Europe Is Losing Nuclear Power Just When It Needs Energy
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
We're reaping what we sowed back then: the "brainwashing" of the public that unquestioningly accept that nuclear power is 'bad' and tightly linked to nuclear weapons and death.
Despite the fact that nuclear power stations do not have to produce "weapons grade" plutonium/whatever and, I'll repeat this until I'm blue in the face, has been responsible for smallest number of deaths of any form of energy generation and produce the lowest amount of CO2 (i.e. zero, other than construction). It's entirely likely more people die in a day world wide from fossil fuel pollution and production than have ever died from nuclear accidents.
> The trouble, as ever, is time. “Any investment decisions you make now aren’t going to come to fruition until the 2030s,” said Osbaldstone, the research director at Wood Mackenzie. “Nuclear isn’t an answer to the current energy crisis.”
As the saying goes "the best time to build X was yesterday".
Careful what you wish for. The millions of tons of CO2 we could have avoided emitting in Europe...
> “Nuclear isn’t an answer to the current energy crisis.”
Sorry, but to use an old quote, nuclear is the worst solution to the current energy crisis, apart from all the others.
Will you stop repeating this if I explain why it's false?
So first up, the stat is usually fatalities per TwH, since that skews things in Nuclear's direction, not just number of fatalities which would be won by some obscure but not very successful power source.
Second, even with the correct metric, solar and wind are now beating nuclear and projected to continue to do so, widening the gap over time. Comparing the very start of the renewable rollout gives misleading stats as the total power generated is low, and many stats that get quoted on this are more than a decade out of date.
You can build a wind turbine and ritually sacrifice someone on completion of the build and the fatalities per TwH is infinite as it's not generated any power yet, but with every year of operation it gets lower.
Basically the same applies to carbon output, nuclear does well, but wind/solar/nuclear have been basically tied on both metrics unless you're relying on some very, very old data.
Of course if you have a limited amount of money to spend, then you'll generate more energy and save more lives with whatever the cheaper form of energy is, so we should really take that into consideration too.
This year we saw weaker summer winds in Europe which is part of what has caused the current energy crisis. These weaker winds are expected to become more common as climate change continues.[1]
Nuclear has the benefit that it's reliable. If you design a plant to output X gigawatts - it'll still be able to do so regardless of the weather.
[1] https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-w...
The main problem seems to be that people have invented an entirely ficticious nuclear power that does not and has never existed, just so they can slag off renewables and "elite culture" whatever the heck that is.
The real actual nuclear power, which is better than coal, but not particularly competitive with modern renewables is apparently irrelevant to people who have bizarrely joined a one sided culture war on the side of fossil fuel companies and think this makes them cool, well informed and counter-cultural despite reality leaning the other way.
Do you have a source for this?
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/12/france.nuclear
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2019-07-0....
> Now, increasingly, more frequent heat waves and hotter average temperatures are making those waters so warm that engineers are concerned that it can't do the job. Analysts say climate change is to blame.
> In little-noticed but publicly available reports to regulators, nuclear plant owners revealed that unusually hot temperatures last year forced them to reduce the plants' electricity output more than 30 times – most often in the summer, when demand from nuclear plants is at its highest. In 2012, such incidents occurred at least 60 times. At one plant in Connecticut a reactor was taken offline for nearly two weeks when temperatures in the Long Island Sound surged past 75 degrees.
It's not like you can just change the legislation to say "allow hotter discharge water" though -- the plants' very engineering criteria is being impacted. Warmer water has lower absorptive capacity to cool the primary loop so things get dicey when temps increase outside the design specification.
If weather gets hot, the temperature of the incoming cooling water gets warmer, too. And having to operate within the limits of the maximum allowed temperature for the outgoing cooling water, the plant may have to regulate its power output, or maybe entirely pause operation.
The temperature limit is mostly a legal one: There is concern about the environmental effects of releasing warmer water to the water bodies. From an engineering point of view, the plant would probably be able to operate, and just release warmer water.
This isn't a game of Top Trumps where you need to find any one stat that's higher than your opponents to declare victory.
Nuclear has to be better than wind and solar and hydro and batteries and everything else (demand response, better insulation, undersea grid connectors etc.) all working together across a wide range of metrics to find a place in a modern grid.
It is failing at this. The alternatives are cheaper, better, greener, safer, quicker to build.
Narrowly focusing on one tiny aspect does not change this big picture reality.
The problem with what you're saying is that to supply peak power at all times could require building capacity in each method to supply full power, in case the others all fall to zero power. And even then, you hope that they don't all fall to zero, I guess.
Curtailment of nuclear power due to periods of extreme heat has had the effect of reducing European nuclear power output by approx. 0.1% since the year 2000. For France specifically, which with its many inland river-sited plants has been the worst hit country, the corresponding figure is approximately 0.15%
But we need to greatly improve energy storage if renewables are going to work.
Places like Scotland have generated equivalent to around 97% of their entire electricity consumption from renewables - yet still consume around 13% of their energy from fossil fuels as they export the renewable energy at peak production.[1]
I also just really don't like the misinformation that surrounds nuclear energy. I majored in Physics and it's just irritating to see people so confident in their ignorance. I recommend the book "Atomic Accidents"[2] as an excellent book on the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear power plant engineering in general.
[1] https://fullfact.org/environment/scotland-renewable-energy/
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Accidents-Meltdowns-Disasters-...
You'd be foolish to believe those projections from salesmen. NuScale's attempt at new reactors has already doubled in cost.
> I am asking you how one determines which regulations are actually necessary.
This is something that experts need to work out.
> Those of you making this "too much regulation" argument never seem to go into detail on that.
Our arguments don't require us to specify specific regulation to eliminate, it suffices to note that we tolerate tens of thousands of annual deaths due to fossil fuels and we tolerate virtually zero deaths due to nuclear. We can be sure that there are regulations which are onerous for relatively little safety gains, but to your point most of us aren't experts here and can't speak to specific regulations or how they work.
> Judging by every other industry that has ever existed, this is not a tractable problem -- one determines what regulations are necessary by failing and learning from the experience.
Not at all. The number of deaths we're willing to tolerate is a choice, largely one driven by lobbyists. For example, we tolerate tens of thousands of annual fossil fuel deaths, transportation deaths, etc. The only reason we tolerate so few nuclear deaths is because of FUD campaigns.
> With nuclear, how many meltdowns are you willing to tolerate to get this experience?
Well, we could look to our own past experience or the experience of other countries which had extensive nuclear experience and virtually zero meltdowns despite far less regulation.
Experts put these regulations into place. To cancel regulations, we will need somebody who is opposite to experts.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/study-transmiss...
Also, this is with technology we have right now that we know works. The problem with SMRs is they have always been 5-10 years away from being ready. We have to plan based on what we know now, not make pipe dreams based on technology we would like to have and which may never pan out.
Same deal with solving for reliability with renewables. We should invest in solving both problems. Moreover, I suspect that "always 5-10 years away from being ready" has a lot more to do with regulators than feasibility.
Yes there are differences, but the fact that the NRC can't certify a reactor class that the navy builds (without interference from the NRC) is itself a problem.
I have a hard time seeing nuclear weapons grade fissile materials spread around in every SMR in every town around the world as a feasible solution.
Apparently, South Korea though has kept the costs down to 1980's levels.
A buddy of mine's joke is that the cheapest way to get new nuke plants in the US is to build a huge naval fleet and park them in ports.
They invented a conspiracy theory that the entire planet's scientific community was trying to destroy the economy for secret marxism reasons for goodness sake.
You'd need to find someone who thinks Godzilla is a documentary to equal that level of nonsense.
Misinformation isn't suppressing nuclear investment, the all too real cost of nuclear is.
Would that have been politically realistic? I think clearly it wouldn't have been. So don't complain about a level of regulation that nuclear requires in order to exist at all.
Secondly, the whole point of anti-nuclear FUD is/was to make nuclear "politically unrealistic", so it doesn't make sense to argue that "political realism"--not FUD--is responsible for the high levels of regulation.
Thirdly, lots of countries (China, South Korea, etc) have had nuclear programs with much lower levels of regulation and far better economics, which goes to show that, absent FUD, nuclear power can be safe enough to be "politically realistic".
[1]https://www.amazon.com/Power-Save-World-Nuclear-Energy/dp/03...
Could you please expand on this? What is the ideal uptime for a nuclear plant vs wind/solar?
As someone who lives in Ontario, Canada, where we have 10,000 MW of nuclear (click "Supply"):
This does not happen here.
Plenty of EU countries have coast lines too.
Base power is only a useful term if it's cheaper than peak power, since you can fill 100% of your power needs solely with peak power.
Clearly, placing any country's energy security in the hands of ever changing climate (less winds and high cloud cover) or at the feet of dictators has to factor in some where.
2) Europe has mostly privatized energy. Who is suppose to set the SLA?
3) Nuclear plants need to be refueled. Does the SLA include a couple of months downtime every few years? That would suggest that the SLA is uniquely tailored to nuclear. 100% uptime? How is nuclear going to deal with that?
4) Power consumption varies over the day. A constant load again favors nuclear. A load that can handle daily and seasonal variation would be quite bad for nuclear.
Basically what we need is flexible electricity production. On their own, nuclear, solar and wind are all equally bad at flexible electricity production. So the questions are: - how do we get cheap storage - how do we minimize the amount of storage we need
Load following nuclear power stations are a thing.
--- start quote ---
The minimum requirements for the manoeuvrability capabilities of modern reactors are defined by the utilities requirements that are based on the requirements of the grid operators. For example, according to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100 % of its rated power Pr, with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% of Pr per minute
Most of the modern designs implement even higher manoeuvrability capabilities, with the possibility of planned and unplanned load-following in a wide power range and with ramps of 5% Pr per minute
--- end quote ---
https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/2011/load-following-npp...
Baseline power can be unreliable because peak power will cover the unreliability.
“Modern renewables” aren’t competitive at all, you can’t build a grid based on them. The ginormous amount of renewables in Germany compared to how much CO2 per kWh their grid produces (https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE ) is everything you need to know.
Even in places like California (where I live) where Solar is viable, renewables will require so many battery storage to remove gas plants that it’ll push their co2/kWh way higher that nuclear.
