I keep thinking discussions are stacked against nuclear unfairly. It's almost as if there are two different arenas to compete: (1) fossil fuels, which is by definition unsexy and ugly, but grandfathered simply because "we need them" now, and (2) everything else, who has to compete against each other on the criteria of "Fine, so we do have fossil fuels, what now?"
For example, in 2019, 80% of US energy consumption was from fossil fuels.[1] Natural gas has actually steadily gained market share.[2] In any objective discussion, this should be considered a massive shortcoming and people should be scrambling to find a better solution.
However, because fossil fuels only compete against themselves in public discourse, it's still considered a victory because gas replaced coal. And one of the reason gas became so popular? Because renewables are rapidly improving but they're still less reliable, so people need an energy source they can rapidly fire up when necessary. Enter gas.
And when people point out that we could be using nuclear instead of gas, they are shut down saying "Ewww, so it's better than fossil fuels, big deal, who cares about that now? Everybody knows fossil fuels are bad!" Nuclear, just by being non-fossil-fuel, is forced to compete in the "cool arena" against renewables, and loses out because it's old, expensive, and has had a series of memorable accidents. All the while these renewable plants are enjoying complementary relationship with gas plants, which is OK, because gas is just gas.
Nuclear power plants are best run at full capacity all the time. If you want to replace gas peaker plants with nuclear then you need to build up enough nuclear capacity to replace all other intermittent electricity producers. If you have that capacity then you could as well run them at full power all the time and you'd need nothing else. Nuclear displaces every other power source. Currently Nuclear is factored into the base load because that's the easiest one to produce and we don't have enough nuclear power anyways. Gas on the other hand is the cheapest one to provide power on demand. Therefore if you have limited production capacity the demand for gas plants that are mostly on standby will only go up.
Nuclear power plants are most profitable when run at full capacity. They have massive sunk costs, but the marginal cost is low. At a grid level you certainly can change output based on demand. But the markets may need to be adjusted to keep them profitable through mechanisms like a capacity market. Or by finding new uses for the power such as making hydrogen.
With peaker plants fuel costs are a factor, but also the cost of the machine. An old fashioned reciprocating engine maybe the cheapest as a last resort that is only used when other peakers are already utilized. Fuel efficiency becomes more important as the plant is more utilized.
> If you want to replace gas peaker plants with nuclear then you need to build up enough nuclear capacity to replace all other intermittent electricity producers.
Why even build all those intermittent electricity producers in the first place then? It sounds like problem searching for a solution.
Ignoring the economics for a second, the persepctive in play when someone says "replace gas with nuclear" should be:
1) If solar is deployed, gas/batteries/something has to be deployed as well to deal with nighttime.
2) So the 'replacement' of nuclear is steady power that replaces some solar panels, some gas for a net improvement, technically speaking.
Of course, the main argument against that is whether the economics plays out. I find it humorous that I'm taking the side of technical excellence and the pro-solar people are saying "who cares, lets just follow the economics". There was a decade where those positions were mostly reversed when it was coal v solar.
This run on the assumption that demand is static. Renewables are great at providing cheap energy to consumers that can match their usage when the price is low.
One such use case happen to also be one of the biggest energy consumer, communal heating. If those invested into bigger capacity they could heat the water when prices is low and operate much like a battery for the system at large. The demand for base load would then be reduced and nuclear would have a easier job without displacing the use of cheaper renewables.
Idea: excessive nuclear but we have big datacenters that ramp up power usage during periods of otherwise low usage, and ramp down during peak hours. Ideally shared compute nodes for job batches that can wait up to a day. Plus EV charging can help reduce variance.
Gas plants are also best run all the time in advanced combined cycle plants. Nuclear often in the US already has backing of very large pumped hydro storage facilities. So no, you don’t need enough nuclear to replace all peakers.
> Natural gas has actually steadily gained market share.
Strangely even some environmental groups seem to be pro-gas or at least ambivalent, like how Sierra Club's "whoops, we got caught" response to taking millions of dollars from the oil companies waxes poetic about the need to "look beyond coal, oil, and gas, and focus on clean, efficient energy sources such as wind, solar, and geothermal" but doesn't mention the word "nuclear" anywhere at all: https://sierraclub.typepad.com/michaelbrune/2012/02/the-sier...
I'd expect them to proudly mention nuclear in the past tense considering Sierra Club successfully killed the nuclear generating station that would have supplied me here in the Bay Area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodega_Bay_Nuclear_Power_Plant
To be fair, I don't think the Sierra Club are the only ones who think building a nuclear power plant two miles from the San Andreas Fault isn't a particularly good idea...
>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.
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.
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?
That's great but there's 84% to go after you have 100% renewable electricity production. At 50% green electricity, that means 92% of energy consumption was generated from fossil fuels on demand.
We (I live in Germany) have more than 92% of the road ahead of us, since we will need to expend more and more effort to find suitable places for all this energy production and storage.
There is no storage to speak of at the moment, which makes sense because Germany isn't even getting close to having a significant portion of its energy generated without emitting carbon.
If we could take a shortcut and generate some 10% with a small amount of land use and variability, that would be a huge win. Cost and the time needed to build are downsides, but from my perspective unavoidable. This will not happen in the next ~2-3 generations (say, a century) because of the ridiculous amount of misinformation about safety being spread in Germany, but other countries don't have that issue so there's still hope to cut corners elsewhere. At best, this is a stop-gap solution, I really don't care if people want to phase out nuclear fission. But then let's do that after we approach 90% renewable energy, not when we approach 90% fossil fuels as Germany currently is doing. We have bigger problems and can't afford to be so picky.
Don't forget that Germany is part of the same grid or have HVDC links with other European countries such as France (70% nuclear power), Norway (near 100% hydro, not only generation but also storage), and Poland (72% coal), so you you should not take Germany in isolation in such discussions.
Really burying the lede by not mentioning the 15 percent lignite production. That produces about 3 to 4 times the undesirable pollution than natural gas.
There are victims of coal / natural gas pollution and climate change as well, it's just not that spectacular.
Nuclear kills when there's unlikely accident, fossil fuels kill when everything goes according to the plan.
