Why is this plant shutting down? Not because of some sort of hate of nuclear technology, as many would have us believe.
No, the real reason this plant is shutting down is because, like every other thermal generation plant, extending its lifetime past the original license means complying with environmental impact laws on waste heat. Once-through waste heat systems are no longer legal [1]. So why not just build a waste heat system and keep it running? Because when the utility tried to come up with one, the cost of the cooling system alone ran into the billions of dollars!
Much better to just by a few billion dollars worth of batteries and site them on location. At current costs, today, $1B gets you 5GWh at 1.25GW, roughly. The very cheapest estimate for a cooling system was $7B and they ran to over $10B for a new cooling system [2]. So even without the inevitable cost overruns, one could purchase 35-50GWh and 9-12GW of batteries.
A 40GWh/10GW battery would be a far better grid asset for California, and massive increase reliability far beyond what Diablo Canyon could ever produce.
When the mere cooling system for nuclear is more expensive than a better battery, the technology is dead, dead, dead. We don't need it and we have better alternatives.
[1] https://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/environment/article...
[2] https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/ocean/c...
Can't or won't?
In the UK, at Wylfa, it's more "won't", Hitachi just refused to go forward with a new build, since it couldn't find external investors despite very generous guaranteed pricing for its energy.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-54158091
At least, it appears to be "won't", because who knows if a construction project that was started would ever be finished.
If the new nuclear startups come through, everything has changed. But the new small ones they are designing are not really anything like the nuclear reactors of yore, so we have to wait and see if they pan out on costs. And in the decades they need to come online, storage and solar and wind keep halving in price every few years.
But at the moment, pretend you're Jeff Bezos and want to buy $50B of nuclear reactors, however much that ends up in practice. Who do you go to? Toshiba, Hitachi? No. EDF? Hell no. Maybe South Korea? But they had their recent corruption scandal for inspections of nuclear plants. Rosatom? Feel like getting into bed with Putin? What's left of the industry?
UK is a world leader in finding particularly sadomasochistic ways of financing critical infrastructure. This is like the PFI debacle all over again. Interest rates are at zero, the government should take out the cheque book and finance the plant directly. You can absolutely just buy a reactor and they are being built in China at record pace.
Private investment contributes nothing of value to this type of project, because spesification, location, and everything else was already decided
It only accrues extra cost because of higher interest rates avaliable to private investors and risk hedging. All the current government is trying to do, is keep the cost of the powerplants off the book, and hiding it from the national debt.
It's not actually the cost - it's the politics of it, and all the very ugly surrounding externalities.
The reason, of course, is that nuclear is not very buildable, and nobody is willing to make a bet, even with very high returns.
If private investors would rather invest in offshore wind, or storage, why should the UK government be less wise with its money?
If the UK is going to take on billion debt for energy infrastructure (an excellent idea in my opinion that would benefit the UK greatly!) it should invest in more sound and reliable sources of energy like renewables, that have a proven track record of being built on time and in budget. And technologies where we learn when we build so that next year's project is even cheaper.
Look at electricitymap.org and compare the emissions of Germany (50% renewables) with France (70% nuclear). Germany is 7 times dirtier in its electricity sector.
I don’t understand why people keep repeating that non-sense that renewables reduce emissions at large scale, they don’t.
And building NPPs fast is no problem, look at China and Russia. Heck, Japan used to build new plants in just about three years.
Yes, most grids still rely on non renewable resources. But that is simply a relic of the fact that they were built that way. The existing examples prove it's possible.
>We estimate that GHG emissions from reservoir water surfaces account for 0.8 (0.5–1.2) Pg CO2 equivalents per year, with the majority of this forcing due to CH4.
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/66/11/949/275427...
That's between 2% and 3% of our global greenhouse gas emissions. About three quarters of greenhouse gas emissions come from energy production and about 15% of all energy production is hydro power if I recall correctly.
It's much better than fossil fuels, but not quite clean.
There are no countries running on wind/solar, which is the only renewable technology that can actually run everywhere.
Certainly the examples I have given are those that have the easiest path to renewables. It is entirely logical that they would be the first to transition. But it proves that it's possible.
If the backup is run infrequently enough then that becomes a non-issue. I can definitely forsee a future where the fossil backup is only used once a decade in particularly abnormal weather conditions.
There has been some research into this topic, but we're not there yet. First, the connectedness of e.g. EU grid is not that high. Second, it's a very political subject in a way (everyone wants to be energy independent on its own, without needing to import too much). Finally, IMO Europe is not that big to be sustainable on its own regardless of weather (which is often similar on large part of continent).
We’d need less “dirty” backups if we invested more in batteries.
