What I find incredible is: Once this fully ramps up, this one power plant is expected to satisfy 14% of the entire country's electricity needs. 7 of these could power an entire country, 24/7.
"The Olkiluoto plant consists of two boiling water reactors (BWRs), each producing 890 MW of electricity, together comprising 22% of the country's electricity generation for 2020.[1] A third reactor, Unit 3, is expected to be online in January 2022, and at 1,600 MW, will by itself satisfy 14% of the country's electricity demand."
And many reactors are able to modulate their output, either by absorbing neutrons to slow the chain reaction, or by letting steam bypass the turbines.
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/3-ways-nuclear-more-flexi...
In any case, the cost/kWh from nuclear is computed assuming it's running flat out (except for refueling outages). Reduce that generation and the levelized cost increases. It's already very much higher than renewables; curtailing nuclear output would make that discrepancy worse.
Note that even some of the OPERATING costs of a nuclear plant are fixed. You still need about as many staff to run the plant even if you cycle it up and down.
The renewables will be wind and PV. Biomass uses too much land area, and would likely be reserved for specialty markets like chemical feedstocks and perhaps aviation fuel.
?? What renewable isnt given that?
Nuclear works when you want it to. Solar and wind work when they want to. That's a very big difference when you're producing the electricity people rely on to live their daily lives.
Hydrogen can be much cheaper for (say) the last 10%, because (1) hydrogen has very low capital cost per unit of storage capacity, and (2) the efficiency hit of going through hydrogen vs. batteries is less important when it's just 10% of the total.
Think of batteries and hydrogen as analogous to cache memory and main memory in a computer. They have different performance and economic characteristics and compensate for each others weak points.
To see this in operation, go to https://model.energy/ and try turning hydrogen off and on in the settings. If you simulate for Germany, for example, turning off hydrogen can double the cost of achieving a certain level of constant grid power. Hydrogen can be particularly valuable for places with large seasonal variation or lots of wind (which has a long timescale component in how it varies.)
I will add that China is already selling electrolysers for < $300/kW, less than half that simulation's 2030 cost assumption.
Basically all hydrogen comes from fossil fuels. It's just natural gas with extra steps.
When describing hydrogen for energy storage in a 100% renewable grid, the hydrogen would be produced by electrolysis using renewable energy.
I once compared a proposed pumped hydro system in Arizona near Phoenix vs. the water evaporated by the Palos Verde nuclear generating station. Per unit of levelized power output, the pumped hydro system used at least an order of magnitude less water than the nuclear plant.
If the panels don't mind settling on the banks, or if they are far enough offshore not to, that will not be a problem. It is already common to float panels on regular hydroelectric generation reservoirs, so the event is anyway familiar to operators.
If the floats are bottom-heavy and attached to cables spanning the reservoir, the water dropping out from under just leaves them suspended. You need cable attachments, anyway, to extract power and maintain spacing.
Nuclear provides a path for decarbonization. Solar and wind do not, until a massive breakthrough in energy storage is invented. And nobody knows when that will happen, or if it will happen.
As for storage, one way to "store" energy is hydrogen, which we can then burn as needed. We can probably get the efficiency of that to 70% (for hydrogen-burning larger-scale power plants).
Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is another existing option, with an efficiency of about 70-80%.
It's also OK to have some carbon emissions if you can manage to have other measures neutralizing that. We can e.g. use renewable biofuels (e.g. wood, biomass from algae or crops) which "use" a lot of carbon while growing to remove a lot of the emissions the power plants produce, and can with filter technology remove the rest to a degree where we'd still be neutral overall.
As I see it, we already got all the basic building blocks, and now it's a matter of optimizing them further and further, and more importantly figuring out the development and deployment (including financing, investment incentives, etc) and logistics (building the additional power lines required is a massive, politically-charged, often NIMBY-kind challenge here in Germany, and from what I hear in a lot of other places including the US too).
The deployment and logistics is a general problem of electrification, even with nuclear. People want to plug in their EVs near where they live, and want heat in their homes, so you either need additional power lines or (smaller scale) power plants close to people and industry, either way.
Decarbonization is maaaybe 1/4 of the way there, but folks seem to like to spin it as 90%.
You're absolutely right that we will need to spend a lot of money and time if you seriously want to achieve to become globally carbon-neutral. However, going nuclear wouldn't be necessarily cheaper or quicker, either.
Which makes a war of conquest or destruction by countries not doing so much easier to win.
Edit: Also, with interest rates likely to go up due to inflation/central bank action, that CapEx may soon be impossible to bear without some equivalent to a wartime economy anyway. A lot of the renewables have been helped by essentially free money.
You can see that in a lot of consumer products already, when the EU e.g. started to mandate to put energy consumption ratings on electric appliances, and the market then swiftly went to improve the power consumption in most cases. I grew up with regular light bulbs, but now I and everybody I know largely uses LED light bulbs, again driven by consumer demand and heavily nudged by political policy in the EU. And I either save money now or at least break even thanks to my electric bill being less, and LED lights usually lasting so long they are over time cheaper than the old regular bulbs.
I wouldn't dare try to predict how these things would actually shake out eventually.
