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So let me get this straight:

1. It's a given that somehow, somewhere, a nuke is going to get away from humanity. I'm honestly optimistic that it'll just be a reactor problem, and that we -- humanity -- learn every time one happens. (Because engineers are a careful lot.) Then the environmental damage will be less than Fukushima.

2. Solar + A Storage Miracle (that much storage would be a certifiable wonder of the world) is competitive to nuclear on the following axes: risk, cost, and ability to regulate to match demand.

Because I don't think that's true. Happy to be proven wrong, but the problem appears to be political, only. Once a small reactor, or a country hungry enough (China) succeeds with nuclear, US politics will catch up. They always do.

tl;dr: I'm long on nuclear.

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From 2012 to 2016 (5 years), China connected 20 GW (20863 MW to be exact) nuclear power capacity to grid. You can check yourself at IAEA Power Reactor Information System: https://www.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.a...

> Once a country hungry enough (China) succeeds with nuclear, US politics will catch up. They always do.

At least one journalist believes we are already trailing behind China, and have been for a while now[1]

1 - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_prit...

China licensed almost evey nuclear reactor design out there and sent its finest nuclear scientists to study in the West. They are going to copy every design and build new ones. India already has a working research Thorium reactor based on their modified version of CANDU (the Canadians pulled out when India made its first nuke).

> Once a small reactor, or a country hungry enough (China) succeeds with nuclear

France has been succeeding for quite some time. The majority of their power comes from nuclear.

Unless you live 15 miles away from it. There's no succeeding with nuclear.

Ironic that after Germany shut down some nuclear plants they had, they started importing more energy from France, which has nuclear power plants near the borders with Germany.

If you believe that most of the cost is in disposing of waste and cleaning up a disaster, outsourcing that sounds like win/win

Yes, let's lower the cost of disposing of waste - with whatever means necessary, dump it into lakes if needed.

actually you are wrong.

germany is exporting way more as they are importing http://phasenpruefer.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Handels...

The image is from the German-language article "Stromexport Deutschlands erreicht immer neue Rekorde (aktualisiert)", 7 October 2015.

http://phasenpruefer.info/deutschlands-stromexporte-bricht-r...

English title courtesy of Google Translate: "Germany's electricity exports are constantly growing (updated)".

Offcourse they are exporting - or more accurately, forcing the neighbours to deal with their green energy surpluses.

Context matters, a lot.

Both France and Germany are net electricity exporters on an annual basis.

But when France sends surplus nuclear electricity to its neighbors that's supposed to be a plus for nuclear technology. When Germany sends surplus renewable electricity to its neighbors that's supposed to be a minus for renewable technology. Both nuclear and renewable generation are rigid in their own ways; neither is as flexible as gas powered generation, but of course neither has the substantial fuel costs or emissions of gas powered generation either.

The point is that Germany is exporting energy when nobody needs it and is thus causing problems for the grid.

France exports energy when German solar cells and wind are in a dip.

My point is that German exports are peak surpluses that cause problems for the grid and French exports are on-demand because steel mills need to work when wind doesn't blow and sun doesn't shine.

But thank you for proving my point. Although you tried to obfuscate away the context.

Are you a renewables activist?

If "nobody needs it" then there will be no consumption in another country to take the German production. (Some production does actually get curtailed, never matched with consumption in Germany or in a connected country). It's not like Germans are smuggling waste-electricity past customs agents into another country. French reactors do very little "on-demand" adjustment either. You can see graphs here; look at the yearly ones: http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/france/

French electricity trade with neighboring countries makes a exports make a jagged line. Fossils make a jagged line. Nuclear is the smoothest line of any of them: it does hardly anything on-demand. It does the same thing day after day. That is an advantage in certain ways (no worries about lost production on a windless night) but a disadvantage in others; you cannot save money/resources by stopping a reactor the way you can by stopping a gas turbine.

I am someone interested in post-fossil electricity. 15 years ago that meant I was primarily interested in nuclear power. Much to my surprise, the nuclear industry basically stalled and the renewable industry expanded scale and cut costs much faster than I thought possible. Following the change in the numbers, I am reading more about renewable technology than nuclear technology nowadays. That's where the most rapid improvements are coming from. I'll change my opinion again if the numbers change again and nuclear starts delivering aggressively on scale-up, costs-down. I'm interested only in numbers from real hardware, though. I've seen enough daydreams in the forms of PowerPoint and TED talks (from nuclear dreamers and renewable dreamers alike) to last me a lifetime.

