We decarbonated our electricity in a 20 years timeframe (while the consumption was rising) thanks to nuclear power. I always wondered why no other country went that road and why they are still hesitating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France#/...
The combination of factors was
- 1973 oil crisis
- almost no domestic oil production, small domestic gas and coal
- pre-existing military nuclear programme
- strong engineering culture and availability of skills
- strong statist/dirigiste culture of state megaprojects
- enough anti-Americanism to not just buy it in from Westinghouse
The UK didn't go down this path because of North Sea oil and anti-statist Thatcherism, along with a classic British failure to do sui generis advanced technology properly (AGR). Germany probably didn't go down this path due to coal lobbying. Few other countries had any nuclear experience in weapons programs, and the anti-proliferation concerns made it hard for them to do so in the 80s (e.g. Iraq built one and Israel blew it up, https://fas.org/nuke/guide/iraq/facility/osiraq.htm )
Germany and Austria is strongly anti-atom. It comes from cold war where Germany was primary nuclear target for Soviets and US.
We haven't found a site for final storage yet either.
Nuclear waste storage shouldn't ever be "final". Nuclear waste processing and recycling today is far more advanced than it was in the past. Nobody knows what we can do in the future.
It's intellectually dishonest to extrapolate technological progress of so-called green technologies, but then not afford the same to nuclear technology, which has effectively been left in limbo for decades.
Nuclear has received 100’s of billions in funding and shows little signs of the massive improvement needed to be cost competitive. It’s going to take a ~60% cost reduction to just catch up with current rentable prices.
Giant concrete structures, armed guards, medical officers, highly trained staff, decommissioning etc. Nuclear has never been cheap, and shows little sign of becoming so in the next 10 years.
Load following nuclear power costs even more per kWh than base load nuclear power. Which is why France imported and exported so much electricity while being theoretically 100% nuclear.
PS: Even battery backed up nuclear seems to be much cheaper than peaking nuclear power based on current market prices.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation reveals that the amount of hydro or battery storage needed to support base load is orders of magnitude beyond current capacities:
https://www.oulu.fi/blogs/how-much-storage-does-the-energiew...
Batteries themselves aren't that green anyway, Lithium can be considered a "conflict material" and there's no better "eco-friendly" alternative today.
Now I'm not saying technology and production can't or won't improve for these complements, but that's way into the future. If we count that progress in, we can't just discount nuclear progress.
> Load following nuclear power costs even more per kWh than base load nuclear power. Which is why France imported and exported so much electricity while being theoretically 100% nuclear.
Riddle me this, then: France has among the cheapest electricity prices in Europe, Germany has the highest after Denmark. France is almost entirely nuclear, Germany is big on wind, but also coal.
France imports/exports energy because that is how the grid in Europe works. If France didn't export to Germany, they'd need even more coal or natural gas to support base load. Germany's wind energy also causes peaks that need to be exported, sometimes at negative prices, more so than coal or nuclear:
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/why-power-prices-...
No, France has extremely subsidized electricity for consumers, but the economy pays the real price. Notably, French nuclear power is generated by the government rather than private industry allowing for minimal transparency in these subsidies.
France regularly needs to import electricity to cover peak demand despite being one of the world’s top exporters of electricity. It also meeds to regularly operate nuclear power plants at below 100% output because the market price often can’t support operations let alone capital costs. This was true before wind or solar became significant energy sources.
This means if other countries had adopted Nuclear then France would have needed even more subsidies. In a theoretical world with increasing Nuclear production globally, it’s costs just keep rising because demand is not a steady state.
According to [1], not only are there significant taxes on electricity for households, but non-household prices are far lower, so I don't see where you got this information.
> France regularly needs to import electricity to cover peak demand despite being one of the world’s top exporters of electricity.
Again, this is how the grid works. European countries both import and export electricity to even out demand and production. This is more efficient than building out extra capacity that isn't needed most of the time.
> It also meeds to regularly operate nuclear power plants at below 100% output because the market price often can’t support operations let alone capital costs.
Like coal or gas plants, nuclear plants can be regulated to meet demand. This is a good thing, because demand varies seasonally. A low or even negative market price means production is too high relative to demand. Basic economics.
This is actually a far bigger issue with wind energy, which cannot be regulated in the same way. You end up with negative prices more often, as shown in the article that I linked to you.
