> I'd love to see some numbers here because without them it's easy to assume this is not cost competitive with solar+battery in +5 years given current trends.
[On nuclear fusion] “It's kind of as instructive to ask what's not the problem as it is to ask what is the problem. There is a problem. The problem is not cost. It's not that energy generation technologies are expensive. The cost is lower than it has ever been to generate electricity.
It's also not intermittency, and there are a lot of studies out there looking at getting to very high penetration of renewables, and how you manage that grid with those intermittent sources, and the answers sort of range between, let's say, 60% penetration of renewables to 100% penetration. I can't argue about that, but fundamentally I think it is possible to manage that grid and, even more so, the cost of doing so is not prohibitive.
[A consultancy called Systemic] added on the cost of intermittency, basically paid for with lithium ion batteries and gas peakers to deal with the hardest intermittencies to deal with—which is not when the sun goes in front of a cloud, but when it's summer or winter, that difference. So this isn't a carbon-neutral grid, it still has gas in it, but the total cost of intermittency adds about $15/MWh to the levelized cost.
So you take solar, for example, from 35 to 50. Well, gas costs 80, so this doesn't change the picture. Solar and wind are still the cheapest sources of electricity.
The problem, and this is where fusion fits, and this is where any new energy technology fits; the problem is scale. This is looking at the growth in deployment of solar and wind in a global sense. [...] This is the total sum of wind and solar based on current policies. We wanted the most aggressive scenario for the deployment of solar and wind, because we wanted to know the answer to the question: do we actually need fusion? So we took these curves, this is continued exponential growth. We did this last year; reality is already behind this model, because last year, 2018, growth in renewables flatlined for the first time. We assumed continual exponential growth. You add all of that up and you compare it to the total demand for electricity.
[...] Renewables can get us to half the required electricity generation. A lot of the stories you see in news take that number and compare it to how much electricity we need now, but you know electric cars are coming, right?, electricity demand is going to increase. If we're going to get to net zero, whilst overall energy consumption might be falling, the demand for electricity is substantially rising because actually only about 20% of energy is electricity, so, you know, the energy in my car I drove here this morning was not electricity.
That is what creates this clean power gap and this is why ultimately we need new technologies. We cannot get to the scale required to meet net zero by 2050 with the technologies that we currently have.”
So, globally I think nuclear can give solar a run for its money, although in some countries nuclear may not be an option due to public opposition or access to the technology.
"The growth flatlined" is a pretty confusing phrasing. What does it mean, that the trajectory is only parabolic? (Their graphic does certainly not look linear.) Things can not stay exponential forever, besides, let's ignore that this is a single data point on the crazy noisy area that is economics.
But anyway, is that really a talk saying we should invest in fusion because solar won't scale fast enough?
His graph assumed continuous exponential growth in deployment. In reality, deployment of solar in 2018 (97.4 GWdc) was slightly less than in 2017 (97.8 GWdc).
> But anyway, is that really a talk saying we should invest in fusion because solar won't scale fast enough?
First Light Fusion, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, and Tokamak Energy are all aiming at net energy by 2025 and grid-connected power by 2030. Lockheed Martin wants power plants at scale in the 2020s, with designs small enough to power aircraft (though their approach is more novel than CFS/TE physically). All four of companies have cost-effective designs radically more economically feasible than the JET/ITER/DEMO pathway of old.
There's no magic to fusion, it's just a matter of finding a way to do it economically.
Company goals, and $5, will get you a mocha grande at Starbucks.
None of those have any real chance of being commercial viable. The tokamak approaches, in particular, are both much larger than, and much more complex than, a fission reactor of equal power output. Yes, they are more cost effective than ITER. Only 40x lower power density vs. 400x lower. Yay?
NuScale is about 3x3x20m for 60 MWe. SPARC is about 4x4x4m (?) for about 50-100 MWe; that only includes the reactor proper, but the rest should be no less compact than any other plant.
I'm talking about the power density of the primary reactor vessel (the part in a PWR that has things too radioactive for hands-on maintenance). In current PWRs, that's about 20 MW/m^3, vs. about 0.5 MW/m^3 for ARC.
OK... so? This seems like a pretty meaningless statistic. The reactor core for a magnetic confinement fusion reactor is pretty much the only meaningful radioactive waste from the process, and within 50 years it turns itself into low-level waste. This isn't a zero quantity of waste, but it's comparatively trivial.
Even if you have to replace a piece, you just unfold, crane the old one out, and crane the new one in.
