Unfortunately, we will have squandered 3 decades of not using it more extensively.
What’s that Churchill quote about Americans?
[Updates]
- I mean the start of building because we will realize we need it.
- Solar won’t provide a base load, no matter how cheap it gets. Yes, i know about the billions and billions of batteries
- We didnt need next generation nuclear. it was important to reduce emissions over the past 3 decades
Like, 10 years ago I thought nuclear was an essential part of the future energy mix, just as a sensible hedge against other things not working out. It's maybe been 5 years since that became obviously unnecessary as renewables continue to progress.
My opinion on nuclear hasn't really shifted in absolute terms. It's still much better than coal for example. But the possibility and now near certainty of solar, wind and batteries being better and cheaper has put them way ahead in relative terms. It's renewables that I've been getting new information or confirmation of old information which was speculative in that time frame. Nuclear hasn't really changed.
The people who remain loudly pro-nuclear, then seem in fact to be super pessimistic about renewables compared with me, rather than super positive about nuclear.
As you kind of confirm with your edits, you think solar is inadequate, when I think it is one of the most astonishly successful power technologies ever conceived by man.
How did we end up with such divergent views on renewables if we're broadly in tune about nuclear?
Cheaper, most certainly, but better, according to what metric exactly? PV has a higher carbon footprint than nuclear. Same for wind if you add storage. Both require at least one order of magnitude more raw materials (mostly extracted using fossil fuels). Land use is also an issue with wind turbines, not all countries can put them offshore. And then there's the geopolitical angle and the huge dependence on China. I know that the nuclear fuel supply chain has its own issues as well, but again the amount of raw materials is relatively small and fuel can be stockpiled.
It's not about being for or against renewables. They have a very real environmental footprint and we're past the point where we can simply disregard that.
Not inherently, though. This is only because the current energy production is 90% non-renewable globally. See e.g. here, page 11: https://group.vattenfall.com/de/siteassets/de/verantwortung/...
The oil industry funds anti-renewable but pro-nuclear efforts[1]. That might seem counterintuitive, since nuclear also competes with fossil fuels, but the fossil fuel industry knows that nuclear plants take a very long time to build. During that time, more fossil fuel plants get built, and the renewables industry struggles and possibly withers.
That creates a stripe of Internet commenter convinced that nuclear plants are the solution and renewables are terrible. They all use the same lines of reasoning, and it doesn't really matter how many times they're refuted because... well, because this is a playbook that has been used many times over.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-solar-kochs-20140420-st...
I can't recall ever seeing one of those.
I hope you're not filing everyone that wants a high nuclear:battery ratio into that box!
The very odd belief that nuclear power does not rely on storage and peaking capacity to deliver electricity when people actually want it, at a price they can afford, and without carbon externalities is one of the key things that indicates to me that nuclear support is an irrational tribal thing.
You could easily think nuclear fans live in a parallel dimension where electricity demand is entirely flat and unchanging, so focused are they on the mythical "baseload" to the exclusion of everything else.
A desire to only have a day's worth of storage is not a belief that storage is unnecessary.
> I would put anyone who thought that in that box.
> You could easily think nuclear fans live in a parallel dimension where electricity demand is entirely flat and unchanging, so focused are they on the mythical "baseload" to the exclusion of everything else.
You're going out of your way to strawman.
I'm kind of surprised we aren't already well on our way to building the latter, considering the potential benefits.
A big reason is that the price effectiveness of solar and the price effectiveness of solar+batteries are wildly different values.
Storage is much more expensive,yes. So much so that building extra solar (and or wind) and just wasting some of the energy when it's above the demand is cheaper overall then storing every drop of generation with batteries.
But how does that impact nuclear vs renewables?
Solar plus batteries is cheaper than fossil fuels (without carbon fees!) in many markets and use cases. And continues to get cheaper. That's an amazing thing that we should celebrate. It pretty much guarantees a solution to climate change even if sensible regulation doesn't get implemented.
Is nuclear cheaper than fossil if you don't include the carbon and pollution externalities? I don't think it is. So the only hope for it (if we assume renewables all stop working tomorrow and we need a plan B) is widespread government intervention.
Even if you're building out for the worst case scenario?
> Is nuclear cheaper than fossil if you don't include the carbon and pollution externalities? I don't think it is.
It can be if we stop using NASA-style one-off engineering methods.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/11/bill-gates-bullish-on-using-...
