Then there's the other issue: weapons proliferation. Look down https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/sc... : country #8 is Iran, which the US is very against expanding nuclear, and #10 is Saudi Arabia, which should not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons either.
And who are we to say who can and cannot have nuclear weapons? The United States' claim to the moral high ground is pretty shaky nowadays, particularly with regards to Saudi Arabia. Saudi (and Iran too) is what it is in no small measure because of our meddling in their politics. If we don't like the results, well, you reap what you sow.
The US does not stop countries from have Nulcear Weapons. But you know if you signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and then make nuclear weapons you are in violation of the treaty. Pull out of the treaty and no one can do anything.
We dont stop North Korea, yeah we try to convince them not to because they are slightly unstable, we dont invade and destroy their nukes. Iran did sign the treaty though.
I've also heard a number of people lament that nuclear is really the best choice from many angles, but solar and wind are winning, so let's just throw out nuclear and run with the winner.
I'm not comfortable with either of these conclusions. If nuclear is the right thing to do, let's do it. And while we're at it, let's switch to Thorium also to address the weaponization issue. Yes it will be super expensive, yes we are on the wide end of the uncertaintity cone at the moment, but it's climate change so let's get moving.
The major problem with nuclear is the up front cost and lead time. The up front cost includes the carbon pollution created by the mountains of concrete required for the facility, so any carbon savings will come at some distant point down the track when the plant has not only been built and commissioned but has been in operation for a decade or more.
The lead time in construction means that it could be two years or twenty years before the plant you start building today will be operational. Simply getting a sufficient supply of the right quality of concrete will be one of the fundamental hurdles to overcome.
The “thorium” cycle isn’t even commercialised yet so there is no option to switch to it. How long until commercial plant is available? Nobody knows.
Wind, solar, and storage are the relatively cheap, well known and abundant tools we have right now. There is no time to waste.
I worked for a solar manufacturer for almost 10 years. I had my blood tested regularly to monitor Cadmium. What is going to be the cost of dealing with all the Cadmium in the 50,000 two foot by four foot modules that we made daily? That's right, daily. Not annually. And we were one manufacturer.
What about the acreage that is consumed and the resulting environmental damage that comes from trying to capture the extremely diffused energy source and then convert a small fraction of it in to energy only to lose a third of it in transmission by the time it gets to power plant?
And cost of development - hasn't taken about 50 years to achieve only about 15% efficiency (assuming economically practical technology).
My point is it doesn't seem like solar is quite as cheap, simple, clean, and safe as it's made out to be while at the same time it seems to get harder and harder to squeeze out more efficiency. It seems to me that nuclear has almost the opposite dynamic.
The cadmium you worked with was either a result of handling dopants in a wafer manufacturing plant, or dust from finishing cells in a panel assembly plant. There is insignificant exposure between assembly and disposal, and even then disposal can include reclamation of materials so that we don’t have panels filling garbage dumps for the rest of eternity.
Do you worry this much about the chemicals used to manufacture your plates or cutlery?
As for transmission losses, the same applies for every energy source that isn’t collocates with point of consumption.
Solar is as comparatively clean cheap and simple as it has been claimed to be because the options are so incredibly dirty and destructive.
Lets see. Denmark is fully self-reliant on energy. They invested a lot in wind. [1]
Quote:
"[..]
The Danish Government has introduced the following targets for national energy policy:
* Eliminating coal from power production by 2030.
* Providing all electrical and heating from renewable sources by 2035.
* Providing 100% of Denmark's energy requirements in electricity, heating and transport from renewable sources by 2050."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Denmark
Our last nuclear plant cost right around 30 billion. (And the cost overruns still haven't stopped with Vogtie. In the end it will cost more.) Now even if you get rid of any and all regulations, you're still talking about 2 to 5 billion to build one of these things. And it's transitional in nature. It will be shut off when the renewables take over.
So that's the problem. Energy investors can take this enormous risk on nuclear, that will be going away, but they don't really know when? So the gamble is, will I make my money back before the renewables do my plant in?
Or
Those same investors can just slap up windmills everywhere and start making their money back right away, and continue generating income on each windmill for the life of the equipment.
Even energy investors like Pickens have switched over to the "slap up a windmill" strategy. (Or in his case, I guess it's more of a "slap up so many that no one else can compete with you" strategy.) Point is, Pickens is old, stodgy, conservative, has a preference for big energy projects, and is not prone to rash action. If you can't even convince guys like that to back nuclear in actual deed instead of screed, you really are just not being realistic about the challenges faced by nuclear investors. It's not just regulation, it's all the other energy options that offer far better returns.
If we want nuclear, the American tax payer will have to foot the bill for it, and that's just not terribly likely to happen.
