Vietnam Going Solar After Nuclear Power Plants Shelved | Hacker News Reader

Vietnam Going Solar After Nuclear Power Plants Shelved

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So they want to be ~20% carbon free in thirty years? That is not a very ambitious goal. Especially if you consider that they want to increase the amount of energy produced from coal from ~30% in 2015 to ~50% until 2030. [1]

[1] https://news.mongabay.com/2017/05/vietnam-makes-a-big-push-f...

Yeah that's what I got from the article.

> Currently solar power only accounts for 0.01 per cent of total power generation capacity in Vietnam, but the government plans to increase the ratio to 3.3 per cent by 2030 and 20 per cent by 2050.

This is not very impressive, they plan to add 3.3% solar in the next 12 years, I don't find that revolutionary at the moment.

having them moved away from that nuclear power plant is a big relief for Vietnamese people already. This is still a huge leap, I would say. Basically, they are just following what China is doing (slowly) so if renewable energy could make a huge impact in China, they might accelerate the program.

> having them moved away from that nuclear power plant is a big relief for Vietnamese people already.

Why so exactly? It would have massively reduced emissions to have that nuclear power plant, now instead you have a vague promise they put on 2050, purposely far enough that it does not bind the government to anything.

People are terrified of high visibility catastrophic risk (ie nuclear meltdown) in a way that they cannot get concerned about fossil fuel pollution. It may cause millions of deaths, but they'll mostly go unattributed and certainly not sensationally reported

.. assuming the nuclear plant got built on time and on budget.

Exactly, considering the nuclear power plants where a vague promise from 2007 to have a nuclear power plant at all. A promise that has now been revoked.

Now let's see if solar can meet it's promises.

I would be surprised if they changed their mind, 3% in 12 years is already not much so that's definitely achievable.

Well it all really depends on how government in Vietnam take actions to that, as far as I know, Vietnam is also one of the most corrupted Government in SEA. I think that supports your case.

Vietnam doesn't have a good track record on public infrastructure projects. Due to corruption and cronyism they have a hard time even building roads to spec. The prospect of running a nuclear reactor in that environment is horrifying.

I'm a Vietnamese and your 2 words "corruption" and "cronyism" are 100% correct for Viet Nam.

Also we shouldn't forget we're talking about Vietnam. A country that is expected to follow slower (because it's not technologically advanced like some European countries or North America). Them having any kind of goal is a good sign, even though it might not be very ambitious in our understanding. Goals can be adjusted.

Actually I'd expect developing nations to be the first in adopting a clean energy grid. They have massively rising demand, so they're building new power plants all the time and don't have vested interests trying to milk every penny out of old coal plants. They also benefit from technological advances that countries with aging power infrastructure can't take advantage of. It's not like they're forced to re-live the industrial revolution like it happened in Europe. It's perfectly possible to leapfrog to carbon neutral solutions.

You're absolutely correct, I didn't really think about that.

Developing nations are generally poor compared to developed countries (duh). So they might not be able to afford energy sources with high upfront costs like nuclear, solar, or wind.

If you ignore externalities, coal is likely the cheapest, unfortunately.

This is exactly what DIDN'T happen with, say, telecom networks. Developing countries skipped directly to mobile telecom, allowing them to save a lot of money by avoiding the upfront cost of building a wired telecom infrastructure.

I agree with you that poorer developing nations will want to generally avoid high upfront costs to new energy (if they can). Doesn't building new coal plants present high upfront cost just the same?

Yes. A modern, efficient coal power plant has to be large and takes a while to build. Solar and wind can be built incrementally.

The upfront costs of wind or solar are about the same as building a coal or gas turbine power plant and have far less ongoing costs.

Really not sure why people parrot these falsehoods that are easily proven wrong.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/generatorcosts/#total1

This could be kind of like how a lot of developing countries have excellent cellular phone networks, having mostly skipped the expensive commitment to wire.

That's an interesting point. It's rather like the leapfrog to cellphones without intermediate steps.

No matter what tech is used, it'll be obsolete at some point.

I wonder how the math works out in terms of mass photovolatics and some sort of night power solution (sufficent wind, pumped storage, or other) vs an expensive nuclear plant at this point.

