Nuclear power looks to regain its footing 10 years after Fukushima | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear power looks to regain its footing 10 years after Fukushima

scientificamerican.com

208 pointspseudolus509 comments

I keep thinking discussions are stacked against nuclear unfairly. It's almost as if there are two different arenas to compete: (1) fossil fuels, which is by definition unsexy and ugly, but grandfathered simply because "we need them" now, and (2) everything else, who has to compete against each other on the criteria of "Fine, so we do have fossil fuels, what now?"

For example, in 2019, 80% of US energy consumption was from fossil fuels.[1] Natural gas has actually steadily gained market share.[2] In any objective discussion, this should be considered a massive shortcoming and people should be scrambling to find a better solution.

However, because fossil fuels only compete against themselves in public discourse, it's still considered a victory because gas replaced coal. And one of the reason gas became so popular? Because renewables are rapidly improving but they're still less reliable, so people need an energy source they can rapidly fire up when necessary. Enter gas.

And when people point out that we could be using nuclear instead of gas, they are shut down saying "Ewww, so it's better than fossil fuels, big deal, who cares about that now? Everybody knows fossil fuels are bad!" Nuclear, just by being non-fossil-fuel, is forced to compete in the "cool arena" against renewables, and loses out because it's old, expensive, and has had a series of memorable accidents. All the while these renewable plants are enjoying complementary relationship with gas plants, which is OK, because gas is just gas.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#/m...

> we could be using nuclear instead of gas

Nuclear power plants are best run at full capacity all the time. If you want to replace gas peaker plants with nuclear then you need to build up enough nuclear capacity to replace all other intermittent electricity producers. If you have that capacity then you could as well run them at full power all the time and you'd need nothing else. Nuclear displaces every other power source. Currently Nuclear is factored into the base load because that's the easiest one to produce and we don't have enough nuclear power anyways. Gas on the other hand is the cheapest one to provide power on demand. Therefore if you have limited production capacity the demand for gas plants that are mostly on standby will only go up.

Gas plants are also best run all the time in advanced combined cycle plants. Nuclear often in the US already has backing of very large pumped hydro storage facilities. So no, you don’t need enough nuclear to replace all peakers.

Ignoring the economics for a second, the persepctive in play when someone says "replace gas with nuclear" should be:

1) If solar is deployed, gas/batteries/something has to be deployed as well to deal with nighttime.

2) So the 'replacement' of nuclear is steady power that replaces some solar panels, some gas for a net improvement, technically speaking.

Of course, the main argument against that is whether the economics plays out. I find it humorous that I'm taking the side of technical excellence and the pro-solar people are saying "who cares, lets just follow the economics". There was a decade where those positions were mostly reversed when it was coal v solar.

Also solar is made primarily in China. It's cheap currently but when the inevitable cold war happens with China and the USA those solar panels may not be nearly as cheap or reliably sourced. Sure we can make our own but it would take a decade or more to ramp up.

Nuclear power plants are most profitable when run at full capacity. They have massive sunk costs, but the marginal cost is low. At a grid level you certainly can change output based on demand. But the markets may need to be adjusted to keep them profitable through mechanisms like a capacity market. Or by finding new uses for the power such as making hydrogen.

With peaker plants fuel costs are a factor, but also the cost of the machine. An old fashioned reciprocating engine maybe the cheapest as a last resort that is only used when other peakers are already utilized. Fuel efficiency becomes more important as the plant is more utilized.

The markets already adjust. I work for a company that melts iron in one factory. This uses a ton of energy, but we work with the power company and so we get discounts for only melting iron at night (when power is cheap). I'm pretty sure that we shut down for regular maintenance based on input from the power company (either they are shutdown for maintenance themselves, or they are expecting a big load)

> If you want to replace gas peaker plants with nuclear then you need to build up enough nuclear capacity to replace all other intermittent electricity producers.

Why even build all those intermittent electricity producers in the first place then? It sounds like problem searching for a solution.

Because we have no choice. We ideally need better storage solutions or something like cheaper fission to keep the price of energy down, but we need to avoid a climate disaster even more to keep the price of living down.

>Why even build all those intermittent electricity producers in the first place then?

Because they're the cheapest. All else being equal, you want most of your grid to be dirt-cheap, and the last 10% can be crazy expensive and you'll still end up ahead.

> Why even build all those intermittent electricity producers in the first place then?

Cost a new nuclear power plant in the US: $10,000/kW

Cost a combined cycle gas turbine power plant: $1,000/kW

Cost a simple cycle gas turbine power plant: $400/kW

This run on the assumption that demand is static. Renewables are great at providing cheap energy to consumers that can match their usage when the price is low.

One such use case happen to also be one of the biggest energy consumer, communal heating. If those invested into bigger capacity they could heat the water when prices is low and operate much like a battery for the system at large. The demand for base load would then be reduced and nuclear would have a easier job without displacing the use of cheaper renewables.

Idea: excessive nuclear but we have big datacenters that ramp up power usage during periods of otherwise low usage, and ramp down during peak hours. Ideally shared compute nodes for job batches that can wait up to a day. Plus EV charging can help reduce variance.

> Natural gas has actually steadily gained market share.

Strangely even some environmental groups seem to be pro-gas or at least ambivalent, like how Sierra Club's "whoops, we got caught" response to taking millions of dollars from the oil companies waxes poetic about the need to "look beyond coal, oil, and gas, and focus on clean, efficient energy sources such as wind, solar, and geothermal" but doesn't mention the word "nuclear" anywhere at all: https://sierraclub.typepad.com/michaelbrune/2012/02/the-sier...

I'd expect them to proudly mention nuclear in the past tense considering Sierra Club successfully killed the nuclear generating station that would have supplied me here in the Bay Area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodega_Bay_Nuclear_Power_Plant

To be fair, I don't think the Sierra Club are the only ones who think building a nuclear power plant two miles from the San Andreas Fault isn't a particularly good idea...

The possibility of seismic activity isn't automatically dangerous. I feel confident that if we can engineer skyscrapers to withstand shaking that we can engineer an isolated reactor vessel too, and a reactor shutdown only takes three seconds: https://public-blog.nrc-gateway.gov/2012/12/28/what-is-a-rea...

> one of the reason gas became so popular?

It got cheap and transportable. Gas is hard to transport until liquified, and having that process makes all the difference. Also, fracking - the reason the US has achieved energy independence, and that gas is so cheap.

> series of memorable accidents

well to me, oil spills are just a as memorable and way more frequent...

We don't run many power plants on oil.

Yes you're right, it's only for chemistry which brings its own trouble too (where were those little plastic particles last time I checked ? in my own body :-)). Oh and cars also...

(just making fun of you a bit, your point is good anyway)

There are victims of coal / natural gas pollution and climate change as well, it's just not that spectacular. Nuclear kills when there's unlikely accident, fossil fuels kill when everything goes according to the plan.

In France, where nuclear is 80% of the electricity (we really played big the game of "oh but we care about nuclear tech for civilian use only" while irradiating Tahiti for military testings).

I like nuclear myself: it's a military technology so the more we know as a country the more we'll be able to sell around as consultants, it's much cleaner for the atmosphere when it works (but yeah failures are horrifying), there is hope the waste materials will one day be reused, and it can be switched on or off more easily than solar (at night) or wind (at rest).

But I heard it's very very VERY expensive and barely profitable on output gain alone (but VERY profitable as a military lab I suppose to have all those nuclear tech people), it's hard to argue with someone whose children are born disfigured today because of waste leaks that at least in 200 years we won't all be dead due to fossil fuel abuse, and it's hard to convince a younger, less objective part of the population who jump at "not renewable = not good".

If with 1Kg of antimatter we could generate 200 years of Paris light, maybe we don't care if it's renewable. In fact, renewable just means "very very very long lasting" since the sun is dying and the earth is slowing down anyway :D

You're living in the 70s, modern plants cannot be repurposed for military use and also have no physical way to blow up.

Well the French plants are from the 70s.

That does not change the fact that the French plants were built in part for plutonium production, in the 1970s.

>it's hard to argue with someone whose children are born disfigured today because of waste leaks

Is that actually happening?

No, it is not.

These discussion are always unfair against every power source. Each has different properties that make naïve comparison difficult. In the real world power stations have to exist within an economic, political, and technical ecosystem. If a particular approach is delivering value then the argument is rather mute.

Nuclear power is just unpopular because politicians can’t make money out of it. Due to its inherent risk, nuclear power plants require close government inspection which makes it a bit harder to cheat.

Nuclear only survives when politicians go out of their way to push it.

Nuclear is unpopular because it competes for the same pool of money as gas, oil, solar, wind, etc do and there is no, or a very narrow band, of investors whose priorities align with the benefits nuclear provides.

They need to prioritize environmental friendliness enough to eliminate the fossil fuel options. Then they need to be willing to put in massive sums of money in one shot, without seeing any returns for many years, to even beginning to choose nuclear, and then they need to find a reason why they would pick nuclear over solar/wind in a world which is over 80% fossil fuel so baseload electricity is not even close to being a concern. And if their particular region has baseload energy concerns, they need to choose the long term option of nuclear over the quicker solar/wind + battery option which even if it is slightly more expensive isnt by much.

The only places where nuclear has gone forward are areas where politicians have pushed for it despite it being more expensive than other renewable alternatives. Examples are in the UK, and even there the plants are delayed, and are gonna be more expensive than originally planned even when the original price was already more than competing renewables.

It's true for classical nuclear reactors as far as I can tell.

But in recent years there had been many advances wrt. other kinds of nuclear reactors which often promise less (or even much less) risc, upfront cost, start/stop times and generally smaller size.

This kind of "small" nuclear reactors can have the potential to be in some cases the best choice.

Anyway best would be of politician let this play out fairly by not pushing any specific technology but just pushing "climate-friendly" energy while punishing (separately) both "climate-unfriendly", "environmental-unfriendly" technology. (Nuclear is climate-friendly but environmental or better human unfriendly).

Germany had 46% renewables and 10% gas for electricity production in 2019. The United States have 40% of electricity production from gas.

Renewables have nothing to do with the high use of gas in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...

Don't forget that Germany is part of the same grid or have HVDC links with other European countries such as France (70% nuclear power), Norway (near 100% hydro, not only generation but also storage), and Poland (72% coal), so you you should not take Germany in isolation in such discussions.

The majority of electricity is not imported. Germany is a net exporter of electricity.

The point is: they can rely on their neighbors as a kind of safety net for times when renewables output is not sufficient. And the Norway hydro-storage potential also plays a huge role here, it allows Germany to have less domestic storage and gas peak plants, thus preventing the electricity cost from soaring even higher (which is already the highest in the EU).

Right, that's also the plan. There is also a grid in the North Sea which will be extended, to exchange electricity from the offshore wind production. There will be more lines to Norway. Germany will have their own storage systems in the North, etc.

That's great but there's 84% to go after you have 100% renewable electricity production. At 50% green electricity, that means 92% of energy consumption was generated from fossil fuels on demand.

We (I live in Germany) have more than 92% of the road ahead of us, since we will need to expend more and more effort to find suitable places for all this energy production and storage.

There is no storage to speak of at the moment, which makes sense because Germany isn't even getting close to having a significant portion of its energy generated without emitting carbon.

If we could take a shortcut and generate some 10% with a small amount of land use and variability, that would be a huge win. Cost and the time needed to build are downsides, but from my perspective unavoidable. This will not happen in the next ~2-3 generations (say, a century) because of the ridiculous amount of misinformation about safety being spread in Germany, but other countries don't have that issue so there's still hope to cut corners elsewhere. At best, this is a stop-gap solution, I really don't care if people want to phase out nuclear fission. But then let's do that after we approach 90% renewable energy, not when we approach 90% fossil fuels as Germany currently is doing. We have bigger problems and can't afford to be so picky.

> We (I live in Germany) have more than 92% of the road ahead of us

FTR in 2020, 15% of Germany's primary energy needs came from renewables: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/38...

So it's only 85% of the road ahead of us :).

As for missing space, you do have a point. At some point domestic renewable capacities will be exhausted. However, right now Germany imports most of its energy in various forms. Likely we'll keep importing it in the future, just that it will be generated renewably. Changing to renewables AND becoming fully self sufficient would demand too much I think. Not that there are any uranium mines in Germany either.

I got my stats from Wikipedia (article: Energy in Germany), looks like that's outdated then! Nice to hear :)

Really burying the lede by not mentioning the 15 percent lignite production. That produces about 3 to 4 times the undesirable pollution than natural gas.

Modern gas turbines can be converted to hydrogen or hydrogen/gas blends. The idea is to use gas now then convert to hydrogen when commercial, renewable hydrogen is available. One idea is to use renewables to do hydrolysis and effectively use hydrogen as a battery.

The US energy segment has decreased CO2 emissions in the last decade and switching from coal to gas is a big part of the reason.

Fracking increased the release of methane at the same time, which is a much more potent contributor to global warming.

The switch to natural gas reduced CO2 output but made global warming worse at the same time. It's quite an achievement.

Hydrogen isn't an energy source it's an energy storage mechanism. You create hydrogen from other sources. Most commercially available hydrogen comes from natural gas already. So you're wasting a ton of energy by converting the natural gas to hydrogen and then burning it again. Hydrogen is just another form of battery.

If you convert natural gas to hydrogen, you can sequester the CO2 produced. The hydrogen production facility can operate 24/7, with the hydrogen stored and only being used when necessary. In this way, natural gas could continue to back up renewables (or back up renewables + short term storage) without CO2 emission, at a capital cost per kW far below nuclear plants.

(The same argument applies to "green hydrogen"; which would be chosen would depend on economics.)

Pet peeve: hydrolysis a chemical reaction where water is used to break apart two other things (like, say, amino acids). The use of electricity to break water into hydrogen and oxygen is electrolysis.

>I keep thinking discussions are stacked against nuclear unfairly.

One of the major reasons for that is that there is a misconception that renewables (solar and wind specifically) can actually replace fossil fuels. In other words, that we have better options than nuclear. We're going to lose a few decades before we realize that that won't work.

>I keep thinking discussions are stacked against nuclear unfairly.

Very fairly. Nuclear will always be many times more expensive than equivalent power hydrocarbon powerplant.

It's not because of any manufacturing intricacies, but largely from just the material cost.

It's not possible to "science it out" how to make ultra reliable pressure vessels with less steel, and metalworking, and large industrial building with less cement.

Nuclear reactors are fairly dumb industrial implements, basically very huge, and expensive water boilers.

The biggest advantage of nuclear is very cheap fuel, and fuel logistics. Nuclear fuel is cheaper than even coal. The price of transporting coal also makes not a small part of its cost.

40-50 years, that advantage was what pushed nuclear power to prominence.

Now, the cost of fuel, and its transport is not considered that significant, and nuclear lost this advantage. Costs of some fuels actually went down as extraction scaled up, and itself became cheaper. Transport costs also went down. Power plants got more efficient.

To regain this advantage, nuclear plants need to produce many times more electricity, and heat for their cost.

This is why I was always telling people that scale is what is the real problem for nuclear now. Four, and up to ten+ gigawatt reactors is what will make difference for nuclear.

Delivering 4GW in a single project would certainly set it apart. Perhaps the sweet spot for nuclear is not the traditional 1GW level.

Although that would create a very large single point of failure that would need peakers/batteries/pumped hydro to backup on failure.

An interesting project would be to stick a 5GW reactor in the middle of the North Sea and run export cables to all the surrounding countries. Build near an old oil well for hydrogen storage and include a thermal hydrogen generator.

Yes, a 4GW reactor is certainly not for any country to build for above reasons (shut down a double digit of your generation every time you refuel.) Even moderately industrialised countries will think twice, but it is indeed very logical for top 10 economies.

The biggest problem will be building a containment building this big.

A dilemma it is. Containment building can't do anything about reactor explosion. Either steam explosion from Chernobil like event, or hydrogen explosion is not survivable by containment building of any reactor in service.

And containment building for a reactor this big will be even less useful.

This means abandoning them, and going for Chernobil like no containment building construction.

>hydrogen explosion is not survivable by containment building of any reactor in service

Or you can simply include specialized hydrogen burners like in the modern VVER reactors, which have complied with the post-Fukushima requirements even before the event has happened. Also a Chernobyl-like event is simply impossible on PWR reactors.

> simply impossible on PWR reactors.

Easily possible. I'll give you a few scenarios I came up within just minutes.

Loss of coolant -> drop in reactivity -> overheat of core -> core melts, and falls into puddle of remaining water at the bottom of the reactor -> instant reactivity boost -> boom

Loss of coolant -> drop in reactivity -> overheat of core -> coolant comes back -> water spayed onto hot fuel -> steam flash -> steam-cladding reaction -> boom

I can reply to you with only one thing: please, learn more about modern reactor designs and their safety systems, don't embarrass yourself. Also learn why the Chernobyl event was so nasty and why its impact is significantly bigger compared to Fukushima (hint: graphite moderation).

Now, do us a favour, and tell us how that is not possible.

You are embarrassing yourself here with lack of manners, and constant attacks. Behave yourself.

It's unproductive to discuss such matters with a total layman who didn't bother to do even a basic research, but ok, I will play along.

Let's start from the simplest thing: a Chernobyl-like event is impossible on PWR because they do not use graphite moderators. Simple, right? I could've finished on this, but let me educated you a bit more. Modern reactors have the following safety systems in place (it's not a full list):

- Hydrogen burners (recombiners) mentioned in my previous comment, which significantly reduce amount of hydrogen inside containment.

- Systems for fast automatic Boron injection.

- Heat sink systems designed to work without electricity.

- Passive cooling systems, which are significantly more reliable than the isolation condenser used on Fukushima-1.

- A way of supplying additional coolant externally.

- Core catchers which lead corium from the containment building.

If you know Russian you can read for example this paper [0] from Gidropress (Rosatom subsidiary) to learn more about how modern nuclear reactors handle severe accidents associated with a total loss of electricity. It's about older VVER-1000 reactors, which are a bit less advanced than the newer VVER-1200 and TOI designs, but it should be a good starting point.

[0]: http://www.gidropress.podolsk.ru/files/proceedings/mntk2019/...

> It's unproductive to discuss such matters with a total layman who didn't bother to do even a basic research, but ok, I will play along.

I will play along too. It will be very surprising to me if you are an actual industry insider.

You have not addressed the loss of coolant.

> Let's start from the simplest thing: a Chernobyl-like event is impossible on PWR because they do not use graphite moderators. Simple, right? I could've finished on this, but let me educated you a bit more. Modern reactors have the following safety systems in place (it's not a full list):

Power excursion is very well possible on PWRs during rapid coolant/pressure loss, especially with very fresh, or very old fuel.

