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>to suddenly abandon renewables now in 2019 when wind and solar is seeing staggering success and really impressive price drops while every nuclear reactor is profoundly delayed and over budget is simply odd.

No one's suggesting abandoning renewables, far from it. Renewable use will continue to increase. They're simply not enough, because of their nature as a variable power source.

>Nuclear power is NOT CHEAP!

The power itself is cheap. The amount of regulation around 40 year old reactor designs is high, so that's expensive. Implementation of a newer design would be much, much cheaper.

>Chernobyl cost tax payers 235 billion dollars to clean up. Fukushima cost tax payers 183 billion dollars to clean up.

Source? Neither of them are actually "cleaned up", you know. Also, both of these are very old reactor designs. You're complaining that a piece of 1950s technology which qualifies as an antique has problems 65-70 years later.

> But we have a multitude of storage solutions: thermal, pumped hydro, flow batteries, gas-to-power

..none of which are scalable enough to meet the demand. We'd have to have a dedicated energy storage system for each house, school, factory and store in the world. That's not only not possible due to physical space constraints, it's disastrous in terms of carbon load.

Our power systems work from a central source. There is no technology that can replace the multiple fossil fuel plants that run the grid except nuclear, period.

>It seems like these nuclear advocates have not even investigated all the storage solutions that exist before going crazy about nuclear power.

I can't speak for other people, but I have investigated and I continue to research. No storage solution exists that even comes close to meeting the demand for power when renewables aren't generating on the scale needed. The individual ideas are good, but they can't match decades of investment and expertise in generating electricity from giant central sources.

To take advantage of the distributed nature of renewables and corresponding energy storage, we'd have to completely rebuild the worldwide electrical grid AFTER we research and agree on standards for control and maintenance. That will take decades, and we don't have time. It'll happen eventually as renewables continue their growth, and maybe a century in the future we'll use all renewable sources with distributed power storage and a fully distributed, redundant power grid.

But if we want to survive climate change, we need nuclear, or else we need to force every person on earth to accept a lower standard of living that uses far less energy than we do now. The latter just won't happen, our species isn't that advanced.

The power itself is cheap. The amount of regulation around 40 year old reactor designs is high, so that's expensive. Implementation of a newer design would be much, much cheaper.

You have of course to factor in the total cost for the power produced. That is building the reactor, running and maintaining it, disposal of the radioactive waste and dismantling of the radioactive reactor itself.

The costs for reactors currently built are ballooning, some have even been given up half finished. The dismantling is usually not calculated in and can approach the cost of building it in the first place - in most countries the cost of disposing the radioactive waste can't even be calculated as there are few permanent storage solutions and we only assume they are permanent.

And of course, the costs in case of a major incident are completely not covered.

>The costs for reactors currently built are ballooning

Yes. Current reactor designs are a non-starter, especially considering the regulatory mess around them. Years of them being an easy target for new "safety" laws because politicians want to look good have left them too expensive to build. We need a simpler, newer design that works around that by needing less regulation.

Radioactive waste from power generation is simple to handle, especially when newer reactor designs can for the most part re-use fuel. It's the waste from nuclear weapons production that's the issue.

Yes. Current reactor designs are a non-starter, especially considering the regulatory mess around them. Years of them being an easy target for new "safety" laws because politicians want to look good have left them too expensive to build. We need a simpler, newer design that works around that by needing less regulation.

Which "new design" provides safe reactors that are cheaper to build?

Radioactive waste from power generation is simple to handle, especially when newer reactor designs can for the most part re-use fuel. It's the waste from nuclear weapons production that's the issue.

No, it is all nuclear waste that is a problem. There are no reactors which can re-use spent fuel. Fast breeders could theoretical do it, there is no one operational in the west.

>Which "new design" provides safe reactors that are cheaper to build?

A trivial Google search for "molten salt reactor cost" or "new reactor design cost" can find this. Here's an example:

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/05/seaborg-molten-salt-re...

By the way, this reactor can re-use spent fuel.

> The power itself is cheap.

You state that as if it's a fact.

> The amount of regulation around 40 year old reactor designs is high, so that's expensive. Implementation of a newer design would be much, much cheaper.

That regulation is the price paid for insurance by the government. It's the only control the public have with potentially disastrous plants.

Go to a private insurance company and try to get an insurance for your new plant design, if you succeed I'm sure a government somewhere will be willing to look at the regulation.

>You state that as if it's a fact.

Because it is. If you Google it, you can find plenty of sources that state exactly this. Even anti-nuclear activists generally agree that economically nuclear power is cheap per kilowatt hour simply because of the capacity of nuclear plants multiplied by their longevity. They just argue that the cheap power isn't worth it because of the "other down sides" surrounding nuclear.

>potentially disastrous plants.

False. No electrical generating nuclear plant in the US has had a "disaster" associated with it. The closest was three mile island, and that had no injuries or negative health effects other than psychological.

Only nuclear weapons manufacturing has had a significant environmental impact.

The regulation around nuclear reactors is insane, and much of it doesn't add in any way to their safety. That's what you get when big, scary reactors become an easy target for politicians who want to look like they're doing something for a change.

