Nuclear is one notch above dead, though I'm sure it won't officially die for another few decades. As a former proponent it's hard to argue against the significant advances made by renewables over the past few years. Sure, nuclear makes for a better baseline load, but the regulatory and safety requires of nuclear make the economics difficult, almost easier to just build overcapacity into the renewable generation.
Hard to argue that something that powers like 70% of France is one notch above dead.
If all of big oil had conducted an incredibly successful campaign against you since you were born, you probably wouldn't be feeling too hot either. And they conducted that campaign because of how incredibly good the technology is.
This isn't a technological problem, it's one of corruption, conflicts of interest, and anti-science policy.
Now is the time to rally for change and science-driven policy, not to give up. The water is lapping at our feet!
People throw out this 70% number but it’s really undercut by the fact France hasn’t built a new nuclear plant since 1999, and has decommissioned quite a few in that time. The average plant age is now 35. Nuclear output is actually down from its peak, with renewables largely responsible for new generating capacity.
France hopes to drop their nuclear mix to 50% by 2035, and their most recent reactor at an existing site started in 2007 aiming for completion by 2012...but that slipped by more than a decade and now they hope by the end of 2022 at the earliest.
So France is pretty hard to hold up as the shining beacon of a vibrant nuclear industry.
This isn't a technological problem, it's one of corruption, conflicts of interest, and anti-science policy.
You sound like someone who doesn't have to work out the financial engineering to back all that development. The treehuggers may be anti-nuclear, but energy investors are not. What energy investors are however, is pro-profit.
Nuclear keeps falling short in the analysis phase of a lot of energy investment firms due diligence. Probably won't be attractive unless and until the government comes in and basically nationalizes the construction of these facilities. It's unreasonable to expect the private sector to lose billions on billions building nuclear plants "cuz we should do right". Look at the mess that is Vogtie, and you'll understand clearly nuclear's problem. I would go so far as to say that even with zero taxes, and no regulations at all, most energy firms would walk away from the vast majority of nuclear projects.
Nuclear's problem is not "corruption". The pursuit of profit on the part of energy investors is not "corrupt". T Boone Pickens is not a tree hugger. He just knows that the windmills he was slapping up generated return in less than 6 months with enviable yield. Whereas a nuclear plant may not return a profit in its lifetime. The essential problem here, is financial, and no one wants to address that problem in a realistic fashion. Government, at least it seems, is simply in no hurry to intervene. (Probably because they don't have any more of an appetite for laying out those kinds of sums than the energy investors do.)
You're absolutely right, the "financial engineering" of nuclear energy is not my problem, and the government should definitely nationalize nuclear energy.
The corruption I'm referring to is the oil lobby's interference in policy and public perception.
You're saying: capitalism doesn't work in the context of carbon-free energy production (or in general, but let's leave that aside), and I agree. Controversial opinion in a fundamentally capitalistic forum such as this one, but capitalism is very much the problem here. It has systematically failed to price in externalities, which is why nuclear energy doesn't look so good on the balance sheet.
Allow me to revise my statement: This isn't a technological problem, it's one of corruption, conflicts of interest, anti-science policy, and a broken economic system that will be the death of all of us.
"Allow me to revise my statement: This isn't a technological problem, it's one of corruption, conflicts of interest, anti-science policy, and a broken economic system that will be the death of all of us. "
As someone who was born into the toxic fallout of chernobyl, despite being quite far away, I can understand the reason many people are against nuclear and in favor of renewables. I see no corruption there - and you can argue, that if all of the government subsidies for nuclear would go immediately to renewables for projetcs like Desertec, there would be no need to have this discussion any further.
So I am not Antinuclear, I would like to see some new and small reactors as kind of a backup for the grid, while we change to renewable for good.
Having a hard time tracking down primary sources, but is it not the case that the design flaws of RMBK reactors (positive void coefficient for one) were suppressed?
I mean, they're dead in the sense that we're not going to build any more - but not in the sense that they're actually all shut down yet.
People in Europe have long memories of Chernobyl. I live in the UK, which is a huge distance away, and I remember drinking powdered milk for a good while because our dairy pastures got an unhelpful dose of radiation. It probably shouldn't affect future energy policy, but I'm not sure that caution about the safety of the existing RBMK reactor fleet is unwarranted if you live near one.
Here in eastern germany it is still not recommended to eat mushrooms from the forest regulary. And the meat of every wild boar that got hunted, needs to be checked for radiation levels, too - and they do not disclose how much meat has to be thrown away. All as of today - because of a event, that happened 34+ years ago.
