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Comment by DrBazza | Hacker News Reader

From my aged perspective, this is reaping the "green benefit" from the 70s and 80s, when there were world wide activists campaigning against nuclear power for "reasons" (largely the Cold War). If you think green activists are something new, it's because you're "young".

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.

View on HN

The fossil fuel industry has had no better friend over the past 50 years than the "green" movement. It has worked so well to keep the dirtiest most polluting coal power generation viable that they could not have paid to get better lobbyists.

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.

> 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...

"In 1970, a leader of the petroleum industry and the head of the Atlantic Richfield Co. named Robert O. Anderson contributed $200,000 to fund Friends of the Earth, an organization that is strident in its opposition to nuclear energy, citing both safety and cost issues."

Why am I surprised at learning this?

I am actually surprised that the article doesn't provide more examples. The article argues that the fossil fuel industry is paying the antinuclear movement and the single, one example given is a onetime payment in the 70s to start a new organization by a private person. Sure, everyone requires different levels of evidence, but I heavily doubt that you will be able to convince anyone with that one. And then the rest of the text is about how renewable are (as of 2016) so much smaller than the loss in nuclear power.

Well they did the same with "climate scepticism" too, so it's from the playbook.

Another fun one: Greenpeace is a natural gas energy provider in germany (proWindGas)

Yeah of course they are, I was being a bit sarcastic (but also don't know how people here would cope with such "conspiracy theories").

This is not the only area of alignment. The green movement has been pushing for "recycling" of plastics for the last decades. This is a big gift to the oil industry, that has been able to rely on a grassroots movement to put the burden of getting rid of plastic garbage on individuals through "recycling".

Agreed. In "The New Climate War" climate scientist Michael Mann charts the history of polluters convincing the green movement that it should be the responsibility of ordinary citizens to change their behavior rather than polluters. He opens with the "crying Indian" campaign in the 70s--sponsored by the soda industry--to convince people to throw away their bottles in order to avoid legislation that would curb their own profits. Nowadays, "environmentalists" try to persuade people toward veganism and away from SUVs as though these things are (1) ever going to happen en masse or (2) put us anywhere near the necessary ballpark even if (1) happens.

Veganism is funny. Some vegan food, such as avocados and certain nuts (cuisine definition; not botanical) such as almonds require a lot of water to grow, and also there's the transport problem. Although that one's a paradox: a transport ship might seem like its terrible for the environment, but its actually quite efficient compared to an airplane or every customer using their car to drive to the grocery store (though via local consumption it can be avoided). In this respect, individual responsibility matters, you can make a difference in various ways. Don't use fast shipping by airplane even if you can easily afford (only do it by exception), you can also sometimes pick train (e.g. from China, via Russia to Europe). You can do grocery shopping perhaps by bicycle instead of car. Other non-vegan food, where no animal got farmed (a free range chicken a family holds) is thrown away or not eaten (even though it was already produced), foods with trace elements (e.g. milk sugar) is avoided, foods with by-products such as gelatin or whey is avoided. But they drive in a train powered indirectly by coals (electricity network), or use a bus with tires made from pigs. And that's somehow fine (as long as they don't know it). What it boils down to is impact of choice, and simplicity of implementing it. Avoiding eating meat is a lot easier than avoiding any animal (by)products, therefore I find veganism self-defeating, and a luxury (first world) problem as well. No normal, average human being is going to have time to care enough about this issue to put the effort in it, its unreasonable. What works? Taxation, for example. If I'd drive a SUV instead of something small like a Ford Ka or Nissan Kia then I'd be paying a lot more per km on fuel, and for what gain? Its not worth it for me. But Americans barely pay any tax on their fuel.

Why would you say something so controversial, and yet, so true?

> 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).

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.

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

But it doesn't matter anyway - wind and solar should complement to nuclear, not to replace it.

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...

No, nuclear plants are regularly taken offline for weather related reasons.

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.

> No, nuclear plants are regularly taken offline for weather related reasons.

As someone who lives in Ontario, Canada, where we have 10,000 MW of nuclear (click "Supply"):

* https://ieso.ca/power-data

This does not happen here.

Probably because Ontario has ample access to water cooling, probably from the lakes. That's not the case for many countries in Europe.

No doubt. But it's important to differentiate "inherit" limitations of a technology versus situational ones.

Plenty of EU countries have coast lines too.

Yeah, and they have floods, too (Re: Fukushima). I'm a proponent of nuclear fission energy (to complement solar/wind/hydro) but it has to be done safely. Hopefully in the future we don't have to rely on it (switch to nuclear fusion or something else), or solve the nuclear waste issue somehow.

Green energy and nuclear are in different product categories. They are in no way comparable. It's like trying to compare an electric scooter to a work truck. This is because green energy is mostly fine for transient demand, but at this time, is completely unsuitable for base load applications. Nuclear is a base load product (base load pricing is quite expensive) and needs to be far more reliable. Its failure modes are such that we can build a reliable energy grid around it, and have done for decades. You can't say the same for green energy (right now) as evidenced by its multiple failures as of late, which is now responsible for decreasing the security of Europe.