The project is continuing after the bankruptcy. It is the only nuclear power project in the US.
Wind varies a lot. On May 4th in the UK it was generating nearly 9GW, but on May 1st was generating 220MW.
Over the last year it's generated 15% of the UKs electricity demand, so increasing by 10 fold would mean it could generate everything, if there was infinite storage.
Lets assume we start off with 100 lots of South Austrailia batteries - so 13 GWh of storage, and fully charge them on May 13th 2018 at 22:30.
After 40 minutes we've added 5.5GWh, but we've taken out 12GWh, and in the next few minutes it stops.
OK, lets go for 130GWh Storage - or 1,000 SA batteries.
That's great, we're doing well. Until May 14th at 07:50, when the battery is full, so we throw away the energy. That's great, we can last until May 17th - less than a week.
So we start with a battery that's got a total capacity of 10,000 SA batteries - 1.3TWh, and starts off full.
Unfortunately on June 1st it wasn't very windy, and we've been drawing down on our batteries for 2 days. The lights go off on June 1st at 10:50.
For the UK to be wind powered for the last year, we'd need 1) 10 times the current wind production 2) A battery or other storage capacity of 13 TWh -- that's 100,000 batteries the size of the one Musk delivered to South Australia.
Or 1) 100 times the current wind production 2) A battery or other storage capacity of 300 GWh -- that's 2,500 batteries the size of the one Musk delivered to South Australia.
Or 1) 1000 times the current wind production 2) A battery or other storage capacity of 500MWh -- that's 3 batteries the size of the one Musk delivered to South Australia.
I'm not sure if it's possible to get 1,000 times as much power from wind as we currently do (21TW of production, generating 57TWh over the course of the year), but it would generate an insane amount of excess energy at windy times.
I thought it was acknowledged in the industry that interconnects need to be built out to distribute wind power better. Why did you choose to ignore that in your calculations?
The reason I'm "ignoring" it, even with an infinite grid across europe, when the wind is blowing in the UK's wind farms in the north sea, it's also blowing in the north sea for Denmark - UK wind production peaks match that of Denmark and Netherlands peaks.
The figures are based on real figures in the UK from the last 12 months. The UK is the world leader in offshore wind power, with Netherlands, Germany and Denmark having their farms in the same location
What happens when the wind isn't blowing in the North Sea, and UK, Denmark and Netherlands are all running out?
That's not to say we shouldn't be pushing to double, triple or even quadruple wind production in the UK and the North sea especially, but we'll still rely on gas to fill in the quiet days for a long time yet. Dogger Bank alone can generate 110GW of energy, which is great, but that would mean when the North Sea is quiet we need to find 110GW from elsewhere.
Sadly political changes in the UK, first in 2015, then in 2016 through today, have reduced the investment in wind power.
Which, I guess, both shows how possible it is to spread load around the UK, and shows how massive a problem anything in the US is to solve.
Wind goes up and down. That's fine. But there needs to be something to cover those gaps. And it's either 2,500 batteries, or some gas turbines.
Current renewable technology is very vulnerable to certain kinds of interruption. In the case of a bad storm, for example, wind turbines have to be shut off (as happened in Denmark in 2005) to avoid damage and the sky is likely to be too overcast for significant solar generation, so a country using 100% intermittent renewables faces blackouts unless they've invested trillions of dollars in multiple days of battery capacity (for my country, the UK, 48 hours of battery capacity at current prices works out to be 2.58 trillion USD).
The alternative to battery backup for wind+solar is to have natural gas plants on-site to fill in demand, but even when they're rarely used they leak so much methane that much of the relative CO2 savings from the renewables they're backing are wiped out.
Nuclear (fission) energy has lots of ugly flaws, and if it does rescue us from the climate crisis it won't be in the form of monolithic one-off generating stations, but I think going all on on wind and solar is a huge mistake. (I'd much rather see a carbon-tax based blind incentive structure designed to encourage fair competition between sources than specific subsidies to any specific one, but I'm not sure that's feasible on the timescale we're talking about)
This is not true.
Also note that natural gas infrastructure can substiture for 'geographical advantages': Germany can store several hundreds TWh that way, which is more than sufficient. Recent claims of power-to-gas-to-power roundtrip efficiency are at 80%, though I've no idea about associated costs.
Sources in the article. There's a paper on observed leak rates at different plants too but I'm on my phone and can't find it.
I don't understand this, and would love if someone could point me to a resource on it. How is it practical to essentially "kick the can" on storage/disposal?
As I understand it, the plan o more or less bury the stuff and hope we figure it out in the future. I read this as "just let some future generation deal with a catastrophic failure". That sounds awfully similar to how we've dealt with the climate/environment in general.
