Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Yes, a mix of technologies. But there's more to it than that. We're going to need increasing amounts of power in the future to explore the solar system and to solve all kinds of existential problems. Energy usage is not inherently evil provided we learn how to do it safely, which is an ongoing process.
Expensive, probably. Dangerous? Not according to the data. Lowest deaths per terawatt-hour of any energy source including solar. Yes, even if you count Chernobyl, Fukushima (where 6 folks died) and Three Mile Island (nobody died) [1]
[1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...
I think the flat amount of direct and indirect death, as well as considering the amount of people who's quality of life has diminished, but not enough to kill them.
Other energy industries have these problems too, so I have no idea how they actually compare.
“At least I am not a mass murderer.”
How do you measure that? Why do you think is higher for nuclear than for other technologies?
Finding climbers for static towers is already hard enough. Death rates of cell tower climbers are 10x that of normal construction workers (cell tower climbers have the highest death of all construction jobs). Of all those deaths investigated by OSHA, almost 40% involved no rules violations -- speaking of that, only 3 of those found in violation were fined more than about $25,000 with most being fined less than 10k and some only being fined a few hundred dollars).
Unlike static cell towers towers, you have lots of moving parts you can't really stop and high-voltage power sources you can't completely shut down. There's additional risks of fires and even disintegrations.
Unlike cell towers, I can't find any overall statistics. The closest I can find is [this organization](http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/AccidentStatistics.htm). It's crazy to realize that at least one windmill suffers structural failure every month. Two catch fire and (since there's currently no way to put out a fire hundreds of feet in the air) burns down. Two more will suffer blade failures whipping sections of blade out at up to 325km/hr (200mph). There will even be someone who is injured due to ice being flung by the blades and hitting someone over 150 meters away. This is all before counting the couple people killed every month. And to top it all off, they don't even have complete statistics.
Underwriters Lab (the official unofficial US government lab) in 2015 claimed a 0.54% blade failure rate worldwide, but with almost 500K units, that's still thousands of units every year (I'd note that they don't actually have reliable data on the 42% of all wind turbines that happen to be located in China). [source](https://www.enr.com/articles/42352-are-four-wind-turbine-fai...)
To quote another [article](https://www.power-technology.com/features/golden-hour-parame...)
> There were 737 reported incidents on UK offshore windfarms in 2016; blades falling off, turbines tipping over, falls from height, vessels sinking in ice-cold water, groundings, onboard fires, helicopter crashes make up just some of the reports. The most common accounts were of hand injuries, while fingers cut off, arms crushed, broken bones, fractures, lifting injuries and teeth knocked out also occur. Non-accidental medical emergencies include strokes, heart and asthma attacks, and anaphylactic shock.
> Of all the incidents at UK offshore windfarms, the majority happened on operational sites: only two were recorded during windfarm development in 2016. Around 44% of offshore medical emergencies occurred in the turbine region, while just over one quarter were on vessels. The number of fall-related injuries was 110 or 15%, of which 95 (13%) were during heavy lifting operations.
Then there's the issue that wind turbines seem to have a realistic lifespan of only 12-15 years instead of the 20-25 years claimed and lose half of their total power output over that 15 years. [source](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/windpower/9770...).
Solar panels have a relatively low direct body count, but mining then melting down entire mountains for their rare earth elements has a severe environmental impact (not to mention the environmental toxins and toxic waste produced during the actual manufacturing process).
In the entire existence of US nuclear power, there have only been around 60 incidents which resulted in death or damages over $50,000 (and only 13 deaths overall) and unlike wind power, every little thing about nuclear plants is logged thoroughly. Even the "waste" is safer to store on average than the caustic waste from manufacturing and will be refined and reused once cheap mining sources dry up.
Rather than scaring everyone with nuclear FUD, we need to embrace it as the most promising and safest green energy technology we have.
EDIT: I'd also give a shoutout to concentrated solar which could be a great green daytime alternative with some caveats (variable power output, still needs nuclear power at night, much more geographically limited, etc).
Sure it's an anecdote, but the point is China has very loose safety standards and cuts a lot of corners. She's much more okay with losing a few people here and there.
Uh, [citation needed].
> ... they had to hire racialized folks from the city to go in and make repairs...
Racialized... folks?
> He also stole reactor sealer to seal our basement from spring leaks and our basement leaked.
That might be because, and I'm speculating here, your basement isn't a reactor. I've heard that a sealant for a specific kind of material may not work on literally any other kind of material.
> Canada has very loose safety standards and cuts lots of corners.
That's just pretty objectively false.
> That's just pretty objectively false.
Don't they still mine asbestos in Canada?
[1] https://business.financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/canada-b...
There is one plant being built at Flammanville. It is 11 years over schedule and 400% over budget, and still not certain that those will be the final numbers.
The Flamanville 3 EPR nuclear reactor is a mess (and I've seen it first hand, working on one of its subsystem a few years ago). The regulations bodies, aka the ASN (Agence de Surete Nucleaire) played its role, and uncovered various issues, most worrying, defects in the reactor vessel itself (and also there was some attempt by the manufacturer to hide these defects). And it's only one of a long chain, the were others like concrete being poured without/insufficient rebar or improper composition, various welding issues on pipes or machinery. And each time, it was not some minor mishaps requiring a quick fix but a major mistake requiring undoing what was done, redoing it properly and causing months of delays.
Basically, this is an Engineering and Project Management failure. On this kind of giant projects, logistic, coordination and management is key, the design is also key (system of systems, interfaces between systems etc) and it failed spectacularly here.
From the political side, despite some calls to just stop the construction from minor parties, the commitment from the politicians to see it built has remained strong all along. And there was also a deep commitment from the French state to the Nuclear industry, with the government bailing out Areva just a few years ago.
The Finish one is not better off, with the same kind of delays. The Chinese ones are in production (after significant delays) but 1) They learn from the mistakes of the first twos 2) They have probably better experience in large projects given the past construction boom in China 3) Some issues were probably put under the carpet as the Chinese government is not exactly renowned for its openness.
Which is extra significant if it's also the cheapest.
I'm somewhat weary of people talking of civilization progress as if its definition is obvious and universal.
And even before fire, organisms could only become more complex as the energy available to them increased. You can't run a hummingbird or mammalian brains on photosynthesis directly, it's just not energy-dense enough.
