Study: Cheap gas, not renewables, caused nuclear woes (2018)
utilitydive.com
utilitydive.com
But gas is a a climate wolf in climate sheep's clothing. The end destination (490) is wholly incompatible with all the IPCC low-carbon scenarios that actually mitigate climate change. So we're kind of lulled into a false sense of success as we shut down vast quantities of coal (yay) but also actually low carbon nuclear (11 gCO₂-eq/kWh) (boo) and replace it directly with gas.
(And I do mean directly. When Indian Point shut down in NY earlier this year, NY subtracted 1016.1 MW of low-carbon nuclear capacity and added 1016.1 MW of high-carbon fossil gas [1]!)
We need carbon pricing so we actually add market value to things that are actually low carbon. Shutting down nuclear to replace with gas is so backwards.
[1] See "capacity of electric power plants" spreadsheet from here: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data.php
As a now-deleted comment observed, gas wells often mean methane methane leaks as well. Methane is 84x worse than CO2 for global warming:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential
There's a growing move towards new (HFO-1234yf [1]) refrigerants (for AC/HVAC) because a lot of the current ones (R-134a, Freon [2]) aren't good for climate change. We went to the current ones to fix the problem of the old ones (R-12 [3]) with the o-zone layer.
* [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,3,3,3-Tetrafluoropropene
* [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1,1,1,2-Tetrafluoroethane
> Some gases, again like methane, break down over time, and their heat absorption, or GWP, over the next 20 years is a bigger multiple of CO2 than their heat absorption will be over 100 or 500 years. Values of GWP are estimated and updated for each time frame as methods improve.
This is the highly-regulated free-market at work. Based on price signals (created by incredible market distortion), gas is less expensive than nuclear. Fans of fission should lobby for (modest) carbon taxes and to end the exemption of fracking from the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts. With those two changes, very quickly the tables would turn.
Unfortunately the economics of natural gas make it a steep hill to climb even if the politics and public sentiment changed on nuclear. To me, fission really seems like the only rational solution to the climate crisis that we can implement starting tomorrow.
We probably do need either carbon taxes or heavy fission plant construction subsidies (easier to implement than carbon tax and most of the negative economic incentive is the capital-intensive upfront costs - nuclear is significantly cheaper than gas at the 35-40 year plant life mark).
Edit: Covered in a reply, but for those who don't read it please understand I was referring to the Medieval Warm Period[1].
[From Wikipedia] The Saga of Erik the Red states: "In the summer, Erik left to settle in the country he had found, which he called Greenland, as he said people would be attracted there if it had a favorable name."
> After finding a habitable area and settling there, he named it Grœnland (translated as "Greenland"), supposedly in the hope that the pleasant name would attract settlers.[20][21][22] The Saga of Erik the Red states: "In the summer, Erik left to settle in the country he had found, which he called Greenland, as he said people would be attracted there if it had a favorable name."[23]
It was slightly warmer than even today, but that was a localized warming, not Global. Greenland has had several cold and warm cycles over the past hundred millennia.
The current temperature anomaly covers the entire earth. https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/map-blended-mn...
Digging into that historical data further, what sourcing is there? The wiki page I already links indicates records for most of the world at the time were, well, awful. And that what we do know suggests it was similarly warm and dry in Asia, Africa, and South America.
Skepticalscience.com is a web cartoonist's blog, not a serious scientific source. That said even cartoonists can read and learn, so I'd be very interested in seeing his sources.
While greenland was warmer during the medieval warm period than immediately afterwards, its ice sheet is 400,000 years old. Saying they had "receded" is a stretch, and it is warmer today than it was then. The effect of the medieval warm period was localized to the north atlantic, while the rest of the world was colder, and the north atlantic is already substantially hotter today than it was then.
Also, in the opposite spirit of your opening sentence, let me advise you that "It really seems like you're just trolling" is a very weaselly way to insinuate bad faith, and you should try to do better. If you want to call me a liar or a fool just do it. I don't think you could support that accusation based on my use of sources like wikipedia because I am acting in good faith and a spirit of intellectual curiosity, but hey you do you.
