California needs clean firm power, and so does the rest of the world [pdf]
edf.org
edf.org
While turning off their only nuclear reactors.
>California will need to rely primarily on forms of energy that do not emit greenhouse gases.
Generated by equipment produced by burning lots of coal in China.
I scrolled down a bit more and saw nuclear as a growing share on their graphs. Remind me again how many plants are even as far as the planning stage in California?
1) Extrememly high construction costs and cost overruns. 2) Requires more cooling water than any other power source. 3) Highly radioactive 'spent fuel' must be stored indefinitely. 4) Uranium ore mining and processing consumes significant energy, of the fossil fuel form typically. 5) Catastrophic failure scenarios (Fukushima, Chernobyl). 6) Major security issues with high costs. 7) Poor compatibility with intermittent and varying energy sources (i.e. solar, wind), as does coal.
Note the 'modular' concept is just as bad, as you still have all the security costs, waste storage costs, cooling issues, etc. just distributed in more locations.
All in all the nuclear experiment looks like a complete failure, and yes you can use solar/wind/storage at scale to generate all the electrical power required for human civilization - and yes, shutting down all the nuclear power plants in earthquake zones makes perfect sense.
As far as the 'you're exaggerating risks' comments, well, then, let's see the repeal of Price Anderson accident indemnity, which would require the owners and operators of nuclear power plants to pay full costs for disasters. Investors would flee en masse if that happened, of course.
If we are to stand any chance of avoiding the tail end of a net hubbert curve we need nuclear.
Fusion, thorium and 4th gen fission (France has cancelled both the super-phenix project and the modern revival of that initiative) are nowhere near realistic and/or deterministic dates, so we have to go with the 100 years of Uranium we have left.
This is the only descision where I'm against, but for, at the same time. There is no alternative except permanent crisis until civilization returns to the stone age.
Coming down from the massive bubble created by stored sunlight (coal, oil and gas) is not going to be a smooth ride any way we turn it.
I also have no doubts about running human civilization on sunlight and wind as long as you have robust electrical storage / chemical conversion / distribution systems. By conversion I mean using sunlight to reduce H2O to H2, then CO2 to CH4 or longer hydrocarbons. Notably this also works for fertilizer production, i.e. nitrogen + hydrogen -> NH3 etc.
...not only for the destruction of natural habitats, but the CO2 emitted in manufacturing and replacing all those panels, and the garbage disaster of disposing of them.
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1978pvse.conf..825L/abstra...
FWIW it's really not clear that there's such a limit on the uranium supply. Could be 4 billion years with seawater harvesting and reprocessing, etc.
https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...
There are large swaths of nations that have never even been prospected for Uranium deposits.
Sea water extraction is not needed.
This is partly because nuclear is unfairly maligned and is forced to do things with 10x the safety requirements of (e.g.) coal and partly because we have not tried a nuclear rollout at 'scale' (i.e. multiples of a standardized system being planned for construction).
> 2) Requires more cooling water than any other power source.
Fair enough, but this hardly seems like a show-stopper, especially with improved recycling methods.
> 3) Highly radioactive 'spent fuel' must be stored indefinitely.
This seems like a small price to pay to implement a solution that would save tens of thousands+ lives per year (i.e. storing the highly radioactive after-products in the air, as with burning massive amounts of coal).
From [0]: >> In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards.
An oversimplification, perhaps, but still valid, especially since new reactors have been designed to reuse spent fuel (hinted at in [0]) anyway and it wouldn't likely need to be permanent storage.
> 4) Uranium ore mining and processing consumes significant energy, of the fossil fuel form typically.
This is not unique to nuclear energy and it would obviously use less 'fossil fuel form' energy with every new plant brought online.
> 5) Catastrophic failure scenarios (Fukushima, Chernobyl)
Only if we stick to out-dated designs forever.
> 6) Major security issues with high costs.
Also fair, but any major center of infrastructure should have high security. The security issues that are more unique to nuclear can/have be/been addressed in new reactor designs (different fuel types, reactors that can't cause meltdowns/explosive scenarios).
> 7) Poor compatibility with intermittent and varying energy sources (i.e. solar, wind), as does coal.