This thread is becoming recursive. Is organism complexity progress? Everyone might agree with you, or not. That's because progress is whatever we say it is. It's subjective, in that everyone can have a different view of it, and it's non-constant, in that you can change your mind whenever. Progress is such a loaded word today. I'm hardpressed to find more than a few words with so much cultural baggage. Even someone who agrees that good and evil are in the eyes of the observer, can often say that the definition of Progress is self-evident.
Things like reliable and easy access to clean water, refrigeration for medicine and food, shelter against the weather, clothing, cleaning mechanisms for the above, all of these are non-equilibrium phenomena and so take energy.
So we either need more sources of power or fewer people. I'm glad that birth rates are falling, but lots of people don't have those basic technological tools, so energy technology will need to be rolled out or our definition of empathy will need to change to allow for lots of people to suffer.
AFAIK, more than enough food and clothing for all people is currently produced, shelter and cleaning probably isn't far, refrigeration for medicine and required food wouldn't take much of industrial output and problems with access to clean water is often caused by "progress" and could be solved with more strategy rather than energy.
Either way, I think most of current energy consumption is for things like heating / cooling inefficient homes, manufacturing things people don't really need, inefficient transportation, brain-dead things like making oil from tar sands etc.
Heck, look at how the complexity of life increased as soon as mitochondria were invented, going from genomes measured in millions of base pairs for bacteria to billions for amoebas once cells were no longer caught in the square/cube trap of respirating over the cell wall.
Hell, even here a lot of people believe that technological progress is a linear path towards the future, even when there's evidence contrary to that assumption. Without even reaching for evidence from other fields, it's trivial to find examples of entire theories that have been forgotten and rediscovered. Think of Low-Density Parity-check codes, that were developed in the 1960s and essentially forgotten for 20 or so years. A lot of technology has been found and then lost.
This is a popular supposition, but is mostly a misunderstanding of Hegel, promulgated by Left Hegelians like Marx. Hegel’s argument was that thought moves toward a greater state of contradiction, not progress, but that this evolved sustainment of the contradiction represents a more rational form.
Todd McGowan at the University of Vermont wrote a whole book on this subject:
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/emancipation-after-hegel/97802...
On the other hand, it's hard to see how civilization could continue to function without the prospect of "growing the pie". If/when we reach a steady state of finite resources, it seems highly likely that the best strategy (individually and tribally) is acquire resources at the expense of one's neighbors (before they acquire your resources first). This has been the default state of nature for nearly all biological history, with occasional exceptions of growth and plenty.
I don't have an answer here, long-term; and where the rubber meets the road, I do think our corporate model of "your business is failing if it's not growing" results in more negative than positive externalities (at least, beyond a certain equilibrium), and should be eyed critically. But the growth model is as much about social mindset as it is real-world wealth generation; and luckily we have lots more progress we can make (both on and off Terra Firma) before we're at risk of fully diminished returns on the growth of sentient well-being. The question is one of intelligent growth (cue Bucky Fuller [0]), rather than a locust-like runaway replicator pattern, which is clearly net-negative even if it looks like growth when zoomed in.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_Manual_for_Spaceship...
Advancing as a species can merely making sure that everyone got a safe environment, freedoms, access to education and health, etc.
There are still billions of people who barely have the quality of life that most of Hacker News reader does.
The big problems are 1) gigatons of soot coming over the north poles, permanently lowering the albedo of the planet and 2) pumping water into the dry upper atmosphere via jet exhaust, creating permanent cloud layers where they didn’t exist.
Solve those two issues, and we’d have a much more interesting debate...
Short term cloud layer albedo effects are even smaller.
If we switched all our greenhouse gas emissions to nuclear, I agree there’s huge room for localized waste heat. But reducing albedo effects isn’t going to help if we keep emitting greenhouse gases.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAJeYe-abUA&feature=youtu.be...
It's hard to say without knowing your definition of long run so would you care to explain why you believe that less energy is required in your long run?
I see it as exactly the opposite, in the short/medium term we will use more energy but it will eventually go into reverse.
Maybe Jevons Paradox will intervene and you are correct, I don't know
For the record, my long run is 150+ years, if only to make sure that we are all dead.
We produce way more energy than we use. We currently do not have an easy way to store it. So why generate more than we need? Well, we need to have power available to prevent brown outs, especially right after work when everyone gets home and flips their light switch (so to speak). Second; it is actually more efficient to keep the generators fully spun up.
That's not how it works. If you generate more than you need, you will have the opposite of a brown out (overvoltage and/or overfrequency). Generation and consumption of power have to always be precisely matched.
> especially right after work when everyone gets home and flips their light switch (so to speak).
When everyone gets home and flips their light switch, the extra demand slightly reduces the system voltage and frequency; feedback loops on the power plants then increase their generation to match the extra demand.
> Second; it is actually more efficient to keep the generators fully spun up.
Keeping the generators running at their maximum means you have no margin for extra demand or sudden loss of generation (for instance, another power plant or a transmission line having an issue and shutting down). It's better to keep the generators running below the maximum to have a reserve for when these things happen.
Science fiction is fun and all, but even an ecologically ruined Earth is going to be a much more welcoming environment to live in than anything else the solar system has to offer. Meaningful exploration of the solar system will be restricted to unmanned probes and complex missions that require 100 Earthbound support staff for each human we send into space.
Continuing to live on Earth will require a big reduction in the amount of energy we use per capita. We're already above what the Earth can realistically handle, and the global population is still growing.
Can you explain in which way solar is not a "near-infinite source of energy"? I mean... there are without doubt technical challenges and all that (but arguably less technical challenges than to do the same with nuclear), but there really is no relevant limit to the deployment of solar cells if you include things like large-scale installations in the desert.
Additionally, The storage density of molten salt is far lower than the generation capacity of a reactor.
This would be a game changer for the major continents like Europe, US, Africa where you could have power coming from hydro, thermal, solar, wind etc and being shipped to where it is needed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Lo...
Considering how costly and inflexible all superconductors are, I don't see why they would help.
But for you: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
On top of that there are political challenges. I have a hard time imagine Europe in current climate being happy to rely exclusively on power from the Sahara.
I guess in the future we'll use imported solar for hard to solve problems, e.g. turn it into hydrogen or synthetic fuels (which also makes the transmission loss problem much smaller), while our electricity needs will be served mostly by local wind and solar.