That's not true. There are 9 RMBK reactors still in operation today.
The other 3 units at Chernobyl continued to operate after the disaster. One was decommisioned after a fire destroyed it's generators. The last 2 continued to operate until they were shutdown as part of the deal with the Ukraine joining the EU.
If anything it's amazing that people don't realise how successful the RMBK has been despite Chernobyl.
>as part of the deal with the Ukraine joining the EU
Lol, since when Ukraine has joined the EU? If you meant the Union Association agreement, then note that it's REALLY FAR from a country joining EU. Here [0] you can see all other countries which have signed such agreement.
>If anything it's amazing that people don't realise how successful the RMBK has been despite Chernobyl.
Yeah, I agree with you. Only recently Russia has replaced RBMK reactors at the Leningrad nuclear plant with VVER reactors. So even despite the serious design flaw, RBMK reactors are quite reliable if you don't intentionally fuck with them.
On this note, reading Vaclav Smil's "Energy Myths and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Policy Debate" [1] has been sobering. I had a similar presumption that this isn't a technological problem but rather of a policy conflicts (and subsequent perverse mechanisms including corruption).
In fact, it is actually a technologically challenging problem. This book is a decade old but I would assume that nothing has drastically changed over the past decade, and the energy demand has probably only gone up. Highly recommended read, if not already!
> It boggles my mind that France and South Korea had such great success with nuclear but nobody else was able to replicate that success.
The reason is that France has invested a lot of public money in nuclear energy. The state has taken the investment risks, over a very long period of time (decades) for the public good.
Nuclear energy is not really viable with private investment, because the return over investment time and the cost of money is too high. States can borrow sub-0% loans. Private power companies just can't.
And France invested at a time where there was a consensus between politicians, to invest in the future. Now politicians hardly invest for their elected time.
One lesson I learned during my masters and my time n the solar sector was that, at scale, financials are all that matters now. During the cold war, nuclear had a huge political push. Espcially in countries building a nuclear strike capacity.
Now we reached a point were, during public bidding, solar and wind are cheaper per kWh than Hinkley C (that was already three years ago). If the CO2 certificates would just be more restricted, solar and wind would easily outbid coal as well. Last time I checked, which was a couple of years ago, in Germany CO2 certificates ahd the effect that they largely pushed out everything except coal and renewables from the market. Renewables had a marginal cost of zero, so they always got demand. And with CO2 certificates plenty, coal plants ended up the next cheapest power source with dirt cheap fuel. Cleaner and more flexible solutions were thus more often than not priced out, like gas and nuclear.
I hate nuclear, because when an accident happens it always carries the risk of being disastrous. But right now, i would make sense to keep alle xisting nuclear plant running and close down coal and oil plants. Sure, we have the risk of an accident, and we have the added nuclear waste to worry about. but we already ahve a lot of waste, adding some more doesn't change that much. And we would buy ourselves time to solve energy storage coming from renewables. And use flexible as plants to cover unexpected peak demand. Not sure if we will ever see that level of long term thinking anytime soon, so.
>Now we reached a point were, during public bidding, solar and wind are cheaper per kWh
That metric is very misleading. Solar and wind are cheaper than most other sources because their fuel cost is zero.
There are a slew of other costs that are not borne by the solar and wind generators but which are borne by consumers namely balancing costs, standby generation costs, ancillary services and so on.
Once you add in all these costs, renewables suddenly aren't as cheap as the media would have you believe. Don't get me wrong - they are an important step towards decarbonising electricity generation but they aren't the final step.
The final step would be transmission interconnections on a continental scale, large amounts of hydro where possible and nuclear where hydro isn't possible and little to no coal and gas.
> And we would buy ourselves time to solve energy storage coming from renewables.
To my understanding, the intermittency/baseload problem is a much larger problem than people give it credit for. And I don't think it is safe to assume that we will eventually "solve energy storage", any more than we can count on eventually developing commercially viable fusion or any other still-pie-in-the-sky technologies.
Of course we will solve energy storage. There are thousands of different battery chemistries, and large numbers of non-battery storage options (including ones like hydrogen that will do much better than batteries for long term storage). And even with very near term storage improvements, renewables will beat nuclear at providing base load.
There was a comment in a similar discussion a few days ago, attributing France's success in part to being able to sell excess nuclear power to neighboring countries, and those neighboring countries not themselves investing heavily in nuclear.
Basically, if France's neighbors tried to replicate France's success, they'd immediately run into the problem that they'd have to compete with France in the same power market. If building more nuclear reactors made economic sense in that market, France would (perhaps) already have done it.