> This means if other countries had adopted Nuclear then France would have needed even more subsidies. In a theoretical world with increasing Nuclear production globally, it’s costs just keep rising because demand is not a steady state.
Yes, demand is not in a steady steady, but that's a far bigger issue with wind and solar energy, where unsteady demand meets unsteady output. That would require far more buffering than steady nuclear power.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
They tax all electricity while subsidizing Nuclear generation. Much like how the US has both farm subsidies and sales taxes on food. This is arguably due to non domestic production. EDF‘s finances are also wacky with huge debt both on and off the books, plus a very odd insurance situation.
>Yes, demand is not in a steady steady, but that's a far bigger issue with wind and solar energy, where unsteady demand meets unsteady output. That would require far more buffering than steady nuclear power.
Not so fast.
Nuclear needs both daily storage and unused capacity seasonally, just like wind and solar. The issue with nuclear is it also costs vastly more per kWh and due to long build times you need over provision pushing that kWh figure up more. On top of that they still need maintain them so you need to over provision even more again increasing kWh costs. And you still need storage to hit 100%.
The France model is to actually use a lot of non Nuclear power. The numbers look much better until you consider what customers are actually using vs just the raw production numbers for the country vs total demand. Something like (450 * .75 -61) / (450 - 61 + 21) so consumption is ~67% Nuclear which is not bad, but a long way from 100%. And this is also with regularly reducing output which again increases prices.
That's different from subsidizing electricity for consumers to make it more affordable. Like many industries, nuclear gets some amount of subsidies, but so do renewables. That doesn't mean subsidies are the reason why electricity is so much cheaper in France. In Germany, wind energy is heavily subsidized - and it is paid for with higher consumer prices.
> Nuclear needs both daily storage and unused capacity seasonally, just like wind and solar.
Yes, but orders of magnitude less. You keep nitpicking nuclear while completely ignoring the fact that wind and solar fails miserably on these metrics.
> The issue with nuclear is it also costs vastly more per kWh and due to long build times you need over provision pushing that kWh figure up more.
Of course nuclear isn't the cheapest form of electricity generation, neither is wind or solar. However, as of today it's the only one that can sustain a grid for almost any country without simultaneously relying on massive amounts of fossil fuels or extremely expensive buffering infrastructure.
If that wasn't the case, everyone would be doing wind and solar everywhere. If wind and solar was so clearly superior, it wouldn't need any subsidies at all. The path to a green future would be clear. Unfortunately, it's not that simple.
No, the only question is the relative subsidies vs taxes, and the revenue from taxes are significantly less than the subsidies. These taxes go right back to the industry and the government adds more to the pot, resulting in a net subsidy. (US telecom’s got some similar taxes passed.)
> orders of magnitude less
Nuclear ends up needing more storage because wind and solar can be crafted to roughly follow load. Yes, peak usage does not exactly match solar, but it’s vastly better than nuclear which produces 1/2 it’s output at night when demand goes way down. Sure, you can buy more nuclear capacity, but buying more wind / solar capacity also reduces the need for storage.
The other option is to vastly over build nuclear capacity which sit’s idle 99% of the year. That’s ridiculously expensive per kWh.
> Of course nuclear isn't the cheapest form of electricity generation, neither is wind or solar
New wind, solar, and hydro are the three cheapest electricity sources. Read up on some of those solar power purchase agreements, it’s hitting under 3c/kWh without subsidies. Solar is not a great fit near the poles, but you can cheaply transport it 1,000+ miles north.
I've tried to find the extent of subsidies to the nuclear industry in France and I failed. It's not public information as far as I can tell. So, how would you know?
> Nuclear ends up needing more storage because wind and solar can be crafted to roughly follow load.
I've given you a link that calculated that Germany would need decades worth of worldwide battery production to buffer its renewables. It also doesn't have near enough locations for hydro storage.
Meanwhile, the share of France's nuclear is far higher than that of Germany's renewables. If that explanation was true, France would have to have massively more buffering than Germany, which clearly isn't the case. This brings us to your alternative explanation:
> The other option is to vastly over build nuclear capacity which sit’s idle 99% of the year. That’s ridiculously expensive per kWh.