There isn't a perfect scalable peaker / clean generation tech unfortunately but storage does the trick instead.
Every dollar spend on nuclear would deliver more power sooner if spent on renewables.
It only requires over-provisioning of 20%. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify
Here's an anti-renewable paper that quite ironically makes the point quite well that battery storage is quite viable: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
Take a look at the graphs at the back. It shows a 99.99% reliable grid made up of an optimal mix of solar & wind, 3x over-provisioned along with 3 hours of storage and a continental grid.
We don't need 3x over-provisioning because the paper doesn't include hydro or existing nuclear. And 3 hours of storage is a lot of batteries, but it's a lot cheaper than building new nuclear.
Until renewables displace a lot more fossil fuel power, those costs are not a consideration. That might happen within a decade in places like New Zealand.
Still, capex on grid scale storage is up and costs are trending down: https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/storage/investment-tren...
All energy storage solutions we have are low capacity, slow to charge, slow to bring online, and often are extremely harmful to the environment to produce.
Of course, you can close your eyes, and pretend this will be solved by magic in the nearest future. It won't. And we need solutions now.
The physical attributes of existing batteries (and related energy storage technologies, like hydrogen for long term storage) are perfectly compatible with a 100% renewable grid. We're just haggling over the cost at this point.
I was addressing the shallow objection that it's a "lot of batteries". That's fine; the budget is will allow purchase of a lot of batteries, and all sorts of other stuff too.
Pretending that I made this argument is an even more despicable lie.
> The physical attributes of existing batteries (and related energy storage technologies, like hydrogen for long term storage) are perfectly compatible with a 100% renewable grid.
It's also not what I argued against.
> I was addressing the shallow objection that it's a "lot of batteries". That's fine
No, it's not fine, and I listed the reasons why. However, you decided to invent an argument I never made and argue against that.
"All energy storage solutions we have are low capacity, slow to charge, slow to bring online, and often are extremely harmful to the environment to produce."
This is 100% bullshit. Energy storage solutions can be scaled as high as we want. They can charge as fast as is needed. By "slow to bring online" you might mean two things (cannot be switch on to deliver power to the grid from an off state quickly, or cannot be built quickly), both of which are false. As for "extremely harmful to the environment", I also see no reason to believe that is true, especially compared to either the harm of CO2 or the harm imposed by the existence of industrial civilzation at all.
So, you listed reasons, and they appear spurious. Care to defend your claims?
Current storage solutions: batteries, water in a dam, molten salt.
Energy density: low
Environmental impact: Dams: need to flood a massive area to make a dent. For example the utterly colossal Three Gorges supplies only 1% of China’s power.
Batteries: filled with extremely bad heavy metals. It’s barely OK right now; if we covered the planet in huge battery farms, it would be a catastrophe.
Molten salt/other temperature-based methods: works with turbine-based generators, not solar/wind.
Responsiveness: low, except for batteries.
Ultimately this whole thing needs less shouting and more spreadsheets.
Batteries are not necessarily filled with toxic heavy metals. Consider lithium-iron-phosphate batteries. Iron is not a toxic heavy metal, phosphate is neither toxic nor a metal, and lithium is anything but heavy. Saying batteries categorically have heavy metals is lying. And no, it would not be a catastrophe to build large quantities of batteries.
You don't even mention underground storage of hydrogen, which is by the lowest cost/kWh of storage capacity, much better than batteries for long term energy storage.
Sorry about the emotion, but I get annoyed at the cavalcade of nonsense you people spew on this issue.
The sibling comment has already showed all the ways in which you are wrong. So I'll address only this part. " I also see no reason to believe that is true". That's the problem with starry-eyed proponents of anything really: they chose belief over facts.
Let’s say you can fit the waste from a certain amount of nuclear energy in a barrel. How much energy can you create with the other methods, given you can only fill up that same barrel?
With battery-supported renewables, my guess is: a hell of a lot less.
seems like that can minimize seasonal storage requirements once higher level of renewables are in the grid
It seems very naive on the one hand to say that climate change is making climate more chaotic and and then turn around and say that we will put all our eggs in the baskets of tech that literally doesn’t work if there isn’t suitable climate (wind and solar).
Unless, of course, the weather is an earthquake followed by tsunami.
Or political weather.
If it takes a tsunami to turn off a nuclear plant, it's about as reliable as it can be.
Total power generated doesn't matter as much as you think it does. Base load and load following matter never factor into the starry-eyed discussions of renewable power sources. Weak winds at night? Boom, suddenly you require other means of producing energy.
So, back that up with burning natural gas.
> so backing up the entire grid this way is cheap (in capital cost) compared to the capital cost of a nuclear-powered grid.
> To cut down on that fuel cost, you can also add some batteries to reduce the fraction of time the turbines are required to operate.
So, the "cheap" is in reality:
- many gas powered energy plants (that are not there, and need to be built)
- plus many batteries (that are not there, and need to be built)
- plus cheap natural gas to burn
So much for "green energy already has the capacity to replace something"
You didn't read my whole comment there. One could use green hydrogen.
Ah yes. It's a thing that
- can be cheaply produced at scale
- can be easily transported to large distances
- infrastructure can be easily and quickly converted to using it
Note that the application of green hydrogen I'm talking about here, grid backup, does not require replacing existing natural gas use with hydrogen. Nor does it require long distance hydrogen pipelines.
There's no "but". The situation right now is that starry-eyed proponents of renewal energy sources claim that they have already surpassed nuclear etc. When in reality they can't cover the basics. And the answer to that? "Oh, yeah, sometime in the future there may be something to complement this".
> Note that the application of green hydrogen I'm talking about here, grid backup, does not require replacing existing natural gas use with hydrogen. Nor does it require long distance hydrogen pipelines.
Ah yes. Because green hydrogen just magically appeares every time you need it when you say "green hydrogen" three times
I am being extremely sarcastic, that's true :) For all the reasons you listed :)
Now, people will say "bUT tHe sUn dOeSn'T sHiNe aT NiGhT", and that's true for the moment. Right now, we cannot shift everything to solar and wind. But if you pay attention to battery development, you don't need to be Einstein to see that pretty soon, we will be able to cost-efficiently store large amounts of energy, distribute it and use it in a way which will solve this intermittency problem.
You can look at the data and read more about this here: https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
I don't know how many batteries it would take to make up for the losses. I suspect we will have gas and nuclear plants for a long while yet.
And it's the same with the turbines and all the rare earths that need to be mined to make the current most efficient dynamos.
If people want to promote wind turbines and solar, they should at least compare like for like, which includes the costs of digging the materials out of the ground, and the disposal of old panels and turbines, in the same way people say 'but nuclear waste!'.
For long term (like seasonal) variations in wind/solar output, you're probably not going to be building enough batteries to bridge that gap, so to stick with just wind/solar you would need to either overbuild (perhaps massively) your generation capacity, or build a global grid.
A global grid introduces geopolitical risks (your neighbor becomes not-so friendly and cuts the link when you don't have sufficient generation), whereas massive overbuilding would be expensive. Having some nuclear plants may be cheaper route.
Maybe you have data on:
- total installed storage capacity as percentage of daily electricity usage (preferably 95th-percentile daily usage). Hopefully this percentage increases every year.
- how often should we expect to replace batteries. Wikipedia says 400-1200 cycles. Does this mean that whole world storage capacity must be replaced every 400-1200 days?
Why wouldn't it be fatalaties per TWh? It's TWh by the way.
> Second, even with the correct metric, solar and wind are now beating nuclear and projected to continue to do so, widening the gap over time. Comparing the very start of the renewable rollout gives misleading stats as the total power generated is low, and many stats that get quoted on this are more than a decade out of date.
> You can build a wind turbine and ritually sacrifice someone on completion of the build and the fatalities per TwH is infinite as it's not generated any power yet, but with every year of operation it gets lower.
No, wind towers don't have infinite generation, require maintenance and decommissioning, and have been well around for long enough that statistics are quite well available throughout the lifecycle. People have been acting like we've been at the very start of the renewable rollout for the past 30 years, which is longer than the operating life of an average wind turbine.
> Basically the same applies to carbon output, nuclear does well, but wind/solar/nuclear have been basically tied on both metrics unless you're relying on some very, very old data.
Again I've been hearing that renewable energy will solve all this and nothing else can for the past 20 years if not more. Hundreds of nuclear plants could have been built and running in that time now.
Funny thing is it keeps getting repeated. Again, and again, and again, by people who don't understand the fundamentals. Coal was doomed, completely on the way out and destroyed by wind and even solar just a couple of years ago according to these very same anti nuclear people. Today, thermal coal prices have been at record highs for the past year. Coal production is ramping in many countries and global consumption is near record highs and will take many decades to drop. Coal plants are being built with 40 year lifespans.
Where's wind and solar? Still only make up little more than 10% of global electricity generation. Most of the stats for renewables quoted includes hydro which exceeds both of them combined.
Only? Not very long ago that stat was less than a percent, if it was mentioned at all.
About 2/3rds of new capacity being added in 2022 is renewable: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50818
And "capacity" of course means something very different when it comes to the wind and solar, which makes that 2/3 not as great as it sounds.
No, the anti-nuclear luddites and conspiracy theorists have no credibility. They are dangerous climate deniers who should not be listened to. The amount of damage they have already caused may well be incalculable.
And nuclear would never happen thanks to the anti-nuclear / pro-fossil-fuel "green" lobby. I'm not saying it would, I'm saying it's been killed and along with it the climate by these lunatics.
Big coal is happy though, they're making some astounding profits in the past year or two, wind turbines or no wind turbines.
The rambling anti-nuclear / pro-carbon rhetoric somehow handwaves about how you can't do that and how renewables will magically solve everything. They were wrong 50 years ago, they were wrong 20 years ago, they're wrong now. Nuclear power still provides as much electricity as wind and solar combined. Today.
GP was making the opposite point that 1 (sacrificial death) ÷ 0 (TW generated from a brand new tower) is "infinite" (fatalities per TWh) which would really be undefined, not infinite, but a silly point regardless.
This is true but not very significant since nuclear is still forty times safer than the next safest energy source, natural gas. Solar, nuclear, and wind all have a niche in a green future. Nuclear fits in locations with insufficient wind and solar resources and provides reliable base supply.