In 2021 there are only two useful types of power: cheap power and peak power, and nuclear is neither.

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.

The crisis in Europe and elsewhere shoots holes in the theory that baseload is somehow no longer applicable. Baseload is not cheap particularly because it must be very reliable (and is more expensive), and is why green energy alone is too variable and completely insufficient at present to replace other baseload providers.

Peak power has to be reliable or you get brownouts.

Baseline power can be unreliable because peak power will cover the unreliability.

The assumption embedded in that line of thought is that the failure modes (and times) of peak and baseline power will never significantly overlap. Essentially, by injecting more variance and different types of uncertainty, frailty and the chance of systemic failure are increased (as shown in Europe), especially regarding second and third order effects.

How about something like an SLA for 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.

There are a number of issues: 1) Short term, the faster we avoid CO2 the better. If SLAs make that more complex, then it is a net loss. Long term, the situation will be different because cheap gains will be gone.

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

> 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.

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...

Technically that is true. Economically, that means that if a nuclear power plant runs for significant amount of time at 50%, the price of electricity will almost double.

> No, nuclear plants are regularly taken offline for weather related reasons.

Do you have a source for this?

Nuclear plants use water from a local river, or sea, for cooling. Or some plants use air and have cooling towers. Nuclear plants are also tightly regulated by law. So there is a limit on how warm cooling water the plant is allowed, as per environmental regulations, to release into the river, or to the sea.

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.

I'm not debating the mechanisms; I'm after a source that hopefully reliably cites the frequency and severity of it. Wind and solar power drop to zero regularly, as we would expect. If nuclear does the same, then the comparison is totally valid. If it's something else then the comparison becomes less valid or invalid.

https://www.google.com/search?q=nuclear+power+warm+summer

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-021-00849-y

https://sci-hub.se/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-02...

Why are you so keen to defend one particular power production method on one narrow stat?

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.

I'm not keen to defend anything. I know this can seem unusual, but I'm just trying to understand the situation as well as possible. I'm not treating any option as a team to blindly cheer on.

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.

Why can't they just refrigerate the water before releasing? Nothing too crazy just a few degrees. Run it through cooling pipes are something to dissipate the heat.

They could evaporate some of the water to cool the rest. This is why many nuclear plants in the US have cooling towers. But cooling towers consume water, and are fairly expensive.

I found this article : https://energyforhumanity.org/en/resources/reports-en/effect...

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%

Thanks. This doesn't sound appropriate to compare with how weather affects most renewables.

Every summer in France

That sounds good, predictability is what you want when designing a power grid.

Source? Is this inherent in all nuclear plants, or only in certain designs?

It happens all the time;

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.

All designs that take water from rivers and return it there. There usually is a regulation for the maximum water temperature in the rivers, so during the summer they can't heat up the water as much, leading to lowered energy output to the point where they have to shutdown some or all reactors of a plant.

That doesn’t imply that nuclear plants regularly get close to this threshold nor that it’s common for all nuclear plants of this type (consider 2 identical plants positioned on differently-sized rivers: the larger river will be able to absorb more heat than the smaller river, ergo reliability of this sort varies).

It's not just the river's ability to absorb the heat, it's also the plant's design criteria. The river water is the coolant in the secondary loop, warm water obviously has less capacity to absorb heat, so the plant will either get hotter (not great!) or will have to slow down the reaction to produce less heat (also not great during the summer when demand is the highest!). This isn't just an environmental concern but a design problem.

Not OP but I google dit and found this [0] from almost 20 years ago. No mention of it being every summer though, and it was during a heat wave that disproportionately affected france.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/12/france.nuclear

In my country (Ukraine), 3 nuclear power plants out of 15 are competing with cities for fresh water because of drought.

I like the engineering of nuclear power plants, but I'm not particularly biased towards them over renewables.

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-...

Yeah. We need a better transmission grid before we can go to 100% renewables (balancing out Scottish wind with Spanish solar). But a better transmission grid is miles cheaper than nuclear, so it's still a no brainer.

Citation? In particular, small modular reactors are estimated to produce energy at a cost which rivals natural gas (but we can’t know for sure because anti-nuclear folks have prevented us from seriously testing it) which is almost certainly less than the cost of solar/wind and tens of thousands of km of massive copper cables.

> small modular reactors are estimated to produce energy at a cost which rivals natural gas

You'd be foolish to believe those projections from salesmen. NuScale's attempt at new reactors has already doubled in cost.

So let’s get our thumb off the scales and allow them to build their technology so we can find out it’s true price? It’s equally foolish to assume that the prices won’t fall over time as we optimize.

What do you mean by "thumb off the scales"? Elimination of nuclear regulation? I'm sure that would be politically sane. /s

If you were here in good faith, you would know that regulation isn't an all-or-nothing proposition.

I guess we just need omniscient philosopher-kings to tell us ahead of times which safety regulations were actually necessary. Is there R&D into crystal balls?

If you can't make good faith arguments, maybe your position isn't very strong?

I am asking you how one determines which regulations are actually necessary. Those of you making this "too much regulation" argument never seem to go into detail on that. 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. With nuclear, how many meltdowns are you willing to tolerate to get this experience?