So in this explanation, not only are France's electricity costs in reality far higher than those of other countries because of nuclear subsidies, but those subsidies are so large that they depress the price of electricity to half of that of Germany, which has all this really "cheap" renewable energy.
To show how unlikely this is, take the cost offset for a single cent per kWh for France's energy usage[1]:
450 billion kWh * 0.01 EUR = 4.5 billion EUR
That amounts to almost 0.5% of total annual tax revenue[2] for a single cent, or over 5% just to explain the consumer price difference between Germany and France without accounting for all this supposed extra cost that nuclear is causing. Yet, somehow France manages to hide this enormous expense in its accounting?
[1] https://www.worlddata.info/europe/france/energy-consumption....
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_France#Taxes_by_so...
> New wind, solar, and hydro are the three cheapest electricity sources. Read up on some of those solar power purchase agreements, it’s hitting under 3c/kWh without subsidies.
I'm not contesting that they are cheap on paper, but they're not that cheap if you count in the infrastructure to actually make them support a nation's grid in the general case. Again, if it was all so easy why isn't everybody 100% invested in wind and solar everywhere? Why bother with anything else? You're ignoring a lot of factors, like land use or location requirements. There's a vast difference in wind output depending where it is, and hydroelectricity doesn't work at all without a suitable location.
Of course there are cases where wind, solar and especially hydro totally make sense. That doesn't mean it's a solution for all energy needs. We can make do without nuclear, we can make do without fossil fuels, but as it is, we can't make do without both. That's the issue at hand.
Is wildly incorrect. When calculating storing wind and solar power you want to minimize total costs, in most cases this results in over productions resulting in a lot of ‘wasted’ power.
Do this and you don’t get 6TWh for Germany. The country only uses 556.5 TWh per year or ~1.5 TWh per day. 0.2 TWh is a high but much more reasonable estimate. Considering they already have .0377 TWh of storage or 19% of that suddenly the numbers don’t look that huge.
> massively more buffering than Germany
France has massive buffering from the rest of the European electric grid. It’s fine because they use peaking power not actually going 100% Nuclear, using significant peaking power generation.
PS: France uses 6,939.52 kWh (2014) per year. A 0.1 euro discount is 70$ per person per year, not exactly crazy money. Germany and much of Europe on the other hand has huge energy taxes which push up their bills.
France (2013) spending central government 487.7€ billion, 562.9 Social Security, Local 252 billion, quasi government bodies 81.3€ billion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_France
The "average" isn't the issue here. If you just look at the graphs you will see that actual production is well below the required ~0.8-1.9 TWh load for several days in a row. That's how the buffering requirements multiply. You can also clearly see how massively larger the discrepancy between production and load is, when compared to the stable output of a nuclear (or fossil fuel) plant.
> France has massive buffering from the rest of the European electric grid. It’s fine because they use peaking power not actually going 100% Nuclear, using significant peaking power generation.
France doesn't have any buffering for itself that the other countries don't also share. As you can hopefully see by just looking at the graphs, Germany currently needs far more buffering than France:
https://www.power-technology.com/features/featureovercapacit...
> France uses 6,939.52 kWh (2014) per year. A 0.1 euro discount is 70$ per person per year, not exactly crazy money.
A 0.1 EUR (=10 cents) discount is ~670 EUR per person per year, or roughly 40 billion EUR per year, just as I calculated earlier. This is more than the entire military budget. If this kind of money was really spent on nuclear subsidies, do you think it could just be kept secret? Wouldn't it be all over the media, wouldn't every renewables lobbyist be touting it, talking about "the big nuclear scam" going on in France?
> Germany and much of Europe on the other hand has huge energy taxes which push up their bills.
France also has those taxes[1], but the taxes in Germany are even higher to pay for the renewables[2].
[1] https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/France-electrici...
[2] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-german-house...
If you just look at the graphs you will see that actual production is well below the required ~0.8-1.9 TWh load for several days in a row.
Only because they had insufficient production. If you do the optimization extra production vs vs storage. It's more or less X$/kWh for storage, but Y$/kWh / (numbers of hours you would be storing it) for generation.
(to simplify) If you pay say 100$ per kWh of storage and 1,000$ per kWh of generation then storage is only a net savings up to 10 hours between generation and usage.
This ends up working out so you want enough generation that in the absolute worst day you still produce more electricity than you need. Be that from nuclear or wind. It's much cheaper to do this with returnables over very large areas.
