydry wrote:
| France has nuclear plants because in the 1970s it decided it
| didnt want to be dependent on middle eastern oil.
|
| It was very very expensive. It was also nothing to do with
| global warming.
|
| Those plants are fully paid off but nearly all close to death.
| Replacing them will still be very very expensive. Extending
| their lives will be dangerous. France isnt quite sure what to
| do.
|
| If there's unlimited money and patience for years long delays
| then yes nuclear power is just fine.
|
| If you want it reasonably priced it either wont happen at all
| or you're risking catastrophe.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| >Those plants are nearly all close to death.
|
| No, these plants are close to the end of their original grant
| for exploitation. Many of them get renewed for 10, 20 years
| easily. The US has had plants renewed for 40 years and are
| still running just fine.
|
| > France isnt quite sure what to do.
|
| We know what to do, every single scientist from the ASN knows
| what to do, every economist knows what to do. The non-renewal
| of nuclear plants is purely a political play to gain votes.
|
| Stop spreading your ignorant, fearmongering, unsubstantiated
| opinions.
| cycomanic wrote:
| > >Those plants are nearly all close to death.
|
| > No, these plants are close to the end of their original
| grant for exploitation. Many of them get renewed for 10, 20
| years easily. The US has had plants renewed for 40 years
| and are still running just fine.
|
| The moving goal post by nuclear proponents never cease to
| amaze. When we talk about safety the argument is always:
| "don't look at these old designs, all these modern designs
| are 100% safe". Then when we talk about cost it is: "don't
| look at the cost of building new plants, just extend the
| operation of these 40 year old plants by another 40 years".
| And the they complain about regulations for nuclear, while
| at the same time arguing that regulations about
| decommissioning a plant after its regulated lifetime ran
| out should not apply to nuclear plants.
|
| Why should the rules about safe operation lifetimes not
| apply to nuclear plants?
|
| > > France isnt quite sure what to do.
|
| > We know what to do, every single scientist from the ASN
| knows what to do, every economist knows what to do. The
| non-renewal of nuclear plants is purely a political play to
| gain votes.
|
| > Stop spreading your ignorant, fearmongering,
| unsubstantiated opinions.
|
| They are not fear mongering or unsubstantiated. Plants were
| build/commissioned with an expected lifetime. There are
| reasons for this, aging of components and materials
| especially under exposure to radiation, aging of computer
| systems...
| sofixa wrote:
| > don't look at these old designs, all these modern
| designs are 100% safe
|
| This is only said as an answer to all the people
| screaming "but Chernobyl was horrible". Old designs are
| pretty safe too ( especially when terrible bugs like the
| one that caused Chernobyl are fixed), precisely because
| they keep getting updated to newer norms during refreshes
| and refits. There are nuclear power plants out there that
| were constructed in the 1950s that still work.
|
| OP's point is that most nuclear power plants can have
| their life extended, at some cost, which is negligible
| compared to the cost of a new plant, and there's rarely a
| case where that doesn't make sense ( usually when for
| some reason the retrofit to update to new standards is
| too expensive). Why waste that? Prolong the life of
| existing plants, _and_ build new ones to expand
| production and eventually replace the old ones.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Yes and the reasons that they don't get extended
| indefinitely is because it gets increasingly expensive to
| modernise and follow the new rules. On top of that is
| that regulators are becoming more reluctant to extend the
| lifetime, because the unknown factors increase (cue
| complaints about regulation). The reason they don't get
| extended that it is not economical compared to using
| wind/solar instead. Why do you think coal plants don't
| get operated indefinitely?
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| The only way plants are extended is if they meet current
| nuclear safety rules, not the rules from 40 years ago.
| Please do literally five minutes of research.
| phh wrote:
| > We know what to do, every single scientist from the ASN
| knows what to do, every economist knows what to do.
|
| The ones who underestimated Flamanville's cost by 80%? (and
| it's still not in production)
|
| Let's maybe not trust them completely, and have our eggs in
| other baskets as well.
| sofixa wrote:
| > The ones who underestimated Flamanville's cost by 80%?
| (and it's still not in production)
|
| It's an entirely new design of a complicated piece of
| technology, of course it will be over budget and delayed.
| Grand Paris Express and the Paris Philharmonic were also
| over budget and delayed, does that invalidate the opinion
| of all experts involved in both projects?
| moogly wrote:
| > does that invalidate the opinion of all experts
| involved in both projects
|
| demonstrably, yes?
| sofixa wrote:
| Because the most important thing about a project as
| complex as a big acoustic-friendly building or multiple
| hundreds of kms of automated metros or a nuclear power
| plant is that the predictions about budget and time are
| perfect?
|
| I wonder what that means for software developers who
| notoriously struggle to predict basically the same stuff,
| only on much less drastic scales (if an engineer
| underestimates how much time and effort a feature will
| take, usually people don't die. If a building crumbles or
| a nuclear power plant has an accident or a train crashes
| people do die).
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| No, you don't know what you are talking about. The
| budget, that's EDF. EDF builds things, the ASN ensures
| the safety is up to standards. Hell, the ASN _is_
| responsible for these costs because they are the ones
| ensuring everything is up to par. There are many EPRs
| running, in Finland, in China, but none of these have
| safety requirements as drastic as the Flamanville EPR.
|
| Additionally, EDF offered multiple estimates at the time
| of construction, from "everything goes well" to "oh dear
| god so many delays". Many of these estimates were
| perfectly in line with the current costs. It is, once
| again, political decisions that only allocated the
| minimal budget, while knowing full well that it would go
| over (but that EDF would take the blame, and not the
| government).
|
| And once again, this is also a result of letting our
| nuclear industry decay for 40 years, losing every single
| person that has the knowledge on how to build nuclear
| plants either to retirement or other countries.
| sofixa wrote:
| > France isnt quite sure what to do.
|
| Yes it is ( big nuclear buildout to replace most of the
| current fleet, while also doing lots of renewables and
| experimenting with small modular reactors):
|
| https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20220210-announcing-
| new-r...
| tcfhgj wrote:
| So they're reducing nuclear power production in the long
| term?
| sofixa wrote:
| By a small percentage, yes, going down from something
| like 75% to 55-60% IIRC, with the difference going to
| renewables.
| [deleted]
| boringg wrote:
| The problems with Nuclear are simple and straight forward: (1)
| Economic not viable if you include the total life cycle cost of
| the system (i.e. nuclear waste storage and dismantling the
| asset.
|
| Theres a large difference between building new reactors vs
| running the old ones until the end of life (in terms of
| economics).
|
| Also the modular reactors that are getting a lot of hype right
| now also still have a nuclear waste disposal issue.
|
| I would like to see Nuclear thrive but until it gets the cost /
| waste disposal resolved it's a tough sell.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| > not viable if you include the total life cycle cost of the
| system (i.e. nuclear waste storage and dismantling the asset.
|
| On the contrary! Nuclear plants pay a fraction of their
| revenue through their life into special decommissioning funds
| that have so far been more than enough to perform full
| greenfield decommissioning.
|
| For waste, there's a separate fund called the Nuclear Waste
| Fund in the US (and other nuclear-operating countries) that
| has a current balance around $50B.
|
| https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/RL33461.pdf
| boringg wrote:
| Sorry should have been more clear. True cost of permanent
| waste disposal. They cant find anywhere to put it so while
| 50B sounds nice it doesn't have a home and the lifetime
| cost of operating a facility is probably significant higher
| (if they can find one).
|
| Read: problem not resolved.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| It's being done in Finland and Sweden [1] just fine, and
| for reasonable cost. NIMBY is a big problem but once we
| figure out how to solve that in the USA like Finland did,
| then it is basically a solved problem.
|
| [1] https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html
| boringg wrote:
| How much nuclear waste does Sweden and Finland produce?
| For scale purposes their population isn't larger than the
| metropolitan area of Los Angeles.
|
| I think the scale of the issue is significantly larger in
| the US.
|
| Yucca isn't viable politically and there isn't anyone who
| lives close by.
| ncmncm wrote:
| US nukes are, in fact, _not_ paying into any waste fund.
| Operators are actually _being paid_ out of the previous
| balance from the previous waste fund.
|
| Legal shenanigans. They got a court decision declaring the
| waste fund as a lie because there is no viable plan for
| waste.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Yet, waste disposal is the _smallest_ of problems nukes pose.
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| I recently read the Serhii Plokhy book Atoms and Ashes, where he
| discusses 6 most notable nuclear accidents in depth.
|
| And his conclusion was pretty grim. Paraphrasing: If we bet on
| nuclear for mitigation of climate change, it is inevitable that
| nuclear accidents will happen more often. Also each accident
| causes a major setback in peoples minds regarding nuclear safety
| and the next Fukushima might kill off a lot of progress and the
| opportunity cost lost would be huge.
|
| I don't know how to argue with this. I personally think nuclear
| is really safe. If the worst accidents have killed a few hundred
| and caused premature deaths to at most hundreds of thousands.
| Compared to the millions of premature deaths PER YEAR for fossil
| related energy and the possible billions coming from climate
| change, nuclear is as safe as it gets (I mean probably more PV
| installers will fall off roofs than get killed by nuclear
| accidents), but peoples fears might not be surmountable.
| zosima wrote:
| There is quite clearly not even remotely 100.000 premature
| deaths from Chernobyl.
|
| The only cancer that clearly went up in immediate connection to
| Chernobyl was thyroid cancer, and that was in most cases very
| treatable. It's also unclear how much of the increase in
| incidence, was due to increased screening. Thyroid cancer seems
| to have affected the general population, but in a dose-
| dependent manner, where the increased risk became really low
| when looking outside the cleaning crew.
|
| On top of that there is some evidence to suggest that the risk
| of leukemia and other blood cancers increased in the cleaning
| crew. (But still really low numbers). And as far as I know no
| signs of increased blood cancer rate was seen in the general
| population.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28929329/
|
| It actually appears that the largest loss of human life from
| Chernobyl happened because of panic. Women chose abortion
| because of the perceived increased risk of malformation in
| offspring. As far as I am aware, the actual increased risk of
| malformations has not been detectable, and I presume it to be
| negligible.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8516187/
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/ywyqzv/why-hundreds-of-thous...
| londons_explore wrote:
| All it takes is for a few newspapers to regularly publish
| alongside any article about any power source the figures of "X
| people died per year by nuclear, Y by solar, Z by coal", etc.
|
| Any newspaper mogul could make that happen.
|
| Any time there is any accident, people interviewed need to
| start with "There is a risk this incident might stop nuclear
| from being the safest energy source. But to be honest, I think
| we'll still keep the crown".
| tptacek wrote:
| It sounds like the argument presented here is that if we
| actually use nuclear power, there will be more accidents, which
| will cost us the opportunity of actually using nuclear power.
| tomp wrote:
| _> Also each accident causes a major setback in peoples minds
| regarding nuclear safety_
|
| Planes are crashing all the time and kill tons of people (way
| more than nuclear power plants anyways), yet flying is more
| popular than ever (before Covid, anyways)
| zosima wrote:
| The biggest problem nuclear has is that it's too cheap and the
| fuel lasts too long.
|
| That means that the oil, gas, wind and solar industry has more
| money and interest in spreading FUD.
|
| On top of that the fear that has been succesfully deployed, has
| pushed nuclear energy into a bureaucratic nightmare, driving up
| costs, and also incentivizing a large part of the nuclear
| industry (the part living off the regulation and bureaucracy) to
| continue the FUD.
|
| The total number of causalities and environmental impact from
| non-weaponized nuclear power, including Chernobyl, Fukushima and
| three mile island are so small, that I guess a larger number of
| people have died or been injured from rare-earth metal mines for
| solar panels or floods due to dams for water turbines.
| TedShiller wrote:
| Nuclear is great as long as it's not anywhere close to where I
| live
| dehrmann wrote:
| I could never take climate change seriously when nuclear wasn't
| on the table. If climate change were really a concern, you'd
| consider a power source that's safer than coal, but has
| negligible CO2 emissions (mining). I'm glad to see people are
| taking it seriously.
| ncmncm wrote:
| No. When it is a choice between spending 5x plus buying coal
| for another decade, or spending 1x and displacing carbon
| immediately, the correct choice is dead obvious, and getting
| moreso with each passing day as the 5x shades toward 6x and
| beyond, relentlessly.
| pfdietz wrote:
| That used to be a valid argument.
| simonCGN wrote:
| Nuclear energy is by far the most expensive form of energy. Also,
| the nuclear waste problem remains unresolved.
| lta wrote:
| A statement supported by which data ?
| ncmncm wrote:
| And, waste is the least of its problems.
| Simplicitas wrote:
| Stunning how many well-informed people here are still so
| distrustful of nuclear energy despite all the advancements.
| amelius wrote:
| Not surprising. Software development has advanced, yet every
| day somewhere some piece of software crashes.
| neysofu wrote:
| You can't say the same about reactors, it's a weak
| comparison.
| [deleted]
| drewvolpe wrote:
| People are irrationally concerned about low-probability but
| high severity risks, which is what nuclear is.
|
| The chance of someone in the US dying from a terrorist attack
| is about 1 out of 3 million. It's a rounding error compared
| with heart disease (1:6), suicide (1:93), storms (1:35k) or
| even sunstroke (1:6k). Yet, the US spends $52B / year on the
| department of homeland security.
| [deleted]
| synergy20 wrote:
| Best news for the day, I'm a firm believer that nuclear is the
| _only_ way for true green energy on earth at scale. it's a
| manageable risk(checking out what France is doing) and there is
| simply no other _true_ alternatives.
| systemBuilder wrote:
| It's not that we don't have nuclear power plants, nuclear fuel,
| and nuclear technology.
|
| One problem is that France's nuclear industry has committments to
| use something like 2/3rds of the world's reserves of Uranium Ore.
|
| Another problem is, we've had 3 once-in-1000 years accidents in
| 40 years. By my calculations, the entire world will be a
| radioactive waste dump in 250,000 years, given the rate of land
| contamination by nuclear accidents.
|
| Why do nuclear cheerleaders ignore this fact? They must.
| k__ wrote:
| I recently saw a good evaluation of nuclear power by
| Hossenfelder.
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=0kahih8RT1k
| redtriumph wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220615121046/https://www.nytim...
| AngryData wrote:
| Everyone arguing over replacing currently energy usage like that
| will be even close to enough, it won't. Personally im a nuclear
| fan and I think many of the costs are artificially high by
| preventing nuclear industry growth and bad legislation that
| outlaws things like breeder reactors, that said we are going to
| need wind and solar even with massive nuclear investment just by
| the total power we need to produce to make industry green.
|
| Electricity generation isn't the only way we use fossil fuels and
| cause pollution. Fertilizer production needs hydrogen, where does
| that hydrogen come from? Natural gas. Why? Because not using
| natural gas increases the energy costs of fertilizer production
| near 10x over. Since it is currently 1% of total world
| electricity consumption already, that is a near 10% global
| increase in electricity demand for one (admitedly large) product.
| The replacement of plastics with other materials like paper,
| glass, and metal? All require higher energy input to produce than
| plastic. Not to mention that plastic will eventually breakdown
| and release carbon also. As the most economical mines start to
| dry up and we seek lesser ores to mine, mining and processing
| electrical requirements will continue to rise. Nearly every
| chemical reagent all around you causes pollution during products,
| but it can be 90% solved, mostly by the addition of more
| electrical electricity for heating, cooling, high and low
| pressure chambers, ect. to not create so many waste products that
| we trash into both the atmosphere and the ground and water. We
| don't use those cleaner methods now mostly because using the
| electricity to do so costs a LOT more. Nearly every industry on
| earth can be cleaner, but it costs significantly more electricity
| which needs to be fairly cheap. Something like concrete
| production could be done more far more cleanly, but again,
| massive amounts of additional electricity needed. And that is
| before we get into things like active carbon sequestering.
|
| Or goals shouldn't be a direct replacement of fossil fuel
| electricity sources, our goals should be exceeding currently
| world electrical output multiple times over without fossil fuels,
| which means we should be producing nuclear, solar, wind, hydro,
| and geothermal power across the board in an attempt to meet our
| extreme future demands.
|
| Maybe solar and wind and batteries will be up to the task in the
| future with some new technology, but also maybe not. Nuclear is a
| known feasible solution to providing as much power as we could
| ever want or need with technology we have right now. Solar and
| battery tech is often assuming we will continue on the same path
| of increased efficiency and reduced costs seemingly indefinitely,
| but you know what, they thought the same thing with nuclear
| energy until they started hitting some walls in generation
| efficiency and costs. And if it ends up not being significantly
| cheaper or easier, you gotta start bringing up questions of land
| usage and grid complexity on top of everything else.
| mikece wrote:
| I would love to see nuclear be far more of the base-load
| production in the US, but rather than large gigawatt-scale
| reactors I think it would benefit everyone more if we moved to
| using SMRs (small modular reactors). Not only could manufacturing
| economies of scale be realized but SMRs can passively cool
| themselves in the event they need to scram or shut down. The
| scenario that concerns me the most is a terrorist attack on our
| grid and externally on a nuclear power station: if a plant can be
| scrammed AND the backup diesels sabotaged then pretty much all
| nuclear plants in the US would be looking at a Fukushima-like
| event once the batteries to the primary cooling loop ran out.
|
| Nuclear is definitely a good idea for the future, but only if
| SMRs are the basis of moving forward.
| politician wrote:
| A Rolls Royce (SMR) for every community!
|
| [1] https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-
| reactor...
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| I think your perception of the risk from terrorist attack on a
| Nuclear power plant and the actual risk involved are out of
| whack. Especially given that human error is a much more likely
| source a radioactive leak.
| rectang wrote:
| The fundamental problem is the concentration of radioactive
| materials at a single facility. (Hydroelectric power has a
| similar problem with the water behind dams.)
|
| Whether it's human error, terrorist attack, or natural
| disaster, nuclear facilities are vulnerable in a way that
| solar and wind facilities are not.
| sirmike_ wrote:
| katz_ wrote:
| Nuclear is necessary for the near term. And it's already a mature
| technology
| 99_00 wrote:
| iammru wrote:
| Good. It's the most logical choice to complement other green
| initiatives.
| ZetaZero wrote:
| No paywall https://dnyuz.com/2022/06/15/nuclear-is-back-on-the-
| table-fo...
