The only American reactors currently under construction, Vogtle 3 and 4, were originally supposed to be built in less than 5 years but are now projected to take 8 years.
But maybe the American reactors aren't intended to be part of the generation added by 2024. India does have 7 reactors currently under construction.
2024 is an eyewatering timeframe, but the actual construction might not be the hardest part. The Chinese have figured out how to do prefabbed skyscrapers in 19 days [0] and the prefabbing is probably highly parallel. If a nuclear plant is 100 times harder than a skyscraper to build that is still only about 5 years as a lower bound.
If they've already done the scoping, fundraising, location picking and had a construction firm who optimised for speed & quality but not cost then I can see ~5 years as achievable, although they probably won't manage it. This is one of nuclear many advantages over more usual nonrenewable, things can happen orders of magnitude more quickly because the physical footprint is so small.
AFAIK one limitation is forging of the large pressure vessels, mainly the reactor itself and the steam generators. Those take a long time. Of course you can do multiple ones in parallel, but then the limit is that there's about 25 heavy forge presses on the planet, of which only a subset are doing nuclear work. So in total the capacity at the moment is maybe 50 large pressure vessels per year worldwide. If one plant requires one reactor and 4 steam generators that would then be 10 plants per year.
Of course it's possible to increase the worldwide heavy forging capacity, but again, something that takes time.
Then there are many reactor designs that don't use water as a coolant or moderator; those are obviously not restricted by heavy forge capacity. But those reactors are mostly on the drawing board and not available off the shelf.
Why would forging be a requirement? Hasn't material science reached a point where we can built alloys that can be just cast into the right shape? Can't the problem of them being slightly weaker be solved by just making them thicker (not a problem for nuclear I'd guess bc you don't build that many pieces and you don't need to move them much), or by just having stuff like turbines replaced more often?
I know that mixing "nuclear" + "cheaper manufacturing" sounds scary, but maybe it's a better idea... why would you need "best of the best" materials for pieces that (1) stay in one place (they're not airplanes!) and (2) can be replaced/serviced/inspected on fixed schedules following fixed procedures on fixed budgets etc.
Modern forges were perfected by the germans in the war because they wanted to build airplane parts (!!) and they wanter to build them fast... I'd imagine nuclear power technology has none of this requirements and can be re-designed to work with commodity low-quality parts and have the movable pieces easily replace-able...
(I'd imagine that if people would get over the "uuh, nuclear, scarry, scarry" mindset nuclear technology could become a dirt cheap commodity and be build with a mixture of ceramics + cheap alloys just fine...)
That's a pretty good question, so I looked things up a little. Casting, especially on pieces this big, is difficult. It has problems with chemical segregation due to temperature gradients in the material, as well as porosity from the differential shrinkage due to the same temperature gradients [1,2]. From [2] "Consolidation of porosity formed in the ingot during solidification and homogenization is the major aim of the initial stage of forging. After that, the material is forged to form the shape of the desired products." The porosity and chemical segregation if I remember correctly, is very bad in nuclear applications, where bubbling and embrittlement would only be accelerated in non-homogenous materials. They are usually 1 piece to minimize welds, and this is just a feeling, but I think replacing the pressure vessel is pretty much currently the same as buying a new reactor [4]. These are very radioactive 1000 ton pieces of solid metal that you need to move and dispose of. Interesting question though, and I'd want to look into it more later.
You are absolutely right, casting large objects with homogeneous composition and mechanical properties is very difficult practically. Slightly off topic, but the turbine blades used in the aircraft/marine/power engines are grown from single crystal for similar reasons.
The quality of the steel is the hard part of this. It is incredibly important to not have any defects in the pressure systems & turbine of a nuclear plant for obvious reasons.
If Nuclear was committed to, would the number of these heavy forge presses likely go up, and costs come down?
I have no idea, but it does seem that if there are bottlenecks in the process, demand for nuclear could bring costs come down dramatically. Am I missing something here?
Those heavy presses themselves seem to be nation-state level engineering projects, so it's unlikely that anyone would build more of them than they absolutely need.
Or well, maybe costs wouldn't come down that much, since AFAIK press forging is a pretty mature technology.
I'm just saying a heavy press forge is a major infrastructure project on its own, and it won't just happen by snapping our fingers. It will take time.
Then there's the question of whether it makes sense to embark on a major buildout of current style large light water reactors? If the market shifts towards smaller modular reactors (SMR's), then for light water SMR's smaller forges would likely do. Or further in the future non-water low pressure designs.