Thank you, this comment seems constructive.

> 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.

> This is something that experts need to work out.

Experts put these regulations into place. To cancel regulations, we will need somebody who is opposite to experts.

No, regulators (bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry and other special interests) put the regulations into place.

So we have high operational costs but a lower capital cost for SMRs since we lose the size advantage of regular reactors. We then hope that these higher operational costs are offset due to the scale advantages of building many reactors. That's gonna require some huge cost savings?

You're making a lot of assumptions, including that the only difference between SMRs and older generation reactors is size. SMRs are also much simpler, with the express purpose of reducing operational costs. Maybe the operational costs would be higher, but we aren't going to know that without more robust analysis or--heaven forbid--trying out SMRs.

They will be a bigger part of the costs compared to current reactors. Which is normal because employment costs are high. It's a popular choice now because all the latest reactors in the west have huge budget overruns.

This is for America, I don't have anything to hand for Europe

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.

The us navy has been building SMRs for decades. Their reactors don't need to generally be refueled either since they use higher grade fuels and burn them in place for 30+ years. So, there are differences but mostly these aren't cutting edge designs, they are 50 year old concepts that have been studied and understood to death.

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.

> The us navy has been building SMRs for decades. Their reactors don't need to generally be refueled either since they use higher grade fuels and burn them in place for 30+ years. So, there are differences but mostly these aren't cutting edge designs, they are 50 year old concepts that have been studied and understood to death.

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.

> 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.

Exactly, the price of nukes are roughly 100% regulation at this point. nuscale spent $500M+ just pushing paperwork at the NRC in the US and still haven't built one. It wouldn't surprise me if the NRC required global asteroid strike mitigations, just in case. The fact that not a single NRC approved design has successfully been built, should tell you that they exist to drive the costs so high has to be economically unfeasible.

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.

Plus, you lose lots in transmission over such distances.

I might note for readers of you book recommendation that despite the title, James A. Mahaffey the author also wrote a pro nuclear book and was a contributor to Power to Save the World[1]. He's definitely in the pro-nuclear camp, and is an expert on nuclear control systems, having introduced digital/computer controls to the industry.

[1]https://www.amazon.com/Power-Save-World-Nuclear-Energy/dp/03...

If we're choosing power sources based on the amount of lies told about them, then I'm afraid renewables win on that metric as well.

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.

No one is making those arguments here so why bring them up? Unlike nuclear, that misinformation isn’t suppressing investment.

Because the person he was responding to was using anti-nuclear bad arguments as a reason for using nuclear. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander.

Misinformation isn't suppressing nuclear investment, the all too real cost of nuclear is.

I repeat: bad arguments aren’t a problem for renewables as with nuclear.

I reject your claim that bad arguments are hurting nuclear. Nuclear is in trouble because of devastating correct economic arguments.

Nonsense. If it weren't for FUD campaigns, nuclear energy regulations could be more lax (there's a huge chasm between the safety of nuclear and fossil fuels and no one had a problem with fossil fuel deaths for most of the last half century) and investment could continue in finding more economical designs. Note that various Asian countries are able to build and operate even older nuclear plants economically.

Nonsense right back at you. Nuclear with a normal level of regulation, with the same level of up-fuckery seen in other industries, would have eventually reached a level of safety, but only after a long string of nuclear accidents (just like as air transport required large numbers of crashes to achieve today's safety.)

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.

I don't buy this at all. First of all, even assuming these regulations were required at one time, it doesn't suppose that they're still needed today to keep nuclear reasonably safe--we could ostensibly lift much of that unnecessary regulation now that things are safe and allow nuclear to compete fairly.

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".

> The real actual nuclear power, which is better than coal, but not particularly competitive with modern renewables

“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.

You have invented a fictitious enemy in your own made up "culture war" to rage and rail against what you believe is the one true answer. Thousands of hectares of pristine remnant bush are bulldozed to move, note not install, move, wind turbines into place. Nobody blinks an eye when thousands of hectares of remnant bush gets covered in solar panels. I'm the greenest person I know, a self identifying eco-facist. And I want a nuclear power station in every suburb. And so should you, if you gave a rats arse about the actual environment, and not some fake "war" raging in your meme-space while actual living things get ground into dust in the actual real world.

That sounds really deranged.

> No, nuclear plants are regularly taken offline for weather related reasons.

Could you please expand on this? What is the ideal uptime for a nuclear plant vs wind/solar?

They don't. They explicitly compete for the same spot, the cheapest most inflexible power generation. Nuclear obviously loses here and are pushed closer to the peaker side and is hampered by the insanely costly initial investment. The closer to peaker you are the more you want the price to only be operating costs.

dunno why this got down voted. Nuclear is a terrible peaker tech and yet pairing it with solar/wind requires it to be flexible and so you end up overproducing.

There isn't a perfect scalable peaker / clean generation tech unfortunately but storage does the trick instead.

Agree completely.

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).

> 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.

Unless, of course, the weather is an earthquake followed by tsunami.

Or political weather.

Although a bunch of solar panels or wind turbines on the coast that are washed away by a tsunami isn't reliable either. Or when there's no wind or sun.

