In the early 2010s, a lobbying campaign against new nuclear in the U.K. basically started, including people like the deputy prime minister [1] complaining that it was too slow and renewables would be faster and it wasn’t necessary.
Fast forward to 2022 and we still don’t have enough renewables, the UK is not very windy at the moment so there’s not enough base load capacity, and we only have 3 active coal fired power stations left. Oh, and we’re in an energy crisis and France, which is normally a net exporter to the U.K., is needing to import energy, making the crisis even closer. It would have been pretty useful to have had a new nuclear power station online right about now.
In 2012 we had in EU access to exceedingly cheap natural gas from Russia and electricity prices where around 2 cent per kw/h, and was getting cheaper each year. No one was in a rush to build nuclear power that costed around 3-4 cent per kw/h, especially since prices were predicted to reach 1 cent per kw/h, and there is little incentives from government speed up the regulative process. Building capacity was mostly a cost center, and nuclear power represented a significant political risk.
In 2022 we have significant energy shortage and the prices are now closing to 50 cent per kw/h (and rising). Inflation is at record high is directly linked to energy prices. Elections can be won or lost based on stances regarding electricity production and efforts to reduce the cost. A nuclear plant planned today should take significant less than 15 years.
I do agree with your post, but I really have to bite my tongue to not get snarky.
Part of the process here has to be recognising that this outcome was the obvious base-case future right from the start. Indeed, from as early as the 1980s when the politicians started really cracking down on building new nuclear plants.
This is an entirely policy-driven problem. If I could see it, anyone who cared to look could - the free market would have been building nuclear plants in 2012 if the question was "how to make money and secure future prosperity?" instead of "how to build an impossibly safe plant, far safer than any standard we've ever applied before?".
People winning or not winning elections shouldn't be a factor in whether people freeze to death in winter or have to start burning wood fires because we're regressing to the early 1900s. People should be able to sort out their own energy needs in a free market.
>if the question was "how to make money and secure future prosperity?" instead of "how to build an impossibly safe plant, far safer than any standard we've ever applied before?"
I'd be happy with this if there wasnt a liability cap on all nuclear plants at ~0.1% the cost of cleaning up 1 Fukushima.
The free market would never, ever, ever have built a single plant if 99.9% of the insurance costs weren't fully socialized, however. That's why the cap exists after all - the government was desperate to get the private sector to build these things.
Arguing to chip away at safety standards in an industry that already has full liability protection against its own mistakes...doesnt make a lot of sense to me.
Especially when solar, wind and storage are all wayway cheaper even before insurance risks are taken into account.
> The free market would never, ever, ever have built a single plant if 99.9% of the insurance costs weren't fully socialized, however.
People do make arguments like this, but when considering 2nd order effects it is a weak argument. The same argument could be made for fossil fuels (which have substantial negative externalities) and powered all the gains humanity made in the last 2 centuries - demonstrating that the positive externalities are far higher than the negative.
The issue with nuclear is that the costs come in very clear events, where for most industrial schemes (like solar, coal or wind) the costs are extremely diffuse and are largely ignored. But it doesn't make sense to start pinning the problems on nuclear when the costs are probably smaller than the alternatives. There are some question marks when compared to solar and wind, but reliable generation capacity is worth quite a lot and people aren't taking the waste products of producing renewable energy seriously. (which sounds like a whine - but if we're going to go crazy about the issue of minute amounts of nuclear waste as people do then we can't give heavy metals a free pass! Or what they put in batteries)
> ...cost of cleaning up 1 Fukushima....
Raising the question of whether the response to Fukushima was appropriate. The response we typically take (again, citing fossil fuels) is to ignore rare problems when they are too expensive to fix. It is enough to swap in a technology that is much better than status-quo. It doesn't need to be perfect.
This part of argument that sounds good, but doesn't actually hold up vs an inspection of what we currently treat as acceptable in the real world. The damage of Fukushima left without remediation is less than damage nations currently accept without blinking. Just a little more concentrated.
> Especially when solar, wind and storage are all way way cheaper even before insurance risks are taken into account.
They said that before the Energiewende too, and now Germany is probably going to need to source some lubricant so that they can be comfortable while Russia has its way with the European energy grid. This pro-renewable argument has a long history of turning out not to be true when tested in reality and exposed to the actual demand people have for reliable power.
It turns out that "renewables are cheaper" - which was said when they started shutting down nuclear plants - was code for "we're going to buy a lot of nat gas". With discouraging results.
IMHO it was a mistake to shut down German nuclear plants before their EOL, but it's a bigger mistake to build new nuclear plants now.
And there are additional strains on Germany's energy grid that nobody predicted, such as exporting lots of electricity to France in 2022 where half of the highly reliable base load generating nuclear plants were down for maintenance and generating absolutely nothing for months.
>The issue with nuclear is that the costs come in very clear events, where for most industrial schemes (like solar, coal or wind) the costs are extremely diffuse and are largely ignored.
I think you've got it exactly backwards.
Free taxpayer fronted insurance that nobody "pays" for until a $1 trillion Fukushima event happens, the cost of decommissioning and storing waste and radiation induced cancers ARE all diffuse and easily ignored.
Whereas the fact that the sun doesnt shine at night and the wind doesnt always blow is fairly well known.
It just so happens that those costs come ON TOP of already being 5x more expensive.
Regulations and laws around liability should be technology neutral and based on historical facts. Every time we have a flood from a hydroelectric dam, the insurance per tw/h generated from hydroelectricity should be increased. Every time a forest fire is triggered by the electricity grid, those units that depend on the guilty equipment should have their insurance increased based on tw/h generated from those units. Same should apply to nuclear, adjusted to the tw/h generated.
Obviously same apply to fossil fuels. When they cause illness and air pollution their insurance to pay for those external costs should go up. When we have extreme weather or rising water temperature, insurance should go up. Anywhere in the world where historically a electricity generated unit create an external cost to society, we should make a note of it and tally it up.
Sadly we won't see those electricity generated sources paying out, but it would be good to have a factually number of how much they in theory should be paying and thus what the theoretical costs to society is when we use, maintain and construct new capacity. That way we can reason around what has more external cost to society and what has less. We can form a number on how much extra a consumer should be paying based on what energy mix they consumed.
Building unsafe power plants holds back nuclear power. Any nuclear power advocate has to realize that every failed plant is a permanent scar on the industry that will never heal.
> No one was in a rush to build nuclear power that costed around 3-4 cent per kw/h,
Do you have a source for prices this low for nuclear? The best I can possibly find is about 4x that cost, from 15-20 cents per kWh. I'm interested in who can do it cheaper than that.
As a more solid data point, Hinkley Point C was built with an inflation-adjusted strike price of 9p / kWh in 2012. That's about 11p / kWh today, or $.13/kWh.
The strike price is the guaranteed price that British ratepayers and the government have guaranteed Hinckley. (The government will make up the difference if retail prices are lower.)
It’s entirely possible its builders will go belly up and need even more bailing out, but that’s some years away.
So, both sides are right. Nuclear is too slow, but renewables are not fast enough / sufficient either.
Another thing is that politicians tend to plan that things will continue to go about as well as they are going at the moment, and the only major crisis ahead is the one being discussed at the moment. Nobody has the nerve to think that e.g. France will have trouble with several nuclear reactors at once, and a major war erupts in Europe at the same time. Ah, and a global pandemic right before that. Who in their right mind would vote for an energy budget based on such paranoid view of a possible future?
A big problem with projects like these (nuclear and even renewable, but to a bit lesser of a degree) is that these projects outlast leadership. It then becomes easy to support something and it never get done. You make a big speech, but a few gears into motion, but more pressing stuff takes priority because a voter's attention is less than an election cycle. Truth is that if they work hard, get everything in motion you have 1 of 2 outcomes: 1) the next person gets all the praise because it is finished under their leadership or 2) the project goes into major delay as the next leadership doesn't prioritize it (often because it was the previous party's platform).
Honestly I think we could get a lot more done if people were able to disentangle when policies were achieved from when they were implemented. Governments are fantastic for long term investments, but politics works on shorter timeframes than many corporations. Though I think changing the cultural mentality to provide that selective pressure is an unrealistic pipedream. That said, it does also really show the constraints that we operate under and why existential issues like climate change are extremely difficult to solve.
How could this be achieved? I have one model in mind that might enable this type of long-term planning, but it would take quite a bit of work to make the US like China.
The reason China can do it is because they are an autocracy. Voters don't matter and their elections aren't as meaningful, meaning they can have projects longer than an election cycle.
If you want to get the West on a path this way, you have to get the people to have a change in how they evaluate their leaders. But first, you need to have the people trust in the leaders, which they don't right now for good reason. It is a tough nut to crack.
I'm not saying this in approval of authoritarianism btw. I think the results of that are worse, but it does have advantages (which is why it is attractive to some).
I wouldn't put nuclear and renewables as opposed sides. The only reasonable future will be built for a minimum of 80%-90% of primary energy generated from renewbles, and it may be that 10%-20% of nuclear is cheaper than to do it all by renewables.
I don't understand why you say renewables will be too slow. I've only done napkin math, but simple projection of continued growth of existing production capacity through, say, 2035, completely replaces all current electrical generation, as well as other energy uses. And when you account for the much much higher efficient of electrification, meaning that we get 2-3x as much work out of the same amount of energy compared to all the waste with fossil fuels, we can fulfill the developing world's needs for growth too.
But this is just my napkin math from taking production trends from top Google hits, it's not a sophisticated analysis. I would be interested to see one that is realistic, meaning that it doesn't assume that solar deployments plateau tomorrow.
80-90% of energy generated from intermittent source would require immense amounts of storage to even out intermittency. If a silver bullet like hydrogen or compressed air solves storage, this may be feasible. But that's a big if. If fusion becomes viable could it be a viable primary energy source? Sure. But societies aren't going to bet the future of the energy industry on an if.
Every model I have seen shows 80%-90% renewables with almost no storage. Where are you getting your estimates?
Fusion is not a realistic power source for decades, and there's no reason to think it will be cheaper than fission, or that it could ever be cheaper than massive amounts of storage.
Demand for storage varies greatly depending on overproduction, geography, and willingness to continue using fossil fuels. Plans for an 80% renewable grid in the he US are estimated at 12 hours of storage and "just" 3 weeks of storage. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...
The problem is, even 12 hours of storage is a prohibitively large amount. The US uses 12,000 GWh of electricity per day. 12 hours of storage is 6,000 GWh. The entire world produces 400 GWh of batteries each year. Most of it is going to EVs and electronics, not grid storage. Even if we stopped building EVs entirely and directed the world's supply of battery production to just America's grid storage needs were talking about a decade of production. And worse yet these batteries are good for a couple thousand cycles, and will have to be replaced after a few years of use. And even with this 6 terawatts of stotage, in the end we'll still have a fifth of our grid still dependent on fossil fuels.
Again, this is why plans for a renewable grid assume some other form of energy storage will be orders of magnitude better than lithium batteries. That'd be great if hydrogen, molten sand, compressed air, or something else delivers. But that's a big if on which to gamble the energy grid, especially when alternative paths to decarbonization that we have more than half a century operating are within our reach.
>80-90% of energy generated from intermittent source would require immense amounts of storage to even out intermittency. If a silver bullet like hydrogen or compressed air solves storage, this may be feasible.
The silver bullets are called demand shaping, pumped storage and batteries and theyre already here.
The fact that renewables are 5x cheaper than nuclear means that any storage that is, overall, less than 4x the cost of generation makes dispatchable solar/wind energy cheaper than nuclear energy when the sun isnt shining and the wind isnt blowing.
Almost every form of storage is cheaper than that. There is no need for an if. The if is here.
If we need to resort to demand shaping (read: turning off the power) then the cost of that needs to be accounted for. If you only run your smelters, chemical industries, etc. for part of the year then the cost of those commodities, and by extension every product using those commodities, gets more expensive. Increasing the cost of steel by 30% because we can't power our arc furnaces all year round is a massive cost that isn't captured when you just look at levelized cost of generation.
What form of storage are you referring to? The only popular forms of storage are batteries and hydroelectricity. The former isn't produced in nearly enough quantities, and the latte ris geographically restricted.
Your straw man is still too strong for you to push over.
Only a small fraction of the arc furnace's power needs to be provided as electricity. A large fraction of it is a reducing agent like carbon or hydrogen which -- shockingly enough -- can be stored as carbon or hydrogen. Your imagined 30% increase due to idle capital is on top of a 50-80% reduction due to lower energy cost.
In industries where energy is the dominant cost, then minor shifts in production methods to do high labour tasks during low energy periods and vice versa will happen regardless of whether nuclear energy is available, because building solar to reduce costs and ignoring the nuclear reactor will still be a cheaper option than buying all of your energy from it. Alternatively the plant does buy the nuclear energy, but only when the sun is not shining because building their own array to use in DC mode costs $10/MWh and the VOM costs of nuclear are $15/MWh.
The only out is mandatory payment to a utility or funding it entirely with public money to everyone's detriment.
>If we need to resort to demand shaping (read: turning off the power) then the cost of that needs to be accounted for.
Of course, but the amount of low hanging fruit in this regard is A) ridiculously high B) zero, according to the nuclear and carbon industry models (they think demand cannot be shaped and only expensive batteries can deal with intermittency).
>If you only run your smelters, chemical industries, etc. for part of the year then the cost of those commodities, and by extension every product using those commodities, gets more expensive.
If you produce 2x as much as normal aluminum on a Tuesday when it's sunny and 1/5th as much on a Wednesday you've created more aluminum.
The solar driven smelter can produce more at a much lower cost because electricity is such a large % of the overall product.
There are plenty more applications like that where 5x cheaper electricity that "decides" when you use it is way better than 5x more expensive electricity that you can use any time.
80-90% of electricity from renewables is achievable in many regions with no storage other than increasing the intermittency of existing hydro, existing interconnects, and adding dispatchable loads to soak up the curtailed energy which is effectively free.
That's great for regions with hydroelectricity, but the significant majority of the world is not lucky enough to have that geography. Also, the places that do have good geography for hydroelectric storage also usually generate their electricity from dams anyway and thus don't benefit from storage.
Well when you find a region witout hydro or interconnects or sufficient renewable resource that neither are necessary to exceed 75% penetration just by adding variable loads then let us know and we can put the chemical batteries there first.
Most of the USA, for one. Some states like mine are fortunate enough to have 70%+ hydroelectric generation. But in aggregate, the country creates 6% of it's electricity through hydropower. If our plan is to use hydro when wind and solar aren't producing we're very limited in terms of renewable production. The US uses about 12,000 GWh of electricity per day. The entire world produces about 500 GWh of batteries per year and this price is climbing as lithium shortages impact the supply chain. Batteries aren't going to cut it. That's why plans for a renewable grid either comes with either plans for extensive blackouts or some silver bullet solving storage.
Again, "variable loads" is a pretty euphemism for "shut off the power". If we're going to be shutting off power to industries the cost of reduced economic output needs to be counted.
So a country with a lot of existing interconnects and hydro where a complete renewable transition would cost less than nuclear and very barely more than the cheapest fossil fuels is your example?
And pretending adding off peak EV charging to carparks or building hybrid renewable+electrolyser stations that provide all their own energy needs and export during high demand is the same as shutting off existing critical infrastructure is laughably dishonest.
Renewables and nuclear are of course not opposing each other; they are opposing fossil fuels.
According to the article, the UK now has less electrical generation than it would like / planned to have. Partly because the nuclear power plants failed to go online at the planned time. Partly because the amount of renewable generation that has been built in the meantime is not sufficient ether, because renewables need to be seriously overpeovisioned, due to their varying output.
Hence "both were too slow". Were they not, there'd be no energy deficit, I suppose.
They are opposing each other because of the combination of two factors:
* Peak energy demand happens when intermittent sources are at their lowest production [1].
* Nuclear power is as cheap to run at 100% capacity as it is to run at 50% or 25% capacity.
If you build enough nuclear power to fulfill the peak demand when renewables aren't producing, then you've already built enough nuclear to power the grid all day. And since nuclear is just as cheap to run at 100% capacity there's no point in provisioning renewables. Renewables work well when paired with a dispatchable energy source like gas or hydroelectricity. The former emits carbon and the latter is geographically dependent. In areas without hydroelectric potential, nuclear is the only existing option for full decarbonization.
The upside of solar generation is its potential for really rapid deployment, and for piecemeal deployment. I can't afford to have a personal nuclear reactor, but I likely would be able to adorn my house with some solar panels, some batteries, and maybe a heat pump to create ice during the day's heat peak and use it after dusk. When I'd be able to afford a house, that is %)
Renewables don’t really oppose fossil fuels. Not to the same extent that nuclear does anyway. Nuclear can 100% replace all fossil fuels as a drop in. Renewables on their own can’t and need significant battery capacity as well to even out the load. Additionally, there are industrial use cases that need high temperature (like 300+ degrees C if my memory is correct). Nuclear power plants can generate this no problem because it’s a massive furnace already. Coal too. Solar and wind cannot.
I strongly believe who think renewables can replace all carbon energy sources are not realistic about what is needed and don’t appreciate the nuance and just think of it as “energy source” rather than as part of a complete energy production / distribution problem.
A small nit, it _is possible_ to generate high temperatures reasonably efficiently using solar concentrators. In fact, it is used as a means for power generation already[1].
Oh, and if you are in a tropical area, you may also use solar concentrators for free-ish hot water (with an insulating tank), and get 24 hours hot water. However, if it was cloudy the day before, it will not be a great experience, and you may need to use amn electric heater.
Hardly, the UK completely replaced coal and reduced it’s dependence on natural gas with renewables from 2010 to 2020. Meanwhile that wasn’t enough time to bring any new nuclear online in the current environment.https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Electric...
Looks like renewables where simply the better, cheaper, and faster option. Which is shocking considering how little hydro and solar they have.
Well sure. When you effectively ban nuclear through regulatory hurdles, why is it a surprise that you don’t builds any and why is that a conclusion you can draw about the efficacy of nuclear itself? Somehow China is building out quite a bit of nuclear capacity while the west is sitting around dithering.
4 of the 5 currently operating UK nuclear power stations are scheduled to close by around the time Hinkley Point C starts operating. Only Sizewell B is scheduled to operate beyond 2028.
Hinkley C will add 3200 MW, but around 9000 MW of nuclear capacity will have been retired between 2012 and 2028.
How is China able to build nuclear power plants relatively quickly? Are you saying the British are incapable of doing this in less than a decade? I bet the military could do it faster.
the military couldn't by itself. they use suppliers nowadays for everything, but they might.
China? well, autocracies look great at these. look at the map, pick the ideal site, appoint a few folks to do it. for every year late shoot one of them.
estimated delay is strictly less than a year.
of course sometimes things like Chernobyl happen, and of course later usually it turns out that the problem came up back then during the project, but it was too inconvenient.
....
the problem with the "Western" process is that they are absolutely 120% political (it's nukes after all, eh), but it's dressed up in 42 layers of idiotic formalities, procurement tenders, domain expert committees, laws, local/regional/state/national/supranational bureaucracy processes, impact assessments, esoteric cost-benefit scoring methodologies, etc. all of this is because the politics is really muddy. so it's a very suboptimal compromise after all.
and it shows. basically it's the classic case of "sure, you get one plant, but it makes no sense in itself, because the economics calls for a fleet of 20+ standardized units and reprocessing" but also "sure, we just got one, that's uneconomical as hel, but we need to keep our nuclear industry/knowhow/capability alive"
and then 20-40 years later the public opinion is completely poisoned by that, and now reversing course requires a fucking war.
> of course sometimes things like Chernobyl happen
Chernobyl is an older design than plants we builds today. if I recall correctly Chinese plants include a lot of passive safety features especially in the wake of Fukushima (gen III / gen III+). Fukushima by the way, despite repeatedly ignoring warnings of the risks of not being prepared for realistic tsunamis and earthquakes it might experience, survived relatively well all things considered. If I recall correctly they used a mildly updated design than Chernobyl.
It’ll be interesting to start seeing gen IV reactors coming online since they have an identical safety profile to fusion. If anything goes wrong the reaction stops rather than the runaway reactions common to traditional reactor designs that are basically fission bombs hooked up to a steam engine.
> Fukushima by the way, despite repeatedly ignoring warnings of the risks of not being prepared for realistic tsunamis and earthquakes it might experience, survived relatively well all things considered.
Yes most nuclear incidents involved risks being ignored. But I don't see how this is an argument for nuclear. This will keep happening as long as we have this stuff built and operated by the lowest bidder bound to make as much profit as they can.
I figured someone works raise that argument because it’s an easy and obvious one but is not helpful.
A) coal power plants ignore warnings too. It’s just that it ends up as a distributed problem of cancer clusters and failing lungs m as by years later that’s harder to link
B) shipping oil creates a lot of ecological and human damage through oil spills
C) even with all the incidents, nuclear is still safer than carbon-based energy sources. It’s death/kWh is closer to wind.
D) gen IV reactors have no risk of runaway reactions negating your argument
So even with the issues they’re still safer and only get safer
Chernobyl was not the fault of rushing things. Chernobyl was the result of only having a single line of control with no separate regulatory system.
The plant (and those like it) had a flaw that when you slam on the brakes you momentarily turn *up* the fire in doing so. Normally this is harmless, but with Chernobyl the idiot in charge was so determined to proceed with his stupid safety demonstration that he didn't hit the SCRAM until the last second--and the momentary increase as the rods came in caused a major power excursion. Whether it went prompt critical or just came within a hair of it we probably will never know.
If someone were to try something like that in the US the phones at the NRC would have been ringing off the hook long before the reactor got in trouble.
Nuclear requires less red tape, engineering & construction workers, manufacturing scale among others. UK or west is worse in all these factors. Anti nuclear lobby causes lot of red tape which adds to the cost. Nuclear engineering is not cool or not even being taught in most univs in west and no workers with knowhow after nuclear industry shut down in 80s. To bring up people with knowhow and skills, it would take almost a decade of constant effort. Building first plant costs a lot, second a little less etc. India and China are building nuclear plants in fleet mode, which amortises costs and keep worker pool alive.
The constraints are probably different for civilian vs military power plants. Military nuclear reactors are known to use more highly enriched fuel than civilian ones. At one point the Soviet Union had a fleet of nuclear-powered ice breakers that used highly enriched fuel.
There has been plenty of noteworthy pushback against renewable energy has been significant, even for offshore wind farms that would have minimal view impact.
Pushback against new infrastructure is high in general, causing society to lean on inefficient and dirty sources of energy.
We need more modern nuclear reactors, renewables and storage since neither can load follow like hydroelectric dams or combined cycle natural gas can.
If you wanna put the tinfoil hat on, having a political flamewar between renewables and nuclear is so ideal for fossil fuel companies that it almost looks deliberately architected.
Nuclear proponents are rarely if ever against renewables on principle, but rather claim they aren’t delivering on their promises. The environmentalists OTOH have been radicalized to be opposed to nuclear in a dogmatic way, are entirely against improving it by lifting research bans etc. The “nuclear is not economically viable” argument seen in recent years is dishonest from the majority of critics; they were against nuclear before and will be in the future, independent of economics and regional viability of wind & solar.
