Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.