So, net, there is about a minute and a half of energy storage across the entire grid. (Most, about 90%, is pumped hydro, not battery). Of course, not really. Most regional areas have roughly 10-30 seconds until the gas peakers absolutely unequivocally must be turned on before brownouts occur.
Hours? Minutes? We are not talking about hours and minutes. We are talking about seconds.
Look at the price of a powerwall. That's for the energy needs of a residential home. What happens to your AWS bill if us-east-1 was to buy a powerwall? Let alone steel, chemical, paper, mineral processing industries. What would happen to our economy if capacity for every one of those was cut by 1/3rd (or more depending on local climate)? Never mind your power bill.
This is the problem that I have with these solar capacity discussions. The number on the tin misrepresents things in just such a fundamental way that these cost discussions don't make sense. The reason, of course, is because fossil fuels are the big batteries we turn on at night when solar is not working.
If you actually care about making the grid green, you must solve this problem. Either with transmission, with battery manufacturing (the cost and environment friendliness curve on that is a bit less rosy compared to solar power...), or with nuclear. There is simply no other way.
I think the idea that renewables have to be paired with large amounts of energy storage is not correct. In Ireland dispatchable power is used when wind is low. Natural gas, hydroelectric, HVDC, pumped storage. Lithium ion batteries are generally only used briefly while the gas power plant gets up to temperature because of their high cost. There are also HVDC interconnectors that allow excess wind to be exported to the UK and electricity to be imported from there when it is cheaper. They expect to be able to achieve 70-80% renewables using this system by 2030, and are currently at around 45%. From 2030 onwards the focus will be on decarbonising the remaining ~20% of electricity generation that is gas. How that will be done will depend mostly on how the technology matures in the meantime, but it will likely be replacing natural gas with hydrogen and biogas. Another option could be carbon capture. Or batteries if there is some technological breakthrough and the price of stored energy drops way below it's current 200euro/MWh price.
I also think that electricity grids are very complex and powering any large grid with 100% of any one source is impossible. As each energy source has different pros and cons, you'll generally always have a mix of different sources.
> I think the idea that renewables have to be paired with large amounts of energy storage is not correct. In Ireland dispatchable power is used when wind is low. Natural gas, hydroelectric, HVDC, pumped storage.
Natural gas is neither renewable nor emission-free when burning, albeit less than burning coal, for instance. About 117 pounds of CO2 are produced per million British thermal units (MMBtu) equivalent of natural gas compared with more than 200 pounds of CO2 per MMBtu of coal and more than 160 pounds per MMBtu of distillate fuel oil. Source: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/natural-gas-...
So while using natural gas is better than using coal, in the longer term we likely needs to reduce its usage and substitute with renewables too.
where solar is quoted at $1300/kwh and adding a battery that can store a little more than an hour of output brings that to around $1800/kwh. I see people quoting that one like it is gospel but that doesn’t seem to be enough storage. If you assume the system needs 12 hours of storage to get through the night you need 10 of those batteries and the cost is getting into the $3500/kwh range.
They quote the AP-1000 and NuScale around $6000. Solar looks cheaper now and maybe it is in the tropics but in the Northeast you are going to get a lot less power in the winter than summer so to keep the lights on all year you might need two of those solar installations (though I think the battery stays the same) and now you are getting around $5000/kwh so that gap with nuclear is getting smaller.
That estimate may be a bit pessimistic, but renewable advocates right now sound like the people who were saying nuclear would be “too cheap to meter.”
Now if you have excess capacity in the summer you could in principle use it for something but that is not trivial. If you use something half he year you basically double the capital cost. Do you hire workers to do nothing in the winter or do you lay them off? “Free” excess solar energy might be “free as in puppy” not “free as in beer.”
The nice thing about solar is it's very cheap, and as a grid provider you can just charge more for energy at night to disincentivize use when the sun is not shining. We do not actually need constant energy supply at all hours of the day and night and solar can cover a great deal of energy needs for very cheap. You can also deploy solar even on a large scale in very short time scales. Want to build nuclear? You start applying for permits today and by the time the earth has surpassed 2.0 degrees C of warming maybe you start generating electricity.
Even though I don't like natural gas for energy generation, let's say an area is currently being served by a natural gas plant. But now everyone wants electric cars and more power is needed. You can deploy a whole boatload of solar and use rate structuring to incentivize consumption in the day time (you charge your car at work). Now the gas plant spins up at night but it is only running half the time, and all day long people are using emission-free solar energy. And they aren't burning gasoline for their cars anymore. Plus if there is a power outage they can use their car as a home battery backup.
So yeah, I don't think it really makes any sense to say "we have 78 seconds of battery backup so solar is pointless". You can make a HUGE dent in people's energy-related carbon emissions if you install solar tomorrow. Or you can pay much more and install nuclear in 15 years. Maybe we should start building out nuclear now but it would absolutely not be to the exclusion of solar! Even if we built 1000 new nuclear power plants in the US we would still need lots of solar and wind energy.
I don't think they were saying solar is useless, but you underestimate how difficult it is to change peak load. Well a good start is actually smart systems within homes, for instance to avoid heating said home when nobody is present, or timing loads like car charging and dishwashers to be on that beat. That's great, but it's been proven these smart systems are very hard to roll out, no matter how much you try to say it's cheaper in the end. Well you can ignore all this and roll out significant pricing changes to coincide with peek production anyway, and quickly be met with two problems. The first are the people who say "fossils were better my energy was cheaper", good luck there. And you will also hear a large number of people say "well this is just a further tax against the poor who can't afford these systems, nice work, joe.", and honestly, they'd be right. A big thing we need if we want this energy transition to go well is a more local view, but also we could have solutions that don't depend on daylight to ease that transition.
Anyway, don't know where I was going with this but those are my two cents.
We actually need constant energy supply at all hours of the day and night if we want to have a modern industrialized economy with factories and refineries operating around the clock. It's generally not practical to shut down those facilities just because electricity prices are temporarily high. So, in practice all of those industries will migrate to areas with cheap, reliable power (even if it's not "green"). This has obvious national security concerns in that it makes us dependent on unreliable imports for critical materials.
Yes, certainly I agree. Solar is the best option, for the first 60-70% penetration. I am, like most in this thread, very optimistic about solar. We are nowhere near that level of penetration in most regions. But after that 60-70%, adding more capacity just doesn't move the needle. Once you hit 100% for the day in solar, a spare panel doesn't help your nighttime situation.
So then what. You could overbuild solar, build distribution, build battery banks. I'm not wild about that. Mining for batteries is nasty business and we need all of the Lion we can get for electric mobility. Distribution? It's alright, but you run into problems -- like, what do you do when the sun goes down on the west coast? What do you do when a line goes down? Your system is larger, more centralized, more vulnerable.
Nuclear under the current regulatory regime is clearly a nonstarter. But the capex of nuclear is almost entirely artificial. Something much closer to "too cheap to meter" could be a reality. All it takes is a cultural willingness.
By the way, nuclear having an extraordinary capex makes it even tougher to compete with solar in the mix. Because your capacity factor goes way down if you are only generating at night. This is why we build oil and gas plants -- they're cheap. What we need is for nuclear to favorably compete with oil and gas. It does not need to compete with solar.
I have so many products now that are either built from the start or have gotten a software update to do the bulk of their routine power draw overnight. I scarcely need to use AC at all where I live and my heat is from gas. I expect peak usage hours have already shifted from daytime to nighttime in my own case, probably for at least a few others in the area as well.
If you looked at installed solar generation capacity 30 years ago then the situation would have looked hopeless too. But there has since been an exponential increase, driven by increases in both rate installation, and in our capacity to manufacture and install panels.
And there is every reason to think that we at the start of similar curve with battery storage right now (batteries are currently manufactured at a relatively small scale, with no major technological barriers to scaling up). Seasonal storage is another matter, but hourly/daily is well within reach.
Multiple solar farms have already been built that store 1/2 their daily output, the economics is already compelling.
Nobody is saying we have grid sufficient storage right now, but in terms of energy storage we’re a well over 30 minutes when you look at just existing capacity (25GWh not 10Gwh) + existing EV’s and that number is growing rapidly ~50% year over year.
So, manufacturing several hours of electricity storage over the next ~15 years is a completely reasonable goal. Further that’s all that’s required, we have carbon free dams supplying 7% of total electricity demand and days worth of total grid demand in energy storage, just time shifting that covers ~16% of nighttime demand. Similarly Solar can be shifted east/west to cover more of the duck curve.
Nuclear is also quite a lot more expensive than people sometimes calculate here.
It cost about 35 billion USD (total cost during build, no maintenance, no fuel)
At current potential earning rates of eg. max 10ct/kWh (Georgia) and 1100 MW peak continuous operation it will take 36 years to make the money back.
That is without just investing that 35 billion into something else or even adding maintenance and fuel cost which makes the entire project never return a profit.
Now in general I like machines, and nuclear reactors are fantastic engineering feats. I dislike the potential for a meltdown of course no matter how 'unlikely'
> and 1100 MW peak continuous operation it will take 36 years to make the money back
That total cost is for 2 reactors, not one. Vogtle 3 just started operating and Vogtle 4 will start in a few months. If you divide your 36 years by 2, you get 18 years.
Not only that but the cost to decommission one is absurdly high and I've read in previous articles that this cost isn't even a consideration at all when building a reactor. Like it's just completely unplanned for and often paid into by the taxpayer.
But you will make the money back. This isn’t private industry. This is government. Many programs are ran at a loss, this however nets a sure profit in some time. Bonds can always be sold to take care of upfront costs.
> I dislike the potential for a meltdown of course no matter how 'unlikely'
Why? A meltdown is really not a big deal at all. If we're fine with burning coal we should be perfectly with a having a meltdown or two every few years (even if we 100% ignored climate change the degree of damage caused by either of those is not that different)
My car has 100kWh energy storage and spends most of the day plugged in. Discharging 20 kWh around the optimal storage point will not hurt the battery. If we reach 20 000 000 cars like that we have 400 000 000 kWh or 400 GWh at our disposable most of the time .
Cars alone could handle about an hour of the national grid, assuming that Energie intensive industries would not shut down temporary whenever the price of electricity is high/ predicted to be high.
With an installed solar capacity of 540 MW of PV, and a battery storage capacity of 225MW/1,140MWh (BYD ESS), the plant is designed to deliver 150 MW of dispatchable power from 5 am to 9.30 pm year-round to the national grid under a 20-year power purchase agreement with South Africa’s national power utility company, Eskom.
It's in MegaWatts not GigaWatts and delivers no power for seven and half hours every 24 hours.
That is not mimicing the stable baseload that nuclear (or a hydro electric pupmped storage dam) provides.
I'm not anti solar but a project such as your example has a long way to go to met the demands of a European country.
It's worth looking into how much of a dent it makes in South African energy demands.
> Look at the price of a powerwall. That's for the energy needs of a residential home. What happens to your AWS bill if us-east-1 was to buy a powerwall? Let alone steel, chemical, paper, mineral processing industries. What would happen to our economy if capacity for every one of those was cut by 1/3rd (or more depending on local climate)? Never mind your power bill.
Using powerwall as the price of stationary battery storage is like using the running cost of gas/petrol household generators as the cost of generating power at fossil fueled power plants. Powerwalls is not how industrial battery storage is done anywhere on the planet.
Every power generation technology needs ‘backup capacity’ and energy storage.
If your transmission line to your nuclear power station trips, you need reserve capacity elsewhere to serve the load.
Gas and coal generation all need storage to run reliably.
If you are going to be an armchair power system designer and you want to ‘gross up’ the cost of capacity and storage into the cost of renewable generation, then be consistent.
Solar is unique in that it reliably "trips" for extensive periods every day and seasonally. It is also unique in that it does not take fuel that can be stored.
Solar cannot act as the backup to a nuclear power plant. Whereas a nuclear power plant can (and does) act as the backup to solar.
I'm grossing up to make the point that after about 60-70% solar penetration, the circle cannot be squared without massive investment either in batteries or in distribution, a fact which seems to never quite fully make it into cost comparisons between nuclear and solar such as those being made in this thread.
From the article, this new reactor is "estimated to cost more than $30 Billion." (Let's call it 30) & It generates 1,114 Mega Watts.
This article [1] says solar panels cost between $0.90 and $1.50 per watt. Let's go with $1/watt to keep the math easy, though I bet it's much cheaper by now, and especially at the scale we'll be buying them at.
So for $30 billion dollars, we can have 30 billion watts of solar, which is 30,000 mega watts, or 27x the amount of power of the new nuke. Obviously solar doesn't produce at night and it's seasonal.
So let's make it more useful.
I saw elsewhere in this thread to get an actual output number from solar you have to divide by 6 to account for night and seasonality. So that means to equal the 1,114 mega watts from the nuke, we need 6,6684 mega watts of solar. call it 7mW to keep the math easy.
So we use 7 billion dollars buying 7mW of solar.