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Funny article in that it doesn't discuss lifecycle costs. A side-
| by-side comparison of the cost of grids powered by nuclear power
| plant relative to those powered by wind/solar/storage is what I'd
| expect to see from a 'paper of record' like the NYTimes.
|
| Except in some specific cases (Finland, other Arctic regions with
| long periods of low sunlight) I'm pretty sure this cost
| comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage.
| Storage is the main cost barrier for 100% renewable-powered
| grids, but this is also an area where technological development
| is possible.
|
| Much of the discussion of energy in the American media is pretty
| poor these days. For example, the solar tariff issue on China
| sourced PV - there are simply no US companies making panels of
| comparable quality (monocrystalline Si lasts longer and is more
| efficient). Concepts like requiring Chinese manufacturers to open
| factories in the USA if they want to sell in US markets would
| make sense but probably would violate some trade provision or
| other.
|
| Another factor that this article should have mentioned is the
| reliability of the global uranium ore -> fuel rods supply chain.
| Costs vary significantly based on the purity of the ore (18% is
| the top, 0.1% is the economically viable limit) and like oil,
| uranium ore is not globally distributed (unlike sunlight and
| wind).
|
| As far as Russia/Ukraine, the real agenda the US government seems
| to be pushing there is using that conflict to rapidly increase
| LNG exports to Europe from the US West/South coast, even though
| energy prices are spiking due to inflation (and plausibly due to
| exports of crude oil from the USA, allowed under that 2015 bill
| lifting that restriction). A far better plan for Europe would be
| to go 100% renewable asap, meaning no need for fossil fuel
| imports from any party. Yes, that's technologically possible, but
| would require massive economic investment.
| politician wrote:
| Is the environmentalist lobby ready to allow the amount of
| mining required to produce the copper, nickel, cobalt, and
| aluminum needed to support going "100% renewable asap"?
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| They are happy to support it when it is done outside their
| own country (speaking as an American)
| politician wrote:
| By the number of downvotes, I'm going to take away the idea
| that, no, the environmentalist lobby does not approve of
| the increases in mining required to support going 100%
| renewable ASAP.
| ncmncm wrote:
| You would have concluded that regardless. And, regardless
| of any other facts.
| politician wrote:
| It's an honest question, but I would challenge you to
| examine your response critically.
| ncmncm wrote:
| The environmentalist lobby doesn't allow or forbid. It has
| overwhelmingly less power than is projected on it by nuke
| advocates. Nukes are losing wholly on their own.
|
| Aluminum is the most abundant metallic element on earth.
| Cobalt demand is already peaking. Copper and nickel have been
| produced in the millions of tons annually for a century, and
| will not slow down.
| ElectronCharge wrote:
| The problem with a cost comparison is that currently renewables
| account for less than ten percent of global energy generation.
| What do you think will happen to the cost there as available
| resources dwindle, and demand for equipment increases?
|
| Also, I'm not sure those comparisons take into account the ~20
| year lifespan of solar panels and windmills, versus the ~40-50
| year lifespan of nuclear plants.
|
| Finally, another factor that may drastically reduce the cost of
| nuclear is the fabrication of small modular reactors which
| eliminate custom construction/permitting and simplify
| installation.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The estimated life of solar panels is much greater than 20
| years. There are 38 year old panels still in operation.
|
| The 40-50 year lifespan of a nuclear plant is also somewhat
| illusory, as planning on achieving that is a bet that
| competing technologies don't keep getting better.
|
| SMRs are talked about as being cheaper, but they have
| inherent diseconomies of scale. They need more materials and
| components per unit power output than large NPPs, and have
| inherently worse neutronics (this is why NPPs got large). The
| putative economies of scale of manufacturing are first
| consumed clawing back this loss, and it's not clear they can
| even do that.
| pfdietz wrote:
| They'll build more factories to make the renewable equipment.
| What, you think there's some inherent limit on the number of
| factories that can be built?
| xienze wrote:
| > What, you think there's some inherent limit on the number
| of factories that can be built?
|
| No, but there are limits on the amount of raw materials
| that said factories can use to produce equipment.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Which raw material are you talking about? Be specific.
|
| I believe a global renewable energy system can be
| constructed using only elements available in essentially
| unlimited amounts, and using those elements at a modest
| scale compared to industrial society as a whole.
| xienze wrote:
| > Which raw material are you talking about? Be specific.
|
| Uh Lithium?
| ncmncm wrote:
| Batteries will be only a negligible fraction of utility
| storage, and a negligible fraction of those will be
| lithium. Lithium is the _most expensive_ storage.
|
| Utilities will choose the cheaper among many
| alternatives, not the most expensive; the which is why
| they are not building nukes.
| pfdietz wrote:
| It's as if you think Li-ion batteries are the only kind
| that can exist.
|
| This is a generic problem with anti-renewable arguments:
| they argue against specific technologies rather than the
| entire class of possible technologies.
|
| (And then they go and posit all sorts of as-yet unbuilt
| reactor types, blithely ignoring the irony.)
| polote wrote:
| The problem with storage is that it needs to be planned for the
| worst case. Imagine three weeks without sun nor wind, even if
| that happens only once every 5 years it should be planned. And
| the cost of having batteries that can produce energy during 3
| weeks is unlikely to be cheaper than nuclear
| ncmncm wrote:
| No. You need only enough storage to last until an order of
| fuel arrives. Which is what everybody does literally all the
| time, now.
|
| There is little storage, yet, because it would be stupid to
| build out storage there is not enough renewable generating
| capacity, yet, to charge up. When there is, then storage will
| be built. All without you lifting a finger.
| simion314 wrote:
| >Except in some specific cases (Finland, other Arctic regions
| with long periods of low sunlight) I'm pretty sure this cost
| comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage.
| Storage is the main cost barrier for 100% renewable-powered
| grids, but this is also an area where technological development
| is possible.
|
| Why the progress is possible only for Solar and storage and in
| your opinion not possible for nuclear? Nuclear could be cheaper
| if people would not be paranoid about it. What I think could
| happen is this new smaller reactors could be deployed in
| countries more rational, irrational countries will have to buy
| energy from the others.
| AlanSE wrote:
| Small reactors are not expected to be any cheaper than
| traditional reactors. They are a better bet right now because
| the traditional reactors keep getting mothballed in developed
| nations, and they have some clever technical innovations, but
| these are not complete game changers.
|
| Each decade, nuclear builds also trend towards getting more
| expensive. Like it or not, it at least partially Fukushima
| Daiichi that killed the nuclear expansion US. The AP1000 had
| new missile shield requirements that was slowing it down
| before that happened, and then the Japan accident added even
| more regulation. There was an anti-nuclear chair of the
| regulatory commission at the time, and yes, this is
| fundamentally political, but it's hard to push back on these
| specifics.
| simion314 wrote:
| Countries will rational regulation will enjoy the nuclear
| progress, the others will buy from them or throw a lot of
| money on expensive batteries that will also cause problems
| with extraction, recycling, fires etc. My bet is US will
| use fosil fuel for a few decades still since is cheap.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Only a negligible fraction of storage will be batteries.
| They cost more. Only lithium, the most expensive, is
| fire-prone, among battery tech.
|
| The alternatives are cheaper and cause no such problems.
| cycomanic wrote:
| > >Except in some specific cases (Finland, other Arctic
| regions with long periods of low sunlight) I'm pretty sure
| this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of
| wind/solar/storage. Storage is the main cost barrier for 100%
| renewable-powered grids, but this is also an area where
| technological development is possible.
|
| > Why the progress is possible only for Solar and storage and
| in your opinion not possible for nuclear?
|
| Nuclear had more than triple the amount of time and
| significantly more subsidies for showing this technological
| scaling.
|
| > Nuclear could be cheaper if people would not be paranoid
| about it.
|
| People were super enthusiastic about nuclear for the first 40
| years. Even after Tschernobyl nuclear opponents were largely
| portrait as unrealistic hippies in most countries and
| policies were certainly driven by people very favourable to
| nuclear. Even Germany one of the most nuclear sceptic
| countries only decided after fukushima to stop nuclear.
|
| What is the technological breakthrough that we already know
| about that would suddenly change the progress massively?
|
| >What I think could happen is this new smaller reactors could
| be deployed in countries more rational, irrational countries
| will have to buy energy from the others.
|
| What people tend to forget is that about 40-50% of a nuclear
| power plant is the same as any other thermal power plant. We
| generally don't build small coal plants either, the scales
| don't work well.
|
| The reason why wind and solar have very different scaling is
| because their principle of electricity generation is very
| different.
|
| If you have two stocks one in exponential just starting and
| the other being slowly growing linearly for a long time,
| which one would you invest in? In particular if indications
| are that both stocks will continue on the same curves. That's
| the situation we have with nuclear vs renewables.
| smohare wrote:
| You're completely ignoring infrastructure. No serious debate of
| a green future precludes nuclear in the next 30-50 years.
| atleta wrote:
| The problem with comparing the cost of different energy
| production means is that most of these have _huge_
| externalities. After all, this is why we 're still burning
| hydrocarbons, because they seem cheap compared to anything
| else, except that we have massed up a huge debt by accelerating
| climate change. Something that may turn out to be nearly
| infinitely expensive.
|
| Now the problem with solar and wind is that those also have
| pretty large energy investment needs at the beginning and given
| that we still mostly run on hydrocarbons these will also look
| cheap (include a sizeable amount of externalities).
|
| Other than that, you're right that these articles rarely
| mention the problem of the fissile uranium supply. From what
| I've read and heard, without breeder reactors, the known U235
| reserves won't last long if we plan to switch the world over.
| (Not that it's a viable plan to build so many reactors in
| time.)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium
| tomp wrote:
| _> A far better plan for Europe would be to go 100% renewable
| asap, meaning no need for fossil fuel imports from any party._
|
| "asap" LOL
|
| Here in the real world, we have Germany, which has the
| strongest pro-green anti-nuclear agenda in Europe, but is (1)
| building coal plants, (2) financing Russian war and (3)
| blocking sanctions on Russia to save its economy (along with
| Hungary who are doing it for political reasons).
|
| The green agenda is a massive failure in the real world. Maybe
| it will work in 50 years (when "possible technological
| development" in batteries catches up) but not right now.
| pydry wrote:
| Germany is not building more coal plants it it shutting them
| down.
| tomp wrote:
| Let's not argue semantics. Building new plants, extending
| existing ones, digging more coal or importing it from
| abroad.
|
| It's all the same. "Green" energy failed, even for one of
| its biggest proponents.
|
| https://www.dw.com/en/germany-coal-tops-wind-as-primary-
| elec...
|
| > In the first half of 2021, coal shot up as the biggest
| contributor to Germany's electric grid, while wind power
| dropped to its lowest level since 2018.
| pydry wrote:
| It's not semantics. Germany built its last ever coal
| plant several years ago and has been slowly turning them
| off for a while now.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Your definition of failure is a funny one. So renewables
| are now consistently supplying 20-30% of Germanys
| electricity despite decades of efforts by the fossil and
| nuclear lobby, which essentially destroyed Germanys wind
| and solar industry (which was world leading).
|
| Nuclear on the other hand which, if you read what
| proponents said in the 50s, 60s and 70s, was going to
| give us unlimited free energy, is somehow deemed a
| success?
|
| Now that renewables are essentially eating fossils and
| nuclears lunch we are supposed to believe that some sort
| of nuclear technological revolution is just around the
| corner and all the high costs are due to the "bad
| government regulations" anyway?
| elteto wrote:
| What are they going to do then? Go back to candles?
| pydry wrote:
| I assume theyll continue to source power from the wind
| and the sun.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Renewables are not dependent upon any battery development.
| Batteries work now, are getting cheaper at exponential rate,
| _and_ are the most expensive form of storage.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > Germany ... is (1) building coal plants
|
| That claim may be a little out of date, especially as the new
| government plans to phase out coal by 2030. It's true that a
| new coal power plant was opened in 2020, but it was "expected
| to be the last"[0]. Admittedly, it's also true that the
| country is temporarily reactivating old coal power plants to
| reduce Russian gas imports.[1]
|
| [0] https://ifrf.net/combustion-industry-news/new-coal-power-
| pla...
|
| [1] https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/germany-
| reactiv...
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| > I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the
| side of wind/solar/storage.
|
| Very unlikely. Nuclear costs are sky high only because in the
| last decades it was suppressed rather than invested in and
| improved. Had it seen the same level of support the wind and
| solar energy have, we'd have a dirt-cheap abundance of nuclear
| power, with very little carbon emissions. Take away the red
| tape and scaremongering, and wind/solar/storage combination
| will be left very far behind in costs and efficiency.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| South Korea has been constantly building nuclear for decades.
| The price has come down marginally, renewables are still far
| cheaper. Yes, the problem is largely political, I don't see a
| solution to that though.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Renewables are only cheaper if you ignore the challenges of
| using an intermittent energy source. There's no real cost
| estimate for storing and re-distributing electricity,
| because there's no feasible plan to build an energy storage
| system at relevant scales.
|
| Attempting to build just one hour of storage via lithium
| ion batteries would case the cost of batteries to skyrocket
| because 1 hour of global electricity use equates to 2,500
| GWh. And annual battery output is only around 300 GWh.
| Supply shock would immediately drive up the cost of
| batteries.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Annual battery production for EVs is estimated to grow
| from 160 gigawatt-hours (GWh) today to 6 600 GWh in 2030
| - the equivalent of adding almost 20 gigafactories each
| year for the next ten years.
|
| So we're building those batteries anyway, because EVs are
| cheaper and better than ICE. It's just a bonus that
| they'll help roll out renewables too.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Estimates are not the same thing as real production
| figures. People estimated we'd have 10Ghz single threaded
| cpu performance by now back in the 90s. Batteries are
| already approaching supply shortages for input materials:
| https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shortages-
| flagged-ev...
|
| And as you correctly point out, most of these batteries
| are going to go to EVs rather than grid storage.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Yes, no-one can predict the future, maybe we'll all be
| riding horses.
|
| But if, as basically everyone acklowledges, we'll all be
| driving EVs, then we will charge them from the grid. So
| they'll be better than grid storage, they'll be
| responsive demand (with grid storage you need to send the
| electricity back to the grid, which incurs another
| efficiency loss).
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Sure, if we have all our electricity produced through non
| intermittent sources we don't need grid storage. EVs
| charge from the grid and drive around just fine. Nobody
| doubts that.
|
| But if we are going to predominantly use intermittent
| energy sources we'd need massive amounts of grid storage.
| Delivering this through batteries is not feasible. We
| need to conserve battery supply for things that cannot be
| directly powered from the grid, like vehicles. It's too
| precious to be squandered on grid storage
| orthecreedence wrote:
| For me, this is the biggest part of the debate. It's not
| whether solar is up to the task or not, it's whether
| supply chains can support solar. From what we've seen,
| no, they cannot. You can provision the solar plant and
| the storage array, but there likely just won't be enough
| panels or batteries being produced to build it. Pumped
| hydro storage is only viable in some places, and from
| what it seems to me all the other ideas for energy
| storage are theoretical at best.
|
| I'm not opposed to investing heavily in solar...it's the
| best long-term energy source we can hope for until we
| crack the fusion nut. However, until we have the
| resources in place to make it happen, fission is our best
| bet. This shouldn't be an either-or: we should be
| building both, as fast as we can. And once we have enough
| solar to power our collective needs consistently, we can
| decommission our nuclear plants and put this behind us.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Grid storage cost is falling even faster than renewables
| cost. Which you already knew.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The costs are falling on white papers, not in actual
| storage projects. Unfortunately, we can't hook a white
| paper up to the grid :(
| ncmncm wrote:
| You may pretend all you like, but I will always correct
| you.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Correct me how?
|
| By insisting that storage is a trivial problem to solve,
| yet neglecting to actually share what your supposed
| solution is?
|
| By insisting that storage costs are falling yet
| neglecting to specify the cost and for what technology?
|
| By all means "correct" me all you like.
| q1w2 wrote:
| This is like saying that the solution to climate change is
| largely political and you don't see that changing, so you
| don't think you need to be part of solving that.
|
| In fact, it's quite exactly like saying that, because
| nuclear is the fastest path to solving climate change.
| ncmncm wrote:
| No, nukes are the _slowest_ , and worst performing.
|
| Starting a nuke, we get no power out for a decade or
| more, and get much less power at the end than building
| renewables with the same money, which furthermore start
| displacing carbon immediately.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| You are missing the point. With continued investment and
| improvements to technology nuclear will be much cheaper
| and faster to deploy. Compare wind/solar prices from the
| year 2000, and imagine we've spent the last 22 years
| giving nuclear the same level of attention and promotion
| as them.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Investment and improvement in nukes are falling, not
| rising. For reasons.
|
| There is no reasonable expectation for substantially
| better costs for nukes. Anywhere they have to compete
| with $0 opex renewables, they will run at well under 50%
| capacity, thus more than doubling their per-kWh cost,
| making them even less competitive.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Renewables are far from $0 opex, and your statement about
| 'no reasonable expectation' are somewhat _unbased_.
| DennisP wrote:
| Renewables are far cheaper on the margins but not
| necessarily if you want them to provide all your power
| needs.
|
| Nuclear cost in South Korea, Japan, and India is generally
| under $3000/kW, according to this peer-reviewed study. See
| Figure 12: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pi
| i/S030142151...
|
| Now let's model overall grid costs, here:
| https://model.energy/
|
| Pick a country and "fetch wind and solar." By default the
| modeler doesn't include nuclear, so click "show advanced
| assumption settings." Check "dispatchable technology 2."
|
| This defaults to a nuclear cost of $6000/kW. Leave it there
| or try $3000. It assumes a nuclear plant lifespan of only
| 25 years; the _average_ plant age in the US is 40 years and
| expected lifespan for many plants is 60 years, so set it to
| whatever you think is more realistic. The default also sets
| the discount rate for nuclear to twice what it has for
| everything else, so fix that.