I'm not able to find any source describing the extent of Greenland's ice sheet during the medieval warm period. If you have one, you should post it. All I can find are temperature records which indicate greenland has been hotter than in the medieval warm period since the 1930s.
I do find myself thinking though how would my intellectual heroes view that? What would Edsgar Dijkstra think of someone identifying as an "assistant professor of computing communication?" What would Richard Feynman think of someone identifying as an "assistant professor of physics communication?" While I can't be sure, abductive reasoning tells me their view would likely be dim to say the least.
This form of nuclear production got an actual construction license from the NRC after incredible amounts of environmental study.
It may raise eyebrows, but consider that in deep water tsunamis are a few feet tall, earthquakes are non-existent, and huge ships like the Prelude are designed to handle category-5 cyclones. You also have infinite access to cooling water and can design in a sink-safe worst-case scenario with a engineered recovery operation.
If we were serious about decarbonizing right now and I were in charge, I think I would march over to S. Korea and try to get their world-class nuclear construction people (KEPCO) hooked up with their world-class shipyard people and just start hammering them out.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1975/05/12/the-atlantic-g...
[2] https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-01-26-offshore-power-sys...
Another strong approach gaining traction is production in the 5-50MW range, with 100s/1000s/yr in the same way Boeing and Airbus build ~2000 wide body aircraft each year. Smaller reactors with lower power density can claim inherent safety with respect to various hazards - ie cannot meltdown through system failures.
Must move away from absolutist mind set with single solution and try lots of strategies. Many will be effective.
The optimal mix using today's technology seems like it would be traditional fission for baseload combined with (solar/wind + battery) / hydro for variable / peak grid load.
[1] https://www.nuscalepower.com/projects/carbon-free-power-proj...
That's why I like combining economies of scale with economies of mass production with large reactors built in shipyards. Decarbonizing requires many new TW of capacity. Exajoules is the unit of import.
Something the size of a chest freezer and rated maybe 100kW-- enough to run a few neigbouring homes, or a small office campus. Maybe it's a heat-decay product rather than a steam system, to reduce moving parts and breakdown risk. It's designed as a sealed, maintenance free unit that you dock in someone's shed, it runs for 5 years or whatever, the green "Change Reactor" light comes on, and you call the manufacturer to take it away and drop another one in place. (It could be properly deconstructed and refurbished by the manufacturer, like the old "disposable" cameras). It would probably output something like 240 or 480v natively to integrate in a similar way to rooftop solar.
I figure this can achieve a couple of goals: * By keeping the scale small, we might be able to get the "worst case" risk profile to something people find palatable (they're okay with some medical facilities with X-ray and radioisotope therapy machines in their neighbourhood, but nobody wants to live next to Palo Verde)
* Transmission losses are minimized and putting much of the generation near demand reduces load on the grid itself if the demand estimates are faulty and we still need to pull peak power from elsewhere.
That's what was always so weird about rooftop solar: if solar is so great, why is there more interest in rooftop than large-scale farms? Especially when you look at the installation cost and sub-par location and orientation, rooftop solar is significantly worse than a farm. Transmission from a farm will be less than inefficiencies because of roof angle.
OTOH, I am still interested in the grid-fragility aspect-- if the main grid is only carrying relatively low peak power needs, instead of the entire base load, won't we be able to better handle failures? Wouldn't extra redundancy be cheaper and easier to build?
There's a chance you were talking about transmission of household voltage. What Ohm's Law does for long-distance energy transmission is amazing
Found this:
> For example, a 100 mi (160 km) span at 765 kV carrying 1000 MW of power can have losses of 1.1% to 0.5%.
And also
> As of 1980, the longest cost-effective distance for direct-current transmission was determined to be 7,000 kilometres (4,300 miles). For alternating current it was 4,000 kilometres (2,500 miles)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Lo...
We've had nuclear powered subs for decades now.
- no one has yet solved the waste problem (okay, the US has ample free land, but the rest of the world does not!)
- the proliferation risk is not eliminated (and no, it's not only plutonium, but also ordinary uranium for dirty bombs to take care of, plus the risk of enrichment tech, as evidenced with Iran)
- uranium fuel is mined under incredibly exploitative conditions. Additionally the US doesn't have meaningful uranium reserves on their territory, dito for Europe. Does the world really want a repeat of the oil crises, with some random sheikhdom having the world by the proverbial balls?