Burying atomic waste on the other hand requires laughable amounts of space if you want to compare atomic waste vs carbon for let's say 100 years of global energy production. We already have to deal with the "catastrophic failure" of carbon storage as a "future generation" as you already mentioned.
I know a lot of people like to imagine that getting rid of atomic waste is basically some people with shovels digging holes for some hazardous yellow barrels, hoping in a thousand years no one will find them. Well, no. Atomic waste is much more manageable. And to be honest: If we had a way to say efficiently compact/solidify/whatever carbon then we would do the same with that stuff today already, just with the difference that we would leave much much much more waste behind for future generations.
The reason why it sits in on-site storage is because on-site storage is about the only option in the US, due to anti-proliferation regulation, and the politicization of Yucca Mountain.
France's 55+ reactors send their spent fuel to a single facility in La Hague, where it only consumes half the facility's capacity. The remaining capacity is resold to other countries' nuclear plants, inasmuch as other countries still operate nuclear plants after Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters.
Reprocessing is about 6% the cost of their entire nuclear program. The program in turn can supply about 1/6th of the program's nuclear fuel. But they stockpile it, unenriched, whenever original processing of mined uranium ores would be cheaper.
The non-Pu, non-U radioactives still have to be extracted in a separate step or be buried somewhere for their 100-year cooling-off period, but the volume is much lower than it would otherwise be without reprocessing. If Yucca Mtn were ever fully opened, and if it took only post-reprocessing waste, it could bury all the world's vitrified waste until it becomes cooler than the average parking lot, much more safely than the current status quo.
Also, tax payers don't pay for nuclear waste. Rate payers do. It's factored into the sale price of nuclear electricity via the Nuclear Waste Fund.
https://psmag.com/ideas/the-hiding-place-inside-the-worlds-f...
We have people who claim there are storage solutions just around the corner, but the corner has been stated since the beginning of renewables. Nuclear can be used in conjunction with the renewables for no carbon solutions.
The whole "baseload" thing is largely a myth pushed by the coal and nuclear lobbies. It hasn't been relevant in new generating capacity in a long time. Instead, new capacity is being planned and built with multiple "overlapping" dispatchable sources along with storage. Eventually the term will go away completely.
http://redgreenandblue.org/2017/07/18/myth-baseload-power-no...
Where it's cheap/possible to build, you mean. It's very uneconomical if you don't have any appropriate geological formations nearby.
> The whole "baseload" thing is largely a myth pushed by the coal and nuclear lobbies.
Ok, fine. "This term is used by evil people" doesn't change the problem of "we need cheap storage to completely switch away from carbon fuels, and we don't have cheap storage" or even "we need power on calm nights". And even the article linked still suggests keeping around natural gas.
> multiple "overlapping" dispatchable sources along with storage.
Pretty sure that "dispatchable" means "not wind or solar" [0] and generally simplifies to "carbon, nuclear or hydro".
No, they don't need to be "nearby" anything, except for a high voltage transmission line. Pumped hydro reservoirs can be located anywhere there is adequate transmission. For example, the largest pumped storage facility in the U.S. stores energy for the entire PJM grid, which spans a dozen states.
> Ok, fine. "This term is used by evil people" doesn't change the problem of "we need cheap storage to completely switch away from carbon fuels, and we don't have cheap storage" or even "we need power on calm nights".
No, we actually do have cheap storage. Like I said, pumped hydro is cheap, and is currently available in quantities sufficient to render intermittent sources "dispatchable" in many regions. In addition, the price of battery storage is plummeting; large battery facilities are currently saving utilities millions of dollars just by regulating frequency. Many U.S. utilities are incorporating battery storage into major plans this year. This trend will accelerate.
> Pretty sure that "dispatchable" means "not wind or solar" [0] and generally simplifies to "carbon, nuclear or hydro"
You misunderstand the concept of dispatchability. It more usefully describes a system, rather than individual energy generators. For example, a nuclear power plant is pretty much the opposite of dispatchable, since it takes days or weeks to spin one up from idle. But pair it with a storage facility and the system gains the ability to sink surpluses and match loads. This works just the same with intermittent sources like wind.
The only truly dispatchable utility-scale generators are diesels and particular kinds of gas turbines, such as the GE 7HA, which will continue to be useful as peakers. However most gas plants take hours to spin up, and these are quickly becoming less economical than renewables+storage. For example, next year the Inland Empire power plant, a large gas plant in CA with at least two decades of life expectancy remaining, is going to be demolished because it has become uneconomical to operate. Guess what's replacing it?
In reality, power sources that have little to no flexibility in power output (coal and nuclear) are not ideal either. They either produce at near capacity or they are offline. You can't throttle a nuclear plant from 80% capacity to 50% capacity. As a grid manager, this doesn't always make things easier.