My opinion is that given the urgency of addressing climate change, coal pollution etc., yes we should embark on a major buildout of currently available reactor types, while also massively increasing advanced reactor R&D&commercialization funding.
Vogtle is even worse than that... Ground works started in 2009/2010 -- Best case scenario right now is first power by 2022/2023 and if they stay on budget from here, cost will be 100% more than first estimated. So much good money being thrown after bad.
It's a trope that Nuclear is failing because of fearmongering. Nuclear is uneconomical, especially with renewable energy dropping in cost consistently. Is France, the long time operator of one of the largest fleets, afraid of nuclear - I think it is very experienced at managing nuclear, both old gen and the very newest gen reactors. And yet this article:
France will save 39 billion euros ($44.5 billion) if it refrains from building 15 new nuclear plants by 2060, and bets instead on renewable energy sources to replace its all its aging atomic facilities, a government agency said.
France should spend 1.28 trillion euros over the next four decades, mostly on clean power production and storage capacities, networks, and imports, according to a report from the country’s environment ministry. If it does this, France would progressively shut down its 58 atomic plants and renewable energy would comprise 95 percent of its electricity output by 2060, up from 17 percent last year
"It's a trope that Nuclear is failing because of fearmongering."
I think it's a large scale astroturfing effort by the nuclear industry (which is huge, with a very small number of players) and the useful rubes who play along.
Nuclear may be a necessary part of the grid mix, but the panacea presented has never remotely been close to reality -- every build takes much longer than promised, and always, with 100% certainty, costs billions more than planned. Every build has maintenance that costs multiples of the claims, operation that is far more expensive, and with waste products that there is still no viable solution for, with an eternity of costs dragging them down. And nuclear only exists because the public subsidizes it by eschewing the need for real insurance (which would be prohibitively expensive otherwise).
In every economic sense nuclear has been an enormous boondoggle, and they stopped making them because every energy provider got wise. This has nothing to do with fearmongering or some sort of ignorant public -- quite the contrary, the overwhelming public sentiment had no problem with nuclear -- though that claim frequently appears. It's bizarre.
To postulate a detachment of the economics of nuclear from public perception very hard to justify in my opinion.
Certainly nuclear has been expensive to build and operate, and the industry is by no means innocent in this. On the other hand, it's extremely regulated, and the bureaucracy built up makes it very expensive, for example, to make a routine change during construction from the blueprints. No other industry is as regulated as nuclear.
During operation it's the same way. You can spend many person-months dealing with corrective action procedures that are mandated, etc. Many of these are considered by the industry to not actually affect safety. For instance the NRC finds like 22,000 "green" findings and a few hundred "white" ones per year. The white ones have low safety significance. Yet, the paperwork and follow-up is nearly crippling.
That's good right? Because nuclear is dangerous? Wrong. Commercial nuclear over its 60 years of commercial operation has killed as many people as coal (operating as designed) kills every single day. Every time a nuclear plant shuts down, more people die because of increased air pollution.
It's not rational. It's regulated so much because people are afraid of it. It's expensive entirely because of fearmongering.
It could very well be that nuclear is so safe because of all the bureaucracy that is required. Its safety record is not a good argument for abolishing the red tape. The fact is that failure scenarios of nuclear plants are very dangerous.
Are they? Tmi was before the red tape was excessive and Fukushima was a huge meltdown from a massive tsunami. How many people died from the radiation released from both combined?
The answer is zero.
I'm not saying we go non-regulated. I'm saying the current regs may be too much. I'd argue that climate change is now more of a threat than more carbon-free nuclear plants.
Isn't Fukishima still leaking into the Pacific? And hasn't the world had to redefine "safe" measures and recommendations for pregnant women and children to abstain from ocean fish because of it? Long term effects could be very bad.
I'm actually in favor of more nuclear power in the U.S. mainland. But certain locations are definitely more or less safe than others. I'm also in favor of streamlining a lot of regulation, if those responsible for a human error based disaster (including managers up to the president/ceo of contsruction/management org) potentially being hanged as a result (not shot, not electric, not chemical injection, hanged till dead).
Nuclear waste only gets talked about because it is visible.
Waste that goes into the air? Waste from mines in third world countries? Out of sight out of mind.
Nuclear waste is easily containable, and the country that generates the power has to pay for it. Not only that, but newer reactor designs can take existing nuclear waste in, outputting energy and a smaller pile of waste.
> every build takes much longer than promised, and always, with 100% certainty, costs billions more than planned.
That's true of pretty much every large infrastructure project in the US (and probably outside the US, but I'm less familiar with that side of things). Nuclear reactors are hardly unique in that regard.
