Building more nuclear helps de-risk wind droughts.
This isn’t specific to nuclear; building more of a different kind mitigates the risk.
This isn’t specific to nuclear; building more of a different kind mitigates the risk.
Wind power makes a lot of sense as long as you are still using fossil fuels. Every watt generated by wind power means that you can reduce fossil fuel, and thus lower your CO2 emissions. But once you got rid of fossil fuels and you have a reliable source of power without CO2 emissions, you can get rid of the unreliable ones.
China just has announced ambitious plans to install storage for 100 GWh by 2030. China's electric power generation capacity is 2200 GW (in 2020). That's not even enough to provide electricity for 5 minutes....
Don’t mistake a manufacturing limit for a tech scaling limit. While it may take decades to get there, batteries could do that; in the mean time, intercontinental HVDC connections could substitute for some of that storage (not all the storage all at once unless mining increases, but certainly plausible over the scale of a decade or so and we would need that timescale to build the renewables themselves anyway)[0], and the batteries are in addition to existing pumped hydro, and even in the current “low wind” scenario the UK is still getting 3.8 GW (~11%) from wind[1][2] rather than getting nothing.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28474201
Yes. There are basically so many different chemistries (and non-chemical storage methods) that the important question is “which type should we prefer” rather than “can we even do it”.
The way forward is wind and solar. Everything else shouldn't be focused on.
Nuclear is the only proven clean technology for base load generation. The only hiccup is political (i.e., people decided they don't like nuclear), and while it's a big political problem, the whole climate crisis is an enormous political problem. Yes, there's the waste to be disposed of, but we already have to manage some waste and once you have to safely manage a little nuclear waste it's a marginal increase in cost to manage a whole lot of nuclear waste.
Further, innovations in nuclear are making it cheaper, safer, and faster to build. Moreover, as another commenter pointed out, if we were willing to ease some of our restrictions on nuclear such that our nuclear plants didn't need to be a thousand times safer than our coal plants (but merely, say, twice as safe), then nuclear could be even less expensive and facilities built more rapidly.
Yes, wind and solar will play a major role in the future, but we incur tremendous risk by ignoring nuclear.
What about a no-wind scenario? I don't know what wind in the UK is like, but in Germany this happens quite often. In November 2015 wind output dropped to 0.2 GW (0.5% of its 40GW power rating) [1]. Hydro doesn't help in such a scenario (<4% in Germany), nor will bio mass (<10%).
[0] https://energycentral.com/c/ec/world-battery-production
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute (German)
Yes, but that doesn’t itself seem like an implausible economic shift given how large the existing fossil fuel sector is.
Challenging, sure — perhaps it is politically impossible, I wouldn’t know as I’m not at all politically astute — but physically it seems fine.
> Are there enough raw materials for this?
That part at least is fine. Earth is big, and while lithium is in the category “rare Earths”, it isn’t all that rare compared to what we need, and even if it was lithium isn’t even the only option for storage.
One of the things suggested in your [2] was long-distance HVDC to different weather zones, and Scandinavian (hydro? I’m unclear) storage. In principle we could also do antipodal HVDC (different time zone for day/night, different hemisphere for summer/winter), though on a previous thread I was encouraged to do the maths and realised the EU collectively would use a 1m^2 cross section conductor for current HVDC designs (if you wanted 100% substitution rather than it being merely part of the solution), and this will take quite a long time to mine at current rates.
> How much waste would there be, given the limited lifespan of those batteries?
No idea, but the current alternatives are “set lots of it on fire” (fossil fuels) and “bury a tiny quantity of extraordinarily dangerous stuff in scary artwork for geological timescales” (nuclear), and all it has to do is beat those.
IIRC the end-of-life batteries can be processed back into their raw material more easily than can the rocks we start with for fresh batteries.
No, it's not. Where did you get that from? Surely not from elementary school chemistry lessons, where you're taught that lithium is an alkali metal.
You’re right, of course. I’m not a chemist and it shows.
I don't think that all these are true.
Yes, the technology definitely exists.
But as far as I know there's no country (yet) that has existing infrastructure that merely needs some upgrades (with the effort for these upgrades being significantly smaller than the total effort that went into building the existing infrastructure or would be necessary for building completely new infrastructure) to enable storing of months worth of hydrogen.
So I wouldn't support the claim "You can store months worth of hydrogen ...".
> Accounting for the accepted use of the higher heat value (because inefficiency via heat can be redirected back into the system to create the steam required by the catalyst), average working efficiencies for PEM electrolysis are around 80% ... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water#Industri...]