I don't know how true that is, but it at least makes sense.
What competition? The Belgian market is already firmly owned by France energy companies.
Belgium has 2 nuclear power plants. In 2016, these covered about 51% of domestic power consumption.
Those power plants are owned and operated by Engie-Electrabel which is a subsidiary to Engie, a french multinational providing utilities services.
Engie-Electrabel covers about 50% of the Belgian market. The second largest producer/supplier on the Belgian market is Luminus (20% market share). The main shareholder of Luminus is Electricité de France (70% stake). Fun fact, EDF Luminus has a 10% stake in Engie-Electrabel's Belgian nuclear power plants. Most of their production is gas based.
Those 2 nuclear plants are coming up on 50 years of age. Their operational lifespan was 40 years. Talks about a phase out have been going on since 1999. So, what went wrong?
Back in 2003, at the end of their legislature, the then-government passed legislation that put a stop on building new plants and asserted a phaseout between 2021-2025. Even though an energy commission back then already noted the high reliance of Belgian consumption on nuclear. It was assumed that subsequent governments would revert that decision.
That didn't happen.
Why? Because between 2003 and now, Belgium has had a string of political crises severely stifling decision making processes. The "energy transition" has been postponed over those past 20 years for political reasons.
Belgium is now at a moment in time where those plants ought to be shut down, but without any proper alternatives to curb power consumption. Meanwhile, the costs for consumers has risen sharply over the past decade: 0.35 EUR / kWh.
Those costs are expected to rise in the future. Past policies regarding subsidizing renewables such as solar panels through tax incentives turned out to negatively impact the budget deficit. Moreover, the existing, outdated grid isn't updated to deal with modern power consumption. As a result, Belgium has ended up in a bind where recently owners of solar panels were barred from putting their surplus production on the grid, and the massive costs of subsidizing will need to be recouped. The already massively accrued costs to the public even before an energy transition can happen in earnest, pretty much render the debate moot.
Needless to say, Belgium is looking towards a future where it will probably be forced to reside to building new gas powered plants for the time being, and steep consumer prices for power.
> It can't be magic or works of God that won that success, so what's the real story?
The real story is that neither France, nor South Korea has any natural gas, coal, or oil reserves.
It seems that when you have no other independent means of generating electricity, you magically become rather good at building and operating nuclear reactors.
If the coal and oil reserves of the United States disappeared tomorrow, it too would acquire that superpower - and our politicians would miraculously discover a way to get both reactors, and waste disposal sites built.
It's a combination of economics and (formerly) geostrategic interests. France is a nuclear power, for which nuclear infrastructure was needed (in the wider sense: universities producing engineers etc., not just plants for enrichment).
Nowadays there's virtually zero nuclear projects that are economically competitive, including in France.
There are several countries that have reaped benefits of nuclear power for decades. In Nordics, both Sweden and Finland has over 30% of electricity generated by nuclear. In Eastern Europe there are also several countries (Ukraina, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Czech R) with a big chunk of their electricity generated by nuclear.
The whole French Nuclear industry is government owned, steered and run - there currently is no economic model in the western world, which supports a successful market-based model for nuclear power.
France runs a lot of totally outdated reactors, because there is not enough money available to replace them. Even extending the lifetimes costs a lot of money, which had better be invested in a future decentralized market-oriented energy landscape.
> France runs a lot of totally outdated reactors, because there is not enough money available to replace them
We don't replace them because there is no political will to do so, and the green party has successfully put fear-mongering campaigns against nuclear energy.
> Even extending the lifetimes costs a lot of money, which had better be invested in a future decentralized market-oriented
And yet France electricity cost is half the price of what you have in Germany, where you will find the "decentralized energy revolution".
> there currently is no economic model in the western world, which supports a successful market-based model for nuclear power.
I keep seeing this argument, and every time I do, I think "who cares?" Why do we care if it's economically viable? We're facing catastrophic planetary change. Act now, worry about the economics later. Take a fraction of the military budget and build a bunch of state-owned nuclear power plants. Why does the market even need to enter into it at all?
I keep beating this dead horse, but if you want to make nuclear economically viable, there's an incredibly easy solution: make the price of fossil fuels incorporate the cost of their externalities. When gas is $30/gallon, nuclear won't seem so bad. We should have been taxing them to all hell 20 years ago, but what better time than now? Why are we letting supply and demand determine such a crucial matter?
There is nothing wrong in having public investment only conventional nuclear plant. Small Modular Reactor is still a possibility for private investment.