Modern gas turbines can be converted to hydrogen or hydrogen/gas blends. The idea is to use gas now then convert to hydrogen when commercial, renewable hydrogen is available. One idea is to use renewables to do hydrolysis and effectively use hydrogen as a battery.
The US energy segment has decreased CO2 emissions in the last decade and switching from coal to gas is a big part of the reason.
Hydrogen isn't an energy source it's an energy storage mechanism. You create hydrogen from other sources. Most commercially available hydrogen comes from natural gas already. So you're wasting a ton of energy by converting the natural gas to hydrogen and then burning it again. Hydrogen is just another form of battery.
Pet peeve: hydrolysis a chemical reaction where water is used to break apart two other things (like, say, amino acids). The use of electricity to break water into hydrogen and oxygen is electrolysis.
It got cheap and transportable. Gas is hard to transport until liquified, and having that process makes all the difference. Also, fracking - the reason the US has achieved energy independence, and that gas is so cheap.
These discussion are always unfair against every power source. Each has different properties that make naïve comparison difficult. In the real world power stations have to exist within an economic, political, and technical ecosystem. If a particular approach is delivering value then the argument is rather mute.
Nuclear power is just unpopular because politicians can’t make money out of it. Due to its inherent risk, nuclear power plants require close government inspection which makes it a bit harder to cheat.
Nuclear only survives when politicians go out of their way to push it.
Nuclear is unpopular because it competes for the same pool of money as gas, oil, solar, wind, etc do and there is no, or a very narrow band, of investors whose priorities align with the benefits nuclear provides.
They need to prioritize environmental friendliness enough to eliminate the fossil fuel options. Then they need to be willing to put in massive sums of money in one shot, without seeing any returns for many years, to even beginning to choose nuclear, and then they need to find a reason why they would pick nuclear over solar/wind in a world which is over 80% fossil fuel so baseload electricity is not even close to being a concern. And if their particular region has baseload energy concerns, they need to choose the long term option of nuclear over the quicker solar/wind + battery option which even if it is slightly more expensive isnt by much.
The only places where nuclear has gone forward are areas where politicians have pushed for it despite it being more expensive than other renewable alternatives. Examples are in the UK, and even there the plants are delayed, and are gonna be more expensive than originally planned even when the original price was already more than competing renewables.
>I keep thinking discussions are stacked against nuclear unfairly. It's almost as if there are two different arenas to compete: (1) fossil fuels, which is by definition unsexy and ugly, but grandfathered simply because "we need them" now, and (2) everything else, who has to compete against each other on the criteria of "Fine, so we do have fossil fuels, what now?"
Not just that, every other power source is rated on only the damage it does when producing power. By comparison nuclear is held to the standard that everything from mining to decommission needs to be taken into account.
By that metric solar kills more people per kwh by the simple fact that installing it means walking on high unsecured places that you fall down from. This is treated as a joke. Somehow we imagine that solar panels of the end of their 10 year life span just fall apart into pixie dust and ignore how environmentally damaging they really are.
The average coal plant releases more nuclear waste in a near than the all but the three worst nuclear accidents.
In France, where nuclear is 80% of the electricity (we really played big the game of "oh but we care about nuclear tech for civilian use only" while irradiating Tahiti for military testings).
I like nuclear myself: it's a military technology so the more we know as a country the more we'll be able to sell around as consultants, it's much cleaner for the atmosphere when it works (but yeah failures are horrifying), there is hope the waste materials will one day be reused, and it can be switched on or off more easily than solar (at night) or wind (at rest).
But I heard it's very very VERY expensive and barely profitable on output gain alone (but VERY profitable as a military lab I suppose to have all those nuclear tech people),
it's hard to argue with someone whose children are born disfigured today because of waste leaks that at least in 200 years we won't all be dead due to fossil fuel abuse, and it's hard to convince a younger, less objective part of the population who jump at "not renewable = not good".
If with 1Kg of antimatter we could generate 200 years of Paris light, maybe we don't care if it's renewable. In fact, renewable just means "very very very long lasting" since the sun is dying and the earth is slowing down anyway :D
I get all the pro-nuclear arguments here and really wish that I could agree. However, what most commenters are missing is the real reason, nuclear came out of fashion: economics. Without enormous direct and indirect subsidies, nuclear (fission) isnt commercially viable anywhere in the world (even China, where security or biases in the population arguably play a minor role, is not building nuclear at scale!) . Heck, you still can't insure a fission plant; a state guarantee is implicit.
As I wrote in a smililar thread some time ago:
Yes, in theory fission would have been the best option for carbon-free energy. No, in practice humanity never figured out how to safely and efficiently use this power source and now renewables are a way safer and cheaper bet. You won't find any objective economic analysis (that incorporates such indirect subsidies as the implicit state guarantee and realistic building and waste handling/storing costs) that can show otherwise. Renewables are already significantly cheaper, even if you incorporate necessary storage costs or DCS grids. Nuclear is only barely competitive when dismissing everything except the direct construction and operation costs which is very misleading.
We have a steady state of about 8.3 GW of nuclear power generation as our base supply of power, representing most power generation in the province. Electricity prices are pretty good- but they used to be better even before it was all privatized. The CANDU reactor design is safe and practical.
We can't rely on solar this far north- the days get too short in the winter. We have wind, but it's too unstable to be a sole source. You can see in the graphs what happens when the wind dies down- we fire up the gas plants to make up the difference.
We have hydroelectric dams, and they're wonderful for variable supply- like a self-refilling battery- but we only have so much capacity there without damming the whole province.
In conclusion: we have figured out a way to safely and efficiently use nuclear. Renewables are cheap, but not steady enough to be usable here. The alternatives are fossil fuels. Nuclear works.
First the price customers see ignores subsides. That’s essentially what subsides do.
Also, Ontario’s production is weighted towards nuclear, but it’s second by second usage is significantly less so. They export a lot of nuclear power and import non nuclear power. That arrangement only works because nuclear is less common in other areas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss...
Also, hydro complements Nuclear extremely well as it can shift production across time, thus maximizing each nuclear power plant’s capacity factor. However, wind fills the same niche more cheaply even with significant excess capacity. This shows up as a grid where the wholesale price frequently sits around zero, which makes nuclear even less economically viable.