>I think it's a large scale astroturfing effort by the nuclear industry
Just to be clear, you think that the nuclear industry is paying people to go on line and say positive things about nuclear power? Can I get some kind of source for this claim?
While I led off with "I think", the notion that this is outlandish is a curious response. Every large industry has social media massaging efforts (and nuclear has layers and layers of lobbying and PR groups), and I see no reason why nuclear would be free of this. The recurring "Nuclear is the only hope" posts on various social media sites come with regular frequency.
But they also have a number of former well-known figures who are quite literally on their payroll. People like Patrick Moore who they pay to write editorials -- always with the byline that he was a Greenpeace activist (yet never noting that he's paid to do this) -- heralding the wonders of nuclear energy. It's a massive industry, and every plant is tens of billions of dollars, so of course they engage in these efforts.
The actual reason you hear a lot of broad support for nuclear is that the energy source is simply quite exciting from a physics point of view. There are roughly 2 million times more Joules in a kg of uranium nuclear bonds than in a kg of anything with chemical bonds (like oil, coal, gas) [1]. A nuclear reactor can operate for decades, powering a city on a few dump-trucks of fuel with no air pollution and no carbon emissions. The imaginations of tech-friendly people run wild with this pure-physics advantage, and one can't help but wonder if it's possible to harness this energy source successfully for the benefit of an enterprising mankind.
I am one such person who let my imagination run wild. I then spent a decade getting a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering, and then spent another decade trying to develop advanced nuclear reactors. I have dozens upon dozens of friends and colleagues who feel the same way, mostly to help solve the climate change and energy poverty issues. This is not some cynical PR campaign. This is young, smart, energetic, and excited people trying to make the best of the world's natural resources through advanced technology.
The nuclear industry is famously pathetic with PR (the old guard think it's best to hide and hope anti-nuclear forces will go away). Can you even think of one pro-nuclear advertisement you've ever seen? Or a positive portrayal in a movie? Or in the news? I cannot. All I can see is Captain Planet and MacGyver and The Simpsons and all the monster movies that show nuclear as some dark scary force with a bunch of environment-hating goons dumping ooze into the river.
Mix this with magnitudes of pure ignorance in the difference between nuclear weapons waste (ooze, river, Hanford, Mayak) and commercial nuclear waste (solid, ceramic, like a teacup, dry casks, never hurt a soul), and you've got yourself a nuclear PR issue that needs some grassroots help.
And I'm sure you're just being paid by the green energy lobby. Isn't is curious how "popular" green energy has suddenly become? It seems incredibly suspicious. It can obviously only be astroturfing.
>I think it's a large scale astroturfing effort by the nuclear industry
Either you don’t know what astroturfing means or you believe in a conspiracy there is no evidence of (nuclear companies faking HN commenter support for nuclear). Either way, this adds nothing to a conversation because it gives reasons for people on any side of the argument to just ignore any material facts or logic.
Rather than assuming that everyone who supports nuclear is a fake account or a shill, perhaps you should try to address arguments directly?
>This has nothing to do with fearmongering or some sort of ignorant public
That’s incorrect. Yucca Mountain is an example. The reactions to Fukushima on the news were another. The Diablo plant that was closed early has been consistently plagued by protests based on irrational fears.
You seem to think that a majority of people supporting nuclear is relevant. It’s not considering the tiny percentage of people required to throw up NIMBY roadblocks at all levels of government.
Example: Despite their tiny population, anti vaxxers are a major problem.
With enough effort pretty soon you have a good foundation of useful rubes who will repeat your claims ad nausea as fact. The claim that nuclear has mostly come to a halt because of fearmongering is one such claim, easily and completely disproven with even the most cursory of analysis. Somehow it comes back from the dead as if it's just those pesky fearmongers, and not nuclear's horrid history (not in accidents or deaths, where it has done spectacularly, but in pure economics), that's to blame.
Most nuclear builds in the west saw extraordinarily little opposition. Ever. We saw a massive spike in builds that went on for a few decades, but it slowly sputtered to a halt because of real-world economics and utilities becoming jaded. Economics that saw that nuclear was overhyped, and the process around it (a process necessary for a platform that can cause enormous economic and ecological damage if it goes awry) made it much less of a win.
Not one nuclear plant has been delayed or not built because of the Yucca Mountain issue (which is a classic issue where you're asking a jurisdiction to take the problems with none of the benefits). Dry cask storage is doing fine.