France reactors are not outdated but functional and updated for post Fukushima security standard following an independent authority audit, and initially envisaged for 40 years, but determined fit for 50 years, the same reactors are found to be suited for 100 years in the USA.
The point is there is no needs to close and rebuild what is working, and as the lasted IEA NEA report showed the cheapest electricity is from lifetime extension of current nuclear, by wide margins, not renewable, in France.
Err... natural gas (the largest component of current U.S. power generation) is produced by the exact same big oil companies, for the most part. The three largest natural gas producers in the United States are ExxonMobil, BP, and ConocoPhillips.
Also, before the Arab Oil Embargo hit in 1973 (causing oil prices to skyrocket) a significant amount (though not a majority by any means) of the U.S. electric grid was oil-fired.
Hydrocarbons have nothing to worry about, even with nuclear. We are running into fossil fuels (our global usage is still climbing at a rapid pace), we have not flatlined, much less started to bend the curve downwards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkj_91IJVBk&t=760s
Cogeneration would be much better for sure. In most countries heating with natural gas ends up being less carbon (after losses). But in France even resistive heating could be viable from a carbon perspective.
To be clear you should never do this, you should use a heat pump. But you could and it wouldn't be the end of the world.
> it's hard to argue against the significant advances made by renewables over the past few years.
I don't think it's that hard to argue that we should have been building nuclear plants en-masse 30 years ago, and that resistance to this has lead to immeasurable damage to our biosphere. And that continued resistance will result in even more damage. No projections for renewables is fast enough to meet the gap.
As long as we're playing counterfactuals: We should have used the untold zillions of public money and subsidies nuclear R&D got (both military and civilian sides) over the last 80 years on renewables, we would have reached the current level of advancement 30 years ago.
And if all goes as planned it'll only cost £121bn and take a total of 139 years to decommission. Really. Started in 1981, scheduled to finish in 2120, and nothing really went wrong
>Sir John Cockcroft, leading the project team, was sufficiently alarmed to order the filters. They could not be installed at the base as construction of the chimneys had already begun, and were constructed on the ground then winched into position at the top once the chimney's concrete had set.[42] They became known as "Cockcroft's Folly" as many regarded the delay they caused and their great expense to be a needless waste. During the fire the filters trapped about 95% of the radioactive dust and arguably saved much of northern England from becoming a nuclear wasteland. Terence Price said "the word folly did not seem appropriate after the accident".
You've got to love the British understatement! Having said that, this was really at the start of the nuclear age and came about through the UK being excluded from US nuclear projects despite having contributed to the Manhattan Project under the incorrect assumption technology would be shared after the war. Windscale was built because Britain needed the atomic bomb to prevent its post-war decline making it geopolitically irrelevant and needed it before the US and Soviet Union banned further testing. There's no way anything like that would be built today by any sane government knowing what we do now.
I've had a tough time understanding the regulations against nuclear. A typical coal plant produces more nuclear waste than a nuclear plant... with the exception that its burned into the atmosphere.
> A typical coal plant produces more nuclear waste than a nuclear plant.
No. This is absurdly incorrect.
That article has been debunked many times because its basic claim is that coal ash ponds emit to the environment (not contain) more radiation than spent nuclear fuel storage in perfect working order.
The spent fuel from a nuclear power plant contains many orders of magnitude more radioactive matter than any coal plant, anywhere. The design of fuel assemblies, as well as the associated exterior containment of e.g. cooling ponds, or dry casks, keeps the massive amount of radioactivity confined and separate from the environment.
Can you cite a source for this? the core claim is that coal ash contains more uranium and other radioactive metals than what a typical nuclear plant consumes in a year owing to the impurities of coal and the massive volume of coal consumed by a power plant in a given year.
As coal ash is typically disposed of via water or air it's an interesting discussion point.
Uranium is not common. For coal to just, by chance, contain enough uranium to run a nuclear reactor is just not consistent with the logic that mining + refining uranium is hard.
It's worth recalling that a coal plant burns 1.1 pounds of coal per kilowatt hour. Considering that a nuclear plant may produce 5 tera watt hours per year this translates to 2.5 million tons of coal burned per year for equivalent coal generation capacity.
Uranium rich coals with concentrations above 200 mg/KG are used in resource extraction around the world. Our hypothetical plant burning this coal would release the equivalent of 500 tons of uranium. In practice it's estimated that Chinese coal plants emit 62 tons of uranium into the atmosphere per year, however this estimate critically depends on the quantity of uranium in the coal - one plant in china was estimated to emit 3 tons of uranium into the atmosphere.