And several large floating sea cities full of engineers to maintain it all.
Does this include stringing them across the Pacific Ocean, which covers thirty percent of the Earth's surface?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_–_New_England_Transmiss...
So remote islands basically (places not worth adding to a super grid). Fair enough. That's a very small niche though.
Neither solar nor wind can provide base power. Unless you can make hyperefficient batteries and guarantee that we'll see cloudless skies and constant wind.
The larger your grid, the more reliably you can source renewables. It's not cheap to install the necessary high frequency inter-connectors but it is still waaaay cheaper than nuclear (see a different thread where i posted a link on an MIT study).
Edit: also, you still need a lot of storage (probably 12-48 hours worth) but i posted another link showing how that's also way cheaper than nuclear.
Take a look at the graphs at the back. It shows a 99.99% reliable grid made up of an optimal mix of solar & wind, 3x over-provisioned along with 3 hours of storage and a continental grid.
Also, three hours of storage for a continental grid? Nice dream.
And continental is what makes 3 hours possible. The wind is always blowing somewhere.
Ah yes, so trivial.
> 40,000 square miles would provide enough energy to power the entire US with solar
No, it wouldn't. As the document yo link shows, even countries with similar makeup have very different solar and wind profiles.
Also. You can't just wave your magic wand and say: "here, we now have 40k square miles". You're saying "oh, let's just randomly find an area larger than Austria (population: 9 million people + farmland + industry + ...) and cover it entirely in solar panels (without taking into consideration the place for all the required infrastructure to go with them".
It is so, so trivial to dismiss, true.
> The wind is always blowing somewhere.
Only... What is the amount of that wind? Is there enough wind in Denmark to cover non-windy days in Spain? Will the grid be able to switch fast enough? (answer is: no, because renewable sources are notoriously slow to ramp up production)
> Only... What is the amount of that wind? Is there enough wind in Denmark to cover non-windy days in Spain?
That is the question the paper answers, but on a national basis.
Comon, if we can't store energy for 3 hours that's an armutszeugnis. The battery of my electric bycicle can store the energy needed to power my flat for 3 hours.
I don't think over provisioning would fix that and you'd need about 12 hours of batteries to cover the shortage.
Projected is the operative word.
One useful concept that was introduced a decade ago is a "cubic mile of oil", or CMO. To yield the equivalent power, one would need to produce 250,000 roof-top solar systems a day for 50 years, or 1200 turbines a week for 50 years, or 1 nuclear power plant a week for 50 years. Innovation is still desperately needed here. Nuclear has been unfairly sluggish in this department.
You would need ~1.4 million barrels of oil per day for 50 years.
edit: it is still weird to see Venezuela at the top spot and just how badly they squandered it
If every mid sized+ city in the world started building one today, and it took 5 years to construct, and they started a new one every other year (so they were being built in parallel). The problem would be solved within a decade.
A year or so ago, I looked at the cost of South Texas Project in Texas, and how much power it generates and figured out that for roughly a single year's state budget one could build 10x those plants, which would remove all natural gas, and coal electric production in the state. Do it a second time, and there would be enough to actually move a significant part of the cars to electric too.
We aren’t debating obscure energy sources anyway, so I don’t see what the point is. This is absolutely the correct unit.
> solar and wind are now beating nuclear and projected to continue to do so, widening the gap over time
Rooftop solar is still losing, but yes renewables in general are still competitive. If the anti-nuclear lobby would allow nuclear to advance beyond 70s tech we could probably see a lot of advances on the nuclear side as well, especially with smaller mass-produced reactors. It’s pretty crumby to criticize nuclear when you’re putting your thumb on the scales.
Moreover, are these figures measuring the actual production or just the capacity? You need a lot more than 1TW of solar or wind capacity to produce 24TWh of energy in a 24 hour period because these energy sources aren’t reliable. You also need something to store the energy (or transmit excess energy to places that can use it)—the construction of which increases the cost, carbon footprint, and fatality count.
Frankly, all of these sources blow fossil fuels out of the water so I don’t much care which of them we use, but we should have a diverse mix for reliability and we should prioritize what works rather than waiting for a technological miracle for economically storing renewable energy.
They aren't though, how many people do you know with an electric car, solar panels, a battery, without a grit tie? AKA they get all their power from renewables?
I personally don't know anyone like that, although I know plenty of people with solar, an electric car, or even a small solar+battery setup.
Why is that, because its super expensive, the tesla will be the cheapest part of the equation when your done.
And that applies to PV and wind at grid scale too, because for every MW of PV+Wind being installed there is a MW of natural gas plants being installed. So the actual cost of a wind turbine isn't just the turbine/panel, its the gas plant and its fuel. Which means that until we get magic pixie dust batteries that are less expensive than a gas plant, the price of wind or PV will never really go lower than whatever the cheapest backup source is. And that is the fundamental issue with the economics of solar/wind. Worse, battery costs can't just be added in because one has to take the duty cycle of the renewable source and multiply it enough (maybe 5x-10x) to get a 100% average duty cycle sufficient to charge those batteries.
So, at this point to get a rough approximation of the price of wind + PV needed to compare it fairly against the legacy power generation one needs to multiply by maybe 10x. And that is why every random person with a farm isn't covering turning their land into power generation.
So, maybe solar thermal solves the battery problem, but AFAIK its crazy expensive at this point too.
So, we keep pumping carbon out our tailpipes because we can't even get renewables to grow significantly, nevermind actually dealing with the impact of doubling or tripling the electric production needed to heat peoples houses and charge their cars.
The only question is how many more decades we will pump C02 into the atmosphere before we say enough, and either dump massive amounts of money into renewables, deal with grid instability, and try to "conserve" out way out of a crisis, or just get out of the way and start reprocessing the "waste" we have sitting around into new plants that can for a small fraction of the construction costs actually solve the problem.
My "still competitive" remark was in reference to deaths per kwh. But to your point, I'm not sure what the deaths/kwh are if we factor in the supplementary natural gas / battery / etc required to bring renewable reliability up to par with nuclear.
I'm talking about absolute numbers here, not TWh, and I'm comparing to fossil fuels, but even if we talk about just wind:
> In England, there were 163 wind turbine accidents that killed 14 people in 2011. Wind produced about 15 billion kWhrs that year, so using a capacity factor of 25%, that translates to about 1,000 deaths per trillion kWhrs produced (the world produces 15 trillion kWhrs per year from all sources).
> These are pretty low numbers. By contrast, in 2011 coal produced about 180 billion kWhrs in England with about 3,000 related deaths. Nuclear energy produced over 90 billion kWhrs in England with no deaths. In that same year, America produced about 800 billion kWhrs from nuclear with no deaths.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/09/29/forget-ea...
I'm sure deaths are going to increase in the production, erection, and servicing of tens of thousands of wind turbines, by tens of thousands of employees.
But you can simply tally up all the deaths for nuclear accidents, direct or indirect, and they're still less than other forms of energy generation.
Presumably you're disputing the deaths, but the link you gave is deaths per TWh is lower. Except by absolute deaths it's.... higher. Which was my point, and is reinforced in the quote above.
> Second, even with the correct metric, solar and wind are now beating nuclear and projected to continue to do so, widening the gap over time.
Yes, deaths per TWh will go down, but power generation will go up, as there is more solar/wind, but so will deaths as more people build, install, and maintain those systems. Those absolute deaths keep rising.
"Of any form of energy generation" you said.
There is no way in even napkin math for this checks out. The amount of construction per generation capacity is orders of magnitude lower for nuclear. For nuclear you build one fancy concrete box and then feed it a fairly minimal amount of fuel for 50+yr. With wind and solar you need far more expansive facilities for equivalent generation capacity and you need to replace them far more often.
Even if you assume a zero carbon supply chain the larger supply chain means that solar and wind have a far larger environmental impact (more mines, more factories, more roads, etc, etc, etc).
Considering the amount of lip services paid to externalities in these sorts of conversations I don't know why this point keeps getting missed but I will note that is is very convenient for some people to miss it.
You screw up 1% of the modules in a solar field, your output is down 1%.
You screw up 1% of the welds or concrete pours in your nuclear plant, it's time for enormous pain.
* stop shutting down current nuclear electrical generation capacity
* build more solar and wind capacity
* as more renewable capacity comes online use it retire fossil fuel generators
Once all the carbon-emitting stuff is offline then perhaps look at shutting down current nuclear.
You know: the opposite of what Germany is doing.
Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ausstieg_aus_der_Kohleverstrom...
Could Germany reduce its dependency on Russian gas with more nuclear?
Probably, but it's not just the politicians and the population who don't want nuclear power, it's also the operators. They're not interested anymore as they can't plan ahead. If the current government decided that the nuclear power plants should run longer they would all need to get modernised first, meaning the operators would have to invest and who says the next government won't shut down them down again. Nobody is going to invest in building a new nuclear power plant that may or may not enter operation in 15-20 years.
> Could Germany reduce its dependency on Russian gas with more nuclear?
Short answer: No. Germany mostly relies on gas for heating, not for electricity.
No where in my post did I say anything about new plants. Simply keep the current ones going until (a) coal/gas is retired, (b) enough renewables are built to then start retiring current nuclear plants.
> Short answer: No. Germany mostly relies on gas for heating, not for electricity.
How cold does Germany get? Some heat pumps can work down to -20C:
* https://www.mitsubishielectric.ca/en/hvac/professionals/fs-s...
* https://www.fujitsugeneral.com/us/residential/technology/xlt...
(I'm Canadian, so there's cold and then there's "cold".)
Winters can get cold depending on the area, but probably warmer on average than Canada. There are currently around 30 million households (around 75%) heating with either gas (50%) or oil (25%). Don't get me wrong, they will all eventually have to switch to some other heating method, most likely to heat pumps, but that will take a few years to maybe a decade.
Only for the first wind turbine. For your Nth wind turbine, you sum all the TwH generated by all previous turbines as well as their deaths, including those ritual sacrifices.
Isn't this precisely the metric you want? If you want to convince me (and perhaps others as well), I think you need to go a little more into the details why this is a bad thing. It's not obvious to me.
> You can build a wind turbine and ritually sacrifice someone on completion of the build and the fatalities per TwH is infinite as it's not generated any power yet, but with every year of operation it gets lower.
