A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028
theweathernetwork.com
theweathernetwork.com
1. Vast swathes of uninhabited land can absorb some of the risks/fears associated with a nuclear accident. With technology like this, the risks are even lower. 2. It's lot cleaner than coal and natural gas, which are still the primary sources of our electricity. 3. There will be a huge demand for electric cars in the near future drawing massive amount power from the grid. Nuclear power would be a lot cheaper and enable us to truely go green.
Of course the coal companies won't like that. I can't see any reason why don't have nuclear energy. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Maybe the nuclear subs will provide impetus
The problem space we're in now is multi-dimensional. Purely on economic and rational engineering grounds you are right. Bring politics to the table and no, there is no clear time now or in the future where it will "work" to propose nuclear for powergen, where if we had installed the worse, 2/3 gen stuff in the 60s we'd be arguing about replacement, but with a good investment in nuclear physics engineering, and baseload supply demands which had displaced brown coal already.
The cost of PV and Wind (with Storage included) is already vastly lower than any commercially available Nuclear Power design.
They're also a whole lot easier to deploy and maintain, don't come with all the risks involved in current Nuclear Power designs.
There is no future path where even SMR can arrive at price point and power rating to replace the overbuild of wind and solar with storage, which provides the same energy reliability. Overbuild sounds negative but it's not: you need more than nameplate power and more units widely dispersed to avoid outages from local weather. With that comes more for storage, more for H2 conversion, desalination, other uses.
Basically, we should be further along our de-carbonisation. It's all about the past.
(I'm a candidate for the Fusion Party; we'd like to remove the ban on nuclear power in Australia because it would enable research)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water#Efficien...
Not that this changes the picture of hydrogen powered personal vehicles. Still the only viable option for grid level seasonal storage.
Liquified ammonia will also be popular.
But we don't need any seasonal storage at all, just as we don't have seasonal storage of oil. We only need enough storage to hold out until a shipment of LH2 or LNH3 arrives from the tropics.
Efficiency of H2 needs to fold in the cost of getting the power back out: Cf. "round-trip efficiency". But as I said, it doesn't matter very much, anymore, since generation is getting so cheap. Gasoline engines were never efficient, but few have cared much about that.
Hydrogen won't, in any case, be "transported to the fuel station". It will be made right on the spot, or just down the street. And, won't be compressed, but will be poured in and allowed to boil up to pressure.
That said, cars will be using batteries for the foreseeable future. In 20 years, H2 might get another chance, if batteries don't improve enough. Which seems unlikely.
Are the efficient machines you are talking about affordable and portable enough to be locally owned?
Also you are talking about hydrogen being poured in - so that would be cryogenic cooling, right? that incurrs an energy cost as well?
But by the time we are doing that on every street corner, the whole grid will be driven from renewables, and joules will be very cheap vs. other concerns. In particular, the LH2 will be banked during peak generation time, so almost free.
If the batteries themselves were to remain expensive even as the electricity to charge them/electrolyse water became cheap, I can imagine a scenario where the lifetime cost difference between batteries and hydrogen tanks might be more than the cost of the energy wasted as heat by making the hydrogen. I don’t think this will happen now.
The same dynamic on a slightly smaller scale means I can also believe that hydrogen cars could be a Vimes’ Boot: low purchase cost, high running cost, so poor people have them because they can’t afford the cheaper option.
Likewise, nukes: a dollar plowed into nukes generates, many years later, much less power than a dollar of renewables that start producing immediately. You spend on coal the whole time while the nuke is being built, and the amount you have spent just on coal, by then, would have bought as much renewable generating capacity as your nuke.
You know three nuclear power plants (spanning 19 reactors) in Ontario provide electricity for 9 million people? How many solar panels and wind turbines would you need to put in their place?
A solar PV facility must have an installed capacity of 3,300 MW and 5,400 MW to match a 1,000-MW nuclear facility’s output, requiring between 45 and 75 square miles of land cover. That's twice the size of Manhattan. [1] Ontario has a generating capacity of 13.5GWe of nuclear energy. That would be almost 1000 square miles of solar panel - 4x the city of Toronto.
I actually don't really care that nuclear's more expensive. It's the better option.
[1] https://www.nei.org/news/2015/land-needs-for-wind-solar-dwar...
Glad you don't care nuclear is more expensive! That's a winning argument.
I'm saying spending the same amount on solar would leave us worse off.
There's a role for both, together.
> If we'd started building reactors when we first said it'd take too long, we'd have all the reactors we need. Instead of saying it's going to take too long, let's just start :)
... and apparently you don't care that there was an alternative that would already be producing a lot of power? Because it doesn't matter how much money you think could have built reactors, the reactor-building community is screwed up.
Anyone who wants carbon free power generation should be pro-solar AND pro-nuclear.
Just some thoughts. Australia has enough unutilised land mass to generate the global power demand a couple of times over, North Africa also does... so you could build a solution that requires no storage at all.
You are reaching. The fact is that renewables are the cheapest source of power that has ever happened on this planet, and they are still getting cheaper.
Storage is likewise cheap and very quickly getting much, much cheaper. By the time we actually need any, you will not notice the cost.
The second-most common type of panel, CdTe solar panels still contain cadmium, tellurium and sometimes lead - and all of them to my knowledge have huge quantities of plastic. These are rarely recycled and generally end up buried with the rest of the e-waste in poor countries. [2]
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/toxic-lake-black-sludge-re...
[2] https://www.americanexperiment.org/solar-panels-are-starting...
CdTe PV is made on glass. They are common mainly in the US, mainly because of import tariffs. But Cd and Te are valuable and easily extracted from panels, so, no, they will not end up in landfills. The Si ones may, but very highly-purified Si is also valuable. Thin-film cells likely to be used in future cells use very little material.
So, you are reaching.
Your second one refers to "black sludge" in Mongolia... but doesn't actually say anything about Solar or Wind production.
Am I missing something?
You could also look at panels towards the poles where the sun shines longer.
Solar panels really are an insane technology.
Every step producing greenhouse gasses or other pollution.
Self sufficiency of this sort is largely a sub-urban myth. A comfortable, optimistic one, but a myth nonetheless.
I am all for nuclear - but let's keep the discussion honest.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-hous...
In the interest of being honest.
No wonder they still work, those are literally water pipes embedded in a roof panel. No inverter, no battery, nothing. The only thing they have in common with solar cells people install today is the fact that they are powered by sun.
Yes, total independence is unrealistic and will be until we have von Neumann universal constructors, but we are starting to get to the point where big footprint homes could reasonably be energy-independent for normal daily use.
If every house had solar panels, there's going to be a rolling requirement for on going maintenance.
Let's say, for argument sake, solar panels and inverts are approximately as reliable and long lasting as air conditioners, we'll still need a whole new fairly large industry.
Seems doable, but we'd need to deal with recycling all the parts, still doable, but there's nothing self sufficient about any of that.
Solar isn't as reliable as the solar industry would have you believe. Worst part, a single component failure often takes large sections of the system offline. With domestic systems, that's the entire system.
Even 1 decade is optimistic life from current technology batteries that I am being sold from industrial battery sales channels.
I'd have to fill my entire house with batteries, and cover my entire 1 acre of land with panels, to get and store enough power in the winter.
First, there's heating my house when it is -40C out.
Second, there's only 5 hours of sunlight, 4 hours of dusk, and the sun stays low in the sky.
Third, snow storms.
So I'd need enough power collected, during 5 hours of weak sun, to power my house for 19 hours, and heat it.