> the core claim is that coal ash contains more uranium and other radioactive metals
No, the core claim is that coal ash contains more radioactivity. That is, there are more nuclear disintegration events per second per kg of mass in coal ash than in spent reactor fuel. And it is wrong by many orders of magnitude. The thorium and natural uranium in coal ash have fairly low levels of radioactivity, nothing like the levels of spent fuel rods.
Simple numeracy will tell you it is fact. But in case that's not accessible, ask yourself: what is a person's radiation exposure by standing upon a coal ash mound 1 year after it is deposited?
Now ask yourself: what is a person's radiation exposure if they were able to stand next to a spent nuclear fuel assembly 1 year after it is removed from the reactor?
You could literally live on top of a coal ash heap and never suffer any radiation consequences. You would have suffered a fatal does from the spent reactor fuel in about a minute.
I'll leave the citations to you, since most of the published works assume basic knowledge of how radioactivity works and I'm not certain are appropriate to your question. If you want to know about spent fuel, the Swedish report [1] is fairly good for lay persons. I'm not going to dig out any studies on ash ponds, but I'm sure there are some.
As it happens, my degree is in physics. the majority of high radioactivity elements that you are describing decay within 5 years the remaining waste that sticks around for 30k+ years isn't nearly as radioactive. The rods burning off hot radioactive material are not intended to leave the plant and hence I didn't call them out in the waste products.
When it comes to low concentrations of radioactive heavy metals like those in spent fuel rods after 5 years the bigger danger tends to be heavy metal poisoning where they are dramatically more toxic than lead.
Isn't it good to have all your waste in one small ___location? Especially radiation which can be attenuated by engineering. That's probably one of the biggest selling points for nuclear for me. Solar and wind involves a lot of land being used that can't be left for nature or other purposes. A 1 km^2 site can power a whole region with nuclear energy.
I'd much rather have nuclear waste safely contained in one spot than distributed into everyone's lungs. The worst case scenario with nuclear waste is that it's distributed around the environment. That's the status quo with fossil fuels. You absolutely do not want to "dilute" nuclear waste into the environment.
I was also a big fan, but there are many alternatives now. I think they will remain useful for some edge cases.
I am now more looking forward to seeing battery and energy storage solutions mature, as well as seeing how solar powered hydrogen gas can replace or dilute fossil fuel in gas turbine generators for greener load balancing.
> I am now more looking forward to seeing battery and energy storage solutions mature
I'm reading Bill Gates' latest book, he says he spent and lost a lot of money on battery tech and while we are able to get incremental improvements, it appears that an order of magnitude improvement is unlikely at this point.
Other areas are still possible - heck, batteries are still possible, but I'm not sure we should hope for that rather than draft an optimistic case of incremental improvements and start planning with that instead.
I think energy storage outside of chemical batteries is where infrastructure scale storage should be happening. Things like pumped dams or gravity batteries. Instead of thinking of them as longer term storage of excess energy, we can think of them as capacitors for the grid overnight. In this way while we still rely on a fossil fuel turbine as a last resort, the vast majority of the year can be covered by renewables.
Lets say the split looks like:
8am - 8pm : 100% renewables
8pm - 8am : Split between remaining renewables then gravity storage begins discharging
If you are going to run out of gravity storage, you will have ample warning, and you will have a comfortable amount of time to bring a backup gas turbine plant online. One of the big challenges with all grids is continuity and keeping everything in sync, most of the time the issue is not having the ability to rapidly respond to fluctuations in the grid. Gravity storage helps solve that issue by being very predictable, and (with a smart grid integration) instantaneously available.
Don't have time for a proper response, just a short note:
Yep people are looking into that, but it ain't trivial. Apparently one needs a fairly specific slope for it to be econom at the moment (competitive with chemical batteries). If you look on YouTube for the (clickbaity, unfortunately) title "the truth about pumped storage" (iirc), you should find a video from some engineering channel where some of this is mentioned. Another keyword might be Ireland. There's gotta be more information-dense / less time-consuming sources than that video though, it's just the one I got this from. My point being, if it were this simple, yeah. Looks like we'll (recurring theme) need a bit of everything to get there on the timescale we're looking at to avoid worse issues.
>I was also a big fan, but there are many alternatives now.
Do some research. There are essentially no alternatives to nuclear power for 100% carbon free generation. That's due to how power is produced, transported and consumed (in the US at least) and simply installing extra capacity of renewables so there's "extra power" won't work.
It's a big discussion, but I don't think we need 100% carbon free to the point of technicality. We should just jump on whatever is good enough and easily available right now, not in 10 years of commissioning time. The tech is here and now and it could be installed on your roof tonight. We should have rolled out nuclear 5 decades ago, and be reaping the rewards now.
