But coal plant as opposed to solar plant has a reliable, predictable output and works after dusk. Nuclear power plant also has these characteristics.
We can use any and all power sources that are clean.
I completely agree with you on that. Of course, the disagreement hinges on whether you can consider nuclear power "clean"...
Accidents have been bad but recall that fossil while operating normally kills 3.8 million/year and causes climate change. In comparison to that nuclear is absolutely pristene.
Germany's choice to phase nuclear out and leave coal on straight up kills a few thousand people per year.
The risk can't be measured in "lives per year" because for most years it will be zero. The "long tail event" is something like: each reactor has a 1/10,000 lifetime chance of an incident of releasing cs137 which will contaminate a random area of Europe in which agriculture becomes uneconomic to make safe. It's a probabilistic judgement of the type that we're very bad at dealing with.
In fact, building a straight-up Chernobyl reactor that runs for 5 years and then explodes is still safer than running a regular old coal plant for 5 years. Fossil is that bad.
At a statistical level, I'm willing to bet that driving a car is probably much more dangerous than living near either a nuclear plant or a fossil fuel plant, but we still do it.
The problem with nuclear power is, unlike fossil fuel plant or cars, an accident takes your home, your daily social connections, and your daily life. It turns you and your family and friends into refugees.
But the big shadow behind nuclear is weapons proliferation. From the 60s onwards nuclear bombs brought the possibility that there might be a civilisation-destroying nuclear exchange, and as the discourse around Iran has shown it's quite difficult for bystanders to distinguish between the two.
Banqiao Hydroelectric Dam, China, was breached Aug. 8 1975 killing more than 85,000 people that day. A study conducted by eight Chinese water science experts who probably had access to censored government reports, estimated the number of total dead — from flooding and the resulting epidemics and famine — at 230,000.
https://www.ozy.com/flashback/230000-died-in-a-dam-collapse-...
I think you're probably right that, even with frequent meltdowns, nuclear power would be less bad than coal. But I also think that we don't have a large enough number of disasters to extrapolate reliably. A hundred Chernobyls might produce much more than a hundred times the deaths from one Chernobyl — or much less.
The difference between nuclear's safety and fossil fuels anti-safety is astounding. They are not even remotely comparable. 4 million deaths per year from fossil, year after year. Up to 4000 total deaths across the decades from nuclear.
Fossil fuels are causing over 2 long-term cancer-included Chernobyls per day every single day right now.
This is an important point that's hard to get through to people.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/26/germany-agrees...
Often repeated, but still wrong: Germany also phased out coal.
They still run over 40 GW of coal.
The nuclear industry totally failed to recover from a PR point of view, and since then has hid under a rock rather than explained how low carbon and safe it is.
They need to be changed often, they use lots of concrete (especially for wind turbines), they need lots of materials and have a quite low power factor (10-20%).
How many tonnes of concrete per megawatt do wind turbines use, and how many do nuclear power plants use? Solar plants used to use a lot of concrete, but they no longer do.
"Power factor" is an attribute of electrical loads, not electrical generating equipment; it describes how far the load's current consumption deviates from the perfect in-phase sine wave of, say, a resistor. Perhaps you meant "capacity factor", the ratio of average power produced to peak power produced. Typical capacity factors for wind turbines are in the vicinity of 35%, although some offshore wind farms reach 60%. Photovoltaic plants typically have a capacity factor of around 25%, though in sunny places like Arizona and California it can exceed 30%. In the US, the lowest PV capacity factors are in Maine, which averages 12%. Germany's average PV capacity factor is 10%. Natural gas peakers are around 9%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor
I've already thoroughly demolished this nonsense about "need to be changed often" in the case of photovoltaic panels. I don't know what wind turbine lifetimes are. Shorter, I imagine, but they still have a much higher ERoEI than PV or in fact any other power source.
> Modern wind energy systems, with good wind conditions, take 460 metric tons of steel and 870 cubic meters of concrete per megawatt.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2007/07/constructing-lot-of-nu...
First source I found.
Wind turbine lifetimes are 20 to 25 years at the best.