What I meant with my comment is I suspect they don't consider solar seriously either, it might just be a PR issue. 3% in 12 years is seriously not much.

All nuclear plants are expensive at this point. Until you get modularized reactors that don't face political/public backlash, you'll not see many nuclear facilities built outside of China. Even the nuclear plants we have built in the USA, they are expensive to maintain but provide carbon-free energy, so some true climate hawks are for subsidizing them. As far as new-builds go, look at the absolutely terrible debacle in South Carolina, where the project will costs billions extra and all of the extra comes from the rate payers, not from those who ignorantly assumed they'd be able to pull off a cost-effective nuclear plant today.

Not totally carbon free. Mining uranium still emits carbon, so too the rest if the fuel cycle. It certainly is very low carbon.

The incremental roll-out possible with solar, and the simpler project management, give it a huge advantage.

The coal roll-out is alarming but as soon as it was pointed out that Vietnam has large coal reserves it was unsurprising. This is where the richer nations need to step up and find a way to pay to leave resources in the ground rather than extracting them. It's the cheapest form of "carbon capture".

Do you mean like the United States or Germany which are increasing or fighting a reduction in coal?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/epa-is-set-to-roll-back-restric...

Coal jobs are this bizarre holy grail of right-wing politics in the USA and Germany. It really makes very little sense in a macro view, because renewables are cleaner for the local populace's air and water, and renewables add some 5X-10X more jobs than coal. Coal extraction and processing is increasingly automated, the ole' miner with his pick is a thing of the past - these jobs are stagnant or decreasing in numbers over time. It's an industry in a steady decline, and yet the electoral college, and the coalitions built for Angela Merkel's party in Germany, prop up coal.

> Coal jobs are this bizarre holy grail of right-wing politics in the USA and Germany.

It's far more than a right-wing politics issue in Germany. The most dedicated supporters of coal are within the social democrats and even the left party has some vocal coal supporters in some areas.

Sssshhh. You'll ruin the narrative.

It seems to me that the easiest way for a Germany to cut on energy needs is simply by having less people live there. I expect they would have been at negative population growth without shipping in a scad of people.

Well duh, the only other ways are “be more energy efficient” (hard because they’re already good at that) or “get everyone to do less” (I’d approve of that, but most people don’t seem to).

Likewise, the cost of less people living there (or in any defined region) is less taxpayers, less people making stuff, and less people supplying stuff.

I can't say that an economic model built on continuous population growth makes any sense. The piper will get paid at some point. Even the current notion of driving down the average age via mass immigration will only last so long.

In any case, what really matters is the per capita wealth, not total.

All growth has to stop at some point, not just population. But if we want population to grow as much as possible, we can add a few more digits before we hit the planetary limits of anything other than stupidity and political short-term-ism.

(On the other hand, stupidity and political short-term-ism are exactly why we now have problems with loss of biodiversity, antibiotic resistance, a disrupted nitrogen cycle, phosphorus waste, a quarter of the CO2 in our air being artificial, boom-and-bust economic cycles, etc.)

Coal jobs are usually available in areas with few alternatives. Whole regions depend on mining. It's hard to tell people that their whole city needs to change jobs when there are none available.

West Virginia has more renewable energy jobs than coal jobs.

Germany is still planning a phaseout: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-coal-regulator/ge...

The United States is currently under the control of the faction which does not believe in anthropogenic climate change, which is a big problem.

You can say that as a headline, however the results on the ground are what actually matter: the US has massively reduced its coal use. Coal use is not climbing in the US and isn't going to no matter what the Trump Admin tries.

US energy generation from coal has gone from 52% in 1998 to 30% today (surpassed by natural gas). Nuclear is at 20% energy generation as a share. Coal will continue falling and drop below nuclear in the next 10-15 years, at which point non-hydro renewables will also have surpassed coal.

"US Coal Continues to Decline Under Trump"

http://mikerazar.com/chart-it/2018/01/30/uscoal2017/

"Coal industry mired in decline despite Trump pledges"

"New projections from the Energy Information Agency (EIA) estimate that Americans will be less dependent on coal, that coal production will fall, and that coal capacity in the nation’s power plants is likely to decline in coming years, according to an annual report released last month."

http://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/376522-coal-industry...

i'm sad to see a decline of nuclear energy everywhere in the world. While renewables are the end goal, nuclear was gonna be the perfect transition source for the next decades, providing emission-free and continuous energy to the grid.

