Nuclear power may be the key to least-cost, zero-emission electricity systems
carnegiescience.edu
carnegiescience.edu
"Previous studies have shown that curbing 80 percent of carbon emissions can be achieved by ramping up wind and solar power harvesting installations"
and
"To nail down that last 10 or 20 percent of decarbonization, we need to have more tools in our toolbox, and not just wind and solar,"
The "more tools" may be nuclear or it may be storage, depending on the cost of both technologies in the future:
"Added Caldeira: “Our analysis looked at the cheapest way to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions assuming today’s prices..at today’s price, nuclear is the cheapest way to eliminate all electricity-system carbon emissions nearly everywhere...if energy storage technologies became very cheap, then wind and solar could potentially be the least-cost path to a zero-emission electricity system.”"
IMO, it seems too early to bet on either, so carry on developing both until more data is available.
There will never he "just renewable" power grid due to renewables intermittency. The realistic options are renewables + some other energy source, or renewables + a lot of storage.
Renewables + storage has a problem: energy storage at scale is not a solved problem at all, either it is hard to build (pumped hydro) not scalable (batteries) or barely in PoC stages (various air storages and trains going uphill or whatever).
Renewables + other energy source has the problem of "what is the other energy source" and right now, that is fossil fuels - there's a lot of greenwashing going on with natural gas, for example, which is as bad as coal with regards to carbon due to all the methane escaping along the way.
Now the argument here is that without the storage being available, there has to be other energy source and in that case, the other energy source should be nuclear. Because the storage just doesn't exist so if the other energy source is not nuclear, it is going to be coal and gas.
But of course, people are just going to ignore the situation and parrot FUDs like "nuclear is too expensive" and "what about the waste", effectively pushing for coal and gas.
Fengning cost $1.8 billion for 3.6 gigawatts and took about 7 years to build.
Hinkley point C will be about $30 billion dollars for 3.2 GW and will take about 10 years to build.
Even prima facie I don't see how building a nuclear power plant could seem easy compared to pushing water uphill.
I've no idea whether it's representative, but I know a construction project where the labour costs were 12% of the final bill. That Hinkley Point project mentioned spends about $8m per day, how much does a construction worker cost per day in that area?
5 days' worth of nuclear power plant's output's worth of storage is 384 GWh. Assuming coire glas prices, $1.3 billion*384/30 maxes out at $16.6 billion or roughly half a hinkley.
That also gives max output of 19.5GW that is fully dispatchable as compared to 3.2GW which comes out whether you need it or not (& must still be paired with storage/gas to match demand).
Lowering the power rating will lower the cost of the pumped storage.
Wind energy is currently about 1/3 the price of nuclear, so assuming 5-6 day lulls it still comes out break-even at the very least.
Until you consider insuring against $800 billion fukushima style clean up costs. If we properly accounted for the cost incurred by insuring against this risk we'd never build another nuclear plant ever again.
So if you have a wind lull that lasts several days you may run into issues unless you have a lot of pumped storage.
This seems to think that there are 100x as many topogrophical options as are required under pessimistic circumstances.
It should be done everywhere it can be done cheaply but it's still no viable alternative
I'm guessing that the big problem today is that there isn't a large price difference between night and day. I'm sure you can find an old mine with enough land to build a ground-level water reservoir above it, but you can't buy nearly free solar power at noon and sell expensive power at night.
Once there's enough solar/wind power generation capability to cover its needs on average days, there'll be cheap power to be had for anyone who who can use power only when the sun is shining brightly or the wind blowing strongly. At that point the economics of these schemes may make sense, and it may be worth someone's while to try to solve the practical/legal problems.
* Newer wind turbines produce power a lot more consistently (being taller).
* There's a huge amount of cheap, low hanging fruit with respect to demand shaping that we've barely scratched the surface of. E.g. aluminium smelters in germany dont particularly care about having a constant source of power they just want cheap. They dial up and down with the spot cost. Smart storage heaters can displace gas heaters. Cars can be programmed to charge when electricity is cheap.
* You dont actually want a source that produces constant power you want supply to match demand.
* Week long lulls in the wind on a contiental level are actually pretty rare (& tend to happen in summer when solar output peaks). Added to which, offshore lulls tend to line up with onshore peaks and vice versa.
* Nuclear power involves taxpayers buying an option out on potential cleanup costs ($800 billion in Japan).
* Non-nuclear renewables get built a lot quicker than nuclear, are not subject to budget/timetable overruns and are likely to continue plunging in price.
But absolutely, better despatch, better demand shaping, and better storage would all be awesome. I hope we can get storage cheap and prolific enough to avoid the need for nuclear entirely.
There are industrial processes that need natural gas as part of the chemical reaction, so there will always be a market for it. Using natural gas for electricity or heating is definitely not "green" or renewable.
[0] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/where-our-na...
On the contrary, in principle there can be. However, even though a napkin estimate says it’s orders of magnitude cheaper, there are a lot of new and exciting problems with building an intercontinental power grid.