Positive scram is possible on PWRs too under condition when rods/poison rapidly reduce coolant temperatures.

Boron injection will not work if your coolant went supercritical.

Catalytic hydrogen recombiners can help with gradual hydrogen release, but would be of no use if you are hit with sudden release.

Passive heat sinks will not do anything if you reactor already lost big part of its coolant. Etc, etc.

What do you do with this power if solar and wind are cheaper? I.e. in a free market, what if buyers prefer wind and solar energy? Do you dump the energy at a loss, go bankrupt leaving investors and banks to write off the cost?

Why would anyone take that risk?

Is there anyone willing to build such a powerplant at fixed cost? (i.e. after x billion euro you either get the plant or your money back)

Obviously, the situation will change if hit the wall with wind and solar. But there are no reliable predictions if or when we would hit a wall.

> What do you do with this power if solar and wind are cheaper?

> Do you dump the energy at a loss

Yes, if you dump energy at loss is still not a total loss, and you still make money if you above water longer than you aren't.

The point of making the reactor that powerful is exactly to get more profit even at super low rates.

That seems unlikely. If, for example, you run at a loss 50% for the time, then you need to have extra expensive rates during the other 50% of the time. Based on typical construction costs of nuclear power plants, those high rates are extremely attractive for competition from wind and solar. Which will reduce the amount of power that can be sold at premium rates, which requires even higher rates to compensate, etc.

Basically, in a free market, nuclear power is competing with power from batteries, hydrogen, and other ways of storing electricity.

This is an extremely unattractive market for nuclear.

No, the solution is building multiple sub 100 MW (NuScale Power and others) and a few sub 500 MW SMRs for major cities (think post VVER 440 designs and Rolls Royce SMRs). Gen VI+ has passive safety requirements that would render a multi GW plant too big and too expensive. Think huge tanks of water, double containment, passive circulation, gravitational safety features and minimal disruption of fisheries and habitats. We need smaller and more modular NPPs with reactor vessels built on an assembly line and QCed, good safety guarantees, minimal staff, minimal operational costs and the ability to regulate the energy output in a wider range.

Building smaller reactors in not as solution to nuclear's cost for many reasons I wrote above.

Economics of small reactors is unsound. A cult like group pushing "small modular reactors" pushes a very likely deliberately miscalculated pricing estimates for them.

Some of the designs seem to have high civil engineering costs. Digging big holes is not exactly a cheap thing to do.

I do not think this is fair. Cost of fossil fuels is largely undervalued: most of the cost (wars and pollution) is not taken into account.

>Nuclear will always be many times more expensive than equivalent power hydrocarbon powerplant.

No, you're behind the times. You're thinking of present nuclear plant technology, and in that you're correct.

Newer plant designs solve most of the issues with construction and management cost, nuclear proliferation, and even reduce the waste that must be stored.

Arguing for greater use of the 1960s technology that's presently in power plants is silly, and no one is really advocating that.

Google "small modular reactors" and read up.

Please tell me how can you make reactor vessels cheaper by making 2 smaller vessels instead of 1 bigger one on current reactor scales. Their math is plainly wrong.

The "small modular reactor" community is a bit of a cult.

Be extra wary of everything they say.

The SMR community does have a lot of hype, but the general idea seems fairly sound. Instead of building huge reactors on site, as basically big one off projects. Instead, mass produce a bunch of smaller modular reactors at a factory. That doesn't seem much different than a modular home vs a custom home to me, with the modular home being way cheaper. But we will see if it actually works.

But for me the biggest issue is, if fighting climate change is so important, why wouldn't we try everything possible? Why do so many people insist on only renewables?

You have smaller logistics costs for smaller reactor, yes... But you don't have reduction in marginal logistics cost per unit of energy produced.

While reactor vessels themselves are most expensive single piece in the nuclear power station, they are not going to save much on them by making them smaller, and they would not get any cheaper from mass manufacturing.

I don't know, the idea that mass manufacturing wouldn't lower the price of something seems kinda ridiculous, you have any examples of a product where mass manufacturing didn't lower the price?

If you said something like "mass manufacturing wont make them cheap enough to be economical", that seems believable, but I'm not sure how you can blanket declare it wont make them any cheaper.

This has been my argument for a long time. Standardize on one of the designs that makes "going critical" is impossible and is "good enough" as power generation and let mass production do its thing. I believe that a lot people who are into "green energy" are also anti-capitalists and think that terms like mass-production are dirty words and tend to ignore history.

> idea that mass manufacturing wouldn't lower the price of something seems kinda ridiculous

The "something" to be manufactured isn't nuclear power plants.

If we made a few 5 MW plants at a certain price but then decided to scale that up and produce huge amounts of 5 MW plants then we could obviously produce those plants at a significantly lower per-unit cost. Everyone agrees. But our goal with electricity isn't to make plants, it's to make watt-hours of electricity.

So what is cheaper? Manufacturing, setting up, operating, and securing 1000 5 MW plants or one 5 GW plant? It seems like the 5 GW one might be cheaper.

>The "something" to be manufactured isn't nuclear power plants.

Wrong, actually. Whenever multiple nuclear plants for submarines in a given class are manufactured, the fact that multiples are being built does lower the cost, although most of that is just from having a complete design to use rather than any kind of mass production. Navy reactors aren't really SMRs since they're also old technology, but they're a good example of how much easier/cheaper/greener it is to build small reactors instead of large ones.

> It seems like the 5 GW one might be cheaper.

Small modular reactors typically run up to 300MW in size. There are very few applications for a 5GW reactor. Besides, the costs of the small reactors in terms of time, money, operating expense, security and other things are so much less than for the large plants that the math really doesn't work anyway, even for your extreme example of 1000 5MW reactors.

> So what is cheaper? Manufacturing, setting up, operating, and securing 1000 5 MW plants or one 5 GW plant? It seems like the 5 GW one might be cheaper.

It's not 1000 5MW plants vs 1 5GW plant, each SMR plant would have dozens of smaller cores. Most of the plans I see are in the 300MW - 1100MW range.

> Everyone agrees. But our goal with electricity isn't to make plants, it's to make watt-hours of electricity.

If the goal is to create carbon free electricity then making as many carbon free power plants is exactly how you'd get more watt-hours.

I think as you do. People are not going to settle for "Well we can keep solar up for up to a few hours when the blizzard comes and reduces radiation levels by 70% with our new battery bank". That's not going to cut it when the blizzard lasts for week. That will never get off the ground.

I live in Scotland. We've gone from ~15% renewable electricity to >90%, replacing fossil fuels.

When you're claiming that something can't possibly be done, when it has already actually been done, it's hardly a surprise that no-one takes your argument seriously.

Go look up a list of countries that have, say, >70% renewables and explain to me why they are managing something you claim is impossible.

My first hunch would be to answer "importing", but it's not always possible to check.

In the case of Scotland, is [1] giving a realistic view of Scotland (it mixes Scotland / England, so I can't really tell ?)

At the time of reading, the mix (again, for GB) of consummed electricity is about 40% wind+solar, 30% gas, 10% whatever, 10% domestic nuclear, and 10% "electricity imported from France", wich is usually 70% nuclear.

I'm writing this middle of the day, in March, so I assume the wind+solar part is working at a nice capacity (it would be much more unfair to compare it in the middle of the night.)

So on a very first approximation that I'm really ready to dismiss based on more data, it seems that Scotland produces a lot of electricity from renewables (a good thing !), and consumes electricy made from a bunch of sources, some of which are not renewables. Is that fair ?

Follow-up questions: are there countries that managed to ditch fossil fuels for their electricity production and to not rely on imports / neighboors without renewables ?

The only examples I have in mind are those relying on hydro (Norway, Costa Rica, maybe ?) who were blessed with mountains.

[1]: https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/GB

My vague understanding based on "stuff I've heard or read at various points" is that you can stuff up to like 80-85% wind+solar on a grid before you start having real problems with the fluctuations in production.

If my vague recollections are recollecting something that was correct and not BS when I heard it, Scotland might be fine with it's ~17% nuclear, replacing the remaining 30% gas with more wind+solar.

Hmm.. How did Scotland solve storage?

From what I can read in the BBC article (1) there's still lots of work to do:

- cars still run on fossil fuels - heating accounts for 15% of emissions and uses gas - industries use fossil fuels to make materials

If that were all to become electric, would renewables be enough?

1: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-51088089

They didn't solve storage. They produce a lot of wind power at certain times that they can't use and that's where the 90% comes from. The actual consumption of renewables is on the order of 40%-50%. Not nothing, but not 90% ... not even close.

Looking at [1]. I would say hydro-power and nuclear is a big reason. Some also have significant wind, but it is balanced by either gas, hydro or good interconnection with neighbours (who themselves are not always as "green".

[1] https://www.electricitymap.org/

Fossil fuels need to be replaced in all their applications, not just electricity.

Even taking the example of Scotland (which is a doing rather well in this regard) electricity is a relatively small portion of energy consumption. Heat and transport are the dominant areas, and both are still mostly fossil-based.

https://www.scottishrenewables.com/our-industry/statistics

So let’s take transport.

We have electric cars on roads being sold in massive numbers.

We don’t have cars with little nuclear reactors sitting inside them.

So how is transport a good example of something that would somehow be better solved by nuclear than solar/wind?

My point was that the progress towards renewable/low-carbon energy is nowhere near finished yet. Something like an order of magnitude more renewable generation than what we currently have, still needs to be built if we want to truly replace fossil fuels.

It's a counterpoint to the claim that the transformation has already been achieved.

I think the claim was that the technology to enable the transformation has largely been achieved, not that it's been installed. But you're right, there's a great deal more the experience curves we're going to be able to go down, so the costs of renewables and storage should fall even more.

>So how is transport a good example of something that would somehow be better solved by nuclear than solar/wind?

Cars will charge from the grid. Nuclear can output not only a lot of energy but output it at a const rate. Wind and solar cannot do that. There are times when wind isn't blowing and sun isn't shining. There are entire seasons when wind and solar output is lower. There are multiple years where wind output is lower. That variability also means you need to over build capacity. But even with that, you're still in trouble because there is no battery technology now, or coming out anytime soon, that can store enough energy (minimum of a few weeks worth) to bridge that intrinsic variability of daily, as well as inter and intra annual variability.

> Cars will charge from the grid.

Hell, let's not forget that the current plan is for people to charge their cars at night. That's when my car is plugged in; during the day I'm either parked at a public garage, or, you know, driving it around. Sure, there's probably still wind, somewhere, at night, but you're still charging your cars when your renewable energy sources are at their minimum.

>Hell, let's not forget that the current plan is for people to charge their cars at night.

The obvious solution for that is for people to plug in at home or at their job - chargers cost less than $500 (that includes installation costs), so it's not entirely impossible for workplaces to install one charger per employee and charge a margin on top of electricity prices to recoup prices. This will be desirable for EV owners once daytime electricity is cheaper than nighttime electricity, and therefore profitable for any location-owners to install.

If you have a car with ~600KM of range, then considering people drive an average of 60KM/day, you can imagine that most of the time most people basically don't need 90% of their battery and can wait until the next day. And considering people only use their car for an average of (IIRC) 2 hours a day, most of the time peoples' EVs will be idle for the charging somewhere.

For special roadtrips that might change, and perhaps midnight EV charging will spike on boxing day or such, but for the other ~360 days of the year people will largely be charging with solar.

Also, as serious as the issue is, let's remember we're talking about a projected ~5% increase on the electricity demand once the entire population goes electric. Over a decade that's less than 1% increase per year. That's not that hard, especially if we're planning to replace over half of the grid with renewables anyway.

> but for the other ~360 days of the year people will largely be charging with solar.

You do know that weather happens and there are many days where solar output drops to zero or near-zero (think snow storm as an example).

And as mentioned before, statistically most people don't need to charge every day. If the cost of charging goes up because it's overcast, people will put it off in case tomorrow is sunny and cheap.

We're talking about averages here. If solar is 10% cheaper then it doesn't matter if the price doubles once a fortnight.

Charge a battery at home during the day or whenever energy is available, then charge your car from that battery at night.

Or charge at work. Or, these days, work from home. That has greatly reduced my gasoline consumption.

> Heat and transport are the dominant areas, and both are still mostly fossil-based.

Nuclear is not used for any of those either. And to use nuclear for heat and transport the easiest way is to just turn it into electricity and use EVs and heat pumps. So we're back to how to clean up electricity.

Cleaning up the grid isn't just useful for the immediate emissions benefit, it's also because if you concentrate the clean technology there you can decouple the problem and clean up everything else by electrifying. There are things like fertilizers and steel where we have more than just the energy input to clean up and even those have solutions based on electrification.

> Nuclear is not used for any of those either.

Sometimes, nuclear is used directly for heating by distributing heat to district heating systems.

Sure, but as a side benefit. Maybe someone has actually proposed doing SMRs distributed over the country and heating all houses directly, but as far as I know it's never been done. It's usually preferred to have nuclear plants isolated from residential areas.

>I live in Scotland. We've gone from ~15% renewable electricity to >90%, replacing fossil fuels.

No you didn't. That number is a ratio between consumption (i.e. how much energy Scotland consumes from ALL sources) and renewable production, but it doesn't actually mean you consume 90% of renewable energy. In other words, if you overproduce in the afternoon but can't use that energy it counts to 90% even though that energy wasn't consumed. It's not nothing because it means you can export it but the real consumption of renewable energy is around 45% wind (solar is inconsequential), with Hydro and Nuclear at around 35%, and the rest composed of fossil fuels and trivial amount of biomass [1].

And let's not understate the geography of Scotland, one of the windiest countries in the world (or at least Europe), that makes wind extra viable. Great! I'm not against wind power. I'm against unrealistic expectations of what wind and (shudder) solar can actually do on a global energy generation scale.

(Also, Scotland is a tiny region with a population akin to a city - it isn't a good model for anything on the global scale)

>Go look up a list of countries that have, say, >70% renewables and explain to me why they are managing something you claim is impossible.

Great idea. Go through the list [3] and you'll see that the >70% renewable in pretty much every case is a result of hydro power (or nuclear if you're talking about low carbon emissions).

Hydro is great if you have the geography for it, but even Hydro is not good enough for many environmentalists. I know in the recent election (in Maine) the green party was against building transmission lines to import hydro power from Quebec [2] ... because why import hydro when you can power your state on good intentions. Crazy environmentalists are a huge hindrance to lowering emissions.

[1]https://scotland.shinyapps.io/Energy/?Section=RenLowCarbon&S...

[2]https://www.sunjournal.com/2019/12/04/green-party-calls-for-...

[3]https://www.electricitymap.org/map

> No you didn't.

Yes, we did. Your nitpicking over the "right" way to count electricity generation and consumption doesn't matter: the graph you linked still shows around 12 percent fossil fuel generation for 2019, it's less now, and it's been replaced with renewables. Quibble over the figures if you like, but the trend is clear.

> And let's not understate the geography of Scotland

Yes, all countries have different strengths and weaknesses for renewable. And?

> Also, Scotland is a tiny region with a population akin to a city

Roughly the same population as the average US state. Anyway, what do you care about the "global scale"? The US is not a renewable energy role model to anyone.

> >70% renewable in pretty much every case is a result of hydro power or...

Hydro is renewable, so I don't get your complaint here

> in the recent election (in Maine)...because why import hydro when you can power your state on good intentions.

According to wikipedia, Maine gets 75% electricity from renewables, which is among the highest of any US state, so they seem an odd example to pick.

What's more, with a population of just 1.34 million, Maine is clearly a complete irrelevance on a global scale, right?

>Your nitpicking over the "right" way to count electricity generation and consumption doesn't matter

It matters. And it isn't a 'nitpick'.

You honestly don't think it is worth clarifying what the 90% refers to because I can guarantee you that a lot of people who read your comment automatically assumed that Scotland consumed 90% of its energy requirements from renewable sources - which it did not.. not even close. It's also important for policy. You can setup a 1TW solar array, and it wouldn't be able to power one house at night. And that's the point here because we're trying to move from fossil fuels and the question is: can wind and solar do it? And the answer is no. Nuclear can do it. Hydro and geothermal can do it (but those are geography dependent).

>The US is not a renewable energy role model to anyone.

No. But Ontario is. We're one of the world leaders for carbon emissions from electricity generation and we are because of nuclear and hydro. France is ahead of Scotland too, and that's solely because of nuclear.

>According to wikipedia, Maine gets 75% electricity from renewables, which is among the highest of any US state, so they seem an odd example to pick.

Again, not from solar and wind. It's hydro. Whenever these high numbers are mentioned it's always effin hydro. The policy here was extending hydro transmission and crazy people trying to block it (meaning that capacity would be replaced by natural gas, not wind, not solar because they can't).

>What's more, with a population of just 1.34 million, Maine is clearly a complete irrelevance on a global scale, right?

It is irrelevant. We can't scale hydro to that level globally.

It is a nitpick. The fact is that even counting your way, it's around 10% from fossil fuels. That's been achieved without expanding nuclear capability. It is renewable that has replaced fossil fuels here. Yes, Scotland also exports renewable energy. That's a good thing.

> can wind and solar do it? And the answer is no. Nuclear can do it.

Can wind and solar and hydro and geothermal do it? The answer is Yes. There's no need for more horrifically expensive nuclear.

> We can't scale hydro to that level globally.

No-one's asking you to. If you're all renewable already, good for you. If you're not, get your own house in order before criticizing others. But stop claiming that what's already being done can't be done.

>It is a nitpick. The fact is that even counting your way, it's around 10% from fossil fuels.

Come on now. The 90% value was dishonest and required clarification when presented (which you didn't do) and a cynical perspective could argue you meant it to be misleading.

The original argument I made is that solar and wind can't do it. You argued it can by pointing that Scotland is using 90% renewables. But we established that there is some nuance to this because Scotland wasn't consuming 90% renewable energy, and also it's a red-herring because even though I argued against wind/solar specifically, you talked about renewables which include things like hydro. I never claimed hydro cannot replace fossil fuels. I know it can.

>There's no need for more horrifically expensive nuclear.

I 100% agree!! If your geography allows for hydro and geothermal (even if paired with Wind and Solar) - sure! Go nuts! No nuclear is needed! Iceland will never need Nuclear power, for example. My province of Ontario could probably replace Nuclear with Hydro from Quebec as well.