No, running solar on rooftops isn't the most practical use either. Depending on latitude, weather, cost of solar installation and battery installation, orientation and layout of roof to the sun, the problems with snow, rain, and hail, the lack of solar at night, the fact that none of this generates enough power for those times when you need it most like in the middle of winter in northern climates, etc. Solar and wind will never meet the growing needs of modern economy. Period. It's a pipe dream.
They are great supplemental sources of electricity. They cannot power a first world economy.
Solar and wind absolutely can produce all the energy the world currently needs, using only a tiny fraction of available land area. You could power the whole of the US by 100 square miles of solar panels in the southwest, backed with one square mile of batteries [1]. Clearly it's a hard problem and there are many obstacles to overcome, but just as clearly it's not fundamentally unsolvable.
Long-distance electrical transmission is actually pretty efficient nowadays, so that's not a showstopper either.
Bottom line, optimists are responsible for progress and while many people on HN are content to write comments about how it can't be done, somewhere there's an entrepreneur working hard to make it happen - and the smart money is on them, collectively, over the long-term - and thank goodness for that!
[1] http://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-and-science/technology/we...
Also, at a guess the energy in solar panels drop with the square of distance to the sun. It is unlikely to be a good choice for interstellar travel if 'advance[ing] as a species' heads in the more fantastic directions.
A fundamental limitation of thermal steam engines is that they can only ever be 50% efficient, and you have to dump that waste heat in order to maintain power.
Already, heat mitigation systems for some existing nuclear plants are starting to fail during heat waves as the climate warms. And these are expensive systems: at Diablo Canyon in California, it's cheaper to replace an entire, functioning reactor with renewables than it is to simply build a new cooling system.
Which is all to say that nuclear won't scale tremendously well unless we 1) figure out fusion, and 2) figure out direct conversion of energy to electricity rather than using steam turbines to mechanically drive a generator.
For the ultimate goal that many people have for nuclear, as a power source when not on earth, these sorts of advancements are also likely also necessary. Cooling in space is not a trivial matter.
The solution is to keep using existing nuclear power and develop renewables for replacement. Nuclear fission plants take at the very least 10 years (!!) to go online from the day construction begins. And that leaves out years of planning and dealing with contracts.
It's too expensive, dangerous and redundant in the face of emerging renewable tech which is becoming cheaper and more efficient by the month.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/fission-and-fusion-what-d...
Batteries, usually reverse hydro power, is an interesting future technology. Some argue it is significant more developed than fusion. The bigger question is if its economically competitive compared to fission. There is costs and energy loss in every single step of producing electricity from renewables, transmitting it to the battery, converting it into potential, recreate the electricity, and finnally transmitting it to the end users. With fission you go directly from the power plant to the end user. Reverse hydro power plants also take a long time to build and either use a lot of land or coast. If you build it on land it also release a lot of methane as top layer of the land decompose.
Yes, but that's what the small modular reactors being proposed by Rolls-Royce, and others, intend to solve. If successful, they would greatly reduce the construction time, risk, and cost of nuclear projects.
To nitpick a bit, he didn't say the sun was powered by fusion, he said fissionable elements are present in the sun. Which is entirely true.
Why are you comparing the state of nuclear energy today with the potential scientific breakthroughs of renewable energy in the future?
If you compare nuclear of today with renewables of today, then the winner is clear. If you compare the two accounting for potential scientific breakthroughs..who knows?
You need to keep a lot of hydrogen at plasma-hot temperatures and very high pressures for a long time. So you can't really do it with masses smaller than Jupiter, because smaller bodies can radiate the energy away faster, and produce fewer events from the lesser mass.
So the only technologically effective way to leverage solar is to deconstruct larger stars into red dwarfs between 0.08 and 0.35 solar mass, perhaps with a ferro-platosmiridium core to increase the overall density and make the reactions viable at lower overall mass. Then surround the whole thing with a Dyson shell and Shkadov/Caplan thruster.
It's a bit beyond our means right now.
For my perspective, we should ban the worst waste first and then iterate. If we can build an energy grid without burning fossil fuels we should do so, preferable yesterday. If we can then build one that also is without nuclear waste then lets do that too, but my first priority is going to be to get rid of the fossil fuels.
What I do not want is replacing nuclear waste with fossil fuel waste. While we have an unsolved problem with nuclear waste, it is dwarfed by what can be done once run away climate change happens. A world where 100% of energy comes from nuclear is preferable over one where 100%, 80%, 50%, maybe even as low as 20% comes from fossil fuels.
To believe that is a problem is to not have grappled with just how big the world is and how much of it is uninhabitable to humans already. The human population is concentrated in an absurdly small footprint in major cities and fertile belts compared to the size of the planet. The area the waste would sterilise would be a non-issue.
I dunno. What do you want to be solved? If we call it poisonous instead of radioactive would you be happy? There are literally poisonous lakes out there and nobody cares much. One more doesn't matter. The only interesting thing about nuclear waste is we use a different word to describe the same outcomes. The outcomes don't seem that dangerous in the big picture.
I'm not sure what kind of "modern nuclear technology" you're referring to. Are you saying that our legacy power plants are bad, and should be replaced? At what cost?
> It wouldn't be an issue except locally where it was stored.
So, a single nuclear power plant for the world?
Transporting nuclear waste is also a problem. Even in the US, where it doesn't need to cross oceans (ignoring Hawaii, Puerto Rico and maybe some other territories).
I'm also uncertain if we'll be likely to encourage modern nuclear reactors in Iran, North Korea and in various failed states. They may be safe wrt weapons grade nuclear weapons initially - but could the be modified? (honest question, I'm not sure how easy it would be to enrich material for a traditional bomb, or indeed a "dirty bomb". But small amount of high grade waste kind of sounds like it's usable for a dirty bomb?).
Right now, small enough amounts of waste are produced that reactors generating power actually store the stuff on site.
>but could the be modified?
Modern reactor types are specifically designed not to be proliferation risks. The only reason the older reactor types are risks is because the governments who originally built them wanted to produce weapons, so they chose the technology that allowed them to do so.
Waste could be used for a "dirty bomb" in some sense, but it wouldn't be terribly effective. "High level" is relative, and the isotopes that would make a dirty bomb truly scary aren't available except in fuel rods shortly after their removal from a reactor... at which point no one does anything to extract those isotopes anyway, they just stick the fuel in cooling ponds to decay down to lower levels of radiation.
I appreciate that you have a conviction that this is a problem, but you're coming across a bit hand-wavy in your arguments. I'd prefer to see concrete solutions (and I don't mean nuclear waste encased in concrete) than rhetoric as a means to address my concerns.