Related to my above point, should it not be expected fatalities over the projected lifetime of whatever plant/turbine/etc.?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
Most other sources repeat either numbers.
And it is not surprising, because we are talking about very different things. Solar-related deaths are mostly people falling from rooftops, Hydro-related deaths mostly come from a single event: the Banqiao dam failure, and Nuclear-related deaths depend a lot on how you count Chernobyl and Fukushima. Coal goes through the roof, mostly because of pollution.
We simply don't know how many people die from the Chernobyl disaster, from 31 to hundreds of thousands, yes, it is that fuzzy. I think the most official number is around 4000, but who knows what number they used to make these numbers? It is probably in the fine print somewhere if really look for it.
Mining operations are also taken into account, but how deep shall we go into the supply chain? Do we count the fatalities related to the raw materials that make the plant? What about the guy who dies in a car accident going to work at the power plant?
Do these numbers even make sense or are they just politics? By carefully picking my metrics, I could probably make coal looks very safe and solar very dangerous if I wanted to.
The link I used used those numbers before they updated them with newer data.
Following the money and principle of least surprise, you might even be forgiven to think it's very likely anti nuclear movement was funded if not founded by big coal.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...
https://thebreakthrough.org/blog/the-true-face-of-the-anti-n...
Why am I surprised at learning this?
A country like France with a massive amount of aging nuclear power plants is in serious trouble replacing them in time.
Fortunately, wind and solar are doing very well in reducing CO2 emissions. In the coming one or two decades, wind and solar can easily outpace nuclear in reducing CO2 emissions.
This is not a fight between wind/solar and nuclear. This is a fight against coal. You should reduce the coal first, not nuclear.
For aging nuclear power plants, keeping them running becomes more and more costly. So the question becomes, if we need to invest a big chunk of money, what should we invest in to reduce CO2 emissions the most.
And the answer is that building out wind/solar and insulating buildings is at the moment way more effective than keeping old nuclear power plants running.
> And the answer is that building out wind/solar
Proofs?
In contrast, companies are now paying money to rent a piece of sea to put a wind farm in.
This is already what we have been doing, and that's including that we can "make do" with energy savings.
It just doesn't close the gap. Nordics/northern europe need nuclear or equivalent power source to close the gap, or a revolution in energy storage.
I think we need more energy in the future, for all the green technology, not less. Energy is the currency, even more so than already, of the future economy.
Fossil fuels are still way too cheap compared to storage of electricity. So there are lots of ways we could store electricity. But if you can't compete with a gas powered plant next door, it is not going to be built.
At the same time, if you look at power consumption of data centers, it is amazing that so much of that can be ad supported.
Well, it's not really, if it was just about money all the research that went into renewables could be invested in other things and we could just keep burning cheap available coal. It's about stopping CO2 emissions and we need every drop of capacity we can get if we are to shutdown fossil fuel plants. Trying to eliminate both fossil fuel usage and nuclear at the same time is insane, and we are going to miss our already lax emission targets because we are taking on a handicap for no reason.
That's very unsourced meme. Surry Nuclear Power Plant will be running till 2050s - for 80 years without significant costs.
Sites that want nuclear and have the extra money for it should go forward full steam ahead, but current construction capability in both the US is extremely low. Even at maximum build capacity, neither the US nor Europe will be able to build at the pace they had in the 1970s. And as the 1970s-era reactors reach natural end of life, we won't be able to replace them as quickly as they leave the grid.
In contrast, renewables and storage deploy quickly, on time, and on budget, and the capacity for production is at least an order of magnitude larger than what we can do with nuclear.
This isn't an either/or, it's a "yes and" but it turns out that nuclear's contribution will be fairly small in comparison.
Yet EU energy crises keep getting worse. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Do you think the EU energy crisis is because of renewables somehow? If so, how did you come to that conclusion, and in what way?
Renewables don't generate any energy when they aren't connected to the grid. And natural gas shortages for heating don't really get solved by renewables unless people start installing lots of heat pumps, which they definitely should.
What are the reasons for that failure? Has Europe had the same problem as the US of severe under-investment in infrastructure and withering capabilities? Is risk-aversion becoming pathological, leading to ballooning costs and complexity?
Maybe its a scale thing. If you build only a few nuclear plants per decade, you can't iterate over designs. You may lose valuable knowledge, etc.
If I look at complex building projects in The Netherlands, it seems that beyond a certain complexity, companies just cannot come up with a design/plan to make it work.
For example, the Dutch government said, we want the biggest lock in the world (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluizen_van_IJmuiden#Bouw_nieu...). Not a controversial project, yet the winning concortium had a design that didn't work and had quite a few other problems.
On the other hand, windturbine designs iterate so quickly, that even floating turbines in rough sea is now economical.
Germany has proved this is a huge lie.
Edit: to elaborate a bit, what it proves without surprise is that wind and solar can't significantly reduce CO2 without a clean baseline. By their very nature (not producing at night and without wind), and without some miraculous tech breakthrough, wind and solar can't be the major part of the mix for our developed societies, that's the hard reality of the orders of magnitudes involved here. So the question is what is the realistic plan for that baseline to complement solar and wind for at least 50% of the mix? Because the only options I see are A/Nuclear, B/Bet on imaginary storage tech, C/Bet on fusion becoming viable with decades earlier.
If you come from a situation where most electricity is generated from fossil fuel, with a bit of nuclear, than installing a bit of solar and wind trivially reduces CO2. Wind on the North Sea can trivially take 50% of all required electricity production.
It is the end game that is hard. With just solar and wind you can't go down to zero CO2 emission.
That said, it is not clear that you can go to zero CO2 with just nuclear. Unless you are massively overbuilding nuclear to deal with peakload.
The current problem is that no government has proposed a timeline when fossil fuel will be more expensive than storage (or than nuclear mixed with wind).
As long as fossil fuel is cheap, we will only see solar and wind, because those are currently cheaper than fossil.
Would it look better with more nuclear? Quite possible.
Does the black bar (as an example) decrease with increase in solar and wind? Yes, very much so.
Also for a reality check have a look at electricitymap.org when there is no wind and when it’s the night, I don’t see how ones could keep a straight face thinking they are doing good, this is the mix of the future for our cities.
I see in 2002, Gas+Oil+Coal+Nuclear = 450 TWh. Then in 2021 this amounts to 262.98 TWh.
So both nuclear and fossil fuel went down quite a bit.
Looking just at the fossil fuel number, they went down by 96 TWh during that period. Seems like a significant win to me.
Note how Russians never stopped building NPPs so they do manage to build on time and within budget.
When finished the UKs Hinkley Point C nuclear plant will probably have cost around £23 billion for ~3.000 MW which is completely insane.
Well those are 3000 real MW. Not 10% when the weather is good and 0 otherwise. And it can be piloted as needed.
Bit in [] is false; apologies.
Side note: electric cars will be a large part of the grid balancing in the future.
Do you have any good reading for this?
In my naive mind, it’s doomed by the fact that we drive to work in the day, then all come home, together, in the evenings, when the sun is on its way down. Or is the plan to have two way power chargers at businesses too? Otherwise, all these batteries are disconnected when you need them.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/08/05/youve-got-30-billion-...
massively over provisioned PV+Storage is still half the price of Nuclear. It even throws in extra money for grid upgrades.
https://insideevs.com/news/458106/battery-cost-110-kwh-price...
Using a pessimistic $150/kWh (it's already under that) I get 70,000,000 kWh or 70 gWh, enough to run the entire state of California for a little over an hour. So you could build over 10GW of wind power capacity and 70 gWh storage for the cost of one nuclear plant.
Nuclear isn't dying because of hippies. It's dying because it's expensive. You're right that the safety concerns are over-inflated, but failure to deliver on its cost promises are the major failure of nuclear (fission) power.
If we make fusion work and can scale it, that's a totally different ballgame... but it won't happen fast enough to impact climate change.
But in the meantime, the best option is nuclear.
Part of the problem is that nobody has built the things in the past 30-40 ish years.
France: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
US: https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118
This is truly remarkable phenomenon that occurs with almost no other technology. And this happening in France rules out the possibility that it's merely increasing regulatory burden that causes increasing costs.
Those who want us to build new nuclear need to grapple with the issue of their cost if they want it to happen, yet I have not found a single nuclear advocate on HN that will acknowledge that these issues even exist, much less bother to propose some solution.
At least for the "safety" issues, we can have a discussion about how designs can mitigate that. But there also needs to be discussion on how design, workforce training, logistical management, or something can improve the construction issues.
You can't just easily build 11500 wind turbines without huge impact on environment.
That's a lot of space used.
And don't forget those wind turbines will have to be replaced after 20 or 30 years while your nuclear plant is good for 50 to 60.
3000MW almost constantly, for what, 60-80 years? How much would the equivalent wind+ grid scale storage(multi-day) that would need to be replaced multiple times over that same lifespan cost?
However we see many governments blocking nuclear and even shutting down current plants. Why is that?
The article indeed mentions modular commercial reactors.
> Don't think so. Taking Germany as an example, many people joined these movements after the country was in large parts affected (to this day actually) by the nuclear fallout of the disaster in Chernobyl.
I don't think those things are mutually exclusive. It's quite conceivable the Soviets supported a seed, which sprouted once Chernobyl created the right conditions for it to take off. It looks like the German Green party opposed nuclear power before Chernobyl and it was also infiltrated to a degree by the East German Stasi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_90/The_Greens#1980s:_...:
> In 1982 ... Those who remained in the Green party were more strongly pacifist and ... tended to identify more closely with a culture of protest and civil disobedience, frequently clashing with police at demonstrations against nuclear weapons, nuclear energy, and the construction of a new runway (Startbahn West) at Frankfurt Airport...
> Among the important political issues at the time was the deployment of Pershing II IRBMs and nuclear-tipped cruise missiles by the U.S. and NATO on West German soil, generating strong opposition in the general population that found an outlet in mass demonstrations. The newly formed party was able to draw on this popular movement to recruit support. Partly due to the impact of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, and to growing awareness of the threat of air pollution and acid rain to German forests (Waldsterben), the Greens increased their share of the vote to 8.3% in the 1987 federal election....