This is because in energy production timing matters. If you over-produce and dump your energy into our shared grid then I must throttle back my base load production, and then when the sun goes down and you do not have enough capacity to handle your needs and require me to increase my production so that you avoid brownouts then your energy production plan is flawed. If the only way you can make your energy production look acceptable is 'on an annual basis' then your plan is pushing the negative externalities onto your neighbors.

Is the German army involved in this dastardly scheme? How else could one explain the atrocities of international power distribution that you describe?

Oh, right, there are contracts for all of this stuff. Power companies freely negotiate how they sell power to each other. "Externalities", try again.

http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/germanys-gree...

When they have their surpluses - they are actually paying their neighbors to take power from them. I.e. they are selling it at a negative rate.

When the renewables are offline - they are paying a premium for electricity from fossil fuels.

While Germany does indeed _produce_ stellar amounts of renewable energy. They are completely dependent on their own and neighbors fossil power production.

Thus they can claim that they are "exporting" renewables. The turth is that their renewables infrastructure and the retarded system of incentives they have set up - result in one of the most expensive electricity prices in the world: https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/energy-guides/average-elect...

Notice how the more renewables a country has - more expensive the electricity is.

Why? Because renewables are really not all that ecological as the activists would like to claim.

Simply because renewables cause more problems than they solve. And the surplus resources spent (or rather wasted) on "green" energy are also a form of energy. Thus one can argue that "green" energy is actually a net contributor to pollution - due to the aforementioned externalities.

Until we get insane amounts of storage (which will also pose a significant potential for pollution) - green energy industry is actually contributing to problems.

And while you are sarcastic - current state of affairs is not due to common sense or economics. But due to politics.

But it's a private market? the only people who should be suffering are those who own generation equipment which can't keep up with the higher rate of change of dispatch. E.g. Steam turbine operators.

I think your point has some merit if the net effect is higher power prices overall. Unfortunately I don't have this information...

Either way, the reality is that renewable technology is making the slow-ramping generators uneconomical. Even if you remove wind-farms from the supply side of the equation you still have roof-top solar eating into the demand side and creating a daily demand profile which requires gas/liquid fuel generators to match.

I've seen a recent example of a cool summer day (Australian) where the daily demand minimum actually occurred at mid-day due to coincidence of maximum roof-top solar generation and low air-conditioning use! Under this kind of scenario your nuclear/coal steam turbine will be running at a horrible financial loss...

Do you have a source for that? A quick search seems to suggest the contrary: https://energytransition.org/2015/06/is-germany-reliant-on-f...

Well, Germany replaced its nuclear power plants with Wind turbines + coal/gas thermic power plants.

So increasing emissions. That's very bad.

I dont't get how people can choose possible local disaster (nuclear) over certain global disaster (co2 emmiting power generation). Not to mention deaths from air polution.

I'm all for solar and improved storage solutions, but we have something we know works and works right now, without uncertainties regarding constant baseload.

Worst of all are green parties everywhere wanting to shut down nuclear, resulting in the building of gas, coal, or paying for importing either those or nuclear. In which universe is that the green solution?

If anything, nuclear disasters are 100x worse. Released CO2 will be decreased by being absorbed by vegetation and CO2 capture, once the world decreases its CO2 production.

Increases in atmospheric background radiation, on the other hand...

Actually Germany is a net exporter of electricity.

That relies upon other countries to handle its wide swings in production variance.

Yes and france depends on other countries for its incapability to quickly vary production. In other words the nuclear fleet of France has a significantly higher capacity factor than the average demand of the french grid because it can push power to other countries. If that did not exist the french nuclear power would be a lot more expensive (uranium is not free!)

Power demands fluctuate as do power generation capabilities. If your generation is inflexible, as nuclear and solar both are at this time (economically speaking right now in this year). You need quick reaction power (e.g. gas peakers) or e.g. pumped hydro.

The funny thing is a wholly nuclear grid needs storage as much as a full solar+wind grid does. Of course in a mixed grid both techs can play to their strengths.

For example in Lazard's 10.0 LCOE analysis solar plus battery is 92 USD per Mwh, while Nuclear starts at $97. That is smack in the middle of LCOE coal costs!

But the solar, will have a lot less of regulatory and construction uncertainty! And a much smaller financial risk. As 3 years from project start to completion is normal. With most projects being set up in independent financial contracts of about 100mw nameplate to allow cancellation if performance or market do not materialize.

