Meanwhile, the United States continues to shut down Nuclear Reactors and prevent modern constructions out of irrational fearmongering.
At least India recognizes the benefits of Nuclear Power...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-10/french-po...
France will save 39 billion euros ($44.5 billion) if it refrains from building 15 new nuclear plants by 2060, and bets instead on renewable energy sources to replace its all its aging atomic facilities, a government agency said.
France should spend 1.28 trillion euros over the next four decades, mostly on clean power production and storage capacities, networks, and imports, according to a report from the country’s environment ministry. If it does this, France would progressively shut down its 58 atomic plants and renewable energy would comprise 95 percent of its electricity output by 2060, up from 17 percent last year
Reactors that are already built and in good operating order provide very predictable electricity at low-moderate costs.
Building new reactors is much less predictable. France's latest reactor design, the EPR, is many years behind schedule and many billions over budget at both French and Finnish projects to build the new reactor. It was even years late when built in China, where presumably no lawsuits/activists/excessive safety regulations were ever allowed to get in the way.
The 3% difference is a reasonable criticism, meaning that they're basically at parity cost wise in this comparison. But then you really have to add the 1000+ year waste storage costs - which even if not ignored, are ridiculous to estimate costs for.
Short version: was originally expected to cost 3.3 bil euro, is now at 10.9 bil euro and climbing.
I think the idea that renewables will be feasible in a country India's size with India's population, while preserving much if any natural space seems, at best, optimistic.
By all means Australia - the 6th largest country by area in the world with a population of 25ish million has the space. But India? Sure it is the 7th largest country by area, but it is less than half Australia's size, with 50-70 times the population (India's population estimates are tricky).
The scariest part of these debates is that the solution is likely energy dependence, as in countries with space - and day more sunshine - sell electricity to those without it. I don't think ANYONE likes that idea, but I can't see any way that it is feasible worldwide while maintaining each country's energy independence.
If every six months the rate at which a million EVs are sold, how much battery storage is that over the next decade? My math says tens of GWs.
EDIT Which is awesome, and surely beats running diesel generators!
Which presumably don't have large, dense cities nor heavy industry?
> If every six months the rate at which a million EVs are sold, how much battery storage is that over the next decade? My math says tens of GWs.
Battery costs are orders of magnitude too high to make sense for anything but very short term storage. Yes, they are fantastic for some ancillary services like frequency control. And with lots of solar and air conditioning, might allow you to get past the duck curve hump in the evenings.
Providing energy for a couple weeks when a high pressure system has parked on your country and wind produces 0? Forget it.
Flow batteries will come online to carry the storage past where high volume production lithium cost savings can't reach. I think if we put nearly the same or as consistent capital into renewable as we put into even the last decade of fossil fuel discovery, we'll find that costs drop very very rapidly.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/03/13/worlds-first-flow-bat...
So, constructing this storage facility costed basically as much as constructing an actual nuclear power plant in 1970s of equivalent generating capacity. Thus, if instead of these, we simply build nuclear plants, we'll likely save money and won't have to deal with instability of generation.
In a cost optimized no-CO2 system, you'll see renewables providing immediate power, short term storage (batteries, pumped hydro) carrying over shorter outages, and some sort of peaking capacity for longer lulls in sun/wind. Overcapacity of the renewables + longer distance transmission will help, as will end-user storage of heat/cold. The peaking capacity will be used only a small fraction of the time, and will be powered by hydrogen (either from electrolysis from excess renewable output, or from NG steadily reformed to H2 and the H2 stored for use during the peaks, and the CO2 from the reformers sequestered). Simple cycle plants are ~40% efficient and cost < $400/kW.
The experience in Australia is nobody has considered nuclear because one political party (labour) has historically had a policy of banning the technology. The economics of the costs have never been tested because of the hysterical response to radiation risk. I suspect if it was regulated to the same safety standards as solar it would be very cost-competitive indeed.