If it takes a tsunami to turn off a nuclear plant, it's about as reliable as it can be.

"Do everything" is wrong. This is why: You want the most power per dollar of capex, and you want to have it come on line as fast as possible. Electricity is fungible. You can't tell a coal watt from a solar watt from a nuke watt. If you want to avoid coal, oil, and gas for externalities, you want the thing that costs the least and arrives soonest. That's renewables.

Every dollar spend on nuclear would deliver more power sooner if spent on renewables.

Except you can't just invest it all into renewables and expect to have a stable power grid, the equation isn't quite as simple as "avg_power / $ capex". Last analysis I saw of this argued that the amount of "over-provisioning" needed to cover baseline demand with renewables made them prohibitively expensive as the sole solution. Peaker and storage solutions aim to solve that, but you need to build that capacity in addition to renewables.

Here's a fully costed plan to green the grid.

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.

Renewables are nowhere near to running up against the need to buy more grid interconnection, storage, synfuel technology, or other ways of using surplus power and providing power from storage or from other regions.

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...

The main power grid should be always from a predictable source. wind and solar are far from that. And there's the problem of disposing solar panels and old wind turbines. We came a long way, but there's a lot of space for improvements. Meanwhile, nuclear energy is a stable and mature technology.

There is no need for a base load source to supply a base load of demand. Intermittent sources + storage to fill in the gaps can work just fine. The new thing is that this latter approach is looking like it will be cheaper.

Im no expert on batteries, but I don't see giant watery banks working in large scale, in most cities in the world. Today the better way to store energy still is with water reservoirs, and its expensive as hell, and you need a gigantic space that will be flooded.

That’s a LOT of batteries…

The world is going to spend maybe a quadrillion dollars on energy over the next century. Big problems have big solutions.

Why build a bajillion batteries with all sorts of hazardous chems if we can do nuclear that has small amounts of waste.

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.

Physics couldn't care less about your "big solutions".

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 implication that physics prevents renewables and storage from being able to do the job is a 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. 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.

> The implication that physics prevents renewables and storage from being able to do the job is a despicable lie.

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.

So, this was your argument

"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?

This is very high in emotion but low on content.

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.

The energy density argument is nonsense. The energy density of batteries is perfectly fine for grid storage. The area taken up by batteries for diurnal load leveling of renewables is a small fraction of the land area of the renewables themselves. This is also true of many other energy storage schemes. Even pumped hydro is not constrained by land area in many parts of the world (off river pumped hydro, mind you).

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.

> I also see no reason to believe that is true

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.

It's not my responsibility to believe your unjustified claims.

There also a slow revolution coming in nuclear energy of small, modular reactors, that are easier to maintain, produce less waste and are safer.

well, don't you get more solar power in the summer?

seems like that can minimize seasonal storage requirements once higher level of renewables are in the grid

Solar panels are less efficient when they get warm.

> 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.

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.

> Still only make up little more than 10% of global electricity generation

Only? Not very long ago that stat was less than a percent, if it was mentioned at all.

Only. When was it less than a percent? 20 years ago?

About 10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States

About 2/3rds of new capacity being added in 2022 is renewable: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50818

That's not going to solve climate change is it? It's not even reducing existing fossil fuel installations let alone providing all new energy requirements. Like a real nuclear effort could have.

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.

They're building 2 nuke plants worth of solar and 1 plant worth of wind in 2022. In a single year. That'd be about $100B if it was nuclear. Given that it takes about 20 years to build a nuke, that means 60 plants being built simultaneously, total cost $2T. That would never happen.

Who is they? And are you talking about the total generating capacity? 3 nuclear plants per year is laughable compared to what needs to be done. It's barely enough to maintain the greenhouse gas footprint let alone reduce it significantly.

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.

That's exactly my question. In this magical world where nuclear power regulations are similar to coal power regulations, who is going to spend the tens of trillions of dollars necessary to partially solve the climate change crisis with nuclear plant?

The same people who spent money to provide much of France's electricity with nuclear. The ones who built Japanese and American and Russian and Canadian and Chinese nuclear plants.

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.

I've often wondered about those % measurements of electricity generation. Because of high variability balancing wind/solar is apparently tricky since rarely is storage capacity built along with the wind/solar (I kinda wish that subsidies focused on that). So... of that 10%, how much of it is excess power that had to be soaked up wherever a place could be found to dump it, and or rapid ramping down of base generation, causing waste. It's probably a hard thing to calculate though.

> 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.

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.

How about:

* 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.

Germany is shutting down coal power plants, not just nuclear. Last year eight lignite fired plants and ten hard coal fired plants were shut down. A total of 7.6 GW, compare that to the 4.3 GW of nuclear that was also shut down last year.

Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ausstieg_aus_der_Kohleverstrom...

Would they have been able to shutdown coal/gas faster if the nukes were kept running? If the 4.3 GW of nuclear was still around, how many more plants—with their corresponding CO2 emissions—could have been eliminated?

Could Germany reduce its dependency on Russian gas with more nuclear?

> Would they have been able to shutdown coal/gas faster if the nukes were kept running?

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.