I personally expect nuclear to stick around for various reasons like bulk radioactive isotope production, but ramping up to become a significantly larger chunk of global electricity production would take dramatically lower unsubsidized prices.
Can you explain how the total cost of ownership is economic, when you include the cost of managing nuclear wastes for thousands of years? There is such a woeful global record of adequate safety measures not being included in any total cost budgeting for nuclear power. Real safety seems to always be an off-budget item. Not to mention the weapons proliferation risk. No thanks.
1. Renewables receive huge subsidies as well, especially in Europe. It is rarely being taken into account, but that's essentially what allowed it to become that cheap. The Nuclear would also be much cheaper if we were investing more in it.
2. There are countries that cannot rely on renewables because there's not enough wind or sun.
3. Renewables don't really work at the moment without stable source that can quickly kick in when there's no sun or no wind. The Nuclear energy is stable and clean. That combination of features is hugely underappreciated in favour of natural gas mostly for political reasons (at least in Europe). Natural Gas is not clean and won't prevent the global warming. Also Natural Gas and Coal have environmental impact and kill people all the time, not only when there's highly unlikely accident.
4. The small modular reactors (SMRs) may be the solution for a huge capital cost required for building a classic Nuclear Powerplant.
I think the biggest 'externality' subsidy of renewables is exactly your point 3.
It's all well and good saying you can produce solar + wind en masse for 3c/kWh (even without govt incentives), but if you need to have a gas plant running extremely inefficiently to pick up the shortfall, I'm not sure you can say it is 3c/kWh.
I'm very pro renewables but think it is increasingly getting missed. You often see charts that solar/wind is significantly cheaper than nuclear, but never taking into account this.
> 1. Renewables receive huge subsidies as well, especially in Europe. It is rarely being taken into account, but that's essentially what allowed it to become that cheap. The Nuclear would also be much cheaper if we were investing more in it.
Assuming that the investment in nuclear power from inception was equally matched in renewables for the same period of time, would anyone bother attempting to make this argument? The affordability of electricity from solar power alone would have likely have overtaken nuclear power long before the end of WWII. Nuclear (fission) power is mind-bogglingly expensive. The costs can not be handwaved away by suggesting it could be less expensive with even more investment into a method of power generation that is orders of magnitude more expensive than the most expensive renewables. Comparatively, we have barely scratched the surface of investing in renewables. If no one ever believed nuclear bombs were necessary, and instead of fission all that effort and cost had been put into developing fusion energy instead, we would have been building clean fusion plants for under $2B a piece by the end of the last millennium. Forget everything you think is wonderful about fission, forget all of it, and focus only on the economics. Then forget about it entirely and focus efforts instead on something, anything else, that is viable.
The interesting thing is that nuclear power is at 90, and Windmills at 150, but only if accidents in undeveloped nations be included, if they not be, and only developed nations are included, then the death toll is 0.1 from nuclear.
The overwhelming majority of accidents with nuclear energy happen in undeveloped nations.
> Nuclear has the fewest deaths per TW generated of any power source.
Yes, but its doesn't have the fewest We-have-hours-to-abandon-this-entire-city-because-no-one-can-live-here-for-the-next-100-years per TW generated of any power source.
Risks don't have to be counted in deaths. The risks of nuclear are very low, but risk is not just about the chance of an accident, its about the acceptability of a potential failure.
Like most discussions of nuclear power here, this will rapidly devolve into proponents of nuclear arguing it's necessary for our near term future while opponents argue that everything that made nuclear weapons bad and 1960s reactors expensive is still the reason that we can't use nuclear going forward.
The truth is that both sides need to update their knowledge of the state of the art in nuclear power generation, learn how the power grid works in depth and learn the patterns of power consumption both by residential locations and industrial ones.
Once you have all the knowledge about what's needed to avoid a significant decrease in our standard of living, you'll understand that a power generation technology with certain characteristics (foremost it has to be carbon neutral) is required... not optional, in other words, and simply adding more renewables is not enough to solve the problem.
The only practical solution (barring spending trillions of $$ and time to completely rebuild the US power grid and invent power storage technologies that don't exist as well as the industrial processes to produce them and infrastructure to handle their whole life cycle) is modern nuclear technology.
I would add that beyond that, electricity is usually a rather small (~25%) fraction of final energy consumption in developed economies, so really there's a lot more to worry about if we're thinking about climate, and that might well imply "lifestyle changes" as David MacKay called them.
A serious response to climate change would be large government support of both nuclear power and renewables.
Are we going to tell our children that the main reason we did nothing to fight climate change was because fossil fuels were more competitive economically?
First replace every coal and gas power plant, then we can argue about nuclear vs renewables.
Aren’t the subsidies that nuclear needs essentially a poor form of carbon taxation? Without a real price on carbon (in the US, for instance), nuclear and renewables need subsidies in order to compete with fossil fuel generation. Fossil fuels receive an implicit subsidy, which is the externalities of climate change and air pollution that we must all pay for.
If a proper price on carbon existed, would nuclear and renewables not automatically look a whole lot cheaper without subsidies?
> Are we going to tell our children that the main reason we did nothing to fight climate change was because fossil fuels were more competitive economically?
But nuclear power has been around just as long as ICs, so this is an odd comment. Obviously it isn't going to follow the same path as ICs because it already hasn't...
Over the last 50 years nuclear has gotten more expensive not less. Also we dont have another 50 years. We dont even have the 10 years it takes to build a nuclear powerplant.
The biggest recipient for subsidies in the energy sector is fossil fuels, for which many would not be commercial viable unless they were directly given funds to stay operating. Here in Sweden we have oil fueled power plants which is paid just to exist, and then they get paid a second time for any energy they do produce.
Why do they get this money but not renewables? The name of the subsidy program makes that very clear. Reserve energy. The oil fueled power plant get paid to simply exist in the case where demand exceeds production of renewables. Before they shut down the latest nuclear reactor this was mostly to address cold windless winter nights, but now its operating basically all year as dips in renewable energy regularly cause situations where that reserve energy is required for a stable energy grid.
