Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
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If you want to convince the public you're going to do it right this time without creating mini fallout zones, you have to do a good damn job of that instead of just wagging your finger at people and calling them dumb. They aren't dumb, they just know rightly that engineers can't foresee the everything in the future and are understandably skeptical.
Or have things changed?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...
The US navy uses nuclear reactors for their aircraft carriers and they don’t seem to have the same problems getting them built and installed that commercial power operators do now. I wonder what makes the difference, I tried googling but couldn’t find a good comparison. Perhaps it is just not commercially viable but works on a military scale budget?
Also those old powerplants were not built with safety in mind. In my country they literally dumped nuclear waste into the sea. Back in the sixties they were cutting corners, something we couldn't do today (I hope).
It's a problem even if you assume the public and the public's view is a bit more sophisticated. If we are precise, the problem was not the disasters the reactors wrought, it's the problem people - operators, corporations, regulators, etc. - wrought with careless operation of reactors and stupid ways of handling fuel processing and waste.
So, if you're that slightly more sophisticated member of the public, you ask the question: are we doing any better today in terms of nuclear regulatory apparatus, governance, and general corporate responsibility? It might actually be a bit better now than forty years ago, but we all know where public sentiment is today. Industry and regulators will very understandably need to do some work to earn everyone's trust. It's not about the reactors, it's about the people operating them.
> They aren't dumb, they just know rightly that engineers can't foresee the everything in the future and are understandably skeptical.
That's exactly right.
Nearly everything I've read since leads me to believe he was honest and accurate. Mind you, I was just a guy with a cocktail in one hand and a shameless will to ask questions in the other. China seems to be making strides, yes.
Perhaps, being a fusion insider, you have some updates on the State of Fusion?
E.g. in Fukushima, people were forced to move back into their homes, without giving them an option to get compensated instead. Furthermore, engineers pointed out that there were issues with the way Fukushima was built but their concerns were discarded. Human issue again. Fission plants should be built with the greatest care possible and be designed for major natural disasters.
As for advancements in the field: they might have happened but many reactors are still kept running even though their design is outdated. The greatest advances in drawers don't help if you still have ticking time bombs and one of them go off. Another human issue.
Or the entire thing with dumping waste into the oceans, like on the coasts of Somalia, harming the health in the region and destroying the jobs of the fishermen. Another human problem.
Engineers, in general, are very smart people. They can foresee a great deal of things. But they need to be listened to, and it's too easy to operate a nuclear plant without listening to safety concerns of engineers.
What we've got right now is people harming the health of locals and discarding concerns by engineers, and lying to locals and politicians about this, claiming that the engineers didn't have any concerns. Which is a big problem, and a very human one. And if there's a catastrophy, the government bails them out (what about a mandatory 100 billion coverage insurance for nuclear plants??), and treats locals like shit again. No thanks.
Sure, we can improve fission in various ways, but this sort of skepticism is way riskier in the aggregate as it translates into public policy.
But still, even if we're going to aggressively build out renewables there's still room for a lot more nuclear in the energy mix. There's use-cases for it where solar, wind etc. isn't a substitute, e.g. shipping[1].
1. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/feb/13/climatec...
Most of the people in my friend group actually live next to one. Zero issues, and it's an old communist party-built one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_...
Everyone knows the externalities of nuclear power and it gets priced in to any discussion of new plants in 2019. The fear (about meltdowns) and concern (about waste) typically outsizes the actual risk substantially.
But most people don't seem to realize that coal far more produces aerosolized radioactive waste, other carcinogens, and as a result, cancer, per watt, than nuclear. Even if you assume every single nuclear plant melts down. Burnt coal is just absymal for public health, but it doesn't get the scary branding that nuclear power does.
Just because some use cases are not practical for renewables now doesn’t mean they won’t be in the near future.
Also just a thought re. your eg. on shipping.. I read a random blog a while back that suggested that a couple of large cargo ships go missing every week (sinking or piracy mostly). Not a thing I would like to see with nuclear reactors and material on board.
http://actuarialeye.com/2014/03/30/how-many-ships-disappear-...
Fukashima was a level 7 nuclear distaster, so that is as bad as it gets. The actual damage done is objectivly not that bad compared to a lot of things we have accepted in the past with only increased safety regulation (like dam failures). 2 lvl 7 accidents in 35 years; and design standards generally go up in civilised countries. The footprint of nuclear is so tiny that might be competitive with renewables, accounting for the fact that the reacion to nuclear disasters is paranoid but the response to environmental damage by renewables is basically to ignore it. Renewables need materials, which are mined, and need to be installed, which creates hazards, and use land/airspace, which is costly. I believe some highly questionable rare earths are used too where the environmental impacts are not usually accounted for because it happens in China.
Purely in non-human terms, the land clearing for a solar plant is definitely worse than a nuclear disaster, because a level 7 nuclear disaster is net-positive for biodiversity ("suggest biodiversity around the massive radioactivity release has increased" [0]). Ie, humans are worse than a nuclear disaster if they happen to want space for their own use.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disas...
Wind turbines need a lot of mechanical components mounted 50 meters (up to 150) off the ground. Needless to say, these components aren't what anyone would call roomy. One component is a big gearbox, or as the technicians call it a "meatgrinder" [2].
TLDR: Nuclear: 0.1 deaths/PWh (US) 90/PWh (global). Wind: 150 deaths/PWh Solar: 440 deaths/PWh [3]
Note that Coal and Oil numbers exclude health impact of the intoxication that is highly visible in places like India and China, but really also plays in many US cities. Even if they're not quite at the point where the sky turns brown and acutely toxic.
Only Hydro power is even remotely competitive with nuclear power in deaths.
(global for nuclear means believing the numbers claiming Chernobyl caused more deaths than 2 US nuclear bombs, or you could more reasonably interpret it as including all deaths due to nuclear weapons. You can freely add in all deaths due to radiation research (low 3 digits), it won't affect the numbers)
In a way it's funny. Solar has already killed more people than nuclear (realistic Chernobyl numbers), including the 2 bombs. And will pass the threshold of adding all numbers together just after this decade ends. Somehow that's never mentioned.
So taking the most pessimistic numbers, Nuclear is 60% safer than Wind turbines, and a staggering 500% safer than solar power. If taking the optimistic numbers for nuclear ... it's absolutely ridiculous.
[1] https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20171019/corona/corona-50th... [2] https://www.healthandsafetyatwork.com/content/siemens-techni... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents
It should be obvious when you think about it; if "it'll never happen" (because it can't or hasn't happened) is true, then insurance actuaries could establish that and there would be no problem with insuring the "safest source of power", but governments have to wave the responsibility for full liability instead. There is a real probabilistic risk of great and persistent tragedies from nuclear plants, the more there are the greater that risk.
Fortunately wind, solar and storage are cheaper already than nuclear [1] and their prices are continuing to drop fast. There may be a good case for improving safeguards on these industries too - it should not be as expensive as trying to fully safeguard nuclear has been.
[1] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
What does ”uninsurable” mean? If nuclear power plants are uninsurable Silicon Valley is uninsurable.
Silicon Valley is insurance because the liability exposure is substantially less.
It is easy to bring up problem after problem with alternatives. It is not easy to show why the status quo is somehow better, because it is not.
A death is a death. Someone dieing because they fell off a roof is equally as bad as dieing due to radiation.
I do support an alternative solution: making rooftop installs safer, and more utility scale ground mount solar. Both are infinitely more tractable as problems than properly managed nuclear power. The US is already on track to install more utility scale solar this year (~150GW) than total existing nuclear generating capacity, even accounting for capacity factor. One year!
Calculating an actuarial probability was never the problem. You can't know the lower bound on the probability of something that has never actually happened, but you can calculate an upper bound based on the period of time it hasn't happened, which is all you really need. They can calculate what the premiums should be.
The issue is that you're asking them to carry a hundred billion dollars in insurance, but insurance companies have capitalization requirements. AIG's market cap is less than seventy five billion. They can't write an individual policy they don't have the resources to pay out on in the event of a claim, regardless of the probability that it actually happens.
So the problem isn't the risk calculation, it's the amount of insurance you want them to carry. The solution is to find someone who could actually pay out a claim that large in the unlikely event that it comes to that, which could only be the government, so that's what they did.