> Nobody is going to invest in building a new nuclear power plant that may or may not enter operation in 15-20 years.

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".)

Even the old plants would require investment for modernisation.

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.

Probably, but they like gas, Germany have decided that gas is somehow renewable.

The plan is to replace it with electrolyzed Hydrogen

Right, you're a logical person, this is how logical people that care about the environment would do it. I can't explain why the people in power don't naturally come to this conclusion, unless I account for corruption, then I can make sense of it.

Why is it false?

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.

I'm talking about absolute numbers here, not TWh, and I'm comparing to fossil fuels,

"Of any form of energy generation" you said.

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.

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.

Why does nuclear have a niche in a green future? I don't see it surviving. Locations with insufficient wind/solar will be supplied externally, either by grid or by transport of synthetic chemical fuels. Places like very high latitudes (where wind is often very good, btw) are so sparsely populated they cannot by themselves sustain a nuclear industry.

> Why does nuclear have a niche in a green future?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26673987

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603464

If we string solar plants all around the planet, the sunny side can always supply the night side.

> If we string solar plants all around the planet, the sunny side can always supply the night side.

Does this include stringing them across the Pacific Ocean, which covers thirty percent of the Earth's surface?

Awfully optimistic when we can't even get one 200-mile HV line greenlit after 10 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_–_New_England_Transmiss...

Building cables across the ocean raises much more demanding engineering problems but much less demanding political problems than building them across multiple states. You don't have to please a bunch of different regional governments and land owners when you're building across the ocean. If you have a government that can dictate national projects like in China you can build long cables over land even faster, but that political alternative also comes with its own problems (to put it mildly).

That would require world peace

And lossless energy transmission.

And several large floating sea cities full of engineers to maintain it all.

Naa, we use gigantic mirrows in space to bring light to the night side.

in theory SMRs don't need much maintenance so could work in these situations. And on the plus side, when they do melt down - not many casualties.

When the entire Railbelt grid in Alaska (the largest grid there) has an average load of 600 MW, there simply isn't much market for SMRs at high latitudes.

> Nuclear fits in locations with insufficient wind and solar resources and provides reliable base supply.

So remote islands basically (places not worth adding to a super grid). Fair enough. That's a very small niche though.

Is there currently any region in the world where wind and solar alone are capable of providing a reliable base supply?

Is that a rhetorical question? It sounds like an oxymoron.

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.

yes. plenty. north america, europe, china - to name three examples.

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.

You only need 3 hours worth of storage. 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.

I'm skimming this rightn now, but a quick question: do they take into consideration the space required by wind and solar farms?

Also, three hours of storage for a continental grid? Nice dream.

They don't take space requirements into consideration probably because it's trivial to dismiss. 40,000 square miles would provide enough energy to power the entire US with solar, in a country with 3.6 million of them. That's less than the space taken up by cemeteries.

And continental is what makes 3 hours possible. The wind is always blowing somewhere.

> They don't take space requirements into consideration probably because it's trivial to dismiss.

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)

The power generation capacity in the US is worth trillions. That kind of money is a magic wand that can makes obstacles like 40k square miles pretty trivial.

> 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.

>Also, three hours of storage for a continental grid? Nice dream.

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.

The UK normally gets 25% of their electricity from wind but just the other night they were only getting about 2.7% of the demand fulfilled by wind turbines. They had to start up coal plants to fill the gap.

I don't think over provisioning would fix that and you'd need about 12 hours of batteries to cover the shortage.

See for yourself.

https://model.energy/

I have conflicting data about deaths per TWh

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.

Its not conflicting data, its just the decade old numbers I mentioned in my comment.

The link I used used those numbers before they updated them with newer data.

> solar and wind are now beating nuclear and projected to continue to do so

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.

One nuke plant a week for 50 years sounds like a lot, but they aren't really that complex, and 52 a year isn't really that many construction projects worldwide. Your talking 2600 plants.

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.

Or, to give a counterexample.

You would need ~1.4 million barrels of oil per day for 50 years.

Guess what? - https://www.worldometers.info/oil/

edit: it is still weird to see Venezuela at the top spot and just how badly they squandered it

> the total power generated

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.

You can back that up with combustion turbines. The cost/watt of a simple cycle combustion turbine powerplant is just 5% of the cost/W of a nuclear power plant (combined cycle, just 10%), so backing up the entire grid this way is cheap (in capital cost) compared to the capital cost of a nuclear-powered grid. If you don't use those turbines very often, the fuel cost is manageable, even if you use non-fossil fuels like "green" hydrogen. 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.

> You can back that up with combustion turbines.

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"

> So, back that up with burning natural gas.

You didn't read my whole comment there. One could use green hydrogen.

> 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

Yes, all of those are likely going to be true. Are they true at this instant? Maybe not, but a nuclear plant we start building today also won't be available at this instant.

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.

> Are they true at this instant? Maybe not, but

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 assume you're being sarcastic. Hydrogen can escape through solid metal, making it brittle in the process. It's cheap to produce from natural gas, but that's not green hydrogen. Green hydrogen is a lot more expensive. It's also very voluminous unless liquified which requires a ton of energy and refrigeration to maintain.

