That "nuclear renaissance" is entirely artificial - driven by lobbying, not sound economic/environmental policy, nor demand from energy grids (we don't need more base power, which is the only thing nuclear is capable of providing.)
Nuclear is the most expensive form of energy generation possible despite being a supposedly "mature" technology. Wind, solar, and energy storage have plunged in cost and continue to do so.
Nuclear is sold as a "green" and "carbon neutral" energy source - a claim only made possible by completely ignoring the massive carbon impact of its supply and operations chain.
People love to bitch and moan about the impact of mining for batteries and magnets for Priuses - all of which can and are recycled - but point out the impact of mining the fuel (and massive quantities of high-grade metals needed for the reactor and its supporting infrastructure) and people dismiss you with a waive of the hand.
This reads as "building nuclear is pointless because we have already have plenty of coal"
I think you'll have a hard time persuading anyone of anything after dropping that turd.
The only reason new power sources are even a topic of discussion is because continued use of fossil fuel is off the table. The existing base load sources need to be replaced with something, and nuclear is the only game in town.
This is a molten salt system heated by solar. It can output power for one night, but only when there is enough latent heat from the previous day. Any number of consecutive days of operation is a lucky streak. A single day of non-ideal sunlight will shut it down.
Make the solar plant and the molten salt battery larger, and build more of them, they can store power for up to a week. You can also charge the battery off of excess wind (or run nat gas in some kind of power emergency).
There are significant issues that limit the scalability of these systems in terms of power, capacity, and duration.
Building larger heat storage capacity, for example, would be useless if it cools down before being used. Long-term storage is an area of active research. There is reason to believe[1] that the technology could improve in the future, but until that is proven to be viable the state of the art for duration is "a few hours".
Speculation doesn't keep the lights on. The grid can only be powered by things that actually work in the present.
That book[1] speaks of the Andasol Solar Power Station, and makes several dubious statements about it. The one being cited is:
> The well-insulated tanks where molten salt is stored contain enough thermal energy for up to a week
A false claim. It has enough energy for 7.5 hours. (149.7MW/1123MWh)
In any case, is says nothing about duration. The wiki writer may have just mistaken capacity for duration.
I couldn't find any evidence of this power station storing energy for any amount of time. It's used on the night immediately after the day that charged it.
> The green folks have already started reinstating reactor licenses because of shortfalls in capacity and storage
Then it's mighty odd that in the US, installed solar only counting grid-scale projects outpaces nuclear decommissioning at a 6:1 ratio in terms of GWhrs.
> And it’s either that or fossil fuels.
...aside from wind, solar, hydro, etc which are all cheaper, safer, and do not represent anywhere near the danger and risk.
Not at all - solar isn’t base load, and can never be base load. Same with wind. And hydro has already been built out in almost every location it’s useful in the US. And your cost numbers are junk because they aren’t ’cost per kWh when we actually need it’, they’re ’cost per kWh when nature cooperates’. Which is not reliable. So over provisioning and storage costs start kicking in, and which, somehow, never get included in a those numbers. Weird huh?
Predictable base load is useful, as California (and other locations) has been finding out, again, now that they have to actually do the math and can’t just hand wave things away.
It’s going to take awhile and a lot of churn before this all stabilizes though IMO. A lot of folks haven’t had to do the math yet.
> Then it's mighty odd that in the US, installed solar only counting grid-scale projects outpaces nuclear decommissioning at a 6:1 ratio in terms of GWhrs.
In _nameplate_ GWs. If you actually want your power to work during winter time or polar vortexes, you need WAY more than that.
Hydropower accidents have killed far more people than nuclear accidents both in real numbers and normalized for energy produced. The ecological downsides to hydro are also hard to overstate.
Just this year there was a dam failure in Libya that killed between 5k-20k people.
And a series of dam failures on a reservoir in China in 1975 likely killed somewhere north of 200k, destroyed more than 5 million homes, and displaced more than 10 million people.
Earth filled embankment dams are used around the world for hydropower. The primary danger from hydropower is flooding due to dam failure, so it stands to reason you’d look at all dam failures when quantifying the risk.
Dam collapses are rare, but when they happen they can kill thousands. Go through the wikipedia list article "list of hydroelectric power station failures" and look for the ones that are actual dam collapses.
