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Comment by ricw | Hacker News Reader

Have we not learnt our lesson? Nearly 70 years of massive global subsidies have gone by and yet the nuclear industry has not been able to produce anything competitive, let alone anything that doesn’t require government guarantees / externalisation of costs.

I love the idea of nuclear, but it just hasn’t worked out. Solar and wind already are cheaper than anything else out there, and they are still regularly falling in cost. We can invest our money better elsewhere.

The nuclear age has come and passed.

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Your post is an anthology of myths and incorrect information.

Some facts:

* Nuclear energy has received less than 50% of the subsidies that renewables have. Renewables only recently ceased to "need" this, and they've been under development for decades. Nuclear power hasn't had investment in significant research since about 1970.

* Nuclear reactors are competitive in many countries, and in fact they are too in the US. Nuclear is the cheapest power per kilowatt-hour except when direct access to nearby fossil fuel sources is available, even using 40-50 year old reactor designs. Newer designs would be even cheaper. In fact this is irrelevant, however, because we're not looking for the cheapest power, we're looking for a way to supplement renewables with always-on electricity that doesn't fuel climate change.

Newer reactor designs will be safer, cheaper, and less expensive to build. They may even use something other than Uranium as a fuel. They will not contribute to nuclear weapons proliferation and they will not produce large amounts of waste. They will release less radiation into the environment than current coal plants do.

If all the people who believe 40 years of propaganda and misinformation spread by self righteous willfully ignorant individuals can do so, we can work toward a clean energy future using renewables and nuclear in time to limit global warming.

If we can't, once we start having wars over water and the world starts boiling in the heat of rising seas, we'll start building nuclear reactors after the fact. Assuming we survive that long.

Sources: https://nuclear.duke-energy.com/2019/01/23/debunking-9-myths...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidy

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-a...

* The market situation was vastly different. Renewables were being developed in a mature market.

* What you mean, but conveniently left out, is that nuclear reactors that are written off are competitive. Until they get too old to fix, then they're closed. That's what's happening at the moment in the Western world whether we like it or not.

When you talk about newer reactor designs, you are not talking about commercial reactors, but research reactors, for which the true cost/potential is unknown.

Nuclear isn't a good match for PV and wind, as those are cheaper when they're on. So you have a huge capital investment but only a low realized capacity factor.

> That's what's happening at the moment in the Western world whether we like it or not.

that's what will happen to the current generation of solar and wind power plants

Yeah and it's a thousand times easier to quickly replace those because their key components are not the most dangerous substances on the planet!

There are a lot of much more dangerous substances on the planet, and many of them are likely used in the manufacturing process of photovoltaics.

Cite?

Have fun with the googling. Feel free to check out the toxicity of plutonium (separate from radiation) while you're at it.

Well, hydrogen cyanide is more dangerous, it is used to produce cyanide salts (potassium and sodium), which are also extremely toxic, and are commonly used in electroplating

And is hydrogen cyanide not used in nuclear plant construction?

> Nuclear isn't a good match for PV and wind, as those are cheaper when they're on. So you have a huge capital investment but only a low realized capacity factor.

That's the wrong conclusion. In a grid made of unreliables and nuclear power, electricity is worthless during the day and priceless at night. If you assume[^] cheap batteries, electricity is worthless in summer and priceless in winter.

[^] But remember, if you assume, you make an ASS out of U and ME.

> Nuclear energy has received less than 50% of the subsidies that renewables have. Renewables only recently ceased to "need" this, and they've been under development for decades. Nuclear power hasn't had investment in significant research since about 1970.

The numbers for subsidies of nuclear power come with some many caveats that they are useless. It does not cover the cost of insuring nuclear power, so you can actually pay to clean up disasters. It does not cover the massive amount of money that went into it for military purposes that civilian nuclear power benefitted from.

I don't think it actually covers the decommissioning costs either, because these seems to typically be much larger than first anticipated.

The subsidies of renewables meanwhile give a false picture because the cost varies considerably depending on where you are in the world. Germany pushed solar into what it is today, but it is not a country well suited for solar power.

And unlike nuclear, these subsidies have lead to massive price drops. Subsidies of nuclear power has not led to any drop in price of nuclear power. In fact the costs keep rising.

