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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

It is so upsetting to see CA close down precious nuclear power plants, not because they have built a better alternative to using natural gas or other dirty fuels to cover this load, they haven't, but because it is unprofitable to do the required maintenance and necessary improvements.

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.

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I mean, if everything runs at a loss, we eventually all starve to death.

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 think you and the parent comment actually agree quite a bit.

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.

> 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.

What's your describing is also known as "subsidizing", a term you may have seen in the headline.

You think that's enough? I guess we'll find out.

It's absolutely capable of being enough if the subsidy is enough money.

Nuclear really is not that precious when it comes to solving climate change. We have undergone a massive tech shift, the consequences of which have not filtered out into many academic models.

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.

This is still pitting two cooperative undertakings against each other, and we really shouldn't do that.

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.

Agreed that the 2040s have great potential due to massively cheaper energy and lots of it, but I disagree that nuclear will contribute much. I'm not convinced that nuclear has such great qualities compared to renewables plus storage, and I think the only reason this is not more commonly held is that people have not yet internalized a world with storage at the prices we will see it within 5-10 years.

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.

Even if it loses the race, we should subsidize research and development right now.

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.

> Battery storage can scale large ...

This is a lie at our current technology levels.

A lie would require that both 1) batteries can't scale, and 2) I know that they can't scale but am knowingly asserting a falsehood.

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.

People keep touting the low cost of renewables plus storage, but this is incredibly misleading when most regions (Germany, Denmark, California, etc.) that have high renewable adoption have some of the most expensive electricity in the world.

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.

But your text is just as misleading!

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!

I find it hard to believe that any 'green tax' will be reduced, or at least without a comparative increase somewhere else, once the infrastructure is done.

But the tax isn't is a problem, quite the opposite because it targets non renewable sources and has been decreasing as green energy has been established.

Also it works as a magnet for business surprisingly maybe.

We have enormous new datacenters from Google, Facebook and Apple being built right at this moment, even though Denmark is tiny.

Taxation is extremely important when it comes to transitioning to green energy. As long as the taxation scheme favours green energy - granted that is difficult to define exactly.

We've had to same scheme with electric cars giving you about half the price of a conventional car.

This is exactly how government should help the green transition, instead of the exact opposite that for many years has been happening in the US with the corporate welfare and grotesque subsidising of heavy industry. Though again this is a contentious issue as Tesla has sucked a lot of green subsidies from the pool. So there definitely is problems to tackle.

I think your missing the point of the above poster. Why get rid of nuclear power until its replaced with some other non carbon polluting source? It just raises the amount of co2 going into the atmosphere. If all renewable energy grids work, great. But don't replace nuclear with fossil fuels, like California, Vermont and many others have done.

No matter when the nuclear is shut off, it's going to cause an instantaneous uptick in fossil usage, because that's the dispatchable power we use. Even if you plug in an extra 4GW of solar/wind to the grid before you turn off the nuclear, the event of turning off the nuclear reactor will still make it look like fossil fuel have replaced it. (That is, until storage becomes the dispatchable replacement not only for peaker plants, but also for open cycle or combined cycle natural gas).

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.

For solar that would be at least $7b every 25-30 years, no?

Well $7B now, and a fraction of that in 25-30 years to replace the aging panels and batteries. (I think 12-15 years is a common battery warranty for grid batteries with daily cycling, but why might fall even further in price in 15 years than solar).

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.

Not discussing with the falling cost of solar and wind - but recently I have read a good argument about why nuclear is expensive:

""" 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. """

https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop

At least in California, the utilities are trying to make that distributed generation unattractive through lobbying. I'm slowly working towards getting myself off grid to avoid the tyranny of PG&E.

75% of my electricity bill is transmission and distribution charges. It's beyond preposterous.

> increasing reliability and resilience

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?

Decommissioning nuclear is pain in the ass though. A turbine can be recycled - everything but the concrete.

And I think that you have some serious metal fatigue in some critical nuclear reactor core components.

Wind turbines have a design lifetime of 20 years, but most will last much longer (source: I work at a large offshore wind company).

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.

Germany saw a huge increase in reliability over the past decade as it increased its renewable percentages. Old-timers said that anything above 5% renewable would cause grid collapse, then kept on shifting up the percentage as renewables increased on the grid and no disasters happened.

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.

In every discussions like this I see so much hope and wishes in regard to storage, and yet we are so far away from having commercial viable solutions to be combined with wind.

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.

However far away storage is from commercial viability, it's far closer than with nuclear.

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.

Battery storage is being built right now in the UK and there is a large pipeline of new projects. And scaling up is comparatively easy. It is ridiculously modular, suited to mass production, and piggy-backs on the global electronics industry.

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.

Also, they can share the inverter(s).

Profit in general is not the problem. It’s that we have no idea how to price externalities. If you could prove in court a correlation between coal production and disastrous weather events then you would enable massive class action suits against coal producers, eliminating any profit potential. No investor would go near it and the problem would solve itself.

Well, we actually do know how to do this fairly well. An Emissions Trading Scheme is the way to go.

I think that models from the reinsurance industry provide a certain amount of guidance as to the pricing of the externalities and they have been upping their premiums in recent years.

When San O went down the Friends of the Earth rejoiced (activist group mentioned in the article). CA lost 8% of its power and put out an extra 10m tons of CO2 the following year.

There are 8.5 million people within 50 miles of that plant, and it sits in a geological fault zone that can make large earthquakes. The plant is old, expensive to maintain, and inspections documented various safety concerns. If anything goes dramatically wrong it’s going to be an incredible disaster.

People can read about the closure etc. at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_...

The problem is not that it got shut down for being old. The problem is that it didn't get replaced with a clean source of energy, be that nuclear or renewables. In the typical nuclear fashion the plant ran for far longer than it was designed for and people kept putting off replacements. I point this out because we need to think differently going forward.

Your comment is typical of the pro-nuclear stance where all of the failures are pinned on opponents. San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station wasn't closed because of Friends of the Earth. It was closed because the new steam generating tubes were wearing out two years after being installed. The regulators weren't about to let the operator run it as is. And the operator didn't want to pay to replace the steam tubes again. So they closed it.

It's possible you're reading something in my comment that I didn't intend.

>the operator didn't want to pay to replace the steam tubes

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.

If the negative externalities that are killing our planet are included in the cost, those killers become less profitable. This can be done via taxes or other means.

Unfortunately, oligopolies invariably perceive such measures as incentive & opportunity for regulatory capture i.e. corruption, which resets progress.

It follows that correcting the energy market requires also restructuring the sector.

> not because they have built a better alternative to using natural gas or other dirty fuels to cover this load, they haven't, but because it is unprofitable to do the required maintenance and necessary improvements.

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.

The competition isn't "nuclear vs renewables", California is not going to not build renewables (it got 40% of it's utility-scale energy from them in 2018!). It's what you do about the rest: over half of CA's energy comes from natural gas. If you can keep nuclear alive longer, you can use the renewable growth to draw down fossil-fuel energy. If you don't, you need to replace the nuclear energy before you can start decomissioning any gas plants.

If your long-term goal is a maximum of renewables, there is a significant difference between nuclear and natural gas.

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.

> If nuclear is no better for the environment and more expensive, why should it keep running?

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.

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