Most of the easy improvements have already been done. with the possible exception of insulating more (far harder than changing out electric bulbs or when new appliances get bought or computers age out replacing them with higher efficiency versions). Normal ICE cars and trucks have also hit diminishing returns efficiency wise.
Usually not so easy though as it may seem, especially in concrete, stone, or other masonry buildings which are very common in Europe.
What I’m referring to is far coarser grained, and on the production side.
Fossil fuels are very, very energy dense, and that energy is released/used through completely different mechanisms than electrical energy. So for heat, even if switching to heat pumps which are over unity devices (1 Input unit of energy can move almost 3x units of heat), the amount of energy required to do so for countries which need a lot of heat is astronomical. I did some back of the envelope math for Germany in another thread, and even being very conservative we’re talking 7x the total energy requirements of their current entire grid to replace natural gas for them.
So it’s more than just buying a heat pump and installing it, it’s a massive undertaking involving the equivalent of $120-$600k+ of capex to accomplish. That is for every many woman and child when you add it all up. One would hope they could be more efficient, but those prices already involve a huge economy of scale.
If the EU forms an army and has mandated no fossil fuels, they would need to spend a massive amount more capex to build that army than if they did not right now, let alone keep it energized. That takes time, resources from other things, and exposes them to unique supply chain challenges too.
If they want to just switch their economy off fossil fuels, right now that will likely take a 5-10 years even on a wartime footing. It takes time to build factories, source materials, R&D complex things. Many of these will depend on countries they may not want to depend on (such as chips from China or raw materials currently sourced from Russia). And that is a massive amount of money, on top of likely weapons manufacturing, etc.
If they wanted to do it in 2 years, I’m not sure it’s possible right now.
These are geographically dependent. You can't build the where you need them.
> As for storage, one way to "store" energy is hydrogen, which we can then burn as needed. We can probably get the efficiency of that to 70% (for hydrogen-burning larger-scale power plants).
Large scale electrolysis remains unproven. This goes in the "scientific breakthrough required" bucket.
> Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is another existing option, with an efficiency of about 70-80%
Also geographically dependent. You basically need an alpine lake handy to build pumped storage.
Carbon sequestration at anything close to relevant scales also has never been done.
> The deployment and logistics is a general problem of electrification, even with nuclear. People want to plug in their EVs near where they live, and want heat in their homes, so you either need additional power lines or (smaller scale) power plants close to people and industry, either way.
No, this isn't a problem with nuclear. Most energy demand is in cities. And since nuclear plants are not geographically dependent, you can build them near places with lots of energy demand. As opposed to renewables which might need to be built very far away in places with large solar or wind potential.
Large-scale electrolysis is not unproven. E.g. Air Liquide operates a 20MW plant producing 3000t/annum near Quebec already[0]. Other projects in development aim for 200MW facilities. Granted, that isn't yet massive scale, just about 99,000 MWh/annum of usable energy (about 33kWh/kg for hydrogen), and the smallest US nuclear plant is theoretically capable of 5,098,320 Mwh/annum or around 50 times more. But large scale enough to act as a proof of concept in my opinion.
Pumped storage is a bit geo-dependent, but you do not need an alpine lake, you need an empty space somewhat higher up where you can pump some water, preferably without loosing too much water due to evaporation and other factors, and some water, preferably fresh water to avoid corrosion as much as possible, maybe desalinated. But if need be salt water and an artificial hill will do.
As for the deployment and logistics of nuclear, it is certainly a problem. Our current grids, independent from the form of electricity generation, are usually not designed to handle the growing demand that electrification probably will create. You can see what happens when the demand somewhat suddenly rises (and the EV introduction is still somewhat "sudden" in the time scales grid operators and infrastructure planners usually consider) e.g. in Kazakhstan when the Chinese bitcoin miners moved there[1]. Furthermore, planning, building and testing new nuclear plants is a massive capital expenditure even without technology research, as well as a political hot topic in a lot of places (and even in nuclear-friendly regions I'd bet that NIMBYs would form real quick once a location for a new plant gets discussed).
Last thing I read by the way is that the EU gets about 20% of the Uranium it uses to fuel existing nuclear plants from Russia (at least until now), with another ~20% coming from Kazakhstan[2], which is somewhat closely allied to (and for sure scared of) Russia. Another ~20% come from Niger, a country not exactly renowned for being a politically stable and human-rights respecting nation. Maybe the EU can source elsewhere, even if the demand increases as potentially more nuclear within the EU goes online, but it surely has a rather problematic political dimension attached aside from general nuclear politics such a nuclear proliferation. And it's not just the EU which needs to switch to electrification, either. Where will Africa or Latin America or Asia get their nuclear tech and nuclear fuel?
Nuclear, like oil, creates international political dependencies in a lot of places, while most renewables would not necessarily do the same.
[0] https://www.spglobal.com/commodity-insights/en/market-insigh...
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-25/kazakhsta...
[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
The hydrolysis example you provided is tiny relative to the requirements of grid scale storage. To put this in perspective, the US alone uses 500 GWh of electricity every hour. And this will increase as electrification progresses, electricity only accounts for about a third of total energy production. Producing grid scale hydrolysis remains unproven.