Plus, the fact that the grid survives when a nuclear plant or coal plant goes offline for maintenance shows that there is flexibility available.
We just need to stop looking at "base load power" as only an advantage and acknowledge that only being able to produce 0 watts or 1 gigawatt of power output is also very inflexible and not always an advantage...
Here's what Erica Bowman, chief economist of the American Petroleum Institute, says about it:
> Baseload is kind of a historical term. It’s not really relevant to how electricity is produced today…What you need is dispatchability... and [coal and nuclear] are far slower when you compare them to a lot of the technology natural gas plants have.
Why not? Can't you just disconnect the turbine from the steam flow?
Actually he is hilariously right about it. Renewables are nowhere near adequate to replace conventional (fossil, etc) fuels.
Even if everything was great (costs, externalities, energy storage, etc), the cost and scale of replacing existing fossil fuel based infrastructure would be ginormous. It's simply not possible in any scale smaller than 3-5 decades...
Aside from other problems, we are nowhere near the capacity of producing the required number of renewable units (turbines, solar panels). And that's for a steady target, whereas energy demands increase. Solar and wind still provide a tiny amount of total energy, and even that with fossil fuel backups (due to intermittency).
Clearly this would involve continued investment in production capacity for photovoltaic panels; you are correct that if production capacity remained stuck at 2019 levels, we would not be able to make the transition. Were you assuming that would be the case? That seems like a an unwarrantedly pessimistic assumption, even more so than my assumption that prices would remain constant. Indeed, your assumption (if it is indeed yours) would entail that photovoltaic panels would suddenly start to get more and more expensive!
My calculations are in notes/japan-energy-autarky.html in http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano-20190724.tar.gz.
Which is not really far fetched: "Reuters is reporting that Eric Luo, president of one of the largest solar panel makers in China, predicts that “the party is definitely over.” Speaking at the World Economic Forum, Luo said that prices have quit dropping and he expected industry consolidation to cause prices to rise by as much as 15% over the next two years."
And that's with current-ish levels of demand. Imagine the increase in demand for replacing most of fossil fuel and other conventional sources with photovoltaics...
Luo's threats (which are from December) do not seem to have been borne out by photovoltaic panel prices since then: https://www.solarserver.de/service-tools/photovoltaik-preisi... although his cartel does seem to have paused the precipitous price declines that have been the rule for the previous 48 years. But it does indeed seem quite far-fetched to posit that the cartel's members have ceased to invest in expanding their productive capacity — much less that the manufacturers excluded from it, or cheating on it, will do so. Especially if we're talking about holding the line and failing to build any new factories, not for a year or two, but for 30 to 50 years!
Presumably even Luo's prediction of a 15% price rise over two years is predicated on the continued exponential growth in demand for utility-scale photovoltaic installations, not on a constant demand level.
I don't have personal calculations, I just go by what I've read about the market in various outlets (like the above "the party is over" which was widely reported at the time).
>Presumably even Luo's prediction of a 15% price rise over two years is predicated on the continued exponential growth in demand for utility-scale photovoltaic installations, not on a constant demand level.
Note that our whole discussion is about the case where the world would go for "continued exponential growth in demand" (e.g. whether photovoltaics could realistically replace fossil fuels in the near future or whether it would take decades).
My original comment in fact was "Even if everything was great (costs, externalities, energy storage, etc), the cost and scale of replacing existing fossil fuel based infrastructure would be ginormous. It's simply not possible in any scale smaller than 3-5 decades..."
I don't think it's wholly unreasonable to expect specific quantitative claims — let alone ridiculing other people's opinions as "hilarious" — to be backed by at least some quantitative reasoning or knowledge. Instead, you posted contradicting other people's arguments, even though you had literally no reason at all to believe that what you said was true.
You say you were merely uncritically repeating claims published in the vulgar media, presumably by politicians and salesmen. Do you want to lower Hacker News to the intellectual level of politicians and salesmen?
You can do better. I've seen you do better in other comment threads in the past.
Then again, I've read that if you add design, construction, operational, and storage costs plus expected operational timespan, nuclear only works with hefty subsidies. And the byproducts are a ticking timebomb...
The half-lives involved are so large compared to societal time they don't really matter (and doesn't really play into the metaphor). It's not like we just need to store them for 1-10 years and then we're OK. Plutonium has a HL of 20K years IIRC.
Btw, conventional time-bombs also lose their potency over time (e.g. TNT breaks down in thousands of years). But the explosion can be programmed much earlier, and similarly, the byproducts can mess things up much earlier than their half lives.
How can someone possibly make an informed decision in this scenario: are they near profitability? millions/billions in the hole? Is there a horizon where they'll break even?