>I keep thinking discussions are stacked against nuclear unfairly.
One of the major reasons for that is that there is a misconception that renewables (solar and wind specifically) can actually replace fossil fuels. In other words, that we have better options than nuclear. We're going to lose a few decades before we realize that that won't work.
>I keep thinking discussions are stacked against nuclear unfairly.
Very fairly. Nuclear will always be many times more expensive than equivalent power hydrocarbon powerplant.
It's not because of any manufacturing intricacies, but largely from just the material cost.
It's not possible to "science it out" how to make ultra reliable pressure vessels with less steel, and metalworking, and large industrial building with less cement.
Nuclear reactors are fairly dumb industrial implements, basically very huge, and expensive water boilers.
The biggest advantage of nuclear is very cheap fuel, and fuel logistics. Nuclear fuel is cheaper than even coal. The price of transporting coal also makes not a small part of its cost.
40-50 years, that advantage was what pushed nuclear power to prominence.
Now, the cost of fuel, and its transport is not considered that significant, and nuclear lost this advantage. Costs of some fuels actually went down as extraction scaled up, and itself became cheaper. Transport costs also went down. Power plants got more efficient.
To regain this advantage, nuclear plants need to produce many times more electricity, and heat for their cost.
This is why I was always telling people that scale is what is the real problem for nuclear now. Four, and up to ten+ gigawatt reactors is what will make difference for nuclear.
Delivering 4GW in a single project would certainly set it apart. Perhaps the sweet spot for nuclear is not the traditional 1GW level.
Although that would create a very large single point of failure that would need peakers/batteries/pumped hydro to backup on failure.
An interesting project would be to stick a 5GW reactor in the middle of the North Sea and run export cables to all the surrounding countries. Build near an old oil well for hydrogen storage and include a thermal hydrogen generator.
Yes, a 4GW reactor is certainly not for any country to build for above reasons (shut down a double digit of your generation every time you refuel.) Even moderately industrialised countries will think twice, but it is indeed very logical for top 10 economies.
The biggest problem will be building a containment building this big.
A dilemma it is. Containment building can't do anything about reactor explosion. Either steam explosion from Chernobil like event, or hydrogen explosion is not survivable by containment building of any reactor in service.
And containment building for a reactor this big will be even less useful.
This means abandoning them, and going for Chernobil like no containment building construction.
>hydrogen explosion is not survivable by containment building of any reactor in service
Or you can simply include specialized hydrogen burners like in the modern VVER reactors, which have complied with the post-Fukushima requirements even before the event has happened. Also a Chernobyl-like event is simply impossible on PWR reactors.
Easily possible. I'll give you a few scenarios I came up within just minutes.
Loss of coolant -> drop in reactivity -> overheat of core -> core melts, and falls into puddle of remaining water at the bottom of the reactor -> instant reactivity boost -> boom
Loss of coolant -> drop in reactivity -> overheat of core -> coolant comes back -> water spayed onto hot fuel -> steam flash -> steam-cladding reaction -> boom
I can reply to you with only one thing: please, learn more about modern reactor designs and their safety systems, don't embarrass yourself. Also learn why the Chernobyl event was so nasty and why its impact is significantly bigger compared to Fukushima (hint: graphite moderation).
It's unproductive to discuss such matters with a total layman who didn't bother to do even a basic research, but ok, I will play along.
Let's start from the simplest thing: a Chernobyl-like event is impossible on PWR because they do not use graphite moderators. Simple, right? I could've finished on this, but let me educated you a bit more. Modern reactors have the following safety systems in place (it's not a full list):
- Hydrogen burners (recombiners) mentioned in my previous comment, which significantly reduce amount of hydrogen inside containment.
- Systems for fast automatic Boron injection.
- Heat sink systems designed to work without electricity.
- Passive cooling systems, which are significantly more reliable than the isolation condenser used on Fukushima-1.
- A way of supplying additional coolant externally.
- Core catchers which lead corium from the containment building.
If you know Russian you can read for example this paper [0] from Gidropress (Rosatom subsidiary) to learn more about how modern nuclear reactors handle severe accidents associated with a total loss of electricity. It's about older VVER-1000 reactors, which are a bit less advanced than the newer VVER-1200 and TOI designs, but it should be a good starting point.