Germany emissions don't come from the 50% renewables, they come from burning 50% coal. I'm not sure why you are blaming renewables for those coal emissions.
France is currently at 23% renewables:
https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/FR
Will you blame their current emissions on renewables? No because if you click on the "emissions" tab you'll see that it's almost all coming from gas, and second highest source of emissions are nuclear.
Does nuclear always require a fossil fuel backup? No, of course not, so there's no need to make up false rules about other sources. Wind reserves can come from hydro, geographically distant wind (offshore is running at insanely high capacity factors these day), batteries as we start to deploy them, and yes even from existing nuclear plants.
But having built nuclear many years ago, and Russia and China building some now, doesn't mean that France or Germany or the US will be successful when they try to build. However, the one thing they have been successful at is building more wind. I hope they lean into their strengths, instead of betting everything on something they have repeatedly failed at.
Germany coal percentage in electricity production in 2020 is 21% and 66% of electricity generation is 0 carbon (renewable + nuclear). Coal part in total production is decreasing year over year.
Of course Germany is using other country to import when wind is not blowing, but at the scale of a continent we can see that most west European countries can go soon to an almost 0% carbon electricity production.
I will say this: Europe has been decreasing its carbon emissions by replacing fossil fuels with renewables. Renewables reduce carbon emissions everywhere that they replace fossil fuels. This is just physics.
They should contract EDF to build it for a fixed price, job done.
In the US most contested have been for a fixed price, it's just that nobody meets that fixed price nor the schedule. And since nuclear front-loads 50 years of generation prices into the construction, Amy delay at all I'm starting service is a financial disaster.
The tech, research and regulations are '40 years old' stuck in an old era.
The 'existential risks' from Nuclear are partly fallout but that can mostly be managed.
It's really 1) waste and 2) proliferation.
The waste ... might possible to be dealt with. We can re-process and turn waste into something that can reasonably sit somewhere safe for '100K years' - that sounds like a challenge but I think it's possible.
Proliferation is the real problem. Nuclear requires 'very responsible systems' from top to bottom. Advanced nations, with transparency and oversight and scrutiny, can handle it.
But as soon as US, Canada, France starts building reactors, then Chile, Ecuador, Afghanistan will want to as well, and who is going to stop them?
Then it's only a 'small bribe' from 'very bad actors' getting a hold of nuclear material, enough to build a bomb, or much easier, just a dirty bomb, enough to very easily do some very bad damaage.
I can see contamination being released in NYC, which maybe only makes a few people ill, another few thousands with 'somewhat unsafe exposure' - but which requires evacuation of Manhatten and 200 years of 'no go zone'. This is the real risk.
So the UN, West, China, Russia would have to all perfectly align on 'the rules' and be very serious about enforcing them.
Because it's political, I don't see it happening. Russia has tons of Fuel they want to sell to Kazhakstan, a civil war breaks out there, baddies get ahold of a reactor, and 'somewhere someone takes a bribe' and some bad materials slip out the back.
We can definitely save the world with nuclear, we just have to act responsibly on a collective level. Not sure if we can, sadly.
It could definitely be used for a dirty bomb, which could, if nothing else, cause significant economic damage from the fear of radiation.
France currently recycles their spent fuel. They put the remaining good nuclear fuel back in their reactors in the form of MOX fuel and immobilize the remaining waste in vitrified borosilicate glass.
The US had a recycling program featuring the use of advanced fast reactors (which have not been deployed on any major scale yet) that was shut down because it created Plutonium, which could be used to make a nuclear weapon. Were some plutonium diverted in the recycling process, a non-nuclear entity could be one step close to building a bomb. However, under programs such as the (now stalled) GNEP [wikipedia], where only countries who already have nuclear weapons recycle, proliferation-free waste recycling can exist. Since the many of the largest energy users are already nuclear weapons states, a massive expansion of nuclear could be done there with no additional proliferation concerns whatsoever.
If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 39.5 grams. That’s the weight of seven U. S. quarters of waste, per year! A detailed description of this result can be found here. If we got all our electricity from coal and natural gas, expect to have over 10,000 kilograms of CO2/yr attributed to each person, not to mention other poisonous emissions directly to the biosphere (based on EIA emissions data).
If you want raw numbers: in 2018, there were just over 80,000 metric tonnes of high-level waste in the USA. Between 1971 and 2018, nuclear reactors in the USA generated 3000 GW-years of electricity to make this waste.
For comparison, in 2007 alone the US burned 948,000,000 metric tonnes of coal. This means that coal plants made 32 times more waste every single day than the US nuclear fleet has made in the past 45 years! Granted, coal made a higher fraction of the country’s electricity, but the numbers are still crazy impressive for nuclear."
