The Chinese have committed to building over 150 new nuclear reactors. The British government will subsidize Rolls Royce. Japan will reactivate over 30 nuclear reactors.
It seems this is the biggest energy story of the year. The comeback of nuclear energy.
It's not a comeback until you push the first kwh to the grid for the price you said you'd build the new generator for. Japan turning back on mothballed reactors is a Big Deal (and a quick win for avoiding CO2 emissions), but getting new reactors built in less than a decade or for less than billons of dollars is where the proof lies. Talk and promises are cheap, action has a cost and can't be faked.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... (Lazard’s latest annual Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis (LCOE 15.0) shows the continued cost-competitiveness of certain renewable energy technologies on a subsidized basis and the marginal cost of coal, nuclear and combined cycle gas generation.)
Comparing the cost of a non-intermittent energy source with an intermittent energy source excluding the cost of storage is comparing apples to oranges. Solar and wind are cheap, until you saturate the energy market during peak production hours. Then it gets exorbitantly expensive. The only viable storage solution at the moment is hydroelectric, which is geographically limited. Global lithium ion battery output for a whole year doesn't even add up to 1 hour's worth of the USA's electricity consumption.
When probed on how to address intermittency, many wind and solar advocates propose things like hydrogen storage, giant flywheels, compressed air, or other solutions that are currently in the prototyping stage and have yet to actually be deployed to a grid and demonstrate viability.
This is the chief advantage of nuclear power: it works and we have over half a century of production experience with it. Betting on one of those storage solutions panning out is betting on a big unknown.
The pricing is quite difficult to measure consistently. For instance, the cost of coal generation is usually priced around $0.10/kWh, but it kills 25-33 people per TWh. At the rate the NRC uses, the statistical value of $9M per life, that would add $0.27/kWh, totaling almost $0.37/kWh.
At that price nuclear is already dramatically cheaper than coal - about half as expensive based on the analysis you linked.
The thing is, it's not clear which externalities are priced into renewables. For instance, is the cost of cleaning up this disaster where rare earth metals are mined/refined priced into wind power? [1] Burying the turbine blades forever? [2] How about the cost of the global scale e-waste problem yielded by covering the earth in solar panels which last 30 years? [3] How about power storage - all that lithium?
I'm fine with nuclear, I'm fine with wind, I'm fine with solar. There's no such thing as "green" just shades of black.
Whatever gets us off carbon fuels - yesterday. I strongly doubt the pricing is what's reflected in those charts - they tend to underprice the externalities of everything non-Nuclear. Even if they don't though, I don't really care, at this point decarbonizing is worth paying double for power. I'm not sure how good a deal we're getting is going to matter when we live on Waterworld.
China is building a whole lot of new reactors, and the ones that came online most recently took about 5-6 years from start of construction to finish, which is substantially less than a decade. Japan, prior to the shutdown, was able to build new nuclear plants in 4-5 years. It's certainly possible to construct new, modern nuclear plants smoothly and quickly, and countries capable of this are the ones that are doing most of the nuclear plant construction. You hear disproportionately about debacles like Flamanville Unit 3 in France (under construction since 2007, with heavy cost overruns), and they're indicative of some serious problems with France's ability to get reactors built, but worldwide they're the exception.
One of the things to watch out for when looking at renewable energy prices is that it can often reflect the value of that energy, rather than production cost.
The price being very low often reflects the fact that, at that time, this energy is basically worthless/useless. And in fact, prices have even gone negative, meaning "please stop feeding this useless energy into the grid".
So low renewable prices are not necessarily a good sign, and can in fact just be the economic indicator for the limited usefulness of renewable energy.
I don't think anyone expects a 100% build rate on these commitments, but like all funnels, a certain percentage of these projects that are having awareness raised now will eventually be built. Any progress here is better than nothing.
The cost consists of a number of factors: materials and labor, design issues, and legal challenges. A global effort to build up proper nuclear infrastructure means the design issues will be far less of an issue: just design one really good reactor, and build a few hundred. And governments can (and in the case of China, will) move to limit the possibility of legal challenges. That just leaves materials and labor, which are comparable to similarly-sized industrial structures: considerable, but certainly not insurmountable.
I suspect the Chinese are less susceptible to the problem in western nations where every random person/group can basically DoS the engineering program through the legal system.
That announcement of 150 reactors in China is no real change to the long term plans either. Still simply keeping the option barely open which is very sensible to do when you're such a huge economy, even if it comes from subsidies.
In 2019, China had a new target of 200 GWe of nuclear generating capacity by 2035, which is 7.7% out of predicted total electricity generating capacity of 2600 GWe.
So with about 50 GWe from 50 reactors today adding another 150 gives you the same goal of about 200 GWe. Unless we're talking SMRs because then the goal just got reduced to a fraction of the original.
Japan invested on nuclear then nowadays don't want it anymore but now needs energy. One has to see them canceling their planned phase-out, as "in March 2021, only 11 percent of Japanese said they wanted that nuclear energy generation be discontinued immediately. Another 49 percent was asking for a gradual exit from nuclear energy" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan#Post-Fu... )
> UK. Rolls-Royce gets funding
"£195m cash injection from private firms and a £210m grant" are ridiculous sums. In France Macron announced 1 billion €: given that nuclear research already burnt ~900 millions € per year (public research), a fair part of the 2.2 billions allocated to the CEA's civilian programs, this isn't decisive.