> Calculating an actuarial probability was never the problem.
Of course is wasn't - revealing and paying the resultant premiums is the problem, which is why governments make alternative arrangements for nuclear.
[1] - https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/largest-insurance-compan...
I think you mean two thousand billion. Which is problematic since there are more than twenty nuclear power stations in the US (each of which would need to be insured), even if that wasn't revenue.
Insurance companies are competitive. If they take in a hundred billion dollars, they pay out more than ninety in claims the same year. They can't pay a claim using the money they're already using to pay other types of claims.
> Of course is wasn't - revealing and paying the resultant premiums is the problem, which is why governments make alternative arrangements for nuclear.
The resultant premiums wouldn't be that bad if it was only the risk of a nuclear disaster they had to account for.
But a smart insurance company is going to take into account that US courts have a way of connecting sympathetic victims to deep-pocketed or well-insured corporations, even when there is only a tangential relationship with them, when it's the only way to save a devastated community. For example, if Fukushima had happened in the US, there is a decent chance that courts would have tried to tack a lot of the cost of the damage from the tsunami on the plant operators. Or for another example, PG&E and the recent wildfires in California.
That's a different kind of risk, but it's one an insurance company that doesn't want to go bankrupt has to account for, and it's also the one that makes buying that amount of insurance prohibitively expensive in the private market.
This statement > "which is problematic since there are more than twenty nuclear power stations in the US" shows a misunderstanding about the insurance business. It is not necessary to have assets to cover worst case events everywhere simultaneously. I expect you do understand that but have not given this subject your best attention.
Because they expected to. If you take in $145B in premiums and pay out $135B in claims, everything is fine. If one year they took in $145B in premiums and paid out $235B in claims, where does the rest of the money come from?
In theory they could collect the premiums and accumulate them over time so that by the time there is a claim there is the money to pay it, but that allows you to pay a single claim of that size in year 50, what is covering it in year one?
> Nuclear plants liability are capped in north america at 13 billion USD the nuclear industry is simply exempt from arranging full cover - unlike other industries.
What other industries? I don't see oil and coal companies each having to be insured against claims for billions in damages from climate change. PG&E isn't covering the full liability from the camp fire, they're filing for bankruptcy.
> This statement > "which is problematic since there are more than twenty nuclear power stations in the US" shows a misunderstanding about the insurance business. It is not necessary to have assets to cover worst case events everywhere simultaneously. I expect you do understand that but have not given this subject your best attention.
That's assuming you can consider them all to be independent. The problem with very low probability events like this is that if they do happen the cause is often another very low probability event. You get something like the Yellowstone Supervolcano or a coordinated terrorist attack and all the claims come at the same time.
Or even at the same time as other types of claims -- you get damage to a nuclear plant or three from a ten thousand year storm or an 8.5 magnitude earthquake and now you're paying that claim on top of the disaster claims from what caused it. Insurance companies want to pool risk, not assume 100% of the damages from a massive disaster with a single dependent cause.
The idea of holding oil companies liable for climate change has a ring to it, but insurance wont cover it because there is no legal precedent. There is legal precedent to claiming damages on industrial accidents and nuclear industry accidents. If one nuclear plant fails badly for any number of reasons and fallout is blown towards a city or across valuable farmland, the claims could easily exceed 13 billion USD.
Rarely in the amount of the theoretical maximum amount of damage they could possibly do. In practice when a company has more liability than insurance coverage, they end up in bankruptcy and it's the insurance policies of the victims that end up paying out, or some kind of government assistance. This is especially true for very rare and very large claims, because nobody really carries that much insurance.
For example, Boeing no doubt has insurance, but their worst case failure mode is something like the hypothesized worst-case scenarios for the Y2K or Y2038 bug where some integer rolls over and every plane they've ever made crashes into the ground at the same time. There is no way they have enough insurance to cover that -- it would be a trillion dollars. But neither do we expect them to, because it's very unlikely even though it could theoretically actually happen.
The same kind of thing could happen to a major auto company, or really any company that runs the same software on a million different pieces of industrial hardware. A company could sell a million pacemakers and have them all fail at once, or elevators, or emergency dispatch equipment. None of them are insured for that amount of liability.
The oil companies are rare in the sense of having extremely deep pockets, enough to cover a major claim like that on their own, but they're about the only instance of that. And even they would be completely bankrupt if the courts ever start allowing claims against them for the damage from climate change.
Recognising that this is a minor portion of a larger post - there are a lot of industrial companies that couldn't possibly cover the damage if something goes badly wrong (eg, explosives supplier flattens a major port, 3rd world mining accident, electrical utility causes wildfire, most mid-sized building companies if a skyscraper collapses, etc). Even many insurance companies won't pay out if a flood or fire hits a city, because they can't afford to cover large-scale disasters. Contamination in drinking water is also a pretty big risk. At that level of probability, the only way of dealing with these threats is government. No other organisation else has the manpower or resourcing to deal with rare catastrophes.
It is a fact that liability for a nuclear catastrophe would overwhelm a companies ability to pay. However, we do a lot of things that are more risky and more costly at that level of probability. The fact that there is risk is a very real consideration. That fact we can't insure it is not - there are too many things where, if a rare event happens, the liability cannot be shouldered by a corporation.
Fukushima cleanup, one of the worst disasters we've seen in 30 years, seems to have cost about $15 billion damages + $60 in compensation [0][1] vs $250 billion due to the actual disaster that caused the nuclear plant to fold (the tsunami). And this is as an unexpected, low probability, cost. If a corporation can't handle this, it is tiny bikkies to a government to cover the $15 billion in actual cleanup. And the probability of the government needing to act is tiny to start with. The risks here are so small we don't even talk about them outside the context of nuclear power.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos... [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/03/10/after-fiv...
Of course this is why in developed countries they are required to buy insurance. Insurance companies exist which can take on extremely large liabilities for industry, the point is that Nuclear has never been able to afford the size of premiums which would make the full risk of its liabilities profitable to cover.
Fukushima was by no stretch an example of the worst nuclear event liable to occur. A bad accident or attack on any one of the worlds hundreds of nuclear plants CAN seriously irradiate many thousands, even millions of people in some locations, poison water tables and make land unlivable for decades - continuing harm to many creatures even if people are able to avoid it.
After each disaster like Chernobyl or Fukushima we don't just have a new "rate of deaths so far" line to work with, that average line is a one dimensional extremely simplistic measurement. Scientists and engineers who have taken it and as a valid summary of hazard should really know better.
So, what about mining fissile materials? How clean is that, particularly with regard to tailings and wastewater?
Are there any studies out there without a bias on this? I mean, it's okay to be biased against coal, any non-metallurgical uses really put the "fossil" in fossil fuels.
But I know there are all sorts of weird edge cases. Like we're going to want to continue to collect and burn hydrocarbons that we collect from landfills, since the methane is so much more potent of a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. We should continue to burn that. Hydropower will continue to be a happy side-effect of flood control.
I worked with Rio Tinto (mining corporation) for some time, and happened to know a few people in management positions at the Ranger Uranium Mine. I can assure you it was one of the most environmentally conscious operations the group was managing, and super-senior management seemed to take the whole thing very seriously. It was a source of much frustration, because as a company we had a good grasp of what acceptable mining practice looks like and Ranger was beyond the standard of reasonable. I dunno, what can you do? Follow the Environmental Management Plan.
Anyway, any comparison is a bit academic, because we can exhaustively list everything that has ever gone wrong in the nuclear industry but the renewables are too diverse for there to be a fair comparison. Which is why I suspect the environmental damage done by renewables is being glossed over.
I guess it's unsurprising that uranium operations run a lot cleaner than fossil fuel extraction, given the politics involved.
I'm not against fission power itself, but being in California makes me kind of a NIMBY on the issue. All you need is somewhere with water and without active fault lines, and nope, not seeing a good spot. The evacuation plans for San Onofre involved moving one to eight million people, or about eight million ways something could go wrong.
The TerraPower design, and many other of the next-gen designs, don't require water cooling. That greatly expands siting options.
You could have the plants out in the desert, or on other less desirable real estate.
"The evacuation plans for San Onofre involved moving one to eight million people, or about eight million ways something could go wrong."