I have the bad feeling that cancelling a nuclear power plant, means building coal/gas plants in its place. This article actually mention the renewaleble goal of Vietnam which are really unimpressive. 3.3% solar inputs by 2030...WOW, in the mean time how are they gonna keep up with the energy requirements of a developing country? Probably coal.

Coal it is, the planned nuclear reactor could provide 4000 MW with 10 billions dollar construction cost. It was too pricy so the plan was shelved and replaced with... 3 coal powered power plants instead. The coal will be imported from other countries, hopefully they will be as clean as President Trump said /s.

It already means manufacturers get less experience building nuclear plants, and it's much harder to de-king the building process of new designs. We've been feeling those effects for the last decade or, Gen IIIs are manufacturing disaster due to the combination of the ongoing popularity of Gen IIs and the dearth of new constructions in the 80s/90s.

Nuclear is good as long as it has very stable, secure and responsible local governance. You can't have political instability, people cutting corners, lack of oversight, lack of security or lack of resources ... or you have problems.

To me that's the problem with Nuclear. Following specific rules and conventions, some nations will be fine, but so many ... it's iffy. If Vietnam gets a couple plants, Burma, Laos, Cambodia etc. will want one too and then the risk of something bad happening just starts to crawl up.

> Nuclear is good as long as it has very stable, secure and responsible local governance.

...and no terrorist attacks. And no war.

And the governance remains stable and responsible for the next 100 years.

They’ve managed to not break even though they’ve been in counties which have been at war (Israel), experienced a military coup (Pakistan), disintegrated (USSR), and experienced terrorism (UK, USA), so none of that is strictly necessary.

Fukushima was the worst possible timing; it's a very hard sell now.

True, but in the long run, it might have been a healthy warning signal. Negative populism aside, we need to know that 'corner cases happen' and that there are consequences.

In a funny way, we're lucky it was a rather minor fallout in a 'good country' wherein we can take measurements, do experiments etc..

Fukishima should help us make more rational decisions if we can get over the populism.

Hmmm. There are many signals already in the nuclear industry that could have prevented a Fukushima.

Fukushima isn't a signal. It's one of the thing that might happens when signals are ignored.

Or you could consider it a signal that in one of the most orderly, fastidious, and organized cultures on the planet (probably THE most), people still manage to catastrophically fuck up nuclear, and if the Japanese can't do it, realistically no one can.

Abu Dhabi has 4 large plants coming online in the next few years. The first is going to start up at the end of 2018 (ie: soon).

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

I think the greatest irony of our age is the progression of climate change due to environmentalists protesting against the development of nuclear power. While nuclear power admittedly has risks, the tradeoffs are clearly worth making if you look at emissions and deaths per megawatt hour. We didn't curtail energy demand, and future generations will pay the price for using fossil fuels instead of nuclear.

Nuclear hasn’t suffered because of environmentalists protesting.

Nuclear has suffered because it is expensive and uneconomical. The only way it is even feasible is by having laws that protect the owners from liabilities caused due to catastrophic failure.

Blaming environmentalists gives them way more power than they possess. Environmentalists have struggled to even stop pipelines running through the US whose sole purpose is to make Canada richer. Far more than environmentalists it’s NIMBY folks who have affected nuclear (but still not as much as basic economics).

Western countries are desperately trying to keep 1960s and 1970s reactors open for as long as they can because the prospect of building new ones is a financial and political nightmare.

One of the reasons it is such a hot NIMBY issue is there has been so much fear mongering about nuclear power.

For existing sites local people tend to be in favour and see the benefits. You would have difficulty building a new site, but that is true of any large scale development and is hardly unique to nuclear. Some people are just opposed to any development and will use whatever argument makes sense to try and stop the scheme. But with political support that opposition can be overcome. But that political support needs to be economically viable for the government involved, and that is the problem.

> and future generations will pay the price for using fossil fuels instead of nuclear

IMO this is pretty short-sighted and ironic in itself - I really don't think future generations will be thankful that we left them huge chunks of radioactive waste.