|
| Run the model. With any reasonable assumptions, many
| countries end up with at least some nuclear on their grid,
| and some get their lowest grid cost with all nuclear. The
| US has some of the best wind and solar resources and
| relatively high nuclear costs (for now anyway), but the US
| situation doesn't generalize to the whole world.
| pfdietz wrote:
| That's overnight cost, not included in model.energy. You
| also have to add in the financing cost during
| construction.
|
| If we are talking about Korean export NPPs, the Barakh
| NPP has four reactors for a total of 24.4B$, producing
| 5.6GW(e). THis is about $4B/GW. If I plug in 4000 per MW
| (its euros, not $, but they're not too different right
| now) for the capital cost of nuclear in model.energy,
| increase the NPP lifetime to 40 years, and use US 2011
| weather data, nuclear optimizes to zero.
|
| I'll add that model.energy is looking at the best case
| for nuclear: providing baseload. Handling variability
| will incentivize storage, which means renewables will be
| at an increased advantage. Dispatchable demand of any
| kind, even slightly dispatchable (allowed to be off 10%
| of the time, say) also tilts the game toward renewables.
|
| The 25 year lifespan for nuclear there may reflect
| economic obsolescence rather than technical lifespan.
| Energy technology is evolving quickly now, so investors
| may simply refuse to credit the promise of such long
| lifespans. Even in the US, there have been existing NPPs
| that shut down because they could not recoup their
| operating costs (granted, much of that was due to gas and
| also renewable subsidies, but with solar having dropped
| in cost by nearly an order of magnitude in the last
| decade it's a bold move to assume it won't keep falling.)
| DennisP wrote:
| Do the same and use German data, and nuclear optimizes to
| 100%. The US has especially abundant wind and solar.
|
| I would very much like to see a similar model that
| includes a demand curve. Preferably, customizable demand
| curves, to allow for modeling of e.g. flatter curves due
| to electric vehicle charging at night.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Yes, Europe (and particularly eastern Europe) are better
| places for nuclear, because of higher latitude and (away
| from coasts) lower winds.
|
| This is all just delaying the crossing point though.
| Nuclear fans are betting nuclear's costs fall while
| renewables and storage run into brick walls and stop
| getting cheaper. It's not clear why one should assume
| this, or why an investor should bet on that outcome. And
| it is just a financial bet; in the worst case for
| renewables they just come in a bit more expensive than
| nuclear, so it's not like the economy explodes.
| trashtester wrote:
| The new Korean plants are designed for a lifespan of 60
| years.
|
| If governments provide guarantees for the loans, a
| discount rate of 3% is not unreasonable.
|
| Set it like that, and it spits out a price of
| EUR32.6/MWh.
|
| Now, to make it even more reasonable to emerging
| economies, assume that through mass production and a
| relaxation of security requirements to less paranoid
| levels, the overnight cost can be reduced to EUR1500, you
| get $21.3/MWh.
|
| This is what the price of electricity SHOULD be, if we
| want the world to stop depending on hydrocarbons. (Not
| just a few rich countries.)
| ncmncm wrote:
| When your argument depends on all existing trends
| reversing, that tells us all we need to know about your
| conclusion.
| trashtester wrote:
| Trends and fashions come and go. My daughter is wearing
| pants that look that the ones my mother wore some years
| before I was born. At that time, nuclear power was still
| popular. And now, perhaps, it is becoming so again.
|
| Indeed, the NYT article in the topic is discussing this
| very question.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| You seem to ignore the fact that existing trends were
| artificially manipulated to suppress the nuclear energy
| use.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| model.energy assumes a flat, constant energy demand.
|
| Which isn't a ridiculous assumption, given their caveats
| and default options, unless you're trying to argue for
| 100% nuclear, in which case it renders any conclusion
| totally nonsensical.
| DennisP wrote:
| I would really like to see a model that includes demand
| curves. Or an academic study that includes nuclear as a
| possibility, instead of just looking at
| wind/solar/storage. So far I haven't come across either.
|
| (But if we start charging a lot of electric vehicles at
| night, the demand curves will flatten out anyway.)
| cycomanic wrote:
| > > I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on
| the side of wind/solar/storage.
|
| > Very unlikely. Nuclear costs are sky high only because in
| the last decades it was suppressed rather than invested in
| and improved. Had it seen the same level of support the wind
| and solar energy have, we'd have a dirt-cheap abundance of
| nuclear power, with very little carbon emissions. Take away
| the red tape and scaremongering, and wind/solar/storage
| combination will be left very far behind in costs and
| efficiency.
|
| And your sources are? Nuclear power has received
| significantly more subsidies than solar and wind combined [1]
| (note you can find similar numbers for Europe) . The myth
| that somehow solar and wind received more subsidies is just
| propaganda.
|
| [1] https://cen.acs.org/articles/89/i51/Long-History-US-
| Energy-S...
| cthor wrote:
| GP refers to "last decades" but that source is from 2011
| with data ending at 2009. Do you have data for the last
| decade?
| cycomanic wrote:
| Why would we not look at the total subsidies over time?
| Here's the spending for Europe until 2007 [1], how much
| subsidies would have to be given to renewables to make up
| that difference? Here is some more data on hidden
| subsidies for later dates going to fossils and nuclear
| [2], but is not a comprehensive comparison of subsidies.
|
| [1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/To
| o_much... [2] https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricit
| y/news/greenpeace...
| ncmncm wrote:
| There is no way that any renewable subsidies in the past
| decade could match the many decades prior. And, those
| subsidies are still running.
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| As far as life-cycle costs go: what about end of life? That's
| the big elephant in the room.
|
| Over the past decades, a couple of hundreds of plants have been
| build globally. Doing nuclear fission safely is a massively
| complex technological undertaking. While the basic principles
| are by and large the same, the concrete designs of each of
| those plants aren't similar. Therefor, decommissioning a
| nuclear plant is equally complex and expensive, and requires a
| per-case approach. And currently, there is a growing number of
| plants which are pretty much EOL, where upkeep costs outstrip
| revenue.
|
| Sure, there's an argument to be made about the operational
| costs per kWh between solar / wind / nuclear relative to the
| revenue they generate over their lifespan. But compared to
| solar / wind, the perceived economical benefits of those
| solutions are also offset by their initial cost of construction
| and their decommissioning.
|
| If consumers / voters / taxpayers assume that they get to enjoy
| cheap power while the costs of those won't ever land on their
| doorstep, they are in for a surprise.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Nuclear plants pay a fraction of their revenue through their
| life into special decommissioning funds that have so far been
| more than enough to perform full greenfield decommissioning.
|
| For waste, there's a separate fund called the Nuclear Waste
| Fund in the US (and other nuclear-operating countries) that
| has a current balance of $55B.
| ncmncm wrote:
| False. They are collecting from the fund, instead.
| q1w2 wrote:
| > Doing nuclear fission safely is a massively complex
| technological undertaking.
|
| Finland has proven this to be false.
|
| ...and frankly, so did the US even in the 1980s. The
| roadblock to storage misguided activism, not science or
| tachnology.
|
| Reopen the Yucca storage facility. It has the space for
| literally ALL the US's spent fuel storage.
| ncmncm wrote:
| False.
|
| It took them more than a decade beyond schedule, and 5
| billion euros beyond quoted cost.
|
| The finally delivered only because it was clear the money
| would dry up either way. If they could have strung it out
| further, they would have
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Sunlight and wind distribution is quite uneven.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Heavy industry is going to tend to move away from places with
| inadequate renewable energy. Why should they stay where
| energy is more expensive?
| goodpoint wrote:
| ...and yet you'll find that there are very few people living
| in places with insufficient sun, insufficient wind and no
| geothermal/tidal sources.
| adrianN wrote:
| Uranium ore distribution is also quite uneven. Fossil fuel
| distribution is also quite uneven.
| goneri wrote:
| Thorium is an abundant alternative to uranium, and the
| technology to use it has existed since the 1960s.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| I'm a layman so I'm trusting the smarty sounding guy on
| Reddit and his elaborate arguments, but it seems like
| Thorium reactors, while delivering on the promise of not
| being able to physically explode, involve materials so
| nightmarish to work with that it's been impossible to
| create one that's safe to operate by nuclear worksers
|
| https://np.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/9unimr/dutch_sati
| ric...
| adrianN wrote:
| Thorium reactors never worked very well unfortunately.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| What? They worked reliably and efficiently, and cost very
| little.
| adrianN wrote:
| Maybe I'm misinformed. Which Thorium reactors worked
| reliably and cheaply?
| ncmncm wrote:
| Indian Point tried thorium. They abandoned it, for
| reasons.
| nazgulnarsil wrote:
| You're not misinformed. Commercial thorium doesn't exist
| and prototypes have issues with proliferation risks and
| the lifecycle of the materials used to build the primary
| containment. It is promising and there are several groups
| working on these problems but it's a hard sell given that
| recent gen uranium reactors aren't gated by fuel costs
| and have established supply chains.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Good thing you can pick it up and move it to other places.
| adrianN wrote:
| Good thing electricity is cheap to transmit.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Transmitting power over long distances has its own
| problems and infrastructure costs. It isn't trivial.
| adrianN wrote:
| Building pipelines for oil and gas isn't trivial either
| but we managed to do it.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| I don't see what that has to do with nuclear plants or
| solar farms. My original point was that complaining that
| uranium isn't evenly distributed is a red herring because
| you don't build power plants on top of the mines. Whereas
| you do have to build solar farms where the sunny days are
| plentiful.
| ncmncm wrote:
| And you can deliver that renewable power wherever it is
| needed, for a one-time up-front cost, free thereafter.
| adrianN wrote:
| Most places where people live have enough sun and/or wind
| to meet demand.
| philwelch wrote:
| Oil and gas pipelines do not normally leak. Power lines
| do leak. It's called "line loss" and it's a significant
| factor in power distribution.
| paulmd wrote:
| > Oil and gas pipelines do not normally leak.
|
| ????
|
| > Currently, the most complete bottom-up inventory of
| natural gas system emissions is the 2012 U.S.
| Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Greenhouse Gas
| Inventory (GHGI). (2) It estimates an overall system-wide
| methane loss rate of 6.2 Tg/yr of methane, or 1.3% of
| methane transported (Supporting Information (SI), Section
| 16) and that the transmission and storage sector (T&S) is
| the largest emitting segment of the natural gas industry,
| (2) accounting for about one-third of methane emissions.
|
| > For T&S stations that are required to report to the
| EPA's Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP), this
| study estimates total emissions to be 260% [215% to 330%]
| of the reportable emissions for these stations, primarily
| due to the inclusion of emission sources that are not
| reported under the GHGRP rules, updated emission factors,
| and super-emitter emissions.
|
| https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.5b01669
|
| Gas will literally bleed right through the seals at a
| certain rate, especially with the compressor motors,
| which is no different to the electrical losses from
| stepping voltage up/down.
|
| And this is actually a huge problem with natural gas
| specifically because methane is an incredibly potent
| greenhouse gas... around 30x as potent as CO2 over 100
| years. Losing a couple percent of your methane is a big
| deal. That is actually what is driving the push for
| electric-driven heat pumps for home use... it's better to
| lose a little bit of electricity than to have thousands
| of miles of poorly-maintained residential gas
| distribution that even in the best case are leaking
| highly potent methane through seals.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Not only they leak, but, unlike electricity, leaked gas
| is terrible for the environment.
| adrianN wrote:
| They do in fact leak a bit.
|
| Power losses are measured in single digit percents per
| 1000km. That's not nothing of course, but it's
| sufficiently low to transmit power from windy places to
| less windy places and from sunny places to less sunny
| places.
| ncmncm wrote:
| When opex is free, and capex is falling exponentially,
| you just put in a little more power upstream.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Oil and gas pipelines do not normally leak.
|
| But they do. Normally. A fraction of the fuel transmitted
| through the pipe will be lost, seals, punctures, breaks,
| medium changes, over-pressure release through venting and
| so on.
|
| > Power lines do leak. It's called "line loss" and it's a
| significant factor in power distribution.
|
| Not all that significant in short range transmission, and
| until we figured out HVDC a major factor in long range
| transmission but the number of HVDC links that are coming
| online is increasing rapidly making this much less of a
| problem. The gear used for this is very impressive stuff,
| it is a different level of semiconductor engineering than
| what you normally have kicking around the yard but it
| works and is deployed at scale already with very good
| results.
| MerelyMortal wrote:
| How does one transmit electricity across an ocean?
| adrianN wrote:
| Undersea cables. There are plenty between Norway and
| Germany for example.
| areyousure wrote:
| In case anyone is curious, I found this interesting
| background reading:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_power_cable
|
| That said, there is only one submarine power cable
| connecting Norway and Germany, and it's been operational
| for one year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NordLink
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HVDC_Europe.svg
| jacquesm wrote:
| This is the future and it will eventually create a global
| connected grid. DC allows the coupling of 60 Hz and 50 Hz
| grids without a problem too.
| idatum wrote:
| Comment was about undersea transmission, but I recently
| learned about DC transmission in the US West. Interesting
| advantages and trade-offs:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie
| ncmncm wrote:
| Lots and lots are under construction. UK just committed
| to a 10 GW cable from Africa, that will be expanded
| later.
| carry_bit wrote:
| It's not though; that's one of the reasons all of the
| grids aren't interconnected yet.
|
| "Don't underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon
| filled with tapes" also applies here. The amount of
| energy you can deliver by transporting fuel rods by
| truck/train/ship is immense.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Transmission costs only capital. Opex for transmission is
| practically free.
| carry_bit wrote:
| And capital isn't free. With physical goods, there is
| already a number of existing roads, train tracks, and
| ports.
|
| Capital costs is why Hawaii has traditionally imported
| oil versus having an undersea power connection to the
| continental US.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Hawaii has abundant sun and wind, and deep ocean hard by
| for cheap storage.
|
| When costs are all capex, the more you use, the less it
| costs. (And, as with nukes, the less you use, the more it
| costs.)
| orthecreedence wrote:
| phil21 wrote:
| The primary cost of nuclear is politically driven. I don't know
| if that matters in a world of actual energy scarcity, I guess
| we'll be finding out.
|
| If you remove liability and the insanity of our current methods
| of waste storage the costs become outright cheap, especially in
| an imagined future where there is massive investment into new
| nuclear infrastructure.
|
| By the metrics people use to judge nuclear, hydro would be the
| most expensive power source known to man if you were to build
| one today. Just the land costs would make the entire project
| nonsensical if viewed solely in that frame.
|
| Those are just artificial constructs though. In a world where
| there is actual human suffering (in the west) due to physical
| energy shortages the politics (and thus cost models) may shift
| rapidly.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| When you say 'primary cost' do you mean construction cost?
| Again, utility managers will be looking at lifecycle costs,
| from the cradle (construction) through use (fueling,
| security, cooling water, maintenance) to the grave
| (decomissioning).
|
| The reason costs are high is not political, it's that the
| systems involved need to be over-engineered relative to say,
| a coal-fired power plant, where a breakdown or fire will
| create a big mess, but not a 100-year exclusion zone. Water
| pumps for nuclear reactor cooling systems, for example, are
| the most robustly engineered (and expensive) pumps ever
| built, as far as I know.
|
| For example, California's decision to close the San Onofre
| reactor was mostly related to maintenance costs, as their
| steam generator system was shaking itself to pieces and had
| to be shut down due to the radioactive loop leaking into the
| non-radioactive steam generation system. The rational
| conclusion is that long-term maintenance of nuclear reactors
| is an expensive proposition, due to catastrophic failure
| modes:
|
| https://www.fairewinds.org/nuclear-energy-education/san-
| onof...
| philwelch wrote:
| > Water pumps for nuclear reactor cooling systems, for
| example, are the most robustly engineered (and expensive)
| pumps ever built, as far as I know.
|
| Which is not an issue with newer reactor designs, which are
| no less proven than grid storage.
| manicdee wrote:
| Grid storage is proven through dozens of working
| installations earning decent money for their operators,
| pushing gas peaker plants out of the market.
|
| Newer reactor designs are well simulated but have zero
| real world implementation.
| dv_dt wrote:
| New reactor designs, even with closely regulated designs,
| are very unproven. The next gen French EDF design
| recently had some units come online, but they had to
| figure out some unexpected buildup in some byproducts.
| You are also validating more than the design, you are
| validating a manufacturing materials control in a very
| long term feedback cycle - which is generally terribly
| difficult for making improvements.
|
| In comparison to something like grid storage where one
| can site, build and operate, in less time than the make a
| minor nuclear design correction. Grid storage can correct
| mistakes at very low cost and on a very rapid cycle
| compared to nuclear.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Grid storage is as simple as E = mgh. We do that
| industrially, billions of times a day, worldwide, and
| have for centuries.
|
| To cite uncertainty about storage is only to admit you
| have no argument.
| cycomanic wrote:
| > The primary cost of nuclear is politically driven. I don't
| know if that matters in a world of actual energy scarcity, I
| guess we'll be finding out.
|
| > If you remove liability and the insanity of our current
| methods of waste storage the costs become outright cheap,
| especially in an imagined future where there is massive
| investment into new nuclear infrastructure.
|
| You are misinformed. Nuclear power operators do not have to
| covee liability costs (no insurance is willing to cover
| nuclear disaster, so this is a massive subsidy). Also the
| cost of long term storage is typically not included in cost
| calculations for nuclear power either. Despite of this
| nuclear is more expensive than renewables.
|
| > By the metrics people use to judge nuclear, hydro would be
| the most expensive power source known to man if you were to
| build one today. Just the land costs would make the entire
| project nonsensical if viewed solely in that frame.
|
| Just because you say it doesn't make it true. In fact hydro
| projects have to typically compensate land owners when
| building a dam.