We're just entering the period where nuclear power plants are nearing end of life stages, where countless billions in costs are going to come due that everyone just whistled and looked the other way about. The massive nuclear hype was courtesy of the 1950s style new age everything is better enthusiasm, and was critical for building out the grid, and is still a very important part of the mix. However they aren't being built because of some soccer mom nattering about Fukushima, but instead because the people who run the energy grid are choosing much less expensive options. Wind and solar are much less expensive full stop, and gas turbines are cheaper because no one has to pay for the carbon released, which has its own problems that we're going to pay a heavy price for.
Gas turbines with CCS are still probably much cheaper than nuclear. The president of Exelon (a US corporation that operates 23 nuclear reactors) has stated that CO2 taxes in the US would have to be $300-400/tonne for nuclear to compete with natural gas. CCS could be done for less than that. Hell, direct air capture of CO2 could likely be done for less than that!
I have issues using French costings because I can't read the primary sources, and there are a lot of stupid environmentalists out there who misrepresent the costs. I'm going to commit the same sin and point out that people are willing to claim 'renewables in Germany are pulling down wholesale prices!' and ignore the fact that their retail prices are amongst the highest in Europe because they are charging a massive renewable-support tariff.
The experience in Australia is nobody has considered nuclear because one political party (labour) has historically had a policy of banning the technology. The economics of the costs have never been tested because of the hysterical response to radiation risk. I suspect if it was regulated to the same safety standards as solar it would be very cost-competitive indeed.
That's a ridiculous analysis of anti-nuclear sentiment in Australia. Australia is a democracy and many minor political parties have responded to genuine community concerns that developed since the cold war around non-proliferation, disarmament, testing, nuclear waste management, aboriginal land rights, mining degradation.
The current focus of energy policy is on reducing GHG emissions, reliability and affordability of supply. The installed cost of nuclear power does not make it an attractive option compared to fast installation of solar and wind generation.
Labor dropped their policy back in '07 because it was a stupid policy, you know.
> non-proliferation, disarmament, testing
You don't need to do any of that jazz to have nuclear power. The existence of cheap and clean nuclear power would in fact be a powerful stabilising force and likely to promote world peace.
> nuclear waste management
Are there worries here that cannot be fairly summed up as concerns about radiation risk? The volumes are tiny and trivially manageable apart from that.
> aboriginal land rights, mining degradation
Those are simply anti-mining concerns. There is nowhere in Australia that mining doesn't interact with somebody's land rights. There is also no organised political force in Australia that wants to ban mining - even the Greens are not opposed to mining in principle.
> The installed cost of nuclear power does not make it an attractive option ...
Maybe. I'm not up to date with the current costs for wind and solar but I've been consistently told they were the cheapest option and it has been consistently proven they are not. Happily the evidence is a lot more compelling this round but I'm waiting to see the whole-of-grid picture.
That doesn't change the fact that there was a long stretch of Australia's history where the most economic cheap & clean source of energy was basically blanket banned due to a major parties policy. You'd have to be stupid to try and run the gauntlet with nuclear power in the current political environment, so I doubt it is going to get a fair go.
39 billion of 1.28 trillion is 3%. Does that mean they only save 3% when betting on falling prices for renewables? For four decades? Doesn't sound much like a financial advantage compared to the (presumably) more predictable and stable prices for nuclear
The only thing predictable about nuclear construction prices and schedules is that they tend to go over by 2x-4x or higher (but they tend to get canceled at that point).
The 3% difference is a reasonable criticism, meaning that they're basically at parity cost wise in this comparison. But then you really have to add the 1000+ year waste storage costs - which even if not ignored, are ridiculous to estimate costs for.
Is that because its a nuclear project, or because its a large civic project? With everything from the California High-Speed Rail project to New York's public transit system to the F35 fighter jet I don't really think the US is going to be getting any major projects done again without absolutely demolishing anything resembling a budget, at least in the near future.
I don't think you can separate nuclear projects from being large civic projects, but I agree with you on something going massively wrong with US large project capability. IMHO, it's the rise of a specialist-in-managment-only class of executive in the US more than other nations.
Only in the US. France has well-managed public works and they use standardized reactor designs for economies of scale. That doesn’t prevent snafus on new designs like the Superphenix fast breeder reactor, but nothing like the US’ absurd cost disease.
Doesn't sound much like a financial advantage compared to the (presumably) more predictable and stable prices for nuclear.
Reactors that are already built and in good operating order provide very predictable electricity at low-moderate costs.
Building new reactors is much less predictable. France's latest reactor design, the EPR, is many years behind schedule and many billions over budget at both French and Finnish projects to build the new reactor. It was even years late when built in China, where presumably no lawsuits/activists/excessive safety regulations were ever allowed to get in the way.