And that doesn't even account for days in a row of blowing, white out snowstorms sometimes.
Solar is useless in some places as core power.
I think the small number of exceptions are, even collectively, even long term, not problematic to fuel chemically.
What kind of insulation do you have? I keep expecting aerogel on sites like this.
Australia is enormous and has a tiny population.
(And 2015)
Meanwhile, the Pavagada Solar Plant in India is rated at 2050 MW, with a footprint of 37 km^2, or 14 miles^2.
Though if you really want to compare like-for-like environments, I think a better comparison is the Noor Abu Dhabi, which is rated at 1177 MW with a footprint of 8 km^2, or 3 miles^2.
And of course that’s in addition to possibly of reaching a significant fraction of demand with rooftop PV, which is otherwise wasted space and which nuclear reactors can’t use.
Heck, you can put the PV onto the outside surfaces etc. of the nuclear reactor if you want. Or between the wind turbines.
The whole idea of base load was that nuclear is very cheap, but inflexible. So you optimize, generating as much as possible with nuclear, then filling in the variable bits with more expensive to run, but more flexible generation.
Cheap renewables have completely wrecked that model though.
Right now we have a market where wind/solar don't have to pay for the externalities imposed by their intermittency. That is backwards.
Fukushima cost around $200 billion to clean up. I don't think that got factored into the cost of the power it sold.
Now I guess the answer here is insurance, but any insurance company that signs up for a potential payout of $200 billion is going to charge quite the premium, which won't make the already expensive nuclear power any more attractive.
And how do you even calculate the premium here? It's not a house or a vehicle with an easy to determine cost. We're talking about evacuating an area of unknown size for however long might be necessary.
In any case, my point is a different one: energy that's available on demand is more valuable than energy that is not, and we should price it as such. If we don't, we end up doing things like backing up our wind/solar with fossil...which also doesn't have its externalities priced in.
Of course you can set up a market system where nuclear is favored, but that would be a market system that would likely not be delivering the lowest overall cost solution to the optimization problem.
At one point MIT had a US grid simulator online and I played around with it for a while. The cheapest fossil-free combination I found was solar and nuclear. Basically enough nuclear for nighttime demand, and enough solar for extra daytime demand. Wind+solar+storage was a good bit costlier.
And that was with conventional nuclear cost. We should probably find out whether, in practice, it's cheaper to mass-produce passively-safe small modular reactors in factories.
It models minimum cost combinations of renewables, batteries, and hydrogen to supply synthetic baseload given historical weather data (insolation, wind) in various places. It can also include nuclear (enable option "Dispatchable 2", which is based on EPR.) Twiddle the cost assumptions as you like to see what dominates.
Passively safe small reactors are the latest in nuclear magical thinking. Yes, this time, the it-will-be-cheaper promise will be real, unlike all the other times it was a lie. At some point Charlie Brown the Nuclear Stan needs to realize Lucy is going to pull away the football again.
Edit: From some initial attempts, using their EPR costs does leave nuclear out entirely, in both the US and China. However, cutting the nuclear capital cost in half results in a grid that is completely nuclear.
And it's not all or nothing. Reducing nuclear capital cost to 2/3 of the EPR value, the US gets a mix of sources with 63% nuclear.
Whether such cost reductions are feasible, we'll see. You may be right, but I'll note that we have never actually tried mass-producing lots of small passively-safe reactors, or done more than early experiments with MSRs. I'm glad there are companies and countries giving it a shot.
Edit2: Actually, even current production nuclear technology can get us there, if we follow the lead of the most effective countries. See figure 12 in this study of global nuclear cost curves: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
For some countries, even the original capital cost of 6000 is viable with a 60-year lifetime. Two I tried are Thailand and, ironically, Germany, both of which went 100% nuclear that way.
One can view the strong position of gas-fired generating capacity in the US not just as a consequence of the low cost of natural gas, but also the low capital cost, which limits the downside risk of future competition. A combined cycle power plant might cost 10% or less the capital cost of a NPP, per unit power output.
Nuclear's main cost is capital, so using an artificially low lifetime biases heavily against nuclear. The model accounts for operating costs separately. Whether other tech will make nuclear uncompetitive is what we're trying to find out with this model; if we start by assuming that, and limit nuclear lifetime accordingly, then we're making a circular argument.
I did notice that fixed O&M costs are expressed as a percentage of capital cost, so if I take them at face value and halve the capital cost, to be conservative perhaps I should double the O&M from 3% to 6%, which I hadn't done before. That doesn't change the German and Thai results, since for those I only changed lifetime. But in the US, it means capital cost of 3000 still results in a grid without nuclear.
But is that number correct? Not quite. Across the nuclear fleet, the average US nuclear O&M cost is $132/kWh, or 125 euros: https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2019-03/documents/at...
That's only 2.1% of 6000. If we lower capital cost without lowering O&M, we get 4.2% of 3000. That puts a small amount of nuclear back in the US market.
However, they default to a discount rate of 10 for nuclear, and only 5 for wind/solar/battery. I don't see any reason to use different numbers here. Setting nuclear to 5, with the above changes, gets us back to a 100% nuclear US grid. Even if we take O&M back up to 6%, a capital cost of 3000 and discount rate of 5% means a 100% nuclear US.
Comparing overall grid cost of two examples: With no nuclear (due to 10% discount), the US average grid cost is 53.7 EUR/MWh. With 100% nuclear (due to 5% discount and 3000 capital cost), the US grid cost is 48.6 EUR/MWh.
In any case, this has changed my view somewhat. I'd thought that nuclear was a clear winner over storage, but it looks like nuclear's place is at least marginal in the US. We have copious wind and solar, and nuclear only lowers overall grid cost if we can manage the sort of nuclear costs they've achieved in South Korea. But in countries less favorable to wind/solar, nuclear dominates.
If we start seeing CO2 taxes here, the way forward will be displacing gas using increased renewables, and if there are enough times where gas goes to zero then adding storage to serve that. Getting to 100% will require additional storage (and likely hydrogen), but even before that the environment will become quite hostile to new NPPs.
With the 2020 assumptions? Do that with the 2030 numbers and renewables will still be on top. 2030 is probably what you want to use right now, since any nuclear plant started now isn't going to be in operation before about then.
Note that some assumptions for 2030 have already been superseded. For example, it assumes hydrogen electrolysers cost 600 EUR/kW; China is already selling them (domestically and for export) for half that.
The EPR numbers are rather optimistic. Flamanville 3 and Vogtle 3 and 4 are now costing around 11,000 EUR/kW, nearly twice what was assumed (and four times the capital cost after we halve that number.) Yes, things went wrong in those projects. That tends to happen with nuclear and cannot be ignored. Renewables usually come in within 10% of promised cost.
Also, remember this is for synthetic baseload, not a grid with variable demand. The latter will favor renewables since that means some of the energy from nuclear will now be going into storage, just like from renewables. The synthetic baseload case is the best case for nuclear.
Can you provide a source for hydrogen electrolyzer cost? My quick google didn't show obvious results, though there's plenty to dig into.
Certainly nuclear looks bad if you use the worst costs available. My claim is that South Korea, for example, has achieved much lower costs in production, so our issues are more with mismanagement than the technology itself.
If I plug your hydrogen cost into the scenarios in my other new comment, it lowers the cost at which nuclear starts to appear on the US grid, but there's still a point within the range of the world's production nuclear costs where nuclear takes over.
South Korea's costs seem to have been related to corruption. That will work until the first accident, and as long as people aren't going to jail (as they did in S. Korea.)