| hushpuppy wrote:
| > Funny article in that it doesn't discuss lifecycle costs. A
| side-by-side comparison of the cost of grids powered by nuclear
| power plant relative to those powered by wind/solar/storage is
| what I'd expect to see from a 'paper of record' like the
| NYTimes.
|
| If you eliminate gas and coal powered plants then the costs of
| nuclear plant lifecycle is incidental compared to economic
| losses that a country would encounter if they relied on solar
| and wind.
|
| The dirty secret about "clean energy" is that it isn't actually
| very clean. When you eliminate big coal plants and try to use
| solar or wind, what you are actually doing is moving your
| dependence from coal to natural gas.
|
| Those wind farms and solar farms require significant investment
| in numerous smaller style natural gas plants in order to
| function correctly.
|
| So, right now, when people think they are moving away from
| fossil fuels they are really just moving to natural gas that is
| supplanted by solar and wind when conditions are ideal for them
| to work properly.
|
| If you want to eliminate your dependence on natural gas, then,
| the only feasible option is nuclear.
| ncmncm wrote:
| False.
| [deleted]
| merb wrote:
| > If you want to eliminate your dependence on natural gas,
| then, the only feasible option is nuclear.
|
| no. you need gas for nuclear AND renewables. it really does
| not matter. it's bullshit to argue against it unless you show
| the world a way to have an on/off button for a nuclear plant.
| (if you do, you might be very very very rich)
| 01100011 wrote:
| > A far better plan for Europe would be to go 100% renewable
| asap,
|
| How is this possible, technologically or economically? It
| sounds like absolute fantasy in anything less than a decade.
|
| > plausibly due to exports of crude oil from the USA
|
| Our refineries are at max capacity. How is hoarding crude going
| to help anything? Exporting crude allows foreign refineries to
| assist with relieving the global shortage of refined products.
| philwelch wrote:
| > ... I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on
| the side of wind/solar/storage. Storage is the main cost
| barrier for 100% renewable-powered grids, but this is also an
| area where technological development is possible.
|
| Sure, if you handwave the unsolved-at-scale technical problems
| with grid energy storage and make a series of generous
| assumptions about future technology, that's probably true.
| Nuclear technology has been up to the task for the past fifty
| years.
|
| > Another factor that this article should have mentioned is the
| reliability of the global uranium ore -> fuel rods supply
| chain.
|
| Seawater extraction is an option if that's ever a real concern,
| as is using breeder reactors to reprocess spent fuel. And the
| exact same issues apply to storage.
| adrianN wrote:
| How is energy storage at scale unsolved when we can
| synthesize Methane quite easily? Grid scale storage is just a
| matter of cost. It's unclear which technology will be the
| most cost effective, but if we wanted to we could just store
| energy as Methane and pay the 50% efficiency cost.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| If this is so simple, why don't we do it? Or is that the
| question you're asking?
|
| Of course, that 50% efficiency cost seems like a bit of a
| bear in itself. If you lose half of the stored power, that
| would seem to significantly drive up the total lifecycle
| cost of a Watt of wind power. (Recognizing, of course, that
| not all of it must be stored.)
|
| The cost and inefficiency (==cost) of storage seems like an
| unfortunate thing to handwave away in a conversation about
| relative costs.
| ncmncm wrote:
| That is all capex. Renewable capex is still in free fall.
| Storage too.
|
| The more you use it, the less it costs, per kWh.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| We do it already on a grand scale.
|
| It's just that since we live in a world where we burn
| lots of gas, we don't need to do the "generate synthetic
| methane" step, we can just burn less of it.
|
| Sure, we could spend billions on generating synthetic
| methane from renewables while at the same time burning
| natural methane, but that would be stupid.
| adrianN wrote:
| No, it's obvious why we don't do it: it's fairly
| expensive and we currently don't have enough renewable
| supply to fill tanks with Methane. Grids can easily be
| 70+% renewable without any storage at all. Money is
| currently better spent increasing supply than building
| storage.
| nine_k wrote:
| Also, reprocessing "nuclear waste" from nuclear power
| stations yields a lot of pretty good fuel for "fast breeder"
| reactors [1]. This also mostly solves the problem of storing
| the highly active nuclear waste: you may need like 5% of the
| current storage capacity if you burn the current "nuclear
| waste" stockpiles.
|
| Yes, the process involves production of Pu-239, which is
| weapon-grade and may raise proliferation concerns. But for
| the US, or France, or UK, or India, or China (and a bunch of
| others) this should not be a concern, since they officially
| have nuclear weapons.
|
| It's mostly the political will, and the public opinion (which
| are interlinked) that limit a nuclear renaissance. If you
| talk about subsidies, please remember how _huge_ were the
| subsidies that kickstarted the current solar and wind booms;
| early panels and wind towers were completely uneconomical by
| today 's standards, and R&D costs were colossal. But now,
| with the technology streamlined and the economies of scale
| kicking in, solar is competitive even without subsidies.
|
| The same could happen to a new crop of nuclear technology,
| much cleaner and more efficient than the kind we've inherited
| from 1970s.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
| smaddox wrote:
| > Yes, the process involves production of Pu-239, which is
| weapon-grade and may raise proliferation concerns.
|
| Not if you use Thorium breeder reactors.
| ben_w wrote:
| > the unsolved-at-scale technical problems with grid energy
| storage
|
| What are these problems, exactly? I see videos and news
| stories about grid batteries being successfully deployed for
| short term management and how pumped hydro is basically a big
| cheap gravity battery, but I'm not a civil/electrical
| engineer, so I accept there could easily be elephants in the
| room here.
| chelical wrote:
| I don't understand why people don't talk about the water
| usage involved in pumped hydro when the vast majority of
| the Western United States is dealing with record low water
| levels + sinking due to groundwater usage.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Pumped hydro doesn't use up the water. It goes back and
| forth between the lower and the upper reservoirs. Some
| evaporates, for sure, but that's a tiny fraction of the
| water that would be evaporated cooling a NPP of the same
| power output.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Furthermore, putting floating solar on the reservoirs
| would eliminate much of the evaporation.
| ncmncm wrote:
| And, when it is used for storage, it is at higher
| altitude, so evaporates less.
| ben_w wrote:
| PV can be used to desalinate sea water as well as pumping
| it up to the top of the reservoirs. It's also possible to
| extract energy from fresh water as it mixes with sea
| water to improve the system efficiency, but I don't want
| to even guess if that's better or worse overall than just
| cleaning the water and reusing it.
| creato wrote:
| It's just scale. Those batteries and pumped hydro stories
| seem big. Relative to your house, they are. Relative to the
| grid as a whole, they are small.
| ben_w wrote:
| That doesn't answer the question. What exactly is the
| problem that needs to be solved?
| paulmd wrote:
| Scaling up capacity of the storage. There aren't that
| many sites that are geologically feasible for pumped
| storage (and it destroys a local ecosystem by flooding
| and draining it repeatedly) and batteries need rare earth
| metals (not actually that rare but environmentally toxic
| to produce).
|
| We need O(100x) current production to fully switch away
| from hydrocarbons. That's a lot of reservoirs or a lot of
| cobalt that have to be mined.
| ncmncm wrote:
| False. You have been corrected on this point before.
| Please stop posting what you know are falsehoods.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Globally the potential pumped storage resource is far
| larger than would be needed. You might be confused by
| assuming the pumped hydro has to be on existing rivers.
|
| http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/
| ben_w wrote:
| Cobalt already eliminated from half of new Tesla
| batteries: https://electrek.co/2022/04/22/tesla-using-
| cobalt-free-lfp-b...
| wumpus wrote:
| > batteries need rare earth metals
|
| "Rare earths" are a column (edit: ha ha see below) in the
| periodic table, and are not used in batteries.
|
| Some types of electric motors use rare earths, others do
| not.
|
| Here's a primer: https://blog.ucsusa.org/josh-
| goldman/electric-vehicles-batte...
| philipkglass wrote:
| "Rare earths" are actually the lanthanides plus scandium
| and yttrium [1], not one column of the periodic table.
| Good information otherwise!
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanthanide#Etymology
| wumpus wrote:
| Ha ha busted! Thanks. As an astronomer I think everything
| beyond He is a metal.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Complains about renewables handwaving at scale, then suggests
| seawater uranium extraction and breeder reactors.
|
| They have very high double standards in Nuclearstan.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > They have very high double standards in Nuclearstan.
|
| Don't worry, they're lobbying to lower those standards in
| order to be more cost-competitive with renewables.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 'handwave the unsolved-at-scale' ? All you have to do is look
| at Australia:
|
| https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/08/10/worlds-largest-
| grid-f...
|
| > Battery rollout: "AGL Energy has committed to build 850 MW
| of battery-based assets by 2024. To that end, Torrens Island
| marks the first project to be constructed at the site of a
| fossil-fuel power plant. It won't be the last, however, as
| big batteries are planned for New South Wale's Liddell coal
| plant and Victoria's Loy Yang facility. In January, AGL
| Energy revealed that it had secured both Wartsila and Fluence
| under non-exclusive framework agreements to supply up to 1 GW
| of large-scale battery storage."
|
| So, would it make more economic sense for this 1GW battery-
| storage system to be replaced by a nuclear power plant?
| Australia after all is one of the places with the most high-
| grade uranium ore, being among the top three exporters.
|
| Here's an example of more reliable analysis:
|
| > "To illustrate this point, the 2,430 MW Vogtle nuclear
| plant could be expected to generate 21 million MWh per year.
| That is enough to power about 1.75 million residential
| households. Meanwhile, a hypothetical 3,500 MW solar power
| plant would be able to produce just under 6 million MWh of
| electricity per year. This number is enough to power only
| 500,000 homes, which is considerably less than nuclear power.
| For solar to produce as much electricity as is generated by a
| nuclear power plant, it would require about 13,000 MW of
| utility-scale solar capacity, which about four times as much
| as built in the existing plants. However, the cost to build
| this 13,000 MW facility would be $12.1 billion, which is
| still just 50% of the cost of the $25 billion Vogtle nuclear
| plant."
|
| https://www.solarfeeds.com/mag/solar-power-vs-nuclear-
| power/...
| eldaisfish wrote:
| Your final comparison there is an excellent example of
| hand-waving away the problem of intermittency. This is
| something that advocates of renewables regularly want to
| dismiss because the discussion is a difficult one.
|
| Wind and solar are cheap now because their fuel cost is
| zero and the cost of grid reliability is borne by us -
| consumers. In a better world, the cost of balancing the
| grid at night should be borne by a solar PV generator
| because it caused the problem.
|
| Even if you match the energy output of a solar and nuclear
| plant, the component of time is ignored. On a grid powered
| by solar, where will energy come from at night? How many
| batteries will you construct? The scale of these batteries
| is again something that's dismissed by claims of
| continental-scale grids but has that been achieved
| anywhere? All the batteries in the world combined can power
| a giga watt scale grid for hours. That's right, hours.
|
| Nuclear is a solution in the here and now. It buys us time
| to sort through these problems while we work towards a
| better future.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Nuclear has the same issue of intermittency. You have to
| either overprovisioning if you use nuclear or use battery
| storage. Nuclear is much more expensive than wind/solar
| so if you follow an overprovisioning strategy the best is
| to build wind/solar capacity, because it buys you more.
| Moreover, the larger and more integrated grids become
| (this is happening already for economic reasons in
| Europe) the less this is an issue.
|
| Also why do you only mention solar and not wind? Maybe
| because eit would make your argument less convincing? The
| wind still blows at night, so you do not need battery
| storage to provide all the demand during the night.
|
| Why are the same simplistic arguments being brought
| forward again and again. They have all been debunked.
| philwelch wrote:
| > You have to either overprovisioning if you use nuclear
| or use battery storage.
|
| Whereas with solar and wind, you need to do both, because
| you need the overprovisioned capacity to recharge the
| batteries.
| cycomanic wrote:
| No with a reasonably large grid you only need to
| overprovison no need for battery.
|
| But this is really a question of economics, the mix of
| how much storage you want to include is really a question
| of cost and the specific grid. One should also say that
| pretty much every grid already has some level of
| overprovisioning, because otherwise you run into problems
| when some exceptional events hit.
|
| In the end why would you pay for more expensive nuclear
| if you can get more capacity for the same price with
| wind/solar. So it is cheaper to build the
| overprovisioning with that. Moreover if the current
| trends for storage prices continue then things become
| cheaper still.
| briandear wrote:
| > The wind still blows at night, so you do not need
| battery storage to provide all the demand during the
| night.
|
| The wind doesn't blow as strongly at night. It's much
| calmer.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Yes and demand is also much lower what is your point?
| Apart from the fact that your statement is highly
| dependent on location (it is much less true for sea
| installations for example).
| xienze wrote:
| > The wind still blows at night, so you do not need
| battery storage to provide all the demand during the
| night.
|
| Is it enough wind to meet all the demand at night? And
| what happens when it stops blowing as much as expected
| for a long period of time[0]? You still need baseline
| power generation for quite some time to come until those
| questions that, well, keep getting hand waved away are
| solved.
|
| 0: https://fortune.com/2021/09/16/the-u-k-went-all-in-on-
| wind-p...
| ncmncm wrote:
| If you don't have renewables for a while, and
| transmission line availability flags, you import
| anhydrous ammonia from the tropics. So, you need only
| minimal over-provisioning and local storage.
| cycomanic wrote:
| There are many studies which showed how much
| overprovisioning you need to go to 100% renewable with
| different size grids. None of these are outrageous, but
| it's also nothing we currently need to think about. We
| can easily scale up renewable capacity to 70% without
| significant overprovisioning. So we really just need to
| build lots more renewables at the moment.
| philwelch wrote:
| French electrical power is 70% nuclear and has an installed
| capacity of 135 GW of power today. That comes out to 94.5
| GW of nuclear power in France alone. Is there any country
| in the world that can supply hundreds of gigawatts to the
| grid from batteries today? If not, then the problem of grid
| power storage _is_ unsolved at scale compared to nuclear.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Not just hundreds of Gigawatts, but also tens of
| thousands of Gigawatt-hours. Unless you're willing to
| accept regular black-outs, you need to build enough
| capacity to account for the occasional long, sustained
| period of cloudy days with low wind. The cost of that
| extra necessary-but-rarely-used capacity needs to be
| factored in to any comparison of wind/solar vs other
| energy sources.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| It might make more sense to have either fossil-fuels as
| backups for such times, or for HVDC lines to connect
| geographically disparate regions (it's always sunny or
| windy _somewhere_ ).
| [deleted]
| carry_bit wrote:
| As we're seeing from Russia and Europe, depending on
| someone else means you can find yourself being threatened
| or actually being cut off.
| ncmncm wrote:
| There will be plenty of tropical suppliers of synthetic
| anhydrous ammonia competing, if transmission capacity or
| availability falls short.
|
| People might even keep a stock on hand.
| guerby wrote:
| France installed nuclear capacity is 61370 MWe, I suspect
| you looked at MWth (thermal output, not electrical
| output). Source:
|
| https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrie_nucl%C3%A9aire_en
| _Fr...
|
| Currently the capacity factor for french nuclear reactors
| is less than 50% because of various technical issues and
| maintenance schedule slippage.
|
| It will go further down because of a very hot summer and
| regulations on maximum released water temperatures.
| adrianN wrote:
| I don't think that's a common use of "unsolved at scale".
| We know how to do it, it just doesn't make economic sense
| right now. I mean, suppose you have hundreds of GW of
| storage of some form installed. You could just claim it's
| still not "solved at scale" because the _global_ energy
| consumption is even higher.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Well nuclear proponents handwave away the massively
| higher costs, the still unsolved long term storage
| problem (it's been >70 years of nuclear power and there
| still does not exist a long term storage facility in the
| world), and insurance for the case of a disaster.
| philwelch wrote:
| > it's been >70 years of nuclear power and there still
| does not exist a long term storage facility in the world
|
| It's bizarre how anti-nuclear activists point at problems
| caused by anti-nuclear activism and ask, like Eric Andre,
| "how could nuclear power do this?"
| ncmncm wrote:
| Nukes' problems are not caused by activists. They have
| nowhere near that much influence. Nukes' problems are
| inherent.
|
| Biggest, by a large margin, is capex which simply prices
| it completely out of the market.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Even a superficial glance would tell you that this
| doesn't make sense. We have had >70 years of peaceful
| nuclear power. A significant anti nuclear movement has
| existed for maybe 40 years and it has clearly not been
| influencial until maybe the last 20 years. So why has the
| nuclear power industry not solved the issues in the first
| 30 years? Moreover, why has France which hasn't had a
| significant antinuclear movement ever solved any of the
| issues?
| philwelch wrote:
| The global supply chains for lithium batteries are
| already struggling to keep up just with current demand.
| Where are we going to get enough cobalt? Hopefully not DR
| Congo.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Batteries will be a negligible fraction of utility
| storage, so that is moot.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Why? What will the rest be?
| zdragnar wrote:
| Kinetic (water gravity, flywheel) or thermal (molten salt
| baths which can be supplemented with solar thermal).
|
| None of these things exist at a large scale except for
| pumped hydro / water gravity, and that requires very
| convenient topography and geology to work. Generally, any
| non-chemical storage system is overpriced (too
| inefficient) or a maintenance disaster.
| californical wrote:
| I know there are options like pumped water, compressed
| air, spinning disc. No idea how feasible they are at
| scale, but I can imagine a world where physical storage
| like that could be lower maintenance & cost in the long-
| term compared to chemical batteries.
|
| Even if less efficient, you can get enormous potential
| storage from pumped water with relatively simple machines
| compared to massive battery farms.
| nine_k wrote:
| There is a number of battery chemistries more cheap and
| even efficient than Lithium-based, but with lower energy
| density. High energy density is important for handheld
| devices, for flying devices, even for cars. But
| stationary energy storage can be much heavier and bulkier
| per kWh stored, as long as it's cheaper, and can sustain
| more than a few thousand recharge cycles.
|
| Lithium batteries have the momentum and are dropping in
| price because of the EV cars revolution happening right
| now. When solar revolution will happen i utility scale,
| the utility-type batteries that will emerge may be
| seriously different.
| adrianN wrote:
| Who says Lithium batteries are the best technology for
| grid scale storage? (Besides Elon, I guess?)
| wumpus wrote:
| There are multiple kinds of grid storage. Australia, for
| example, wants these batteries to provide fast-acting
| frequency stabilization... in addition to stabilizing the
| output of various wind and solar facilities.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| >Where are we going to get enough cobalt?
|
| Nobody would use this kind of lithium ion battery for
| grid storage. Instead use Lithium Iron Phosphate
| (LiFePo4) batteries- no cobalt needed. LiFePo4 batteries
| are absolutely good enough right now for grid storage.
| ncmncm wrote:
| And any sort of lithium battery is the most expensive
| storage.
|
| Utilities are not generally in a habit of reflexively
| choosing the most expensive alternative, even if some
| have plumped for nukes in places where ratepayers have no
| say.
| BenoitP wrote:
| At scale means with mining requirements as well.
|
| With current and projected reserves we can manage intra-
| day requirements for the whole world. This is the we mine
| it all option.
|
| But we need intra-year storage capacity.
|
| Nuclear is clearly the easier and only option (and the
| most environment-friendly to me, considering the mining
| requirements)
| adrianN wrote:
| Mining of what? Hydrogen as storage medium for example
| doesn't require all that much mining. Are you assuming
| storage will be in the form of Lithium batteries?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Personally, I expect something made with iron or sodium
| to take over.
|
| For hydrogen, we have to solve the horrible cycle
| efficiency of its storage. It's not so bad for use as a
| fuel (e.g. for airplanes), but as static storage hydrogen
| is currently a very bad choice.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Cycle efficiency is trivially resolved by feeding in more
| zero-opex power.
|
| But hydrogen efficiency is improving as fast as all
| renewable tech.
| megaman821 wrote:
| I agree that hydrogen efficiency doesn't matter here, but
| the capital expenditure to build a giant electrolyzer
| with 5% utilization doesn't really make sense. The cost
| of the electrolyzer is the things that needs to greatly
| fall if hydrogen is going to be used for long-term
| storage.
| BenoitP wrote:
| I'm assuming currently proven tech of batteries. And we
| need to act now for climate change, with current tech.
|
| Electricity to H2 to electricity has horrendous
| efficiency (about 20% at most IIRC). We'd be much better
| off CO2-speaking using it to replace coal in steel
| production, and replace gas in fertilizer production.
| Both of which are proven tech (but not globally deployed,
| as coal and gas are cheap)
| ncmncm wrote:
| Inefficiency just requires extra capex, not opex. And the
| capex is capex is still falling at an exponential rate.
| So, no.
| Sinidir wrote:
| Where are you getting that 20% number from?
|
| https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publicat
| ion...