Also, we're now in an environment where power technology is changing rapidly, due to the rapid decline in cost of renewables. In that environment, any long term investment is suspect. This is one reason combustion turbines held on: they have lower capital cost, so if they're made obsolete in a couple of decades it's not as big a hit.
Does that account for the space available in India? How much land would it take to provide power for 1.3 billion people?
I think the idea that renewables will be feasible in a country India's size with India's population, while preserving much if any natural space seems, at best, optimistic.
By all means Australia - the 6th largest country by area in the world with a population of 25ish million has the space. But India? Sure it is the 7th largest country by area, but it is less than half Australia's size, with 50-70 times the population (India's population estimates are tricky).
The scariest part of these debates is that the solution is likely energy dependence, as in countries with space - and day more sunshine - sell electricity to those without it. I don't think ANYONE likes that idea, but I can't see any way that it is feasible worldwide while maintaining each country's energy independence.
People say this, but they never explain where the power will come from when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining. I hear people throw out "batteries" as if that word is some sort of solution.
You build these[1]. When the sun shines and the wind blows excess power reverses the turbines, when there is demand on the grid water flows and turbines spin back to generate power.
The project – begun in 1974 and costing £425 million[6]
So, constructing this storage facility costed basically as much as constructing an actual nuclear power plant in 1970s of equivalent generating capacity. Thus, if instead of these, we simply build nuclear plants, we'll likely save money and won't have to deal with instability of generation.
> There are several islands already running on solar, wind, and batteries alone.
EDIT Which is awesome, and surely beats running diesel generators!
Which presumably don't have large, dense cities nor heavy industry?
> If every six months the rate at which a million EVs are sold, how much battery storage is that over the next decade? My math says tens of GWs.
Battery costs are orders of magnitude too high to make sense for anything but very short term storage. Yes, they are fantastic for some ancillary services like frequency control. And with lots of solar and air conditioning, might allow you to get past the duck curve hump in the evenings.
Providing energy for a couple weeks when a high pressure system has parked on your country and wind produces 0? Forget it.
Iceland has a lot of industrial aluminum smelting operations there because they have very low cost renewable hydro power...
Flow batteries will come online to carry the storage past where high volume production lithium cost savings can't reach. I think if we put nearly the same or as consistent capital into renewable as we put into even the last decade of fossil fuel discovery, we'll find that costs drop very very rapidly.
Nuclear proponents bring this up, but it's not an argument that saves nuclear. Nuclear is quite horrible at providing backup power, since it has large fixed costs.
In a cost optimized no-CO2 system, you'll see renewables providing immediate power, short term storage (batteries, pumped hydro) carrying over shorter outages, and some sort of peaking capacity for longer lulls in sun/wind. Overcapacity of the renewables + longer distance transmission will help, as will end-user storage of heat/cold. The peaking capacity will be used only a small fraction of the time, and will be powered by hydrogen (either from electrolysis from excess renewable output, or from NG steadily reformed to H2 and the H2 stored for use during the peaks, and the CO2 from the reformers sequestered). Simple cycle plants are ~40% efficient and cost < $400/kW.
Nuclear can be cheap. We have decided to make it expensive.
We throw away 95% of the fuel. This is because Carter gave an order to not reprocess old fuel rods. Well, we would throw away 95%, but actually we just keep it sitting around for political reasons. Most of our fissionable material is sitting in containment ponds.
The NRC refuses to give guidance. They will only approve a reactor or disapprove it, given a finalized design. You have to do all the design work up front, completely in the dark, and then you get a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down.
Every stupid insignificant part involves absurd paperwork, right down to changing the lightbulbs.
Nuclear fuel is very cheap per kWh generated. It's so cheap that people don't bother with breeder reactors, because the potential savings in fuel costs are trivial.
It's not why nuclear is expensive. It's the construction costs.
And operation costs. Construction and operation costs are both hampered by regulatory burden that is not currently commensurate with the statistical risk.
It understates the statistical risk! Nuclear power plants have international treatise to severely curtail their liability in the event of an accident because nuclear events are extraordinarily costly.
Fukushima thus far has yielded some $700B USD of costs, and it has no end in site. Chernobyl has been estimated at having cost $235B USD.
No insurance company would touch this sort of liability, so governments put a hard cap on the potential liability. Here in Ontario, nuclear plants were only responsible for $75M of damage for the longest time, though over the next few years it will increase to $1B. The actual damage it could reasonably cost -- what any other industry would have to insure for -- would be more in the $1000B ($1T) range.