So hydro and geothermal do work very well. They can also complement wind/solar by providing base-load and satisfy 'peaker' requirements (i.e. scaled down when lots of wind and solar, and scaled up when not).

But notice, the critical bit that makes wind/solar work is AVAILABILITY of hydro and geothermal because hydro/geothermal provides very stable and predictable output and can ramp up or down based on availability of wind/solar. And if your region is blessed with an abundance of either, you may not even need to bother with wind or solar at all.

The problem for wind and solar is that hydro is not a scalable solution because it is geography dependent and relatively few places could scale out hydro infrastructure. So if you don't already have access to hydro or geothermal (which is the case for most places on earth) what the heck are you supposed to do?????? Well ... I'll tell what you do, you invest in natural gas and coal, like Germany is doing and every other region that does not have access to hydro and has a large wind/solar investment.

>If you're not, get your own house in order before criticizing others.

Ontario has some of the lowest emissions in the world. Lower than Scotland. So ... when it comes to energy generation, my house is in order. [1]

[1] https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/CA-ON

Then "good for you", as I already said.

> The 90% value was dishonest

No, the 90% value is more honest since exports reduce CO2 emissions just as much as domestic usage, but you prefer to cherry-pick the lowest number you can. I accepted your figures because even with them the point remains that Scotland has replaced its fossil fuel elec with renewable. A point you keep trying to evade.

> what the heck are you supposed to do??????

Where exactly are you talking about now? I keep hearing that there are all these countries or states that have no ability to deploy renewables due to their geography, but I've never seen one actually specified. Where is it?

> you invest in natural gas and coal, like Germany is doing

Germany is investing in renewables and has increased its share from them each year.

>the 90% value is more honest since exports reduce CO2 emissions just as much as domestic usage

Let's torture this a little more. The reason why it's an important distinction because today we do not have a model of sizable country (and let's include Scotland in that group as well) that powers their economy by wind and solar. Scotland is not an example of that. There is no example of such a nation.

>I keep hearing that there are all these countries or states that have no ability to deploy renewables due to their geography

Come on, don't be obtuse. Almost every country that doesn't have hydro today will not have hydro tomorrow. Almost every country that has deployed hydro, will not have more hydro tomorrow. Why? Because, at least in the developed world, we've dammed every river that could be dammed over the last century. So no, you can't just rely on hydro as a solution to wind/solar base load problem - I wish it were so, but it isn't. So pick any country that doesn't have any sizable hydro deployment, and that country is an example you're seeking.

>Germany is investing in renewables and has increased its share from them each year.

They are also spending billions to build natural gas pipelines to Russia. What does that say about their confidence in wind/solar?

I am curious why you dislike solar more than wind. Solar to me seems much more predictable. At smaller percentages it works well to handle peak AC loads. Larger percentages seem foolish to me.

But it is nuclear that cannot replace fossil fuels, because it can only supply base load. Also what are you doing when rivers are too low, too hot or frozen and you cannot get the water needed for nuclear power?

Heh. Check out France on this map: https://www.electricitymap.org/map

Imagine if every developed economy invested in nuclear at the same level of France even if you still need to rely on fossil fuel peaker plants - that's a good start no? France, even with fossil-fuel backup has far lower emissions than most other countries (3x lower emissions than the darling of renewable energy, Germany ... which by the way relies on France's nuclear power too)

Here's something to get depressed at: Imagine if every developed economy invested in nuclear at the same level as France but in the 70s. Think of the trillions and trillions of tons of CO2 that would not have been emitted into the atmosphere. It would have bought us decades to get global warming under control.

When history passes judgment, it won't be the climate-denialists that will take the brunt of criticism, but anti-nuke environmentalists who fucked things up (and continue to do so) for our species.

Some of them already have recanted their previous stance. That's a large part of the Pandora's Promise documentary (a Sundance film): former anti-nuclear activists who reversed their stance.

Just 60% nuclear according the map. Why not 100%?

A lot of countries have more than that in renewables: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable...

>I keep thinking discussions are stacked against nuclear unfairly. It's almost as if there are two different arenas to compete: (1) fossil fuels, which is by definition unsexy and ugly, but grandfathered simply because "we need them" now, and (2) everything else, who has to compete against each other on the criteria of "Fine, so we do have fossil fuels, what now?"

Not just that, every other power source is rated on only the damage it does when producing power. By comparison nuclear is held to the standard that everything from mining to decommission needs to be taken into account.

By that metric solar kills more people per kwh by the simple fact that installing it means walking on high unsecured places that you fall down from. This is treated as a joke. Somehow we imagine that solar panels of the end of their 10 year life span just fall apart into pixie dust and ignore how environmentally damaging they really are.

The average coal plant releases more nuclear waste in a near than the all but the three worst nuclear accidents.

The list goes on an on.

> By that metric solar kills more people per kwh by the simple fact that installing it means walking on high unsecured places that you fall down from.

Utility scale solar, which is dominating because it's much cheaper, installs modules at ground level.

I hope one day we are as lackadaisical about deaths from home nuclear as home solar.

I get all the pro-nuclear arguments here and really wish that I could agree. However, what most commenters are missing is the real reason, nuclear came out of fashion: economics. Without enormous direct and indirect subsidies, nuclear (fission) isnt commercially viable anywhere in the world (even China, where security or biases in the population arguably play a minor role, is not building nuclear at scale!) . Heck, you still can't insure a fission plant; a state guarantee is implicit.

As I wrote in a smililar thread some time ago: Yes, in theory fission would have been the best option for carbon-free energy. No, in practice humanity never figured out how to safely and efficiently use this power source and now renewables are a way safer and cheaper bet. You won't find any objective economic analysis (that incorporates such indirect subsidies as the implicit state guarantee and realistic building and waste handling/storing costs) that can show otherwise. Renewables are already significantly cheaper, even if you incorporate necessary storage costs or DCS grids. Nuclear is only barely competitive when dismissing everything except the direct construction and operation costs which is very misleading.

This line of thinking would have never made renewables possible.

As far as I know, this is not true. On a small scale wind has been profitable for a long time. In The Netherlands, small scale commercial wind turbines go back a long time. As far as I know there were no subsidies back then.

There's also hydroelectric power, with a very long history of being economically viable.

Economically viable because the costs of the land used behind the dams were not nearly as high. Today most of the good places for hydro are already taken, and we have far more concern for the environmental impacts. There is still room for adding hydro, but it isn't as easy as in the past.

Hydro is being phased out in the USA because it destroys river/watershed biomes. You won't see any significant hydro being done in the USA for quite a while as the environmental groups won't allow it and it will be locked up in court for decades.

Not true. Technology is making breakthroughs because that is what technology does. Solar and wind may not have moved along quite as fast but they would have moved along. We need nuclear for stability (as we don't have energy storage facilities that can handle extreme weather events for days or weeks) and we need solar and wind because who can afford to give up "free" energy that is there for the taking. Solar is the end goal (or fusion) of course but energy storage density at grid scale is decades off. There are several viable nuclear designs available now that can't go critical and are practical with just a little more work and government support.

> We need nuclear for stability (as we don't have energy storage facilities that can handle extreme weather events for days or weeks)

We also don't have the nuclear reactors that would supply that energy (particularly at global scale, where breeding would be needed). Why is building those reactors conceivable, but building energy storage systems not?

Looking at the costs of e.g. Hinkley Point c, this feels right.

I do wonder, though, what the costs would look like if a big country like the US built, say, 400 Hinkley Point Cs. What economies of scale would you see? You could probably get a sense by looking at the marginal build costs were associated with some of the last French plants during the 1970s-early 1990s construction boom, when they built over 50 plans.

You can get a rough measurement of the scale effect by comparing Hinkley Point C and Olkiluoto with cost of new VVER plants and time which it takes to build them.

Even hydro power can have cost overruns. See the Site C project in British Columbia for example. Massively over budget, yet the province absolutely needs this source of carbon free electricity to support its energy needs in the coming decades.

Everyone's also forgotten nuclear proliferation. I assume that everyone advocating new nuclear in America is also happy for Iran to build a line of new nuclear plants?

It can be and is controlled. It's not that easy to use the civilian reactor to get a bomb, otherwise Iran would already have it long time ago.

I'm fine with it. There is some concern about them building plants that can create bomb grade material as a byproduct, but we can verify they don't build that into their plants.

No, it's impractical to use civilian reactors for generating materials for a nuclear bomb (I don't count "dirty" bombs as nuclear). Also usually spent fuel rods are returned to the country of production.

Certain kinds of civilian reactors produce plutonium with large amounts of higher isotopes, but (1) it's still possible to use that stuff in bombs, with boosting, and (2) other reactor type produce plutonium that's better than weapons grade (for example, fast breeders with a breeding blanket region around the core; the Pu from that blanket is almost entirely 239Pu, and remember that scaling nuclear to supply world energy demand will likely require breeding.)

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171106112256.h...

France seems to be a pretty solid argument there’s little here to cause concern. China too.

I'm not sure what your point is, because both those countries have nuclear weapons?

No, because their abundant use of nuclear power, including fast breeders, has not contributed to nuclear proliferation.

France's fast breeders have been failures, and they recently cancelled their next iteration trying to make them work. China doesn't have any fast breeders beyond research work, as far as I know.

It may be that sodium cooled fast breeders had a fundamental materials flaw that was not recognized soon enough.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11665-010-9763-5

Thanks for that. Even if those jurisdictions are not using fast breeder technology, I think they're still pretty good evidence that nuclear proliferation is low risk.

Absolutely. Building nuclear power plants is quite different from pursuing nuclear weapons.

30 some nations use nuclear power, or are building nuclear plants. Only nine countries have nuclear weapons.

Pursuing nuclear weapons is obviously a choice, it's not automatic with nuclear power. It requires an immense, concerted effort to build nuclear weapons.

The US has begrudgingly learned to live with North Korea and Pakistan having nuclear weapons, it'll learn to live with Iran having nuclear weapons as well (and shortly after that, Saudi Arabia). Will Israel accept that outcome? I guess we'll find out, there is no scenario where Iran doesn't acquire nuclear weapons at this point. It's guaranteed.

Well, Iran is ready to return to the previous agreement, if the US will upheld its part of the deal, without any additional talks or introducing new pre-conditions. Well, it also asks to compensate damage from the US sanctions, but I think it's simply a way to improve its negotiation position.

It's Trump who did messed everything up, not Iran. Unfortunately it does not look like the Biden administration is eager to fix it.

Iran isn't playing squarely with the current US administration. They don't want to go back to the old agreement straight up, they want cake with icing and sprinkles and Biden has been around long enough that kissing their hineys is not a smart way to go about resuming the agreement. Everyone knows that Trump is most likely an anomaly in international politics and will fade into history (it may take a few years of course) as such.

"I assume that everyone advocating new nuclear in America is also happy for Iran to build a line of new nuclear plants?"

Yip. a) because 3.67% enriched Uranium fuel is not a weapon and will never be b) civilian nuclear energy is part of the multi-national JPCOA deal that they kept their side of c) its really not your call to tell other sovereign people what energy to use d) you should be happy they are using less coal.

1. Renewables receive huge subsidies as well, especially in Europe. It is rarely being taken into account, but that's essentially what allowed it to become that cheap. The Nuclear would also be much cheaper if we were investing more in it.

2. There are countries that cannot rely on renewables because there's not enough wind or sun.

3. Renewables don't really work at the moment without stable source that can quickly kick in when there's no sun or no wind. The Nuclear energy is stable and clean. That combination of features is hugely underappreciated in favour of natural gas mostly for political reasons (at least in Europe). Natural Gas is not clean and won't prevent the global warming. Also Natural Gas and Coal have environmental impact and kill people all the time, not only when there's highly unlikely accident.

4. The small modular reactors (SMRs) may be the solution for a huge capital cost required for building a classic Nuclear Powerplant.

I think the biggest 'externality' subsidy of renewables is exactly your point 3.

It's all well and good saying you can produce solar + wind en masse for 3c/kWh (even without govt incentives), but if you need to have a gas plant running extremely inefficiently to pick up the shortfall, I'm not sure you can say it is 3c/kWh.

I'm very pro renewables but think it is increasingly getting missed. You often see charts that solar/wind is significantly cheaper than nuclear, but never taking into account this.

A simple cycle gas turbine power plant is 5% of the capital cost of a nuclear power plant. So even if you have to cover your entire renewable system with 100% CT backup, you still aren't paying as much as nuclear.

Wind energy also kills people, more direct deaths than nuclear power by any estimate, actually.

Windmills fall over and kill people.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

The interesting thing is that nuclear power is at 90, and Windmills at 150, but only if accidents in undeveloped nations be included, if they not be, and only developed nations are included, then the death toll is 0.1 from nuclear.

The overwhelming majority of accidents with nuclear energy happen in undeveloped nations.

> Wind 150 (2% global electricity)

> Nuclear – global average 90 (11% global electricity w/Chern&Fukush)

> Nuclear – U.S. 0.1 (19% U.S. electricity)

The article you linked makes no claim about developed or undeveloped nations. And the data here simply marks 0.1 as the US death toll from nuclear, and 90 as the global average death toll including Chernobyl and Fukushima.

US is not the only developed nation, and Japan is not an undeveloped nation. I'm not sure I'd consider any country with the capability to run a nuclear power plant "undeveloped", including USSR in 1986 or Ukraine specifically, but this isn't an argument I feel strongly about. IMF data (seen on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developing_country) would put current day Ukraine out of the list of developed, and I suspect the same for 1986.

Also, it's unclear if the death rate on wind is a global average. It's difficult to infer substantive information from the labeling on the data in this article from 8.5 years ago. There is no distinction between developed and undeveloped nations, for nuclear or for wind power. And the proxy you're using (US or non-US) is not listed for wind.

You misapprehend the statistics I feel. — this is the number of deaths per trillion kWh generated, not absolute number of deaths. You cite it in a way that implies that Nuclear is to be multiplied with 5.5 to offer a fair comparison with wind.

I think you misunderstood my comment. My primary point is that what you wrote about nuclear re: developed vs. undeveloped nations is not supported by the article you linked, as the article makes no such distinction:

> The interesting thing is that nuclear power is at 90, and Windmills at 150, but only if accidents in undeveloped nations be included, if they not be, and only developed nations are included, then the death toll is 0.1 from nuclear.

The distinction seen in the article between the 90 and 0.1 numbers is global average vs. U.S. death avg. You cited those numbers and re-labeled them as "undeveloped" (for the global avg including Fukushima and Chernobyl) and "developed" (for US).

You cannot directly map "US" data to all developed nations, as this mapping does not include all non-US developed countries which should be included. Nor can you directly map "global avg" data to all undeveloped nations, as this mapping will include developed countries which should not be included.

>I suspect the same for 1986

No, in 1986 Ukraine was one the richest and most developed states in USSR (Baltic states were close) and probably quite well-developed on the European scale. But since it became independent it gradually became the poorest country in Europe.

I would say that a sign of development is an ability to build reactors, not to run them. Today countries can easily order a reactor if they have sufficient funds for it and a certain level of political stability. A producer country probably will be even willing to give you a cheap credit to finance the construction.

> 1. Renewables receive huge subsidies as well, especially in Europe. It is rarely being taken into account, but that's essentially what allowed it to become that cheap. The Nuclear would also be much cheaper if we were investing more in it.

Assuming that the investment in nuclear power from inception was equally matched in renewables for the same period of time, would anyone bother attempting to make this argument? The affordability of electricity from solar power alone would have likely have overtaken nuclear power long before the end of WWII. Nuclear (fission) power is mind-bogglingly expensive. The costs can not be handwaved away by suggesting it could be less expensive with even more investment into a method of power generation that is orders of magnitude more expensive than the most expensive renewables. Comparatively, we have barely scratched the surface of investing in renewables. If no one ever believed nuclear bombs were necessary, and instead of fission all that effort and cost had been put into developing fusion energy instead, we would have been building clean fusion plants for under $2B a piece by the end of the last millennium. Forget everything you think is wonderful about fission, forget all of it, and focus only on the economics. Then forget about it entirely and focus efforts instead on something, anything else, that is viable.

The cost of an integrated circuit in the 1970s would be so prohibitive you couldn't even type this today if we used this argument.

Likewise with lithium batteries. It just takes use, iteration and scale nuclear energy can easily be cheaper than everything else out there.

Over the last 50 years nuclear has gotten more expensive not less. Also we dont have another 50 years. We dont even have the 10 years it takes to build a nuclear powerplant.

Why exactly has it gotten more expensive?

Because otherwise even a state wouldn't want to vouch for it.

In large part, because civil engineering projects got more expensive.

I see two reasons:

Increased nuclear safety. Proponents often tout nuclear's relative safety. Good, but that safety is hard won through regulation. Compliance is costly, and improved safety has been subject to diminishing returns.

Economies of scale. Building a nuclear power plant is a massive undertaking, so the world simply hasn't been building a lot of nuclear power plants. Supply chains (parts, know how) are getting smaller and more uncompetitive with every passing year as other forms of energy production have become more attractive.

I dont really know why civil engineer projects of all kinds have gotten so expensive but they have. One would think that the more we learn from our failiures the more things we have to make sure we do right and that should take more time, on the other hand we should also learn to streamline and use technology to speed things up, but apparently not enough.

It could be an example of Baumol's Cost Disease.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

> The cost of an integrated circuit in the 1970s would be so prohibitive you couldn't even type this today if we used this argument.

The improvement in IC technology more or less dealt with marginal price reduction.

The price of nuclear power is the price of a lot of nickel alloy parts, and huge pressure vessel, and huge containment structures.

> and huge containment structures.

If you want to build huge reactors. If you want to build small modular reactors, not so much. For example, the US navy is not flitting around in giant concrete domes.

Unlike the US navy reactors, civilian reactors don't swim in coolant.

Yes, power levels make difference there, but there is no inherent advantage of smaller sizes in this context.

If reactor explosion happens even with small reactor sizes, containment building makes no difference unless you size it to contain even an explosion, which will make it even more expensive. And you will still have to deal with meltdown products in the end.

If you have enormous amounts of coolant at hand, you can equally well cool a bigger reactor too.

Modern reactor designs physically CAN'T explode. Modern reactors are designed with a HEAVILY negative coefficient.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_coefficient

> Modern reactor designs physically CAN'T explode.

You have a few gigawatt water heater, and an extremely large pressure vessel.

Modern reactors physically can explode, with, or without positive void reactivity coefficient.

I urge you to disable the control system on any working PWR reactor, and stand by to test your hypothesis.

Rapid power excursions with, or without coolant inside come from many phenomena, not just void reactivity coefficients.

