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Comment by matthewmacleod | Hacker News Reader

Problem is that you don’t get to opt out of the “human bullshit”. Nuclear power comes with a massive and unavoidable cost from these matters.

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Those costs are negligible compared to climate change.

Fukushima every 5 years for next 1000 years, or gradually leaking long term nuclear waste, are several orders of magnitude less harmful for humanity or life on earth than climate change.

But investing in wind, solar and storage would be much cheaper still. The fukushima cleanup effort has cost close to $100 billion. Imagine where we could take renewable and energy storag tech with that level of investment.

How do you know that the storage investment will produce something viable? Investments still have risk and nuclear can fill that hole.

It's true that there's always risk involved. As we know, that is true for nuclear as much as any other energy technology.

My view on this is that we are not particularly far away from this being viable even with 2020 technology. And that this is especially true if we are creative in how we apply technology, for example by decentralising the grid and installing storage capacity in people's homes, and by being aggressive with load shifting to reduce the storage capacity required. And there are dozens of promising new energy storage technologies. It seems unlikely that none of them pan out. I thus consider the risk of going all-in on renewables fairly low.

Sure, but the stakes are human existence on the planet. I don't know why you would turn away from solutions we already have with boundable risk.

Because I consider the renewables solution to have comparably bounded risk.

It's still not clear what basis you're bounding that risk on—it seems like optimism that one of the investments would pay off. I would strongly prefer pessimism in this case!

Just looked up some numbers from Wikipedia:

"Japan had 282 GW of total installed electricity generating capacity in 2010"

"A 2010 study by the Japanese government (pre-Fukushima disaster), called the Energy White Paper,[citation needed] concluded the cost for kilowatt hour was ¥49 for solar, ¥10 to ¥14 for wind, and ¥5 or ¥6 for nuclear power.

Masayoshi Son, an advocate for renewable energy, however, has pointed out that the government estimates for nuclear power did not include the costs for reprocessing the fuel or disaster insurance liability. Son estimated that if these costs were included, the cost of nuclear power was about the same as wind power.[49][50][51]

More recently, the cost of solar in Japan has decreased to between ¥13.1/kWh to ¥21.3/kWh (on average, ¥15.3/kWh, or $0.142/kWh).[52] "

And:

"Photovoltaic prices have fallen from $76.67 per watt in 1977 to nearly $0.102 per watt in October 2019, for multi crystalline silicon solar cells and module price to $0.21 per watt."

so ~10W/$ for photovoltaic gives 1TW for $100 billion, about four times larger than the 2010 installed energy generation capacity.

realistically there will be more costs than just the panels.

10 years ago? It's 2020, wind/solar have dropped by significant percentages every year since then.

Wind/solar are cheaper (LCOE) than everything except natural gas, which it is on parity with right now, and shortly will pass even for installed generation (meaning it will be worth it for electric companies to invest in replacing the natural gas generators)

Yes renewables have gotten cheaper but nuclear isn't outlandishly expensive either.

If it doesn't match expectations and the price doesn't significantly drop further from today (seems unlikely), going nuclear would be a good decision. If renewable continues to drop, we have a bit more expensive power depending on the percentage of nuclear to renewable power. However, if we don't build nuclear, I'm really not sure how much CO2 we're adding to the air and how many more people had to die from pollution before we managed to build enough renewables. If it's ballpark reasonable I don't see that we can afford to wait.

> However, if we don't build nuclear, I'm really not sure how much CO2 we're adding to the air and how many more people had to die from pollution before we managed to build enough renewables

To me the achilles heel in this scheme is how long it takes to build a new nuclear power station. This article [0] says that modern nuclear plants are planned to be built in 5 years (this assumes no time overruns which have been common in practice in recent years). I'm not convinced that nuclear will still be relevant in 5-10 years times once it's actually been built.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...

I'm aware of the building time unfortunately (10-15 years iirc, seems to match what you wrote), but yeah I'm still expecting it'll be helpful to at least plan for a third, maybe half the power to come from nuclear plants. It's not as if we are likely to be using less energy than today, and on top of that we need a tenfold amount as we use today to replace the petajoules currently coming from oil (e.g. for transportation, I don't know the exact uses, just that NL in 2014 used 10x more kWh or mtoe than we produce+import in electrical power).

