White House eyes subsidies for nuclear plants to help meet climate targets
reuters.com
reuters.com
You don’t have to stop or even slow renewables deployment to do this. They are fairly different industries with different workforce’s, so there are resources to do both simultaneously without significant interference. And you’re not going to get “too much” electricity as cheap abundant electricity will help accelerate decarbonization of other things like building heat and transport and industrial processes.
Existing nuclear ESPECIALLY must be protected. And existing hydro. Number 1 and number 2 (tied with wind) clean energy sources.
Nuclear power produces as much energy in our country as coal. We can phase out coal twice as fast if we at very least keep nuclear around a few years longer.
The need for profit is killing our planet. When it comes to basic essential things like shelter, energy, food, water, profit is pure parasitic loss and should be eliminated. These things really should run at a loss, considering these things generate all other economic activity there is, but we insist that they must be run privately and for profit.
I think there's a big difference between running things "for profit," which I agree is not always necessary, and attempting to run things "cash flow positive."
When we have resources like electricity that are very feasible to charge for, one of the best ways to make sure our overall system is operating efficiently and not just wasting resources is to charge for the resource and aim for slight cash-flow positive - the goal being to break even with a small margin for error.
If break-even isn't economical under the current market rules, but something is a social good we want to maintain, like nuclear power, we can adjust the rules of the market. This actually makes sense for base load power, as we know there's a floor that we don't want to fall beneath, and renewables are so elastic that we sometimes fall below that floor. Plus the transmission network needs to be kept in balance, so we can't actually handle huge swings in power.
But the solution here is not to say "profit is killing our planet," it's to fix the rules of the market to get the outcome we want. Profit, in general, is a good thing. But yes, sometimes the system gets into a state where bad outcomes are profitable, and we do need to fix that.
I can't see any way of fixing it that doesn't entail interfering with the (supposedly) natural operations of profit seeking in the market.
At some point we need a state (or somebody or something that is in charge and able to reconfigure and manage economic processes "from above"), some agent or authority to be able to say, "Build this. Don't build that. Do it even if it doesn't make any money." Or we'll eventually experience our own very profitable self negation.
The parent comment is saying "profit is killing our planet", and you're basically saying "markets aren't killing our planet". The resolution, of course, is that non profit-motivated organizations can exist and participate in markets.
Seemingly just in time, solar, wind, and storage are scaling both in production capacity and in falling costs to solve our climate problems. These will be the backbone of getting to 80% carbon free electricity in the next decade, and 0% carbon not that long after. This will be far cheaper than any other source of energy generation we can use, and will save us massive amounts of money.
One of the better grid modelers out there, Christoper Clack, who has no opposition to nuclear and in the past has made strong arguments for it being a cheaper way to get to 0%, also has an amazing new mode out this year that says we should do something very unintuitive: deploy massive amounts of distributed solar and storage close to power meters (e.g. on people's homes). This will result in a much stronger distribution grid that can both shave peaks of demand, resulting in far less very costly distribution infrastructure, and which will empower far even cheaper deployment of larger amounts of utility-scale solar and wind in future decades.
Nuclear would be nice if it weren't so expensive, and if it were our only option we should keep it around, but there's little reason to create make-work when we have cheaper options, and options that will have additional benefits for the grid such as greatly increasing reliability and resilience. Massive distributed solar and storage will create an absolutist rock solid grid that will be able to weather disruptions far better than one with large generators that become almost like single points of failure.
""" Excessive concern about low levels of radiation led to a regulatory standard known as ALARA: As Low As Reasonably Achievable. What defines “reasonable”? It is an ever-tightening standard. As long as the costs of nuclear plant construction and operation are in the ballpark of other modes of power, then they are reasonable.
This might seem like a sensible approach, until you realize that it eliminates, by definition, any chance for nuclear power to be cheaper than its competition. """
The thing is, we want more power. Like, a lot more power. Power is wealth, there is an unlimited number of good things we can do with it.
Nuclear power is qualitatively about the best power you can have. Absolutely enormous amounts, available on demand, constantly. You just can't beat it.
We should heavily subsidize reasearch and development on new nuclear energy, until we have ten times as much nuclear power as we have now.
And we should do that in parallel with building out so much solar that we can rapidly retire coal completely, because we want to do that in ten years and that is completely feasible with solar + batteries. The new nukes will barely be coming online when that happens.
But the 40s will be a renaissance of human culture if we have that nuclear power.
Battery storage can scale large, but more importantly, it can scale really small. This means that you can throw a couple shipping containers of it at one side of a congested transmission link, and save tons of money. It means that we can make all our houses self reliant for hours at a time.
Storage will help us solve the problem of transmission lines causing massive wildfires. It will provide massive reliability and resilience across the grid. Small nuclear won't help much with that, unless is also paired with storage.
If nuclear can provide electricity at rates competitive with solar and wind, then storage will help nuclear too. But if nuclear is not beating the cost of solar and wind, then we will have less wealth if we spend our labor building nuclear than if we build renewables and storage.
A world built on solar wind and storage will probable have peak power capacity 2x-4x more than we need, with 2-3 days worth of storage. The ratio between power and storage will largely depend on the relative costs of storage versus power.
And I think it's time to start thinking about the sort of word where we have an over abundance of energy that renewables will provide. We will have lots of excess energy being produced, and with the right applications that can tolerate intermittency, that excess energy will incredibly cheap.
