Good news for the climate and the environment!
It's incorrect to say that countries never go all in on one energy source. Norway generates almost all of it's electricity from hydroelectricity. Iceland generates the overwhelming majority from geothermal. And France generates the lion's share of it's electricity from nuclear power. The last of these three is geographically independent.
Sure, Norway and Iceland probably don't have to build a single nuclear plant. Nor would some states like Vermont and Washington that have extensive hydroelectric generation. But other geographies can only make do with fossil fuels. Intermittent sources can mitigate this, but we'll always need a solution to fill in the duck curve until we either make a breakthrough in energy storage or some other carbon free form of energy. But we already have another form of carbon free energy, and one that is already working for other countries.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/germany-gree...
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-renewables-recor...
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/10/29/solar-other-renewable...
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/...
If land cost ever did become significant globally for renewables then renewables will have already slaughtered the competition, by being cheaper by a huge factor.
If you build enough nuclear power to fill the gap in the duck curve without storage, and remove fossil fuels, you're basically running entirely nuclear and hydro, and mostly nuclear. You end up building almost double the amount of capacity that you actually use, because you need e.g. 100GW for the peak load in the evening but only 50GW for twelve hours overnight.
That doesn't seem likely to be cheaper than using storage for only the differential load in the evening. But once you have storage there isn't any good reason not to use cheap solar for the daytime load differential, and to provide the energy to charge the storage for later in the day.
If storage does become cheap and available, then renewables could be cheaper depending on the price of land and capacity factor of the energy sources. But that's a question of if. We have nowhere near the amount of storage required and no solid plan for reaching the required scale. So it's a matter of burning fossil fuels until we're able to build out orders of magnitude more energy storage.
Nuclear fans just have no economic sense. It is all about nuclear no matter the cost.
It's true that nuclear doesn't make economic sense relative to running a gas plant and using solar when you can. You can get a greater immediate carbon reduction by spending the cost if a nuclear plant on supplementing fossil fuels with nuclear. But that'll only go so far. Once you outstrip demand during peak generation hours, you're effectively getting less energy for the same capacity. It doesn't provide a path to decarbonization without storing large amounts if energy - much larger than what we'll be able to store for decades at least.
The Finnish Olkiluoto plant might go on line in 2022 and then it would have had a 22-year development time. Starting such a project today this would mean it finishes around 2040. And this was planned with "conventional" nuclear technology and knowing well all the difficulties such a construction entails. That would perhaps be in time to power a kind of cold house museum to show our children how Earth has been looking before runaway climate change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...
Proposing new technology which is sure to run longer smells to me a lot like to suggest doing nothing in order to avoid change that is both absolutely urgent, and totally possible now.
Oddly, this is the exact sort of behavior I sometimes see with the advocates for renewables.
Cost should always be a consideration, but when people conveniently ignore some costs and focus on others, it does a disservice to the goal of decarbonizing the grid.
The levelized cost for residential rooftop solar is at least as high as nuclear, but that cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates. The cost for renewables + storage is at least the cost of nuclear, but that cost also doesn't matter to some advocates. (If grid storage was cheap, we would have built it decades ago.)
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Some advocates recommend massively overbuilding solar or wind to deal with seasonal differences. This is obviously a cost multiplier but that doesn't seem to matter to some advocates.
Advocates also describe how we will rebuild the electrical grid to move vast amounts of solar or wind power across the USA. This will not be cheap or easy. Even the relatively small proposed Tres Amos SuperStation hasn’t been completed yet. This cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates.
Advocates for renewables seem happy with relying on natural gas peaker plants to get around the costs of building grid storage, but methane is a very potent GHG in the short term and there are lots of methane losses in its capture and distribution. No one seriously thinks that natural gas is a long term answer to climate change.
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. In that case - great! But... what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. If you were forced to choose, would you prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?
Other projections have the economy basically decarbonizing (without needing nuclear) at a CO2 tax of just $200/ton.
There's a good reason Exelon is tryin to spin off all its NPPs.
Where did they say that?
“The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.
I don't think we really know what a fair CO2 tax should be since it is hard to say what are the long term societal costs of an extra ton of CO2 in the atmosphere. (Though we will likely find out in the next 50 years.)
I am not sure the amount of subsidies that are given to wind, but the rationale for the CO2 tax idea seems to come from that:
>...Crane blamed the regulators of wholesale power markets for failing to give credit to nuclear generators for the social benefits of their carbon-free output. He and other executives say that it’s unfair to not provide nuclear generators a subsidy comparable to the tax credit that wind turbine operators receive for every kilowatt-hour of electricity they produce.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China#History
That is a different discussion. France built France built over 50 reactors in about 15 years, so obviously a rapid buildup could be done if that ends up being the best option, but that is worthy of its own discussion.