Overcapacity is not inherently a bad thing as long as it's cheaper on net than the other options. It does absolutely destroy more expensive sources of production, but that's how economies are supposed to operate.
It's not obvious that you made a typo there. Sure, reducing the cost by one cent is only ~70$ per citizen per year. But it's also only one cent, which is not much of difference, so you wouldn't really have a point there. The price difference to Germany on the other hand is about ten cents (=0.1 EUR).
What's more likely, you got yet another thing wrong after getting so many things wrong, or it was a simple typo?
> Only because they had insufficient production. If you do the optimization extra production vs vs storage. It's more or less X$/kWh for storage, but Y$/kWh / (numbers of hours you would be storing it) for generation.
There are days where production is 1/10th of the requirement, followed by days where production is double that required. Some days, there just isn't enough wind. What's the overcapacity required there? Where exactly does it show up in your earlier calculation of kWh cost?
It's pretty telling that you're ready to point out the demand to production discrepancy for nuclear, but when it comes to wind, which has far higher such discrepancies, you basically ignore it.
> Overcapacity is not inherently a bad thing as long as it's cheaper on net than the other options. It does absolutely destroy more expensive sources of production, but that's how economies are supposed to operate.
Overcapacity destroys electricity infrastructure if it's not manageable anymore. Negative energy prices signify that the grid is nearing its limits.
Also, if you end up needing 5-10x more capacity than base load, is it really still cheaper?
Frances electricity prices are 0.01 euro’s lower than Great Britten a comparable economy, but France is still higher than much of Europe.
> There are days where production is 1/10th the requirement.
Wind production in a single country on it’s own is extremely variable.
Germany: “The day with the lowest wind yields was 24th July 2018. With an average output of 1338 MW, corresponding to 10 percent of the average daily output, only 32,1 GWh of wind power was fed in on this day.”
However, solar output on that day was not also 10% of normal.
Low solar power and low wind power days are inversely correlated. Further, variability decreases over larger geographic areas.
A realistic look at generation goes something like this.
As an optimization problem you need to compare daily demand which is seasonal and weather dependent with solar and wind generation which are also seasonal and weather dependent. Further, choosing wind locations that match your demand both seasonally and hourly. Figuring out the cost of excess capacity for each generating source.
After doing that you can back fill with imports and hydro generation which is dispatch able over time.
Storage is effectively a last resort, though after building it you want to maximize it’s use which means reducing the need to import and use hydro power.
Finally, on extremely unusual situations you ask some consumers to cut demand and finally use backup generators.
It's actually a great comparison, because Germany has put a lot of money into renewables, especially wind. Remember, we're comparing nuclear to renewables.
Earlier, you made the claim that renewables are so much cheaper than nuclear and that the only reason that nuclear is competitive is massive subsidies.
If that's true, Germany should at least be competitive. Which it would be, if you took out the taxes. The problem is, it's those taxes that pay for the renewables subsidies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Source...
> Frances electricity prices are 0.01 euro’s lower than Great Britten a comparable economy, but France is still higher than much of Europe.
"Much of Europe" is countries with far lower incomes and little to no taxes on electricity[1]. Among comparable countries, France is among the cheapest, despite not having any geological advantages.
Anyway, the point is not that nuclear is so much cheaper. It really isn't, coal is both cheaper and can support a grid just as well. In this sense, Germany got the worst of both worlds: Lots of toxic coal but also high prices.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/e/...
> Wind production in a single country on it’s own is extremely variable.
Well yes, that's the issue.
> Low solar power and low wind power days are inversely correlated.
Perhaps, but solar also is far less viable economically.
> Further, variability decreases over larger geographic areas.
So does loss due to transmission.
> After doing that you can back fill with imports and hydro generation which is dispatch able over time.
Well, where do these imports come from? Germany is not exactly a small country, how big of an area do you need to have a stable supply of renewable energy?
Remember, your claim is that renewables are cheaper, yet they need all this infrastructure and an electrical grid spanning vast areas of different countries.
You haven't done the math, you haven't provided a source, so what actually supports this claim?
> Finally, on extremely unusual situations you ask some consumers to cut demand and finally use backup generators.
In other words, you just fail.
You can't say the same about climate change.