That's temporary. New powerlines to south Germany are being built, a new HVDC line to Norway is under construction.

Additionally we will see a lot of new ways to deal with surplus electricity. Surplus electricity in the North will grow over the next two decades. Power to gas, Power to Heat, etc. will be feasible then.

France has the same problem, but different. Demand varies + production varies. On many weekends they have surplus power from the nuclear plants. In summer and winter nuclear power may not be able to meet demand. In hot summer weeks, the nuclear power plants overheat the rivers. In cold winter weeks, the electrical heating of French consumers creates more demand than nuclear electricity is available. This problem may increase, since France has aging reactors, but new reactors are not coming online - maybe one EPR - but when? 2018? 2020? 2022?

This live map of CO2 emissions for electricity in Europe shows that France has some of the lowest emissions in Europe. Click each country to see the energy mix that produces their electricity:

https://electricitymap.tmrow.co/

For some perspective on the current 'success' of France with nuclear power:

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21711087-electricit-d...

Incredibly strict safety regulations are being applied to nuclear plants, because the public is a lot more worried about that. But someone who falls off a ladder installing a solar panel can die just as dead as someone who gets exposed to radiation, and megawatt for megawatt there are a lot more of the former than the latter.

So I guess the race is on to either figure out a way to prevent nasty nuclear meltdowns, versus how to prevent humans from falling off roofs.

(Hint: Tethering)

If someone falls off a ladder, life goes on for the rest of us.

If nuclear power plants have an accident like in Fukushima. then tens of thousands have lost their home for decades or forever and ten thousand workers will fight for three decades to clean up the mess under the worst possible circumstances with costs going into the hundred billion dollars.

In middle Europe easily a few million people can be affected.

> If nuclear power plants have an accident like in Fukushima. then tens of thousands have lost their home for decades or forever and ten thousand workers will fight for three decades to clean up the mess under the worst possible circumstances with costs going into the hundred billion dollars.

Sure. But again, compare the area of land rendered uninhabitable - and the homes and lives lost - per megawatt generated. If you consider "renewables" as a whole then the area rendered uninhabitable by hydroelectric dams - even assuming they function perfectly - is much larger than for nuclear disasters. If you consider solar plus actually existing battery technology then you need to talk about the area blighted by rare earth mining etc. (Yes uranium mining is also pretty harmful, but again we need to talk about impact per megawatt). If you're considering solar on its own then you're never going to be able to provide reliable baseline power.

> uninhabitable by hydroelectric dams

Nobody builds one where I live. But there are several nuclear power plants. But most of them are now history. They are not in some remote areas, but near populated areas with millions of people.

> If you're considering solar on its own then you're never going to be able to provide reliable baseline power.

Why would I 'consider solar on its own' as baseline power? These arguments were brought up twenty years ago and were boring then. Even though there are solar power plants which store heat.

The biggest achievement of the Energiewende is that it has broken up the big electricity monopolies of the nuclear- and fossil-based electricity companies. It has enabled two decades of exciting research into new technologies and enabled distributed energy production by much smaller players. It's a paradigm shift like it was from few Mainframe computers to the distributed nature of the modern Internet.

> Nobody builds one where I live. But there are several nuclear power plants. But most of them are now history. They are not in some remote areas, but near populated areas with millions of people.

This is a failure of planning (or possibly of international diplomacy in the case of e.g. Japan). In terms of the engineering constraints, nuclear plants are a lot easier to build far away from people than any of the alternatives: they don't have to be built on particular parts of rivers, or in a sunny or windy area, or a gas pipeline or an endless supply of mile-long coal trains. (They probably do have to be on some kind of rail line just because fuel transport is excessively regulated).

> Why would I 'consider solar on its own' as baseline power? These arguments were brought up twenty years ago and were boring then.

It may be boring, but the issues are still real. Baseline power is a requirement, and the only proven ways to provide it are carbon-based, hydro, or nuclear.

> Even though there are solar power plants which store heat.

There was only ever one in full-scale production, and it's now closed, AIUI. There are various experimental efforts.

You need to revisit your facts. Solar plants with storage are currently in operation [1] [2]. They have been producing 370GWh per year. This is tiny compared to a mid-sized nuclear power plant, but the technology is there and is easy to scale up without hazards.

[1] http://torresolenergy.com/TORRESOL/valles.html?swlang=en

[2] http://torresolenergy.com/TORRESOL/gemasolar.html?swlang=en

I think it's fair to characterize a 50MW plant as "experimental" or at least "not in full-scale production".