The current focus of energy policy is on reducing GHG emissions, reliability and affordability of supply. The installed cost of nuclear power does not make it an attractive option compared to fast installation of solar and wind generation.
> non-proliferation, disarmament, testing
You don't need to do any of that jazz to have nuclear power. The existence of cheap and clean nuclear power would in fact be a powerful stabilising force and likely to promote world peace.
> nuclear waste management
Are there worries here that cannot be fairly summed up as concerns about radiation risk? The volumes are tiny and trivially manageable apart from that.
> aboriginal land rights, mining degradation
Those are simply anti-mining concerns. There is nowhere in Australia that mining doesn't interact with somebody's land rights. There is also no organised political force in Australia that wants to ban mining - even the Greens are not opposed to mining in principle.
> The installed cost of nuclear power does not make it an attractive option ...
Maybe. I'm not up to date with the current costs for wind and solar but I've been consistently told they were the cheapest option and it has been consistently proven they are not. Happily the evidence is a lot more compelling this round but I'm waiting to see the whole-of-grid picture.
That doesn't change the fact that there was a long stretch of Australia's history where the most economic cheap & clean source of energy was basically blanket banned due to a major parties policy. You'd have to be stupid to try and run the gauntlet with nuclear power in the current political environment, so I doubt it is going to get a fair go.
I think it's a large scale astroturfing effort by the nuclear industry (which is huge, with a very small number of players) and the useful rubes who play along.
Nuclear may be a necessary part of the grid mix, but the panacea presented has never remotely been close to reality -- every build takes much longer than promised, and always, with 100% certainty, costs billions more than planned. Every build has maintenance that costs multiples of the claims, operation that is far more expensive, and with waste products that there is still no viable solution for, with an eternity of costs dragging them down. And nuclear only exists because the public subsidizes it by eschewing the need for real insurance (which would be prohibitively expensive otherwise).
In every economic sense nuclear has been an enormous boondoggle, and they stopped making them because every energy provider got wise. This has nothing to do with fearmongering or some sort of ignorant public -- quite the contrary, the overwhelming public sentiment had no problem with nuclear -- though that claim frequently appears. It's bizarre.
Just to be clear, you think that the nuclear industry is paying people to go on line and say positive things about nuclear power? Can I get some kind of source for this claim?
But they also have a number of former well-known figures who are quite literally on their payroll. People like Patrick Moore who they pay to write editorials -- always with the byline that he was a Greenpeace activist (yet never noting that he's paid to do this) -- heralding the wonders of nuclear energy. It's a massive industry, and every plant is tens of billions of dollars, so of course they engage in these efforts.
I am one such person who let my imagination run wild. I then spent a decade getting a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering, and then spent another decade trying to develop advanced nuclear reactors. I have dozens upon dozens of friends and colleagues who feel the same way, mostly to help solve the climate change and energy poverty issues. This is not some cynical PR campaign. This is young, smart, energetic, and excited people trying to make the best of the world's natural resources through advanced technology.
The nuclear industry is famously pathetic with PR (the old guard think it's best to hide and hope anti-nuclear forces will go away). Can you even think of one pro-nuclear advertisement you've ever seen? Or a positive portrayal in a movie? Or in the news? I cannot. All I can see is Captain Planet and MacGyver and The Simpsons and all the monster movies that show nuclear as some dark scary force with a bunch of environment-hating goons dumping ooze into the river.
Mix this with magnitudes of pure ignorance in the difference between nuclear weapons waste (ooze, river, Hanford, Mayak) and commercial nuclear waste (solid, ceramic, like a teacup, dry casks, never hurt a soul), and you've got yourself a nuclear PR issue that needs some grassroots help.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densitie...
That's true of pretty much every large infrastructure project in the US (and probably outside the US, but I'm less familiar with that side of things). Nuclear reactors are hardly unique in that regard.
Waste that goes into the air? Waste from mines in third world countries? Out of sight out of mind.