It's meaningful because cost is related to size and complexity.
The core of a fission reactor of a given power output should be smaller and simpler than that of a fusion reactor. As a result, it should be much cheaper, and also more reliable.
The parts outside will be very similar (even fusion reactors will require containment buildings, due to the very large amounts of tritium involved).
Fusion designs go even further and imagine operating at high temperature than LWRs. But this also drives up cost; materials problems rapidly become worse as temperatures increase. High temperature fission reactors have never caught on, for this reason.
It follows that fusion power plants will not be cheaper than fission power plants.
People have priced these already, it's competitive.
Fusion requires fewer safeguards, less insurance, and is more repairable than fission. Reliability isn't an issue just because it's 4m³.
Why would fusion reactors need ‘very large’ tritium supplies? SPARC would use, what, <100g/day? And it would generate excess, so they wouldn't need a stockpile. Tritium isn't even particularly dangerous; it goes away on its own, and doesn't stick around in biological systems.
> People have priced these already, it's competitive.
I don't believe these estimates, either in the input data or the methodology. They are basically an exercise in "how optimistic can I be before no one believes me". It's not as if any shenanigans in them will be checked against reality anytime soon. They aren't a good counter to the simple argument of "larger, more complex, and made of more exotic materials implies more expensive."
But in any case, let's look at ARC, shall we? The cost comes to $29/W(e), very much higher than fission reactors. They have to resort to "and the Nth of a kind plant will be a factor of K cheaper". Never mind that the closest analogy, nuclear fission plants, has not shown good experience effects.
About tritium: I don't think you grasp how problematic this material is. The amount of tritium consumed in a 1 GW(e) fusion plant in a year would be enough to contaminate 2 months worth of the flow of the Mississippi River, at New Orleans, above the legal limit for drinking water. Confinement of tritium is going to have to be damned near perfect for a DT reactor to be acceptable.
The claim is that a renewable grid would be manageable and affordable IF we could produce enough solar and wind installations, but that even optimistic projections don't have enough supply (of solar/wind/etc. installations) to get there in a timely manner.
But this logic makes little sense. It's not like there's some fundamental limit to the supply of wind or solar equipment. If we want more, we build more factories. Nuclear advocates are implicitly admitting this when they propose building new reactors at large scale for which there are no existing factories.
It's an economic issue. Solar reaches a price advantage in Phoenix before it does in Toronto because there's more sun, so people in Arizona are willing to pay a higher price for panels. Or there is more demand during the day so it's profitable much sooner to buy solar to satisfy the daytime/nighttime load differential than if you need to combine it with batteries.
So you build a bunch of panel factories, sell panels to Arizona and pay off most of the fixed costs of building those factories. But then the markets willing to pay higher prices get saturated. Once you've sold them as many panels as they need, they already have them and stop buying as many. Lower demand. So by supply and demand, the price comes down.
That's good -- now you're competitive in Northern California and people start buying panels there. But it's also bad -- it's profitable to keep operating your existing factories which are already built, but at the lower price it's not as profitable to build new ones. Eventually the price gets low enough that production capacity stops growing.
You can use the existing production capacity to get to 100% eventually, but if you wanted to do it faster you would need higher prices to justify building more factories. Only then there would be less demand, so you still can't increase the growth rate.
Nuclear comes at it from the other end. Can't compete with solar in Phoenix for the daytime peak but it can in Toronto for baseload. Which means there is greater demand for solar for some uses and greater demand for nuclear for other uses, and you replace carbon faster when you build both at once.
Nuclear is the second largest generation source in Canada after hydro. One bidder was not competitive ten years ago.
And it's a bit silly to argue against doing things that make it more cost effective to build something (improving regulatory efficiency, increasing production scale) by arguing that it costs too much to build. The whole idea is that if we did the things then it wouldn't cost as much.
These NuScale reactors cost less (even per MW) than that bid in Ontario, do they not?
There were no other compliant bidders ten years ago.
What was notable about that process was the province required bidders to taking on risks that the province would not back. The only bidder willing to do that (Areva bid but did not do so, so their bid was not compliant) priced the cost of the risk into the bid.
This demonstrated that, properly priced, nuclear is far out of the running economically. It only gets built when the risks are forced on others (taxpayers, ratepayers) outside a fair competitive process.
In retrospect, this should have been a serious warning that other new builds in the "nuclear renaissance" were extremely risky, as they turned out to be.
Given this history, I would believe NuScale only after they've built their Nth-of-a-kind system on budget and aren't bankrupt.