Yeah, I actually think the advanced nuclear companies should say they don't need things like Price-Anderson to cap liabilities. They're really that safe, and the designers are that confident. Doing so would demonstrate that level of confidence.
The fair comparison, though, is: what's the cost of global warming, and who will insure against it once fossil fuel emitters are held liable?
Also, if we looked at the latest research on low-dose radiation effects and really let that sink in, we'd spend far less on the cleanup of near background dose stuff after the few accidents that do occur.
> It's a trope that Nuclear is failing because of fearmongering. Nuclear is uneconomical, especially with renewable energy dropping in cost consistently.
You are ignoring that the fearmongering has over a long time influenced laws and regulation to make it uneconomical. To pretend there is no correlation is simply disingenuous.
It was a hope of many senators that wanted to get the 'green' vote to systematically defund and over-regulate nuclear. Nuclear innovation was significantly hindered by political interest on ever level, federal to local and I can go into lots of examples.
It is actually well known and confirmed that anti-nuclear organization such as green peace had a deliberate political strategy to focus on one thing only, more regulation for nuclear TO make it more expensive. The 'nuclear is unsafe' hammer has turned out to be very effective because most people and even most politicians don't know the facts. The coal and oil interest of course have a nice alliance with the greenpeace types and together nuclear was systematically hindered.
Just look at the current regulatory agency and the almost complete standstill in improvements since they took over.
If you look the production of nuclear reactors in the US you will see that they were on pace to replace coal power when building them was not much more expensive then a coal plant. Since then we had almost zero innovation and cost have exploded.
If you just look at the resources required for nuclear, there is no reason it should be so expensive. The problem is that we are using 60 year old designs because innovation has been made totally impossible thanks to the regulatory framework.
What damage does it actually make to the environment when creating solar panels? I mean, what materials are gathered, distributed and collected from where? What is the break even point just on cost, not even counting environmental impact.
All this renewable stuff and the saving are total theory. There is no industrial country that is even close to being fully renewable. France would do much better to replace their nuclear reactors with more modern once over a long time.
These reactors work for almost 100 years while you have to replace solar panels and wind multiple times.
Not to mention intermittency is not even close to being solved.
Every actual attempted of using renewable has skyrocketed costs however much people want to ignore that.
I’ll bet you lunch the US replaces every GW of nuclear generation with solar, wind, and utility scale energy storage in 10 years (sooner than any nuclear generator would come online).
Disclaimer: I am an armchair energy policy enthusiast, and aggregate generator permitting, construction, turn up, operation, and decommissioning data for visualization and production siting.
Sure, maybe that happens. Only an irrational culture would squander an obviously great energy source.
But you cannot dispute the massive resources, and square footage it requires to accomplish that future of massive wind farms, every building with solar panels installed, and huge battery warehouses littered throughout the nation... especially when compared to a handful of modern Nuclear Reactor Plants.
More people die installing Solar Roof Panels than from all the Nuclear energy production combined [1][2][3]
I don’t dispute the land constraints, it’s the economics you can’t argue with. Solar and wind at utility scale are below 2 cents/kWh and falling. Nuclear cannot compete with that in any configuration.
You can make roof installs safer (process, hardware), utility installs on the ground are already safe. No one has any place to store nuclear waste, no one will insure it, and no one wants to tie capital up for decades in nuclear generators.
Nuclear, like coal, is a wonderful fuel if you can foist all of the externalities on someone else.
The Solar and Wind kWh production doesn't take into account having to store it, which costs additional money. Nuclear didn't become expensive all on it's own... it became expensive after 60+ years of not building new Nuclear plants in the United States and keeping only a few outdated first-generation plants...
Modern Nuclear plants are very safe, and very cost effective... and can ramp up or down energy production on demand. Plus, they can be built wherever people want... not just where sunlight or wind patterns are suitable.
Solar Roof Panel installation is dangerous because people fall off the roof...yet, that alone has led to more deaths than Nuclear energy production.
The U.S. Navy has gone 60 years without a nuclear accident (the entire history since inception of the "Nuclear Navy")... and that's in vehicles (both surface and submarine vessels) designed to be shot, blown up, and sunk in combat.
Nuclear is safe, and cost effective. Particularly when considering modern approaches to reactors and spent fuel recycling and storage practices. We, as a nation, are just irrationally afraid of something most people simply don't understand.
> The U.S. Navy has gone 60 years without a nuclear accident (the entire history since inception of the "Nuclear Navy")... and that's in vehicles (both surface and submarine vessels) designed to be shot, blown up, and sunk in combat.