Source: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
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Interesting: "2018 Nobel Prize for Physics-winner Gérard Mourou has proposed using Chirped pulse amplification to generate high-energy and low-duration laser pulses to transmute highly radioactive material (contained in a target) to significantly reduce its half-life, from thousands of years to only a few minutes."
---
I do not think nuclear waste and proliferation are a problem. Consider ITER, for example:
"Fusion reactors, unlike fission reactors, produce no high activity/long life radioactive waste. The "burnt" fuel in a fusion reactor is helium, an inert gas. Activation produced in the material surfaces by the fast neutrons will produce waste that is classified as very low, low, or medium activity waste. All waste materials (such as components removed by remote handling during operation) will be treated, packaged, and stored on site."
"Because the half-life of most radioisotopes contained in this waste is lower than ten years, within 100 years the radioactivity of the materials will have diminished in such a significant way that the materials can be recycled for use in other fusion plants. This timetable of 100 years could possibly be reduced for future devices through the continued development of 'low activation' materials, which is an important part of fusion research and development today."
Or to put it briefly: "No long-lived radioactive waste: Nuclear fusion reactors produce no high activity, long-lived nuclear waste. The activation of components in a fusion reactor is low enough for the materials to be recycled or reused within 100 years.".
Proliferation: "Limited risk of proliferation: Fusion doesn't employ fissile materials like uranium and plutonium. (Radioactive tritium is neither a fissile nor a fissionable material.) There are no enriched materials in a fusion reactor like ITER that could be exploited to make nuclear weapons."
Source: https://www.iter.org/mach/safety and https://www.iter.org/sci/Fusion
---
To repeat: waste is not much of an issue CURRENTLY, and in the future we will have ITER and the like, i.e. fusion reactors instead of fission reactors that solve the nuclear waste and the proliferation problem. It is sad how many people are misinformed about nuclear (other comments). There is no higher electricity consumption without nuclear, like... just forget about it. But then again, the future, that is fusion reactors, are pretty damn great. Just check out the last link in this comment.
This is purely a debt to the future generations, and as such we are very easily blue to take them, because we will not be around when it needs to be payed. If we ever realistically counted that stuff in nuclear would be completely and utterly unaffordable.
Sure thing, we could develope ways of reducing the half life time of the waste, building better and greater storage facilities that manage to stay functional 25 times longer than the pyramides, find newer cleaner ways of using the limited nuclear resources we have, etc.
This factor alone makes me unsure this really is the best way to generate energy. One thing many don't realise is that reducing production emissions alone doesn't cut it. We have to use less as well. Eat less meat, based on the methane the cows fart alone. All in all buy and produce less stuff. Which in turn would break capitalism, which we realistically won't carry through even if it would mean extinction.
Let's play with the sliders: https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org Most people are way to optimistic about this. Technology alone will not safe us here.
Deforestation to make way for livestock, along with methane emissions from cows and fertilizer use, creates as much greenhouse gas emissions as all the world’s cars, trucks and airplanes combined.
The fertilizer has to be used for the life stocks food. If you eat 1 kJ of meat vs 1 kJ of the soy that is produced to feed it, there is less water usage [1], less CO2 emissions [2], less land usage etc.
If anything a move away from meat would help earth to accommodate more people. And that is only meat. What if you are able to buy one product that lasts a decade vs 10 that last a year?
This kind of "use the resources more efficiently"-stuff is what I mean when I say reduce consumption.
And that should by the way not be the task for individuals to tackle, we need higher standards when it comes to efficient resource usage, quality and lifetime of products, etc. This is not something that will be solved fast enough by consumers and their wallets.
Of course energy and transportation is a factor as well in all of this. If we don't want to move our planet into " lol maybe we go extinct"-territory, we will have to reduce individual transport and expand public transport and use renewable or otherwise more efficient means of converting energy.
The thing is: doing it later means we would have to do even harder changes. If we all started tackling this 4 decades ago we could have gone with a smooth, gradual change. Now even instantaneous change would be only amount to damage limitation.
The Greenlandic ice is over the tipping point. We cannot unmelt it. And heating 0°C ice to 0°C water takes the same amount of energy as it takes to heat 0°C water to 80°C water. This means thermally speaking our breaks are still working, but they will stop working any moment and we cannot stop them from loosing their function anymore.
The last year of reading up on climate science really made me realize that things are far worse than I thought they were.
[1] The waterfootprint of beef vs soy is nearly 15 times bigger: https://research.utwente.nl/en/publications/the-water-footpr...
[2] For CO2 it might be even worse: https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat
One NPP replaces millions of solar panels with a 90% capacity factor while solar has a 10-20% capacity factor.