The same reliance on a globalized economy still exist with intermittent sources. The copper used in wind turbine generators probably comes from Chile, for instance.
That will, of course, still need to be developed to production. But it is a (large) incremental process improvement, not a whole different technology.
First you said hydrolysis was not practical at all. Today you say 200 MW facilities are not big enough. What will you say tomorrow? Why not admit it now?
Throughout this whole thread you've been pointing to proposals and plans as though simply having plans is a demonstration of viability. Unless people are actively implementing the solutions you're proposing, then those solutions aren't proven to work. There's a massive difference between pointing to an entrepreneur that promises this special drill will be able to build geothermal plants anywhere, and actually building geothermal plants in the middle of Germany. There's a massive difference between plans that promise to store X amount of hydrogen, and actually building and running said storage plants. Electrolysis has been known for at
As far as I'm concerned, both hydrolysis and this geothermal-anywhere approach fall into the bucket of "scientific breakthroughs". Could they be viable if they pan out? Sure. But it's highly unwise to bet the future of civilization on something that might work out, as opposed to something that's been operating at scale for most of a century.
1. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628955-900-laser-dr...
60 years, by the way, pushes the boundary of "most of a century".
Let's actually put this in perspective: Global electricity consumption is about 60 TWh daily, which works out to about 2.5 TWh per hour or 40 GWh per minute. Plans to run a wind and solar grid predict a 12 hour storage requirement to generate 80% of our energy from wind and solar [1], and weeks of storage for a 100% wind and solar grid. And remember, this is on top of the cost of actually generating all that energy in the first place. If people want to prove that these storage mechanisms are viable, then how about they build one minute's worth of storage. If we don't even have one minute's worth of storage provisioned, then I see zero reason to be confident in the ability to build hours, days, or weeks of storage.
By comparison, we'd need to build 9 nuclear plants for each one that presently exist to generate all of our electricity from nuclear. Any only 8 if we eliminate everything but nuclear and hydro. Also, It's 68 years since the first nuclear electrical plant and 80 years since the first fission reactor.
1. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...
Pumped hydro has always worked at scale.
You keep repeating that storage is not built out. We know. Before it can have been built out, it will need building out. But nukes are also not built out. Which can get done faster?
You just really wish storage tech was harder than it is because you need that for nukes not to look like the obviously bad investment they have proven, by "most of a century" of experience, to be.
By comparison, we need 6 to 7 orders of magnitude increase in our existing hydro and battery storage capacity to decarbonize through renewables. And an infinity order of magnitude increase in electrolysis storage, because we don't have any such storage at all. It's not that they haven't been built out. They haven't been built, full stop.
I don't need to make storage tech look any worse than it is. How much electrolysis storage capacity do we have, worldwide? Zero. I think you're the one engaging in wishful thinking, treating these totally unproven systems as certain when nobody has ever operated a grid storage electrolysis facility.
If someone told you they have plans for a supersonic passenger jet that will be even cheaper than normal airliners, would you believe them? If they actually had working planes, and they were actually able to build and operate a batch of a few dozen planes more cheaply than typical airlines then yes. But if they only had one plane, and little operational experience I wouldn't. And if all they had were plans on paper, I certainly would not - this is the stage that storage mechanisms other than hydro and batteries are in.
Pretending that "breakthroughs" will be needed to field storage must be your last hope, but building out storage is just construction. You will continue to be disappointed.
Come back to me when electrolysis storage systems are actually built, and we can examine the actual costs of storage the same way we examine the costs of nuclear: by looking at the bill after the plant has been built. If you really are so confident in their efficacy, then this should be no problem.
Today's thermal reactors, if they provided the entire 18 TW of primary energy demand, would consume in excess of 1 million tonnes of natural uranium per year. This would consume known uranium resources in less than a decade.
So, either seawater uranium would be needed (which would have to be scaled up by something like 11 orders of magnitude from what has been demonstrated) or breeder reactors would be needed (also not a proven technology, and likely more expensive than thermal burner reactors.)
The real figure [1] is 60,000 years worth of uranium with our current nuclear energy production, which is about 10% of our electrical demand. So 6,000 years for a 100% nuclear grid. Electricity production is about 25% of total energy demand, so call it 1,500 years for all energy converted to nuclear.
Furthermore, moving nuclear seawater extraction - even at it's present costs, without economies of scale - would not significantly impact nuclear's costs [2]:
> Fortunately, the cost of uranium is a small percentage of the cost of nuclear fuel, which is itself a small percentage of the cost of nuclear power. Over the last twenty years, uranium spot prices have varied between $10 and $120/lb of U3O8, mainly from changes in the availability of weapons-grade uranium to blend down to make reactor fuel.
> So as the cost of extracting U from seawater falls to below $100/lb, it will become a commercially viable alternative to mining new uranium ore. But even at $200/lb of U3O8, it doesn’t add more than a small fraction of a cent per kWh to the cost of nuclear power.
1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo...
2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...
