The abounding skeptics don't seem to have any specific criticisms. Overall it seems like a good idea to reuse the heat-to-electricity machinery and grid connection of existing coal plants, since that's a good fraction of the capital required.
Compare the cost of a coal build to a nuclear build and you will see this is not the case.
Nonetheless, the transmission infrastructure is super valuable, and super expensive, as that is a huge fraction of the cost of electricity in the US, something like 40% on average. Reusing these sites for batteries is probably a good idea.
Big industry, such as green ammonia production from electrolyzed hydrogen, could be good though. But I bet those will likely be powered by massive amounts of solar plus batteries, as is being planned in places such as Spain right now. For at least the next generation of electrolyzer tech, energy costs will be dwarfed by the capital costs of electrolyzers, and the electrolyzers will need to be run nearly continuously. It remains to be seen if the tech curve of electrolyzers will decrease more quickly than the cost or batteries and solar do.
The newer technology, what amounts to drilling by vaporizing rock with microwaves, enables drilling to much greater depths quickly and cheaply. Being new, it has not actually been used yet, but once mature should be less dependent on local geology, and not generate (sometimes reasonable) fears of causing damaging earthquakes, and should yield more power from a single borehole than EGS gets from two more costly holes.
But there seems to be no prospect of commercial deployment before 2028, and something could go wrong on the way, delaying or even deep-sixing it.
EGS, even where it works best, is more costly than solar and wind. Working independently of weather gives it a leg up, but money for it is less available than for those, for now, because we haven't enough of those yet.
The cost for electrolysers is amortized over not just the time to refill local tankage, but over all the time when surplus power is available, generating direct revenue. The presence of electrolysers makes overbuild of top-line generating capacity an obvious win, because it is always generating income.
Cost wise, it’s unclear how much actual savings will take place.
If you want to repurpose your steam turbines, geothermal is a better choice. Now that we know how to bore very deep holes electrically, geothermal is practical in many more places than before.
Sometimes I wouldn’t be surprised if wooden ships would be coming back again, especially now with all the modern technology.
Battery costs have also plunged to a level where Hawaii pairs them with solar farms to provide baseload.
The extreme low cost of all of these technologies is largely why nuclear power is dying out. It struggles to compete. The consistency just isnt that much of an advantage.
Take away the insurance subsidy so that the taxpayer funded $800 billion cleanup costs for Fukushima are privatized and nuclear moves from struggles to compete to eye wateringly expensive.
It can share some of the costs with nuclear arsenal maintenance though, so some governments will continue to push it on their populace.
However, you should probably account for solar farms and battery installations taking 6 months to plan, execute and deploy. Offshore wind farms are a couple of years. Large pumped storage projects can take up to 4.
Meanwhile Hinkley point C will be completed in 2026 after being kicked off all the way back in 2010 and will provide power that is "only" 3x the price.
I'd argue that nuclear has really expensive and slick PR.
I think I'm only half serious about this. Payoffs (well, "subsidies" in political language) might be an awful idea. It's a realpolitik viewpoint, maybe not a good one. But maybe it could get us around the roadblocks.
It would either mean no new nuclear plants or somebody comes up with a genuinely cheap, safe version that theyd be willing to put their money behind.
That isnt what the propaganda is demanding though. It wants the perpetuation of free insurance for nuclear and to be given massive subsidies on top of that that solar, wind and pumped storage will never be granted. to produce less electricity for more money. It wants the market contorted out of all recognition to allow this and the only reason I can think of why is because the military needs it.
Each dollar dumped into building a nuke is a dollar taken out of circulation and unavailable for wind/solar/storage. It would (a) in the end displace much less coal, (b) produce nothing for an unknown number of years, maybe forever. During each of those years, more dollars would go to coal making it also unavailable for wind/solar/storage.
So, starting a nuke plant brings global climate catastrophe nearer, even if it might be made produce some power someday, and not be canceled because of massive cost overruns and delays. Every dollar that can be pulled together for energy should go to building out solar, wind, and storage. And maybe geothermal.