> driven by lobbying, not sound economic/environmental policy
So just like the rest of the energy market?
Britain is importing wood pellets from trees chopped down in the Amazon and burning them in Drax powerplant as 'Sustainable low-carbon energy'
We import oil from India which originally came from Russia.
We import natural gas from America which has higher CO2 emissions and cost than Coal, while we sit on deposits of Coal.
Its illegal to build a win turbine on land because they ruin the view. Solar farms are illegal on any land that could potebtially be farmed, which is like 80% of all land.
The other day solar farm has been rejected planning permission because there were hundreds of objections, especially noise complaints.
The idea that energy market is a free market is a total face
> We import natural gas from America which has higher CO2 emissions and cost than Coal,
Not true. Virtually all of the energy from coal comes from burning carbon, while a significant amount of the energy in natural gas results from burning hydrogen.
In fact, burning natural gas emits only about half the carbon for a given amount of energy output.
It could go the other way if the coal is domestic and the natural gas has to be shipped across world on a sludge-burning oil tanker. But why burn either of them?
That first part is not true. What we need is not carbon capture, but to stop burning fossil fuels.
We can worry about bailing the boat after we patch the massive holes.
Until then, and likely even then, carbon capture (especially direct air capture) remains “Chevron’s fig leaf” [0]. I.e., a blatant predatory delay strategy by the fossil fuel industry.
Yeah this is that thing you’re talking about. This is us stopping burning fossil fuels for energy.
We can talk about everybody just riding their bike, which I agree would be better for all involved, but so far the data coming back from that experiment has been absolutely dismal.
At this point I think ignoring peoples reluctance to bear any inconvenience, and the consequences that has on policy in a democratic society, is dangerously negligent if you take the climate crisis seriously.
The data is emphatic and unambiguous. We could do more, but we refuse to, and the steps we could take to force the issue would be catastrophic and extremely risky. War is not carbon neutral, and victory is far from assured.
Building some nuclear power plants is arguably the least bad option. I don’t expect that medicine to taste good going down but I, as well as a great many around here, am in the solutions business. And this will take a bunch of coal plants offline in a fashion that we could get people to choke down.
You were insisting that we stop burning fossil fuels, withijt a suggestion on how to replace the base load. The base load must be replaced.
I inferred you didn’t like nuclear power because most folks who are focused on climate do not. EVs and nuclear power plants aren’t a panacea but they can make a dent, a big one, they’re politically possible, and we can start today.
Yes I can see how you would draw those conclusion.
I would start by saying that a) I don’t have an ideological problem with nuclear, I have an economic one. While wind, solar, and hydro (and the rest) have been getting cheaper (sometimes drastically so, as in the case of solar) year over year, nuclear has only been getting more expensive. The longer we run the plants, the more problems we learn about and the higher the cost becomes.
And no, I don’t think the SMNR will solve that, if anything I think they will be even more expensive ($/MWh) because they lose the economies of scale within the plant. It’s argued that you’ll get that price down since they can be mass produced and modular, but the 400MW scale currently being made are neither small nor mass produced. Building enough of them to actually take advantage of learning rate effects is a dubious proposition, especially with the market fragmented behind dozens of designs.
Whether nuclear retains a spot for itself remains to be seen and will be dictated (I believe) primary by the cost being brought down faster than the alternatives.
And that alternative (point b) is the modernization of the electrical grid (something that we need to do regardless of the path forward) to create larger electrical grids. The intermittency problem is lessened when large geographical areas share their generation capacity. Similarly with storage (hydro one solution that already exists).
“The intermittency problem is lessened when large geographical areas share their generation capacity.”
Are we having a serious discussion here? We’re pretty darn good at transmitting power and there are physics problems at work here that are really frustrating to have to explain over and over to people who desperately want to believe there is some silver bullet around the base load problem.
There isn’t. There is no grid scale solution. There is no mix of renewables that is going to get around the base load. It doesn’t exist.
We are having a serious discussion. If you have good sources showing why HVDC and/or hydro are a less economical solution please share.
But to your point about not being able to wait, I agree. So if we were to greenlight a new nuclear power plant today how long until it produces electricity? (Let’s even assume we have all of the trained personal available to build and operate it.)