My point was that there are advocates who only talk about the cost of nuclear power compared to say the low cost of solar electricity from solar cells in Arizona at noon. If we are going to only rely on wind/solar there are a lot of unknowns about how long term grid storage could work or the costs of over building of wind/solar that might have to be done, etc etc. Yea that all might just work out, but if it doesn't is it better to suffer an existential threat from climate change or use nuclear power? If people are opposed to nuclear power no matter the consequences, then they should just say that.
I think Bill Gates has the right approach here - he is investing in grid storage technologies AND investing in advanced nuclear plant designs.
There's this weird myth of "either or" here. People are treating money, labor, and materials as if they are these static things. This isn't a video game where if you need more pylons you just buy them. In reality we only have so many experts in a field at a time. We can't just solve fusion faster by throwing more money at it. There are diminishing returns after a point. So you use this money elsewhere. This weird myth of "either or" really comes down to thinking that everyone is stupid and "I'm an expert" (the "It's so simple, you just..."). I find this odd on a site full of tech nerds who have to frequently deal with these types of logistical issues and laymen making wildly naive conjectures.
This is why most plans for renewables are contingent on orders-of-magnitude improvements in energy storage. Or continued use of fossil fuels. Because if you use nuclear to fill in the duck curve, then there's no reason to build out other sources of energy.
If so, the renewable advocate should argue based on cost. Nuclear is very likely going to lose that argument, ultimately spurious arguments about energy density or intermittency notwithstanding.
Consumer rooftop solar might be the most highly subsidized form of power in the world, so yes it might be cost-effective for the people getting the subsidies - but that doesn't mean it is not expensive.
Rooftop grid-connected solar is a way to get the reliability benefit of being on the grid without having to pay your fair share of the cost of providing that reliability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Virginia_earthquake
The US east coast faces a tsunami risk from undersea avalanches on the edge of the continental shelf:
https://www.livescience.com/24813-east-coast-tsunamis.html
"An offshore earthquake of magnitude 4.5 or above could cause submarine avalanches and create dangerous tsunamis with waves higher than 26 feet (8 meters), [...] Underwater canyons and bays could focus these waves and make them even bigger."
"A 7.2-magnitude earthquake off the southern coast of Newfoundland in 1929 caused a large underwater landslide, creating a large wave that rushed ashore and killed 28 people on the island, ten Brink said. The waves were up to 26 feet high until some reached narrow inlets, where they grew to 43 feet (13 m), he said."
> An offshore earthquake of magnitude 4.5 or above could cause submarine avalanches and create dangerous tsunamis with waves higher than 26 feet
Turbidity currents occur on the regular without earthquakes and rarely result in substantial waves. They have been observed to happen due to earthquakes, but this is a rare event. The Grand Banks quake is the only known earthquake to have done this, and as you pointed out it was an earthquake with a much larger magnitude.
In the grand scheme of things, turbidity events don't significantly impact the overall risk of tsunamis. The tsunami risk overwhelmingly comes from the earthquakes themselves, not the turbidity events they may trigger.
Like Tsunamis.
Do you know where Flamanville is situated? Right next to the Atlantic ocean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
Why is "geographical independency" desirable here?
We ditched the concept of self-sufficiency long ago for almost every other product. Your iPhone was not built here. Your banana was not grown here. The corn might have been grown half a country away. The drugs you might have been prescribed were maybe not produced in your country at all. Why would energy be so different in that regard? (#)
Intermittency is much easier solved geographically than temporally. Move energy instead of trying to store it for local use later. Self-sufficiency was necessary in medieval times because it was impossible to move large amounts of things fast and easy. We solved this problem and famines went away as well. Any famine you hear about today is not caused by logistics or unavailability of food in general but by political or societal problems.
High-voltage direct current (HVDC) power transmission also exists. China has power lines that can transfer gigawatts over distances of thousands of kilometers. Today.
Losses of HVDC are roughly 3% per 1000km by the way, so it is not even that half of the energy is lost in the process.
(#) It actually is different in the regard that effects of lost or cut power (the latter in case of talking about a conflict) are more immediate than they are for most physical products. The latter are usually to some degree in transit or storage so production issues are not immediately felt. It feels like this problem can be solved by even more interconnectedness of power grids. (In Europe, more than a TW (Terawatt)of power sources and consumers are connected to the same grid already, even though a relatively low fraction of this power can be moved over larger distances at the moment.)
The examples you provided here really don't illustrate your point well because most of them are easily shipped across the ocean which is not at all true for energy.
A better counterargument would the suspicious number of wars, invasions and military bases involved in cross-country energy exchanges (ie, there is a lot of fighting over oil in the middle east). It seems remarkably foolish to source energy from territory controlled by a foreign military.