It is an order-of-magnitude argument; a bit like arguing whether $1 billion or $1 million is more dollars. The difference between the two figures is almost exactly a billion dollars because there really is no comparison between orders of magnitude. Uranium is something like 6 orders of magnitude more energy dense than fossil fuels (so more of a trillion to a million) - the waste is a lot worse too, but it is nowhere near 6 orders of magnitude more dangerous, because that would suggest it is killing more people than the population of the earth already. Which it is not ^.
You can say you want something solved, but the problem you want solved is several orders of magnitude smaller than the problems everyone currently shrugs off as totally normal. The orders of magnitude are so different they do not need to be solved and can be handwaved. The nuclear waste problem is incomparably small compared to the fossil fuel problem which has proven to be tolerable despite 20+ years of resistance by Green groups.
It is also probably going to turn out to be smaller than the waste problem fabricating renewable will have by the same order of magnitude issue.
^ The evidence suggests it is actually not that much worse because it is so easy to isolate. It is practically achievable for nuclear waste to do less actual harm unit-to-unit than coal.
For examples, the half-life of output products from uranium-fueled SVBR-100 is ~550 years, and that can be reduced further by several technologies that are now available.
Most substances are toxic forever. If you bury mercury or lead in a hole a dig it up in a few million years it will be just as toxic. Radioactive substances are an anomaly in that they become less toxic over time.
It's turned into glass as far as I know (which isn't much). It's not like some ooze to leak out.
When we measure such things in terms of "increased cancer risk" and "possible thyroid dysfunction", it is far easier to discount, particularly as young people are not tremendously concerned when people above a certain age die of diseases that are already typical in the aged.
So even if we knew it exactly, people would still care less. It might be more relevant if, instead of death toll, it could be given a money value derived from additional healthcare expenses for exposed individuals, because young people implicitly know that they are the ones who pay when old people get sick.
If you look at a long enough time scale, anything can seem like a giant problem.
Then you have a faulty memory, and a selective one at that because the crisis is still on-going; there were an estimated 2000 from evacuation alone:
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2014/03/01/editorials/f...
You think this is safe or healthy? 100k+ displaced people living in abject squalor in the 3rd richest nation on Earth? Often seen as less-thans by their fellow citizens due to the Meltdown:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpxtMBOiD6A
What's even more conflicting is that this year's Olympics are scheduled to take place in Tokyo, all the while the food is contaminated, as is the water (and the air if they're still doing regular debris burns that spreads it around the World).
The cancer rates, thyroid maladies and heart disease are all correlated to the radiation exposure, but they don't have an interest in monitoring this accurately and reporting it to the Public due to typical Japanese 'cultural norms.' So, in it a very defying sense of abnormal behaviour, Japanese house wives have taken to measure their neighborhoods, as well as the food and the vacuumed debris.
This is quite honestly a bigger part of why Humanity has to solve its energy crisis, Greta makes a good case for what their generation is left to live with, but being in between the two generations as a millennial and having been around for both Chernobyl and Fukushima, its hardly comprehensive of the true costs. That last video even delves into the Children of Chernobyl, they are reporting large frequencies of cancer and various immunological diseases. This is more the norm that I ever thought in surrounding areas, when I lived in Croatia it was also the same. When I lived in Germany their were patches of Earth that looked scorched that had been hit particularly hard due to the Fallout of Chernobyl. Many farming families in that area went Bankrupt due to it.
I honestly think people like you should only be able to have this opinion if you live near Nuclear Plants, for a decade at a minimum. You'll see first hand how perilous it could be, the infrastructure around coastal areas is another bottle neck that most don't consider an issue for things like evacuation until its too late; they often only have 1 way in-1 way out layouts.
Nuclear regulation is a joke, and is as entrenched and as corrupt as Big Oil. The legal system, in both Japan and the US, is equally as complicit as the Nuclear lobby and refuse to take preventive action, as was the case with why Fukushima was left exposed on the coastal area after TEPCO was warned, repeatedly by several studies, that is was prone Meltdown should something like that Tsunami happen. The Nuclear village/TEPCO/Japanese Government did nothing:
https://news.usc.edu/86362/fukushima-disaster-was-preventabl...
> I honestly think people like you should only be able to have this opinion if you live near Nuclear Plants, for a decade at a minimum.
For what it's worth, I've lived near nuclear power plants for over 30 years, and have no problem living near them until I die-- which will almost certainly not be from radiation unless we have a nuclear war. I had more radiation exposure from the coal fired power plant in my childhood town than from any of the nuclear plants I've been around.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
There are several answers to the question "what we can do with it", such as 1) reprocess it and use it again; 2) keep it in the power plant pools or similar storage facilities; 3) dump it to some deserted place where it isn't a big problem (high depth, stable earth crust). In the past, UK just dumped nuclear waste in barrels into the sea, which seems kind of convenient and irresponsible, but if done right (better isolation from sea creatures), this could work too.
It is true that there is no single universally agreed upon answer. But that is the same as with all other waste. Most of waste gets either burned or dumped at some place. The same will happen to nuclear "waste", until people start reprocessing it.
I'm familiar with your (1) (2) (3) items, but again, from what I've read these aren't fully satisfactory. (1) is probably ideal but hasn't really been cracked, (2) and (3) are just different facets of containment, but (3) is admittedly the most plausible right now.
We can tolerate a limited amount of this for sure, while we work on other solutions, but unless this question gets resolved it will hamper the widepsread adoption of nuclear.
The UK approach is interesting because yes, they just dumped it in the Irish sea. There's a deep underwater ravine between Scotland and Northern Ireland where it's all dumped, along with various other bits of old military hardware and other bits that are inconvenient.
Think about that the next time you here Bojo talking about building a bridge to Northern Ireland.
This is not liked by certain governments, even if theoretically NPT gives a framework to do it safely, and large scale commercial reprocessing essentially died after India used Canada-built CANDU reactors to kickstart their nuclear weapons program.
Nuclear waste has to be shipped to the facility. All the shipping routes from all the nearest waste-producing reactors converge there. That's naturally a concern to all those who live nearby.
Multiply by 8*10^9 people (a little more than the current world population) and you get 320,000 metric tons which is about 3/5th the capacity of the largest oil tankers.
Finding a place for that much waste per year is a political problem, not a technical problem. There's plenty of geologically "safe enough to outlast the radioactivity" places we could dig a deep hole (thanks to the fossil fuel industry that is a solved problem) to dump that much waste into.