> I assume you're being sarcastic.

I am being extremely sarcastic, that's true :) For all the reasons you listed :)

You probably know, but "cheap hydrogen" is produced from natural gas... lol.

At present, with no CO2 fee. But this will not last.

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.

<i>Rooftop solar is still losing, but yes renewables in general are still competitive</i>

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.

> They aren't though

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.

> So first up, the stat is usually fatalities per TwH, since that skews things in Nuclear's direction

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.

Related to my above point, should it not be expected fatalities over the projected lifetime of whatever plant/turbine/etc.?

> 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,

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.

>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

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.

The problem is the nuclear construction is much more finicky.

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.

Exactly this. And even leaving out deaths and the high long-term environmental uncertainties of nuclear waste storage, solar and wind are already cheaper and will continue to get cheaper for the forseeable future.

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

Meanwhile nuclear plants come with months worth of energy storage, as fuel is storage.

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.

There's a solar panel field I go by occasionally. Last time I saw them, all the panels were covered in inches of snow. I guess nobody bothered clearing them off since we can have weeks go by without much if any direct sunshine in the winter, and windy days are equally infrequent.

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.

That's very anecdotal, I'm sure that most solar panels are not usually covered by snow.

You do realize that there exist countries where it snows regularly? When that happens, even if it’s just 1 week/year, you require battery capacity to cover that one week.

Panels are black, slick, inclined and warmer than ambient. Snow accumulation is generally not a problem.

Thanks for the link.

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?

Hey, I know that anti-nuclear views are not popular on HN. But instead of downvoting, why not engage with the data and facts that I linked to? If it's because of the funnily capitalized sentence, come on, don't take everything so seriously.

Your link is very light on facts. E.g how much cheaper batteries would need become to be competitive with gas/coal/nuclear and is that even possible with lithium batteries alone?

But how many millions of tons of soil do we have to shift to get the lithium for all these millions and millions of batteries, versus a few kilos of uranium?

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!'.

Yes, I agree that we need to include all costs. But, to my knowledge the costs presented in the link I sent to include all costs, e.g. here for batteries: https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth#batteries...

I'm not disagreeing that batteries are cost efficient, just pointing out that batteries aren't (natural) resource efficient.

Sure, but digging for Uranium isn't a walk in the park, either :-) I'm just pointing to the fact that if the data in the Our World in Data does in fact inclulde these costs for both our cases, then it's still clear that the costs of renewable + battery is cheaper than nuclear and still on a strong downward trend.

Nuclear is also the most expensive energy source (total cost per MWh). Which is the real reason why "Europe is losing nuclear power".

When finished the UKs Hinkley Point C nuclear plant will probably have cost around £23 billion for ~3.000 MW which is completely insane.

> 3.000 MW

Well those are 3000 real MW. Not 10% when the weather is good and 0 otherwise. And it can be piloted as needed.

Let's do some math. You can build a 3 MW wind turbine for around £2 million. Which means you could build around 11,500 wind turbines with the amount of money spent on HPC. Which in turn means a maximum production of 34,500 MW. So even under the assumption that these will run at below 10% of their capacity you're still producing more electricity than HPC. Now in reality this number averages around 30% actually. So the price per MWh is orders of magnitudes lower compared to nuclear.

This is still not equivalent because we haven't solved storage (peaky energy is not as valuable as constant energy) [and because you've compared build costs to total costs].

Bit in [] is false; apologies.

Yes, there needs to be more storage or backing by gas plants. But nuclear power needs the same gas plants as you cannot change the output levels quickly enough to drive the grid. In a sense, constant output is almost as bad for the grid as peak energy, which can easily be throttled. In both cases you need additional flexible plants or storage. In the moment, when there is true surplus renewable energy production, storage buildup will increase quickly.

Side note: electric cars will be a large part of the grid balancing in the future.

> 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.

Considering how much storage capacity becomes available when connecting cars to the grid - even if the part used for grid storage is only 10kWh/car (typical batteries have 70 or more kWh) - I would assume there will be a huge push by utility companies to get as much cars connected as possible.

Do the math on this too. How much storage would half of $21 billion buy?

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.

I really don't think this isn't about maths with money. People are constantly working on this as-yet unsolved problem. Those batteries aren't suitable. Perhaps some will be one day, and that will be the fix.

But in the meantime, the best option is nuclear.

this does the sums with storage (for a Georgia nuclear plant)

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.

I've compared the build costs of HPC to the build costs of wind turbines. Not total costs.

You're right. Will edit.

But! But. What's the source for the turbine build cost? Now I need to try and attack that :)

> 11,500 wind turbines

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.

The largest onshore windfarm has 240 wind turbines (https://www.wikiwand.com/en/F%C3%A2nt%C3%A2nele-Cogealac_Win...).

You can't just easily build 11500 wind turbines without huge impact on environment.

That’s not quite fair. If we were building 11,500 nuclear power plants their unit price would be much lower too.

Part of the problem is that nobody has built the things in the past 30-40 ish years.

Though falling prices would be intuitive, with nuclear that's been found to be false, both in the US and in France. Building subsequent versions of the same design increase in cost, rather than staying the same price or going down.