I get how people do not like subsidies for nuclear, but I really dislike subsidies for fossil fuels and I hate how oil is being burned just because it now is called "reserve energy".
One would think that if storage costs were the cheaper choice then we would be phasing out fossil fuel from the "reserve energy" strategy. There is no such plans. In contrast, the current plan and government investments goes to increase the reserve energy capacity from fossil fuel in every way possible. To my knowledge there does not exist a single commercial operated storage system that get charged with wind and later sold, here or globally. There does exist solar and battery, commonly with about 75% capacity for 4hrs, and a charge cycle of a single day. The economics for wind require massively higher capacity (weeks rather than hours), and the charge cycle which will repay the investment is significant slower (several weeks rather than a single day).
Another aspect of the economics is that renewables are cheaper yes, but their capacity can also be built out incrementally year by year whereas with nuclear the construction risk is very high often taking decades before the plant is commissioned. With renewable's costs dropping consistently year by year who wants to take a chance on nuclear being competitive fifteen years from now when it's finally built? Nuclear's economic window of opportunity has almost entirely shut at this point. Though niche applications for small reactors in remote locations may be viable.
Everyone's also forgotten nuclear proliferation. I assume that everyone advocating new nuclear in America is also happy for Iran to build a line of new nuclear plants?
I'm fine with it. There is some concern about them building plants that can create bomb grade material as a byproduct, but we can verify they don't build that into their plants.
Absolutely. Building nuclear power plants is quite different from pursuing nuclear weapons.
30 some nations use nuclear power, or are building nuclear plants. Only nine countries have nuclear weapons.
Pursuing nuclear weapons is obviously a choice, it's not automatic with nuclear power. It requires an immense, concerted effort to build nuclear weapons.
The US has begrudgingly learned to live with North Korea and Pakistan having nuclear weapons, it'll learn to live with Iran having nuclear weapons as well (and shortly after that, Saudi Arabia). Will Israel accept that outcome? I guess we'll find out, there is no scenario where Iran doesn't acquire nuclear weapons at this point. It's guaranteed.
"I assume that everyone advocating new nuclear in America is also happy for Iran to build a line of new nuclear plants?"
Yip.
a) because 3.67% enriched Uranium fuel is not a weapon and will never be
b) civilian nuclear energy is part of the multi-national JPCOA deal that they kept their side of
c) its really not your call to tell other sovereign people what energy to use
d) you should be happy they are using less coal.
Looking at the costs of e.g. Hinkley Point c, this feels right.
I do wonder, though, what the costs would look like if a big country like the US built, say, 400 Hinkley Point Cs. What economies of scale would you see? You could probably get a sense by looking at the marginal build costs were associated with some of the last French plants during the 1970s-early 1990s construction boom, when they built over 50 plans.
Even hydro power can have cost overruns. See the Site C project in British Columbia for example. Massively over budget, yet the province absolutely needs this source of carbon free electricity to support its energy needs in the coming decades.
You can get a rough measurement of the scale effect by comparing Hinkley Point C and Olkiluoto with cost of new VVER plants and time which it takes to build them.
But you're acting like nothing advances? Fission is still the best chance we have. We are decades away from battery technology that could provide stable power for several days in the case of grid level from non-nuclear green friendly power sources. That's not an issue with nuclear fission reactors.
As far as I know, this is not true. On a small scale wind has been profitable for a long time. In The Netherlands, small scale commercial wind turbines go back a long time. As far as I know there were no subsidies back then.
Not true. Technology is making breakthroughs because that is what technology does. Solar and wind may not have moved along quite as fast but they would have moved along. We need nuclear for stability (as we don't have energy storage facilities that can handle extreme weather events for days or weeks) and we need solar and wind because who can afford to give up "free" energy that is there for the taking. Solar is the end goal (or fusion) of course but energy storage density at grid scale is decades off. There are several viable nuclear designs available now that can't go critical and are practical with just a little more work and government support.
Not a technical problem, it's just that long term projects with large upfront investments end up costing a lot within the socio-economic system we have. These are societal choices. Do we collectively want low-carbon electricity, with proper regulation and independent safety authorities, or do we want neoliberalism, small government and free markets...
https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Hinkley-Po...
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.)
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well yeah, in a democracy popular opinion will force you to do things if you want to win the next election. If you want proof that Merkel's instinct wasn't entirely wrong, you can take a look at the results of the 2013 election: her party (CDU/CSU) gained 7,7 points to 41,5 percent, while the FDP, who were seen as representing the industrial lobby, dropped a whopping 9,8 points to 4,8 percent (and out of the Bundestag, because a party has to get at least 5% to be represented there).
I hate this new HN culture of downvoting completely accurate statements when they don‘t align with the hivemind‘s ideas.
Ok, maybe not the most insightful comment, but completely true. Schröder pushed denuclearization and advocated for the switch to natural gas (which is so convenient for Russia that he‘s now very close to Putin and held top positions in Russian energy companies)
The truth is, the discussion on nuclear can't be done only on the technical aspects of it, but needs to face and clear its political aspects too.
Nuclear as it is today brings centralization (compared to solar/wind) and many don't like that. For example, nobody wants to live close to a nuclear waste deposit, but governments will just force the decision to build one to local populations.
There's also the feeling that it will concentrate the power in the hands of a smaller and smaller technical elite.
Another matter is that people don't trust neoliberal governments with a tendency to austerity to correctly handle maintenance of nuclear power plants in the long term. After all, with nuclear you just need to fuck up badly once to cause unrepairable damage.
If we want nuclear to be adopted, we have to dispell the (justified) fear people have of it. Discussing about it like techno elitists won't certainly help.
> nobody wants to live close to a nuclear waste deposit
I'll repeat what I've said for wind turbines: do my back yard first then. If nobody else wants it, it gotta go somewhere.
But I think you're confusing reactors with waste. We want reactors as close to population centres as possible to avoid losses (some distance is fine, but concentrating power generation for Europe in the Sahara would be wasteful, for example), but radioactive waste can be transported just fine. There's very little of it, shipping it to the Sahara isn't a big deal in energy usage terms. Politics is an issue, but there's more uninhabited places we can put it.