I agree for solar panels, they don't need lots of concrete and only loose efficiency over time. But you would need lots of them + a complete power storage system behind. So the cost and material used to have a similar power output is still order of magnitude higher.
https://newatlas.com/timbertower-wooden-wind-turbine/25007/
Making things out of wood is generally a good idea to save on carbon footprint. I have doubts you could build a nuclear power plant from timber given all the containment & shielding requirements.
Glulam wood can substitute for some uses of concrete, but I'm thinking it's probably not ideal for earth contact applications. Especially in places like Ohio, which we mentioned as an example in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22181187
> But you would need lots of them + a complete power storage system behind. So the cost and material used to have a similar power output is still order of magnitude higher.
This turns out not to be true.
So, if concrete requirements for wind farms dropped by two thirds from 2007 to 2013, what do you suppose they are today?
Again a power plant life expectancy is 3, maybe 4 times that. And you need to do the foundation once.
You don't replace a wind turbine over a wind turbine, you need to redo the foundations (the concrete is constantly stressed and fragilized through the years), same for a power plant (also for security purposes).
This doesn't count the concrete needed for the access roads and cables to connect everything. From the article "Lafarge also supplied 20,000 tons of Type I cement for soil stabilization of approximately 44 miles of roads".
Let's try to do the maths with a modern power plant as well. Knowing that you produce more energy than in the 70' with modern turbines and we have bigger plans as well on smaller areas.
The low capacity factor (it's actually around 30% for new solar and 50+% for wind) is already accounted for in the levelized cost of energy. LCOE from renewables is a factor of 3-4x lower than from new nuclear.
I looked for some reference material and I found a "rule of thumb" which claims that PV panels lose about 1% efficiency per year of operation and can last 25-30 years.
Nuclear power stations (in China) are designed for a 40 to 60-year operating life.
Well, as long as it is no coal or nuclear, no, we don't. But those two do not like to share capacity, so as much as you have them, you better use them.
> Blocking nuclear in favor of some sort of pie in the sky global power network...
The natural state of nuclear is blocked. It's not in favor of a renewable network, it simply is. Maybe it would be better if it wasn't, but that's not reality.
Disclaimer: I am a layman in this topic and not energetics expert, this is my understanding of the state but please feel free to correct me.
I would prefer if we did not use use any power source that is dirty. It might sound similar but the outcome is very different. A ban against fossil fuels would prevent countries from relying on fossil fuels for base load when wind or solar can't fulfill demand.
Basically we still need to do x10 or more in electricity storage (hard to do when you already built all the reversible damns you can build in your country) in most places by still having the risk of a several day grid cut if we don't have wind and enough sun for a while.
In France for example, we don't have space to build reversible damns anymore. Which represent a huge majority of the electricity stored (batteries are only 2%). We can basically store 14h of the country consuption. Handling those "no wind, no sun" cases would need up to weeks of storage.
Moving to renewable energy is basically stressing the grid. The Germans can use the other countries to limit the impacts but it doesn't work when everyone is doing it.
Except if our society is ok to have multiple times per year global power cuts of several days.
I'd also like to stress that CO2 emission are also massively coming from transports and buildings. Focusing massively on electricity generation decarbonation only is I think a nonsense.
Reversible damns are for small amount of energy and short term... but most classical damns do store much more energy - that is an energy you can decide to use now, or in two weeks, or sometime in few months. They store energy, just can't store already produced electricity
Energy efficiency and demand-response have HUGE potential to reduce energy consumption, and to make energy consumption "programmable"
A good mix of different renewable energy (hydro, biomass, onshore wind, off-shore wind, solar) make it impossible to have a "no wind, no sun" case, even if there will be fluctuation in what level of electricity you can produce
Human stupidity.
I prefer to use good ol' technologies such as power plants/damns, they are reliable, they can be done locally (most of solar panels are coming from China), they can be repaired and we can handle them country wise easily.
If we want to reduce our CO2 emissions, we move to gaz (coal -> gaz is -20%), we reduce our consumption (building isolation is -30%, sometimes -50%), and we massively reduce cars usage (by developing trains, another good ol' technology that works really well).
But if we need to reduce our CO2 emissions really fast it's one of the most efficient way to cut 1/5 of the emissions without massively changing how the grid and the other things are working.
But for sure in the end it's more a way to save time and to reduce coal usage that is also producing serious health issues to the populations.