Storage (especially at the current rate of growth) is nowhere close to meeting our capacity needs for a 100% renewable grid. We can't store enough energy for a single day of consumption. Keep in mind we would need to store enough energy to handle long periods of low production. We're an order of magnitude away from that. On top of that, the vast majority of global energy storage is not actually provided by batteries, but by pumped-storage hydro (expanding this capacity would run into environmental issues and physical limitations; we don't have enough water in convenient locations).
Battery tech seems way off from providing us the needed capacity. Even Tesla is bottlenecked by battery production. We'd need to see Moore's Law level growth to have enough storage capacity to mitigate climate change, but we're only seeing 30% to 40% growth, which is just not enough given that it's currently less than a fraction of a percent of our total energy storage needs for 100% renewable power.
People are also seriously overestimating the time table needed to build a nuclear power plant. India, China, and Russia have been able to build plants in a few years vs 10 years in the West. If we're not pushing nuclear now, we'll be burning coal and natural gas for the next century.
Only about 14% of what we pay in Denmark and probably a comparable amount in Germany goes to paying for the actual electricity.
The rest is for "Green taxes" that pays for our new green infrastructure, R&D and lots of things that will benefit the transition.
So if we just said "we good now", 86% of the cost would disappear, and probably not be much more expensive than US energy, or even cheaper, at least soon!
This is too important to leave to the back of a napkin, is what I'm saying. Breakthroughs in nuclear energy would be a big win. The aesthetic and ecosystem costs of transforming hundreds of square kilometers of desert into solar farms are bearable, but they're real.
The power yield of solar panels in the Belt is also not superb given the launch costs. Pretty dangerous to go blasting uranium into space on top of a rocket, no matter how reliable, but we can go to where the uranium is, for the most part.
We don't want to be behind the curve when that time comes. Extracting metals from Earth's surface is just going to get more environmentally noxious and less profitable, as we work through the good veins. We might luck out and find a few more rich lodes, but we shouldn't count on it, and mining in the ocean is a whole unexplored world (just like the Belt): it's closer, but it's also an ecosystem, and water is capable of spreading solid pollution quite a bit more promiscuously than the air is. Groundwater and surface water leaching from mine tailings is already very bad, we don't want that happening in the ocean. We only have one of those and we already beat it up pretty badly.
This is a lie at our current technology levels.
Neither of these are true. We are current at 200-300GWh of production per year, and consistent with recent history are expected to grow capacity 10x every five years, so that by 2031 we will produce 20-30TWh of new batteries per year. That's 500-750GW per year, at a 4 hour duration.
In contrast, the idea of scaling nuclear production to 100GW of new capacity per year by 2031 is simply inconceivable.
In 2021, with current technology, nuclear simply can not scale as fast as storage, or for that matter solar or wind.
I'm far from well versed in this area but I was under the impression that renewables really suffer in this department. The lifespan of a wind turbine is about 20 years. We don't know exactly what the lifespan of a nuclear plant is but it's certainly longer than that. And of course the availability on solar and other "harvesting" type mechanisms can be inconsistent, up and down as a function of weather, etc. What am I missing?
There are two reasons why everything is still built for 20 years: Firstly, there is not pressure on the projects to increase lifetime, because the deprecated value today of further production in year 21 is basically zero. Secondly, the turbines we installed 20 years ago were so small that there is really no reason to keep them going.
It does require running the grid differently. But part of that is becoming more responsive to constantly changing conditions, and a grid that it used to that will have far fewer problems then one where a GW reactor trips off because of some sensor problem (as happened in Texas). As we get closer to 80% renewable grids, then we will be used to running backup natural gas plants to keep everything running. And the ultimate in resilience and reliability will happen as we add more storage. With batteries everywhere, we will have buffering all over the grid that will make it far far easier to make sure everybody has power, and to limit outages to the smallest areas possible.
The first year of power shut offs for PG&E's public safety in the face of high wind and fire conditions covered massive areas. This last year they covered far less, as they could focus the power shut offs far better with an extra year of work. This sort of finer grained granularity and control is what happens as more renewables and storage will be added to the grid, as we update this impressive machine that we started building a century ago. Adding modern communication and control will come along with more storage, demand response, and home-to-grid power from solar.
And I think that you have some serious metal fatigue in some critical nuclear reactor core components.
Current state of the art storage with solar is commercial viable around 75% capacity for 4hrs, with a charge cycle of 24 hours. Those numbers are a good improvement over 0% storage, but there is a good reason why there are not a single commercial operated wind farm that use the same technology. Wind does not have a 24hr charge cycle, and 4hrs of 75% capacity does not do much when there first several weeks of good weather followed by several weeks of bad weather.
When northern European countries plans for stability, we are not talking about hours. This is why oil power plants get subsidized in countries who invest heavily in wind power. The reserve energy source need to be profitable while the weather is creating negative energy prices, regardless for how long such period last, because afterward you will need a lot of it to be available for an equal long period of time. This is the problem that storage need to solve and have yet to find any suitable commercial viable answers. You could improve the economic viability of current batteries used in PV by 1000% and it would still not be economical viable for wind.
When it comes to individuals and personal homes, the answer that most experts seems to conclude on is that solar and storage is something which comes after more fundamental improvements such as heat exchanges and replacing internal combustion engines with electric ones. Solar and batteries are nice, but the planet is still going to be quite damaged if we continue burning massive amount of coal, oil and gas in order to generate power that electric heaters demand during the winter.
I wouldn't get hung up on paring battery storage with a particular generation technology. Just connect it to the grid and let the market decide when to charge and discharge.
