The Reason They Hate Nuclear Is Because It Means We Don't Need Renewables | Hacker News Reader

The Reason They Hate Nuclear Is Because It Means We Don't Need Renewables

forbes.com

29 pointshirundo30 comments

I work in the energy industry and find these kinds of articles frustrating. Rather than arguing the facts, they paint a caricature of "the other side."

Many environmentalists, particularly those focused on greenhouse gasses are very supportive of nuclear energy. The strongest argument against nuclear is not environmental. It is economic.

New nuclear plants take over a decade to bring online, last 40+ years, and cost $20 billion plus. In an industry moving towards distributed generation and decentralization this is out of place. We can't predict our energy needs 50 years in advance.

Furthermore, nuclear plant construction tend to run 100%+ over budget and those costs are passed onto the ratepayers rather than borne the utilities.

The levelized cost of wind and solar is already cheaper than nuclear. They can be brought online in months rather than years, they can be deployed at whatever scale is needed and we can use market forces to do so.

What's not to love?

However, as many informed environmentalists will point out, it will be almost impossible to get to zero carbon emissions in the next 50 years without nuclear power.

The truth is far more interesting and much less confrontational than these kinds of articles lead you to believe.

> And so the New Left environmentalists attacked nuclear energy as somehow bad for the environment.

This would be more of a caricature against "many environmentalists" than it is against "the New Left". The Green New Deal has been getting approving reviews from all over that quarter, seemingly including all of the Democratic presidential candidates and many in the legislature. Given that the GND rules out nuclear energy, is it really such a caricature?

Just wait until China figures out next-generation nuclear power generation and eclipses what the US is capable of. They will. Because they don't seem to be concerned with the BS talking points like our bubble-brained climate "scientists" and dishonest and or paid-off politicians. They also seem to be able to take the risks.

I fully expect that the next great ideas of how to do energy production is going to happen elsewhere, because the US keeps shooting itself in the foot and going "well it's expensive and solar and wind and ..." instead of looking at it as an investment that secures our status and capability well into the future.

Unlikely.

> The country [China] has the capacity to build 10 to 12 nuclear reactors a year. But though reactors begun several years ago are still coming online, the industry has not broken ground on a new plant in China since late 2016, according to a recent World Nuclear Industry Status Report.

> Officially China still sees nuclear power as a must-have. But unofficially, the technology is on a death watch. Experts, including some with links to the government, see China’s nuclear sector succumbing to the same problems affecting the West: the technology is too expensive, and the public doesn’t want it.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-... (China’s losing its taste for nuclear power. That’s bad news.)

>Furthermore, nuclear plant construction tend to run 100%+ over budget and those costs are passed onto the ratepayers rather than borne the utilities.

Isn't some of that due to regulatory ratcheting which is instigated by environmentalists who want to delay and make the economics unfeasible?

Also, SKorea is able to build them on-time and on-budget. So, it's not a given it can't be done.

It's honestly very hard to say precisely. All parties are incentivized to blame someone else, but these kinds of regulations tend to change very slowly and usually grandfather in projects that are completed or are in process.

Looking at the recent Summer plant in SC, for example, it looks like it was mostly poor planning and unforeseen changes in energy prices and building costs. These factors change much more quickly than regulations.

Great, succinct points. Also worth noting that a different Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors think-tank (of which the Breakthrough Institute is a subsidiary-ish entity) agrees with your economic analysis regarding nuclear power plants startup/op costs versus LNG, wind, and solar (https://climatenexus.org/climate-issues/energy/nuclear-energ...).

What is the situation regarding storage and grid instability due to increasing renewables?

This is my main question every time. Storage seems to be lagging behind generation.

Grid operators the world over are screaming about it, but so far things have gone pretty well. Germany has had some hiccups, but they were extremely aggressive in bringing renewables online and moving away from nuclear. And these problems were mostly a matter of strange wholesale prices rather than outages.

The gird and grid management certainly needs to be changed to accommodate renewables, but utilities all over the world are already making these changes, both to the infrastructure and to the way they balance the grid.

It's a fascinating time to be in the industry.