And I keep thinking I need to make a video or a blog post about why beamed power is a terrible idea for Earth, but again, technically it’s a way to avoid storage.
But enough batteries for cars is also enough for a renewable grid, so it’s probably not important.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
Renewable would only work if we stopped our quest for constant growth, which won't happen any time soon, in the meantime it's 90% marketing: "keep consuming it's green"
Storage doesnt really make economic sense until gas is consistently priced according to the environmental damage it does or wind starts massively overproducing.
Of course, nuclear makes little economic sense if you factor in disaster insurance, but nobody does. Nuclear power is simultaneously too dangerous for private insurers to touch with a barge pole and also apparently too safe for us to worry about it.
The cost of maintaining nuclear arsenals/submarines/etc. explodes without a nuclear industry so the UK, US, China, France, etc. are happy to throw oversized subsidies at it, let the taxpayer insure it all and run PR campaigns about how only it can save the planet.
...all while glaring angrily at Germany for turning off coal plants "too slowly" while slyly ignoring that Japan is turning a whole hell of a lot of them on.
What will happen if a fission reactor is blown as a result of warfare (by a bomb or missile)? Is it Chernobyl-grade hazard or not? Also, how strongly does the danger correlate with reactor size?
I also don't think a plane is comparable to warfare in this aspect, a falling plane is an accident (or a relatively cheap act of terror), a missile can be a ballistic one, I don't think you can protect anything above ground from targeted destruction intent
The ramp-up time on reactors is just too long, the capital investments too big, and the reactors themselves too inflexible. Combined with the lack of appetite from the public for new reactors, it's just not worth it.
Just like how wind and solar became cheap and widespread over the last decade, grid-scale energy storage is going to be the big change in the energy market over the coming decade.
Surprisingly, it's going to be the fossil fuel industry that will make it happen, because they have the money and the will, and because selling green hydrogen and gas turbine electricity generation capacity allows them to transition to a low carbon future without changing their business model much.
Recent new construction of nuclear plants in the west has been fraught with boondoggle. The troubles with the Westinghouse AP1000 have been the most distressing to me personally, since the design was to be the conquering hero of the Nuclear Renaissance I was so excited about in nuclear engineering undergrad back in the mid-2000s. The July 2017 cancellation of the two AP1000s at VC Summer, the astronomical delays and overruns at Plant Vogtle, and the bankruptcy of Westinghouse were all devastating.
Non-problems?
If markets valued the low-CO2 nature of nuclear, they’d be doing better
Even in government owned nuclear plants (TEPCO) that don't have to optimize for profits we see these issues.
https://twitter.com/laydgeur/status/1433463215321669633/phot...
Renewables fluctuate. Nuclear is not great at scaling, and most reactors cannot be shut down without taking weeks and months for safe re-starting.
Nuclear is good for base load. And countries that have a lot of (really expensive) nuclear to cover their base load, have zero incentive to invest into renewables, since its output would just become surplus.
For broad adoption of renewables, we need to accompany it with (hopefully clean) solutions that can buffer and restore surplus energy efficiently and most importantly scale up and down really fast, to smooth out the fluctuations. Keeping a constant 50 Hz is becoming increasingly difficult with renewables.
In the past Austria used to store (nightly) surpulus energy from german nuclear reactors and (more recent also renewables) and getting paid to do so, to feed it into the own network and also selling abroad during daytime. This was stopped because it was putting a lot of strain on the north-south bottlenecks in the German power network, aggravated by large wind farms in the north, that became capable of covering the whole German power use for short periods of time.
Nuclear energy is green energy:
I won't adopt definitions forced by countries that also want natural gas plants to be categorized as "green" ("who cares what they emit?!")
I didn't say nuclear does generate CO2. I said it produces waste, and that I have a definition of renewable that does not include nuclear.
You first shifted the goalposts and said it is "green" (what is "green"?? who defines "green"?), citing sources. I discredited the sources, since it these are just announcements, made by (political) institutions, where politicians lobby for a re-labeling of certain energy sources, because it suits their agenda.
None of this makes nuclear "renewable" in my book.
IMO the world renewable implies something in the line of "self-regenerating"/"grows naturally"/"replenishes" and producing toxic waste in my world-view is orthogonal to that meaning.
And don't try to explain that nuclear waste is non-toxic, I think my interest in discussing this really ends there.
That's a design issue, not an inherent problem. There is no reason (other than cost) why the steam turbine can't be temporarily decoupled from the generator -- instant shutdown.
You could even design a generator where the rotor can be (partially) retracted from the stator coils. Retracting or inserting more of the rotor would give you continuously variable control over the conversion factor from steam pressure to electrical power.
If you ask 100 people, 99 will tell you that they rather live next to a solar panel or a silicon extraction mine than next to a nuclear power plant or a uranium mine.
If you ask 100 people, 99 will tell you they would rather buy new electronics every year and throw away the old, and they would rider drive a huge SUV than walk or bike.