> Japan invested on nuclear then nowadays don't want it anymore but now needs energy. One has to see them canceling their planned phase-out, as "in March 2021, only 11 percent of Japanese said they wanted that nuclear energy generation be discontinued immediately. Another 49 percent was asking for a gradual exit from nuclear energy" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan#Post-Fu... )
Wow. To have even ~40% of the population not opposing nuclear after a national trauma like Fukushima, shows their sophistication as a people.
> The Chinese have committed to building over 150 new nuclear reactors.
Hang on, China also announced a couple of months ago to build 43 new coal-fired power plants.
It's not that long ago - perhaps a decade - that China was building a new coal-fired power plant every 10 days or so. Not small ones, but on the same scale as the largest coal-fired power plant we had in Australia at the time.
I mention this as a counterpoint to any 'If China's doing it, it must make sense' fallacy.
It makes sense to build both. Coal fired plants are much less expensive to produce and get to a positive ROI much faster. If you don't like it, you can always try launching a land war in Asia to stop them.
It's only good news if they aren't PWR/LWR meltdown-possible 70 year old designs.
I do like there is a large market to this startup. Hopefully that will result in a somewhat price-competitive reactor design. But I doubt that will happen for another 10 years.
I think solar/wind/battery will eat the lunch of any new nuclear plant in cost once it goes online.
"The comeback of nuclear energy" At last, I would say. We have magic energy source in our hands but, no, better spend milliards on wind turbines and solar panels, although we know they sometimes work and sometimes don't, so they can't provide predictable input for a grid without batteries that we don't have and will not have in foreseeable future.
I am wondering what Germany is going to do. They have bet heavily on wind & solar (apparently they haven't check how many sunny days Germany has...) with the backup from Russian gas from Nord Stream 1/2 (for some reason this gas is "clean" although burning it produces CO2). If everyone around will switch to nuclear, what I hope will happen, they can end up with the very expensive setup that is still producing a lot of CO2.
I am afraid that Germany will try to enforce ban on nuclear by European Union (what they can do, since Brexit Germany is in fact ruling UE), as the wrong investment might hurt their economy. I hope France will oppose.
Exactly. Unfortunately the problem is the people are opposing nuclear and to make people happy Germany leaders will do what they can, to push the whole EU to their home politics drama. One of the biggest drawback of any union when the big guys are incentivized for something not aligning with rest of members. No wonder so many neighbors are unhappy
This is super good. Again, the point is not Europe in and of itself, but also India and China.
The demand for power in India and China is outstripping everyone else. And it is still stuck using coal power. India and China do NOT have land (for renewables) commensurate with the population or energy demand.
Also one of the biggest sources of renewable hydro power is a geopolitical flashpoint for India vs China (https://www.indiatoday.in/news-analysis/story/china-proposed...). Almost a hundred soldiers died in an India vs China battle recently around this area.
Both India and China have unilaterally rejected COP26 restrictive measures from developed nations... simply because it is not possible to reduce the power demand coming from populations (the size of Europe) being lifted up from poverty.
The only answer for the next 50 years is nuclear tech. And France is literally the only game in town right now. So let us pray, this happens sooner than later. You do NOT want coal from 2 BILLION people in the atmosphere.
Actually, it is not so clear nuclear is the solution in Europe (e.g. France) at this point. You still have to mine lots of uranium ore, because compared to coal, you actually only seek a small fraction of it, where with coal you can burn almost all of what you mine. The enrichment facilities have dual use for war and the uranium mostly comes from Russia which is geopolitically problematic (for Europe, somewhat similar to coal/ oil/ gas mostly). With nuclear fission, we basically don't recycle much if at all. You have to take care of the waste. With coal of course, you have ash and all the CO_2 you have to do something about (again in Europe at least) if you don't want to pay too much on emission allowances.
The last point, we just don't know how to build nuclear economically anymore. The process is so bureaucratic and slow it becomes infeasible to finance without major interventions. Letting Chinese or Russian companies build it from the standpoint of Europe is a geopolitical challenge and a security risk.
All this time and money would be perhaps spent better elsewhere. In Europe, we are not able to build a nuclear powerplant in 15 years, so that is lots of time for research and development and even building something useable. It is very likely, most of the renewable sources will become more economical and nuclear less even less. We might devise a scheme to store energy by e.g. splitting salt (NaOH) into sodium metal, hydrogen and oxygen and later combining sodium with water to NaOH again, while getting hydrogen as a byproduct and lots of electrical current. It is a simple process, we "just" have to scale it and develop it further. The first half of it is well known for 100 years and was used at industrial scale. Currently, we just split NaCl directly to obtain sodium... The second half is described in patents by Lockheed-Martin that are long expired. You can read more in this diagram: https://www.orgpad.com/s/iV3vbi
Btw. Slowakia has a lot of nuclear too and here in Czechia, we have a conversation about building new reactors in Dukovany too. For Czechia, the approach seems to be misguided as you can read here (Google Translated from Czech): https://denikreferendum-cz.translate.goog/clanek/32812-cesky...
My biggest argument against nuclear is that there are no incentives for decommissioning unsafe plants in the far future.
