Germany's populistic policy decisions following Fukushima set us back so much.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clearing-the-radi...
US nuclear power gets a liability cap of $0.2 billion. The nuclear industry will keep telling us it is safe but it will refuse to shoulder the insurance costs beyond a minimal level. That's the taxpayer's job and the taxpayer's job alone.
And, EVEN INCLUDING that, nuclear is about 3x more expensive than solar and wind.
You could get the price down in a number of ways, but the most obvious one is going to be to skimp on safety.
This isn't Germany's fault. Nuclear is only competitive with lavish subsidies beyond those it already has. The only countries that will really want it are those with nuclear weapons and a desire to keep a nuclear industry running to maintain skills and technology.
It's about nuclear arsenal maintenance at this point, with decarbonization as an excuse.
Germany's nuclear phase out costs the country $12 billion per year plus 1100 additional deaths due to air pollution:
> https://haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/WP304.pdf
> And, EVEN INCLUDING that, nuclear is about 3x more expensive than solar and wind.
Except you are comparing levelized costs of electrity with the total system costs. Wind and solar need backup and/or storage, nuclear doesn't.
> Nuclear is only competitive with lavish subsidies beyond those it already has.
Nuclear was *never* subsidized in Germany:
> http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/14/080/1408084.pdf (p. 16, answer 27)
> It's about nuclear arsenal maintenance at this point, with decarbonization as an excuse.
It's not. Please compare which countries have nuclear weapons and which have nuclear power. North Korea has nuclear weapons, they don't have nuclear power. South Korea is the opposite.
Anyone who claims that nuclear power is a step towards nuclear weapons has no clue about the history of nuclear technology and has no clue how Uranium and Plutonium for nuclear bombs is made.
Hint: It's not made with BWRs or PWRs, that would be way too inefficient and expensive.
When nuclear plants were built in Germany you couldn't get green electricity for $33 / MWh.
>It's not. Please compare which countries have nuclear weapons and which have nuclear power.
This is equally true of everywhere else. It's not about who built them 30 years ago. It's about who still wants to build them.
>Anyone who claims that nuclear power is a step towards nuclear weapons has no clue about the history of nuclear technology and has no clue how Uranium and Plutonium for nuclear bombs is made. Hint: It's not made with BWRs or PWRs, that would be way too inefficient and expensive.
I didn't say that nuclear plants are being built to create plutonium. I said that they were being kept around because of the skills and tech - it's a more or less cost-neutral way of keeping a ready supply of nuclear engineers and a supporting industry.
In the UK it's partly about nuclear submarines, too (which are PWRs).
This. Nuclear power doesn't give you nuclear bombs, but it does give you the ability to start building them within months.
You don't really believe that, don't you?
> Anyone who claims that nuclear power is a step towards nuclear weapons has no clue about the history of nuclear technology and has no clue how Uranium and Plutonium for nuclear bombs is made.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapon_progra...
"Japan was reported in 2012 to have 9 tonnes of plutonium in Japan, enough for more than 1,000 nuclear warheads, and an additional 35 tonnes stored in Europe.[37][38] It has constructed the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant, which could produce further plutonium.[37] Japan has a considerable quantity of highly enriched uranium (HEU), supplied by the U.S. and UK, for use in its research reactors and fast neutron reactor research programs; approximately 1,200 to 1,400 kg of HEU as of 2014.[39] Japan also possesses an indigenous uranium enrichment plant[32][40] which could hypothetically be used to make highly enriched uranium suitable for weapons use."
This first link here makes me absolutely furious. There's too much to quote from here, but this succinct excerpt touches on loosening safety tests. It goes into more detail in other parts of the article. The post has numerous example of very concerning issues.
> When valves leaked, more leakage was allowed — up to 20 times the original limit. When rampant cracking caused radioactive leaks from steam generator tubing, an easier test of the tubes was devised, so plants could meet standards.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna43455859
> The proposal comes as most of the nation’s nuclear power plants, which were designed and built in the 1960s or 1970s, are reaching the end of their original 40- to 50-year operating licenses. Many plant operators have sought licenses to extend the operating life of their plants past the original deadlines, even as experts have warned that aging plants come with heightened concerns about safety.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/climate/nrc-nuclear-inspe...