> It's unproductive to discuss such matters with a total layman who didn't bother to do even a basic research, but ok, I will play along.
I will play along too. It will be very surprising to me if you are an actual industry insider.
You have not addressed the loss of coolant.
> Let's start from the simplest thing: a Chernobyl-like event is impossible on PWR because they do not use graphite moderators. Simple, right? I could've finished on this, but let me educated you a bit more. Modern reactors have the following safety systems in place (it's not a full list):
Power excursion is very well possible on PWRs during rapid coolant/pressure loss, especially with very fresh, or very old fuel.
Positive scram is possible on PWRs too under condition when rods/poison rapidly reduce coolant temperatures.
Boron injection will not work if your coolant went supercritical.
Catalytic hydrogen recombiners can help with gradual hydrogen release, but would be of no use if you are hit with sudden release.
Passive heat sinks will not do anything if you reactor already lost big part of its coolant. Etc, etc.
What do you do with this power if solar and wind are cheaper? I.e. in a free market, what if buyers prefer wind and solar energy? Do you dump the energy at a loss, go bankrupt leaving investors and banks to write off the cost?
Why would anyone take that risk?
Is there anyone willing to build such a powerplant at fixed cost? (i.e. after x billion euro you either get the plant or your money back)
Obviously, the situation will change if hit the wall with wind and solar. But there are no reliable predictions if or when we would hit a wall.
That seems unlikely. If, for example, you run at a loss 50% for the time, then you need to have extra expensive rates during the other 50% of the time. Based on typical construction costs of nuclear power plants, those high rates are extremely attractive for competition from wind and solar. Which will reduce the amount of power that can be sold at premium rates, which requires even higher rates to compensate, etc.
Basically, in a free market, nuclear power is competing with power from batteries, hydrogen, and other ways of storing electricity.
This is an extremely unattractive market for nuclear.
No, the solution is building multiple sub 100 MW (NuScale Power and others) and a few sub 500 MW SMRs for major cities (think post VVER 440 designs and Rolls Royce SMRs). Gen VI+ has passive safety requirements that would render a multi GW plant too big and too expensive. Think huge tanks of water, double containment, passive circulation, gravitational safety features and minimal disruption of fisheries and habitats. We need smaller and more modular NPPs with reactor vessels built on an assembly line and QCed, good safety guarantees, minimal staff, minimal operational costs and the ability to regulate the energy output in a wider range.
Building smaller reactors in not as solution to nuclear's cost for many reasons I wrote above.
Economics of small reactors is unsound. A cult like group pushing "small modular reactors" pushes a very likely deliberately miscalculated pricing estimates for them.
>Nuclear will always be many times more expensive than equivalent power hydrocarbon powerplant.
No, you're behind the times. You're thinking of present nuclear plant technology, and in that you're correct.
Newer plant designs solve most of the issues with construction and management cost, nuclear proliferation, and even reduce the waste that must be stored.
Arguing for greater use of the 1960s technology that's presently in power plants is silly, and no one is really advocating that.
Please tell me how can you make reactor vessels cheaper by making 2 smaller vessels instead of 1 bigger one on current reactor scales. Their math is plainly wrong.
The "small modular reactor" community is a bit of a cult.
The SMR community does have a lot of hype, but the general idea seems fairly sound. Instead of building huge reactors on site, as basically big one off projects. Instead, mass produce a bunch of smaller modular reactors at a factory. That doesn't seem much different than a modular home vs a custom home to me, with the modular home being way cheaper. But we will see if it actually works.
But for me the biggest issue is, if fighting climate change is so important, why wouldn't we try everything possible? Why do so many people insist on only renewables?
I think as you do. People are not going to settle for "Well we can keep solar up for up to a few hours when the blizzard comes and reduces radiation levels by 70% with our new battery bank". That's not going to cut it when the blizzard lasts for week. That will never get off the ground.
You have smaller logistics costs for smaller reactor, yes... But you don't have reduction in marginal logistics cost per unit of energy produced.
While reactor vessels themselves are most expensive single piece in the nuclear power station, they are not going to save much on them by making them smaller, and they would not get any cheaper from mass manufacturing.
I don't know, the idea that mass manufacturing wouldn't lower the price of something seems kinda ridiculous, you have any examples of a product where mass manufacturing didn't lower the price?
