Steep decline in nuclear power would threaten energy security and climate goals

The article is clear and accurate. Deploying close to 3000 GW is an unprecedented effort.

Or do I misunderstand what you're saying?

And it's not just the cost of solar/wind that's dropping... it's the cost of short-term energy storage, by way of batteries/thermal/hydro/etc. Nuclear plants are base-load power, good for long-term stable output rather than quick spikes up and down. But short-term storage allows solar/wind to act as baseline as well, capturing more when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, and dumping it from storage when needed.

Committing to expensive nuclear power plants now, with this much disruption going on, is a good way for a utility to go bankrupt twenty, thirty years from now.

I would guess that we'll see far more thermal storage (refrigerators, water heaters, etc...) in households as appliances get smarter.

But people are interested in photovoltaics because they're cost-competitive (during the day at least).

Seems like those would take up lots of land area and easily fry and possibly blind animals, especially birds that get too close.

They do look cool though.

If you want to be a stickler, what that actually means is that it has never happened before. Have we ever installed ~2500 GW of new photovoltaic generation capacity over a twenty year period? Of any individual generation method?

> Have all the factories that got us to this level of (obviously) installed capacity burned down recently? Have the investors who invested in them and the engineers who built them all died?

It's not just a question of supply. It's also a question of demand.

Subsidizing five times as much capacity would require five time as much government money, which may not be available. If the subsidies end, the demand curve takes a hit.

In addition to that, the fact that solar only generates during the day hasn't yet become an issue because the daytime demand is higher, so solar can currently be efficiently used to satisfy the demand differential between day and night. But once there is enough solar generating capacity to satisfy the full differential, that efficiency ends and you start having to deal with expensive energy storage or paying capital and maintenance for alternative generation which is idle and unproductive half the day, effectively requiring the cost of solar to fall lower than the alternative's fuel/operating cost only and not the total cost including capital and maintenance, because the capital and maintenance then have to be paid anyway to make the capacity available at night.

It has also been getting installed more in the locations amenable to it -- places with more sunlight, clearer skies and less expensive land. Notice that a lot of the existing capacity is in places like Arizona and not places like Seattle. But once the demand in those locations is satisfied, you have to move to places without those characteristics and you get less power at higher cost.

Meanwhile just because you have the existing supply doesn't mean you have the existing supply. You need the price to fall to the level that it becomes economical to generate power even for use at night in Seattle, but that price may be lower than the price that customers in Asia and South America would pay, so even if the supply exists, it ends up going somewhere else first.

All this to say that extrapolating from an exponential curve is generally wrong sooner or later, and frequently sooner.

> Solar capacity will rise to 100% of today's total capacity, and it still won't displace lots of other energy sources. Why? Because when power is cheaper and has fewer negative externalities, we'll use more of it.

If it becomes genuinely cheaper even in northern cities and even with the cost of energy storage, it will displace lots of other energy sources and we'll use more of it. But that's still speculation that may or may not ever actually happen. And maybe it does, but it's still justifiable to be prepared if it doesn't.

1) Ok, this can be a problem. 2) Citation needed. It has lowest number of deaths per kWh. By your logic, planes fall out of the sky, and many people die, so we should never use planes and rely on more deadly methods.

As for pebble bed reactors, mistakes are normal when doing something novel. See the problems LHC faced. Luckily LHC had better funding than nuclear.

3) It's a thousand year problem. The rare metals in average phone are a more of a forever problem. They will never decay to a less toxic compound.

4) Yeah, this is true.

5) Not sure about this one, I see lots of FUD on all sides.

To clarify, I'm not claiming nuclear power is an angel that will save us. But it's a devil we'll probably have to live with if we are to go 0 carbon in near future. Going 100% renewables requires a revolution in battery tech, and a revolution in how electric grid distributes electricity.

Realize this thing is a sideshow. Having it open would not have helped the market acceptance of nuclear power. Even if waste disposal costs are totally ignored (as the Lazard levelized cost numbers do) new reactors are totally out of the running economically.

A) We'll solve it later (we should research fuel reprocessing, we have an urgency to act, etc.)

B) It's not really a problem (people don't actually die from radioactive waste, most nuclear plants have proven themselves safely managed, etc.)

Both answer sound like sweeping the dust under the rug. What happens when (not if) a catastrophe occurs? If a war breaks out, how can you guarantee the safety of all nuclear power plants around the world? If a country economy collapses, how will nuclear engineers get paid? If an epidemic of a deadly disease spreads worldwide, how many people can die before there is not enough people to safely operate a nuclear plant?

We cannot sweep this under the rug. Nuclear energy may be theorically cheap to implement, but the potential cost of an uncontrollable failure is too great.

Why not?

I'm fairly pro-nuclear, at least as part of a broadly renewable energy portfolio, as I think industry and transportation will need at least something more than solar and wind to reach none-emission energy production saturation any time soon.

However, if my own Government's record is anything to go by here in the UK, waste management is a perenially-deferred problem and clean up was not part of the original billing of any existing Nuclear facilities. It's all stored on site pending long-term secure solutions or - if optimisim is t obe believed - until we can develop technologies to eke every last joule of energy from the ever-growing mountain of waste.