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.

If you build 11,500 nuclear plants they will have to be breeder reactors (or, we'd have to deploy 2 million square miles of uranium collector fields in the ocean if that could be made cheap enough to supply U for burner reactors.) We don't use breeders because they've proven to be more expensive than LWRs, not less expensive.

> £23 billion for ~3.000 MW which is completely insane

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?

Refueling outages last on average for about 2 months every 18-24 months, so it's never been "constantly" really.

And it's still the most reliable power generation method by far.

Well, might be. The question is though if it's worth a price orders of magnitude higher than competing energy sources. And most countries on this planet seem to have come to the conclusion that it is actually not worth the price. Now I am actually not particularly for or against nuclear power - just making the argument that it's not an economic source of energy anymore.

If it's not economically viable, then there's no need to regulate against it, as no one would build it.

However we see many governments blocking nuclear and even shutting down current plants. Why is that?

The already build reactors are the cheapest energy source. If you close reactor stupidly early, like 20-30 years after build, you're throwing out next 30-50 years of generation that cost basically nothing.

And unfortunately, of that £23bn, something massive percentage will be government "bureaucracy" for want of a better word. If nuclear power were properly commercialised it would be cheaper. The only analogy I can think of is cost of launches for SpaceX vs NASA or ESA. SpaceX had to be efficient and make a profit, they innovated, and now are the cheapest launches available by a huge margin. Governments are always interested in nuclear for "security" reasons.

The article indeed mentions modular commercial reactors.

It is very simple, nuclear has been a failure in Europe in the last couple of decades. Look at projects in the Finland, France and the UK. The situation would have been much better if there was a nuclear industry that could deliver in time and within budget.

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.

> 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.

Ultimately, this is about money.

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.

> Ultimately, this is about money.

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.

> 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.

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.

The problem we have is that in the past decade fossil fuel was way to cheap. This has now changed, but ramping up production of solar and wind takes a while.

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.

> what should we invest in to reduce CO2 emissions the most.

> And the answer is that building out wind/solar

Proofs?

The proof is that nobody is investing in keeping old nuclear power plants open. All over Europe. When those plants stay open it is governments paying for it.

In contrast, companies are now paying money to rent a piece of sea to put a wind farm in.

This is because nuclear can't fight with cheap coal and anti-nuclear propaganda: https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html.

>keeping them running becomes more and more costly

That's very unsourced meme. Surry Nuclear Power Plant will be running till 2050s - for 80 years without significant costs.

Agree 100%, but this isn't in the context of one or the other, it's in the context of doing the maximum of both.

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.

> 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.

Yet EU energy crises keep getting worse. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Could you be a bit more clear about your implication here?

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.

> It is very simple, nuclear has been a failure in Europe in the last couple of decades. Look at projects in the Finland, France and the UK. The situation would have been much better if there was a nuclear industry that could deliver in time and within budget.

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?

It seems to be a combination of nuclear becoming too high tech combined with not enough volume to maintain the technology.

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.

> 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.

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.

It's the other way around. Without wind and solar, Germany would produce a lot more CO2 than it produces today.

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.

https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...

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.

Sorry but no this is not what I call “very much”, nor “very well” as GP said. If you look at all the fossil bars (don’t forget the gas that would be too easy) it further prove my point that Germany really failed this decade and the trajectory is not looking good.

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.

Can you explain the 'not looking good' part?

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.

Well, nuclear power plants are not every easy to build. It takes time, knowledge, and experience. US/UK/French experience slowly degraded after this extended period of nuclear hatred. Now, when NPPs are cool again, they realised they lost core competences!

Note how Russians never stopped building NPPs so they do manage to build on time and within budget.

> the "brainwashing" of the public that unquestioningly accept that nuclear power is 'bad' and tightly linked to nuclear weapons and death.

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.

Fukushima wasn't that bad. Very little radiation was leaked and the max number of expected cancer cases expected based on conservative modeling is ~100, mostly of the treatable thyroid variety. Most of those people will likely die of other causes.

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.

Fukushima as a plant was also asking for trouble: "the earthquake had also generated a tsunami 14 metres...swept over the plant's seawall" (c) Wikipedia. 14 metres is a joke for a country where 40 metre tsunamis happen.

It is amazing how this could be built not taking high waves into account.

This what happens when politicians control the placement of nuclear plants. The scientist and engineers picked a much better location for the plant, but were overridden, and a political favor moved the location.

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.

Yeah, and even that would have been fine if backup power in plant one hadn't been in the basement. The other, newer reactors had above ground backup power. Either a taller wall or a generator in a shed would have prevented the accident.

Well, part of it is that there is a lot of FUD about nuclear. The impact of Fukushima accident is a grand total of 0 deaths.

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 !

> 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

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.

Nuclear had roughly 60 years to deliver clean, cheap and reliable energy. If it did all that, no amount of green lobby could have derailed it. Unfortunately, and I feel that deeply as an engineer, it did not achieve those goals.

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.

I don't know where you're from, but in France, we did it.

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.

Government subsidized.

> 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...

https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el... (International Energy Agency):

> 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.