Thank you for the information but, as a realtive laymen, the whole "It seems to be going pretty well" doesn't seem to jibe with the fact that we seem to be failing miserably to meet Paris accords with even Germany pulling out of the commiment.

If things are going pretty well and renewables are "What's not to love?" (to shamelessly steal your quote) then what on earth is going on.

I was commenting on the effect the renewables would have on running the grid itself. In general, the grid seems to be able to handle to increases in renewables we've seen so far and those we see coming.

The pace at which we are deploying renewable generation is another matter entirely.

(I'm working from memory here, so take this with a grain of salt.) IIRC, the latest info is that the existing grid can handle something like 15% renewable energy before things start falling over in a big way. This is a bit higher than the 10% to 12% which was originally forecast, but considerably lower than the 30% which some optimists were claiming.

They used to say the same thing in Denmark. Yet, wind penetration is now a bit below 50%, and the grid is stable, see for instance page 14 here

https://ens.dk/sites/ens.dk/files/Globalcooperation/security...

"Figure 5 illustrates that there have been no major blackouts in Denmark in the past ten years"

Of course it requires adjustments, and the adjustments made in Denmark are specific to the local circumstances, just as they'll have to be everywhere else in the world.

I'd probably have to read the entire report to know for sure (too lazy), but I'm guessing that they currently only have such stability because of their interlinks with other electricity markets; see Figure 1 on page 11. And if those other markets start transitioning to renewables in a big way then "problem" for Denmark.

BTW, as I understand it the best-sited windmills only provide maybe 25% of their "nameplate" capacity on average, and even that number is probably too optimistic overall. Plus, windmills in general are only lasting maybe half of their originally expected lifetimes - 10 years instead of 20, or what have you. These and plenty of other factors just seem to be being ignored when people call them "very low cost producers".

>> The levelized cost of wind and solar is already cheaper than nuclear. They can be brought online in months rather than years, they can be deployed at whatever scale is needed and we can use market forces to do so.

I'm not personally aware of any place where this is actually true.

Even assuming you are not building out wind and solar on the scale of a country like germany you still need comparable subsidies to incentivize power producers to build new renewable energy sources; to say nothing of the grid management cost. You can quibble with exactly how large the subsidy is and, to be fair; unless you are employed by a consulting comapany you will never have access to the internal accounting figures that actually value the marginal cost of electricity produced by variable renewable sources compared to conventional sources but the subsidy is almost certainly not less than 15-17% of the wholesale price. Given that this subsidy is guaranteed by law to extend far into the future it simply defies imagination to assume that the levelized cost is somehow comparable at all.

I see this kind of argument a lot and a fair number of times someone claims they work in the energy industry or at a think tank with renewable energy or something. If that is the case I find it strange that they can't name actual examples where wind/solar don't require subsidies. It's usually just a link to a Lezard report with strange CoC assumptions.

You need to be careful not to compare existing, written-off power plants with new plants. What's compared is what would happen if you start a tender for a new generation capacity - what generation capacity would then win.

Regarding your questions: subsidies have fallen over the years, and we're beginning to see the first projects without direct subsidies:

https://www.vox.com/2018/5/30/17408602/solar-wind-energy-ren...

And yes, it's true that running a grid is much more complicated than just LCoE.

Subsidies and grid management are important considerations regardless of what kind of generation we are talking about.

However, there is widespread agreement that the levelized, unsubsidized cost of nuclear is more expensive than that of wind and solar, and the cots of renewables are dropping.

Here's a good starting point.

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

"Nuclear energy is the most certain future source" -John McCarthy

FAQ:

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nuclear-faq.html

This is a slanted screed by a guy who publishes nothing but nuclear-shilling and attacks on renewable technology[1]. I don't know why anyone would read it, except to catalog the cherry-picking, omissions, and outright falsehoods. It is basically an example of the Brandolini Principle.[0]

So, to make the ad-hominem explicit, consider the source.

[0] https://twitter.com/ziobrando/status/289635060758507521?lang...

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/#641ea3afb...

"Even if nuclear power were clean, safe, economic, assured of ample fuel, and socially benign,” said the god head of renewables, Amory Lovins, in 1977, “it would still be unattractive because of the political implications of the kind of energy economy it would lock us into."