> The Greens were the target of attempts by the East German secret police to enlist the cooperation of members who were willing to align the party with the agenda of the German Democratic Republic. The party ranks included several politicians who were later discovered to have been Stasi agents, including Bundestag representative Dirk Schneider, European Parliament representative Brigitte Heinrich, and Red Army Faction defense lawyer Klaus Croissant. Greens politician and Bundestag representative Gert Bastian was also a founding member of Generals for Peace [de], a pacifist group created and funded by the Stasi, the revelation of which may have contributed to the murder-suicide in which he killed his partner and Greens founder Petra Kelly.[11] A study commissioned by the Greens determined that 15 to 20 members intimately cooperated with the Stasi and another 450 to 500 had been informants.[12][13]
So far. The spent fuel will be around for another 10k years to potentially cause further deaths.
If we have a few more Fukushimas, we might ruin the ocean forever.
I could be wrong, but, IIRC, coal power has actually created more radioactive pollution than nuclear energy. It's just a far, far larger volume of less concentrated pollution.
Also, Fukushima-style pollution isn't "forever." The most radioactive stuff also decays the quickest, so it disappears relatively quickly. It looks like most of the pollution from Fukushima was caesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years.
A few million gallons of nuclear contaminated water into the ocean is nothing, it'll dilute to next to nothing, Nuclear homeopathy, if you prefer.
Given that japan had a giant radioactive ocean leak and I still haven't heard comprehensive reasoning about why we think facilities for storing nuclear waste will not be slowly defunded, I think the scare quotes can go. Politics anywhere (at the moment) simply cannot be trusted to properly manage nuclear waste, so we should not be producing it.
Nuclear is far and away the less harmful solution.
What we have currently have are slightly evolved designs over those of the 60s, which are fantastically expensive, take up to a decade to build and three more decades to recover investment, and present a large economic failure risk - see the Nukegate fiasco. No sane financial investor wants to approach nuclear, no one wants to insure it, so the only ones willing to eat the risk are states.
Yes, we had a window in the last 20 years to reinvent fission, have new, secure and cheap reactors which cannot proliferate, are passively safe and fast to deploy. The industry and regulators remained paralyzed, structurally risk averse. That window has now closed.
Renewables are cheaper then nuclear, fast to come online and have very low risk. Storage is quickly dropping in price. Together, storage and renewables, coupled with a smart grid, will be able to cover more and more of the demand and require fossils to be fired less and less. It does not matter if you go fosil for a whole week in a year where there is no sun, wind or rain, that's still only 2% of the production and you can use very expensive mitigations like CCS, as long as you have cheap renewables in the rest of the time.
As for clean and reliable. No CO2 right? And the nuclear power stations in the UK pretty much have run continuously since they were switched on, so I'm not sure what 'reliable' means here.
Sure, if you can cook the accounting books to pay for a military nuclear industry, and also get a civil sector that has no need to pay for capital, insurance and cleanup. I doubt it's a scalable model, and France had its own share of fuckups and close calls.
Electricity was, and is still, rather clean, and cheap, and reliable, thanks to nuclear (see https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/FR ).
And the most striking example of that is how terrifying the rise of cost of electricty is coming ahead for consumers and enterprises, mainly because of other energy sources, rather than because of nuclear itself.
Renewables are all nice and thanks (and definitely to grow and improve), but they cannot, from a long way, deliver the sheer and stable massive amount of base energy that nuclear can.
Without monstruously large storage capacities that we don't have today, cutting ourselves from nuclear is a civilisational collapse guarantee.
> In 2010, as part of the progressive liberalisation of the energy market under EU directives, France agreed the Accès régulé à l'électricité nucléaire historique (ARENH) regulations that allowed third party suppliers access up to about a quarter of France's pre-2011 nuclear generation capacity, at a fixed price of €42/MWh from 1 July 2011 until 31 December 2025.[47][48][49]
> As of 2015, France's household electricity price, excluding taxation, is the 12th cheapest amongst the 28 member European Union and the second-cheapest to industrial consumers.[50] The actual cost of generating electricity by nuclear power is not published by EDF or the French government but is estimated to be between €59/MWh and €83/MWh.[51]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Manage...
> Nuclear thus remains the dispatchable low-carbon technology with the lowest expected costs in 2025. Only large hydro reservoirs can provide a similar contribution at comparable costs but remain highly dependent on the natural endowments of individual countries. Compared to fossil fuel-based generation, nuclear plants are expected to be more affordable than coal-fired plants. While gas-based combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGTs) are competitive in some regions, their LCOE very much depend on the prices for natural gas and carbon emissions in individual regions. Electricity produced from nuclear long-term operation (LTO) by lifetime extension is highly competitive and remains not only the least cost option for low-carbon generation - when compared to building new power plants - but for all power generation across the board.
As for the "government subsidized", I don't see that a particular problematic issue, but that may be just me (a quite a few fellow French people) - that's my taxes at work.
That is the issue at hand, building new nuclear is not only marginal cost, it is mostly fixed costs and a unfathomable initial investment.
I can only speak for myself but I don't think nuclear power is bad, and I don't connect it with nuclear weapons or even deaths. It's just scary. And that's due to Chernobyl and Fukushima. And I haven't dug into the technicalities of why one of these new level 5 grand wizard mosfet reactor types can't fail in 50 years like the old ones did. Because we are smarter now? But if I look around at the current state of affairs I would say it looks like we have started to walk backwards as a civilisation. Not a rational thought I know, but it nicely feeds into that first ingrained irrational fear.
Chernobyl was just an idiotic design that no one outside of the USSR would have built after about 1954. Graphite piles are death traps, and not building a containment building is insane.
It is amazing how this could be built not taking high waves into account.
The engineers mentioned they needed a large seawall to protect the plant from the frequent tsunamis, and were overridden because it cost too much.
Nuclear can be safe, but you have to keep politics out of it.
If we talking about technology development than each technology has ups and downs but very often there is a gradual improvement, peak and then slow of fast fall.
I don't think nuclear energy passed its peak and degrades. Newer reactors are better than 50 years ago. The only think which can be worse - ever increasing amount of regulations added without cost-benefit analysis. Safety by any price is a dubious goal because the price may be too high to pay.
Extract from the Report of the UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation) of 2020 :
"Since the UNSCEAR 2013 Report no adverse health effects among Fukushima Prefecture residents have been documented that are directly attributable to radiation exposure from the FDNPS accident."
You can check the source here : https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/fukushima.html. (Be warned, it's full of jargon).
For the worst nuclear accident of this century, I would argue it's pretty good !
First, show us what is the progress in nuclear waste treatment. (None)
Show us the data of long time term safety of operating nuclear plants. (Every decade we have an unmitigated disaster, even with so few operating nuclear plants)
Also please show us an economically viable plan to keep sourcing Uranium for increasing demands. (Ideally one that does not involve waging wars)
The construction costs are very relevant, not only from a CO2 perspective. Nuclear power is not very attractive, only if you reduce environmental protection to CO2 output, which is insufficient. So no, the greens of former years were not that wrong. It is questionable to shut down working plants, but if nuclear was that feasible, it would already play a larger in energy production today. If you start building plants today, you will need at least a decade to get them operational. You can look at France for the youngest examples of that.
And would you want to mine Uranium? Have fun with that.
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-nuclear-energy-good-for-...
Base load
Base load
Any green energy plan that dismisses nuclear without addressing base load issues with a concrete plan (no future tech that doesn't exist yet) is profoundly unserious
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-thr...
If you object to these because they are not scaled out, I will point out that a nuclear powered world will also need new tech of that kind: either seawater uranium extraction on a massive scale, or a breeder-based fuel cycle. Existing burner reactors would, if they powered the entire world, exhaust available uranium resources in just a few years.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/russians-...
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/25/world/europe/germany-russ...
However that's maybe like accidents with Cars x accidents with Airplane: The statistics are irrelevant for people with intrinsic fear from Airplanes.
Resouces:
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...
And yet, somehow, we're seeing Europe in this position where they're trying to go it without energy. The figures out of the UK [0] are jaw dropping to me. 44% reduction in energy production, 20% in electricity and with a growing population!
The country must be populated entirely by monks and ascetics if they are putting up with this.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom#O...
And that's before we add heating to the winter electric load. Conservatively, and I am really trying here, you're doubling grid load. If we go by my household, you're adding a zero.
I can find multiple >12 hr periods in this fairly mild winter where wind has essentially failed on demand (<5% satisfaction). I'm sorry but if someone says "storage" when talking about even that sort of shortfall they're lying.
France goes through similar bouts of having to import because so many of their nuclear plants keep having to offline at the same time.
I say this, not in defence of the anti-nuclear generations of Europe but more so to explain why the political climate is how it is.
Beyond this comes money. Our technology sector is invested in basically every sort of green energy, except for nuclear. All our advantages in making money lie in things like wind and solar power, and if we were to truly adopt nuclear power, it’s very likely that all that money would leave Europe and go into Chinese or Indian technology. Which may be great for the planet, but you’re just not going to see European politicians stand in line to transfer energy sector jobs in the hundreds or thousands out from Europe.
It is what it is, but this isn’t likely to change in the next 40 so years.
Fortunately (at least in my opinion) this is changing, Rolls-Royce are developing new "mini nuclear reactors". We have the technological expertise and it looks like we are beginning to see the political and financial motivation too.
I was reading yesterday how despite the gas price explosion we are seeing, which is crippling for many low income households, we actually exported twice the quantity of gas September - November 2021 than in the same period in 2020. Clearly privately owned gas companies currently have the right to sell to the highest bidder, even if it is oversees. But, right now, the UK government needs to be addressing the cost of energy crisis that is impacting its citizens and it isn't a supply issue at all.
https://www.energylivenews.com/2022/01/31/how-did-the-uk-man...
I generally agree with free markets but I also believe the government should step in and regulate, impose restriction or cut taxes when their own people are suffering.
I believe the stats on exports are exclusive to exports of what we have “produced”.
From my maths we exported about 3bcm of gas Sept-Nov last year.
My understanding from memory is that the oil/gas companies licence the right to drill in the north sea from the Crown (effectively the government). I believe the Crown estate “owns” the seabed, or something like that.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/332211/united-kingdom-uk...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/265393/natural-gas-consu...