> There's very little of it, shipping it to the Sahara isn't a big deal in energy usage terms
I wish it was that easy, but that's not a chance in the current political climate.
In Italy we're still debating about where to send the waste generated in the '80s. We turned off our last plant in the '87.
Every single town involved as a destination for waste storage is in revolt against the decision. Literally nobody wants that waste even dozens of kilometers away from their town.
And I totally understand, I don't trust any government (even worse, private contractor), in this economical system and political climate, to correctly maintain such waste storage for the next 300 years.
We can barely make consistent plans for the duration of a government.
In northern Europe its even more insane. Germany is closing 6 nuclear power plants earlier because of what happend after Fukushima. And they will switch to Lignite / brown coal. The energy companies took the state to court because of potential money loss, and they won 2.4 billion euro in damages. Meanwhile in the Netherlands more and more politicians want nuclear energy in the national energy mix because biomass, wind and solar is not growing fast enough to meet the Paris agreement.
This coal spiel is getting so old. This shift to coal in the German energy mix hasn't materialized. This is counter to what many predicted (or hoped?) would happen as the nuclear share weaned.
The facts:
In the time frame 2010 to 2020, the share of nuclear energy in the German energy mix has halved, from 22% to 11%.
At the same time, the share of lignite in the energy mix has dwindled from 23% to 16%. The share of hard coal has gone from 19% to 7%.
Germany reduced its nuclear power output while at the same time reducing its coal power output by even more than its nuclear output.
Gas is up by 2 percentage points, but renewables have more than doubled their market share in 10 years time, and now make up 45% of the power mix (was 17% in 2010).
So no, Germany simply is not switching to coal (or even gas for that matter), and renewable energy production is ramping up rapidly.
To be fair: Wind energy and solar has gained a lot of traction in Germany and is producing more and more energy every year.
Sadly "the big four" (energy companies) are influencing politics and are actively halting progress on renewables which leads to really strange effects.
My landlord installed a rather big solar system on the roof and due to its size, the energy company can decide to remotely shut it off when there's enough energy in the grid.
It's really a shame and a lot of corruption is going on there.
Also: Little to no research on energy storage was done in the last 25 years, because of all this corruption.
There can't be too much or too less electricity in the grid. So it's normal that the power operators can shut off larger producers, as they can also shut off large consumers.
They have to shutdown production if the demand is not high. Once in a while they pay other countries to get their leftover electricity while they shutdown production.
As one data point, one of the UK's in-development nuclear power stations, Hinkley Point C, was announced in 2010, plans approved by the owner + government in 2016, and expected to be operational by 2025 (no idea if that's an accurate expectation or not). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
So a bit less than 20 years, even including the 6 years between announcing a site and actually confirming plans to go ahead with it.
This isn't true. The one new coal plant, bad as it is, was planned and allowed before Fukushima happened. These things change slower than the news cycle.
And Germany still is a net energy exporter, BTW, even without the nuclear plants.
Yeah, I remember that discussion after Fukushima. We had an agreement and a plan to get out of nuclear power. Back than, climate change was less of issue (at least as far as policy was concerned). Then we got a conservative government, and one of the first things they did was to cancel the nuclear power exit. Only to reverse that basically immediatly after Fukushima due to public pressure. This time so, without any long term plan.
As a result, Germany is now pushing coal instead of nuclear while limiting wind and solar due to legal restrictions.
Fuushima happened. Chernobyl happened. It is not disaster propaganda. Japan was hit with a disaster. Same with USSR.
Nuclear advocates have a tin ear as far as the fact that nuclear failures don't have a theoretical cap on disaster magnitude.
It's a simple enough fact. No theoretical limit to the extent of the damage, beyond "end of life on Earth". Even the dreaded fossil fuel business does its mass extinction events at a more manageable tempo.
Arugably, there should be conventions against use of any technology that has potential for irreversible harm to the environment.
In my opinion, there are two solutions to USA's energy problem (in relation to climate change). Either...
(1) USA bets on nuclear. The real production energy demands can be supplied by nuclear reactors.
(2) USA decides to bet on wind and solar. USA then re/opens it's own local rare earth material mines. USA also manufactures all energy collectors locally. All of this is to avoid having to pay the carbon cost of having the raw materials mined in China, and energy collectors shipped over from China to USA.
The uninformed opinion doesn't take into consideration raw material extraction, fabrication, and shipping.
Renewables don't need rare earths. PV doesn't use them, and wind doesn't require them (there are generators for them that don't use permanent magnets.)
Readit News
For example, in 2019, 80% of US energy consumption was from fossil fuels.[1] Natural gas has actually steadily gained market share.[2] In any objective discussion, this should be considered a massive shortcoming and people should be scrambling to find a better solution.
However, because fossil fuels only compete against themselves in public discourse, it's still considered a victory because gas replaced coal. And one of the reason gas became so popular? Because renewables are rapidly improving but they're still less reliable, so people need an energy source they can rapidly fire up when necessary. Enter gas.
And when people point out that we could be using nuclear instead of gas, they are shut down saying "Ewww, so it's better than fossil fuels, big deal, who cares about that now? Everybody knows fossil fuels are bad!" Nuclear, just by being non-fossil-fuel, is forced to compete in the "cool arena" against renewables, and loses out because it's old, expensive, and has had a series of memorable accidents. All the while these renewable plants are enjoying complementary relationship with gas plants, which is OK, because gas is just gas.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#/m...
Nuclear power plants are best run at full capacity all the time. If you want to replace gas peaker plants with nuclear then you need to build up enough nuclear capacity to replace all other intermittent electricity producers. If you have that capacity then you could as well run them at full power all the time and you'd need nothing else. Nuclear displaces every other power source. Currently Nuclear is factored into the base load because that's the easiest one to produce and we don't have enough nuclear power anyways. Gas on the other hand is the cheapest one to provide power on demand. Therefore if you have limited production capacity the demand for gas plants that are mostly on standby will only go up.
With peaker plants fuel costs are a factor, but also the cost of the machine. An old fashioned reciprocating engine maybe the cheapest as a last resort that is only used when other peakers are already utilized. Fuel efficiency becomes more important as the plant is more utilized.
Why even build all those intermittent electricity producers in the first place then? It sounds like problem searching for a solution.