South Korea isn't the only country with decent nuclear costs. See the study I linked.
US nuclear costs are related to the fact that we build reactors as occasional one-offs, throw in long political delays, and sometimes change regulations in the middle of construction. We're probably not going to change any of that, so it's good we do so well with wind and solar. But our situation is not the situation everywhere.
If your electricity cost is too much, industry will move elsewhere.
If you try to subsidize it, that money will have to come out of somewhere.
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-5-trillion-in-fossi...
Solar is extremely amenable to mass manufacturing. You can pump out solar panels by the millions. Then it all goes together with various metal brackets, wiring, and electronics, all of which have long been mass manufactured. They're made in many places and have uses in multiple industries, and there's plenty competition.
Wind is very amenable to mass manufacturing. Generators, gears, various nuts and bolts can all be mass made. The actual towers and windmills are definitely more specialized though.
And trailing way behind that is nuclear. You need to deal with radiation, use exotic alloys, and have a bunch of very specific tooling and instrumentation with lots of regulations and certifications. Plus lots of redundancy to make sure nothing bad happens.
And they have exactly the same "cheap electricity". A solar panel just sits there and makes power, only it comes for cheap from a factory in China and you don't need various backup systems. You can just build more solar instead, which produces more money.
Luckily that's almost exactly the roof area of detached dwellings.
But since we're mostly talking about solar, that doesn't apply. What may apply is that solar will have highest output when it's sunny, whereas in a hot climate, demand will peak when it's sunny — which aren't quite the same thing, but strongly correlated.
That said, you need to be able to handle hot, cloudy days, and for that reason you may be right that you're best off going entirely with one or the other.
If the cost of land ever did become a global constraint on solar energy, it would be because the other parts of solar had become incredibly cheap. At that point, solar would already have consigned all other energy sources to oblivion.
The value produced per hectare per year from a PV field is much greater than many other current uses of land, such as raising lifestock, growing grain, or commercial forestry. If solar is deemed impractical because of land usage, so should those other uses.
apparently circa. $ 40 billion, for, right now... one GW. On average - and be assured I have checked this - five, which puts it in the same cost / GW as nuclear, and a capacity factor, not of sixty percent as advertised, but twenty-five. And we don't dump a megatonne or so of CO2 into the atmosphere a week running gas plants to cover nuclear variability. As alluded to by someone else, big wind projects are starting to run into the same levels of NIMBYism as nukes, because the footprint is huge.
You want to advocate for less nuclear, that megatonne a week is something you answer for.
- refueling (regularly done, highly plannable)
- insufficient cooling water/ too warm cooling water (regular, seasonal, not very predictable short-term)
- planned maintenance (often combined with refueling)
- unplanned maintenance (accidents)
Whenever these things happen, the entire reactor is producing no power. This is why most nuclear facilities have multiple reactors, so you can rotate these tasks among them and still have some power. Unfortunately, the cooling issue is becoming more and more of a problem, and many sites that used to operate year-round now have to scale down significantly in mid-summer due to lack of cooling water.
The main reason? NIMBYs. Loads of people go out to the countryside to retire. imagine what these retires would do if their picturesque landscape is now comprised of windfarms? and they dont have anything else to do to fill up their day?
Bonus numbers, the horizon 'drops off' at 5 KM distance, and modern windmills are about 300m high.
And, is the wiring in your house all exposed?
The untidy assortment of cabling under the living room floor sends shivers through my spine even though that's hidden. I once was a cable guy.
they imagine themselves wanting to go out to the country side to retire, but would find that living in remote places that doesn't have facilities to be poor quality life.
you want to travel to the countryside for leisure - may be even for extended vacation. But you will almost always want a "home base" in a big metropolitan area for when services are needed - such as medical or home helper etc.
I'm in Australia, you can listen to them on the radio (podcasts) complaining about the noise etc.
How do we find a balance between people's right to quiet enjoyment of their homes and other factors that affect the rest of society.
In the US at least, a lot of wind, solar and long-distance transmission projects have also faced long political delays. That doesn't imply anything about our technical capability to build them, and the same is true of these new nuclear designs.
And China, for one, will certainly not hesitate to build stuff like this, once they're able.
Remember, Ontario is 40% of Canada's population.
[1] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...
I trust StatsCan though, so your point is well made.
[1] https://blogs.edf.org/energyexchange/2019/11/15/long-conside...
"the rate of emissions per unit of electric generation from hydropower (excluding tropical reservoirs) is much lower than for fossil fuel technologies." Source: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1209/ML12090A850.pdf
I'm not really opposed to hydro, I only responded because the impact of the creation of reservoirs is likely not factored into the headline numbers.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-maga...
Usage profiles are indeed pertinent: Australians probably don't need dissipate energy in order for heating as Canadians do, but even this perspective isn't easy to grasp: heating thanks to gridpower is a thing in some nations without really cold seasons, France being one.
However the subject here is a gridpower-producing nuclear reactor, this IMHO sets a perimeter.
Only WA+NT are not connected to the national grid.
The problem with having a nuclear power plant on the coast where there's sufficient reliable water is that nobody wants one in their back yard.
(Yes there's parts of the WA/NT/QLD/SA coastlines where population drops to bugger all, but they're generally less suitable for all sorts of reasons)
Putting them inland where they're still near major interstate grid connections runs into the water problem again.
Which is a problem Canada doesn't have.
(Sorry if this is really ignorant)
There's at least one common feature that you see in all of them - the giant cooling towers, often pictured emitting large white fluffy steam clouds while they're operating.
They're also all on massive permanent rivers, lakes or the ocean.
Pumping/Delivering water for that purpose is basically not feasible.
We did.
BHP had massive steelworks in Newcastle and Wollongong (~150KM north and south of Sydney), aside from others.
BHP found it was cheaper to do it in other countries where environmental, safety and labour laws weren't such as hassle to deal with (aka: Paying a living wage, avoid killing your workers, and limiting the impact you had on the surrounding population).
Newcastle also had a massive Aluminium smelter - but again, cheaper to do it overseas.
It's a repeating pattern.
Alcoa is the largest employer in South Australia, and operates the world's largest integrated bauxite mining and aluminium refinery.
You realise you're commenting on a post about Canada using Nuclear power, and all of the things you said about Australia also hold true for Canada?
TL;DW: Coal, gas lobbies.
You just need to cool the steam with ambient air - water is better (more cooling) but hardly required.
And it's hardly "vast amounts", it's a small portion of the flow of a small river.
A coal plant also works better with a water source - there's no real difference here, you just need something to cool the steam at the end.
If coal can work in Australia so can nuclear.
A map of the country's population density may help bring this into perspective: https://i.redd.it/9mw8ttqqu0b41.jpg
There is no mainstream party that supports nuclear outside of the libertarian party (which gets single digit percentages at the ballots).
We have a lot of "unused" and stable land well away from population centres.
I imagine transport from afar is an issue though.
Wherever it is put the high level waste (not much in quantity but...) is deadly and a silent killer for over a hundred thousand years. This is geologically significant time period, and we can make bets, but have no guarantee of any place on Earth being stable on those time scales.
So it must be monitored.
For a hundred thousand years
That would be us making future generations pay for the cost of our current consumptions. I do not think they will think kindly of us.
- Extinction - We don't need to care about it, because there are no descendants.
- Advancement - We will be able to handle the problem better as our technology improves.
- Stagnation/regression - We don't need to care about it. Our descendants will have to worry about dysentery, crop failures and regional warfare. Some magic rocks that kill people will end up as curios in warded laden boxes after first adventurous monk opens sarcophagus and succumbs to curse.