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/round-
| trip-...
|
| The round trip efficiency is 30% or more and rising with
| better electrolysis and reverse electrolysis being
| developed.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Power2Gas2Power has low round trip efficiency (say 40%),
| but as only a fairly small fraction of the energy flow
| goes through it that doesn't matter that much at the end
| of the day. If it did, that just means heavy industries
| would migrate to less seasonally variable places.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Why would you need 100% storage supply. Also note if
| France would go 100% nuclear they would need either
| significant overprovisioning or storage as well. Nuclear
| is not an load following source. Even less so if you want
| to operate economically.
| philwelch wrote:
| > Why would you need 100% storage supply.
|
| So you don't have power outages on windless nights.
| cinntaile wrote:
| You generally use peaker plants or backup fossil fuel or
| hydro for that use case, at this point in time batteries
| are used to supply power for a couple of hours at best.
| You need that backup power anyway for when the nuclear
| plant is out of commission for some reason.
| philwelch wrote:
| Regardless of how you're generating your power, you're
| going to need to overprovision your generation capacity
| slightly to account for downtime. You only need _storage_
| if all of your generation capacity is offline at the same
| time, which is inevitable with solar power (nighttime),
| possible with gas (pipeline failure?), but less
| inherently likely with nuclear.
|
| > backup fossil fuel
|
| In practice this means fossil fuels become the baseload
| power source.
| ncmncm wrote:
| > _In practice this means fossil fuels become the
| baseload power source._
|
| False. In the immediate future, synthetic anhydrous
| ammonia will displace it. Extracting NG will be too
| expensive to compete, because the only cost of ammonia
| will be capex. The more you make, the less it costs.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I sincerely believe that HVDC is a game changer here, it
| allows you to move energy around at a fraction of the
| losses that were considered normal before allowing for
| overcapacity in one place to be used elsewhere
| eliminating a major requirement for storage, on that
| scale there is no lack of combined sun/wind availability.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Anyway transmission losses are immaterial when top-line
| generating capacity is so cheap.
|
| China is building solar in Chile, at their antipodes, and
| a transmission line back to China with only 50% loss, for
| solar energy through the night.
| cinntaile wrote:
| > In practice this means fossil fuels become the baseload
| power source.
|
| As the name baseload power implies, it would have to be
| providing power all the time and that's not what is
| needed.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Your argument does not follow at all. I have the
| impression that you don't know what baseload is. Baseload
| is the minimum amount of demand over a given time (it is
| not a measure of supply at all).
|
| The previous poster talked about using fossil (or any
| other means) to supply the mismatch between the supply
| and demand at the times where such a mismatch might
| exist. This is completely unrelated to baseload, it could
| in fact be larger than baseload. Note that such a
| mismatch would also exist for nuclear (dependent on
| overprovisioning). However it would in general be only
| needed of short periods of time.
| BenoitP wrote:
| > Nuclear is not an load following source
|
| In France it is, and has been successfully for more than
| 33 years [1]
|
| [1] https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01977209/
| cycomanic wrote:
| Ok I didn't know that they implemented load following in
| France. However, note thatbbecause nuclear power cost is
| almost completely capex dominated so doing this
| essentially increases your power cost by the factor that
| you use for load balancing. So out of economic reasons
| you hardly ever want to not run a nuclear plant at 100%.
| yohannparis wrote:
| Thank you for providing a trustable source.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| > the cost to build this 13,000 MW facility would be $12.1
| billion, which is still just 50% of the cost of the $25
| billion Vogtle nuclear plant.
|
| Yes this is generally my argument. If you take the money
| you would spend on nuclear and spend it instead on solar,
| wind, gridscale storage, as well as EV and home battery
| rebates, you end up with a much more robust distributed
| energy production grid with very low maintenance costs. I
| think the idea of including rebates for home batteries and
| EVs is an important one, because it means that when major
| parts of the power line system are knocked out for some
| reason, you still have a lot of distributed storage.
|
| You can also begin energy production with a solar and
| battery roll out MUCH sooner than new nuclear construction.
| From a climate change perspective, producing clean energy
| sooner is a big deal.
|
| And we should not overlook that nuclear energy is a single
| target for terrorist attack and requires a powerful state
| to manage security for the plant and its supply chain,
| while batteries and renewables require no such thing. From
| a libertarian/anarchist perspective, we can have a weaker
| state and still have good energy production with
| renewables.
|
| EDIT: I am also realizing that handing out a bunch of
| rebates to the voters for new stuff (rooftop solar, home
| batteries, new EVs) would be WAY more politically popular
| than "lets pay now for a big monolithic nuclear power plant
| that takes 20 years to build." If you want a plan that
| actually works, keeping the voters happy seems like an
| important component.
| anton96 wrote:
| So you see a doubled cost for nuclear.
|
| But you need to add that Renewable solution only last 20
| years vs 60 for nuclear. That can be seen like triple the
| cost you factored in already.
|
| And also, your renewable energy source won't work 100% of
| time and not at 100% of the capacity. Which also implies
| that you need to build multiple time what you planned to
| really get that planned capacity.
| gnicholas wrote:
| But if you just price in the cost of the rebates, aren't
| you overlooking a large chunk of the cost, which is borne
| by homeowners? That's still a cost, even if it's not
| being directly paid by the government.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| 850MW doesn't tell you how much energy it can store -- if
| you need 850MW to power your grid and your battery can
| supply 850MWh, where do you get power for the other 11
| hours until the sun comes out?
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| > So, would it make more economic sense for this 1GW
| battery-storage system to be replaced by a nuclear power
| plant? Australia after all is one of the places with the
| most high-grade uranium ore, being among the top three
| exporters.
|
| As much as I detest the pro nuclear shilling, this isn't a
| valid comparison. 250MWh of storage is only useful for very
| short term energy arbitrage and isn't a replacement for
| always-on power.
|
| The real answer is a mix of solar, solar-thermal, wind,
| storage, and combined cycle plants for the holes (ideally
| eventually powered by plant-based and solar-cracked
| hydrogen/methane/etc.). This mix costs a bit more than
| nuclear does now, but doesn't have the huge massive
| downsides of total dependency on and subservience to a
| handful of companies operating out of the five or so
| countries that are allowed to produce fuel (as well as all
| the existential risk stuff, concentration of risk to
| mistakes/attacks, horrible un-accounted externalities and
| supply chain fragility). It will also likely cost less to
| build it at a time such that it would still be completed
| before a nuclear plant which was comissioned now.
|
| Of course that's all moot because the balance *right now*
| is running existing fossil fuel infrastructure more vs.
| building solar and not storing the energy. And in this
| equation, the cost of solar is a tiny fraction of nuclear.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I think the thing I never hear people talk about however is
| redundancy and consistency. Wind and Solar are great and likely
| should be a huge huge portion of our power production.
| Something like Nuclear though we can project huge consistency
| (assuming the plant does not get destroyed by a giant natural
| disaster) long term and day to day.
|
| Personally though I really have always liked Geothermal!
| ncmncm wrote:
| Nukes and geothermal both depend on steam turbines, which are
| down for very expensive maintenance 10-20% of the time. That
| is why those can't compete with 0% opex renewables + storage.
|
| Nukes, of course, have lots of other opex on top of the
| turbines, and _also_ crippling capex.
|
| Geothermal _might_ be able to compete at very high latitudes
| where the alternative is shipping in synthetic ammonia from
| the tropics when wind flags and transmission lines don 't
| deliver.
|
| But steam turbine s are absolutely not getting any cheaper or
| more reliable.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Everybody always says that solar + storage is cheaper. And
| sometimes there are even studies to support it. But if that's
| true _where is it_?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| China mostly:
|
| 2021 figures:
|
| > China was the biggest contributor, adding 121 GW to the
| continent's new capacity. Europe and North America--led by
| the USA--took second and third places respectively, with the
| former adding 39 GW, and the latter 38 GW.
|
| 81% of new electricity generaton build globally was
| renewables last year.
| fallingknife wrote:
| I don't dispute the economics of renewable generation on
| the existing grid. I'm talking about storage as replacement
| for baseload, which is purely hypothetical at this point.
| Right now we have very small scale storage as peaker
| capacity, but not as a baseload replacement.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Storage doesn't replace baseload.
|
| Did the pumped hydro dams they built alongside nuclear
| power plants replace the baseload? No, they took the
| cheap energy that was produced at times when it wasn't
| needed and provided it back at peak times. They literally
| increased the base load by propping it up when it would
| otherwise droop at night (mostly).
| ncmncm wrote:
| Storage does, in fact, supply base load. That is its
| purpose.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Today, storage runs (i.e. supplies) when electricity
| prices peak, which broadly matches high demand.
|
| It charges, when electricity prices are low, which
| generally means off peak overnight.
|
| In a future renewable grid, with zero dispatchable power
| it might be used on occaision to help meet the baseload,
| but it's almost certainly going to be used more during
| demand peaks, because that's when most electricity is
| used. Maybe in equatorial regions with a lot of solar,
| not much wind and no other energy sources it'll share
| baseload duties with the solar that charges it during the
| day, but unless the term baseload has lost all meaning
| (which I fear it has) storage is not ever providing
| baseload, since that would imply supplying that amount
| constantly and storage needs to absorb more energy than
| it returns.
|
| I can't see a definition of 'baseload' provider that
| storage meets that solar doesn't for example.
| q1w2 wrote:
| That does not discuss storage AT ALL.
|
| True solar with storage is not economical.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Storage cost is falling even faster than solar.
| Renewables + storage beats everything, hands down.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| PV + storage is cheaper than nuclear:
|
| https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-
| energy-...
|
| (you have to compare cost of nuclear on first page with
| wholesale PV+storage energy on subsequent pages).
| Brometheus wrote:
| Top five countries with the highest wind energy capacity in
| 2020 China - 288.32 GW. ... United
| States - 122.32 GW. ... Germany - 62.85 GW. ...
| India - 38.63 GW. ... Spain - 27.24 GW.
| q1w2 wrote:
| This means nothing if you don't factor in storage, or at
| least measure the CONSISTENT power output.
|
| These are just PEAK numbers that are totally useless when
| planning a grid.
| ncmncm wrote:
| So, factor in storage. And, those are not peak.
| NickChasanis wrote:
| q1w2 wrote:
| In fact, there are NO studies that demonstrate that solar or
| wind AND STORAGE, are able to produce CONSISTENT power for a
| full year anywhere.
|
| The only studies you'll see are that they proved to be
| economical on a certain day, or maaaybe overnight. ...but
| there are zero studies that any solar and/or wind (even
| combined), can provide consistent power for a full year.
| ...because that is not currently possible with economical
| tech.
| ElectronCharge wrote:
| It's worse than that. Storage can, at best, provide for
| some interval of backup while wind/solar aren't providing
| enough power.
|
| The problem is that "100 year", "1,000 year" or worse
| events will require more than currently stored. Then,
| potentially millions of people will be at risk of injury or
| death from cold or heat.
|
| Reliable generation of at least enough to cover survival
| seems necessary.
| pfdietz wrote:
| That's what hydrogen (stored underground at a storage
| capacity cost of $1/kWh) is for.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Anytime local storage runs low and transmission line
| capacity is exceeded, you order a shipment of synthetic
| ammonia or hydrogen from the tropics. There will be
| plenty competing for your business.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > "100 year", "1,000 year" or worse events
|
| Okay, then we can keep gas power stations around for
| another 100 years and only turn them on for the few days
| they are needed. Probably, though, after 50 years we will
| have solved climate change and energy storage (or wiped
| ourselves out) anyway.
| schroeding wrote:
| > A far better plan for Europe would be to go 100% renewable
| asap, meaning no need for fossil fuel imports from any party.
| Yes, that's technologically possible, but would require massive
| economic investment.
|
| I agree, but: It's 100% impossible to replace the need for gas
| in the short timespan of five months until the next winter, no
| matter how much money or resources we throw at the problem. The
| absolute majority of heating is done with gas and major parts
| of the electrical grid depend on it. We cannot replace it with
| renewables in time. We need gas or people will freeze to death
| in the worst case, there are no alternatives to the LNG imports
| in the short-term, IMO.
|
| And the countries that can export LNG, including the US, are
| aware of their strong negotiating position and want long-term
| contracts.
|
| Europe may not have a choice. :/
| [deleted]
| fpoling wrote:
| The gasoline prices in US have little to do with price of oil.
| In 2008 oil was 140 USD while gasoline was much cheaper. The
| real problem is underutilization of refineries . Some of them
| reduced output during Covid and was not able to restore
| production. Some where closed due to environmental regulations.
| themitigating wrote:
| To add to your comment:
|
| "U.S. oil refiners' margins smash records, but few plan to
| build more plants"
|
| https://www.marketplace.org/2022/05/23/u-s-oil-refiners-
| marg...
| themitigating wrote:
| As far as Russia/Ukraine, the real agenda the US government
| seems to be pushing there is using that conflict to rapidly
| increase LNG exports to Europe from the US West/South coast,
| even though energy prices are spiking due to inflation (and
| plausibly due to exports of crude oil from the USA, allowed
| under that 2015 bill lifting that restriction)"
|
| How are they pushing this and you claim it's "the real agenda",
| what are they claiming instead? Are you claiming the US got
| involved with the Ukrainian conflict in order to sell LPG to
| other countries?
| MisterTea wrote:
| > A far better plan for Europe would be to go 100% renewable
| asap,
|
| Something I've been thinking about for a while: the best course
| of action to secure a nation is to build out renewables until
| the need for external fossil fuels is zero. Even if that means
| using renewables to make fossil fuels via a process like
| Fischer-Tropsch as a stop gap.
|
| I also think it would be advantageous to start thinking about
| how to drive the cost of generation and distribution down until
| electricity is free or nearly free. This might sound utopian
| but imagine how secure and prosperous a society could be if
| energy was super cheap or free? We are moving towards an
| electrified future and at some point we will have to heat homes
| and charge cars with electric that will place significant
| demand on an ageing grid.
| ncmncm wrote:
| It will be cheaper to synthesize and burn ammonia or
| hydrogen. Which is, therefore, what will happen, anywhere it
| works at all. Freight shipping, first.
|
| Probably the last big holdout for hydrocarbons will be
| aviation, but anywhere LH2 airframes start to move in, the
| old stuff will be wholly unable to compete. Transitioning the
| whole fleet will take a long time, though.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Small distributed reactors sound great, but don't they exacerbate
| the waste disposal problem? I think the logistics and politics
| would be easier to manage if the waste production was highly
| centralized.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Not to mention nuclear proliferation and risks of terrorism or
| social unrest...
| philwelch wrote:
| As long as the deployment of nuclear power is large and growing
| in scale, there's zero waste disposal problem, because all of
| the long-lived wastes can be reprocessed into fuel using
| breeder reactors.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I think the idea is that you'd have something like 10 100 MW
| reactors enclosed in a single facility rather than 1 1000 MW
| reactor in that facility. You'd probably put all the hot fuel
| rods in a single cooling pond in that scenario. Security for
| such a facility would be less expensive than having to manage
| 10 plants scattered acrooss a wide region, as well. Note that
| provision of cooling water is also a major issue in all these
| designs.
|
| Whether or not this would be cheaper overall is anyone's guess.
| There are also questions about the reliability and efficiency
| of small modular reactors in general; past novel nuclear
| reactor designs like the pebble-bed reactor were similarly
| promoted but never went anywhere.