Nuclear has track record of decarbonizing entire industrial economy in just 10 years.
We dont have storage solution with such track record.
That's just the direct industry. The support industry for nuclear plant construction materials has also lost maturity and scale between first gen and new gen, as evidenced by the failure of upgrade materials in the So Cal Edison San Onofre plant. This is after decades of investment.
Because its so much less complicated to scale, my bet is on storage before any next round of new nuclear plants are built at scale. But we don't even need that much storage in the next decade, we mostly need far more renewable energy acceleration in very proven and fast, reliable rollouts.
It probably could have, if you priced carbon appropriately 50 or 60 years ago, but no one did so cars and various industrial processes never made the shift and other random things like cow burps it cant even theoretically fix.
Now it's too expensive to bother trying even for the bits it's suited to.
Ironically, the main thing that wpuld make nuclear cheaper, would be cheap energy storage as youd only need to uild enoigh plants to generate the average yearly demand and use tge storage to handle the varying loads.
And for the sake of the discussion, I think France can be fairly considered decarbonized, even if not really 100%.
Note that TFA refers to decarbonization of electricity generation only, which is the definition I use as well.
As far as I'm aware, even the 1st-generation MAGNOX reactors in the UK have longer to go to full decommissioning than the time that's passed since they were built.
"Proven" doesn't just mean "deployed at scale"; it also means "fully decommissioned". It's not fair to claim that nuclear is "clean", while leaving it to future generations to figure out how to actually clean up.
My bet is that the Japanese will build some huge newfangled storage facility. There'll be a big earthquake. The storage will meltdown/burn/whatever somehow. It'll cause a great big semi-permanent problem. Everyone will declare victory and shout 'at least it wasn't nuclear'.
Storing hydrogen isn't that easy/cheap either.
So I'd guess we're going to see storage of energy in the form of liquid/liquefiable hydrocarbons (synthesized from hydrogen) like methanol or propane.
> If battery technology improves to the extent that it becomes viable for large scale storage, then wind and solar can become our main source of energy.
Batteries are not the only way of storing electricity.
All of that assumes that the demand doesn't go up... Which is not compatible with things like climate goals
It's not been that way for long though. Economic grid scale batteries are here but still relatively new.
It makes sense to continue running old nuclear plants but not to build new ones. Much too expensive.
As of now storing 10kWh at 1kW costs around 1000$ from the cells alone. If you're changing them every 3 years then you have to spend 10 000$/kW over 30 years whereas nuclear is the same price per kW for a 30 year period.
If you don't take that into account then sure.
Tesla suggest such with its megapack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Megapack
You can avoid that right now because the grid has baseload. But if it doesn't you can avoid the wear cycles.
10 years is about what you'd expect if you only discharge ~30% of capacity daily, which is how it is operating right now.
Ah, you're focused on chemical batteries.
Hauling a lot of water up a mountain at times of low demand, and releasing it through a turbine at times of high demand, is a type of battery; it seems to me a reasonable approach to smoothing supply and demand for wind/solar.
I agree that it's going to be a long time before grid-scale chemical batteries can help much with demand-smoothing.
Pumped hydro is promising but it's going to be as expensive as regular hydro.
https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-ne...
And gas is a lot cheaper than nuclear.
Theres a new battery backed solar plant in california that can service the early evening peak times with cheaper electricity than coal.
Battery prices have been plummeting consistently for the last three years.
I'll point out using existing natural gas peaking plants to make up for temporary shortfalls of solar and wind power is also a viable stop gap.
What would make sense is larger local stores of hydrogen, to be burned in combustion turbines during the rare wind outages.
Would this work when there's little wind for a week or more?
Germany alone has the potential to store an estimated 9.6 PWh of hydrogen, enough to supply their average electric power demand for years, not weeks.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03603...
(I have no idea either way if this is an important limit or not. Just that it can have other sources of downside besides merely using otherwise wasted energy).
There are two sides to this cost: energy production, and storage.
The part which is argued to be essentially free is the production, which is not synchronized with energy consumption patterns.
Renewable's main challenge is how to store energy cheaply in order to be able to be used reliably to supply the baseline. Until that happens, everyone is required to employ non-renewable energy sources that can and do meet the baseline.
It matters nothing is production is free if storing it to supply the baseline is more expensive and thus wasteful than conventional non-renewable sources.
Or so analysis from people I know in the industry, interested in decarbonising (not fossil lobby related), show.
https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/07%20D...