We have a tidy $23 billion dollars left over to spend on storage.
This site [2] says grid scale storage costs something like $300/kWh. (I bet it's cheaper now, and cheaper at massive scale, but we'll go with that.)
So with our $23 billion left over dollars we go and buy 76.6 million kWh of storage (which is 76,666 MWh). So even when there is no sun coming in, our storage can maintain the 1,114 mega watts of output for something around 68 hours. That sounds like overkill, so it probably makes sense to spend more of the money on solar and less on storage, but you get the idea.
Also note for the same $30 billion dollars our solar + storage setup now has no running costs, no refuelling costs, no downtime due to refuelling and maintenance and no radioactive waste disposal problem.
Also note the $30 billion nuke plant is a single point of failure, and needs big lossy power transmission lines coming in/out to go useful places. I would be interested to see the numbers on how much of that 1,114 mW of nuke power winds up lost in transmission. The solar setup can be distributed all over, and can generate and store the power right where it's needed - on factories, houses, schools and where ever else needs power. Transmission loss of close to zero.
Nukes are awesome, but they're not even in the realm of making sense financially.
Year after year the price of solar and storage will go down again, then again, then again.
(Please point out any holes / problems in my math)
EDIT: as pointed out below the cost for grid scale storage is more like $500/kWh.
So for our $23 billion we can buy 46 million kWh of storage (46,000 mWh). So we can equal the nukes 1,114 mW output for about 41 hours. Still plenty
You are comparing to the worst case scenario of catastrophic nuclear overbudgeting. Normally nuclear plants don’t cost nearly as much.
Korea has built 5.6 GW Barakah NPP for about 25B dollars. It took less than 8 years. Russia is building its standard VVER-1200 reactors at about 10-15B for 2.4 GW
China is building its reactors at about 5B per 1.2 GW reactor.
These costs might fall further if standardized designs get deployed at larger scales, just like with solar.
Given steady and predictable generation regardless of weather and location that nuclear can provide, your numbers don’t look that impressive now, do they?
This napkin math is so hand wavy and rudimentary that it pretty much means nothing. For starters, you took near the bottom range from your source, and omitted the 25% labor fee.
Also FFS were comparing a nuclear reactor to residential solar?! In what world is it a safe assumption that those figures scale? What happens when we start running out of rare earth metals?
Let’s just step away from this poorly thought out hypothetical…ask yourself why solar is barely producing any power. Theres a massive financial incentive here. Is everyone stupid? Are you a genius that noticed something everyone else missed?
The price for storage is closer to $500/kWh for the large utility scale projects using Teslas Megapacks and falling fast [1]. I wouldn’t be surprised to see $200-300 fairly soon (within the next 5 years). Tesla is only starting to seriously ramp up production on Megapacks. I couldn’t find reliable pricing for a project usings BYD’s new MC Cube system but Las Vegas is installing half a gigawatt hour worth of those units.
[1] 413 million dollars for 800,000 kWh = $516.25/kWh installed price.
coal 82.6, combined cycle 39.9, advanced nuclear 81.7, geothermal 37.6, biomass 90.1, onshore wind 40, offshore wind (that one was a surprise, since offshore wind should be quite cheap, mainly driven by capital cost of 104 USD per MWh) 105, solar 33.8, solar hybrid 49 and hydro 64.
This caught my eye: "Prior to Vogtle Unit 3, the last nuclear reactor to start in the United States was Watts Bar Unit 2 in Tennessee. Construction on Watts Bar 2 began in 1973 but was suspended in 1985. Work resumed in 2007, and the reactor came online in 2016."
I can't even imagine how you'd get the parts, and they probably can't change the plans either. Ok so I decided to look into it a bit more, and here are some interesting details from documents on the nrc.gov and EIA.gov:
Here's some context for what was happening in 1985, from the eia:
>"As a consequence of the identification of a large number of deficiencies shortly before the WBN Unit 1 license was expected to be issued, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) sent a letter to TVA [...]. In response to this letter, TVA developed a Nuclear Performance Plan (NPP) to address corporate and site-specific issues, establishing programs to address a wide variety of material, design, and programmatic deficiencies. WBN Unit 2 construction was suspended at about that time, with major structures in place and equipment such as reactor coolant system piping installed."
And while most of the documentation was very terse and spoke more about specific regulatory requirements that I don't understand, this is pretty interesting:
(From the nrc.gov)
>"The NRC staff reviewed TVA’s refurbishment program and found the following: (1) TVA was refurbishing or replacing most active components and instruments; (2) TVA had determined the potential degradation mechanism for each category of components, along with any contributing environmental factors; (3) the acceptance criteria were developed from the licensing basis, design specifications, and vendor specifications; (4) the proposed inspections and testing included in the program could be expected to identify degradation; and (5) refurbishment activities would be in accordance with applicable vendor and design specifications or requirements."
That sounds like a massive, massive amount of work. It explains why it took longer even if the reactor was apparently 60% completed.
(From the eia) :
>"That time, a study found Unit 2 to be effectively 60% complete with $1.7 billion invested. The study said the plant could be finished in five years at an additional cost of $2.5 billion"
> I can't even imagine how you'd get the parts, and they probably can't change the plans either.
One of the bullets on the box is that the AP1000 uses a fairly standardized design, unlike many prior designs which were mostly a patchwork of one-off designs. The AP1000 still being "in production" means parts are available.
I have no idea, but I would assume most parts are custom machined to spec. If that's true, you'd just need to find machine shops capable of making the parts.
> Construction on Watts Bar 2 began in 1973 but was suspended in 1985. Work resumed in 2007, and the reactor came online in 2016.
That seems to be common with nuclear power plants. The latest one near where I live (Angra 3) has been under construction since 1984, and it should be complete in a few more years if it doesn't pause again; construction of the previous one (Angra 2), according to Wikipedia, started in 1976 and came online in 2001.
Are they building or are they "building" (as in, talking and planning and not actually building.)
India is famous for talking about nuclear. Building it, not as much. India gets 2x as much energy from PV as it does from nuclear, and the PV is growing rapidly.
Russia has 4 domestically under construction and about 17 actively under construction internationally. They are planning something like 29 more by 2050, though the jury is out on whether those will actually ever get completed.
But it is very nice that RosAtom seems to be one of the most competently run Russian Gov agencies.
Construction on WNP 3 & 5 began in 1977 in Elma, WA by Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS, AKA "Whoops!"). The plant is partially finished, and every decade or someone tries to get work started again. There is a business park at the base of the cooling tower, which reportedly held an overstock.com call center for a while. During Dieselgate, Volkswagen used the facility to house 10s of thousands of recalled vehicles. The tower is often used as a filming location, including adult films.
The A-35 (a highway in Quebec) has been under construction since 1966. When finished, it will be 34 miles/55 km long.
Two decades isn't very long for an infrastructure project, which is unfortunate since long-term planning benefits greatly from political stability, and many areas are seeing large shifts for the worse in that regard.
Makes me wonder how much effort went into mothballing partial construction and then unwinding all of that to get it going again. Seems like it would have cost a lot.
There must have been engineers who worked their entire careers on GE's "next gen" reactor or whatever they call it, and retired without seeing one built.
It seems like up-front monetary 'cost' is continually used to bash nuclear. And 100% from the perspective of human beings.
To put it into context, nuclear
* total human deaths due to nuclear since its inception is in the low thousands at worst, for the entire industry.
* total animal deaths due to nuclear since its inception is minimal, in fact, for example, wildlife around Chernobyl has flourished
* damage to the environment is minimal
* waste is tiny by volume, zero CO2, and can be buried deeply where no human will ever get to it.
Versus fossil fuels:
* has killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions of humans
* has killed millions if not hundreds of millions of animals through climate change, oil spillage, fires and so on
* has destroyed thousands of square miles of land for open cast mining, oil slicks, and so on
* waste dumps thousands of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every day plus other byproducts
So, what's the actual monetary cost of the usage of fossil fuels? How much money needs to be spent to mitigate climate change? Or figuring out how to de-extinct species? Or restoring habitats after cleaning up oil slicks? Or attempting to the put the land 'right' after open cast mining?
How much money are we going to spend on figuring out 'energy storage' for green power, when nuclear power is already stored in the uranium, in a tiny volume?
In fact how much money could we have saved by going long on nuclear in the 60s and 70s, had it not been for ill-educated, and ill-informed campaigns by CND and Greenpeace, for example? And how much better would the environment be right now?
>It seems like up-front monetary 'cost' is continually used to bash nuclear.
We certainly still need to get a handle on the cost of deploying nuclear because it is not sustainable the way we do it today
In 2022 Georgia Power got 23% of its power from nuclear, 1.9 gigawatts of capacity.
Since construction started, Georgia Power customers have been paying the construction costs (about 6%) and now that construction is complete the rest of the costs are now being added to customer bills. These are surcharges in addition to the actual cost of fuel and operations at the plant, so they're going to be paying per kWh as well.
At the same time Southern Company (parent of Georgia Power) shareholders are now receiving profits from the operations of Vogtle 3 while capital costs are recovered--IE they are not paying for the asset that they will own
This 10% increase in customer bills will result in the nuclear percentage as pat of GPC's mix increasing just a few percent. It would still be lower than either Gas/Oil or Coal as of 2022's numbers (in 2023 I believe it will be higher than coal, but that is because GPC is replacing coal with gas at a rapid rate)
If you replaced all fossil fuels with nuclear at the same cost structure, power bills in Georgia would increase many fold
I'm completely on board with nuclear, but we have to absolutely and totally rethink the designs we build, how we manage the projects, who owns them (private vs. public) and more
It isn't about "nuclear vs. fossil fuels" but about "nuclear and/or renewables?".
The amount of damage/victims linked to nuclear is a matter of debate, and a final count will only be possible after its very last hot waste will be cold.
The actuarial account for fossil fuels is important, but I've come across this set of summary items many times and it ignores the positive effects of CO2, which have been substantial. This is a great benefit for many ecosystems and also improves crop yields, to your monetary cost point.
The overall phenomenon is well documented, so I'll give just one highly credible account: "The greening [over the last 35 years] represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States… Results showed that carbon dioxide fertilization explains 70 percent of the greening effect" - NASA Apr 2016, https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2436/co2-is-making-earth-green...
I'm not wanting to rehash the climate debate, nor am I implying how much it offsets negatives and would grant all of your points otherwise. I do think it's wise to do whatever we can to move towards cleaner carbon burning to remove toxic and particulate emissions, and limiting CO2 emissions as well, but also within fair economic tradeoffs. I also support developing nuclear, fission and fusion.
the fact that oil spills sometimes happen doesn't seem to be any better of an argument than the one that nuclear meltdowns sometimes happen.
Nuclear fanboys need to accept the fact that so long as nuclear always costs multiples more than literally anything else, these things won't get built, no matter how carbon-clean and healthy they are.
Problem is that we don't build the damn things anymore, so each one is bespoke and expensive. Ideally we'd keep building them and develop the expertise and make it a more repeatable scalable process.
I worry instead that the lesson taken from this will be "nuclear is too expensive and ineffective".
MIT found that reusing a design made plants more expensive to build, not less, because of costly on-site last minute design changes.
Taking your point more charitably, it is indeed the lack of a sustainable nuclear energy industry that routinely builds plants that causes costs to skyrocket. There is a chicken and egg situation: nuclear projects don’t get funded because they’re too expensive, so there is no chance to develop expertise in how to build them cheaply, which causes the few that get greenlit to be built by rookie teams that make rookie mistakes that cause costs to skyrocket.
I heard or read somewhere that in China they had the same issue - like in every mega project, there are deadlines and ... well it doesn't really fare well. So the issue is real.
I sometimes imagine how cool it would be if some of the worlds biggest billionaires got together and just did some crazy mega project and didn't care about profits.
This nuclear plant cost ~$34 billion USD. What if Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, and a few others just got together and built 10 or so nuclear power plants? I wonder if that could actually bring down the price to build them.
Both Ukraine and the Red Sea collapsing has produced ads for uranium mining in Saskatchewan, Canada. These kinds of ads don't run without government support; since public opinion is often extremely uninformed, I expect the pivot to nuclear to happen with or without pundits vocalizing their views.
Somehow all the articles criticizing Vogtle keep mentioning the cost overruns, the additional cost to consumers, but don't mention that in Georgia people pay less than the national average price per kWh (11 cents vs 12.7) while sunny California, for example pays about twice the average (24.3 cents per kWh). In my state, NY, where 2 reactors were decommissioned in 2020 and 2021, the average price is 22 cents per kWh.
This is the case for all public works projects. The red-tape overhead is crazy. Regulation is necessary but the bureaucratic maze that has to be negotiated is a huge problem. I worked on a public rail system and the down-time waiting for permission on everything was draining.
That's the failed project OP blithely elided over as:
- "Two other Westinghouse AP1000 reactors were planned for a nuclear power plant in South Carolina, but construction was halted in 2017."