There are certainly promising options emerging in the area of storage, but I don't think it's a solved problem, especially at the scale necessary here. If I had your confidence about storage then I would agree with you completely, but I don't, and it doesn't seem like there's any consensus that storage is a solved problem. Quite the opposite: the consensus seems to be that we're not ready yet. As such, investments in that area are also potentially places where capital expended might produce nothing for an unknown number of years, maybe forever. CAES is often cited as a storage mechanism but nothing has been built at utility scale and multiple projects that have tried have fallen apart before getting there.
This is an extreme crisis situation where no single option has a guaranteed outcome. Pursue multiple in parallel. Heck, if we'd done that two decades ago-- massively build out nuclear while massively investing in renewables-- the issue wouldn't be nearly as critical.
But for planning, the universal method is good enough. We already know we can make, tank, and transport any amount of, e.g., anhydrous ammonia, anywhere and at any scale, and can burn any amount of anhydrous ammonia (in existing gas plants) for power, anywhere and at any scale. It has a round-trip efficiency of X, requiring top-line generation with capacity factor Y of 1/XY, which we know we can afford. And that suffices.
We have not built out much storage yet, specifically because the costs of storage alternatives are in free fall, just as costs for wind and solar generation plummeted in the past, but faster. So, building out storage next year gets you a lot more storage than building out this year. Storage method X is likely to be undercut by method Y next year. Projects X "fall apart" because methods Y are turning out cheaper, just as concentrated-solar projects fell apart when photovoltaics undercut that. Falling apart is bad for whoever put money into those, but very, very good for the rest of us.
In the meantime, money is much better spent on top-line generating capacity, because you will need that to charge up the storage from, anyway. And, your dollar gets by far the most top-line generating capacity building photovoltaic solar and wind. Tying that dollar up in a nuke project that won't deliver anything at all for years, if ever, and more dollars buying coal in the meantime, is the opposite of good strategy.
If we can get to the point where we are routinely overproducing from solar and wind and turning off the gas then yea we should ramp up storage. We will see it coming years away though.
China is ahead of the curve on this having just completed a 40GWh 3.6GW pumped storage battery.
Nuclear power would also need a lot of this if we were to rely upon it 100% since it is not dispatchable.
I'd love to know more about this. Links?
Thus the most economical way to construct a grid right now is renewables when weather is optimal and fossil fuels when its not. Optimize for cost and that is what you get, and that type of grid is exactly what many countries energy politic has been subsidizing towards. Nuclear don't need storage, but it also cost more than both renewables and fossil fuels.
It is only sunk-cost nukes, ignoring construction and leaning on military subsidies, that match the current cost of renewables + solar. And, of course, the cost of the latter at the time any new nuke construction could (ever) be completed will be much lower.
A full discharge cycle mean it must charge and then sell all the energy it captured, and in their prognosis, it need to do so every single day. A battery that does that, and only carries 1-6 hours of capacity, can match the cost of nuclear power. Otherwise nuclear power is cheaper, and in comparison to green hydrogen, nuclear power is cheaper by a very large margin.
And anyway, all the money tied up in it during all that time would be unavailable to displace coal, so you would additionally need to pay for coal that whole time.
Someone has to take responsibility while waiting for that cost to come down. A proper market solution would be to ban fossil fuels now and let non-fossil fuels alternative compete for investment and research. Not hopes and dream but technology that works when one can not just fall back on burning murder gas. Fossil fuel advocates are working very hard to convince people that coal should be replaced with natural gas, rather than non-fossil fuel alternatives.
The greenpeace dolts who got it regulated into oblivion (in no small part thanks to the help of a bunch of useful idiots who equated nuclear power with nuclear weapons) with the specific aim of making it not cost competitive.
A generation later, the clipboard warrior dolts point to the results of the prior generation of dolts and say it's not cost competitive.
It's only not cost competitive because we make it that way. You could bring down the cost of nuclear substantially without actually changing the physical requirements of the plants themselves simply by setting the bureaucratic processes up to default to speedy approval rather than default to delay and deny.
Nuclear has the highest opex of any electrical generation method; it's also estimated by some to have a greenhouse gas impact worse than natural gas. Wind costs a fraction of any other electricity generation method, solar isn't far behind, and continuing to drop around 10% a year.