I'm originally from the area, and was sad to hear of San Onofre closing. However, its siting was terrible.
Given California's stance on climate issues, it should be the world's largest promoter of next-gen nuclear power.
Several very interesting designs are being pursued, I'm hopeful the government will eventually adopt a better policy stance. Bill Gates looks to be helping a lot there!
In other ways, the Democratic coalition in California is so big that they can afford to annoy one end of the base. But at the same time, pro-nuclear is not a natural stance for an administration trying to balance environment and housing development.
My perspective is as as a former meteorologist and climate scientist, and currently involved in the Democratic party. We're in such an oil town that the high school colors are black and gold, the birthplace of Unocal -- but people are so anti-oil here now that we'd love to make a switch. You know, as long as gas prices at the pump don't increase.
I've talked to enough people that I think the politics is doable but hard, but the capital man, I dunno. Maybe that comes from Bill Gates.
I used to work for Western Mining Corp (early 90s), and am familiar with how 'patchy' adherence to environmental principles can be across a large organisation. I'm not implying malfeasance (or any other explicit cause).
A few other instances where Rio's failed to hold itself (or its subsidiaries) to the highest standards: Lassing, Austria [1]; Panguna, PNG [2].
[0] http://www.minesandcommunities.org/article.php?a=926
[1] http://www.industriall-union.org/archive/icem/austrian-mine-...
[2] https://www.smh.com.au/world/billiondollar-mess-a-major-disa...
By this logic people should be deathly afraid of coal and what it puts into the air.
People misunderstand the risk. The amount of radiation you need to be exposed to for a 50% chance of getting cancer would be a fatal dose from radiation poisoning. The way people end up with cancer isn't by one person getting a large dose, it's by a million people each getting a small dose, so that they each have a one in ten thousand chance of getting cancer and then a hundred of them do.
Which is exactly the same thing that happens with coal -- not least because coal is radioactive and burning it puts the radioactive materials into the air.
Except that coal does it as a consequence of normal operation rather than only in the event of a catastrophic failure.
About the only practical way to do that is to eat them, at which point you're in the same category as any other adulterated food. How is caesium any scarier than prions or mercury or various pesticides or a thousand different chemical carcinogens?
Parent noted distinction between nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. I'm assuming here you're talking about nuclear fission exclusively.
In any case, how sure are you that the footprint for nuclear is tiny?
As I understand it the construction / commissioning costs are enormous - more than a coal or gas plant (eg. a breathtaking volume of concrete). The costs of acquiring fissionable material seem to often be overlooked, but mining (currently) requires fossil fuels.
That's before you get to decommissioning costs (which may not be within the 'footprint' category) or waste management.
The UK's recent experience [1] trying to get one nuclear fission plant up and running provides an abject lesson.
[1] https://jeremyleggett.net/2018/08/22/why-the-uk-nuclear-rena...
The construction costs are high predominantly as a result of inefficient (or in this case purposely obstructive) legal requirements. The government has literally been known to change the requirements a new reactor must be built under after the portion of the reactor subject to those requirements has already been built. This predictably leads to cost overruns, but it is also an artificial problem.
> The costs of acquiring fissionable material seem to often be overlooked, but mining (currently) requires fossil fuels.
It's overlooked because it's tiny. The energy produced through fission from one pound of uranium is the same as from burning 2.7 million pounds of coal. In other words, the weight of coal vs. uranium to operate a coal fired power plant for an hour would run a nuclear reactor for more than 300 years.
Moreover, the fuel rods we already have sitting around at existing reactor sites that we don't know what to do with? Can be used as fuel in newer generation reactors. Plus all we have from decommissioned nuclear weapons that we also need to get rid of.
Everyone currently alive will die of old age before we have to mine any more uranium for newer generation reactors.
> That's before you get to decommissioning costs (which may not be within the 'footprint' category) or waste management.
Decommissioning costs are a thing invented to make nuclear seem more expensive by counting it in one place but not the other. Do you know how much it costs to clean up the superfund sites left at the mining operations for coal and the raw materials that go into solar panels?
And long-term waste management is only a thing for legacy reactors. The newer reactors use their "waste" as fuel, solving both problems.
This seems unlikely given a) several western governments are dead keen on nuclear renaissance, b) the high construction costs are historically, and in recent times, seen in each country dabbling with new nuclear fission plants, and c) the absence of claims from construction companies and investors in new nuclear fission plants about this alleged obstacle.
(Aside - Jeremy Legget's site has some great resources for cost and scheduling blowouts. He's partisan, but I've found no reason to doubt his sources or conclusions.)
> The energy produced through fission from one pound of uranium is the same as from burning 2.7 million pounds of coal.
I wasn't suggesting a disparity in source fuel volumes - I'm aware of how both burning stuff and fission works.
My point was that obtaining clean high quality fissionable material is non-trivial (if it weren't the case we'd probably all be dead).
I'm unconvinced that existing fuel rods can be used to power newer model fission reactors -- unless you're talking about MSR's, which I thought went out of favour last century, and we don't really have any 'modern' plants built (yet). Again, I refer to some of Leggett's work analysing some of the new UK plant constructions - way over cost and time expectations, and likely about to be abandoned by investors.
> Decommissioning costs are a thing invented to make nuclear seem more expensive by counting it in one place but not the other.
I don't understand. Are you suggesting it shouldn't be counted, or the comparison costs to renewables is being misstated?
Comparing it to coal mines is disingenuous, unless you think I'm pushing coal (I am not).
Comparing it to mines for 'raw material that go into solar panels' is more interesting, but I highly factoring that in would shift the balance sheet in favour of fission.
> And long-term waste management is only a thing for legacy reactors. The newer reactors use their "waste" as fuel, solving both problems.
If you're talking thorium and MSR's here, it's not strictly true, is it? Apart from the absence of any existing viable reactors, thorium reactors need, and produce, rare isotopes of uranium, with longer half lifes than say 235 or 238.
I'm at the edge of my knowledge here, to be sure, but ultimately the ramp-up times to build MSR's, the sheer volume required to replace the existing fission reactors, the experiences around the world of cost / schedule blow-outs, the trend for wind, solar thermal, storage, and and even solar PVC -- all seem to indicate fission isn't really a sensible option now.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
Because of the unregulated attachment of intermittent power sources South Australia has no base load generation any more, this is coal or nuclear stations. Victoria had an incident with one coal plant shutting down on Tesday which was the first $14500 spot price hike. Then because of weather and plant maintenance the same thing happened for two more days in a row with the power regulator stepping in when the rolling blackouts started on Friday telling everyone to run everything at full blast.
A renewable only grid will cost an order of magnitude more to run than one based on coal or nuclear, if not more.
The above is hugely simplified for obvious reasons and only my opinion and not that of my employer.
However, saying that renewables are the cause of this is the same as saying that nuclear is the cause of Chernobyl. Nuclear plants don't inherently melt down if they are properly designed and operated and renewables don't inherently cause load-shedding if they are integrated to a properly planned and operated bulk power system.
What is occurring in SA is a power system planning and market design failure that is not inherent to any one technology.
It seems the system operator has been relying on reliability services provided by large synchronous generators without actually pricing and creating a market for those services, which has caused them to disappear with coal retirements and leave the power system in a chronically insecure state. In order for the market to ensure both day-ahead generation adequacy and as well as real-time operating reserve margin for unit contingencies, generators need to be able to get paid for providing those services, at a level that makes it economical to invest in new assets or maintain existing ones.
This is a policy problem, not a technical one.
FWIW I work for the company that owned the now decommissioned Hazelwood coal plant in Victoria, but I'm not involved with that plant at all.
Are you suggesting SA renewables suffered an unplanned failure this summer? I havn't heard anything about that and I expect that they have been functioning as expected and that you are mistaken. Do you have a source?
However, there was a very well documented failure of LVRT performance on wind turbines during the 2016 SA blackout.
https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/Lessons%20Learned%20Document%...
Isn't this just juggling semantics? Nuclear is very much a necessary condition for nuclear meltdown. Removing nuclear power is a foolproof option to avoid nuclear meltdown.
Likewise displacing dispatchable generation with renewables enables the conditions where we can get these super high spot prices. To guarantee supply during peak load you need a lot of redundant dispatchable generation sitting around gathering dust until the $14500 day. On that day it needs to pay for itself, hence $14500 per megawatt hour.