I'm pretty sure this will be the case for any large, power producing center. Any large-scale solar or wind project will include battery storage anyway, which would act as a transitional buffer between the sources.
[0]: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
This is like pushing someone off a cliff and then accusing them of being clumsy.
We MAKE nuclear plant construction expensive. We shut down storage facilities, we ban transport of fuel, we have environmental groups file lawsuits for even aspect of the environmental review, we have local mom's groups protest and sue for everything under the sun... we force reactors to meet 1970s rules on safety that no longer have meaning - we have local politicians rally and protest and cut funding whenever they can.
WE MAKE NUCLEAR EXPENSIVE.
China builds identical Gen III+ nuclear reactors for less than one-tenth the price - using Western construction companies. ...and they currently have 24 One Gigawatt plants under construction and due to complete this decade.
> 2) Requires more cooling water than any other power source
This isn't a severe problem. I'm not even sure why this is on your list. The water "used" by the reactor isn't consumed in any way. It goes in one side, and comes right back out the other side of the reactor chamber.
> 3) Highly radioactive 'spent fuel' must be stored indefinitely.
One barrel of spent fuel per reactor per year. That's it. You could put all the spent fuel from ALL the US reactors, even if we went to 100% nuclear in the ONE facility in Yucca Mountain. It's safe, geologically stable, and has more than enough space. This is not a science or engineering problem. This is a public ignorance problem.
> 4) Uranium ore mining and processing consumes significant energy, of the fossil fuel form typically.
Per unit of energy produced, it consumes far less than the manufacture of solar panels, wind turbines, hydro dams, or any other power source. This argument is a positive for nuclear.
> 5) Catastrophic failure scenarios (Fukushima, Chernobyl).
This is like comparing leeches to penicillin. Fukushima and Chernobyl were designed in the 1950s. They were both the first generation of reactors which had poor safety designs. Today's GenIII+ reactors have passive safety systems that mean you need to actively keep the reactor from turning off. If the plant losses power, or is attacked by terrorists, or the entire population turns into zombies - the reactor turns off. These passive safety systems are now standard on all new reactors. The containment pool is so safe these days, that divers actually dive in the - you can literally swim in them.
> 6) Major security issues with high costs.
Is this a reference to possible theft of fissile material? Uranium fuel isn't kept in the plant, unless it's in the reactor. No one has ever broken into a facility to steal uranium to make a small dirty bomb (you cannot make real hydrogen bomb with uranium from a reactor). It would be easier to conduct a normal terrorist attack than to break into a nuclear plant, escape, and then assemble and deliver a bomb somewhere. This just isn't a very thoughtful idea. It would be easier to just shoot a bunch of people with a machine gun.
> 7) Poor compatibility with intermittent and varying energy sources (i.e. solar, wind), as does coal.
This is a commonly repeated lie. A nuclear plant can output whatever power is needed. There's no "compatibility" issue at all. The genesis of this notion is that once the Uranium is enriched, it's generating heat whether that's used or not - and that's true - but the point is the energy density of Uranium is so high, that this "waste" still makes it orders of magnitude more productive than any other source of energy.
> All in all the nuclear experiment looks like a complete failure
It looks more like the fearmongering has been a complete success. It's bizarre that people still believe the nonsense you posted here.
https://energypost.eu/dispelling-nuclear-baseload-myth-nothi...
> ‘Baseload power stations’ are inflexible in operation, in the sense that they are unsuitable for following the variations in demand and supply on timescales of minutes and hours, so they have to be supplemented with flexible peak-load and slightly flexible intermediate-load power stations.
As far as why nuclear plays poorly with solar, for example, consider a PV system that generates, at noon, 100% of demand. You'd want to shut down alternative power sources at this time - that's not efficient at all with nuclear or coal.
As far as safety, what are your thoughts on cancelling Price-Anderson accident indemnity laws, and having owners and operators of nuclear power plants accept full liability, no pass-on to the taxpayer?
Uranium is so energy dense that it doesn't cost anything to do that. This is amazing when you think about it.
If you really want to capture it - create battery systems.