Namely, the status quo. Cheaper energy will tend to pacify the masses. If you want big changes to the power structure, pacific masses are a bug.

And ecologically, wealthier people with time on their hands playing with their nuclear powered electric ATVs and boats and whatnot will occupy and damage more ecosystems. They'll consume more of all sorts of resources.

The increase in human energy use by itself, clean or not, works against many popular ecological and political goals.

He’s right, environmentalists don’t want solutions, only perpetual problems. It’s why I can’t take any of them too seriously.

They like to say stuff about how we need to fight for our lives over climate change, after that group set nuclear power generation behind by multiple decades at this point.

They like to complain about how it’s too risky, when their public fear mongering have effectively left us with a fleet of reactors for the 1960’s and 1970’s that have outlived their planned lives. And the NRC has no choice but to extend their operating licenses until it becomes too expensive for the utilities to maintain. So they get shut down.

Wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the lot of these talking heads have had their palms greased by the renewable industry.

Eff them all.

Yikes. Talk about ignoring externalities. The energy industry is still run by oil and gas, not renewables, not nuclear. We've made a lot of progress but to think that Nuclear is a better solution than renewables is not an automatically won debate.

Nuclear in the US has historically been the victim of deep pocketed fossil fuel industry and their PR and lobbying efforts. Now, it's getting it from the fledgling renewable energy industry also.

Many of these environmental groups are likely funded by both the fossil fuel industry and the renewable industry. Heck much of the renewable industry is owned by the fossil fuel companies.

People forget how big and powerful fossil fuel companies are. The largest company in the US ( by revenue ) is Exxon. 3 of the 5 largest companies ( by revenue ) in the US are fossil fuel companies. Nuclear doesn't stand a chance without some real heavyweights pushing for it.

Despite rigorous engineering, you still get:

Fukushima Daiichi

Chernobyl

Three Mile Island

Enrico Fermi Unit 1

SL-1

Sodium Reactor Experiment

Windscale

via https://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/nuclear-power-accidents...

You are omitting the whole next layer, which is all the plants that were run in "risk-enhancing mode" but just by chance didn't have a catastrophic accident. Davis-Besse's corroded pressure vessel head, which was covered up for 6 years before being reported, is a good example.

My bad. Thanks for bringing that up.

Also, we're just now getting to see spent fuel at Fukushima?

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201902140041.html

Just because we can doesn't mean we should. Yes, total clickbait, but still.

Nuclear energy would at least stop additional solar waste from accumulating. So that would be a big plus.

I don't think so.

The problem with the watermelons (green outside, red inside), is that they're a runaway psyops from the cold war time KGB. It's basically a headless chicken that keeps running in the courtyard.

More interesting would be the reason why nuclear power has not been more developed BEFORE renewables could be considered. And the reason is:

1- civil nuclear power has been developed using uranium instead of thorium since this produces plutonium as by-product, which is useful to build nuclear weapon.

2- we want to prevent nuclear weapon proliferation, therefore we have to prevent proliferation of uranium-based civil nuclear power.

The solution is to start to develop thorium-based civil nuclear power. This doesn't lead to military-use or ecologically problematic by-products, so it can be used everywhere on the planet.

> 1- civil nuclear power has been developed using uranium instead of thorium since this produces plutonium as by-product, which is useful to build nuclear weapon.

All of the plutonium production for weapons was done in special purpose reactors at Hanford, WA. It takes a pretty specialized process to extract the plutonium from the fuel slugs. And btw most used nuclear fuel in the US is still sitting in tanks next to the power plants that they were used in.

We also stopped producing plutonium a fairly long time ago because we have more than enough for all the weapons we could ever conceivably want to produce.

The reason we have the reactors we do is probably more to do with the US navy than anything.

The reason you don't try to make bombs from power reactor plutonium: The long fuel cycle of power reactors produces too much Pu240 and Pu242. It's dang near impossible to get a nuclear explosion if there's much of those isotopes; their high spontaneous fission rate makes the bomb "fizzle" before the core can be sufficiently compressed.

Those who pretend to believe that industrial civilization can be run on "sunny days when the wind is blowing" energy are engaged in arithmetic denialism.

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