One good reason for colocating battery storage with renewables is that you get to share the grid connection. That connection can be expensive and will be under utilized due to intermittency. So store some of the energy in batteries and spend less money on expensive AC cables. You can even reverse the flow and take energy from the grid.
Costs are dropping so rapidly that typical 5-year timelines for utility planning and procurement is running into some problems. People who make bids have to anticipate their costs in the future, so there's considerable betting going on.
Agreed on the heat pumps versus fossil heat. I moved in the past few years, and replacing all the natural gas is my first task before installing solar. By replacing natural gas with a heat pump, my total energy consumption has plummeted drastically. However, my utility charges only about 15% as much for a unit of natural gas energy as it does electrical energy, which eliminated the cost savings! So now that I better know my total energy consumption the switch to solar will happen very soon, and save me a ton of money.
The event that is precipitating CA's shutdown has been planned for more than a decade. And the cost of keeping the nuclear plant would be $7B-$14B, before any of the inevitable cost increases that accompany large construction projects. $7B for solar and storage will easily replace nuclear. At $1/W for solar, and $250/kWh for storage, $7B will buy 4GW of solar and 12 GWh of storage, and cost overruns are unheard of for solar and storage installations.
The nuclear plant that is shutting down is already at the end of its original license, and the $7B of work would be for 20 years or less of nuclear.
People can read about the closure etc. at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_...
How silly is that? This is kinda my point. 8% of power for the most populous state in the second most populous nation is no small amount. The operator didn't want to do the necessary maintenance, so we opt for a cheaper, objectively worse solution, instead of spending the money required to do the job correctly. It's not like it was physically impossible to fix San Onofre, the engineers know exactly what work is required to be done, but the beancounters in charge of the purse strings ultimately thought better and we are all worse off for it in ways that will costs us far in the longrun than this maintenance would have.
It follows that correcting the energy market requires also restructuring the sector.
Solar and wind are pervasive and cheap in California. If nuclear is no better for the environment and more expensive, why should it keep running?
The whole "profit" thing is a way to manage scarce resources, i.e. minimize waste. That's exactly what we want.
You're right that for basic needs like shelter, energy, food, and water, we shouldn't accept that some people might have to go without. So we have tipped the scales through programs like section 8, progressive energy rates, EBT, etc to get that outcome will still seeing other resources efficiently used.
Nuclear generation can't react to changes in demand very fast and so doesn't play well with large amounts of wind generation. It's ok with solar, because you can predict night-time 8 hours in advance, which is optimal for ramping up nuclear generation.
Combined-cycle gas turbines, while they do use fossil fuels, are the most carbon-efficient way to get electricity from fossil fuels, and can quickly react to changes in demand.
So while I agree with the point about not getting rid of nuclear too fast, both nuclear and natural gas have their place in moving to mostly renewables. Natural gas could especially be important if it allows other fossil-fuel burning, eg for transport, to be replaced by electricity generated with non-zero but low carbon emissions.
40% of power in CA is generated with natural gas. If you can close the nuclear power plant and replace it with the equivalent amount of solar and wind, you should just keep the nuclear plant open and build that amount of solar and wind anyways.
Chasing that rabbit down the hole, what happens if the US does wean off fossil fuel entirely, but countries like Russia and China continue (and say it is projected to increase 400X like China in the last 30 years). Then its an existential threat, does that mean use of force, or limit ourselves to diplomatic means that will ultimately fail and just accept the resulting existential outcome? Does the analysis change when it is a less diplomatically controversial Country such as India?
Alternatively what if those Countries beat the US to weaning off fossil fuel and determine overnight any continued US use of fossil fuel is an existential threat and act of war?
It sounds like hyperbole but I remember when the US began regulating incandescent light bulbs and it was floated by certain media outlets as an attack on freedom and liberties. We have literally seen murders of people telling others to wear a mask during the pandemic, and I watched a news segment claiming a normal year sees 150-300 FAA incidents on planes and we have seen 1,300 already this year mostly related to passengers refusing to wear masks and many times escalating to attacks on the airline workers for attempting to enforce the CDC mask guidelines. We live in violent and chaotic times, where millions and millions of people allow themselves to be worked up into mobs by a media that does it willfully and deliberately. I don't see it as an easy transition domestically much less globally, and those in power don't care about the science but seem to froth at the mouth for this kind of discontent.
I think it would be like pouring sugar over a bacteria colony. The earth's crust could be economically strip mined. Ore could be smelted into metal at negligible cost, which could in turn be used to make more machines to strip mine the crust at a faster rate. Oceans could be boiled to access rare metals, or maybe just for fun by a bored teenager.
This isn't to detract from OPs practical comment, but it's an interesting thought experiment.
..and with infinite power, even that isn't necessary because we could simply create whatever matter we wanted directly from energy.
Funding for each may actually benefit the others. For example, FLiBe salt is being considered as a coolant in some Gen IV fission, as well as compact fusion and concentrated solar. Production will increase if there is a definite market for it, making it easier to obtain.
I very much doubt FLiBe was ever seriously considered for solar applications.
The ARC fusion reactor concept would require even more Be per MW(th) of output.
Nuclear is 4 times more expensive, it would be interesting to know if we could boost renewable much further much faster.
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Making+Climate+Policy+Work-p-978...
If we treat all industry as spherical cows, a common carbon price comes out as a great way to incentivize industrial change.