> Newer designs would be even cheaper. Eh... thus far newer designs have been massively more expensive to build and much slower.

> Newer reactor designs will be safer, cheaper, and less expensive to build.

Ah yeah.... how old are you anyway? I have been hearing this claim for something like 20 years now. I remember the promise of pebble bed reactors for probably 20 years or longer. They were invented back in the 50s I believe. Yet we are still not seeing them being built. At least not here in the west.

I am tired of empty promises from the nuclear industry. Wind and solar has succeed where nuclear has failed. They have been given there chance AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN and failed to deliver.

> They will release less radiation into the environment than current coal plants do.

Ah yeah... until there is an accident. After Chernobyl we were promised nothing like this would ever happened again because that reactor was so bad, and bla bla bla. Oops then Fukushima happened. Always the same story "Nobody could have foreseen this!"

Ah yeah... that is kind of the point. That is why nuclear power is a terrible idea. There will always be something you did not think about.

>After Chernobyl we were promised nothing like this would ever happened again because that reactor was so bad, and bla bla bla. Oops then Fukushima happened.

This is remarkably sloppy logic. Chernobyl was a questionable design. Fukushima was a different design that's more common, but still old.

The two accidents had little in common. Did you really think when someone said that Chernobyl wouldn't happen again that they meant all reactor types everywhere would never have another accident of any kind? If so, you're pretty naive.

>There will always be something you did not think about.

True about every technology ever created, and not a good enough reason to avoid progress and invention altogether.

Fukushima's atmospheric release was two orders of magnitude lower than Chernobyl's - 370TBq vs. 70Pbq (cf. https://www.npr.org/2011/04/12/135353240/fukushima-vs-cherno..., https://www.oecd-nea.org/rp/chernobyl/c02.html)

> Yet we are still not seeing them being built.

We’re seeing them be shut down because people don’t seem to want them.

> Ah yeah... until there is an accident.

Even with accidents nuclear has probably released less radiation than coal.

Not probably, it definitely has.

> * Nuclear energy has received [a massive amount of subsidy]

> * Nuclear reactors are competitive in many countries, and in fact they are too in the US.

Illinois has one of the largest nuclear deployments in the US. Our latest climate legislation was drafted by Exelon, and provides massive subsidy in the form of carbon credits to the nuclear industry. And yet even with this, they have no plans to replace their 50-year old reactor fleet and no projected path forward for them except seeking another taxpayer bailout in a couple decades to again extend the life of these obsolete reactors. Nuclear is not competitive, period, unless you choose not to look at the full life-cycle.

Here's what the collective of nuclear advocates at MIT concluded[1], but I'm sure that's just "propaganda and misinformation spread by self righteous willfully ignorant individuals", too.

    For  a  large  expansion  of nuclear  power  to  suc-ceed, four critical problems must be overcome:

    * Cost. In deregulated markets, nuclear power is  not  now  cost  competitive  with  coal  and natural gas. However, plausible reductions by industry in capital cost, operation and maintenance  costs,  and  construction  time  could reduce  the  gap.  Carbon  emission  credits,  if enacted  by  government,  can  give  nuclear power a cost advantage.

    * Safety. Modern  reactor  designs  can  achieve  a very  low  risk  of  serious  accidents,  but  “best practices” in  construction  and  operation  are essential. We know little about the safety of the overall fuel cycle, beyond reactor operation.

    * Waste. Geological disposal is technically feasible but execution is yet to be demonstrated or  certain.  A  convincing  case  has  not  been made that the long-term waste management benefits   of   advanced,   closed   fuel   cycles involving reprocessing of spent fuel are out-weighed  by  the  short-term  risks  and  costs. Improvement in the open, once through fuelcycle  may  offer  waste  management  benefits as large as those claimed for the more expensive closed fuel cycles.

    * Proliferation. The current international safe-guards  regime  is  inadequate  to  meet  the security  challenges  of  the  expanded  nuclear deployment   contemplated   in   the   global growth   scenario.  The   reprocessing   system now  used  in  Europe, Japan, and  Russia  that involves separation and recycling of plutonium presents unwarranted proliferation risks.

1. http://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2003/07/MITEI-The-F...