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/meet-vaclav-smil-man...
I've never really found what he argues particularly compelling.
His December 2017 piece, Electric Vehicles: not so fast, seems kind of wrong in retrospect but also pretty empty of intellectual heft.
[1]https://www.taxpayer.net/energy-natural-resources/nuclear-po... [2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Too_much...
No, it won't be back here for decades, if not a century, if ever.
Insurance, financing, and NIMBYs.
They're essentially intractable problems that make it cost-ineffective when NG and renewables are cheaper. Why sink billions into something that doesn't have a clear ROI?
I find this to be overly optimistic. Even millennials and gen-Z parrot the tired NIMBYism that has characterized all discussion of nuclear power for the past few decades, so that overly-emotional, irrational mindset seems to be alive and well.
Its problems are entirely emotional and political. We could completely solve waste storage, completely solve safety, and we'd still be dealing with the ignorant general public for another couple generations.
Hands on training is hard to provide and acquire. As in expensive and not widely dispersed geographically around the world.
Nation states actively pursue programs that restrict the flow of nuclear knowledge and the development of expertise. Particularly flows toward low wage economies.
UIUC has a great nuclear program (NPRE PSE), and so does the US Navy with hands-on experience.
Building that back to a fraction of what it was would take decades and wouldn't be the same.
Isn't Gates new plant all about creating standardized, modular, repeatable designs to lower costs ?
Of course, you could argue that cities shouldn't be in deserts.
Hey Now! I resemble that comment :-P
They also need to be near large water sources to use evaporative cooling.
its only the largest nuclear plant in the country :-)
I don't think I did ?
https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2020/02/25/palo-verde-nuclear...
I don't think that using waste water from a city an hour away would be considered "close to a large source of water".
Also, thanks for the link - it was interesting. Maybe they can get my electric bill down some more :-)
Actually, it turns out that the medicinal value of certain isotopes that we could manufacture at nuclear facilities far outweigh the energy value per fissile event.
This is especially true for cancer destroying isotopes that are many orders of magnitude more effective in terms of precision and kill rate then typical radiation sources used today (or for targeted quantum dot medicines).
Other benefits include potential safe nuclear batteries that would allow an iPhone to last a few years without charge. But these are inventions for future generations.
Within a decade, solar will have dropped another 300% and "next gen nuclear" will still be 10 years away.
At this point, it's a dead heat between next gen nuclear and fusion.
It's a 24/7 fusion reactor that requires no supervision or maintenance. There are minor energy losses due to its transmission being over 8 light-minutes in distance, but it provides 50% cover of the entire planet 100% of the time.
I actually made the same joke about 10 years ago while working for a CPV (concentrated photovoltaic) startup collaborating with Sandia National laboratory.
I was talking to a Sandia researcher who was working on their huge fusion-inducing laser and he was all pumped up about it, then, I mentioned that I really don't know what the big deal was, we already had working fusion power. The joke did not go over too well.
I'm not optimistic that it can be cost competitive without massive government subsidies for construction, fuel production, waste disposal, and/or insurance.
Confined fusion has been demonstrated at Q=0.6, it just hasn't hit break-even yet which would make it industrially useful. ITER should exceed break-even and DEMO should produce power in 2051.
- Powered flight: from first demonstration to commercial application was less than a decade.
- Computation: I know about Babbage and Lovelace, but from the invention of the transistor to practical computing was years to decades depending on how you count.
- Electric motors: similar
- Batteries: don't know the history, probably they were known in ancient times, but it's not like their development was held back by anything, people just didn't have much interest in finding applications for them.
- IC engines: At most two decades between invention and useful work. But probably less by more reasonable definitions.
- Rockets: Again, depends on what you count as successful. But people had working versions pretty fast.
Fusion is unique in that we've known how to do it for 80 years, spent billions of dollars on it and outside of scientific research and weapons have no real applications for it. The only way to make the timeline for others seem similar to fusion is to stretch the start date back to when people imagined being able to do something, e.g. to put the start date for powered flight at da Vinci, but you could do this with fusion too (perpetual motion machines?) and make it begin arbitrarily back in the past as well.
In basically all other cases of technological development precise characterization of the underlying phenomena to commercial application takes a few decades at most.
Edit: Also, those older technologies had the massive disadvantage that materials were much harder to get and of less consistent quality. Fusion research has basically not had these problems.