Europe's other "big example" (Germany) will be closing all of it's nuclear power plants within years. Only to replace them by (Russian) gas powered plants. Currently "only" 35 % of Germany's power production (2018) is from "sustainable" sources. CO2 production will go up significantly when they start moving from nuclear to gas and other sources: there's no power source that generates as little CO2 per TWH as nuclear when looking at the entire life cycle.
The end result in the future will be: more absolute CO2 emissions (debatable), more CO2 emissions per generated TWH (absolute certainty), more deaths per generated TWH [2], higher consumer energy prices ("sustainable" is way more expensive than nuclear sustainable), more political dependency on Russia due to gas imports and no more electricity exports from France to surrounding countries (France is a net exporter of energy thanks to nuclear) potentially leading to a more unstable European grid.
I don't get it.
[1]https://www.nucnet.org/news/france-plans-to-delay-shutdown-o...
[2]https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...
I don't get it.
In the 1980s the Green Party emerged in Germany, a powerful new left-wing party. Unlike most new parties, they didn't disappear quickly, but proved remarkably politically adept. Their original USP (unique selling point) was environmetalism in general, but extreme and well organised opposition to nuclear power in particular. At the time, all other parties supported nuclear (including the hard left, since the Soviet union was all in on nuclear). At the time de-carbonisation and global warming wasn't a big issue. Merkel's 2011 decision to abandon nuclear was a direct (and political) reaction to the Fukushima nuclear disaster and impending regional elections: Merkel feared (rightly) that with Fukushima fresh on the electorate's mind, her party would be savaged by the Greens on the nuclear question. In order to prevent that, she forced a 180 degree turn on her party and promised to phase out nuclear energy quickly.
As an aside, I've always wondered to what extent the anti-nuclear movements had tacit support from coal/oil producers/users.
Or to put it in Putin's eloquent trolling words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDQDyt0B-1E
Not everyone who disagrees with you is a shill.
I agree that the connection with nuclear weapons triggers powerful emotions against nuclear electricity generation. But nuclear electricity and nuclear weapons are not the same thing. (Cf. do you expect much opposition against nuclear fusion electricity because of hydrogen bombs?)
Clearly opposition against nuclear weapons was in parts guided by the Soviet Union: for example the World Peace Council was set up by the Soviet Communist Party in 1948–50 to to campaign against nuclear weapons at a time when only the USA had them [1].
Given that oil and coal based electricity generation would have been vanquished by going full-in on nuclear electricity generation, I'd not be surprised if there had tacit or not so tacit support of anti-nuclear movements from ... interested parties.
Rainbow Warrior
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_influence_on_the_peace_...
No, but distinguishing between the two from the outside can be tricky even for a small army of IAEA inspectors, cf the Iranian and Iraqi nuclear programmes.
> Clearly opposition against nuclear weapons was in parts guided by the Soviet Union
What I'm arguing against was your original "I've always wondered to what extent the anti-nuclear movements had tacit support from coal/oil producers/users." and the nearby comment "but here's an issue (Germans switching from nuclear to Russian gas) where the Russians would obviously benefit strongly both economically as well as politically."; it's very common these days to allege that people aren't who they say they are or are backed by shadowy forces, on the basis of zero evidence, and when this is levelled against the Left there's a whiff of McCarthyism there too.
As you say, the Chernobyl disaster was the end of Europe believing that nuclear power was inherently safe.
(The more I think about it, the more the reason nobody cared much about CO2 in pre-90s environmentalism was that the existential risk of nuclear war was seen as a much higher priority!)
it's very common these days
to allege that
against the Left
whiff of McCarthyism
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/opinion/was-lenin-a-germa...
Pretty much everyone who looks at it agrees that nuclear costs more than solar, wind and batteries and is a non-solution to climate change due to cost alone.
Yet, 'nuclear realists' show up in every thread to complain about how stupid lefties and greens are for not embracing nuclear.
If you look at support for nuclear in the US it's noticeably higher for Republicans, who also are distinctly less likely to be in line with reality on various related issues.
Sadly I have to assume that most of the people loudly supporting nuclear are actually part of the problem, voted for Donald "climate change is a Chinese hoax, so let's subsidize coal" Trump and now use this idea that Nuclear is being shut down by hysterical greenies as a way to salve their conscience, because they know they're actively involved in destroying the planet, but will feel better if they can convince themselves that "the other side does it too".
