This is nuts. I wonder what the effect of spending $1T on nuclear would be in comparison. I bet it's enough money to get to practical nuclear fusion in a decade, which would largely obviate the need in most other energy generation methods.
Look at the new windfarm called "Wikinger" that Germany built near the island of Ruegen: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore-Windpark_Wikinger
Cost: 1.4 billion Euros Lifetime: 20 years Power: 350 MW Max. capacity: 0.4 (40%) Price at the electricity stock exchange Leipzig: 36 Euro/MWh
Thus: 3500.42436520*36 = 883 million Euros
Result: 517 million Euros loss
In general energy also seems to be a low-risk business, where if the energy companies would ever loose money, they are either already covered by the government or can sue the government for losses due to changed regulations with a good chance of winning.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Source...
Is that really the lifetime of the farm, or is it just when turbines need to be replaced?
Because wind farms have 0 fuel costs, they will operate at any price above a few eurocents per MWH. Which means once a critical mass of wind farms is operating in an area, the price frequently dives all the way to near 0. Sucks if you operate wind farms. Sucks less if you ALSO operate natural gas generators which you can then idle. And sucks a lot less if you're a consumer with dispatch able loads.
Wind and solar don't even compete in the same category as nuclear until you include storage. Cheap, bursty energy is useless for base-load.
Wind/solar are still far more expensive than fossil and nuclear when you take into account the over-provisioning and energy storage requirements to provide reliable base-load.
The grid survives fine when nuclear and coal plants go offline for several days for maintenance/turn-arounds!
Do you have a source for that? Cost comparisons I've seen between nuclear and renewable energy doesn't reach that conclusion. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21479651
How does that work?
Full research http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2019/7299-system-costs.pdf
Short https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/05...
Nuclear safer, cheaper (in short and long term) and produce less carbon emission
He is so pro nuclear and anti renewables that he simply makes stuff up in order to show $50 is less than $5. Oh look, he's branded the graphs with his lobbying outfit logo. Why is he not comparing with other countries that are getting it right? Ah because the conclusion was determined before he wrote a single word.
He was drastically wrong on the Amazon recently too: https://news.mongabay.com/2019/08/michael-shellenbergers-slo...
Also that don't rely on hydropower. That's something limited by geography.
Also, the paper was from the OECD NEA, nothing to do with Shellenberger.
The "obvious" choices would seem to be Sweden, Iceland, Morocco, Denmark and UK. Perhaps China, or even Costa Rica who seem to have the world's most ambitious target - carbon free by 2021. I'm sure there's others progressing quickly.
But you should provide some papers which support your position
If we want civil discussion
Compare that with a competitive industry that's manufacturing in bulk and improving every year. Where do the lines cross?
Let's assume that a single fission plant costs $5B (if you're building hundreds of them, you can take advantage of some economies of scale). For $1T, you can build 200 of them. New fission plants have something like 2 GW capacity on average. 2 GW times 200 is 400 GW.
Now, US uses 13 quads of BTU worth of electricity annually.[1]. 13 quads a year is 434 GW of power on average. So, we could basically cover our energy needs with $1T worth of nuclear plants, if you average things out and ignore peaking needs. Most certainly, however, if you add $1T worth of nuclear to our current system, as opposed to adding $1T worth of wind energy, we'll pretty much be able to go off fossil fuels in electricity generation altogether, with already existing water and renewable generation. The resulting system will be much better for environment (less land used for nuclear plants than for equivalent $1T worth of wind turbines), safer (wind turbines are more dangerous per kWh produced than nuclear, people die installing those every year), and more stable (the supply will be extremely steady, and will not depend on weather fluctuations).
Where is the waste being stored and how safe is that location against the drastic climate change which is now beginning to occur?
Where is it "beginning to occur"? And if you do really believe this, wouldn't you want to shut down the second largest emitter of carbon worldwide as soon as possible by the most efficient means available to us?
Basically it explains that wind has a typical average utilisation of about 20% vs 70% for full nuclear. A turbine lasts about 20-30y vs 60 for a nuclear reactor. In addition, wind is producing the electricity at the edge of the network, and you loose the diversification effect of having a network (the example he gave is that in France the total potential consumption of all usage of electricity is 4-5x the total installed supply, because not all machines are switched on at the same time, but if you produce your electricity locally you must size it to the potential local need). In addition you have to stock more between seasons for wind than nuclear. So even though the cost per kW built of wind is roughly half or a third of nuclear, the overall cost is 10-20x higher than nuclear.
[1] (in french) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4teA8ciuRU
Half that.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/19368
[1] https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/...
It looks more like several billion, not several trillion.
People fall in love with the idea of nuclear power. They get offended that it may not be the savior after all.