However, once we get into the particulars of different industries and the varying levels of difficulty they have in decarbonizing, and the very different levels of lobbying power they have to influence that price, and the difficult of enforcement across different sectors, a common shared policy across all sectors starts to be far less efficient than tailoring the solution to each industry.
For example, steel is pure commodity, very difficult to eat any cost from stranded assets, and has far less ability to call up capital to solve the problem than, say, natural gas. So the price will have hugely different consequences for steel than natural gas production, and there are different tailored industrial policies that will make the transition happen much more time- and cost-efficiently.
* First, academic economists have basically ignored the topic. A survey of top economics journals found that, out of 77,000 total articles published, only 57 (0.074%) were about climate change.
* Many of the most cited papers have turned out to be crap, with basic calculation and data coding errors the authors have had to publish corrections for. Smith argues that this is partly because economists don't collaborate with other researchers much, especially natural sciences like climate change.
* The most important model for integrating climate change into macroeconomic analysis is the DICE model created by Richard Nordhaus. But the DICE model has big problems, the most important of which is that, due to discounting of future economic effects, it basically ignores the welfare of future generations. The DICE model also assumes that preventing climate change will be very expensive, and hasn't adjusted for recent technology advances on that front.
* Last, economists have been obsessed with carbon taxes, and haven't dealt with how politically unpopular they are, especially in international negotiations. This is, IMO, similar to how economists love to promote free trade, saying that the losers can be compensated via money from the overall economic gains, leaving everyone better off, and ignoring that this never, ever actually happens.
I'm in the camp that thinks that economists haven't earned a ton of credibility on the specific topic of climate change. Our best shot, IMO, is massive R&D efforts and CO2-removal geoengineering (especially wave-powered olivine weathering, as promoted by Project Vesta). Accompanied by crippling taxes on heavy emissions industries, but I think people will have an easier time accepting those if it's clear that governments are pursuing alternatives to taxes too.
Anyway, that's about what I see happening if you try to tax carbon. There is no legibility into what causes pollution from the outside - you can't look at the good itself, you must know the history of all inputs down to the raw goods and then some! If you just tax the creation of carbon domestically, you will encourage offshoring everything that necessarily pollutes to places that will pollute way more. If you just tax big players, businesses will split off divisions to be under the limit. If you just tax certain industries, you will send them offshore (apart from air travel). The righter solution would be to implement a carbon VAT, so that you align the incentives of producers and consumers. Now, you are in the business of taxing grain from peasants! How much pollution goes into foreign steel? Who knows? Are their carbon offsets real? Do we just put a tariff on foreign steel which feels sorta right? That will violate trade deals and will doubtlessly punish the honest players the most, once again encouraging more pollution.
I would make a bit of of a change, though--make the carbon tax refundable. Lets say you tax CO2 emissions at $100/ton. You then pay $100/ton to anybody who effectively sequesters CO2.
In fact, I would pretty much scrap the emissions rules and replace them with taxes of this sort. There should be no acceptable level followed by fines, there should be a cost from the first gram.
That would have been the plan 30 years ago.
Right now, we can either turn it up to 11 when the scheme starts, or face horrible consequences.
Doing both, removing subsidies from dirty energy and moving them to nuclear, would be the best case.
We have two recent build sites in the US, one failed entirely, and the other is hobbling along. I've read lots of analyses and postmortems, and the only regulation-related criticisms I've found are that the NRC doesn't regulate enough. By only looking for safety of the design, Westinghouse was able to submit designs that were safe, but not particularly buildable. If the regulators had checked the work of Westinghouse to include basic build ability in addition to safety, tens of billions of dollars might have been saved, and we might have been building more nuclear reactors.
But I would like to hear more specific complaints about how regulations could change, if it has the chance to improve nuclear.
A few years ago I got to sit in a meeting between reps from a bunch of GenIV reactor startups, and a former head of the NRC. The reactor people had one complaint: that the NRC required near-complete blueprints before they would even look at a design. It cost several hundred million dollars to get to that point, then the NRC would give a flat yes or no. If no then you were out of business, and if yes then you still just had a paper reactor.
That's a really difficult environment for investors. They said it would be a huge help just to have a multi-stage process. The NRC person was unsympathetic, said it wasn't the NRC's job to help develop nuclear technology, and brushed off climate change arguments.
Fortunately Congress has gotten involved since then and things seem to be improving a bit.
https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop is a review of "Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop" by Jack Devanney.
Based on the review, the short version is that the regulators use the wrong threat model for radiation (LNT), and a regulatory model which effectively requires nuclear to be unprofitable (ALARA).
The review describes briefly what needs to be changed.
Because the commission is biased towards safety above all else. They need to be more realistic and not cave in to fearmongering. The design needs to be safe, but against a realistic threat model.
The designs also need to be assembly line and not so highly customized. French style reactor designs are good for this reason. Part that holds the reactor? Fine, evaluate for weather and calamity resistance and build per location. The reactor? Hope you like black.
If we started mass producing plants, there would be stronger push for uniformity in design and that would translate into significant cost savings. But no one is going to start mass producing plants because it's so difficult to get just one plant online.
To the more general question though: subsidies are to incentivize people (or companies) to do a thing (or do more of a thing). In the case of nuclear power, the timelines involved in building a power plant are so long, and given the uncertainty of having the same tax credits staying in place for long enough to impact financial plans, it seems unlikely that it would actually have the effect we'd want on nuclear power production.
Nuclear is the cheapest energy when state-owned, but struggle to compete against coal/gaz otherwise.