[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/assets/waste_per_person.pdf (no idea on source bias here, I didn't read the whole thing)
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
If energy prices rise then it will become worthwhile to extract, if they fall then it will be less so. Of course if the number of consumers rises this will also improve the viability of mining. According to this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_Australia, it is currently uneconomic to proceed with several mining projects.
Regardless of economic considerations fissile material is a finite resource although it could be that we will never reach the limit.
In practical terms, however, switching nuclear reactors to use the Thorium fuel cycle would allow us to use a supply of fuel that would probably outlast human civilization.
Fission however (a) is politically unpopular and (b) has a waste problem that no country wants to own.
If we asked Environmental Energy SCIENTISTS, they overwhelmingly support nuclear power.
Theoretically I find nuclear fission impressive and amazing.
Practically I see no desirable outcome without bad effects especially when coordinated by the private sector with their habit of saving money and squeezing out more profits every year.
Bingo. I have no issues with nuclear power. I have an issue with the human component. Safety regulations have been continuously changed and been made more relaxed to keep up with the crumbling nuclear plants that are way past their design life and coming up on another extension.
Have a crack in the concrete? Increase the allowable crack tolerance. Have leaking radioactive water? Change the way the test is performed so it allows you to still pass.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/climate/nrc-nuclear-inspe...
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/07/17/insanely-bad-mo...
The nuclear reactor comes pre-installed.
...very few existential problems have anything to do with technology.
Yet the microscope proved to be the biggest advance in medicine. Nobody could have predicted that being able to look at really small things would have an impact on how we understand disease.
Likewise nobody could have predict the profound impact satellites have had on our economy and on science.
Space exploration brings technological progress. If you are concerned about waste of money then first start to worry about industries we spend far more money on 1) Gambling 2) Cosmetics 3) Weapons, bombs etc 4) Disposable fashion
Not to mention most of the worlds problems are of political nature. They are not problems a scientists can solve. Insisting that a physicist should apply his skills to create say world peace is a waste of skills and effort.
Inter-system travel will never happen. Forums like this tend to have a healthy population of the sci-fi minded, so it won't be a popular opinion here, but the laws of physics simply rule it out. And the "men once thought they couldn't fly" argument doesn't carry water with me. We know a lot more about what we don't know now than we did then
Which aren't far off.
We don't need to break the laws of physics, or have cryonics or singularity shit work out to eventually consume the universe. All the nodes will just be real isolated.
Programmers and CEOs.
Spending for space exploration is currently at a laughably low level, if countless people didn't manage to solve all our problems in the course of decades then adding a few billions of dollars won't do anything except make a few people even richer.
Without space exploration we may not have had CMOS image sensors, in addition to a whole bunch of other things:
That tech is known, well designed, approved and extensively proven through many thousand years manwork experience worldwide. It’s also the most affordable in liberalized markets. Going smaller & modular is the real novelty in the industry, for grid-agnostic coupling and decoupling. FYI: I have been consulting and designing innovative or exotic NPPs for years and I am now pretty confident I will not live long enough to see any one of them built and working, maybe not even at the demonstrator stage... but this side of the story might come good for another post ehehe.
Refueling is easier to do in MSRs and nigh takes away an embarrassing long downtime while the solid fuel is loaded. Why is that not a first concern (less downtime means more energy from roughly same capital expenditure)?
Safety is critical. It also costs a lot. With MSRs you need less land and can place the plant closer to the point of use (frozen plug to drain tank makes it so that any runaway is contained without intervention). It's even been suggested that for high-thermal uses like steel plants you could get better efficiency by using a thermal plant instead of making electricity for at least a twofold gain in power use. Is there anything inherently wrong with that idea?
Is the dialysis design as solid as it looks like on paper? Are there operational problems with it that the advocates are not talking about?
I have so many questions.....
The fundamental point is (in my very humble opinion, mind) you may still have a business case for nuclear in 2020 but no feasible return on investment against non-nuclear sources for decades-long experiments that, all in all, are aimed at marginal improvements in the grand scheme of things and the enormous hassle proponents have to face.
It is fusion or nothing, apart of a couple of Gen IV that are advanced enough already, for the next 20-30 years or such in the West (China or Russia might be more ambitious, but they are not liberal or neoliberal democracies, so they can play a different game to some extent)... until all the PWRs still operating worldwide must be put down for obsolescence.
For a layman computer science comparison, think of the still up-and-running fortran legacy in some sectors (banks?) you won’t really really want to drop if not really forced to... because it works, you need no fix, you do not expect any unheard catastrophic incident or accident anymore.
It sounds a little apocalyptic putting all of ones hopes on a technology that may or may not work at all. We have no guarantee that fusion will provide a return. It's the tech of choice because of wishful thinking. Gen 4 and liquid fuels are proven to work and eliminate a big slew of the disadvantages that made people fearful of NPPs. IMO if a part of the solution to CO2 is DAC then we will need massive energy generation to run the capture plants and we need them soon. No tech can deliver that in the next 10 years safely except Thorium.
There's nothing wrong with old tech in computer science. You can containerize Fortran batch programs with ease. All old things come back once in a while. Functional programming is now the rave and Common LiSP actually sees use.
You got it. May I second that as a nuclear eng for nuclear? Small & Modular is your container... and the novel, distributed grid at transnational level is your framework!?
Proven to work on lab scale, or an industrial scale? Because one thing is very different from the other
https://www.forbes.com/sites/energysource/2012/02/16/the-thi...
[1] https://art.inl.gov/ART%20Document%20Library/High%20Temperat...
There are a bunch of places I've found where the difficulty (and therefore cost) of working with titanium is really holding humanity back. If we could find cheaper techniques for working with titanium it would revolutionize a lot of industries, as it's plentiful, light, strong, non-reactive, and melts at high temperatures. But the same attributes that make it hold up under the stresses of use, make it very hard to shape.
Any material that can resist the corrosion will be bombarded by neutrons until it is transmuted into another material that can't, even with "slow" neutrons.
The Wikipedia article[1] says, "A 2011 MIT study concluded that although there is little in the way of barriers to a thorium fuel cycle, with current or near term light-water reactor designs there is also little incentive for any significant market penetration to occur. As such they conclude there is little chance of thorium cycles replacing conventional uranium cycles in the current nuclear power market, despite the potential benefits." What did they know at MIT in 2011 that we don't? Or were they just wrong?