Current nuclear is too expensive and too slow to build to be any use for anything but a distraction in this matter.
Yes I know, you think that cost of regulation is also the fault of lefties and greenies and everything would be fine if the free market could just do its thing and build nuclear everywhere, but even in China, where they can basically do whatever they want, nuclear is not the answer. For boring economic reasons.
You'll never get a nuclear fan to meet you on that territory. Rhetoric about it being better than coal and the lefties and greens holding them back is all they have. I assume this is because they know they're in trouble if facts come up, so they just avoid them.
I saw someone attack the very concept of "net present value" rather than accept the answers it gave for nuclear investment.
It's not a good solution, no matter how hysterical the people are about nuclear radiation risks. Don't focus on them, focus on the people who say it's too expensive if you have a genuine answer.
And stop voting Republican if you expect your opinion on anything environment-related to be taken seriously, they're actively working against this goal.
Could you point to some studies on this? I am open to persuasion but as far as I'm aware, the battery technology is not there yet, and lots of countries would struggle to find enough land to get all their power from solar + wind.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Hard to declare 33% as "not significant". Yes, that chart also shows a significant contribution from nuclear, but it really does take much longer to build.
Here's the first study I found:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014811...
Regarding land: Lots of small countries don't have the resources either in the current situation and import oil, gas and coal.
https://edition-m.cnn.com/2019/02/06/motorsport/morocco-sola...
Store heat in salt for use at night time.
They are really ambitious it seems.
Obviously no longterm storage, but interesting non the less I think.
> The best model for current technology would be a large government backed program to build a national utility powered by nuclear with secure sources of fuel production and methods of disposal all of which requires influence at the state level to overcome nimbyism
i.e. France.
And where would we even put it? Need water for cooling. And water crisis is also happening.
That said, I still want traveling wave reactors. We need to dispose of our stockpiles. And if we get some useful energy out of it, yay.
(Or dump our stockpiles into a subduction zone.)
Yes, long-term storage is expensive. But there are options: Overprovisioning, hydropower, thermal storage if you just need to heat up houses, thermal-electric storage if you need the electricity, biomass (plants store the energy).
Thermal and thermal-electric storage is still in its infancy, but if you show up with the need and the money, you could buy a plant to be installed in a year or two.
--
As I currently understand it:
Most power generation will addressed with wind plus solar, and adopting direct power for our grid. The challenges here are time, money, politics. We'll need to prop up existing nuclear during the transition. Say 10-20 years. Better batteries (storage) will be better, sure. But batteries are no longer a blocker.
We can kinda us see how transportation will play out. 20-30 years to transition to EVs. Carbon taxes to greatly discourage shipping and air travel.
Construction and agriculture are all but unaddressed, much less solved.
--
Meanwhile, atmospheric carbon will continue to rise due to burning forests, ocean acidification, thawing tundra. These "natural" sources are 2-3x greater than anthropogenic. They are in a positive feedback loop. They are currently unstoppable.
For which we have no plan.
We'll need carbon capture. Olivine, CO2-to-ammonia, CO2 scrubbers, algae bioreactors are the only concrete proposals I've heard (and now remember). It won't be enough.
We should dump money into every half-way plausible idea (a la X Prizes) and hope some of it works. Somehow remove carbon faster than it's being added.
More far fetched notions will be tried too. Dumping iron into the ocean. Aerosols to dim sunlight. Light up some volcanos. Hopefully something helps.
Someone suggested that you could use the excess electricity to generate hydrogen. Yes you could, but you could generate more hydrogen for less money with solar/wind.
Two options, with similar drawbacks, one of which is cheap and easy to build (well, conparitively, those windmills are stupid big) and roll out around the globe and one that isn't.
People are seriously working right now on how to get to 100% renewables. Lots of interesting proposals and plans. Basically every government is on board with this. It's just fiddling with the details. 80% is considered pretty easy.
No one is working on aiming for 100% nuclear because it's just a plain stupid idea. Build a wall and get Mexico to pay for it levels of stupid, as similarly it wouldn't even solve the problem.
Yet somehow you can pretend to be the adult in the room by armchair quarterbacking it as what we should have done if the sensible people were in charge.