Nuclear waste is easily containable, and the country that generates the power has to pay for it. Not only that, but newer reactor designs can take existing nuclear waste in, outputting energy and a smaller pile of waste.
Certainly nuclear has been expensive to build and operate, and the industry is by no means innocent in this. On the other hand, it's extremely regulated, and the bureaucracy built up makes it very expensive, for example, to make a routine change during construction from the blueprints. No other industry is as regulated as nuclear.
During operation it's the same way. You can spend many person-months dealing with corrective action procedures that are mandated, etc. Many of these are considered by the industry to not actually affect safety. For instance the NRC finds like 22,000 "green" findings and a few hundred "white" ones per year. The white ones have low safety significance. Yet, the paperwork and follow-up is nearly crippling.
That's good right? Because nuclear is dangerous? Wrong. Commercial nuclear over its 60 years of commercial operation has killed as many people as coal (operating as designed) kills every single day. Every time a nuclear plant shuts down, more people die because of increased air pollution.
It's not rational. It's regulated so much because people are afraid of it. It's expensive entirely because of fearmongering.
The answer is zero.
I'm not saying we go non-regulated. I'm saying the current regs may be too much. I'd argue that climate change is now more of a threat than more carbon-free nuclear plants.
I'm actually in favor of more nuclear power in the U.S. mainland. But certain locations are definitely more or less safe than others. I'm also in favor of streamlining a lot of regulation, if those responsible for a human error based disaster (including managers up to the president/ceo of contsruction/management org) potentially being hanged as a result (not shot, not electric, not chemical injection, hanged till dead).
Either you don’t know what astroturfing means or you believe in a conspiracy there is no evidence of (nuclear companies faking HN commenter support for nuclear). Either way, this adds nothing to a conversation because it gives reasons for people on any side of the argument to just ignore any material facts or logic.
Rather than assuming that everyone who supports nuclear is a fake account or a shill, perhaps you should try to address arguments directly?
>This has nothing to do with fearmongering or some sort of ignorant public
That’s incorrect. Yucca Mountain is an example. The reactions to Fukushima on the news were another. The Diablo plant that was closed early has been consistently plagued by protests based on irrational fears.
You seem to think that a majority of people supporting nuclear is relevant. It’s not considering the tiny percentage of people required to throw up NIMBY roadblocks at all levels of government.
Example: Despite their tiny population, anti vaxxers are a major problem.
Most nuclear builds in the west saw extraordinarily little opposition. Ever. We saw a massive spike in builds that went on for a few decades, but it slowly sputtered to a halt because of real-world economics and utilities becoming jaded. Economics that saw that nuclear was overhyped, and the process around it (a process necessary for a platform that can cause enormous economic and ecological damage if it goes awry) made it much less of a win.
Not one nuclear plant has been delayed or not built because of the Yucca Mountain issue (which is a classic issue where you're asking a jurisdiction to take the problems with none of the benefits). Dry cask storage is doing fine.
We're just entering the period where nuclear power plants are nearing end of life stages, where countless billions in costs are going to come due that everyone just whistled and looked the other way about. The massive nuclear hype was courtesy of the 1950s style new age everything is better enthusiasm, and was critical for building out the grid, and is still a very important part of the mix. However they aren't being built because of some soccer mom nattering about Fukushima, but instead because the people who run the energy grid are choosing much less expensive options. Wind and solar are much less expensive full stop, and gas turbines are cheaper because no one has to pay for the carbon released, which has its own problems that we're going to pay a heavy price for.
We throw away 95% of the fuel. This is because Carter gave an order to not reprocess old fuel rods. Well, we would throw away 95%, but actually we just keep it sitting around for political reasons. Most of our fissionable material is sitting in containment ponds.
The NRC refuses to give guidance. They will only approve a reactor or disapprove it, given a finalized design. You have to do all the design work up front, completely in the dark, and then you get a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down.