If you said something like "mass manufacturing wont make them cheap enough to be economical", that seems believable, but I'm not sure how you can blanket declare it wont make them any cheaper.
> idea that mass manufacturing wouldn't lower the price of something seems kinda ridiculous
The "something" to be manufactured isn't nuclear power plants.
If we made a few 5 MW plants at a certain price but then decided to scale that up and produce huge amounts of 5 MW plants then we could obviously produce those plants at a significantly lower per-unit cost. Everyone agrees. But our goal with electricity isn't to make plants, it's to make watt-hours of electricity.
So what is cheaper? Manufacturing, setting up, operating, and securing 1000 5 MW plants or one 5 GW plant? It seems like the 5 GW one might be cheaper.
>The "something" to be manufactured isn't nuclear power plants.
Wrong, actually. Whenever multiple nuclear plants for submarines in a given class are manufactured, the fact that multiples are being built does lower the cost, although most of that is just from having a complete design to use rather than any kind of mass production. Navy reactors aren't really SMRs since they're also old technology, but they're a good example of how much easier/cheaper/greener it is to build small reactors instead of large ones.
> It seems like the 5 GW one might be cheaper.
Small modular reactors typically run up to 300MW in size. There are very few applications for a 5GW reactor. Besides, the costs of the small reactors in terms of time, money, operating expense, security and other things are so much less than for the large plants that the math really doesn't work anyway, even for your extreme example of 1000 5MW reactors.
> So what is cheaper? Manufacturing, setting up, operating, and securing 1000 5 MW plants or one 5 GW plant? It seems like the 5 GW one might be cheaper.
It's not 1000 5MW plants vs 1 5GW plant, each SMR plant would have dozens of smaller cores. Most of the plans I see are in the 300MW - 1100MW range.
> Everyone agrees. But our goal with electricity isn't to make plants, it's to make watt-hours of electricity.
If the goal is to create carbon free electricity then making as many carbon free power plants is exactly how you'd get more watt-hours.
This has been my argument for a long time. Standardize on one of the designs that makes "going critical" is impossible and is "good enough" as power generation and let mass production do its thing. I believe that a lot people who are into "green energy" are also anti-capitalists and think that terms like mass-production are dirty words and tend to ignore history.
I live in Scotland. We've gone from ~15% renewable electricity to >90%, replacing fossil fuels.
When you're claiming that something can't possibly be done, when it has already actually been done, it's hardly a surprise that no-one takes your argument seriously.
Go look up a list of countries that have, say, >70% renewables and explain to me why they are managing something you claim is impossible.
>I live in Scotland. We've gone from ~15% renewable electricity to >90%, replacing fossil fuels.
No you didn't. That number is a ratio between consumption (i.e. how much energy Scotland consumes from ALL sources) and renewable production, but it doesn't actually mean you consume 90% of renewable energy. In other words, if you overproduce in the afternoon but can't use that energy it counts to 90% even though that energy wasn't consumed. It's not nothing because it means you can export it but the real consumption of renewable energy is around 45% wind (solar is inconsequential), with Hydro and Nuclear at around 35%, and the rest composed of fossil fuels and trivial amount of biomass [1].
And let's not understate the geography of Scotland, one of the windiest countries in the world (or at least Europe), that makes wind extra viable. Great! I'm not against wind power. I'm against unrealistic expectations of what wind and (shudder) solar can actually do on a global energy generation scale.
(Also, Scotland is a tiny region with a population akin to a city - it isn't a good model for anything on the global scale)
>Go look up a list of countries that have, say, >70% renewables and explain to me why they are managing something you claim is impossible.
Great idea. Go through the list [3] and you'll see that the >70% renewable in pretty much every case is a result of hydro power (or nuclear if you're talking about low carbon emissions).
Hydro is great if you have the geography for it, but even Hydro is not good enough for many environmentalists. I know in the recent election (in Maine) the green party was against building transmission lines to import hydro power from Quebec [2] ... because why import hydro when you can power your state on good intentions. Crazy environmentalists are a huge hindrance to lowering emissions.
I am curious why you dislike solar more than wind. Solar to me seems much more predictable. At smaller percentages it works well to handle peak AC loads. Larger percentages seem foolish to me.