Meanwhile, coal, gas and oil are doing absolutely splendid – even countries with a strong environmentalist ethos can easily be convinced to expand their fossil fuel dependencies during a crisis, when their citizens can’t afford to heat their homes in the winter.
That's a great point. Those that generally fall on the "just trust the science, bro" side are also the ones saying "nuclear isn't as effective right now, so let's avoid it like the plague" and "think of the long term!"
It has always baffled me. This flamewar being pushed by fossil fuel companies makes perfect sense.
The problem with this analysis is not that it’s wrong: the existence of a zero-sum nuclear/renewables “argument” is absolutely a huge benefit to the legacy fossil fuels industry. The problem is that right now it’s renewables and not nuclear that pose the most direct threat to fossil industry profits. Given current prices and dropping costs/watt of solar and wind, those sources are going to extinguish a lot of fossil competition in a relatively short period through exponential increase in deployment - and delaying an exponential “knee” can mean years of additional profit. Whereas right now there’s really no path to a massive nuclear rollout, and the costs don’t compete with fossil sources even if we decided to push harder.
Coal loves nukes. They know coal is doomed, but each nuke plant start is a guaranteed 10-20 year continuance of the coal contract.
The cost of that amount of coal would build enough solar to cover for the prospective nuke. Not then building the nuke frees up enough money to construct that much solar several times over.
An important reason for the gangbusting success of solar and wind is that they build incrementally. Build some, and it starts producing immediately. Build more, get more, in a virtuous cycle. There is precious little room for graft, because anybody can cost it on a napkin: N turbines x $per, M square meters of panel x $per. Nukes, meanwhile, leave unlimited room for graft: nobody knows how much anything ought to cost, and actually finishing the job means cutting off everybody's gravy train. There is really no fixing this: nukes are well established as an unlimited graft pipeline.
I think this is an objective overstatement, just 10% of 2021 global electricity production came from wind and solar combined, and these are supposedly “easy to scale incrementally”, “simple technology that can be manufactured quickly anywhere” and have had major subsidies in relation to their market cap.
Then you have the intermittence issue, which is worse than dispatchable like hydro & nat gas, but isn’t factored in.
Lastly you have the regional variations in wind and sunshine which makes it impossible to say how it performs unless you know the regional conditions. Often you hear success stories from places like South Australia or the Danish coast or something, which is similarly honest to car commercials driving on empty mountain roads.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for developing and expanding renewables, especially in areas where the sun or wind is strong, but if I put myself in the shoes of fossil fuel lobbyists, current wind & solar is kind of a perfect nerfed pretend-enemy in regions of influence, such as say Germany.
These arguments, where you only look at current deployment and not growth and projected trends, aren’t worth very much. It’s like asking whether you should invest in smartphones or dumb-phones back in 2008: looking at that year’s ownership data might have convinced you that smartphones didn’t have much of a future, and then you would have made a very stupid bet.
The question is whether going forward there will be a huge increase in deployment of solar and wind, and answer is that every expert projection says that due to surprisingly reduced and reducing costs there absolutely will be. There are questions about whether this new generation will eat all of fossil’s market share (due to storage improvements and coordinated grid improvements) or just an enormous fraction of it. But both are devastating to the industry.
Similarly, worrying about edge cases and specific geographies doesn’t matter when you’re looking at aggregates. The claim here is not that renewables are perfect or will even be able to supply 100% of our needs. It’s simply that even at 75% of all power generation that’s a terrifying kick in the teeth for fossil corporate interests. The nuclear industry has nothing plausible on the table that can do this: outside of a few countries that invested heavily while building a nuclear weapons program, nobody has the political will to launch the sort of “Interstate-Highway System” government projects that would be needed to subsidize nuclear into that level of deployment. And even if we did, building the plants would take decades.
I do think nuclear has a clear role as baseload to help with the intermittence issues, and that renewables and nuclear deployment are natural allies. But that happens in a world where renewables have been massively built out and nuclear happens at the margins. The advantage of this plan is that it involves building a lot less expensive nuclear (maybe even less than we think now, if there are new storage tech improvements) and it’s not such a disaster if nuclear takes another 15-20 years to build. However: this pathology where nuclear advocates preen about an all-nuclear world is harmful and dangerous. It’s bad that so many advocates have mistakenly identified renewables as their competition and are spreading bad arguments trying to politically dissuade/delay people from adopting them. While it may not be intended that way, this line of argument reads like pure fossil-industry FUD.
Renewables don't need baseload help, they need dispatchability. So nukes would not help at all. Nukes will be mothballed in a few years as they become unable to attract bids sufficient to continue operation. (In some places they will continue getting their massive tax- or rate-payer subsidy.) As operation time falls, cost of every kWh they ever produced grows as the massive construction cost is amortized over fewer lifetime kWh.
Fortunately, most storage technologies are nimbly dispatchable. They are not being built out much, yet, except for extra-short-term load shifting, and hydro cheaply retrofitted with a pump, because there is not enough renewable capacity to charge from. Until there is, combined-cycle NG turbines fill shortfalls. Build-out gradually reduces that expense, but not to zero.
Instead, solar farms in the tropics fixing ammonia for export mean nobody needs more than a week of storage. The NG furnaces will be converted to burn ammonia, or maybe hydrogen extracted from ammonia. Catalytic fuel cells might enable retiring the gas turbines when they get cheap enough.
I'm not sure I agree with that assessment. Many environmentalists (those primarily concerned with global warming) are all for nuclear, but realistically nuclear does not play very well with renewables (nuclear wants 100% output all the time, renewables need a peaker complimentary service). Arguably, many nuclear proponents are , at least from my perspective, coming from right-wing groups and the like who previously didn't care about fossil fuels and didn't like renewables. Of course that's just a faction, but IMO it's a significant factor in the renewal of calls for nuclear - muddying the waters and delaying everything (as nuclear is so good at nowadays)
At this point in time nuclear will take forever to come online, costs more than renewables, is harder to scale up than renewables, etc. Any company can toss together a factory that spits out turbines, solar panels and batteries without facing onerous regulations and massive liability risk.
Renewables are just much more friendly to private sector actors - incremental capital investment, politically safe, etc.
But if you accept a bit of carbon emission from the peaker plants it can play reasonably well with solar in warm climates.
You can also make some uses of renewables demand-dependent. Consider desalinization--uses a lot of power. Let's redesign our desalinization plant a bit: Put in a big seawater holding pond, it must be several hundred feet above the actual plant. Now, make the pumps considerably bigger than you need. When the grid has extra energy you use that energy to run the pumps and fill up the pond. When the grid doesn't have extra energy the pumps turn off.
The actual plant works on pressure, not power (it's a glorified version of the reverse osmosis system a lot of us have under our kitchen sink--and note that the kitchen sink systems don't even plug in at all.) So long as there's water in the pond it's happy, power use is low. Thus you can run your plant 24/7 off an intermittent supply of power.
This isn't the only heavy use situation where intermittent supply isn't a big handicap. What you need is a power grid that broadcasts (probably down it's wires) realtime information as to what the electric rate is and the users set their machinery up to optimize for that.
The political flame war doesn’t matter. I have a lot of capital allocated towards natural gas, but none to nuclear because the math doesn’t work (see the duck curve). Nuclear is dead on arrival because there is no industry demand for additional base load, regardless of whether it comes from uranium or coal.
> Nuclear is dead on arrival because there is no industry demand for additional base load, regardless of whether it comes from uranium or coal.
What if there is a political demand for phasing out existing coal / gas plants, thereby necessitating new plants to provide base load from some other source?
> Intermittent renewables displace the need for any base load.
When you talk about wind and solar you have to specify the region, because it differs wildly. As someone who has watched exactly those ideas fail to the point of crisis in north-central Europe, I truly hope you’re talking about some other unrelated place.
Note that there is not only the daily cycle, but the seasonal one, in particular in cold regions. Baseload usually refers to the lowest demand during the day, so in those terms the baseload changes dramatically over the year. This is something that nuclear can adjust to perfectly fine.
>Oh, and we’re in an energy crisis and France, which is normally a net exporter to the U.K., is needing to import energy
They're spending hundreds of billions just to replace ~80% of the nuclear plants that are aging out and officially hoping that renewables will make up the difference.
It's almost as if it does take too long and cost too much.
Meanwhile the UK is refusing planning permission to solar farms at a record rate because who needs electricity that costs £35 per MWh now when you can pay £92.50+inflation for Hinkley Point C in a decade:
Hinkley B has been in development since around 2010 and has not generated any power. Wind and solar are over 25% of generated electricity per year. And most of that capacity was built in the last five years. It is growing very quickly.
A few more nuclear power stations would be very valuable. But in terms of decarbonisation renewables are just faster. Interconnectors are also faster to build and also help avoid power cuts.
Yes but, and this is the point that people seem to miss, that means you don't have to have them burning the rest of the time. This is still better than the actual situation that "we shouldn't do anything unless its big nuclear" proponents are helping to maintain where you are burning carbon all the time because we aren't building nuclear reactors in the real world for a variety of reasons (mostly political) and aren't likely to do so any time soon. So let's do the thing that makes things better and is politically possible even if its not perfect rather than doing nothing.
It looks better when zooming in than in the country-wide view, but Bayern (Bavaria), our most ardent wind power saboteur, demonstrates how to do it properly.
It doesn't really make any difference to my original point what the cause of delays were. This is not an academic question over which approach is theoretically better. Consenting is just another real world problem that has to be resolved.
It is all about MTBKB (Mean time between KaBoom). If there hasn't been one in a while, everyone is okay with nuclear. If there has been one recently, everyone comes up with reasons for why they are bad. This will never change.
I would say that the Sellafield plant has a huge amount of nuclear waste that the UK has to deal with from nuclear weapons development and early power station decommissioning, and that modern nuclear power stations do produce waste but at considerably lower quantities than we already need to deal with, to the point that it’s basically a rounding error.
50% capacity factor for nuclear power is an aberration: typical capacity factors are over 90% [1] [2]. By comparison, capacity factors between 20-35% for wind and solar are the norm. Nuclear's capacity factor problems are also solve-able: France identified that irregular metallurgy caused faster corrosion, and this informs future builds. Nothing can make the wind blow more consistently, or make the sun stay in the sky for longer.
In Finland wind power provides roughly 30% of the nominal power on average. The problem is that it fluctuates between 0-80%.
The National Emergency Supply Agency calculates 6% of the nominal power capacity as the guaranteed capacity of wind. Unfortunately even that is overly optimistic.
During days when temperatures hover close zero, wind farms are shut down due to the danger from ice debris. This has caused zero production days of wind power in Finland during the last month.
Our electricity prices have been 30x the normal.
List of causes includes: importing electricity from Russia has been halted, unreliability of wind power, delays in building new nuclear power, premature shutting down of certain carbon based energy production, increased exports to Estonia and Germany due to Nordstream/Russia/Ukraine, increased exports to Sweden due to maintenance of a nuclear plant there. )
Nuclear is typically under 80% availability, with the three usual examples of "cheap fast" programs being even lower. The only exceptions of note are the US whose program is horrifically expensive -- and to get >90% requires some accounting tricks like spending big money on upgrading rated power without changing the nameplate and ignoring all the failed projects that were still paid for -- and China.
The wind blows more consistently by having a higher hub height or putting it in a better place. Both are being done which is why, contrary to your claim, every year the capacity factor of new projects increases.
> France identified that irregular metallurgy caused faster corrosion, and this informs future builds
This is a great example of a factor leading to a negative learning rate just like the US experienced ever since their first large commercial plants began operating at the end of the 60s.
Probably because all of the French reactors are over 20 years old and the last operational reactor they built was in 2000.. how is France going to replace the carbon free energy they get from their aging reactors? Average life span of reactors are between 20-40 years. Intuition tells me wind and solar ain't gonna cut it.
France has been trying to start their fleet rebuild at Flamanville, but it's proving to take far far too long. 15 years of construction and it's unclear when it will be generating electricity.
Olkiluoto, using the same design, was trumpeted to be ready at the beginning of the year, but is still not online.
Intuition tells me that after 4 decades of construction productivity being stagnant, we will not have any sudden improvements in construction productivity any time soon.
Also, my intuition on wind and solar is entirely different from yours. It's already so much cheaper, faster, and easier to deploy wind onshore, wind offshore, and solar that I can't imagine nuclear being able to catch up. And storage is live today, and ready for the grid. We are scaling storage production capacity far more quickly than we could hope to scale nuclear construction capacity.
The difficulty of commencing nuclear construction at, say, 500GW per year, is absolutely staggering. But we will be very close to that for wind and solar, correcting for capacity factor, quite soon.
France has the right strategy but failed to properly maintain for years due to stingy previous administrations.
Then Macron's admin decided to push for maintenance all at once (likely because they were worried if he lost to Le Pen next cycle) but they failed to foresee the Ukraine war and loss of cheap Russian gas.
France is in trouble because due to the same misguided anti-nuclear public sentiment, they stopped building new plants. The good news is that Putin has woken people up, and the public is now decidedly pro-nuclear.
It's crazy to think it would only take a few thousand plants to power the entire world, or about 15 times the ones we have today. But even another few hundred plants could completely change the geopolitical landscape. Nuclear power is a cheatcode we refuse to use.
It takes too long to build primarily because opponents tie things up with lawsuits and challenges. Federal research money is available for competitors but not nuclear. One Utah Senator tried to for something like fifteen years to get money to build a modern thorium reactor sample plant. He never succeeded but there was plenty of money for things like Solyndra.
Thankfully thorium research has become so attractive that it's now attracting private money but we've lost a couple of decades.
There's a company named Thorcon building a modern nuclear salt reactor in Indonesia that's actually doing it in what seems like a legitimately safe, scalable, cheap, easily reproducible way using shipyard/ship manufacturing techniques.
The average lifetime of a nuclear reactor is also ~40 years. Sure maybe some of those were early closures due to political pressure, but it's still a big challenge. Not only do you have to convince the public now, but also every 40 years or so
Everyone's saying "we should've started building nuclear 20 years ago" but the thing we really should've started 20 years ago is heavy investments in our education system
I know, right? Why build a solar farm in 6 months or a wind farm in a year when you can spend five times as much and have a nuclear plant ready in 10-15 years?
Because the solar farm is going to saturate the energy market on sunny days, and fail to produce energy at night and on cloudy days. There's diminishing returns on intermittent energy sources once peak production is saturated. Comparing intermittent sources of electricity to dispatchable sources of energy is comparing apples to oranges.
It's insane to fret about saturating the energy market when 40% of electricity is produced by gas on a sunny day and electric car drivers are gagging for differential pricing tariffs.
Intermittent electricity produced now is worth more than baseload in 14 years later.
40% of electricity may be produced by gas on a given day, but that 40% is being produced mostly at night - which is is not going to be displaced by further investments in solar. "Base load" isn't a reference to generation, it's a reference to demand. Base load refers to the load during the lowest period of energy demand in a 24 hour period. Unfortunately, load peaks when solar is producing no energy and load at its base when solar is producing the most energy [1]. Without storage, these excesses of solar production when load is at its base cannot be shifted to the time when load is at its peak.
Renewables look great if you just look at generation. But the goal isn't simply to generate clean energy, the goal is to displace fossil fuels. This is why non-intermittent sources like nuclear and hydroelectricity are, contrary to your assertion, far more valuable for decarbonization.
I live in NYC, and about 50% of energy coming to my apartment comes from nuclear and hydro sources, according to the energy company.
But NYC has a few gas-fired peaker plants, and during summer they are fired at the hottest time of the day, when AC load soars.
More solar power would certainly help this specific problem. I suppose that somewhere farther from ocean, where day and night temperatures vary more, a solar plant should have an even bigger effect in the summer.
Unfortunately the solar potential north in New York is pretty bad. It's not just the weather, it's the angle of incidence with the sun. The further away from the equator you go, the less light per square meter of land you get.
Actually, Europe's renewables - besides hydroelectricity - are mostly wind precisely for this reason. Wind is 12% of the EU's electricity generation as compared to 6% for solar [2]. Nuclear power is more than both combined at 25% [3].
Aren't you quoting numbers on grid electricity production?
In Europe many household solar installations are connected to batteries, and don't feed directly into the grid. You won't see such use in production statistics, only indirectly as a reduction in demand.
Some of those also don't produce electricity, but use solar for heating.
Maybe I'm wrong (either the numbers encompass that, or the difference isn't substantial). But it seems to me that you'd get a bias against solar if that's correct. Wind installations are usually more centralized, and feed into the grid.
Europe's renewables are mostly wind because they have good wind resource and terrible local weather for solar. 40 degrees latitude makes very little difference to output and the 10% CF during mid winter available for fixed utility solar in new york still makes the energy considerably cheaper than nuclear.
Most of what's south of switzerland or north of estonia has decent local weather for it. Finland's resources are quite good compared to even some equatorial places like PNG, just with higher seasonal variability. It's more the central part + UK. The point being that latitude is less important than weather, and as such claiming that solar is untenable in northern US or southern canada because it's merely okay in england is an obvious lie.
All of which is not to say solar won't be more important than gas, coal or nuclear in central europe going forward. Just that wind will take the front seat.
Finland has good weather for solar? You realize how far north they are? They gave good weather for solar in the summer when they don't need electricity for heating anyway. How much solar are they getting right now?
In case you aren't aware latitudes reduce solar energy collected per square meter of land. This can be motivated by tracking solar panels. But what can't be mitigated are shorter days in winter that get more extreme the further your are from the equator. In Helsinki right now the sun rises at 9:30 and sets just after 3pm.
If you lack the critical reasoning ability to understand how that could be useful or to understand that adding a thing that's biased towards summer to a thing that's biased towards winter gives you energy all year around, then we shouldn't really be listening to your energy infrastructure advice.
How many gigawatts of sand storage have been provisioned (in terms of electricity output, not thermal output)? How many years of operational experience do we have? In fact I'm not aware of any project using thermal sand for electric storage, only for district heating. Finland uses about 87TWh electricity annually, working out to about 230 GWh daily. I'd be a lot more convinced of it's viability for seasonal storage if they're able to provision at least a day of storage.
I don't doubt your critical reasoning ability, but I do doubt the wisdom of treating the challenge of provisioning and operating massive seasonal storage on the order of terawatts as a solved problem because of a few district heating projects.
> How many years of operational experience do we have?
Yes. Huge problem. Very nice and good faith objection to something that can be done incredibly simply with a few dollars per kWh. What if some hot water or sand leaks out and contaminates an entire country?
Indeed so! But I suppose there may be enough slanted surfaces facing approximately south. If solar were cheap enough to depoy, it could help. But possibly it may be not, due to labor costs.
I still see some (tall, multifamily / office) houses in Brooklyn and even on Manhattan adorning their roofs with solar panels. I know only one house that incorporated them right from the start though, it's on Coney Island, facing the ocean.
I think when someone comes up with translucent solar panels which can work as window shades on a skyscraper while looking good from the outside and not requiring a fortune to deploy, that will change the face of metropolises around the globe.
Right, but then how do you displace the remaining fossil fuel use? It's only a matter of time until the "other places" are also saturated. How do you get from 40-50% decarbonized energy to zero?
The solution is non-intermittent energy generation. Hydro and geothermal are great for places that have the right geography and geology. But nuclear is the only other non-intermittent form of decarbonized energy we have*.
* Some would point to biomass, but I don't consider them decarbonized: the biomass could have been a carbon sink if it wasn't burned. It's emissions by virtue of opportunity cost. An it's not a very scalable form of energy anyway.
But nuclear is a terrible complement to intermittent power sources. Nuclear wants to run 24/7 - not intermittently.
IMO, gas is going to be around for quite a while as a peaker for renewables - and the more renewables come online, the less necessary it is as a peaker, but it will still be needed.
>Right, but then how do you displace the remaining fossil fuel use?
The cost effective way would be with wind farms, pumped/battery storage and demand shifting.
(this would be a nice problem to have, by the way, but we are STILL churning through terawatt hours of gas while the sun is shining and the wind is blowing all over).
Nuclear power isnt dispatchable. It's not just 5x more expensive. It would overproduce during times when we don't need electricity and underproduce when we do.
You do exactly what Australia is doing and build PHES and dispatchable loads like electrolysis for fertilizer and smelting as well as adopting EVs.
Also your SA example is cherry picking a time when a bunch of transmission infrastructure has been destroyed because it was built to sub par standards and hit by a storm. When this happened last time there was only large centralised fossil fuel generation and there were weeks of blackouts and other problems. Seems like a pretty good case for more rooftop solar.
Unfortunately nobody has figured out how to deploy enough storage to make intermittent sources viable. Hence why plans for a renewable grid assume that compressed air, heated sand, or giant flywheels will deliver storage at orders of magnitude better than the existing battery and pumped hydro systems. Australia is not a big success story: Fossil fuels still comprise over 60% of electricity sources for Australia - it's no better than the USA. They are not using renewables for chemical and metallurgy industries. And this is despite Australia having some of the best weather and geography for solar power.
Sweden is the country making the most progress into green hydrogen, but it's still experimental at this point. Sweden also gets 40% of it's electricity from nuclear and 40% from hydropower, too. It's hardly a poster child for the success of wind and solar over nuclear power. Intermittent sources need to be backed by a dispatchable source. For countries that don't have widespread hydroelectric potential like Sweden, intermittent sources are not viable except as a supplement to fossil fuels.
> Unfortunately nobody has figured out how to deploy enough storage to make intermittent sources viable.
They're viable even without storage as evidenced by installing new capacity at a rate of net generation of about 20% of the entire cumulative nuclear fleet per year. And getting enough storage is well understood, it is just not a priority in most places until around 70% penetration and progress towards decarbonizing transport is met.
> Australia is not a big success story: Fossil fuels still comprise over 60% of electricity sources for Australia - it's no better than the USA. They are not using renewables for chemical and metallurgy industries. And this is despite Australia having some of the best weather and geography for solar power.
Australia has languished under a government that was openly hostile to renewables for years. South Australia has been operating at over 90% gross renewables for a week and this is after only a few years of large scale effort with insignificant storage and limited ability for interstate transmission due to storm damage.
> Sweden is the country making the most progress into green hydrogen, but it's still experimental at this point.
Looks like about the same level of investment for similar targets to me. Could it be that was another example of blatant lies?
> For countries that don't have widespread hydroelectric potential like Sweden, intermittent sources are not viable except as a supplement to fossil fuels.
Yes. 90% for a week right near the beginning of the transition is a 'suppliment'. Very sound conclusion from the evidence at hand.
This constant lying must be exhausting. Just sell your coal shares.
Where are you getting the idea that 90% of South Australia's electricity is coming from renewables? Fossil fuels still account for ~35% of the state's generation [1]. You mention "for a week", so it sounds like this was under ideal conditions in the middle of the Australian summer. I could also cherry-pick data from the middle of winter to show a particularly bad week. The only state that has more renewable generation is Tasmania, and they produce it mostly through hydropower. Again, the constraints of intermittent sources energy continue to surface themselves. Australia has not found a way to escape this.