> they have no plans to replace their 50-year old reactor fleet and no projected path forward for them except seeking another taxpayer bailout in a couple decades to again extend the life of these obsolete reactors.

They have to keep extending obsolete reactors because they aren't allowed to build newer, safer, more efficient ones!

Aren't "allowed" by whom? If it was economical to replace these reactors they would have a plan for it.

By the US Government, nuclear regulatory agencies, the state governments, and above all ignorant people who are afraid of the word "nuclear" and anything associated with it, because they've never understood the idea that nuclear energy can mean something other than "bombs".

For a new plant type to be built, it first has to be approved by the US government. Then funding has to be acquired, insurance bought, permitting done. Unless the US government makes an effort to clear the way for new construction, all that overhead and cost makes new reactor types a non starter for any for profit business.

They could build more of the older types, but with the unreasoning fear associated with nuclear anything in the US population going on, the cost of doing so is ridiculous... and most of these companies don't much care about climate change anyway. They're about profit.

One of your sources is literally a power company.

You could argue that they're biased, but you could also argue that they're the most knowledgeable people available.

If you don't like those sources, look around. There are lots of government studies in many countries available.

If you are willing to read them, that is.

With current energy grids that are used in the world as a template, you can have one of two grid.

1) Nuclear, with the high building cost and externalization of spent fuel.

2) Renewable, with cheap building costs and externalization of variable production rate which is solved by burning fossil fuels like natural gas or coal.

If we look beyond current grids and look into the future there is solutions to those externalizations. Renewable could use batteries rather than burning fossil fuels, but the current best bet is to build enough hydro powerplants and dams to fully support the energy grid during low production periods, and pumping back the water during high production. This will cost a lot of land and put a lot of greenhouse gases into the air, in particular because putting a lot of land under water tend to create a lot of methane. The cement for the dams are just like the cement in nuclear plants a major contributor to greenhouse gas production.

Personally, I just would declare that the age of burning fossil fuel to manage the energy grid has come and passed. By 2020 we should not build any new natural gas power plants. by 2030 we should have decommissioned 90% of all fossil burning plants, and by 2040 a complete ban of burning fossil fuel for electricity for any scale larger than a hospitals backup generator. With those decision in place I trust that investors will figure out if nuclear is profitable or not, and I personally do not care. For the climate sake my only wish is that we stop burning fossil fuels.

Current grids are or have been mostly fossil fuels. You can displace a lot of those with renewables, no problem.

It's true that to get to 100%, or to start a new grid, you need to have something to fill in the gaps. Here there's a wide array of options, of which the most deployed at the moment are hydro and biomass AFAIK. But there are other proposals.

In the past it mostly didn't make sense to store electricity, not when you are paying for coal or gas and could as well store that. So many of the latest proposals are not fully developed and operating at a massive scale yet.

For the US grid that is very true. There are nations which has reached closer to peak renewable and a good example is Denmark. At peak time wind production is almost 100% and if I remember right they export a lot when that happen, but then we have times like right now (when this comment is posted) and wind production is less than 10% of total usage and both natural gas and coal produce sits above 10% to compensate, in combination with imports from Germany which is also right now mostly produced from coal. (https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&rem...)

Hydro as a natural resource is not a perfect fit to use in case like this as natural lakes can only take so much changes in water levels, and in many cases you have chains of hydro plants and lakes which mean dumping a lot of water in one place means you have to dump a lot of it further down without causing flooding. Hydro plants must also manage how much water they have available. Swedish power prices is notorious effected by how much water winter/fall periods produce.

There are two common environmentalist arguments:

1. Climate change is an existential threat to humanity, and we must make radical changes to our lifestyles and economies immediately.

2. Wind and solar are now so cheap that there's no need for nuclear.

How can both of those be true? If wind and solar are really that cheap, great! Build enough of them to replace all existing fossil fuels and nuclear plants, and we're done. The fact that this has not happened even in enlightened countries makes me question that claim.

How long has solar been that competitive? Less than a decade. How much power infrastructure is there in the world--a huge amount. How long will it take to retire and replace all that infrastructure? Decades at best.

Neither technology is so cheap as to make it economical to replace our entire energy system through market forces. That's why the climate crisis is not magically solving itself. That does not contradict the argument that nuclear, for cost reasons, is poorly-positioned to be the main player in a subsidized transition to a post-carbon economy.

https://terrapower.com https://terrapower.com/updates/netflix-documentary-on-terrap...