If really no material will work for this, I can only imagine some sort of mag-lev design that keeps the molten salt out of contact with other materials, but that seems kind of far-fetched.
If you were to build that, how would you transfer the heat out of the molten salt?
However, running one and being able to make a cost effective reactor is completely different.
Especially when water is already a very well known and very well understood heat transfer medium.
Not being a proven technology would certainly be a business risk to consider though Thorium would be an easier pill to swallow politically and socially once the population is aware of the safety benefits.
EDIT: wrong decade
Newer types aren't used yet in the US because the incredible over-regulation of existing reactors due to the fear involved has made them very un-economical to build and very difficult to get new designs approved... if there's no money in something, corporations won't do it.
Which fuel is that? Thorium-U233?
If the last ten years are any indication, an order of magnitude further drop in prices before the end of the decade is not unreasonable considering mass production of batteries, solar, and wind is still ramping up and considering the enormous amount of R&D currently being spent on reducing cost and increasing efficiencies further.
In the UK it's going to be hard to compete with wind (Scotland exports more of that than its total energy consumption already) and people installing solar panels on their roof and putting batteries in their house and cars (which can power a house for several days).
Renewable produces only a fraction of their nominal output (typically 15-20%), and at random times. So typically a huge, sprawling 12km2 900MW solar plant produces a small amount of power during the year, in the best case (in the desert) 1.4TWh, while a 900MW nuclear reactor produces typically (actual numbers) 6.5TWh every year.
You also need to complement renewable production with an equivalent amount of steerable power (usually natural gas), or a large amount of batteries which multiplies the price by 5, 10 or more. So you can't consider the renewable price alone; you must take into account the price of the substitute power source, too... And its environmental price!
So renewable energy is cheap because it isn't worth much. It puts extra pressure on the grid, it forces nuclear plant to run at reduced capacity, which reduces the yield, and artificially lowers their profitability for no good reason at all.
In fact, renewables, by reducing profitability of nuclear power, has another very undesirable side-effect: making nuclear power companies cut corners on safety to save money.
Renewable power is better than coal; but it isn't, by large, as good as nuclear.
I haven't had time to carefully review the literature, but there seem to be quite a few papers that claim that storage for a 100% renewable grid would not be such a big issue.
You must account for the fact that there could be no sun or no wind for several days, therefore be able to store incredible amounts of power, far beyond the scale we know of.Then the sheer space required for renewable power is staggering. As I said, the biggest solar plants are 600MW to 1GW and occupy tens of square km. Now imagine supplying 10s of GW this way.
As someone joked on twitter, if you covered the whole Fukushima exclusion zone (250 km2 or so)with solar panels, it wouldn't come close to the Daishi nuclear plant annual power output.
For a detailed discussion on these matters, see https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/renewables/100-re...
Current-gen solar panels average about 30 W/m² over the year in Japan's latitude and climate. So a solar park the size of the Fukushima exclusion zone would produce around 7 GW on average which is more than the combined nameplate capacity of the six reactors (5.3 GW). Supplying the entire country with electricity (~114 GW) would require about 3800 km² of solar panels, or about 1% of Japan's area.
A 1GW solar plant outs 1GW once every sunny day, at noon. The rest of the day, it produces less, and nothing at all 12 hours a day. A 1GW solar plant roughly produces 3GWh a day. OTOH, a 1GW nuclear plant produces on a yearly average 800MWh every hour, every day and night. So at the end of the year your 1GW solar plant produced a grand total of 1100GWh, while your 1GW nuclear (or coal-fired, or gas-fired) power plant produced 7000GWh.
Plus your solar panel will provide energy mostly around noon, need it or not. While the nuclear (or gas, or coal) plant will provide power exactly when you need it.
Wind is even worse than solar, because production yield isn't even particularly predictable. So when wind blows, electricity goes into the grid without any consideration for the need for it. That's why its price drops to negative at times: because we don't need it. That's not because wind is wonderfully efficient or something. It's because building wind farms is a fantastic misallocation of resources. We're literally spending money for electricity worth almost nothing, and it won't ever recoup its costs.
That's why Germany, after having dumped 300 billions euros on wind farms in 20 years, stop building them altogether in 2018. At some point some accountant did the math.
As for wind energy, you are completely wrong. In 2019 25% of Germany's electricity was generated by wind (compared to 13% nuclear). This has significantly reduced the fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions.
The main reason for halting construction is that conservative politicians have passed idiotic NIMBY regulations that now make it very difficult to build new on-shore wind farms. Somehow they even managed to convince a signify fraction of the population that wind turbines are somehow dangerous (probably the same fraction that believes in electro-smog).
In addition to being tedious and doing no good, such comments often end up being false, once users come along and (as they typically do) give corrective upvotes to the unfairly-downvoted comment. Unfortunately, posts like yours here don't then garbage-collect themselves—they stick around, adding noise to the thread. That's one reason we ask people not to post them.
And if we are being honest, why not include total cost of ownership in the $/kwh.
As far as I know this is an impossible calculation for any current nuclear reactor technology.
During summer, I run my office 100% solar. It's a fun exercise, but it's deeply reliant on batteries. Storage capacity is a cliff: run out of stored power, you're done. This "brick wall effect" is grossly under-appreciated by solar proponents.
There's a funny thing about supply-and-demand: so long as supply is sufficient, costs are reasonable; when supply actually hits zero, and demand isn't zero, economic badness follows. Solar hits zero daily; batteries have a hard limit of a few hours/days.
Doing stuff like this is currently expensive but will eventually drop in price to the point where it stops being a cost reducing supporting technology and can actually become your main source of energy together with maybe a more expensive option as an emergency fallback based on some grid level solution (wind, more solar, tidal power, nuclear even, gas, etc). It's just a matter of $/kwh of battery & solar panels. Both are still coming down in price. The reason people are putting this stuff in their homes is that they are already on the right side of that price compared to the grid.
Eventually it was concluded that the shielding of the reactor would make a nuclear powered passenger car impractical, as it would make the vehicle too big. And of course there were the obvious safety concerns.
There is an good documentary on this subject on youtube [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR5gefU87TY
I read in a kid's science book that if you went to bed and waited until your eyes were adjusted to the dark, and then held the watch dial against your closed eyelid, you would be able to see the sparks as individual radium atoms decayed.
I did this, and it worked! I could see each spark!
I've never observed this when working with radium, but then I don't stick it in my eye.