You will agree then that a 10kW residential solar installation on a roof is "experimental" and "not in full-scale production".

What about the 1 million residential solar installations done in 2016? Is that "experimental"? When you add 20 100MW plants, you reach the scale of a nuclear plant. That is precisely the beauty of solar. That it can grow incrementally without high capital costs (unlike borrowing $4bn and a huge insurance at once with nuclear).

Whether PV solar is in full-scale production is irrelevant, because PV can't supply baseline power.

> This is a failure of planning

It has to do with costs, lack of space, various engineering and environmental constraints, business decisions, ...

> nuclear plants are a lot easier to build far away from people than any of the alternatives

There is no far away from people in Europe.

Even in Russia they have built their new dangerous breeder next to a large town. Keeps the engineers committed to the thing...

> Baseline power is a requirement

For what?

> carbon-based, hydro, or nuclear.

Biomass.

>There was only ever one in full-scale production, and it's now closed, AIUI. There are various experimental efforts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_thermal_power_st...

>> Baseline power is a requirement

> For what?

Modern civilization.

> Biomass.

Still carbon-based. Burning x tonnes of hydrocarbons is still burning x tonnes of hydrocarbons even if the carbon was only recently captured from the atmosphere - it's basically no different from burning coal and running a sequestration process in parallel. Carbon is fungible.

Even without stats to back it up, I'd say that this sounds correct. I love solar, but there are so many instances like this in society. For example, the war against terror (in the US and I guess various other western countries). You're far more likely to be killed by a right-wing extremist, than a terrorist who happens to come from an Islamic religion. Yet the spending on this war against terror is almost limitless.

Imagine if 'TWAT' had been ignored, and the same money had been spent on obesity, or poverty. In fact, the US could have given all 45 million Americans, who live below the poverty line, 20k each.

Actually, put that way, it makes 'TWAT' pretty cheap, especially when compared to the GFC.

France has one of the cheapest electricity price in Europe thanks to nuclear plants. The reactors were checked if they respect to new regulations from the post-Fukushima era.

They were checked because the steel is bad.

http://www.powermag.com/frances-nuclear-storm-many-power-pla...

> The discovery of widespread carbon segregation problems in critical nuclear plant components has crippled the French power industry—20 of the country’s 58 reactors are currently offline and under heavy scrutiny. France’s nuclear safety chairman said more anomalies “will likely be found,” as the extent of the contagion is still being uncovered.

Electricity price in France:

http://www.reuters.com/article/europe-electricity-idUSL5N1CD...

> EUROPE POWER-French spot power prices jump to four-year high on nuclear outage worries

Generally the prices in France are kept low, because the tax payer pays for the expensive nuclear industry monopoly.

> Generally the prices in France are kept low, because the tax payer pays for the expensive nuclear industry monopoly.

And also because the decommissioning costs are not factored in at all. Currently EDF is pushing to extend the operating life of old reactors to 60 years, and to postpone their decommissioning to 2100. They want to just leave them there in the meanwhile. The trouble is that they simply don't know how to do the decommissioning, and it proves incredibly more expensive than thought. The fund that was set up to pay for it is undersized by a large factor.

Right. They will see that it is much more expensive than the tiny fund they have prepared for it. Germany, with way less nuclear power plants, has more money in its decommissioning fund than France.

Generally: The political system in France makes it impossible to demand market prices for electricity. It's all centralized and monopolistic. EDF is the large state owned electricity producer. It has around 80% market share.

Imagine now a steep electricity price rise. This would be highly unpopular and the french president would not be re-elected.

Well even if reactors are very safe, there is still a huge problem with maintenance costs.

Belgium for example has some old reactors. There are micro cracks appearing but because this is still not an issue they keep the oldest reactor open for another 10 years.

But what if there will be a point in time when Belgium doesn't have the funds to maintain this reactor?

I think what Fukushima taught us, is that profit-driven companies will always be looking for ways to cut costs. Nuclear, like oil, requires extremely tight regulation to keep the companies involved from cutting corners and creating unreasonable safety problems.

Also, doesn't nuclear also still have a storage problem? Storing electricity is mostly a solved issue: batteries. We just need to do it cheaper and on a larger scale. And it doesn't even have to be centralized: a Tesla Powerwall in every home will also solve the problem.

I think it's a bad idea to take perfectly working nuclear power plants offline, but it's really only a temporary solution during the transition towards full solar.

I'd like to know why you think that is what Fukishima taught us?