From the point of view of safety smaller reactors that -can't- go into critical mass by the design are far superior to the older huge reactor designs that we have currently. Sure it's usually cheaper to go bigger but the public just is not going to have allow it with designs that can potentially go critical mass and make the next Chernobyl no matter how many times you tell them you can handle any situation.

> From the point of view of safety smaller reactors that -can't- go into critical mass by the design

Man, any reactor is critical, by the definition.

You know exactly what I was talking about. Sorry I'm not a nuclear scientist. In common parlance "going critical" means losing control of the reaction and having to run away at a fast rate of speed before you become a victim of radiation poisoning.

But nuclear power has been around just as long as ICs, so this is an odd comment. Obviously it isn't going to follow the same path as ICs because it already hasn't...

Even worse, nuclear very clearly gets more expensive the more if it we build, not less expensive.

That's not true and the entire history of mass production is goes against what you just said. If we settled on a common reactor design, that is modular and can not (by design) ever go critical the price would absolutely drop. Surely basic logic will tell you that.

The reason your logic doesn't work out is because the assumptions you put in place are counterfactual.

What is factual is that the nuclear industry has been around for many decades and has not been able to solve this problem, despite there being lots of pretty clever people involved in it.

A contributing factor to making the learning curve negative is that the security guarantees underlying the plant designs are built on what we know can go wrong. As we learn more about the problem, we also learn of more weird failure modes, complicating the design of future plants.

I've seen people handwave this away with paper designs. Paper designs are comparatively easy to make safe. Real reactors are much, much harder. If you think this is bullshit, try looking up a certain admiral Rickover and see what he has to say about this.

Meanwhile, renewables keep falling in price.

I'm not sure where the logic is here, you are making an assertion without any supporting evidence. What sort of logic can you provide to back up your assertion? Any such reasoning must also include actual numbers and costs.

> I'm not sure where the logic is here, you are making an assertion without any supporting evidence.

You might want to take your own advice. You did the exact same ting, make an assertion without supporting evidence, in your previous comment.

> What sort of logic can you provide to back up your assertion? Any such reasoning must also include actual numbers and costs

Nuclear power was built with an average cost of $2-3 billion dollars per GWe of capacity when nuclear was built at scale during the late 1960s through much of the 1980s [1]. The US was building nuclear plants at a rate of several plants per year, rather than several plants per decade. The same pattern holds true in France. During the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s, plants of the same design were built in serial production. Now, when they're building plants one or two at a time it's more expensive.

There's a clear pattern of cheaper plants when built at scale, and this pattern holds true across the two main nuclear power producers.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...

I wasn't the one who said my assertion was true because of "logic"

You seem to be backing up my point with your claims. Nuclear has consistently gotten more expensive over time. The designs you point to from the 1970s will never be built again, because nuclear engineers realized their flaws and don't want to build them again.

With each new generation of nuclear, it gets more expensive, not less. As we refine the designs, we spend more per GW, not less. And not just a little bit more, but massively more. Even if we build the AP1000 serially, do you think it could reach $3B/GW? That's a huge hike in reasoning, and I'm not sure where in the long long Wikipedia article for nuclear power it states that serially production of the same design could drop costs by a factor or 4 (or more).

Everywhere it has been studied, nuclear has a negative learning rate. See, for example, Figure 1 and the many articles it cites:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

> You seem to be backing up my point with your claims. Nuclear has consistently gotten more expensive over time.

And we're also building fewer nuclear plants over time. Let's revisit your point:

> Even worse, nuclear very clearly gets more expensive the more if it we build, not less expensive.

This is not only untrue, it is the opposite of true. The more of it is built, the less expensive it is. The less of it is built, the more expensive it is.

You're right that nuclear has gotten more expensive. But that's because we're building less of it. If what you said were true - that nuclear get more expensive the more we build it - then today's nuclear plants should be cheaper than the ones built in the 1970s and 1980s during the nuclear boom.

> Even if we build the AP1000 serially, do you think it could reach $3B/GW? That's a huge hike in reasoning, and I'm not sure where in the long long Wikipedia article for nuclear power it states that serially production of the same design could drop costs by a factor or 4 (or more).

It's not a huge hike in reasoning. It's based on the price history of previous plant construction. Click on those plants built in the 1970s and early 80s. Many were built at a cost of only $2B. AP1000s are fundamentally not much different than previous PWR designs. Iterative improvements extend life and generate a bit more power, but the overall layout is the same.

In short we did build nuclear plants at scale, and it was 4-5x cheaper. This is a claim based on demonstrable patterns in price history.

France and the US have experienced greater costs over time, please see the paper I linked:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

"greater costs over time" wasn't what you claimed. What you wrote was:

> nuclear very clearly gets more expensive the more if it we build, not less expensive.

We've been building less nuclear not more. So if what you say is true, costs should have been going down over time. The reality is that nuclear is cheaper when built at scale. The larger number of plants being built together was cheaper than a handful of plants.

Your own source shows this. Look at this graph [1]. You see that cluster of plants around 1970? When we built a lot of nuclear, it was a lot less expensive. $1-2,000 per KW of capacity, or $1-2B per GW. This was actually cheaper than the figures I originally cited, thanks for the source I'll be sure to use it to demonstrate how nuclear is cheaper when built at scale in the future.

1. https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03014215163001...

Nuclear can be competitive with subsidies.

A serious response to climate change would be large government support of both nuclear power and renewables.

Are we going to tell our children that the main reason we did nothing to fight climate change was because fossil fuels were more competitive economically?

First replace every coal and gas power plant, then we can argue about nuclear vs renewables.

> Are we going to tell our children that the main reason we did nothing to fight climate change was because fossil fuels were more competitive economically?

We're doing exactly that.

Aren’t the subsidies that nuclear needs essentially a poor form of carbon taxation? Without a real price on carbon (in the US, for instance), nuclear and renewables need subsidies in order to compete with fossil fuel generation. Fossil fuels receive an implicit subsidy, which is the externalities of climate change and air pollution that we must all pay for.

If a proper price on carbon existed, would nuclear and renewables not automatically look a whole lot cheaper without subsidies?

Exactly this. Fossil-based energy is enormously subsidized by a deferred carbon tax. No fossil/nuclear comparison is really meaningful without internalizing that externality.

I have to argue this to friends all the time.

That's why once you have a strong fission program you retire fossil fuel power as new nuclear comes online and then electrical vehicles and other more environmentally friends travel/HVAC etc starts happening. Economies of scale and training lower the price even more. This could happen in big powerhouses like China/India/Europe/USA and reverse some of the damage we've done to the environment and green house gas increases.

>No, in practice humanity never figured out how to safely and efficiently use this power source

That's patently false. Nuclear has the fewest deaths per TW generated of any power source.

It also ignores the economic successes seen in China recently, like the Hualong One builds. And in Russia with the VVERs.

Yes, and those really highlight what the problem in the West is. The cost of nuclear has nothing to do with the physical construction, safety, or operation of Nuclear.

The costs are caused by legal challenges that cause massive delays and interruptions to construction, the transport of fuel and spent fuel, and to storage. There are egregious regulations that place unreasonable and outdated requirements on nuclear plant construction and operation.

Nuclear isn't a science or engineering problem. It's a political and legal problem.

> Nuclear has the fewest deaths per TW generated of any power source.

Yes, but its doesn't have the fewest We-have-hours-to-abandon-this-entire-city-because-no-one-can-live-here-for-the-next-100-years per TW generated of any power source.

Risks don't have to be counted in deaths. The risks of nuclear are very low, but risk is not just about the chance of an accident, its about the acceptability of a potential failure.

Okuma, Japan is already inhabitable again. Understand the reason people aren't moving back is less due to nuclear fallout but more because the whole town was leveled by the earthquake and tsunami.

That is actually a good point, and one that frequently irritates me: people are hand-wringing about the total non-issue of Fukushima Daichi to this day, because of media fear-mongering that the scary radiation would cross the Pacific and impact Americans.

Meanwhile, twenty thousand people had just died from a tsunami. Twenty thousand. Not to mention the complete destruction of infrastructure in a populous city, and the ramifications of that.

Not to forget that without the evacuation due to fear from the reactor killed people. According to a recent post on here [1] fukushima wouldn't have killed anyone without the evacuation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26409247

Likewise, Pripyat remains a ghost town because it was planned city built to support the power plant workforce. Now that the power plants are no longer in operation, there's no incentive to clean it up and resettle it.

How do you explain the chernobyl exclusion zone?

They never bothered to clean it up because without the power plant, the town was dead. Most of the people living there were plant workers.

The soil and the groundwater are contaminated. You can't realistically replace those, not across 2,600 km^2.

Another problem is that most people (especially younger) don't want to live in rural area. They escaped due to tsunami, but no reason to back. Even who loved the area, there are few jobs, shops.

I was listening to the Cautionary Tales podcast (I know, I know, Gladwell) and one episode featured Fukushima.

Apparently follow ups of the evacuees suggest that we may have only given them an extra few days of life on average. The stress of uprooting people had nearly as large a health impact as the potential radiation. And not all of the evacuated area is uninhabitable. It was abandoned as a precaution.

Even if Fukushima is uninhabitable for 100 years, that could be a small price to pay to counter climate change. I don’t think the anti nuclear crowd are taking climate change as seriously as they should.

That means nuclear isn't very harmful when everything goes right. It has nothing to do with risk.

> No, in practice humanity never figured out how to safely and efficiently use this power source and now renewables are a way safer and cheaper bet

Take a look at Ontario's power generation data right now: https://ieso.ca/en/Power-Data

We have a steady state of about 8.3 GW of nuclear power generation as our base supply of power, representing most power generation in the province. Electricity prices are pretty good- but they used to be better even before it was all privatized. The CANDU reactor design is safe and practical.

We can't rely on solar this far north- the days get too short in the winter. We have wind, but it's too unstable to be a sole source. You can see in the graphs what happens when the wind dies down- we fire up the gas plants to make up the difference.

We have hydroelectric dams, and they're wonderful for variable supply- like a self-refilling battery- but we only have so much capacity there without damming the whole province.

In conclusion: we have figured out a way to safely and efficiently use nuclear. Renewables are cheap, but not steady enough to be usable here. The alternatives are fossil fuels. Nuclear works.

First the price customers see ignores subsides. That’s essentially what subsides do.

Also, Ontario’s production is weighted towards nuclear, but it’s second by second usage is significantly less so. They export a lot of nuclear power and import non nuclear power. That arrangement only works because nuclear is less common in other areas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss...

Also, hydro complements Nuclear extremely well as it can shift production across time, thus maximizing each nuclear power plant’s capacity factor. However, wind fills the same niche more cheaply even with significant excess capacity. This shows up as a grid where the wholesale price frequently sits around zero, which makes nuclear even less economically viable.

I personally expect nuclear to stick around for various reasons like bulk radioactive isotope production, but ramping up to become a significantly larger chunk of global electricity production would take dramatically lower unsubsidized prices.

Hydro complementing Nuclear is Pumped Hydro Storage. I like this but economists will note, it has system loss: the energy costs to store, include losses which can't be recovered: the value proposition is that SOME (large) amount of energy is shifted in time, behind the dam wall.

So its real. but, its not perfect. All systems have losses. The losses in PHES are not necessarily a huge problem.

By adding extra turbines to any large dam regular Hydro is effectively self filling pumped storage. The losses end up roughly identical and you can release at the maximum or minimum rate at any point over a week as long as the total stays the same it’s almost free peaking production. The only issue is it’s location dependent and thus can’t scale.

This is why retrofitted dams generally increase the maximum power production rate even if the average remains the same time shifted power is extremely valuable.

>I personally expect nuclear to stick around for various reasons

Nuclear arsenals.

It's the only reason I can think of for paying inflation linked £92.50 per MwH for 35 years for Hinkley point c when the UK can build wind or solar for £35-40 now and probably less in future years.

The economics are insane.

The lobbying effort in the mid 2000s for a "nuclear renaissance" was absolutely a tour de force. It passed laws in US states that put all construction economic risk (the biggest risk of nuclear) onto rate payers rather than the utilities that start nuclear construction projects. These sorts of shady laws sneak through state legislatures all the time, but these ones in particular were the only reason that utilities in Georgia and South Carolina embarked on construction projects. Of course, these have been massive economic and management failures, as nuclear too often is. All the US/UK efforts are echoes from that lobbying push.

And in the mid 2000s, nuclear seemed to be a much better idea. Solar and wind were more expensive, not far less expensive, than estimated nuclear costs. It seemed like nuclear was going to be an absolutely essential part of a carbon neutral or negative society.

Fifteen years later, we have had an energy technology revolution, and we are still in the middle of it. Personally, I don't see a future for nuclear, and for that matter I see only niche applications for thermally generated electricity. Other technology will undercut the steam turbine driven electricity that has been the basis of grids for a century. We might have some chemical storage in hydrogen, methanol, methane, or longer carbon chains that comes from atmospherically extracted CO2 for use in extreme scenarios, but it also seems likely that long-duration battery storage (e.g. vanadium flow batteries) will get cheap enough to replace even that.

> It's the only reason I can think of for paying inflation linked £92.50 per MwH for 35 years for Hinkley point c when the UK can build wind or solar for £35-40 now and probably less in future years.

Really? Intermittency seems like a very good reason.

Yes. I've not seen figures that put the cost of handling it above 30%. 160% > 30%.

It's not like nuclear is dispatchable either, whereas wind turbines can be.

> I've not seen figures that put the cost of handling it above 30%

Really? Is that battery storage? Hydroelectricity?

I haven't seen a storage plan, let alone a cheap one, that hasn't assumed some future technology like hydrogen, synthetic gas, or molten salt will essentially be a cheat code to provide nearly-free storage.

Yup, a lot of the conversation around energy and electricity feels like we're not at all talking about the same things. A book worth reading on the subject: https://www.withouthotair.com/

The book mostly focuses on raw generation figures. I see little to no writing on how to handle the intermittency of renewable sources.

Also, the 1,000 year figure for fissile fuel does not consider reprocessing which reclaims over 80% of fuel used.

That author is long dead, and his assumptions are increasingly out of date.

Worth bearing in mind that it was published in 2009 & the author died in 2016.

A lot has changed since then - the costs he specifies, for instance, might as well be from the previous century.

Energy use has also decreased.

A combination of overproduction, demand shifting and storage. Storage being the most expensive way to handle it. There's a few papers on managing the mix of this but theyre not widely read or reported on.

For a long time the carbon lobby pretended that lithium ion batteries were the only thing that could be used to manage renewable intermittency. This was precisely because they wanted to charactize it being technology that was impossibly far fetched. In reality it's the most expensive of many options and the best last resort but as a result most people think it's just "the solution".

The price of even those has plummeted though and even they are being rolled out (e.g. in Hawaii, next to solar farms). That's still a lot cheaper than hinkley point C.

However, if you're Germany and you've got a calm and overcast day the most cost effective approach is to tell heavy non time sensitive industrial users like aluminum smelters to ramp down production today and ramp it up extra high tomorrow when it's very sunny and windy. The cost of doing this is comparatively very low for many users like smelters and we've barely scratched the surface of what's possible in this space.

So, investing in capacity on the presumption that dealing with the intermittency costs of solar and wind will be an enormous 160% of production costs is flat out insane without subsidies.

Hence why it's fairly clear that the UK wanted hinkley point c for other reasons - i.e. to keep nuclear capacity and know how local so that the nuclear arsenal can be maintained.

Your response fits the same pattern: allude to the existence of storage solutions, but neglect to actually specify what those solutions are.

> There's a few papers on managing the mix of this but theyre not widely read or reported on.

Again, great of you to cite these papers.

> For a long time the carbon lobby pretended that lithium ion batteries were the only thing that could be used to manage renewable intermittency. This was precisely because they wanted to charactize it being technology that was impossibly far fetched. In reality it's the most expensive of many options and the best last resort but as a result most people think it's just "the solution".

Okay then: if not lithium ion batteries, what is the storage solution? Pumped hydro is geographically limited. That leaves approaches still in testing, like thermal storage or hydrogen storage.

> However, if you're Germany and you've got a calm and overcast day the most cost effective approach is to tell heavy non time sensitive industrial users like aluminum smelters to ramp down production today and ramp it up extra high tomorrow when it's very sunny and windy. The cost of doing this is comparatively very low for many users like smelters and we've barely scratched the surface of what's possible in this space.

So we have to tell people not to use energy. Because we have no effective way of addressing intermittency.

You're assuming that industries can just "ramp up extra high" when there's excess energy. Not all industries work like that. If a factory uses 100 MW at peak capacity it can't just produce 3x as much product if you feed it 300 MW. The reality is that few industries can be flexible like this.

What about things like street lights? Or sewage and water distribution? Hospitals, data centers, and essential services? There's plenty of things that cannot shift load like this.

Nuclear doesn't need pumped hydro storage so much. France has historically been doing load following with its reactors, and the rate of modulation is of 80% over 30min. (so 24MW/min for a 900MW reactor). Sure, having a bit of pumped hydro to help for really steep spikes can't hurt, but its role is minor. Storage for renewables on the other hand...

I was referring to using traditional hydro to cover peak demand not pumped storage.

Anyway, reducing power output regularly is straightforward in the moment but requires reactors to sit idle for ~90% of what it costs to run at full power. That extra capacity is therefore what’s expensive. France got around that by exporting a lot of nuclear power rather than see rates spike due to that excess capacity.

Essentially you can pay between X$/kwh for nuclear on a grid with storage or peaking power plants or 2.5X$/kWh for near 100% nuclear without storage or peaking power plans. The second one is what’s completely uneconomic and gives rise to the term base load power as it’s poorly suited to cover peak demand.

Canada sure does have a lot of untapped offshore wind power and hydro power from the east cost you could be exporting to Ontario.

Energy transmission has a significant cost. Wiring the east cost to Toronto is probably not the best use of the wind energy produced there.

Well they are building high voltage dc lines to connect Quebec to Massachusetts so it is very possible.

Can you explain how the total cost of ownership is economic, when you include the cost of managing nuclear wastes for thousands of years? There is such a woeful global record of adequate safety measures not being included in any total cost budgeting for nuclear power. Real safety seems to always be an off-budget item. Not to mention the weapons proliferation risk. No thanks.

Let's break down the problem you've stated.

> managing nuclear wastes for thousands of years

There's a fun way to think about this: the more dangerous the isotopes in terms of radiation, the faster it becomes safer. That radiation is the isotope breaking down into something else, something more stable. For the most dangerous waste, the stuff that has proliferation risks, in a few decades it's not nearly as dangerous. So "thousands of years" is a popular misunderstanding, in my view.