I'm really, really strongly in favor of nuclear fission power; but the American attempts this decade, and this company in particular, have been a grotesque failure. We really seem to have forgotten how to build things.
This is always the case when you build large one-off projects.
If you continue to build reactors non-stop you'll learn how to make the process more efficient and be able to make better estimates.
Surely we software developers should appreciate how hard making accurate estimates is? And this isn't a 2 week sprint we're talking about, but a gigantic engineering project.
These were not one-off reactors, it's just that the first ones went so poorly that everything else was cancelled. There were four that were started at roughly the same time. There were many other sites getting order ready.
Westinghouse used a new regulatory process that had been created specifically at the request of industry to speed the design and build of AP1000s. Despite this, Westinghouse did not deliver constructible designs, and the contractor soldiered on with on site modifications. Westinghouse screwed up so bad that they nearly bankrupted Toshiba, their owner.
So we have two failed holes in the ground at Summer in South Carolina, something like a $10B monument to corruption, with utility execs going to jail for their fraudulent reports.
All the other sites that were eyeing AP1000s to replace aging reactors have now backed out. The disaster was too big. What exec wants to go to jail for a nuclear reactor? What exec wants to lose their job for greenlighting what has a not-insignificant chance of bankrupting the entire utility.
Nuclear is too risky, but public perception is off, it's not running reactors that have the risk, it's the financial risk to anybody who wants to build one.
The difference is that there are many cheaper viable alternatives to the firm power that nuclear provides, including renewables+batteries ($60/MWh and dropping) and enhanced geothermal ($80/MWh and dropping). Heck, even natural gas combined-cycle + carbon capture/storage is cheaper on an LCOE basis (~$60/MWh) than nuclear ($180/MWh and rising) [1]. It would be great if nuclear could be cost competitive for equivalently firm power, but its costs are increasing, not decreasing.
In contrast, the only real alternative to air travel for high speed transportation between Northern and Southern CA is high speed rail. The "Hyperloop" has been exposed (charitably) as a failure, and personal vehicle travel (even electrified) is not an equivalent to HSR in a state as big as CA.
None of that is to say that the CA HSR project has been well planned/executed or that the costs have been well estimated. But that doesn't obviate the need for high speed ground transport in the state.
I have a very strong impression that the perpetual money pits of California (rail, the amount spent on homelessness without progress, etc.) aren’t bugs but features… for someone. That money is going into someone’s pocket.
If I was a betting man, I would put money down that Vogtle 4 is the last nuclear reactor that gets built in the US. Solar and batteries are just too cheap for nuclear to compete. The world will be installing a terawatt of solar capacity per year soon.
*excluding research or military reactors of course.
One kilogram of uranium-235 (50 cm^3) can theoretically produce about 20 terajoules of energy. One square kilometer of solar panels can theoretically produce the same amount (as 50cm^3 U235) in a day. I'll take this bet.
Edit: Tried to edit the edit but somehow deleted the rest of the edit. It was something to the tune of how a big problem with renewables is the fact that peak solar production does not match peak energy consumption, and storage is very difficult, so realistically we'll need a wide variety of energy options to fully transition to renewables. Nuclear is reliable and to some degree adjustable, helping to alleviate the storage issue. Basically, it's my opinion that nuclear works well with other renewable sources, and a full renewable transition will certainly involve more of it.
> One kilogram of uranium-235 (50 cm^3) can theoretically produce about 20 terajoules of energy. One square kilometer of solar panels can theoretically produce the same amount (as 50cm^3 U235) in a day.
Does the US have more 50cm^3 sized blocks of U235, or more square kilometers of land with low land values and high annual insolation?
There's an estimated 6 million tonnes of mineable uranium reserves in the world [0]. Of which 0.72% is U-235, so we have a worldwide reserve of 43200 tonnes, or 43.2 million Kg U-235.
Arizona is about 300k square kilometers. If we covered an area 10% the size of Arizona in solar panels, then they would have produced more energy than all the world's known U-235 in just four years. And would continue producing after those four years are up.
> One kilogram of uranium-235 (50 cm^3) can theoretically produce about 20 terajoules of energy.
That's missing the huge and expensive nuclear power plant around that kilogram of uranium.
If you don't account for the conversion device (for which solar is cheaper per GJ than nuclear power plants), then light is a much better medium: assuming 15% efficiency, which is a conservative estimate, solar panels can convert one kilogram of solar light (remember e=mc^2) into 13.5 terajoules of electricity.
Not unreasonable, but I would point out two options (not the only):
1) "Water batteries" - highly efficient (far more than the 'chemical' you are apparently referring to) & responsive
2) Methods for using 'renewables' to produce &/ support production of chemical fuels - with the added draw / potential goal of 'closing' the 'carbon cycle'
As to #2, one of the ideals that has been kicked around for decades is to do something like: use 'renewables' to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere and convert it into something like butanol, for example.
Now, last I was up-to-date on any of this sort of work (~10+ years ago), the economics were not favorable. Certain types of commodity chemical production with 'biological basis' (another type of renewable, typically) had much more favorable properties economically. And, indeed, you do see, for example, (thermo)plastic products made from chemicals like "PLA" increasingly. But, the "biofuels" concept is / was much more challenging, especially as "fracking" technology made great leaps etc.
Nuclear has its pros and cons - blanket disavowal is fatuous. Nevertheless, there are substantially more options, systems, technologies, etc. in development and production than are often discussed in too many of the pro-nuke(s) / no nuke(s) 'sniping' chains that have been prevalent in society & on the internet since I was a wee tyke myself.
The US doesn't lack space. But investors like a quick return on investment; meanwhile nuclear reactors only make sense if you bet on high electricity prices for the next ~70 years. The time a nuclear plant spends on construction and decommissioning is about the same as the total lifetime of a solar installation.
Perhaps I fail to understand, but doesn't this comparison depend on a number of parameters such as the total reactor fuel load and enrichment, the burn rate, the cost of nuclear fuel, the cost of solar PV, the lifetimes of each system, and the relative process efficiencies (notably the cost of decommissioning nuclear)?
Otherwise you might as well say a teaspoon (or whatever) of water has as much potential fusion energy as 1 Kg U235 at a fraction of the price. ;-)
One interesting point that I think is often missed, is that solar and wind produce energy roughly at an anticadence to each other and so storage is of significantly less of a requirement than one might imagine.
But remember that a square kilometer of solar panels needs maybe ten square kilometers of actual land. Anywhere other than at the equator, the panels need to be spaced far enough apart not to shadow each other. On a north-facing slop they would be even more spaced out. Do that in two dimensions, so they can track the sun, and keeping one square meter of panels perpendicular to the sun requires a suprisingly large footprint.
And trees. Clearcutting forests to make room for a solar panels just seems wrong, a Captain Planet style of evil. There are all sorts of places where the terrain just isnt suited.
Nuclear is the way forward. It’s a damn shame hippies stopped us from leveraging it. We literally wouldn’t have climate change if we kept increasing nuclear power plants in the 70s. It’s just a no brainer. Solar and wind are great but the amount of power they generate may as well be 0 compared to nuclear.
The uranium can produce power when it's dark outside, unlike the solar panels. I wouldn't bet against clean energy that can produce on demand. We'll always need it from somewhere.
You're comparing a one-time-use resource in U235 vs. the land required for a solar plant, which will last indefinitely for all intents and purposes. Adding the "in a day" constraint is quite misleading in your comment when that is not the long-term limiting factor.
Let's not forget that the externalities of nuclear power are generally much more costly than solar / wind.
Have you seen the Lazard lcoe numbers? Nukes are 6x more expensive than wind solar.
And wind and especially solar have more economies of scale and materials research to make them even cheaper.
This comes from a LFTR fanboy. Boy howdy do I wish economical nuclear existed. But 6x as expensive? That ain't all red tape.
I think of course that LFTR has a path to cheaper nuclear with breeding and near waste elimination, full fuel use, safety, and scalability. But I don't think it will ever beat solar, especially once mature multifunction silicon perovskite cells or something like that and salt water batteries develop.
I hope to be proven wrong.nyclest power is so cool.
Can we not overbuild solar and wind such that the troughs are nearly good enough, combined with high voltage cross-regional transmission lines, and limited storage for buffer? Solar panels are absurdly cheap, and the world has a lot of equatorial desert.
A little bit silly to compare the price of solar and batteries, which has been driven down due to extensive government subsidy, tax incentives, and massive economies of scale over the past few decades (including production in China), to the current estimated cost of nuclear plants that we have almost no experience building anymore.
If we embarked on a sustained plan to invest in nuclear the way we have in solar and wind, nuclear's all-in cost would be far cheaper. I guarantee it.
And I “guarantee” the opposite. Nuclear is fundamentally massive complicated technology that just wouldn’t benefit from cost reductions due to manufacturing scale in the same degree. Solar is so so simple in comparison, that’s why it’s gotten so cheap and will continue to get cheaper.
Maybe after 10 years of massively scaled nuke production we get costs down 2-4x . That would be nice but solar is down 30x and still dropping.
No. The US has subsidized the hell out of nuclear historically [1] and also in recent years [2]. Without subsidies, commercial nuclear development would never have happened in the first place and we would be shutting down plants faster than we already are because of economics. This also excludes all the VC money that has flowed into nuclear startups.
You are probably right, but only in the short term. Long term, there will be the political will for projects that require 10-100x our current power production, and nuclear will look attractive again. Alternatively, the renewables curve may flatten before we are fully decarbonized simply because the maintenance and materials don't scale well. Nuclear is expensive up front, but maintenance requires far fewer (albeit more specialized) personnel and way less material per kwh.
When people want 10-100x our current power production, they will build 10-100x solar and wind, because they are massively cheaper. Nukes have only ever got more expensive.
Moreso, solar and wind are too predictable. How Big Things Get Done ranks them up with road construction as top projects that barely go over budget. If you expect to spend $100 million on solar or wind, then it’s probably going to cost <$110 million. Meanwhile other projects could go 2, 3, 7x over budget, time or money or both.
Someone who builds a solar array will be able to go directly to build another, not have to lick their wounds and repair their reputation or business.
Nuclear does not seem to be on the mass production curve that solar and batteries are.
Even if you could design a reactor that itself can be mass produced at that scale, you still need to do the same with selecting and getting environmental and public safety approval for installation sites and production, transportation, and disposal of the fuel and waste.
I'm not against nuclear from a technological perspective, but I just don't see it being economically competitive with effectively printable devices like solar and batteries given the current direction of the cost curves on each.
For that to happen in the US, (1) we need to focus on more numerous, smaller modular reactors, (2) the NRC needs certification timeliness requirements forced on it (and more funding if there's an actual lack of resources), and (3) specific project requirements need to be frozen before construction (no more up-requiring mid-construction).
Modular reactors are the solution to not having enough capital or a long enough timeframe to launch and fund megaprojects at a pace that creates economies of scale anymore, which is exactly the US problem.
I love the improvement implied by "continue to improve" in the face of all evidence that shows fission is a uniquely impractical source of energy that has done nothing but get more and more expensive.
Nuclear is costly _now_*. It wasn't getting built, for years. There is so much energy to be had from that, and cost learning curves can come down. France's ("small") modular reactors, SMR, they even aim to sell internationally, in their 2030 plan, are a model. To China no less.
China also builds nuclear reactors, and we can't fall behind them. I cannot abide an SMR gap.
Nuclear power seems like a good option for non-military boats too, like container ships and oil tankers. It's already a very well proven maritime technology.
That was tried, nuclear reactors on civilian ships, and found to be a stupid idea. Too expensive and no real benefit over ship engines. By the way, tha vast majority of military ships and boats are not nuclear powered.
I think you are wrong for the reason parent stated. Safety and regulations for nuclear are just too high to be competitive with modular solar that can scale and has no nuclear waste issue that is still unsolved.
Perhaps, but so far in the US we still don't have any really large battery storage facilities connected to the grid. These will be necessary if want to have reliable base load capacity without building more nuclear or fossil fuel power plants. The largest battery storage facility being built right now only has 2165 MWh of capacity, which is a drop in the bucket relative to demand.
Battery prices keep falling, but the supply chain is still constrained and there are huge expenses involved in building storage facilities that go beyond the cost of the cells. Other storage systems such as pumped hydroelectric or electrolyzed hydrogen may play a role but aren't cheap either.
There's little reason to build massive batteries at one spot, unless you are repurposing an only transmission line.
Instead, a good chunk of grid storage is getting deployed right at the generation site of solar (and some wind), which allows more efficient use of that transmission line.
Instead, we should be looking for large amounts of total install. However, this still won't happen much until it's actually needed by the grid, which starts to happen at much higher amounts of renewable generation than most states are using.
The tech is there, it's being deployed at massive scale where needed, and it's dropping in cost as fast or faster than predicted.
Another big advantage of solar, and wind to some extent, is that is distributed. It provides resilience to the network. Nuclear produces a lot of power, sure, but it's one big fat single point of failure.