> Looks like about the same level of investment for similar targets to me. Could it be that was another example of blatant lies?
As per your links, Australia merely has targets while Sweden has actually produced and delivered green steel. In fact, again as per the link, Sweden has made the world's first delivery of steel produced without fossil fuels. I'm struggling to see how you conclude this is a lie when your own sources explain how Australia has no plants or production, while Sweden has actually produced green steel.
It should be said that until the entire European energy supply is carbon free, green steel is not only incredibly expensive, but also bad for the climate.
It would be much better in both ways to feed that energy into the electric grid to replace fossil fueled power.
Norway has a similar initiative to produce carbon free ammonium, but that, too, depends on dirt cheap electricity supply to be rational.
In both cases, Hydrogen is used, and I suppose if large amounts of hydrogen becomes available and very cheap (for instance due to excess wind power supply), it _could_ be good to already have this tech available.
But based on what I can see from electricity flows from Denmark and Germany to Norway, it is still very rare for the European grid to have excess power due to good wind conditions.
Norway can still absorb a lot more wind power on such days by temporary pausing hydro production. (Max hydroelectric electricity production in Norway is around 20GW, or about 4KW per capita).
Sweden and Norway both have 100% decarbonized electricity. Makes sense that they're the ones that are starting to make progress on decarbonizing chemical and other industries besides electricity.
Sweden and Norway are both part of the European grid, so excess power can be exported to Germany, the UK, Denmark, Poland etc where it can replace coal/gas based power. (In fact Norway and Sweden are required to do so as part of the ACER agreement.)
For now, that makes a lot more sense economically AND it replaces more carbon emissions per kWh.
> Where are you getting the idea that 90% of South Australia's electricity is coming from renewables? Fossil fuels still account for ~35% of the state's generation [1].
You're still making the point for me here. After only 5 years or so of actually supporting renewables and meaningful growth, and around two years of solar being the cheapest option, they're meeting 65% of the total electricity.
> As per your links, Australia merely has targets while Sweden has actually produced and delivered green steel. In fact, again as per the link, Sweden has made the world's first delivery of steel produced without fossil fuels. I'm struggling to see how you conclude this is a lie when your own sources explain how Australia has no plants or production, while Sweden has actually produced green steel.
Ah, so you're back to claiming that things that aren't already finished are impossible and irrelevant. Really working hard to find somewhere you can put those goalposts.
Also Lulea is in Sweden's north so your pathetic attempt at a gotchya of a single load from a demo plant was powered with hydro and wind, not Nuclear.
And what powers the turbopumps that make your plumbing work? What powers the streetlights? Or datacenters that run your internet services and cell phone networks? Or the smelters, factories, and chemical plants essential to a developed society? If we're going to load shift (read: turn off the power) to these industries, then the cost of reduced industrial output needs to be included. If you only run your smelters half the time, then your steel output is reduced by half, and the cost of steel increases along with any products that use steel.
The world uses 60,000 GWh of electricity per day. Global battery production is only ~400 GWh of batteries per year. A day's energy storage amounts to over a century of battery production. Storage is nowhere near as simple as "buy a battery".
Right and China is also set to produce 80% of the world's batteries. Emphasizing "China alone" seems strange shen china alone produces the vast majority of the world's batteries. Between that and the lockdowns in China, I'll be interested in seeing if the final figures for lithium batteries are even close to the 1,000 GWh global production figures that people had predicted. Moore's law unfortunately doesn't play out in heavy industry.
And again, the question is how do you move the water around when the wind isn't blowing? Or do you think citizens are just going to be okay with plumbing that only works on windy days. The point is that household energy use is hardly the only kind of thing that needs to be backed up by a storage system. Energy demand cannot easily be cut without making significant sacrifices in standards of living and industrial output.
Yes, people have used wind pumps to pump wells in villages and homesteads. But that's because they didn't need that water on demand, it's just a labor saving device used opportunistically. But it's a lot harder to pump water to the top of a skyscraper, and to a city of millions of people. This kind of pump [1] is not a drop in replacement for this [2] kind of pump.
In conclusion, we'd need a way to provision massive amounts of storage to get renewables and o become a reliable source of primary energy. It's costs are being measured in the context of opportunistically replacing fossil fuel power. But in a context where fossil fuel use is not permitted, it would be highly impractical without an incredibly performant form of storage. Perhaps heated sand, compressed air, electrolysis, etc. will deliver that. But thus far they haven't, and in the absence of such a storage system nuclear power would be a more reliable path of decarbonization.
> I'll be interested in seeing if the final figures for lithium batteries are even close to the 1,000 GWh global production figures that people had predicted
Oh no, storage might only be buildable at a consistent 4x the peak rate of nuclear additions instead of 8x. Guess we better give up and use fossil fuels for 20 years while the nuclear industry starts up.
Not only are there a host of ways of covering constant energy demand with VRE, but you still don't seem to be able to comprehend the idea that water can go downhill. Why would we listen to energy advice from someone who doesn't understand ideas that are millenia old like a water tower or that bricks can stay hot for a day or two?
If you think the NIMBYism for renewables is bad, imagine trying to build a nuclear plant in your backyard. In fact, the majority of problems with nuclear being slow to build boil down to "the NIMBYs wont have it".
This is probably a place where nuclear and renewable advocates could come together and fight back against the NIMBYs who would rather you just built more coal plants next to the poors. Because NIMBYism is just lower-case c conservatism with extra steps.
If your only concern is radiation exposure, coal plants actually emit more radiation than nuclear. And that's deliberate, everyday emissions, not the accidental once-in-a-decade megaevents like Fukushima or Chernobyl.
Please do share the total cumulative activity of all bioacumulative elements present in all non-filtered fly ash ever released and compare it to the Cs137 that Sellafield poured into the ocean as part of normal operation in 1975 or the Kr 85 that La Hague releases on an average year.
If I build an IKEA bookcase, do I time the build from when I throw the instructions away, or when my significant other decides to buy it between mouthfuls of meatballs?
> How many net GW of new nuclear were added in the year with the highest addition?
There were six (6) new reactors > 1 Gw connected to the grid this year, totaling 7.4 Gw capacity, and eight (8) new reactor construction starts, totaling 9.7 Gw capacity.
There were zero (0) new solar plants > 4 Gw (which you realistically need to be equivalent to a 1 Gw nuke) brought online in this year. In fact, there weren't even any > 1 Gw (equivalent to a 250 Mw nuke) brought online.
And no, putting a few solar panels on your roof isn't going to replace grid scale generation stations when it comes to running an industrial civilization. It's a fantasy akin to Mao's idea that people were going to be smelting iron in small furnaces in their back yard.
Hahah. Nice mental gymnastics. Utility solar doesn't exist unless it's all in one place and industrial machinery explodes if a joule of energy that comes fron a residential roof powers it.
You're really hunting for somewhere to move those goalposts to now.
Are you going to answer the question or are you going to cry victim?
I made a (provably) true statement, namely that grid-scale renewables largely do not exist.
You tried to change the subject to something else. Sorry, you don't get to do that. I don't owe you any of my time to discuss a different topic of your choosing, especially not when (based on our previous encounter) you:
1) don't understand the difference between power and energy
2) don't understand the difference between energy storage and energy production
So lying and crying victim and then trying to ad hominem based on your failure at reading comprehension then.
If you want people to treat you with respect, you could try making a single good faith comment, rather than a ridiculous stretch using tortured definitions and then cry bullying when people point out how ridiculous it is.
That does not mean the second best time is to start now though! The second best time to start could be never, assuming that renewables and storage will become significantly cheaper and more efficient in the next decades, which does not seem unlikely.
The law of diminishing returns has thus far been wrong on battery and renewables. Previous estimates often were wrong due to assuming a slowdown. Not to say it can't or won't happen, but unlikely isn't the word I'd use.
The last two years were weird, especially regarding batteries due to prices increasing, but I'd put that on Covid and the resulting mess.
Especially as solar & wind is already cheaper than everything else by far, so the critical part is batteries which is a broad field with a huge increase in relevance & research over the past few years.
The chances are pretty good, but of course a slowdown could still happen.
Chemical batteries are nowhere near suitable for providing sustained load to the grid, and never will be.
What's happened is they're now cheap enough that for fast dispatch load levelling applications, you can install them where instead you'd have to consider bringing a whole powerplant online inefficiently.
In the next 100 years, I predict no overnight load is going to be handled by installed grid batteries as part of a major energy grid: it'll only ever be backup capacity to make smooth the small scale variations of renewables (i.e. a cloud blowing over a solar farm briefly).
Right now, household batteries are being installed by those that can afford them (and the prices dropping). They are enough to handle overnight load. And electric vehicles are becoming popular, usually with double or more capacity, which will replace the household batteries. The uptake is high and will only get higher because it saves people money. Even people who can't afford a household batteries themselves will be able to get one installed, as the cost saving will allow someone else to profit. So grid batteries are easily able to provide sustained load to the grid, by simply pricing power from the batteries higher than power direct from the generator. Household batteries kick in because it saves people money, and turns out you need very little grid storage at all to handle overnight load. The trick is handling black swan events, such as extended periods without wind or ash/dust blocking sun, across the entire grid area (usually solved by making the grid bigger, such as connecting to neighboring countries).
Any civilisation that can produce a 60kWh battery or three per residence for gigantic EVs can trivially produce a 30kWh battery for overnight storage. Prices are at around $150/kWh at the cell level and assembly costs are plummeting, there's no real reason to think 12 hour Sodium-ion, Iron flow or ZnBR storage won't be available for prices close to the PV required to drive it daily.
It won't be needed because renewables can provide 70-95% of hours just by adding dispatchable loads even without adding more PHES or CSP, but it's not because batteries will be exorbitant compared to non-renewable generation options.
The experience curve for PV follows a power law, where a doubling of cumulative production reduces cost by about 20%. At that rate, when the world is powered by PV, the PV would be producing energy at < $0.01/kWh, and even less in the best locations.
With that cheap solar, it would be better to just heat up a big pile of rocks with resistive heat and use that to drive steam turbines, instead of using nuclear fission to make the steam. Artificial geothermal.
While the law is there, the grid-scale battery tech is pretty far from the point where the returns start diminishing. I'd say that it's now in the lower part of the S-curve, with a lot of lower-hanging fruit to crop.
I'm saying this as a definite proponent of nuclear power and of renewables.
If Nixon hadn't sent his people to Vietnam in the late 60's and promise the Vietcong a better deal if they walked away from negotiations, He wouldn't have been able to run on 'winning the war' and we would have been out of Vietnam FIVE YEARS EARILER. Nixon was a fuck up, and is still screwing the world today. Piece of shit.
Nixon canceled the Mars program where the vast majority of cutting edge nuclear research was happening - tech like the nuclear lightbulb (search my comments for details) that could have matured and saved us by now. He was no friend to nuclear, just the entrenched nuclear industry.
In fact, they built several experimental setups and were just short of testing fissile material before the program was canceled.
If anyone would like a starting point for research instead of lobotomized rhetoric like "this is magical thinking", request this paper: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19750027209
Yes, let's vaporize nuclear fuel. What could possibly go wrong with this stunning large brain engineering. It is surely no more burdensome on materials than solid fuel sealed away in metal tubes. /s
Yes that's how civilization was built. By pushing material science further and further. Do you think pressurized steam turbines just magically appeared?
Read the papers, they explain it all and characterize the tests.
Vaporizing nuclear fuel is how we enrich it. Uranium => Uranium Hexaflouride sublimed at 57C => Gaseous centrifuge to separate the isotope. We've been doing it since the Manhattan Project, since before nuclear power plants were even a thing.
Comparing uranium hexafluoride vapor at 57 C to incandescent vaporized uranium + fission products at 22,000 C. The materials problems with the latter are just a bit more severe!
It would take about 6000 3 GW(th) plants to supply the world's current average rate of primary energy consumption (18 TW). And if these were today's thermal reactors we'd run out of the current estimate of the global resource of U (at < $260/kg) in less than a decade.
Increase in price would increase amount of mineable U. Nobody even prospected it in last 50 years. There is enough of of known deposits, why trying to find new ones?
That is like peak oil stories. Increase price twice or thrice and suddenly there is enough place where it is worth mining. Nobody even talks about peak oil anymore. It's not like U is significant part of a cost/kWh. We could get U even from seawater.
Sea mining as an alternative to renewables + storage is an absolutely riotous joke. Take a look at the results of practical attempts and see if you can find the punchlines (there are at least three).
Powering a single 1000 MW(e) LWR reactor with sea water uranium would require an adsorber field covering 170 square kilometers of continental shelf. The average power/area would be considerably worse than solar.
Also (from second reference): "The predicted cost to extract uranium from seawater ranged from $610/kg U to $830/kg U." Ouch.
You missed the really funny bit where to reduce costs to a "mere" ~$400/kg you attach the sea mining equipment to supply 5MW to an offshore wind turbine which in 2022 will produce around 10MW net. Then it produces enough vanadium to add about 1hr or storage in flow batteries for the wind turbine each year.
It also requires a constant supply of polymer that caps the EROI around 10.
Good thing we only extract 10% of the energy from the Uranium today. Also, you wouldn't go 100% nuclear with today's PWRs. Gen 4 reactors will be much more responsive and efficient with the fuel.
Yes, that's why I'm saying breeders would be required. To scale from existing operating breeder reactors to powering the world would require increasing the number of such reactors by a factor of 5000. Scaling up renewables and storage is a much smaller multiplier, in comparison.
> To scale from existing operating breeder reactors to powering the world would require increasing the number of such reactors by a factor of 5000
That's a very silly way to frame it because there's only like 3 commercial breeder reactors today. Why is that the case? Because energy has been cheap, we know how to do PWRs so there's little reason to do the work necessary to use Uranium more efficiently. It's only in the last 3 or 4 years that the world has collectively realized the extent of our problems.
> Scaling up renewables and storage is a much smaller multiplier, in comparison.
I feel that you don't appreciate the sheer number of machines we'd have to build to accomplish a renewable only primary energy design. How much mining and refining we'd have to do. Things that we cannot do at scale today without fossil fuels. Nuclear energy's main advantages are the sheer energy density you get, on demand. 6000 power plants to replace global primary energy is a bargain compared to the hundreds of millions of machines we'd have to build to do that with solar/wind. If solar/wind weren't intermittent, it might be doable. But we really suck at storing energy today.
Let's look at a large scale off shore wind farm in the US. We use offshore wind because they get the highest capacity factors and therefore the most bang for the buck. The Dominion offshore wind farm is a 112,000 acre 2.6 GW (peak) project planning to utilize 180 state-of-the-art Siemens Gamesa 15 MW turbines for a cost of 10 Billion USD. Let's say it gets an amazing 50% capacity factor because it is 27 miles off the Virginia coast. That means, it will produce 1.3 GW on average. But wait, we need battery storage because the output can randomly go from 0 to 100% in several minutes. Let's eyeball it and say we want to be able to provide an hour of buffer. So 2.6 GWh of battery storage. That is the same as the combined capacity of all the grid batteries that existed in the US in 2020. Source: https://sandia.gov/ess-ssl/gesdb/public/statistics.html
Or we could build a single APR-1400 nuclear plant for 1.35 GW on demand. The UAE just built 4 of them in 10 years, for 6B each. And each of them will last at least 2 times as long as the turbines.
> That's a very silly way to frame it because there's only like 3 commercial breeder reactors today. Why is that the case? Because energy has been cheap, we know how to do PWRs so there's little reason to do the work necessary to use Uranium more efficiently. It's only in the last 3 or 4 years that the world has collectively realized the extent of our problems.
There are zero commercial breeders today. There are zero demonstration breeders that use Pu239 or U233 as their fissile fuel. There is one reactor doing something approximating breeding by playing a shell game with MOX and has made no public claim of producing more Pu239 than it consumses under normal operation.
Your argument about not being needed does, however, apply to pumped hydro which has geography for thousands of >50GWh sites all around the world. Only a tiny handful of them are needed.
> I feel that you don't appreciate the sheer number of machines we'd have to build to accomplish a renewable only primary energy design. How much mining and refining we'd have to do. Things that we cannot do at scale today without fossil fuels. Nuclear energy's main advantages are the sheer energy density you get, on demand. 6000 power plants to replace global primary energy is a bargain compared to the hundreds of millions of machines we'd have to build to do that with solar/wind. If solar/wind weren't intermittent, it might be doable. But we really suck at storing energy today.
"Big number scary" is not an argument. What matters is raw materials and cost. These both favor monocrystalline solar by such a large margin that there's no contest. A mix with onshore wind using modular foundations has reached concrete parity with Gen III reactors or an EPR and offshore is not far behind. Nuclear reactors require less iron, but far more chromium. Only the latter is in anything approximating short supply and iron mining for either pales in comparison to the tens of billions of tonnes of ore that need to be mined (or leached where geography or apathy towards the locals allows) to fuel the reactors.
The overwhelming majority of Uranium ore is an absolutely terrible fuel barely more energy dense than coal if used in a PWR (but requiring much more processing), and its only redeeming features are low carbon emissions and portability once you mill and refine it.
> Or we could build a single APR-1400 nuclear plant for 1.35 GW on demand. The UAE just built 4 of them in 10 years, for 6B each. And each of them will last at least 2 times as long as the turbines.
You forgot the mandatory service contract to KEPCO for another $20 billion, that its net power is 1.1GW per reactor even when nothing goes wrong (Korea's reactors historically have about a 7% unplanned outage rate on top of the 15% planned) and that O&M which is on top of the service contract costs as much as replacing the entire wind turbine (rather than just repowering which is commensurable with normal maintenance on a thermal generator assuming there isn't a massive upgrade available for lower than the original price).
We need the power now, not in 15 years. The magic wand that waves away all of nuclear's problems that prevent this from happening sooner, simply does not exist. There seem to be lots of delusional dreamers that pretend otherwise but they don't have a whole lot of GW of power to show for their wishful thinking.
Nuclear has been a no show during the Ukraine crisis. People talk about it. But it's all a bit academic. A whole lot of could have, would have, should have, but not a whole lot of actual new capacity coming online. What little there is under construction tends to have eye watering budgets and lots of delays. This crisis will be ancient history by the time any new nuclear planned this year actually comes online. Solar and wind on the other hand are outstripping nuclear in terms of growth by no small margin.
It's the cheat code we have and we're using it to make hundreds of GW of new power generation happen in the next few years.
Did you not read the article? Stop pulling the 15 year number out of your ass. It's plainly possible to build nuclear power plants in under 4 years.
Solar and wind are outstripping nuclear in growth because their contribution is laughably small, and there's plenty low hanging fruit that can be achieved with small investments.
If we'd invested in nuclear power plants in 2010, like we said we needed to and then we didn't then we wouldn't have been dependent on Russian oil in 2022 during a fucking war while playing with windmills and solar panels like toddlers in a fucking sandbox.
Look what all that supposed growth in windmills has given us. Ask the layed off employees from aluminium power plants if wind energy was cheap enough for them. You want to know how you can tell windmills are a joke the energy industry is playing on you? They're in every fucking Shell "we've changed" TV commercial, that's how.
Three Mile Island wrecked the plant due to government idiots keeping the operators from handling it right. There was basically zero radiation release (if you lived at the reactor fence it was more dangerous to walk across one street in evacuating than it was to stay put), it shouldn't really be counted.
Chernobyl was a major disaster caused by blatant disregard for safety protocols that never would have happened in a country with a functioning regulatory commission. The plant operators knew what the boss was doing was insane but there was nothing they could do about it.
Fukushima should have had a death toll of approximately zero (because a fraction of a person can't die--the expected death toll was well under 1) but hundreds died due to the politically motivated evacuation of the area. It probably wouldn't be a good idea to eat things grown locally for some time but the threat from simply living there was minuscule. (Not to mention that there seems to be no relationship between background radiation rates and cancer.)
Waste isn't a problem, or at least not a problem that can't be solved with a bit of effort. Let's stop repeating the scary propaganda line that there's mountains of highly radioactive waste pouring out of nuclear power plants that is just waiting to irradiate our neighborhoods because we don't have anywhere to put it.
> If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 39.5 grams. That’s the weight of seven U. S. quarters of waste, per year!
And that's not even assuming that the "waste" was recycled into usable fuel again creating a mostly closed loop fuel cycle:
> Nuclear waste generally is over 90% uranium. Thus, the spent fuel (waste) still contains 90% usable fuel! It can be chemically processed and placed in other reactors to close the fuel cycle. A closed fuel cycle means much less nuclear waste and much more energy extracted from the raw ore. Additionally, this process allows you to convert your waste into chemical forms that are totally immobilized.
I agree that nuclear waste is an overblown problem, but that link entirely ignores the structural components that become radioactive. There's lots of things like concrete and steel that need to be contained as well.
Because the radiation from those structural components is not harmful in the doses people would experience from them. The fear of radiation is wildly exaggerated and is based on the LNT model which every single scientific test of has proved invalid. The threshold appears to be about 25 mSv / day.
The worst American nuclear disaster, TMI, exposed some people to a radiation dose equivalent to a single trans-Atlantic flight. What do you think the radiation dose from structural equipment is? One of the worst examples from structural irradiation was when recycled rebar was used to build 180 apartment buildings in Taiwan, the highest annual dose received from that was 910 mSv, or 2.5 mSv / day, significantly less than the threshold dose of 25 mSv / day. The occupants of those apartments had fewer cancers than the average population.
A terrible mining accident/dam failure, not a storage issue of radioactive structural material. Now go ahead and compare deaths from mining accidents and dam failures from other sources of energy to those associated with nuclear fuel. What do you think the result would be when a nuclear reactor requires hundreds of thousands of times less fuel than any conventional reactor does or hundreds of thousands tons less of concrete and steel and rare elements than renewable generation does?
Mining accidents kill some ~10,000 people every year. Mining coal is a large portion of that. The worst damn failure killed 170,000 people.
If you don't like deaths from mining accidents then an energy source with millions of times the energy density is far superior. If you don't like deaths from dam failures then maybe putting a dam on every river isn't the greatest idea either.
> There's lots of things like concrete and steel that need to be contained as well.
That's actually the VAST majority of what needs to be contained. But these don't need to be contained for thousands or even hundreds of years. We're talking a few years (<=5). This waste also does not require shielding nor cooling and is mostly a precautionary factor ensuring that there is no cross contamination. Low level waste accounts for ~90-95% of waste, intermediate is ~5%-7% (shielding but no cooling. Short lived ILW -- <30 yrs -- is often stored on site and disposed normally. Long lived ILW is just thrown in with HLW in geological depositories for convenience) and high level/trans-uranic waste (<1%-3%) is what needs to be stored in a geological depository (several of which exist btw).
Just want to make sure you have the facts before you start forming big opinions. Things like concrete and steel are typically stored on site and later disposed of normally. It's not really the concern of nuclear waste.