How is that “obsolete”?
When building something new that lasts decades, and the current examples that have already paid off their capital costs are shutting down because fuel and maintenance alone is more expensive than newer tech, that is pretty much the definition of obsolete.
In India, the reason for coal and nuclear is that it's easier for local officials to take bribes. Not sure what the story is in China, as they are far more strict with the corruption penalties there. I suspect that it's mostly that there are old long term plans that haven't been updated for today's reality, a reality where renewables and storage got cheaper than even the most optimistic predictions.
See my recent comment here where you'll find 50 power reactors currently under construction in 15 countries.
Though I'll grant whether any of it turns out to be money wisely invested, either financially or environmentally, is a different matter.
Firstly, the evidence is that the Chinese are excellent at manufacturing and will likely be churning out high quality nuclear reactors.
Secondly, high quality energy production is a bad topic for nationalism. The West decided not to pursue nuclear decades ago. But it remains the most technically excellent form of energy production and we should be grateful that there are still nations in the world pushing technology and engineering forward. It isn't like there are a lot of choices; the obvious options the world has right now are either Chinese nuclear or Chinese solar.
But the answer is won't.
I submit to you that the economics and historical precedent are utterly irrelevant.
It's a simple choice: build more nuclear power plants..... or face extinction
https://spectra.mhi.com/hydrogen-and-salt-domes-are-winning-...
A single cavity in that salt dome can store 150 GWh of energy, and there's room for 100 cavities.
I think we will be making lots of hydrogen for decarbonization of industrial processes, and maybe even for aviation or shipping, so as long as we can dump electrons to Utah and find the water, this sounds great.
There are lots and lots of other salt formations, both in the US and in the world. Also, aquifers and exhausted oil and gas fields can be used to store hydrogen.
The political environment being such that nobody wants to build them is the definition of won't not can't.
Unless there is strong support from government, Nuclear Plants can’t happen.
I’m really putting a lot of hope in the next generation of mini self contained nuclear plants. I think Bill Gate is also looking into that. These have the potential to be successful both for the planet (get rid of gas turbines for peak demand when renewables fail) but also economically (easier cheaper to build).
And that culture needed to change not now, but a while ago. If the whole world fully stopped emitting CO2 today, the latency till we could measure the first effect on climate would be roughly 13 years.
Most people I know are way too optimistic about what it takes to deal with this. A good way to get a feeling is to play with the sliders of this model here: https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org
Edit: this is btw. not something that I am happy with. Like at all. It stresses me out to think about it. People down voting a post that simply states the scientific consensus on that topic doesn't make it any better to be honest.
I was doing some research and practically all the sites in use today were built in the 1970s...
I think if you want to bring up a nuclear success story, Canada would be far better. Their CANDU has been really successful, and they haven't yet tried to build a new generation of reactors so they haven't yet failed.
The old reactors are the things nuclear advocates dismiss and say modern designs are better than on issues like safety and other concerns.
So the technology that looked good, theoretically, in 1970 may not have the same outlook in 2020.
In particular, France's failing attempt is the EPR. There have been construction starts at three sites, and all have been massive off schedule. For the three not in China, they have been massively over budget. The build in China was the third to be started, but is the only one completed; planned construction time was 48 months, but it ended up taking twice as long. I don't know how to judge the pricing of construction in China, but if the Western world could do it in 8 years and at the stated cost of $7.5B, it would be a fantastic deal.
What has changed since the last time? I don't know. Maybe different sorts of people go into the same jobs. Maybe executive culture is to blame. Maybe engineering culture is to blame. Maybe procurement and construction is to blame. Nobody has provided a solid explanation of X, Y, and Z with concrete examples.
Some will say regulations are different and the cause, but at the same time nobody says that these are unnecessary regulations, or that there's a smarter path that would make them cheap, it's always just vague accusations without any specific call to action.
Why would we remove a common sense environmental regulation, when we can build cheaper better things that have less environmental damage? Why the obsession with nuclear, at any cost? What is the benefit and gain when we have cheaper better alternatives?
What was considered "cheap" in the 1980s is no longer the cheapest option. We have better, cheaper technologies.
And on top of that the US can no longer build big things. We don't have construction management competence.
No we can't. The plans are to build nuclear plants that do exactly no environmental or social damage. Solar/wind/etc can't possibly compete to that standard. Try reliably isolating solar panel waste from the biosphere for even a century and see how much it costs. The figures would be too absurd to consider, which is why nobody is suggesting it.
I'd be happy to go with the cheapest thing if everything was to the same standard; but solar seems to getting a free pass that nuclear isn't, because people care about having to evacuate an area but have no fear of heavy metals poisoning. For reasons that continue to baffle the rationalists.