Leaving piles of toxic waste - either nuclear or some other nefarious thing you are implying - is due to greed.
Can we deal with our greed?
The geological pixel - smallest possible measurable period - is 50,000 years. Nuclear waste is 2 pixels.
Everest is a 50 million years old. The chalk that makes up white cliffs of dover is 130 million years old. There are layers of bedrock over a billion years old.
So yes, we are making a bet in the sence that when I go putside I make a bet that an asteroid won't fall on my head.
What's left is just fission products. Encase them in glass and bury them, and they'll be back to the radioactivity of the original ore in 300 years. Most of the radioactivity will be gone in the first few decades, since the decline is exponential.
Russia has a couple fast reactors in operation right now, and various startups are attempting new designs.
It does not really matter how big the caverns are where you store the waste so any additional nuclear material stored is basically free.
ugh ffs : mabo was 30 yrs ago last month
If you ask the people who inhabit "uninhabited" areas they may have a different opinion. That's why we tell them and not ask them.
Yes nuclear is cleaner than coal. But also way more expensive than everything else even before you consider that. Note how the article carefully dodges the cost topic. That's because it probably is quite a bit of money per mwh. Nobody installs nuclear because its cheap. There's always a secondary objective; usually military. Countries like being labeled "a nuclear power". It's not about the electricity. It's a label that comes at an extreme premium. The price of the energy they sell simply does not cover the cost of the plant over the lifetime.
The cheapest options in the market are solar and wind. Not by a little bit but by a wide and growing margin. That's just at current prices; they are widely predicted to continue dropping for a long time and there is very little consensus on where it will bottom out except perhaps nowhere close to current price levels. Cheap energy storage solutions are also becoming available and also dropping in price. Solar in Canada is not good enough to rely on exclusively. But wind is fine. Lots of coastal areas; lots of empty planes. Lots of wind.
Electrical cars won't be that big of an impact. They will actually have a balancing impact on the grid because they can be both sources and sinks of energy. They can absorb oversupply and supply back to the grid during peak hours. A single EV can keep a house hold going for several days. With millions of EVs on the road, a large percentage of them will be plugged in and either charging or ready to discharge at any time. Even using just a small percentage of that capacity means you can pretty much permanently turn off a bunch of gas peaker plants. 1 million cars supplying 1 kw of power for 1 hour would amount to about 1GW of capacity and 1GWH of power delivered. The same as running 3 of these fancy new nuclear plants for 1 hour. Charge them with a few solar panels and they pretty much become net producers rather than consumers of energy too.
The us drives about 3.2 trillion miles per year apparently. A good EV might get 4-5 miles per kwh. Lets call it 3.2 miles for the sake of easy numbers. So, that's 3.2 trillion kwh. Or 3.2 billion mwh. Or 3.2 million gwh, a common metric of the output of energy producers. The US generates about 4 trillion kwh per year. So switching overnight would cause some issues but also be a completely impossible scenario because the battery production volume wto make that happen simply does not exist to make that happen. Not even close. It will take decades to construct that. But gradually phasing in storage and renewable energy sources over say decades, would be plenty of time for the less than 2x increase in energy production. It's not an energy crisis but a healthy growth scenario for any energy company worthy of the name.
That's why the investment space around renewables is so hot right now. Nuclear, not so much. Risky investments, poor ROI (if not outright negative), long lead times to plants actually coming online, politics very uncertain, high chance of budget overruns, etc.
Canada is somewhere I'd begrudgingly admit that nuclear may have a role to play in the future energy market, but it would be downright silly for Australia.
I'm happy with whatever actually delivers carbon-free watt hours, which yes, in Australia should be solar.
Clearly you want something else as well.
But I'm not, so I have to be realistic and admit that there are niche areas where nuclear is helpful in real politics even if most of the noise around nuclear is clearly climate change denial.
I have seen thos banged about a lot - where does the idea that banning nuclear would somehow improve our ability to build renewables come from? What is the basis for it?
'most of the noise around nuclear is clearly climate change denial.'
Again, why? Why do not believe that 90% of noise about nuclear is well intentioned people seeing an alternative solution?
The vast majority of people advocating for nuclear simply cannot hold in their criticism of renewables. That's because believing lies about renewables is a basic requirement for thinking nuclear is a useful solution in a world rapidly deploying renewables.
By that logic, we could be taking money people spend on casinos and spending it on renewables - we'd get more done and that money was being wasted by definition.
Budget of a country is not like budgeting your personal expenses, and we are limited by resources other than just Money. Like production facilties, pool of talent and skilled workers, natural resources, etc. Nuclear has almost no overlap with renewables when it comes to consuming real resources - so both could be used. Meanwhile money is not real, and when the banks were in danger, trillions just magically appeared overnight.
In UK main obstacle to renewables are idiots who think they own the landscape, and that their view is more important than the future of the planet -> a local group had cash in hand to build a wind turbine, and it took them 4 years to get permission to do so!
You could do similar for tidal power, but since it's so much worse than wind/solar in terms of efficiency/cost you basically don't build any.
Not because it's competing for steel, but because you have better option(s) for achieving the same goal.
Now, swap nuclear for tidal power and you have the same situation.
The main problem for renewables in the UK is the same main problem for them everywhere. Fossil fuel lobbying. All the bullshit about wind turbines was generated by the same political groups funded by fossil fuel interests.
It's great that lots of people have put a lot of effort into getting past "There's no problem", "There is a problem but we can't do anything about it", "we can do something about it but it's too expensive", to get to the current "it's cheaper but the people don't like it".
Imagine how much further on we'd be if we didn't have to wade through all that BS to get here.
There isn't one fix all.
For example, Australia has loads of land perfect for solar, even in the winter.
Meanwhile, much of Canada is too dark, and has too much night for solar in the winter.
Some countries have loads of tidal power, and others are land locked -- no tides!
We need loads of solutions, options, and costs to transition.
It sometimes feels like the internet has one group of nuclear fans who have never heard of wind power and another group who have never heard of solar. It's tiring to deal with.
1. Nuclear is a more expensive sources of energy than our alternatives (uranium ore is a small proportion of the cost stack, and Australia would still need to import nuclear fuel)
2. Nuclear isn't commercially viable in energy markets with very high levels of variable renewable energy where they have to be economically curtailed on an almost daily basis (our coal plants are all closing for this reason)
Electricity will never, ever be a free market. The barriers to entry are almost insurmountable, especially capital requirements (production + distribution, especially distribution) but also the myriad safety regulations.
Might as well involve the government and gain some accountability, because with corporations, there is 0 accountability.
> with corporations there is zero accountability
This is not Somalia, lol. There is rule of law here and it works fairly well. The only problem is who people vote for.
Realistically the grid needs to be nationalised or under an arms-length wholly government owned corporation. You can't have competing grids. The grid is the market. The UK tried privatizing it (and the rail infrastructure, and the broadband infrastructure) and ended up taking electricity and rail national again.
On the back end I think the UK market works reasonably well with a light regulatory touch allowing for microgenerators. The retail side is more of a problem. You can't really expose retail customers to the spot price (that went wrong in Texas), so there has to be an intermediary, who is vulnerable to bankruptcy instead if the spot price shoots up.
Well, I didn't say "unregulated". You can have regulation that doesn't create huge barriers to entry.
What would be a free market today? Something with very low barriers to entry (capital, expertise, legal requirements) and with lots of competition.