This is why you see wind and solar replacing decommissioned nukes at a ratio of 6:1 (not including commercial or residential capacity) in the US and growing, and coal plants being decommissioned. There are now multiple technologies for recycling turbine blades, and solar panels are recycleable (or just resellable in the secondhand market where people don't care that they've lost 20% of their capacity.)
Storage is also plunging in cost, and additional technologies are already in commercial use (iron flow, for example.)
HVDC transmission is spreading, with higher capacity, lower cost, and higher efficiency for moving electricity greater distances (in other words, it's less of a deal if it's really windy in one spot and not in another, and ideally-suited wind sites can be further from where electricity is needed.)
Fanboys who think it's as simple as "if only we could work past the NIMBY issue" are ignoring the fact that nuclear power has not been economically viable for three quarters of a century (it has only been viable because of the military applications of nuclear power), while wind and solar keep getting more economically viable, and our grid keeps leaning more and more toward being distributed. Nobody needs the slow-reacting, base load generation nuclear provides.
Wind and solar are as distributable and scaleable as you want.
Wind and solar have significantly simpler supply chains, regulations, and maintenance/repair/inspection needs.
You don't need to worry about geological stability with wind and solar.
Wind and solar don't require tens or hundreds of megawatts of cold-start / post-operation (cooling) power.
Wind and solar have little/no security concerns nor do you need to worry about area social/political/economic stability.
Wind/solar don't generate waste that is weaponizeable.
You don't need a highly trained workforce to install, operate, repair, and decommission wind/solar.
I would expect such outrageous claims to be heavilly substantiated
> You don't need to worry about geological stability with wind
Really? Almost 1,000 feet tall, top heavy structure under huge windload does not need geologican stability?
'require tens or hundreds of megawatts of cold-start / post-operation (cooling) power.'
How or why is this ever relevant, they operate at >90 capacity factor for 2 years at a time
> Storage is also plunging in cost, and additional technologies are already in commercial use (iron flow, for example.)
> HVDC transmission is spreading, with higher capacity, lower cost, and higher efficiency for moving electricity greater distances (in other words, it's less of a deal if it's really windy in one spot and not in another, and ideally-suited wind sites can be further from where electricity is needed.)
How do you transform DC up and down? By converting it to AC. Running it through a transformer and converting it back, HVDC isn't gonna take over the world, certain stretches might be HVDC where beneficial but not all over the world.
The difference with nuclear is that anyone can build and operate next-gen storage, so you're commercial right out the door. I could hook my UPS up to the grid and feed back, commercial success!
> Wind and solar are as distributable and scaleable as you want.
Not without storage, which is harder to scale than production of other kinds.
> You don't need to worry about geological stability with wind and solar.
I don't see the USP, there are plenty of geologically stable areas in most countries.
> Wind and solar don't require tens or hundreds of megawatts of cold-start / post-operation (cooling) power.
They have the added downside of only producing power when the weather guy says so.
> Wind/solar don't generate waste that is weaponizeable.
Good point, for now.
> You don't need a highly trained workforce to install, operate, repair, and decommission wind/solar.
No, you need a disposable workforce that can die from workforce accidents without anyone batting an eye.
Bill Gates is a good example of someone with a bit of time around the smartest people on earth asking for advice where he can make a difference, here's a TED talk where he explains that we'll need all solutions to come together rather than one single silver bullet: https://youtu.be/JaF-fq2Zn7I
Does it sound reasonable that we should use all good tech we have? To me it does, and it includes all energy sources in different amounts and situations.
Yes, this is a core problem. It seems like a large number of people want to focus on only one solution. They complain that solutions $X is more expensive or solution $Y is less proven or solution $Z isn't consistent. That sounds like a great reason to embrace them all to have each one's strengths complement the other's weaknesses. Cost should also be a secondary issue to speed of scale out & reliability. We're racing a clock where going too slow has its own costs, in capital & lives. It should be a factor but not the factor.
Who are those "some"? It's an outrageous claim. Are you sure you aren't mistaking it for hydro?