A giant earthquake AND a tsunami hits the plant and not a single person is killed... For me it reinforced the fact that nuclear energy is one of the most tightly regulated industries in the world in terms of safety.

This comment taught me that 100,000 people still unable to return to their homes five years later is no big deal...

And if you actually believe that "not a single person killed" bullshit, I got a bridge to sell you. Death from cancer is still death, even if it takes a year or two.

I think parent post is downplaying things a bit, but I'd take the risk of 100k people bring displaced by a nuclear accident over 100's of millions of people being displaced by climate change.

I totally agree. But when we have the option to not displace anyone, I prefer that. Nuclear technology is to me at best a transitional technology to fill the gap until solar is ready to take over. And it seems solar kind of is already.

I'm not arguing for taking nuclear reactors offline, but it's not clear to me why we should build new ones if solar is cheaper and cleaner. Of course large scale electricity storage is still an issue for solar, and I can understand solar isn't the best option for cloudy countries, but I do think it's important to look beyond nuclear.

If we can get there with mostly solar, I'd be all for it. I just hope we don't get into a situation of perfection paralysis where we wait so long for the perfect solution that the adequate solution doesn't get implemented and we end up with worse consequences.

> Death from cancer is still death, even if it takes a year or two.

Yes, but even those are monitored. And the expected increase in cancer deaths over the next several decades due to Fukushima is still modeled to be fewer than 100 people.

> A giant earthquake AND a tsunami hits the plant and not a single person is killed

This IS the worst problem with nuclear, a denial complex of the size of Jupiter.

Two workers Kazuhiko Kokubo and Yoshiki Terashima were killed directly by the tsunami, as other >15.000 japanese. At least 20 among the thousands of workers involved where injured by radiation, some where severely burned. Other died by sudden leukemia of course quickly tagged as "non related with Fukushima". 230.000 people can't still return to their homes and live in temporary refuges and are vulnerable to depression. Stress-related illnesses and other maladies had killed about 1,656 people in Fukushima Prefecture since the tsunami. I bet that living in a refuge for years takes a toll to your health.

> For me it reinforced the fact that nuclear energy is one of the most tightly regulated industries in the world in terms of safety.

The one-damned-single-page safety plan of fukushima was all except a good example of "a tighly regulated industry"

Well before the disaster, there was a report that stated that the backup generators would be flooded by a powerful tsunami, and recommended improvements to fix that. TEPCO chose to ignore that report.

This is one of the dangers of a technology that is inherently centralized. It puts control of safety in the hands of a large, uncaring, faceless entity.

For that reason, decentralized technologies like solar are a better choice for where to spend money on energy.

Why do we need storage for nuclear? It has always on capacity. If surge capability is the need - this can mostly be fixed with demand scheduling or smaller more nimble power plants.

Electricity storage is far from a "solved" problem. Long term storage losses are high, battery safety is concern, durability/life is still a concern, scarcity of the materials to make batteries is a concern, recycling the materials used is a concern.

We have batteries, but not very good ones, and not ones that are anywhere near close to solving the intermittent nature of solar and wind, nor the demand cycles of each working day.

Nuclear plants are not good at rapidly changing to accommodate demand. Powering down a nuclear reactor is a big operation. Powering down a smaller reactor may be a smaller operation, but they still don't adapt as easily as gas turbines. Or batteries.

But the storage problem I was alluding to is the storage of nuclear waste. Some of it remains dangerous for an extremely long time, and storing it safely is far from trivial. There are several options, but they all have problems.

Similar to batteries for electricity storage, perhaps: there are millions of ways to store electrical energy. None of them are perfect, but on the other hand, they are improving rapidly.

> Storing electricity is mostly a solved issue: batteries.

Ok....

> We just need to do it cheaper and on a larger scale

So it's not at all a solved issue then!

We can already store it. With more research, we may be able to store it more efficiently. But we do already have a lot of options for electricity storage.

I think the issue is moot because the real danger isn't a nuclear reactor accident, it's a nuclear weapon detonation -- especially if it's from an nuclear power to another.

I think worrying about global warming is rather optimistic.

I thought hydroelectric was our storage miracle? You invest solar into pumping up the reservoir and drain it at night to spin turbines.

The problem is that the costs to build such power stores demands broad adoption of solar to justify the investment to build these hydroelectric systems. Their efficiencies are awful on the small scale. But people cannot adopt solar until stable power can be had. It will require state intervention and forward thinking to subsidize some of these projects to get broad solar buildup off the ground.

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