For example real estate agents in some developing countries. They frequently have only a high school degree (if that), they don't really need a ton of money to get started (just some nice clothes and some time), and the legal aspects are mostly covered by notaries, anyway. In many developing countries the real estate market is not consolidated so you have a million independent real estate agents, who frequently don't even have exclusivity for the property they're selling. So you could literally have 10 agents promoting the same property.
The additional pumped storage needs of solar and wind are more than offset by their vastly lower cost.
If nuclear power could compete on a level playing field it'd be great but it sucks up subsidies like nothing else and puts the taxpayer is fully on the hook for dealing with all and any 800 billion dollar fukishima events.
But some 18 years before the 2011 disaster, new scientific knowledge had emerged about the likelihood of a large earthquake and resulting major tsunami of some 15.7 metres at the Daiichi site. However, this had not yet led to any major action by either the plant operator, Tepco, or government regulators, notably the Nuclear & Industrial Safety Agency (NISA). Discussion was ongoing, but action minimal. The tsunami countermeasures could also have been reviewed in accordance with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) guidelines which required taking into account high tsunami levels, but NISA continued to allow the Fukushima plant to operate without sufficient countermeasures such as moving the backup generators up the hill, sealing the lower part of the buildings, and having some back-up for seawater pumps, despite clear warnings.
We already know that the Chernobyl incident was due to even more egregious human error and poor planning.
I don’t have an issue with nuclear power but IMO the industry should be forced to pay for a ~1T insurance policy to avoid bad incentives rather than the government simply taking on the associated risks.
Good idea; let's start by applying that incentive to the externalities generated by the fossil fuel industry first though, so that the playing field is fair.
Ed: spelling
Unfortunately, fossil fuel externalities cross national boarders which creates perverse incentives. Do only price in the costs to your own country or accept an economic disadvantage? Essentially countries need to start doing pollution tariffs not just taxing externalities.
Economically the correct choices are obvious, but politics is rarely so simple.
Pretty much every country with civilian nuclear energy had some big scandals or incidents around them[1]. Humans just can't be trusted to build a 100% safe process.
[1] Just to name a few: Three Mile Island (US), Sellafield (UK), Brunsbüttel (DE), Saint-Laurent (FR)
Australia absolutely would have egregious chains of human failure and bad planning.
You've only got to look at the present state of this country to see that that is how we, evidently, prefer to do things.
No, coal plants have spent-fuel disposal problems due to "human error"/poor management too. This one cost over $1b to clean up and required them to scrape off the topsoil and rendered the area essentially uninhabitable, just like fukushima. TVA ended up having to buy out the inhabitants and move them elsewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
And the fun part is: that shit is actually radioactive too. Coal plants put out as much radioactive waste as nuclear plants do... but they put it straight into the air, and then put a bunch more into spent-fuel pools besides.
> The radioactive materials stay fully encased for their entire life and beyond. It's a very robust, strong fuel that's designed to make sure it indefinitely keeps the fuel safely inside the pellet.
> Some of the main differences that the MMR has from conventional nuclear plants is that the reactor cannot meltdown as the heat is passively released into the environment, does not need any active systems to remove heat, and requires no on-site fuel storage, handling, or processing.
This reactor would have been completely unaffected by the events at Fukushima.
Crappy reactors from the 70s are the only financially viable reactors these days. Also the ones Germany is being raked across the coals for trying to shut down.
This is seriously glossing over details. The cost of pumped hydro is highly geographically dependent. If you happen to have an alpine lake handy, then yes it can be cheap. But building pumped hydro in flat terrain is much more expensive.
Nuclear doesn't have a big support base. It's basically only supported by educated technocrats.
And those educated technocrats are already holding their nose, because they know big government projects are often late and over budget. And the designs that are intrinsically safe haven't been built before. And if there was a meltdown, the taxpayer would have to foot the bill. And nobody's going to want the plants built in their area. And a permanent waste repository has been a political football for longer than most of us have been alive.
At the same time, if you squint hard enough when you look at the figures, solar+wind+batteries look cheaper.
Squinting that way is pretty tempting if you were on the fence anyway.
I think it's unconscionable that we chose to emit ~20 gigatons of CO2 instead of pushing nuclear from 20% of our electric supply to 100% -- we would be there today if we had just kept up the pace -- but what's done is done. We killed nuclear and waited for renewables to become viable. We paid the price. The CO2 is in the air. Now we can move forward.
True for cost per Watt, but there are other factors. A good replacement for burning fossil fuels is solar + batteries, which is more expensive right now. Even if batteries get cheap, you still have to protect yourself from black swan events e.g. volcano eruption which hides the sun. Also, it seems Australia would need nuclear weapons to protect its independence in the future. It's critical to have nuclear experts at home.
No they wouldn't. To quote https://globalroadtechnology.com/uranium-mining-australia-hi...
> Australia is home to 31% of the world’s recoverable uranium. Australian uranium is exported and consists about one-quarter of its energy exports. Australia uses no nuclear power and depends on coal. The uranium mining industry is a billion dollar industry in Australian dollar ... In 2019, Australia produced 7790 tonnes of uranium and was ranked the world’s third best producer behind Kazakhstan and Canada.
If that is true, Australia would have to export natural uranium and import back uranium enriched in 235U, unless they would choose to build a reactor with heavy-water, which can use natural uranium as a fuel.
Australia is one of the most affluent countries in world history and hyper resource rich.
They should have a third of their energy supply coming from nuclear.
Nuclear is expensive (commonly said)? So what. Australia is hyper rich ($67k GDP per capita) and can afford to do it and can afford to subsidize it for consumers. What's a lot more expensive (risk) is having a weak, unreliable grid with a poor diversity of energy sources.
It's insane not to subsidize nuclear, if one believes even the calmer side of environmental warnings re climate change. It's extremely potent energy technology, we know how to build it, and we know we can keep improving on it yet.
About 60% of Australia’s electricity came from coal over the last 12-months, but this proportion is rapidly declining and all the large coal plants are losing money and slated for closure.
Expect a big uptick in coal usage to offset Russian oil
I've asked time and again for costed *TWh-scale* storage, the proposals are never forthcoming. Because, on first principles, they're far too high and unlikely to ever decrease. Ask actual investors - which I have - in private, and they'll admit it.
Almost nowhere are renewables outcompeting nuclear. What is outcompeting is greenwashed gas.
Our state with the highest share of renewable energy, South Australia, has not seen gas use increase as renewables have replaced coal.
The idea that 100% of all renewable capacity has to be ‘backed up’ with firm capacity is not true in general, and certainly not true in the specific case of Australia given the solar and wind resources we have.
But there is still plenty of coal production no? Here Nuclear which is the vast majority of our production is being phased out due to political pressure. Our Greens push gas plants to cover the lowdays for renewables. Which variable production source is kept in mind in South Australia in the scenario where coal is pushed out all togheter? Is there a hydro dam or so?
Coal accounts for about 75 per cent of Australia’s electricity generation, followed by gas (16 per cent), hydro (5 per cent) and wind around (2 per cent).[1]
About 92% of electricity in Ontario is produced from zero-carbon sources: 59% from nuclear, 24% from hydroelectricity, 8% from wind, and 1% from solar.
[1] https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/energy/overview#:~:t....
[2] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr....
Not in the very long term. Upfront it's really expensive yeah.
>(uranium ore is a small proportion of the cost stack, and Australia would still need to import nuclear fuel)
A very small portion and isn't Australia a big exporter? Might as well set up refinement capabilities.