Blaming the costs on regulatory compliance bureaucracy is one of those things that pro-nuclear people really need to stop saying, even to the extent that it's true (which is less than they think). Distrust of big corporations is as high as distrust of government, and for good reason. No one wants to live downwind from a nuclear plant constructed by the lowest bidder. Blaming the cost and construction issues on those stupid anti-science treehuggers and their liberal regulations is just alienating the very people you need to win over.

That said, nuclear will never, ever be able to achieve either the real or the apparent risk levels of a wind farm or a bunch of rooftop solar panels. And there's probably not a less attractive look for nuclear enthusiasts than some dude mansplaining about how solar is more dangerous than nuclear based on the number of people who smash their thumbs with a hammer while installing panels.

But there's many places where wind power just isn't feasible.

It was also used to keep the Greens on side though you do have to ask who benefits and is keeping coal plant open longer really a green solution.

The problem with having any discussion of nuclear is agreeing upon the facts. It's crazy hard to find an unbiased source. If you asked a random bystander why we haven't built nuclear reactors in recent years, you might hear "environmentalists." However, the truth is dramatically different. No one will insure a nuclear power plant except the US government. Investors won't invest in nuclear, as there's no appetite for the risks to open a plant and spend over a decade building it when cost overruns are common and it may never actually open.

The reason wind and solar are growing much, much faster than nuclear today isn't because of "environmentalists." It's because nuclear involves far more subsidies and risk.

If nuclear hasn't iterated as much, that's the fault of nuclear, not the cruel oppressing world. It's a technology that's big and slow to evolve, and that's ultimately lethal.

[1] https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jun...

https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/community/fort-wort...

My relatives have had to replace their roof twice in the last 15 years. What's the hail-proof solar cost?

Even with inflated costs, however, the extremely high latitude of the UK and its need for wintertime heat mean that the amount of renewable curtailment needed to ensure sufficient carbonfree wintertime energy make nuclear still cost competitive in a carbonfree scenario.

Generally speaking, no halfway competent investment in carbonfree energy should be opposed, IMHO. We don't have time to fight such internal battles when we're fighting anthropogenic climate change.

    > Battery waste: empty, disassemble and reuse. Health risk: very moderate.

How long is nuclear waste toxic? 92% for 40 years, 0.2% for thousands of years.

Do you have a source that solar panels can simply be ground up and reused? The article linked in the top level comment implies that recycling solar panels is much harder that one might think, and that solar panels are full of toxic heavy metals that are not "negligible" health risk.

Nuclear power was NEVER going to be very cheap. Even in the 1950s, it was recognized that the cost of the common elements of coal and nuclear plants were going to restrict nuclear to being MAYBE 20% cheaper than coal, at best, and that only if everything broke the right way.

And that maximally optimistic scenario didn't happen. Nuclear plant construction turned out to be more difficult than thought. Even before increases in regulation -- which were going to happen, as new failure modes and near misses were identified -- costs and delays were escalating.

And now, nuclear has two feet in the tech grave. The tech base has decayed away, and continues to degrade. Hoped for cost reductions of Gen III/III+ reactors from experience would require impossible sustained subsidies. This is why hopes are being pinned on small Hail Mary Reactors. They're the only possibility of avoiding nuclear's extinction.

It isn't that the plant failed and the vivid depictions of that which have most affected me. It's the depictions of the knock on effects which were barely stemmed after the failure that have caused me to reconsider.

The most concerning thing about Chernobyl is not the initial explosion. It's the impact the secondary and tertiary disasters could have had if the Soviet government had not acted to mitigate them. Those are cases in which millions of people are affected and regions the size of Alabama become uninhabitable. I personally was not aware that a failure at a plant could cascade into those kind of issues. I didn't realize that Chernobyl could have been much much worse.

And that is my problem. I believe fundamentally in human fallibility. We and our best machines will always find new ways to fail. Always.

In some cases, the risks are acceptable. Such is the case with flying in a plane. No matter how good aircraft and our safety procedures get. The loss of a plane, however tragic does not impact the future of our planet of our species.

What's more, the law of large numbers says if you make nuclear power ubiquitous, it's almost a guarantee that some 1/1000, 1/10000, or even 1/1000000, event will occur.

For me, I'm not against nuclear now but I am much less gung-ho and that's due to this show. I look forward to learning more though and perhaps my opinion will sway back.

Its quite literally impossible to operate a prototype reactor for example. You literally need to build a production version on your first try to even get fissile materials.

To actually being able to regulate something you need to pay the DoE and they don't even give you a timeline. "Hallo I like to build this new reactor, here are the plans", "Thanks now give us 100M$ and 2-4 years and then we will tell you all the things that we required, then you can submit it again (with more money of course)".

The externalities of large scale solar PV are not just bad, they're impossible.

https://www.ted.com/talks/david_mackay_a_reality_check_on_re...

"The rotation of the earth does have an effect on the direction of the wind, but it does not create it. Wind is primarily driven by differences in air pressure. These variations in air pressure are due to temperature differences caused by variations in solar energy received at the surface of the earth."