The MIT Sparc and Arc projects are one group's attempts at coming up with a practical design. They seem to be making steady progress.
- In 1000 tonnes of uranium ore, there is 1 tonne of uranium. This contains about 0,7% U-235 used as fuel in most civilian applications. U-235 is used in the fuel in concentrations of about 3-5%. In the end, from a tonne of uranium, you can make about 100 kg of fuel used by a nuclear reactor. This is all used up in about a day in a largish installation. So you have to dig and process 1000 tonnes of ore each day to keep a 1 GW electrical output reactor running. The recycling of the fuel isn't economical unless you have a nuclear military program or want to do some research with various isotopes. That doesn't seem like a huge improvement compared to coal, gas and oil. Nuclear just isn't very clean in this respect either.
- The technology and mentality of how we build actual nuclear reactors is stuck at best in the 1980s. This might change, but there isn't any conceptually new reactor running in production anywhere. Compared to wind and solar, where replacement with better technology is the norm, this is just nuts. Also, wind and solar starts to be competitive to fossil fuels when producing electricity in some cases.
- Solar and wind don't have to produce stable output if the output is very cheap. In such a case, it will be economical to build better transmission lines, motivate consumers to adjust use based on production capacity and finally invest in clever energy storage projects. Good transmission lines (which we will need anyway, because of EVs and other electricity consumers) will spread out the production and load in such a way that the Central Limit Theorem will guarantee something similar to the traditional "base load" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem Cheap batteries acting basically as grid capacitors will smooth out most of the peaks in production or demand, which will make the whole thing more economical still. (As we can already see in several places.)
- For winters, long term energy storage from the summer or very good inter-continental transmission lines are needed. This is not a solved problem but we still have plenty of time to think about solutions, but we really should think about them. Just building something conceptually stuck in the 1980s that is more expensive just to ensure we have electricity and perhaps heat in the winter without having to think about perhaps more efficient solutions doesn't seem like a situation we want to be in. We can decommission existing power plants over the next 10-20 years, while we think about storing the energy/ producing energy intensive stuff mostly in the summer or something like that. There is e.g. the possibility to produce ammonia, sodium metal or something else with excess energy that we can transform into electricity in the winter. There is also HVDC lines that might actually connect continents, which would solve some of this as well. There really is plenty of energy in wind, solar, tides/ waves, etc. that we can use. If it is produced at a low enough price, we might be able to throw some even rather substantial portion of useful energy away to transport it to the consumers be it on a different continent and still end up with cheaper power. It might be more economical to buy storage to have enough for the winter or to transport some form of fuel. I think, the reality will be a mix of all approaches.
- We might do a better job of insulating our homes and more stuff like that to reduce some obviously inefficient use of electricity (e.g. for "just" heating, cooling, drying). Actually making infrastructure better is a good long term investment as it enables new approaches to solving problems and makes the quality of living better for everybody but especially for the less affluent.
- Nuclear is regulated as hell, where wind and solar isn't really all that much. Wind and solar is very flexible, as can be seen in poor bu sunny countries, where solar is a way to have electricity most of the time without having to worry about diesel (or uranium for that matter). Some people have a much better quality of living thanks to the dropping price of solar electricity in their circumstances and they don't have to ask anybody for permission to use solar. They just throw it on the roof of a hut and have enough electricity to power a phone and a battery so they have light at night. They can now communicate e.g. about the price of their produce and educate themselves. These people will not see nuclear or fossil fuels as a solution when they progress into the middle class, where they actually can affect some things e.g. by engineering infrastructure solutions.
- Nuclear always has the risk of a nuclear meltdown, which just isn't an option in large population centres. We humans are just too error prone to be able to reliably design and handle this. Because we are quite risk averse and have all the preventive measures (that have failed multiple times already) the cost of producing nuclear power just skyrockets.
- Finally, if there were no nuclear reactors, it would be even more uneconomical to keep a large stockpile of nuclear weapons or to power attack submarines and other stuff that is made only for the purpose to solve problems by force. Perhaps there is some advantage to the fear of guaranteed destruction but in reality, we just wage wars using ransomware and proxy countries - nuclear weapons aren't useful there at all.
The other uses of nuclear science e.g. in scientific instruments, medicine etc. can be done without nuclear being used to produce electrical power. We will have the current reactors for perhaps at least two more decades, so we have time to think about this even without building any new nuclear power generating capacity.