- safety issues haven't been solved at all: terrorism (hijacked airplanes) remains a constant threat, operator error/sabotage is a risk, and capitalism leading to corner cutting in construction, operation and demolition is popping up every other year.
Fission is a dead end, the hope is solar, wind and battery storage.
In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amounts generated are manageable and in a relatively short amount of time we can use most of this "waste" to generate electricity.
>...- the proliferation risk is not eliminated (and no, it's not only plutonium, but also ordinary uranium for dirty bombs to take care of, plus the risk of enrichment tech, as evidenced with Iran)
This isn't really relevant for commercial nuclear power - no country has ever gotten a nuclear bomb from commercial nuclear reactors. No terrorist has ever gotten access to nuclear waste. There are lots easier ways for terrorists and countries to obtain nuclear material. (Nuclear designs like the Integral Fast Reactor keep everything on site (including reprocessing) so the terrorist threat would be even more unlikely.)
>..- uranium fuel is mined under incredibly exploitative conditions.
Better than mining rare earths or coal etc.
>...Additionally the US doesn't have meaningful uranium reserves on their territory,
With next gen breeder reactors, there is enough fuel for tens of thousands of years. (Or thorium reactors might be used, etc)
>...- safety issues haven't been solved at all:
Nuclear power has proven to be the safest form of mass power we have ever created. Yes, like any power source we should worry about terrorism, but that isn't unique to nuclear power.
>...Fission is a dead end, the hope is solar, wind and battery storage.
It is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. But what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. Is your fear of nuclear power so great that if you had to choose, you would prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?
https://www.covra.nl/en/radioactive-waste/the-art-of-preserv...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...
Waste is completely overblown as a problem. Solar and windmills have much lower energy density than fission. So your zero-carbon alternatives to storing fission waste somewhere are:
- Find even more land from somewhere for solar/wind farms, or
- Vastly reduce electricity consumption
Neither option really seems better than storing fission waste.
We are zeroing in on free energy from renewables, so it isn't economics - not any longer. With that past us, why do folks on the right even care where we get our energy from?
If the argument is jobs - well, that's a weak argument because the only job fields that either party cares about are those that can be leveraged for politics.
If the jobs argument includes thwarting disruptive technologies to prop up legacy industries - well, that doesn't sound very Keynesian to me.
Even so, I'll accept the jobs argument. I would love to see Appalachian coal regions become a mecca for renewable manufacturing. I'd love to see N.Dakota oil workers own massive energy generating coops (or whatever someone who actually groks energy comes up with). I'd be happy to see my tax dollars fund the heck out that. So whatever your jobs[1] complaint is, assume I accept it and agree to subsidize worthwhile substitutes.
Once jobs and economics is off the table, why are you still attached to fossil fuels?
[1] Shareholding isn't a job.
Because you can't rely on renewables to provide power throughout every day/year, you need to have natural gas/coal/nuclear available. Those have very high fixed costs (other than natural gas), but very low marginal costs, so once you have built them it is cheaper to just use them than to build additional renewable power infrastructure.
It seems reasonable that policy discussions about future energy should be increasingly dominated by renewables. That the worth of fossil fuels will steadily diminish toward a niche value ought to be a universally accepted understanding.
Nuclear energy serves the purpose of acting as the filler for the delta between the peak and trough.
I agreed with that before Tesla's Big Battery experiment - and that leveraged established tech. I can't wait to see how sodium or one of the other, in-dev materials eventually supplant lithium, on a massive scale.
Tesla's battery isn't really grid-scale energy storage of the kind you'd need to do 100% renewables. It's more for smoothing out fluctuations in the grid than for filling in for intermittent sources when conditions are poor.
If the gamble on renewables works out, it will be because of geological hydrogen energy storage. That's the only way to get country-days worth of storage at a price that's actually feasible (if it works in practise like it does on paper).
It is equally impossible to run a grid from only nuclear power. These assets can't "load follow" which is why in the US the 1970s build-out of nuclear power was contemporaneous with the build-out of pumped hydro storage.
https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-news-29-2-lo...