>> Chernobyl cost tax payers 235 billion dollars to clean up. Fukushima cost tax payers 183 billion dollars to clean up.

> Source? Neither of them are actually "cleaned up", you know. Also, both of these are very old reactor designs. You're complaining that a piece of 1950s technology which qualifies as an antique has problems 65-70 years later.

For Fukushima, the 200 billion figure came from opposition politicians who used the plant failure as part of their election platform. Japan has spent nowhere near that amount of money.

And the irony is that this decision to close nuclear plants likely killed more people than the plant failure itself: https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/11/07/was-shutting-japan...

You do not need dedicated energy storage scattered around. It is far more useful to build large storage systems in one place then connect them to the HV grid like a normal power station. Then the energy can be exported to millions of homes and store energy from across the grid. And you get better economies of scale and lower installation costs.

Distributed storage can make sense when it is colocated with a generator (like a wind farm) as it helps increase utilisation of the expensive grid connection.

>Solar and wind meanwhile is beating coal on price even without subsidies. Yeah sure... it doesn't always shine or blow wind. But we have a multitude of storage solutions: thermal, pumped hydro, flow batteries, gas-to-power and there are many good solutions for adjusting power usage on demand to fit lower production.

None of which scale well. I'm kind of baffled by this approach, I would assume that posters here would be hyper sensitive to the ability of technologies to scale and as such would immediately point out the issues here. Solar and Wind prices have dropped substantially, that is true. However just like coal hides and exports it's true costs (carbon emissions and general air population), variable production renewable energy hide their true costs to an energy grid. If renewables are so cheap then why is German and Californian electricity costs so damn high considering their respective investments into them? It's because they're paying more on other parts of their grids to keep everything stable. And those costs only increase as percentage of renewable increases. Choosing a solar plant over a equivalent nuclear because construction costs are 1/5th only to get hit with 10x costs on keeping your grid stable is not a wise decision.

>It seems like these nuclear advocates have not even investigated all the storage solutions that exist before going crazy about nuclear power. These solutions will only become more viable as we get a bigger renewable mix, because it will cause the spot price of power to drop really low, making it profitable for companies to buy and store power.

And had you really investigated all those different storage solution's you'd see that there aren't panaceas. Quite the opposite. And to suggest that they will become more viable as you get a bigger renewable mix is ludicrous. A bigger renewable mix means that your production is becoming much more variable. Which means you need more and more over capacity storage in order to smooth out greater lows and highs. Worse of all the best and highest efficiency storage solutions, Lithium Ion batteries, are consumables and would need regular replacement.

> If renewables are so cheap then why is German and Californian electricity costs so damn high considering their respective investments into them? It's because they're paying more on other parts of their grids to keep everything stable.

I'm not sure that necessarily follows. It seems just as likely, at least in California's case, that high energy prices are due to our stringent emissions standards. If fossil-based power plants are required to invest more in exhaust scrubbing technology or cleaner-burning fuels or more efficient processes to keep the air clean, that raises prices.

> None of which scale well.

There is a startup that has developed a battery that was designed from the start to scale as much as possible for grid level storage.

http://news.mit.edu/2016/battery-molten-metals-0112 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiRrvxjrJ1U

So far I've seen no reason to think that we won't be able to solve the energy storage challenges over the next 10-20 years.

To be clear, I'm talking about smoothing out the power over hours and maybe days. If it's suddenly windless for a couple of weeks for some reason, there's no battery that will cover that. But we could just keep gas power plants around. They're great for that, and running them a few times a year is not gonna make a big dent in emissions. If they're used that rarely, we might even be able to use renewable gas.

The other challenge is seasonal variations. But Northern Europe has ways to deal with that. Norway has massive amounts of hydro power, and is building new power lines to help nearby countries. Sweden has built a lot of trash burning facilities that also supply heat to nearby areas. I think I read these run mostly in winter. Not sure what the solution for northern North America is.

> I am utterly baffled by these old solar and wind advocates who suddenly NOW are becoming big advocates of nuclear power

Possibly relevant that this fellow just took a new job as President & Chief Executive Officer of the Canadian Nuclear Association.

Something I haven't seen mentioned in this discussion yet is that you can reduce the variability of renewable energy by distributing production over wide areas and building relatively efficient long-distance high-voltage DC connections to link up different regions.

The wind may not blow all the time in New York, but it's blowing somewhere in North America. You can average down fluctuations in wind power by building wind turbines on the East Coast, in the Midwest, in the West Coast, etc., and linking everything together.

That reduces the need for storage. You can even further reduce the need for storage by working on adjusting demand dynamically, based on the price of energy. Big office buildings can go for an hour without A/C without people noticing much.

Here's an article on wind capacity factor across the US region-by-region [0]. The significant conclusion is that winds nationwide are stronger in winter and weaker in summer. California and the Northwest buck this trend with strongest winds in spring, early summer.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=20112

That's interesting. You could imagine distributing wind farms in such a way as to try to minimize variance (while still trying to maximize overall output - there would be a trade-off).

It would be interesting as well to see what the overall variability of wind + solar + hydro generation would be for various distributions of wind + solar plants over North America.