Every stupid insignificant part involves absurd paperwork, right down to changing the lightbulbs.
It's not why nuclear is expensive. It's the construction costs.
Fukushima thus far has yielded some $700B USD of costs, and it has no end in site. Chernobyl has been estimated at having cost $235B USD.
No insurance company would touch this sort of liability, so governments put a hard cap on the potential liability. Here in Ontario, nuclear plants were only responsible for $75M of damage for the longest time, though over the next few years it will increase to $1B. The actual damage it could reasonably cost -- what any other industry would have to insure for -- would be more in the $1000B ($1T) range.
The fair comparison, though, is: what's the cost of global warming, and who will insure against it once fossil fuel emitters are held liable?
Also, if we looked at the latest research on low-dose radiation effects and really let that sink in, we'd spend far less on the cleanup of near background dose stuff after the few accidents that do occur.
These reactors work for almost 100 years while you have to replace solar panels and wind multiple times.
Not to mention intermittency is not even close to being solved.
Every actual attempted of using renewable has skyrocketed costs however much people want to ignore that.
You are ignoring that the fearmongering has over a long time influenced laws and regulation to make it uneconomical. To pretend there is no correlation is simply disingenuous.
It was a hope of many senators that wanted to get the 'green' vote to systematically defund and over-regulate nuclear. Nuclear innovation was significantly hindered by political interest on ever level, federal to local and I can go into lots of examples.
It is actually well known and confirmed that anti-nuclear organization such as green peace had a deliberate political strategy to focus on one thing only, more regulation for nuclear TO make it more expensive. The 'nuclear is unsafe' hammer has turned out to be very effective because most people and even most politicians don't know the facts. The coal and oil interest of course have a nice alliance with the greenpeace types and together nuclear was systematically hindered.
Just look at the current regulatory agency and the almost complete standstill in improvements since they took over.
If you look the production of nuclear reactors in the US you will see that they were on pace to replace coal power when building them was not much more expensive then a coal plant. Since then we had almost zero innovation and cost have exploded.
If you just look at the resources required for nuclear, there is no reason it should be so expensive. The problem is that we are using 60 year old designs because innovation has been made totally impossible thanks to the regulatory framework.
Disclaimer: I am an armchair energy policy enthusiast, and aggregate generator permitting, construction, turn up, operation, and decommissioning data for visualization and production siting.
Edit: Lunch bet email in my profile.
But you cannot dispute the massive resources, and square footage it requires to accomplish that future of massive wind farms, every building with solar panels installed, and huge battery warehouses littered throughout the nation... especially when compared to a handful of modern Nuclear Reactor Plants.
More people die installing Solar Roof Panels than from all the Nuclear energy production combined [1][2][3]
[1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all... [2] https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi... [3] https://asiancorrespondent.com/2011/05/green-deaths-the-forg...
You can make roof installs safer (process, hardware), utility installs on the ground are already safe. No one has any place to store nuclear waste, no one will insure it, and no one wants to tie capital up for decades in nuclear generators.
Nuclear, like coal, is a wonderful fuel if you can foist all of the externalities on someone else.
Modern Nuclear plants are very safe, and very cost effective... and can ramp up or down energy production on demand. Plus, they can be built wherever people want... not just where sunlight or wind patterns are suitable.
Solar Roof Panel installation is dangerous because people fall off the roof...yet, that alone has led to more deaths than Nuclear energy production.
The U.S. Navy has gone 60 years without a nuclear accident (the entire history since inception of the "Nuclear Navy")... and that's in vehicles (both surface and submarine vessels) designed to be shot, blown up, and sunk in combat.
Nuclear is safe, and cost effective. Particularly when considering modern approaches to reactors and spent fuel recycling and storage practices. We, as a nation, are just irrationally afraid of something most people simply don't understand.
I think this is especially impressive considering the losses of the USS Thresher [0] and USS Scorpion [1]. Despite their loss, there was still no significant containment breach.