Is that not only an issue when a plant is permanently decommissioned? That seems like a fairly easy problem to solve as well: Bury it like you would any other nuclear waste that can't be reprocessed; or melt the steel down and use it in a new reactor.
Not an expert; but offhand I recall that irradiated materials, in addition to being harmful to biological entities like humans, are also changed by the absorbed radiation. Effectively they gain impurities from it. The best course of action would be to let the halflifes decay and then return it to the raw material stream.
elting it down doesn't make it less radioactive. It's still a significant health hazard to work with, making new construction with the remolded materials prohibitively expensive.
I don't think that actually meaningfully helps all that much. Storing it for 2 years, 30 years, or 500 years, are nearly the same problem from a political perspective. "Where to keep it" is really the question "where to put it", and then you leave it there because moving it is dealing with the problem "where to put it" all over again.
On site. That's what we're doing and that's what works really well. Honestly, it is only the high level stuff that will outlive the powerplant. I know this might not be the answer you want to hear, but the truth is that we probably won't do any significant huge waste repositories (like Yucca Mountain. Though we do have smaller ones) until the waste reaches a significant volume and it actually becomes a problem. Human nature and the inability to do long term planning or something. The good news is that even if we increased our nuclear output, globally, by say 10x or something, we'd still have many decades to resolve that problem because so little waste is actually produced that it can be stored on site relatively easily. Maybe we put things off because in the future we're usually more knowledgeable and have better technology so things are cheaper. Maybe we're just dumb. Either way, it doesn't seem like a huge worry.
> And that's not even assuming that the "waste" was recycled into usable fuel again creating a mostly closed loop fuel cycle
This is scifi. MOX has the fuel reused once to provide a small boost in efficiency after being reprocessed in an incredibly polluting weapons facility that needs an excuse to stay open and then the Pu240 still needs dealing with. And the "leftover uranium" is U238 not U235. There is no closed or "mostly closed" fuel cycle, it's just a shell game.
And your 40 grams doesn't include the 400 grams of non-radioactive heavy metal enrichment tailings, the 4kg of low level and non-radioactive waste and the 40kg of milling or leaching slurry that would come out of any new mine or half of the existing mines.
Then multiply that all by 5 for full decarbonization rather than just electricity.
Man, the source I listed is literally from a guy with a Ph.D on the topic. Where exactly am I "falling for the narrative of the nuclear industry?" An industry which, by the way, hardly exists in the US anymore.
> Denying the basic problems with recycling, TRANSPORTATION and storage is not helping.
Do you care to elaborate on what any of these supposed basic problems actually are?
You can tell that the biggest damage from nuclear power plant waste is emotional, by the fact that no one gives a shit about disposal of radioactive coal power plant ash.
Even though that shit is dumped next to where people live on the regular, with increases to cancer rates as you would expect.
I had an active nuclear plant in my neighborhood (Indian Point Energy Center) until the NY government made it untenable to continue the relicensing process. I would be perfectly fine with the plant continuing to run and continuing to have onsite storage of the waste. It provided 25% of the power for our county and NYC, employed 1500 people directly, and paid for roughly 1/3 of our children's schools. Shutting it down was a mistake, nuclear is so upfront capital cost intensive that it is a waste to stop a functional plant.
If zealous supporters of coal plants asked for the fumes to go into their neighborhood I still would not be on board. Have you ever seen the effects of coal power? Like really - lived there?
I have and it is not pretty at all. I would take a correctly stored nuclear waste right away.
I would love a nuclear plant in my neighborhood, especially if I could buy power from it without going through PG&E. I have trouble imagining waste storage being cost effective here.
Large nuclear wants to be somewhere that the (physically enormous) electric station and connection to the grid makes sense. Small nuclear could go near where power is used. Waste should be somewhere with inexpensive land and in a convenient location for putting the waste there.
If there were container-sized reactors that produced a few tens of MW, they could go all over the place. Fancy neighborhoods could pay a premium to put them in fake houses. But the waste would probably be much more economical to handle by moving the entire container to a service facility, refueling at the facility, and handling the waste at or near the facility. This would be in an industrial area, just like other large warehouses or factories.
To be fair, if it was going to be a Fukushima-style boiling water reactor that can fail dangerously if it loses power, sticking it that close to a major fault line in an isolated area may not be the best idea.
At Fukushima, the reactor SCRAMed successfully and it was the seawater that took out the generators powering the decay-heat cooling system. If California experienced a wave that could crest Bodega Head's yuge natural seawall then we have bigger problems lol https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/ht-bin/tv_browse.pl?id=96773349539f93...
I would very happily have one in my neighbourhood, so kindly stop slandering me.
Here's the deal: I get that, and am connected to the grid, you don't, and no fossil back up for either. Virtue signalling over a gas grid is killing people, people I know, and I don't like people who support that. No "batteries maybe in some mystical future". We had carbon free tech forty years ago. If you frustrated that you too are responsible for the destruction I now see everywhere.
If zealous deniers of nuclear asked for storage of other power waste to be stored anywhere other than the sky, they'd realize their argument is worthless.
Waste is stored on site until it’s quite a bit less radioactive, this can and has been done for decades. The fear of shipping this cooled down waste and burying it in a mountain is entirely unfounded and the only reason it hasn’t happened is people spreading unnecessary fear.
Nuclear power is a half baked technology that hasn’t had any real advancement since the Cold War ended.
Unfortunately advancing the technology is beyond us. Like going to the moon, the costs are too high. Nuclear can and is commercialized, but the technology is still extremely complicated and dangerous given how relatively primitive it is.
Maybe go global scale with 10th gen nuclear, but what we have is barely better than 50 years ago still.
Case in point most reactors today are not failsafe, as in an emergency once their backup generators fail the core will meltdown.
Edit: I would go on to argue that our technology has actually regressed. The technology has not kept up with regulations which means the time to build is getting longer. The answer is not rolling back regulations - you really want to live near a plant built with less regulations? The answer is actually improving the base technology - which is much much harder, but necessary to achieve a design that is both cheap to build and inherently safe.
And I'd blame anti-nuclear folks for keeping nuclear less safe than it could be, even though it's already one of the least dangerous energy sources in existence
Coal power kills a million people every year. Go check how many die from nuclear then x15 that as a thought experiment and then tell me which technology is dangerous and half baked
> hasn’t had any real advancement since the Cold War ended.
That's just plain ignorance.
> Case in point most reactors today are not failsafe
Most reactors in use today sure, but we've already established that we haven't been building new reactors for a while now. Any new reactor built today would be failsafe.
The ‘new’ reactors are barely more advanced than the old ones and even more complicated.
Nuclear is pretty high end technology, it needs real investment to move forward. The government has shown little interest. Few reactors are built, what we have is aging, the number of people doing R&D is next to nothing.
They have been talking about that for 30 years. It could be done in a very short period of time if real R&D was put into it. Look at submarine nuclear reactors for example.
Some risk and complexity is just intrinsic. Flying is risky because of hitting the ground. Nuclear power is risky because of the nature of radioactive material. Mitigating those risks add complexity and cost.
You need more redundancy, higher quality materials, better QA, more pro-active maintenance, more security, etc. And many of your staff will need to be very highly trained and expensive. This all adds up in terms of expense and timescales. Flying may be cheaper but we all still drive!
We still tolerate much less flying risk than driving risk -- driving makes much more deaths than flying, and coal makes for worse health than nuclear, but we hold flying and nuclear to higher standards than driving and coal
But we should be holding driving and coal to a higher standard. And many people are trying to do exactly that.
I think an interesting part of this question is consent. People have a reasonable understanding of the road and are implicitly consenting to that risk. And as a society we make a conscious choice to balance safety and convenience. But that is just not true with flying, nuclear or even coal power. People don't understand and they absolutely don't consent to the risk. As professionals and scientists that does change things. As a hypothetical example imagine a lab testing the cold virus. It needs expensive safety equipment and an ethics review board. A scientist who just has a cold just needs a box of tissues. It is ethically different.
I think a problem we have is that some historical things have managed to escape the ethics review board because people are used to them. Cars cause cancer and yet people are presumed to consent to that. A solar farm with no real impact has to spend years getting consent. It is unbalanced.
Maybe the biggets problem with nuclear is that it is mostly driven by careful responsible professional people. In renewables society can cut corners (relative to nuclear) and get away with it because risk is just so much lower.
> We still tolerate much less flying risk than driving risk -- driving makes much more deaths than flying, and coal makes for worse health than nuclear, but we hold flying and nuclear to higher standards than driving and coal
Driving has more deaths than flying because we hold flying to higher standards than driving. If both were held to the same standard, there would be more deaths flying. That's because flying is inherently less forgiving: the energy involved is higher (both kinetic and potential energy), and you cannot "just stop" like a land vehicle can.
The same applies to nuclear: if we built nuclear power plants the same way we build coal power plants, the health consequences would be worse than coal.
Precautionary Principle doesn't work that way. Also you're assigning a terawatt value for a human life. We do that anyway often enough, but when you do it consciously it's ghoulish.
Ignoring the tradeoff doesn't make it go away, and if you don't consciously put a value on a human life, you'll probably wind up far from the Pareto frontier. In this case, for instance, thinking in terms of deaths-per-TWh is exactly what you want in order to fulfill our energy needs with as few people dying as possible. If a little "ghoulishness" saves lives, then I'll happily be a ghoul.
Like, how else should we talk about the topic in any other objective way? Sure, the death of any person is said and tragic. But true zero and true one probability simply doesn’t exist in reality. And we require energy, otherwise hospitals could not operate killing much much more people. So simply by that logic, one can minimize the amount of human suffering by nuclear.
And it is a fact, that non-nuclear, non-renewable energy sources kill a shitton of more people per unit energy, release orders of magnitude more radiation, let alone other carcinogenic gases.
Humanity isn't a process of talking about things in an objective way. You're talking about people as if they are numbers.
> And it is a fact, that non-nuclear, non-renewable energy sources kill a shitton of more people per unit energy
I once heard the circus of Congressional, reactionary policies described as thus:
"Something has to be done. This is something, so we will do it."
Yes, that's all perfectly true, and something absolutely has to be done. Many things actually. We're making good progress on a number of them. And turning off coal fired plants at a steady clip. It matters what you replace it with.
One of the things missing here is that when humans are involved, choices and the illusion of choice apply a multiplier on the risks. People volunteer for risks all the time, and they are happy to do so. Which is effectively what this is saying:
> Same thing with planes: people are afraid to fly them, but driving the same distance by car is way more dangerous.
If we only cared about traffic numbers we'd ban automobiles and force everyone to take public transit and airplanes to go anywhere. We'd save more people than we would by replacing coal with nuclear, and banning the cars would also reduce death by pollution by something like 10%.
Do you count deaths caused by mining rare minerals which is needed for the production of renewables?
Re your car example: And that’s why everything should be talked about in context. Cars are essential for our modern lives and it would be close to impossible the negative impact of its disappearance. And the relevant such context for energetics is the deaths per unit energy.
The point of the "Nuclear waste" is that it is perceived as dangerous. If someone gives a numerical argument to rebate a perception and your comeback is that "using numbers like that is ghoulish", then I know who is winning the argument.
We know who’s already won that argument, yes, but we also spend a lot of time here talking about the dystopian mess created by reducing everything to a number. This is the same exact situation.
I didn’t make an accusation to win the argument. I made the accusation to make the accusation.
Nuclear power is not half-baked, it's corrupted. The powers that be co-opted it for nuclear weapons programs. We chose to invest exclusively in war-time applications while pretending to seek peacetime uses.
Only now are we going back and looking at solutions that don't create ingredients for fission and fission-fusion warheads, and the lack of progress there means that countries who we don't want to join the nuclear arm's race are in a prickly position because the nuclear plants they can build leave them with ingredients the UN doesn't really want to proliferate.
I didn't understand how true this was until someone in the pebble reactor camp pointed out that these ideas were already known before the Manhattan project, and that there was a moment where the direction of investment was still up in the air and the war hawks won. I figured that was something someone discovered in the 80's and took a while to popularize. Nope.
You could argue if it weren’t war we wouldn’t have nuclear power or have landed in the moon, and many other things. There are many technologies out there completely obtainable, but without the investment of billions it won’t happen.
Commercialization is the commoditization of an established technology. Many technological leaps are far beyond what any company is capable due to the amount of investment and risk required.
Biotech for example is so far behind compared to our advancements in computers.
> The truly unique feature of US nuclear power is the unlimited power that was given to federal regulators.
> [...] Congress had effectively told the regulator make the rules up as you go. This meant the regulator had no problem changing the rules. A design that was legal at the start of construction, could be declared illegal any time thereafter.
No capital project would ever break ground with these conditions in place. Who would invest billions of dollars in something that could be made illegal any day with no recourse? I'm surprised that any new nuclear power plants were built at all.
That's why most great innovations happen during or just after wars. Bureaucracy stifles everything. It would be nice if we could fix this without having a war.
You'd think "increasingly-inevitable catastrophic destruction of Earth's biosphere" would count as a "war", given the projected casualty counts potentially dwarfing all wars combined.
They were only built with massive subsidies or through legal means being able to shift the costs to the ratepayers like the now cancelled Virgil C. Summer.
I'd much rather we be spending massive subsidies on nuclear power (and space exploration, and science in general) than on an increasingly-bloated military-industrial complex.
When did the NRC ever relax, cancel, or not enforce regulations on the nuclear industry?
[*edit] if you’re downvoting, could you please provide an example. I’m pretty well read on this and have never encountered any regulatory loosening by the NRC.
and I also suppose that the contracts with private corporations are such, that they don't just lose their money if regulation changes. Although, again, I'm a lay person when it comes to the US energy sector.
Totally fair. I think the issue has been that the various parts of the US government have been working at cross purposes with respect to nuclear power.
> and I also suppose that the contracts with private corporations are such, that they don't just lose their money if regulation changes.
The way the NRC works, they can without notice change the rules in a way that will force you to redesign a plant that is under construction. If you're too far along you'll just have to scrap the whole thing. If you look at this list of closed or abandoned nuclear projects, 4 are explicitly due to NRC changes[1]. This doesn't include any cancelled plans that hadn't begun construction and isn't a complete list. If coal power were regulated the way nuclear was, there would be no coal power in the US. Coal plants release 2 orders of magnitude more radiation per kwh than nuclear in the US and in a form that is more dangerous, e.g. coal ash which goes deep into your lungs[2].
There could bwhate similarity with what aeroplane manufacturers have to do. The Max 8 was declared illegal overnight. And new planes cost tens of billions to develop.
Literally everyone who builds anything ever does so under the condition that it could be made illegal any day with no recourse. That's the normal state of affairs.
Hah - I suppose by that standard all organization are criminal organizations (because someone who works in them commits crimes). I suppose they are all drug smugglers as well (as doubtless some of their employees use drugs). Someone should tell the DEA.
I think a more useful model is to look at what "the organization" does (as opposed to the people who work for it). For instance, Enron's business strategy relied on breaking the law. PG&E has been unable (or unwilling) to maintain its infrastructure to a level where it is safe to operate year round. These things existed outside of any individual crimes committed by employees (and it is useful to differentiate between individuals who are committing crimes in service of organization goals v.s. only for private benefit).
It doesn't matter who is footing the bill. It is crazy for any entity to invest any money under those circumstances.
The solution to one chunk of the government running mad and then handing lots of money to some other chunk of the government to try to chase after them would... uh... probably produce a world fairly similar to what we live in, actually. Which isn't a solution.
Regardless, constantly changing the goal posts with no significant costs to the ones doing the changing is a problem for any funding mechanism.
This line of reasoning makes no sense to me. If the government was better at building things than "profiteers," why shouldn't we just have the government build everything? Why shouldn't the government make cell phones and iPads? Why does Silicon Valley even exist?
In fact, we tried your proposal at scale. Nearly every developed country privatized electricity generation in the 1980s. Many countries, like India, still have state-owned power companies. If they were better, we would know.
Germany was at 40% renewables last year, and its electric generation sector is private. The UK—which privatized its electric generation under Thatcher back in the 1980s—was at 43%. China was at 29%.
The point is that neither of those is happening because the plants are not being built at all.
They are footing an entirely different kind of bill instead, paid with an entirely different kind of currency.
Instead of paying for a nuclear plant, regardless by what mechanism, they are living with continued use of coal and gas, or simply not enough capacity to meet the upcoming needs of things like wider adoption of EVs.
No single entity solves anything. There is no such thing as an unbiased decision maker. Competing interests must always have to deal with each other and answer for whatever they do.
Here we've had an entity with no consequences and it's had a negative outcome. It doesn't matter that it was a government or a private entity. Examples of both abound.
Her prime example here is the Empire State Building, which was built on time and on budget even though they had not finished designing it when they started building. The basic notion is that contrary to the current paradigm, more planning does not necessarily make things better.
On my own account I'd add that the rise of The Plan corresponds to a rise in a managerial caste (driven in part by the invention and rise of MBAs) that took power from people with domain-specific expertise. Much of that managerial work relates to developing, maintaining, and enforcing The Plan. But this is so much the dominant paradigm that it's hard for many to even imagine alternatives. A good book here is Spender & Locke's "Confronting Managerialism": https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec...
So it may be that even if the future depended on it, build times could not be reduced because it's paradigmatically impossible. For basically the same reason that a lot of large software projects are clusterfucks: the POSIWID-type purpose of many organizations is not the work they're supposed to be doing, but protecting and benefiting the people supervising the work.
I think there’s another thing driving “The Plan,” which is that each party involved is trying to race to the local maximum of efficiency. We need the plan to be finished so that the whole building can be value engineered to reduce waste (material, labor, whatever).
If you plan the whole building and know the exact forces it is going to encounter in different conditions, you can then spec the exact amount and type of materials you need, which means those have to be created to more exacting standards and there is less tolerance for deviation from The Plan.
There is an environment component to this in that we shouldn’t be intentionally wasteful, but trying to engineer in too much precision seems less efficient when you zoom out for anything that is not mass manufactured.
I agree, but think it's even worse. I think the key local maxima being pursued are the personal interests of managers.
Long ago I worked on a project for a financial company. The exec in charge, known to us as The Hammer, had made big promises to poobahs higher up. So for no real-world reason, his employees worked death-march hours to have everything done by the arbitrarily chosen date. As the year's end approached, it was obvious that there were big problems in performance and quality, with a lot of bugs in place and absurd operational requirements. (If I recall rightly, it was so over-complicated a single in-house release took a conference call with more than a dozen people going over a checklist of more than 40 steps.)
Did The Hammer pause the work, do some root cause analysis, and improve the situation? Of course not. He demanded everybody work even more hours and ignore anything but the highest priority issues. And so the project limped across the finish line at the last minute, with an enormous backlog of cleanup to do before they could add a single new feature. The team was exhausted. And after the celebratory lunch the next week, they were also demoralized, as they all got The Hammer's hearty congratulations and $50 gift cards.
But none of that mattered, because The Hammer's bosses got positive status reports with everything in the green. He was then quickly promoted to a more impressive position in a different area, meaning that the code base he had created, which resembled a pile of manure covered with Christmas paper, was now the problem of some other sucker. I'm sure it eventually had to be rebuilt, providing another hero story for another ladder climber.
If I had to guess, the amount of waste on that project was north of $5 million. But by The Hammer's measure and that of his bosses, it was a great success, because they either didn't know or didn't care about the waste.
We like to refer to manager "fiefdoms" as being "feudal" but they really aren't - feudal lords couldn't just leave their lordship and jump into another larger one somewhere else.
I'm not sure it's a problem that's entirely solvable without some kind of outside force.
I think largely I agree but I'm personally sensitive to too much disparagement of having a plan at all. I doubt the empire footers were dug and poured prior to a plan. The important part is knowing when phase 1 can be executed and then phase 2 until the last phase so that all the layers are in the correct order. If you have incompetent planners or perhaps even people with disincentive to complete then you wind up digging out the electrical after the walls are finished.
Pro-nuclear people like to scream about the hippies putting up too many barriers to nuclear plants.
Really it is just all the same middle-managers and dynamics at the jobs that they work at everyday.
Everyone is willing to spend another few million dollars and a few weeks of delay, which only increases the fiefdom they control, to mitigate some risk and diffuse any possible blame to the rest of the committee.
But that also means that we're not going to ever build like China unless our management culture fundamentally changes.
An alternative is that nuclear pushback got better in that same time period, and is now more able to cause delays.
The same applies with building construction - the governance process have evolved to check for more things with more ability to say no and delay, but without being able to say no(or what needs to change) more quickly
This could just mean that the ESB had a budget and schedule w/ sufficient margin. The rise of more managed planning meant that everything is pre-optimized and all margins are slashed - the planning process as it is operated in the modern day is generally all about getting to minimized commitments.
I suspect that having up to 3000 people per day working for a pittance in the middle of a global financial crisis was a larger factor in getting the Empire State Building built on time and budget than lack of planning or middle management...
Either way, I'm not sure Depression-era construction approaches are really what we want for nuclear plants.
There's been rapid progress with those two in particular that's made it shockingly cheap. Solar cost is down about 95% in 10 years.
If that trend keeps up in the 2020s, anything else will have a real hard time catching up.
I'm still pretty excited about the idea of fusion space travel though. Trips to Mars could be done, depending on what thrust system can be built, in about 1-3 months (compared to about 9 now) and because the fuel is denser, longer high speed trips become feasibly possible, like to Jupiter in 4 months. For a comparison, it took Galileo 74 months to get there when it launched in 1989.
The idea of humans, say, landing on Europa in the 2030s might now be on the table.
Comparing intermittent sources with non-intermittent sources is comparing apples to oranges. A realistic comparison would also include the cost of energy storage, as well as transmission line construction to support energy transport [1]. Intermittent sources are shockingly cheap if you naively compare on a watt-hour basis, ignoring the cost of storing and releasing energy. Unfortunately, storage at the scale required remains expensive and unfeasible [2] and are actually rising due to lithium prices rising 10x over the last few years [3].
> Wind and solar need to be built in specific places, and thus have to move large amounts of energy over long distances.
That's not exclusive to wind and solar. From the ones I've seen in my country:
1. Hydroelectric power needs particular geographic features, and an abundance of water. Of the 4 long-distance HVDC links in my country, 4 of them are there to move large amounts of energy from large hydroelectric power plants to the region where most of the power demand is.
2. Coal is cheaper when it doesn't need to be transported for long distances. Not coincidentally, most of the few coal power plants in my country seem to have been built close to (or directly next to) coal mines; the exception I've seen was built next to the coast, and receives coal by ship.
3. Gas power plants tend to be built either next to already existent gas pipelines, or next to the coast to receive LNG by ship.
Yup and when there's no sun and no wind, like in winter in most places, you need something else, or batteries, which are ridiculously expensive both in $ and CO2 per kwh. Solar and Wind just can't do base load today, and you can't turn off the natural gas / coal plants that back them when they don't work.
This is a classic case of "doing the first 50% is easy, doing the last 50% is 99% of the work".
Renewable energies are much more diverse than just solar and wind. There is also waterpower and biomass which makes a considerable part of renewable energy in many countries.[1] Niche sources like geothermal and tidal power might become more important in the future. There are other types of energy storage available and in research than batteries.