Looking at how much renewable power we managed to build in the past ten years, we need to ramp it up massively, while at the same time we just did the low hanging fruit in terms of where to build. A video I watched a few days ago mentioned that Germany had been debating over laws regarding the placement of wind turbines. Germany, the big country (to me), where there is still a lot of nature and space (compared to where I'm from, the Netherlands, here I can find a big forest not far from home and housing is also cheaper due to lower demand for the space). Apparently they were debating over a 1000 meter minimum distance between dwellings and a wind turbine for noise reasons, but that would apparently already have left nearly no space. Now it's 300 meters but some states have higher distance requirements and so you see few turbines there. It's a real pickle...

I'm a very enthusiastic LFTR stan that wondered why we weren't full on into Thorium reactor research at the beginning of the Obama administration.

But wind/solar have just changed the face of energy generation.

I agree that in theory, nuclear can provide cheap and plentiful energy in a large number of applications. But in practice it has not, and the regulatory structures and entrenched interests (fuel rod reprocessor companies, US military wanting weapons grade isotopes, NIMBY) simply make it really really hard to do a new reactor.

I think small scale reactors that fit in a shipping container or pallet box is what should be pursued. A "disposable" reactor that can simply be sent back for recycling is the way to go.

As someone else has noted, a new nuclear project is a five year lead time. Look at the improvement curves in solar/wind EROEI / LCOE. Five years will be another annualized 10-20% savings in panels / rotors / batteries. Nuclear won't be able to compete.

When the main curves for solar / wind finally stabilize, then nuclear can probably target something that might be competitive.

Investing nuclear, wind, solar and storage is be cheaper than leaving nuclear out.

Nuclear has it's place in the mix.

Whereas with lovely coal and oil we get to ignore the problem. It's just smoke until... Catastrophic climate feedback loops, mass extinction, hundreds of millions of climate migrants escaping uninhabitable parts of earth, coral and shellfish disappear in acidic oceans, entire ecosystems collapse and etc etc. But nuclear had costs. Sure. But we could at least begin to calculate those costs.

Why does the answer always reply with coal and oil instead of Renewables and storage?

If you’re German for one, then it’s justified, because Merkel has been shutting down nuclear plants which forced a switch back to more coal.

Then why isn't the argument that Germany should build more solar and wind generation? Nuclear plants take decades from start to finish - if they even finish in the West. Vs months to a few years for many renewable projects.

Because the plants are finished and working. They just shut them down.

Nuclear plants have a lifetime of 30ish years. Many are getting shutdown now because the first wave of builds was around 30-50 years ago. The risks of continuing to operate older designs gets higher if they're refurbished.

Sure, but newer designs were shut down too. I used to live basically next to one. It was in construction for years, very close to completion when Fukushima happened. It was definitely not a rational reaction to cancel that thing.

Becayse germany has been very rapidly ramping up wind and solar, and still they are struggling to replace the reactors. They have made no progress in decarbonising the grid because rhey've been replacing one zero-carbon source with another zero carbon source, instead of removing coal.

Germany has cut coal use in half since the wind-down of the nuclear fleet began. Please do not repeat misinformation.

And they would have cut it to zero by now if they left nuclear plants alone.

That is factully incorrect. Even if Germany had left nuclear on a level of 1995 and replaced aging plants with new plants of the same capcity the net nuclear output combined with renewables would not be enough to offset coal/gas/oil. See https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromerzeugung

This graph seems to show that coal would have been gone by now.

What I getting wrong?

That’s misinformation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany

You can clearly see how coal is on the rise shortly after 2010. So it is factually true to say they switched back to coal. You would be correct to point out that coal use has gone down since, but not by half. Not even close.

Let’s use German industry data[1]

    Fuel        2010  2019  (TWH)
    Lignite    145.9 113.9
    Hard Coal  117.0  57.3
    Nuclear    140.6  75.1
    Renewables 105.2 244.3
    Natural Gas 89.3  91.0

That’s as of 9 months ago. Since Lignite generation dropped 22% in 2019 alone, and Anthracite 30%, we can expect it is even lower today. I make it about 35% by the 2010-2019 numbers, so true, not 50%, but it does in no way support any kind of statement that “coal use has gone up”. Just the opposite.

[1] https://ag-energiebilanzen.de/index.php?article_id=29&fileNa...