But deep subterranean cave and sub-ocean tanks for pumped hydro will be a thing. These make pumped hydro storage practical in radically more places than usually imagined. Combined with hill reservoirs, they multiply the storage capacity per unit mass of water.
A hilltop reservoir is, incidentally, an excellent place to site a solar array, which is cooled and more efficient by the water under it, and in turn radically reduces evaporative loss and biofouling in the reservoir.
We were originally planning to ditch domestic peat as fuel, in favor of Russian biofuel, but that's off the table now, and peat will probably be used extensively for a few years until alternatives are in place.
Energy independence is what we aim for at the moment. Carbon neutral is still something we aim for in the long run, but not being relianton Russian energy is the primary goal for the next few years.
For condos and apartment buildings by far the most common method of heating is district heating (teleheating) [1], and historically this has been very carbon intensive, even though cogeneration of both heat and electricity in one plant is quite efficient (efficiency > 80%; most Finnish thermal power plants are cogen). Fossil fuels and peat are being replaced with more sustainable (mostly wood-based) fuels, but attaining the emission goals requires burning less fuel, period, which means technologies like geothermal boreholes and large-scale heatpump facilities.
SMR nuclear reactors, if they ever become mainstream, would be an excellent source of clean heat and electricity for cities. Current nuclear power plants are located (by design) too far from cities for it to be economical to pipe their waste heat to where it's needed.
Its operating cost will necessarily be quite a bit more than solar, but it works in the Arctic winter, 24x7, and provides cogen heat.
It might end up cheaper to ship in ammonia synthesized from solar in the tropics. Most likely it will be a combination of several: normally, delivery by transmission line because cheapest, but with geothermal held ready for strategic backup, and stockpiled ammonia for load peaks.
Shipping will get cheaper as fuel does, but is already astonishingly cheap.
I’m not aware of any significant and serious efforts to replace ships with a green fuel, and they comprise a huge percentage of our emissions.
The west-African coastal Sahara, coastal Peru/Bolivia, Baja California, Arabia/Sudan/Eritrea, Yemen/Oman/Pakistan, Socotra, and north-western Australia all look like good places to site solar-driven ammonia synthesis. I don't doubt that less geographically-favored sites will dominate instead.
Some 42 million megawatts of energy reach the surface continually and are radiated into space as the earth cools from its initial molten state more than 4 billion years ago. No feasible amount of geothermal development could make even a small dent in this process. Furthermore, the earth’s heat budget is continually replenished by the radioactive decay of naturally occurring elements, and almost all of the energy associated with each decay event is converted to heat. Plus, the heat content of the geothermal reservoir rocks is continually replenished by conduction of heat from the earth’s deeper interior.
So a single nuclear power plant would be roughly equivalent to 0.002% of earths geothermal energy radiation. It doesn't sound like much, but for something as crucial as the earth's magnetic field, I wouldn't want to reduce it one bit.
I guess if the heat is radiated into space anyways and we simply capture that it doesn't speed up the core's energy loss, but if we start digging into the core and allowing energy to escape faster, we would effectively speed it up, right?
The radius of the Earth is 4000 miles. A 10-mile hole is thus 1/400 of the way to the center. You may as well worry that scratching the skin of an apple might damage the seeds.
Look at a graph of the temperature of the Earth as a function of depth. The temperature jumps tremendously below the crust, and is much more stable per depth below. The crust is the insulation of the Earth - and damaging that crust might affect the mantle is ways we cannot yet imagine.
The answer remains "we don't know".
The argument "it's big, we can't affect it" has been proven wrong in the case of the atmosphere, and again in the case of the ocean. It is no longer a sound argument.
Eruptions in Siberia, and later in India, not long ago geologically, released more heat in a (geologically) short time than we could use up in a million years, with no effect on the Earth's magnetic field.
I don't think we're even digging through the crust - there'd still be the mantle (~100x thicker) before we got to the core.
In numbers, I believe the deepest borehole is ~12km deep... and the Earth has a radius of >6000km. We're barely scratching the surface.
Since the layers are directly connected, it doesn't sound like to me that you'd have to dig into the very core for that to happen.
Of course at the current state of affairs the effects are miniscule, but it doesn't sound like a very good investment as something to potentially scale up in the future to where it will actually matter.
If it turns out to be a problem, how hard would it be to insert fuel back into the earth's core to sustain the magnetic field?
In another century, if we don't blast ourselves back to the stone age first (increasingly likely), energy from hydrogen-boron fusion will dominate wherever solar is impractical, and the geothermal wells will become too expensive to continue operating. So, either way, the whole process is an imperceptible blip.
Blasting our way back to the stone age will succeed in chopping off CO2 output suddenly, though. The climate could then return to normal in only a century or three, if the sudden change did not instead trigger an ice age or something.
You should worry instead about the effects of excreted pharmaceuticals and neo-nicotinoid pesticides on wildlife, excess fertilizer runoff on coastal ecosystems, and ocean acidification from CO2 dissolving to produce carbonic acid, making sea life unable to fix calcium for shells, destroying the underpinnings of the food chain and the whole ocean ecosystem. Oh, and global climate disruption.
We have no need to borrow imaginary trouble, we are making plenty of actually real trouble already.