And for new capacities, that is cheaper than coal or nuclear
Saving 50% on generation gives you a lot of options in terms of demand shaping and storage.
It's also far, far less capital intensive and doesn't require an uncapped disaster insurance subsidy from the taxpayer.
2) 2x cost for these attributes does not seem particularly bad to me.
3) I am not aware of any production ready options that have been deployed at scale somewhere. I know there are a lot of ideas however. If you have time can you please point me to the most promising ones? I am genuinely interested.
People theorize that nuclear could be more expensive than a grid that relies on over capacity wind turbine parks in combination with thermal or hydro batteries, but no country has gone that route yet. We have countries that are almost 100% nuclear and we have a bunch that are a mix between wind/solar which falls backs to fossil fuels when needed.
The cost of running a energy grid is the total cost, not individual megawatts being produced in isolation.
Ban fossil fuels and the real costs comparison between clean energy becomes apparent.
In the us northwest there's a fairly regular 2-week wind outage across a 4 state area each winter.
> This characteristic is called being dispatchable.
While I mostly appreciate your contributions to this conversation as being informative, a dispatchable plant is one that you can turn on and off to respond to demand, not one that cannot be higher than the wind itself.
Additionally, nukes can be used for district heating, seawater desalination, hydrogen production, and lots of other non-electric things when the electricity demand is low by using steam bypass techniques.
Regarding correction: I meant to say that but thank you for pointing out that it made no sense as written. I have edited accordingly.
The non-electric uses of nuclear thermal energy you mention are potentially interesting, but essentially they're just a slightly different form of demand response. If you're doing demand response in your desal plant, you can do it regardless of whether it's an MSF plant driven from nuclear thermal power or an RO plant driven by electric pumps. (And RO is usually considered more efficient.) I think it's more common for waste heat from power plants to be a nuisance that results in cooling towers rather than an asset that results in district heating, although I'm not entirely sure why that is.
https://bilan-electrique-2018.rte-france.com/eolien/
Also there is currently no offshore wind park, as only offshore would approach the 50% capacity factor, but they won't, they will be in the 43% as estimated by renewables.ninja
Throttling nuclear power happens only a few days in the summer, once every few years, with only a few percent because it only impact a few reactor on some rivers for environmental norms, during the lowest electricity usage of the year.
Which is the same number I wrote?
Maybe you mean to compare wind in France with world best wind, but this is what you wrote.
"nuclears capacity factor in France (the country with a high nuclear buildout) is about 72%, while that of wind is about 50%"
It's just not cost effective without both massive implicit and explicit government subsidies.
Renewables are cost effective now and will only become more so.
And the actually produced energy as share of capacity (= the capacity factor) is way better than most think. For the nuclear plants in France it currently is just over 70%, while it is about 50% globally for offshore wind parks [2,3]
[0] http://www.windustry.org/how_much_do_wind_turbines_cost
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-edf-nuclear-epr/frances-e...
[2] http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/wind-energy-factsheet
[3] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/20170912wnisr2017...
Edit: Changed phrasing because it apparently sounded like the 50% capacity factor also referred to France.
https://bilan-electrique-2018.rte-france.com/eolien/
Also there is currently no offshore wind park, as only offshore would approach the 50% capacity factor, but they won't, they will be in the 43% as estimated by renewables.ninja
The price of the MWh of offsore park will be from 44 to 150€/MWh, where EDF is forced to sell its nuclear at 42€/MWh, average price of wind in 2020 93€/MWh.
I don't get why you think comparing to offshore wind is misleading, though. Could you expand on that?
Wind: "The costs for a utility scale wind turbine range from about $1.3 million to $2.2 million per MW of nameplate capacity installed." http://www.windustry.org/how_much_do_wind_turbines_cost
Nuclear: " Companies that are planning new nuclear units are currently indicating that the total costs (including escalation and financing costs) will be in the range of $5,500/kW to $8,100/kW or between $6 billion and $9 billion for each 1,100 MW plant." https://www.synapse-energy.com/sites/default/files/SynapsePa...
If we look at the costs of constructing new nuclear plants (which the article we comment on is about), France is a particularly bad example, with current costs already at $11B for 1600MW of capacity for the Flamanville project. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-edf-nuclear-flamanville/e...