| losvedir wrote:
| One thing I don't understand is the uninhabitable zone around
| Chernobyl is not _that_ big, and the U.S. has plenty of space.
| And electricity can be transmitted decently far, right?
|
| So... is it unreasonable to have lots of fairly low-regulated
| nuclear power plants in, say, 50 mile uninhabited areas (maybe
| even make it a nature preserve or something for animals)? And if
| one or two meltdown, oh well?
| Manuel_D wrote:
| There was also no real incentive to clean up the Chernobyl
| exclusion zone. The town of Pripyat existed for the purpose of
| supporting the nuclear power plants. So when the plants closed,
| there's no reason to clean up the contamination. This is in
| contrast to Fukushima, in which the majority of the exclusion
| zone has been rehabilitated.
| layer8 wrote:
| Mushrooms in Germany are still contaminated today from the
| Chernobyl fallout:
| https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...
| trashtester wrote:
| EVERYTHING around us is contaminated in some way or another.
| We are constantly bombarded by cosmic radiation with doses
| far in excess of the expose you will get from eating those
| mushrooms.
|
| Below 100mSv, there is "no evidence" that exposure leads to
| any elevation of cancer risk. At levels covered by the
| article, ie 1000Bq/kg / 80000 Bq/mSv = 0.0125 mSv/kg.
|
| In other words, you can eat 8 tons of those mush before there
| is any measurable increase in cancer risk.
|
| And breating the air in Berlin for 1 year is MUCH more
| dangerous than eating those 8000 kg of mushrooms. (Not to
| speak about taking a single shot of covid vaccine.)
|
| In other words, dispite being scientifically "true", the net
| effect of an article like this, is to mislead people into
| thinking that radiation is a lot more dangerous than it is in
| reality.
|
| If nuclear were to be treated like other health hazards in
| our environment, the thresholds should be set somewhere
| between 10000-100000Bq/kg, depending on how much people would
| eat of that food in a year, not at 600Bq/kg.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Arguing that leaked radioactive contamination is less
| harmful than often assumed does not make habitually leaky
| nukes seem any more attractive, vs. alternatives that leak
| nothing hazardous at all, ever.
| skrbjc wrote:
| " the waste produced by coal plants is actually more
| radioactive than that generated by their nuclear
| counterparts. In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power
| plant--a by-product from burning coal for electricity--
| carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more
| radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same
| amount of energy"
|
| From: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-
| ash-is-more-...
|
| We seem to have been fine burning coal and not thinking
| about the radiation that puts into the surrounding
| environment.
|
| It's also disingenuous to think that there aren't
| negative environmental externalities from the production
| and operation of "renewables".
|
| All forms of energy production will have some negative
| consequences and we need to understand what those are and
| think of ways to mitigate them, rather than just pointing
| to what's bad about one form and ignore what's bad about
| others.
| alar44 wrote:
| Yeah but that coal radiation is tiny! Nuclear reactor
| radiation is big!
|
| It's like a kid preferring 5 nickels to 2 quarters
| because 5 is more.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Coal is on the way out, so immaterial to argument now.
| Only just enough coal is burnt to fill in for
| insufficiently built-out renewables and storage.
|
| In many places that role is being moved to NG. The
| immediate hiccup is a short-term setback that will be
| fixed the way we are doing, building out renewables,
| later storage.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| How radioactive are covid vaccines?
| trashtester wrote:
| They are bioactive, not very radioactive....
| layer8 wrote:
| The website is official information from the German federal
| agency for radiation protection. While the risk now is low,
| and the article is actually giving a useful comparison to
| radiation exposure in airplane travel, you probably still
| wouldn't want to eat those mushrooms or game every day, and
| the contamination was much higher in the first months/years
| after Chernobyl. The overall point is that the impact was
| not restricted to a 50 mile radius as suggested by the GP.
| trashtester wrote:
| > you probably still wouldn't want to eat those mushrooms
| or game every day
|
| For the mushrooms, as a side order, even every day would
| be harmless. If you follow some stone age diet, eating
| only meat, then MAYBE eating those boars every day might
| cause a measurable increase in cancer risk. Probably
| still less than simply breathing the air in a city,
| though.
|
| > and the contamination was much higher in the first
| months/years after Chernobyl
|
| In the first days and months after Chernobyl, there were
| real reasons to be somewhat careful. That was before the
| short-lived isotopes had decayed. Once the decays of
| those isotopes took over, and Cs-137 became the main
| source, the levels were pretty safe, even if they were
| double compared to today (the half-life of Cs137 is 30
| years).
|
| > The overall point is that the impact was not restricted
| to a 50 mile radius as suggested by the GP.
|
| And this is where my main objection is. The "impact" as
| counted in measurable increase in cancer risk, is nil.
|
| By employing the ultra-conservative "linear no-threshold
| model" (LNT) of radiatino risk, then theoretically, over
| a very large population, you could calculate some number
| of expected cancer cases. But there is (last time I
| checked) no consensus that the LNT hypothesis matches
| data better than a null-hypothesis that doses under about
| 100mSv are harmless.
|
| In any case, at that level, the risk for any given
| individual is so small, that it disappears next to any
| other risk you can imagine from pollutants or similar, so
| there is no reason to take such hypothetical risks into
| account for your personal behavior.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Planning nuclear power plants based upon the Chernobyl disaster
| is kinda like planning road and bridge construction based upon
| the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse - (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940) )
|
| Such disasters should only be a small - if bright red -
| footnote to a good policy: "NEVER build anything resembling
| this historic disaster. And if anything ever shows operational
| characteristics remotely resembling it, then shut it down
| IMMEDIATELY."
| ncmncm wrote:
| They all resemble a historic disaster, more or less.
| Renewables don't though.
| dboreham wrote:
| This was the original (1040s, Fermi) idea, hence reactors in
| Idaho (after becoming alarmed that they had constructed a
| reactor in downtown Chicago). I think however there's a reason
| this isn't done now: it acknowledges that large reactors aren't
| safe (which they're not), therefore begs the question why build
| them at all. For the idea to become viable, climate change
| would need to become a much more immediate pressing concern,
| allowing the trade off to be made between irradiating some Utah
| desert vs boiling the planet.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Lots of reasons invite the question, why build them at all?
| There is no answer, because we have overwhelmingly more
| attractive alternatives.
| hushpuppy wrote:
| The solution to Chernobyl style accidents is to not build
| Chernobyl style nuclear reactors. The design was bad to begin
| with and it really didn't have any sort of containment or
| bunker or anything like that to speak of.
|
| This is why they go on and about the "sarcophagus" required to
| keep it contained. They had to build a proper containment unit
| after the fact. You want that stuff built BEFORE you have a
| nuclear reactor. Not wait until after one blows up.
|
| I, very literally, would love to have a nuclear reactor in my
| backyard if it's off the correct design. A design that depends
| on physics to be safe, not human operators.
|
| Which is entirely possible. You can build a nuclear reactor in
| such a way that if the worst possible case happened it would
| meltdown and dump it's guts into a container. Then just sit
| there until it cooled to the point were it could be processed
| correctly.
| ncmncm wrote:
| > _The solution to Chernobyl style accidents is to not build
| Chernobyl style nuclear reactors_
|
| Or, indeed, any at all. Thus, also no Fukushimas, and no
| TMIs, and no Santa Susanas.
| Bromeo wrote:
| I don't disagree with your main point, but what's the point of
| making a nature preserve in an already uninhabited area? Since
| it's uninhabited right now the animals are probably doing just
| fine. Also, power plants (of any kind) need heavy machinery for
| construction as well as regular maintenance.
| ncmncm wrote:
| A nature preserve is there to keep somebody sweeping in
| anytime and eliminating the habitat. Which happens all the
| damn time.
|
| Starbase, e.g.
| jeffbee wrote:
| If you're willing to dedicate that much land you could just
| cover it in solar panels and generate 1500GW of peak
| electricity for less money.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Except those solar panels generate energy intermittently. Not
| just in the short term due to the day/night cycle, but also
| over the long term with weather and seasonal shifts.
|
| Nuclear is unique in that it's the only geographically
| independent, and non-intermittent energy source.
| Hydroelectricity and geothermal are non-intermittent but are
| geographically dependent. And also fossil fuels, but those
| emit carbon dioxide.
| ncmncm wrote:
| As has been explained to you numerous times, intermittency
| is a trivial technical matter that cannot justify diverting
| capital to nuke construction or operation.
|
| Repeating your falsehoods here does not make them true.
| E39M5S62 wrote:
| I'm not familiar with this area. Can you explain why it's
| a trivial technical matter, and what the solution(s) are?
| ncmncm wrote:
| Many billions of dollars are today going into
| constructing factories worldwide to produce equipment for
| storage of numerous kinds. It takes time to build the
| factories, and then time to run them to build out the
| storage capacity.
|
| There is thus far little use for storage, because there
| is not enough renewable generating capacity yet to charge
| up storage. (Charging it by burning fossil fuels would be
| stupid.) By the time we need much of it, it will be very,
| very cheap. In the meantime, building generating capacity
| is the right use of capital.
|
| Although people insisting there is a problem love to talk
| about expense of batteries, only a tiny fraction of
| utility-scale storage will ever be batteries. The
| cheapest storage is gravity, exemplified by pumped hydro,
| which represents today almost all utility storage. But
| there are many variations that all work.
|
| The only uncertainty is which ones will be cheapest. Each
| is a different mix of build cost, maintenance cost,
| storage cost, charging cost, and discharging cost.
| Different users will favor different places on those
| axes. Best for most uses are those that cost only to
| build, and store as much energy as you care to, cheaply.
|
| Synthetic ammonia and hydrogen are attractive storage
| media because they may be sold.
|
| Liquifying nitrogen is extremely mature tech and, like
| the synthetic fuels, valuable in its own right.
|
| Compressing air underground, adiabatically, is another
| mature method. Compressing to a sea-floor bladder through
| a hose from a compressor onshore, likewise.
|
| Buoyancy, drawing a float down toward a pulley on the sea
| floor, using a winch onshore; and raising a very, very
| heavy weight up a disused mine shaft are other, very
| similar examples of gravity storage.
|
| There are various battery chemistries, for cases where
| batteries are useful at all. All under consideration are
| much cheaper than lithium. Farthest along are iron-air,
| molten-metal, and sodium-bromide, none of which are prone
| to fires.
|
| Storage costs of all kinds are falling much faster than
| solar generating capacity.
| [deleted]
| Manuel_D wrote:
| And as has been explained to you numerous times,
| intermittency is an incredibly difficult problem and
| cannot be solved without some miraculous storage
| mechanism that makes energy storage effectively free.
| It's so trivial to solve, yet you neglect to mention the
| solution.
|
| As per your previous comments, you assume that hydrogen,
| compressed air, or some other form of energy storage will
| be this silver bullet. This is a very risky assumption.
| We have no cost history for these systems being built at
| scale. There's a massive difference between writing a
| white-paper promising a super cheap storage cost, and
| actually building an energy storage facility and looking
| at the bill.
| rswskg wrote:
| *in the right conditions, ignoring nighttime, winter,
| northern hemisphere, etc etc...
| mperham wrote:
| That's why you mix in wind too.
| woeirua wrote:
| And there are still days (like during Texas' winter power
| fiasco) where neither the sun, nor the wind are strong
| enough to generate sufficient power from renewables
| alone. How people still believe that you can get by
| without _any_ baseload power generation capacity is
| beyond me.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Okay, put in batteries, still an order of magnitude cheaper
| than a nuclear plant without any risk of doomsday
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Not even remotely true. _Global_ battery production is
| around 300 GWh per year. The US alone uses 12.5 TWh of
| electricity per day. The world uses ~60TWh. That 's 8
| years of global battery output to fulfill just one hour
| of electricity storage.
| schiffern wrote:
| > _Global_ battery production is...
|
| Now repeat the same math for global production of new
| nuclear power plants, in GW/year.
|
| While writing your reply about how this isn't the right
| way to think about the future of nuclear power, realize
| that those exact same arguments apply to batteries, too.
| ncmncm wrote:
| There is absolutely no need for batteries to provide for
| storage, so that is a misleading assertion.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| And what, pray tell, would we be using for storage
| instead? Surely you're not going to suggest some untested
| and unproven storage mechanism like hydrogen storage,
| ammonia, thermal batteries, etc. Those technologies have
| never been built at anything remotely close to grid-
| scale, and thus we have no idea what they'd actually cost
| when we attempt to build them at grid scale.
|
| Batteries and hyrodelectric storage are the only energy
| storage mechanisms for which we have any meaningful cost
| history.
| zardo wrote:
| Are thermal batteries unproven? I thought they were at
| the "available for purchase from Siemens and GE" stage of
| development.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| They exist in prototypes, I am not aware of any grid
| scale energy storage facilities using thermal batteries.
|
| Are there any >1GWh thermal battery facilities? Remember
| the US uses 8GWh of electricity per _minute_.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > Are there any >1GWh thermal battery facilities?
|
| I don't know about that, but for comparison, the "world's
| biggest battery storage system" opened last year in
| California[0] at 400MW / 1,600MWh.
|
| [0] https://www.energy-storage.news/expansion-complete-
| at-worlds...
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Which is a lithium ion battery facility. Not a thermal
| batter facility.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Yes, I realise that. That's why I said "I don't know" and
| "for comparison".
|
| My point was that GWh-scale thermal battery proposals
| would be competing with already existing (and possibly
| cheaper) chemical batteries, and that energy storage on
| this scale is not unheard of.
| zardo wrote:
| Certainly there are >1GWh thermal storage systems. I'm
| not sure if any are set up to generate electricity
| though.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The only deployed thermal storage systems are in solar
| thermal arrays. Those have costs that aren't not
| competitive with nuclear, and they're still subject to
| seasonal output variability due to weather and Earth's
| inclination.
| zardo wrote:
| And district heating systems. Where a 1-2GWh thermal
| accumulator will be used.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| District heating systems distribute heat, usually
| scavenged from a power plant. They don't store heat
| really - they do in a pedantic sense in that heat is
| "stored" in the distribution pipelines, but not in the
| sense of a battery. And they don't transfer heat at
| gradients large enough to generate electricity
| effectively.
| zardo wrote:
| They store heat in the sense that one of the components
| is a giant thermal accumulator.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Why are you comparing cost with industrial output?
| mwint wrote:
| Probably the issue is that access to water (for cooling)
| correlates highly with access to water (for human
| civilization).
| philwelch wrote:
| The Chernobyl power plant did not have a containment building
| around the reactors until after the meltdown. Every Western
| nuclear power plant has a containment building around the
| reactors. That's the single biggest factor.
| ncmncm wrote:
| TMI and Fukushima had containment, for all the good it did.
| Vecr wrote:
| It did a lot of good? TMI slagged the core but the
| containment held, and Fukushima's cores (the ones that
| melted, obviously) was still mostly covered, the hydrogen
| explosion was the major problem.
| Shadonototra wrote:
| "American"'s nuclear energy is back on the Table for a Green
| Future
|
| years of anti-nuclear propaganda all over EU past decade, thanks
| Germany, only to end up depending on the US even more, while
| boycotting their friend France
| neonsunset wrote:
| As more people after work in US jump in to browse HN, I expect
| all reasonable comments on advancements in safety of nuclear
| energy and its superior efficiency will get downvoted because
| political agenda is more important than not destroying out
| environment.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Historical lifecycle costs for nuclear plants are perhaps not
| useful for comparison. Newer reactor plans are drastically
| different.
| TradingPlaces wrote:
| Nukes are expensive and take many years to build. No reason to
| shut them down, but also not a lot of good reasons to build them.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Spending to keep them operating diverts money from building out
| renewables. So, no.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Whether you think nuclear is a good idea or a bad idea, too
| costly or a price we will have to pay, one thing I can say is
| true: we have spent so very much time and effort demonizing
| nuclear power that if it _were_ a good idea, we 're going to have
| a lot of people standing in the way, because the message was
| received, loud and clear.
| pydry wrote:
| This seems to be a barely rewritten press release on behalf of
| "Maria G. Korsnick, president and chief executive of the Nuclear
| Energy Institute, a trade group that promotes nuclear power".