>with very high levels of variable renewable energy where they have to be economically curtailed on an almost daily basis (our coal plants are all closing for this reason)
I went to check gov sources and it still seems to be mainly fossil fuels tho renewables are growing. What will be kept as backup for days with little production btw? Here our greens are pushing for gas.
Australia is different to Germany. We get high solar output every day, even in winter, and while we do get some wind droughts, they are less long and widespread than in Europe. We don't need to 'back up' anything close to 100% of our renewable capacity, and we don't need 'back up' for very long durations.
Doesn't electricity usage vary quite a lot throughout the day? Especially in the evening.
And to make matters even worse, you generally want to run nuclear at 100% all the time because of the high initial costs but summer peaks can be twice winter lows which means you would need to have a ton capacity that hardly ever gets used whereas gas is by far the cheapest option for handling variable demand.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
And it is still extremely inefficient to my knowledge with some roadblocks towards improvement that are hard to overcome. Hydropump storage doesn't seem grand from an intuitive perspective but probably ends up doing better.
>Here in the states nuclear is now about 3x as expensive as wind/solar
Now spread that costs over a proper lifetime, calculate in the costs of storage and/or variable demand backup and the adjusted distribution infrastructure and don't ban things like fuel reuse technology to reduce waste at the behest of fossil fuel industry and it looks a lot better.
https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/image/png/2020-12/lco_b...
>but summer peaks can be twice winter lows
Is this in Arizona and the likes? I feel like America really need to get it's head out of it's ass and dis-incentivise living in deserts with water problems to boot as well as some other common sense things. The CO2 output per capita being twice that of the EU and a bunch of other countries and that after a whole lot of improvement on the US front makes it clear this is not just a developed world thing but rather that some core issues are not being looked at.
>whereas gas is by far the cheapest option for handling variable demand.
And a fossil fuel with a climate change impact much much higher than most people expect.
The link I posted is from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) published the Annual Energy Outlook (AEO) which uses LCOE. It doesn't include hydrogen/methane storage but we are talking 3 times the cost which leaves a lot of room to come out ahead.
> Is this in Arizona and the likes? I feel like America really need to get it's head out of it's ass and dis-incentivise living in deserts with water problems to boot as well as some other common sense things. The CO2 output per capita being twice that of the EU and a bunch of other countries and that after a whole lot of improvement on the US front makes it clear this is not just a developed world thing but rather that some core issues are not being looked at.
Um, like almost everywhere? Honestly, west coast places like SF/LA are pretty unique in not having as much variable temperatures. We definitely get heat waves here in the midwest and it is definitely not a desert.
And now that I think about it, if we are truly to decarbonize that includes heating and heat waves [0] would be childs play compared to polar vortexes [1]. Good luck building enough spare nuclear to heat the entire continent by 40-90 degrees.
[0]: https://cw39.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/06/NATL-HI...
[1]: https://mashable.com/article/polar-vortex-2021-cold-temperat...
Which non carbon heating or energy source do you suggest? The US doesn't seem to be warming up to heatpumps much and it's not like those are grand in those extreme conditions. The insulation standards there from what i've heard and compared are still quite bad (Not helped by the fact that AC and pure heating solutions common involve lots of airflow)
We're not even using pumped storage nowhere near enough where possible and it's the vast majority of all utility scale storage but the amount of people that somehow champion power to gas as this grand thing that's anywhere close to being able to compete with it at scale is staggering.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/07/weatherwatch-nu...
So geographically, that likely means that nuclear power stations would still be close to Australian coastal cities.
In the place I live (Brittany/west part of France), a hot day is more like 25°C.
Also Australia doesn't have anything like the number of size of major rivers that France, and continental Europe has.
Water is a essential resource, and in a higher level than electricity.
But this is a conventional issue, a gas or coal generator has similar cooling requirements.
There are still unending miles of coastline in Australia that aren't peppered with big cities ;-)
The problem really is that time is of the essence now and it simply takes way too long to build a new plant. Cost isn't great at all, they will never be profitable and insurance is neck breaking, but it can be managed. If any of these issues currently do exist with renewables, they are continuously waning.
Two recent nuclear projects:
- Olkiluoto Unit 3 (EPR) in Finland. Projected cost: €3 billion / Real cost: ~€11 billion (4x) / Delay: 13 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant)
- Flamanville Unit 3 (EPR) in France. Projected cost: €3.3 billion / Real cost: €19.1 billion (6x) / Delay: currently 10 years, no start in sight (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...)
It doesn't look much better in other countries most of the time [2], China is possibly an exception due to, let's say, different handling of safety and other topics... In any case, nuclear is quite an expensive energy source [3] on top of critical time issues in construction and commission [4].
In the time it takes to build new nuclear power (10-15 years) technology and cost of renewable energy are projected to become much more favorable and then we gain several things:
- inherent safety
- decentralization
- stable cost (less dependence on imported resources such as uranium)
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSK...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
[3] https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...
Such a cynical take. We have a lot of land, its fine if we turn some of it into a nuclear wasteland.
Every reactor ever built has been guaranteed to be safe. Yet 2 of them have experienced meltdowns. This technology is safe in a sense but not in the sense that accidents will not happen. They have happened and they will happen again.
Incorporating solar into housing, like roof tiles seems like a no brainer. Energy stores like reservoirs, or flywheel tech or something else could help plug gaps.
Then there is the whole question of energy needs. Zero energy housing. And micro generation could help.
In the UK our housing and agriculture sector, uses a huge amount of energy for not a lot of gain. Given a modern country and opportunity learn from others' mistakes.
Like renewables, much of the cost of nuclear is in construction - unlike renewables, this has gone up not down over the years.
> Of course the coal companies won't like that.
This is a fairly important reason why it's not going to happen in Australia.
Does it? Article says this new reactor is helium cooled and vents heat. No mention of water cooling.
The system described in the article punts the "how do we use the heat this system outputs" to some other facility/plant. It could use the heat directly in a variety of industrial processes, or it could be used to boil water for a steam turbine.
They don't all work that way.
The reactor is helium cooled. Their own collateral (https://usnc.com/mmr-energy-system/ ; annoying scrolljacking) shows shipping the heat to e.g. industrial process use or electricity generation - but for generation, you'll need a standard steam turbine + condenser setup. Which consumes water for cooling the condenser.
Also from their web page:
> FCM® fuel cannot be re-processed using currently available reprocessing schemes.
They list this as a nonproliferation benefit, but it has downsides.
So it's non-functional without a methane industry tuen. Got it.
Water or salt or sodium sounds more sustainable.
personally I feel this is untrue. its done out of convenience; but from an engineering/infrastructure standpoint there isn't a reason we can't condense the steam that gets pumped out of the towers.
That's what the water is for!
Turbine systems follow the Rankine cycle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankine_cycle , which includes a condenser. The water circulating is a closed loop. The steam you see coming off cooling towers is the external water which has been used to condense the circulating steam.
The water is a source of "coolth".
> The nuclear plants need to be built near water, which means they're likely to end up near habitation.
Would seawater work? Does Australia have any "vast swathes of uninhabited land" near the sea?
> Like renewables, much of the cost of nuclear is in construction - unlike renewables, this has gone up not down over the years.
IIRC, a big reason why nuclear plants cost so much to construct nowadays is that most reactors designs aren't produced in quantity, like they used to be.
The thing is that nuclear is expensive by itself, anything you increase makes it less desirable.
Anyway, AFAIK, nearly all of the uninhabited land on Australia is inside the continent. It's much easier to deploy solar and wind there than anything else.