Nuclear is characterized by very low opex compared to capex, but that ratio is even higher with renewables. If we are going to give nuclear the benefit of low capital costs, we should also give renewables that same cheap capital when comparing to nuclear.
[1] https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Home/Warfare-Centers/NSWC-Crane/
Kill two birds with one stone and all that…
With technological advancement, a little change in regulations could go a long way.
My dad actually left his role when he was stuck in a pipe shaft in 120 degree heat. A pipe fitter went up and the person who helped him out of the pipe and was fired for not following protocol.
The regulation came in when they started codifying the union rules. There was also an incident where Westinghouse and GE were faking inspections. I don't have specifics on hand.
Generally though, it seems corrupt. At least at the time, the unions essentially controlled construction and wanted to line their pockets, the politicians also lined their pockets. Eventually, the cost was too high to build.
It's a good investment for taxpayers, unlike subsidizing dino juice.
2014 was a long time ago. It’s possible both technologies have improved since then. I wonder why we don’t hear about this comparison more.
Solar is NOT a replacement for nuclear. It absolutely can augment power generation, but it - especially solar cells - is not a reliable base load provider.
No amount of hand waving by solar cell proponents will change that. If we ever discover a way to reasonably store electrical power that’s far more reliable and cost effective than chemical batteries then that equation will change - but we aren’t there today. Nuclear is here now and there are more than enough designs that are inherently safe and cost effective that never get discussed because everyone emotionally freaks out as soon as the word “nuclear” is uttered :p
It’s conparable in place to nuclear if I’m not mistaken, and it’s fault scenarios are less severe.
Especially in US, with vast amounts of deserts, it seems like a no-brainer.
(having said that, climate change is so urgent that I’d say do whatever it takes to get to zero emmissions - be it nuclear or solar)
No hand waving required. It’s fine for other sources (even nuclear) to fill in the gaps. Also no need for accusations of emotional freak outs. I think the nuclear side has its fair share of deluded people who for some reason pretend that both solar and batteries are not improving year by year. And who pretend that solar advocates demand solar-only solutions. It’s just not the case.
[1] https://cdn.britannica.com/s:800x1000/00/196800-050-E30A2B4A...
Real-life non-vaporware solar + battery combo installations are improving and spreading all the time.
By the time vaporware small nuclear materializes outside of demonstration projects (10 years? 20?) there’s no telling how efficient and ubiquitous solar + batteries will be.
If Elon is a willing to start selling power walls at 100$ / kwh retail at scale then we’ll talk.
It's not fine if you are a private energy company with shareholders who are looking to take on a gain and who are only looking at life one quarter at a time. Executives would rather invest in something cheaper where their investors will see a quicker return, because that's how executives keep their jobs. Executives and shareholders care about themselves and their profit, while the government is designed to care about the collective, although its great power is frequently commandeered by individuals seeking personal profit.
Since there is not sufficient political consensus for the former in the US, the latter is a good interim solution.
Right now, it seems the most likely outcome is that we keep using fossil fuels, so I'm desperate for anything!
(The exception are measures such as banning plastic straws, which I oppose because it's actually a significant inconvenience—which means spent political capital—but will do exceedingly little for the planet.)
So, yeah, stop subsidizing dirty companies, but also subsidize those solutions that get us out of this mess faster.
There are currently more subsidies for solar and wind.
The absence of Pigovian taxes to internalize te environmental externalities is a de facto subsidy equal to the value of the externalized negative impacts (it's paid by society at large through the externalized impacts rather than through government, but the impact is the same.)
Implementing a new tax for CO2 emissions is a much, much bigger political endeavour than simply letting a subsidy expire and not renewing it.
That's why there's not much value in perverting language to somehow argue that fossil fuels are subsidised. They are not, there's no way to "remove subsidies from their dirtier competitors", as the parent poster suggested.
There is a way to tax CO2 emissions, but that's a different discussion altogether.
Massive repeated bailouts for the fossil fuel auto industry, gutting of EPA regulations to redefine pollution so as to let oil and gas and auto industries avoid financial responsibility for the pollution and other environmental damage (fracking quakes for example) they cause, and multi-trillion-dollar decades-long wars and military engagements all in the service of oil and gas, taxpayer funded, would beg to differ with your claim.
Hell the 2003 invasion was originally called "Operation Iraqi Liberation" - before that blatant of an acronym was deemed unseemly.
It's amazing that this is being glossed over now when it was such a major part of public discussion at the time. Seems like someone pushing an agenda.
But that cost is largely a function of strong regulations and lack of innovation. If the government gets the ball rolling with subsidies it might get to the point where it doesn't need them anymore. Reducing regulation where appropriate could help too - but in general there are risks and regulation is warranted.
And because it makes so much sense - implement a carbon tax that ramps up slowly to the full cost of the externalities of fossil fuels. It's the most effective thing to fight climate change, but instead of doing that we actually subsidize fossil fuels?!? I don't get it.
I see this argued a lot for many industries, has it ever actually happened for any of them? It doesn't seem realistic, but I'd love to be wrong.
I think it's safe to say we're not operating under a democracy/republic anymore, so whatever will appease the coroporate/banking overlords the quickest is the best path forward.
"Freedom fries?"
Also, I think you're confusing cost and price there.
It can't exist in a free market or a leveled playing field.
Right, because free markets are not capable of pricing in externalities (and in fact they actively incentivize externalities). If they were capable of this, fossil fuels would be prohibitively expensive, and nuclear would be cheap.
But if the objective were to curry favour with as many people as possible, subsidising everything works better than leveling the playing field.