Most of the time, people saying grid-scale storage is feasible point to technologies that exist in the prototyping phase. The reality is that we don't know whether these solutions will be feasible at scale, or if they'll hit bottlenecks or poor scalability that drives up cost when deployed at scale. Comparing a hypothetical cost of hydrogen, to actual historical cost is comparing apples to oranges.
I agree, we should tighten screws to eliminate fossil fuels. But hydroelectricity is the only scalable form of grid storage we currently have, and that's limited to the right geography. Expecting some unproven technology to be a silver bullet for storage is extremely wishful thinking. We need to be honest about technologies like hydrogen, compressed air, flywheels, etc: These are experimental technologies that might operate cheaply at scale, but we have no real-world experience to back up these claims. I could just say "storage is irrelevant because fusion will deliver energy at $1/MWh" and while nobody can technically disprove it, since they can't see into the future, it's also dishonest to claim this as fact for the same reason.
The reality is that hydrogen storage costs nowhere near $1/KWh. People making predictions about what a technology will cost and actually building it are two totally different things.
Can you point me to a developer that's actually offering to build hydrogen electric grid storage at $1/KWh? As in, if I give them $1 million they will build 1 GWh of hydrogen electric storage for me. Are there any enterprises actually willing to provide grid storage at this cost? If so, please point them my way. I'll make a massive amount of money. But I doubt I'll have anyone taking this offer.
The storage costs your citing are absolutely incredible. As in, I genuinely do not believe them. You're claiming that the entirety of the US's grid storage (which cost billions of dollars to build, mostly in the form of hydroelectric storage) can be matched by only $20 million in hydrogen storage. This is a cost estimate totally disconnected from reality. Until enterprises are actually building hydrogen electric grid storage for $1/KWh then this figure is meaningless.
If not then what's your explanation as to why people are missing out on the opportunity to become billionaires or trillionaires by construction hydrogen electric storage? Bill Gates alone could build enough storage for 24 hours of the USA's electricity consumption with only 10% of his net worth. This would be a rounding error on the national budget.
There appear to be no dense long range pipeline networks (for hydrogen) connecting multiple countries (yet).
Pipeline networks for natural gas aren't designed to safely transport pure (or high concentrations of) hydrogen, so over a certain concentration hydrogen would have to be converted into synthetic natural gas. The latter conversion appears to not yet be deployed at very large scales.
Seems to me that the reason why there is no large scale hydrogen generation yet (though there are medium-large/industrial scale projects now), is simply that until now large scale wasn't economically feasible. With hydrogen strategies and more pressure from a price on CO2 on their way we'll definitely see more of it soon.
No, not at all. Nuclear is used for base loads, not to compensate fluctuating electricity production of other sources.
In any case Fukushima is easily explained: They ignored the risk of tsunami despite two studies (and governmental bodies) warning of it. The real reason the Fukushima is so damaging, is that the Japanese are seen as generally "competent", so their mistakes/hubris are seen as reproducible anywhere i.e. "if the Japanese couldn't get it right".
I agree entirely with the hubris argument. And it's a harsh one, because if an organisation claims to be more competent than the Japanese and and safety-minded too, why can't it persuade an insurer to sell it liability insurance on normal commercial terms, at a justifiable price? It's a difficult argument to make.
It's because nobody else buys that amount of insurance. A hundred billion dollar insurance policy has significant risks and costs to the insurer completely independent of the actual risk of a claim.
For one thing, the insurer is required to hold enough capital to pay out possible claims no matter how unlikely they are. So you're basically paying interest on that sum of money in the difference between the ordinary market rate of return and the lower return on the "safe" securities insurers are allowed to hold. That cost is completely independent of the risk of a claim; it's strictly based on the amount of insurance you want.
Then what happens if there is e.g. a major earthquake which causes a minor incident at a nuclear plant, so that 99% of the damage is caused by the earthquake but the insurer is a deep pocket and the judge is sympathetic to the earthquake victims? That's a risk an insurer has to account for, but it's not a risk you can address by improving the safety of the nuclear plant because the risk is rooted in politics.
When the risk of an incident is low enough, it's costs like that which dominate the premium for the policy. You can make the risk of a legitimate claim arbitrarily small and those costs would still be the same.
And it's an isolated demand for rigor. Nobody else is required to carry that amount of insurance. When a coal mine turns an entire town into a superfund site and kills thousands of people, they just file for bankruptcy. What would the alternatives cost if they had to carry the same insurance, or pay for their externalities?
Try going to a major insurance company to get a policy that pays out in the amount of two hundred billion dollars in the event that you're abducted by aliens. If you can get the policy at all, the premium will be unaffordable, and it's not because the insurance company thinks there is a significant probability that you'll actually be abducted by aliens.