The usual pro-nuclear argument says that nuclear plants are only unsafe if managed incorrectly. However, the West doesn't have the political or economic framework to ensure they will get managed correctly: if you are the leader of the executive of some country, are you going to decomission a plant built 30 years ago that gives the country a lot gW of energy and raise energy prices for everyone, or are you going to risk the very low chance of a serious accident to keep prices down and pass the ball to whomever governs next?
If nuclear is the future, we need an effective process of automatic decommissioning that can bypass governments. That process doesn't exist yet.
Um, what ? There is not really any meaningful voices against building a new reactor block in Dukovany. Rather, there was a debate about making sure non-friendly foreign blocks are excluded from the tender to avoid the power plant being used as bargaining chip in future diplomatic games involving the Czech Republic.
There are already massive solar array farms in the Gobi desert.
You are misunderstanding the growth in power needed. If India and China move towards electric vehicles..... just New Delhi has 12 million cars. Just to compare, London has 2.6 million cars. New York has about 4 million cars.
I don't think people grasp what 2 billion people really means.
I’m no fan of the Chinese regime, but maybe they just concluded that the preening do-nothingness that goes on at these summits isn’t worth getting mixed up with. From last week:
“China has reported overnight to be planning 150 new nuclear reactors over the next 15 years — more than have been built around the world since 1980 — a signal that uranium production needs to be stepped up, fast and soon.”
Macron said "We are going, for the first time in decades, to relaunch the construction of nuclear reactors in our country".
This is a blatant lie, as France launched a project and never ceased trying to build. However it failed flat.
Then in 2002 the project Flamanville-3 was launched (a generation III reactor, the "EPR", first one of its kind), and the building phase started in 2007. It is a major failure, not delivered, at least 11 years behind schedule, and will cost at least 19.1 billion euros (initial budget: 3.4 billions €).
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
I believe the Flamanville EPR is considered as some sort of prototype. It was planned to be years in the making and difficulties were expected.
However, they were not expecting this much. The reasons that they are pushing are:
1. Lack of proper trained personnel
2. More constraints imposed during the projects due to Fukushima
3. First design of that kind
And as you said, the last nuclear reactor to be finished in France was 20 years ago[0]. The people who worked on that last plant were probably the one who worked on plants during the 70s, 80s and 90s and retired right after. It fits with reason 1.
The last reactors to enter commercial operation in France, the 2 units at Civaux Nuclear Power Plant, took 13 and 11 years from construction start in 1988/1991 to commercial operation in 2002:
I wonder if EDF succumbed to hubris in thinking that they could build a new reactor design twice as fast as the last-completed reactors, or if they published optimistic numbers because they thought that there was more institutional tolerance for constant slippage than for estimating unhappily large numbers right at the start.
> Flamanville EPR is considered as some sort of prototype
No, it officially is a "tête de série" (meaning among the firsts of a series). It cannot be a prototype because this very model, the EPR, was sold to Finland and the corresponding project (Olkiluoto-3) started 2 years before Flamanville's.
> the one who worked on plants during the 70s, 80s and 90s and retired right after
In such huge heavy industry projects occupying tens of thoosands persons there is a constant stream of newcomers. Moreover this industry must maintain existing (exploited) reactors, and a non-neglectable portion of skills needed when building are also needed during maintenance. Also: many critical specialties, especially outside the nuclear isle, are qualifications built upon a non nuclear-specific trade (concrete, welding...): a "standard" professional can be trained in nuclear-specific skills in months. In any case the industry (which isn't exactly a low-cost lo-margin one...) has to manage human resources, and to find ways to maintain critical and very specific skills.
As happy as I am that nuclear is back, I really don't trust Macron on this. For the record, here is what he did in his current term regarding nuclear:
- shut down the Fessenheim plant, one of the most reliable one. Yes it was the oldest, but not by far, and reports from the nuclear authority are pretty clear that this plant was in a much better shape than others built just a few years afterwards (Bugey, one year later which is now older than Fessenheim was when shut down, and Blayais started 4 years later).
- promised to reduce the share of nuclear in the electricty mix to 50% by 2025.
- shut down Astrid, the French research project for 4th generation nuclear (which is the only long term viable path for nuclear, since there will never be a shortage of fertile material (U238 or Thorium) whereas fissile one is pretty limited. Breeding reactors also solve the very-long lived nuclear waste issue).
He did all of this when he was trying to seduce electors from the green party. Now he don't seem to care about them, but who knows for how long…
Maybe the green party elector finally realised that the battle against CO2 doesn't need to be 100% renewable?
Regarding the closing of Fessenheim, it seems like a sensible decision. The central was designed to last 40 years and long exceeded its expiration date. In the last 10 years it had roughly one incident per year with graver and graver consequences. And in any case, France would have started lose a lot of money because, due to the geographical position and the risk it pose, its neighbours, Switzerland and Germany were not really happy with it and had started to repetedly attack the decision to maintain it open in courts.
The fact that a politician had to take this decision (and not engineers) is in my opinion the most shocking part. It shows that the ANS probably became complacent with the state of security of centrals. Probably similar to finanicial markets or aviation regulators. And generally when that happens it's the begining of catastrophes.
> Maybe the green party elector finally realised that the battle against CO2 doesn't need to be 100% renewable?
I wish it was it, but it's not what's happening. Macron is currently campaigning for his reelection and has decided to adopt a really conservative tone for his campaign: it's all about “fighting islamism”, reducing welfare, etc., etc., the strong nuclear narrative fits clearly in this tone.