In my state in Australia, which resembles California to a fairly uncanny degree in many areas, we have a majority of energy from rooftop solar for a period of most days, the rest is filled by gas generators and the whole shebang is stabalized by a massive tesla battery ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve ). It isn't perfect but it is a huge decrease in carbon emissions and a big step toward totally renewable.
Somewhat ironically the state also has the national nuclear waste dump and was previously the site of British and American nuclear weapons testing out in the desert. So uh, guess we may as well have popped a reactor out there in the 60s and have enjoyed the clean energy.
But what if the cost of nuclear energy were to come down by a factor of 3? Nuscale's SMR cost is about $3BN/GW, while the cost of Vogtle 3-4 is about $10BN/GW.
The cost of solar has a lower bound: even if panels become free, you still need to buy the rights to the land where you mount them. The cost of solar has come down a lot lately, but there's not much scope to come down further, if you look at the total cost.
> you still need to buy the rights to the land where you mount them.
And you need to store the power somewhere for nights and cloudy days. Energy storage ain't cheap, or even feasible enough for an all-solar-and-wind power system. I don't know why solar advocates continuously ignore this point.
Batteries for short term storage, hydrogen (stored underground and burned in turbines) for long term storage. Combined cycle is 10% of the cost of a nuclear plant of the same capacity; simple cycle just 5%, so one can back up the entire grid with hydrogen and still pay lower capital cost than for a nuclear grid.
Not according to the EIA ([1] page 8 Table 1b). The cost for 1 MWh of nuclear energy is $63 and for solar $30. The solar cost includes 4 hours of storage (no long term storage).
I’m incredibly depressed about renewables. They’re a dead end technology for a civilization in decline—one cutting energy usage rather than exponentially increasing it to make wonderful things possible. You’ll never power a starship with windmills. Why can’t we bring down the price on nuclear instead of giving up?
> I’m incredibly depressed about renewables. They’re a dead end technology for a civilization in decline
Solar could supply civilization with more energy than fission or fusion (in manmade reactors) ever could. The Sun will produce orders of magnitude more energy than totally fusing all the deuterium or fissioning all the uranium and thorium in the solar system could provide. Far from being a sign of a civilization in decline, the triumph of renewables would be a signpost on the way to becoming a Kardashev 2 civilization that can fully exploit the energy resources of the solar system.
If we wanted to we could cover the Sahara with solar panels and have several times more electricity than we know what to do with.
The important shift btw is not from coal and nuclear to renewables, it's from fossil fuels for heating and transportation and industry to electricity. If we figure out how to build fusion power plants safely for cheap in a few decades, we will already have set up our infrastructure to run on electricity instead on carbon. Cutting energy usage is just a nice side effect of switching from 30% efficient ICEs to 80% efficient electric cars and from heating with gas to heating with a heat pump.
> If we wanted to we could cover the Sahara with solar panels and have several times more electricity than we know what to do with.
Do we have enough rare-Earth minerals to build this many solar panels? What do we do with the panels when they reach the end of their lifecycle twenty years from now? What do we do when it's nighttime in the Sahara?
Panels are almost exclusively sand by weight. When panels are at the end of their life we either recycle them into new panels or simply store them somewhere. They're not particularly difficult to store safely. Right now there is not much recycling going on because there simply isn't the volume of old panels available to make this interesting from an economic perspective.
To cover nights in the Sahara we use some of the absurd excess energy we get from covering the whole desert to make some Hydrogen or Methane and convert that back to electricity. If we don't want PV and gas synthesis for some reason to we can also just store heat in molten salt in solar-thermal installations and drive steam turbines. That's just a bit more expensive than PV today.
I'm not sure why rare Earth minerals would be a bottleneck. They aren't rare in the element abundance sense, just uneconomical to extract, which is why they are being extracted in countries where human rights violations are happening all the time.
Why does this canard about rare earths in PV show up in the comments to every one of these nuclear posts? Where did you hear this, and why did you believe it?
There have been thousands of satellites and dozens of space probes powered by solar electricity. Space missions out to the orbit of Jupiter can be powered by solar PV (Juno probe). Actual fission reactors have never gone beyond Earth orbit.
Very deep space missions can't use solar power due to the inverse square fall-off of light from the sun, but even those don't use nuclear reactors. They use radioisotope thermal generators powered by radioactive decay. RTGs don't have any moving parts and can run for decades without maintenance.