The grid is not a network. It's a large single frequency balanced power distribution machine. It is, in and of itself, _the_ single point of failure, and there are significant tradeoffs in having lots of small capacity generators vs. small amounts of large capacity generators connected to it.
There's this cry for absolutism in this thread that's just absurd, on both sides. You want a wide multiplicity of power generation plant sizes and technologies, for what should be, at this point in history, solidly obvious reasons.
So, you want lots of Nuclear _and_ Solar. Seeing the two as competing shows just how monopolized our energy markets truly are.
If you complete that thought to include both space and time, solar is present only during daylight whereas nuclear is distributed evenly right around the clock.
It's less either|or, more swings|roundabouts.
A pure solar solution requires (on the order of) 2x excess daylight production and 10 hours of offset storage to buffer against the night (and compensate for energy transfer (daylight power -> storage -> night time power) losses).
Solar is great, sure, but there's a long way to go to replace the energy production of fossil fuels, that comes with a lot of reqource mining and waste.
Somewhere in the middle is an optimal solution with much solar and wind, a little bit of nuclear OR gas fired OR <somethig steady> and a whole lot of varied storage (battery + gravity + thermal + green gases).
The 1TW prediction was for the whole world. I’d expect the US to settle somewhere in the high 10s to low 100s by 2030. The US added 23GW in 2023, and is expected to add 37GW in 2024.
Batteries haven't gotten cheap; unless we get some crazy breakthrough total wind and solar power production will probably peak within the next 20 years.
It seems to me that having a couple of nuclear reactors as base load spread throughout the country would be more useful than having a massive spread out battery & solar infrastructure.
I mean as an example many companies, especially PG&E can't maintain adequate powerlines, who is banking on the fact that they'll do an even better job when we quintuple the amount of infrastructure and they have to develop a whole new domain of expertise based in battery technology.
Not to mention even the supposedly clean, solar and batteries, still have an enormous amount of carbon emissions involved in their supply chain, and need to be replaced on a fairly regular basis.
Grid level solar has batteries installed on site. The site acts as a power generator that sells energy to PG&E, they don’t manage it themselves.
If anything a solar field requires much less operation expertise and staff to manage than a nuclear power plant. And when it goes bad, it might leech some acid and heavy metals into the soil over years, not leave a 10k year radioactive exclusion zone.
Would you prefer PG&E defer critical maintenance on a field of solar panels or a nuclear plant?
That question dovetails into nuclear's biggest hurdle; the risk for catastrophe is high, both in reality and especially politically, so regulation is high, and thus the cost to build, operate, and decommission is immense.
Nuclear is extremely dependent on long distance power transmission. Nobody wants a reactor in the middle of a city, and 1-5 GW of power needs to be sent long distances before it’s used.
Solar on the other hand scales down to 50MW instillations just fine so you can put it near substations etc. Huge solar parks make sense in locations with lots of sunlight and cheap land, but they aren’t the only option just a trade off in terms of transmission costs vs generation costs.
Chinese nuclear is not competing very well. There's a minuscule amount of it planned, only like 50GW over the coming decades. This is not even a drop in the bucket compared to what China are doing with batteries, wind, and solar.
I don't know how many times this needs to be said: solar and wind and batteries can't provide consistent enough power, either for current or the growing energy needs, of the US or the world. Alternative power sources are required to maintain energy sufficiency into the future. Period. Ask any company that builds green energy if you don't believe me.
What's more ridiculous than this oversight is the idea that the cost of wind, solar, or batteries is somehow never going to go up. News flash: all advanced industrial processes that depend on a global supply chain are subject to price fluctuations.
>I don't know how many times this needs to be said
Zero. Few people are unaware that the sun doesnt shine at night. It never needed repeating.
What theyre less educated about is that pumped storage, hydrogen, batteries, solar/wind anticorrelation and demand shaping are, together, more than capable of accomodating renewable intermittency.
What's most ridiculous is that even the most expensive form of viable power storage (hydrogen) is still cheaper when paired with solar or wind than nuclear power is alone. This isnt to say that we should go all in on hydrogen/solar, just that nuclear power's cost is unconscionably high.
Indeed, if it werent for the nuclear military's reliance on civilian supply chains and skills it would never get built and the 'environmentalist nuclear' PR offensive of the last ~8 years that resonated with so many people wouldnt have happened.
> If I was a betting man, I would put money down that Vogtle 4 is the last nuclear reactor that gets built in the US. Solar and batteries are just too cheap for nuclear to compete.
On the contrary, solar and wind are _waaaaaay_ too expensive if you actually want your generation to be reliable. Just ask Texas.
“The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.
I was a nuclear engineer for eight years and I left the industry because I felt like I was taking crazy pills. Every time someone says "nuclear is the only practical solution for climate change, it's not possible to build solar or wind fast enough or cheaply enough", you can point them to this press release. All the nuclear supporters I know deal heavily in magical thinking, completely ignoring the factual reality of the industry.
I hear a lot of magical thinking about wind and solar too, with some magical pixie dust solving the intermittence problem but nothing practical being built at scale.
From the linked article, we get how much power it generates 1,114 MW (or 1.114 Gigawatts), how long it took to build that reactor (started in 2009, so 14 years), and how much it cost (planned $14 billion, final $30 billion):
> The new 1,114 megawatt (MW) Unit 3 reactor
> Construction at the two new reactor sites began in 2009. Originally expected to cost $14 billion and begin commercial operation in 2016 (Vogtle 3) and 2017 (Vogtle 4), the project ran into significant construction delays and cost overruns. The total cost of the project is now estimated at more than $30 billion.
Meanwhile:
"Utility-scale solar capacity in the U.S. electric power sector increased from 61 gigawatts (GW) in 2021 to 71 GW in 2022, according to data from our Electricity Power Monthly. Wind capacity grew from 133 GW in 2021 to 141 GW in 2022."[1]
So solar increased 10 Gigawatts last year and wind grew 8 Gigawatts. About 18x that one nuclear reactor we've managed to complete since 2016. In a single year.
Also wind and solar is cheaper than the cost of nuclear energy now:
"Nuclear energy is generally more expensive than wind and solar energy. The IEA report estimates the cost of electricity from new nuclear plants to be between $60 and $70 per MWh (megawatt-hour), while the cost of electricity from onshore wind and solar PV is estimated to be between $30 and $60 per MWh."[2]
So wind and solar is faster and cheaper. The only main benefit is a nuclear plant can still keep generating power in inclement weather (which is still important, but doesn't make it cheaper or faster than wind and solar).
I mean, we know we can build nuclear plants quickly because we've done it before. It is physically possible. China and Korea can still do it today.
If you just mean the bureaucracy is impossible to defeat, it would just take political will. Which we are seeing more and more of recently. The first of a kind build is always slow.
Seems to me the people saying solar and battery only future do not live in areas that can be cloudy for multiple weeks.
I didn’t run the math but I’m guessing it’s not feasible to build a battery pack large enough to ride out winter in some areas. The SF Bay Area, sure, but I suspect blackouts will be common in solar+battery only areas.
A preferred solution would be a mix of both with nuclear handling disruptions due to weather.
One technology for power generation should not “win”. Employing a variety of power generation methods will give you the most stable power grid.
Batteries are not for riding out winter, they're for evening out the daily load.
You have to overbuild renewables to handle seasonal variation, as well as make long-distance interconnects. Pumped hydro is also extremely interesting for obvious reasons.
Nuclear as it exists today is not cost competitive. But that's mostly an artificial problem caused by regulation. Can we solve that without sacrificing safety? Can we even solve it at all? Bloated regulatory agencies seem to have infiltrated and poisoned every aspect of society with no relief in sight.
Maybe it's a real problem caused by the physical realities of nuclear. Calling regulation an artificial cost is like calling sewage treatment an artificial cost of water.
> Bloated regulatory agencies seem to have infiltrated and poisoned every aspect of society with no relief in sight.
It's often repeated, including by a certain political grouping, but never established IME. Unregulated markets, such as cryptocurrency, privacy, etc. seem to cause most of the problems. The FAA, etc. do well IME. They fail when undermined by a political class that benefits from fraud (the same trying to prevent the IRS from collecting legitimate taxes.)
If there's any area to not skimp on safety regulations, I'd say nuclear is it. I think the alleged blight of "overregulation" has become a conservative mantra but without much basis in fact.
Or maybe I'm wrong. You seem to know a lot about nuclear regulation. Can you tell us a specific, unnecessary burdensome regulatory rule that you feel is holding back progress?
Pumped hydro used to exist here in Sweden during the 1970s. They were phased out because they are not cost competitive. They built nuclear power plants instead because those were cost competitive at that time.
It would be funny if the cost has switched between pumped hydro and nuclear, but I suspect they haven't. What really pushed out both were cheap natural gas and oil. Even now, new gas powered plants are being planned to be built within the next 5 years. I don't see a solutions to this without new regulation putting a clamp on the fossil fuels.
The one hope I have for pumped hydro is that our current hydropower fleet are outdated and far outside of minimum environmental standards. Combined they have managed to drive species to the brink of extinction, basically being large meat grinders for migrating fish. The solution of catching the offspring and fly them to Sweden to be implanted back into lakes is a terrible solution that have little to no scientific support. With the required investments into modernization, reverse hydro might not be too expensive to include, assuming again that the economics of the concept start to make sense.
> Nuclear as it exists today is not cost competitive.
At the risk of stating the obvious, this notion entirely depends upon your definition of costs, and the definition of what is competitive. It's vastly more costly to society to have unreliable power (e.g., blackouts, brownouts, or weeks on end of lowered usage restrictions) than it is to have slightly more expensive electricity.
There is no rich country in the world with expensive energy.
You can't solve the variability of wind by overbuilding. Output can go down to <5% for more than a week several times a year. So the only way is storage. On a massive scale. Or having another source that makes sense to modulate. LNG is one (though carbon based).
One benefit of building excess capacity of renewables - free electricity to power your automobile. If we actually priced excess energy smartly people would charge their cars in the daytime and spend ~ 0 to drive most of the year.
It's not that the agencies regulating nuclear are bloated but that they're given a mandate that nuclear must be as safe as possible rather than being held to some finite standard of safety.
> Nuclear as it exists today is not cost competitive. But that's mostly an artificial problem caused by regulation.
Is it regulation or a lack of scale? The US has launched 2 reactors in the last 2.5 decades. I'm guessing there was a lot of stuff - materials, processes, documentation, etc - developed from scratch specifically for those plants. It might get cheaper if we can start re-using that stuff.
> Seems to me the people saying solar and battery only future do not live in areas that can be cloudy for multiple weeks.
Or we've researched it and understand the basics of solar technology.
In sunny California solar has a capacity factor of around 25%. In Germany, which is prone to many cloudy days this drops to around 10%. So yes cloudy days have an impact but do not entirely eliminate solar from contention and certainly don't require enough battery capacity to last all winter.
In terms of capital costs solar is around $1 per watt while nuclear is around $10. Combined cycle gas plants are roughly the same as solar. It takes a bit more than a year to build a solar farm, while a new nuclear plant you're looking at a decade. ROI on solar is on the scale of 1 to 2 years. Nuclear will be shockingly lucky to have even started construction in that period.
When we look at the levelized, unsubsidized cost of energy (https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april...) we get a range of $24 to $96 per MWh for utility scale solar, while nuclear is $141 to $221 and combined cycle gas plants at $39 to $101.
And the trend lines strongly favor solar + storage.
Is it any wonder investors are reluctant to fund nuclear projects? For the same amount financed I can build 10x the capacity, have half the marginal cost of production, and see nothing but upside in 2 years.
Places like Singapore that lack land suitable for utility scale solar will need to look to other solutions including nuclear. For the rest of us the decision is not difficult.
Seems to me you are unaware of basic facts of the matter while you make naive criticisms of solar investment due to a personal affinity for nuclear technology.
You both raise good points. Yes solar is getting cheaper but economical and environmentally friendly long term storage (order of several days or even a month worth of energy for a hundred million people) is far from a solved problem.
> In sunny California solar has as capacity factor of around 25%. In Germany, which is prone to many cloudy days this drops to around 10%. So yes cloudy days have an impact but do not entirely eliminate solar from contention and certainly don't require enough battery capacity to last all winter.
In Croatia yearly capacity factor is around 15%, but the problem is it varies wildly throughout the year. In summer we get up to 300 hours of sunlight per month, in winter less than 50. So yes, on paper the capacity might be enough, but one needs to have the ability to store the massive amount of energy inter-seasonally.
This is a good quality post except for the dig in the last paragraph.
I would, however, be curious if you can run the numbers for the UK or Germany. How much solar and battery would you need to be able to have no brownouts during winter?
Trying some very rough numbers myself:
Currently Germany seems to use around 3.3 trillion kwh[1] of energy per year. Likely around 300 billion kwh for December.