Of course the pellets are insanely toxic in just about every way.
Even 20 watts will eventually melt small quantities of metal, think of every soldering iron. The authorities are not going to approve a reactor that melts its own armor if someone accidentally throws a quilt on top or equivalent.
So most designs do some kind of incredibly heavy passive cooling where the required very large surface of the armor only emits a fraction of the heat you'd see from sunlight. Now sunlight as an engineering 1 sig fig estimate is about a kilowatt per sq meter, so your 25 KW of waste heat would require some multiple of 25 square meters of surface area for passive safety cooling. A cube 5 meters on a side of solid copper and lead would have a surface area of 150 square meters, which will be warm to the touch but not as warm as it would get laying in the sun all day.
The problem with a cube of lead and copper 5 meters on a side is that is 125 cubic meters. And metal, again to one sig fig, weighs about ten thousand kilos per cubic meter. So that shielding would weigh quite a lot.
Its the old problem of the ratio of surface area to volume that comes up in so many engineering problems. Yeah I'm strong enough that I could pick up a small space craft RTG and walk around with it, for several reps at the gym anyway, but the scaling factors are such that a car charger would be immensely heavy.
I'm not sure, on a daily basis, what you'd do with 125 kilowatt-hours of car charge anyway. A gallon of gas is about 25 KW-hr (to one sig fig) so that's five gallons of gas. That would be 150 miles of driving per day, around here that would be something like 3 to 5 hours of driving per day, which sounds like a horrible way to live. Unless you're a bus driver, or delivery guy, or similar, LOL of course. Still, I don't think a five meter on a side bus or car is in our future.
I’d have my car mine bitcoin when it’s not being used :)
Wouldn’t the knowledge gained by fixing a large one-off reactor be of limited transferable value, as compared to expensive knowledge that could be used to upgrade an existing “fleet” plus improve subsequent versions?
In both cases they took a long time to come to light and the country is now stuck dealing with them across a large fraction of its power production.
This idea that mass production creates more mistakes really doesn't make sense when you actually think about it.
Cars/guns/airplanes/even furniture all benefit from mass production to keep costs and mistakes down. There's no reason why reactors would be magically exempt from it.
What you are asserting isn't the reality of mass production as experienced by industrial society so far.
1. A flaw is found in a standardized design impacting hundreds of units. Engineers identity a fix, and technicians receive training on how to apply the fix. They apply the fix to hundreds of units in a standardized and repeatable fashion. If the flaw is catastrophic, chances are this will prevent hundreds of catastrophes.
2. You have an industry producing hundreds of bespoke designs. Each time a flaw is found, engineers work to devise a solution, and technicians repair the flaw on an ad-hoc basis. The industry is competitive, so potential learning surrounding individual flaws does not propagate quickly. Each catastrophic flaw is a new catastrophe, endangering many lives.
Funny thing about auto makers manufacturing 100s of millions of units: they're still hugely profitable and despite the risk of mass recalls, bespoke designs are practically unheard of.
Now we get the argument that yes, that will happen but it will still be profitable to do so.
All of this contradicts 70 years of nuclear industry experience. It is an unsupported assertion, not a truth, that modular manufacturing will experience a beneficial industrial learning curve that will bend costs toward being competitive with alternatives.
By unproven I mean that the economics of it is unproven. We have no proof that SMR will be cheaper than large reactors. The article points this out as well.
By late I mean at current fast pace of development a lot of will happen with wind and solar in the 10 years it will take for this to get online.
Most likely though it won't, then we are stuck relying on a couple of unproven large reactors.
All of them will be too late and are of unproven economics.
I guess best option is to sit back and watch the fireworks?
The reality is that nuclear power, as is, can solve global warming.
The only solution is to give our money to the overlords.
However, there is a dearth of people experienced with the design and development of new reactor technology. The development pathway of building up the supply lines, understanding the complexities of the various systems, etc. is long.
I laughed at first many years ago when I saw some new reactor designs taking 10years but it turns out in a lot of cases that's optimistic.
It's a shame, because development in the mid 20th century was a LOT faster. And the people involved moved from one new reactor design to the next, bringing valuable experience.
Much of the work force entering this industry are entirely green and need an understanding of existing reactor technologies and why some designs were made a certain way before trying to reinvent them. Looking at the development in Russia and India could be very helpful.
But this would need to be a fail save type of reactor and with a clear plan(s) all the way down to how the waste is handled till it's no longer active.
Only about one percent of high-level nuclear waste is fission products, the broken-apart atoms left after fission. The rest is U238, unused U235, plutonium, and other transuranics produced by absorbing neutrons without fissioning. Fast reactors can fission all of these. That's why they can run on nuclear waste.
For the same reason, they can get over a hundred times as much energy from the same amount of uranium ore. Conventional reactors can only use the U235, which is 0.7% of natural uranium.
That's a great start, but with such efficient use, it's practical to get the uranium from seawater. We can do that now at five times the cost of mining; if we only need 1% as much uranium, then total fuel cost would be 5% as much as nuclear reactors spend on fuel today. Fast reactors fueled from seawater would last for millions of years.
TLDR: Its all just theoretical.
"TerraPower planned to build a 600 MWe demonstration Plant, the TWR-P, by 2018–2022 followed by larger commercial plants of 1150 MWe in the late 2020s.[15] However, in January 2019 it was announced that the project had been abandoned due to technology transfer limitations placed by the Trump administration."
Only if mini-reactor gets cheaper than the coal plant, can they get competitive.
If Rolls Royce can get good at building these ractors they could be making them quickly and cheaply enough to make a big difference.
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...
- economies of scale
- no decommission costs - you just leave them to decay.
- fewer security measures.
> And if there's water in your mine, it seems like it could transport radioactive particles out
You need to pick a really deep and isolated shaft (Some gold mine shafts can reach 4 km)
It is still cheaper and more efficient to have a 1.2 GW diesel power plant instead of a warehouse of thousands of back up generators wired together.
Part of the problem is the components are very large and very heavy even for industrial projects and coasts have barges and seaports.
Some parts are too heavy even for railroad shipment, so its barge and crane or expensively fabricate on site, or expensively assemble on site.
Its quite a logistical headache to build a large nuclear reactor. Yes, submarine scale plants are petite, but GW-class baseline generators have very large and heavy parts.