I think it's astonishing and delightfully living-in-the-future that solar cells -- once so expensive that only space missions could justify their cost -- are now manufactured by the square kilometer and cheap enough to "farm" electricity here on Earth. If you're pondering speculative technologies of the future, a solar collecting Dyson swarm could provide more energy than all the fissionable materials in the solar system.
Source? Because I believe the most they've said is that they'll offset enough generation to make up for the natural gas used by starship. The sabatier process on Earth is even more troublesome than on Mars due to the trace amounts of atmospheric CO2. Even with the thin atmosphere on Mars there's literally more CO2 in a cubic meter of Martian air than in a cubic meter of terrestrial air.
That dead end technology is one of the few hopes for countering global warming and carbon emissions. And rooftop solar and EV batteries dual-purposing for distributed grid storage are complementary technologies.
"Why can't we bring down the price of nuclear" is a problem with the nuclear industry, and has nothing to do with the REVOLUTIONARY sea change that renewables represent.
And I'm a LFTR fan. Brayton cycle? 100x more available fuel that's breeded? Vastly reduced proliferation risk? "Burn" spent fuel rods? 99% fuel use? Zero meltdown risk with plug and liquid fuel? Scales down to the size of a closet? Very rapid startup/shutdown time? Container degradation was a problem, but whatever. Amazing stuff.
But LFTR and other technologies have zero chance in the open market right now with renewables plummeting in cost to the point that there exist no fossil fuels that are competitive in the marketplace.
Solar/wind is one of the few developments that are counter to our civilization sliding into a polluted, totalitarian, oppressive dystopia. Solar/Wind can enable decentralized power production in the third world, and combined with Starlink and other satellite internet webs will enable so much potential for the third world without the pseudo-oppressive nature of grid and wired communications infrastructure.
Solar power is becoming so cheap and plentiful that it is cheaper than free. At certain times you can literally be paid to consume it. All kinds of possibilities from that.
They significantly reduce primary energy usage. When you generate one 1kWh in a thermal power plant you also generate an additional 1 - 2 kWH of thermal energy. So in statistics it will look like the thermal power plant produces more energy. If your city has district heating it might be a valid form of power, but right now we assume all the thermal energy is always useful and necessary which is especially bad in cars where you turn up to 70% of the energy into waste heat.
By increasing energy efficiency by a factor of 2 you easily cut down on energy usage.
I don’t really understand how wind and sun could totally replace nuclear. How do we get electricity during the night? How do we get electricity when it’s cloudy but the wind is light at the same time?
You build a big grid. Wind won't be light everywhere.
Load is lower at night, so lack of sunlight is less of an issue.
Maybe people start placing battery packs in their homes. Battery technology has seen large investments over the past decade and performance is better than ever.
When demand is high, inexpensive natural gas can be turned on quickly.
There are a lot of options, almost all of them less expensive than nuclear. That's my point, traditionally nuclear was good for baseline and renewable doesn't have a comparable equivalent apart from hydro. But other renewables like wind are getting to be so efficient and inexpensive, that I don't see how building an excess of it can't compete with nuclear.
> Battery technology has seen large investments over the past decade and performance is better than ever.
Battery technology still has a bit to go before it can perform this task though. Even if we don't account for freak weather events (which are becoming more common).
> When demand is high, inexpensive natural gas can be turned on quickly.
Is this a good option though?
I think the only good argument against nuclear is cost, so I agree with that. But if we consider the cost of emissions, storage (these aren't counted in solar and wind and don't make for fair comparisons to base loads like coal, gas, or nuclear), or other factors that fall under "tragedy of the commons" (i.e. putting sources on even playing fields) the prices become more comparable (depending how you weigh factors). But it really does come down to how much you value the cost of climate and human lives (since nuclear is about 50x safer than natural gas).
Cost is a good argument, but we have to define our priors because "cost" means different things to different people. I for one would rather pay more for electricity and save human lives and reduce emissions. Just at $50/ton tax (low) would make it competitive[0], assuming that we couldn't regain economies of scale.
We're talking power station level storage, as in it doesn't have to be light, cheap and consumer durable.
Risks of fire or toxicity from consumers doing dumb things doesn't have to be worried about for instance. A pet gnawing at it and getting sick? Not happening.
So not unobtainium but expensivium can be used. Also operating environments can be dictated, such as temperature, humidity, water cooling or say if the battery technology required a contraption the size of a house, etc.
And lastly it doesn't have to be produced at scale. The lead time for some power station equipment is already months to years. Clunky awkward manufacturing is production ready.