Everybody gets a taste.
If nuclear had to compete with coal on actual safety, nuclear would already be cheaper than coal.
Where are we going to build a solar farm to cover NYC, DC, and Philadelphia? There is 9 hours of daylight in the dead of winter, and it’s not exactly known for being sunny in January.
NYC alone needs 11,000 megawatt hours per day. My back of the envelope fermi estimate is a solar farm covering approximately 16,000 acres. Forget the metro area, that’s just for NYC. Probably double if you include the entire metro area.
You aren’t going to find that kind of land within 300 miles of NYC.
We do need more transmission (another thing the White House is working on: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...), but power import/export over long distances is already commonplace.
Edit: And if you really want to look to the future, you could read the proposal for a North American Supergrid: http://northamericansupergrid.org/
The numbers I quoted were just for NYC, and they weren’t adjusted for the winter sunlight problem. To power the entire metro area would likely require 40,000 acres. To cover the entire region likely 60,000 acres. This land does not exist.
2) Rooftop solar
3) National grid improvements that make transferring power from renewable sources further away more efficient
4) There are massively huge areas of empty land within 100 miles of NYC. This map shows roughly the 100 miles west of NYC. Take note of all of that unused space, which is most of it: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7560624,-75.4552232,170414m/...
And sure, you can imagine a power grid that's smart enough to handle all of that, but implementation of something like that isn't any faster than the construction of more nuclear power.
“Without technological breakthroughs in efficient, large scale energy storage, it will be difficult to rely on intermittent renewables for much more than 20-30 percent of our electricity.” Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy - 2010.
https://grist.org/article/2010-02-22-energy-secretary-steven...
We do not have a date for when fossil fuels will be removed from the energy grid. No date, no plan, no strategy, nothing. What we do have is three distinct plans in order to address the stability problem from renewables.
1: Continuing subsidize fossil fuel plants to operate in ready mode for when demands exceeds that of renewables. Oil for now, natural gas in the future.
2: Expand the ability to buy fossil fueled energy from nearby countries for which we sell our green energy. One can pretend that the import of dirty energy does not exist if the total amount of green export over a year is higher than the import.
3: Future technology that does not exist yet and tend to change from year to year based on what currently sounds like interesting-but-decades-from-being-invested-in tech. This year it is wind to hydrogen in dedicated ocean windfarms with massive pipelines of hydrogen, burned in retrofitted natural gas power plants. It has the upside that more natural gas power plants (and pipelines for natural gas) can be built in the pretense that at some later date we can use that wind produced hydrogen if it ever get built.
The result is investments and subsidies goes to mix of renewables and fossil fuels, which is a far cry from 100% renewables.
As long as you are able to scale your storage, you'll be able to fill it up with solar energy.
> The reason solar is winning is because the manufacturing technology can be iterated every six months, so the learning curve is much faster. Nuclear power plant technology is iterated roughly every 25 years, or twice in the lifetime of a plant. Many first generation plants are still operational, while few third generation plants have been commissioned, and fourth generation plants are still in the planning stage. Even if every design iteration was a factor of 10 better than the previous one, solar, iterating 50 times faster, could outdo this improvement over the same timescale with a mere 5% improvement per iteration. Since this is roughly the solar learning rate, we can now ask if each nuclear design iteration is 10x better than its immediate predecessor. Obviously not.
There's definitely an argument that some part of that slow iteration speed for nuclear is political and unnecessary. Clearly if we built more plants they would iterate faster. But realistically at this point...is it going to happen?
Personally, I think looking at the data so far, we should just stop investing in fission plants, continue research of fusion plants, but put a practical focus on building renewables to meet climate targets to get the most reduction for the buck.
All other AP1000 projects in the US have been cancelled. No one in the US is going to order an AP1000 unless the government takes on construction risk.
I do not care only about the climate - I care about the environment. The entire planet should not be covered with solar panels and wind turbines. Whether or not it is more expensive, I support nuclear because it is the right thing to do.
You don’t need to cover the whole planet.
In Fukushima total cleanup costs could go up to a trillion dollars : https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...
End-of-life for plants is a huge issue. The owners of plants are obligated to collect fees for cleanup, decommissioning, and remediation of power plant sites. But what has happened (unsurprisingly) is that operators will sell these plants to someone else, who signs a contract, accepting all future legal liability for any issues resulting from operations or cleanup, then those cleanup fees (which total in the hundreds of millions) get put into an escrow account.
Of course, these new owners are limited liability corporations who find that it's cheaper to provide campaign donations to high-level state officials who then pressure state agencies to allow half-assed measures to be used for containment of toxic chemicals. This is an ongoing issue in right now because so many coal plants have been driven out of business.
If these people won't spend an extra million bucks to line coal ash containment ponds appropriately, I have no faith they will do so with significantly more expensive nuclear waste.
The difference is that rightly or wrongly, the public doesn't see the military spending as wasteful government spending in the way they see spending on the Postal Service or for some, health programs like Medicaid.
There's an argument that a way to sell renewables to the climate change denying sections of the population is to have the military involved in its implementation.
If you think about it, the military has functions of 1) protecting the US against existential threats and 2) providing a path toward a dignified livelihood for a lot of the population. Climate change also poses existential threats, and there is an opportunity to create a path to a dignified livelihood for many people by tackling it with renewables.
US Naval reactors are not some silver bullet no one has thought of. They're a different tool, and it's not clear the Navy would be particularly more effective in creating a future of factory built small modular reactors vs any other company that's attempted it so far.