Sure, when you disregard the initial investment cost and only look at the marginal nuclear is among the cheapest. Although still being undercut by new investments in renewables nowadays.

That is the issue at hand, building new nuclear is not only marginal cost, it is mostly fixed costs and a unfathomable initial investment.

The question is rather: how do you expect to get rid of nuclear energy production in the coming century AND reduce CO2 emissions AND not get energy blackouts and prices soaring to unimaginable levels?

France did it

"so the only ones willing to eat the risk are states."

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.

In the UK, every single time there's been a proposal for a reactor, there are local protests, and CND/Greenpeace turn up en masse. There's been no opportunity to deliver 'cheap' energy in terms of up-front cost, because there are so many artificial hoops to jump through - legislation, planning, and so on.

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.

Thanks for calling us brainwashed.

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)

If you would let somone collect #2 ;)

For sure I can understand that maybe nuclear power plants from the 70s don't have the best security for today's standards. But based in the technology leap from the 70s until today, I can imagine that a nuclear power plant being built today are much safer than those from the 70s. And you are right, death numbers by nuclear energy accidents is much smaller than with Nuclear. UN says that not more than 50 person died in Chernobyl[1]. In Fukushima: 0[2].

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...

[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56252695

All those things may be true, but they still count against nuclear energy. Lack of public support and lack of continuous development make building capacity more difficult to deploy in the present. Technical superiority is not enough.

ironically, that same could now be said about our gas crisis in Europe, where we handover immense leverage into the control of Russia.

Nuclear power is not a solution to climate change. It would bind too many resources (which are also finite in economical quantities). Last year the first permanent storage worldwide opened, it is not a solved problem. Nuclear processing plants have elevated cancer rates around their location and it is still legal to dumb contaminated water into the ocean. It was only restricted for barrels.

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

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

It is important to mix your energy, but it is an insufficient argument.

https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-thr...

The technology for addressing baseload exists: renewables, batteries, and long term chemical storage (like hydrogen). All these exist, it's just a matter of pushing the costs down via deployment and experience.

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.

Part of the problem with Nuclear is tax payer exhaustion. Every time they build a plant it take 10-20 years longer and cost over runs are in the billions. And then you have costly refurbishment that runs into the billions and takes half a decade longer than anticipated. It's a shit show from day one until they finally shut it down 20 billion $$$ later...

even then it's still a shit show because someone has to play for cleanup and storage and the nuclear company usually goes conveniently bankrupt soon after they stop producing energy.

> has been responsible for smallest number of deaths of any form of energy generation

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.

> 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.

There's no small irony that after Chernobyl, all evidence is that animal life has actually thrived in spite of the radiation, and if anything, the most sensitive species to radiation is us. Another commenter has already pointed out that there is vastly more radioactivity in the sea than anything we can add.

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.

There's 4.5 Billion metric tons of uranium in the ocean already.

https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6191296

You need to include the risk, cost, and near and long term consequences, of catastrophic failure in your analysis. That may alter the conclusion that N.E. is 'the least worst option'.

> 'bad'

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.

The alternative is producing emissions from coal and oil which we just dump into the air.

Nuclear is far and away the less harmful solution.

The alternative is to switch to renewable energy and storage faster

I wonder how much of the green movement of that era was supported by the Soviets, who had obvious motives for undermining nuclear research in the West. I could be that even long after the USSR has been wiped away that its influence remains.

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. So I guess experiencing this first hand made a huge impact for many people. Personally I don't have a very strong opinion on nuclear (neither positive nor negative) but I also believe that you can't simply take these experiences away from people and it would be wrong to invalidate them.

>> I wonder how much of the green movement of that era was supported by the Soviets, who had obvious motives for undermining nuclear research in the West. I could be that even long after the USSR has been wiped away that its influence remains.

> 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]

And now you know why Russia supports Green Party in many countries. Such support can advance many geopolitical goals, from undermining the party opposed to your interests, e.g.,[1], to undermining forms of energy opposed to your interests, as here. How convenient is it for Russia that Germany could really use the nuclear power that was removed in no small part to strong opposition lead by the Green Party, and just as Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline is nearing completion, tying Germany's entire economy to paying Russia for energy for the next few decades? It is not a coincidence.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/russians-...

You are incorrect. They are advocating against the greens and support the social democrats, because of gas gerd. Google it

That's only one example, in a voting system that is easily gamed with vote-splitting. Do you have any more examples to show us? You mention Germany, well in that country the best buddies of Putin are the previous Christian democrats and the socialists, while the biggest opponents are the greens under the leadership of Annalena Baerbock.[1]

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/25/world/europe/germany-russ...

Yes, the RUS support does seem to have switched, they were supporting DE Greens in the past, not sure why the change, haven't followed it closely enough. Maybe damage (to nuke industry) already done, and they needed to amp up support for importing fossil fuels, which wouldn't be credible for Greens to support. As far as I can tell, it's all opportunistic, laying groundwork for whatever might work in their favor. Since I don't have copies of the checks, it is also possible that the Greens merely played the role of Useful Idiots (in the V. Lenin definition) and happily helped with RUS goals.

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