Having a look, the solar irradiance in the sunnier parts of Germany in December seems to be around 20-30 kwh/m^2.[2]
Cheap PV solar is generally around 30% efficient and 1.5m^2 costs around £91 retail[3].
So the order of magnitude solar cost needed for Germany in December to not need more than a week's storage is probably around €2 trillion. Amortised over 20 years that's €200 billion per year...
This doesnt take into account many things like installation and maintenance and the reduced prices from not buying retail, but it still seems pretty doable, though noticeably higher than current spend of around €100 billion/year. (Which is also roughly what you'd get with French style nuclear)
Cost of solar in isolation is meaningless. You need to factor in the cost of dealing with its intermittency, i.e. no power at night, variable power during daylight.
You don't need to 'ride out winter'; there's a sweet spot around 100-hour storage where you can unlock a huge amount of grid resiliency and decarbonization (you can keep as many dispatchable gas plants sitting nearly-always-idle to address risk of any freak long-tail events.)
Nuclear power plants are currently too expensive to not be used at 100% all the time (except when you need to perform maintenance). Some nuclear power plants are designed to be able to load follow, but in practice they don't do it.
Batteries will never be cheap enough to allow for seasonal storage. They are good for day-to-night storage. For seasonal fluctuations, the best you can do is natural gas. If we convert all our energy to solar, wind, hydro, and natural gas for peaker plants, we'd be comfortably net negative. In fact, right now in the US the CO2 absorption by forests is equal to all the emissions produced by the natural gas power plants (which are mostly used full time, not in peaker mode). Of course, the US produces a lot of emissions from transportation and industry. But they can be electrified in time, and the coal power plants can be eliminated, and the natural gas plants kept as peaker plants only.
The path to net zero, or net negative, does not strictly speaking need nuclear energy.
I personally am a huge fan of nuclear, but I acknowledge that it is not really needed to fight climate change.
> Nuclear power plants are currently too expensive to not be used at 100% all the time (except when you need to perform maintenance).
France has been load following with their nuclear plants for decades. They have to as they have so much of it. The reactors in Germany also did/do the same.
The reactors in Finland also started to do that too during this summer as we are having more and more wind (and a new 1600MW nuclear reactor) and a huge chunk is sold on the spot market (so if nobody bought your nuclear power you are not allowed to send it to the grid). Basically leaving ramping down your production as the only choice.
i agree with almost everything in your cogent and well-informed comment, with only two exceptions:
- forests can only increase in biomass up to some relatively low limit; you may be correct that in the usa they currently absorb more than gas plants emit, but that is not a sustainable situation, unless you start cutting them down and sequestering the carbon
- you can get pretty far covering seasonal fluctuations with simple overprovisioning
also i think you're not taking into account the likely advent of mass production of synfuel
The good news is that it’s very possible to “run the math,” and people run power generation capacity expansion models and production cost/dispatch models to look at these things. And then 15-25 years of solar irradiance and other weather data, at hourly resolution or shorter intervals, is available for most of the world.
Maybe the general public extrapolates from their own experience, but grid planners and researchers do much more than that.
Dunkelflaute (dark and calm) is indeed a real problem for a renewable-only future. If you want to maintain current reliability statistics with solar/wind only, you need to overbuild both storage and generation to such an extreme level that it might not be cost competitive in the end. You'll end up building your entire grid for the 100 year dunkelflaute event even though 90%+ of it will be idle most of the time, or you'll keep a bunch of gas plants idling to pick up the load in that case.
Really we need to crack better storage. Improvements in hydrogen electrolysis or direct air to fuel could do it, but there are non-trivial technology hurdles there as well.
I'm holding out hope for deep sea geothermal ala Peter Watts' Behemoth. Perhaps we can exploit the temperature difference between geothermal vents and the surrounding water to get stable and green base-load power.
It doesn't make any sense to use nuclear as a standby source of power. Nuclear costs pretty much the same whether you use it or not, so it doesn't make any sense to build it and leave it off.
So if you build a nuclear power plant, save yourself the cost of whatever else you wanted to use as a primary source.
I think I never, ever heard or read anyone saying this, and I think I follow/participate in the debates, before it was cool and everywhere.
Renewable people rather sound like this:
"Employing a variety of power generation methods will give you the most stable power grid."
Where of course quite many "green" people don't want nuclear at all in the mix. Rather more of long distance energy transport (HVDC). And otherwise any option that works and does not pollute, or pollutes less.
(And personally I am not antinuclear as long as the alternative are fossil fuels, so they should be used as a transition technology and long term rather reserved for other application, like powering things in space and remote important sites)
I'd love to know what you're reading and who you're talking to. I regularly and often speak to and read comments by people who insist on a solar+battery only future. I'd like to be a part of the communities you're describing.
There should be a "roof-tile" mandated on every single structure built which captures weather information for every single structure. And that structure should be able to be read by any device which states in a standard format the sunlight avg per N, rainfall avg per N and temp. (air quality adds cost, but should also be there (staring at Purple's horrific pricing)
Edit to add: "Whether Information"
Big Brother: "was @dang there?"
Smart-Tile (as played by Marissa Tomai: "Look, my coverage is limited. I can tell you weather... weather... but I can't whether this or whether that. you'll have ta pay"
Nuclear is already about 20% of US electricity generation. I don't think many people are suggesting taking that offline. When people are talking about being all solar, wind and storage they are talking about _new_ generation. So the eventual solution would still be a mix of all of those.
Dunkelflauten can be dealt with by burning an e-fuel like hydrogen.
A simple combustion turbine power plant is maybe 1/20th the cost per W of Vogtle 3/4. So one could completely back up the grid with hydrogen burning turbines at a small fraction of the capital cost of powering that grid with nukes.
Using nuclear to handle rare disruptions is ridiculous, as the cost per kWh would be astronomical, far higher than the cost per kWh from nukes used for baseload.
Yeah and solar and wind are perfect for baseline load but you need something that can react to demand changes like how NG or Coal production can by simply burning more / less fuel.
There are clever ways to store / "shed" excess capacity for the inverse but it'd still be better to be able to adjust capacity in real time.
I think solar+battery usually also involves overbuilding the solar capacity by a lot and running some HVDC lines. A mix with nuclear and wind seems smart to me, but I wouldn't be shocked if some cloudy places successfully manage solar+batteries in combination with HVDC and/or having some easily-curtailed industries in the area.
Solar+battery isn't sufficient in all places indeed. But those places are usually great for wind. With solar+battery+wind+other renewables+grid, the solution becomes rather easy. Toss in some gas until the battery capacities have grown enough. But nuclear is the worst thing to put into this mix due to its nature.
The people saying that might live far from the equator, where wind power helps balance solar in winter but people in general live fairly near it and energy intensive industry will migrate in that direction to follow the cheap power.
> Seems to me the people saying solar and battery only future do not live in areas that can be cloudy for multiple weeks.
This isn't a big problem. Wind is negatively correlated with solar, and electricity can be sent across long distances (intra- or inter-country) with minimal loss, and overbuilding eliminates a lot of the variability issues. Variability across geographies and across modes cancels out.
Nuclear is pretty good, but solar and wind is simply better. Way cheaper and quicker to implement, less resistance from NIMBYs who have an irrational fear of leaks, less valid concerns of enabling nuclear weapons proliferation, less technical know-how requirement. It's the most brain-dead obvious calculus if you know the actual facts, costs and trade-offs.
And time is of the essence. Eliminating 80-90% of emissions in 4 years (with only solar and wind and without batteries, yes this is possible whilst being cheaper than nuclear) means less emissions than eliminating 100% of emissions in 20 years with nuclear.
Yes, but not strongly. It is definitely a problem, as seen in Texas on cold mornings where solar isn't getting much light, winds are still, and people need heat.
Yes, we need a mix of technologies. But at the current state of things, nuclear shouldn't be something to invest into. Yes, existing reactors should be used for their full life time, but there is far too much speaking against building new ones.
Other than the practical reality of it being expensive to construct nuclear facilities (which may or may not be solvable), what is speaking against building new ones?
As exciting as this should be, the soaring cost overruns on this project means we Georgians have been left holding the bag. There’s now a “Nuclear Construction Cost Recovery” line item on my bill, so electricity costs more rather than less.
Unfortunately, this more the rule than the exception. Same thing happened on Long Island, NY with Lilco's Shoreham reactor that took years to build (construction was riddled with all sorts of problems, theft, etc.)and when finally finished, people realized if something went wrong, the narrow, 128 mile island would be impossible to evacuate. After completion, it was never put online and despite the mass incompetence, no one was fired. In fact, management bonuses were as big as ever. Rate payers on LI are still paying for this debacle 40 years later thanks to then Gov. Mario Cuomo. LI utilities, like many utilities, are so poorly managed.
Arguably, the benefit is "less coal and CO2 in your family's lungs".
The military doesn't make you money, it makes you safe. The post office doesn't make you money, it ensures communication and logistics. Roads don't make you money, they undergird the economy.
Nuclear power doesn't save you money on your power bill. It establishes energy independence for our country and clean power for our atmosphere.
Try and imagine how much solar/wind and grid-scale energy storage that money could have bought …
I don’t think nuclear power is the future. In my country, 7% of the time electricity prices are like 1 cent or even negative. Try to run your nuclear reactor at a profit in this environment.
Readit News
Let's do some math.
There is a total of around 10 GWh of deployed grid storage in the US.
The US consumed about 4,000 TWh of electricity in 2022.
(10GWh/ 4000TWh) * (31,536,000 seconds) == 78 seconds.
So, net, there is about a minute and a half of energy storage across the entire grid. (Most, about 90%, is pumped hydro, not battery). Of course, not really. Most regional areas have roughly 10-30 seconds until the gas peakers absolutely unequivocally must be turned on before brownouts occur.
Hours? Minutes? We are not talking about hours and minutes. We are talking about seconds.
Look at the price of a powerwall. That's for the energy needs of a residential home. What happens to your AWS bill if us-east-1 was to buy a powerwall? Let alone steel, chemical, paper, mineral processing industries. What would happen to our economy if capacity for every one of those was cut by 1/3rd (or more depending on local climate)? Never mind your power bill.
This is the problem that I have with these solar capacity discussions. The number on the tin misrepresents things in just such a fundamental way that these cost discussions don't make sense. The reason, of course, is because fossil fuels are the big batteries we turn on at night when solar is not working.
If you actually care about making the grid green, you must solve this problem. Either with transmission, with battery manufacturing (the cost and environment friendliness curve on that is a bit less rosy compared to solar power...), or with nuclear. There is simply no other way.
I also think that electricity grids are very complex and powering any large grid with 100% of any one source is impossible. As each energy source has different pros and cons, you'll generally always have a mix of different sources.
Natural gas is neither renewable nor emission-free when burning, albeit less than burning coal, for instance. About 117 pounds of CO2 are produced per million British thermal units (MMBtu) equivalent of natural gas compared with more than 200 pounds of CO2 per MMBtu of coal and more than 160 pounds per MMBtu of distillate fuel oil. Source: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/natural-gas-...
So while using natural gas is better than using coal, in the longer term we likely needs to reduce its usage and substitute with renewables too.
A similar project is being constructed in the Southwest United States:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38801943
3,500 MW of wind+ HVDC transmission for 11 billion dollars.
I was looking at this paper
https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost...
where solar is quoted at $1300/kwh and adding a battery that can store a little more than an hour of output brings that to around $1800/kwh. I see people quoting that one like it is gospel but that doesn’t seem to be enough storage. If you assume the system needs 12 hours of storage to get through the night you need 10 of those batteries and the cost is getting into the $3500/kwh range.
They quote the AP-1000 and NuScale around $6000. Solar looks cheaper now and maybe it is in the tropics but in the Northeast you are going to get a lot less power in the winter than summer so to keep the lights on all year you might need two of those solar installations (though I think the battery stays the same) and now you are getting around $5000/kwh so that gap with nuclear is getting smaller.
That estimate may be a bit pessimistic, but renewable advocates right now sound like the people who were saying nuclear would be “too cheap to meter.”
Now if you have excess capacity in the summer you could in principle use it for something but that is not trivial. If you use something half he year you basically double the capital cost. Do you hire workers to do nothing in the winter or do you lay them off? “Free” excess solar energy might be “free as in puppy” not “free as in beer.”
Even though I don't like natural gas for energy generation, let's say an area is currently being served by a natural gas plant. But now everyone wants electric cars and more power is needed. You can deploy a whole boatload of solar and use rate structuring to incentivize consumption in the day time (you charge your car at work). Now the gas plant spins up at night but it is only running half the time, and all day long people are using emission-free solar energy. And they aren't burning gasoline for their cars anymore. Plus if there is a power outage they can use their car as a home battery backup.