Local (to me) example: Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant killed all the abalone in its discharge cove during its first hot run due to the increased water temperature. There were so many that before the plant the spot was known to locals as "abalone cove". You could rock pick to your heart's content and not even need a wetsuit. On the other hand, they do have rather fascinating sea life in that cove due to the higher temps there vs. the cold Pacific just a few feet away (they used to have a show-and-tell marine biology lab onsite for visitors to check out). Anyway, to relicense DCPP, the plant would likely need to switch to cooling using the signature big towers people associate with nuclear plants, which is obviously a titanic effort.
Not always. The Palo Verde nuclear plant in my state is in the middle of the desert far from any body of water, and also the largest in the country in terms of net generation.
I suppose anyone who has some knowledge re electricity knows what they're trying to say here, and for anyone who doesn't it won't make much difference, but reading a sentence like this still hurts me a little.
MW (megawatts) are a measure of power, not energy. This means the "per year" part is meaningless. Also for what it's worth, 300MW for 300k homes is 1kW/home, which is a pretty old rule of thumb for average household power use. I believe the current average in Canada (and the US) is considerably higher But that's also just the average; the peak is much higher. 300MW is the peak output for the plant, so the true number of homes it could power is lower regardless, absent storage.
None of that to say the prospect isn't exciting! And I suppose the source here is the weather network, so perhaps they're a bit outside their area of expertise.
All in all, the greatest feature of SMRs in my opinion, is the scalability they offer. I'd have also added decentralization, but I'm far from familiar what is most optimal in terms of electricity networks.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Canadian-provinc...
Supposedly this is promoting clean energy and fighting climate change, but the details don't always match this rhetoric. In particular they're thinking they can use nuclear power to replace piped-in natural gas to mine the Alberta tar sands and make (very dirty) syncrude for export to refineries in the USA, maybe China too. Yes, that does reduce natural gas use... but you're still burning dirty tarsand oil. The better option is to just leave the tar in the ground.
Otherwise, SMRs sound kind of interesting, but there's been a lot of failed innovation in nuclear reactors in the past. Some of us might remember when safe and reliable and innovative pebble bed reactors were going to be the thing that made nuclear acceptable everywhere, and that ended up going nowhere:
https://thebulletin.org/2009/06/the-demise-of-the-pebble-bed...
> "For some, helium-cooled, graphite-moderated reactors such as the PBMR have always been the ultimate evolution of fission reactor design. The use of helium and graphite allows the reactor to burn the fuel efficiently and to operate at much higher temperatures than conventional light water reactors. It is hoped the temperatures would be high enough to allow for the reactor’s heat to be used directly for industrial processes such as hydrogen production and tar sands processing. High temperature reactors can also be designed to use thorium-based fuel as well as uranium and can be developed as fast neutron reactors that don’t need moderators."
I was enthusiastic about nuclear 20 years ago... now, not so much, since solar/wind/storage really gives more watts per dollar invested, with less side issues (security, uranium supply, waste storage). Nuclear has a niche, but it's going to remain small.
https://www.elysiumindustries.com/
https://www.terrestrialenergy.com/
Plus there's General Fusion, the craziest steampunk idea for fusion ever. It's gotten investment well into nine figures, and is building a reactor for a net power attempt around 2025.
The pebble bed reactors seemed to have stability issues created by graphite rubbing off of the spheres as the pebbles we loaded in the top and removed from the bottom. This newer design works around that by having the fuel in a cylinder and the fuel in the core not being changeable for its 20 year life. It seems to be one of the simplest designs yet and is likely cheaper as a result.
If it turns out to be cheap power this would have a big impact on northern communities where there is little sunlight for several months, and low-angle sunlight during the summer months. It doesn't have to beat typical solar, it just has to beat diesel that is shipped or flown in.
I'm from Alberta and I also wish they would leave the tarsands tar in the ground. I have little expectation they will, so nuclear seems like an improvement at least.
It is fortunate that extracting tar sands produces very expensive oil. As demand for oil drops, cost for oil from tar sands will be unable to match prices offered.
But nukes have had plenty of time to do better. Ultimately it looks more like the market in nukes (distinguished from power from nukes) is interested only in building nukes where there is abundant scope for corruption.
I am fairly enthusiastic about both renewables and nuclear, but I am a bit pessimistic about storage. The holy grail would be green hydrogen as storage, and that has been the political aiming for in the last 10 years. However in the mean time, everyone just got to rely on that Russian gas and oil. Solar/wind/fossil fuel is the current model and I just can't get enthusiastic about that.
It is strange that people proposing storage methods frequently seem unable to reason about cost, so propose absurdly expensive realizations of their ideas. What will end up deployed will be the most sensible alternatives.
We don't need to have storage built out until after we have enough renewable generating capacity for both peak load and to charge up the storage, at the same time. Until then, money is overwhelmingly better spent on the generating capacity. Given equipment to synthesize ammonia or hydrogen, we can then continue building out generating capacity, because all the hydrogen or ammonia produced after local storage is topped up can be sold for direct revenue.
There are some alternative use cases. If you can convert the energy directly to a substance that an industry consume, like hydrogen in steel production, then the economics start to shift a bit. Hydrogen is produce today through natural gas, and if we include the carbon tax and introduce some subsidies to those who want to use renewables, then green hydrogen can be made to price match grey hydrogen in steel manufacturing. It not perfect, and its not storage, but it does reduce the use of fossil fuels. Burning the hydrogen for power however is still several times more expensive than nuclear, and I don't think people are willing to pay that kind of money in order to avoid nuclear power.
The current way most governments seem to operate is to build out renewable generating capacity while also build out equal or greater amount of fossil fuel generating capacity. Looking at the Ukraine war, looking at the climate, and just looking at air pollution or graphs over fossil fuel usage, I am not optimistic that the current strategy are working at all. If anything it look exactly what the fossil fuel lobbying are pushing which is a future where they still hold a significant position and where the high peak price results in about as much profits as in the past but for a significant less amount of actually product.
Green hydrogen will be getting very cheap. It makes no sense to assume prices for everything will stay the same as the world changes around them.
Natural gas generation equipment is easily retrofitted to burn synthetic hydrogen or ammonia, along with compressed air, so such purchases are not wasted. Burning along with compressed air yields more energy than the sum what you would get just burning, and separately running compressed air through the turbine. (Compressed air storage is really cheap to build out.)
So what would happen if a disaster somehow hit one of these mini plants?
These new miniplants don't require power or water, loss of either causes shutdown.
A town not too far from where I grew up had most of it's economy based around a single factory (Hershey Chocolate in Smith's Falls, Ontario). There were lots of other stores and whatnot, but money flowed into the town via the factory paying workers' salaries, then bounced between hands from in shops, services, whatever else.
When I was in high school, that factory closed down. The inflow of money stopped. And so did the rest of the economy of the town. Hard to run a flower shop when nobody in town can afford to buy flowers, you know?
Stopping mining of tarsands entirely would be a bit like doing that to the entire province of Alberta. The money enters the province via the dirty oil they sell. We should never have gotten into this situation, no doubt, but now that we're here it's politically impossible to stop.
And being major exporters, they're also a big reason for the value of the Canadian dollar. Stop exporting all the dirty oil and the exchange rate goes to crap- now all the things we buy from the USA and China are more expensive. What political party wants to be elected on that promise?
Nuclear could be the thing that provides a route forward. Given BC's seismic issues, it's probably not a great place for nuclear power plants and there's really no more rivers to dam. Alberta should be pivoting away from oil and toward becoming a nuclear power provider to BC, the Prairies and the United States.