> There is such a woeful global record of adequate safety measures

There have been a small number of incidents- Chernobyl and Fukishima primarily- but that mostly boils down to poor initial designs or choices for locations. No CANDU[0]-based reactor design has ever had a dangerous safety incident.

I know I'm trying to convince you of something you don't agree with, but give this link[1] a chance. It has a lot of answers to some of your oppositions- maybe you agree with them, maybe you don't, but I think it's well written at least.

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

[1] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...

> So "thousands of years" is a popular misunderstanding, in my view.

"Thousands of years" comes from the half life of Plutonium-239, which is 24,000 years.

Pu-239 isn't unusually dangerous for an isotope. It's chemically toxic and somewhat radioactive but so is tons of stuff. The biggest problem with it is that you can make nuclear weapons from it.

Most commercial reactors make both Pu-239 and Pu-240. They're infeasible to separate (harder than separating U-235 from natural uranium) and enough Pu-240 makes the plutonium unsuitable for weapons.

But Pu-240 has a shorter half life than Pu-239. So if you take the plutonium out of a legacy reactor and bury it in the ground for a long time, it turns into weapons-grade plutonium. Burying it in the ground is very stupid because then you have to guard it for tens of thousands of years to keep anyone from going in and taking it to make nuclear weapons from.

But that ship has sailed. We have a half century of the stuff already. Half again as much or not makes no difference, we need a solution for what do with what we already have regardless of whether we make any more.

The solution is that newer reactors can use plutonium as fuel, which permanently eliminates it. So far from nuclear waste being a reason not to build newer reactors, it's the reason we should, so we can get rid of what we already have before it becomes suitable for weapons.

239Pu's radiotoxicity vastly exceeds its chemical toxicity.

As an alpha emitter with a long half life?

Note that we also don't price in the gloabal warming of the planet, the medical costs of asthma, and the deaths from cancer that fossil fuels bring about. Or the ecological costs of the large land masses needed for renewables, which increase as low-hanging fruit is picked and you try to scale renewables up to a whole society.

I think proponents of nuclear welcome the cost comparisons. Nuclear stacks up really well when you start factoring in externalities.

I'd recommend looking into long term storage. The story there is a lot better than you'd think. It's kind of funny that this is even brought up at this point.

These arguments from the '60s are why we have a warmed planet.

For Canada most of the country is basically unpopulated. We have enough land that we can store nuclear waste for basically forever with very minor costs.

The areas using nuclear are some of the most densely populated areas in North America, hugging the US border, and adjacent to the great lakes (in fact the generating stations are right on the lakes). Transporting the waste out is a constant risk, and there's been some rather disturbing proposals to do things like store the waste in an underground dump near Lake Huron, upstream from the water supply for the 3rd/4th biggest city in North America.

So, no, I don't think your analysis applies here.

Now look at Ontario's recent effort to get bids for new nuclear power plants. The bids they got weren't remotely competitive.

Like most discussions of nuclear power here, this will rapidly devolve into proponents of nuclear arguing it's necessary for our near term future while opponents argue that everything that made nuclear weapons bad and 1960s reactors expensive is still the reason that we can't use nuclear going forward.

The truth is that both sides need to update their knowledge of the state of the art in nuclear power generation, learn how the power grid works in depth and learn the patterns of power consumption both by residential locations and industrial ones.

Once you have all the knowledge about what's needed to avoid a significant decrease in our standard of living, you'll understand that a power generation technology with certain characteristics (foremost it has to be carbon neutral) is required... not optional, in other words, and simply adding more renewables is not enough to solve the problem.

The only practical solution (barring spending trillions of $$ and time to completely rebuild the US power grid and invent power storage technologies that don't exist as well as the industrial processes to produce them and infrastructure to handle their whole life cycle) is modern nuclear technology.

I would add that beyond that, electricity is usually a rather small (~25%) fraction of final energy consumption in developed economies, so really there's a lot more to worry about if we're thinking about climate, and that might well imply "lifestyle changes" as David MacKay called them.

Doesn't France make lots of money selling nuclear baseload power to UK, Germany, etc?

The biggest recipient for subsidies in the energy sector is fossil fuels, for which many would not be commercial viable unless they were directly given funds to stay operating. Here in Sweden we have oil fueled power plants which is paid just to exist, and then they get paid a second time for any energy they do produce.

Why do they get this money but not renewables? The name of the subsidy program makes that very clear. Reserve energy. The oil fueled power plant get paid to simply exist in the case where demand exceeds production of renewables. Before they shut down the latest nuclear reactor this was mostly to address cold windless winter nights, but now its operating basically all year as dips in renewable energy regularly cause situations where that reserve energy is required for a stable energy grid.

I get how people do not like subsidies for nuclear, but I really dislike subsidies for fossil fuels and I hate how oil is being burned just because it now is called "reserve energy".

One would think that if storage costs were the cheaper choice then we would be phasing out fossil fuel from the "reserve energy" strategy. There is no such plans. In contrast, the current plan and government investments goes to increase the reserve energy capacity from fossil fuel in every way possible. To my knowledge there does not exist a single commercial operated storage system that get charged with wind and later sold, here or globally. There does exist solar and battery, commonly with about 75% capacity for 4hrs, and a charge cycle of a single day. The economics for wind require massively higher capacity (weeks rather than hours), and the charge cycle which will repay the investment is significant slower (several weeks rather than a single day).

But you're acting like nothing advances? Fission is still the best chance we have. We are decades away from battery technology that could provide stable power for several days in the case of grid level from non-nuclear green friendly power sources. That's not an issue with nuclear fission reactors.

Not a technical problem, it's just that long term projects with large upfront investments end up costing a lot within the socio-economic system we have. These are societal choices. Do we collectively want low-carbon electricity, with proper regulation and independent safety authorities, or do we want neoliberalism, small government and free markets... https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Hinkley-Po...

Another aspect of the economics is that renewables are cheaper yes, but their capacity can also be built out incrementally year by year whereas with nuclear the construction risk is very high often taking decades before the plant is commissioned. With renewable's costs dropping consistently year by year who wants to take a chance on nuclear being competitive fifteen years from now when it's finally built? Nuclear's economic window of opportunity has almost entirely shut at this point. Though niche applications for small reactors in remote locations may be viable.

Nuclear is one notch above dead, though I'm sure it won't officially die for another few decades. As a former proponent it's hard to argue against the significant advances made by renewables over the past few years. Sure, nuclear makes for a better baseline load, but the regulatory and safety requires of nuclear make the economics difficult, almost easier to just build overcapacity into the renewable generation.

Hard to argue that something that powers like 70% of France is one notch above dead.

If all of big oil had conducted an incredibly successful campaign against you since you were born, you probably wouldn't be feeling too hot either. And they conducted that campaign because of how incredibly good the technology is.

This isn't a technological problem, it's one of corruption, conflicts of interest, and anti-science policy.

Now is the time to rally for change and science-driven policy, not to give up. The water is lapping at our feet!

very much this.

I'm skeptical 'big oil' campaigned against nuclear.

Oil doesn't compete for power generation, fossil fuel power is mostly from coal and natural gas.

I would totally believe coal companies did that

Err... natural gas (the largest component of current U.S. power generation) is produced by the exact same big oil companies, for the most part. The three largest natural gas producers in the United States are ExxonMobil, BP, and ConocoPhillips.

Also, before the Arab Oil Embargo hit in 1973 (causing oil prices to skyrocket) a significant amount (though not a majority by any means) of the U.S. electric grid was oil-fired.

What will it take to convince you of the facts?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/oil-gas-lobby-opposes-state-sub...

That should also give you some terms to search for other sources too if you feel compelled.

Maybe Big Oil was afraid of nuclear powered cars.[1] (Okay, this is mostly a joke...)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon

Hydrocarbons have nothing to worry about, even with nuclear. We are running into fossil fuels (our global usage is still climbing at a rapid pace), we have not flatlined, much less started to bend the curve downwards. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkj_91IJVBk&t=760s

70% of the electricity in France is nuclear. Almost all other power (heating, cars...) is still fossil fuels.

Sure. That's still a big number though. And with that much nuclear, even resistive heating is pretty reasonable from a carbon perspective.

Nuclear power is a giant kettle, why would you even bother with resistive heating?

Cogeneration would be much better for sure. In most countries heating with natural gas ends up being less carbon (after losses). But in France even resistive heating could be viable from a carbon perspective.

To be clear you should never do this, you should use a heat pump. But you could and it wouldn't be the end of the world.

This isn't a technological problem, it's one of corruption, conflicts of interest, and anti-science policy.

You sound like someone who doesn't have to work out the financial engineering to back all that development. The treehuggers may be anti-nuclear, but energy investors are not. What energy investors are however, is pro-profit.

Nuclear keeps falling short in the analysis phase of a lot of energy investment firms due diligence. Probably won't be attractive unless and until the government comes in and basically nationalizes the construction of these facilities. It's unreasonable to expect the private sector to lose billions on billions building nuclear plants "cuz we should do right". Look at the mess that is Vogtie, and you'll understand clearly nuclear's problem. I would go so far as to say that even with zero taxes, and no regulations at all, most energy firms would walk away from the vast majority of nuclear projects.

Nuclear's problem is not "corruption". The pursuit of profit on the part of energy investors is not "corrupt". T Boone Pickens is not a tree hugger. He just knows that the windmills he was slapping up generated return in less than 6 months with enviable yield. Whereas a nuclear plant may not return a profit in its lifetime. The essential problem here, is financial, and no one wants to address that problem in a realistic fashion. Government, at least it seems, is simply in no hurry to intervene. (Probably because they don't have any more of an appetite for laying out those kinds of sums than the energy investors do.)

You're absolutely right, the "financial engineering" of nuclear energy is not my problem, and the government should definitely nationalize nuclear energy.

The corruption I'm referring to is the oil lobby's interference in policy and public perception.

You're saying: capitalism doesn't work in the context of carbon-free energy production (or in general, but let's leave that aside), and I agree. Controversial opinion in a fundamentally capitalistic forum such as this one, but capitalism is very much the problem here. It has systematically failed to price in externalities, which is why nuclear energy doesn't look so good on the balance sheet.

Allow me to revise my statement: This isn't a technological problem, it's one of corruption, conflicts of interest, anti-science policy, and a broken economic system that will be the death of all of us.

"Allow me to revise my statement: This isn't a technological problem, it's one of corruption, conflicts of interest, anti-science policy, and a broken economic system that will be the death of all of us. "

As someone who was born into the toxic fallout of chernobyl, despite being quite far away, I can understand the reason many people are against nuclear and in favor of renewables. I see no corruption there - and you can argue, that if all of the government subsidies for nuclear would go immediately to renewables for projetcs like Desertec, there would be no need to have this discussion any further.

So I am not Antinuclear, I would like to see some new and small reactors as kind of a backup for the grid, while we change to renewable for good.

Having a hard time tracking down primary sources, but is it not the case that the design flaws of RMBK reactors (positive void coefficient for one) were suppressed?

They were, and RBMK branch of development was in fact buried after that.

As far as Russia is concerned there is only VVER (PWR tech, mostly resembling AP1000 series). And some experiments with fast neutrons at Beloyarsk.

Why anyone still remembers the RBMKs is sorta strange. They've been dead for more than 30 years.

> They've been dead for more than 30 years.

That's not true. There are 9 RMBK reactors still in operation today.

The other 3 units at Chernobyl continued to operate after the disaster. One was decommisioned after a fire destroyed it's generators. The last 2 continued to operate until they were shutdown as part of the deal with the Ukraine joining the EU.

If anything it's amazing that people don't realise how successful the RMBK has been despite Chernobyl.

>as part of the deal with the Ukraine joining the EU

Lol, since when Ukraine has joined the EU? If you meant the Union Association agreement, then note that it's REALLY FAR from a country joining EU. Here [0] you can see all other countries which have signed such agreement.

>If anything it's amazing that people don't realise how successful the RMBK has been despite Chernobyl.

Yeah, I agree with you. Only recently Russia has replaced RBMK reactors at the Leningrad nuclear plant with VVER reactors. So even despite the serious design flaw, RBMK reactors are quite reliable if you don't intentionally fuck with them.

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

I mean, they're dead in the sense that we're not going to build any more - but not in the sense that they're actually all shut down yet.

People in Europe have long memories of Chernobyl. I live in the UK, which is a huge distance away, and I remember drinking powdered milk for a good while because our dairy pastures got an unhelpful dose of radiation. It probably shouldn't affect future energy policy, but I'm not sure that caution about the safety of the existing RBMK reactor fleet is unwarranted if you live near one.

Here in eastern germany it is still not recommended to eat mushrooms from the forest regulary. And the meat of every wild boar that got hunted, needs to be checked for radiation levels, too - and they do not disclose how much meat has to be thrown away. All as of today - because of a event, that happened 34+ years ago.

On this note, reading Vaclav Smil's "Energy Myths and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Policy Debate" [1] has been sobering. I had a similar presumption that this isn't a technological problem but rather of a policy conflicts (and subsequent perverse mechanisms including corruption).

In fact, it is actually a technologically challenging problem. This book is a decade old but I would assume that nothing has drastically changed over the past decade, and the energy demand has probably only gone up. Highly recommended read, if not already!

[1]: https://www.librarything.com/work/10653100

What does Vaclav Smil get wrong?

https://cleantechnica.com/2020/11/13/what-does-bill-gates-fa...

Thanks for this view! Added to the reading list.

Probably as a cautionary note: Reading a decade old book on fast evolving topics may be a bad idea.

People throw out this 70% number but it’s really undercut by the fact France hasn’t built a new nuclear plant since 1999, and has decommissioned quite a few in that time. The average plant age is now 35. Nuclear output is actually down from its peak, with renewables largely responsible for new generating capacity.

France hopes to drop their nuclear mix to 50% by 2035, and their most recent reactor at an existing site started in 2007 aiming for completion by 2012...but that slipped by more than a decade and now they hope by the end of 2022 at the earliest.

So France is pretty hard to hold up as the shining beacon of a vibrant nuclear industry.

Would China be a better example as it is currently building dozens of new nuclear plants?

It isn't a shining beacon of vibrancy, but it does show that it was, at least at one time, a real possibility. An existence proof.

With sufficient subsidy and a powerful enough engine, you can make a pig fly.

I'll believe it when I see it

It boggles my mind that France and South Korea had such great success with nuclear but nobody else was able to replicate that success.

It can't be magic or works of God that won that success, so what's the real story?

There was a comment in a similar discussion a few days ago, attributing France's success in part to being able to sell excess nuclear power to neighboring countries, and those neighboring countries not themselves investing heavily in nuclear.

Basically, if France's neighbors tried to replicate France's success, they'd immediately run into the problem that they'd have to compete with France in the same power market. If building more nuclear reactors made economic sense in that market, France would (perhaps) already have done it.

I don't know how true that is, but it at least makes sense.

What competition? The Belgian market is already firmly owned by France energy companies.

Belgium has 2 nuclear power plants. In 2016, these covered about 51% of domestic power consumption.

Those power plants are owned and operated by Engie-Electrabel which is a subsidiary to Engie, a french multinational providing utilities services.

Engie-Electrabel covers about 50% of the Belgian market. The second largest producer/supplier on the Belgian market is Luminus (20% market share). The main shareholder of Luminus is Electricité de France (70% stake). Fun fact, EDF Luminus has a 10% stake in Engie-Electrabel's Belgian nuclear power plants. Most of their production is gas based.

Those 2 nuclear plants are coming up on 50 years of age. Their operational lifespan was 40 years. Talks about a phase out have been going on since 1999. So, what went wrong?

Back in 2003, at the end of their legislature, the then-government passed legislation that put a stop on building new plants and asserted a phaseout between 2021-2025. Even though an energy commission back then already noted the high reliance of Belgian consumption on nuclear. It was assumed that subsequent governments would revert that decision.

That didn't happen.

Why? Because between 2003 and now, Belgium has had a string of political crises severely stifling decision making processes. The "energy transition" has been postponed over those past 20 years for political reasons.

Belgium is now at a moment in time where those plants ought to be shut down, but without any proper alternatives to curb power consumption. Meanwhile, the costs for consumers has risen sharply over the past decade: 0.35 EUR / kWh.

Those costs are expected to rise in the future. Past policies regarding subsidizing renewables such as solar panels through tax incentives turned out to negatively impact the budget deficit. Moreover, the existing, outdated grid isn't updated to deal with modern power consumption. As a result, Belgium has ended up in a bind where recently owners of solar panels were barred from putting their surplus production on the grid, and the massive costs of subsidizing will need to be recouped. The already massively accrued costs to the public even before an energy transition can happen in earnest, pretty much render the debate moot.

Needless to say, Belgium is looking towards a future where it will probably be forced to reside to building new gas powered plants for the time being, and steep consumer prices for power.

There are several countries that have reaped benefits of nuclear power for decades. In Nordics, both Sweden and Finland has over 30% of electricity generated by nuclear. In Eastern Europe there are also several countries (Ukraina, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Czech R) with a big chunk of their electricity generated by nuclear.

> It can't be magic or works of God that won that success, so what's the real story?

The real story is that neither France, nor South Korea has any natural gas, coal, or oil reserves.

It seems that when you have no other independent means of generating electricity, you magically become rather good at building and operating nuclear reactors.

If the coal and oil reserves of the United States disappeared tomorrow, it too would acquire that superpower - and our politicians would miraculously discover a way to get both reactors, and waste disposal sites built.

There are smaller locales too that are heavily nuclear, like Ontario.

> It boggles my mind that France and South Korea had such great success with nuclear but nobody else was able to replicate that success.

The reason is that France has invested a lot of public money in nuclear energy. The state has taken the investment risks, over a very long period of time (decades) for the public good.

Nuclear energy is not really viable with private investment, because the return over investment time and the cost of money is too high. States can borrow sub-0% loans. Private power companies just can't.

And France invested at a time where there was a consensus between politicians, to invest in the future. Now politicians hardly invest for their elected time.

One lesson I learned during my masters and my time n the solar sector was that, at scale, financials are all that matters now. During the cold war, nuclear had a huge political push. Espcially in countries building a nuclear strike capacity.

Now we reached a point were, during public bidding, solar and wind are cheaper per kWh than Hinkley C (that was already three years ago). If the CO2 certificates would just be more restricted, solar and wind would easily outbid coal as well. Last time I checked, which was a couple of years ago, in Germany CO2 certificates ahd the effect that they largely pushed out everything except coal and renewables from the market. Renewables had a marginal cost of zero, so they always got demand. And with CO2 certificates plenty, coal plants ended up the next cheapest power source with dirt cheap fuel. Cleaner and more flexible solutions were thus more often than not priced out, like gas and nuclear.