Then there is the path to improve energy efficience in industry and private consumption, which both have a lot of potential, and to replace fossil energy sources outside of electricity production with renewables, such as heat-pumps for buildings.
Burning wood/biomass or gas generated from biomass releases the CO2 that has been captured by the plant while growing. Replanting the same plant will capture the same amount again. It’s effectively solar energy using photosynthesis instead of solar cells. So it’s a renewable energy, as long as you replant what you harvest.
The problem correctly pointed out in the article is that often the replanting comes after the harvest, or does not effectively happen at all - at least for wood pellets.
Isn't that an inaccurate simplification? A lot of harvested wood is not from tree plantations but from old(ish) growth forests. It also takes decades to regrow trees so the carbon capture is taking place over an extremely long time compared to the near instant release from burning the wood. Add to that the emissions from harvesting the trees using heavy equipment, transporting them, and processing them into pellets. Burning wood is also pretty inefficient when it comes to energy or heat production and it releases a lot of particulate matter. Of all the renewable options it's obviously the worst.
I would imagine it taking out plenty of minerals and nutrients from the soil though, needing constant fertilizer usage which comes with its own set of problems.
The minerals remain in the ashes. Other nutrients may be an issue, but for example when producing biogas, they’re essentially in the leftover parts of the plant. Biogas is mostly methane, so carbon and hydrogen.
There is promising process to burn biomass a low oxygen environments producing biochar(black carbon residue) without releasing CO2. This process is still in testing stages and is not deployed at scale with unclear scaling and costs.
Turning on a power plant is a slow and cumbersome process. If you need them to handle loads in excess of renewable capacity, or to handle sudden lows, you unfortunately need to keep them running...
Uh, winter is windier than summer, caused by the stronger temperature gradients.
In the last 12 months in Denmark, wind produced over 3 times more power in January and February (the coldest month of the year) than it did in August. This is completely opposite of solar which peaks in July. In that sense they complement each other quite well.
What an antiquated argument. If you can't understand Geoffrey Moore's crossing the chasm and what those trends look like in market segments, I can't help you
I don't know what GP meant about "most places", but I guess generally places that have a winter (away from the tropics, that is) are cloudier in the winter, as well as by definition having lower solar irradiation. Most of Europe is in the unenviable position of having higher power requirements precisely when solar potential is at the lowest[0].
The power requirements are fixable by better insulated housing (see eg passive houses).
Practically free natural gas has kept people from investing in energy efficient housing, just like in warmer places where people use AC wastefully in poorly insulated buildings.
Ironically during a nuclear winter event which may or may not be a fraudulent science meme concocted during the cold war. And yet we have had points in fairly recent human history where we had years long stretches of problems caused by volcanic activity. All we need then is some way to turn nuclear fuel directly to enriched calories.
if we only have 8500 coal power plants globally and this is the single largest source of emissions, shouldn’t we be trying to eliminate 20% of global emissions?
Furthermore, if renewables are cheaper shouldn’t we immediately stop adding to the coal problem?
We need to replace a billion gasoline powered cars, etc. Coal power generation seems like an easy thing to do.
> What is better for the environment, A gas powered car or an electric car where the electricity comes exclusively from coal?
Rhetorical question, I assume. A coal powered EV is still something like 15-20% less polluting than a gas powered car. And the EV gets instantly more efficient when the coal plant inevitably gets replaced with something cleaner.
Sounds great until you remember you're not get even half of that nameplate capacity. Capacity factors of solar/wind is between 10% and 30%. Offshore wind can be as high as 45% but your link says it's only 5% of wind capacity (in 2020).
Intermittents like solar/wind aren't suitable for grids without a backing firm energy source. Today that is fossil fuels. We don't have a proven viable replacement right now. Most people think that we'll use batteries instead but that's a pipe dream with today's battery tech. We literally don't have enough minerals. See this report: https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf
Lots of people are trying to address this storage problem but there's nothing that is proven and manufacturable at scale today.
Lithium (element #3) is a very abundant resource and widely distributed across the Earth. Saying we don't have enough is laughable. At certain price levels some of it is uneconomical to extract, but the price today is very different than the price when that report was written.
The report doesn't even mention price. That is a whole other level of analysis. The fact is, the known global reserves of several minerals (not just lithium) needed for a primarily wind/solar grid are insufficient for today's battery tech. We need a new plan. Underground hydrogen storage looks more promising than batteries, but again we don't have anything scalable ready to go today in terms of cheap energy storage.
> It's not like fossil fuels where it is plausible that there are limited amounts. Elements are created by the same processes that formed the universe.
This is a non sequitur. There is a limited amount of anything on Earth. The pertinent question is: can we get enough of these minerals economically to use them as storage by 2050. If it is not economical, it won't happen.
If you think extracting more than 4x the known global reserves of lithium is going to be economical, I don't know what to tell you.
It hasn't even doubled in the past 10 years. At today's global lithium mining rate, it would take 220 years to get today's known reserves out of the ground. Nevermind 4x. And then there's the human and environmental impact of all that mining. We're just talking about a single element. There's several more that are just as constrained if not worse.
Today's batteries just aren't suited for grid storage.
Because mines take 10 years to open on average from minerals found to minerals being moved out of the ground. 1% of surveyed mineral deposits become mines.
Because for the better part of a decade, the green transition plan has been to move to solar/wind plus energy storage. The obvious question is, how many machines will we need? What kind? How much will it cost?
The author of this report described how he convinced his management to fund this work. He works at a Finnish government geological survey organization. He told his management, "Who do you think the EU leadership will blame when they realize that we don't have anywhere near the resources needed to complete the green transition as it is imagined today?"
The spglobal link connects to a product (global database + updating tools) that S&P acquired from it's source here in Western Australia, between here and the Toronto TSX you'll find the vast weight of companies and capital that form the bulk of global transnational mining (sans Russia and China, although they are threaded in and tracked also).
> Because mines take 10 years to open on average from minerals found to minerals being moved out of the ground.
Bear in mind that "minerals being found" is when they first become "resources" (see JORC terminology which has become standard across the global mineral industry) .. when minerals have been proven (tightly estimated by volume and density) and had an Economic Feasibility Technical Report completed and filed they become "reserves" .. known amounts with a costing to extract.
Also bear in mind that mines can open much faster when there is a demand .. mines generally don't open faster unless there is a demand, now that past global supply issues and ramping production of end goods upwards you'll see mines open on proven reserves and more resources being advanced toward reserve status.
I agree with your general point about general EV resources (there's a looming Copper issue and with the processing of rare earths in general) .. but your argument here WRT lithium is overly simplified, there are political issues that weigh more on mid future lithium extraction more than known reserve issues.
I'm just paraphrasing (likely poorly) Associate Professor of Mining Engineering Simon Michaux. He wrote a ~1000 page report on this. I assume he understands those definitions of reserves etc. Lithium is only one of the minerals we seem to be short of.
FWiW and just as a note, I'm ~60, have written several million SLOC of exploration geophysics code, first worked in a mine at 16, have an engineering ( and math and Comp Sci ) degree, and put together that global registry of mineral resources with a few others I know, most of whom are mining engineers, geologists, etc.
In the course of tracking resources we'd find ourselves dealing with four to five 300 - 2,000 page technical reports for each resource across several thousand companies spanning the globe. Come Annual report and quarterly report filing times we'd also have to deal with each company dropping several hundred pages of report and finnacials.
Prior to onselling that business to S&P some 15+ years ago we sold mineral intelligence to most of the large players in the mineral exploration and production game, from Rio Tinto and BHP down.
While I still have a large contact list I must say I've never spoken to or heard of Associate Professor of Mining Engineering Simon Michaux in Finland ... although I did visit Finland several decades back and was given a nice SAKO rifle system for efficiently finding a target drum of nuclear waste in a forest from 80m altitude in a two second window at 70m/sec.
Still, a great many people have written about and modelled the boom | bust dynamics of mineral exploration and production and time to life of mining operations and their retirement, etc ... specially those large organisations do this on daily basis.
A report which contains delightfully scientific assumptions such as:
- All solar panels are thin film or polysilicon from the late 2000s
- All wind and solar stations are the same size as an average pulled from a single report and "number of power stations" is a metric that matters.
- You need to put energy in a 4 week buffer of 6 year old NMC811 batteries which use double the lithium of a new one (along with nickel and cobalt even though noone would pay more for a battery that is worse at grid storage than LFP, and other chemistries have been scaling since before he started writing this) before putting it in a car battery, and this is more likely than just convincing most EV owners to leave their cars plugged in when parked by offering a discount.
- You need to put energy in the same battery before electrolysing hydrogen with it for transport or feed stock.
- Air conditioning must be able to run during cloudy days in the middle of the night in hot regions backed by the same obsolete NMC battery storage.
- All heating must be backed by batteries and not thermal storage.
- It's impossible to build pantographs, rail, or LEVs.
- That all EVs and Electric motorbikes in india, africa, and southeast asia will be long range US/EU style with built in batteries rather than the already popular battery swap systems for bikes and LEVs.
- Some incoherent mess where km/kWh is used interchangeably with kWh/km and then drivetrain and motor losses were added to get battery capacity for EVs when that was already based on their range for some reason and then multiplied by distance travelled and then thrown away.
- All shipping can only run on NMC batteries or fuel cells, and refuelling or recharging at a floating platform near one of the many areas with world class solar or wind resource you pass is less likely than giving up 75% of your cargo space for battery on short trips just in case you need to do a 25000km trip.
- Meeting demand during off season can be achieved with chemical storage alone, and not by curtailing loads that are added for that purpose such as electrolysers and multi-month thermal storage.
- Improving electrolysers or using CSP to run them or running them in good climates and transporting ammonia is impossoble.
- Burning any amount of that ammonia you made or any amount of fossil fuel gas in the turbines you already have as a last resort is impossible, even if only for a few tens of hours a year.
- All storage must be battery, and using the existing hydro production for dispatch or any of the 1000s of TWh of undeveloped PHES sites is impossible.
- 0% of variability in demand can be met with long distance transmission.
- The 50% of the planet that lives within transmission distance of cloudless deserts cannot tap them for CSP+thermal storage that is available 8000 hours a year.
And on top of that, the report completely rejects the idea that a nuclear fleet could meet the required power in any reasonable timescale on similarly shaky grounds. So even if we believe it, you're still completely wrong.
Unless, of course the conclusion you're trying to push is to delay the transition for a century on the faulty premise that adding renewables achieves nothing.
> it would take 220 years to get today's known reserves out of the ground
That doesn't strike me as particularly constrained then - it's highly unlikely known reserves won't expand in that time or that we'll find no alternatives.
The question is: do we have enough minerals to switch to a solar/wind plus batteries energy system as a species? There is a controversial report from a mining professor who says the answer is 'not even close'. https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf
Fortunately I don't believe we'll need to. From a previous glance of that report, scenario F is pretty close to what I'd imagined we'd likely aim for. It would've been a lot smoother and less costly if we'd started 40 years ago, but it's not shortage of minerals like lithium or cobalt that have been holding us up.
If the "Big rare-earth-metals-mining" industry had anything like the clout of Big Oil/Gas/Coal, we'd probably be half way there by now.
You might want to look at figure 26.10 of Scenario F. We still hit mineral constraints.
The author says outright the report is not an attempt at simulating a realistic transition because it's asking first order questions: along the lines of "do we even have enough stuff to try this?". There's no attempt to ask if this is economical or logistically possible because it is not.
The author is convinced that we're all about to be much poorer because the IV drip of cheap energy that the world has enjoyed for at least 50 years is about to be ripped out. Personally, I think what's most likely to happen is that we will fail to get the world's nations to stop using fossil fuels and we will suffer the environmental consequences of that. Plus all the consequences of the resource wars that will follow. It's a shame.
I think our best chance to avoid this is to rush research on mass manufacturable gen 4 nuclear reactors. We need a factory that spits these things out so we can ship them to developing nations because otherwise, they build coal plants. I have high hopes for Thorcon. They plan to use shipyards to build annually up to 200 GW of modular shippable reactors.
That report is a pathetic attempt at a hit piece from a coal shill.
Cherry picking reports from 2014 that refer to technologies from 2008 and assuming an order of magnitude more batteries than anyone is seriously suggesting of an old version of a chemistry that is never going to be used for bulk storage isn't science. It's just pathetic.
And dredging up this report in order to try to sell people on a solution that actually is resource constrained every time the subject comes up is even more pathetic.
It's true he worked in Australian mining (I assume coal). The guy has been working in industrial recycling and 'circular economy' since 2015 https://www.simonmichaux.com/current-work
> And dredging up this report in order to try to sell people on a solution that actually is resource constrained every time the subject comes up is even more pathetic.
We will literally never run out of fissile material.
An ad hominem is where you use someone's character as a faulty reason their argument is flawed. Pointing out someone's argument is flawed and is a standard part of the coal propaganda machine as a valid reason to question their motives is not ad hominem.
The absolute most generous interpretation of the report you linked is that it was a mastubatory exercise by a completely naive person who thought he was the first person to think of problems that have been studied for decades and have detailed roadmaps for overcoming the real roadblocks (which are not even issues he considers).
> We will literally never run out of fissile material.
There are no commercially viable or even prototype closed loop breeding programs and there never have been. The current stock of economically accessible fissile material is around 40,000 tonnes and each GW of reactor needs 3-20 tonnes. There are no processes with a doubling time under 10 years because spent fuel needs time to cool, so rolling out your non-existent reactor in place of renewables rather than after one or two generations still requires mining all of it.
Even in the scifi world where breeding is viable, we still need a 70-95% renewable transition to fill the 20-40 year gap.
You started by trying to discredit the work based on the author's work history. Then you threw out a few unspecific attacks on his data sources. Hardly convincing. Essentially name calling.
> The absolute most generous interpretation of the report you linked is that it was a mastubatory exercise by a completely naive person who thought he was the first person to think of problems that have been studied for decades
Here is a paper published by IEEE this year, On the History and Future of 100% Renewable Energy Systems Research. It is a comprehensive review of the research in this field. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
Section D. Raw Material Demand for 100% Renewable Energy Systems
As the previous criticisms are starting to become less and less tenable, increasing attention is now shifting towards the more salient point of raw materials needed for the transition towards a sustainable energy system. Practically all research in this field finds critical limits for material availability. This may be a major concern and should be addressed with more consideration and analyses to truly test the material limits.
> As the previous criticisms are starting to become less and less tenable, increasing attention is now shifting towards the more salient point of raw materials needed for the transition towards a sustainable energy system. Practically all research in this field finds critical limits for material availability. This may be a major concern and should be addressed with more consideration and analyses to truly test the material limits.
Yes. There are real critical minerals, as well as real broad overviews that highlight them without going into industry specific roadmaps for addressing them.
The limits are entirely unrelated to the paper you first linked because the Michaux analysis does things like assuming all new PV will be CdTe or there will be weeks of battery storage for any electrolysers built in the form of NMC811 batteries.
Trying to conflate the former with the latter or use overviews to pretend said roadmaps don't exist is just as dishonest as your first attempt.
You're trying to use this to push nuclear, but 1kg of lithium gets you 1kW of diurnal storage for a decadeor two, whereas 1kg of Uranium gets you 1kW of power production for at most 8 years.
Lithium has larger reserves, is mined in larger quantities at lower impact than uranium, and won't even be relevant to grid storage because in contradiction to Michaux's claims that he's the only one to ever consider the idea of a different chemistry, nobody is assuming there will be a week of NMC batteries for every watt of renewables.
There were multiple news items about sodium ion, zinc bromide, iron batteries, pumped hydro, thermal storage, and a-caes being released the entire time he was fishing through ancient LCAs and IEA reports to try and claim there isn't enough Tellereum to make solar panels that don't contain any or not enough Niobium to make dual wound generators with no permanent magnets.
He considers LFP in his more recent work and you still run into mineral constraints. Even if you take his 4 week buffer to 48 hours.
> 1kg of lithium gets you 1kW of diurnal storage for a decade or two, whereas 1kg of Uranium gets you 1kW of power production for at most 8 years
That is an absolutely cursed comparison. What forms of these elements are you talking about? Why are you comparing energy storage to energy generation? It doesn't matter. We have enough U and Th to power humanity for millennia. We only use 0.7% of the U we mine for fucks sake. We're not even trying.
> There were multiple news items about...
Oh please, the news is saying we've solved nuclear fusion. The report was constrained to tech that was commercially available in volume. Come back to me when we're pumping out gigawatt hours of storage. Pumped hydro is great, there's not enough suited geography for it. No we can't just dig the reservoirs anywhere because then the energy payback goes negative.
Stil 4x as long as any serious proposal and still assumes all low grade heat and all energy that will eventually drive an electrolyser will be stored in a battery for no reason. Any report that suggests an electrolyser needs guaranteed 100% uptime backed by chemical storage has the same amount of credibility as a report that suggests all PV will be polysilicon or thin film.
> That is an absolutely cursed comparison. What forms of these elements are you talking about? Why are you comparing energy storage to energy generation?
Because you are trying to say that storage is a constraint to using renewable generation. And the form to compare doesn't matter. It's the elemental material you need to extract used in technology that is currently commercially viable.
> It doesn't matter. We have enough U and Th to power humanity for millennia. We only use 0.7% of the U we mine for fucks sake. We're not even trying.
Fertile material isn't fissile material. Even in a closed fuel cycle (which is not a thing that exists in reality) you still need startup fuel material, and none of the proposed over unity breeder scenarios have a fast enough doubling time to be useful. That's a very nice double standard where the technology that actually exists and has a tens of GWh/yr supply chain already 90% built has to have already solved the problem to be feasible, but vague hand waving at reactor designs and fuel cycles that don't even exist as a prototype get a pass.
> Pumped hydro is great, there's not enough suited geography for it
There are thousands of TWh of sites with suitable geography. Only a fraction of a percent need to pass environmental feasibility to cover the plurality of storage.
> The report was constrained to tech that was commercially available in volume.
Then why did he repeatedly say thing like sodium ion has yet to show industrial scale feasibility mere weeks after CATL announced that they were building out an industrial scale pipeline having already finished proving feasibility? Why not include Zinc Bromide that was developed in the university whose logo he put on the report?
I'd love to see this serious proposal that says we can globally replace fossil fuels with intermittents and 4 hours of energy storage.
> That's a very nice double standard where the technology that actually exists and has a tens of GWh/yr supply chain already 90% built has to have already solved the problem to be feasible, but vague hand waving at reactor designs and fuel cycles that don't even exist as a prototype get a pass.
You're conflating my explanation for why U/Th supplies are not a concern with your assumption for what my proposed solution is. PWRs are sufficient for today and can be built today. We can and should work on new reactors and fuel cycles that don't just leave 90% of the energy on the table. US energy usage alone is 26,400 TWh a year. 10's of GWh a year may as well not get out of bed.
> Then why did he repeatedly say thing like sodium ion has yet to show industrial scale feasibility mere weeks after CATL announced that they were building out an industrial scale pipeline having already finished proving feasibility? Why not include Zinc Bromide that was developed in the university whose logo he put on the report?
You must a different idea of what "in-volume" means.
> I'd love to see this serious proposal that says we can globally replace fossil fuels with intermittents and 4 hours of energy storage.
Not only is 48 / 4 not 4, but serious proposals like this one https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z don't involve trying to replace the last 20% of electrical generation in the few areas without PHES resources before tackling the much larger and more cheaply solved emissions involved in currently non-electrified industries.
Once you have your ammonia, hydrogen, and ethylene supply chains mature, then you can just burn some of those in the handful of areas where a dunkelflaute can't be managed with 12hr storage and dispatchable loads.
> You're conflating my explanation for why U/Th supplies are not a concern with your assumption for what my proposed solution is. PWRs are sufficient for today and can be built today. We can and should work on new reactors and fuel cycles that don't just leave 90% of the energy on the table. US energy usage alone is 26,400 TWh a year. 10's of GWh a year may as well not get out of bed.
Putting U235 in a burner ractor just lengthens the time before your burner can come online. There is not enough viable uranium for a single fuel load to provide primary energy in existing designs. Your serial production of Gen III+ reactors cannot put a dent in world emissions before it needs to change course to breeders and all your new built reactors are mothballed for 20 years while fuel supplies are bred.
> You must a different idea of what "in-volume" means.
Your statement about what was in the paper was a lie as evidenced by the statements made in the paper referring to industrial feasibility. Those statements were a lie as evidenced by industrial feasibility being already proven. Why does your reasoning about the transition from an imaginary PWR supply chain to an imaginary Gen IV supply chain not apply to transition from a real TWh/yr battery supply chain transitioning into a real drop in replacement already mostly built that uses the same equipment?
> but serious proposals like this one https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z don't involve trying to replace the last 20% of electrical generation in the few areas without PHES resources before tackling the much larger and more cheaply solved emissions involved in currently non-electrified industries.
That's your example? That paper is about electricity demand and they don't even manage to meet that. We're talking about global primary energy here. Surely you can do better.
You see, the thing about energy that needs to be available in chemical form is that it can be stored in chemical form. And the bizarre thing about low grade heat is it can be stored as low or high grade heat. And the absolutly wild thing about energy that needs to be stored in a vehicle for an average of a week is it's stored in a vehicle for an average of a week. Weird twist, huh?
The next thing that would shock you if you were arguing in good faith and not just trying to spread FUD to delay the death of coal is that provisioning 5x electricity to meet those dispatchable loads reduces the storage required for the electricity even further.
If renewables can meet 95% of the goal with just the previously industrially deployed technogy stack and have proven but not deployed technology for the remaining 5%; then it makes no sense to stop deploying them and instead switch to a technogy that can meet 40% at much higher cost and has no answer even in the demonstration stage to the remaining 60%.
Just because the 5% is contained in the 40% doesn't make it a sane strategy. Especially when in most of the world that 5% already has preexisting hydro that can serve it with a simple turbine upgrade.
Lithium batteries (as focused by the paper) are attractive for mobile applications, for grid storage the energy density is not very important and li-ion batteries have disadvantages like going up in flames frequently.
There are lots of overlapping options for running the grid with renewables from other battery chemistries to hydrogen, pumped hydro storage, long distance hvdc, hourly pricing to cut demand peaks, etc.
Yes there are many competing battery technologies in the works right now and I sincerely hope that one of them turns out to be manufacturable/scalable. Or any kind of energy storage becomes cheap at Terra-watt hour capacities.
But right now, it's just a bunch of 'maybes'. The fact that we don't have a solid plan RIGHT NOW for something so important is alarming. Everyone is just hoping it will work out. Maybe we'll find a good cheap battery. Maybe we can unify our grid and build thousands of miles of HVDC interconnects. Maybe we can find more pumped hydro sites.
In the absence of a buildable storage solution for renewables today, we should be building the only other scalable clean energy technology we have: Nuclear energy. No energy storage. No brand new grid. No massive expansion in mining. Thankfully, more people are coming around to this. No it won't cover 100% of our energy. But it is an incredibly underutilized tool. We should at a minimum, replace all coal power plants with nuclear.