The Vogtle plant took 14 years, and that was at an existing site. I’m putting my bet on a solid 2 decades if a new site is needed. To say nothing of the cost overruns.
But, let’s be generous and say 14 years. We can’t wait for 14 years to remove fossil fuels off the grid, to say nothing of growing demand. We need to build something that will produce green electricity next year.
Again, nuclear can certainly have its place. But it has a bunch of economic challenges to overcome to earn that place.
> We can’t wait for 14 years to remove fossil fuels off the grid
'We' == just the US that struggles to build a nuclear plant, or 'We' including, say, South Korea with 25 reactors operating and another four under construction and due to be finished by 2030 (along with boofing up and extending some of the older plants in the same time period)?
The US could ask South Korea for assistance, of course, but they might be tied up building nuclear reactors in Uganda and potentially other one or two other countries in Africa.
It’s true South Korea is doing a little better. Shin Hanhul 1 and 2 only took 10 years (a mere 100% schedule overrun) to build. So that is better. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what that 2030 estimate turns into in the end.
They have their work cut out for them with countries in Africa, I didn’t believe they currently have the local expertise or supply chains.
There’s a few things worth saying. The first is that plenty of people will die and will be displaced by climate change because the world, especially the developed world, has dragged their heels and not acted in earnest for decades.
Those alternatives do exist. The levelized cost of energy for renewables (especially solar) has seen a dramatic drop over the past 2 decades, and is continuing to drop. As it stands, they are already equal to or cheaper than fossil fuels. And this is before we start pytting a price on carbon that’s commensurate with the externalities it produces.
The same is true for energy return on investment [0].
As for carbon capture. It is an incredibly expensive process, both energy and money wise. Implementing it on a fossil fuel plant would dramatically raise the price of the electricity it generates.
Direct air capture is even more expensive.
And like I said, carbon capture is extremely energy intensive. If you want that carbon capture to really do much (other than predatory delay) it needs to be powered by new renewables. We’ll you’re better off just hooking those renewables to the grid and displacing the fossil fuel plants.
I’m not sure where you got the idea that I’m arguing for their ban.
What I’m arguing for is that we stop treating the atmosphere as a public sewer and put a durable price on carbon (one that’s reflective of the externalities it creates).
See for example page 5 for a comparison of LCOE [0].
For the issue of intermittency see page 11. Even after firming for intermittency (and without subsidizes or a price on carbon) solar and wind are cheaper than gas peaking plants, very competitive with coal, and competitive/more expensive than combined cycle gas. If you put a price on carbon (I.e. stop treating the atmosphere as a free sewer) the renewables become even cheaper.
This analysis considers a carbon price of 20-40USD/tonne CO2. (It’s unclear if they only consider that price on literally CO2 or on CO2e.) but that hypothetical 20-40$ is lower compared to what currently Canada is doing (48$ USD) and a lot lower than were the Canadian number is going (~112 USD). It’s somewhere in the middle for the Europe since there is a huge spread in price [1].
That’s simply not true. One option for firming is to overprovision to account for the capacity factor. The other kind of firming, talked about in the slide I mention, is about short term (hours) battery storage.
Taking California as an example, their solar causes negative electricity prices during the day meaning that fossil fuel/nuclear need to dump electricity on the market and pay people to take it since ramping down would be even more expensive. This in turn requires peaking plants on either side of that solar peak.
Introducing short term storage allows for that access electricity to be shifted a few hours to address that demand.
A complementary, and orthogonal, change is demand side management. People already voluntarily change their behaviour to take advantage of time of use pricing. With strong solar penetration mid day can become the cheap electricity price rather than night time.
No amount of overprovisioning is going to help you at 2am with solar (or during a really bad storm), and wind has similar but even less predictable issues.
Either way, overprovisioning, storage, etc. add significant costs and it isn't clear what those costs would actually need to be to avoid serious problems with high frequency if we actually take fossil fuels out of the equation.
We have experience with fossil fuels enough to say 'store x amount of diesel (or natural gas) onsite so you can handle a 100 year storm' or similar. We have no such experience with solar, battery storage, wind, etc.