> The nuclear industry is also pushing the NRC to cut down on safety inspections and rely instead on plants to police themselves. The NRC “is listening” to this advice, the Associated Press reported last month. “Annie Caputo, a former nuclear-energy lobbyist now serving as one of four board members appointed or reappointed by President Donald Trump, told an industry meeting this week that she was ‘open to self-assessments’ by nuclear plant operators, who are proposing that self-reporting by operators take the place of some NRC inspections.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/153465/its-not-just-pork-tru...
Where can I find a source confirming that ?
Wind $26-$54 Nuclear $129-$198
Wind power producers should be required to buy some kind of base load generation credits.
We are still far from the point where we have enough wind that any of it goes unused.
Also what is the cost of storing that energy? It's so much cheaper to generate it might still come out cheaper.
Doubt. Weather systems/patterns are often extremely large.
> Also what is the cost of storing that energy?
Insanely high compared to the cost of producing it.
For one common naive case: Storing the energy in Li-Ion batteries in e.g. a Tesla Powerwall: $437/kWh.
How did you come up with that number? Total cost of the battery divided by its capacity?
Since you do not dispose of the battery upon first discharge, the true cost should be amortized across the thousands of cycles it would go through during its lifetime.
Batteries are still far from economical in many situations, but there are many situations where they now make sense. They are also getting cheaper all the time, and as they do, so will the range of applications increase.
The context here is storing energy for the days when it's not windy or when it's cloudy.
> Batteries are still far from economical in many situations, but there are many situations where they now make sense.
This a not about your Tesla, or what you feel about Tesla and batteries in general.
> Insanely high compared to the cost of producing it.
Ok, how about you share your numbers on the cost of production for 1kwh.
Your use of "insanely high" leads me to believe you are comparing the capital outlay for batteries, vs operating costs of a power station. It's important to compare like for like.
This is apparent looking at how much energy prices change throughout the day / month based on usage and cost of production, and how predictable those changes are.
If storing energy were cost effective you could make a killing buying low and selling high on the national grid.
>If storing energy were cost effective you could make a killing buying low and selling high on the national grid.
Maybe not a killing but you could make $$$ yes. This is starting to happen.
This giant (world's largest!) and very expensive thing provides short term-relief against grid outages. The batteries last for ~1 hour and it can still only provide electricity for something like 50k homes.
(It's used for more economically useful things, like stabilizing the grid in emergencies.)
The periods between high and low/zero wind are in the order of 200-300 hours (at least where I live).
I'm very suspicious of these claims. First, there's stuff like this: https://energycentral.com/c/ec/germany-solar-and-wind-triple.... Second, the position of most nuclear opponents is not "solar and wind can provide clean energy for everyone at a fraction of the cost", but rather "everyone needs to radically cut back on energy use and alter their lifestyles". I get the same sense as I do from religious conservatives who oppose STD vaccines because they allow people to continue their sinful ways.
Guess which energy source in France receive most subsidies? If the answer was fossil fuels you would be right. If you ask Germany with its massive subsidies for renewable, it is actually renewable followed by fossil fuels. Then its fossil fuels again. The story repeats itself in practically every country in EU. Even Sweden with its very public facing pro-renewable stance spends millions on subsidizes for fossil fuels. In total for 2018, 50 billions euro wast given as subsidies for fossil fuels in EU.
Inquisitive people might ask why all those countries are spending so much subsidizes on fossil fuels, and the answer is pretty simple. Do you want a stable energy grid? You either pay the oil, gas and coal companies to keep the engines warm in case there is a demand spike, or there won't be enough supply when demands go up. Now lets discuss why the need to pay for "reserve energy" has spiked in the last few decades. It has something to do with intermittent energy production.
Here is a suggestion. Lets cut that 50 billions for fossil fuel subsidies to 0. Either pay for nuclear/storage or accept an unstable grid. I am very tired of oil, coal and gas being paid to just keep the engines warm.
I don't care if nuclear can be made safe on paper, as long as it's build by humans it's going to be messed up somehow.
I once took a school trip to a nuclear power station in northern germany, turns out they had a direct link to their local coal plant to manage demand. That link was unsecured radiowaves directly interacting with their safety critial systems. Their defense was "it's point to point, so you'd have to build a tower beteen." Yeah or wait 15 years and buy a drone.
And we still haven't the tech to get rid of the waste products.
The cleanup costs of ONE uranium mine alone could buy germany enough solar to replace 3 nuclear reactors.