Terrapower is one of Bill Gate’s active developments. There are immense amounts of depleted uranium that the gov thinks is waste sitting in fields. Terrapower can build nuclear reactors that can run and power the entirety of the US for 100 years. You’re right that most nuclear reactors haven’t made significant improvements which is why they’ve made considerable technological advancements for example no human operators (use AI like google to run their entire facilities) and liquid metal instead of water and disaster proof. Watch this documentary for more insight!

Yes, they've been touting these for 15 years now and still don't have any plans for a prototype. The nuclear industry always seems to have some game-changing innovation just around the corner. I'm all for aggressively funding the research, but these new designs are all hypothetical, not existing solutions.

There are plans to build a prototype but the Trump administration blocked them: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a25728221/te...

Right, hence, no current plans for a prototype.

The plans are made and ready to go as soon as a president who isn't loyal to the fossil fuel industry is in office. This technology could literally save our species and the planet and it got spiked to protect dinosaur industries. You can watch the documentary "Inside Bill's Brain" on Netflix for more information, specifically episode 3.

> Solar and wind already are cheaper than anything else out there

Yes if you conveniently choose to ignore the availability problems (in the night and in no wind). And that no scalable battery/storage solution exists yet?

How are batteries, power-to-gas, and solar-thermal with molten salt not scalable?

Because they can provide nowhere near the amount of storage required. For example, one of the flagship solar storage facilities here in California has a capacity of 300 MWh. By comparison, the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant generates 2,200 Megawatts. That storage facility can store less than _ten minutes_ worth of energy that the nuclear plant outputs.

The German natural gas infrastructure can in fact store several hundreds of TWh.

What do you mean natural gas infrastructure? Pneumatic storage?

Lots of German households and industries use natural gas for heating, hence we've got something like 400,000 km of pipeline as well as storage facilities sitting around. Instead of buying natural gas from Russia, we could fill them with synthetically produced methane and/or hydrogen, generated during off-peak hours.

Synthetic methane production has a theoretical maximum efficiency of 30-40%. So we'd need to build 3x as much power and is actually needed, and a bunch of electrolysis and Sabatier reaction plants on top of that.

Or we can just follow France's example and build nuclear plants.

Those numbers are outdated. Round-trip efficiencies of up to 80% have been claimed:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054421...

If that's legit and can be made cost-effective, the case for nuclear is largely gone...

Efficiencies of over 100% have been claimed. Over 50% of the US patent office's applications are for entropy-reversing devices.

Come back to me once these claimed figures are actually implemented.

Reverse fuel cells aren't magic, though. I agree that 80% seems rather ambitous...

...in the form of methane. How do you store wind and solar?

Uhm, well, electrolysis and Sabatier reaction, and then you clean it up and compress it or something. Unfortunately, you need a source of carbon dioxide (no, not air, extracting a trace gas is rather impractical), and then the whole process has a round trip efficiency of certainly no better than 20%. Looks like we need a 4x or so overbuild of unrealiables so that methanation can keep the lights on in winter.

What confuses me is that there are much more practical chemical storage methods nobody talks about. Ammonia comes to mind. It's easier to make and easier to store. I can't help but think that the whole methanation idea is a PR stunt by the gas industry, intended to positively associate renewables with fossil gas in the minds of the unwashed masses.

German Wikipedia lists round-tip efficiencies of 30-38%, and 43–54% if you cogenerate heat.

I've already linked a paper which makes promises of efficiencies of up to 80% using reverse fuel cells.

Here's an older one that promises 'only' 70% efficiency, using caverns for CO2 and CH4 storage:

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2015/EE/C5EE0...

Not sure how much of these claims will survive after contact with reality...

Heat cogeneration doesn't really improve efficiency of the methane generation process itself. Cogeneration refers to using the waste heat of a thermal plant to assist in some other facility. Using the waste heat of a gas plant to heat water in desalination is an example of cogeneration. So it does improve overall energy efficiency, but it assumes that there's a convenient source of heat next door. Wind and photovoltaics don't generate any significant amount of heat though, so there's no opportunity for cogeneration.