Yes, we did. Your nitpicking over the "right" way to count electricity generation and consumption doesn't matter: the graph you linked still shows around 12 percent fossil fuel generation for 2019, it's less now, and it's been replaced with renewables. Quibble over the figures if you like, but the trend is clear.
> And let's not understate the geography of Scotland
Yes, all countries have different strengths and weaknesses for renewable. And?
> Also, Scotland is a tiny region with a population akin to a city
Roughly the same population as the average US state. Anyway, what do you care about the "global scale"? The US is not a renewable energy role model to anyone.
> >70% renewable in pretty much every case is a result of hydro power or...
Hydro is renewable, so I don't get your complaint here
> in the recent election (in Maine)...because why import hydro when you can power your state on good intentions.
According to wikipedia, Maine gets 75% electricity from renewables, which is among the highest of any US state, so they seem an odd example to pick.
What's more, with a population of just 1.34 million, Maine is clearly a complete irrelevance on a global scale, right?
>Your nitpicking over the "right" way to count electricity generation and consumption doesn't matter
It matters. And it isn't a 'nitpick'.
You honestly don't think it is worth clarifying what the 90% refers to because I can guarantee you that a lot of people who read your comment automatically assumed that Scotland consumed 90% of its energy requirements from renewable sources - which it did not.. not even close. It's also important for policy. You can setup a 1TW solar array, and it wouldn't be able to power one house at night. And that's the point here because we're trying to move from fossil fuels and the question is: can wind and solar do it? And the answer is no. Nuclear can do it. Hydro and geothermal can do it (but those are geography dependent).
>The US is not a renewable energy role model to anyone.
No. But Ontario is. We're one of the world leaders for carbon emissions from electricity generation and we are because of nuclear and hydro. France is ahead of Scotland too, and that's solely because of nuclear.
>According to wikipedia, Maine gets 75% electricity from renewables, which is among the highest of any US state, so they seem an odd example to pick.
Again, not from solar and wind. It's hydro. Whenever these high numbers are mentioned it's always effin hydro. The policy here was extending hydro transmission and crazy people trying to block it (meaning that capacity would be replaced by natural gas, not wind, not solar because they can't).
>What's more, with a population of just 1.34 million, Maine is clearly a complete irrelevance on a global scale, right?
It is irrelevant. We can't scale hydro to that level globally.
It is a nitpick. The fact is that even counting your way, it's around 10% from fossil fuels. That's been achieved without expanding nuclear capability. It is renewable that has replaced fossil fuels here. Yes, Scotland also exports renewable energy. That's a good thing.
> can wind and solar do it? And the answer is no. Nuclear can do it.
Can wind and solar and hydro and geothermal do it? The answer is Yes. There's no need for more horrifically expensive nuclear.
> We can't scale hydro to that level globally.
No-one's asking you to. If you're all renewable already, good for you. If you're not, get your own house in order before criticizing others. But stop claiming that what's already being done can't be done.
>It is a nitpick. The fact is that even counting your way, it's around 10% from fossil fuels.
Come on now. The 90% value was dishonest and required clarification when presented (which you didn't do) and a cynical perspective could argue you meant it to be misleading.
The original argument I made is that solar and wind can't do it. You argued it can by pointing that Scotland is using 90% renewables. But we established that there is some nuance to this because Scotland wasn't consuming 90% renewable energy, and also it's a red-herring because even though I argued against wind/solar specifically, you talked about renewables which include things like hydro. I never claimed hydro cannot replace fossil fuels. I know it can.
>There's no need for more horrifically expensive nuclear.
I 100% agree!! If your geography allows for hydro and geothermal (even if paired with Wind and Solar) - sure! Go nuts! No nuclear is needed! Iceland will never need Nuclear power, for example. My province of Ontario could probably replace Nuclear with Hydro from Quebec as well.
So hydro and geothermal do work very well. They can also complement wind/solar by providing base-load and satisfy 'peaker' requirements (i.e. scaled down when lots of wind and solar, and scaled up when not).
But notice, the critical bit that makes wind/solar work is AVAILABILITY of hydro and geothermal because hydro/geothermal provides very stable and predictable output and can ramp up or down based on availability of wind/solar. And if your region is blessed with an abundance of either, you may not even need to bother with wind or solar at all.