And that's only the long term cost of pulling it out of the ground. The costs of putting it safely away for a million literal years is not included.
But 8 million people per year are killed by particulate emissions from normally-operating fossil and biofuel combustion plants. Nuclear, wind, solar, and hydro are all orders of magnitude safer ways, per TWh generated, than the dominant worldwide sources. Therefore we should replace fossil and biofuel with nuclear, wind, solar, and hydro.
Conveniently, those 4 are also very low carbon, so they prevent climate change along the way.
[1] https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1
But of course we should replace fossils by renewables and phase them out before nuclear. And if nuclear wouldn't take too long to build building new nuclear plants as a stopgap may actually make sense. Unfortunately, they do.
[1] https://unis.unvienna.org/unis/en/pressrels/2021/unisous419....
I cannot see how this view can be justified.
But if you want to take this view, consider this hypothetical worst case. Imagine we push forward with wind, solar, and batteries, but human rights issues related to manufacturing with slave labor, corruption, mineral shortages, grid instabilities, and land usage issues that emerge once these technologies reach world-scale cause enough trouble that we just keep on operating large amounts of fracked fossil gas to the point that climate change hits the bad predicted scenarios and all the bad events of climate change happen anyway. Isn't that hypothesized worst case just as valid as this worse-than-Chernobyl nuclear accident you're holding above our heads?
Also building enough nuclear to replace fossils would take too long anyway, it's not even an option.
This statement has no basis. We've had multiple awful nuclear accidents and the world keeps turning. We are headed towards a much worse scenario of climate change if we don't effectively decarbonize.
You are aware that there are places on earth with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants that have natural radiation dose rates from the geology that are well beyond the dose rates in almost all of the Chernobyl and Fukushima exclusion zones?
> Also building enough nuclear to replace fossils would take too long anyway, it's not even an option.
That's a thing anti-nuclear institutions have been saying for sure but it doesn't hold even a little water. France, for example, decarbonized almost all of its electricity with nuclear in 15 years. When you take a look at achieved decarbonization rates per capita, nuclear is at the top.
Today, we've seen reactors of the Hualong One, ABWRs, VVERs, and ARP-1400 designs built in wholly reasonable times.
And for deep decarbonization, we plan to use factory/shipyard production techniques to serially produce thousands of standardized low-carbon power plants even faster.
You hadn't forgotten I was writing about severe accidents within half a sentence, hadn't you?
> We are headed towards a much worse scenario of climate change if we don't effectively decarbonize.
I'm quite aware of that. And if I considered stopgap nuclear realistically possible, maybe I'd support it.
> That's a thing anti-nuclear institutions have been saying for sure but it doesn't hold even a little water. France, for example, decarbonized almost all of its electricity with nuclear in 15 years.
Building nuclear is not even the hard part. Deciding to do so is. Changing public opinion to favour nuclear won't happen in time so there's no point. The decision to decarbonize using renewables has been made, there's actually no need to even discuss it further.
> When you take a look at achieved decarbonization rates per capita, nuclear is at the top.
The available technology and political climate has changed since then.
Germany needs nuclear for base load. The current alternatives for base load are natural gas (meh, but maybe not horrible) and coal (horribly dirty, and Germany transitioned from nuclear to coal [!!!], making their energy mix dirtier than the French one, as France still uses a ton of nuclear power plants).
Solar can't be used for base load at the moment.
A nuclear power plant that's finished in 10 years is not gonna provide you with the baseload to stop climate change.
That's only possible with expanding the existing tech we have.
We won’t stop climate change, we’re decades late. What we need is everything we ca have, which includes solar and wind where appropriate, but also nuclear. The fact that people pretending to care about climate change are pushing for gas is absurd.
It's like all the people who didn't understand grade 7-9 physics conspired to make us all miserable.
To the down voters: just because you learn about electricity in secondary school, it doesn't mean that the second or third level effects are obvious and that you immediately understand what their impact on a power grid is. But hey, maybe some people were super interested in power grids or just super gifted ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Base load exists on the consumer side, as the minimum power the grid needs to operate during a cycle of X hours/days/weeks/years/whatever. It used to exist on the producer side since the cheapest power plants were also inflexible regarding ramping their power up and down coupled with high fixed costs and low marginal costs. Therefore, nuclear and coal was termed as base load providers, although it was purely an economical coupling leading to a term existing.