WRT to Fukishima, its probably cheaper and more efficient from an engineering perspective to build a massive seawall than an unblockable long canal. The effort and concrete required to build an unblockable kilometer long canal that would survive a 30m tsunami would probably survive a 100m tsunami if put into a seawall instead. Or more likely, management would only permit a 10m rated seawall (or canal) "because that'll never happen" and we all know how that turned out.
But in Ontario where the biggest nuclear power plants are located. Two are next to Lake Ontario, and one is by Lake Huron.
During the heatwave the rivers were so warm the reactors weren't allowed to dump any more heat into them
And yes, I think they will be pretty well guarded. But if you have lots of them some of them will have security flaws.
I stopped worrying about terrorism when I realized that they could easily take out most of the European power grid with a few well-placed bombs on the central very-high-voltage power lines. Yet for some reason, they don't.
If terrorists were really hellbent on killing as many enemy civilians as possible, the world would look very different. What actually seems to be happening is that they use the smallest possible intervention that causes sufficient fear (and, conversely, sufficient support on their home turf). So I don't think they'll be blowing up nuclear reactors anytime soon. That would be unnecessary overkill (literally).
I suspect it is a matter of ideology and psychology. Just emptying an AR-15 clip into substations throughout a country isn't "exciting" or "sexy" even if it would be very effective saboage. It is boring and doesn't validate their ego or whatever statement they want to make. It would be petty vandalism and not even inspiring to those already radicalized to their cause. Plus while causing damage and disruption it isn't exactly terrifying - the aftermath involves selling bonds and overtime for repair and manufacturing. Even if it kills it is far less traumatic than direct violence.
Atomwaffen are essentially the only group I know of who would actually have something like that as a goal instead of a potential method. They are essentially an example of the theory of fascism as a death cult insanely trying to control their own mortality it by inflicting death upon the other. Thankfully they are fundamentally incompetent losers.
Dirty bombs are also far less dangerous as they are made out to be.
I mean, how many successful terrorist attacks on nuclear plants have we really seen?
This is the best example of survivor bias I've seen in a while.
"Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility"
Can you point me to an example that is being overlooked?
The probabilities of a successful terrorist attack on a nuclear plant are very thin given the extreme security measures around them, and that's a fact.
Thinking that, despite a basic probability being extremely small, "it's still possible", and thus assigning the event a larger probability than it naturally has, now that's an error.
You expect a technology to be made to work first, then to be made to work profitably, and only then commodified, miniaturised, etc.
Nuclear works, but no one has made it work profitably. There is no reason to think shrinking it will make more profitable.
Quite the opposite in fact: nuclear has big fixed costs. That's why you usually see multiple reactors build close together on single sites. The more profitable (less loss making really) sites are the biggest ones.
This is why the first computers were not laptops.
I disagree that it is necessary for technology to be made profitable before becoming commoditised. I would argue that some technologies only become profitable when they are commoditised.
There is no reason to think shrinking it will make more profitable.
I cannot see into the minds of Rolls Royce, but I would hazard that they think it can be done. They suggest that if they can export this technology overseas as well, they can turn a profit on it. While I don't know if they're correct, they clearly believe it's possible.
The answer is my opinion is still no I'm afraid.
I think we assume things shrink and commoditise because technology we use daily has often done that (say home computer parts). But other technologies, especially industrial ones, have not.
Cars for instance are bigger and offer more diversity and less commoditisation than ever before.
Similarly, we've had coal power plants for a long long time. And they are larger than ever. Do you know anyone with a mini coal plant? Neither do i.
Nuclear specifically shows no likely hood of shrinking or commoditising in my opinion. Large fixed costs make shrinking hard. A wide diversity of requirements from customers and interconnectedness makes commoditisation hard.
Maybe rolls toyce have solved 2 problems when no one else has solved 1, but I'm skeptical...
Why does nuclear power have this enormous additional requirement that literally no other power source seems to have to account for?
Because no other power source has the inner components become radioactive during normal operation. Normally these radioactive parts are fully contained, but that's no longer the case once it's dismantled. That makes dismantling a nuclear power plant not only much more expensive, but also a requirement (you can't just abandon it, otherwise it will gradually break down and lose the containment).
If you can't afford to shut it down then don't build expensive big designs. Build smaller ones that you can actually afford to take offline.
What we should be doing is using nuclear energy for HEAT. We need a LOT of heat for a variety of chemical and industrial processes, not to mention heating of homes in colder climates. For these uses nuclear fission has massive potential.
Closing existing nuclear power plants like they're doing in Germany is absolute lunacy.
For heat that timeline is acceptable given that it can be "decarbonized" by switching to burning biomass to cover the transition.
If we could build safe nuclear electric plants within a reasonable timeframe and cost then we should absolutely do it (this would make so much sense in huge countries like the US or China because you can have the reactors located well away from large populations).
Pretty sure that's not true if you account for total costs. (Including the energy and materials budget for making solar panels and batteries at scale.)
At first glance it seems to slightly favor nuclear when it can operate 24/7, but nuclear power plants have a very long lifecycle 40+ years and projected battery costs for future replacements are lower than today’s values. Worse nuclear has a much longer lead time so you already need to compare battery prices ~5 years from now when you’re looking at building a new nuclear power plant.
PS: Note grid batteries are significantly cheaper when they can share inverters with solar generation and be directly charged via DC. Standalone prices are higher. Also, fast discharge peaking power reduces battery lifetimes over longer discharge nighttime useage.
A grid cannot make use of average power generation. It needs consistent power generation.
...and storage needed to make that happen is orders of magnitude higher than what's being factored in here.
To be more clear only using solar with battery backup you can provide 24/7 power that covers demand but at lower costs per kWh than current nuclear numbers operating 24/7 and vastly lower than trying to reach 100% nuclear generation in almost every country.
Even then their nuclear capacity factor is 77% where it’s generally 90+% in the US because frequently nobody want’s to import electricity from France. So, France’s high percentage of nuclear power results roughly 17% higher costs per kWh for nuclear power due to oversupply. Or more depending on what it exports at.
Further, the more you increase nuclear capacity globally, the less anyone is going to be importing it at night and weekends when everyone is over supplied.
We also have quite a lot of precipitation - but again, solar isn't hopeless even here.
As for seasonal storage, I suspect some kind of kinetic/potential energy storage might be better than batteries? Like lifting a weight, or pumping a liquid up hill/up a tower?
So there's little incentive to move from cheap hydro.
But for those that want, it's possible. And feasible. But with a solid grid built out - it's mostly as a supplement.