The problem for wind and solar is that hydro is not a scalable solution because it is geography dependent and relatively few places could scale out hydro infrastructure. So if you don't already have access to hydro or geothermal (which is the case for most places on earth) what the heck are you supposed to do?????? Well ... I'll tell what you do, you invest in natural gas and coal, like Germany is doing and every other region that does not have access to hydro and has a large wind/solar investment.
>If you're not, get your own house in order before criticizing others.
Ontario has some of the lowest emissions in the world. Lower than Scotland. So ... when it comes to energy generation, my house is in order. [1]
No, the 90% value is more honest since exports reduce CO2 emissions just as much as domestic usage, but you prefer to cherry-pick the lowest number you can. I accepted your figures because even with them the point remains that Scotland has replaced its fossil fuel elec with renewable. A point you keep trying to evade.
> what the heck are you supposed to do??????
Where exactly are you talking about now? I keep hearing that there are all these countries or states that have no ability to deploy renewables due to their geography, but I've never seen one actually specified. Where is it?
> you invest in natural gas and coal, like Germany is doing
Germany is investing in renewables and has increased its share from them each year.
>the 90% value is more honest since exports reduce CO2 emissions just as much as domestic usage
Let's torture this a little more. The reason why it's an important distinction because today we do not have a model of sizable country (and let's include Scotland in that group as well) that powers their economy by wind and solar. Scotland is not an example of that. There is no example of such a nation.
>I keep hearing that there are all these countries or states that have no ability to deploy renewables due to their geography
Come on, don't be obtuse. Almost every country that doesn't have hydro today will not have hydro tomorrow. Almost every country that has deployed hydro, will not have more hydro tomorrow. Why? Because, at least in the developed world, we've dammed every river that could be dammed over the last century. So no, you can't just rely on hydro as a solution to wind/solar base load problem - I wish it were so, but it isn't. So pick any country that doesn't have any sizable hydro deployment, and that country is an example you're seeking.
>Germany is investing in renewables and has increased its share from them each year.
They are also spending billions to build natural gas pipelines to Russia. What does that say about their confidence in wind/solar?
Fossil fuels need to be replaced in all their applications, not just electricity.
Even taking the example of Scotland (which is a doing rather well in this regard) electricity is a relatively small portion of energy consumption. Heat and transport are the dominant areas, and both are still mostly fossil-based.
> Heat and transport are the dominant areas, and both are still mostly fossil-based.
Nuclear is not used for any of those either. And to use nuclear for heat and transport the easiest way is to just turn it into electricity and use EVs and heat pumps. So we're back to how to clean up electricity.
Cleaning up the grid isn't just useful for the immediate emissions benefit, it's also because if you concentrate the clean technology there you can decouple the problem and clean up everything else by electrifying. There are things like fertilizers and steel where we have more than just the energy input to clean up and even those have solutions based on electrification.
Sure, but as a side benefit. Maybe someone has actually proposed doing SMRs distributed over the country and heating all houses directly, but as far as I know it's never been done. It's usually preferred to have nuclear plants isolated from residential areas.
>So how is transport a good example of something that would somehow be better solved by nuclear than solar/wind?
Cars will charge from the grid. Nuclear can output not only a lot of energy but output it at a const rate. Wind and solar cannot do that. There are times when wind isn't blowing and sun isn't shining. There are entire seasons when wind and solar output is lower. There are multiple years where wind output is lower. That variability also means you need to over build capacity. But even with that, you're still in trouble because there is no battery technology now, or coming out anytime soon, that can store enough energy (minimum of a few weeks worth) to bridge that intrinsic variability of daily, as well as inter and intra annual variability.
Hell, let's not forget that the current plan is for people to charge their cars at night. That's when my car is plugged in; during the day I'm either parked at a public garage, or, you know, driving it around. Sure, there's probably still wind, somewhere, at night, but you're still charging your cars when your renewable energy sources are at their minimum.
>Hell, let's not forget that the current plan is for people to charge their cars at night.
The obvious solution for that is for people to plug in at home or at their job - chargers cost less than $500 (that includes installation costs), so it's not entirely impossible for workplaces to install one charger per employee and charge a margin on top of electricity prices to recoup prices. This will be desirable for EV owners once daytime electricity is cheaper than nighttime electricity, and therefore profitable for any ___location-owners to install.