Your numbers also show that coal use went up by several TWh shortly after the Energiewende. I'll concur that the numbers improved much faster than I would have expected based on what I had in mind from previous years. But they still went up.

Anyone who describes the Energiewende nuclear draw down as having caused coal consumption to rise is propagating misinformation.

While there may be some small, tightly qualified way in which the statement can be twisted to be true the impression that is conveyed is one that is in conflict with the facts.

Misinformation often uses small truths to tell larger lies.

> Anyone who describes the Energiewende nuclear draw down as having caused coal consumption to rise is propagating misinformation.

Anyone who does that would be factually correct, as proven by your own numbers. And this accusation is especially ironic coming from someone who made a factually incorrect statement.

> there may be some small, tightly qualified way in which the statement can be twisted to be true

It was true for several years and for several TWh. It's not at all fair to call that "twisted and tightly qualified".

If you don't think so, note that from 2010 until now, the length of time in which coal use was elevated is about the same as the length of time where it decreased. So if my statement is twisted and tightly qualified, then so is your statement that coal use has been reduced by 35%. Not to mention your initial claim that it's been cut in half.

> the impression that is conveyed is one that is in conflict with the facts.

Since you insist, I'll amend my statement: getting out of nuclear forced an increase in coal use for several years.

But the main point remains untouched. From a climate standpoint, Germany would've been strictly better off with nuclear.

Because you cannot simply replace conventional rotational generators with inverters. The inertia of the turbomachinery smooths out fluctuations in the grid keeping it stable. Lots of details in [0].

So without lots of hydro or synchronous wind generation, there will always been a need for some kind of conventional generation to keep the grid stable.

0. https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/2019/10/25/grid-inertia...

I'm no expert, but I did find this[1] recent (May 2020) information posted by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Lab that indicates that non-inverted power sources (such as solar and wind) may be able to produce synthetic current frequency in order to maintain grid stability. This technology can be included within large-scale storage batteries.

In addition, these inertial techniques ('fast frequency response') are digital and as a result could provide lower-latency and higher-accuracy response compared to mechanical approaches.

If I understand that correctly, then eventually these approaches could phase out the need for rotational inertia (no pun intended).

[1] - https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2020/inertia-and-the-power...

Edit: adding a useful quote from the linked report, below:

"In the United States, the Texas grid (the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT) is the smallest of three main grids. ERCOT’s relatively small size, combined with its large wind deployment, has required it to compensate for declining inertia by adopting several low-cost solutions, including allowing fast-responding noncritical loads to respond to changes in frequency. This has enabled ERCOT to achieve increasingly high instantaneous wind penetrations—reaching a record of 58% in 2019—while maintaining reliability."

If you're building a grid-scale battery storage system, isn't it a relatively straightforward engineering problem to emulate the inertia of a flywheel?

I would be much more concerned about batteries' ability to respond on the days/weeks/months scale than the milliseconds scale.

What challenges do you foresee in responding over days/weeks/months?

The challenge is just having enough raw capacity to meet demand using intermittent renewable sources. Weather varies on the scale of days/weeks, and winter is cold because of limited sunlight. What energy source will we use to stay warm all winter?

Make hydrogen, store it underground, and have enough combustion turbines available to back up the grid. A simple cycle combustion turbine power plant is about 5% of the cost of a nuclear power plant, per unit of power output.

That seems physically plausible, though it would be a lot easier if we could make methane efficiently, because we already have the infrastructure to transport and burn it.

The problem then is where do you get the carbon to make the methane. Ammonia might be a possibility, if it can be kept from escaping (toxic) or dissolving in underground water.

Yet another possibility is underground storage of high temperature heat, artificial geothermal, if you will. But it would have to be extractable with cheap equipment. Perhaps it could be used to superheat hydrogen for injection into those combustion turbines.

Making hydrogen via electrolysis is very lossy though.. it's only worth it if you have nothing else to burn the power on.

Or if you need a chemical energy store with very low $/kWh of storage capacity, for long term or rarely used storage. There, the efficiency penalty is much less important than it would be for rapidly cycling diurnal storage.

For the last 40 years, that has been the actual alternative.

