Nuclear has other advantages over solar as well, such as not requiring the vast amounts of land solar does, sometime which will probably cause more and more problems as the industry grows.
Solar and wind are working at miniscule size ... and ... "no" impact (well, wind clearly has impact already, but ... let's forget that).
Well actually, solar does have an impact. In Spain there's a couple large wind farms I visited and ... not that it should surprise anyone but there's nothing growing near or below them. Below the panels there's dried out, sad grass. Now I guess this is what you'd expect, but still. It kinda sucks.
What happens when we have regions in every country the size of a decent state/province essentially covered in solar panels ? Habitat destruction, of course (even in deserts).
But for now, when we're talking a decent number of football fields, we can all happily pretend no impact.
Truth is, for the amount of power it produces, nuclear fission is not just amazingly, but almost absurdly low impact (meaning you'd get laughed out of the room if you predicted it in 1950). Far LOWER, not higher than solar, in impact, in danger (in lives lost / KwH, even if you include nuclear bombs), in place occupied, in nature poisoned/displaced ("environmental impact"), ...
Fusion can do better. That makes it worth pursuing.
You can double-check my calculations: take the output of largest solar farm installations, note their land area, adjust for solar radiation at your chosen location/latitude, then use the target city's electricity consumption to see how many of these solar installations will be required. Note, I'm talking solely about land-use requirements here, not cost/battery requirements etc.
So covering cities in solar would work great if the overall electricity mix was 50% nuclear for base load, 50% solar/wind/hydro for peak times, but relying heavily on solar will bring its own issues.
Anyway even at 10x, Canada has a LOT of land, that's totally viable and wouldn't even make a dent in land-use compared to say agriculture.
And yeah, Canada has a lot of land, but once we ask Canadians "How would you like to chop down 5 Torontos worth of forest to cover them in silicon panels and make it into a lifeless desert?", then maybe some people will reconsider the relative merits of nuclear.
Land is cheap and abundant it's a non-issue for the kind of area we'd need to even power the whole world 100% on solar.
Habit losses would be more than made up for by not continuing to accelerate climate change.
Renewables are always a mix of solar, wind, hydro, and - eventually - wave.
Again, the mount of electricity consumption is public info. The amount of output a wind turbine or solar farm per km^2 is available. Put these together and ask yourself how easy would be to convince people to do this.
Our old nuclear plants are our golden-egg-laying goose. Not only should we not kill it, other places should get their own.
There was some especially interesting discussion around thorium based nuclear power which has the potential to be much less dangerous.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/a1c7kt/why_do_peop...
Renewables consistently produce more than 60% of Portugal's energy needs, and have topped 100% on occasion. The figure for Spain is more than 35%, and more than 35% of electricity consumption in Germany.
I'm not sure how you get from 60% to "no impact". It's really quite a puzzling statement.
As is the suggestion that windfarms cause some kind of ecological blight to farmland. Not only is there no scientific basis for that claim, but if it were true, anti-wind propagandists would surely have jumped on it and made sure they mentioned it at every possible opportunity.
Perhaps you have some independent evidence to back you beyond the "couple large wind farms in Spain" you visited?
To make those a reasonable base you need to add enough storage to keep everything working even when your current weather does not meet the energy demand. I think setting up that storage is currently going to be the biggest cost factor.
People regularly go off grid solar for less than the cost of grid electricity over the lifetime of their system. They save on the grid distribution system and overhead, but lose out on vast economy of scale. Peaking power plants also tend to be more cost effective than large scale grid storage. Having excess capacity also vastly reduces the need to storage.
Existing investments complicate the issue, but falling prices for both solar and battery systems regularly change the equation and this shift is only going in one direction.
Why so little storage? It's not really needed at the scale of projects that are being planned, and storage gets cheaper every year.
So let's say we could start building a nuclear plant and get it done in 10 years (which is highly speculative, but let's give nuclear the benefit of the doubt). What are the costs going to be 10 years from now? Or more importantly, what are costs going to be 30 years from now? Because the storage lasts 10-15 years, so you get to replace it with cheaper tech at that point, whereas with nuclear you've locked in your costs for the next 60 years.
This is why no sane entity wants to build nuclear, unless they are ideologically motivated. There are some nuclear startups that may make nuclear cheaper, and less risky to build, but they are still startups without functioning prototypes or manufacturing facilities. By the time they start production, the utility will be ready to replace any batteries that get deployed on the grid today, so one may as well start deploying wind/solar + storage. And add more time of use rate plans so that energy is used efficiently.
Nuclear power plants for example where known to be hard to throttle which was a significant design issue. Historically, the tradeoff is worth it as the cost per kWh was less, but again not a useful feature and you would expect renuables to kill off other forms of base load power based on price.
However, zero reactors are capable of doing so economically. The cost of a nuclear plant is in its construction, upkeep, and staff. Those costs are the same at 110% and 30% output, but revenue isnt. In order to turn a profit a nuclear plant needs to be running at 80%+, 24/7.