EDIT: Oh wait, I'm a dummy who didn't read your post correctly. I agree with your comments about the market needing to correctly price reliability of supply. In WA we have a capacity market for this reason.
Which goes back to my argument that this is to a large extent about market design and not technology.
Aren't these frequency response services the same provided by Tesla's battery system at the Hornsdale Power Reserve? If so, those reliability services are paid for by the South Australian government. Additionally, the Hornsdale Power Reserve responds to frequency sags within milliseconds, whereas legacy thermal needs upwards of 15-20 minutes to raise the frequency or voltage back up.
> First, let’s recap on some of the important points. The Tesla big battery was built without subsidy, in a period of just 4.5 months from design to full operations, and at a cost of $91 million. If the figures available to date are any guide, it is making plenty of money ($24 million in revenue this year) and may deliver a payback to its owners of less than four years.
> Even better, it is delivering an even bigger market benefit for consumers ($40-$50 million in its first year) by lowering costs, particularly in the frequency control market, but also in wholesale price. Add in the value of grid security, and the avoidance of blackouts, and the savings are considerable.
> Tesla makes its money through a $4 million a year contract (for 10 years) with the South Australia government, and sets aside 90MW and 10MWh to provide grid security, mostly by intervening when major events happen.
So we build more batteries.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/deep-dive-into-first-year-of-tes...
https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1520406/hornsdale-b...
As you should well know being in the business the spot price has a hard cap of $14500. You should also know that spot prices were maxed out from 3pm to 8pm in Vic and SA on Thursday and would have been maxed out for the whole of Friday if not for AEMO stepping in and effectively nationalizing the electricity market.
Anyone with a spreadsheet and publicly available data can see that the SA shedding events have expanded to Vic for the first time this year. Further anyone who even looks at the ages of the coal plants providing base load generation will realize it will get worse on from here.
For the rest of your points: this is absolutely a technological problem. Physics and maths, contrary to what our old prime minister used to say, are respected in Australia. Electricity generated by heavy spinning things takes a long time to ramp up and down and needs a different grid to that used by renewables and batteries. Batteries are about 5 orders of magnitude too expensive to be used as the backbone of the energy network. So the only things renewables do today from the pov of the network is add spikiness both the production and demand side of the market, making both the market and the grid more unstable, more expensive and worse for everyone who isn't a speculator.
In short: with current technology you can have a stable network or a renewable one, you can have both if you're willing to pay at least 10 times more for electricity.
Or we can build nuclear power plants and solve all our problems for the next 50 years.
That number is going to vary in different grid systems based on the size of the balancing area, the strength and resiliency of the transmission system and amount of storage available. Balancing areas with large amounts of hydro-storage will be able to accommodate more renewables, as will those that connect 10s of thousands of MW or more.
This isn't about physics and math. It's about SA being a very small grid where contingencies (both transmission and unit trip) dominate reliability planning. There are grids operating with the same level of renewable penetration as SA or more that have never experienced load shedding.
SA could accommodate perhaps one large nuclear power plant. And then the entire system design would be dictated by unit tripping contingencies. The cost of planning the system to prevent load-shedding when a 500+ MW unit trips at that plant would be massive. Nuclear is not a panacea for system security.
Please don't generalize the problems of a very unique and small system to the rest of the world. SA has unique challenges as a vast and sparsely populated region that don't exist in Europe, Asia or even most of North America. ERCOT has run with 40% wind penetration on a 44 GW system, and they've done it cheaper than anyone can build nuclear today.
Perhaps the answer is to not put nuclear plants in seismic areas and instead improve storage and transmission technology so that nuclear can be used more. Putting a reactor on a fault line, in a tsunami zone isn’t necessarily a beat practice, but don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Solar farms and windmills are ugly and environmentally harmful.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
You choice is either to switch to nuclear or continue using coal.
Arguing for solutions that are never going to happen, is equivalent to arguing in favor of the status quo (and the status quo is horrible).
We need to come up with an alternative to this. Nuclear in the ideal could be that. But nuclear's track record is murky, nuclear's cost is murky. For all I know, solar and wind are X times less effective than nuclear though as mentioned real world costs versus theoretical costs are still problem. I mean, consider raw solar now is the cheapest energy source but maybe solar plus reverse hydro would be some proportion more expensive.
Thus if we're creating an alternative to fossil fuels, solar and wind seems like a clear real world win.
An nuclear requires huge upfront money because it requires huge upfront energy investment. This risk of nuclear isn't just disaster, it's that this huge investment fails to pay as calculated and this is a risk that's materialized in the past.
With current technology we really only have two distinct options. We can use solar and wind when the weather allows for it and then burn coal, gas and oil when it doesn't. The global warming impact is the combined result averaged over the year, and the energy cost is similar to the combined price.
The other option is nuclear which has the huge upfront cost and nuclear waste, but with minimal global warming.
In the future we could get more alternatives. Different form of batteries (like reverse hydro) would allow solar and wind to be separated from on-demand fossil fueled power plants, and dynamic energy market could change demand based on supply so that a lower base generation from nuclear and regular hydro would work in combination with wind and solar.
I don't see why the various battery types aren't practical today. Unlike nuclear, there's no huge political resistance and once solar and wind are online, investment in energy storage becomes online energy fairly quickly. Moreover, the huge energy include huge uncertainties, uncertainties whether the plant will shutdown early, especially.
Remember, the huge upfront costs of nuclear includes energy expenditure and as you're pointing out, expending more energy means more global warming until we have fully replaced fossil fuel.
Long ago, solar and wind advocates were derided for contrasting hypothetical ideals with current realities. Nuclear proponents now seem much closer to doing that.
Sure, nuclear provides baseload energy in a way its cheaper competitors cannot, but as long as you have more than 20-30% fossil fuel the baseload is not really a concern anywhere.
It seems foolish to divert money intended to reduce polluting sources of energy into the more expensive nuclear alternative, until the share of coal and natural gas is low enough that more stable sources of energy are neeeded.
Climate change is an exsistential threat to our way of life.
> Sure, nuclear provides baseload energy in a way its cheaper competitors cannot, but as long as you have more than 20-30% fossil fuel the baseload is not really a concern anywhere.
Yes, it is a concern. We need to hit net zero emissions in the next five years, or net negative emissions, with massive carbon sequestration, in the next 15. How exactly are we going to do that between shipping, air travel, AND fossil-fuel baseload power?
For a deep decarbonized grid (95%+ less emissions), the least-cost will OTOH likely involve a rather high fraction of nuclear, plus a somewhat smaller fraction of the aforementioned wind, solar, transmission, demand response, batteries on top.
Dealing with climate change requires a deep decarbonized grid. So while most grids can take a lot more wind and solar than currently, if we overbuild those sources we can get locked into higher emissions long-term.
But I'm not sure if you can say that definitively. Peoples feeling of the "badness" of an outcome matters. And you also have to consider that dying a bit earlier might not be as bad as some of the immediate consequences a nuclear disaster can have to people of all ages.
I'd be all for building more nuclear, but I feel like it's just unrealistic to expect a sudden revival of nuclear. I think it's likely more productive to focus more R&D and investment on solar/wind and storage.
Solar/wind+storage also has some really nice benefits like being more decentralised and does not depend on a steady source of fuel. This has big benefits for developing nations as they don't need to build out big centralised grids.
Accelerating solar/wind+storage could have a bigger impact on the developing areas in e.g. Africa, as if their choice is between coal and nuclear, they may be more likely to go for coal as it's just much simpler for a nation that's not as advanced.
Moreover, in a disaster situation like Fukushima, power loss would be an issue. Fukushima was fine in the immediate aftermath (24 hours?) of the disaster until the on-site batteries ran out and backup generators couldn’t start due to damage from flooding. A fully robotic installation would face similar and greater problems after a SCRAM.
It’s an interesting sci-fi idea that might be possible in a hundred years, once we master simpler robots like vacuums and folding laundry!
The greatest advances in drawers don't help if you stop building new nuclear plants. The choice today is not about whether to build more outdated plants; it's about whether to build new modern plants.
