Not anti nuclear or anything, but you really want a large share of wind+solar. Less hard to handle waste and cheaper. Once we are approaching 80% wind+solar we can discuss how to best deal with the difficult remaining 20% (load shifting, expanded transmission grids, storage, CCX and Carbon2Gas gas plants and nuclear are all options that are possibly going to play a role).
Personally I'm with Bill Gates on this one: we basically need an innovation miracle to solve our energy and climate problems, but probably just one, and it can be in any of four or five different fields (renewables + storage, fission, fusion, biofuels, carbon capture, etc.). Success in any one of those spaces is far from guaranteed, so we shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket, and should be aggressively pursuing all of them in the hopes that at least one will pan out.
Even for extremely high carbon reductions (95% on 1990) the best models I've seen consider transmission lines and sector coupling considerably cheaper. And these models make very aggressive assumptions on the fall of battery prices. E.g.:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.05290.pdf
Edit: The thing to look at is figure 11. on page 16. It gives a policy trade off. Given political limits on the amount of transmission grid extension (x axis) what is the cost of the economically optimal mix of technologies (y axis). Left graph shows sector coupling, right graph shows sector coupling. The second graph almost completely eliminates the need for battery storage.
Nuclear is not in this mix, partly because this is exploring policy constraints on transmission capacity in the context of Europe (and nuclear is pretty much a non-starter politically) but it clearly shows that the idea that large amounts of battery are inevitable is outdated.
I'll leave you with a quote from the conclusions:
"The All-Flex-Central scenario with optimal transmission costs just 13% more than today’s system [even when excluding health benefits]"
> Despite the sustained and growing cost-competitiveness of certain Alternative Energy technologies, advanced economies will require diverse generation fleets to meet baseload generation needs for the foreseeable future
with specific numbers in the actual report.
It's easy enough to focus on Europe or the Americas where the rich have the comparable luxury of being able to overpay for generation if the political will is there, but the overwhelming majority of new generation capacity brought online globally in the next century won't be in these places, it will be in Asia, Africa, and South America, as these countries work towards developmental parity with the West. We need to come up with solutions that aren't just possible, but cheap, and deployable in places that are starting from basically nothing in terms of modern grid infrastructure, and where hyper-inefficient diesel generation is currently the norm, to the extent that electricity is broadly available at all (as is the case in large parts of Africa in particular today).
Again: this isn't to say that renewables can't work, or that any other particular technology will or won't be the solution. We just don't know yet, both in terms of feasibility and economics.
Also, once you go into the developing world context a lot of things change. What is difficult and expensive in the European context is to guarantee the last few hours of electricity a year. If you can take an area that has a few hours of electricity a week to that point, you have a massive win already. Plus you can build sector coupling in from the beginning.
In a green field scenario you _really_ want wind/solar as a decentral bootstrapping technology that scales down, that can get you a really long way.
Bangladesh has >5 million solar home systems installed. That's a Norway or a Denmark population running 100% on decentral off-grid solar.
Edit:
An important point here is to be aware of time horizons. A study looking at a 2025 or a 2030 system looks very different from one that looks at a 2050 system. If the foreseeable future means the next ten years, then sure.
Renewable energy sources are already cheaper than traditional nuclear energy, in many parts of the world already cheaper than fossil sources, and rapidly getting even cheaper:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
And at the same time, Westinghouse had to file for chaper 11 bankruptcy because ... well, nuclear power does not seem to be so economical at all.
As an interesting side note, both nuclear power as well as renewable energy sources have the cost structure that almost all investments are up-front, while the relative amount of running costs is very small. Because in a market system, the marginal cost of production per unit determines the market price, and the market price is therefore close to zero, both technologies have the problem that they actually need subsidies and incentives to be created. In other words, while renewable power sources definitively need incentives, nuclear power also can't exist without huge subsidies.
Again: only when looking at the cost of generation alone. It's more expensive if you factor in the storage and/or long-distance transmission necessary for high utilization (even the study I'm responding to says so, though by a smaller amount than I've seen elsewhere -- ~13%).
> well, nuclear power does not seem to be so economical at all.
Nuclear power isn't economical under the current regulatory environment and set of political realities. There's no fundamental reason that that need be the case. More people die from wind and solar per year than nuclear (mostly installers and technicians falling off of things), and obviously both are dwarfed by orders of magnitude by coal once externalities are factored in. If we were as risk-averse with those sources as we are with nuclear, they would be expensive too. Coupled with the slowness of construction eliminating economies of scale or effective market competition, and you don't have a great situation.
https://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/3029756/scottish-wind-...