Ultimately that means nuclear needs batteries almost as much as solar and wind, since only ~30% of grid energy is constant 24/7. This should be no surprise- all three technologies have nearly no reliance on fuel, and are funded pretty much upfront. If you have no marginal costs then your only rational option is 100% output.
The inability to load-follow is not a design flaw; any reactor built in the last ~40 years can ramp an order of magnitude faster than coal or gas-steam, and will run very happily at anywhere from 50-100% power, ramping up and down multiple times per day. Many can ramp at hundreds of megawatts per minutes. In fact all of them can ramp from 100%-10% output in about a minute, since that's legally required for reactor SCRAM.
That's as fast as an average gas turbine[2] and at the high end it's faster than the fastest gas turbine. Nuclear plants are the most agile nonrenewable plants on the grid but the fact is that a nuclear plant operating <80% output does not generate a return.
> Throttling the plant doesn't reduce it's profitability, since the power it would product at that point has no value - that's why you need to throttle it.
I get what you're saying, but it's wrong. The grid is not a free market and excess generation is not legal. Electricity markets are based around contracts and producing too much is just as heavily penalized as producing too little. If you generate so much excess that you bring grid frequency or voltage out of spec, people start going to jail.
To rephrase: If a nuclear plant throttles, its costs are constant and its revenue is lower. If it doesn't throttle, its costs are higher and its revenue is lower. Nuclear sees rising revenue/kWh by throttling, but not enough. Because of all that nuclear is not profitable in short term contracts. Generally they aren't used for ancillary services either, but that's more due to conventions- for instance they are used for frequency control in France.
[1]: https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/2011/load-following-npp...
[2]: https://www.wartsila.com/energy/learning-center/technical-co...
If anyone else in Europe tried this, or if the US tried it, it would be prohibitively expensive. Even in France, it's still very expensive- the EDF is 36 billion euro in debt[2]. French nuclear gets 9 cents per kWh in operating funds, slightly lower than the US- but the US is MUCH larger, and distribution costs are included in that. And again, the EDF is heavily in debt.
Nuclear doesn't readily beat natural gas on price, and the areas that it's better than renewables are rapidly shrinking. End of the day we'll need ~40% nuclear in the US, but that's not much growth compared to how much renewables need to grow.
[1]: http://clients.rte-france.com/lang/an/visiteurs/vie/courbes....
[2]: https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/dedicated-sections/finan...
The same can be said about wind and solar power.
Compare to hydro which can often do 0-100% or 100%-0 in minutes and has little opportunity cost for doing so. It’s relatively cheap to add max capacity even if you can’t increase average capacity much etc. On the other hand increasing nuclear max capacity is as expensive as increasing maximum sustainable capacity.
Nuclear also has issues going from sub 5% and ramping to 100% with little notice. Thermal stress is an issue ramping up and down frequently over the life of the system. 2x cycles per day is possible but would adds noticeable lifetime costs, 30x per day would cause huge issues. Which means you need to look at ramping as an expense each time you do so which causes incentives to avoid doing so.
PS: Civilian and military reactors are also significantly different designs with different goals. Military reactors are more expensive per GW of capacity, making them a poor though relevant comparison.
Can anyone in the industry chime in on thermal energy storage in fission plants? Do the economics work out?
Frankly the potential capability of nuclear far outweighs anything else.
If the gen public were more on board with it, nuclear could be rolled out and be the main source of power in the world in 30-40 years, removing the need for fossil fuels for power generation.
Even building them in remote locations and taking the transmission losses would be better than diving head first into wind and solar, do you have any idea how destructive the mining is to get the elements required for some of the solar and wind solutions?
We're fast getting to the point where wind and solar is going to wipe out fossil fuel generation - for new construction - in some places it already has. Never mind nuclear, nuclear just isn't in the game anymore.
"Don't believe the spin on thorium being a greener nuclear option"
and
https://thebulletin.org/2018/08/thorium-power-has-a-protacti...
"Protactinium separations provide a pathway for obtaining highly attractive weapons-grade uranium 233 from thorium fuel cycles. The difficulties of safeguarding commercial spent fuel reprocessing are significant for any type of fuel cycle, and thorium is no exception."
"Less" is only if need thorium would magically materialize out of nothing, that is, if you ignore the whole process. In reality, thorium inevitably has to be prepared with uranium rectors:
"Thorium cannot in itself power a reactor; unlike natural uranium, it does not contain enough fissile material to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. As a result it must first be bombarded with neutrons to produce the highly radioactive isotope uranium-233 – 'so these are really U-233 reactors,' says Karamoskos.
This isotope is more hazardous than the U-235 used in conventional reactors, he adds, because it produces U-232 as a side effect (half life: 160,000 years), on top of familiar fission by-products such as technetium-99 (half life: up to 300,000 years) and iodine-129 (half life: 15.7 million years). Add in actinides such as protactinium-231 (half life: 33,000 years) and it soon becomes apparent that thorium's superficial cleanliness will still depend on digging some pretty deep holes to bury the highly radioactive waste."