Even if we keep looking at only batteries for grid storage instead of all the estabilished and proven ways: the predicted lithium shortage would happen gradually over O(100 years), leading to rising cost of lithium batteries which should give lots of lead time for investment in alternatives, of which we have many, both in old ones (pre-lithium) and many prospective ones under development.
IMO the more alarming problems currently in climate change are the missing plan for global fossils rampdwn and solving the international-relations collective action problem of enacting the required energy saving policies in a coordinated and fair way.
The expensive part of coal power is the coal itself. The upfront costs for the power plant are quite low. This is the opposite of solar. It has an very high upfront cost, but for the next couple decades, you only need to pay a little for maintenance, so the amortized costs are cheaper. However, poorer areas of China can't afford this large upfront cost, but they still have a lot of demand for energy, so they build new coal plants.
Also this is always how transitions look. Incandescent bulbs were still sold next to LEDs, CRTs were still manufactured during the LCD transition, platter drives are still for sale during the SSD revolution, people still buy gas cars.
There is a time before commodity prices are hit at scale but when it happens, the price floor of the new technology will be below the price floor of the old technology (for instance the cost of a big screen TV) and that's when the old technology finally exits. Solar still has a long way to fall.
We're in a transition and they always look like this.
China doesn't build coal plants because areas cannot afford nuclear. They do so because need they need stop gap solutions. Their new coal plants use supercritical CO2, and phase out older, less efficient and more polluting coal plants. Check out this thread by Chinese energy sector consultant David Fishman which states that the new Chinese plants are amongst the most efficient in the world: https://twitter.com/pretentiouswhat/status/16004256242919055...
He explains that these more efficient coal plants are not only motivated by climate targets, but also by market prices.
Even these new plants aren't going to be around forever. They're going to be phased out eventually as China moves towards their 2060 net zero goal.
> If that trend keeps up in the 2020s, anything else will have a real hard time catching up.
That's the problem though: *IF* that trend holds. Past performance doesn't guarantee future performance.
Climate change presents an existential threat to civilization so relying on a single trend holding seems like a fairly risky bet to make if you ask me.
In that vein, I'd argue for throwing everything at the problem. Build it all, wind, solar, geothermal, and nuclear. If we overshoot and spend billions more than was necessary, great, that's a hell of a lot better than undershooting and losing trillions from entire economies shutting down.
Regardless of how cheap it may be, the storage of solar power is still a big problem. If we're on the topic of cost trends and batteries, the price of lithium is up ~500%.[1] That's making batteries more expensive than in the past and given all of the demand for them I don't really see it going down any time soon, at least not until new lithium mining plants are built mainly in South America, which still isn't likely to drop prices again in the near future.[2]
Global production of lithium has doubled since 2015.
I think it's reasonable to expect energy storage to become cheaper purely by the mechanisms of capitalism. The market for energy storage scarcely existed 4 years ago -- there were a handful of pumped hydro storage plants and one compressed air energy storage plant and that was it. The US had 1.5 GW of battery capacity in 2020; we added 5.1 GW of capacity this year and currently scheduled projects will bring 30 GW of battery capacity online by 2025 (per the EIA).
It's clear from the current buildout and the current price of solar that there will be a large market for energy storage in the next 10-20 years. That means there is a large market opportunity to build grid energy storage and to increase production of the entire supply chain for grid energy storage. I would be surprised if it is not met.
There are alternatives for grid storage that are being deployed right now. Sodium or Flow batteries, CAES and underground pumped hydro. As lithium prices increase, alternative technologies will be deployed in scale and come down in cost.
The second link shows that natural gas increases steadily for exporting and for domestic industrial consumption. If you click the Excel link under the table graphics [1], it shows that natural gas consumption for generating electricity remains below 2020 demand levels until 2047. As for why they think that demand will pick up in the late 2040s after decades of stagnation, I'm not sure; maybe it's projections of population growth finally overcoming trends in fuel efficiency.
I will note that the EIA has badly underestimated renewable electricity growth in the past. Their projections are very restrained, far from "optimistic industry projections." You can read a retrospective on their past forecasting here:
In particular look at the electricity section of the table, "Comparison of AEO Reference case projections with realized outcomes, 1994–2021." The EIA underestimated future usage of solar power 80% of the time and future usage of wind power 84% of the time. The magnitude of the underestimates was actually worse for solar power, though.
It's also vastly underestimated growth in natural gas energy generation. By that reasoning, we can only assume that the 21st century will continue to be a century of fossil fuels.
The EIA almost always projects boring linear growth for everything. Their data is a terrific resource for what is currently happening, what has happened recently, and what is already scheduled on the pipeline. I would not put much stock in their projections beyond their Short Term Energy Outlook. I would certainly not describe them as the most optimistic industry projections.
They project that the solar growth rate will drop after 2023 when the ITC would have expired, but it was extended in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. From there, they expect the growth curve of solar to slowly decay. It's basically all a linear projection and scarcely any more insightful than that.
They expect that electricity generation from coal will be flat (except for already-announced early coal plant retirements). They expect nuclear to be flat. They expect generation from natural gas to increase (unless renewables are cheap, in which case they expect it to be flat). They fail to anticipate the replacement of coal by natural gas or renewables and they fail to anticipate the replacement of natural gas by renewables.
Finally, as a point of comparison, take a look at their projections for EVs and hybrids. The EIA projects that EVs and hybrids will still only make up about 20% of the market for new cars in the US in 2050. (See page 9 of [1]).
Your link talks about the IEA, which is the International Energy Agency.
I was citing the EIA, which is the US Government Energy Information Administration.
This is just Clayton Christensen/Geoffrey Moore/SteveBlank stuff. It's the same patterns of growth, price, adoption curves, irrational exuberance, etc down to the bad predictions by entrenched industry experts.
It's remarkable how cleanly it's playing out. There's probably some easy academic opportunities on writing about it if someone wants some easy first authorship opportunities while sitting in their pajamas, it's there for the taking.
This isn't just hopes and dreams though. There's an economy of scale argument called Swanson's law which is expected to continue for the forseable future: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law
There's also quite a bit of research going on into different cell technology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-cell_efficiency). The current physics wall puts it at about theoretical 4-fold increase in electricity per square meter compared to what we have today without consideration of the cost of manufacturing or longevity, which is expected to again, continue to improve.
Also as far as land goes, people are really bad thinking at scale. If you look here: https://www.seia.org/research-resources/major-solar-projects... you'll see all the installations and the ones planned. The sun doesn't shine every place, on every day, sure, but when you have that kind of coverage it's a different story.
There's a lot of arid desert out there and lots of potential for combining solar panels with existing food farms through something called agrivoltaics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics ... many crops do as good or better with shade so this is just a straight increase in profit per acre for those crops with the dual use of energy generation.
This is all pretty new. The cost tipping points in favor of solar just happened a few years ago. We're seeing one of Clayton Christensen's graph of disruptive technology in real-time right now (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity where solar went from being the most to the least expensive in about a 5 year period)
Everything hits a physics wall, of course but not only does it look like there's still plenty of runway with solar before we get there but there's also lots of unexplored opportunities such as, just throwing this out there, a solar capturing wind turbine that can cleverly capture energy both ways. The point is this is still extremely greenfield
To be clear, I'm not arguing against solar here. We should be building as many forms of non-carbon-emitting energy generation as we possibly can.
A challenge of large solar plants like you're describing is getting the energy to where it's needed and when it's needed. A ton of solar panels in the desert does no good if there's no way to store that energy or get it to a city a few hundred miles away. All of that requires significantly more investment in storage mechanisms and interconnectors to move it around the grid. The latter actually being most concerning to me simply because of NIMBYs fighting projects to build more high voltage power lines because they're ugly and ruin views from their properties. It's hard to quantify that, but when you need to run so many power lines over such long distances that touch so many people's properties it becomes a permitting nightmare which dramatically slows down, or even cancels, projects.
I also touched on this in another comment below: In terms of storing solar energy with our current method of lithium-ion batteries, well, the cost of lithium is up ~500% in the past two years and is expected to stay that way for the foreseeable future: https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2022/06/09/...
As to Swanson's Law, sure, I get where the trendline currently is, but as a counterexample: How's Moore's Law holding up these days?
I'm sure there's plenty of articles about different battery storage methods and all that being researched, but the fact is that we need proven, on-demand energy generation that drops into the existing grid NOW and nuclear provides that. But by all means, build all of it: nuclear, wind, solar, etc. Having too much carbon-free energy is a much better problem to have than too little.
First let me dispatch this "existing grid NOW and nuclear provides that" - it's a 7 year average lead time as of 2022; solar is 2. And if you granted all the accelerations you're going to propose to solar or wind as well, it'll still beat nuclear. It's just simpler and cheaper to deploy. It's also expandable and upgradable and you can start producing after the first station is done. Your 2022 nuclear reactor will still be based on 2022 technology in 2072. The solar farm, however, will be current with the times as the parts are swappable.
The predicted end to Moore's law had been anticipated for many years. This took nobody by surprised. The only surprise really is that it went on longer than expected.
From all indications we're in the solar version of the 1980s right now on the Moore's law timeline and in the future we'll see a solar PV equivalent that's as remarkable as say, the 2TB microsd card - imagine cheap, high-efficiency newspaper thin panels that you buy packaged like those plastic ponchos from a 7/11 that you just unfurl onto the ground, plug in and power whatever you feasibly need.
The future of solar will be like telling someone in the 1980s that we live in a time where we give away 32gb of storage for free with company logos stamped on it at trade shows and it is so normalized that nobody takes any notice.
> First let me dispatch this "existing grid NOW and nuclear provides that" - it's a 7 year average lead time as of 2022; solar is 2.
Nuclear can certainly be made quicker if we had the political will to do so but I'm not going to try to argue that it's quick. That said, if we would have invested in this 20 years ago like we should have it wouldn't have been a problem. The argument has been "wind & solar are going to ramp up so quickly in the near future so why build nuclear?" and then it takes longer than we thought and underwhelming progress is made.
Regardless of how long it takes:
> The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
> It's also expandable and upgradable and you can start producing after the first station is done. Your 2022 nuclear reactor will still be based on 2022 technology in 2072. The solar farm, however, will be current with the times as the parts are swappable.
This argument doesn't really make sense. You can't add reactors to a nuclear plant? Or retrofit them as needed? The primary form of generating all forms of electric other than photovoltaics uses steam to spin a turbine; that's the same now as it was 100+ years ago. Who cares if it's 2022 technology in 2072 if it's producing useful electricity?
I'm sure solar panels have some runway to the technology, but that's not the point here. Solar currently does not have the ability to drop into the existing grid with large scale, on-demand energy nor will it in the foreseeable future. It's a slice of the energy pie, but to say that it's going to improve so much doesn't mean it's a wise idea to put all your eggs in that basket.
Measuring cost by installed capacity is highly misleading because solar and wind need storage to be reliable sources. The cost of storage dwarfs the other costs, and battery prices have stagnated.
The reason battery prices are down 97% since 1990 is because of better battery chemistries coming along.
Currently there's a few more in the pipeline (including silicon) that lead market forecasters to predict the long-term (think 2030) trend will continue.
The downhill road of pricing has had some bumps but it's very assuredly, extremely downhill
The battery price graph tells a different story. Improvements have been slowing down for a long time, and have been almost zero the past couple of years and we've actually had a price increase this year. Switching to an entirely new technology is speculative at best, not all that dissimilar from putting all hope in fusion. Could work, but betting the future of the planet on it is silly.
Yes, that's what the historical data from the last 50 years supports.
There's giant periods without any movement. Batteries have been around for centuries for instance.
These model can be a bit imaginative at times and nuclear may start its journey on it any day but so far it doesn't look like it has.
I'd love something absurdly cheap like a working Ponz-Fleischman bubble fusion to come around but if I was advising say a $100 million fund I'd say "solar + wind + chemical batteries" is the foreseeable future. It's just the reality.
Wait, that has happened with fission too, just not at grid scale because there hasn't been funding for it. If you look at military, academic, and space nuclear reactors, you will see Wright's law playing out. Solar and wind got the chance to ramp investment and scale. Grid-attached nuclear never did.
Personally, I see more risks to massive-scale battery production than to modest-scale nuclear fission, both of which solve the same problem.
But we really should not make energetic decisions into a free market question. Of course market prices are a fundamental aspect, but going all-in on a single, cheapest source will be a huge liability and the whole thing should be planned for. E.g. it really makes sense to have a base load and a quick to turn on/off load for spikes in energy usage. Nuclear is very useful for the former and I don’t see not using it (besides renewables of course!) a great decision.
It’s questionable whether the price can stay as low as it currently is though. The three major manufacturers of wind turbines are basically operating at a loss on the turbines themselves. The price can’t go much lower.
Ok I'm going to explain the bit that no one wants to accept about those "shockingly cheap" wind/solar W's. Which the cheapest I think I've seen are only about 1/2 the cost of carbon based energy (which swings between NG and coal being the cheapest).
Lets talk solar because its initially easier to reason about:
So when you see $X per (K/W/G)watt compared to $Y per (K/W/G)watt for coal/ng/oil/nuke/etc your comparing what is basically the nameplate generational capacity of a renewable resource with the nameplate generational capacity of a reliable source. Then everyone gets happy and walks away.
But really lets say that you get 12H of solar production a day (which is a bit hand wavy because it won't ever produce peak power in the morning/evening).
So now on a given day your actually producing 12Wh of energy, but lets say for a moment you need 24Wh of energy evenly spread over the day. That same 1W NG plant can provide that. So to reach the 24Wh of reliable generation you need
2*SolarW
But because 1/2 of it is at night what you need is
1xSolar during the day+1x solar to charge a 12Wh battery+1x battery*12
(which we are going to call a 1x battery from now on)
Now what happens if the sun fails to shine 1 day every two weeks?
Well now you need
1xSolar during the day+1x solar to charge for the night+1x battery+2x solar to charge the dark day+2x battery
1xSolar * 4+1xbattery * 3
And once every 3 months the sun doesn't shine for two days.
1xsolar*6+1xbattery*5
So, lets assume batteries cost 3x per 12Wh what 1W solar does and they last 1/2 as long (15 years say).
Now lets say the battery cost per unit solar is 6x.
So to just handle the case of two dark days in a row its:
6*x+(5*x*6)=36x the installed W price of solar.
But in reality lets say you want 3 9's generational reliability (which is probably still two more than you get with that 36x above) how much redundancy do you need? The answer in many places where its possible the sun doesn't shine for a week or more at a time is further multiples of the above! Making solar by far the most expensive sources of energy, only comparable with wind, in just how bad it actually is.
So, how does it work today? Well generally the wind/solar plants serve to green wash, and depending on the environment and the fuel costs of NG either make it slightly less expensive or significantly more vs the just running NG plants.
The equation works out that one installs NG plants equal to the peak load, then installs just enough wind+solar to reduce to 0 NG consumption (usually for month or so in the spring) at peak renewable production. Any installed capacity beyond that just drives up the price. Put another way, the "battery" today is a natural gas combined cycle generator, and you can only install enough renewables until the constant operational costs stop reducing the fuel costs of the NG plant. Beyond that the prices shoot up.
Now the really bad news, energy utilization has been steadily increasing, and the carbon savings have generally been going down per W generated, but the total carbon production has been holding steady or going up. In other words 0 progress over the past three decades in reducing carbon footprint.
And there is literally nothing changing over the next ten+ years. We might get another order of magnitude or two of battery production but it won't make a dent. That might be enough to electrify the personal vehicle fleet, which is ~15% of carbon emissions, it won't do anything for all the new NG plants required to back up the extra electricity generation requirements for those vehicles.
In ten years though, if we started today we could shutdown every coal plant and replace it with nukes while still increasing overall generational capacity to meet the demand created by the electric cars. And at least in the US we wouldn't have to open another mine, if we just took the existing waste and reprocessed it. And if we passed some national laws stopping some of the NIMBYism we could probably build them cheap enough to make the energy price competitive with carbon sources.
We can play around with the install vs operational cost model, but that is sorta the summary.
So, when I hear people talking about "renewables" (ignoring hydro) I hear people who don't understand energy markets, politics and engineering because even if you manage to get the market+engineering in place to support a lot of wind+solar consumption people are going to be in the streets burning down your house when they get the bill.
So, yah, there is really only one replacement for a coal plan, and its a nuke plant, and it can in theory be cheaper (Nuke plants were cheaper than NG in the past) but until the NIMBY's get out of the way its going to cost more, how much more to save the planet is a political question, but even today it should be fairly easy to do without doubling the generational price.
Yes, a 100% solar grid would be very expensive. But a 90% renewable grid backed by 10% natural gas would be pretty cheap. And it's already rapidly under construction right now, and the natural gas infrastructure for it already exists. It would get us 90% of the carbon benefits, and buy time to figure out how to clean up the last 10% of the grid.
90% nuclear plus 10% hydro would be a fine end state. But we're at a standing start. The incremental change from "we're building 1 nuclear power plant which is years behind schedule and wildly over budget" to "we're simultaneously building 50 new nuclear reactors" is immense and I do not see how we get past it.
Except that its nearly impossible to get to 90% with either wind or solar by itself because when you look at the weather data the average capacity factors are really misleading. If you look at the data and say, I'm at 40% what does it take to get to 60% its many multiples overbuild. Mixing them helps a bit, but is nowhere near a solution either.
The problem boils down to the fact that you can't overbuild enough to solve the problem of the wind not blowing or the sun not shining for days at end. Which sounds uncommon but that is what happens. The wind goes gangbusters for months on end then sits there doing nothing for a week or two and your producing at <10% of the rated capacity. Sometimes you can replace it with solar, sometimes not if you have two random sequences with probabilities that they produce nothing for a while, eventually they overlap and you are SOL.
Someone should really build a proper weather + price simulation that shows what having 8x idle windmills and a couple overbuilt solar farms and idle gas-plant (which all need maintenance and their bonds paid) for 70% of the time does to the price of electricity. Because that is what happens to get to 90% when your not selling the excess/buying it back from C02 sources and then confusing people with gross consumption vs net. Maybe someone can dump all that excess power into CO2 recapture or something, but at the moment the economics are crazy bad.
And I might buy that every bit helps, but we are in many cases going backwards, doing the same thing we did for the past 10 years for the next 10 is going to be even more disastrous as its been from 2010-2020. The carbon output needs to go to 0, not 90% of what we did last year. The richer countries should all absolutely be economy wide carbon neutral, and that isn't going to happen because no one has airplanes or new electric rail, or electric plant build plans to get the 2x electric demand increase required to start actually reducing transportation and heating Co2 much less actually have a grid that only sources 10% of its energy from carbon which isn't already there via Nukes or Hydro.
And I love the downvoters who are having their feeling hurt because they don't want to believe that renewables and batteries wont solve this problem anytime soon.
So the short version is, that until you understand that a solar farm at 40% or a wind farm with an average 30% capacity factor can't produce 100% of the required generation when you 3x overbuild them, you won't understand why solar+wind doesn't work.
It's comparing apple and orange. Solar/wind aren't available on demand. How much would cost a wind power plant that has the same guaranteed power as a nuclear plant, including batteries for storage? what would be the environmental footprint of such a thing?
> The whole purpose of electrical grids is to stabilize such things.
Except it doesn't. Which is why Germany didn't decrease its gas plant capacity. They're needed when there's no wind.
> The forced outage rate of solar is almost 0, wind is about 1%.
The issue with wind/solar isn't forced outage. It's that the wind doesn't blow all the time, so comparing how much cost 1MWh of wind when the wind blows with 1MWh of coal is dishonest. You're comparing apple and oranges.
Right, forced outage of solar is 1%. Meanwhile, Germany is back to building coal plants because solar/wind doesn’t get you through the winter. Also, they postponed closing their nuclear plants. Jee, I wonder why?
You must read a lot of right wing media. That's a very nonlinear cherry picking of news items out of context and a packaging of them to puppet a talking point.
You can wonder why all you want but hobbling together headlines some of which are 3 years apart and pretending they're related is the thing you actually should be wondering about.
The facts I cited above directly contradict the myth of solar having a small forced outage. The fact of the matter is that solar is an intermittent source of energy. Sure, you can get away with saying that solar has a small forced outage, if you conveniently forget that solar generates a minuscule amount of power when the sun is out. You’ll have a hard time heating yourself with that, as the Germans discovered.
By the way, my source of information is mainstream French media.
That graph just really says it all haha. It’s all we need to look at. Which way are the arrows pointing? No need for millions of words trying to justify and explain a way for nuclear to work.
Solar and wind are fantastic, cheap sources of power, but they have their limits. They generate power when the sun shines and the wind blows, which is not necessarily when humans need it. We still aren’t very good at storing this power for use later, at large scales, in cost effective ways. So for now solar/wind needs to be paired with power sources we have greater control over, which mostly means nuclear, coal, natural gas, hydro, etc.
And PV is now off the bottom scale of that chart.. Some combination of overbuilding PV and Wind capacity + ever-improving battery tech "won" the energy market. Gas peakers and other stand-by sources will contribute for decades to come but when they're pricing out new nuclear builds at >$0.10/kwh wholesale, no amount of "but capacity factor!" will matter.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't one of the reasons we are building MORE coal (and biofuel) plants because the addition of solar and wind have added volatility to the electricity supply?
With few exceptions in the world, in a electricity grid the supply and demand of electricity have to be 1:1, and if wind and solar is adding volatility to that supply, another flexible power source suddenly becomes very profitable and useful.
Nuclear is costly to turn on/off, but coal, biofuel and natural gas isn't. So turning it on/off based on the shortage caused by sustainable sources is why they're coming back, have been my understanding
I think you have to be very careful with the word "we" here.
Coal's market share in the US has been eroding for 15 years and will likely fall below nuclear soon. It has been replaced by natural gas and, more recently, renewables.
The reason that we "worldwide" have been building lots of coal plants is that China has been building lots of coal plants. This is despite China also building world-dominating quantities of nuclear, wind, and solar.
The reason China is adding so much coal appears to be that provincial officials get to book coal power production as economic growth internal to their province. By contrast, the electricity from renewables in Xinjiang shipped over HVDC transmission lines does not boost their province's economic growth numbers so they do not want to use it even if it would be cheaper.
That is not correct. Coal and gas fired power plants have turndown capabilities where they can decrease their power genration very quickly by 75%-90% or so depending on the plant.
Is it common for those huge old plants to use pulverized coal?
I imagine all the new ones use it, and thus all the new ones can change their outputs in a matter of minutes, instead of hours. But that still makes coal one of the slowest sources to react to grid volatility, and sill basically useless to compensate wind oscillations, only useful for the solar cycle.
I've seen some really old plants and they've all used pulverized coal, since it burns more consistently. It basically explodes when it ignites due to the temperatures involved. Coal and gas are both really good at responding quickly to varying load requirements.
Perhaps they don't turn off but merely down? Is that a day? Is there even such a thing as different levels of operation?