The complexity, capital costs and liability risks make commercial "small nuclear" unfeasible. It's "go big or go home".
Maybe funding it via the navy is politically palatable.
There’s the problem, this kind of short term thinking that is just long enough to let someone else deal with it.
Also, guarantees on paper don’t mean as much as physical reality. Ask any native American or Fukashima resident about how much guarantees are worth.
White House eyes subsidies for existing nuclear plants to help meet climate targets.
This movement was heavily pushed along by the established fossil fuel power industry. It's much less "grass roots" than it appeared to be on a surface level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety
What's really missing for nuclear is economics of scale. If we could just organize a repeatable build model so many operational challenges would be solved.
That said, I'll take anything. Wind, solar, batteries, tidal, nuclear. They're all far, far better than coal or oil from a public health and climate change standpoint. It's such a shame so much was wasted on the Iraq War, since the entire USA could have been powered by green energy with half what was spent.
Mining lithium is a horrible, polluting process that wastes tons of fresh water. One thing to put small quantities into phones and computers. Another to suggest that they should be used for all cars (unless the end goal is to have only the super rich driving cars).
Solar panels involve mining coal (so much more moving away from the coal economy) and quartz, and will pile up as toxic junk after 10 years or so.
Wind turbines can’t be repurposed after their useful and short (comparatively) life and will pile up as junk.
It’s not even a question of “don’t have catastrophic outcomes”, it’s a question of a slow-moving guaranteed catastrophic outcome, or the possibility of a fast catastrophic outcome.
We are at the point now where there are enough “options on the table” (solar, onshore offshore wind, hydro, nuclear, various storage applications ) that incentives should go towards the cheapest “clean electrons”, regardless of technology. This way the money contributed as subsidy can go the furthest distance.
Nuclear power’s Achilles heel on the economics side are particularly problematic for new builds. With increasing construction costs (compared to declining solar and wind), an almost 10 year timeframe to build out, and potentially half a century operating lifespan, it can be hard to ultimately pencil out. That said, nuclear refurbs and upgrades of existing setups is probably a better direction, even if life extension is likely to be more limited.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/white-... [2] https://www.cftc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-09/9-9-20%20Re...
The doomsday clock is ticking and we don't have time to waste debating. We must buy time now
I would suspect that the nuclear subsidies is taken from the later strategy and not the former. Companies can still compete on the market to produce the cheapest possible energy, while the government are moved away from fossil fuels and into alternatives that are clean and provide the desired stability for which existing subsidies are paying for.
Renewables + batteries will NEVER supply enough energy in a world that will require more electricity if it uses electric vehicles and move away from fossil fuels. The coal and gaz industry love renewables because you NEED gaz and coal if there's no wind or sun.
Please look at the number.
> Renewables + batteries will NEVER supply enough energy
NEVER is a long, long time. We definitely need nuclear to step in for quite a while, but it's plausible that we can be completely renewable and non-nuclear some time in the future.
https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Coun...
https://www.reuters.com/world/india/exclusive-india-may-buil...
How many miles of solar panels, wind turbines, and battery backup are needed to produce the same amount of energy as a single nuclear plant? I imagine if you do the math at scale, it turns out to be negligible, if not more expensive for renewables.
And solar/wind are also "cheap" because they are mostly produced in mainland China, with coal and cheap labor (including "very cheap labor": https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/business/economy/china-so...). Not a very sustainable solution...
Since they use so much of it, that would build up capacity for other uses, and the subsidy doesn't even have to necessarily go straight to nuclear power, which might improve the optics.
Here's a discount for specialty concrete that only nuclear plants and hydroelectric dams would be interested in...
Let's see - the per capita total energy consumption - which includes transportation, industry, agriculture (everything) in the US is 80 MWh yearly[0]. The global population is expected to peak at 10 billion. Assuming the whole world consumes energy like a drunk sailor like the US does (and by the way, BEVs, for example, are twice as energy-efficient per mile than gasoline vehicles [1]) - that comes to 800 PWh.
The average solar cell produces 150 watts per square meter[2]. Running at 6 hours per day for a year, thus a square meter produces 0.3285 MWh. Therefore you need 2.4 million sq. km of land to supply the total global energy consumption (where the average consumption is 15 times higher than current consumption) only through solar. How much land is it? Quite a lot - twice that of India, and a quarter of the Sahara desert[3]. But remember this is spread all over the world. As a percentage of the total land area, it's not even a single percent. Agriculture itself consumes 60 times more area than this.
However, this is only from solar. The current state-of-the-art offshore turbines produce 15MW peak power already. Such a turbine has a rotor diameter of 236m. The optimal distance between turbines is 10D, where D is the rotor diameter [5]. Thus assuming a 50% capacity factor, an offshore wind farm produces 11.8 kWh per square meter per year. You would also need 12 million such turbines to supply the entire world's energy consumption per year. Assuming we get half of our annual energy consumption from offshore wind, you would need 33 million square kilometers covered in wind turbines. When it comes to areal efficiency wind, it is an order of magnitude worse than solar - however, the advantage is that the area is mostly free. Offshore turbines spaced kilometers apart can coexist easily with shipping lanes, while onshore turbines can and do exist without issues with ranches and farmland. By the way, the US coastline itself is 150,000km [6]. Thus, if you cover the coastline with turbines (only five deep), you can only generate the entire combined US energy demand from offshore wind.
And we have not touched on rooftop solar and onshore wind at all. So I fail to see how renewables will NEVER supply enough energy to the world.