There's many more possibilities given those possibilities. Right now it's Li-ion and nicad at installation sites but look for that changing soon
The problem with intermittent power and batteries is that you don't have to equal the capacity of an on demand or base load system, you have to have higher capacity. This does vary dramatically between different areas. For example, Nevada doesn't have the same requirements as New England. Nevada has fairly consistent seasons and isn't as subject to storms, thus they don't need much excessive storage. On the other hand New England suffers frequent heavy seasonal storms and long winters that make storage more difficult. Even more so when we are talking about the frequency of these events increasing due to climate change.
The problem is complicated.
> A pet gnawing at it and getting sick? Not happening.
Power outages are often caused by animals. 11% are from squirrels[0]. SQUIRRELS!
> Also operating environments can be dictated, such as temperature, humidity, water cooling or say if the battery technology required a contraption the size of a house, etc.
This just adds to the nuance from above. Because now you need to power your containment. This needs priority over powering homes actually. So now you need more excess and more backups because this is going to be expensive if it fails and take a long time to get back up.
A lot can be reduced if people start building battery systems in their homes. But most people don't have $5k-$15k to drop on a powerwall. But that is shifting the burden to consumers and I'm not sure that's a fair comparison because this consumer cost isn't included in our pricing comparisons. Though this would be a much more robust system (assuming we ignore increase in risk of fire) and greatly reduce damage done by events like what we saw in Texas, even if there is a lot of human error involved.
Climate and power is an extremely difficult topic. Anyone saying otherwise is uninformed.
Right. The point is mass produced consumer devices we're familiar with have different constraints than a power grid so most people's existing familiarity with low cost retail batteries isn't all that relevant.
For instance Lithium–air batteries have about the energy density of oil but comes with loads of problems that make them currently impractical for consumer devices. There's fewer hurdles however in making it power station ready.
Same thing with liquid electrodes research. There could be large reservoirs that are on multiday flow cycles for capacity smoothing.
It's like comparing a drainage pipe to a hydropower river dam, it's fundamentally a different problem space
Yes, exactly. Your battery that is in your phone that dies after 2 years of use is the main driver of battery innovation. If you quick draw from these your battery will light on fire (no joke, please don't test because lithium fires are not good, even if you manage to put it out... i.e. let it burn).
That's why nuclear is important for island and industrial country like Japan. Island country is difficult to develop well-balanced renewables because of the grid is small and difficult to connect to other countries' grid. Sadly Japan is now very difficult to build new nuclear plants for obvious reason. I suspect that that's why Japan gov and Toyota is going to develop Hydrogen.
Overproduction, storage and demand side shifting. The market can choose which mix of these works best in which market - which might vary a lot from market to market.
It's rather ironic that the carbon industry spent the last 30 years telling us through Koch institutes etc. that the market knew best (when fossil fuels were most viable financially) and now that the green energy competition is undercutting them to death, suddenly markets don't solve anything.
From the numbers we saw during the Texas power outage, the amount of batteries required would be mind-boggling.
Lots of places do not have the geography required for pumped storage, or it is already fully exploited (building a new dam is also an environmental disaster)
Molten salt also still seems to be in it's infancy.
The most practical solution I could see today to live without baseline power would be to build a massive inter-continental HVDC grid. Large grids have a tendency to be fragile and have catastrophic failures though.
To be honest the best probably would be to get small modular reactors (SMRs) into mass production. That would give economies of scale along with other benefits. But we aren't quite there yet. I'd imagine if SMRs became popular larger reactors would as well too.
Can you imagine how a Texan operator of a SMR would have cut corners and what the damage to their plant would have been in this cold snap?
Remembering that the damage to Texan energy production was due to failure to winterise their equipment after the last two cold snaps. It has happened before, they were told it was going to happen again, but the legislature decided that it was best to let the market decide the outcome.
An SMR operator refusing to winterise their plant would end up in a similar situation: part of the equipment freezes or ices over (because antifreeze costs money), leading to an inability to scale up production until ambient temperatures rise far enough to defrost the frozen plant.
Yes, and nuclear facilities have significantly different standards from other facilities. The parent's comment is bad because the SMR wouldn't explode or leak if it wasn't properly winterized. It would shut down. But there is a lower chance of that happening simply because the significantly higher standards surrounding nuclear.
Also, there will be hundreds of millions of EVs in about 10 years. With not-so-small batteries, charged by distributed rooftop solar. Many / most of the EVs will have batteries that are overprovisioned for daily driving in order to enable distance driving.
Making Methane is important too. We already have infrastructure for storing vast amounts of natural gas. We can just use it to store Methane made from Water, CO2 and electricity.