> what are your thoughts on cancelling Price-Anderson accident indemnity laws
One of the biggest challenges of nuclear plant construction is all the frivolous lawsuits, so I would really really want to know the exact details before making a determination on those laws. Often they are sold as "safety", but are really just ways to obstruct the process.
Nuclear plants these days are incredibly safe.
That is how insanely energy dense uranium is.
Hydrogen production is largely a hydrocarbon byproduct (made from gas or biomass, which is burning organic matter).
Geothermal resources are not particularly plentiful, although there is certainly greater potential than our existing use.
After 15+ years of study, I’m convinced that nuclear is the only option for carbon emissions reduction at the scale that leadership hopes to achieve.
The paper highlights at least 2 other possible roads. The point that we need to understand the need, compare the options, and invest in at least one of them.
There’s not enough hydroelectric power, but wind and solar can be thought of as a way of conserving it for when it’s most needed. It might be interesting to see how the numbers work out if the Pacific Northwest is included.
What they miss entirely is building an international electrical grid that can deal with intermittency of any energy source (even nuclear reactors go down for half years at a time). Why does Chile want to provide power to Asia, rather than the US (or in fact any of the countries along the pacific coastline)? Just as transportation infrastructure (containers, highways, trains etc) liberalised and reduced the cost of international trade, a grid would do the same to energy.
Great international electrical grids is what we really need. Then let the market solve for who, where and what supplies the power (with the right incentives of course)...
There are rather clear signs [0] of political interference in the price of nuclear. It might be the only technology I've ever seen where the learning curve suddenly inverted.
The demand isn't even that we have to go nuclear at all costs, it is just ... if the global warming people are serious then a Fukushima every 40 years is nothing and we should be letting cheap nuclear (the safest, cleanest, most reliable form of energy we know of) take over. Instead it is being held to impossible safety standards and we're using coal (basically the least safe, most polluting form of energy we know about). This is madness.
Renewables are acceptable to me personally now the price has come down, but it is hard to overlook that places that go renewable all end up in the headlines for an energy crisis a few years later. Wind power is cheap but it isn't reliable.
[0] https://cama.crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/publica...
Perhaps the cheaper generation of nuclear plants were inherently unsafe, hence the more expensive costs going forward, necessitating a new learning curve as we "overbuilt" the plants to avoid thousand-square mile exclusion zones?
Not at a tractable price. Adding saltwater never makes things cheaper.
You also need to cut big grassy "highways" through otherwise undisturbed forest, and run roads through there, so that the trees can be trimmed back (ideally annually, but realistically every 3-5 years) it's pretty disruptive ingress of human culture into otherwise undisturbed wild forest.
I'm pro more infrastructure, but there's a lot to be considered here, you're introducing humans, effectively forever, to previously (and increasingly rare) untamed wild lands. Once that infrastructure is approved and built, it is almost never recalled
> run roads
Is that really necessary to trim every 3-5 years? One could helicopter workers in every 3-5 years.
> wildfires
I suspect that can be mitigated by devising automatic systems that are faster at shutting off the power should there be a break or fluctuation.
Also, wildfires are inevitable regardless.
Most importantly, one has to weigh the (small) issues with power lines with the environmental cost of not doing them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gacGuWjqKco
The video profiles the EU's efforts to do exactly this. One example used is how Spain (geographically blessed with solar power), and Denmark (geographically blessed with wind), can both use France's nuclear power as a buffer between them to smooth out the peaks/throughs in their output, and therefore are able to invest in more renewable power.
Interconnected grids that straddle national borders are absolutely essential to increasing the amount of renewable energy we can build. The technical limitations are easy to overcome (especially for neighboring countries). The barriers are purely political, as this system requires a common electricity market on the grid, and co-operation between national governments.
Hopefully North America can get it's crap together on this. As it stands right now, the USA can't even get a common grid within it's own nation. Maine voters just rejected an interconnection from Hydro-Quebec. Which is disappointing since Quebec is blessed with near perfect geography for hydro-electric, and can no longer expand this energy production since it's capacity outstrips the demand.
That's completely crazy. HQ's offer was something like 5 cents per KW/h. That's 3 times less than what New England is paying for right now with natural gas.