Even if not a day, maybe still not responsive enough.
Then again, maybe it gets you close enough that now you only need a smaller more doable version of some otherwise unrealistic gap filler like batteries or thermal mass or gravity mass etc.
>You’d think if the future depended on it, build times could be reduced.
That seems to be what Japan did until Fukushima went boom.
>Instead we’ve been building more coal plants.
That seems to be what Japan did after Fukushima went boom.
To be fair, coal has quite widely replaced all around the world in the last 8 years by a mix of wind, solar and gas. It's now almost as unattractive to investors as nuclear power is.
At this point, there are multiple well-developed western economies with regulatory regimes that are generally trusted to adequately keep the perverse incentives of business in check. It would be an interesting regulatory experiment to charter a project that would be subject to a different regulatory environment than the country in which it was physically built. For example, a nuclear plant in the US that was exempt from all US regulations, but had to meet all of the French ones - built by French companies, inspected by French inspectors, etc. Just a wholesale transplant of the entire business/regulatory culture, as a point of competition.
(Obviously there are a thousand ways for this to go wrong, but entertain the idea anyway)
Thus far only a couple of the French next gen builds have been built in France. During the Messmer plan, dozens of the same design were built. The fact that the former is more expensive than the latter isn't contradicting the claim that serial production is cheaper than one-off production.
It's not magic, when you build series like France did in the 70s and 80s (I think they were building 8 or 9 reactors a year), the time and cost reduce. When every project is a unique design, they cost a lot and have lots of delays. Wind and solar would be much more expensive without economies of scales (and if the cost of dealing with their volatility would be factored in).
Also should be noted that even at the height of France’s building the bigger and more complex reactors took longer and never got down to the build times of the smaller ones: the CP (900MWe) series got down to about 5 years, the P4 (1300) all needed 7+ iirc.
Many solar & wind plants do have the cost of dealing with their volatility built in. For example, 8minuteenergy is developing several solar+battery projects and selling that energy for 4cents per KWh.
The wartime Hanford reactors did not produce any electricity. They had no safety containment systems. And they released cooling water containing radioactive contamination directly into the Columbia River:
Aside from "possible catastrophes" involving control rod failures, enemy bombing, or sabotage, DuPont's greatest concerns about reactor operations involved pumping Columbia River water through the reactors for cooling purposes. Using a "once-through" system, water was taken from the river and chemically treated before passing through the core of the reactor at the rate of 75,000 gallons per minute and being released back into the river. The reactor used canned fuel slugs, which prevented radioactive fuel from getting into the coolant as long as the cans did not accidentally rupture. Even if no fuel escaped, however, there was induced radioactivity of the impurities and treatment chemicals within the water. Radioactivity thus inevitably entered the Columbia. To alleviate possible dangers, DuPont engineers diverted the heated and "somewhat radioactive" exit water, containing mostly, but not exclusively, short-lived radionuclides, as well as certain chemical contaminants, to a 12,000,000 gallon retention basin. Each basin was divided in two, with the two sides operating in parallel. Monitoring for radioactivity occurred at the inlet to the basin, at an intermediate point, and at the exit. After six hours, radioactivity diminished by a factor of about twenty. With radioactivity below the then tolerance dose for complete immersion, the water was further diluted with wastewater free from radioactivity and returned via underground pipes for release in mid-river.
I know this point is made a lot but I’m not sure it’s that meaningful.
WW2 boats were not the enormously complex network and sensor systems that today’s are. While, yeah, 10 years is extreme, but I don’t think 39 days is physically possible.
It was Liberty ships—slow, high-capacity, not especially durable cargo ships built as fast as possible, assembly-line style. The median construction time only got that low after the assembly line really got going and they were able to work out some kinks. It was over 200 days early on.
Warships—none of the capitals ships, certainly—weren't built that fast. Not even the cheap-as-hell escort carriers we built tons and tons of, I don't think. Destroyers and little corvettes and other smalls screen and utility ships, maybe some of those weren't too far from 39-day construction times.
I would be surprised if some of the systems were actually harder to work on back then. Old battleships always seemed to have insane amounts of wiring and cabling, because they used the nightmarish one signal per wire protocol in the pre digital age.
They presumably used to have to run an individual wire for every. single. signal, or at most, they'd have extremely simple multiplexing.
I have no idea what these cables do, but I'm glad I'm not the one repairing it. Not only is there physically a lot of wire, 90% of it looks to be going directly to something mechanical.
I don't know how modern ships do it, but with civilian digital logic , you'd probably run a few redundant ethernet(Or fiber, or CAN) links to some kind of fan out box right near the switches or motors.
Cars these days are very extreme about it, sometimes even running the entertainment system commands over the fairly critical CAN bus for some reason.
If one of those cables went bad, spanning tree protocol would save you till you fix it, and probably tell you which cable broke and maybe even where. Mix them up, no problem, firmware knows what to do.
Plus, everything goes through a computer, so you've got logging and all kinds of stuff to help spot issues, rather than the classic "Oh well, noise and intermittent connections, we live with it till it gets bad enough to be all the time".
The only rats nest is right from the mechanical switch to your PLCish thing, but that's short enough to trace by eye.
You might have zero concern about interference in cables, because they might be fiber.
You won't have complicated color code schemes or wiring diagrams, or cut off wires that nobody knows where they go to anymore, you can just test it, because you don't have 50 thousand things to sift through.
People argue about whether digital or analog is more reliable, but digital is definitely easier from a hardware perspective, the hard stuff is done in factories by robots.
I'm sure the technicians had special training and it was a lot better than average civilian industrial uses of the pile o wires system, but I would think it would still be time consuming and not paralellizable, only so many people can fit around one of those giant bundles at once.
I could also be vastly misinterpreting how modern ships are wired, I know some industrial setups today insist on home run wiring instead of condensing to digital.
Well, and that the nuclear reactors back then commonly had terrible accidents and after Chernobyl (and TMI in a lessor manner) we realized that you can really screw up the planet with a nuclear oopsie whoopsie.
Or because covering half of Europe to the level that in some places you, even to this day, have to measure the radiation levels of mushroom and wild game is irrelevant?
The common reaction to "this process is too slow" is to ask the question, "what if we made it fast"?
As I mentioned the last couple of times this topic came up, I am concerned that the answers to that question that have already been offered are ignoring how the statistics of scalable system work and particularly where they overlap with the Rule of Large Numbers.
It's been suggested that if we want to go fast what you do is make a bunch of small reliable reactors and then co-locate them, but if you make something that's 10x as reliable, the assumption is that having 10x as many of them results in the same failure rate, and the same consequences. But that's not quite how statistics work, or for that matter equipment.
When you have 100 of something, there is always preventative maintenance or repairs going on. We have storage array designs specifically to deal with this problem in data centers by just letting equipment fail and then replacing whole units, because the labor involved with reacting to each event is simply too high. That's not particularly unique to IT. That's just a fact of large scale operations. You keep spare tools because some of them are going to break every week. You swap them out and -maybe- someone repairs them, or cannibalizes them.
With mechanical equipment, maintenance materially affects the reliability and safety of the job site. Suspending maintenance and repairs because you've been pre-empted by the failure of other equipment leads to risks stacking up higher and higher. Can I do scheduled maintenance on Reactor 3 if Reactor 50 ate itself yesterday? At some number of reactors, every plant has experienced one catastrophic failure. What do you do with that? What can you do with that?
The techniques for repair of radioactive equipment are still in their infancy, and seem to progress only with each accident (due to their inherent costs). Robots die in minutes in a hard radiation environment, and we don't make any new microprocessors with rad hard techniques (though maybe RISC V will change that).
From a safety critical analysis POV there has been a huge change in technical capacity over the last 20 years, but no one in the field would say we're close to strong safety, especially now in regards to software intensive systems. IoT just isn't going to be the same with radiation, you can leap from a correct state to an unsafe one at any point, dozens of bits being flipped every second, transistors misbehaving, faults between silicon layers... Completely unrelated logic is in the same fault compartment of critical trusted logic.
So if you have 50 reactors, that's 50 control systems, plus the shared infrastructure (water/electricity/data/fuel in and out, fire suppression). If you remove one for refuelling you're moving/vibrating a radioactive system with lots of pipes which are now fragile due to radiation. All the stress analysis techniques we use on planes are very hard to use on plants due to lack of access. It seems to me like we're just beginning to understand the complexity of SMRs and, contrary to the PR, they will take a long time to mature.
Everything about nuclear is nonlinear and coupled. Production line techniques are all about equipment that operates in the known region, and the consequences are not too bad when it departs from that because the operator is at fault.
As far as probability of failure, having a large number of small powerplants raises it to basically 1. But as far as consequences go, it's a very different story.
If you have a 10 kg rock dropping on your head, you're very likely dead. For 10 kg of gravel you've very pissed, and for the same amount of sand you're... possibly having fun?
We don't care that much about the probability of failure, because as a society we've already decided we REALLY don't like nuclear disasters. I don't think you could convince anybody that going from 1.5% to 0.5% is good enough. But lowering the maximum impact of a failure is a different game - it just means what we now call "disaster" becomes not just unlikely, but impossible.
What proponents of the "Well if we just removed all the regulatory requirements we could build loads of nuclear much faster than renewables" argument fail to take into account is that the building of renewables is also massively constrained by regulatory requirements, that if removed would lower the cost and make roll out much more rapid. In the UK the Tories have essentially banned building on shore wind for the past several years, removed subsidies for household solar (and insulation and other energy efficiency measures), and threatened to legislate against solar panels on farmland. Remove these obstacles and you could build out more renewables more easily, in the same way as if you removed regulatory obstacles to new nuclear. We need a mix of solutions that can be rolled out rapidly, and it is probably easier to roll out wind, solar and improve energy efficiency than it is to persuade people to build new nuclear reactors. As it is we seem to be locked into this ridiculous "I demand a perfect, preferably macho big science solution" attitude towards actually doing anything.
In fact after reading some detailed descriptions of Monju I can only ask "what were they smoking?" because the design of the plant didn't seem to take seismic risks seriously at all.
I was watching a documentary the other day that described how bad their habits were at Fukushima. That generation of BWR has an "isolation condenser" that is supposed to help cool the reactor in an accident, when it operates a huge amount of steam blows out of two pipes that are called the "Pig's nose".
At 9 mile point in upstate NY they regularly test the isolation condenser so everyone there knows what it is like when it is working. At Fukushima they had never tried it so when it produced just a trickle of steam they thought it was working. Similarly they had a pipe that was supposed to deliver water to the reactor core but when they really pumped water into it they found out it went someplace else. If they'd been responsible (like nuclear operators in the US) they would have practiced emergency procedures ahead of time.
It's still a testament to how safe nuclear power plants really are.
- Bad operators? Check
- Earthquake? Check
- Tsunami? Check
...
- "There were no deaths from radiation exposure in the immediate aftermath of the incident, though there were a number of (around 1600 non-radiation related) deaths during the evacuation of the nearby population" Wikipedia
I recall an engineer writing that Fukushima did a lot to prove that the idea of a run away meltdown where the core melts into a super heated blob that escapes the facility and melts its way into the earth was even more unlikely than they had thought. If it couldn't happen at a poorly operated / out dated facility the odds must be pretty low.
People all over this thread making the enormously wrong point that nuclear is ~safe because Fukushima and Chernobyl weren't that bad... There is absolutely no indication that either one was the worst case and it's a failure of imagination to rely on what happened at either to assess the 'real' risk of nuclear.
As just one example -- the pools at Chernobyl below the reactor that the engineers had to manually open after the meltdown were sufficient to cause a massive steam explosion. Sure, some additional fissile material would've been spread by that explosion which would be bad -- but the real risk is whether a few hundred ton equivalent explosion in reactor 4 would have been enough to destroy the immediately adjacent reactor 3 building and the reactor 1/2 building as well.
There were 13GW of thermal energy in the complex and between design deficiencies and operator errors, 1/4 of that melted down and resulted in a 1,000 sq mi exclusion zone. It's absurd to think that was as bad as it could get.
> There is absolutely no indication that either one was the worst case
You're trying to prove a negative using Chernobyl (a 50-year old design) as some kind of proof.
Even with Chernobyl only 100 deaths are directly attributed to the disaster and there hasn't been any statistically observable rise in effects like cancer since.
So, the greatest nuclear power plant disasters in human history caused ... fewer deaths than a single coal power plant in a big city.
So yes. We will use them as examples of how safe nuclear power actually is.
> Even with Chernobyl only 100 deaths are directly attributed to the disaster and there hasn't been any statistically observable rise in effects like cancer since.
The trouble with taking the position that only 100 people were killed by Chernobyl and everything else is just estimates, is that holding such a position in good faith means chalking off similar back-of-the envelope estimates for deaths caused by exposure to coal plant emissions...
> Even with Chernobyl only 100 deaths are directly attributed to the disaster
It was the same liquidator dying 60000 times. Just one death, but slipped in a banana skin and then fell from a window.
Put it in the box next to "Holomodor was not a genocide", "No hospital has been bombed", "it is just a special operation" and "we always tell the truth and never hide anything inconvenient".
> and there hasn't been any statistically observable rise in effects like cancer since.
This is like saying SARS1 was as bad as a modern pandemic could be... of course it's not. It was the worst we'd seen to that point but with some bad luck, it could be substantially worse. If you assume that the worst thing that has happened is the worst thing that could happen, you're going to be in for a very bad time.
This isn't remotely to say that Nuclear is 'bad' or that we shouldn't build new plants, just that we should be clear-eyed about the actual tail risks while designing them.
> This is like saying SARS1 was as bad as a modern pandemic could be... of course it's not.
Of course its not. Meaning "of course it's not like saying <insert false analogy here>".
> but with some bad luck, it could be substantially worse.
Funny how bad operators + most powerful recorded earthquake in Japan's history + tsunami isn't bad luck worth considering because there's always worse luck around the corner.
> that we should be clear-eyed about the actual tail risks while designing them.
We are: the greatest disasters involving nuclear power plants have shown that they are incredibly safe. And yet, the perception is "this is just waiting for bad luck to be so much worse".
Strangely enough when we look at other sources of energy by deaths from normal operation (coal plants) or historical disasters (Banqjao Dam, 26 000 dead from flood, 145 000 dead from subsequent famine and epidemics, 11 million homeless), somehow no one goes "oh you cannot look at those and state something".
I'm not sure how people are misunderstanding tail risks this much but NNT would be ashamed. "Regression to the tail" is super important when assessing long-term risk -- and likely points more in favor of nuclear plants due to the insanely disruptive tail risk that climate change represents.
But "our repeated accidents didn't end up being too bad" isn't the way to assess them.. acknowledging that the accidents resulted in thousand-mile exclusion zones, but limited loss of life is important but that should directly inform the siting of new plants and the operation of existing ones (and why it's a good thing Indian Point is shutting down).
And yet I don't hear anyone look at those and say "oh no, you shouldn't judge by the past, it can always be worse" :-\
> But "our repeated accidents didn't end up being too bad" isn't the way to assess them
It's a valid way to assess them.
> that should directly inform the siting of new plants and the operation of existing ones
What makes you think the new constructions don't take that into consideration? What makes you keep saying "no you shouldn't say itself because earthquake+tsunami+bad operators isn't bad luck enough, there's always worse luck around the corner"?
You could say that infinitely. That doesn't help you avoid anything... could direct you to worse decisions.
We use the incidents we know to inform ourselves about probability and etc. It's not just those incidents that are considered. And when more data comes along we use that too. That's how figuring things out works for just about everything.
I mean, in both cases it could have hardly been worse. There were failures in the planning, in the operation and in external events. Like, what else could be worse? A meteor hitting the plant during a terrorist attack?
I gave one clear example - the pools below Chernobyl causing a secondary steam explosion that would've resulted in Reactor 3 and potentially 1/2 melting down as well.. naively making that disaster 3x worse than it was. In Fukushima, the explosion and subsequent power loss caused the spent rods from the 4th reactor to nearly boil the water away, had workers not been able to gain access to the site and manually spray the rods, they would've been just burning in the air releasing clouds of radioactive gases. Clearly this would've been much worse than what happened already, but is mostly unaccounted for when people proclaim that the accidents we've seen are evidence that those are the worst possible outcomes.
But the whole point is that we don't know the universe of bad things that can happen..
Chernobyl already disproved the China Syndrome hypothesis. If you have a critical or nearly-critical mass it flows--and it doesn't stay in the same shape as it does so. It quickly goes subcritical and solidifies. It left a room in the basement of Chernobyl that was suicide to enter (you couldn't get back out before you had sustained a lethal dose) but that's it.
I agree. I think Fukushima due to the more open nature and recentness indicates it as well, but yeah Chernobyl proved it, but with less transparency and etc.
Two real world / terrible runs at a full melt down scenario and it just doesn't seem to happen.
Deaths that wouldn't have occurred had a mass evacuation not taken place.
Here's a paper analyzing the evacuation-related deaths from Hurricane Rita.
> A majority of the deaths (90/108 or 83.3%) were related to the mass evacuation process. Of these deaths, 10% were directly related to hyperthermia in motor vehicles. The combination of traffic gridlock and high temperatures, limitation of air conditioning to reduce fuel consumption, reduction of oral intake to decrease restroom visits, and conservation of limited supplies is suspected.
1,600 seems a little high, my memory was about half of that. 100% due to the evacuation, not the reactor. It's just politically inconvenient deaths tend to get labeled something else, often the underlying condition that was exacerbated by whatever the issue da jour is. I've never seen a breakdown of exactly what caused the evacuation deaths but when you go shipping a bunch of frail patients around in a total mess you should *expect* deaths.
Japanese companies have been great at other things like manufacturing and decent at stuff like software. What gives when it comes to nuclear plant operation?
There’s been lots of fraud revealed lately. Japan has been simply covering it up very well.
Just a few examples that I recall this past year or two include faking emissions tests for vehicles, faking steel quality tests, faking GDP by counting construction costs up to four times, and faking about 99% of clams from Kumamoto and local fishermen were apparently aware of this for decades. All of these issues went on for several years. Corruption at all levels has been revealed lately, and when you stack this up, all these things passed of as “good enough. Nobody will know” can end up in total disasters when quality matters.
You would think that the quality movement ideas that have made Japanese cars so good would apply to safety but the UAW will point out that a US car factory is a much safer workplace than a Japanese car factory. Some of that is the UAW being a strong union that looks out for its members, some of it is the adversarial legal culture in the US.
Japanese workers, for instance, like to make changes to their workstations to improve their performance (for instance, complete the job more quickly.) In a normal workplace that's a great idea, but when you are working with solutions of fissionable elements there are many details you need to control to prevent a criticality accident, and they evaded those controls.
For all the talk about Europe and Asia being ahead of us, I think we have the about correct amount of adversarial legal culture, maybe only slightly too much, and everyone else doesn't have enough.
I hear people saying the hot coffee lawsuit should have been thrown out , and to me that's just crazy that anyone would want to allow safety standards to go on ignored to that level.
Outside of safety related stuff our laws are a bit messed up, but I do appreciate the fact that we make an effort to keep people safe.
> I hear people saying the hot coffee lawsuit should have been thrown out , and to me that's just crazy that anyone would want to allow safety standards to go on ignored to that level.
I think it's a matter of taking personal responsibility rather than finding someone to blame when you make a mistake.
If it was just “ow I spilled some coffee” I’d totally agree but it was serious burns requiring hospitalization. It looked like an industrial accident not something one should get from spilling food.
If a steak house brings you a super hot plate they warn you profusely. McDonald’s didn’t do that here. I for one would never expect coffee handed through a drive through window to be so hot I am at risk of second and third degree burns. That’s crazy.
I don’t think the severity of the injury should dictate whether a corporation is at fault or not.
Accidents happen in unexpected ways.
If you drop a glass in a restaurant and cut yourself on a shard, is the restaurant to blame? After all, they could have served your drink in a plastic cup instead.
Hearing some of the responses to my post, I suspect there may be a slight cultural difference in expectations. Being from the UK, I wouldn’t find it remotely surprising to be handed a boiling hot liquid.
I personally don't think it's reasonable to assume that something intended for human consumption would be served hot enough to fuse one's labia to one's thigh if spilled on one's lap. In light of that, "personal responsibility" doesn't seem to be very applicable in that particular case.
I am absolutely empathetic to that poor women, but never really understood the physics behind it. You can’t superheat water under normal pressure, so it capped out at 100C (sorry, don’t know that in F, but boiling point of water). Which is pretty expected for tea, and not unheard of from coffee (without milk). I do get the economic.. money-grab on the company side that you can’t feel how bad the coffee tastes if it’s too hot, and also that it will get to a drinkable temperature when you’ve walked back to your office, but I don’t see any evil on this part and 90C coffee would not have caused much lesser damage. Of course their reaction after the fact was very disturbing (ridiculing the poor victim), but we’ve just forgotten how truly terrible any kind of burn is, and boiling water is just extremely hot.
Like, any number of news where someone poured boiling water on their cheating husband is just behind stupid and just shows an absolute lack of understanding of basic reality. I’m sure they didn’t intend that much damage, but they are just dangerously stupid at that point.
> They served coffee at the temperature people wanted it served.
I can guarantee you that if McDonald's or Starbucks or what have you served coffee at the proper 135F-150F instead of "literally boiling" the percentage of customers complaining about it would have enough zeroes on the left-hand side for Japan to have another go at bombing Pearl Harbor.
Like many British people, I drink several cups of tea per day. A process that entails boiling water to 100C. Most people here make coffee at home in the same way. We trust children to have enough common sense to realise that boiling hot water can cause a nasty injury.
To put a cup of practically boiling water between your legs is utterly absurd. The companies actions are irrelevant, they did something silly and only have themselves to blame.
That doesn't mean it's actually served at that temperature, for the same reason that me baking a pizza at 200C in my oven doesn't mean it's actually 200C when served. Serving temperatures are typically far lower than cooking/brewing temperatures - in the case of tea or coffee, typically below 80C - unless, of course, it's McDonald's or Starbucks overcooking the bejeezus out of their beverages for the sake of cheapness and consistency.
I feel you’re presenting a straw man. I’m not suggesting we hold corporations blameless in all circumstances, merely that we can’t abdicate all personal responsibility for our own safety.
I am absolutely out of my depth here, but isn’t Japan very “agist” (not sure of the correct word)? Just basing it on a previous HN thread about Japanese website design, a commenter mentioned software company higher managers, who can’t use a computer and the like.
Some tendency of placing elderly people in important roles simply based on respect and not knowledge sounds like a plausible explanation, especially when one, high-enough people can wreak absolute havoc in a very top-down control flow.
But I’m talking out of my ass here, don’t take anything seriously.
I think it is different in different countries. I think the US has a much tougher attitude about health and safety than most places. Maybe we pay a cost for that, but it is for real.
I spent a year living in Europe and was surprised at how much worse nutrition labels were in Europe at the time. In Dresden, Germany they still had cigarette vending machines all over town and frequently had a candy vending machine mounted next to the cigarette machines to get the little ones started.