I'm not sure if you're serious with post. "No" environmental damage, when we have to mine uranium, iron ore, and massive amounts of concrete? Yet somehow they "waste" of old solar panels is hazardous to the biosphere and impossible to separate? Nuclear waste is far more hazardous and we don't seem to have much problem isolating that in France.
And then you say that solar is getting a free pass, when you invent issues for solar that are far more difficult for nuclear to handle?
How is this rational in any way?
If you include the mining that tips the scale even further in the favour of nuclear. A renewables-first strategy use substantially more iron ore and concrete and many more rare-earth metals (which are typically mined in China last time I checked, because they are environmentally damaging to produce). Less uranium with renewables, for obvious reasons, but you can power a country with a very small uranium mine. And again, uranium mines are typically held to higher standards than other mines because they are so small and relatively easy to manage.
> ... Nuclear waste is far more hazardous and we don't seem to have much problem isolating that in France. ...
You seem to be inching towards enlightenment. Keep following that thought.
> you invent issues for solar that are far more difficult for nuclear to handle?
https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/6/21/are-we-...
I care about the environment when it is convenient. Nuclear remains hands-down the most environmentally friendly option. The only defence renewables have against it is economics (which is a compelling case, I must admit).
Renewables need fossile backup plants.
Go on electricitymap.org and see how Germany has among the highest emissions in the electricity sector in Europe despite 50% renewables in their electricity mix.
China and Russia are building new reactors faster and faster because in these countries nuclear never had a strong political opposition.
Of course the plans should be a lot more rigorous.
And then of course prices would go up. But cost overruns would go down.
Also, the fact that "the West" has stopped its building boom led to the construction industry atrophying. There is no efficiency, because there's no scale.
Also the mechanical safety standards are way stricter now, so you can't really just take an old design and add digital bus automation. You need more redundant safety systems, corium catcher and stuff. Not so easy.
It’s not a design problem, it’s a bureaucratic problem.
Is China planning any more EPRs? I can't find any evidence of them.
I would agree that it's a bureaucratic problem, but it's a bureaucratic problem of the construction industries in all Western nations. And nobody can even figure out what exactly the problem is, or how to change it.
The West just forgot how to build large projects.
Well, they've built them.
Even unsafe nuclear plants (at least historically) are higher frequency of still-rare but potentially-catastrophic failures, not regular failures that are likely to be obvious after a handful of years of a small number of reactors being in operation, its far from clear that they do so safely. (And, since neither of these regimes favors transparency, its not like you can easily externally analytically assess likely safety, either, and even the economics before considering safety may be less clear than they superficially seem.)
But, yes, getting things done that some currently-in-power faction would prefer is more complicatdd in systems in which the dominant faction is constrained by competing power bases rather than free to run roughshod over them. Though that's not something that has recently changed, its always been true, and those constraints have been a feature of the West for centuries, and most people in the West consider it a feature, not a bug; what is new in regard to nuclear power since the 1950s is that there are both more alternatives and more understanding that it has risks at all.
But man, I'd love a tap into that industrial quantity supply of "waste" heat piped just to my backyard. I'd heat my pool in the cold months, run my spa and sauna all the time, and use it to run an absorption chiller the rest of the time. And of course skim some for my hot water heater.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00119...
[2] https://www.buildinggreen.com/news-article/capturing-and-dis...
As far as district heating goes though, it could be an absolutely fantastic way to solve the fuel oil problem in the north east; if we could store heat generated in the summer underground in large stores for clusters of houses, it could provide a great way to heat all through winter with simple heat pumps.
France: 50 Grams CO2 per kWh
Germany: 400 Grams CO2 per kWh
Germany invested 500 billion Euros for its renewable program the past 20 years.
Flamanville 3 will probably cost 19 billion alone and won’t start regularly generating electricity by at least 2023 with construction having started in 2007.
The argument is "we could have avoided an apparently existential threat at any time with this tech, and there is evidence what we're actually doing won't avoid the thread" and the response is "nuclear isn't free". There is a mighty disconnect here somewhere.
You should check out the recently approved in the US nuclear reactor by NuScale[1]. It is what everyone has been waiting for. A small (60MW electrical output) reactor built in a factory and shipped to the power plant site. This could be a real game changer.
They had to spend $500 million on just paperwork to get it approved, but they did it.
But they haven't built anything yet. It's fairly easy to design something and show that it's safe. The AP1000 got approval, but the designs turned out to be too difficult to build, with the builders saying that some parts of the design were "unconstructable", resulting them in building their own design instead, which then had to get reapproved.