And it works pretty well. The last power failure I can remember which was in any way related to wind energy was in 2006:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout
(but wind energy was not the primary cause, the main cause was bad planning)
What happens at large scale is that the fluctuations induced by variable wind speeds smooth out over larger regions. And having a large, interconnected grid is usually much cheaper than battery storage.
What would also help is diversification. In Scotland, there was a fascinating project to generate electricity from wave power, the Pelamis wave power converter. It had working 500 kW installation but was scrapped then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYzocwUfpNg
Fortunately, some Chinese companies seem to have copied the design:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3832029/Chinese-wave...
> If we were as risk-averse with those sources as we are with nuclear, they would be expensive too.
A wind power plant blowing up will not cause half of Europe to be contaminated with huge costs to agriculture, like it happened in 1986. You must also not forgot the extreme health costs of uranium mining.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211...
Which I find considerably more convincing, given that it addresses the concerns raised in detail and gives a much wider overview of the literature and ideas around.
In my view the response article actually demonstrates that Heard et.al. had an ideological motivated conclusion they wanted to get to and chose evaluation criteria to fit their desired outcome.
Yes, I am. I'm not particularly convinced by it, it seems to largely repeat the same claims made previously. Anyway, there's a preliminary informal response to that at http://4thgeneration.energy/response-to-brown/
> In my view the response article actually demonstrates that Heard et.al. had an ideological motivated conclusion they wanted to get to and chose evaluation criteria to fit their desired outcome.
Clearly Heard is a nuclear advocate, yes, but AFAICT the criteria they chose aren't unreasonable. OTOH it's hard to argue Jacobson, Breuer, Brown et al. aren't pushing an ideology either, since they claim to be motivated by decarbonizing the energy supply, yet they are excluding one of the very few sources which, historically, has provided large-scale low-carbon energy.
For renewables not.
And the storage is a problem yes, but not one that requires miracles. Just investing.
(And there are much more technologys around than just batteries. Air-pressure storages for example. Or hydrogen. Or different H2 based ones like Methan, etc. or artifical lakes for water pump storage, etc.)
But to make Fusion work any time soon, there are indeed miracles required. If it works one day, nice. But I would not bet on it, to solve any problems we have today.
For the critical issue of tritium breeding, it is more like non-existing technology. What is meant to bridge the gap between today's plasma physics experiments and working power plants includes a large amount of fairy dust. It is not a valid comparison to compare that against the advantages and disadvantages of the existing renewable sources. Even the Pelamis wave power plant (which was discontinued for whatever reasons) is far far closer to large-scale energy generation than any nuclear fusion process could be in the next 50 years.
Renewable storage and transmission requires some breakthroughs. Maybe we could do it Soon, maybe in decades.
Fission requires political will, no miracles, no breakthroughs. We could have been doing it last year.
Fusion is not possible now. As climate change is happening now, any delay in transitioning to clean and available solutions is purely ideology driven.
The wider it is avaiable, the easier it is for certain groups to get more dangerous.
But I don't know much about the topic. Short google search shows that your claims are not proven and at least controversal:
https://theecologist.org/2017/oct/03/james-hansens-generatio...
Proliferation resistance is trickier, and not all gen IV designs focus here. There are a couple of areas of attention here. The first, and probably more mature development-wise, are alternative fuel cycles like the Thorium fuel cycle that don't produce easily usable fissile material out the other end (and do produce a bunch of U232, which in addition to being non-fissile is also difficult to steal because it's super-dangerous to handle). Secondly, there are designs that breed and then immediately burn fuel in situ without reprocessing, such that there's no point during which the fissile material exists outside the reactor to be stolen. I don't think any of this class have actually been built yet, but the Traveling Wave design is probably furthest along, and TerraPower is building one of those in China with a target completion date of ~2025.
Two important caveats though: these are "proilferation-resistant" in the sense that fuel would be hard for non-state actors to steal; state actors are another concern as that article points out, but they also don't really need to breed fuel, and can just enrich uranium directly without that much difficulty, as Iran and North Korea have both demonstrated, if they're willing to pay for it. At this point the physics are very well-understood, so this is a problem in need of diplomatic solutions more than technological ones. And second, the focus here is on material for fission weapons. I don't think any nuclear technology has good defenses against using material for dirty bombs.