That doesn't mean it's a good thing.
I don't think that's true.
Anyways. We are comparing nuclear, radioactive waste that has the potential to make whole areas of land unlivable for decades if it touches them and stays radioactive for a million years to cadmium, which is much less toxic than nuclear waste, has a shorter half life and in doesn't require us to find a solution to an unsovled problem to deal with it.
How can you seriously compare the two on the same level?
I'd guess that most people would rather live near a solar panel or a nuclear plant than a mine. One is potentially dirty and disruptive, the other IS dirty and disruptive.
At some point we'll have to chose the lesser evil, and most of the good rivers have already been dammed so more hydro isn't really the solution.
A combination of renewables, nuclear base power, reduced power needs, smart grid load management, and synth fuel production during peak production seems like the best bet for something that might actually work.
For now, we've got very few alternatives when it comes to base power generation. Biogas is probably one of the more interesting renewable power sources for base power (if we can ramp up production), but other than that, and leftovers from the wood industry, we're stuck at hydro and nuclear if we want to avoid fossil fuels. Last time I checked, there's no large-scale rollouts of modern power storage going on.
I am really tempted to call this one bullshit. I will admit that I just started reading about this topic half an hour ago because of this thread, so I may be wrong and I will happily change my mind if someone makes the case. I just skimmed the first page of search results for toxic solar panel waste. They mostly seemed rather negative, so I don't think I only got to see the white washed numbers. However most numbers seemed a bit dated, 2016 was a year I repeatedly came across. I will not provide sources as I really just skimmed the articles and collected the numbers.
Solar panels are recyclable but the costs of USD 20 to USD 30 per panel are considered prohibitiv. Doesn't seem to bad to me, it's not negligible but also not outrageous. High recycling costs are attributed to low recycling volume while on the other hand the problem is described as a gigantic pile of toxic waste. Europe seems to mandate the recycling because it is not economically attractive.
For 2016 I found a number of 11,000 tons of lead, I am neither sure for what geographical area nor whether it is cumulative or for that one year. On the other hand I found that in the European Union an estimate 100,000 tons of lead are annually introduced into the environment from sport shooting, hunting, and fishing.
Another thing that gets mentioned is silicon dust during production. Seems a manageable problem to me if we think we can manage the handling of radioactive compounds for nuclear plants. There is admittedly probably a difference in scale and volume, so this might have an impact. Nitrogen trifluoride also gets mentioned, especially because of its carbon dioxide equivalent of about 17,000. I did however not notice any numbers about the amounts used or released. But this again seems not like an unmanageable problem.
Cadmium is also usually mentioned, about one percent of the amount of lead, but there is not much more information than that it is carcinogenic. Finally rare earths are often mentioned and their limited supply, the production condition, and so on just as in the discussion of semiconductor and electronics manufacturing in general. If I am not misremembering the easily accessible supply of uranium ores is also quite limited, especially if one considers a substantial expansion of nuclear power production.
Recycling will, of course, bring the levels of waste down from old panels themselves, but we're still looking to replace a lot of fossil fuel-powered plants, and there's no way we'll get around the fact that we need more raw materials than we can obtain from recycling old panels. We'll also still get a lot of waste from the production of the new ones.
What are the toxic byproducts you are talking about specifically?
> The toxic fission byproduct is tiny and goes underground in the middle of the desert and disrupts zero people's lives.
Haha, if it were that easy. Nuclear waste can be radioactive up to 1 million years. Can you give me an example of a successful long-term nuclear storage facility that exists today? All we're doing currently is storing nuclear waste in temporary storage and rolling over the need to deal with this problem to future generations.
The article says least-cost, we're fresh out of perfect solutions.
Sure. The earth is full of radioactive material (also known as rocks) that have been 'stored' successfully for millions of years.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
There are natural deposits of radioactive material and there have been natural nuclear reactors on our planet.
You do understand that "long half-life" = "less radioactive", by definition?
It gradually approaches the ore level over time, which again makes sense, as the fission products are going to build back up.
The point here is that the uranium is going to decay no matter what you do, whether in the controlled environment of a reactor with some attention paid to proper disposal, or in the completely uncontrolled environment of the original ore bed, where it's quite possibly going straight into the water table.
Regardless, both those disasters were more or less man-made. Chernobyl was caused by serious design flaws, and (as far as I know) people who refused to admit something was wrong until it was too late. Fukushima was built below the line indicated by stones setup to warn about tsunamis. I don't think there's any doubt such considerations need to be taken into account when building the next-generation nuclear reactors.
[0]. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
Finland has one of the most advanced fission byproduct storages in the world and they are so freaking compact. Like, it's nothing like that green glowing substance they show in movies.
Oh, and they will make money on it fast forward few decades, that fission byproduct will be fuel for future generation stations.
> we don't want
We very much want (need) constant/on demand/large scale energy sources and renweables aren't up for that