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.
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?
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?
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...
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.
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.