All of that said, I'd still stand by my original point that newer designs are well-understood and dramatically better in these respects than most currently operating plants, and are only not being built (at least in the US and Europe) for political reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor
But there were incidents when the plant was basically out of control. Worse, the design is based on graphite spheres which contain the fuel. That is only safe as long as the spheres in the hot reactor do not come into contact with air, which will cause them to burn, or with water, which will form hydrogenium-oxygen mixtures. Burning graphite was both a main ingredient in the Windscale fire, and in the Chernobyl disaster. There were also important mechanical problems with the spheres. In retrospect, these claims for passive security were unwarranted and the plant was dangerous. With the experience from the AVR, one can also say, that the nuclear industry is not transparent at all about safety problems. Also, it is not only very hard to make such plants inherently safe, if this also very expensive. Unfortunately, this conflicts with the goal of every company, which is to make a profit which is as large as possible.
Well your original point was written a bit more absolute...
With this I go along. And as I said, I also prefer fission as the short term solution. But only as a transition on the way to fully renewable (or allmost full, I am for pragmatism). As there are just many problem involved with nuclear power, like danger and waste and the need for uranium, etc. that you would not have with solar energy. So this is the goal for me, fission power only as a way to get there or where there are not really other options. (submarines, spacemissions, etc.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westinghouse_Electric_Company#...
Assuming you are in the US, you forgot how close the Three Miles Island accident was to cause an US version of Chernobyl in the East coast.
There is a big Initiative with that goal, desertec. But unfortunately it got very quiet around them.
Now look at some of the figures in this slide deck: https://www.svensktnaringsliv.se/Bilder_och_dokument/mattias... (in particular, slide 3, showing rate of added generation/year for various countries, comparing nuclear to wind+solar+geo+bio energy, compared to the needed rate of addition of carbon-neutral energy to hit 2 deg C warming goals.) These data are also sourced from the BP statistical review and the World Bank.
If you trust that information, evaluate for yourself whether or not we can reach 80% penetration of wind and solar in time to avoid anything short of catastrophic warming.
If your response is to extrapolate current trends in cost reductions for wind and particularly solar, please bear in mind that there are no indefinite exponential growth processes in the real world where transfers of matter and energy are concerned, only processes that show logistic growth. And we can't necessarily predict when we'll reach the plateau phase of logistic growth.
What I conclude from that, personally, is that we shouldn't gamble on continued trends in solar and wind adoption to get us to decarbonization.
China is ramping up investments in renewables (including crucial grid strengthening measures) and hasn't approved a nuclear power station in two years (as of beginning of this year, I haven't heard if it has resumed building them now).
Again, I'm not ruling out that nuclear has a role to play. But most of the lobbying for nuclear seems to be based in an instinctive dislike of wind+solar rather than in facts. Nuclear is terribly expensive and there really is a waste problem (even if CO2 is clearly the more severe problem).
Indeed, wind and solar can produce power very cheaply nowadays, which is awesome. We should definitely build more of them. OTOH, due to their variable nature, their value to the grid reduces as their penetration increases, so it's a race of declining costs vs declining value due to increasing penetration.
Nuclear, being somewhat dispatchable, doesn't suffer from this.
Given the magnitude of the climate crisis, IMHO we should build about every low-carbon source we can, as fast as we can. Including wind, solar, and yes, nuclear.
> China is ramping up investments in renewables (including crucial grid strengthening measures) and hasn't approved a nuclear power station in two years (as of beginning of this year, I haven't heard if it has resumed building them now).
According to http://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profile... China has 20 nuclear plants under construction. AFAICT China is investing heavily in both renewables and nuclear.
The variability of renewables is of course a well studied problem [1] and exactly why, after a certain point, we need transmission capacity (or, more expensive, local storage). The variability averages out on large scales.
[1] I posted this elsewhere already: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.05290.pdf
That said, we are in the middle of the experiment you are talking about. Renewables are cheaper now than new nuclear, despite nuclear having received a massively larger amount of subsidies over the years, there are still many parts of the world that are building nuclear so it's not like we're losing the technology, but really, there doesn't currently seem to be a good reason for building new nuclear.
Let me put it another way, a relatively small island like Ireland is going to be capable of going 100% wind/solar relatively soon. They are not strongly connected to the EU grid. Smaller disconnected islands already have gone 100% renewable. So we will have plenty [1] of test cases of increasing size as we ramp up renewables. Conveniently, electricity is also much more expensive on small islands, so it's also economical to test every technology you want to bring to maturity there first.
If we find that beyond a certain size it doesn't work we'll have a decade of warning before we hit that wall with the big continental size grids.
[1] 2200 EU Islands: https://ec.europa.eu/energy/en/topics/energy-strategy-and-en...
But maybe a group like the Citizen’s Climate Lobby can pull something off (they suggest using the revenue of the tax as a monthly dividend for all citizens. Never underestimate the power of a monthly bribe in generating consensus in the American public).
Bet on fusion?
I would bet on nuclear, but in the long term indeed switch to solar + wind, starting now. Which is happening... at least the last.