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Please can the nuclear industry stop paying PR consultants.
|
| We have one use for the nuclear industry - building scientists
| who can then build nuclear bombs. IMO this is a reasonable use of
| public funds - the strategic needs of nuclear weapons are not
| going away.
|
| But please please just accept that and move on. Stop getting in a
| vital public debate.
|
| Nuclear fission is a terrible civilian technology - vastly
| expensive, the effects of a catastrophic failure are massive and
| the costs to avoid it (yes you can build safe nuclear plants) are
| huge - basically nuclear projects need to be on the A game - all
| the time, year after year, constantly upgrading and improving for
| decades to come.
|
| I might believe that for five or six plants run to just build
| weapons. But i refuse to believe we can build 1,000s of the
| fuckers in every country on earth and think that they will be all
| maintained to standards _better than_ Fukijyma
| gfodor wrote:
| China is going to do it, and you seem to believe the safety
| profile of nuclear energy technology has been frozen for 50
| years. It's extremely strange to think something as broad as
| the process of nuclear fission can be spoken about as having a
| universal, never changing risk-profile, regardless of
| technological advancement. We don't do this for any other
| technology.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...
| Brometheus wrote:
| China is building out mostly solar and wind.
| rectang wrote:
| The fundamentals of that risk profile haven't changed -- you
| still have high concentration of radioactive materials in a
| single geographic location. The risk profile for nuclear is
| unlike that of other technologies.
|
| They told us it was safe back then. They tell us its safe
| today. They will always tell us it's safe. The fundamentals
| tell us they're wrong.
| gfodor wrote:
| "The fundamentals" is doing a lot of work there. It's
| fundamentally unsafe to move at a high velocity in a meat-
| based body. Does this mean the risk profile of high speed
| transportation is invariant across technology?
|
| The "fundamentals" you speak of boil down to the first
| principles analysis, based on physics, of the possible
| states a nuclear energy production system can get into.
| This is not invariant with regards to technology. It seems
| far too reductive to claim "putting radiocative materials
| together in the same location" should box out all civilian
| use of a energy production mechanism.
| donkarma wrote:
| nuclear fission is actually the safest electricity generation
| we have right now, and modern reactors are pretty safe and are
| hard to cause to melt down even intentionally, all of this non-
| sense is mostly just fearmongering
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Managing nuclear fission is something that _can_ be done
| safely. At fukushima they had (from memory) 6 reactors - 4
| had been upgraded and 2 were left un-improved for cost /
| benefit reasons. The 4 that were upgraded safely failed in
| the flood - the other 2 caused the problem.
|
| And this is my argument - the reactors were not on their
| A-game. One slip, one B-level decision, one in decades and
| decades and the price is paid.
|
| And this is for one of the richest countries on Earth. Who is
| going to build and run the nuclear reactors in Argentina,
| Sudan, Belize. Will they be on their A-game in 2045?
|
| Why choose the option with the high cost and the nasty
| downside when you literally do not have to.
| goodpoint wrote:
| It's appalling how these conversation on HN are made of people
| endlessly repeating only a handful of pros and cons.
|
| No progress in the conversation and no discussion of more subtle
| aspects, like centralization of control/power, systemic risk,
| nuclear proliferation etc.
| nipponese wrote:
| Here is a 2016 map of Nuclear power plants operating and under
| construction. https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-the-worlds-
| nuclear-power-...
|
| Some things I found interesting:
|
| Under development: 11 in China, 3 in US
|
| Operating: Over 40 in the US and no major accidents since Three
| Mile Island (1979).
| notJim wrote:
| This appears to be out of date. Watts Bar 2 [1] is completed
| and operating. Summer 2-3 were cancelled [2]. Sounds like
| Vogtle is getting close to coming online [3]
|
| 1: https://www.tva.com/newsroom/watts-bar-2-project
|
| 2: https://www.chooseenergy.com/news/article/failed-v-c-
| summer-...
|
| 3:
| https://www.southerncompany.com/innovation/vogtle-3-and-4.ht...
| ncmncm wrote:
| The US ones, anyway, will be cancelled. Each dollar poured down
| the rathole first, diverted from renewable build-out, brings
| climate catastrophe nearer. That has thus far not stoped the
| pouring.
| johngalt wrote:
| The near future looks like Solar + Natural gas. Driven entirely
| by economic factors. It is cheap to build PV, and Natural Gas
| plants cost less than sufficient batteries/storage for PV.
|
| I used to be very bullish on Nuclear. The numbers just don't
| pencil out in the US under the current constraints. We would need
| a vast reduction in the overhead to build a Nuclear plant, or a
| vast increase in the costs of the alternatives.
| stakkur wrote:
| I'm reminded of the software world, where 'interim' or 'just ship
| it now and adjust later' actions lead to...technical debt and
| often worse. I feel nuclear creates the mother of all technical
| debt.
| traveler01 wrote:
| Don't know how germans thought that closing down nuclear plants
| in favor of natural gas was a good idea, both politically and
| environmentally
| loeg wrote:
| Their electorate is very anti-nuclear (it made sense
| politically).
| lelag wrote:
| Thinking about it makes me mad. For all their renewable
| production capacity they still average over 300g of CO2 / kwh
| with all the gas and coal they burn. All of it, credit to the
| german green movement trying to save the planet from... Not
| sure. Even assuming the occasional Chernobyl/Fukushima-level
| disaster, as terrible as those catastrophes are, nuclear plant
| accidents are localised and will never threaten mankind
| survival. Climate change IS threatening our future, however.
|
| And don't get me started on the political cost which the news
| make so obvious now.
| legulere wrote:
| A big percentage of mushrooms and game is still not fit for
| consumption today in Germany because of Chernobyl. So it's
| not just local.
|
| And even if, Germany is more densely populated than the
| Ukraine. The Chernobyl exclusion zone in Ukraine is the same
| size as the state of Saarland.
| lelag wrote:
| The externality of emitting 1kg of CO2 has been evaluated
| between 10000 usd to 100000 usd. Assuming the lower range,
| the 300 millions tons of CO2 produced by the german
| electricity production accounts for 3x10^15 USD per years.
| That's 789 times the german GDP per year taken away from
| future generations. Now compare it to the GDP of Saarland.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| Please name a source of that. The environmental
| department of the german government estimates about 640
| euro per ton for the next 100 years.
|
| https://www.presseportal.de/pm/62786/4789535
| lelag wrote:
| As I answered to my own comment:
|
| > Found the source at https://link.springer.com/article/1
| 0.1007/s10584-020-02785-4.
|
| > So I made a mistake and it's for 1 ton not 1 KG but my
| point rest, even divided by 1000: Germany destroy close
| to their GDP per year with their electrical production
| emission, which is in my book worse than potentially,
| loosing a region if you are unlucky.
| lelag wrote:
| Found the source at https://link.springer.com/article/10.
| 1007/s10584-020-02785-4.
|
| So I made a mistake and it's for 1 ton not 1 KG but my
| point rest, even divided by 1000: Germany destroy close
| to their GDP per year with their electrical production
| emission, which is in my book worse than potentially,
| loosing a region if you are unlucky.
| zosima wrote:
| What does not fit for consumption mean?
|
| Are there more ionizing radiation in a German mushroom or
| boar than in an average banana?
| legulere wrote:
| Yes, a banana has an effective radiation close to 0
| because our bodies evolved to hold its level of potassium
| in homeostasis. Your body already has radioactive
| potassium in it. When you eat more potassium, the excess
| is excreted and the amount of radionuclides in your body
| stays the same. Caesium-137 on the other hand is
| drastically more radioactive and stays longer in the
| body.
| zosima wrote:
| Seems that caesium-137 is also excreted pretty quickly:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium-137
|
| Still even though it's hard to find good numbers, and the
| average seems to be ~ banana / kg. I believe there's at
| least reports of mushrooms and boars with ~10-100 times
| the radiation of an average banana.
|
| I don't think it's actually possible to show any health
| effects of that amount of radiation, even if ingested
| (and excreted) but it's more than the average banana.
| Brometheus wrote:
| /remindme 10years
| lelag wrote:
| /remindme in 80 years
|
| If I have to choose between an additional 3 Fukushima and
| the loss of thousands of costal cities due to sea level
| rise, I know what I'm choosing.
|
| This study predict than sea level could rise by 2m by 2100
| displacing up to 187 million people. Fukushima displaced
| about 160 thousands.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6561295/
|
| Pick your poison, wisely.
| thehappypm wrote:
| It's probably easier to deal with sea level rise since
| it's slow motion. If there's a Fukushima every year..
| wow.
| lelag wrote:
| I assumed 3 events in the next 80 years.
|
| There's been 25 years between Chernobyl and Fukushima,
| and assuming we build new reactor, there is no reason to
| imagine it would happen more frequently. Why do you think
| there could be a catastrophe per year ?
| ghusto wrote:
| The Germans take any opportunity to "do the right thing". I
| won't go into my beliefs on where that comes from, other than
| to say it's an emotional place, and not a logical one. So they
| often end up doing the wrong thing.
|
| I actually feel sorry for them.
| infamouscow wrote:
| > I actually feel sorry for them.
|
| I felt similarly. Then I learned about Bonhoeffer's theory of
| stupidity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc
| legulere wrote:
| Nuclear was replaced by renewables in Germany:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out#/media...
|
| It would have made more sense though to first replace coal
| plants before shutting down nuclear plants.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Germans chose to build out lots of wind instead of spending
| the money to refurbish ramshackle old nukes. They displaced a
| lot more CO2 by that choice.
|
| They could have chosen to continue operating the old
| contraptions unsafely, but chose not to shoulder Fukushima-
| style risks.
|
| Armchair second-guessing is misleading. Each euro spent on
| one is a euro not spent on the other.
| NickChasanis wrote:
| impostervt wrote:
| I just finished Bill Gates' "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster".
| Very good book, and it makes two points (among many others):
|
| - To reduce carbon in the air, getting clean electricity is key.
| If we can do that, we can more easily reduce emissions from other
| areas.
|
| - There are no paths to clean energy by 2050 without nuclear
| power.
| outside1234 wrote:
| * No paths to nighttime clean energy without nuclear power
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| That's the same thing
| tcfhgj wrote:
| Why is that?
| defterGoose wrote:
| You both just said the same thing.
| BatFastard wrote:
| poster added provision _Nighttime_ energy.
| neysofu wrote:
| I believe parent was making a point that the nighttime vs
| daytime distinction is irrelevant, because the grid never
| goes to to sleep. Having sufficient clean energy during
| daytime only is not acceptable.
| Brometheus wrote:
| https://www.e3dc.com/#Intro
| heretogetout wrote:
| How many GW of wind, solar, and nuclear can we bring online in
| the next 28 years?
| ben_w wrote:
| In 2021, we added this many new gigawatts: 183 PV[0], 100
| wind[1], 7.88 nuclear (but 8.6 nuclear was also shut down)[2]
|
| 28 times that, ignoring the shutdowns (I don't actually know
| how long wind lasts, IIRC nuclear is "about 50-70 years" and
| PV is "about 30 years"), gives a total of: 5124 GW PV, 2800
| GW wind, 218 GW nuclear.
|
| But that's a lower bound for PV, as that's growing with what
| looks like an approximately exponential long-term trend
| (since 1992) of 36.5% per year.
|
| While such a growth rate is physically possible to maintain
| for 28 years even without going into space, given that if we
| did make so much we wouldn't merely give everyone an American
| lifestyle but also be able to get the _entire_ human
| population _continuously flying_ [3], I'm assuming it will
| turn into a sigmoid before then.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_
| rea...
|
| [3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28105*1.365%5E%2828
| %2B...
| mlyle wrote:
| The thing is, 183GW from PV is like 20-30GW of nuclear,
| because nuclear's capacity factor is near 100% and PV's is
| often near 10%.
|
| Storage seems hard and expensive. We're going to need a
| whole lot of approaches:
|
| - Wind taking a bigger share of renewables
|
| - Whatever storage we can reasonably build, including some
| exotic stuff like power-to-gas-to-power.
|
| - Nuclear filling in a little bit
|
| - PV comically overbuilt and routinely throwing away a lot
| of power midday on most days.
|
| - Still peaking off natural gas, a little bit.
| ben_w wrote:
| Even at 10% capacity factor, _and_ with a sudden
| cessation of the long term exponential trend in PV, _and_
| assuming the 2021 numbers for new nuclear power while
| ignoring that more was shut down, that still leaves more
| than twice as much new PV as new nuclear.
| mlyle wrote:
| Sure, but I think we already know that we build a lot
| more PV than nuclear. The question is, should we build a
| bit more nuclear? Even a small change would be equivalent
| to a _lot_ of PV production, and provide power at times
| when PV can 't.
| ben_w wrote:
| Well on that point I agree completely, although mainly
| because I think it's a good idea to have a diversity of
| supply and not because it's the most cost effective.
|
| From what I've seen, the cheapest solution is a few
| square meters' cross section of HVDC encircling the
| planet, but that would almost certainly take a big
| increase in global metal mining even on these time scales
| and even when ignoring the political issues.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| For the USA, utility scale PV runs at a capacity factor
| of over 25% in the sunbelt and mid teens elsewhere. I
| suppose that may qualify as "often near 10%" but I think
| you are overstating it a bit, as really household PV is
| the only one that really is around 10%.
| mlyle wrote:
| See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31755603
|
| Note non-utility scale solar is 75% of the installed
| watts, too-- so you have a huge share of it pulling
| towards that 10-12% number.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Renewables' capacity factor is much greater than 10%, in
| practice. If you need falsehoods to make your case, you
| have no case.
| mlyle wrote:
| > > The thing is, 183GW from PV is like 20-30GW of
| nuclear, because nuclear's capacity factor is near 100%
| and PV's is often near 10%.
|
| > Renewables' capacity factor is much greater than 10%,
| in practice. If you need falsehoods to make your case,
| you have no case.
|
| Residential/commercial PV -- e.g. rooftop solar-- very
| often is 10% or less.
|
| If you want to _only_ look at utility-scale fixed tilt,
| instead, recent deployments average near (not quite) 20%.
|
| https://emp.lbl.gov/pv-capacity-factors
|
| Nuclear's capacity factor is 93%. In which case, 183GW
| from utility-scale, fixed-tilt PV is like 183/.93 * .20 =
| 39GW. Which, admittedly, is outside of my range of 20-30,
| but also relies on generous assumptions (utility scale
| projects only-- which are only ~25% of US solar wattage).
|
| If you consider _only_ tracking, you can get all the way
| to 49GW, which still doesn 't eliminate the point.
|
| Perhaps the bigger point is looking at the eastern
| seaboard. Shipping power 2000 miles is not super
| practical for various reasons, and the capacity factors
| for a whole region of the US are pretty poor.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Shipping power 2000 miles is absolutely super-practical.
|
| China has a project to send it 8000 miles from solar
| farms they are building in Chile, for use during
| nighttime in China.
| r00fus wrote:
| How much solar capacity is actually residential? I'd say
| quite small since solar is hard to deploy residential +
| lack of home value improvement.
|
| Nuclear should be part of the equation (it has it's own
| issues with wastewater) but if adding nuclear means not
| investing equally or more in solar/wind renewables,
| that's completely misguided.
| r00fus wrote:
| PV throwing off excess during peak is fine - if we have
| storage. Storage is has only recently become feasible, it
| would likely be utility-grade storage, Powerwall/home
| storage or Vehicle2Grid integration by the 2050
| timeframe.
|
| Storage cost being excessive means it's early adoption
| timeframe. As the need for it becomes clear options will
| open up.
| mlyle wrote:
| > PV throwing off excess during peak is fine
|
| PV throwing off excess during peak is fine even if we
| don't have storage, because it means PV is adequate for a
| bigger fraction of the morning and evening (and in turn,
| the needs for storage become a little less because of the
| over-provisioning of production).
| ncmncm wrote:
| Storage is cheap and getting cheaper even faster than
| solar.
|
| Batteries will only ever be a tiny fraction of storage.
| boringg wrote:
| Bill Gates, while wealthy and renowned for his tech
| contributions, has had some missteps in the climate energy
| space slowing down actual progress with his diversions (i.e.
| putting money/political will into new moon shots and saying
| that we don't have the technology to deal with this yet --
| instead of deploying readily available technology which is
| ready).
| ncmncm wrote:
| Bill Gates has not, in fact, been responsible for tech
| contributions. His effect has been balefully negative, from
| the get-go.
|
| He is personally responsible for "have you tried turning it
| off and on again?". Before MS, that was plenty of reason to
| demand a refund.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > instead of deploying readily available technology
|
| Well there's no opportunity for him to make inflated profits
| off a technology that he can't patent...
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-
| bi...
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| > There are no paths to clean energy by 2050 without nuclear
| power.
|
| This is either stupidly wrong or stupidly right.
|
| Stupidly right, there's fairly new nuclear plants in operation
| that there's no real reason to shut down, so will probably be
| running in 2050.
|
| Stupidly wrong, it seems to be placing some entirely
| unwarranted implication that without nuclear we'd be lost, when
| most serious analysis agree that renewables will be about 80%
| of energy production, which doesn't really leave much room for
| nuclear to take all the credit.
|
| IEA's net zero roadmap:
|
| > In the net zero pathway, global energy demand in 2050 is
| around 8% smaller than today, but it serves an economy more
| than twice as big and a population with 2 billion more people.
| More efficient use of energy, resource efficiency and
| behavioural changes combine to offset increases in demand for
| energy services as the world economy grows and access to energy
| is extended to all.
|
| > Instead of fossil fuels, the energy sector is based largely
| on renewable energy. Two-thirds of total energy supply in 2050
| is from wind, solar, bioenergy, geothermal and hydro energy.
| Solar becomes the largest source, accounting for one-fifth of
| energy supplies. Solar PV capacity increases 20-fold between
| now and 2050, and wind power 11-fold.
|
| > Net zero means a huge decline in the use of fossil fuels.
| They fall from almost four-fifths of total energy supply today
| to slightly over one-fifth by 2050. Fossil fuels that remain in
| 2050 are used in goods where the carbon is embodied in the
| product such as plastics, in facilities fitted with CCUS, and
| in sectors where low-emissions technology options are scarce.
|
| > Electricity accounts for almost 50% of total energy
| consumption in 2050. It plays a key role across all sectors -
| from transport and buildings to industry - and is essential to
| produce low-emissions fuels such as hydrogen. To achieve this,
| total electricity generation increases over two-and-a-half-
| times between today and 2050. At the same time, no additional
| new final investment decisions should be taken for new unabated
| coal plants, the least efficient coal plants are phased out by
| 2030, and the remaining coal plants still in use by 2040 are
| retrofitted. By 2050, almost 90% of electricity generation
| comes from renewable sources, with wind and solar PV together
| accounting for nearly 70%. Most of the remainder comes from
| nuclear.
| SECProto wrote:
| Expecting global energy consumption to drop 8% in the next 30
| years (while also reducing fossil fuel usage to 20% _and_ all
| of that with carbon capture and underground storage) is...
| hilariously unrealistic (or very pessimistic for overall
| energy usage trends). Here[1] 's a visualization of world
| energy usage over time. Here[2]'s a sketch I just made to
| show what the IEA apparently thinks will happen to get to net
| zero (per your post). Here[3]'s a tweet that looks at the
| IEA's other renewable energy forecasts over time (spoiler:
| they were laughably pessimistic, which doesn't instill
| confidence when they instead make a laughably optimistic
| forecast)...
|
| [1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
|
| [2] https://imgur.com/a/xvkZSRi
|
| [3]
| https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/1064529619951513600
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| It's easily possible because most energy we produce today
| is wasted as heat when burning it and dumping the carbon
| into the atmosphere.
|
| Since we're going to stop doing that, by electrifying lots
| of things that currently burn fuel, we can achieve both
| goals at the same time.
|
| The text on top of the graph you cite says this:
|
| "Primary energy is calculated based on the 'substitution
| method' which takes account of the inefficiencies in fossil
| fuel production by converting non-fossil energy into the
| energy inputs required if they had the same conversion
| losses as fossil fuels."
|
| It would be clearer to reduce the fossil fuel amounts by
| that percentage, since we currely don't use that energy,
| and in fact expend more energy trying to get rid of it as
| waste heat in many cases.
|
| And, note the difference betwene energy and electricity,
| they say electricity will grow by nearly 3x ("To achieve
| this, total electricity generation increases over two-and-
| a-half-times between today and 2050").
|
| You should look up recent graphs of renewable growth, with
| hydro seperated out, to see that your quick mock-up looks
| positively sedate by the recent standards of growth.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-change-
| renewables?...
|
| global renewables including hydro. Solar and Wind are
| barely noticeable until 2000, when wind, then solar (in
| 2010) grow from nothing to octuple previous hydro within
| about a decade:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-change-
| solar?tab=c...