1) If solar is deployed, gas/batteries/something has to be deployed as well to deal with nighttime.
2) So the 'replacement' of nuclear is steady power that replaces some solar panels, some gas for a net improvement, technically speaking.
Of course, the main argument against that is whether the economics plays out. I find it humorous that I'm taking the side of technical excellence and the pro-solar people are saying "who cares, lets just follow the economics". There was a decade where those positions were mostly reversed when it was coal v solar.
One such use case happen to also be one of the biggest energy consumer, communal heating. If those invested into bigger capacity they could heat the water when prices is low and operate much like a battery for the system at large. The demand for base load would then be reduced and nuclear would have a easier job without displacing the use of cheaper renewables.
Strangely even some environmental groups seem to be pro-gas or at least ambivalent, like how Sierra Club's "whoops, we got caught" response to taking millions of dollars from the oil companies waxes poetic about the need to "look beyond coal, oil, and gas, and focus on clean, efficient energy sources such as wind, solar, and geothermal" but doesn't mention the word "nuclear" anywhere at all: https://sierraclub.typepad.com/michaelbrune/2012/02/the-sier...
I'd expect them to proudly mention nuclear in the past tense considering Sierra Club successfully killed the nuclear generating station that would have supplied me here in the Bay Area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodega_Bay_Nuclear_Power_Plant
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.
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.
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.
Renewables have nothing to do with the high use of gas in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germanyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...
We (I live in Germany) have more than 92% of the road ahead of us, since we will need to expend more and more effort to find suitable places for all this energy production and storage.
There is no storage to speak of at the moment, which makes sense because Germany isn't even getting close to having a significant portion of its energy generated without emitting carbon.
If we could take a shortcut and generate some 10% with a small amount of land use and variability, that would be a huge win. Cost and the time needed to build are downsides, but from my perspective unavoidable. This will not happen in the next ~2-3 generations (say, a century) because of the ridiculous amount of misinformation about safety being spread in Germany, but other countries don't have that issue so there's still hope to cut corners elsewhere. At best, this is a stop-gap solution, I really don't care if people want to phase out nuclear fission. But then let's do that after we approach 90% renewable energy, not when we approach 90% fossil fuels as Germany currently is doing. We have bigger problems and can't afford to be so picky.
well to me, oil spills are just a as memorable and way more frequent...
The US energy segment has decreased CO2 emissions in the last decade and switching from coal to gas is a big part of the reason.
The switch to natural gas reduced CO2 output but made global warming worse at the same time. It's quite an achievement.
It got cheap and transportable. Gas is hard to transport until liquified, and having that process makes all the difference. Also, fracking - the reason the US has achieved energy independence, and that gas is so cheap.
Nuclear is unpopular because it competes for the same pool of money as gas, oil, solar, wind, etc do and there is no, or a very narrow band, of investors whose priorities align with the benefits nuclear provides.
They need to prioritize environmental friendliness enough to eliminate the fossil fuel options. Then they need to be willing to put in massive sums of money in one shot, without seeing any returns for many years, to even beginning to choose nuclear, and then they need to find a reason why they would pick nuclear over solar/wind in a world which is over 80% fossil fuel so baseload electricity is not even close to being a concern. And if their particular region has baseload energy concerns, they need to choose the long term option of nuclear over the quicker solar/wind + battery option which even if it is slightly more expensive isnt by much.
The only places where nuclear has gone forward are areas where politicians have pushed for it despite it being more expensive than other renewable alternatives. Examples are in the UK, and even there the plants are delayed, and are gonna be more expensive than originally planned even when the original price was already more than competing renewables.
Not just that, every other power source is rated on only the damage it does when producing power. By comparison nuclear is held to the standard that everything from mining to decommission needs to be taken into account.
By that metric solar kills more people per kwh by the simple fact that installing it means walking on high unsecured places that you fall down from. This is treated as a joke. Somehow we imagine that solar panels of the end of their 10 year life span just fall apart into pixie dust and ignore how environmentally damaging they really are.
The average coal plant releases more nuclear waste in a near than the all but the three worst nuclear accidents.
The list goes on an on.
Utility scale solar, which is dominating because it's much cheaper, installs modules at ground level.
I like nuclear myself: it's a military technology so the more we know as a country the more we'll be able to sell around as consultants, it's much cleaner for the atmosphere when it works (but yeah failures are horrifying), there is hope the waste materials will one day be reused, and it can be switched on or off more easily than solar (at night) or wind (at rest).
But I heard it's very very VERY expensive and barely profitable on output gain alone (but VERY profitable as a military lab I suppose to have all those nuclear tech people), it's hard to argue with someone whose children are born disfigured today because of waste leaks that at least in 200 years we won't all be dead due to fossil fuel abuse, and it's hard to convince a younger, less objective part of the population who jump at "not renewable = not good".
If with 1Kg of antimatter we could generate 200 years of Paris light, maybe we don't care if it's renewable. In fact, renewable just means "very very very long lasting" since the sun is dying and the earth is slowing down anyway :D
Is that actually happening?
As I wrote in a smililar thread some time ago: Yes, in theory fission would have been the best option for carbon-free energy. No, in practice humanity never figured out how to safely and efficiently use this power source and now renewables are a way safer and cheaper bet. You won't find any objective economic analysis (that incorporates such indirect subsidies as the implicit state guarantee and realistic building and waste handling/storing costs) that can show otherwise. Renewables are already significantly cheaper, even if you incorporate necessary storage costs or DCS grids. Nuclear is only barely competitive when dismissing everything except the direct construction and operation costs which is very misleading.
Take a look at Ontario's power generation data right now: https://ieso.ca/en/Power-Data
We have a steady state of about 8.3 GW of nuclear power generation as our base supply of power, representing most power generation in the province. Electricity prices are pretty good- but they used to be better even before it was all privatized. The CANDU reactor design is safe and practical.
We can't rely on solar this far north- the days get too short in the winter. We have wind, but it's too unstable to be a sole source. You can see in the graphs what happens when the wind dies down- we fire up the gas plants to make up the difference.
We have hydroelectric dams, and they're wonderful for variable supply- like a self-refilling battery- but we only have so much capacity there without damming the whole province.