Where I disagree is when we try to manipulate the market to lower prices so that poor people can afford it. Let's stop screwing with the market when not necessary and just make sure people have the needed money to get by. Ultimately that will need cheaper in total. But costs would be obvious instead of hidden ask it's politically hard to impossible.
In the countries where nuclear is shut down / being shut down it's often so with large majorities in public opinions supporting it
He's not talking about the Koch, Gates and Murdoch type elites
He's talking about the "I read the New Yorker and shop at whole foods" type elites who make the bulk of the noise and drive most of the discourse around these sorts of issues despite their landscaper being the one who's actually hurt by high energy costs.
2004 2,619 produced 135 imported
2016 1,465 produced ? imported
I imagine ? is quite a lot. I'm not sure how they do the numbers but we import a lot of gas and oil. I'd guess the drop in produced has more to do with north sea oil running out than greenery.
That's like selling both your kidney to buy a prosthetic robot arm and wonder why you're not feeling well despite the upgrade. Sadly you can't argue on the pros of nuclear as you'd get drowned out by the "But Chernobyl blew up" shouts.
Rich anti-nuclear countries like Austria call themselves green while supplementing their energy needs via imports from coal burning Czech Republic and nuclear powered Slovenia. Laughable. This loophole in the EU should be stopped. If you import dirty energy you should also be responsible for the equivalent CO2 emissions you imported and not be allowed to call yourself green when clearly you just outsource your pollution.
And the best example of that in Germany is Hambacher Forst. Return to coal is a direct result of moving away from nuclear. Nuts.
Germany's buying cheap energy from coal burning Poland so it might as well have.
Call it outsourcing of coal burning if that makes it easier to take in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_surface_mine
> Begun in 1978, the mine's operation area currently (as of end of 2017) has a size of 43,8 km2, with the total area designated for mining having a size of 85 km2.
So there's still a bit to dig.
It's also interesting that nobody was saying that the Atomaustieg was responsible for increased coal use in 2020. Because it's only last year that was an exceptional year, which saw a uptick in coal vs wind.
https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/long-series/germa...
Your link says that oil is (in 2017) the primary source of energy. Followed by gas. Then coal. Edit: When I ignoring wood.
I'm a Czech hence biased, but hey we've got two nuclear power plants! (and yes the Austrians hate them)
According to Our World in Data [0], Czech Republic is 15% nuclear while Slovenia is 18% nuclear. We both have different primary sources of power (Czechia coal at 37%, Slovenia oil at 39%). I take offense at your statement "Czechia coal Slovenia nuclear"!
If it weren't for Austria, we'd likely have more nuclear and less coal. We wouldn't have knoedel and schnitzel though, so perhaps it evens out.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/czech-republic?cou...
So shutting down old nuclear power and replacing it with wind/solar backed up by gas was not a crazy idea.
Was is a crazy idea is then letting 'the free market' take care of the gas supply.
Where is gets more complex, natural gas is not just used to generate electricity, but also to provide heat for lots of homes. Keep old nuclear power plants running doesn't do anything for keeping people warm.
In short, Europe has a natural gas problem, not so much a nuclear power problem.
https://keepwarmeurope.eu/news/?c=search&uid=Nsjnork8
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325110704_Construct...
"According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, about 43 nuclear reactors around the world—mostly in Eastern Europe and Russia—provide district heating in addition to generating electricity." (https://www.powermag.com/district-heating-supply-from-nuclea...)
So keeping a few nuclear power plants open has hardly any effect on the amount of natural gas that is used.
Russia now has a "war chest" of almost a trillion USD. Enough to pay off all of its debt and to run the country under complete sanctions for two full years.
This is 100% because the EU, led by Germany, decided to allow natural gas to be pumped in.
Despite cheap money (pension funds are chock full of cash due to aging retiring population and they buy government bonds) and slack in the economy (youth unemployment) every "developed" country is full of idiots (ahem, pensioners and soon to be pensioners) clutching pearls about how spending will ruin everything. Sure, they want to play it safe, but this has an enormous cost on the current and future generations.
Sure we can argue that we were not prepared for the recent uptick in energy demand as well as exceptionally low wind last year. However, one can just as well argue that this was a failure not to build more wind and solar capacity.
The bigger issue is that nobody wants to build nuclear power without massive subsidies, because it is simply not economical. So shouting now, "you should have build more plants" is easy, but that would have meant higher electricity prices, because that's what would be needed to economically run nuclear power.
This is simply not true. The main reason plants are being shutdown is because Germany, Belgium and Spain are closing them before end-of-life due to political pressure.
We currently do not have _any_ viable solution other than "put it somewhere in a mountain" to get rid of nuclear waste. Nobody would propose a technology or product where this is the only solution to take care of the waste, nevertheless this seems to be fine for nuclear power.
What we really need to do is invest heavily in research and developement of storage systems of all kinds, building a more decentralized power grid (solar on every roof where possible e.g.) and getting rid of fossil fuels along the way. Everythings needs to run parallel, not one after another.
What's the problem with that? Radiation goes away, eventually.
The main thing that we should do is to reduce the amount of "nuclear waste". Spent rods are one thing, gloves that touched a facility with some amount of radioactive materials are another
A property that makes it a lot less toxic than all sorts of nasty industrial byproducts that humanity generates in similar quantity.
Imagine you poised a watershed with radiator. 100yr later it's probably mostly fine depending on how much you poisoned it in the first place. Now try that with a heavy metal laced chemical...
Well, seems like a proper problem to me. What if something happens to those "safe" underground storages? What if radioactive material leaks into the groundwater reservoirs? There might be problems we can fix and control for say 50 years or so, like a generation long. But what after that? Maybe somebody has found a solution, maybe not. So bury it for another generation and hope the generation after that finds a solution? I don't like that as a "plan".
I'm interested to see what part is the gearing cost vs building at larger scale. A large part of the cost, some nuclear engineers told me, is that there is no more large scale industry in building large nuclear reactors. Investments have dried up essentially, so next generation plants pay a steep gearing cost.
I'm from a country with about half nuclear mix. The managing company has made around 1-2B EUR in profits last year, and that is with a special 1/5 tax agreement for keeping the nuclear reactors open for longer. So those reactors built in the 70-80s appear to have been massively profitable over their lifetimes. It remains to be seen how much the decommissioning factors in.
Those decisions made almost half a century ago were shortsighted, emotional, and led by ideologues lacking the ability or the desire to realize the consequences of their actions which we are now reaping in the form of an energy crisis and an environmental crisis that has become much worse than it need have been.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwentendorf_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_Austrian_nuclear_power_re...
As of this year, the cheapest wind and solar farms have a lower total cost than the marginal cost of the average nuclear plant.[1] That means that in many places, it is cheaper to immediately shut down the nuclear plants and direct the money that was spent on operating costs into construction of renewables.
Yes, we should certainly keep the better-designed existing plants up and running, and build some new ones where the conditions are favorable, but in most places in the world it doesn't come close to making sense.
[1] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Except that in this situation fossil fuel-based generators keep running.
We should be keeping nukes for as long as possible, and shutting down coal and gas first. The new renewable pick up the slack for coal/gas, and once all of the latter are gone then you start shutting down nuclear.
Nuclear is one of the most reliable sources. The world has enough uranium for at least a few hundred years, which in practice could be much much longer depending on if we can keep installing more renewable plants. So, why not use nuclear as a backup? There is nothing even close to a better option than that.
Indeed we would have to build enormous overcapacity with wind and solar to achieve 100% uptime, but until we perfect energy storage, that’s true of any energy source today.
And the wind stopped blowing several times today, the sun was only around for a few hours.
There's a clear difference. I invite you to think about it.
> Indeed we would have to build enormous overcapacity with wind and solar to achieve 100% uptime
Except, that does not guarantee 100% uptime, not by a long shot, regardless of how much over-capacity you build. One area not having wind usually means that there is no wind in a much larger area close to that. If you have wind in another part of the globe, that is useless to you because it can't be transmitted to your place; too much transmission loss for it to be viable.
Similarly, if you don't have sun, it is very likely that your entire hemisphere doesn't. So, it is crucial to have backups that are more reliable than that... and there is nothing that is better than nuclear for this... at least as of now.
But the same is true of nuclear power. Not even France tries to provide 100% of power with nuclear, because it would be an absurd over-investment to handle a few peaks or unexpected maintenance periods.
It’s pointless to argue that renewables can’t provide 100% of power, because in theory any single source of energy could, and in practice no single source of ever should.
So nuclear can be at most a factor of 2.5 better. Given how cheap wind is, you can easily overbuild a factor of 2.5 and still be cheaper than new nuclear.
But more importantly, nuclear plants are up WAY over 90% of the time. If they need to do maintenance, they do one reactor at a time in the 4-5 reactor plant. This is similar to how they do maintenance on one turbine at a time in a hydro plant.
But I responded to 'Nuclear uptime is orders of magnitude better than solar or wind'. That is simply not true. Uptime cannot be 10 times better. It could be rephrased as the downtime of nuclear is one order of magnitude smaller than wind. But even that is not clear. And certainly not 'orders of magnitude'.
This won't work with solar or wind becuase no sun in one location usually means no sun in a much larger area around it. Same for wind.
The sun and wind much further away are of no use because it is not practical to tranmit that electricity to the location it needs to be.
The existing nuclear plants have ceased production once every few years at the worst. In contrast, wind mills and solar panels stop producing electricity multiple times everyday.
Given the current costs for nuclear power, you can do a lot of crazy stuff with wind and solar (like transporting it over long distances) and still be cheaper than nuclear.
Also, the long distance transport costs for electricity are massive - can be 30% loss. Look at HydroQuebec. They massively overproduce just to transport over HUGE long distance power towers because of the huge losses - and that's only 500 miles.
Renewables push down the cost when the price is already low, and do nothing when the price is high
To some extend this is happening. California for example [1] had 1 GW or installed solar capacity in 2010, 13 GW in 2015 and 31 GW in 2020. But California is at a much lower latitude than any place in Europe (the average latitude in Europe is about 57 degrees, in California about 37 degrees). And it's also sunny.
Lazard doesn't say what region their LCOE is based on, maybe it's a global average. But then it's going to be biased towards southern latitudes by the simple fact that that's where most solar installations happen. And they happen there, because that's where they are profitable.