> What was notable about that process was the province required bidders to taking on risks that the province would not back. The only bidder willing to do that (Areva bid but did not do so, so their bid was not compliant) priced the cost of the risk into the bid.
The problem with these risk calculations is that you're asking a private insurance company to issue a very large policy with a small probability of payout. The major cost of those policies isn't actually in the risk itself, it's the cost of holding enough capital in reserve to be able to satisfy the policy size independent of the risk probability. They're not allowed to just invest that money in the stock market, so you're essentially paying them to forego the market rate of return on a huge pile of money for the entire term of the policy, even if no claim is ever filed.
That's why it's typically a government providing the insurance in these cases -- they're not required to hold the money in reserve so they don't have to effectively pay interest to hold money that might never actually have to be paid out.
Also notice that the competition there still wasn't solar, it was fossil fuels. And if you want to talk about pricing in the that risk then nuclear looks very attractive.
> The problem with these risk calculations is that you're asking a private insurance company to issue a very large policy with a small probability of payout.
And the problem with the opposite is that risk is foisted off on unwilling consumers. The bidding process is subverted.
If risk is placed on the groups selling the technology, they have an incentive to work on technologies that are inherently less risky. Renewables, for example, typically come in within 10% of the bid price. Yet you would not allow this risk advantage to have any place in the decision process by subsidizing nuclear's risk.
> And the problem with the opposite is that risk is foisted off on unwilling consumers. The bidding process is subverted.
It isn't the consumers who take on the risk, it's the government. But nobody's asking them to do it for free, just charge an actuarially honest insurance premium that doesn't include having to effectively pay interest on a giant reserve fund even if it's never used.
> If risk is placed on the groups selling the technology, they have an incentive to work on technologies that are inherently less risky.
And yet they would still be stymied by a similar requirement.
Consider that solar panels have some nasty stuff in them. Heavy metals. That's well and good so long as they stay inside like they're supposed to and then get properly recycled, but what's the worst case scenario? Maybe something like a major hail storm that cracks open the panels, followed by severe acid rain that leeches the metal into the soil and the groundwater, or maybe a big forest fire that burns them and releases the toxins into the air.
A 1GW solar farm would have something like a million panels, so tens of millions of pounds of material, maybe a hundred million. If they all burned, the cloud could spread over a huge area, or pollute the soil and groundwater for millions of people. So all I ask is for you to have to carry $200,000,000,000 worth of insurance just in case that happens. The worst case is really bad but the probability of that happening is pretty low, so you won't have any trouble finding someone to write a policy that size and whoever you do find will give you a good rate, right?
Assuming risks like that is what governments do. If your giant solar farm burns to a crisp and you go bankrupt, they're the ones who will have to make it a superfund site, clean it up and bail everyone out.
Doing the same thing with nuclear isn't a special subsidy, it's standard operating procedure across all industries. Requiring nuclear plants to account for every last penny of risk or externality is fine if they're going to do the same thing for everybody else, but they don't. So are we going to require everybody to insure against the worst case scenario, or not?
Ah, so you're telling me that your proposed new power plants can't meltdown. Well that's great to hear, but you know it hasn't been deployed at large scale for very long, so we don't actually have a good actuarial model of the true risk it poses.
Doesn't that mean we should prohibit operating it at scale until we have some better data on the risks of operating it at scale? Or at least require you to carry the insurance in the meantime, say for six to twelve decades?
Isolated demands for rigor can make anything too expensive to be competitive.
The risk that was being discussed in reference to Ontario was not the risk of meltdown, it was the risk the plant would blow way past the promised cost.
On that metric, we know renewables are far less risky. They typically come in within 10% of the bid.
Plugging in the numbers and running a linear programming model is not the same as building factories and installing generating capacity and transmission lines.
No one is building new capacity (with current tech) because existing factories are operating at a loss.
As for new tech, 1366 Technologies has built a factory in Malaysia and was expected to ramp up their kerf-less wafer production in Q3 2019 for sale to Hanwha at their neighboring plant.
I am certainly hopeful that eventually new capacity will come online that can compete with existing factories, but the fact remains that numbers from a linear programming model do not mean that the factories exist to build all that solar.
China is where the ecosystem of experienced manufacturers, material suppliers, and manufacturing equipment suppliers all comes together now. The rest of the world's solar manufacturers are struggling because the Chinese ones have such economies of scale that it's difficult to compete head-on. (Barring perhaps First Solar. First Solar is still doing ok because it has achieved multi-gigawatt manufacturing scale too, and because its product has advantages when operating in high temperature conditions. Also there are a few other solar manufacturers that can weather the storm because they're part of large conglomerates, like LG.)