If you have a car with ~600KM of range, then considering people drive an average of 60KM/day, you can imagine that most of the time most people basically don't need 90% of their battery and can wait until the next day. And considering people only use their car for an average of (IIRC) 2 hours a day, most of the time peoples' EVs will be idle for the charging somewhere.
For special roadtrips that might change, and perhaps midnight EV charging will spike on boxing day or such, but for the other ~360 days of the year people will largely be charging with solar.
Also, as serious as the issue is, let's remember we're talking about a projected ~5% increase on the electricity demand once the entire population goes electric. Over a decade that's less than 1% increase per year. That's not that hard, especially if we're planning to replace over half of the grid with renewables anyway.
And as mentioned before, statistically most people don't need to charge every day. If the cost of charging goes up because it's overcast, people will put it off in case tomorrow is sunny and cheap.
We're talking about averages here. If solar is 10% cheaper then it doesn't matter if the price doubles once a fortnight.
My point was that the progress towards renewable/low-carbon energy is nowhere near finished yet. Something like an order of magnitude more renewable generation than what we currently have, still needs to be built if we want to truly replace fossil fuels.
It's a counterpoint to the claim that the transformation has already been achieved.
I think the claim was that the technology to enable the transformation has largely been achieved, not that it's been installed. But you're right, there's a great deal more the experience curves we're going to be able to go down, so the costs of renewables and storage should fall even more.
My first hunch would be to answer "importing", but it's not always possible to check.
In the case of Scotland, is [1] giving a realistic view of Scotland (it mixes Scotland / England, so I can't really tell ?)
At the time of reading, the mix (again, for GB) of consummed electricity is about 40% wind+solar, 30% gas, 10% whatever, 10% domestic nuclear, and 10% "electricity imported from France", wich is usually 70% nuclear.
I'm writing this middle of the day, in March, so I assume the wind+solar part is working at a nice capacity (it would be much more unfair to compare it in the middle of the night.)
So on a very first approximation that I'm really ready to dismiss based on more data, it seems that Scotland produces a lot of electricity from renewables (a good thing !), and consumes electricy made from a bunch of sources, some of which are not renewables.
Is that fair ?
Follow-up questions: are there countries that managed to ditch fossil fuels for their electricity production and to not rely on imports / neighboors without renewables ?
The only examples I have in mind are those relying on hydro (Norway, Costa Rica, maybe ?) who were blessed with mountains.
My vague understanding based on "stuff I've heard or read at various points" is that you can stuff up to like 80-85% wind+solar on a grid before you start having real problems with the fluctuations in production.
If my vague recollections are recollecting something that was correct and not BS when I heard it, Scotland might be fine with it's ~17% nuclear, replacing the remaining 30% gas with more wind+solar.
Looking at [1]. I would say hydro-power and nuclear is a big reason. Some also have significant wind, but it is balanced by either gas, hydro or good interconnection with neighbours (who themselves are not always as "green".
They didn't solve storage. They produce a lot of wind power at certain times that they can't use and that's where the 90% comes from. The actual consumption of renewables is on the order of 40%-50%. Not nothing, but not 90% ... not even close.
But it is nuclear that cannot replace fossil fuels, because it can only supply base load. Also what are you doing when rivers are too low, too hot or frozen and you cannot get the water needed for nuclear power?
Imagine if every developed economy invested in nuclear at the same level of France even if you still need to rely on fossil fuel peaker plants - that's a good start no? France, even with fossil-fuel backup has far lower emissions than most other countries (3x lower emissions than the darling of renewable energy, Germany ... which by the way relies on France's nuclear power too)
Here's something to get depressed at: Imagine if every developed economy invested in nuclear at the same level as France but in the 70s. Think of the trillions and trillions of tons of CO2 that would not have been emitted into the atmosphere. It would have bought us decades to get global warming under control.
When history passes judgment, it won't be the climate-denialists that will take the brunt of criticism, but anti-nuke environmentalists who fucked things up (and continue to do so) for our species.
Some of them already have recanted their previous stance. That's a large part of the Pandora's Promise documentary (a Sundance film): former anti-nuclear activists who reversed their stance.
One of the major reasons for that is that there is a misconception that renewables (solar and wind specifically) can actually replace fossil fuels. In other words, that we have better options than nuclear. We're going to lose a few decades before we realize that that won't work.