Also keep in mind, California has pretty much the ideal climate for 'green' energy - almost all it's population is in temperate, sunny climates, and it has huge sunny deserts and wind generating mountains all nearby. Most electrical usage will be air conditioners, and in that climate those are near ideal solar loads.
And they're the ones that just pushed to keep their major nuke plant online they were shutting down.
It's going to be a lot harder for almost everyone else.
Demand side only goes so far - sometimes people do actually need that energy now, and it tends to be when there are real issues that need that energy to address. Like emergencies, storms, cold snaps in the winter, etc.
Yes, voting to keep operating your existing fleet in operation for an extra 5 years is one thing, paying up for a major refurbishment or a brand new plant is another thing.
But this is beside the point. If we still need use gas peaking plants for emergencies and outlier events and only that, then 99% of the energy decarbonization battle is won.
Before your comment the discussion was about comparing the price of renewables to that of fossil fuel plants, specifically it got onto the discussion of peaking power plants. If you wish to change the topic to base load, then you're going to have to make that clear.
As for night time, see my comment about storage; build out pumped hydro or dam-based hydro and use it as your battery. When you inevitably have excess solar/wind during the day pump water uphill, and/or decrease you hydro production rate, and then at night time use that pumped storage and/or increase the rate at which you run water through your turbines.
If a particular region doesn't believe that it's realistic for them to do this, or show that nuclear will be cheaper, then build that.
> A large number of people will die if you force this to happen without providing an adequate substitute.
We have adequate substitutes. Replace base load with nuclear. Electrify transportation and charge the batteries with renewable generation.
The true barriers are political. The fossil fuel industry doesn't want to be replaced with nuclear and renewables. The auto industry (which makes a large proportion of profits from maintenance) doesn't like simpler vehicles that need less maintenance. So they dig in their heels and put regulatory barriers in front of the alternatives.
> We can’t wait for 14 years to remove fossil fuels off the grid, to say nothing of growing demand. We need to build something that will produce green electricity next year.
I ask you to reread that sentence and try a non-inflammatory read.
I am discussing the building of new electricity production, not the forceful removal of fossil fuel production.
You don’t need to ban coal burning, you simply have to make them pay for the externalities they create. Gas power plants replace coal ones for the simplyfact that they’re cheaper. Unless we actively subsidize coal, they aren’t cost competitive and will fail on their own.
There is a massive need for degrowth. Carbon capture is a scam — the thermodynamics just don't make sense. It's far easier to not pollute the first place than to pollute and then expend even more energy trying to undo the damage.
The answer is less, not more: compact housing, compact communities, compact cities, efficient transit, etc.
The way we have built the world relies on assumptions about limitless resources, and in order to get through this problem we need to fundamentally reconsider how we approach using resources.
What can be done today:
- zoning reform (in the USA especially)
- investment in small dense housing
- investment in transit
What isn't going to help:
- Business As Usual (BAU) But "Green"
- Dumping more energy into the system
Nuclear reactors can be great, but they do not resolve the civilization-level energy waste problem.
> we don't need more base power, which is the only thing nuclear is capable of providing
This is wrong both ways. First, we need more base load power because most of the existing base load is fossil fuels which we have to stop using.
Second, it's very difficult to have "too much" base load generation once you electrify transportation because the extra base load generation is useful to satisfy normal demand when demand would otherwise outstrip supply and useful to charge vehicle batteries when it doesn't.
> Nuclear is the most expensive form of energy generation possible despite being a supposedly "mature" technology.
This was done on purpose. There is nothing inherent in the technology that makes it expensive. "Generate heat to generate steam to generate electricity" is fundamentally the same for nuclear and coal or natural gas, so the only explanation for the former having a significantly higher cost is regulatory, which was intentional and could be different given a different intent.
> Nuclear is sold as a "green" and "carbon neutral" energy source - a claim only made possible by completely ignoring the massive carbon impact of its supply and operations chain.
Nuclear has a low carbon impact even if you include its supply and operations chain. Also, most of those things apply to any form of power generation (you also have to manufacture and transport solar panels), and most of the CO2 emissions required are from energy and transportation, so if your energy comes from non-fossil fuels you don't have to burn carbon to build power plants.
> point out the impact of mining the fuel (and massive quantities of high-grade metals needed for the reactor and its supporting infrastructure) and people dismiss you with a waive of the hand.