I think this is especially impressive considering the losses of the USS Thresher [0] and USS Scorpion [1]. Despite their loss, there was still no significant containment breach.
For every MW capacity of wind the states around me put in a MW of nat-gas. The reason obviously being that the wind doesn't blow all the time. As for solar, it only really produces 4 hours a day and a cloudy day can cut production in half or more.
The only serious solution to our energy needs is nuclear. Everything else requires magical thinking.
This just seems like common sense though? There isn't a conflict here that I can see. Use renewables to eliminate some carbon, add natural gas plants (which are cheap and quick to build by comparison) for leveling. Dump coal. Then build nuclear which take a decade or more to replace natural gas plants.
But it's not squandered, just the opposite. Using nuclear (or any other fossil fuel) when you can use a renewable source seems to me like eating the emergency rations on a regular weekend dinner. It only sounds sensible if one doesn't expect us to be around much longer.
How do you store the energy for later? Lithium batteries? What makes lithium more renewable than uranium?
Even so, on the long run, power and not energy is what matters. By definition, you need a net power surplus to build up energy stores, because you need to generate energy faster than you are consuming it, and power is merely energy over time.
> Even so, on the long run, power and not energy is what matters. By definition, you need a net power surplus to build up energy stores, because you need to generate energy faster than you are consuming it, and power is merely energy over time.
You said that available land limits the power, but not the energy, available via renewables. If power is what you actually need rather than energy, that point is irrelevant, isn't it?
Renewables are better than nuclear, but nuclear is much better than combustion power. We desperately need to drop coal, and it's gonna take a long, long time to reach 100% renewable.
except nuclear doesn’t produce pollution on a scale close to fossil fuels. 90 reactors are producing %20 of our electricity right now without emitting air pollution (although I’m not sure about the energy used to mine/transport uranium)
This is definitely not my area of expertise, but I found John Platt's work on modeling the marginal cost of energy a pretty compelling counter-argument https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub46289
The gist is that after ~30-40% penetration, the cost of renewables, even with storage, is no longer cheaper than natural gas.
And while storage bends the curve, getting from 80% renewables to 100% without something dispatchable is very expensive.
I don't think this is necessarily important for nuclear, since we could have Gas+CCS, but I have lower hopes for pure renewables+storage.
It's conceivable that renewables + fossil w. CCS will be the cheaper solution, at least until the fossil fuels run out. One could, for example, reform NG to hydrogen and CO2, then sequester the CO2 and store the H2 for use in peaking turbines. This would fit nicely with renewables. It would leave little room for nuclear.
I think it's more that nuclear plants are exceptionally large and complex and that makes it difficult to access economies of scale, and each new safety measure introduced after an accident involves additional complexity layered on top, which worsens the problem. There are so many countries with so many different cultures of regulation which have had difficulties with nuclear recently, in particular with the latest generation designs.
I think you could make the situation better by having a dramatic programme to scale up nuclear, because then you can get economies of scale. That worked quite well for the French, but it means a large upfront investment, essentially paying for 50 years of energy in advance, with significant risk of cost over-runs.
That requirement for front-loaded investment means the cost depends very strongly on the interest rate of money borrowed, and a low interest rate on a large, complex project requires government backing. So the fundamental reason is that governments do not have the appetite for that sort of intervention or that level of risk, like they did during the 60's-70's.
China followed the big spin up plan, aren't in any sort of over regulation problem, and could roll over any anti-nuclear protest, and yet found schedule and cost overruns still occured.
> The country has the capacity to build 10 to 12 nuclear reactors a year. But though reactors begun several years ago are still coming online, the industry has not broken ground on a new plant in China since late 2016, according to a recent World Nuclear Industry Status Report.
> Officially China still sees nuclear power as a must-have. But unofficially, the technology is on a death watch. Experts, including some with links to the government, see China’s nuclear sector succumbing to the same problems affecting the West: the technology is too expensive, and the public doesn’t want it.
Sadly 3MI and Chernobyl turned environmentalists against it. In fairness, one can’t blame them, but as a technology matured and is better understood and built, they should actively support something they previously were against arguably for valid safety concerns.
Fukushima was the nail in the coffin. A lot of people don't remember Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl had been spun (not unreasonably) as Soviet incompetence. People in general were cautiously tolerant of nuclear until Fukushima. It's a damn shame.
Yes but the tech was dead before Fukushima the first. Da ichi was a 40-50 year old tech, and for the tech it did okay given the circumstances.