I hate nuclear, because when an accident happens it always carries the risk of being disastrous. But right now, i would make sense to keep alle xisting nuclear plant running and close down coal and oil plants. Sure, we have the risk of an accident, and we have the added nuclear waste to worry about. but we already ahve a lot of waste, adding some more doesn't change that much. And we would buy ourselves time to solve energy storage coming from renewables. And use flexible as plants to cover unexpected peak demand. Not sure if we will ever see that level of long term thinking anytime soon, so.

>Now we reached a point were, during public bidding, solar and wind are cheaper per kWh

That metric is very misleading. Solar and wind are cheaper than most other sources because their fuel cost is zero.

There are a slew of other costs that are not borne by the solar and wind generators but which are borne by consumers namely balancing costs, standby generation costs, ancillary services and so on.

Once you add in all these costs, renewables suddenly aren't as cheap as the media would have you believe. Don't get me wrong - they are an important step towards decarbonising electricity generation but they aren't the final step.

The final step would be transmission interconnections on a continental scale, large amounts of hydro where possible and nuclear where hydro isn't possible and little to no coal and gas.

> And we would buy ourselves time to solve energy storage coming from renewables.

To my understanding, the intermittency/baseload problem is a much larger problem than people give it credit for. And I don't think it is safe to assume that we will eventually "solve energy storage", any more than we can count on eventually developing commercially viable fusion or any other still-pie-in-the-sky technologies.

Perhaps we will, but dangerous to count on.

Of course we will solve energy storage. There are thousands of different battery chemistries, and large numbers of non-battery storage options (including ones like hydrogen that will do much better than batteries for long term storage). And even with very near term storage improvements, renewables will beat nuclear at providing base load.

https://model.energy/

The low interest on those loans is of course a subsidy. So the "success" in France was really just another subsidy-driven boondoggle.

It's a combination of economics and (formerly) geostrategic interests. France is a nuclear power, for which nuclear infrastructure was needed (in the wider sense: universities producing engineers etc., not just plants for enrichment).

Nowadays there's virtually zero nuclear projects that are economically competitive, including in France.

Have you forgot about Russia? Also China makes a great progress in this field as well (they diversify and build both foreign and domestic designs).

The whole French Nuclear industry is government owned, steered and run - there currently is no economic model in the western world, which supports a successful market-based model for nuclear power.

France runs a lot of totally outdated reactors, because there is not enough money available to replace them. Even extending the lifetimes costs a lot of money, which had better be invested in a future decentralized market-oriented energy landscape.

> France runs a lot of totally outdated reactors, because there is not enough money available to replace them

We don't replace them because there is no political will to do so, and the green party has successfully put fear-mongering campaigns against nuclear energy.

> Even extending the lifetimes costs a lot of money, which had better be invested in a future decentralized market-oriented

And yet France electricity cost is half the price of what you have in Germany, where you will find the "decentralized energy revolution".

> We don't replace them because there is no political will to do so

There is no money for it and France does not know how to do it --- see the exploding problems, costs and time overrun of the EPR.

> And yet France electricity cost is half the price of what you have in Germany, where you will find the "decentralized energy revolution".

The French tax payer pays. In Germany the electricity costs are higher for private consumers and cheaper for industrial consumers.

There is nothing wrong in having public investment only conventional nuclear plant. Small Modular Reactor is still a possibility for private investment.

France reactors are not outdated but functional and updated for post Fukushima security standard following an independent authority audit, and initially envisaged for 40 years, but determined fit for 50 years, the same reactors are found to be suited for 100 years in the USA.

The point is there is no needs to close and rebuild what is working, and as the lasted IEA NEA report showed the cheapest electricity is from lifetime extension of current nuclear, by wide margins, not renewable, in France.

https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_51110/projected-costs-of-ge...

> there currently is no economic model in the western world, which supports a successful market-based model for nuclear power.

I keep seeing this argument, and every time I do, I think "who cares?" Why do we care if it's economically viable? We're facing catastrophic planetary change. Act now, worry about the economics later. Take a fraction of the military budget and build a bunch of state-owned nuclear power plants. Why does the market even need to enter into it at all?

I keep beating this dead horse, but if you want to make nuclear economically viable, there's an incredibly easy solution: make the price of fossil fuels incorporate the cost of their externalities. When gas is $30/gallon, nuclear won't seem so bad. We should have been taxing them to all hell 20 years ago, but what better time than now? Why are we letting supply and demand determine such a crucial matter?

> Take a fraction of the military budget and build a bunch of state-owned nuclear power plants.

Sure, it will just not make an impact. Just more problems. Invest the money where the it scales to a solution.

Only the US navy succeeded at fielding nuclear power, while the army, marines, and air force failed. Maybe it really is hard.

At least one US president was the founder of a petroleum company (Pennzoil).

I was also a big fan, but there are many alternatives now. I think they will remain useful for some edge cases.

I am now more looking forward to seeing battery and energy storage solutions mature, as well as seeing how solar powered hydrogen gas can replace or dilute fossil fuel in gas turbine generators for greener load balancing.

> I am now more looking forward to seeing battery and energy storage solutions mature

I'm reading Bill Gates' latest book, he says he spent and lost a lot of money on battery tech and while we are able to get incremental improvements, it appears that an order of magnitude improvement is unlikely at this point.

Other areas are still possible - heck, batteries are still possible, but I'm not sure we should hope for that rather than draft an optimistic case of incremental improvements and start planning with that instead.

I think energy storage outside of chemical batteries is where infrastructure scale storage should be happening. Things like pumped dams or gravity batteries. Instead of thinking of them as longer term storage of excess energy, we can think of them as capacitors for the grid overnight. In this way while we still rely on a fossil fuel turbine as a last resort, the vast majority of the year can be covered by renewables.

Lets say the split looks like:

8am - 8pm : 100% renewables

8pm - 8am : Split between remaining renewables then gravity storage begins discharging

If you are going to run out of gravity storage, you will have ample warning, and you will have a comfortable amount of time to bring a backup gas turbine plant online. One of the big challenges with all grids is continuity and keeping everything in sync, most of the time the issue is not having the ability to rapidly respond to fluctuations in the grid. Gravity storage helps solve that issue by being very predictable, and (with a smart grid integration) instantaneously available.

Don't have time for a proper response, just a short note:

Yep people are looking into that, but it ain't trivial. Apparently one needs a fairly specific slope for it to be econom at the moment (competitive with chemical batteries). If you look on YouTube for the (clickbaity, unfortunately) title "the truth about pumped storage" (iirc), you should find a video from some engineering channel where some of this is mentioned. Another keyword might be Ireland. There's gotta be more information-dense / less time-consuming sources than that video though, it's just the one I got this from. My point being, if it were this simple, yeah. Looks like we'll (recurring theme) need a bit of everything to get there on the timescale we're looking at to avoid worse issues.

>I was also a big fan, but there are many alternatives now.

Do some research. There are essentially no alternatives to nuclear power for 100% carbon free generation. That's due to how power is produced, transported and consumed (in the US at least) and simply installing extra capacity of renewables so there's "extra power" won't work.

You do some research. You're wrong. Your position might have been defensible ten years ago, but it's now obsolete.

It's a big discussion, but I don't think we need 100% carbon free to the point of technicality. We should just jump on whatever is good enough and easily available right now, not in 10 years of commissioning time. The tech is here and now and it could be installed on your roof tonight. We should have rolled out nuclear 5 decades ago, and be reaping the rewards now.

In my state in Australia, which resembles California to a fairly uncanny degree in many areas, we have a majority of energy from rooftop solar for a period of most days, the rest is filled by gas generators and the whole shebang is stabalized by a massive tesla battery ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve ). It isn't perfect but it is a huge decrease in carbon emissions and a big step toward totally renewable.

Somewhat ironically the state also has the national nuclear waste dump and was previously the site of British and American nuclear weapons testing out in the desert. So uh, guess we may as well have popped a reactor out there in the 60s and have enjoyed the clean energy.

I don’t really understand how wind and sun could totally replace nuclear. How do we get electricity during the night? How do we get electricity when it’s cloudy but the wind is light at the same time?

Store the power. Batteries, pump water up into lakes, melt salt, etc.

From the numbers we saw during the Texas power outage, the amount of batteries required would be mind-boggling.

Lots of places do not have the geography required for pumped storage, or it is already fully exploited (building a new dam is also an environmental disaster)

Molten salt also still seems to be in it's infancy.

The most practical solution I could see today to live without baseline power would be to build a massive inter-continental HVDC grid. Large grids have a tendency to be fragile and have catastrophic failures though.

To be honest the best probably would be to get small modular reactors (SMRs) into mass production. That would give economies of scale along with other benefits. But we aren't quite there yet. I'd imagine if SMRs became popular larger reactors would as well too.

Can you imagine how a Texan operator of a SMR would have cut corners and what the damage to their plant would have been in this cold snap?

Remembering that the damage to Texan energy production was due to failure to winterise their equipment after the last two cold snaps. It has happened before, they were told it was going to happen again, but the legislature decided that it was best to let the market decide the outcome.

An SMR operator refusing to winterise their plant would end up in a similar situation: part of the equipment freezes or ices over (because antifreeze costs money), leading to an inability to scale up production until ambient temperatures rise far enough to defrost the frozen plant.

Isn’t nuclear federally regulated today?

Yes, and nuclear facilities have significantly different standards from other facilities. The parent's comment is bad because the SMR wouldn't explode or leak if it wasn't properly winterized. It would shut down. But there is a lower chance of that happening simply because the significantly higher standards surrounding nuclear.

Where did I suggest a SMR would explode or leak?

Texas' (additional) problem was lack of connectivity to the rest of the country. With a proper grid the outages wouldn't have occured.

Also, there will be hundreds of millions of EVs in about 10 years. With not-so-small batteries, charged by distributed rooftop solar. Many / most of the EVs will have batteries that are overprovisioned for daily driving in order to enable distance driving.

Making Methane is important too. We already have infrastructure for storing vast amounts of natural gas. We can just use it to store Methane made from Water, CO2 and electricity.

Store it, or get it from somewhere else?

Transmission lines and storage.

There are multiple 2500km transmission lines in use today. They are relatively cheap to build and solve almost all the intermitency issues.

China has a few over 3000km long already, eg: https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/the-smarter-grid... and there is a 4500km long line planned for Australia to Singapore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%E2%80%93ASEAN_Power_...

You build a big grid. Wind won't be light everywhere. Load is lower at night, so lack of sunlight is less of an issue. Maybe people start placing battery packs in their homes. Battery technology has seen large investments over the past decade and performance is better than ever. When demand is high, inexpensive natural gas can be turned on quickly.

There are a lot of options, almost all of them less expensive than nuclear. That's my point, traditionally nuclear was good for baseline and renewable doesn't have a comparable equivalent apart from hydro. But other renewables like wind are getting to be so efficient and inexpensive, that I don't see how building an excess of it can't compete with nuclear.

Load is lower at night

Only in warm climates.

Yes, and also load is higher in the winter, when there's less wind and sunshine.

Less wind in the winter is surely not true for countries in Europe.

> Battery technology has seen large investments over the past decade and performance is better than ever.

Battery technology still has a bit to go before it can perform this task though. Even if we don't account for freak weather events (which are becoming more common).

> When demand is high, inexpensive natural gas can be turned on quickly.

Is this a good option though?

I think the only good argument against nuclear is cost, so I agree with that. But if we consider the cost of emissions, storage (these aren't counted in solar and wind and don't make for fair comparisons to base loads like coal, gas, or nuclear), or other factors that fall under "tragedy of the commons" (i.e. putting sources on even playing fields) the prices become more comparable (depending how you weigh factors). But it really does come down to how much you value the cost of climate and human lives (since nuclear is about 50x safer than natural gas).

Cost is a good argument, but we have to define our priors because "cost" means different things to different people. I for one would rather pay more for electricity and save human lives and reduce emissions. Just at $50/ton tax (low) would make it competitive[0], assuming that we couldn't regain economies of scale.

[0] https://www.axios.com/nuclear-energy-could-be-competitive-bu...

Battery technology isn't as far off as you think.

We're talking power station level storage, as in it doesn't have to be light, cheap and consumer durable.

Risks of fire or toxicity from consumers doing dumb things doesn't have to be worried about for instance. A pet gnawing at it and getting sick? Not happening.

So not unobtainium but expensivium can be used. Also operating environments can be dictated, such as temperature, humidity, water cooling or say if the battery technology required a contraption the size of a house, etc.

And lastly it doesn't have to be produced at scale. The lead time for some power station equipment is already months to years. Clunky awkward manufacturing is production ready.

There's many more possibilities given those possibilities. Right now it's Li-ion and nicad at installation sites but look for that changing soon

The problem with intermittent power and batteries is that you don't have to equal the capacity of an on demand or base load system, you have to have higher capacity. This does vary dramatically between different areas. For example, Nevada doesn't have the same requirements as New England. Nevada has fairly consistent seasons and isn't as subject to storms, thus they don't need much excessive storage. On the other hand New England suffers frequent heavy seasonal storms and long winters that make storage more difficult. Even more so when we are talking about the frequency of these events increasing due to climate change.

The problem is complicated.

> A pet gnawing at it and getting sick? Not happening.

Power outages are often caused by animals. 11% are from squirrels[0]. SQUIRRELS!

> Also operating environments can be dictated, such as temperature, humidity, water cooling or say if the battery technology required a contraption the size of a house, etc.

This just adds to the nuance from above. Because now you need to power your containment. This needs priority over powering homes actually. So now you need more excess and more backups because this is going to be expensive if it fails and take a long time to get back up.

A lot can be reduced if people start building battery systems in their homes. But most people don't have $5k-$15k to drop on a powerwall. But that is shifting the burden to consumers and I'm not sure that's a fair comparison because this consumer cost isn't included in our pricing comparisons. Though this would be a much more robust system (assuming we ignore increase in risk of fire) and greatly reduce damage done by events like what we saw in Texas, even if there is a lot of human error involved.

Climate and power is an extremely difficult topic. Anyone saying otherwise is uninformed.

[0] https://gesrepair.com/what-are-the-most-common-causes-of-pow...

Right. The point is mass produced consumer devices we're familiar with have different constraints than a power grid so most people's existing familiarity with low cost retail batteries isn't all that relevant.

For instance Lithium–air batteries have about the energy density of oil but comes with loads of problems that make them currently impractical for consumer devices. There's fewer hurdles however in making it power station ready.

Same thing with liquid electrodes research. There could be large reservoirs that are on multiday flow cycles for capacity smoothing.

It's like comparing a drainage pipe to a hydropower river dam, it's fundamentally a different problem space

Yes, exactly. Your battery that is in your phone that dies after 2 years of use is the main driver of battery innovation. If you quick draw from these your battery will light on fire (no joke, please don't test because lithium fires are not good, even if you manage to put it out... i.e. let it burn).

That's why nuclear is important for island and industrial country like Japan. Island country is difficult to develop well-balanced renewables because of the grid is small and difficult to connect to other countries' grid. Sadly Japan is now very difficult to build new nuclear plants for obvious reason. I suspect that that's why Japan gov and Toyota is going to develop Hydrogen.

Overproduction, storage and demand side shifting. The market can choose which mix of these works best in which market - which might vary a lot from market to market.

It's rather ironic that the carbon industry spent the last 30 years telling us through Koch institutes etc. that the market knew best (when fossil fuels were most viable financially) and now that the green energy competition is undercutting them to death, suddenly markets don't solve anything.

I’m incredibly depressed about renewables. They’re a dead end technology for a civilization in decline—one cutting energy usage rather than exponentially increasing it to make wonderful things possible. You’ll never power a starship with windmills. Why can’t we bring down the price on nuclear instead of giving up?

Ask your question to the average person and imagine their response.

It's because nobody is thinking about the starships, for better or worse. People are bad enough at dealing with today's problems.

You'll never power a starship with coal either.

That dead end technology is one of the few hopes for countering global warming and carbon emissions. And rooftop solar and EV batteries dual-purposing for distributed grid storage are complementary technologies.

"Why can't we bring down the price of nuclear" is a problem with the nuclear industry, and has nothing to do with the REVOLUTIONARY sea change that renewables represent.

And I'm a LFTR fan. Brayton cycle? 100x more available fuel that's breeded? Vastly reduced proliferation risk? "Burn" spent fuel rods? 99% fuel use? Zero meltdown risk with plug and liquid fuel? Scales down to the size of a closet? Very rapid startup/shutdown time? Container degradation was a problem, but whatever. Amazing stuff.

But LFTR and other technologies have zero chance in the open market right now with renewables plummeting in cost to the point that there exist no fossil fuels that are competitive in the marketplace.

Solar/wind is one of the few developments that are counter to our civilization sliding into a polluted, totalitarian, oppressive dystopia. Solar/Wind can enable decentralized power production in the third world, and combined with Starlink and other satellite internet webs will enable so much potential for the third world without the pseudo-oppressive nature of grid and wired communications infrastructure.

If we wanted to we could cover the Sahara with solar panels and have several times more electricity than we know what to do with.

The important shift btw is not from coal and nuclear to renewables, it's from fossil fuels for heating and transportation and industry to electricity. If we figure out how to build fusion power plants safely for cheap in a few decades, we will already have set up our infrastructure to run on electricity instead on carbon. Cutting energy usage is just a nice side effect of switching from 30% efficient ICEs to 80% efficient electric cars and from heating with gas to heating with a heat pump.

> If we wanted to we could cover the Sahara with solar panels and have several times more electricity than we know what to do with.

Do we have enough rare-Earth minerals to build this many solar panels? What do we do with the panels when they reach the end of their lifecycle twenty years from now? What do we do when it's nighttime in the Sahara?

Panels are almost exclusively sand by weight. When panels are at the end of their life we either recycle them into new panels or simply store them somewhere. They're not particularly difficult to store safely. Right now there is not much recycling going on because there simply isn't the volume of old panels available to make this interesting from an economic perspective.

To cover nights in the Sahara we use some of the absurd excess energy we get from covering the whole desert to make some Hydrogen or Methane and convert that back to electricity. If we don't want PV and gas synthesis for some reason to we can also just store heat in molten salt in solar-thermal installations and drive steam turbines. That's just a bit more expensive than PV today.

https://imgur.com/QwKBMvn

I'm not sure why rare Earth minerals would be a bottleneck. They aren't rare in the element abundance sense, just uneconomical to extract, which is why they are being extracted in countries where human rights violations are happening all the time.