> Regarding the closing of Fessenheim, it seems like a sensible decision. The central was designed to last 40 years and long exceeded its expiration date. In the last 10 years it had roughly one incident per year with graver and graver consequences.
It was designed for 40 years, but so did every other plants that were given a extended lifetime approval. Actually, it's not uncommon at all to design a power plant with a specific lifetime in mind, and extending it afterwards when you realize it hasn't wore out too much (fun facts, some systems were dead long before reaching the 40 years span they had been designed for, and have been replaced even though it wasn't part of the original plan). And as I said, Fessenheim was one of the best plant of that generation when it comes to incidents, it had a much better rating than several plants built a bit later and which will still be in service for the next decade.
> And in any case, France would have started lose a lot of money because, due to the geographical position and the risk it pose, its neighbours, Switzerland and Germany were not really happy with it
I don't know where you take that from but in reality, France have to pay a huge sum of money to Germany as compensation for the shut-down because part of Fessenheim's plant (17.5%) was owned by the land of Bade-Wurtemberg. The overall price that will be paid until the end of the compensation period (supposed to last until 2041) is still unknown because it will depend on the market price of electricity on that period, but it's expected to be between a faction of billion to a few billion euros.[1]
> The fact that a politician had to take this decision (and not engineers) is in my opinion the most shocking part. It shows that the ANS probably became complacent with the state of security of centrals. Probably similar to finanicial markets or aviation regulators. And generally when that happens it's the begining of catastrophes.
This is indeed a serious risk with regulation authorities, but in the case of the ASN it's proven pretty reliable in recent days: rthe 50 years lifetime extension was granted in exchange of a huge overhaul of the existing plants (“le grand carénage)” costing several billions, to add a lot of new safety equipment, most of them designed with the Fukushima accident in mind.
To promise to reduce the share of nuclear in itself means nothing. If you increase the production with renewable, automatically, nuclear will have a smaller share. It does not mean that you do not plan ahead.
Fessenheim had been a thorn in the back of previous governments for years. Sometimes political move are not logical from a technical standpoint but can be seen as intermediate step in a larger plan. I don't blame him for that.
Astrid though seems to be the real mistake. The new CEA boss at the time said that[0] we don't need that kind of reactor because uranium is cheap as nobody wants nuclear anymore since Fukushima. This is such a stupid reason that I cannot believe to be the real one.
I'm not sure what's been debunked. The US does not have the construction capabilities of 1970s France. And for that matter, neither does France, as is being proven in Flamanville and in Olkiluoto, Finland.
Perhaps we can invite Slovakia or Russia to build in other countries, but there's no knowing if they could train local workforces accomplish what they have.
If this is combined with a move away from fossiel fuel for heating and logistics - and a significant investment in renewable - then it is an excellent move for France.
I would sign up today for nuclear power in 2025 if it replaced all natural gas and diesel/petrol vehicles on the roads.
We need a law that for megaprojects, local governments and/or federal agencies must respond to requests within X days, or be fined an escalating per-day rate. And if their responses are incomplete, same.
The timeline ballooning as all external parties take their time weighing in and covering their asses, and costs associated with idling construction waiting for same, are getting ridiculous.
Either it's a priority (in which case everyone should treat it as such), or it's not (in which case we should accept we just can't build non-priority projects over a certain scale).
EDF has been quietly acquiring land around existing nuclear power plants for many years (like Cattenom, near Luxembourg), with the unstated but likely goal of expanding them rather than going for brand new sites.
In some cases EDF even planned building more reactors from the very beginning, for example at the nuclear power plant of Belleville-sur-Loire: everything was planned for 4 reactors, but only 2 were built. So they can build two extra right there, no need to find a new site.
The current not so small problem is that EDF needs to learn how to build nuclear reactors again. That's what they are currently doing, at great cost and great delays... But if the political will is there, they can start to break ground quite literally tomorrow.
The French have a streamlined regulatory framework including standardized reactor designs and limited public comment that helps to reduces their costs and timelines.
Source: chapter 6 of “Nuclear Power: A Brief Introduction.”
It is really all the lawsuits, environmental impact reports, and bureaucracy that slows infrastructure down.
We used to be able to build things quite quickly. E.g. The Bay Bridge was built in 5 years for $77 million (~$1.5 Billion today) in 1931-1936. This is not ground breaking, but law passed to bridge opening.
Just replacing the Eastern span cost $6.5 Billion and took ~18 years to build (1995-2013) from law passed to section opening.
If you create hydrocarbon fuels with sequestered CO_2, driven by nuclear electricity, you have a clean, energy-dense battery. Plus, you don’t have to retrofit the entire automobile fleet.
Just make sure to do something about NOx emissions, the cause of the downfall of Diesel in many countries. As long as you burn just about any fuel - hydrocarbon or otherwise - using air you'll end up with NOx as a combustion by-product. Filtering out nitrogen from air is possible - zeolites are used for this purpose in oxygen concentrators - but hard to do at a high enough capacity to satisfy the needs of even modest-sized ICEs so a post-combustion NOx capture/conversion step will be needed regardless of the provenance of the fuel [1].
Sort of - but it doesn't solve the issue with air quality. Electrification of transport isn't just about CO2. We'll see more instant benefits from having air we can breathe.
But liquid fuels are incredibly convenient, so maybe they will be worth the high price in certain applications. For example in jet engines for airplanes.