So even before Fukushima, there’d be delay after delay for more studies and impact and safety concerns for new projects and old ones getting shut down mostly due to thd ghosts of 3MI and Chernobyl.
Of course it doesn’t help to engender confidence in the tech as this legacy is the baggage any new tech faces in any consideration.
Before fukushima, I estimated any natural disaster big enough to destroy a nuclear plant would kill so many people itself, that the nuclear accident would be a mere side note.
Well Tōhoku tsunami and earthquake killed 15,000+ people and yet everyone only talks about the nuclear plant that was hit with it.
At some point you just have to accept that human mind has an irrational fear on rare but dramatic events
Fukushima Daiichi..which killed zero people from radiation. I think we have to reflect on whether or not we overreacted from that accident. In a sense it shows that even in crazy conditions, most of the core remains in the plant, and the radiation released isn't much of a health threat. Meanwhile coal kills a 200,000 per year while operating normally! The difference is astounding, yet nuclear is the most regulated industry on earth.
Fukushima did massive contamination of inhabitable land, which is in short supply in Japan already. But the only reason it wasn't much worse is the wind pattern blowing towards the sea.
> Meanwhile coal kills a 200,000 per year while operating normally!
Coal is definitely the worst conventional energy generation tech. No wonder nuclear advocates love to focus on it as if it's the only alternative. That said, do you know anyone who died from coal?
>That said, do you know anyone who died from coal?
Personally no. But in production of coal you have many miners’ lives cut short as a direct consequence of mining activities. Now, that’s short of the annual number listed there but this is a known direct consequence.
Respiratory disease kills everyday people from coal emissions left and right by similar mechanisms to smoking. The numbers are huge for asthma and COPD, and large fractions of those are attributed to fossil fuel air pollution. In less developed energy markets, indoor cooking is as bad or worse. In the USA, the Clean Air Act saves lives like crazy but we still are killed by fossil emissions.
> Fukushima did massive contamination of inhabitable land
Have you seen the dose rates in the area recently and compared them to the higher end of natural background in inhabited areas on Earth? If not I recommend you do. It's very reasonable to evacuate an area during a massive nuclear accident. When the dose rate goes down, it's very reasonable to go back. Here's a handy reference: [1]. The main point is that global warming gets rid of even more inhabitable land by pushing people out of cities en masse.
> No wonder nuclear advocates love to focus on it as if it's the only alternative.
Nuclear is safer than almost every other energy source. More people fall of their roofs installing solar panels per TWh than people die from nuclear accidents. Hydro has killed people by the 100,000 as well. Shoot, even wind kills people with ice-throw [2].
> That said, do you know anyone who died from coal?
A few hundred thousand per year, but no I don't actually know any of those people. Do you know anyone who has died from nuclear power, which kills 6 orders of magnitude fewer people?
The main point is that global warming is the serious threat and we should throw all serious low-carbon energy sources at it. Nuclear is the only large-scale operational low-carbon source that can run through daily and seasonal weather shifts, so it should play a large role. Wind and solar are needed as well, at about 20x their current deployment.
> More people fall of their roofs installing solar panels per TWh than people die from nuclear accidents.
Belarus has not commissioned its first nuclear plant yet, but already two construction workers died on its construction. That's already +INF amount of deaths per TW generated nationally.
> Do you know anyone who has died from nuclear power, which kills 6 orders of magnitude fewer people?
I actually do, met a dying Chernobyl liquidator in early 1990s.
I wonder how the economcics between nuclear, natural gas, and coal would pan out if the negative externalities (including both emmisions during consumption of the fuel and those created during mining/capturing of the fuel) were accounted for into the cost of the produced electricity.
The president of Exelon has said new nuclear in the US would require a CO2 tax of $300-400/tonne in order to compete with natural gas. At that tax rate, it would be cheaper to completely sequester the CO2 from a NG plant.
So, no, the externalities cannot save nuclear in the US.
By that measure solar and wind are catastrophic failures given that they still depend on non-existent storage technologies to hit any kind of baseload replacement goals.
Also pretty much anything is better than coal and fossil fuels. I can't hear the phrase 'clean coal' bandied about without wanting to bang my head against the nearest wall.
Anyone who, at the same time, claims that "we're all gonna die" if something is not done in the next decade, and doesn't want to consider nuclear is a hypocrite, and not a very bright person. If you believe in the first premise (for the record, I do not, although I do believe in man-made climate change), then you have to concede that nuclear is the only way out that's anywhere near viable without pretending that we can spend tens of trillions of dollars on infrastructure that needs to be replaced every 20 years.
One has to admire the no-nonsense problem solving happening here.