The lobbyists really did a great job here.
Part of politics is coalition building. If you can’t do it then you get what you get.
Building new transmission lines is quite difficult, especially in the USA.
2X = 4c/kWh solar + batteries + wind + hydro solves the grid just about everywhere. US might only get 6.6% of annual electricity from hydro, but it’s already a huge grid scale battery storing up extremely intermittent rain into dependable power. 6.6% 100% of the time is already an 80+% solution 5% of the time.
That said, when you start talking 0.01% edge cases plenty of options open up. Burning fossil fuels at that scale for example is nowhere near a significant CO2 source compared to current releases. I fully expect hospitals to have backup generators and that’s not a significant issue.
I have no issues using hydro, I just don't think it should be placed in the reliable category. I think coal, gas, nuclear, etc should be in that category.
Of course total capacity on an annual basis basis varies. But we care about the ability to reliably produce power when necessary far more than maximum capacity across months. Markets adjust to supply limits on an annual basis far more easily than a power outage.
Hydro has some serious downsides for the ecosystem of whatever watershed it bottles up. Maybe newer implementations solve that?
Dams net climate change impact is very close to zero.
Their net climate change impact can only be considered close to zero when considered as offset fossil-fuel based sources. If they're emitting large amounts of methane and CO2 (until we get net 0 concrete), it seems extremely unlikely that the impact is close to 0.
In terms of concrete, the percentage of concrete produced worldwide that ends up in dams is minuscule. Only 34 states even have any hydroelectric dams. The US alone is producing 90 million metric tons per year, look for the most recent large hydroelectric dam in the US it wasn’t produced in 2021, or 2020, or 2019, or …
Also, moving solar power from California to Washington state and hydro from Washington state to California is cheaper than building excess generating capacity in each state. It’s already part of the same transition grid, transmission capacity is simply insufficient right now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss...
CA uses ~15GW of gas power when the sun turns off at 6pm. It still uses 8-10GW of gas during the day when the sun is shining. That gas is going to increase another 2GW when Diablo canyon is switched off. During the day while solar is running it additionally imports 4-6GW from the NW and SW interchanges. When the sun turns off at 6pm it jumps up to 8GW sometimes more of imported electricity.
Meanwhile during the afternoon and evening the NW region is generating 20GW with fossil gas and coal power. While only managing to generate 16GW at these same peaks with its hydro power.
There is not enough hydro to do this, and you can't build more. CA is a power hungry state that has outsourced much of its pollution to other states. This is a result of targeting renewables rather than targeting clean power. It needs to build firm clean power, whatever form that takes. Targets should be for CO2 emissions. Not for some favored technology.
Currently, 5% of all solar power generated in California is wasted and that number keeps increasing because people just keep adding more solar. Storage is currently cost effective, and it’s only getting cheaper. More storage means building even more solar is again cost effective until eventually the grid ends up looking very different.
So you'd need enough solar to on the cloudiest of days to both keep things running with daytime demand in NW and CAL while still providing enough excess to (picking some numbers) charge up ~30% of the batteries, while the hydro runs to supplement charging the other ~30% of charge, so that overnight the 60% of charge can be drained in conjunction with the 20GW of hydro continuing to run. Why even rely on hydro if solar can still do all this, just build even more solar.
Seems shaky and fragile. And this is before you even get to solving the rest of North America.
To greatly simplify if daytime demand is 200GW and nighttime demand is 100GW. You build enough solar to in theory provide 600GW in optimal conditions and 60GW in the worst case accepting most of that is wasted. Still 90% of the time they provide 300+GW in the day which can charge batteries to provide 100GW at night. Which means 90% of days hydro is producing ~0 electricity.
The other 10% of the time solar is producing between 300GW and 60GW in the day. If it’s 299GW then hydro needs to supplement 1GW at night. If it’s only 60GW then hydro needs to supplement 140GW in the day and 100GW that night.
Now in the real world things aren’t that simple. Hydro isn’t a light switch, and wind is part of the equation etc, but as a first order approximation it works especially as you can use hydro to charge the same batteries that solar or wind would.
