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> 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?

>> 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

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...).

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.)

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".

>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.