Cogeneration happens at the gas-to-power side of things. Doesn't help you with electricity generation, but that's ok as the goal is reduction of emissions across all sectors.

The source calculates somewhat optimistically. They assume storage at 80bar, while mentioning that actual storage is at 200bar. They also assume 60% efficient conversion from methane to electricity, while using 55% in other parts of the paper. There is no accounting for transmission losses or the energy needed to procure the CO2. Cogeneration is again creative accounting. We're talking about supplying electricity, and heat isn't electricity.

Those reversible fuel cells... I'll believe in them when I can buy them. And a round trip efficiency of 80% is unbelievable when simple electrolysis of water, which is only half the round trip, isn't that efficient.

They probably can scale, but haven't scaled yet. The only proven solution today is pumped storage, which is not available everywhere. Pumped storage accounts for >95% of world's installed energy storage capacity.

Not being needed to scale yet and not being able to scale are two completely different things though.

Simple: because at high levels of intermittent penetration, you have to build so much "non-productive" storage technology that the Energy Return on Investment is below the level thought necessary to sustain industrial civilization. For example, this was just published last week:

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X1...

(Iñigo Capellán-Pérez, Carlos de Castro, Luis Javier Miguel González, Dynamic Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI) and material requirements in scenarios of global transition to renewable energies, Energy Strategy Reviews, Volume 26, 2019, 100399, ISSN 2211-467X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2019.100399.)

I accidentally clicked get PDF on the recommended paper from the page, this one:

"Will EROI be the Primary Determinant of Our Economic Future? The View of the Natural Scientist versus the Economist"

https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S2542435117300831?...

Which actually answers why the point you bring up is not relevant:

"In a recent meeting of scientists and economists in London, economists raised eight points as to why it was not necessary to consider EROI in determining future energy availability or policy."

Now the above paper tries to refute those points, but using invalid logic, e.g. arguing that because EROI and costs are linked in oil and gas, then the same observation must hold across categories to renewables.

That paper has problems.

The red flag that stood out to me is that they show huge increases in tellurium, gallium, and indium demand in Figure 10. Those materials are only required for thin film solar technologies. But according to Table 2, their scenario includes one PV technology: fixed-tilt arrays of silicon PV. Where are the increased demand for tellurium, gallium and indium coming from? It reads like they copy-pasted information from prior studies without paying attention to their own scenario parameters.

People are not only powering up their "macbook pros" to watch netflix. Try to run steel mill or any factory on batteries, solar or molten salt, even decent size server farm is not going to run well on solar or wind.

It has one massive advantage though. It's perceived to be "hated by the greenies". That makes some circles really love it - and that could make it very viable where those demographics wield enough power.

It’s sadly ironic that the greens historically opposed nuclear and thus share partial responsibility for where we are with respect to our energy production mix.

But I don’t see them flagellating themselves over this flagrant mis-step they share responsibility for.

It’s unfortunate that people who become activists are often (but not always) more dogmatic than scientific in their approach to dealing with issues. I think, looking retroactively, that there was an opportunity to coöperate with industry to address issues and work towards a working solution. I mean Yucca mountain. Where would France be if they had capitulated to this thinking.

There is some movement around small modular reactors. I hope they could be done in a fast and safe way.

Even just heating cities could provide a huge saving in emissions. The reactor design simplifies and the whole facility simplifies even more massively if you forgo power generation. You can operate with low pressures and temperatures.

The same people who are pro-nuclear don't want it in their backyard, nor to worry about future waste storage sites, or invest more heavily in the current Superfund clean up aftermath from previous nuclear-related projects.

Usually they talk about how the newest reactors are more efficient and reliable than ever, but still cost billions to manufacturer and maintain, and only if liabilities are removed from those involved with building it.

>nor to worry about future waste storage sites

Why would we need more than one waste storage site?

All the waste produced by power generating reactors in the US ever would fit on a US football field and be about 30 feet deep. That's less waste than one coal plant produces in a decade.

All that waste we can't figure out what to do with, that no one wants to store or transport? That's from making nuclear weapons. No one sane wants more of those.

Ok, let's just get one site approved, and all states that nuclear waste might travel through on board, simple, right? Why hasn't it been done then?