I don't believe that waste heat is plenty. Here, in Romania, we use the waste heat from the nuclear power plant as district heating but that is enough for a small town near it.
You can have tiny heat pumps in every home that share a district-wide pipe as a heat source, you can use giant/deep heat pumps to supply the district-wide pipe and you can do both at the same time. And heat pumps can also be used to cool things, returning heat into the system and allowing for big solar gains in windows, since the heat generated can be re-used when it's more than needed rather than wasted.
This is still probably a good thing, but something to consider.
We have electricity run to almost everywhere there is a road, and every building that we spend any significant amount of time in. We can charge at work or on the street during the day. Basically anywhere a car is stationary.
With the right incentives and infrastructure we can shift electric vehicle charging to daytime, or whenever there is excess generating ability coming from the grid.
Because most people don't drive at night.
If a country has abundant solar power (probably not Finland!) it would make more sense to wire up workplace parking lots so that EVs could absorb the excess midday electricity.
That would be nighttime.
Some EVs can automatically charge at these times, and sometimes you get discounts for charging at these times, but you can also usually just set a timer on your charger.
https://www.oeb.ca/consumer-information-and-protection/elect...
For example the above suggests it's usually nighttime, but weekends and statutory holidays are also good.
As an aside, I wonder how much money an economy could save by having a new "cheap electricity holiday' which chooses one or two days a year that they announce a month in advance as national holidays when an extreme weather event is predicted.
It amazes me that we are still using steam power (mostly 18th and 19t century discovery AFAIR) in such advanced systems.
Predicting here there will be no fusion plants that drive steam turbines, ever. (Unless General Fusion's system turns out to work.)
There are projects working on these. They have much higher activation energy, so are harder to make happen -- for hydrogen-boron fusion, much, much harder. Helium-3 is scarce, effectively available only from decay of tritium, all of which has to be synthesized, then it needs to decay, with a half-life of 12 years.
Hydroelectric plants, nuclear reactors, gas and oil plants, all of them depend on mechanical movement.
(edit - assuming everyone uses the same amount of power globally as the average person in Finland which - why shouldn't they be able to - and - obviously they don't)
Finland's climate is an outlier:
One-third of energy consumption in housing was electricity in 2018. [...] 47% of electricity was used to heat indoor areas and 36% to household appliances. The remainder of electricity was used to heat domestic water and saunas.
https://www.thenomadtoday.com/articulo/finland/energy-consum...
There's going to be an obvious error of margin either side of my napkin calculations but I think the order of magnitude is in the ballpark.
Whereas making something warmer can be done without a heat pump, by releasing stored chemical energy, at nearly no losses.
How many more meltdowns per decade?
The plants are also located away from cities, so utilizing the waste heat for district heating is uneconomical.
It’s like complaining that a wool blanket is itchy so it might be better to catch hypothermia and die.
That's hardly unique to nuclear plants; in particular, coal plants typically have lower thermal efficiency.
Energy generation is always a trade off. Right now the world is reacting to the fossil fuel funded wars created by one such trade off. We are also in the middle of causing irreversible climate change, which would cause more damage than any amount of meltdowns or nuclear waste could ever get near.
Naturally there are alternatives. If money were no objection then green hydrogen looks pretty nice, and one could always extract heat from the core of the earth as long the technology was safe enough to do so. As soon we have a technology that get proven to be cheaper, safer and more scalable than nuclear we should all switch to that. Buying natural gas from Russia is for multiple obvious reason not that.
Less radioactive EMISSION during NORMAL OPERATION than coal plants (and I think that ignores radioactivity released in uranium mining). The amount of radioactivity in the spent fuel rods of a nuclear plant is vastly higher than that liberated by a coal plant.
BTW, your chance of dying from cancer in your lifetime is about 20%, so I'm not sure that the 1/5 figure you gave there means anything.
There is a place in the US that has a rather peculiar name of Cancer Alley. It is not a nuclear testing area, nuclear waste deposit area or area for nuclear plants. It is an area know for its petrochemical plants. It illustrate quite well the difference of nuclear waste that people are scared of, and fossil fuel waste that people accept as just normal part of life.
In Finland's case, the realistic alternatives are burning coal or burning Russian gas. (If the Finns dedicated a substantial chunk of their forests to this one generator, they could maybe use biomass.)
Coal kills two orders of magnitude more people per GWh than nuclear--and it does that when operating nominally, not when malfunctioning--and it produces three or four orders of magnitude more waste and more environmental harm from mining.
Russian gas has geopolitical/national security problems.
Biomass is a roundabout way of burning diesel fuel and gas, while degrading and eroding forest soils and polluting watersheds.
The number of new meltdowns per decade rounds to zero, to five significant figures.
That's a weird metric (one meltdown is quite a catastrophe) and the calculation seems suspicious too. Between Chernobile and Fukushima I don't see how this could be correct.
I do find your other points more convincing, though with some "citation needed" wrt. coal.
And that's before we consider the environmental and health risks of ash ponds[2], which can (and have caused) heavy metal pollution in nearby groundwater supply. The largest industrial spill in US history happened barely a decade ago, and was an ash pond[3].