> Do we have enough rare-Earth minerals to build this many solar panels?

The are no rare-Earth minerals in silicon solar cells.

D'oh. TIL

Why does this canard about rare earths in PV show up in the comments to every one of these nuclear posts? Where did you hear this, and why did you believe it?

I am pro nuclear, but it is actually SpaceX’s plan to fuel Starship with methane produced by offshore wind power.

Source? Because I believe the most they've said is that they'll offset enough generation to make up for the natural gas used by starship. The sabatier process on Earth is even more troublesome than on Mars due to the trace amounts of atmospheric CO2. Even with the thin atmosphere on Mars there's literally more CO2 in a cubic meter of Martian air than in a cubic meter of terrestrial air.

Elon said so on Twitter. Google will probably find it for you.

How are renewables cutting energy usage?

They significantly reduce primary energy usage. When you generate one 1kWh in a thermal power plant you also generate an additional 1 - 2 kWH of thermal energy. So in statistics it will look like the thermal power plant produces more energy. If your city has district heating it might be a valid form of power, but right now we assume all the thermal energy is always useful and necessary which is especially bad in cars where you turn up to 70% of the energy into waste heat.

By increasing energy efficiency by a factor of 2 you easily cut down on energy usage.

Nuclear power plants rarely have been used for district heating. Lot's of nuclear power plants are heating up rivers...

The civilization in decline is the one that destroys the environment in order to build spaceships.

Not that so-called renewables will actually solve that, cutting energy usage on the other hand definitely would help.

Solar power is becoming so cheap and plentiful that it is cheaper than free. At certain times you can literally be paid to consume it. All kinds of possibilities from that.

There have been thousands of satellites and dozens of space probes powered by solar electricity. Space missions out to the orbit of Jupiter can be powered by solar PV (Juno probe). Actual fission reactors have never gone beyond Earth orbit.

Very deep space missions can't use solar power due to the inverse square fall-off of light from the sun, but even those don't use nuclear reactors. They use radioisotope thermal generators powered by radioactive decay. RTGs don't have any moving parts and can run for decades without maintenance.

I think it's astonishing and delightfully living-in-the-future that solar cells -- once so expensive that only space missions could justify their cost -- are now manufactured by the square kilometer and cheap enough to "farm" electricity here on Earth. If you're pondering speculative technologies of the future, a solar collecting Dyson swarm could provide more energy than all the fissionable materials in the solar system.

> I’m incredibly depressed about renewables. They’re a dead end technology for a civilization in decline

Solar could supply civilization with more energy than fission or fusion (in manmade reactors) ever could. The Sun will produce orders of magnitude more energy than totally fusing all the deuterium or fissioning all the uranium and thorium in the solar system could provide. Far from being a sign of a civilization in decline, the triumph of renewables would be a signpost on the way to becoming a Kardashev 2 civilization that can fully exploit the energy resources of the solar system.

I've had a tough time understanding the regulations against nuclear. A typical coal plant produces more nuclear waste than a nuclear plant... with the exception that its burned into the atmosphere.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

Diluting nuclear waste is a good way to deal with it. The problem with nuclear plants is that you have all this radiation sitting in one spot.

Isn't it good to have all your waste in one small location? Especially radiation which can be attenuated by engineering. That's probably one of the biggest selling points for nuclear for me. Solar and wind involves a lot of land being used that can't be left for nature or other purposes. A 1 km^2 site can power a whole region with nuclear energy.

I'd much rather have nuclear waste safely contained in one spot than distributed into everyone's lungs. The worst case scenario with nuclear waste is that it's distributed around the environment. That's the status quo with fossil fuels. You absolutely do not want to "dilute" nuclear waste into the environment.

> A typical coal plant produces more nuclear waste than a nuclear plant.

No. This is absurdly incorrect.

That article has been debunked many times because its basic claim is that coal ash ponds emit to the environment (not contain) more radiation than spent nuclear fuel storage in perfect working order.

The spent fuel from a nuclear power plant contains many orders of magnitude more radioactive matter than any coal plant, anywhere. The design of fuel assemblies, as well as the associated exterior containment of e.g. cooling ponds, or dry casks, keeps the massive amount of radioactivity confined and separate from the environment.

Can you cite a source for this? the core claim is that coal ash contains more uranium and other radioactive metals than what a typical nuclear plant consumes in a year owing to the impurities of coal and the massive volume of coal consumed by a power plant in a given year.

As coal ash is typically disposed of via water or air it's an interesting discussion point.

Uranium is not common. For coal to just, by chance, contain enough uranium to run a nuclear reactor is just not consistent with the logic that mining + refining uranium is hard.

It's worth recalling that a coal plant burns 1.1 pounds of coal per kilowatt hour. Considering that a nuclear plant may produce 5 tera watt hours per year this translates to 2.5 million tons of coal burned per year for equivalent coal generation capacity.

Uranium rich coals with concentrations above 200 mg/KG are used in resource extraction around the world. Our hypothetical plant burning this coal would release the equivalent of 500 tons of uranium. In practice it's estimated that Chinese coal plants emit 62 tons of uranium into the atmosphere per year, however this estimate critically depends on the quantity of uranium in the coal - one plant in china was estimated to emit 3 tons of uranium into the atmosphere.

https://www.mdpi.com/2075-163X/7/12/239/htm

Note that 3 tons out of 2.5 million is not concentrated enough to run a nuclear power plant - but is producing greater emissions than our plant.

> the core claim is that coal ash contains more uranium and other radioactive metals

No, the core claim is that coal ash contains more radioactivity. That is, there are more nuclear disintegration events per second per kg of mass in coal ash than in spent reactor fuel. And it is wrong by many orders of magnitude. The thorium and natural uranium in coal ash have fairly low levels of radioactivity, nothing like the levels of spent fuel rods.

Simple numeracy will tell you it is fact. But in case that's not accessible, ask yourself: what is a person's radiation exposure by standing upon a coal ash mound 1 year after it is deposited?

Now ask yourself: what is a person's radiation exposure if they were able to stand next to a spent nuclear fuel assembly 1 year after it is removed from the reactor?

You could literally live on top of a coal ash heap and never suffer any radiation consequences. You would have suffered a fatal does from the spent reactor fuel in about a minute.

I'll leave the citations to you, since most of the published works assume basic knowledge of how radioactivity works and I'm not certain are appropriate to your question. If you want to know about spent fuel, the Swedish report [1] is fairly good for lay persons. I'm not going to dig out any studies on ash ponds, but I'm sure there are some.

[1] https://www.osti.gov/etdeweb/servlets/purl/587853

As it happens, my degree is in physics. the majority of high radioactivity elements that you are describing decay within 5 years the remaining waste that sticks around for 30k+ years isn't nearly as radioactive. The rods burning off hot radioactive material are not intended to leave the plant and hence I didn't call them out in the waste products.

When it comes to low concentrations of radioactive heavy metals like those in spent fuel rods after 5 years the bigger danger tends to be heavy metal poisoning where they are dramatically more toxic than lead.

Look on page 22 of the cited doc. At 50 years, the dose rate is still 20,000 mSv/hour/tonne. Compare that to fly ash for us, please.

I have written about this a couple of times:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26216669

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14466887

The Scientific American article cites actual published research but distorts it in the retelling.

> it's hard to argue against the significant advances made by renewables over the past few years.

I don't think it's that hard to argue that we should have been building nuclear plants en-masse 30 years ago, and that resistance to this has lead to immeasurable damage to our biosphere. And that continued resistance will result in even more damage. No projections for renewables is fast enough to meet the gap.

https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/15/renewable-e...

Nuclear is increasingly the only option for meeting climate targets quickly enough to save our biosphere.

We can't build nuclear plants quickly. In the ten years it takes to build a nuclear plant you can build a lot of wind and solar. It's cheaper too.

The UK commissioned Calder Hall in 1953 and connected it to the grid in 1956 (although energy production was its secondary purpose).

We could do it faster if we really wanted to.

And if all goes as planned it'll only cost £121bn and take a total of 139 years to decommission. Really. Started in 1981, scheduled to finish in 2120, and nothing really went wrong

Oh except for the year after 1956, where that site saw the worst nuclear accident in the UK's history. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire

>Sir John Cockcroft, leading the project team, was sufficiently alarmed to order the filters. They could not be installed at the base as construction of the chimneys had already begun, and were constructed on the ground then winched into position at the top once the chimney's concrete had set.[42] They became known as "Cockcroft's Folly" as many regarded the delay they caused and their great expense to be a needless waste. During the fire the filters trapped about 95% of the radioactive dust and arguably saved much of northern England from becoming a nuclear wasteland. Terence Price said "the word folly did not seem appropriate after the accident".

You've got to love the British understatement! Having said that, this was really at the start of the nuclear age and came about through the UK being excluded from US nuclear projects despite having contributed to the Manhattan Project under the incorrect assumption technology would be shared after the war. Windscale was built because Britain needed the atomic bomb to prevent its post-war decline making it geopolitically irrelevant and needed it before the US and Soviet Union banned further testing. There's no way anything like that would be built today by any sane government knowing what we do now.

As long as we're playing counterfactuals: We should have used the untold zillions of public money and subsidies nuclear R&D got (both military and civilian sides) over the last 80 years on renewables, we would have reached the current level of advancement 30 years ago.

Renewables have such a poor energy density that I am not sure anyone can take your last sentence seriously.

The "energy density" argument against renewables is not even wrong. It's just one big non sequitur.

But what if the cost of nuclear energy were to come down by a factor of 3? Nuscale's SMR cost is about $3BN/GW, while the cost of Vogtle 3-4 is about $10BN/GW.

The cost of solar has a lower bound: even if panels become free, you still need to buy the rights to the land where you mount them. The cost of solar has come down a lot lately, but there's not much scope to come down further, if you look at the total cost.

> you still need to buy the rights to the land where you mount them.

And you need to store the power somewhere for nights and cloudy days. Energy storage ain't cheap, or even feasible enough for an all-solar-and-wind power system. I don't know why solar advocates continuously ignore this point.

Batteries for short term storage, hydrogen (stored underground and burned in turbines) for long term storage. Combined cycle is 10% of the cost of a nuclear plant of the same capacity; simple cycle just 5%, so one can back up the entire grid with hydrogen and still pay lower capital cost than for a nuclear grid.

https://model.energy/

Not according to the EIA ([1] page 8 Table 1b). The cost for 1 MWh of nuclear energy is $63 and for solar $30. The solar cost includes 4 hours of storage (no long term storage).

[1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....

That nuclear number has no credibility. AP1000 and the EPR were also promised to be cheaper, but were 2-3x times that.

Study up on modern nuclear technology (which solves a lot of the economic issues as well as a lot of safety/regulatory issues).

Also, learn about how power grids work. Simply building in over capacity of renewables won't solve the problem at all.

>almost easier to just build overcapacity into the renewable generation.

That won't be sufficient to stabilize a grid. You need big baseline output and/or lots of storage.

> accelerated a preexisting plan in Germany to completely phase out nuclear power by the end of 2022

That's a bit misleading. This is how it went:

- in 2002, the Social-Democrat/Green (Schröder) government decided to phase out nuclear power by 2021.

- in 2010, the Christian-Democrat/Liberal (Merkel) government decided to delay that plan.

- in 2011, after Fukushima, they made a U-turn, which led to the current phase-out that will (probably) be completed in 2022.

(see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomgesetz_(Deutschland)#Novel... - in German)

So Fukushima didn't accelerate the plan, it actually forced the Merkel government to return to the preexisting plan...

It didn’t force Merkel to do anything. It was just a cheap opportunity to try and grab a few Green votes.

Well yeah, in a democracy popular opinion will force you to do things if you want to win the next election. If you want proof that Merkel's instinct wasn't entirely wrong, you can take a look at the results of the 2013 election: her party (CDU/CSU) gained 7,7 points to 41,5 percent, while the FDP, who were seen as representing the industrial lobby, dropped a whopping 9,8 points to 4,8 percent (and out of the Bundestag, because a party has to get at least 5% to be represented there).

>in a democracy popular opinion will force you to do things if you want to win the next election

Well, there's the problem with our type of democracy.

It boils down to a popularity contest instead of a competence one, so politicians will do or say whatever gets them re-elected instead of what's good for the long term being of the country/voters/society.

Much like the focus on the "next quarter" of CEOs, that ends up ruining companies long term at the expense of quick profits short term, politicians in the west focus only on the "next election" instead of major issues like housing, education, pensions, demographics, infrastructure, defense, immigration, all of which require long term planning to get right but nobody cares as they just keep kicking the can down the road and hope they won't be in the office by the time shit really hits the fan. And when the shit does eventually hit the fan, whoever will be in office will just blame the predecessors for knowing X was unsustainable and not having done anything about it. Rinse and repeat.

I don't disagree, western democracy is still the worst system of government except for all others that have been tried from time to time.

Solutions to short-termism are very welcome, but more often than not they tend to boil down to "someone stays in power for decades", which is not really desirable, is it?

>"someone stays in power for decades", which is not really desirable, is it?

Which is super ironic as Merkel has been in power since forever, well, 15 years to be exact, but still, way longer than most other EU or western governments.

But as mentioned, she had to steer her policies several times to do so. Democracy in action.

There is a simple solution to short-termism: create strong incentives for people to learn in depth about the topics they will press the politicians about. Even better, down that same road you can get effective direct democracy where everybody has a direct vote for the laws, and the legislative is no longer a representative body.

Notice that the devolution of democracy into a "popularity contest" isn't a given: the French "Convention citoyenne pour le climat" proved that informed (and not propagandized) citizens can make rational political choices when given a chance.

You can either see it as a problem or as its main feature.

It's not great but at least it's better than public opinion having 0 effect on policy.

> It didn’t force Merkel to do anything

Merkel would have governed against the strong will of the Germans to get rid of nuclear ASAP.

This topic has been intensely discussed in Germany for two decades already.

That was not a sustainable position. Mass protests would have awaited the government.

> Merkel would have governed against the strong will

Her changing positions got a 10 point bump. It’s a large group for sure, but it’s still just placating dimwits to gain quick political support to stay in power. The vast majority clearly didn’t care.

> just placating dimwits

Only shows your lack of respect for the voters.

> The vast majority clearly didn’t care.

The vast majority did care. It was one of the hottest and longest debated politics topics.

Merkel knew everything about it, since she was before the responsible minister.

> Only shows your lack of respect for the voters.

Lack of respect specifically for 10 percent of the voters who changed their view of a politician to a positive based solely on her caving into populist pressure to adopt a bad energy policy.

People are too ignorant to decide in any form of direct democracy how safe nuclear is. These dimwits chose to accelerate climate change (a well-known acute global problem) over nuclear power because “nuclear is scary” and didn’t support Merkel until she agreed. Despicable.

> The vast majority did care. It was one of the hottest and longest debated politics topics

Nope. The 10 point change showed how little it mattered. “Hottest political topics” just means people interested in national politics. It’s still irrelevant to the majority.

Here is a survey from April 2011 that proves you wrong: https://www.infratest-dimap.de/fileadmin/_migrated/content_u...

I don’t think that says what you think or you didn’t understand what I said.

And Schroder is now chairing Rosneft, Putin's oil extraction and export conglomerate.

Talk about putting Rick Belluzzo to shame.

I hate this new HN culture of downvoting completely accurate statements when they don‘t align with the hivemind‘s ideas. Ok, maybe not the most insightful comment, but completely true. Schröder pushed denuclearization and advocated for the switch to natural gas (which is so convenient for Russia that he‘s now very close to Putin and held top positions in Russian energy companies)

What is more, the Nord Stream I and II pipes were put under the Baltic Sea to bypass Poland and Ukraine and avoid extending existing pipes, not because it was economically viable.

This is a political decision that hits Ukraine geopolitically.

It increased German and European dependency on Russian natural gas and decreases political costs of Russian hostility against Ukraine significantly.

No, don't trust the US propaganda used to promote its more expensive LNG and keep European countries in its leash. Both of Nord Streams are commercial projects first and foremost. IIRC they have payback period of something like from 10 to 15 years, which is quite reasonable for an infrastructure project. Look at the map, primary source of natural gas today in Russia is the Yamal peninsula, and path from it to Germany through the Baltic is shorter than through Ukraine. Also take a look at companies which invest into the project, almost half of the cost is paid by the European companies. Do you think they would invest so heavily into a purely geopolitical project?

Also it's a common sense to reduce your transportation risks, both Poland and Ukraine are clearly hostile towards Russia (does not matter why and who is responsible for that in your opinion), so why would you not avoid their territory for transportation of one of your main exports if it's possible? We already have seen how disputes can cause a significant disruption in 2008-2009 and now Poland tries to fine Gazprom for a ridiculous sum for building Nord Stream 2 (sic!). And finally Ukrainian gas transportation system is in a dire need of rehabilitation and modernization, e.g. due to its poor state they recently had a gas explosion near the Lubny city. The Ukrainian state does not have funds for it, Russia will not do it for obvious reasons, and Europe does not want to pay for it either.

>It increased German and European dependency on Russian natural gas

Blatantly false. Consumption of Russian natural gas has been more or less stagnant for a decade and does not show any signs of future growth. It has even shrunk, in 2007 Russia supplied 626 billion m3, while in 2018 only 549. If anything it will only decrease in the following decades. For example according to a Gazprom's model it will peak in 2027 around 580 billion m3 and will steadily decline thereafter.

You're saying about 'US propaganda' and 'the leash', which pretty much explains clearly why your perspective is a bit distorted, but let me mention a couple of facts:

1. Cost of building the pipe on the sea bed, potential ecological issues and costs of maintenance are much higher than putting it on land. It was quite a lot of effort to do that.

2. Bypassing Ukraine and Poland decreases the political costs of Russian aggression towards these countries, of course it's a good thing from Russian or German perspective, but there's no doubt it increases the probability of military conflict in Eastern Europe. Obviously, as you mentioned, the fact that these countries can no longer influence the German-Russian natural gas transit is the biggest advantage for Russia.

3. It was Russia that seized a part of Ukrainian territory recently, not the other way around, and natural gas was always used as one of the means of Russian influence in the region. In that context saying that Poland and Ukraine are hostile towards Russia introduces a bit of distortion. Why shouldn't they be? Is it not enough reason? This is what will be worse because of that pipe.