The SARS-NCoV-2 epidemic showed how brittle the worldwide supply chains really are. China is a production powerhouse, producing all kinds of everything, and everyone and their neighbour wants to produce in China, but unfortunately this had created a single point of failure. Once the virus stopped things in China, the disruption cascaded along the supply chain networks; demand existed but production was stopped.
Resiliency in supply chains won't happen through adding massive inventories to handle a months long disruption, instead it will happen by moving some of the production away from Asia back to USA, Europe, Great Britain, and so on.
Naturally bananas and corn won't get this treatment, but technological goods will.
I think there are good reasons to be bullish about battery storage. It is already an area of massive research. It is something we need to scale anyway due to electric cars. And it is very easy to deploy to the existing grid. You just need a concrete pad, some power gear, and a substation.
Being optimistic about nuclear does not mean we cannot be optimistic about batter storage.
I only need to look at how long my laptop lasts compared to 15 years ago.
That's not my issue. My issue is that we currently have working nuclear technology. That we can build and deploy now. Bullish means we're relying on future inventions. With the potential catastrophe we have ahead of us I don't think it is a good idea to put all our eggs in one basket. It may not pan out. It may not pan out in the timeframe we need it to. Nuclear is a relatively cheap risk reduction strategy. Be bullish on battery, but have a backup because in the mean time we're still using coal/oil/gas.
I dont doubt that we can build nuclear plants. But right now the number of nations that can actually pull it off is small. Changing that would require new tech, modularisation, mass production etc. That is great and we should do that. But will it happen quickly?
Well nuclear needs water, not a very strong constraint I agree but one nevertheless.
In France when it gets too hot they have to stop the nuclear plants since by environnement regulations they cannot pump out too hot water in the river.
By now offshore wind is still behind in capacity factor compared to nuclear but it's closer and closer.
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
2x nuclear plants with 50% capacity factor due to planned maintenance can work fine, one covers the other.
2x solar panels with 50% capacity factor due to night is a problem, because now something else is needed to deal with night-time power.
The disparity between peak energy load and minimal energy load is only ~25%. Excess energy is an easy problem to solve. Nuclear power plants' thermal output is largely fixed, but their electrical output can be modulated by more aggressive cooling. Basically, deliberately produce more waste heat. If this nuclear plant is on the coast it can use this waste heat for desalination - the waste heat gives you freshwater as a bonus.
But the same solution also makes solar interesting again when it's used in combination, because you can store heat from nuclear during the times when solar is generating and then use it during the times when it isn't.
If you remove fossil fuels, you have to replace them with something. You're building new power plants. New nuclear power plants could straightforwardly be built with thermal storage.
Nuclear plants definitely could use thermal storage, but the main advantage is of nuclear over renewables is that they have consistent energy production and thus don't need storage in the first place. It doesn't suffer from the duck curve like solar, or weather-dependent intermittency like wind. Nuclear doesn't need storage to become viable, as France has demonstrated for decades.
For one, it needs a cool river with lots of water available for cooling. Which with climate change is, even in the UK, becoming less ubiquitous than it was so far.
This is the worst argument I've ever read for renewables.
With renewable and storage, you need to build at the very least 7 times the capacity. Maybe as much as 40 times the capacity. Because of the low load factor, the fact that it's pretty common to have a full week without wind or without sun, etc.
Also, wave energy converters like Pelamis are an exciting technology, precisely because they harvest wind energy decoupled in space and time. It is a great opportunity for Scotland, the coast of France and Spain, Japan, Scandinavia and so on. Not totally technologically mature but shown to be viable using 400kW plants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3-SXFtPYe0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slawyq4PXxE
This is so fantastic. Makes my heart jump.
Our daily routines are so synchronized that we see these massives peaks everywhere. Not only in energy consumption but also in road use (congestion), commuting services (packed subway cars) or in super markets (low fraction of total available checkouts needed during most times of the day because their number was dimensioned for peak times). I'm sure you can find other examples if you think about it.
Flattening the demand over time by allowing to spread out daily routines (by not requiring or forbidding certain opening hours or office hours for example) so our infrastructure would not need to be dimensioned for these outsized peaks would be addressing the actual underlying issue. Building nuclear plants and more streets might be an easier task as the other would require personal and societal change ... and people are creatures of habit (which is something we should never underestimate).
If you remember the pro-nuclear argument at that time, hold on, it was "electricity from nuclear energy will be so cheap, it will be useless to install a meter in privates homes".
That was simply a statement from the head of the AEC at a meeting with science writers along with a lot of other bold statements about the future:
>...It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age.
>...A later survey found dozens of statements from the period that suggested it was widely believed that nuclear energy would be more expensive than coal, at least in the foreseeable future.[6] James Ramey, who would later become the AEC Commissioner, noted: "Nobody took Strauss' statement very seriously
I mentioned I'm skeptical, but I'm genuinely asking, because I've never seen anyone ask about it.
Large scale electricity storage other than hydro power doesn’t exist and is extremely unlikely to materialize anytime in the near future.