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-change-
| wind?tab=ch...
|
| They have an article about why this is occuring too:
| https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
|
| I didn't choose IEA to demonstrate because they are the
| only outlier that support my point. My whole claim is that
| even the boring, cautious industry analysts are saying
| broadly the same thing.
|
| I think their assumptions about carbon capture are silly
| and more renewables will be built instead, but even their
| numbers make it clear than nuclear is a sideshow at best.
| r00fus wrote:
| 8% reduction sounds incredible considering our energy usage
| patterns, but if you yearly world google energy usage, key
| areas like coal/petro are actually down over the past 5
| years. Correspondingly NatGas and Renewables are up.
|
| Conversion efficiency of Solar/EV/battery storage vs.
| extraction/refining/storage/burning just for transportation
| is like 10x better.
|
| If EVs go with their curve (especially with petrol prices)
| we can project 80% are EVs on the road by 2040, that'd be a
| massive improvement in transport alone.
| SECProto wrote:
| > key areas like coal/petro are actually down over the
| past 5 years.
|
| The source I provided (current to 2019) does show coal
| down a hair (Peaked at ~45000 TWh in 2013, hovering
| around 44,000 TWh in 2019), but oil continuing to
| increase (49700 to 53600 over same period) and natural
| gas increasing even more (33700 to 39300). Renewables all
| increasing (solar 356-1793, Wind 1628-3540, even hydro
| 9765-10,455).
|
| The part that I think is unrealistic is dropping the
| fossil fuels to 20% and simultaneously restricting growth
| to negative 8%. Increased energy usage is desirable for
| anyone, so while decreasing renewable cost will certainly
| encourage wider adoption, I think a more realistic
| prediction would be at least 20-30% growth over the next
| 30 years (compared with ~75% growth over the last 30
| years, ~20% over the last 10 years alone). Fingers
| crossed we can do this simultaneously with abandoning
| current fossil assets.
| user_7832 wrote:
| >Stupidly wrong, it seems to be placing some entirely
| unwarranted implication that without nuclear we'd be lost,
| when most serious analysis agree that renewables will be
| about 80% of energy production, which doesn't really leave
| much room for nuclear to take all the credit.
|
| >IEA's net zero roadmap...
|
| I'd like to make a slightly vague rebuttal to your slightly
| vague rebuttal (ofc not your fault if the IEA doesn't
| explicitly say anything about nuclear, not blaming you). The
| IPCC has said that nuclear is necessary if we want to hit our
| climate goals.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| It gets a mention, just not a starring role:
|
| > By 2050, almost 90% of electricity generation comes from
| renewable sources, with wind and solar PV together
| accounting for nearly 70%. Most of the remainder comes from
| nuclear.
|
| So "no path to clean energy without solar" and "no path to
| clean energy without wind" are a bit more defensible,
| though in both cases, we'd just build more of the other
| one.
|
| "no path to clean energy without hydro"? Maybe, again we'd
| just build more solar and wind.
|
| So, if someone waves a wand and magically makes nuclear
| disappear (or just economically unattractive) then I think
| the our path is still fairly clear. No real need to take
| that path unless nuclear becomes much more relatively
| expensive, but it's definately an option, and possibly one
| we'll gladly take because it's cheaper.
| trashtester wrote:
| > By 2050, almost 90% of electricity generation comes
| from renewable sources, with wind and solar PV together
| accounting for nearly 70%. Most of the remainder comes
| from nuclear.
|
| In other words, IPCC counts nuclear as "renewable"?
| pfdietz wrote:
| No, the "remainder" that is nuclear is the 10% that
| renewables don't cover. The renewables other than
| solar/wind are things like hydro, geothermal, and
| waste/biomass.
| trashtester wrote:
| Ok, thx.
| BenoitP wrote:
| > most serious analysis agree that renewables will be about
| 80%
|
| Well, let's see them; and see how much they rely on yet to be
| proven industrially new storage tech (and without humongous
| mining activity)
| rswskg wrote:
| Yep!
|
| Once battery storage doesn't pan out(and it won't currently
| for trucks), I see synth hydrocarbons picking up the
| transport slack. But that will require alot of energy..
| ncmncm wrote:
| Trucks will operate on synthetic fuel, so no.
| ncmncm wrote:
| That is, synthetic ammonia. Which will be much cheaper
| than synthetic diesel.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I know HN is just _desperate_ for that i-told-you-so moment when
| fission rises from irrelevancy to save us all from climate
| change, but it 's just not going to happen. Look at this figure
| [1]. The amount of proposed solar and wind and battery projects
| in the United States at the end of 2021 was 1000s of time larger
| than the amount of proposed nuclear power projects. And one big
| difference is the renewables are actually built, while the
| fission projects never make progress. Fission's purported
| resurgence is a press release blitz being coordinated by defense
| contractor grifters who have no higher ambitions than raking a
| few tens of billions of dollars in consulting fees out of
| government budgets.
|
| 1: https://emp.lbl.gov/queues
| Phlogistique wrote:
| Did you mean fusion? Fission is certainly not irrelevant today!
| rectang wrote:
| Are there any Y Combinator companies who are invested in the
| advance of nuclear power?
| amacbride wrote:
| I know of Oklo, Helion, and UPower; there may be others.
| These three were relatively early (2014-2015 or so.)
| MrMan wrote:
| they are mostly sticking to web3 I think
| jeffbee wrote:
| There's Helion, a supposed fusion power company, but
| everything about it screams "fraud".
| pfdietz wrote:
| I think Helion is the most credible of all the fusion
| companies.
| IMTDb wrote:
| > The amount of proposed solar and wind and battery projects in
| the United States at the end of 2021 was 1000s of time larger
| than the amount of proposed nuclear power projects.
|
| Your article links to _capacity_ not _effective production when
| customer needs it_. The issue with electricity production
| resides in being able to _reliably_ produce electricity when
| customer needs it, not when planet aligns for [insert preferred
| electricity production method].
|
| It's great to say "I can produce 100Gw of green electricity",
| but if I ask you "Give me 30GW now" and you tell me "Best I can
| do now is 5GW, there are clouds in the sky", I'll kindly ask
| you to shut up about your "100GW capacity".
|
| As the recent price hikes in Europe have shown, the prices paid
| by customers is dictated by the cost of the most expensive
| megawatts. Solar and wind have not suddenly become pricier, but
| gas has. And as a consequence, prices paid by customers have
| increased proportionally.
|
| Batteries might seem like a good answer, but basic physics
| shows us that it is not remotely doable on a large scale, if we
| want to guarantee reliable supply. The energy density simply
| isn't there.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Please explain said "basic physics". I'll wait.
|
| California is building battery storage at a rate of
| ~2500MW/year. There are ZERO physics problems standing in the
| way of this. And there is considerable innovation in fixed
| batteries like iron-air flow batteries, ones that exist and
| aren't just VC scams like most of the nuclear stuff.
|
| https://www.energy-storage.news/california-utility-pge-
| propo...
| IMTDb wrote:
| Basic physics 101. The US produced 4 10^9
| MWh in 2017 [1] That's roughly 11 10^6 MWh / day or
| 11 10^12 Wh /day So to power 50% of the US for half
| a day, we need : 11 10^12 Wh /day * 0.5 day * 0.5 = 2.75
| 10^12 Wh = 275 10^10 Wh The energy storage of a
| Lithium Ion battery is roughly 270 Wh / kg [2], let's round
| this up to 275, I am feeling nice here. This means
| we need : 275 10^10 Wh / 275 Wh / kg = 1 * 10^10 kg of
| Lithium Ion batteries. That's 10 million tons of batteries
| The total reserve of lithium for the whole world are
| roughly 20 million tons [3]
|
| The US cannot claim half the total worldwide lithium
| reserve to give batteries for half a day for half their
| population. It does not work like this.
|
| [1] https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/energy-storage-2019
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery [3]
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1253739/lithium-
| reserves...
| pfdietz wrote:
| You do know that lithium is just a few percent of the
| mass of a lithium-ion battery, right?
|
| Also, I didn't realize that Li-ion batteries were the
| only conceivable energy storage technology.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Ah, so the basic physics problems are twofold:
|
| 1) You don't know how little lithium is contained in a
| li-ion battery cell; and
|
| 2) You don't know that li-ion is less than half the
| global battery market.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| The United States is not the only place in the world. There are
| other countries with their own idiosyncrasies where different
| strategies may make more sense, and they all vent to the same
| atmosphere. So maybe if you're going to make a dismissing post
| such as this, about _global_ emissions, you should include
| arguments that cover places that are not the United States.
| Shadonototra wrote:
| spot on! no wonder you get downvoted! nobody likes to hear the
| truth over here
| nabla9 wrote:
| You make huge order of magnitude errors in your thinking
|
| Nuclear provides the so called base load (the minimum level of
| electricity demand required). To replace base load with
| renewables + energy storage requires so much CAPEX and battery
| manufacturing that you don't have money to fill gaps between
| caseload needs and renewable energy production.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The state of California has built more battery capacity in
| the last six months than the entire nation has built of
| fission power plants in the last 25 years. It is extremely
| easy to build batteries for fixed service, and bulk
| semiconductor manufacturing is the #1 thing that humans are
| good at. These problems are absolutely solved, the whole
| industry thinks so, that's why the whole industry is behind
| pv+wind+storage, as demonstrated at that link I posted.
| nabla9 wrote:
| As I said, order of magnitude error.
|
| > has built
|
| But enough?
|
| Global battery manufacturers have invested so much that
| they can take total battery capacity to more than 5,500 GWh
| by by 2030. US would need something like 3000 Gwh of energy
| storage to replace the base load. (within days, then few
| weeks). It would would be insane misuse of resources.
| fallingknife wrote:
| In 2021 US power consumption was 3.93 PWh. 5500 GWh is a
| bit over 12 hours of consumption. Not gonna cut it. And
| that's assuming 100% of the batteries are used for grid
| storage, and there is no demand growth in the next 8
| years.
| ZetaZero wrote:
| With Vogtle 3 & 4, the only nuclear plants coming online
| in the US, the construction costs are now projected to be
| $30 billion for 2.2 GW. We'd need ~1000 of these size
| plants to power the US. That's not going to cut it
| either.
| fallingknife wrote:
| You mathed wrong. You would need a little over 200, but
| no one is suggesting powering the whole grid with
| nuclear.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Nuclear is needed for base load, not for all electricity
| needs.
|
| Nuclear is the most cost effective way to achieve base
| load.
| nickles wrote:
| > However, much of this proposed capacity will not
| ultimately be built. Among a subset of queues for which
| data are available, only 23% of the projects seeking
| connection from 2000 to 2016 have subsequently been built.
| Completion percentages appear to be declining, and are even
| _lower for wind and solar than other resources_.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Wind and solar are fighting very hard to replace existing
| supply at a comparable cost. It's a luxury substitute. We need
| more supply for cheaper.
| ZetaZero wrote:
| Is Nuclear cheaper?
| dosenbrot wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sour
| c... Depends. With just the cost per kWh is photovoltaic
| cheaper, but you would need additional storage for the
| nighttime, so it would become more expensive than nuclear.
| Also this didn't account for winter time (in Germany
| photovoltaic make 5-10% compared to summer) and storing a
| half year worth of energy is going to be funny.(this will
| cost way way more than nuclear) A nuclear power plant could
| run 24/7 the whole year.
| Brometheus wrote:
| Its only mid-november til mid-february that really sees a
| strong dip in production.
| dosenbrot wrote:
| And the other months it's a not-so-strong dip in
| production (Jan 16%, Feb 31%, Mar 57%, Apr 94%, Jun 100%,
| Jul 100%, Aug 87%, Sep 60%, Okt 41%, Nov 22%, Dec 13%).
| This means (for germany) we have to install more than
| 170% PV and store 3 months worth of energy for half a
| year (or install 800% and don't store anything). It's
| just a very rough estimation, but it's clear that one
| can't compare the cost of 1kWh PV to 1kWh nuclear (at
| least if one doesn't live in the desert).
| ZetaZero wrote:
| No one is suggesting PV alone. My understanding is that
| Germany already gets more power from wind. Wind still
| works at night and in the winter, right?
| fallingknife wrote:
| Well that probably won't happen. The I told you so moment will
| be more like in 20 years when we didn't build nuclear, still
| don't have economically viable tech for a renewal only grid,
| and are still burning fossil fuels.
| mgfist wrote:
| > The amount of proposed solar and wind and battery projects in
| the United States at the end of 2021 was 1000s of time larger
| than the amount of proposed nuclear power projects
|
| Because the public has been anti nuclear energy for the past 4
| decades.
|
| > And one big difference is the renewables are actually built,
| while the fission projects never make progress.
|
| Nuclear energy regulations are an absolute nightmare and make
| building anything virtually impossible.
|
| You're not necessarily wrong with your point, but man the world
| would've been so much cleaner if we didn't abandon nuclear
| energy 40 years ago. Now that we've lost all expertise and have
| neglected research, yes it's very hard for nuclear energy to
| make a huge resurgence.
| pydry wrote:
| It was always too expensive. It wasnt hippy peaceniks that
| killed it. It was money.
|
| The odd catastrophe didnt help though.
|
| Why there is a resurgence of interest now when dirt cheap
| solar and wind have effectively rendered it a costly relic of
| the past is somewhat puzzling.
|
| I guess PR campaigns like the OP's link are one reason.
| mgfist wrote:
| It's expensive when you rely on cheap Russian/ME fossil
| fuels
|
| > Why there is a resurgence of interest now when dirt cheap
| solar and wind have effectively rendered it a costly relic
| of the past is somewhat puzzling.
|
| If cheap solar/wind was enough right now Europe wouldn't be
| going through an energy crisis.
| otherme123 wrote:
| Solar is cheap since 2012 or so. 10 years is not enough
| to make a full shift. But we europeans are going there:
| 15 GW installed in 2019, 20 GW in 2020 and 23 GW in 2021.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > If cheap solar/wind was enough right now Europe
| wouldn't be going through an energy crisis.
|
| It's an oil/gas crisis, not an electricity crisis - that
| one went away when the days started getting longer.
| Brometheus wrote:
| Germany had a Solar buildout cap at 50GW because of our
| coal lobby.
| nicoburns wrote:
| There isn't enough solar/wind or nuclear to power Europe
| _right now_. The question is which power mix will be best
| in a decade 's time.
| otherme123 wrote:
| Regulations are a nightmare for good reasons. Nuclear power
| is safe because regulations are a nightmare. Yes, we could
| build Chernobyl-like power plants with soviet-like
| regulations, that are cheap. That leads sooner or later to
| Chernobyl-like accidents.
|
| If nuclear power depends on lowering the safety regulations
| to be economically viable, it is not economically viable, at
| least for now.
|
| Take for example the infamous Flamanville third reactor: it
| could be opened by 2014, but "nightmare" regulations detected
| flawed components. A year later, regulations detected faults
| in cooling valves. Three years later, the secondary cooling
| systen didn't meet regulations. A year later, a failure in
| steam pipes delayed more the opening, literally more than 100
| defective welds. All of the delays combined more than tripled
| the costs, but to me they sound valid requirements.
| mgfist wrote:
| You're not necessarily wrong. At the end of the day we lost
| all nuclear expertise when the public turned against it 40
| years ago.
|
| Per kwh fossil fuel disasters have killed more people and
| have caused more damage to the environment. Compare the
| public reactions to the Three Mile Island Accident vs the
| BP oil spill.
| IMTDb wrote:
| The problem isn't the safety regulation, but the opening
| authorisation regulations. Because we basically forbid the
| opening of new reactors _regardless of their safety_ we
| have said to all people with nuclear expertise "Go find
| another job, you industry is a dead end".
|
| Instead of saying to welders "Learn nuclear grade welding,
| develop a valued expertise and you are going to have a
| safe, well paying job for the next 30 years". We told them
| "this is the last reactor we're gonna do, do the bare
| minimum and find something else, your job is gone anyway".
|
| Instead of saying to your graduates "Study nuclear and you
| are going to work in building/managing reactors and provide
| carbonless energy to your country" we told them "If you
| study nuclear, all you are going to do is dismantle old
| reactors we don't want to see anymore".
|
| And surprise: 25 years later we have a very hard time
| properly building and maintaining reactors. And _that_ is
| the consequence of the opening authorisation regulations.
| otherme123 wrote:
| I don't know who you are referring with "we forbid".
| Certainly not we Europe, because there are 3 reactors
| currently being built, 7 planned and 16 proposed. Again,
| Flamanville is delayed mainly _because of safety issues_
| , and not _regardless_.
|
| Industries rise and fall. Coal is largely being phased
| out (in Europe), so coal miners are expected to lose
| their jobs and certainly their sons are not going to be
| miners. Of course they sang the same tune "we need
| guaranteed and well paid jobs for the next 30 years, and
| then for our youth", but sadly no industry is free from
| falling.
|
| If nuclear power cannot teach their people to weld
| properly, they cannot exist. If their plan is to wait for
| the state to send them fully formed, the plan is flawed.
| It's like tomorrow Google or Facebook cries because MIT
| isn't teaching how to harvest data properly.
| bullen wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4
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