NuScale's bet is that factory-based construction will drive down the construction cost to the level that it compensates for the lack of scale that the larger reactors' teams used as justification for going really big.
Now, that said, the whole problem is that of scale. There's no real money in building nuclear power plants. It's basically a few fanatics doing it at new and old companies.
If the US would announce a 2T USD new plant budget, there would be competition.
And even then, probably we would need to build a few very similar plants to have some sort of efficient design.
Also, you have to charge those batteries from somewhere...
I see the current solar panels generating tons of waste. Along with plastic this is terrible. Why are we so bad at building biodegradeable things?
France emits only 1/7 of the emissions of Germany in its electricity sector.
Reducing emissions with nuclear works extremely well and saves lives:
> https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/kharecha_02/
Oh, and plants can run well beyond 40 years:
> https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/whats-lifespan-nuclear-re...
You're ignoring the other 50% to make broad general claims about the first 50% not helping? That's not correct, on many levels. Moreover 'has in the mix' doesn't equal 'produces locally' so for all we know Germany is just importing all of it, and producing locally only using gas and coal. Which it isn't. tldr; you might have a point, but its way more nuanced than what you're presenting here (without evidence)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_...
> https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/whats-lifespan-nuclear-re...
It's supported by the official 2020 Democratic Party platform: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbryce/2020/08/23/after-48...
Renewables (as well as storage) have reduced in cost (and continue to reduce in cost) much faster than has been expected by groups like the EIA.gov. While I fully support nuclear of all sorts, it's likely not to have a massive impact beyond the ~19% of electricity it provides today. It just takes too long to build, and proving a new design that'd be faster to build would also take a while, so it'd be supplemental to the energy transition, not the primary power source.
This is much different from 20 years ago when even wind power was still much more expensive than it is today, when off-shore wind was an expensive science project, when solar was literally over 10x (EDIT: more like 20x) the price as well as battery storage. At that point, yeah, I would've agreed nuclear was our only option for a rapid transition.
France produces 50 grams of CO2 for every kWh, Germany 400 grams.
If Germany hadn’t shutdown 11 nuclear power plants since 2011, emissions in the electricity sector would now be 50% to 70% lower.
That's the thing where you're very likely wrong, as you ignore the political situation where all of this happened. Germany had a huge boost in renewables for a couple of years after Fukushima, which politically was closely tied to the (hugely popular) nuclear phaseout. This wouldn't have happened otherwise.
The alternative to the nuclear phaseout in Germany realistically would've been having no nuclear phaseout and much less ambition with renewables. Given that the German renewable energy program basically brought down solar prices for the world this would've very unlikely be a win even if you only look at CO2. The alternative of "Germany could've shut down coal earlier, keep nuclear longer and still have a massive development of renewables" is only theory, as that option was never politically on the table.
> Plus, the spent fuel has no place to go, it stays on site in concrete casks, potentially forever.
Great! Seriously, there are zero problems with that.
'In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards.' [0]
[0] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
If by “regulated to death”, you mean, “heavily subsidized and granted special liability regimes to reduce individual operator risk exposure”, that would be true.
Nuclear power plants are money printing machines, not money pits.
This is a point on which nuclear advocates and the nuclear industry disagree.
I wonder which understands the economics of the situation better?
You can’t breath money.
How much have carbon emissions cost individuals in the form of negative health outcomes? Diablo Canyon cost 14b in 2019 dollars to build and has been producing carbon free energy for half a century. The state's total spending in 2017 -- State and federal funds -- was $256b.
The fuel could go to Yucca, or it could to go to Finland, which regularly takes nuclear waste. Or it could stay where it is just fine.
Did you just wake up from a coma?
Nothing will go to Yucca Mountain because it isn't operational. Obama terminated funding in 2011. Trump has opposed reactivating the project and Congress hasn't funded it. This isn't surprising considering Nevada doesn't want to be America's nuclear waste dumping ground. There is strong opposition from its residents, including Native Americans, and state government.
Finland doesn't take nuclear waste. It used to ship its waste to Russia (and the Soviet Union) for reprocessing. That stopped in 1996 due to legislation in 1994 that mandated domestic long term storage.
>Or it could stay where it is just fine.
Ah, not a coma, just stupidity.
Let's pretend that this is unequivocally true. Sometimes doing things for public health and safety costs money. It seems like the main question we should ask is "would switching to nuclear significantly save lives and improve the environment?". Most research says yes.
See e.g.:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
And since that's the case, then we can ask a new question: "Does your 'money pit' statement account for the benefits of reduced mortality and greenhouse emissions, or are you only thinking about the electric bill?"