Just look at coal: The coal lobby is also constantly talking about how many jobs they are bringing and so on while in reality they bring only very few jobs and those that exist are being reduced due to automation.
Or more specifically, and even harder to accept: We know perfectly well how to do it right, but the danger of someone selling out public safety is high enough that we should refrain from advocating for an entire field of progress, at least presently.
Ask those in charge how close to a plant they are willing to live. I bet most won't live anywhere near. The thought of waking up in a radiated area in the middle of the night as a meltdown occurs is not exactly comforting to anyone. Private entities will always run a risk assessment to calculate whether it's more profitable to turn a blind eye. Most of the time the punishment is a fee that amounts to a slap on the wrist and its back to business as usual. Time heals indeed. Narrative changes. The public is distracted with some flashy personality. People forget and stop caring until it repeats all over again.
Capitalists, funny to say, are actually highly protective of their capital. If you have an asset worth billions of dollars no rational manager would take a risk on it; the maintenance generally gets done. Billion dollar assets generally don't get associated with reckless people.
That sort of short-termism no-maintenance approach is more likely a symptom of the political risk of running a reactor. Maybe they want to invest in an upgrade, but there is a reasonable chance that politicians will shut you down (eg, as happened in Germany). In that sort of environment, because the asset is at risk, the rational course of action switches from maintenance to exploitation.
And I'd bet the plan managers would live locally, you'd be silly not to. They don't expect their plant to melt down, or they wouldn't be willing to be the plant manager. Nobody would be involved if they didn't expect the plant to function, they'd shut it down.
You might be underestimating how many high-value assets we are surrounded by that are well maintained and extremely reliable. They tend to blend into the background because there are so many.
Obviously mistakes happen, but the central point here shouldn't be controversial: a rational and greedy agent maintains their assets. Otherwise they sorta get booted out of of the club of people who own assets, because their competition would have similar realised returns and a fully functional asset (if maintenance is possible it is usually a more economic option than building from scratch). If the government is going to obsolete your asset by force, then the agent's decisions will change, but the agent isn't exactly in control of their situation if the government is stepping in.
The existence of the cap indicates that the industry itself believes that the costs of a black swan event in the nuclear industry could be ridiculously high.
It's not just that! I was pro-fission until someone educated me how horribly irresponsible we've been about our nuclear waste disposal. And how dangerous it is.
Deep waste storage has been deadlocked in government since the 80s so waste is just hanging out by each reactor. If this funding and nuclear push doesn't include just finishing Yucca mountain, then imo it's a bad idea.
It looks like some progress was made recently but given that it took 40 years to vet yucca mountain I hate the idea of more nuclear power concurrent with a restarted site selection process.
http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/looking-trash-can-nuc...
According to Wikipedia, “TWRs could theoretically run, self-sustained, for decades without refueling or removing spent fuel.”
Agreed that the failure to finish and activate Yucca Mountain is ridiculous. Alternatively, we could be using that spent fuel in other reactors as I believe France does. Either way the current policy is irresponsible although it’s due to politics not technology.
If we took all of our nuclear waste, and put it directly into our food supply, this would be a better situation than what we are in now.
This is because of just how horrible coal is. Coal kills millions of people. Would taking our nuclear waste and feeding it to children cause millions of deaths? I think that's unlikely. Which means that it isn't as bad as coal.
Opposing alternatives is the same exact thing as supporting the status quo. Unless the alternative also kills millions of people, then it is better than what we have now.
Branding problem. Hell if "clean coal" can start to get inroads then something like "Direct Helium Solar" or something can be used as re-branded nuclear fusion.
On January 24, 2019, President Trump Signs Pro-Nuclear Legislation: make regulations move more quickly with respect to new nuclear reactors and to establish a better and faster licensing structure for advanced nuclear reactors
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/01/24/president...
Wonder what kind of hand-waving dismissals and assurances were used to sell that project.
I have yet to hear about a comprehensive plan or set of designs that is meltdown proof and doesn’t have a waste problem. It’s a conceptually simple way to make a lot of cleanish energy, and it works now and it works on cloudy days but there are still giant externalities that just haven’t been solved. We can’t even out the waste in deep underground mines in the desert, we haven’t had the political will to do that.
That's no excuse! In the end I don't care if the fission guys misestimated the natural disaster risk or whether they simply discarded it as "not in our threat model".
> and how the field has advanced since three-mile island and chernobyl,
But the old plants are still there!
And, tying it together with the first point: back then the fission guys promised it was safe and no catastrophe could happen.
Then the catastrophe happened.
Okay, but this time we have cool new technology, and we know so much more, and nothing bad can happen.
And then it happened.
Now we're just back in the cycle. Why should we believe you?
It's possible that it's now perfectly safe. But the fission guys lost all credibility when they again and again oversold what they really know, plan for and guarantee.
- too slow. Break ground now and you'll be producing energy by 2030.
- political instability. Hands up who supports the switch of Iran and Saudi Arabia to nuclear? It would reduce a lot of carbon emissions. Let's not overlook Ukraine either: https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featurenuclear-plants-i...
- budget instability: Wylfa has stopped https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/hitachi-job... and Hinckley Point C is hanging on by an expensive thread. It is also at risk of inconvenience from Brexit, given that the UK is leaving Euratom and is likely to experience "no deal" chaos for personnell and equipment from EDF.
Is the US really able to build nuclear plants with the occasional total budget shutdown for 3 months?
https://www.mercatus.org/publications/infrastructure-US-crum...
There are many reasonable ways to deal with radioactive waste. And even if there weren't, so what? If we stay on the current trajectory regarding fossil fuels, we're all screwed within a generation or two, nuclear waste is the least of my worries.
California recently voted to shut down the last remaining nuclear power facility in California, Diablo Canyon: https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-diablo-canyon-nuclear...
but I don't think it has anything to do with budgets and more to do with the public's perception of safety of fission and officials not wanting to have a meltdown event happen while they're in office.
>The lessons that we learned out of Libya giving up its nukes … is, unfortunately: If you had nukes, never give them up. If you don’t have them, get them.”
This quotr misled me. What I found from another source is that they had a nuclear weapons program according to another source 'likely to develop a nuke in 3-7 years'
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wii/Libya_and_weapons_of_mass_des...
Mass-produced energy technology (solar and wind) would seem to have the edge?
When did the US Govt Shutdown for 3 months (90 days)? Source please.
When has there ever been a three month budget-based shutdown, much less occasional? You're inventing a premise that has never happened as a supporting argument and then furthering pretending it happens from time to time. That argument is entirely void.
Rosatom will sell you a floating power station for $300 million [0], you can tow it into place and connect it up. The regulatory approval will probably take you longer than getting it here.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power...
Trading the devil you know for the one you don't is wisely considered a bad idea
Any advice on that level of generality is useless and better trashed.
The only thing we don't know well is how much improvement current technology brings. We have an idea, but there are probably flaws on our estimative.
I don't think nuclear will help, mostly because it's too late. But basing decisions on ignorance is crazy.
Basing decisions on limited understandings is also not crazy. I've heard the rough US Army guideline is to act when you have 70% of the information. If you wait too long, there's often no right answer.
Anyway, my whole point is probably one level meta from what you're talking about. I find many disagreements turn out to be simply two different simultaneous discussions.
Thanks for making my point.
Fission plants have a finite lifespan anyway so if fusion or space laser or whatever appear, openings will be appearing constantly.
If those wealthy people are happy to pay a 5x or 10x rate, you can use it to install tons of renewables (with batteries). That's not something to complain about.
> Meanwhile, a middle/low-class family would be paying 1.5x the rate to keep the lights on home.
If it's not low, middle, or upper class, who do you imagine is paying the 1x rate?
But independent of this, I'm pro wealth-redistribution at any rate so really I see the solution to the paycheck to paycheck problem in terms of that. Massive investment in switching to green energy should also help by creating good jobs, as well.
The largest bulk of excess emissions doesn't appear to come from individual habits so much as structural industrial practices - things like producing things far overseas and shipping them by oil tanker, electricity production still being heavily reliant on coal, commutes being effectively mandated for many workers as their work doesn't pay them enough to live close to their job - or their job being doable remotely but corporate policy preventing workers from taking advantage of that (to both the benefit of their free time and health as well as the environment). So it seems unfair that working people should be punished for something they have limited power over.