Edit: I can personally recommend "The Buffalo Creek Disaster" (ISBN 9780394723433) as a writeup by a lawyer involved in a similar coal ash accident (one that directly killed over 100 people).
[1]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2017936118
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash_pond
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
Maybe the problem is the uranium mine tailings are safely off in some poor country, not in the US where the coal ash would be?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p...
Moreover the more we obtain uranium (prospecting, mining, milling...), the more we add to the associated carbon footprint. Therefore a sustained growth of installed nuclear capacity will lead us to exploit mines at always lowering ore grades => more emissions.
Scientific studies are clear: M. Lenzen ("between 10 and 130 g CO2-e/kWhel, with an average of 65 g") and E. Warner et G. Heath ("9 to 110 g CO‐eq/kWh by 2050")...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222817608_Life_cycl...
The popular YouTube channel The B1M has an interesting video on how Finland is tackling nuclear waste:
Finland might have solved nuclear power's biggest problem (2021): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYpiK3W-g_0
And even after all that it's still far less expensive than remediating coal output.
Hoping to know enough and for sure about all this is... a hope.
Stating that we know what our descendants will need/do in a so distant future is even more funny.
They "considered" such facts using a somewhat light approach: 'Bob Loux, the executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, expressed amazement that the US Department of Energy had only just carried out the "11th hour" drilling tests.
"It certainly looks like DoE has encountered a surprise out there, and it certainly speaks to the fact they haven't done the technical work they should have done years ago," he told the paper.
"It's going to have to cause some change of the design in the final analysis. It's going to impact the safety case."'
Oops...
They also "considered" those metal containers as adequate during the 1990's, then... (what, you think "they" are omniscient?)... problems related to brines and high temperature arose...
https://www.nwtrb.gov/docs/default-source/board/mrs_duquette...
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0335/ML033500420.pdf
Oops...
Just as you wouldn't factor Amelia Earhart's plane into 2022 air safety prognoses, you shouldn't use Chernobyl reactors for nuclear safety.
Nuclear fision reactors safety technology have moved further. There are challenges, but we havent even tried to solve them fully (as we were busy improving gas burning efficiency)
The RBMK reactor is quite an elegant design. Simple plug-and-play architecture for adding and removing fuel and other assemblies while the reactor was running, perfect for things like doping silicon for semiconductors and producing plutonium for weapons. But to get this capability you have to either give up affordability or safety, and they chose to give up safety.
TMI and Fukushima were both "modern" when built. All reactors that melted down did because operators ignored construction, maintenance, or operating safety standards. Other plants not yet melted down show evidence of more construction standard failings: pumps installed despite failing to meet specifications, bolts of substituted, inadequate steel. Diablo Canyon is built directly on a fault line. Now we learn that new EPR plants are inherently flawed, by design.
Ignoring standards is, by the evidence, itself standard procedure for building and operating civil nuke plants. Our global society, as it is conducted, is by the evidence unable to produce and operate a safe civil nuke.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kori_Nuclear_Power_Plant
This is an understatement. The three largest nuclear power reactors in the world (Taishan 1, Taishan 2 and Olkiluoto 3) are all EPRs.
It is feared that all other current EPR suffer the same design mistake, but there are currently no plan to stop them.
A few people were vocal about this before it happened, and things did not go well for them. The Maureen Kearney case is simply unbelievable, this woman was working for Areva and blowing the whistle hard on this transfer of technology, after receiving threat she was found tied up in her bedroom, a letter A engraved in her abdomen, with a kitchen knife handle inserted in her genitals.
The police decided she probably did that to herself and jailed her, while the state attorney prosecuted her. And she was sentenced to prison time and a hefty fine. it took a while before the sentence was overturned and for the truth to come out that she had not faked anything.
In the end, what she was warning actually happened, France is no better and even worse in its ability to build nuclear plants with no actual plant put in service (ITER is a mess, Flamanville EPR is plagued), while China started both Taishan EPR reactors and is now able to sell its ability to build plants to other countries.
Nuclear, as it stands, is the only solution to decarbonizing the energy grid for much of the world. Until some breakthrough in energy storage transpires, or fusion becomes feasible, fission plants remain necessary for decarbonization.
Storage cost is falling much faster, even, than solar and wind generation. The only question today is whether to put a euro into solar or wind now, or into storage that will be much cheaper next year. Thus far, in most places, the former is still favored. More carbon tax can help move the choice the other way.
As solar and wind costs continue down, synthesizing methane and kerosene from captured CO2 and synthetic hydrogen will shortly be cheaper than mining, refining, and transporting them, even without the carbon taxes. Synthesis of those, and of ammonia and hydrogen itself will absorb unlimited "overbuilt" peak generating capacity, and stocks of all of those serve also as storage. That their round-trip efficiency is less than, say, hydro or batteries matters little where they rarely need to be used for that.
In response to your edit:
> As solar and wind costs continue down, synthesizing methane and kerosene from captured CO2 and synthetic hydrogen will shortly be cheaper than mining, refining, and transporting them, even without the carbon taxes. Synthesis of those, and of ammonia and hydrogen itself will absorb unlimited "overbuilt" peak generating capacity, and stocks of all of those serve as storage.