Separately, the LCOE does not take into consideration the fluctuations in the energy produced. And that's quite a big deal for solar and wind.
So, sure, new nuclear power plants are not economical, but just operating existing ones? In Europe, that most surely is.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_California#Phot...
All in all I am very hopeful and not against Nuclear at all but I just can't ignore the charts today.
Such a nice thought that a good % of my flat is being powered with little consequence!
I know this is not what you're saying, but that's pretty much how I imagine some people think, especially "green" politicians.
How someone can say this (and still claim to be green) is beyond me.
Furthermore you have bought-and-paid-for members of the establishment like Gerhard Schröder who have a vested interest in shutting down nuclear power plants.
The best solution is a bunch of smallish nuclear reactors spread out over the continent for base power production, wind/solar/hydro (is wave electricity a thing? I remember it was discussed a bunch of years ago in relation to green production) wherever those make sense, and high voltage transmission lines to allow load balancing.
But we don't have that, and it takes a long time to build so we should get started now, but instead they will say "oh we should have built that 20 years ago now it's too late"... :(
We know the price of CO2 will just go up and up. We know how hard it is to create a base load with wind/solar and storage.
Yet nobody with money believes it is worth investing in nuclear.
Of course, looking at Hinkley Point C, Olkiluoto, Flamanville makes it very clear why nobody wants to invest in nuclear power.
Sweden is planning for super energy intensive green steel, the Northvolt battery production and recycling facility, huge datacenters for Microsoft/Google/Amazon/Facebook, and on top of that a rapidly accelerating electrification of private vehicles. To cover this they are planning to expand hydro, but the estimates I've seen are for an additional 600MW which is literally nothing in context (green steel alone is estimated to need 9000MW) and will do fuck all for the new requirements from the above, it's fucking looney tunes.
I personally think the environmentally best short-term solution would be for all the shut down but technically still usable reactors, in countries like Sweden and Germany, to be turned back on while we construct new safer and more future proof ones.
I should buy a UPS.
Until recently, nuclear was the undisputed king of cost. There was nothing more expensive in the market. And that's before you count the cost of long term storage, security, and decades of government subsidies. I guess, for this year it might look quite alright compared to gas. But that is probably a temporary effect before it goes back to its undisputed status as being the most costly thing in the market.
Replacing an expensive thing with an even more expensive thing is not a solution to reducing cost. It doesn't make sense. Europe needs cheap power, not expensive power. And it's getting plenty of that from renewables. It's far ahead of most other places in the world in terms of deploying wind and other renewables.
The nuclear phase down in Germany is actually happening without any disruptions to energy supply. The grid seems plenty resilient (again, rolling blackouts are not a thing here). Also, there's a healthy growth of other capacity and it's a very competitive market with lots of innovative companies making lots of money.
Nuclear was always a relatively minor part of the energy economy in Germany. We're talking about some 20GW of capacity in total of which some 8(?) GW remains which is on track to disappear later this year. Compared to the new capacity that has been added in (mainly) wind and solar form since the nuclear phase out started 12 years ago that is nothing. About 3x the amount of nuclear capacity Germany ever had was added in wind energy alone since then. Probably in the next few years more will come online than Germany ever had in nuclear capacity. People probably have more solar on their roofs than ever existed in nuclear capacity. That was growing at a pace of almost 0.5GW per month last summer apparently.
The reasons electricity prices are high is because the EU is overly dependent on natural gas, which until recently was vastly cheaper than nuclear (and coal plants). The current geo-political situation with particularly Russia is disrupting oil and gas prices. Not because there is a shortage but because Russia is trying to pressurize the EU to do what it wants. The cheapest solution to that is diplomacy. And given that apparently gas prices dropped 11% or so after Russia kindly started providing gas through Ukranian pipelines again, that seems to be working.
The likely long term effect will be an acceleration of replacing gas with other things. That was already happening anyway. Higher prices will make it happen faster.
I'm still waiting for a practical alternative to natural gas for small housing units (apartments, or just small houses without gardens). Heating water with heat pumps is impractical unless you have a lot of space. My combined hot water/central heating heater is the size of a large microwave oven. If I can replace it with something similarly sized, I will. Until that's possible, I'm afraid I'm stuck with gas.
*: called bergvärme in Swedish, I just looked up the Swedish wikipedia article and clicked English so I don't know if this is the right term
Part of that is historical, but also cooking on natural gas was for a long time the best solution. So if you run natural gas to every home anyhow, there is little reason to have a separate hot water distribution system.
Some very new constructions rely on district heating, but that's only feasible if there's a source of waste heat nearby (some kind of factory, usually). I doubt we have more than 50 such constructions in the entire country.
... yet (and that's only for large-area outages. In 2019, large parts of Berlin were without power for over 30 hours [1]). Wherever I look, civil protection agencies are scurrying to set up contingency plans for a multinational, month-long blackout. In Switzerland, the public broadcaster has started communicating that risk to their population three years ago, clearly stating that this will lead to a massive loss of lives. We are running into a catastrophe, and we're too ideologically blinded to accept it.
Better stock up on those conserves and gas cartouches for cooking.
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-blackout-raises-questions-over-...
> "The likely long term effect will be an acceleration of replacing gas with other things. That was already happening anyway. Higher prices will make it happen faster."
This is a bit of "when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again" thinking.
But still if everything worked perfectly I would hazard we would still be at least 20-30 years out of a commercial project that would cost billions and take a decade to build.
ITER has horrific power density, some 400x worse than the reactor vessel in a fission power plant. Given that the non-nuclear part of the a fission and DT fusion plant will be similar, making the reactor itself much larger and much more complex, and therefore much more expensive, cannot be a win. The less experimental follow-ons to ITER (PROTO, DEMO) are still massively too large.
This generic problem with DT fusion reactors has been known since at least the 1980s.
The initial investigations from MAST are encouraging, but we'll see how it goes.
Of course, this stuff will be ready for commercial use in like 2050 assuming everything goes to plan (which is rare unless it's really prioritised like the Manhattan Project, Apollo Missions etc.)
So regardless, something will have to be done prior to then - either we find better energy storage solutions for renewables or we expedite the construction of replacement/new fission plants or both.
For a PWR, this is about 20 MW/m^3 . For ITER, it's 0.05 MW/m^3 and for ARC (2014 paper) it's around 0.5 MW/m^3 .
The scientific work that is planned to be done at ITER has the possibility of proving that nuclear fusion may be a viable path for electrical generation. But it will never serve as a commercial basis for the generation of electricity. Accomplishing nuclear fusion is actually relatively easy. What it hopes to prove is that controlled nuclear fusion can serve as a net producer of energy. A complete success of the ITER project in no way implies that nuclear energy is commercially viable. From a scientific standpoint it is amazing work. From an energy generation standpoint, it's a card trick.
The follow on "DEMO" project will attempt to establish commercial viability of nuclear fusion for electrical generation would commence operation no earlier than 2050.
If clean energy is something we need now, then nuclear fusion is not a viable solution.
That was kind of my point as well, commercial fusion is decades out in the best of cases, thus making the reluctance to maintain and or invest in proven fission technology that much more risky. If commercial fusion was few years out I would be much more sympathetic to objections to fission.
> Plants, though, take a decade or more to construct at best and the risk is high of running over time and over budget. Finland’s new Olkiluoto-3 unit is coming on line after a 12-year delay and billions of euros in financial overruns.
I'll expand on this further: do you know how many of the world's nuclear power plants (~660 IIRC) were privately funded and built without (significant) government subsidies? The answer is zero. This is not just a construction issue, it also affects maintenance [1].
Sure lets continue researching smaller, modular reactors that can be constructed more cheaply and in less time. But we're not there yet. None of the research projects, prototypes or proposals are anywhere close to commercial viability yet. Most of them don't even exist yet.
Personally I'm bearing on fission power. Plants take too long to build. They're too expensive to build and maintain. I don't trust humans or corporations for long-term management and maintenance, particularly in countries without strong government. We don't have a good story for the long term storage or disposal of enrichment waste or power production waste. The significant systems required around mining, fuel processing, spent fuel processing, maintenance, fuel replacement, inspection and oversight (eg the NRC) are significant and won't scale to the required level.
The article is right though: this is political and the politics are bad for nuclear. It will take the likes of China to mass deploy nuclear once these problems are solved to change any opinions in the West.
[1]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/nuclear-power-wont-surv...
Nuclear plants are built, like any power plant or major project, with corporate/state/municipal bonds. These aren't really handouts. They are fixed income instruments that allow corporations to spread the cost of construction over the life of the project.
Nuclear reactors are profitable. The challenges are those we create to stop them. Lawsuits, protests, political work stoppages, etc...
"Europe is losing ICE vehicles, just as it needs to transport people."
It's very hard to accurately estimate the risk of a nuclear power-plant disaster because looking back at the past and extrapolating data from there is non-sensical when the risk is so fat-tailed. Sure, Chernobyl, Fukushima and ever Three Mile Island killed a few thousands at most in aggregate but for anyone familiar with the history of Chernobyl, the story is quite different.
10 days after the main explosion, a leak caused a large amount of water to accumulate under the melting core. Had the melting core reached that pool of water, it would have caused a massive steam explosion that would have spread radioactive particles over most of Europe and Russia making them uninhabitable. Thankfully, three men risked their lives to enter the power-plant and closed a valve preventing more water from accumulating under the core.
Now, you could say that current reactors are safer, which might be true, but before Chernobyl, such a disaster was also thought to be impossible. Even if there is a 10% risk of contamination of a whole continent over a century, does it make sense to take it? One could argue that such risk would be acceptable if it prevents climate change. But acknowledging the existence of these enormous risks is a required step to have an honest debate.
JFC, this is the perfect capture of the level of debate surrounding nuclear
If it was true, don't you think every single country in the world would obtain such a world-destroying weapon?
If it was true, then a single nuclear reactor would be able to power the whole world for eternity
> If it was true, don't you think every single country in the world would obtain such a world-destroying weapon?
Countries already have nuclear weapons. They can very well spread radioactive material over large landmasses but what's the point?
> If it was true, then a single nuclear reactor would be able to power the whole world for eternity
I have no idea how you deduced this but it's wrong.