It's still lower than I'd prefer, further nuclear power research seems by far the best way to truly go off fossil fuels long term (even with the improvements in batteries, we are several orders of magnitude away from it actually being realistic to build them for power grid scale energy storing).
New reactor designs can go 72 hours [2] without any human interaction, which avoids much of the natural disaster concerns, such as requiring generators for cooling, which is what caused the major problems in Fukushima.
[1] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/4/23/1850729...
No. Just. No.
It's incredibly stupid and inefficient to use nuclear as a peak power plant. Due to the huge CAPEX reasonable power system should use nuclear for base load and maximize capacity factor as much as possible.
Yes, there are experiments on maneuvering nuclear plants, but: a) usually maneuvering range is relatively small (60-80% from max output) b) latency is still too big when compared to gas plants and hydroelectric storage. There are some micro-nuclear plant designs, which would be more flexible and more suitable for this scenario, but they are mostly just paper reactors.
I believe they meant the delta time between peaks, rather than the delta power between baseline and peak.
I think that depends on the shape of the infrastructure. Super-dense cities seem like the least accommodating to near-future renewable/storage tech. Suburbs and rural areas seem like a much better fit to deploy the tech as it matures - which is happening fast.
Also a little understanding about the grid, dynamic generation and duck curve convinced me that we need predictable generation. I am not for FOSSIL FUELS, its just that Nuclear and ONG are the real choices. Solar in American South West and Wind at the foot of Rockies and Southern Plains make general sense, but the usually they are far away from Cities.
Long story short - there may be lobbyists running around doing naughty stuff, the general bigger problems are Physics, Geography and "existing" technology - Battery Storage.
Note: I'm specifically picking on fossil fuels because I'm still holding out hope for safer, smaller-scale nuclear tech. I can't tell how realistic that is tho.
Regarding your observations: They seem to indicate (or at least allow) that there's low-hanging fruit, that we ought to be grabbing now.
Solar and Wind will have limited impact. Disposing Solar panels and Wind mills after their useful life is going to be its own TOXIC Waste problem.
Solar in space is an interesting idea too.
The Duck Curve convinced me of something different -- that flat-rate power prices don't send the appropriate price signal to the market. Supply and demand should be balanced through price signals like most everything else in the economy. And then let the free market figure it out.
The right wing tends to believe that if a problem can be solved by an individual then there is no need for a government response.
If the assumptions in your question were true, you, WarOnPrivacy, could become a billionaire by outcompeting fossil fuel plants. Therefore no political action is needed.
[1] https://www.electricitymap.org/map
And before anyone says nuclear is too expensive, know that nuclear costs today are about on par with all other future low-carbon grid proposals. While wind and solar generators are dirt cheap, adding the extra transmissions lines, vast energy storage, smart grids, etc. adds $40-$60/MWh when done at levels that actually decarbonize, which makes nuclear already competitive.
Right now the dirt cheap renewables are riding on the back of a natural gas powered grid that can handle their intermittency, (except sometimes in California).
I ran the math this week on powering the house off-grid with solar and batteries. We even have a stream going through the property that could easily power all our needs throughout the year. The solar install is just so much simpler and lower maintenance though. With current available batteries going 100% solar already has a positive return on ~12k€ total investment. But it still makes more sense to only do a 1 to 3k€ investment in solar with no batteries, even giving away the rest of the power to the power company as we have no net-meetering. If we had net-meetering for the next 5 years it would boost the solar installs while the batteries keep going down in price. Within 10 years we can cover all the rooftops with solar. And with the distributed generation and storage we'd probably need less of a grid than we have now, not more.
FWIW uranium is also expected by many to undergo a big surge in price in the next few years with refueling contracts coming due in the US and the growth of nuclear overseas. But the fuel costs for a nuclear plant are a much smaller component compared to other sources, and I am guessing also compared to the battery metals component of the alternate solar/wind/battery/new grid system.
Does this include your vehicles and winter heat?
The 2 recent projects in the US came about because of loan guarantees passed under Obama, a form of subsidy. Both have been miserable financial failures going 2-3x over budget on money and time. One was cancelled after spending $9b on a hole in the ground, the other should be coming online soon.