Nobody has successfully built a grid-scale energy-to-gas plant, ever. It remains the stuff of prototypes. This approach is very much in the "hypothetical" phase. There are serious unsolved problems in energy-to-gas:
* It needs a source of carbon to convert H2 to methane. This could come from biofuels, but those aren't available in sufficient supply.
* Producing large quantities of hydrogen without CO2 emissions remains difficult. Almost all methane comes from steam reformation (CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2), which emits carbon dioxide. Electrolysis can't be done effectively.
Currently, power to gas storage is way more expensive than either lithium ion or hydroelectric storage and it's unclear whether it'll ever be cheaper than existing options.
1. https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
And, obviously hydrogen will not continue to be made from hydrocarbons. It will instead be feedstock for synthesizing hydrocarbons. Carbon would need to be extracted from air, or at least from exhaust, to get carbon credits.
In short, converting electricity to methane and then back to electricity again is not a presently available option and it's unclear whether it'll ever be viable at stale. Grid-scale energy storage remains an unsolved problem
Other storage media being built out for full-scale production use include iron-air batteries, where (IIRC) $1.5B is going into factories, a liquified-air storage system in Chile ($0.5B), and synthetic ammonia in Norway. Nobody can track even a fraction of the utility-scale pumped-hydro projects under construction world-wide.
We will need hundreds times as much of these, and of others, in the end, which will all take decades to build out.
You said it'd be stored in caves, so perhaps it's a different project. It'd be good to link to this project.
The Utah project looks like it's still trying to secure funding, and hasn't broken ground. https://power.mhi.com/regions/amer/news/20210511.html#:~:tex....
Similarly in Texas. The plans for this project were unveiled only a couple weeks ago: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/green-hydrogen-inte...
Nobody announces billion-dollar physical construction projects for untested tech.
Things still being built need to finish being built before they go into service.
Just yesterday, you said some unspecified "breakthroughs" would be needed. Now you point to construction not finished. You are clutching at straws. The more honest course would be to admit you were just wrong.
Energy storage is far from a solved problem. You insist that it's been solved, but none of your proposed solutions have actually been implemented.
That is not to say there won't be breakthroughs, too, that make storage even cheaper to build out. But any storage already built will continue working as well as ever. Any hoped-for breakthroughs that don't pan out will not stall build-out. The worst that can happen is costs plummeting not quite as precipitously as had been expected.
We already see utility-scale hydro storage in use, and utility-scale iron-air battery factories under construction, and utility-scale liquified-air and ammonia-synthesis plants under construction, and utility-scale investment in hydrogen synthesis and storage. Each additional storage technology that begins to come online only improves the picture.
Repeating, again and again, that things that still need to be built out have not been built out yet sheds no light.
It is so economical nonviable that there isn't even small scale experiments to get the ball running as a storage medium. There is however some bright spots for green hydrogen when hydrogen itself can be used. Green hydrogen is only a few times more expensive than using fossil fuel in order to create hydrogen, and in that situation green hydrogen has found a place. It also reduces those industries CO2 emissions which can then be turned into profits in terms of trading existing emissions rights. As fossil fuels prices goes up, the economical viability of green hydrogen in hydrogen using industries goes up, but the price compared to nuclear remain the same.
In the mean time, nuclear is a nice thing to invest in.
Even a massively-nuclearized France produces 7% to 12% of its gridpower thanks to fossil-fuel plants.
French official historical data: https://www.statistiques.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/editi...
Pertinent document (French ahead!): https://new.sfen.org/rgn/expertise-nucleaire-francaise-suivi...
« un réacteur peut varier de 100 % à 20 % de puissance en une demi-heure, et remonter aussi vite après un palier d’au moins deux heures, et ce deux fois par jour »
Proposed translation: "a reactor power output can vary from 100% to 20% in 30 minutes, then after 2 hours can go back to 100% at the same speed, and can cycle this way 2 times per day".
This is quite a good performance when it comes to load-following (French engineers are very good at this), however it is insufficient in the real world (save any ridiculously expensive over-provision of nuclear reactor, most idling) and very weak compared to gas turbines performances.
Okiluoto started in 2003 and was supposed to cost 3 Bns and be ready in 2009. it took 18 years instead of 6 and total cost is difficult to know exactly but is over 12 Bns instead of 3.
Building this plant (and the Flamanville one) put into light so many issues at so many levels that I am surprised it was completed and actually works.
Though the previously completed EPRs in Taishan was stopped since last june after gas leaks have been found in the primary circuit and framatome asked the US for help. Current talks point to a design flaw and the possibility of not restarting this EPRs is on the table. If this is confirmed, this flaw could also affect Okiluoto and flamanville EPRs.
With last winter trend of France finding design flaws in its reactors and being forced to stop them for emergency repairs and maintenance[1] (affecting the most recent and most powerful ones too), nuclear plant do not seems like a sound sustainable choice at least when France is involved.
[1]: https://www.ouest-france.fr/economie/entreprises/nucleaire-l...