I don't have to pretend, it is true. Not a single nuclear plant in the United States has opened on time and on budget. Not a single one. In the 1950s, nuclear power was heralded as the cheapest electricity possible, so cheap that it would be almost free. Electricity generated from nuclear is about four times more expensive than solar and wind.
>Does your 'money pit' statement account for the benefits of reduced mortality and greenhouse emissions, or are you only thinking about the electric bill?
I don't live in fantasy land, somebody has to pay for it. I am already on the hook for PG&E's misdeeds.
Having tens of nuclear graveyards, especially close to population centers is not a good idea when California is covered with active faults. Nuclear needs water and lots of it. Perhaps you are not familiar with California.
Well, I hear that the air force has so much extra money sitting around that they are working on yet another fighter jet. Maybe we could dig in the military industrial couch cushions a bit. "Somebody has to pay for it" is not the same as "we can't afford it". We absolutely could afford it.
> Having tens of nuclear graveyards, especially close to population centers is not a good idea when California is covered with active faults.
Given that California currently gets a third of its power from entirely outside of the state, clearly it's possible to build them not directly on top of the fault lines.
Looking at a map, it seems California is right beside a fairly large body of water, the Pacific Ocean. Maybe you could place your thermal power plants by the coast rather than smack in the middle of Death Valley? Perhaps not coincidentally, both Diablo Canyon and San Onofre nuclear power plants are sited right beside the ocean, and use(d) ocean water for cooling.
Perhaps you should look at a fault map of California. Diablo, the only nuclear plant still operating, sits on an active fault that wasn't discovered until 2008. Not surprising, many new faults have been discovered recently. The Hollywood Fault was mapped in 2014 and many buildings in Los Angeles sit on it. Zoning was changed because of that discovery.
The coast of California is eroding through a combination of rising seas and sediment reduction. In 2010, an entire city block in Pacifica was red tagged because it was close to falling into the ocean. Many asked, why were these buildings allowed that close to the cliff? Well, in 1962 they were about fifty feet away.
Perhaps you should do some reading on the California Coastal Commission. The consensus is we need to retreat from the coast.
Let us imagine we can build magic nuclear plants. Where are we going to build them? Not Southern California. Well, maybe Camp Pendleton or Vandenberg, but that is federal land and they would be operated by the military. Maybe we can sneak one in the top of the northern coast near Oregon.
Says the person who was not aware California is right beside the biggest body of water on the planet.
> Perhaps you should look at a fault map of California. Diablo, the only nuclear plant still operating, sits on an active fault that wasn't discovered until 2008. Not surprising, many new faults have been discovered recently. The Hollywood Fault was mapped in 2014 and many buildings in Los Angeles sit on it. Zoning was changed because of that discovery.
Great. So when/if California builds a new nuclear plant, they can use the new information and not place it on top of a fault line. And earthquake-proof it as well, just to be sure.
> The coast of California is eroding through a combination of rising seas and sediment reduction. In 2010, an entire city block in Pacifica was red tagged because it was close to falling into the ocean. Many asked, why were these buildings allowed that close to the cliff? Well, in 1962 they were about fifty feet away.
How is that relevant wrt to siting a nuclear plant? Fifty feet in 50 years. So build the plant 500 feet away and make a tunnel for the cooling water.
> Perhaps you should do some reading on the California Coastal Commission. The consensus is we need to retreat from the coast.
If so, the incremental cost to build thermal power plants with dry cooling is not even a rounding error compared to the cost of moving cities with millions of inhabitants.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
Does that cost comparison include the storage required to use the solar and wind at night, during dark winter days, etc?
Nuclear plants are highly economic, at least outside the US. Every plant in Germany so far has already financed itself.
For an existing plant, what are the marginal costs and benefits of keeping it running?
Your child comment: > Electricity generated from nuclear is about four times more expensive than solar and wind.
Again, you are badly mixing arguments about sunk costs versus marginal costs.
Since it was built in 1968, two faults were discovered, one a few miles offshore and another less than a mile inland. PG&E made structural changes to the plant in 1981. In 2011, PG&E told the NRC to hold the twenty year renewal permit until the company could do a seismic study in wake of the Fukushima disaster because coastal California suffers from both earthquakes and tsunamis. PG&E determined it was too expensive to continue to operate the plant and it could not take on the liability if a Fukushima type disaster happened at Diablo.
IMO the biggest problem with nuclear is the cost and time to construct. I don't think the energy industry would be so keen to shut them down if they were cost effective.
The nice thing about Nuclear is that it's boringly reliable. You buy a 500MW nuclear power plant, you're getting ~500MW from that maybe 80-90% of the time. Own a half dozen of those (3GW nameplate capacity) and you can have 2GW or more pretty much always.