In conclusion: we have figured out a way to safely and efficiently use nuclear. Renewables are cheap, but not steady enough to be usable here. The alternatives are fossil fuels. Nuclear works.
Also, Ontario’s production is weighted towards nuclear, but it’s second by second usage is significantly less so. They export a lot of nuclear power and import non nuclear power. That arrangement only works because nuclear is less common in other areas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss...
Also, hydro complements Nuclear extremely well as it can shift production across time, thus maximizing each nuclear power plant’s capacity factor. However, wind fills the same niche more cheaply even with significant excess capacity. This shows up as a grid where the wholesale price frequently sits around zero, which makes nuclear even less economically viable.
I personally expect nuclear to stick around for various reasons like bulk radioactive isotope production, but ramping up to become a significantly larger chunk of global electricity production would take dramatically lower unsubsidized prices.
2. There are countries that cannot rely on renewables because there's not enough wind or sun.
3. Renewables don't really work at the moment without stable source that can quickly kick in when there's no sun or no wind. The Nuclear energy is stable and clean. That combination of features is hugely underappreciated in favour of natural gas mostly for political reasons (at least in Europe). Natural Gas is not clean and won't prevent the global warming. Also Natural Gas and Coal have environmental impact and kill people all the time, not only when there's highly unlikely accident.
4. The small modular reactors (SMRs) may be the solution for a huge capital cost required for building a classic Nuclear Powerplant.
It's all well and good saying you can produce solar + wind en masse for 3c/kWh (even without govt incentives), but if you need to have a gas plant running extremely inefficiently to pick up the shortfall, I'm not sure you can say it is 3c/kWh.
I'm very pro renewables but think it is increasingly getting missed. You often see charts that solar/wind is significantly cheaper than nuclear, but never taking into account this.
Assuming that the investment in nuclear power from inception was equally matched in renewables for the same period of time, would anyone bother attempting to make this argument? The affordability of electricity from solar power alone would have likely have overtaken nuclear power long before the end of WWII. Nuclear (fission) power is mind-bogglingly expensive. The costs can not be handwaved away by suggesting it could be less expensive with even more investment into a method of power generation that is orders of magnitude more expensive than the most expensive renewables. Comparatively, we have barely scratched the surface of investing in renewables. If no one ever believed nuclear bombs were necessary, and instead of fission all that effort and cost had been put into developing fusion energy instead, we would have been building clean fusion plants for under $2B a piece by the end of the last millennium. Forget everything you think is wonderful about fission, forget all of it, and focus only on the economics. Then forget about it entirely and focus efforts instead on something, anything else, that is viable.
Windmills fall over and kill people.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
The interesting thing is that nuclear power is at 90, and Windmills at 150, but only if accidents in undeveloped nations be included, if they not be, and only developed nations are included, then the death toll is 0.1 from nuclear.
The overwhelming majority of accidents with nuclear energy happen in undeveloped nations.
That's patently false. Nuclear has the fewest deaths per TW generated of any power source.
Yes, but its doesn't have the fewest We-have-hours-to-abandon-this-entire-city-because-no-one-can-live-here-for-the-next-100-years per TW generated of any power source.
Risks don't have to be counted in deaths. The risks of nuclear are very low, but risk is not just about the chance of an accident, its about the acceptability of a potential failure.
The truth is that both sides need to update their knowledge of the state of the art in nuclear power generation, learn how the power grid works in depth and learn the patterns of power consumption both by residential locations and industrial ones.
Once you have all the knowledge about what's needed to avoid a significant decrease in our standard of living, you'll understand that a power generation technology with certain characteristics (foremost it has to be carbon neutral) is required... not optional, in other words, and simply adding more renewables is not enough to solve the problem.
The only practical solution (barring spending trillions of $$ and time to completely rebuild the US power grid and invent power storage technologies that don't exist as well as the industrial processes to produce them and infrastructure to handle their whole life cycle) is modern nuclear technology.
A serious response to climate change would be large government support of both nuclear power and renewables.
Are we going to tell our children that the main reason we did nothing to fight climate change was because fossil fuels were more competitive economically?
First replace every coal and gas power plant, then we can argue about nuclear vs renewables.
If a proper price on carbon existed, would nuclear and renewables not automatically look a whole lot cheaper without subsidies?
We're doing exactly that.
Likewise with lithium batteries. It just takes use, iteration and scale nuclear energy can easily be cheaper than everything else out there.
The improvement in IC technology more or less dealt with marginal price reduction.
The price of nuclear power is the price of a lot of nickel alloy parts, and huge pressure vessel, and huge containment structures.
Why do they get this money but not renewables? The name of the subsidy program makes that very clear. Reserve energy. The oil fueled power plant get paid to simply exist in the case where demand exceeds production of renewables. Before they shut down the latest nuclear reactor this was mostly to address cold windless winter nights, but now its operating basically all year as dips in renewable energy regularly cause situations where that reserve energy is required for a stable energy grid.
I get how people do not like subsidies for nuclear, but I really dislike subsidies for fossil fuels and I hate how oil is being burned just because it now is called "reserve energy".
One would think that if storage costs were the cheaper choice then we would be phasing out fossil fuel from the "reserve energy" strategy. There is no such plans. In contrast, the current plan and government investments goes to increase the reserve energy capacity from fossil fuel in every way possible. To my knowledge there does not exist a single commercial operated storage system that get charged with wind and later sold, here or globally. There does exist solar and battery, commonly with about 75% capacity for 4hrs, and a charge cycle of a single day. The economics for wind require massively higher capacity (weeks rather than hours), and the charge cycle which will repay the investment is significant slower (several weeks rather than a single day).
30 some nations use nuclear power, or are building nuclear plants. Only nine countries have nuclear weapons.
Pursuing nuclear weapons is obviously a choice, it's not automatic with nuclear power. It requires an immense, concerted effort to build nuclear weapons.
The US has begrudgingly learned to live with North Korea and Pakistan having nuclear weapons, it'll learn to live with Iran having nuclear weapons as well (and shortly after that, Saudi Arabia). Will Israel accept that outcome? I guess we'll find out, there is no scenario where Iran doesn't acquire nuclear weapons at this point. It's guaranteed.