4. It is going to increase western Europe dependency on Russian natural gas , if you increase supply that's what happens. Natural gas is the obvious choice to balance the renewables in the grid. Even some German politicians recently mentioned that it may tie German and Russian energy sectors too much.

5. It all plays nicely with German policy to phase out the Nuclear as they will in fact become a major natural gas hub in Europe. It is against the climate and may jeopardise efforts to slow down global warming. They want the same policy for whole European Union.

6. The fact that from Russian perspective there are clear geopolitical benefits doesn't mean that western european companies cannot make money on it. I don't think that potential to destabilize any region or benefit from global warming was ever concern to the oil and gas companies or investment banks. Of cour

7. The list of German and Austrian politicians that received personal benefits out of that project is quite long: https://euobserver.com/foreign/151123 If it was just an economic project, would that be necessary?

Do you deny that EU has a limited geopolitical independence and the US exerts a strong influence over it? In my book it's called a leash. It's not so different from Russia trying to keep on the leash (with varying success) countries like Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan and other ex-USSR states.

1) If we will take into account how much Gazprom pays Ukraine and Poland for the transit and estimated cost of associated risks, then additional cost of a sea pipeline is nothing. Ecological concerns are hugely overblown in an attempt to stop the pipeline, Nord Stream 2 is effectively a clone of Nord Stream 1 and there was little to no concern at the time it was built.

2) Aggression against Poland? Are you kidding? As for Ukraine, it's a very difficult conflict with deep historic and cultural roots. I want to ensure you, as someone who is quite familiar with it by personally hearing stories from people in Crimea and from reading various sources based in Russia, Ukraine, and the West, that Ukraine is FAR from being a cute democracy-aspiring little victim of the big evil Russia as depicted by the western propaganda (e.g. see [0] if you are not familiar with the current situation inside Ukraine). Russia of course is not without a blame, but most of its actions, while drastic in nature, have a clear logic behind them and dictated by its interests and well-known phobias.

3) How dares Russia, the Evil Empire, to exert and expand its influence over other countries! Only forces of good (read USA) can do it! It's a pure matter of bilateral relations between Russia and Germany (modulo intra-EU obligations taken by Germany). Why the hell do you think the US and Poland can have their say in it? Also note that the previous gas conflict with Ukraine (which largely kick-started Nord and South streams) has happened long before 2014 and that it has roots as far as in the 90s.

4) You continue to repeat the same propaganda assertion without backing it up, while I have presented the numbers which clearly show that amount of supplied gas will stay approximately the same, thus the dependency will not rise. Instead gas transit between Germany and Russia will become independent from the middle-man countries. Will transit through Ukraine decrease significantly? You bet. But Russia is under no obligation to feed the hostile regime, which can not even properly take care of its transit system.

5) No, it's the other way around. Natural gas does help to increase renewables share. Gas plants are the best tool after hydro storage to compensate for their intermittence with a relatively small environmental impact. It's one of the reasons why Germany is so interested in the pipeline, due to its heavy bet on renewables instead of nuclear it needs natural gas since Norway hydro and domestic storage is not yet sufficient. Until the energy storage problem will be properly solved at the required scale, natural gas and renewables will go hand to hand (though in the following decades natural gas may get essentially rebranded into hydrogen, but most of its generation will be still from NG). If you are so worried about climate, then start with Poland which in this day and age still uses coal for 70% of its electricity generation, but instead for some reason you attack much cleaner gas instead.

6) So you do admit that companies which invest into this project will make profit of it and are eager to do it? It makes the project commercial in my book. The fact that it also has a nice political bonuses for the involved countries is nothing more than an icing on the top. Your claims about destabilization are highly subjective and debatable. If anything, stronger economic ties between Russia and Europe will only contribute to stability of the region (at the expense of the US influence over the key countries).

7) Yes, because large capital does not like to invest huge money into projects which can be later shut down by politicians. So they lobby such project beforehand and only start investing into it seriously if sufficient backing and insurances have been achieved. If anything, it only confirms the commercial nature of the project. Or do you think that Russia has bought all those European politicians in the current anti-Russian climate?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26381672

1) From Russian perspective the biggest risk of having Poland and Ukraine as transit countries is that it limits the political costs of aggression towards Eastern European countries, period. It is not a good thing, because it decreases the stability in Europe, which serves only Russia as their strongest cards, such as military power, disinformation and intelligence services, can be played most effectively only in these circumstances.

2) It does not need to be a military aggression. I see your stance against Ukraine, but let's be clear Russia for a long time was involved in Ukrainian political processes as it tried to be in the USA, UK and around the world. It was Russia that annexed part of its territory and this is unacceptable.

5) If you need natural gas to balance the only other energy source you have - the renewables that's dependency. Poland is whole other topic - it limits natural gas usage to not be as you call it on "Russian leash" that much and will be seeking nuclear as the way out of that problem.

6) The nice political bonuses will potentially enable aggression in eastern part of Europe. I guess that's fine for you, but it's a very Russian perspective.

The rest basically is the argumentation based on "what you're saying is a US propaganda" so I'm not even going into that. Cheers. EOT.

So in the end your position boils down to "but, but Russian aggression!!111". You were unable to refute any of the evidence of Nord Stream 2 being a commercial project first and foremost presented in my comments. When I gave you hard numbers, you've continued to repeat the baseless assertions about Europe becoming more "dependent" on Russia. BTW try to calculate on how much this "dependency" will increase in the ultra-optimistic for Russia scenario of Nord Stream 2 being used at full capacity.

When you started to talk about the climate change, I've countered with the well recognized deep connection between natural gas and renewables at the current moment in history and presented the dirtiest Poland energy sector as a counter-example, on which you've replied with another apologetic propaganda line "but, but independence from Russia!!!11".

>It was Russia that annexed part of its territory and this is unacceptable

More unacceptable than bombing of Yugoslavia and recognition of Kosovo by the West? Or US' military invasions into Iraq and later Syria unsanctioned by the UN? I know that you'll reply with another "but, but it's different!" rooted in the deep and naive belief that the West lead by the US is always right and always on the side of "good guys". Also don't forget that even the Western polls admit that Crimeans overwhelmingly support the unification with Russia and this support again has deep historic and cultural roots. Now compare this effectively bloodless "annexation" with Ukraine blatantly killing its own citizens in Donbas using unconstitutionally deployed military forces.

I recommend for you to widen your horizons outside of propaganda templates and learn more about Russia. Right now you think about it not as of country with its own thoughts, believes, phobias, and interests on the world stage, but as of a pure evil incarnate whose only wish is to see the world burn. Note that in all wars the first thing propaganda does is dehumanization of enemies. I hope you can see the similarity.

A good start would be this lecture read in Yale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X7Ng75e5gQ

The truth is, the discussion on nuclear can't be done only on the technical aspects of it, but needs to face and clear its political aspects too.

Nuclear as it is today brings centralization (compared to solar/wind) and many don't like that. For example, nobody wants to live close to a nuclear waste deposit, but governments will just force the decision to build one to local populations.

There's also the feeling that it will concentrate the power in the hands of a smaller and smaller technical elite.

Another matter is that people don't trust neoliberal governments with a tendency to austerity to correctly handle maintenance of nuclear power plants in the long term. After all, with nuclear you just need to fuck up badly once to cause unrepairable damage.

If we want nuclear to be adopted, we have to dispell the (justified) fear people have of it. Discussing about it like techno elitists won't certainly help.

> nobody wants to live close to a nuclear waste deposit

I'll repeat what I've said for wind turbines: do my back yard first then. If nobody else wants it, it gotta go somewhere.

But I think you're confusing reactors with waste. We want reactors as close to population centres as possible to avoid losses (some distance is fine, but concentrating power generation for Europe in the Sahara would be wasteful, for example), but radioactive waste can be transported just fine. There's very little of it, shipping it to the Sahara isn't a big deal in energy usage terms. Politics is an issue, but there's more uninhabited places we can put it.

> There's very little of it, shipping it to the Sahara isn't a big deal in energy usage terms

I wish it was that easy, but that's not a chance in the current political climate.

In Italy we're still debating about where to send the waste generated in the '80s. We turned off our last plant in the '87.

Every single town involved as a destination for waste storage is in revolt against the decision. Literally nobody wants that waste even dozens of kilometers away from their town.

And I totally understand, I don't trust any government (even worse, private contractor), in this economical system and political climate, to correctly maintain such waste storage for the next 300 years.

We can barely make consistent plans for the duration of a government.

In northern Europe its even more insane. Germany is closing 6 nuclear power plants earlier because of what happend after Fukushima. And they will switch to Lignite / brown coal. The energy companies took the state to court because of potential money loss, and they won 2.4 billion euro in damages. Meanwhile in the Netherlands more and more politicians want nuclear energy in the national energy mix because biomass, wind and solar is not growing fast enough to meet the Paris agreement.

To be fair: Wind energy and solar has gained a lot of traction in Germany and is producing more and more energy every year.

Sadly "the big four" (energy companies) are influencing politics and are actively halting progress on renewables which leads to really strange effects.

My landlord installed a rather big solar system on the roof and due to its size, the energy company can decide to remotely shut it off when there's enough energy in the grid.

It's really a shame and a lot of corruption is going on there.

Also: Little to no research on energy storage was done in the last 25 years, because of all this corruption.

There can't be too much or too less electricity in the grid. So it's normal that the power operators can shut off larger producers, as they can also shut off large consumers.

This has nothing to do with corruption.

> This has nothing to do with corruption.

In the end it has. Development and building of energy storage systems of any kind was not in the focus in the last decades because nuclear energy and coal was always "the solution" for energy problems and the big four told us not to worry about anything, so they could do their business as usual.

They have to shutdown production if the demand is not high. Once in a while they pay other countries to get their leftover electricity while they shutdown production.

And we could use that energy instead to fill storage systems, be it water reservoirs or large battery packs or what might come.

But we need to have the right technology to do things like that...

Nuclear isn't quick to build though... I doubt you could plan and build a nuclear plant anywhere in the west in anything under 20 years...

As one data point, one of the UK's in-development nuclear power stations, Hinkley Point C, was announced in 2010, plans approved by the owner + government in 2016, and expected to be operational by 2025 (no idea if that's an accurate expectation or not). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

So a bit less than 20 years, even including the 6 years between announcing a site and actually confirming plans to go ahead with it.

But the latest satellite images [1] show they're still laying flooring concrete, so there's no way it'll begin operations in 2025.

[1]: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Cru4YAkVvxyv8idc7

I know little about the subject, and it would certainly make sense for it to be running late with a pandemic going on, but it seems like 5 years is a typical prediction from start of building to being in operation according to this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_nuclear_power_station...

The planning and getting approvals actually takes longer than the construction itself.

Hinkley Point C has been delayed until at least June 2026: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-27/edf-sees-....

Another reactor of the same EPR model family that EDF is building in Flamanville, France, started construction in 2007 with commercial introduction originally scheduled for 2012 but now delayed to 2023 (no official statement with that date, but fuel loading is estimated only for the end of 2022 and it takes a few months after that). It's also five times over budget (€19.1bn, original estimate was €3.3bn, for one reactor with 1.6GW of electrical output).

Yet another one, Olkiluoto in Finland, began construction in 2005 and is also not finished, with commercial introduction planned for 2022. Its cost is estimated at €11bn, but was supposed to be €3bn originally.

The two operational ones, Taishan 1 and 2 in China, took 10 years of construction, too. It was planned to take less than 2 years.

Yeah, I remember that discussion after Fukushima. We had an agreement and a plan to get out of nuclear power. Back than, climate change was less of issue (at least as far as policy was concerned). Then we got a conservative government, and one of the first things they did was to cancel the nuclear power exit. Only to reverse that basically immediatly after Fukushima due to public pressure. This time so, without any long term plan.

As a result, Germany is now pushing coal instead of nuclear while limiting wind and solar due to legal restrictions.

> And they will switch to Lignite / brown coal.

This isn't true. The one new coal plant, bad as it is, was planned and allowed before Fukushima happened. These things change slower than the news cycle.

And Germany still is a net energy exporter, BTW, even without the nuclear plants.

> And they will switch to Lignite / brown

Germany does not. coal usage has been going down.

This coal spiel is getting so old. This shift to coal in the German energy mix hasn't materialized. This is counter to what many predicted (or hoped?) would happen as the nuclear share weaned.

The facts:

In the time frame 2010 to 2020, the share of nuclear energy in the German energy mix has halved, from 22% to 11%.

At the same time, the share of lignite in the energy mix has dwindled from 23% to 16%. The share of hard coal has gone from 19% to 7%.

Germany reduced its nuclear power output while at the same time reducing its coal power output by even more than its nuclear output.

Gas is up by 2 percentage points, but renewables have more than doubled their market share in 10 years time, and now make up 45% of the power mix (was 17% in 2010).

So no, Germany simply is not switching to coal (or even gas for that matter), and renewable energy production is ramping up rapidly.

Source: Agora Energiewende

And again the propaganda machine is spinning for nuclear disaster. https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2021-03/atomkraft-fukushima-k...

Paywall or somrthing (its in german)

Fuushima happened. Chernobyl happened. It is not disaster propaganda. Japan was hit with a disaster. Same with USSR.

Nuclear advocates have a tin ear as far as the fact that nuclear failures don't have a theoretical cap on disaster magnitude.

It's a simple enough fact. No theoretical limit to the extent of the damage, beyond "end of life on Earth". Even the dreaded fossil fuel business does its mass extinction events at a more manageable tempo.

Arugably, there should be conventions against use of any technology that has potential for irreversible harm to the environment.

In my opinion, there are two solutions to USA's energy problem (in relation to climate change). Either...

(1) USA bets on nuclear. The real production energy demands can be supplied by nuclear reactors.

(2) USA decides to bet on wind and solar. USA then re/opens it's own local rare earth material mines. USA also manufactures all energy collectors locally. All of this is to avoid having to pay the carbon cost of having the raw materials mined in China, and energy collectors shipped over from China to USA.

The uninformed opinion doesn't take into consideration raw material extraction, fabrication, and shipping.

Renewables don't need rare earths. PV doesn't use them, and wind doesn't require them (there are generators for them that don't use permanent magnets.)

> Since then about a third of them have been permanently shut down, and only nine have resumed operation.

I dont think this is true. As far as I know they are all shut down still.

FWIW Jancovici explained the fact that eco "friendly" people dislike nuclear power the following way:

The people that are comfortable with progress/technology/industries are usually also comfortable with the idea of nuclear energy. On the other hand people concerned with the environment usually distrust things related to technology and industries, making them distrust nuclear energy.

So... I can't like tech and also be worried about the environmental impact of greenhouse gasses?

Might this be from a different era, where techies didn't yet know a climate disaster is looming? I don't know who or when this Jancovici was.

It's already almost too late to stop climate change. If nuclear wants to be part of that push (and base load without carbon is its only real selling point apart from weapons production), it needs to be ready to turn on in the next 5 years. That doesn't seem likely to me.

On the other hand phasing out the existing nuclear in favour of natural gas doesn't seem to solve the problem either.

At this point, it seems really unlikely we will "solve" the problem. I suspect we will go with flood defences, water management projects and geo-engineering.

So I think it's safest to take the cheapest option. Right now, that seems to be green energy (wind and solar) plus some gas power to deal with intermittent supply.

If you add CCS to the natural gas it would. And that would likely be cheaper than nuclear.

Why not liquefy air when electricity is low price, use a heat engine between your liquefied air and your power plant heatsink, then use that now heated/compressed gas as input for a turbine? Plus - you can sell liquefied gases (nitrogen and oxygen).

Air must be filtered and completely desiccated (else the ice clogs everything). Then you need huge cryogenic tank. Also the extra peaker turbine costs something. Efficiency of whole setup is abysmal compared to batteries.

Air storage is actually a thing, drying included. it uses salt domes, or other large underground structures. You can do this when you have the facilities, just as people with thermal can do thermal. Doesn't work everywhere, can work where you have the right conditions.

Same for CCS: It can work, with huge if-but-maybe, and is well known to work for oil & gas field injection to increase production. The downsides are fugitive gas release. All attempts at CCS for "clean" coal have turned out to fail, AFAIK (economically, if not practically, but mostly practically: its hard)

See https://www.edie.net/news/8/World-s-biggest-liquid-air-batte...

Exactly, that's what I'm talking about. Batteries are good for just storing electricity, LAES should be even better when you have heat you already need to get rid of (like those big cooling chimneys). In many generators you need to actively get rid of lots of heat, usually it's just dumped. Cogeneration should be much more common.

Your system requires:

* Air filtration

* An air liquidation mechanism (cooling system + pressurization system)

* A heat engine

* Liquified air storage system

* A turbine

This is why exotic storage systems don't really pan out. Unless you already have 80% of the infrastructure already lying around (like in pumped hydro storage), you're better off buying batteries than buying the myriad of systems needed for some exotic energy storage system.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Thorium reactors yet. My understanding is that the fuel is more abundant and that meltdown is impossible, however the technology is still in its infancy.

What’s missing from this discussion is a carbon price. If carbon were priced at $200/T, nuclear energy and renewables would both be favored over carbon based energy sources.

Are you including mining costs for the metals to create wind turbines and solar panels? The mining costs to create a battery network large enough to have backup power for billions of households? What about the carbon cost of replacing and recycling the batteries? What about the carbon cost of rebuilding/refurbishing the current electrical networks to allow for this green future? What about creating a supply network for transportation where one basically doesn't exist today?

Hydrocarbons are 12-15x more energy dense than what current batteries are able to store. A $1 spent today on hydrocarbon production results in 500-600% more energy produced than $1 spent on solar/wind energy production. Green is sexy, but the physics and economics don't support a massive shift to green.

Take your points and try them against nuclear. It wont work. The original argument is solid: the economics are failing us, so change the economics and suddenly nuclear becomes viable. Then you don't have to deal with battery arrays and other silly things.

My bet is on fusion. From our sun.

https://youtu.be/DB_zSKJDGpU

And yet another of this scheduled propaganda articles

>the rise of renewable power

Hah, yeah right - subsidised to the gills with government grants and other hand outs, then sure, it's on the rise.

And yes, of course I know the energy industry generally gets a lot of subsidies. But like many other fads before them, renewables are the darling of the ruling classes, until the next fad comes alo...oh look, bubbles!

The negative externalities of carbon-based energy production dwarf any renewal subsidies.

See https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-03/uos-tmt03012...

> The negative externalities of carbon-based energy production dwarf any renewal subsidies.

And incidentally, dwarf the cost of building nuclear plants as well.

> And incidentally, dwarf the cost of building nuclear plants as well.

This is a false statement.

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