Know what would work today? Reducing our energy consumption.
It also doesn't make a damn bit of difference of base load power comes from coal.
Laying out a ton of solar panels everywhere is great but if we have rolling blackouts when it’s too cloudy for a while people will be very upset.
One of the worlds biggest batteries (currently under construction nearby LA) stores the huge-sounding amount of 400MWh of energy. What isn't clear to folks who don't do the math is that battery is really only big enough to help out with peak load periods. The peak consumption of LA has reached as high as 6,393 MW (about double their average peak). At that rate, that battery -- literally one of the biggest ones in the whole world -- will last just 3.8 minutes.
Only small pilots have been deployed because batteries are just getting cost competitive now for the first time, and utilities are super slow to pick up new technology. They're not used to living in a world where there is new technology, but they are slowly waking up.
It's going to be like digital versus film cameras. Once the critical cost threshold is crosses, they will scale like crazy. And batteries are trivial to scale to huge or small sizes. We could start putting them in all substations and massively increase reliability of the grid in addition to switching to 100% renewables. It's just a matter of cost, we know how to engineer and build them. With nuclear, it's a matter of cost, and we know how to engineer, but we don't know how to build or scale.
You may be mistaking energy production with energy consumption. However, I'm not entirely sure what qualifies as "energy" in the list that I found. If we mean only electricity, then I believe some of these countries are still less than 100% run on renewables.
There are plenty of sources illustrating that things have changed in that time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguay#Green_energy_supply
nuclear is very slow to deploy and limited in capacity. the industry suffers from significant latency and tight bottlenecks.
the 2018 world nuclear outlook, a dubiously bullish and optimistic predictor of industry trends, shows that the most ambitious likelihoods for capacity growth will struggle to match total global demand growth - and that's assuming most plants up for (or past) retirement get license extensions. Nuclear is just too slow to make a meaningful dent in carbon-fueled power, and that's even before we consider cost.
renewables are our future, but also my present. My home produces more power than i need; half the houses in my street have their own solar panels; the shopping centre and church down the road are plastered in them. And although the local power company is 99% gas, they're buiding a medium-scale solar farm down the hiway; nearby small towns are fully solar already; and the next-largest city is building a battery farm to enable them to be more than 50% renewable within 10 years.
Cost-wise renewables are already winning in many parts of Earth and viable efficient storage has become the main problem.
Batteries are great for quick on-demand grid balancing, but are environmentally damaging and lose large amounts of capacity within half a decade.
Supercapacitors hold great promise, but like fusion always seem 20 years away. On a $/Ah scale they are useless today, but don't suffer from any of the flaws of batteries apart from weight/volume issues.
Gravity storage [1] seems the most promising, pumped hydro isn't that efficient and very site-dependant, rail or crane weight systems seem to outperform and hopefully they gain some traction
[0] https://www.nuscalepower.com/technology/technology-overview
[1] https://www.aresnorthamerica.com/grid-scale-energy-storage
It's similar to the fear of planes vs the actual safety statistics of planes.
The problem, as you point out, is that people are generally very bad at understanding risk.
Here's the risk as society that doesn't pretend to be purposefully dense defines it: when something goes wrong, how bad it is. Take all the coal plant disasters, and compare them to all the nuclear disasters. Now let's take a future disaster, the reason for which you don't know and cannot account for with "new design" which will be called "old and faulty design" in a few decades. During that disaster, looking at past disasters, do you want that destroyed power plant to be coal or nuclear?
Coal has no risk. Coal has a well defined, predictable, and understood small and slow detriment. You define that as risk. The world defines that as the opposite of risk.
Lived in Kiev for a year an a half, took a bus trip to Chernobyl.. Guess what they got in that huge area where no one lives (actually there is a crazy old lady who lives there, still in her house). Did you guess it? Yeah, fresh tree stumps.
That radioactive wood is cut down by shady companies for free, and shipped to europe and other parts of Ukraine. Out of it you get houses and furniture. Did you account for risk of sitting on a radioactive couch in a radioactive house when you claimed you fully understood "risk?" Ah, that's because to understand the risk of something you first need to understand what the English word means.
http://www.guillaume-herbaut.com/en/the-black-gold-of-cherno...
But at least we know that we need to maintain nuclear waste for a long time. Or we create deep subterranean disposal sites, and this will be dangerous work.
Coal is probably even a lot worse because of climate change effects.
Renewables seem to fare better for future mortality.
Firstly, renewables are great and we should of course be investing heavily. However, until we have the what is still non-existing storage tecgnology, we need a base load of either nuclear or fossil fuels. Insisting on a nuclear-free energy supply right now unfortunately means insisting on fossil fuels as a base load for the foreseeable future.
Given the greatest risk to humanity's survival is climate change, failing to secure a low-carbon energy supply is a risk that far outweighs any of the risk of using nuclear alongside renewables.
We can already see the results of foregoing nuclear - energy in now nuclear-free Germany is seven times as carbon-intensive as nuclear-heavy France[1].
[1] http://energyforhumanity.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Euro...
So I would propose, to hedge against the perennial optimism of industry apologists who will never have to back up their claims, have the investors who bet on this also fund an escrow account to the tune of 10x or so of the construction and other initial costs, to make up for gaps in their wildly positive projections. These funds could be invested and returned to the original sources if the project turns out to remain safe and financially worthwhile after x number of years. Not enough money to fund 10x? Then don’t do the project until there is.
NuScale said their tech was targeting $90/MWh, and trying to get a first plant running by 2023[1]. That's a non-starter for most modern utility RFPs even today.
Xcel Energy is seeing bids as low as $18/MWh for wind, $29/MWh for solar, and $36/MWh for solar+storage[2]. So maybe nuclear can fit into the realm of the 10% of edge cases where renewables+storage aren't effective, but I'm not seeing any financial scenario where nuclear comes close to providing the middle 80% of generation capacity. It's just too damn expensive.
Unless Bill Gates is proposing we can cut nuclear prices by 80%, I'm worried this is a huge distraction from us deploying renewables + storage + flexible load, which is currently extremely cheap and getting cheaper.
[1]: https://analysis.nuclearenergyinsider.com/small-modular-reac...
[2]: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/record-low-sola...
Sure doesn't sound like a lot in the context of ~trillion market cap companies...but this is a billion un-encumbrered. No lawyers...just one person deciding this is happening.
While I agree that nuclear energy is basically required at this point in order to ween humans off of lighting crap they get out of the ground on fire, bill's antics may not be the best option (can his company deliver? others have already done so.. so why not them instead? it will require more than $2bn... so tax dollars required.)
We should be taxing the ultra rich more, and then the public instead of the ultra rich would be the one being able to decide what to do with this money.
I know, that's a whole pile of variables; but variables should be reduced when it comes to nuclear energy, IMO.
That said, I greatly favor nuclear over, you know, burning stuff, and I'd like to see it succeed alongside renewables.
Nuclear waste is well contained and can be secured for hundreds of years easily: https://www.npr.org/2011/02/02/133399514/into-eternity-nucle...
Coal isn't without it's drawbacks[0], no matter how much it's praised but the fallout[1] (no pun intended) from nuclear disasters has much longer and farther-reaching implications, which we have no way to really recover from - still to this day.
As others have pointed out, the disasters have caused a bit of uneasiness with the public and it's understandable, when the general consensus in modern-day society is, "It's not my problem, so I don't care."
If we treated it as a "human problem" and not "x" society's problem, we'd probably get a lot further; of course, this assumes that people believe the environment is in serious danger but, alas, there are people who do not. (Did these same people exist during the CFC/Ozone-hole problem?)
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#The_Exclusi...
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-we-nee...
Previous HN discussion here:
In practice, anyone who knows about those technologies is active in the academic and industrial community. There are a lot of regulation that you can’t understand without professional lobbyists, and most of them are former civil servants.
I would compare it to Space exploration: a private actor like SpaceX of BlueOrigin is welcome on principle but has to pay a significant fee for controls. Whether you see that as needed security expertise or fealty is a matter of interpretation.
Hmmm. PG&E wouldn't have to worry about 100,000 miles of transmission lines if power-generation could be decentralized. Oh, wait, it can be! And without paying for 10,000 years of security.