France already has 80-90% of electricity supply being supplied by nuclear. It also exports an enormous amount of power to other European countries.
I don't know exactly how true this is but I believe gas usage for heating is much rarer in France than other countries. They have a lot of electrical storage heating due to the cheap off peak baseload that nuclear gives.
uranium may not be a fossil fuel but it shares all the problems of them
- pollution and waste
- it's limited
At the current consumption, uranium would only last 80 years, if all the countries start to build new power plants, won't last more than 2 decades before it's depleted, and we will have the same problem again.
nuclear power is not a solution, is just a small patch.
> As of 2011 the world's known resources of uranium, economically recoverable at the arbitrary price ceiling of US$130/kg, were enough to last for between 70 and 100 years.[60][61][62] In 2007, the OECD estimated 670 years of economically recoverable uranium in total conventional resources and phosphate ores assuming the then-current use rate.[63]
> Light water reactors make relatively inefficient use of nuclear fuel, mostly using only the very rare uranium-235 isotope.[64] Nuclear reprocessing can make this waste reusable, and newer reactors also achieve a more efficient use of the available resources than older ones.[64] With a pure fast reactor fuel cycle with a burn up of all the uranium and actinides (which presently make up the most hazardous substances in nuclear waste), there is an estimated 160,000 years worth of Uranium in total conventional resources and phosphate ore at the price of 60–100 US$/kg.[65]
Maybe they and China will create a little power envy in the USA, and we can get back on track for some real change and improvements in CO2 pollution containment.
The major drawback of nuclear seems to be their large power output and long durability. Once you built the few plants you need (France and Sweden for example) you don't have to build any more for 50 or so years and then the manufacturing capability dies.
Hoping for companies like NuScale, maybe they can get a continuous operation going and churn out cheaper and cheaper plants.
The manufacturing/construction capability for nuclear needs to be global, rather than national. There is plenty of need for new nuclear to sustain and grow the expertise around the world. This goes for the governments as well, but unfortunately governments seem to be abysmal about learning from other countries.
Jean Marc Jancovici is one of the most vocal of we can call "Nuclear ecologist" around in France, the content is amazing and he definitely have a point if you want to follow [0].
He is a realist, but in this field we need to go beyond and to open big money for the research into small and decentralized nuclear power.
Every citizen have to know the pros and the cons, and be educated to the risks. Energy provide good living standards, but we have to know the drawbacks and we have to account for externalities in every business model.
This will be the only way to keep our standards of living and keep an habitable home.
Readit News
It seems this is the biggest energy story of the year. The comeback of nuclear energy.
https://smallcaps.com.au/china-supercharge-uranium-race-150-...
The HN discussion on the China story:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29151741
Japan reactivating nuclear reactors:
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210501/p2a/00m/0op/00...
UK. Rolls-Royce gets funding to develop mini nuclear reactors:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59212983
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... (Lazard’s latest annual Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis (LCOE 15.0) shows the continued cost-competitiveness of certain renewable energy technologies on a subsidized basis and the marginal cost of coal, nuclear and combined cycle gas generation.)
When probed on how to address intermittency, many wind and solar advocates propose things like hydrogen storage, giant flywheels, compressed air, or other solutions that are currently in the prototyping stage and have yet to actually be deployed to a grid and demonstrate viability.
This is the chief advantage of nuclear power: it works and we have over half a century of production experience with it. Betting on one of those storage solutions panning out is betting on a big unknown.
At that price nuclear is already dramatically cheaper than coal - about half as expensive based on the analysis you linked.
The thing is, it's not clear which externalities are priced into renewables. For instance, is the cost of cleaning up this disaster where rare earth metals are mined/refined priced into wind power? [1] Burying the turbine blades forever? [2] How about the cost of the global scale e-waste problem yielded by covering the earth in solar panels which last 30 years? [3] How about power storage - all that lithium?
I'm fine with nuclear, I'm fine with wind, I'm fine with solar. There's no such thing as "green" just shades of black.
Whatever gets us off carbon fuels - yesterday. I strongly doubt the pricing is what's reflected in those charts - they tend to underprice the externalities of everything non-Nuclear. Even if they don't though, I don't really care, at this point decarbonizing is worth paying double for power. I'm not sure how good a deal we're getting is going to matter when we live on Waterworld.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...
[3] https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die...
The price being very low often reflects the fact that, at that time, this energy is basically worthless/useless. And in fact, prices have even gone negative, meaning "please stop feeding this useless energy into the grid".
So low renewable prices are not necessarily a good sign, and can in fact just be the economic indicator for the limited usefulness of renewable energy.
Dead Comment
In 2019, China had a new target of 200 GWe of nuclear generating capacity by 2035, which is 7.7% out of predicted total electricity generating capacity of 2600 GWe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
So with about 50 GWe from 50 reactors today adding another 150 gives you the same goal of about 200 GWe. Unless we're talking SMRs because then the goal just got reduced to a fraction of the original.
This may be more complicated than that, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29159944
> Japan reactivating nuclear reactors:
Japan invested on nuclear then nowadays don't want it anymore but now needs energy. One has to see them canceling their planned phase-out, as "in March 2021, only 11 percent of Japanese said they wanted that nuclear energy generation be discontinued immediately. Another 49 percent was asking for a gradual exit from nuclear energy" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan#Post-Fu... )
> UK. Rolls-Royce gets funding
"£195m cash injection from private firms and a £210m grant" are ridiculous sums. In France Macron announced 1 billion €: given that nuclear research already burnt ~900 millions € per year (public research), a fair part of the 2.2 billions allocated to the CEA's civilian programs, this isn't decisive.