Some advocates of renewables argue that “Power2Gas” is an option but they completely underestimate the amount of energy large countries need to store.
In Germany, for example, the daily electricity consumption is 1600 GWh. Converting that into methane would require to produce 3.5 million gas trucks filled with methane - for just a day.
And Germany’s current total hydro capacity is about 40 GWh, so only 1/40 of what we need of storage for a single day.
I don’t see a future for 100% renewables other than for small countries like Norway, Austria or Iceland who have lots of mountains for hydro power but only a fraction of the population of Germany or even the US.
Using 2030 projections, nuclear loses.
(and that model doesn't take into account addressing intermittency with transmission or dispatchable demand, such as end-user thermal storage.)
As you imply here, it is not cheaper now, and plan something on hopes that it will be seems not very prudent.
Past performance is not indicative of future one.
We don't know what technical and engineering problems will surface when building battery packs orders of magnitude bigger than current biggest ones.
Investors are used to operating under uncertainty and placing their bets. The market, which reflects the combined input of all those investors, seems to think NPPs are not a good bet.
The technical issues of storage are unique to particular kinds of storage. There are many different kinds being pushed. Are you saying ALL of them are going to fail? That's a bold position, especially as cheap renewables make the environment more and more lucrative for anyone who can provide better storage technology. We're talking many trillions of dollars here, and the economic incentives will only get stronger as duck curves and CO2 taxes increase.
How many homes could you insulate for even a tenth of the cost of this project?
There are around 4 milion UK homes using electric storage heaters or ancient oil heating systems for starters.
Office blocks waste vast amounts of electricity on heating and cooling that could be reduced through tougher building regulations.
We aren't doing anything that nature doesn't do on its own.
Worst case, you dilute it back down to ore levels and bury it in the ground. Take care to avoid the water table, and it's exactly as dangerous as a lot of the stuff that's already in the ground.
You could put all the nuclear waste the US has ever produced on one football field stacked 3 stories high.
Roughly 83,000 metric tons.
Meanwhile we produce over 50 million tons of electronic waste that is full of nasty heavy metals that can, and do, leech into the environment causing wide spread destruction, because instead of storing them in some sort of containment vessel we just dump them on whatever country will take a pittance payment.
Nuclear waste storage is a NIMBY problem, in terms of environmental pollutants you could probably find hog farms that churn out more waste.
Concrete and a train is the usual method.
Nuclear waste isn't some magic death substance. It is hazardous, but so are a lot of other substances that are dealt with in large volumes every day, and again, nuclear waste isn't even that large of a volume!
Meanwhile coal plants pump radioactive particles directly into the air, and communities surrounding coal plants have higher rates of cancer, but people complain less because it is in the air and not in barrels labeled with a scary symbol.
With modern nuclear plant designs, the waste would be even less, and there are even designs for plants that would use existing nuclear waste as fuel.
Nuclear is a technology with trade-offs like anything else. There is no need to dismissing it outright.
To the extent that this is true it's because of anti-scientific FUD. The problem of nuclear waste is utterly insignificant compared to fossil fuel emissions.
Only technocrats know how to build an operate an electricity grid, it isn't commonly held knowledge.
The voting public are not equipped to vote on how to create a reliable, performant and affordable energy grid. It isn't an issue that should be decided by the public's will.
The public can overrule anyone on anything, but on technical issues it is usually wiser to defer to the technocrats.
This isn’t to say there should be no supervision or accountability; more that the elites are called so for a reason (a better word would be “experts”), and that there’s otherwise a risk of micromanagement and all that it entails.
It seems quite reasonable to say that if "the public" want unclean, unsafe, high-carbon energy sources and deny that climate change is a problem, they should be unable to have any input in the same way that someone who wants a tall building that is unsafe can't have one, and someone who wants a car on the road without passing any safety tests can't have one, and someone who wants to provide unsafe medical treatments is not allowed to.
There's no evidence that it can't be. And given that it's pretty safe, pretty stable, and there's not much of it, the burden of proof is VERY much on the small minority of fear mongers to explain something so obviously easy is, in fact, impossible.
I'll bet my life that fewer than 10% of the people who voted Conservative last December had any idea what the manifesto said about nuclear power.
(I don't mean this as a jibe at Tories in particular; my point is just that no-one reads manifestos, and even fewer people bother to learn about the finer details of their party's nuclear policy in an election that's completely dominated by one issue [Brexit])
Can you do better than that? Sure. Leaving it sitting onsite until there's enough will to do reprocessing is probably better.
You can dispose of nuclear waste "safely" by having a (single) Chernobyl style meltdown, continent-wide fallout, and long-term deadzone and still come out ahead of all the coal power plants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reductio...
Also, there are some reactor designs that can burn the waste we currently have, so we could get more energy and less waste.