The cynic in me would like to point out that it's not really running yet:
> Olkiluoto 3 started test production at just over 0.1 gigawatt, a small fraction of its capacity, with a ramp-up to full, regular electricity output planned by the end of July.
And by the time you finally got those ten $10B plants online, Bitcoin's energy use would have ballooned to some even more absurd number, assuming we do nothing to stop the current trajectory.
To me, that’s a flaw of the charger if it keeps working when no device is connected.
As for TVs and others, we need to mandate a front-facing power switch, because most TVs/devices don’t have one anymore.
Have you ever worked at a big corporation? They pay for some stupid useless shit just because it’s nobody’s job to stop paying for the service.
and who's to judge it was useless? If you're the one paying, then you can make this judgement. Otherwise, you're merely putting your own moral values above someone else's.
If somebody was growing weed indoors, or they're smelting aluminium, then they're not wasting?
Edit: Found one myself: https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/comparisons
Interestingly gold mining also uses more electricity than Bitcoin mining and that doesn't even include the associated costs of pollution, cleanups etc. Gold also isn't a network that can transfer value. On the other hand some of it is used in industrial applications.
Energy wasted by natural gas flaring is 5.5x more energy than bitcoin consumes. Renewable energy curtailment in China alone (turning generation off because we can't consume it fast enough) is almost enough energy on its own to power all bitcoin miners. https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/comparisons
It's perfectly fine to have a negative opinion of bitcoin and proof of work, but you're wasting political capital in the fight against climate change when there are much bigger fish to fry against wasteful uses of energy that don't have an army of people, businesses, and even nation states (El Salvador) gearing up to fight you to defend their money.
reward in a currency for which you buy the energy. This takes into account the current btc/eur price in finland, if that's where you buy the energy, and that's not guaranteed to halve either.
But bitcoin is currently about a $1 trillion asset class, and growth of it's price has been slowly logarithmically for years. Most bullish cases suggest an eventual value of $10 trillion (in line with gold) to $100 trillion (in line with global bond market). But it's likely going to take decades (with several halving cycles) to get there.
Unless you're suggesting that it's likely to balloon in value even more and/or fast than that, I don't see mining ever becoming the biggest problem we have to deal with. Especially since bitcoin holders don't see PoW mining as a liability, but as a mission critical feature of the system.
...if you continue to heat with gas, drive on petrol, fly on petroleum...
I don't want to be the party pooper but that renewable energy has to cover more than current electricity consumption does get overlooked continuously. Less by governments than by the media and general public, thankfully, but still.
But it is a lot of power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udJJ7n_Ryjg
With time renewables production will get less an less intermittent thanks to a more and more adequate spreading, to a mix (wind, solar...), to storage (hydrogen...) and an overly-expensive nuclear will become useless.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...
They'll probably shut the plant down, and have 500 workers come in to replace everything that needs to be replaced, and then power it up again within a few days, and let it run for another 6 months or so.
Everything will be planned on workplans, and most won't require specialist knowledge... Eg. "Replace pump 205 in building C with this pump. Required skills people: 2x plumber, 2x electrician".
Most reactor maintenance is already done during refueling so there isn't much more room to optimize that downtime. (though that may change the older a reactor gets)
Finland is actually somewhat known for running short (1 year) cycles with very very short (<10 days for refuelling is not unheard of) refuelling outages every other cycle alternating with slightly longer maintenance outages. A more typical scenario in the US would be 18 month cycles with a 30ish day outage. Some plants are moving to 24 month cycles with slightly longer outages.
Capacity factor for nuclear plants in the US is consistently around 93% (similar figures in many other countries as well), which is significantly higher than other generation sources.
This is called demand response, https://www.energy.gov/oe/activities/technology-development/..., and it's probably as important of a component to future grid management as energy storage.
Bitcoin mining is commonly promoted as this kind of ideal electricity consumer. Hydrogen production could be another.
However, I think more interesting for this community would be to build some kind of demand response general computing datacenter. Basically, sell computing resources with poor availability guarantees, but at a cheaper rate than standard datacenters.
i.e. we'll run your batch jobs very cheaply, but we can't give you strong guarantees about how long it will take because we have to wait for excess grid electricity to have the energy to run them. Best case that's every night. Worst case we won't be able to run anything for weeks because Texas is going through another freak winter storm.
I think you misunderstood. The parent comment implied that excess electricity could be use to produce synthetic fuels (via carbon capture) to power conventional airplanes, ships or other machinery.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130116000447/http://www.hs.fi/...
"Suomenkin uusi ydinvoimala maksaa 8.5 miljardia euroa" which translates to "Finland's new nuclear power plant will also cost 8.5 billion euros."
And let me be provocative (and probably downvoted here)... it also works during windless nights!
Luxembourg has 1/7th the population and could run off ONE of these.
The USA has 60x the population so would need about 420 of these?
at an average cost of $10 billion per plant, that's 4.2 trillion dollars. I think the US has spent more than that on the iraq war and the afganistan war - 8 trillion according to https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar - which could've paid for these 420 plants twice over.
But US decided to invade Iraq and Afghanistan instead of any of those.
A /very small/ entire country of 5.5M.