Of course it won't make anyone rich or powerful, and it's decentralized, and those are bad things. Apparently.
I really respect it when people are willing to put their money where their mouth is. Kudos to Gates.
And from my understanding, that spent fuel can be reused after a certain amount of time.
Yucca Mountain is a good solution if they can ever figure out the local politics.
There are interesting initiatives around the country to curb peaks in usage, however. For example, my parents are signed up for a service where they collect bill credits as they minimize power usage during a pre-announced hour of the week which exceeds normal capacity and would require dirtier and more expensive power plants to operate.
Most countries actually don't even have the expertise to manage a nuclear industry anymore.
Every row in the table has a citation at end.
A hundred years of burning coal has damaged our atmosphere a little bit; doing the same for another hundred thousand years would be absurdly catastrophic to our ecosystem, killing and displacing billions.
You'd also need to look carefully at hydro as well, as thousand-year-old mega-dams begin to randomly fail.
Nuclear risk will probably be lower as the shockingly naive Soviet-era and 1960s-era designed reactors are all replaced with new designs built with immensely improved understanding of nuclear physics, materials design, computer augmentation, and local climatic risks.
It now happens to be that the indirect, psychosocial effects of the evacuation and economic losses due to the plant closure caused way more total health problems than the radiation. We now see similar trends at Fukushima.
And no, that doesn't mean that radiation isn't dangerous, people definitely died from radiation in Chernobyl (not in Fukushima), particularly the personnel and rescue workers.
However, the danger of low-level radiation seems to be vastly overstated. The Linear Non-Threshold Model (LNT)[1] for radiation damage seems to simply be wrong, which is not surprising as it was never based on data in the first place.
That of course also affects how we should think about nuclear waste, as the idea that we have to isolate it 100% from contact with the biosphere is predicated on the LNT.
And as someone pointed out, if we actually crash back down to a Bronze-Age society, nuclear waste will be the smallest of our problems, whereas if we remain an advanced industrial society, we will be able to deal with it, better each year.
However, the bigger point about nuclear waste is that there is just so incredibly little of it. With BFR, we can probably start chugging the worst bits of it into the sun if we don't want to re-process.
In fact coal plants actually produce more radiation:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model#Cont...
https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy
The future is renewables not pushing the can down the road with Nuclear, ignoring all of its negative externalities.
Bill Gates doesn’t need government to build solar either.
For getting the most safety per dollar, probably not.
We have to go out of our comfort zone and start pushing for laws that force manufacturers to allow for 20 year repairability of electronical products (some brands already offer 10 years, so 20 years is probably possible too), pushing for automatic 5 year warranty on electronic products instead of 2 in the EU, disallowing environment breaking agriculture, putting extremely high taxes on airplane tickets, etc.
Sure, that means that we need to change the way we live. We need to consume less and better. We need to think long term instead of jumping onto the new bright innovation every 2 years.
21st century capitalism has gotten to a point of absurdity in which everything in the world "has to" be available within the reach of a click and max 3 days delivery, whatever the cost (environment is dying, poverty is still not gone despite the absurd amount of wealth produced by modern economies, etc).
Maybe we ought to rethink how we consume and what we expect from life.
Extreme measures like you are talking about could not be implemented in any democracy.
The example the parent is taking is very good: having 10 years guarantee on all products is pro consumer (it might increases prices a bit, but I believe people will actually save money in the long run).
That being said, while improving energy efficiency is good as it makes the challenge of decarbonization easier, when/if we have low-impact electricity generation we could use (lots of) electricity to decarbonize many processes requiring fossil fuels today. Such as production of ammonia for nitrogen fertilizer (today from natural gas), or building heating with heat pumps instead of fuel burning boilers, steel production with hydrogen direct reduction instead of coke, etc.
You could also just buy those evil Koch Brothers/Adelson/etc. They are all smaller than you. Just buy them and shut them down.
You can save the country with a wave of your hand. Why are you always making such a small impact with such a large amount of money? Stop trying to bunt to first and smack the home run.
Alternative: Give me all your money and I'll do it for you.
This is the way it's been done for decades.
The government should decide this as representatives of the people, not as arms of extremely wealthy people.
The free market prioritizes cheap buildings and profit. One law that requires energy-efficiency for all new structures ends the argument.
No offence, but participating in the nuclear argument makes you a moron.
It's called ybco tape
And the reason for that is because the funding for fusion is below the "fusion never" stage.
If Gates were really interested, he'd commit a billion dollars every single year to fusion. That would roughly speaking quadruple the amount of funding driving fusion forward.
And, to top it off, even if you didn't get fusion you'd start getting real engineering spinoff technologies that you could use in other facets of power generation, transmission, storage, etc.
Add in leverage and say 2 billion in research could represent 10-20+ billion worth of clean energy investments before the fruits of this research could come online. And even then you would need to spend even more money actually building something useful.
This could be my own bias talking but fission has seen 100+ Billion in R&D. I have my doubts this is going to move the needle much.
PS: I am more than open to any counter arguments you have...
Even storage of waste is a solved problem: bury it in dry old mines in seismically dead locations, or start moving to the known novel reactor types.
Politically, the issue is much different though...
Really, I would have no problem with Nuclear if it was cheap, but nobody can get it to be cheap (not even China) even without the need to load follow. We need cheap power and supplemental load following / storage. But, Nuclear is simply well behind the curve on both sides of the equation. Safe, stead production at 4c/kWh without subsidies would be a game changer or load following at much higher prices.
Now, if the economics looked great then sure, but this stuff is all about minor improvements that don’t really change the game.
However, I do not have good enough background to vet the source well. Are they missing something obvious?
Also, I was not talking about worker safety, rater about everyone's health, from the miner to the person living near the power plant.
Another issue is that the page is from 2012 and its numbers for renewables, solar PV in particular, overestimated costs for 2017. Solar PV costs declined much faster than the EIA estimated.
the era of supersonic travel?
I mean, sure, supersonic flight is /technically possible/ but it is exceedingly rare that the sound barrier is broken by traveling civilians.
My understanding is that the problem mostly has to do with air resistance increasing with the cube of speed; this could be overcome by going higher, above the atmosphere, but nobody has figured out how to do that at subsonic flight costs, either.
I mean, it is kind of sad; one of those technologies that we created, but that then turned out to not be as practical as the older stuff for everyday use.
Which is why countries and companies that don’t give a fuck about the environment are all over it. It took a long time to beat coal, but games over it won now it’s just a question of time.
However, replacing natural gas as peaking power that’s still in the works.
That's probably optimistic, but there's a lot more hope in that idea than in fighting a pitched battle about solar panels, China, and "clean coal" in the current political climate.
I'm not a fan of Gates, but if this is his gameplan, I'm all in.
If we can ditch coal and fossils for nuclear, we'll have a new set of problems, but nothing as dire as "12 years before we all cook to death".
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Don't get me wrong - there are dangers in nuclear energetics. And the long-term effects of radiation incidents are still hotly debated. But as you just demonstrated, the dangers are way overestimated in public imagination and discourse. You use as an argument an imaginable incident that is at least five orders of magnitude worse than any accident that ever happened, and that is pretty much impossible given current technology, and are comparing it to very real dangers of the alternatives.
Imagine if, instead of making their case to the administration, the advocates of the FIRST STEP Act felt it was sufficient to criticize the administration, and then give up entirely.
I see no reason why, with the right pitch, the Trump administration would be especially resistant to an effort like this. It's not as though they oppose certain "green" policies because they're "too green"; they oppose them because they are costly for, and unpopular with, their base.
Real people are not your caricatures of them.
My point is that if you couch it in the same balanced terms, there's no reason why an equally progressive initiative in energy should be assumed to be futile.
If anything, it may be easier to pass legislation favoring nuclear under Trump: Trump likes to deregulate, he doesn't care about anti-nuclear "activists", and he understands the role of cheap energy in the economy really well.
This is like asking someone with a 4 Gbps connection to transfer some files and offering to burn a single mini CD to help them.
What is the current US federal budget for building or supporting nuclear energy infrastructure?
$30.6 billion requested in 2019 for the Department of Energy, which includes more than $757 million for the Office of Nuclear Energy (NE).