Because it isn't massive quantities. One kg of uranium has the same energy content as two thousand metric tons of oil. A 1GW nuclear power plant generates as much power in a day as ~25,000 acres of solar panels.
> This was done on purpose. There is nothing inherent in the technology that makes it expensive. "Generate heat to generate steam to generate electricity" is fundamentally the same for nuclear and coal or natural gas, so the only explanation for the former having a significantly higher cost is regulatory, which was intentional and could be different given a different intent.
Nuclear is vastly more complicated and the ultimate failure condition that everyone worries about can cost hundreds of billions to clean up.
That results in a lot of engineers and administrators sitting around tables and dreaming up possible ways things could fail (particularly with humans in the loop) and dreaming up ways to mitigate them. The designs get more complicated and expensive over time because nobody wants to say 'no' to mitigating those risks.
The engineering of the plant also needs to be built to exacting standards and none of the pipes or concrete are what you find slapped on buildings in your local neighborhood.
Contrast that with a solar or wind plant or even a coil or nat gas plant and nobody cares that much about the engineering. If something breaks you just shut it down and fix it and maybe retrofit the design (bit more care needs to be taken in the case of a coal or nat gas plant since you don't want it blowing up but nothing out of the ordinary for any refinery or other industrial plant). With a nuclear plant you can't just pull the plug and shut it off to fix it without creating a 40-year long cleanup disaster.
You're explaining why they cost more to design, not why they cost more to manufacture. The kind of redundancy you need for this doesn't require an excessive amount of raw materials. The cost of a diesel generator that can run coolant pumps, or five of them, isn't a meaningful percentage of the construction cost. A large proportion of the plant isn't any more safety critical than it is in any other kind of turbine-based generating plant, because it's doing the same thing in the same way.
It's also working against one of the most effective design criteria for ensuring safety: Simplicity. Things with fewer moving parts fail less. But they also cost less. It shouldn't cost more. Something's being done wrong.
And if your argument is that nuclear plants are required to have higher safety standards than anything else does even for doing the exact same thing with the exact same risk as it is in some other kind of facility, yes, that's the point -- that's why it's a regulatory problem. Uneven application of standards. Either one of them is too loose or one of them is too tight, but they shouldn't be different.
They're different because one of them has a risk of a meltdown with hundreds of billions of dollars of damage. That's the asymmetry and why a nuclear plant costs more than a refinery.
I agree with most of what you say, but you can find reasonable attempts to calculate the carbon impact of nuclear electricity along the whole chain. As of the latest figures around a decade ago, it was in the same ballpark as solar and wind for carbon intensity, and human health impacts.
That source has historically been very pro-nuclear, but even more critical sources don't change the fundamental conclusion too much:
> Results for the process-based, input-output, and hybrid methods range between 16.55–17.69, 18.82–35.15, and 24.61–32.74 gCO2e/kWh, respectively. These are either well above or at the upper end of the range of possibilities (5 to 22 gCO2e/kWh) stated in a report for the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, and significantly higher than the median value of 12 gCO2e/kWh presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Obviously wind and solar have improved massively since then and continue to improve while nuclear is stagnating but still the numbers suggest it's in a totally different league than fossil fuels on those metrics. It's primarily cost that makes modern renewables preferable.
> nor demand from energy grids (we don't need more base power, which is the only thing nuclear is capable of providing.)
This is exactly the opposite in Europe. Base power is what we need, so we can replace coal and gas.
> Nuclear is the most expensive form of energy generation possible despite being a supposedly "mature" technology. Wind, solar, and energy storage have plunged in cost and continue to do so.
You're wrong, replacing nuclear with storage would be much more expensive.
Nuclear is the most expensive form of energy generation possible despite being a supposedly "mature" technology. Wind, solar, and energy storage have plunged in cost and continue to do so.
Nuclear is sold as a "green" and "carbon neutral" energy source - a claim only made possible by completely ignoring the massive carbon impact of its supply and operations chain.
People love to bitch and moan about the impact of mining for batteries and magnets for Priuses - all of which can and are recycled - but point out the impact of mining the fuel (and massive quantities of high-grade metals needed for the reactor and its supporting infrastructure) and people dismiss you with a waive of the hand.