Regarding the volume of waste, would you feel comfortable sitting next to even a gram of raw nuclear waste? Even if the volume is small, it still needs to be handled with extreme care. If the handling of weapons waste is any indicator, that level of care has yet to be demonstrated.

Sure the waste is miniscule.

However I don't trust the corporations in running it. When profit motive rears its ugly head, bad semihidden shit happens.

I'd trust the military in running it. They do have operational nuclear knowledge.

That's why not-for-profit Chernobyl never happened? And the military, they do have their experience of hiding their failures. One mega-corporation. Totally not-for-profit.

You know that almost all the reactors in the world are corporate run, right?

What? According to whom? That's all just made-up FUD.

Because solutions to those issues never seem to come up in pro nuclear posts, only that the new reactors are safer and more efficient, while ignoring the issues of waste storage, expensive proprietary fuel and liability concerns.

> I love the idea of nuclear, but it just hasn’t worked out. Solar and wind already are cheaper than anything else out there, and they are still regularly falling in cost. We can invest our money better elsewhere.

You should not compare raw prices but what's required to use it for an actual load, those figures look pretty different.

Intermittent renewables are making less than 5% of our primary energy today. At scale, the intermittency problem becomes significant because you have to build all this storage. The energy required to build the storage reduces the total Energy Return on Investment below what is necessary to sustain industrialized civilization. Nuclear EROI is about 50:1, well into the safe range.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X1...

Some of the most important advances came from making previously expensive things cheaper. Your argument could have applied to the space industry, for example. Then SpaceX happened.

Rooftop solar is available, but you can't exactly get a 30 kW washing machine sized nuclear power plant to install in your basement, can you? It's mainly due to non-proliferation risks. Remove some of the regulatory hurdles, like requiring airplane impact proof reactor containments (after 9/11 of course) and we'll see a boomibg nuclear industry.

https://www.troutmansandersenergyreport.com/2009/02/nrc-requ...

It does not really matter whether nuclear requires government backing, it's the role of the state to back things that may not be viable otherwise. Actually, currently renewables receive massive amounts of subsidies.

Nuclear works.

The important points for our current problems is that it is low emission and that it can guarantee vast amounts of electricity 24/7.

In order to drastically reduce emissions while meeting demand, not least the upcoming demand from electric vehicles, there is simply no alternative.

This does not mean that renewables should not be pushed as much as possible as well.

Can't you replace "nuclear" with almost any of the staple renewable energy dujour and your comment remains valid?

Solar and wind have massive externalities specially when you factor in lifecycle of batteries.

70 years is not enough time to fully flush out the potential of nuclear power. We're already on the cusp of breakthroughs with Thorium (cleaner) and Fusion (more and cleaner) power that are derivatives of the science from nuclear.

There are several countries that rely heavily on nuclear today and have done so successfully and in a way that has helped curb their greenhouse gases: France being one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France)

Additionally, nuclear has unlocked insane potential in the military with nuclear subs and ships. They can go a whole year without refueling and at the micro level they are very effective. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion)

So to your first rhetorical question. What lesson have you learned from Nuclear the last 70 years? What I have learned is that it's an incredibly effective and green source of energy. It's a type of power that we should invest more money into not only for green energy production, but also for the future potential derivative technology. We can solve climate change tomorrow (in the sense that next 30 years is tomorrow) if everyone made a conscious effort to adopt nuclear in all forms of energy consumption.

No one in Nuclear is saying no wind/solar/batteries, everyone in Nuclear is saying we should do everything that doesn't catastrophically harm the environment and we should invest more into a very powerful and ultimately useful technology.

Imagine a world where energy is functionally free and robots have enough AI to do most basic motor tasks, they can grow and deliver crops start to finish, run stores and shops, build houses and provide the materials necessary to do that. We're not that far from that reality and pushing the human cost to have basic living standards met down to near zero. We're also looking into nuclear as a primary fuel source for space travel, traveling to mars right now takes 9 months, that's an incredibly amount of time round trip for a human, just look up humans that went to the space station for 12 months, you need to spend about 3x that time to go to mars, that's incredibly harmful, if we had nuclear, we might be able to dramatically shorten that. (https://www.space.com/nuclear-propulsion-future-spacecraft-n...)