I should add that there is such an energy glut in the world nowadays that companies that make turbines for nuclear/coal/gas plants are in dire financial straits. (See GE and to a lesser extent Siemens and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries).
What we need now is a good storage solution, or a flexible on demand power plant. Nuclear is very bad for both of these goals.
BTW Mr. Gates' offer is not that generous. He says if the tax payer puts billions of money in his company he will also put a billion of his money in his company. Well gee that is great for you but what does the taxpayer get out of it. What if a stranger comes up to you and says "Hey buddy, if you pay $5000 to fix my car, I will pay $1000 out of my own money to repaint it."
When people stop bragging about how many more jobs green energy creates than fossil fuels, I'll start believing that renewables are cheaper at scale.
> What we need now is a good storage solution
Collocate the new nuclear plants with facilities that (at high energy cost) recapture carbon into dense fuels.
I'm trying to understand your nuclear -> fuel plan. Nuclear reactors already use a storage solution, why are you adding an extra step? Why not combine it with wind/solar?
Edit: Are you suggesting the green jobs would lead to high wages and costs? Don't forget theres no fuel cost with renewables.
Hmm, not sure what storage solution you're thinking of? Is there a nuclear-specific means of storing the energy produced for later use?
What I mean to say is: nuclear power is so cheap that you could use it to power carbon recapture, even at the current cost. There are even people working on using direct air capture to create ultra-dense fuel, e.g. http://carbonengineering.com/ . This is surely very inefficient (lots of energy required to recapture a small amount of fuel), but if we powered it using a nuclear plant's off-peak energy, it's effectively a liquid battery.
The fissile material itself.
Nuclear power is dispatchable to a point, and I don't think its as cheap as you seem to think it is. The scheme might be worth it for producing jet fuel etc, but using fission to generate electricity to generate fuel for short term storage for a generator? Unless it is really efficient, no.
Combined with renewables which aren't dispatchable at all, more likely, but not where I would put my money.
These braggarts haven't calculated the labor intensity per MWh (construction + operation) over the full life cycle of utility scale wind and solar facilities. Utility scale renewables are less labor-intensive than coal or nuclear over the full life cycle. The only reason that renewable boosters can tout jobs vs. coal right now is because coal is shrinking and renewables are still growing robustly.
I suspect that natural gas burned in a combined cycle plant may be more labor-thrifty than anything else, but 1) it's not a low-carbon electricity source like nuclear or renewables and 2) it has been harder for me to calculate how much labor is required for fuel extraction; the calculation is easier with coal since quite a few coal burning plants have dedicated mines.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13218366 for a labor-intensity comparison of legacy coal and utility scale PV that I worked out previously.
In fairness, I have seen advocates for coal and nuclear brag about the bountiful wages distributed (costs incurred for electrical ratepayers) by their preferred generating technologies, too.
It's hard to marshal evidence for or against this claim, since as you say, the newest renewable technologies are in the earliest stages of their life cycles. It's also hard to defend or refute claims about the cost of renewables at scale, since they're currently such a small fraction of energy production. Are we looking at economies of scale / diminishing marginal costs? Or, how quickly will we exhaust the geothermal sites, the dam-able rivers, and the rare minerals that go into batteries and solar panels?
Projecting the answers to these questions requires a lot careful modeling, extrapolation, and educated guesses. Given the hopes, fears, and ideologies at play, it's very easy to lie with stats here (or for proponents of any given source, to bend the truth in one direction in the conversation about creating jobs, and in the opposite direction in the conversation about cutting costs). Based on your linked post, it looks like you're digging into this rigorously & honestly, so thanks for that.
> how much labor is required for fuel extraction
Plus transportation. Isn't this way cheaper for nuclear, where way less fuel (in terms of mass) produces way more power? And, isn't there a good deal of extraction that goes into creating a solar panel?
With present technology geothermal is going to be a niche source. Hydroelectric generation is not, but most of its potential in developed countries is already tapped. When I speak of large scale renewable growth I mean utility-scale photovoltaics and wind.
Neither solar panels nor batteries for stationary energy storage require rare minerals. Lithium ion batteries that maximize energy density, like those in cars and portable electronic devices, usually contain the comparatively rare element cobalt, but this is not required if lower energy density is acceptable. Batteries that stay in one place don't need maximum energy density and can eliminate cobalt. Lithium itself is not rare; lithium iron phosphate is a perfectly fine battery chemistry for stationary applications and requires no rare minerals.
My estimates of labor intensity for renewables do not include storage or overproduction (to diminish reliance on storage). The numbers I've provided are for incremental nearer-term goals achievable without storage, like "displace the 28% of American electricity that comes from coal with renewables." Storage is immature and I'd be piling speculation on top of speculation if I tried to estimate how much storage and/or overproduction a zero-fossil energy system needs, and how much labor that will require. Note that a zero-fossil energy system built on nuclear foundations will need to deal with these questions too eventually; the difference between peak and average demand for electricity means that nuclear reactors too would need to be overbuilt or coupled with storage to take the place of fossil peakers.
I think that nuclear power is quite safe enough, certainly safer than continued fossil combustion. I don't have any grudge against nuclear apart from the high costs and unpredictable schedules that have attended attempts to build new units. 15 years ago I thought it was obvious that building even the cheapest solar farms was a more expensive way to generate electricity than building an average nuclear reactor. But the numbers changed, and I changed my mind along with them.
Some countries have dense populations and poor availability of sunny land, like Belgium and the Netherlands. The US has better sun and lower population density. There is some resistance to retiring coal from people who make money from coal. But generally speaking solar has always had a favorable public image apart from the high costs -- and the high costs are now turning into moderate and even low costs.
Since large cost reductions have been so very recent, it's just taking a while for everyone to catch up. Just this month Florida Power and Light surprisingly announced plans to build more solar power than any other regulated utility in the world, for example:
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/florida-power-a...
Their first large-scale solar project was a 25 megawatt facility built in 2009. Last year and this year they're adding solar capacity of about 300 MW per year. With the "30 by 30" announcement they apparently want to accelerate that to beyond 1000 MW per year.
[1] In the long term, manufacturers will have to stop using conductive silver pastes to make cell contacts and switch to more abundant base metals like copper, tin, nickel, or aluminum. Multiple companies have already used copper metallization instead of silver at an industrial scale so I'm reasonably confident that this eventually-necessary transition will not be too difficult.
I don't doubt any of the stats you cite, but it seems that one of the biggest impediments to solar is the huge amount of area it requires. The real estate costs of putting such plants nearby large population centers seems to be one of the major costs.
Rooftop solar seems to be a good solution, but it's still not economical without generous government incentives.
Anecdote: A colleague of mine is trying to get approval for solar panels on top of a property she owns in a high density area of New Jersey. After doing an in depth cost/benefit analysis, she found it was economical, but only because New Jersey has very large incentives. Roughly 2/3 of the project would be financed by the government either in grants or tax credits.
Rooftop solar is not especially cost-effective. It yields less energy per installed watt than large solar farms and it costs multiple times as much per watt to install in the US. If the US could get its permitting and inspection for rooftop solar streamlined and standardized like in Germany or Australia, then the price premium over ground-mount systems would be more like 40% than 400%, and it would be worth considering in states without large open spaces.
Even in Germany rooftop systems are less cost-effective than ground mount systems though the cost-effectiveness gap isn't as large as in the US. I attribute Germany's continued incentives for rooftop solar to a desire to maintain broad societal buy-in to the energy transition. Millions of households and businesses all with their own stake in solar makes for a large and stable coalition of supporters. Just having the legacy energy utilities build their own big solar plants is more cost effective but doesn't give so many people a personal stake in the transition.
Green energy anywhere and anytime you need it, not just when the sun shines and the wind blows.
The one major problem with nuclear energy is that mining uranium has thus far been an environmental disaster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
For the price of one nuclear powerplant you could have built 3 nuclear powerplants worth of energy storage this year and over the next 20 years the price of energy storage will drop even further which will make it economical without any subsidies.
Gates basically has dedicated his life to thinking about issues like this. He funds and promotes all the other sources of green energy as well. It's clearly his considered opinion that nuclear energy is going to be an important component, over and above other sources of green energy to actually achieve our goals in an amount of time and at a scale to have a meaningful impact on climate change.