That's just not really true, plenty of people warned that with Germany closing nuclear and coal plants at the same time it would need to rely on external sources for energy, France for electricity, and with NordStream 1 and 2 projects, the reliance on Russian gas for Germany rose to around 50%. It was pretty obvious that becoming dependent on a not always friendly foreign power was a bad idea, but with Germany being so dominant in Europe no one dared to oppose it. Now Russia is playing this card fully.
We should either go nuclear or renewables with storage. There are still some good spots for hydro-storage as well as batteries are getting cheaper each year.
Why would you do that as an energy company. Ask Tepco if they are happy. They aren't. The only countries that still build nuclear are the ones that massively promote it for political reasons and it's often countries with an or wanting to have an arsenal of atomic weapons, go figure. Nuclear is a dead horse unless.
You have a headwind to doing an activity when you rarely engage in an activity.
Chernobyl really messed us up in this regard, sadly.
Look at the projects in the UK - delays for decades and massive budget overruns. Or Turkey if you to see something that is driven by dubious reasons ...
If there was a real push for nuclear energy there would be a way to build a plant a year.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia-class_submarine#Boats...
The navy is not really a good comparison. First of all, they have large budgets and somewhat different risk tolerances than civil engineering. Powering submarines by solar power is also not a reasonable concept :p But Germany has some fuel-cell driven submarines, which get many benefits of nuclear ones, but of course with much shorter deployment times (max. 30 days).
https://ourworldindata.org/global-energy-200-years?country=
Coal is not even going down.
Current situtation: The energy sector (in Germany) was never eager to use nuclear fission power, they were pushed into it by politics in last century. The environmentalist movement is weird - in Germany. People want wind turbines but they don't want wind turbines in reach of 2 kilometer. What is stupid, because it is a minor thing compared to nuclear power plants, coal power plants or whatever harm a wind turbine can do (collapsing, hitting a bird...). One example of how people can completely lose their mind are the "Startbahngegener" in the late eighties, shot a cop to dead. Because? They were against a new runway at one of the biggest, busiest and oldest airports in Europe. The runway is not an issue and made sense. We need to handle climate change anyway, whatever we do. Nuclear fission power plant? If it blows up you, your country, your kids, the neighbor countries and everyone else is fucked. We increase the chance with every nuclear fission power plant further. It is not a matter of "if", it is a matter of "when".
Outlook: At least in Germany. Built wind power plants, build more, store energy as hydrogen (whatever the energy loss is, it is better than not to store) and if possible use NUCLEAR FUSION. Yes Nuclear FUSION! It is much saver, creates only a minimum of nuclear waste after shutdown and in case of control loss and blowup the damage is probably on minor level. Wendelstein[2] - an experimental nuclear fusion project which shall test only but not create energy - is doing progress. Interestingly, this works without the usual international affairs which require involving some companies from every country. But we invest to less. There is no guarantee in success, but nuclear fusion is on any level better than nuclear fission. Sadly politics in cold war were no interested in fusion - nuclear fission was easier to develop and usable for weapons.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tötungsdelikte_an_der_Startbah... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X
Heads up! Not down!
The question isn't CO2 neutrality, but "How much worse is the alternative". And when the alternative is to burn Coal, Oil and Gas, Nuclear power wins by a landslide.
Secondly:
Fossil Fuels have to be mined, transported and stored as well. The components of Wind and Solar energy farms have to be constructed from resources which have to be mined and processed. Power plants, be they coal, nuclear, solar, whatever, need to be constructed and maintained.
To our best estimate, the footprint of nuclear is a bit higher than solar and wind, but much closer to them than fossil fuels.
e.g.: https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-wind-nuclear-amazingly-low...
Edit: see page 539 here for a better comparison https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...
Some of the other ways we might have to mine uranium then are carbon intensive. But research is being done. So it depends.
"We're not making nuclear weapons, only nuclear power plants" is what countries like Iran say. And many other countries would like them to stop.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, just giving a wider perspective.
It's low carbon, but we've decided not to cut our emissions, so why bother?
It would rescue us from Russian gas reliance. But cost 10 times more and won't be ready till 2040 so why bother? (Plus you can't replace domestic gas supplies with electricity...).
It's reliable for base load, but we already have that from gas so why bother?
What? Where do you have this from?
A few years back, in Paris, we signed a "you do you" agreement to all decide for ourselves whether to cut our emissions and not to complain if others don't cut them.
We're well on schedule to blow through all the ppm concentrations (I think we blew through the 1C rise one last year some time?)
It's like this weird open secret where we all agree something should definitely be done, and then do nothing. Like 100 people are a car crash all hoping someone else will get involved or something.
Europe is a very diverse continent. Something that tends to be forgotten in American perception. A country like the Netherlands has practically unlimited amount of money to import oil and gas from abroad while people in Greece are reduced to burning wood to keep warm in winter.
The short con: Environmental ethics, the other team is illogical.
The long con(Nuclear Lobby): Those that support nuclear have invested and given subsidies to their respective industries disregarding the fact that it is not that safe. The definition of safety is based on the insurance which if I recall was capped at 100mil and the rest is insured by peoples taxes if something happens. If it wasn't capped the concept of nuclear would not be feasible.
The long con(Non nuclear Lobby aka Germany): The previous German counselor (whose politics as I see them from afar where mostly based on human sentiment except when against industry) overshot anyone's assumption of the feasibility of a non nuclear policy and subsidized heavily non nuclear. Then they tried to support by European Lobbying and legislation. The whole thing backfired and they need to buy energy from abroad which has caused a steep increase in prices and a passive policy against Russia. So natural gas needs to also be defined as "kind of environmental" or Germany has no real policy. If it works, and since they are the entry of natural gas for Europe, they can friction everybody towards any policy that makes sense in the future.
Also: The environment something something (I have phased out, EU or any large country does not plan based on ethics, just based on short term reelection goals).
Also 2: EU refused to pre agree with Russians for natural gas prices and the gas price skyrocketed forcing more environmental policy that smaller countries in EU must adopt early. French threw a wrench in German's works who are exposed to their non nuclear investments. Also somehow Russians fault? Sure...
Also 3: Two actual targets of environmental policy: Reduce gas emissions, Reduce nuclear meltdown danger. Pick and choose depending on which country's media you are exposed to and their respective owners financing.
Also 4: 30% increase in non service production due to covid did not help prices I assume.
Guess: They will find an understanding somewhere in the middle, they are financially exposed, which means politically exposed and no one will remember after the a new round of articles from the media. In the meantime we are paying for no reason.
If it's adopted to any extent it will need a lot more than that.
Not since they banned it, resulting in a lot of the hash power moving abroad. Only 20% or so that stays underground.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/18/chinas-underground-bitcoin-m...
Unfortunately it isn't. Do you trust the Financial Times, Reuters and Forbes? They're not exactly some treehugger fanzine.
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcontent%2...
(necessary to remove paywall)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tedknutson/2022/01/20/crypto-en...
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/kosovo-bans-cryp...
If anything, it helps suppliers monetize the load which would otherwise be wasted, like unexpected peaks in solar or wind production.
IF it happened that crypto mining drives electricity prices up, the economy would reach a new balance with mining included.
In any case, crypto mining pays carbon tax as any other industry. If I get sound money in exchange, I agree to pay the transaction fees, which will in turn offset those expenses.
You can easily tell which chain has the most work sacrificed, but if a netsplit occurs with a proof-of-stake protocol, it is vulnerable to a Sybil attack hijacking consensus with, say, a botnet.
This is not ahppening at all, so not sure why you mention completely absurd scenarios.
When deciding on the wisdom of adopting a technology that will shape our fate for the next century you don't condition on the best (or even expected) scenario, you condition on the worst plausible scenario.
For a long as we haven't solved our obvious and serious socio-economic pathologies it is actually safer to keep burning carbon. At least that damage is in-principle reversible.
One would think "green" movements (greenpeace, and modern green parties) have been infiltrated by coal/oil/gas lobbies as so far the only winner out of no nuclear yes wind policy is Vladimir Putin and not the environment
Solar is today 5x less expensive than it was in 2010[1].
---
[1] https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication...
That something this simple is never talked about when it comes to renewables is a monument to peoples ability to ignore the obvious.
Also, if you could please stop posting flamewar comments in the first place, that would be good, because it's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
Also much of the price reduction for renewables are in things like solar which has other issues like it's shorter lifespan paired with it's recycling being basically a joke/scam.
Additionally if you throw a solar panel or windmill in the trash before it's proper and well done the cost of it's energy in the calculation goes up just the same.
The shorter lifespan of PV is actually a good thing for solar. In an environment where technology is changing rapidly, long lifespan has little value. Would you think it's a huge negative if your PC fails after 20 years instead of 40? No, because you replace it before then anyway. Pretending that nuclear is better because its value is computed based on a 40 year lifespan is just pretending that its competitors will stop improving (otherwise, the nuclear plant won't even make it to 40 years due to operating costs > full cost of renewables.)
The problems with it's recycling are a bit more inherent than that.
>The shorter lifespan of PV is actually a good thing for solar.
It's downright silly to say that PV degrading is good for it. The improvements don't stop because they have to be replaced quicker. More people would adopt it if they lasted longer since the ROI is higher, etc I might replace my pc in less than a decade but I'm not jumping to get on a roof again and invest 10's of thousands of euros.
It also means PV is less at risk right now from obsolesence. The shorter the time span needed to justify a PV installation, the less motivation there is to delay and wait for better technology.
Given that it still ends up the best from a cost perspective (solar doesn't come close) if extended marginally i wouldn't say so.
There is one core difference. Those extensions, investments and even proper use need political will given the size and scope of such projects. Those politicianse are subject to stupidity and lobbying. Hell the US bans fuel rod recycling at the behest of oil and gas companies to give one such example.
[1] https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/12/23/solar-panel-waste-a-d...
[2] https://www.irena.org/publications/2016/Jun/End-of-life-mana...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...
It's about the choices that led to shutting down nuclear instead of coal, oil and the green-lighting of gas projects.
If we were serious about our co2 predicament the conservation and refurbishment of nuclear capacity would be as high as a priority as taking fossil fuel plants offline.
And then after electricity production related emissions has dropped to virtually zero we could have a great discussion on how to go forward.