So yeah, I don't think it really makes any sense to say "we have 78 seconds of battery backup so solar is pointless". You can make a HUGE dent in people's energy-related carbon emissions if you install solar tomorrow. Or you can pay much more and install nuclear in 15 years. Maybe we should start building out nuclear now but it would absolutely not be to the exclusion of solar! Even if we built 1000 new nuclear power plants in the US we would still need lots of solar and wind energy.
Anyway, don't know where I was going with this but those are my two cents.
So then what. You could overbuild solar, build distribution, build battery banks. I'm not wild about that. Mining for batteries is nasty business and we need all of the Lion we can get for electric mobility. Distribution? It's alright, but you run into problems -- like, what do you do when the sun goes down on the west coast? What do you do when a line goes down? Your system is larger, more centralized, more vulnerable.
Nuclear under the current regulatory regime is clearly a nonstarter. But the capex of nuclear is almost entirely artificial. Something much closer to "too cheap to meter" could be a reality. All it takes is a cultural willingness.
By the way, nuclear having an extraordinary capex makes it even tougher to compete with solar in the mix. Because your capacity factor goes way down if you are only generating at night. This is why we build oil and gas plants -- they're cheap. What we need is for nuclear to favorably compete with oil and gas. It does not need to compete with solar.
And there is every reason to think that we at the start of similar curve with battery storage right now (batteries are currently manufactured at a relatively small scale, with no major technological barriers to scaling up). Seasonal storage is another matter, but hourly/daily is well within reach.
Nobody is saying we have grid sufficient storage right now, but in terms of energy storage we’re a well over 30 minutes when you look at just existing capacity (25GWh not 10Gwh) + existing EV’s and that number is growing rapidly ~50% year over year.
So, manufacturing several hours of electricity storage over the next ~15 years is a completely reasonable goal. Further that’s all that’s required, we have carbon free dams supplying 7% of total electricity demand and days worth of total grid demand in energy storage, just time shifting that covers ~16% of nighttime demand. Similarly Solar can be shifted east/west to cover more of the duck curve.
It cost about 35 billion USD (total cost during build, no maintenance, no fuel) At current potential earning rates of eg. max 10ct/kWh (Georgia) and 1100 MW peak continuous operation it will take 36 years to make the money back.
That is without just investing that 35 billion into something else or even adding maintenance and fuel cost which makes the entire project never return a profit.
Now in general I like machines, and nuclear reactors are fantastic engineering feats. I dislike the potential for a meltdown of course no matter how 'unlikely'
That total cost is for 2 reactors, not one. Vogtle 3 just started operating and Vogtle 4 will start in a few months. If you divide your 36 years by 2, you get 18 years.
Why? A meltdown is really not a big deal at all. If we're fine with burning coal we should be perfectly with a having a meltdown or two every few years (even if we 100% ignored climate change the degree of damage caused by either of those is not that different)
Cars alone could handle about an hour of the national grid, assuming that Energie intensive industries would not shut down temporary whenever the price of electricity is high/ predicted to be high.
https://cleantechnica.com/2023/12/28/scatecs-540mw-pv-1140mw...
With enough storage and onsite renewables you can mimic the stable baseload that Nuclear provides.
That is not mimicing the stable baseload that nuclear (or a hydro electric pupmped storage dam) provides.
I'm not anti solar but a project such as your example has a long way to go to met the demands of a European country.
It's worth looking into how much of a dent it makes in South African energy demands.
Using powerwall as the price of stationary battery storage is like using the running cost of gas/petrol household generators as the cost of generating power at fossil fueled power plants. Powerwalls is not how industrial battery storage is done anywhere on the planet.
Powerwalls are expensive even by battery standards.
"True cost of using wind and solar to meet demand was $272 and $472 per MWh [pdf]"
source:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220916003958/https://files.ame...
If your transmission line to your nuclear power station trips, you need reserve capacity elsewhere to serve the load.
Gas and coal generation all need storage to run reliably.
If you are going to be an armchair power system designer and you want to ‘gross up’ the cost of capacity and storage into the cost of renewable generation, then be consistent.
Solar cannot act as the backup to a nuclear power plant. Whereas a nuclear power plant can (and does) act as the backup to solar.
I'm grossing up to make the point that after about 60-70% solar penetration, the circle cannot be squared without massive investment either in batteries or in distribution, a fact which seems to never quite fully make it into cost comparisons between nuclear and solar such as those being made in this thread.
Dead Comment
From the article, this new reactor is "estimated to cost more than $30 Billion." (Let's call it 30) & It generates 1,114 Mega Watts.
This article [1] says solar panels cost between $0.90 and $1.50 per watt. Let's go with $1/watt to keep the math easy, though I bet it's much cheaper by now, and especially at the scale we'll be buying them at.
So for $30 billion dollars, we can have 30 billion watts of solar, which is 30,000 mega watts, or 27x the amount of power of the new nuke. Obviously solar doesn't produce at night and it's seasonal.
So let's make it more useful.
I saw elsewhere in this thread to get an actual output number from solar you have to divide by 6 to account for night and seasonality. So that means to equal the 1,114 mega watts from the nuke, we need 6,6684 mega watts of solar. call it 7mW to keep the math easy.
So we use 7 billion dollars buying 7mW of solar.
We have a tidy $23 billion dollars left over to spend on storage.
This site [2] says grid scale storage costs something like $300/kWh. (I bet it's cheaper now, and cheaper at massive scale, but we'll go with that.)
So with our $23 billion left over dollars we go and buy 76.6 million kWh of storage (which is 76,666 MWh). So even when there is no sun coming in, our storage can maintain the 1,114 mega watts of output for something around 68 hours. That sounds like overkill, so it probably makes sense to spend more of the money on solar and less on storage, but you get the idea.
Also note for the same $30 billion dollars our solar + storage setup now has no running costs, no refuelling costs, no downtime due to refuelling and maintenance and no radioactive waste disposal problem.
Also note the $30 billion nuke plant is a single point of failure, and needs big lossy power transmission lines coming in/out to go useful places. I would be interested to see the numbers on how much of that 1,114 mW of nuke power winds up lost in transmission. The solar setup can be distributed all over, and can generate and store the power right where it's needed - on factories, houses, schools and where ever else needs power. Transmission loss of close to zero.
Nukes are awesome, but they're not even in the realm of making sense financially. Year after year the price of solar and storage will go down again, then again, then again.
This is not a fair fight.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/solar/cost-of-solar-...
[2] https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/battery-storage-cost...
(Please point out any holes / problems in my math)
EDIT: as pointed out below the cost for grid scale storage is more like $500/kWh. So for our $23 billion we can buy 46 million kWh of storage (46,000 mWh). So we can equal the nukes 1,114 mW output for about 41 hours. Still plenty
Korea has built 5.6 GW Barakah NPP for about 25B dollars. It took less than 8 years. Russia is building its standard VVER-1200 reactors at about 10-15B for 2.4 GW
China is building its reactors at about 5B per 1.2 GW reactor.
These costs might fall further if standardized designs get deployed at larger scales, just like with solar.
Given steady and predictable generation regardless of weather and location that nuclear can provide, your numbers don’t look that impressive now, do they?
Also FFS were comparing a nuclear reactor to residential solar?! In what world is it a safe assumption that those figures scale? What happens when we start running out of rare earth metals?
Let’s just step away from this poorly thought out hypothetical…ask yourself why solar is barely producing any power. Theres a massive financial incentive here. Is everyone stupid? Are you a genius that noticed something everyone else missed?
Our nuclear fleet is ancient, and still produces ~8% of domestic supply. Solar is ~1.6%: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/
With a renewed investment and more efficient regulatory practices, we could be like france who produces >70% of their domestic supply with nuclear: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France
[1] 413 million dollars for 800,000 kWh = $516.25/kWh installed price.
https://carboncredits.com/tesla-413m-megapacks-revolutionize...
LCOE (total, incl. CAPEX, in USD per MWh):
coal 82.6, combined cycle 39.9, advanced nuclear 81.7, geothermal 37.6, biomass 90.1, onshore wind 40, offshore wind (that one was a surprise, since offshore wind should be quite cheap, mainly driven by capital cost of 104 USD per MWh) 105, solar 33.8, solar hybrid 49 and hydro 64.
Variable cost (same as above):
coal 23.7, combined cycle 27.7, adv. nuclear 10.3, geothermal 1.2, biomass 30, onshore wind 0, offshore wind 0, solar 0, solar hybrid 0, hydro 4.1
All number from here:
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation...., page 9.
More on that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_Bar_Nuclear_Plant#Unit_2
Here's some context for what was happening in 1985, from the eia:
>"As a consequence of the identification of a large number of deficiencies shortly before the WBN Unit 1 license was expected to be issued, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) sent a letter to TVA [...]. In response to this letter, TVA developed a Nuclear Performance Plan (NPP) to address corporate and site-specific issues, establishing programs to address a wide variety of material, design, and programmatic deficiencies. WBN Unit 2 construction was suspended at about that time, with major structures in place and equipment such as reactor coolant system piping installed."
And while most of the documentation was very terse and spoke more about specific regulatory requirements that I don't understand, this is pretty interesting:
(From the nrc.gov)
>"The NRC staff reviewed TVA’s refurbishment program and found the following: (1) TVA was refurbishing or replacing most active components and instruments; (2) TVA had determined the potential degradation mechanism for each category of components, along with any contributing environmental factors; (3) the acceptance criteria were developed from the licensing basis, design specifications, and vendor specifications; (4) the proposed inspections and testing included in the program could be expected to identify degradation; and (5) refurbishment activities would be in accordance with applicable vendor and design specifications or requirements."
That sounds like a massive, massive amount of work. It explains why it took longer even if the reactor was apparently 60% completed.
(From the eia) :
>"That time, a study found Unit 2 to be effectively 60% complete with $1.7 billion invested. The study said the plant could be finished in five years at an additional cost of $2.5 billion"
One of the bullets on the box is that the AP1000 uses a fairly standardized design, unlike many prior designs which were mostly a patchwork of one-off designs. The AP1000 still being "in production" means parts are available.
I was wondering how that was powered.
I have no idea, but I would assume most parts are custom machined to spec. If that's true, you'd just need to find machine shops capable of making the parts.
That seems to be common with nuclear power plants. The latest one near where I live (Angra 3) has been under construction since 1984, and it should be complete in a few more years if it doesn't pause again; construction of the previous one (Angra 2), according to Wikipedia, started in 1976 and came online in 2001.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
India is famous for talking about nuclear. Building it, not as much. India gets 2x as much energy from PV as it does from nuclear, and the PV is growing rapidly.
But it is very nice that RosAtom seems to be one of the most competently run Russian Gov agencies.
Two decades isn't very long for an infrastructure project, which is unfortunate since long-term planning benefits greatly from political stability, and many areas are seeing large shifts for the worse in that regard.
an abandoned nuclear station in Cuba
was under construction from 1970. I believe it's had 3 generations working on it.
"Georgia nuclear rebirth arrives 7 years late, $17B over cost" https://apnews.com/article/georgia-nuclear-power-plant-vogtl...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...
To put it into context, nuclear
* total human deaths due to nuclear since its inception is in the low thousands at worst, for the entire industry.
* total animal deaths due to nuclear since its inception is minimal, in fact, for example, wildlife around Chernobyl has flourished
* damage to the environment is minimal
* waste is tiny by volume, zero CO2, and can be buried deeply where no human will ever get to it.
Versus fossil fuels:
* has killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions of humans
* has killed millions if not hundreds of millions of animals through climate change, oil spillage, fires and so on
* has destroyed thousands of square miles of land for open cast mining, oil slicks, and so on
* waste dumps thousands of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every day plus other byproducts
So, what's the actual monetary cost of the usage of fossil fuels? How much money needs to be spent to mitigate climate change? Or figuring out how to de-extinct species? Or restoring habitats after cleaning up oil slicks? Or attempting to the put the land 'right' after open cast mining?
How much money are we going to spend on figuring out 'energy storage' for green power, when nuclear power is already stored in the uranium, in a tiny volume?
In fact how much money could we have saved by going long on nuclear in the 60s and 70s, had it not been for ill-educated, and ill-informed campaigns by CND and Greenpeace, for example? And how much better would the environment be right now?
We certainly still need to get a handle on the cost of deploying nuclear because it is not sustainable the way we do it today
In 2022 Georgia Power got 23% of its power from nuclear, 1.9 gigawatts of capacity.
Since construction started, Georgia Power customers have been paying the construction costs (about 6%) and now that construction is complete the rest of the costs are now being added to customer bills. These are surcharges in addition to the actual cost of fuel and operations at the plant, so they're going to be paying per kWh as well.