I know you think Nuclear is scary because sometimes things go wrong, we have to figure out a better way to deal with the waste, but in this science based community lets try to be the first to promote more science first and not let the fear of what could happen stymied the progress we all need.

> Solar and wind already are cheaper than anything else out there, and they are still regularly falling in cost.

But they can't provide stable baseline power without storage. Storage is not yet cheap enough to be cost competitive with fossil fuel solutions hence why we are still running old coal plants and building new natural gas plants. This is why people are still talking about nuclear. It can provide baseline power but without crapping carbon into the atmosphere. Yes we will have less use for power that cannot be throttled in the future as more of the grid is wind/solar but newer reactor designs can be throttled.

Edit: Yes I know that natural gas is traditionally for peak load but that is changing. See my reply to bryanlarsen's comment.

Not quite.

The bigger problem with solar and wind isn't baseline but rather the fact that they are variable in nature. That makes it harder to have a baseline power plant.

The reason natural gas is taking off is that it can quickly respond to differences in production vs demand (it's a peaker plant, as in it handles peaks in demand). Solar and wind make those peaks more pronounced while lowering what baseline can do.

This is why coal plants are dying, they are slow to respond to demand and renewables decrease the baseline that can run at (well, that and fuel costs keep rising due to inflation).

Storage solves both problems. Baseline can be higher, storage will consume it, and peaks are less a problem, storage can handle those.

Alternatively, load based demand would make sense (at least to solve the baseline problem). We could, for example, eat excess energy doing CO2 extraction (though, that only makes sense if baseline doesn't produce more co2 than what we are consuming).

Coal plants are dying as gas became cheap due to all the fracking and shale gas in the usa. Germany is about to start a brand new coal plant in 2020 https://www.power-technology.com/projects/datteln-4-coal-fir... They need the coal plants to compensate lack of nuclear and alleviate the intermittent issue of the renewable.

That's because if the German government canceled the new coal plant, they would have to compensate the owners. The German government doesn't want to do that, so the plant is going forward. There's also political pressure from coal-mining regions in Germany to keep coal going.

This has less to do with electricity demand than with politics.

Also note that construction of the plant started in 2007 (ie years before Fukushima and the subsequent decommissioning of some nuclear plants). It was supposed to go online in 2011, but there were legal as well as technical problems that led to a significant delay.

Storage can solve any problem, but we don't have good enough solution yet. I agree energy storage research is the highest priority item.

We have a few promising ones IMO. Lithium will probably win out due to cost, but liquid metal storage is what I wish would win. It is more expensive, yet it also has basically infinite cycles (it doesn't wear out). That seems like an ideal characteristic for grid storage.

We're building new natural gas plants to provide peaking power, not to provide baseline power. Conventional nuclear plants can't provide peaking power, although there are designs that can.

>We're building new natural gas plants to provide peaking power

True, kinda, but that has more to do with there being no good reason to build a natgas plant that can't be throttled in response to demand. You can use anything for base load if you want but economically it makes more sense to use the cheapest stuff possible for base and more expensive stuff for daily fluctuations and peak. But coal is getting more expensive and gas is cheap so we see more and more base load taken up by gas. Instead of idling in off hours more and more gas plants are running at low capacity to provide a little bit of base power.

The whole base load/peak way of discussing things is slowly going out the window as more and more power comes from renewable since even base load is going to fluctuate around the grid based on the availability of sun/wind and something (currently gas, maybe storage in the future) has to absorb that load.

I really should have framed things in terms of stability rather than base load. With wind/solar you can't be sure you'll have wind/sun when everyone wants power some arbitrary date in the future which is where storage/gas come in. You have a base load but solar/wind can't be guaranteed to provide base power so gas/storage spins up. From a gas plant or battery point of view a dip in solar/wind capacity is no different than a demand peak on an otherwise coal grid.

But traditionally when people talk about 'baseload' gas they mean CCGTs and 'peaking' gas they mean OCGTs. It's not about ability to throttle but capital cost vs efficiency.

The good reason not to build an OCGT if you're going to use it for baseload generation is that it's quite a bit less efficient than a CCGT. And the good reason not to build a CCGT for peaking use is that you probably won't recover the additional capital cost (because efficiency for a CCGT won't exceed an OCGT for several hours after startup).

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