Yip. a) because 3.67% enriched Uranium fuel is not a weapon and will never be b) civilian nuclear energy is part of the multi-national JPCOA deal that they kept their side of c) its really not your call to tell other sovereign people what energy to use d) you should be happy they are using less coal.
I do wonder, though, what the costs would look like if a big country like the US built, say, 400 Hinkley Point Cs. What economies of scale would you see? You could probably get a sense by looking at the marginal build costs were associated with some of the last French plants during the 1970s-early 1990s construction boom, when they built over 50 plans.
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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!
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.
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.)
It can't be magic or works of God that won that success, so what's the real story?
Oil doesn't compete for power generation, fossil fuel power is mostly from coal and natural gas.
I would totally believe coal companies did that
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.
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/15/renewable-e...
Nuclear is increasingly the only option for meeting climate targets quickly enough to save our biosphere.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
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.
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'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.
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.
Also, learn about how power grids work. Simply building in over capacity of renewables won't solve the problem at all.
That won't be sufficient to stabilize a grid. You need big baseline output and/or lots of storage.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not that so-called renewables will actually solve that, cutting energy usage on the other hand definitely would help.
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.
It's because nobody is thinking about the starships, for better or worse. People are bad enough at dealing with today's problems.
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.
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.
There are multiple 2500km transmission lines in use today. They are relatively cheap to build and solve almost all the intermitency issues.
China has a few over 3000km long already, eg: https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/the-smarter-grid... and there is a 4500km long line planned for Australia to Singapore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%E2%80%93ASEAN_Power_...
That's a bit misleading. This is how it went:
- in 2002, the Social-Democrat/Green (Schröder) government decided to phase out nuclear power by 2021.
- in 2010, the Christian-Democrat/Liberal (Merkel) government decided to delay that plan.
- in 2011, after Fukushima, they made a U-turn, which led to the current phase-out that will (probably) be completed in 2022.
(see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomgesetz_(Deutschland)#Novel... - in German)
So Fukushima didn't accelerate the plan, it actually forced the Merkel government to return to the preexisting plan...
Merkel would have governed against the strong will of the Germans to get rid of nuclear ASAP.
This topic has been intensely discussed in Germany for two decades already.
That was not a sustainable position. Mass protests would have awaited the government.
Talk about putting Rick Belluzzo to shame.
Nuclear as it is today brings centralization (compared to solar/wind) and many don't like that. For example, nobody wants to live close to a nuclear waste deposit, but governments will just force the decision to build one to local populations.
There's also the feeling that it will concentrate the power in the hands of a smaller and smaller technical elite.
Another matter is that people don't trust neoliberal governments with a tendency to austerity to correctly handle maintenance of nuclear power plants in the long term. After all, with nuclear you just need to fuck up badly once to cause unrepairable damage.
If we want nuclear to be adopted, we have to dispell the (justified) fear people have of it. Discussing about it like techno elitists won't certainly help.
I'll repeat what I've said for wind turbines: do my back yard first then. If nobody else wants it, it gotta go somewhere.
But I think you're confusing reactors with waste. We want reactors as close to population centres as possible to avoid losses (some distance is fine, but concentrating power generation for Europe in the Sahara would be wasteful, for example), but radioactive waste can be transported just fine. There's very little of it, shipping it to the Sahara isn't a big deal in energy usage terms. Politics is an issue, but there's more uninhabited places we can put it.
I wish it was that easy, but that's not a chance in the current political climate.
In Italy we're still debating about where to send the waste generated in the '80s. We turned off our last plant in the '87.
Every single town involved as a destination for waste storage is in revolt against the decision. Literally nobody wants that waste even dozens of kilometers away from their town.
And I totally understand, I don't trust any government (even worse, private contractor), in this economical system and political climate, to correctly maintain such waste storage for the next 300 years.
We can barely make consistent plans for the duration of a government.
The facts:
In the time frame 2010 to 2020, the share of nuclear energy in the German energy mix has halved, from 22% to 11%.
At the same time, the share of lignite in the energy mix has dwindled from 23% to 16%. The share of hard coal has gone from 19% to 7%.
Germany reduced its nuclear power output while at the same time reducing its coal power output by even more than its nuclear output.
Gas is up by 2 percentage points, but renewables have more than doubled their market share in 10 years time, and now make up 45% of the power mix (was 17% in 2010).
So no, Germany simply is not switching to coal (or even gas for that matter), and renewable energy production is ramping up rapidly.
Source: Agora Energiewende
Sadly "the big four" (energy companies) are influencing politics and are actively halting progress on renewables which leads to really strange effects.
My landlord installed a rather big solar system on the roof and due to its size, the energy company can decide to remotely shut it off when there's enough energy in the grid.
It's really a shame and a lot of corruption is going on there.
Also: Little to no research on energy storage was done in the last 25 years, because of all this corruption.
This has nothing to do with corruption.
So a bit less than 20 years, even including the 6 years between announcing a site and actually confirming plans to go ahead with it.
This isn't true. The one new coal plant, bad as it is, was planned and allowed before Fukushima happened. These things change slower than the news cycle.
And Germany still is a net energy exporter, BTW, even without the nuclear plants.
Germany does not. coal usage has been going down.
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As a result, Germany is now pushing coal instead of nuclear while limiting wind and solar due to legal restrictions.
Nuclear advocates have a tin ear as far as the fact that nuclear failures don't have a theoretical cap on disaster magnitude.
It's a simple enough fact. No theoretical limit to the extent of the damage, beyond "end of life on Earth". Even the dreaded fossil fuel business does its mass extinction events at a more manageable tempo.
Arugably, there should be conventions against use of any technology that has potential for irreversible harm to the environment.
(1) USA bets on nuclear. The real production energy demands can be supplied by nuclear reactors.
(2) USA decides to bet on wind and solar. USA then re/opens it's own local rare earth material mines. USA also manufactures all energy collectors locally. All of this is to avoid having to pay the carbon cost of having the raw materials mined in China, and energy collectors shipped over from China to USA.
The uninformed opinion doesn't take into consideration raw material extraction, fabrication, and shipping.