That was the France plan from the 1970s: 100% nuclear, as a way of getting off oil dependency. As we can see, 80% was achievable, 100% wasn't, and the decommissioning costs are starting to become a question.
Some people feel judged by other people's lifestyle and personal choices.
Case in point: https://www.google.com/search?q=prius+repellent
Battery and solar applications just weren't ready in the past yet in scaleability.
I won't get into the political with us or against us strawmen.
So far nuclear power has done a lot more to quell climate change than solar. The world leader for dealing-with-climate-change is France, on something like 80% nuclear. The situation might have changed in the last 5 or so years, but realistically nuclear has always been obviously workable because it has been demonstrated to work.
> If you look at support for nuclear in the US it's noticeably higher for Republicans, who also are distinctly less likely to be in line with reality on various related issues.
That'll be a contender for the worst argument you'll make today; profiling is a very bad way of reasoning when the alternative is arguing from actual evidence.
> I saw someone attack the very concept of "net present value" rather than accept the answers it gave for nuclear investment.
NPV does have weaknesses at assessing long-term infrastructure spending, it tends to favour short-term cash grabs and a hope that something else comes up in the medium-long term. It is a great tool for assessing two broadly similar options but it isn't the be-all and end-all.
> Sadly I have to assume that most of the people loudly supporting nuclear are actually part of the problem
This really underscores a vibe I'm reading in your post that I do not like. You don't seem to want the environmental problem to be solved, you want Republicans to feel bad and mend their ways (on a rather questionable assumption that they are more disconnected from reality than any other group). If you wanted the problem to be solved you'd probably find your way to something more like "Wow, we can get this solved even if they don't believe in climate change! What a great resolution that would be!".
If those countries built their own nuclear then neither they nor France would be economic since everyone would have the excess power at the same time. We can't export power to other planets, so nuclear is not an economic solution for the whole globe, it only works at small scale when the rest of the system can absorb the inflexible power.
Note that wind and solar have similar issues, which require geographic spread, oversupply and storage to meet. They can do that and still be cheaper than nuclear in an apple to apples comparison.
"and storage to meet" --> There is currently no economically viable way to store electric energy from "sustainable" non-continuous sources at a large scale. If there was, we wouldn't be having this discussion right now.
You know that nuclear power is pretty flexible right ? France actually pilot most of the load variations through its nuclear plants. You can see it here: [1]. The only thing you can't really do at scale is turning on and off a reactor every once in a while, but you can easily go from 100% to 50% power in a few hours. You can even go further (down to 25% with recent fuel) but then you'll start burning the fuel in a sub-obtimal way, so they limit the number of times they go bellow 50% power.
[1] https://rte-france.com/fr/eco2mix/eco2mix-mix-energetique
Switzerland has 5 nuclear plants operating right now, which produce 34% of its electricity (with hydro accounting for another 60%) [0] however these plants are approaching the ends of their lives and a referendum in 2017 banned new plants [1], so we need to find an alternative way to replace them.
Expanding hydro isn't an easy option because there's nowhere to build new dams (and the populace is generally against it) and the glaciers that provide the water are shrinking due to climate change. This will produce a burst of extra capacity but following that hydro won't be a viable option. There are plans to turn a few existing resevoirs into pumped storage facilities [2] but this isn't a great deal of capacity.
Wind can be a part of the overall solution but it's not enough. The Swiss government (optimistically) plans to have ~300GWh/month by 2050 [3] but that's only ~5% of Switzerland's current consumption.
Solar is another potential part of the solution but current capacity is minimal and adoption hasn't been going well [4].
The Swiss government has a 2050 energy plan [5] but it doesn't seem realistic to me. For one, they expect a 43% decrease in overall energy consumption _and_ a 13% decrease in electricity consumption. Assuming most of the non-electric consumption is from cars and it's reduced in favor of EVs, I just don't see how electricity consumption can be less than it is today.
In the end, I think Switzerland is going to be heavily dependent on importing energy from elsewhere in Europe unless it removes the nuclear ban in the immediate future. It doesn't look likely that it's going to be able to replace the lost capacity with renewables quickly enough.
[0]: https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/wirtschaft...
[1]: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/vote-opener/43190762
[2]: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/hydropower_swiss-alps-proposed-...
[3]: https://www.uvek-gis.admin.ch/BFE/storymaps/EE_WEA/index.php...