> Japan invested on nuclear then nowadays don't want it anymore but now needs energy. One has to see them canceling their planned phase-out, as "in March 2021, only 11 percent of Japanese said they wanted that nuclear energy generation be discontinued immediately. Another 49 percent was asking for a gradual exit from nuclear energy" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan#Post-Fu... )
Wow. To have even ~40% of the population not opposing nuclear after a national trauma like Fukushima, shows their sophistication as a people.
Hang on, China also announced a couple of months ago to build 43 new coal-fired power plants.
It's not that long ago - perhaps a decade - that China was building a new coal-fired power plant every 10 days or so. Not small ones, but on the same scale as the largest coal-fired power plant we had in Australia at the time.
I mention this as a counterpoint to any 'If China's doing it, it must make sense' fallacy.
It makes sense if you realize
1. China pledges to peak carbon emission by 2030
2. Any increase in emission before 2030 will increase China's peak carbon allowance afterward.
3. Coal plants are cheap to build. Who cares if you only run them at 30% load factor for their entire lifespan.
4. Cap and trade between countries mean the carbon credit will worth a lot in the near future.
China seems to be adding ~30GW of coal, 70GW of wind, ~50GW of solar, and ~6 GW of nuclear power/year to its grid.
I do like there is a large market to this startup. Hopefully that will result in a somewhat price-competitive reactor design. But I doubt that will happen for another 10 years.
I think solar/wind/battery will eat the lunch of any new nuclear plant in cost once it goes online.
Hoping for the best!
I am wondering what Germany is going to do. They have bet heavily on wind & solar (apparently they haven't check how many sunny days Germany has...) with the backup from Russian gas from Nord Stream 1/2 (for some reason this gas is "clean" although burning it produces CO2). If everyone around will switch to nuclear, what I hope will happen, they can end up with the very expensive setup that is still producing a lot of CO2.
I am afraid that Germany will try to enforce ban on nuclear by European Union (what they can do, since Brexit Germany is in fact ruling UE), as the wrong investment might hurt their economy. I hope France will oppose.
The demand for power in India and China is outstripping everyone else. And it is still stuck using coal power. India and China do NOT have land (for renewables) commensurate with the population or energy demand. Also one of the biggest sources of renewable hydro power is a geopolitical flashpoint for India vs China (https://www.indiatoday.in/news-analysis/story/china-proposed...). Almost a hundred soldiers died in an India vs China battle recently around this area.
Both India and China have unilaterally rejected COP26 restrictive measures from developed nations... simply because it is not possible to reduce the power demand coming from populations (the size of Europe) being lifted up from poverty.
The only answer for the next 50 years is nuclear tech. And France is literally the only game in town right now. So let us pray, this happens sooner than later. You do NOT want coal from 2 BILLION people in the atmosphere.
The last point, we just don't know how to build nuclear economically anymore. The process is so bureaucratic and slow it becomes infeasible to finance without major interventions. Letting Chinese or Russian companies build it from the standpoint of Europe is a geopolitical challenge and a security risk.
All this time and money would be perhaps spent better elsewhere. In Europe, we are not able to build a nuclear powerplant in 15 years, so that is lots of time for research and development and even building something useable. It is very likely, most of the renewable sources will become more economical and nuclear less even less. We might devise a scheme to store energy by e.g. splitting salt (NaOH) into sodium metal, hydrogen and oxygen and later combining sodium with water to NaOH again, while getting hydrogen as a byproduct and lots of electrical current. It is a simple process, we "just" have to scale it and develop it further. The first half of it is well known for 100 years and was used at industrial scale. Currently, we just split NaCl directly to obtain sodium... The second half is described in patents by Lockheed-Martin that are long expired. You can read more in this diagram: https://www.orgpad.com/s/iV3vbi
Btw. Slowakia has a lot of nuclear too and here in Czechia, we have a conversation about building new reactors in Dukovany too. For Czechia, the approach seems to be misguided as you can read here (Google Translated from Czech): https://denikreferendum-cz.translate.goog/clanek/32812-cesky...
The usual pro-nuclear argument says that nuclear plants are only unsafe if managed incorrectly. However, the West doesn't have the political or economic framework to ensure they will get managed correctly: if you are the leader of the executive of some country, are you going to decomission a plant built 30 years ago that gives the country a lot gW of energy and raise energy prices for everyone, or are you going to risk the very low chance of a serious accident to keep prices down and pass the ball to whomever governs next?
If nuclear is the future, we need an effective process of automatic decommissioning that can bypass governments. That process doesn't exist yet.
You are misunderstanding the growth in power needed. If India and China move towards electric vehicles..... just New Delhi has 12 million cars. Just to compare, London has 2.6 million cars. New York has about 4 million cars.
I don't think people grasp what 2 billion people really means.
“China has reported overnight to be planning 150 new nuclear reactors over the next 15 years — more than have been built around the world since 1980 — a signal that uranium production needs to be stepped up, fast and soon.”
That’s a reported planned investment of $440B.
https://smallcaps.com.au/china-supercharge-uranium-race-150-...