Not to mention that these hypothetical reactors simply don't work: if they would be viable means to produce energy, nobody would wait for the taxpayer subsidies, there's enough money which couldn't wait to make huge profits, if they were possible:
"'Without exception, [thorium reactors] have never been commercially viable, nor do any of the intended new designs even remotely seem to be viable. Like all nuclear power production they rely on extensive taxpayer subsidies; the only difference is that with thorium and other breeder reactors these are of an order of magnitude greater, which is why no government has ever continued their funding.'"
"The weak beta emission is stopped by the walls of laboratory glassware. Soft X-rays are emitted when the beta particles are stopped, but as long as the body is kept more than 30 cm away these should pose no problem. The primary hazard when working with technetium is inhalation of dust; such radioactive contamination in the lungs can pose a significant cancer risk."[1]
Laboratory glassware, safe distance 30cm. Hardly a "pretty deep hole"!
"Protactinium separations provide a pathway for obtaining highly attractive weapons-grade uranium 233 from thorium fuel cycles. The difficulties of safeguarding commercial spent fuel reprocessing are significant for any type of fuel cycle, and thorium is no exception."
Why? Research has shown that nuclear fission could be safer per kWh than wind and solar. Just because it's not as good as fusion doesn't make it worthless.
Sounds completely improbable. Care to provide some reference to back that statement up?
https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi...
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...
It might sound improbable if you are comparing from a purely technological point of view. But the reality is that the energy output of nuclear is so much higher than other technologies, it easily makes up for any increase in risk by requiring much fewer plants. That's what makes nuclear so attractive in the first place.
The second article you quote is just a blog, and the conclusions are just as dubious, for example trying to weigh falls during roof construction into the risks of solar etc.
edit: removed confusing statement about fission/fusion
[1] https://www.iaea.org/publications/magazines/bulletin/21-1
[2] "Perhaps the most damaging criticism was that the study was inconsistent in applying the methodology to the various energy technologies. For example, while Inhaber considered materials acquisition, component fabrication, and plant construction in his analysis of unconventional energy sources and for hydro power, critics have claimed that he did not follow the same approach for coal, nuclear power, oil, and gas. Furthermore, critics claimed that the labor figures for coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power included only on-site construction, while those for the renewable energy sources included on-site construction, materials acquisition, component manufacture."
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267817006, page 31.
Suppose everyone in the world already agreed to go a hundred percent renewable in 10 years. Effectively replacing the entire world's energy infrastructure is going to take a huge amount of raw materials and production capacity. Is there going to be enough?
It's possible the answer is yes, but I wouldn't take it for granted. There will need to be a lot of battery storage, which means there needs to be a lot of lithium. Are there enough lithium mines? Have geologists identified enough deposits to cover that massive quantity? And are there enough factories that can build batteries? For wind, there will need to be neodymium permanent magnets. For solar, you need fabs to build it all.
Maybe all those challenges can be solved, but maybe it's also possible to streamline the process of building nuclear fission power plants.
No, if we actually want this, pumped-storage hydroelectricity is a proven solution that works. There is actually no uncertainty regarding energy storage: we can do it.
No need to - there are 230 billion tonnes of the stuff in seawater.
Just one percent of that is enough to create 25,000TWh worth of li-ion batteries - that's roughly the amount of electricity produced by the world annually.
Also other chemistries like zinc-air are gaining traction and serve as a good, cheaper alternative.
If it's purely a future technology, just like zinc-air batteries, then we should be allowed to look at future nuclear technologies as well, some of which are very much in development.
No, because it's exactly like with tar sands: it will happen when it's commercially viable. At this point it's much cheaper to "mine" the brines in Chile.
If it's purely a future technology, just like zinc-air batteries
Thing is - it isn't.
Here's a company making grid-scale Zinc-Air batteries:
They figured it out in 2015 and they're already sold-out for 2019 and secured funding for a production facility.
And this is just one of many companies doing the same.
Btw uranium extraction from seawater has been demonstrated, and isn't used just because it's 5X more expensive than mining. That's not a showstopper because fuel is a small portion of nuclear energy cost.
I've stumbled upon them years ago back when they were promising 1MW/6MWh modules, 10k cycles and usage in EVs.
They backed down on these promises somewhat since, so I guess what they have now is a real product.
I expect some more news late summer when the construction of the plant will be - hopefully - already in progress.
France took their grid from zero nuclear to 80% nuclear in two decades. We don't have a comparable example for wind/solar.
In any case, it's clear that nuclear can do the job if we're smart about it, because France did it.
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/france/
But that works in part because they're also exporting 15% of their generation to the UK, Switzerland, Italy and Spain. The export is reducing the need for gas plants in these neighbours, which have higher marginal costs. If France was an isolated grid, or if the neighbours had a similar generation mix, it would be harder to do this without a lot of storage, or throttling the nuclear plants.
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