You buy 3GW of solar panels obviously they don't do anything for a big portion of every day because the sun is on the far side of the planet, so then either you're also buying a lot of storage and more panels, or you don't have a replacement for the nuke plant.
Now, if you have 3GW of molten salt concentrated solar maybe you can hit that 80-90% reliability on the individual units and replace the nuke plant, but do Nevada and Arizona have any of those today? Are they expected to build a California nuke plant's worth any time soon?
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/how-can-tucson-electric-get...
Since then, the public bidding processes in Nevada and Colorado have revealed many more projects at similar costs. Since utility planning is typically on a five year timeline, bids are expected to be at the cost of storage at the time of delivery, and since the cost of storage is falling 20% per year, outsiders think that these projects are taking future cost drops into account. But if a three year old project is so affordable, anything delivered in the next six months will be pretty equivalent.
Maybe if sodium proves out then batteries will be acceptable. Right now, though, we don't have a viable technology that serves the purpose.
We don't need any big leaps in battery tech, just the current learning curve will serve us wonderfully.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/the-story-of-che...
As for environmental damage, I've never ever heard that strip mining is essential for any battery component. Could you clarify? Neither is child labor necessary.
Current grid storage has warranties longer than a decade of daily cycling. Fire suppression is greatly improving.
All the hurdles are easily surmountable. Certainly far more easily surmountable than the difficulty of building new nuclear. There are clear and easy paths for all of batteries, and we are going to be building TWh of them for cars anyway, so we may as well clean that up then use the same industrial process for grid storage.
You are seriously underestimated the required capacity to just store electricity for one day in an industrial country.
There is a reason why Germany is massively build new gas plants and building a second pipeline to Russia (Nordstream 2).
Since I did not estimate the amount of energy to store for a day, I don't know why you think I underestimated it. If you think we will turn off all generation for an entire day, ignoring solar and wind and hydro resources, and just run off batteries for no good reason, I'm not sure why you would think that.
What is the real resin that Germany is building gas plants? And how do they justify new gas plants, economically, in this day and age? They will be stranded assets in a few years, so it sounds like corruption or ignorance. Surely the economics can't be so different there than what exists in this Rocky Mountain Institute analysis of US costs, where we have super cheap gas?
> We find that the natural gas bridge is likely already behind us, and that continued investment in announced gas projects risks creating tens of billions of dollars in stranded costs by the mid-2030s, when new gas plants and pipelines will rapidly become uneconomic as clean energy costs continue to fall.
https://rmi.org/a-bridge-backward-the-risky-economics-of-new...
The only large storage systems are hydro storage and even those don’t have enough capacity to store energy for more than a few hours.
In Germany, all hydro storage plants combined can supply Germany with electricity for one hour at night before they’re empty (40 GWh).
As battery prices fall, entirely new markets open up. Right now batteries beat the cost of natural gas peaker plants. In Arizona, where solar is so cheap, batteries are becoming economical for correcting the duck curve in the evening.
Germany has plenty of wind overnight.
It's not like an entire country's grid will ever be powered by a single source of energy, so I'm not sure what the point of comparing hydro capacity to total energy consumption is.
South Australia would like to have a word with you.
The primary purpose of that Tesla battery is to manage short-term discrepancies, it can do 200MW power output for ten minutes without problems and that's enough time for relatively slow standby systems to spin up.
To give a comparison hydro storage systems of 10GWh (almost two orders of magnitude more) are totally a thing. Why didn't Australia buy one of those? Well the problem is geography, the hydro storage needs a mountain because what it's really storing is gravitational potential energy, and er, that bit of Australia is a bit flat.
You might as well just issue bonds and invest money directly.
With civil service employees, management overhead costs are usually way lower. Corporate management usually gets overpaid.
Deals like this one are unacceptable because they are a Frankenstein monster - state guarantees profit, so the state bears all the risk. The normal market mechanisms don't work, inefficiencies and wastefulness is not punished, but profits are still private. It encourages the worst possible behaviour.
Where that doesn’t happen and regulation doesn’t exist, utilities will happily operate a 100 year old depreciated coal plant forever.
It's almost a truism at this point, to say that a look large infrastructure project is going to go over time and over budget. But when nuclear is in the picture, this seems to be wheeled out like its somehow a fault of nuclear alone.
There is plenty of energy in renewables that is far cheaper and safer than nuclear.
Diablo Canyon is over 50 years old. It's not considered a particularly safe design. Stretching a few more years out of it isn't going to make a significant impact, certainly not relative to the auto regulation under discussion.
I mean, look, sure. I "support" extending Diablo Canyon in principle. But that takes a ton of money, and I'd like to see numbers showing that isn't better spent on a bunch of wind farms.