And actually doing that as we speak, instead of "planning".
The last delivered reactor was Civaux-2 (generation II), in 1999. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civaux_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Then in 2002 the project Flamanville-3 was launched (a generation III reactor, the "EPR", first one of its kind), and the building phase started in 2007. It is a major failure, not delivered, at least 11 years behind schedule, and will cost at least 19.1 billion euros (initial budget: 3.4 billions €). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
However, they were not expecting this much. The reasons that they are pushing are:
1. Lack of proper trained personnel
2. More constraints imposed during the projects due to Fukushima
3. First design of that kind
And as you said, the last nuclear reactor to be finished in France was 20 years ago[0]. The people who worked on that last plant were probably the one who worked on plants during the 70s, 80s and 90s and retired right after. It fits with reason 1.
[0]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrale_nucl%C3%A9aire_en_Fra...
It was scheduled to take 54 months to build when construction started in 2007:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110613091002/http://www.neimag...
The last reactors to enter commercial operation in France, the 2 units at Civaux Nuclear Power Plant, took 13 and 11 years from construction start in 1988/1991 to commercial operation in 2002:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civaux_Nuclear_Power_Plant
I wonder if EDF succumbed to hubris in thinking that they could build a new reactor design twice as fast as the last-completed reactors, or if they published optimistic numbers because they thought that there was more institutional tolerance for constant slippage than for estimating unhappily large numbers right at the start.
No, it officially is a "tête de série" (meaning among the firsts of a series). It cannot be a prototype because this very model, the EPR, was sold to Finland and the corresponding project (Olkiluoto-3) started 2 years before Flamanville's.
> the one who worked on plants during the 70s, 80s and 90s and retired right after
In such huge heavy industry projects occupying tens of thoosands persons there is a constant stream of newcomers. Moreover this industry must maintain existing (exploited) reactors, and a non-neglectable portion of skills needed when building are also needed during maintenance. Also: many critical specialties, especially outside the nuclear isle, are qualifications built upon a non nuclear-specific trade (concrete, welding...): a "standard" professional can be trained in nuclear-specific skills in months. In any case the industry (which isn't exactly a low-cost lo-margin one...) has to manage human resources, and to find ways to maintain critical and very specific skills.
Honestly I don't know if we can really build nuclear plants anymore, at least for a reasonable cost in a timely fashion.
[1] https://www.franceculture.fr/economie/scandale-de-la-forge-d...
- shut down the Fessenheim plant, one of the most reliable one. Yes it was the oldest, but not by far, and reports from the nuclear authority are pretty clear that this plant was in a much better shape than others built just a few years afterwards (Bugey, one year later which is now older than Fessenheim was when shut down, and Blayais started 4 years later).
- promised to reduce the share of nuclear in the electricty mix to 50% by 2025.
- shut down Astrid, the French research project for 4th generation nuclear (which is the only long term viable path for nuclear, since there will never be a shortage of fertile material (U238 or Thorium) whereas fissile one is pretty limited. Breeding reactors also solve the very-long lived nuclear waste issue).
He did all of this when he was trying to seduce electors from the green party. Now he don't seem to care about them, but who knows for how long…
Regarding the closing of Fessenheim, it seems like a sensible decision. The central was designed to last 40 years and long exceeded its expiration date. In the last 10 years it had roughly one incident per year with graver and graver consequences. And in any case, France would have started lose a lot of money because, due to the geographical position and the risk it pose, its neighbours, Switzerland and Germany were not really happy with it and had started to repetedly attack the decision to maintain it open in courts.
The fact that a politician had to take this decision (and not engineers) is in my opinion the most shocking part. It shows that the ANS probably became complacent with the state of security of centrals. Probably similar to finanicial markets or aviation regulators. And generally when that happens it's the begining of catastrophes.
I wish it was it, but it's not what's happening. Macron is currently campaigning for his reelection and has decided to adopt a really conservative tone for his campaign: it's all about “fighting islamism”, reducing welfare, etc., etc., the strong nuclear narrative fits clearly in this tone.
> Regarding the closing of Fessenheim, it seems like a sensible decision. The central was designed to last 40 years and long exceeded its expiration date. In the last 10 years it had roughly one incident per year with graver and graver consequences.
It was designed for 40 years, but so did every other plants that were given a extended lifetime approval. Actually, it's not uncommon at all to design a power plant with a specific lifetime in mind, and extending it afterwards when you realize it hasn't wore out too much (fun facts, some systems were dead long before reaching the 40 years span they had been designed for, and have been replaced even though it wasn't part of the original plan). And as I said, Fessenheim was one of the best plant of that generation when it comes to incidents, it had a much better rating than several plants built a bit later and which will still be in service for the next decade.
> And in any case, France would have started lose a lot of money because, due to the geographical position and the risk it pose, its neighbours, Switzerland and Germany were not really happy with it
I don't know where you take that from but in reality, France have to pay a huge sum of money to Germany as compensation for the shut-down because part of Fessenheim's plant (17.5%) was owned by the land of Bade-Wurtemberg. The overall price that will be paid until the end of the compensation period (supposed to last until 2041) is still unknown because it will depend on the market price of electricity on that period, but it's expected to be between a faction of billion to a few billion euros.[1]
> The fact that a politician had to take this decision (and not engineers) is in my opinion the most shocking part. It shows that the ANS probably became complacent with the state of security of centrals. Probably similar to finanicial markets or aviation regulators. And generally when that happens it's the begining of catastrophes.