The only serious solution to our energy needs is nuclear. Everything else requires magical thinking.
Even so, on the long run, power and not energy is what matters. By definition, you need a net power surplus to build up energy stores, because you need to generate energy faster than you are consuming it, and power is merely energy over time.
Lithium doesn't get depleted.
> Even so, on the long run, power and not energy is what matters. By definition, you need a net power surplus to build up energy stores, because you need to generate energy faster than you are consuming it, and power is merely energy over time.
How does this contradict my argument?
You said that available land limits the power, but not the energy, available via renewables. If power is what you actually need rather than energy, that point is irrelevant, isn't it?
The gist is that after ~30-40% penetration, the cost of renewables, even with storage, is no longer cheaper than natural gas.
And while storage bends the curve, getting from 80% renewables to 100% without something dispatchable is very expensive.
I don't think this is necessarily important for nuclear, since we could have Gas+CCS, but I have lower hopes for pure renewables+storage.
So even before Fukushima, there’d be delay after delay for more studies and impact and safety concerns for new projects and old ones getting shut down mostly due to thd ghosts of 3MI and Chernobyl.
Of course it doesn’t help to engender confidence in the tech as this legacy is the baggage any new tech faces in any consideration.
> Meanwhile coal kills a 200,000 per year while operating normally!
Coal is definitely the worst conventional energy generation tech. No wonder nuclear advocates love to focus on it as if it's the only alternative. That said, do you know anyone who died from coal?
Personally no. But in production of coal you have many miners’ lives cut short as a direct consequence of mining activities. Now, that’s short of the annual number listed there but this is a known direct consequence.
Have you seen the dose rates in the area recently and compared them to the higher end of natural background in inhabited areas on Earth? If not I recommend you do. It's very reasonable to evacuate an area during a massive nuclear accident. When the dose rate goes down, it's very reasonable to go back. Here's a handy reference: [1]. The main point is that global warming gets rid of even more inhabitable land by pushing people out of cities en masse.
> No wonder nuclear advocates love to focus on it as if it's the only alternative.
Nuclear is safer than almost every other energy source. More people fall of their roofs installing solar panels per TWh than people die from nuclear accidents. Hydro has killed people by the 100,000 as well. Shoot, even wind kills people with ice-throw [2].
> That said, do you know anyone who died from coal?
A few hundred thousand per year, but no I don't actually know any of those people. Do you know anyone who has died from nuclear power, which kills 6 orders of magnitude fewer people?
The main point is that global warming is the serious threat and we should throw all serious low-carbon energy sources at it. Nuclear is the only large-scale operational low-carbon source that can run through daily and seasonal weather shifts, so it should play a large role. Wind and solar are needed as well, at about 20x their current deployment.
[1] https://xkcd.com/radiation/ [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
Belarus has not commissioned its first nuclear plant yet, but already two construction workers died on its construction. That's already +INF amount of deaths per TW generated nationally.
> Do you know anyone who has died from nuclear power, which kills 6 orders of magnitude fewer people?
I actually do, met a dying Chernobyl liquidator in early 1990s.
Well Tōhoku tsunami and earthquake killed 15,000+ people and yet everyone only talks about the nuclear plant that was hit with it.
At some point you just have to accept that human mind has an irrational fear on rare but dramatic events
I think you could make the situation better by having a dramatic programme to scale up nuclear, because then you can get economies of scale. That worked quite well for the French, but it means a large upfront investment, essentially paying for 50 years of energy in advance, with significant risk of cost over-runs.
That requirement for front-loaded investment means the cost depends very strongly on the interest rate of money borrowed, and a low interest rate on a large, complex project requires government backing. So the fundamental reason is that governments do not have the appetite for that sort of intervention or that level of risk, like they did during the 60's-70's.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-...
> The country 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.
So, no, the externalities cannot save nuclear in the US.