Given how badly the projects went no utility in their right mind would order a reactor without even more subsidy to remove risk.
There are also other forms of subsidy, notably the $450m per reactor cap on liability. That's a $3b/yr subsidy to the industry.
I recommend watching the two NREL videos on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58EYcYbRKqk
NREL Overview of Floating Offshore Wind
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdKvmwsFGPE
NREL Grand Challenges in the Science of Wind Energy
As for comparing with nuclear for the past two years (2018 2019) capacity factor of nuclear power in France has been around 70% mainly due to maintenance according to RTE (1)
For reference best UK offshore wind farm had 55.3% capacity factor in 2019 and UK offshore wind average capacity factor was 40.6% in 2019 (2)
(1) https://media.rte-france.com/bilan-electrique-2019-2/ 379.5 Twh produced, 63.1 GW installed, 68.7% capacity factor
(2) https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors
Not far from so-called "baseload".
Installed generating capacity is probably down from 2006 too. Electricity usage is flat or declining and old coal power stations have been phased out in CA.
edit: missing space between words.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/watchdog/sdut-san-...
So unless we want to advocate for a mass human die off such that our energy needs have no appreciable footprint, we need to recognize that there will be serious trade-offs and deal with it.
There are certainly some environmental effects, as described at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power#Envir...
But the basic model seems cleaner to me.
- High land use (low energy density). This has both economic and ecological cost/impact. It might be ok in the SW US, but likely unacceptable elsewhere.
- Becomes less effective the further you get from the equator.
- Energy storage is a problem at night time, and also cloudy days.
Fossil and biofuel kills 8,000,000 people/yr from air pollution. Add in climate change and who knows. Meanwhile nuclear power stations have caused Chernobyl and Fukushima, which were devastating locally but have had surprisingly little radiological impact [1,2].
[1] https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html
[2] https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/fukushima.html
The thesis of the recent Michael Moore film "Planet of the Humans" [3] talks about human die-outs and serious trade-offs. I like your perspective of accepting trade-offs. This is very reasonable. Another recent film, Juice [4] is kind of the optimistic mirror of the Moore doco.
[3] Full documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE
[4] Promo: http://juicethemovie.com/
This seems like an intentional omission to go along with the rest of the doc's tone. I suppose making it into a marketing piece for nuclear wouldn't be good branding for Moore, either.
That said it annoyed me that the movie spent a lot of time in Vermont and not once acknowledge that Vermont gets 70% of its electricity from clean nuclear power at the Vermont Yankee plant. And this particular plant is targeted for shutdown by environmental groups for a long time. This contradiction needs to be seriously dealt with and was ignored by the movie.
The movie really basically boiled down to wind/solar is a scam and we can’t possibly think of any other solution (cough nuclear cough) so we need to reduce our use magically and oh I guess somehow tell the rest of the developing world to stop developing. This doesn’t work. It’s not a solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_Yankee_Nuclear_Power_P...
Low-carbon, non-combustion sources (wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, nuclear, tidal) are the only way to go.
Not using the biomass results in methane, which is estimated to be 86 times worse (as a greenhouse gas compared to CO2 alone) for our atmosphere than CO2 alone.
* we don’t build them at scale (takes too long to build one, require much engineering efforts to build each, complex permits to build each etc)
* opposition from locals/governments increase delays/risks and thus capital cost
* its cheaper to train/hire engineers/maintenance workers/construction workers when reactors are the same
Nuclear will be much cheaper when we start building many of them.
Cannot find the source now, I recall S Korea built each next power plant faster than the previous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_South_Korea
The three last nuclear reactors have taken up to double the time of the previous ones between construction start and producing power. The last one took ten years, instead of mostly 5 years for the previous ones.
It seems the only good to go about it is to educate people so that they can understand why their standard of living will be forcefully taken from them so that their children can live better lives.
Climate change is the worst punishment caused by individualism, even worse than inequality. I'm still staying optimistic, but in the end I think that carbon reductions will reduce the average standard of living of all humans on earth, and that's the most worrying fact, in my view.