This is indeed a serious risk with regulation authorities, but in the case of the ASN it's proven pretty reliable in recent days: rthe 50 years lifetime extension was granted in exchange of a huge overhaul of the existing plants (“le grand carénage)” costing several billions, to add a lot of new safety equipment, most of them designed with the Fukushima accident in mind.
[1]: https://www.lefigaro.fr/conjoncture/2017/04/05/20002-2017040...
Fessenheim had been a thorn in the back of previous governments for years. Sometimes political move are not logical from a technical standpoint but can be seen as intermediate step in a larger plan. I don't blame him for that.
Astrid though seems to be the real mistake. The new CEA boss at the time said that[0] we don't need that kind of reactor because uranium is cheap as nobody wants nuclear anymore since Fukushima. This is such a stupid reason that I cannot believe to be the real one.
[0] https://www.lefigaro.fr/sciences/nucleaire-le-patron-du-cea-...
New timeline means 16 to 17 years between planning and operation, thus 16-17 years of CO2 and pollution before a single kWh
https://www.wabe.org/new-delay-for-georgia-nuclear-reactors-...
we are running out of time! the transition to WWS is faster and cheaper.
see: https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/WWS-...
Perhaps we can invite Slovakia or Russia to build in other countries, but there's no knowing if they could train local workforces accomplish what they have.
I would sign up today for nuclear power in 2025 if it replaced all natural gas and diesel/petrol vehicles on the roads.
> Median construction time required for nuclear reactors worldwide oscillated from around 84 months to 117 months, from 1981 to 2019 respectively.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/712841/median-constructi...
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/a-new-coal-fired-pow...
The timeline ballooning as all external parties take their time weighing in and covering their asses, and costs associated with idling construction waiting for same, are getting ridiculous.
Either it's a priority (in which case everyone should treat it as such), or it's not (in which case we should accept we just can't build non-priority projects over a certain scale).
In some cases EDF even planned building more reactors from the very beginning, for example at the nuclear power plant of Belleville-sur-Loire: everything was planned for 4 reactors, but only 2 were built. So they can build two extra right there, no need to find a new site.
The current not so small problem is that EDF needs to learn how to build nuclear reactors again. That's what they are currently doing, at great cost and great delays... But if the political will is there, they can start to break ground quite literally tomorrow.
Source: chapter 6 of “Nuclear Power: A Brief Introduction.”
We used to be able to build things quite quickly. E.g. The Bay Bridge was built in 5 years for $77 million (~$1.5 Billion today) in 1931-1936. This is not ground breaking, but law passed to bridge opening.
Just replacing the Eastern span cost $6.5 Billion and took ~18 years to build (1995-2013) from law passed to section opening.
[1] http://www.meca.org/technology/technology-details?id=5&name=...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d0MPg7DxbY
But liquid fuels are incredibly convenient, so maybe they will be worth the high price in certain applications. For example in jet engines for airplanes.
The entire transportation fleet, a good chunk of the grid and a good chunk of the infrastructure for heating things.
I don't know exactly how true this is but I believe gas usage for heating is much rarer in France than other countries. They have a lot of electrical storage heating due to the cheap off peak baseload that nuclear gives.
- pollution and waste - it's limited
At the current consumption, uranium would only last 80 years, if all the countries start to build new power plants, won't last more than 2 decades before it's depleted, and we will have the same problem again.
nuclear power is not a solution, is just a small patch.
Interesting. I had not heard this before, and Wikipedia seems to somewhat agree. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Uranium_resource...:
> As of 2011 the world's known resources of uranium, economically recoverable at the arbitrary price ceiling of US$130/kg, were enough to last for between 70 and 100 years.[60][61][62] In 2007, the OECD estimated 670 years of economically recoverable uranium in total conventional resources and phosphate ores assuming the then-current use rate.[63]
> Light water reactors make relatively inefficient use of nuclear fuel, mostly using only the very rare uranium-235 isotope.[64] Nuclear reprocessing can make this waste reusable, and newer reactors also achieve a more efficient use of the available resources than older ones.[64] With a pure fast reactor fuel cycle with a burn up of all the uranium and actinides (which presently make up the most hazardous substances in nuclear waste), there is an estimated 160,000 years worth of Uranium in total conventional resources and phosphate ore at the price of 60–100 US$/kg.[65]
Thank you for pointing this out. People blithely assume that U235 is available in unlimited supply when it is not.
My own view is that it is a useful partial interim solution that buys us some time. That is worth quite a lot.
It was expected to cost 3.3B€, but in the end will probably cost around 19B€.
Hoping for companies like NuScale, maybe they can get a continuous operation going and churn out cheaper and cheaper plants.
What has been learned at Flamanville that could be transferred elsewhere?
He is a realist, but in this field we need to go beyond and to open big money for the research into small and decentralized nuclear power.
Every citizen have to know the pros and the cons, and be educated to the risks. Energy provide good living standards, but we have to know the drawbacks and we have to account for externalities in every business model.
This will be the only way to keep our standards of living and keep an habitable home.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGt4XwBbCvA
> This will be the only way to keep our standards of living and keep an habitable home.
Jancovici uses physics and maths to prove we definitely won't have western standard of living for 8B people. Even for 2, not for long.