Can you imagine where we'd be if we had continued pursuing the nuclear future? A largely decarbonized grid, advanced reactor designs deployed, knock-on effects from plentiful power, etc. What would the CO2 levels look like now? But no, instead we're now at a crisis point...

Because we need truly fantastic levels of storage to make renewables even remotely feasible. The US has 8 seconds of battery storage, and ~4 minutes of hydroelectric storage. We need 12 hours of storage to get to 80% renewable generation, and 3 weeks of storage to get to 100% renewable generation [1]. And even if we did go this route, we'd still need to cover 3-5% of the landmass of the Earth with solar panels to achieve this.

1. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora....

There have been many studies since 2018 that say areas where they previously thought it would be difficult to get to 80%, that would be perfectly feasible to get to 100% with near term technologies. See Austrailian grid analysis. The key difference is that the prices for both renewables and storage are far ahead of cost reduction estimates in previous forcasts.

Australia has vast tracts of cheap land and very good solar potential (close to equator, little cloud cover). They also have energy usage patterns that are amenable to solar, with ACs run during the day and little need for heating at night. Most countries do not share these characteristics.

And I'd still like to see what they have planned for energy storage. It likely still involves shifting demand (in other words, they can't actually fulfill demand and they have to tell people not to use electricity during certain times of day).

That seems to have improved greatly in a years time. The speed with which renewable sources come one line I think is surprising everyone.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/08/31/renewables-improve-re...

Because nobody has put forth any workable plan to provide the storage capacity needed to rely on solar or wind.

Nobody said otherwise. What point are you trying to make?

Massive compared to what, though? Chernobyl was a catastrophe, but it's also like just a month of driving deaths here in america, or a couple coal plants just doing their thing. None of these are even on the same amount of destruction that climate change will wreak, up to and including possible extinction, something scarier even than a nuclear holocaust. Perhaps you might articulate what the risk you're alluding to is?

Cost is massive indeed, but even in extreme cases like in Chernobyl, it will be offset to non-existence compared to the gains we will reap in the long run if we master this technology.

Remember, that nuclear is still in its early stages. Newer and better designs emerge and we're even still researching fusion.

Early cars were like a death sentence in Texas. But that didn't stop engineers from improving and making them better. What if they said after the first crash - "Screw it, back to horses and carts, this stuff is too dangerous."

Does it, though? A large portion can definitely be avoided with design and technology. Chernobyl happened because it was a positive feedback loop, in the West it was an obsolete design even before it was built. And Fukushima was quite literally acts of god (in the actuarial sense.)

As an equal analogy - why can't we design our way out of governments having lots of "human bullshit" problems? If you can answer that question, you solve a much bigger problem than energy.

Yes, it does. Humans lie and cheat and steal and misrepresent. Contractors use inappropriate materials or cut corners. Regulators demand unreasonable operational constraints because of political pressure. Insurers demand unaffordable costs. Protestors fight construction because of unfounded fears. Political stasis prevents sensible waste management strategies. And so on.

I absolutely think it would be possible to build a safe future on nuclear power - in an ideal world. But the world is very very far from ideal; the impression I get is that that effort which would be required to actually deliver a modern nuclear strategy is unattainable.

It doesn't matter if you have a new design if you don't deploy it. The Fukushima plant was older than the Chernobyl plant. One could have simply decided to replace it with a newer design. In hindsight if Japan's government didn't have to pay for the Fukushima cleanup they could have done more sensible things, like update the entire nuclear fleet. It certainly would have been cheaper to tear all nuclear plants in Japan down and build new ones when you look at the cost overruns at Fukushima.

You do. US Navy had zero nuclear accidents so far, simply because one Hyman Rickover was able to convince the government that safety overrides everything else.

Unlike the Air Force which accidentally flew two nukes to the wrong state :). But that’s not nuclear power so I suppose you are correct.

And dropped a couple on Spain for good measure.

> US Navy had zero nuclear accidents so far

and here we go again....

"coal energy destroyed zero inhabitable planetary biospheres so far"

Um, are you sure about that? I can think of at least two.

I assume that you're referring to USS Thresher and Scorpion. These weren't nuclear accidents.

> These weren't nuclear accidents.

Of course they were, unless we assume that those nuclear plants were lost on purpose and not accidentally

Anything related with the destruction of a damned nuclear submarine that is lost somewhere in the sea bottom is a nuclear accident, by definition.

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