All the pro-nuclear folks seem to miss another important thing - uranium isn't growing on trees, the mining is probably as destructive as coal mining, and the worldwide supply is finite - we simply couldn't mine enough uranium to power the entire world for a long time.

We have plenty of uranium. For all intents and purposes, we have an infinite supply of uranium that would have minimal environmental impact to mine, at roughly 2x existing prices of ore mined from the ground.

As for wastes, all the truly nasty stuff will be naturally decayed in a hundred years or so. And we have real solutions that we don't use for political reasons.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...

I’ve seen wildly divergent estimates for how much uranium we have. Personally I’d rather use renewable and storage for the ground, and keep the atomic fuel for spacecraft just in case we can’t make lightweight fusion engines.

I've noticed a lot of nuclear advocates talking about climate change but having a poor grasp of the actual issues involved. The aim isn't the unrealistic goal of going to zero emissions, it's to cut emissions such that carbon ppm stays below 450 (or 350, if we had acted sooner). If you look at serious comprehensive plans to fight climate change, nuclear doesn't play a big role for a variety of reasons (time to build, cost, production bottlenecks, etc.). Conservation usually plays a much bigger role (as do renewables).

People blame environmentalists, but nuclear fans acting like nuclear is the one and only silver bullet while ignoring much more important components hasn't helped the fight against climate change.

The goal is zero emissions, as soon as possible. The IPCC assumes we’ll have to have negative emissions, into the indefinite future.

The goal is not a certain level of emissions, as you say - negative emissions would be desirable. A 50% reduction will be a great improvement, a 90% reduction will be almost as good as 100%. 110% even better...

Our task is to reduce emissions as fast as possible. But what is "possible" still entails economic, environmental and safety limitations and priorities.

There is a carbon budget that countries have agreed to (though the budget is too optimistic, and countries aren’t really committed to it). Either we stick to the agreements we made, or we keep doing whatever we feel like doing.

The UK's agreed carbon budget is to achieve 80% reduction by 2050, and the US administration is no longer even officially interested in its own.

Those agreements are bust on their own terms never mind the idea of zero emissions. Don't over rate their importance, we should and can do much better, much quicker.

This idea that existing data on nuclear disasters amounts to a sufficiently large and representative sample to extrapolate a hazard trend from - shouldn't really float in statistically literate conversation.

Estimation of the likelihood and error bars on different classes of potential nuclear disasters, involves confounding complexity and argument. The worst conceivable nuclear disaster types have thankfully not been realized to date. The problem with the "death rate" measure is it simply assumes they never will be realized. A most flattering assumption that is widely taken as granted along side genuine hope and enthusiasm for a nuclear solution.

The biggest advantage of PV energy is that it is almost scale agnostic - a single panel on top of somebody's rooftop is as efficient as one installed in a gigawatt scale plant. This is something no other commercial power source has.

Rather than giving lump sum subsidies, a nation can make much much more by just ironing out feed in rules, and making sure the grid can accommodate that. It takes around 6-8k usd (5kw setup) to make an average Asian single family house energy neutral during summer using Chinese panels (basically we talk about 1 aircon and a fridge).

Now just compare payout periods of such setups.

Now, the last moment that can't be overstated, but almost always forgotten: the economic effects of feed-in tariff gets greatly negated when there is no real time pricing. See, in Asia aircon usage peaks proportionally to insolation, and so is the PV electricity production.

I never understood how a country like Vietnam could afford nuclear powerplants when in Europe costs of building new ones skyrocket to 10 billion euro.

Standards. Not to say that Vietnam is unable to maintain the same quality, but doing something "right" is tough and expensive. Every little thing needs to be thoroughly planned and inspected which costs money.

What does it cost in labour-hours rather than dollars? According to Google, minimum wage in Vietnam was $166/month last year.

The EU and US massively restricting / taxing Chinese solar has its upsides. This might be quite the leapfrog and actually getting solar into countries with lots of sun is quite a meta-efficieny effect. I wonder though how a country like Vietnam can get it's grid in order to cope with a lot more natural energy.

I don't know about Vietnam, but at least in many parts of India people are used to the grid being unreliable anyway.

I'm living in Saigon now, it works well, I have maybe one power-cut every two month.