At the same time Southern Company (parent of Georgia Power) shareholders are now receiving profits from the operations of Vogtle 3 while capital costs are recovered--IE they are not paying for the asset that they will own
This 10% increase in customer bills will result in the nuclear percentage as pat of GPC's mix increasing just a few percent. It would still be lower than either Gas/Oil or Coal as of 2022's numbers (in 2023 I believe it will be higher than coal, but that is because GPC is replacing coal with gas at a rapid rate)
If you replaced all fossil fuels with nuclear at the same cost structure, power bills in Georgia would increase many fold
I'm completely on board with nuclear, but we have to absolutely and totally rethink the designs we build, how we manage the projects, who owns them (private vs. public) and more
The amount of damage/victims linked to nuclear is a matter of debate, and a final count will only be possible after its very last hot waste will be cold.
Case in point (Chernobyl):
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/forests-around...
https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/food-environmen...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...
Energy storage: vehicles batteries are a game changer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid ). Grid backup will also use existing hydro along with turbo-alternators burning green-hydrogen ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_economy#Energy_system... ).
The overall phenomenon is well documented, so I'll give just one highly credible account: "The greening [over the last 35 years] represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States… Results showed that carbon dioxide fertilization explains 70 percent of the greening effect" - NASA Apr 2016, https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2436/co2-is-making-earth-green...
I'm not wanting to rehash the climate debate, nor am I implying how much it offsets negatives and would grant all of your points otherwise. I do think it's wise to do whatever we can to move towards cleaner carbon burning to remove toxic and particulate emissions, and limiting CO2 emissions as well, but also within fair economic tradeoffs. I also support developing nuclear, fission and fusion.
How unfair of us, to use the egregious flaw of nuclear to criticize it.
Pointing at fossil fuels would have made sense in the past, but that's a useless argument against renewables.
Chernobyl was estimated at 50 billion+ adjusted.
Accidents are rare but they are costly.
Nuclear fanboys need to accept the fact that so long as nuclear always costs multiples more than literally anything else, these things won't get built, no matter how carbon-clean and healthy they are.
This can't be serious...
I worry instead that the lesson taken from this will be "nuclear is too expensive and ineffective".
Taking your point more charitably, it is indeed the lack of a sustainable nuclear energy industry that routinely builds plants that causes costs to skyrocket. There is a chicken and egg situation: nuclear projects don’t get funded because they’re too expensive, so there is no chance to develop expertise in how to build them cheaply, which causes the few that get greenlit to be built by rookie teams that make rookie mistakes that cause costs to skyrocket.
The MIT study into the causes of cost overruns: https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118
When we built them more often, weren't they bespoke and expensive?
Dead Comment
This nuclear plant cost ~$34 billion USD. What if Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, and a few others just got together and built 10 or so nuclear power plants? I wonder if that could actually bring down the price to build them.
Except for airplanes that's one of the few things we still do better.
My overall point is I highly doubt nuclear powerplants will be built here in any major way. Will it happen in Asia? Far more likely.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sc/pr/top-westinghouse-nuclear-... ("Top Westinghouse Nuclear Executive Charged with Conspiracy, Fraud in 16-Count Federal Indictment")
That's the failed project OP blithely elided over as:
- "Two other Westinghouse AP1000 reactors were planned for a nuclear power plant in South Carolina, but construction was halted in 2017."
I'm really, really strongly in favor of nuclear fission power; but the American attempts this decade, and this company in particular, have been a grotesque failure. We really seem to have forgotten how to build things.
If you continue to build reactors non-stop you'll learn how to make the process more efficient and be able to make better estimates.
Surely we software developers should appreciate how hard making accurate estimates is? And this isn't a 2 week sprint we're talking about, but a gigantic engineering project.
Westinghouse used a new regulatory process that had been created specifically at the request of industry to speed the design and build of AP1000s. Despite this, Westinghouse did not deliver constructible designs, and the contractor soldiered on with on site modifications. Westinghouse screwed up so bad that they nearly bankrupted Toshiba, their owner.
So we have two failed holes in the ground at Summer in South Carolina, something like a $10B monument to corruption, with utility execs going to jail for their fraudulent reports.
All the other sites that were eyeing AP1000s to replace aging reactors have now backed out. The disaster was too big. What exec wants to go to jail for a nuclear reactor? What exec wants to lose their job for greenlighting what has a not-insignificant chance of bankrupting the entire utility.
Nuclear is too risky, but public perception is off, it's not running reactors that have the risk, it's the financial risk to anybody who wants to build one.
In contrast, the only real alternative to air travel for high speed transportation between Northern and Southern CA is high speed rail. The "Hyperloop" has been exposed (charitably) as a failure, and personal vehicle travel (even electrified) is not an equivalent to HSR in a state as big as CA.
None of that is to say that the CA HSR project has been well planned/executed or that the costs have been well estimated. But that doesn't obviate the need for high speed ground transport in the state.
1. https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april... (pages 2 and 31)
*excluding research or military reactors of course.
Edit: Tried to edit the edit but somehow deleted the rest of the edit. It was something to the tune of how a big problem with renewables is the fact that peak solar production does not match peak energy consumption, and storage is very difficult, so realistically we'll need a wide variety of energy options to fully transition to renewables. Nuclear is reliable and to some degree adjustable, helping to alleviate the storage issue. Basically, it's my opinion that nuclear works well with other renewable sources, and a full renewable transition will certainly involve more of it.
Does the US have more 50cm^3 sized blocks of U235, or more square kilometers of land with low land values and high annual insolation?
There's an estimated 6 million tonnes of mineable uranium reserves in the world [0]. Of which 0.72% is U-235, so we have a worldwide reserve of 43200 tonnes, or 43.2 million Kg U-235.
Arizona is about 300k square kilometers. If we covered an area 10% the size of Arizona in solar panels, then they would have produced more energy than all the world's known U-235 in just four years. And would continue producing after those four years are up.
[0] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
That's missing the huge and expensive nuclear power plant around that kilogram of uranium.
If you don't account for the conversion device (for which solar is cheaper per GJ than nuclear power plants), then light is a much better medium: assuming 15% efficiency, which is a conservative estimate, solar panels can convert one kilogram of solar light (remember e=mc^2) into 13.5 terajoules of electricity.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1+kg+*+c%5E2+*+15%25+in...
The sun bombards our planet with around 61 metric tons of light per day:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2+*+pi+*+radius+of+eart...
Where the 6 kwh/m^2 come from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance#Irradiance_on...
1) "Water batteries" - highly efficient (far more than the 'chemical' you are apparently referring to) & responsive
2) Methods for using 'renewables' to produce &/ support production of chemical fuels - with the added draw / potential goal of 'closing' the 'carbon cycle'
As to #2, one of the ideals that has been kicked around for decades is to do something like: use 'renewables' to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere and convert it into something like butanol, for example.
Now, last I was up-to-date on any of this sort of work (~10+ years ago), the economics were not favorable. Certain types of commodity chemical production with 'biological basis' (another type of renewable, typically) had much more favorable properties economically. And, indeed, you do see, for example, (thermo)plastic products made from chemicals like "PLA" increasingly. But, the "biofuels" concept is / was much more challenging, especially as "fracking" technology made great leaps etc.
Nuclear has its pros and cons - blanket disavowal is fatuous. Nevertheless, there are substantially more options, systems, technologies, etc. in development and production than are often discussed in too many of the pro-nuke(s) / no nuke(s) 'sniping' chains that have been prevalent in society & on the internet since I was a wee tyke myself.
Move to a mixture of wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, nuclear - whatever makes sense.
When the last coal powered plant is shut off in US, we should celebrate that as a day off for everyone.
Otherwise you might as well say a teaspoon (or whatever) of water has as much potential fusion energy as 1 Kg U235 at a fraction of the price. ;-)
And trees. Clearcutting forests to make room for a solar panels just seems wrong, a Captain Planet style of evil. There are all sorts of places where the terrain just isnt suited.
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- More energy
- Energy diversification
That includes nuclear, solar, and even more fossil fuels as we wean ourselves off of them.
Writing off any form of energy is ideological, not practical.
Let's not forget that the externalities of nuclear power are generally much more costly than solar / wind.
And wind and especially solar have more economies of scale and materials research to make them even cheaper.
This comes from a LFTR fanboy. Boy howdy do I wish economical nuclear existed. But 6x as expensive? That ain't all red tape.
I think of course that LFTR has a path to cheaper nuclear with breeding and near waste elimination, full fuel use, safety, and scalability. But I don't think it will ever beat solar, especially once mature multifunction silicon perovskite cells or something like that and salt water batteries develop.
I hope to be proven wrong.nyclest power is so cool.
If we embarked on a sustained plan to invest in nuclear the way we have in solar and wind, nuclear's all-in cost would be far cheaper. I guarantee it.
[1] https://www.gao.gov/products/emd-79-52
[2] https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-establishes-6-billion-pr...
Nukes might make sense on the moon.
Someone who builds a solar array will be able to go directly to build another, not have to lick their wounds and repair their reputation or business.
Even if you could design a reactor that itself can be mass produced at that scale, you still need to do the same with selecting and getting environmental and public safety approval for installation sites and production, transportation, and disposal of the fuel and waste.
I'm not against nuclear from a technological perspective, but I just don't see it being economically competitive with effectively printable devices like solar and batteries given the current direction of the cost curves on each.
Modular reactors are the solution to not having enough capital or a long enough timeframe to launch and fund megaprojects at a pace that creates economies of scale anymore, which is exactly the US problem.
In the 72 years since then, in what meaningful ways has "Nuclear tech" improved?
It's not cheaper to build.
It's not cheaper to operate.
It's not cheaper to dispose of the waste.
It's not cheaper to decommission.
It's not faster to build.
?
It's indeed not a lot. At a great cost. That kind of is the point. Nuclear is very costly.
Solar, wind, battery storage, and other cheap alternatives are indeed being rolled out at a plural orders of magnitude larger scale.
China also builds nuclear reactors, and we can't fall behind them. I cannot abide an SMR gap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA8W2Xpz2hA
https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/projects/edwards-sanborn-so...
Battery prices keep falling, but the supply chain is still constrained and there are huge expenses involved in building storage facilities that go beyond the cost of the cells. Other storage systems such as pumped hydroelectric or electrolyzed hydrogen may play a role but aren't cheap either.
Instead, a good chunk of grid storage is getting deployed right at the generation site of solar (and some wind), which allows more efficient use of that transmission line.
Instead, we should be looking for large amounts of total install. However, this still won't happen much until it's actually needed by the grid, which starts to happen at much higher amounts of renewable generation than most states are using.
The tech is there, it's being deployed at massive scale where needed, and it's dropping in cost as fast or faster than predicted.
There's this cry for absolutism in this thread that's just absurd, on both sides. You want a wide multiplicity of power generation plant sizes and technologies, for what should be, at this point in history, solidly obvious reasons.
So, you want lots of Nuclear _and_ Solar. Seeing the two as competing shows just how monopolized our energy markets truly are.
It's less either|or, more swings|roundabouts.
A pure solar solution requires (on the order of) 2x excess daylight production and 10 hours of offset storage to buffer against the night (and compensate for energy transfer (daylight power -> storage -> night time power) losses).
Solar is great, sure, but there's a long way to go to replace the energy production of fossil fuels, that comes with a lot of reqource mining and waste.
Somewhere in the middle is an optimal solution with much solar and wind, a little bit of nuclear OR gas fired OR <somethig steady> and a whole lot of varied storage (battery + gravity + thermal + green gases).
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/pdf/steo_full.pdf
I mean as an example many companies, especially PG&E can't maintain adequate powerlines, who is banking on the fact that they'll do an even better job when we quintuple the amount of infrastructure and they have to develop a whole new domain of expertise based in battery technology.
Not to mention even the supposedly clean, solar and batteries, still have an enormous amount of carbon emissions involved in their supply chain, and need to be replaced on a fairly regular basis.
If anything a solar field requires much less operation expertise and staff to manage than a nuclear power plant. And when it goes bad, it might leech some acid and heavy metals into the soil over years, not leave a 10k year radioactive exclusion zone.
That question dovetails into nuclear's biggest hurdle; the risk for catastrophe is high, both in reality and especially politically, so regulation is high, and thus the cost to build, operate, and decommission is immense.
Solar on the other hand scales down to 50MW instillations just fine so you can put it near substations etc. Huge solar parks make sense in locations with lots of sunlight and cheap land, but they aren’t the only option just a trade off in terms of transmission costs vs generation costs.
Chinese nuclear can compete just fine.
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What's more ridiculous than this oversight is the idea that the cost of wind, solar, or batteries is somehow never going to go up. News flash: all advanced industrial processes that depend on a global supply chain are subject to price fluctuations.
Zero. Few people are unaware that the sun doesnt shine at night. It never needed repeating.
What theyre less educated about is that pumped storage, hydrogen, batteries, solar/wind anticorrelation and demand shaping are, together, more than capable of accomodating renewable intermittency.
What's most ridiculous is that even the most expensive form of viable power storage (hydrogen) is still cheaper when paired with solar or wind than nuclear power is alone. This isnt to say that we should go all in on hydrogen/solar, just that nuclear power's cost is unconscionably high.