References:
[0] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=85&t=1
[1] https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/evtech.shtml#:~:text=EVs%20h....
[2] https://www.solar-electric.com/learning-center/solar-insolat....
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara
[4] https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1706915/vestas-laun...
[5] https://www.pnas.org/content/116/29/14495
[6] https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/shorelength.html#:~:text....
https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
> This might seem like a sensible approach, until you realize that it eliminates, by definition, any chance for nuclear power to be cheaper than its competition. Nuclear can‘t even innovate its way out of this predicament: under ALARA, any technology, any operational improvement, anything that reduces costs, simply gives the regulator more room and more excuse to push for more stringent safety requirements, until the cost once again rises to make nuclear just a bit more expensive than everything else. Actually, it‘s worse than that: it essentially says that if nuclear becomes cheap, then the regulators have not done their job.
Cheap high capacity energy storage is needed to make renewables competitive as a base load. Until that happens, nuclear is better than goal or gas.
University programs, technical schools, research labs, and a robust supply chain for plant construction and maintenance.
The energy density of nuclear fuel would have convinced any higher rational society to do this decades ago. There is no contest, not with solar, not with coal or NG. Pound for pound (including all of the cladding, reactor vessels, and everything else), nuclear plants produce just so much energy.
How many tons of easily exploitable coal/ng/etc exist in the world? Nevermind easily exploitable: how much energy exists, period, in fossil deposits?
It's dwarfed by nuclear fuel. 1 cm3 to 20 tons.
Energy density also makes things easier. You can transport a year's worth of energy on one train. You can ship it to remote areas. To get a lot of energy out of the ground, you don't need a huge extraction process like fracking or strip mining.
https://www.reutersevents.com/nuclear/mini-reactor-builders-...
Seems like this idea didn't get traction.
2. Subsidize existing, inefficient providers.
3. Profit! (for entrenched players, not us)
Your statement there is the equivalent of "work harder, not smarter."
No one questions whether the zero emissions target is rational. Natural gas in North America should complement the variability of wind and solar, IMO.
So the answer for what to do with the waste is to build reactors that use it as fuel. That not only doesn't create more long-lived waste, it gives us a way to get rid of what we already have.
Both are immense problems with immense dangers, but it seems to me that one is clearly easier to solve.
Not to mention the possibility that spent fuel could be of use to future generations for some kind of future science and it would all conveniently be in one place.
To everyone's point removing subsidies is politically challenging (especially as this is almost a red / blue state issue) - however subsidizing something else so that it has a competitive advantage is essentially the same thing albeit the money flow is a bit different.
Edit: Why is this getting downvoted so much without any negative comments? weird...
Coal power was probably a net benefit in the beginning, but there are much better alternatives now.
One way they do this is Percentage Depletion. A mine take out 10% of the available coal, they can deduct 10% of the value of the mine, to the point where the total deductions can exceed capital costs.
There is also deduction that came about because they wanted to promote domestic energy production and reduce dependence on foreign energy fuel, which between the year 2002-2010 awarded $12.2 billion in tax credit to coal alone.
The Wikipedia page has a nice breakdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidy
Coastal mayors and governors have access dashboard to order nuclear submarines and pay by the hour. Submarine plant comes within a week, plugs itself to the local grid from the shore and electricity flows in. You may want to reserve an instance for a year or the submarine may move to a higher bidder municipality. Emergency cooling handled by construction even in worst case scenarios, no pumping necessary.
Regulations are fine because the submarine plants are not built in your country. Nuclear waste moves out of the country with the submarine when submarine is done powering your local grid. A real-time marketplace lets cities and countries worldwide bid to host the waste for good money.
For reference, natural gas power plants can hit the GW range easily. Even those diesel backup generators you see outside of hospitals and such are about 1kW. You could throw a bunch of those on a tanker ship and probably provide more power output than a nuclear sub reactor.
If it were, then massive amounts of money and time wouldn't go into trying to make it safe. Nuclear control rooms wouldn't be locked down like Fort Knox. And every major population center would have a nuclear power station nearby.
There's this idea that the only thing stopping nuclear from saving the world is a bunch of hippies perpetuating a myth that it's not safe — like nuclear energy is a genetically modified tomato.
It's not that. It's actually just not safe — or rather, the only way of making it safe is by having round the clock security, big brains monitoring it the whole time, and lots of money.
So, given that climate change will bring with it more pandemics, civil unrest, and natural disasters, is it wise to assume that there will always be people around who know how to look after nuclear power stations? Or people who can stop terrorists who want to make dirty bombs from the waste?
There's a reasonable argument to be made that it's a risk we should take to avoid worse distasters.
But, given that there are cheaper alternatives, that don't take a decade to build, why don't we just not build nuclear?
Let's generate non-controversial power, while massively reducing our usage.
Source: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/06/update-of-death-per-te...
As for “cheaper” - citation needed. Especially for handling base load requirements in reliable and predictable ways. Most of the cost around nuclear power, especially in the United States, is from bloated, ineffectual policy decisions designed to artificially suppress it.
I do agree we should be doing more with the existing “waste” - we should be burning it in better reactor designs instead of burying or storing it. Note I didn’t say newer or modern designs - we have had the technology since the 50’s to burn what we (ridiculously) term “waste” today but it wasn’t pursued for numerous political and ill informed social issues. These designs also coast to a natural stop if their support systems are interrupted, negating the problems of active systems (like cooling) failing leading to problems in most of our currently deployed reactors.