Nowadays with renewables undercutting everything they are the new base load providers, but it also brings new challenges for adapting the grids and consumers to more variability in the supply. This is our current world were the high fixed, low marginal cost power plant is pushed out of the market, as we are currently seeing globally. This is unless they can find a way to get their prices below renewables, but that is getting more and more unlikely with the steam cycle itself soon adding more to the KW/h cost than an entire renewable operation.
Actually, there is one thing, we need super capable and reliable super long distance power grid connections, maybe there's some progress on this front?
Because solar and wind absolutely are unreliable on a local front.
China recently finished a 3300 km UHVDC line from Xinjiang to the east coast with an expected loss of 1.5% per 1000 km.
I quite often see journalists writing about energy politics confusing power and energy.
Seriously.
> In any case it's no law of nature.
Yes it is. It's a law of human nature :-)
Yeah,base load still exists as in the dictionary definition (floor of aggregate power supply and demand), but it ceases to be a fixed level that is a hard production quota.
No, thats not really how it works out.
Baseload should actually be called baseload demand. The idea of baseload demand, is that there is some minimum level of electricity, that will always be demanded, almost no matter how high prices go.
Or, in other words, there is some about electricity demand is very inelastic.
So no, you can't just increase electricity costs. Because then electricity costs will massively spike, and cause huge amounts of problems.
You are massively underestimating the amount of problems and costs that it would put in people for demand to be as elastic as you want it to be.
It would be way cheaper and better for everyone, if there was simply enough baseload supply to meet the baseload demand.
You want demand to adapt? I'm supposed to turn the lights out when the wind's not blowing, or what?
Demand shouldn't adapt, supply should adapt. Connect more and bigger power grids, add energy storage to the grid in large enough quantities.
Your "solution" is like telling people to give up cars. They won't.
In cold climates people have increasingly well insulated houses that are relatively affordable to heat, and mostly use non grid electric heating. And can also shift power usage around the day because it takes a day or so for the house to cool uncomfortably.
Which energy sources that emit less co2/kWh than nuclear power should be used to heat houses in that case?
> (In cold climates people have well insulated houses that are relatively affordable to heat, and mostly use non electricity heating, like thus far)
What are talking about? What kind of non-electricity heating? Let's burn some coal or what?
I'm in Sweden. It gets cold. Houses are well insulated and typically heated via quite efficient electric air-to-air or air-to-water heat pumps. Our electricity has been like 98% co2 neutral since the 70s because of a 50/50 mix of hydro and nuclear as a base load.
Now, ironically, the leftist politicians (including the green party) here are dismantling all of this because they and the journalists don't understand the concept of base power, because they don't understand the difference between power and energy. Their solution is to build lots and lots of wind power plants.
By non electric heating methods I meant CHP and biomass based heating.
But yes, old energy inefficient houses in cold climates should be replaced. There's no need to get dramatic over it, houses are machines for living and it depends on circumstances how far to extend their lifespan. (Except some historical houses of course)
Umm. This whole thread is about the existence of nuclear power. Is it hard to understand that if nuclear power went away, the baseload would become extremely expensive during cold and wind-free days? That's a substantial part of the year, here.
You may argue that the current value of the base load is artificially high, but there obviously is some fundamental base load given by the kinds of consumers you have.
With distributed generation and storage, yes, it's plausible to have periods of 0MW grid demand.
> there obviously is some fundamental base load given by the kinds of consumers you have.
The kinds of consumers you have are not a fixed quantity; particularly their on-site use, generation, and storage patterns all vary over time.
If not, than you must accept there exists some necessary base load. That can be provided from base production like it is today, or it could theoretically be provided from storage and over-production in a hypothetical renweables-only grid.
> The cleanup costs of ONE uranium mine alone could buy germany enough solar to replace 3 nuclear reactors.
How much do those solar panels cost once you factor in environmental remediation, EOL recycling, land use, etc.? Since that's the standard nuclear is held to, it would be good to know.
https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/what-about-radioactive...
The Fukushima plant was hit by:
1) Magnitude 9 (!) earthquake 2) Devastating tsunami 3) Massive fire 4) Total loss of all power to control circuitry.
Even after that, it still didn't kill anybody from radioactivity (some firefighters were killed fighting the fire, not from radiation).
What do you suppose would happen if a similar series of catastrophes struck a hydroelectric dam? Say, the Three Gorges Dam in China?
Hint: nothing good.