Indeed, if it werent for the nuclear military's reliance on civilian supply chains and skills it would never get built and the 'environmentalist nuclear' PR offensive of the last ~8 years that resonated with so many people wouldnt have happened.
On the contrary, solar and wind are _waaaaaay_ too expensive if you actually want your generation to be reliable. Just ask Texas.
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4088
“The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.
All the solar and wind proponents I know deal heavily in magical thinking, completely ignoring the factual reality of the industry.
We need a mix of low-carbon energy sources, where nuclear is an important piece (otherwise we'll have to resort to oil/gas/coal).
> All the solar and wind proponents I know deal heavily in magical thinking, completely ignoring the factual reality of the industry.
Now that we have established that both sides are into magical thinking, how about just reducing energy consumption?
> The new 1,114 megawatt (MW) Unit 3 reactor
> Construction at the two new reactor sites began in 2009. Originally expected to cost $14 billion and begin commercial operation in 2016 (Vogtle 3) and 2017 (Vogtle 4), the project ran into significant construction delays and cost overruns. The total cost of the project is now estimated at more than $30 billion.
Meanwhile:
"Utility-scale solar capacity in the U.S. electric power sector increased from 61 gigawatts (GW) in 2021 to 71 GW in 2022, according to data from our Electricity Power Monthly. Wind capacity grew from 133 GW in 2021 to 141 GW in 2022."[1]
So solar increased 10 Gigawatts last year and wind grew 8 Gigawatts. About 18x that one nuclear reactor we've managed to complete since 2016. In a single year.
Also wind and solar is cheaper than the cost of nuclear energy now:
"Nuclear energy is generally more expensive than wind and solar energy. The IEA report estimates the cost of electricity from new nuclear plants to be between $60 and $70 per MWh (megawatt-hour), while the cost of electricity from onshore wind and solar PV is estimated to be between $30 and $60 per MWh."[2]
So wind and solar is faster and cheaper. The only main benefit is a nuclear plant can still keep generating power in inclement weather (which is still important, but doesn't make it cheaper or faster than wind and solar).
[1]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55960
[2]: https://medium.com/@liam.m.obrien/nuclear-vs-wind-and-solar-...
If you just mean the bureaucracy is impossible to defeat, it would just take political will. Which we are seeing more and more of recently. The first of a kind build is always slow.
I didn’t run the math but I’m guessing it’s not feasible to build a battery pack large enough to ride out winter in some areas. The SF Bay Area, sure, but I suspect blackouts will be common in solar+battery only areas.
A preferred solution would be a mix of both with nuclear handling disruptions due to weather.
One technology for power generation should not “win”. Employing a variety of power generation methods will give you the most stable power grid.
You have to overbuild renewables to handle seasonal variation, as well as make long-distance interconnects. Pumped hydro is also extremely interesting for obvious reasons.
Nuclear as it exists today is not cost competitive. But that's mostly an artificial problem caused by regulation. Can we solve that without sacrificing safety? Can we even solve it at all? Bloated regulatory agencies seem to have infiltrated and poisoned every aspect of society with no relief in sight.
Maybe it's a real problem caused by the physical realities of nuclear. Calling regulation an artificial cost is like calling sewage treatment an artificial cost of water.
> Bloated regulatory agencies seem to have infiltrated and poisoned every aspect of society with no relief in sight.
It's often repeated, including by a certain political grouping, but never established IME. Unregulated markets, such as cryptocurrency, privacy, etc. seem to cause most of the problems. The FAA, etc. do well IME. They fail when undermined by a political class that benefits from fraud (the same trying to prevent the IRS from collecting legitimate taxes.)
Or maybe I'm wrong. You seem to know a lot about nuclear regulation. Can you tell us a specific, unnecessary burdensome regulatory rule that you feel is holding back progress?
It would be funny if the cost has switched between pumped hydro and nuclear, but I suspect they haven't. What really pushed out both were cheap natural gas and oil. Even now, new gas powered plants are being planned to be built within the next 5 years. I don't see a solutions to this without new regulation putting a clamp on the fossil fuels.
The one hope I have for pumped hydro is that our current hydropower fleet are outdated and far outside of minimum environmental standards. Combined they have managed to drive species to the brink of extinction, basically being large meat grinders for migrating fish. The solution of catching the offspring and fly them to Sweden to be implanted back into lakes is a terrible solution that have little to no scientific support. With the required investments into modernization, reverse hydro might not be too expensive to include, assuming again that the economics of the concept start to make sense.
At the risk of stating the obvious, this notion entirely depends upon your definition of costs, and the definition of what is competitive. It's vastly more costly to society to have unreliable power (e.g., blackouts, brownouts, or weeks on end of lowered usage restrictions) than it is to have slightly more expensive electricity.
There is no rich country in the world with expensive energy.
At which point it ceases to be as cheap.
Is it regulation or a lack of scale? The US has launched 2 reactors in the last 2.5 decades. I'm guessing there was a lot of stuff - materials, processes, documentation, etc - developed from scratch specifically for those plants. It might get cheaper if we can start re-using that stuff.
Not at all feasible with solar throughout much of Europe. Of course wind is a much better option there.
Or we've researched it and understand the basics of solar technology.
In sunny California solar has a capacity factor of around 25%. In Germany, which is prone to many cloudy days this drops to around 10%. So yes cloudy days have an impact but do not entirely eliminate solar from contention and certainly don't require enough battery capacity to last all winter.
In terms of capital costs solar is around $1 per watt while nuclear is around $10. Combined cycle gas plants are roughly the same as solar. It takes a bit more than a year to build a solar farm, while a new nuclear plant you're looking at a decade. ROI on solar is on the scale of 1 to 2 years. Nuclear will be shockingly lucky to have even started construction in that period.
When we look at the levelized, unsubsidized cost of energy (https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april...) we get a range of $24 to $96 per MWh for utility scale solar, while nuclear is $141 to $221 and combined cycle gas plants at $39 to $101.
And the trend lines strongly favor solar + storage.
Is it any wonder investors are reluctant to fund nuclear projects? For the same amount financed I can build 10x the capacity, have half the marginal cost of production, and see nothing but upside in 2 years.
Places like Singapore that lack land suitable for utility scale solar will need to look to other solutions including nuclear. For the rest of us the decision is not difficult.
Seems to me you are unaware of basic facts of the matter while you make naive criticisms of solar investment due to a personal affinity for nuclear technology.
> In sunny California solar has as capacity factor of around 25%. In Germany, which is prone to many cloudy days this drops to around 10%. So yes cloudy days have an impact but do not entirely eliminate solar from contention and certainly don't require enough battery capacity to last all winter.
In Croatia yearly capacity factor is around 15%, but the problem is it varies wildly throughout the year. In summer we get up to 300 hours of sunlight per month, in winter less than 50. So yes, on paper the capacity might be enough, but one needs to have the ability to store the massive amount of energy inter-seasonally.
I would, however, be curious if you can run the numbers for the UK or Germany. How much solar and battery would you need to be able to have no brownouts during winter?
Trying some very rough numbers myself:
Currently Germany seems to use around 3.3 trillion kwh[1] of energy per year. Likely around 300 billion kwh for December.
Having a look, the solar irradiance in the sunnier parts of Germany in December seems to be around 20-30 kwh/m^2.[2]
Cheap PV solar is generally around 30% efficient and 1.5m^2 costs around £91 retail[3].
So the order of magnitude solar cost needed for Germany in December to not need more than a week's storage is probably around €2 trillion. Amortised over 20 years that's €200 billion per year...
This doesnt take into account many things like installation and maintenance and the reduced prices from not buying retail, but it still seems pretty doable, though noticeably higher than current spend of around €100 billion/year. (Which is also roughly what you'd get with French style nuclear)
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/germany
[2] https://www.dwd.de/EN/ourservices/solarenergy/maps_globalrad...
[3] https://shop4electrical.co.uk/panels/9905-ja-solar-jam54s30-...
https://formenergy.com/technology/battery-technology/
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Batteries will never be cheap enough to allow for seasonal storage. They are good for day-to-night storage. For seasonal fluctuations, the best you can do is natural gas. If we convert all our energy to solar, wind, hydro, and natural gas for peaker plants, we'd be comfortably net negative. In fact, right now in the US the CO2 absorption by forests is equal to all the emissions produced by the natural gas power plants (which are mostly used full time, not in peaker mode). Of course, the US produces a lot of emissions from transportation and industry. But they can be electrified in time, and the coal power plants can be eliminated, and the natural gas plants kept as peaker plants only.
The path to net zero, or net negative, does not strictly speaking need nuclear energy.
I personally am a huge fan of nuclear, but I acknowledge that it is not really needed to fight climate change.
France has been load following with their nuclear plants for decades. They have to as they have so much of it. The reactors in Germany also did/do the same.
The reactors in Finland also started to do that too during this summer as we are having more and more wind (and a new 1600MW nuclear reactor) and a huge chunk is sold on the spot market (so if nobody bought your nuclear power you are not allowed to send it to the grid). Basically leaving ramping down your production as the only choice.
If the "backup" is reliable, inexpensive, CO2 free energy, why on earth do I need an unreliable, also CO2 free "primary" source?
- forests can only increase in biomass up to some relatively low limit; you may be correct that in the usa they currently absorb more than gas plants emit, but that is not a sustainable situation, unless you start cutting them down and sequestering the carbon
- you can get pretty far covering seasonal fluctuations with simple overprovisioning
also i think you're not taking into account the likely advent of mass production of synfuel
Maybe the general public extrapolates from their own experience, but grid planners and researchers do much more than that.
Really we need to crack better storage. Improvements in hydrogen electrolysis or direct air to fuel could do it, but there are non-trivial technology hurdles there as well.
I'm holding out hope for deep sea geothermal ala Peter Watts' Behemoth. Perhaps we can exploit the temperature difference between geothermal vents and the surrounding water to get stable and green base-load power.
So if you build a nuclear power plant, save yourself the cost of whatever else you wanted to use as a primary source.
I think I never, ever heard or read anyone saying this, and I think I follow/participate in the debates, before it was cool and everywhere.
Renewable people rather sound like this:
"Employing a variety of power generation methods will give you the most stable power grid."
Where of course quite many "green" people don't want nuclear at all in the mix. Rather more of long distance energy transport (HVDC). And otherwise any option that works and does not pollute, or pollutes less.
(And personally I am not antinuclear as long as the alternative are fossil fuels, so they should be used as a transition technology and long term rather reserved for other application, like powering things in space and remote important sites)
Edit to add: "Whether Information"
Big Brother: "was @dang there?"
Smart-Tile (as played by Marissa Tomai: "Look, my coverage is limited. I can tell you weather... weather... but I can't whether this or whether that. you'll have ta pay"
A simple combustion turbine power plant is maybe 1/20th the cost per W of Vogtle 3/4. So one could completely back up the grid with hydrogen burning turbines at a small fraction of the capital cost of powering that grid with nukes.
Using nuclear to handle rare disruptions is ridiculous, as the cost per kWh would be astronomical, far higher than the cost per kWh from nukes used for baseload.
Lots of solar + battery systems got propane generator upgrades this year.
There are clever ways to store / "shed" excess capacity for the inverse but it'd still be better to be able to adjust capacity in real time.
Financially building nuclear power plants make absolutely no sense.
This isn't a big problem. Wind is negatively correlated with solar, and electricity can be sent across long distances (intra- or inter-country) with minimal loss, and overbuilding eliminates a lot of the variability issues. Variability across geographies and across modes cancels out.
Nuclear is pretty good, but solar and wind is simply better. Way cheaper and quicker to implement, less resistance from NIMBYs who have an irrational fear of leaks, less valid concerns of enabling nuclear weapons proliferation, less technical know-how requirement. It's the most brain-dead obvious calculus if you know the actual facts, costs and trade-offs.
And time is of the essence. Eliminating 80-90% of emissions in 4 years (with only solar and wind and without batteries, yes this is possible whilst being cheaper than nuclear) means less emissions than eliminating 100% of emissions in 20 years with nuclear.
Yes, but not strongly. It is definitely a problem, as seen in Texas on cold mornings where solar isn't getting much light, winds are still, and people need heat.
To me, this is a false dichotomy.
In my opinion energy is one of the most important pillars of society. It is so important that it must be hedged.
I don’t think we can afford to put all of eggs in 1 basket, no matter how confident we are in a single basket.
I support all forms of sustainable energy advancement and research.
We need more nuclear plants AND more solar/wind. And probably also geothermal, and tidal, and other things I don’t even personally know about.
I've never seen a public/private setup like this actually yield benefit for the consumer.
The military doesn't make you money, it makes you safe. The post office doesn't make you money, it ensures communication and logistics. Roads don't make you money, they undergird the economy.
Nuclear power doesn't save you money on your power bill. It establishes energy independence for our country and clean power for our atmosphere.
I don’t think nuclear power is the future. In my country, 7% of the time electricity prices are like 1 cent or even negative. Try to run your nuclear reactor at a profit in this environment.