We (the west) should be strongly encouraging this in developing countries. We have the money, we have the instruments, all we need is the will.

The US put men on the moon using 1960's technology and brought them back alive. Switching the world to 100% carbon neutral energy production should be more than achievable.

There's no political or economic will. It won't happen.

It all depends on economics, people will switch if the new technologies are cheaper, or if they face tariffs for not doing their part.

If the west tariffs developing countries there will be an outcry over neocolonialism and forcing the poor countries to our will and whatever.

The only thing the west is allowed to do is putting money into developing countries without any guarantees and hope they do something useful with it. It's frustrating.

We pump plenty of money in now for specific infrastructure projects; which is exactly what we should be doing here.

I'm not sure about political but economic is questionable. I am pretty sure installing and maintaining solar and wind is cheaper than coal (based on https://www.drawdown.org/ book). Not sure about solar.

The article briefly mentions security fears (alongside cost) as one of the reasons for not going ahead with nuclear. Is this code for a certain foreign power throwing their weight around?

How are they going to balance supply from solar (which peaks at midday, and goes away entirely at night) with demand (which usually peaks in the evening)?

Same way anyone else will. Displacing demand to easier times. If most demand is aircon based then moving it to pre-cooling (make ice during day/defrost during evening) etc... and economics will do that for the largest consumers.

A bit of storage, and peaker plants. Storage kinds do not really mater as it is all about what is locally price efficient.

Otherwise, it is the same as the nuclear case. Production does not match demand curve so fix it with storage, pricing and other tools. (i.e. if nuclear is baseload something else needs to produce when demand peeks, which in other words makes it rather similar in practice (see also why all the pumped storage in the UK was build in the 60-80's))

The newest trend is to orientate the PV panels east-west instead south. If you want to know more: http://www.rechargenews.com/solar/1182796/is-east-west-the-b...

Well this will give some place for the output of FirstSolar Inc. two Vietnamese manufacturing plants to go. (2.4 GW DC capacity a year, all online from Q2 2019)

To be honest, nuclear industry hasn't done itself any favors by not building the plants they sold on anything close to time and budget. 15 to 20 years from idea to operation is just not nimble enough.

I don't even think that the all of the proposed coal power will all be build to completion and in operation for long just due to the infrastructure costs.

Sounds like a sound decision, plenty of sun in Viet Nam, all year long.

Coal is what is actually being built.

I'm really curious if there will be massive storage systems?

Nuclear is too expensive, and small nuclear is even more so, but one has to remember that nothing can replace atomic energy as the closest one to ideal, flawless power source.

"Too expensive" seems like a flaw, as does radioactive waste.

(Unless you're counting solar as a form of nuclear energy.)

We built profitable nuclear plants in the past. One might wonder how with mind bogglingly better designs and a much richer world, we can't afford to build them today. My money is that the blame lies between political reasons and that Nat-Gas is cheap, relatively clean, and wildly abundant energy source in N. America.

Right now in N. America you'd be a fool to build anything but a mid-sized Nat-Gas generator which can be spun up/down quickly and costs less to run than anything else, while gaining major political points for outputting far less pollution than coal.

Well that’s interesting, because University of Minnesota ran simulations with MISO that stated batteries and solar would outperform a gas peaker on that grid financially in the next few years.

http://energytransition.umn.edu/modernizing-minnesotas-grid-...

Then it shouldn't be a problem at all. The power companies will simply veer towards solar if it's cheaper.

Tell that to Entergy New Orleans (on the MISO grid) and a population fixated on “local” plants and jobs

Relevant John Oliver clip below:

https://www.theadvocate.com/gambit/new_orleans/news/the_late...

My state's power companies all run solar and wind installations, and are incredibly heavily regulated, and all charge extra if you want power from them. Without a doubt wind and solar cost more in my southern state than Nat-Gas. Solar is a complete waste as other providers require contracts to stay available to pick up the slack on cloudy days, and that price is directly accountable against the solar energy making it far less competitive.

The Department of Justice took Entergy to court for this sort of behavior; that’s why they were forced to join MISO.

https://www.clarionledger.com/story/opinion/columnists/2018/...

That is too bad. My wind plan in Maryland is less than 10 cents per kw hr.

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