The US has been reluctant to license MOX fabrication plants in the US because of the fear of the the danger of plutonium dust poses to workers. France has been confident that it has it under control. It is a subject that people have talked about for a long time without a lot of data, but a relatively recent study shows the dangers are real
> I spent a year living in Europe and was surprised at how much worse nutrition labels were in Europe at the time.
When was that? There is compulsory information about ingredients (sorted by percentage, so you readily see when "sugar" is on the very top), France has "nutriscore" which is a A-E scale of nutritional value.
There are strict rules on naming (for instance "100% juice" means that the jucie directly comes from pressed fruit (concentrates are forbidden) and that nothing else can be added).
> the US has a much tougher attitude about health and safety than most places.
Attitude? Maybe. In reality? Often not.
No idea why you think nutrition labels are worse and how they factor in "health and safety" when corn syrup is everywhere in the food in the States and 42% of population is obese.
This is only measuring the time from first shovel to completion. In reality, the period before first shovel is often much longer.
Best case scenario is China, where it takes them about 3 years to do the planning and then 2 years to do the build. In the US it seems to be about 20 + 20. I can see the build phase coming down to about 5 years, but it's hard to imagine the planning phase taking less than 10...
And it's not the nuclear part of the regulation that makes it slow in the US. In a country where it takes over 30 years to go from initial planning to completion of High Speed Rail, every big project seems to take forever and cost way too much. Nuclear specific regulation doesn't help, but I don't think it's the primary problem.
Even in China it takes a while, China's Sanman power plant uses the same Westinghouse reactor design as Vogtle in Georgia. Both started plants construction in 2009, and Sanman finished 9 years late, while Vogtle is slated to finish next year.
Price wise, that's China, and most countries rightly don't want to have an ongoing absolute dependence on China for their energy.
Second best is Russia, a bunch of countries did this and now a big chunk of Europe depends on a hostile power for half of their nuclear fuel and for parts.
Third best is South Korea and they just charged Saudi Arabia $5/W with an extra $4/W in mandatory service fees (no labour included). Their plants at home are also not great reliability wise and their nuclear industry keeps getting caught forging documents.
Fourth by price or tied first by effectiveness is the US, they can't do it for under $10 and they're famously good sports about controlling other countries' energy infrastructure.
Then there's Japan and France, and they're in the news a bunch for some reason lately. Finland and UK bought the latest French model and they are going just peachy. Taishan (another EPR) was also pretty dismal for a Chinese plant, but was at least mostly on time when it started leaking.
Alternatively buy renewables which are generally below the (much smaller) budget and on time from China, South Korea, USA or many places in Europe. The whole intermittency thing is largely just a scare campaign from coal, and the emissions avoided per dollar are far better.
China has built an impressive amount of high speed rail in the last two decades, but I expect they must have been planning that through the 90's, and the amount is probably because they dared to construct several projects simultaneously.
The author is a shipbuilder who wants to use shipyards to mass produce large reactors. This is a truly great idea. I just wish he focused on regular water cooled reactors for this first rather than highly exotic fluid fuel ones.
> Figure 4. French and Chinese nuclear electricity production. Source BP Energy Review.
Is shown to demonstrate that nuclear isn't slow.
Yet China has added more solar, and more wind, in that same period. So it is slower than either on their own, and much slower than both, even at nuclear historical high.
Meanwhile, solar and wind get cheaper and faster each year.
I feel like currently nuclear power is like early space flight. It works, it is fairly safe, but super expensive and very bespoke. NASA cost+ model comes to mind.
What we need is SpaceX for nuclear, maybe without Musk's volatile narcissism. It seems like the business of building nukes, challenging as it is, is eminently doable, just bogged down by a plethora of processes not optimised for viability.
As much as solar and wind are nice, people who live in sunny windy places seem to struggle to imagine a north European winter with no sunshine or wind, and massive energy requirements. Good job we have vapourware
So many folks overlook the impact of China on todays energy landscape.
First of all renewables. People keep talking about how solar is now so economical and it's price has fallen 90%+ in a decade. How did this happen when US and Australia (previously solar research juggernauts) threw their solar industries under the bus to protect oil and coal interests?
Simple. China. When everyone else was bitching over whos pocket the energy budget should go into China didn't have a choice but to simply build everything at once just to try keep up with demand (they still failed the last few winters to go without blackouts of industrial workloads).
As a result they simply dogpiled money into solar, nuclear, coal, everything. Their eventual goal is to be self-sufficient on energy which they are still a huge chunk away from and will also necessitate sunsetting the coal plants because they don't have the thermal coal necessary to keep going down that path.
So China almost single-handedly (I say almost because there are other players involved) willed the current solar prices into existence.
They are going to do the same with nuclear whether people believe it or not. Maybe not as dramatic as the price drops we have seen from solar (because it benefits much greater from mass production efficiencies) but they are going to build a ton of nuclear plants all with a few common designs.
I hope my home country of Australia wakes up to this and leverages our strong trade (and hopefully improved relations) with China to negotiate technology transfer of Chinese nuclear to Australia at some point. No amount of renewables is going to be enough for Australia because we simply don't have the geography necessary for renewable baseload or storage.
Nuclear would change the game entirely for Australia, with an abundance of cheap energy we could build desalination plants to overcome our susceptibility to drought, use electric arc furnaces to revive our steel mills which have largely been chased out of Australia because coking coal is too polluting, etc.
The author blames regulation without weighing any benefits, as if regulation were there for regulation itself. I am willing to listen to an argument that less regulation is needed, but it needs to take the benefits of regulation into consideration as well.
Wouldn't the USA do better to build small "pluggable" nuclear power generation plants similar to those on nuclear submarines? Periodically the fuel would be replaced.
Big power plants are "one-offs", with little/no interchangeability of parts and each having a unique set of problems, costly construction and maintenance.
I suspect a big part of the reason why submarine reactors are able to be so small is because they sit on a planet-covering heatsink. Terrestrial plants accomplish the same with artificial lakes and large cooling towers; the actual "nuclear" parts are already pretty small in comparison.
But yes, assuming the cooling systems could be similarly mass-produced, it would make sense to mass-produce small-scale nuclear plants as well.
How about we just tax carbon and let the power companies build whatever they think will be cheapest? Let the market do its job. All this bullshit arguing about it accomplishes exactly nothing.
Because all commercial enterprises operate on timescales too short to be relevant to long term climate and energy needs. We should have state owned power generation, transmission and storage. It makes the most sense and can function optimally if it's optimised as a state run monopoly.
Yes, nukes are too slow and expensive--let's look at why in a bit more detail:
Slow: There are two big factors here. First, they aren't using stock designs. Most of the design time goes away if you're using an off-the-shelf design. Second, litigation. The greens figured out how to tie things up in court to the point that power companies won't touch nuke. Especially with things like regulators telling them they can't operate their newly-built plant (nothing wrong with it) and can't pass it along to customers in their rates.
Costly: As he says, ALARA guarantees nuke is too expensive because it automatically precludes any actual improvements. There's no reason to come up with a better design because in the end it will cost just as much because of the extra safety systems they will have to pile on it. There's also the delays caused by litigation that can really drive up the bill.
My fixes:
1) One bite at the apple. Once a plan has been approved that's it, the government doesn't get to say no unless what's actually built has a meaningful deviation from what was approved or there have been major changes in understanding of the risks.
2) Scrap ALARA. Instead, require nuke plants to be 10x safer than the next safest *competitive* source of power. This is natural gas which is currently approximately 50x as dangerous. (Solar and wind are intermittent--to be competitive you need to count their storage systems also. The storage systems don't exist, thus they can't be counted. Hydro is limited by available sites--and pretty much every worthwhile place already has a dam. I haven't seen safety numbers on geothermal but it has the same problem--it can't be scaled up.)
(And I would apply this principle to industry in general--the government can't impose safety requirements on something that's too far above the alternative.)
The core of the problem is, as almost always, incentives. The agencies set up to write the rulebook and supervise and the people in them gain nothing by having nuclear plants built. Their mandate is to prevent accidents - and you can't have accidents if you don't have power plants.
To me this is what made the recent fusion news exciting.
As far as I’m concerned, the verdict is in for nuclear plants generating highly radioactive long-lasting waste: people don’t want them. You won’t be able to overcome their opposition. What more is there to say? Let’s move on.
If fusion can get to a point where it can solve the long-lasting radioactive waste problem - that would resolve the problem. That would get nuclear power adopted by the masses.
We might as well aim for that, however long it takes, because that’s the only politically viable solution.
> As far as I’m concerned, the verdict is in for nuclear plants generating highly radioactive long-lasting waste: people don’t want them. You won’t be able to overcome their opposition. What more is there to say? Let’s move on.
Why should public opinion override the need for energy security, which is a national security issue? Sometimes, the public makes the wrong decision. The public generally has trouble when it comes to differentiating between the short-term and long-term. Energy sovereignty should not be subject to the democratic will of the populace. Leave it to the experts and the technocrats, not the average Joe and Jane who operate with asymmetric information.
Putin threw half the world into recession with an economy the size of Italy's. That's how little our technocrats cared about energy security - we sleptwalked into that entirely thanks to them.
Energy security would be better served by throwing the same amount of money at carbon neutral alternatives that are proven, deployed and already 2-5x cheaper. Solar, wind, pumped storage, batteries, etc.
For technocrats, civilian nuclear power is just a means to support the military nuclear industrial complex, which represents the apex of hard power. Energy security is of secondary if not tertiary concern to them.
Why solve the problem today when you can hype a solution that will solve the problem in 20+ years and book some of those sweet profits from fossil extraction in the mean time?
> Why should public opinion override the need for energy security
Ah, you've made the mistake of believing politics is rational. There's no reason for this other than "politicians would be punished otherwise". Is the public wrong? Yes. What are you going to do about it? You can go round and round about the way things should be. That doesn't make them so.
> Leave it to the experts and the technocrats, not the average Joe and Jane who operate with asymmetric information.
This is going to be an extremely tough sell. Godspeed.
A democracy that is also a product of the availability of huge amounts of continuous energy for quite a decent price.
Insert blackouts or raise the price of energy to get access to it, day-to-day life, society and economy will not look like quite the same.
So a democracy which wants to survive the primary energy turnout ahead (oil has to go, and we are all deeply, highly dependent on it), takes the means to transform its energy usage on one side, and to sustain its energy needs on the other.
Removing nuclear-based electric energy will only sustain, at the time being, the production of carbon-based electricity. Fusion looks definitely better than fission, but it's 10s of years away still.
But that's my point: just because a society has a democratic political system does not mean everything has to be run through the same mechanism. Sometimes, the experts need to override the people, no matter how much of a fit they throw.
This is already the case. Unpopular decisions are made regularly by all three branches of the Federal government, as well as by local governments at every level. But even if you can get unpopular policies through, there's still the risk that you'll face consequences at the next election.
How are you going to generate power with your fusion plant? Steam?
Coal and nuclear are uncompetitive simply from the cost of the steam side. Today you can just about give a steam plant free energy and it still makes a loss.
Solar or wind does not have this limitation. CCGT gas plants gets around it by having a turbine giving raw mechanical power and then utilizing the same awful steam side to get the last percentage points of efficiency at a much smaller required scale.
Unless you can step around the steam turbine I am not so positive on fusions future outside of incredibly small niches.
Coal still gets built where gas infrastructure does not exist, but that's about it.
> uncompetitive ... cost of the steam side ... it ... makes a loss.
Huh? Whatever gave you idea that electricity production needs to be a profitable endeavor? The considerations for choosing technologies should be availability, sustainability, safety (of the plant, the population, the environment), etc. - the price of electricity can be set arbitrarily afterwards, and if there's a loss then taxes will cover it, or subsidies + taxes to cover those.
So, the question of whether to use steam or not is not a question of profit-and-loss.
I don't understand your comment. You seem to be indicating that I am somehow opposed the wide use of solar or that I support wide use of nuclear power - neither of which is the case. I'm just saying that steam turbines being "non-profitable" is not a consideration in whether or not to use them.
You're proposing using laws or tax payer money to subsidize certain power generation. That's bound to lead to issues, like for example the now cancelled Virgil C. Summer.
All economic systems (with division of labor) are arrangements in which the efforts and the products of people's work are channeled in certain avenues. Laws and taxes are just some particular mechanisms within such systems. You (or I) might find certain laws or taxes beneficial or detrimental of course.
Anyway, if the use of steam turbines is justifiable in terms of feasibility, efficiency, safety, costs (monetary or otherwise) etc. - then it is justifiable, period; and if it isn't, then it isn't. And the same goes for nuclear power plants. Otherwise you're arguing that we shouldn't use technology X because some US state is too corrupt to make it work. If that's your argument, I understand where you're coming from, but - USers should fix _that_ problem, not suggest that we forego the technology entirely.
They run at 30-35% efficiency with a humongous amount of machinery to support them. Heat exchangers, pumps, condensers.
Compare that to the simplicity of a jet turbine where you get raw mechanical power out. They take pretty much the same engine as an airplane engine and instead of having the turbofan putting that shaft into a generator. That's all there is to it.
Today new built renewables are in most cases cheaper than the marginal cost of paid of existing coal and nuclear plants. Gas is on the edge.
> Nuclear plants currently being built have about 34-36% thermal efficiency, while one of the new reactor designs boasts 39%. In comparison, new coal-fired plants approach 40% and CCGT plants reach 60%.(4)
This is the reason for Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR). Then you can increase the temperature and through Carnot's theorem reach higher efficiency. But now you have a pressurized reactor with another host of complications...
Since a coal boiler is much simpler in construction than a reactor, and do not rely on water to slow down the neutrons causing the chain reaction, they can do more fancy stuff and use supercritical steam leading to the higher, but still not good efficiency.
The last coal plant in the US cost $600M to build. And the steam turbine and everything else required to turn heat into power comprises the majority of a coal plant.
Literally nothing. But the heat is never actually free. You have to build and run a bunch of infrastructure to turn the raw heat into steam. Even if you're iceland with "free" geothermal you need to spend money to capture the heat as steam.
If steam were free like the wind nobody would care.
Comparing efficiency is a really apples to oranges way to go about this and should be a massive red flag that someone has an axe to grind.
Comparisons across different forms of generation typically look at cost (in dollars, carbon output or any other metric you want) per energy over the life of the thing doing the generating or per some multi year period.
The last coal plant built in the US cost $600M for 900MW. Most of the cost of a coal plant is the apparatus for turning heat into electricity (the turbine etc).
Even if you have free heat, turning that free heat into electricity is more expensive than solar electricity.
I've become convinced that fusion power will never be commercially viable in the foreseeable future.
Considering:
Electrical energy from coal is, right now, barely competitive with renewables (which are still continuously improving!).
Thus, any fusion plant would basically need to provide thermal energy for less than the fuel cost in a coal plant + the cost of some burners.
That includes:
- Vacuum chamber
- Cryocooling
- Huge superconducting magnet assemblies
- Maintenance of all above in a very hostile environment (=> thanks to high neutron flux and thus potentially neutron-activated materials near the fusion chamber)
Right now, the only halfway credible pathway to a viable design is ITERs successor plant; everything else is pure vaporware/research project by design, which is obvious from the scale alone.
Nuclear fusion is IMO in the same spot as a steam-jet powered carriage (heating water, expelling it backwards out of a nozzle) would have been in 1500AD:
- Technically possible? Sure.
- Academically interesting? Kind of.
- Economically viable? Hell no (and no amount of progress has changed that since!).
I'm very open to having my mind changed, but not optimistic :(
But photovoltaics/wind/battery storage looks all super promising, so i guess there is that...
What do you mean by long-lived? Fission products all become harmless ‘ less radioactive than the rocks we pulled out of the ground initially within ~300 years. That is well within the lifetime we can design containment systems for and far too soon for language drift to become a serious problem to communicating risks.
Actinides produced, ie uranium that absorbed some neutrons but didn’t fission and so became some other elements lime plutonium, americium, etc., do have half lives in the thousands to tens of thousands of years but are a much smaller fraction of the waste fuel than the fission products. They can also be put back into reactors to burn up.
If you reprocess spent nuclear fuel, then you can take all the very radioactive fission products and separate them out, vitrify them, and put them somewhere. You only get about one tonne of those per GWe-yr of reactor power, and as I said, they become harmless in a few hundred years. The bulk of the remainder is U-238, which is most of nuclear fuel anyway. And the remaining ~1% or so is actinides which along with the U-238 can be mixed with fresh U-238 and U-235 to create new fuel rods which then go into reactors.
Thus the only thing you really produce out of a fuel reprocessing system is the fission products, which aren’t long-lived. The only reason the US has a bunch of spent fuel with lifetimes of tens of thousands of years lying around is because we banned fuel reprocessing for no good reason in the late 70s.
The entire country could run on 3TWe of nuclear power and never have more than 900k tonnes of fission products under management ever, and could be placed in a total of ~8 million tonnes of glass like the French use, taking up a volume roughly equal to a square kilometer at a depth of ~3 meters.
300 years is too short, but you've got the right idea.
Let's do a little experiment.
In the left corner we have a nuclear plant and reprocessing facility. In the right corner we have a coal power plant. The reprocessing facility removes the commercially useful isotopes and sells them, removes the unused uranium and plutonium and sends it to the fuel plant and sends the rest to the landfill. The coal plant sends it's fly ash to the landfill.
Round 1 (one year's operation): We have waste from each powerplant, we build identical landfills. The coal plant fills it's landfill, the nuke plant only uses a small bit of it's.
Round 2: The coal plant uses another landfill, the nuke plant is fine on it's original one.
Round 10,000: The coal plant is on it's 10,000th landfill, the nuke plant has finally filled it's landfill.
Round 10,001: The coal plant needed yet another. The nuke plant, however, we can take out the first material as it's now down to ambient (no more radioactive than an average bit of earth) and no longer a hazard. Thus we still do not need another landfill, nor will we ever.
I think that fission will solve some of its long lived depleted fuel problems sooner than fusion will(!)
Just like with climate change, for nuclear we need to forge ahead with our best knowledge, engineering and belief in the future and our competency to solve problems. Let's use the best of our problem solving ability. To decline to do what we think is the best just because of long-held stereotypes, that just holds us back.
People "don't want them" because of fear peddling by people saying exactly what you're saying right now. Of course you want us to "move on" because that means the asinine state of affairs people like you have created will not be challenged.
Waste that is "highly radioactive" cannot be "long lasting" because physics just doesn't work that way. Anything atomically spicy will have decayed into less spicy things in decades, typically a handful, dozens at worst, resulting in waste that's not really any more harmful than heavy metal laced this or that that humanity already deals with in the waste streams of other industrial processes. The fact that nuclear waste decays at all is really a godsend. You can literally just ignore the problem until it goes away. This isn't the case for heavy metals and some other types of pollutants. You can NEVER build a house on an unmitigated lead mine.
Furthermore, the actual physical amounts of waste produced by nuclear are tiny compared to other things. Yucca mountain was gonna store waste for literally the entire nation.
Eh, to a degree it's a marketing problem then. We could relabel modern plants as "Quantum Power" and explain (truthfully!) that they are very different from older style fission plants that were genuinely dangerous.
The US Navy could be quite quick building reactors and innovating, because it didn't have to go through the same amount of regulation. They've operated lots and lots of reactors with very little problems for decades.
Go figure when the government owns the reactor and hires technicians to maintain them, they can be built "quickly".
In an earlier post here
> The truly unique feature of US nuclear power is the unlimited power that was given to federal regulators.
> [...] Congress had effectively told the regulator make the rules up as you go. This meant the regulator had no problem changing the rules. A design that was legal at the start of construction, could be declared illegal any time thereafter.
The solution may be that the federal government owns the plant and contracts out the work. Ultimately, the government would have to answer to itself about regulation changes.
It's because the US Navy can just decide to do it without years of red tape and mountains of paperwork. National security cuts through the red tape.
I don't think the government owning civilian reactors would help if they don't reform the process that means it takes 10+ years and millions of pages of documentation to get anything done.
When I saw the title I immediately thought of the nuclear engines in Kerbal Space Program, which have a famously low amount of thrust (although they are efficient) :)
Yeah, nuclear-thermal is low thrust because you don't have the rocket exhaust to cool your system. You have to deal with the waste heat and that severely limits your power to weight ratio. I think all low-thrust KSP engines are way, way above real world numbers (necessary as the game engine can't handle burns in time warp and players aren't going to be able to plot them without MechJeb type assistance anyway) but I'm not sure on the nuclear-thermal stuff.
It seems you missed the conclusion in which they state that there is unlikely to be a learning curve beyond the build of the first unit or two as evidenced by France and Japan's build times. They also did a decent job of showing that the average build time should be around 4 years which is equivalent to the build of a coal power plant and that the time it takes in both cases is determined by how long it takes to build the boiler and turbine. The swelling of timelines appears only when large changes in regulation enter the picture.
Nuclear plants absolutely should take longer to build than a coal plant. Of course coal plants are awful and can cause environmental disasters, but when there is a flaw in their design or construction they don't make an entire area uninhabitable for a generation or more.
Once more for the people in the back; we do not need nuclear. Renewables and storage are cheaper, faster and less risky.
Storage has nothing viable on the horizon, let alone in production. I will agree it's less risky--because risk is an unknown and thus a certain failure isn't a risk.
What storage are you talking about? We use batteries for very small scale storage, just long enough to spin up something better. To actually store power for night is several times as expensive as the power in the first place.
The arguments around this are always weak and spurious. I've been at this too long to take the bait from any trolls who 'have it all figured out.'
By no measure or justification is splitting the atom a good idea. There are few things more short sighted than arguing we should figure out what to do with nuclear waste because we haven't quite nailed solutions with ZERO waste.
People who minimize the significance of both nuclear waste and absolutely inevitable nuclear disasters just aren't thinking with any foresight or vision about the core concepts of sustainability.
But then that's it. A lot of people advancing Nuclear power aren't environmentalists at all. Learned that the hard way.
Considering coal power plants emit more radioactivity than nuclear ones [1], having 8500 coal plants instead of nuclear doesn't seem to be a great deal anyway. You could tell me even coal plants shouldn't exist, but they do, new ones are built, basically unopposed compared to nuclear even if they are far more dangerous.
Nuclear is going to have to play a significant role if we want to get off fossil fuels. By all accounts nuclear is far safer and cleaner than fossil fuels (even amortizing the disasters), and so it is a suitable replacement if we can make it economically viable and publicly acceptable like it used to be. Solar and wind are already economically viable (even compared to fossil fuels), but still leave some key problems unsolved (e.g. baseline power at night). We might be able to solve this with batteries and other grid storage solutions, but these aren't yet scalable in the way that nuclear energy can be.
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Fast forward to 2022 and we still don’t have enough renewables, the UK is not very windy at the moment so there’s not enough base load capacity, and we only have 3 active coal fired power stations left. Oh, and we’re in an energy crisis and France, which is normally a net exporter to the U.K., is needing to import energy, making the crisis even closer. It would have been pretty useful to have had a new nuclear power station online right about now.
[1] https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2011/03/nuclear-power-...