Also, dams don’t operate anywhere close to 100% 24/7, what I am describing is generally closer to a 2x increase in maximum generating capacity than 10x which isn’t free but the value of electricity produced would be vastly high more than making up for these costs.
I don’t get objections like this: There isn't the space for all that. That’s not an inherent limitation, people built these dams in the first place, we can remove them and build a new structure if that’s what it takes. Don’t flood properties downstream is a perfectly reasonable limitation, don’t build any new infrastructure isn’t. 2019 we produced 100x as much solar power as in 2009, change happens.
One issue is that they tried to set up an export system for solar electricity before they ensured that the local economies would have priority access to reliable power, that may have been a central problem.
In this case, the article's author is worried that Desertec, while much cleaner, and a clear environmental win, could replicate some of the political dynamics of oil extraction in the middle east.
He pretends that he would like to see "decentralized small-scale projects that can be democratically managed and controlled by local communities that promote energy autonomy". But has this been created? No. By opposing actual real projects, he is voting to keep extracting and burning oil. With this article, he is actively promoting oil and the dictatorships propped up by it, while pretending to fight against injustice.
Build a conveyor belt that literally transmits the solar resources of African countries to Europe that does not guarantee that Africans actually benefit from the transaction?
The climate crisis should not be used as an excuse for rich countries to plunder underdeveloped ones.
There is however a way for an industrialized nation to partner with a developing country for such projects in a mutually beneficial manner, rather than using the strict old-school colonial plantation model.
For example, I note that Saudi Arabia's role in the global oil market - which was due to the USA's investment in Saudi Arabia - has done far more to drive local development than the French 'partnership' with Niger's uranium mines has done to drive the development of that country. Niger supplies about a third of France's uranium, but get basically nothing in return:
> "According to the World Bank, around 60 percent of Nigeriens live below the national poverty line. With a per capita income of $420, Niger is one of the world’s poorest nations. In 2016, it ranked 187 out of 188 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index."
I get the sense that China is offering better deals to African nations than Europe or the USA is, but that's very iffy too.
Every country in the world needs oil. You can buy refined oil products at every corner store of the planet. SA's oil is also easy to extract, so it's a rather low tech operation.
It's not the case with uranium. There are very few buyers and the tech required to mine and handle it as well as to use it isn't widespread. Without France buying and funding the mine it it's questionable whether there would be a mine at all.
For a solar farm, every country with a coastline and useable land will be offered a chance to bid and the lowest bidder will get the contract.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Ad...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...
- Not dependent on weather
- Economically viable
Pick 2
We very simply must go towards clean/carbon-free as much as we can, so that's my #1 pick.
It must be economically viable for it to, you know, actually happen, so that's #2.
Pretty easy then, actually: our energy sources must be dependent on weather. Sucks, but it is what it is. The choice is even easier when you think about the fact that going this route is with the purpose of avoiding even more extreme/unpredictable weather. If we want stable weather, we must go with energy sources that are dependent on weather; the weather being stable is important to using sources that are dependent on weather.
Bottom line: lean hard into solar and wind, and go really hard into better energy storage tech.
Yes! Building dam's/silos (pumping water up when energy is available drain it when it's not) no need to build them 'into' rivers, artificial fjords where current is strong, batteries/hydrogen where nothing else is viable, create heat pumping into the ground, pump it up when no heat from other sources are available etc.
It is so very obvious to me that there's one way forward: on the smallest levels possible, replace what energy production a given area can with some sort of creative renewable(s) implementation. And over time, replace fossil fuels not from the top down, but from the bottom up. Essentially a modular grid of small, bespoke-for-its-area energy producers.
Nuclear and a mix of available sources (wind, water, ground etc)
- Not dependent on weather
Nuclear, ground and dam's (aka water batteries)
- Economically viable
Nuclear and a mix of available sources (wind, water, ground etc)
BTW: Nothing is carbon free AtM
That nuclear is slow and expensive to build is an artifact of infrequency and bad regulation.
This not being possible is why I said making nuclear economically viable is not politically viable.
The political situation in all of the West is moving rapidly and in unexpected ways lately, so the realm of what's possible could easily change.