Non-Chinese solar manufacturers like to cry "unfair competition" at low Chinese solar prices, but after reading industry trade publications for several years I am skeptical of that argument. To me it looks like Chinese PV companies did get government protection and incentives to establish themselves, but no worse than Western countries give to their own favored industries. And now they can produce good products at unbeatable prices. Not a whole lot different from Japan overtaking American radio and TV manufacturers in decades past, or (more recently) China rapidly overtaking incumbents to become the world's largest lithium ion battery manufacturer.
That doesn't mean the factories can't be built, it means it doesn't make economic sense to build them right now, in the current global environment that still lacks carbon taxes or the equivalent. It also means it does not yet make sense to rip out much of the installed capacity and replace it with renewables (a point that requires a lower price than just dominating replacement of end-of-life plants and building for growth in demand.)
Agreed. I think one way of looking at it is that building factories does not scale in the same way as building plants. You can build a plant that produces 1GW base and it can start generating when you turn it on. An equivalent factory making 250MWp of solar PV cells will take 20 years of production to build up to an equivalent installed base (when it can start producing cells to replace retired 20 year-old cells.)
If you try to scale up factories for faster growth you will have to start shutting them down when you hit an oversupply after 5-10 years and then where will your replacement cells come from?
I think it's just a speed bump due to running into limits on new capacity. In the US, for example, demand for electrical energy is nearly flat. Once the price of renewables falls enough the existing plant (much of which is only there because the capital cost is sunk) will start being replaced before its EoL.
BTW, the argument being made here against renewables would apply equally well against nuclear. Hail Mary Reactors will also require scaling up of factories to make them.
I think what he's saying is "At the current construction rates for solar and wind, or even with a quite aggressive increase in construction, the UK still won't meet its net zero carbon by 2050 emissions target, so we're on course to keep gas power stations operating because it'll be easy"
That's 30 years away. Given the rate of change in the rate of construction of solar and wind in the past 30 years, that extrapolation is very silly. To give you some idea: the global cumulative installed PV capacity has increased by about four orders of magnitude since 1990.
[On nuclear fusion] “It's kind of as instructive to ask what's not the problem as it is to ask what is the problem. There is a problem. The problem is not cost. It's not that energy generation technologies are expensive. The cost is lower than it has ever been to generate electricity.
It's also not intermittency, and there are a lot of studies out there looking at getting to very high penetration of renewables, and how you manage that grid with those intermittent sources, and the answers sort of range between, let's say, 60% penetration of renewables to 100% penetration. I can't argue about that, but fundamentally I think it is possible to manage that grid and, even more so, the cost of doing so is not prohibitive.
[A consultancy called Systemic] added on the cost of intermittency, basically paid for with lithium ion batteries and gas peakers to deal with the hardest intermittencies to deal with—which is not when the sun goes in front of a cloud, but when it's summer or winter, that difference. So this isn't a carbon-neutral grid, it still has gas in it, but the total cost of intermittency adds about $15/MWh to the levelized cost.
So you take solar, for example, from 35 to 50. Well, gas costs 80, so this doesn't change the picture. Solar and wind are still the cheapest sources of electricity.
The problem, and this is where fusion fits, and this is where any new energy technology fits; the problem is scale. This is looking at the growth in deployment of solar and wind in a global sense. [...] This is the total sum of wind and solar based on current policies. We wanted the most aggressive scenario for the deployment of solar and wind, because we wanted to know the answer to the question: do we actually need fusion? So we took these curves, this is continued exponential growth. We did this last year; reality is already behind this model, because last year, 2018, growth in renewables flatlined for the first time. We assumed continual exponential growth. You add all of that up and you compare it to the total demand for electricity.
[...] Renewables can get us to half the required electricity generation. A lot of the stories you see in news take that number and compare it to how much electricity we need now, but you know electric cars are coming, right?, electricity demand is going to increase. If we're going to get to net zero, whilst overall energy consumption might be falling, the demand for electricity is substantially rising because actually only about 20% of energy is electricity, so, you know, the energy in my car I drove here this morning was not electricity.
That is what creates this clean power gap and this is why ultimately we need new technologies. We cannot get to the scale required to meet net zero by 2050 with the technologies that we currently have.”
https://youtu.be/DtvcEkIb4D4?t=653