[4]: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2018/07/12/switzerland-close-to-...
[5]: https://www.bfe.admin.ch/bfe/en/home/policy/energy-strategy-...
If you look at the reasons in France, I suspect CO2 did not matter much, but rather that it was a matter of national security.
If the European nations of today started to feel threatened, I'm sure you'd see plenty of public funding for renewables and nuclear.
Anyway, we'll get there some day, it least with renewables that are falling in price year by year.
It was in the 70s, CO2 emissions were not yet identified as a serious problem but peak oil was already a known problem.
You didn't mention the cost.
I searched "France nuclear waste." The first response was a BBC article https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26425674 saying
"France generates around three quarters of its electricity from nuclear power but despite decades of activity it is no nearer a solution to the perils of nuclear waste. Many countries agree the hazardous material - some of it at temperatures of 90C - has to be disposed of deep below ground where it can be isolated from all living things for tens of thousands of years whilst the radiation slowly reduces."
Tens of thousands of years is long.
Unless I'm missing something, we have no idea the problems that may arise in a period longer than since Egyptian pyramids.
I'm comparing nuclear pollution not to coal, but to had similar resources been put into reducing consumption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Transmutatio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Re-use
It would be unwise to gamble on technological progress making 100% green energy feasible, but not making safe nuclear waste disposal feasible. Consider that nuclear waste can be stored temporarily way into the future, but climate action and reliable energy is needed right now.
If I had to choose between the environmental impact of climate change and the odds of some nuclear leaks thousands of years down the road, I'd go with nuclear. Such radiation isn't that harmful and the effects will either be localized or diluted.
Because when things go wrong they go really wrong and many times we see capitalism continuously move the goal post on safety rules. A plant designed for 30 years with an acceptable 1cm crack tolerance surpasses both limits, lobbying occurs, and then it's now all of a sudden designed for 40 years and 3cm cracks.
My impression is that the main reason is poor education and scaremongering, rather than actual causalities. When comparing nuclear with other energy sources, nuclear is still quite safe in deaths/TWh, see for example [1].
[1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...
This risk is not captured by a single deaths/TWh number, so please stop comparing this when debating (current) nuclear energy options (not talking about future designs or even fission-based plants)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Simplified_Boiling_Wa...
The Fukushima disaster nicely demonstrated that there is lots of risk, but the incredible severity of the release at Chernobyl is probably going to be historically unique.
(Fukushima released quite a lot of material, mostly leaking Cesium into groundwater (and then the ocean). Chernobyl released several metric tons of fuel directly into the atmosphere...)
But people should analyze the risk as it exists, not shout about another Chernobyl. That a wealthy, stable nation failed to account for a situation with pretty strong historical evidence is not encouraging. And then there were multiple relatively inexpensive ways that Fukushima could have been better prepared.
Well as you said, there are a lot of consequences and risks even if it's not another Chernobyl.
> And then there were multiple relatively inexpensive ways that Fukushima could have been better prepared.
And this is what it really comes down to. Can nuclear power be made safe? Yes, but typically stupidity, profits, and capitalism take precedence. Again, in the US nearly all operation nuclear power plants are operating past their designed life and have cracks larger than the allowable tolerances. Power plants are expensive to build and profitable to keep running so just like every other capitalist business/plant, you invest barely any money into fixes/repairs, you instead spend money on bending the rules to stay in business longer, and you run it into the ground, typically until failure. At the end of the day the owner of the company can declare bankruptcy, shut down the company, and go on with his life on some island away from any repercussions from the destruction caused.
There are massive social costs of displacing ~half a million of people all at once; added about 25% to the displacement caused by the original tsunami. Realistically, the government evacuation was probably the unacceptable part of the story. It was clearly excessively paranoid.
The health impacts of living next to Fukushima for 10 years and though the disaster appear to be less damaging than living in a coal mining region for 10 years.
As an engineer, theoretically I could in my life time screw up a decision and be responsible for killing 10 people. I'd much rather have Fukushima on my conscience.
To put it bluntly; if the situation is assessed without an anti-nuclear lens then yes Fukushima was acceptable. Not completely acceptable, as obviously they could have done better. And this is after scouring the history of the nuclear industry across the entire globe and picking the 2nd worst incident, ever.