I know that fossil fuel plants have a lot of waste heat that enables cogeneration, but I've never heard of that with solar or wind.
Of course, in the winter in Canada, you have to bleed the system otherwise the water will freeze in the tubes and they'll burst.
There's no free heat from a wind turbine.
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/02/heat-your-house-with...
However, I find it elegant that heat is directly used to heat homes, rather than turning it into low-entropy electricity just to turn it to heat again (which is inelegant, even with heat pumps).
We need a heat pump that is heat-powered…
Have you done the math to check whether it's more efficient?
There was talk of heating cities with the waste water, but "nucleophobia" killed that idea, as usual.
Also, you'd need enough heat to boil water, but the waste heat, by definition, is lower than the boiling point of water (otherwise the turbine doesn't work).
The waste heat from a steam turbine is higher than boiling. Otherwise the turbine wouldn't work. The boiler turns water into steam, which produces pressure to drive a turbine. The condenser takes the low pressure steam and condenses it back to water.
Though for industrial purposes (rather than just heating buildings) you'd probably have to be closer.
You can make hot water though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Nuclear_Generating_Stati...
Lower electrical production, not lower power production.
This statement reflects the quality of the article.
There is nothing very interesting about SMRs. They are much more expensive than equivalent renewables, so they will only be built by coercion of ratepayers who would be better served by the alternative.
This statement reflects the quality of the comment.
Renewables need significant storage to be directly comparable, cost-wise, to nuclear. There are no currently existing grid level storage solutions, same as SMRs, and both are invested in.
And you're missing a huge part of the equation - we're talking about Canada, the northern cold parts. Which renewables would run there ( maybe wind?) and which storage solution could be viable to withstand the cold and storms and what not?
There are a lot of interesting variations on pumped hydro that do not depend so much on geography. Undersea variations are most interesting. Wikipedia explains some of them.
Undersea compressed air is also interesting: a bag anchored to the sea bed is inflated with air. Advantage is it needs no mechanical or electrical apparatus underwater.
Similarly, a float attached to a pulley anchored to the seabed, attached to an electric winch onshore, or on the side of a wind turbine post.
There are the usual rapidly improving battery chemistries, prominently iron-air batteries, with utility-scale factories already under construction, to deliver in 2023, with plenty of time to spare.
I can understand that it might be fine to bury small amounts in specific stores but if countries slowly adopt nuclear energy at scale then over time won’t we be burying a lot of waste that, correct me if I’m wrong, has to be stored for thousands of years? I don’t understand how this can be sustainable long term. I also think it’s maybe arrogant of us to assume that it will always be safe to just store it and that something won’t happen that could disrupt that.
I’m no expert on this though so if someone has a great explanation I’d love to understand it.
Is a good starting point. There has been a lot of thought put into this.
All of the uranium used as fuel came from the ground. Now, we will be putting smaller quantity of other, also radioactive, materials into ground. Lot of places have high natural levels of radiation[0], sometimes they even make it as a spa location[1].
People were living around radiation since before they were people. And they managed. We still do.
In the end the question is if we want some radioactive pollution that is easy to contain in the near term, or a lot more carbon pollution that is impossible to contain in the near term.
One is destroying the planet as we speak. The other might be a problem few centuries in the future, if there is one.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation#Areas_wit...
Most of newer reactor design produce very little waste -- the newest type of reactor produce only a few pounds of spent fuel a year per 1GW.
However. I still think humanity can do better.
If we put all the energy, resources and research that we are putting into nuclear into truly sustainable energy like wind, solar, wave and geothermal, which to my knowledge produce less or no byproducts, then that would be best.
It's unfortunate that the world can't take an aligned approach and build solar farms in deserts, wind farms at sea, wave energy on coastlines and then just export it all fairly to countries. I think I'm almost campaigning for energy as a global right and not for sale as a commodity.
Just came here to point out what appears to be a significant error in the linked text.
"...when an earthquake-triggered tsunami crashed into the nuclear plant and caused three nuclear meltdowns that leaked radioactive materials for several days."
It is my understanding that radioactive materials were leaking and being released into the oceans far longer than, "several days."
According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster), "As of October 2012, radioactivity was still leaking into the ocean."
This article from World Nuclear (https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...) describes unintentional leaks and planned discharges continuing for years.
- Power company executives live in on-site "VIP housing", and work from offices within the outer containment structure. In case of a major spill, they're issued mops, buckets, and lead underwear, and deployed as front-line clean-up workers.
- NIMBY's shiver in the dark.
300MW is a lot of energy to passively release into the environment. Does this design really fail safe? And if so, how?
The Fukushima issues were caused (IIRC) by failure of the backup generators to run the cooling system after the reactors were shut down. Do these small reactors really not need any external power when in that state? And do they get into this state by default? I.e. do they shut themselves down without external power and if the control systems fail? That would seem to be a massive safety advantage if it's true.
I remember reading about UK magnox reactors where the graphite control rods were held above the core by electrically powered actuators and which were designed to fall into the core (and stop the reaction) if there was a power failure. Perhaps these reactors are similar.
Most modern designs claim that if you just switch everything off, the reactor is safe. This is either because having no machinery around the reactor working still makes it safe, or the few critical components have tons of redundancy, and everything is designed to be “broken”.
300MW is what the reactor produces with the moderators retracted. You put them in place and the reaction stops immediately. So you don’t need to cool 300MW passively. What you do have is the residual heat, and fission products decaying away and giving more heat. I’m not sure what power output that equates to, but far, far less than 300MW, and decreasing over time too as shorter-lived fission products go away.
Some major advantages of small reactors in this context:
- the ratio of volume (r^3) to surface area (r^2) is better so it’s easier to cool
- there is simply less bad stuff in any one reactor so the tail risks are smaller
If the reactor is air cooled, that can be translated as “the heat can just burn off” as there isn’t a liquid cooling system, reducing this failure mode.
As mentioned in the video, reactions are about balance. If a ‘safe’ SMR gets shut off or has its systems fail, you would want the accelerators / enablers of the reaction to disappear, and roll out the reaction.
This is unlike most fission reactors in use today which are a ‘balanced dance’ where lots of the design is focused on reducing the speed of the burn (like a constant stream of water on a fire) rather than say controlling the oxygen of a fire with limited fuel. SMRs aim be more of the “control the oxygen” type of reaction rather than “keep the fire cool” kind of reaction. (Forgive my vast oversimplification, but this is my intuition on it).
If those balls are removed from the reactor, it won't have the critical mass to maintain the reaction.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300 or if you can read german: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_THTR-300 with a lot of details.
> spherical fuel compacts each 6 centimetres (2.4 in) in diameter with particles of uranium-235 and thorium-232 fuel embedded in a graphite matrix
And from the article on Canada's reactor:
> The fuel inside of this vessel are solid kernels made from a mix of uranium, carbon, and oxygen, with each being roughly the size of a poppy seed. These kernels, which are covered in several ceramic coatings, are then encased in a diamond-like substance
That substance is silicon carbide: https://www.ans.org/news/article-2830/a-first-triso-fuel-mad...
Also, the wiki says "a fuel pebble became lodged in a fuel feed pipe to the reactor core." In the new design, there's "no on-site fuel storage, handling, or processing." If the fuel elements are just sitting there instead of getting moved around in pipes, there's little reason for them to break.
However, it is prudent to expect other problems in new technology. And nuclear reactors need a huge initial investment (they seem to be vastly over budget and time these days) and take a long time until they are available. It seems to be cheaper, safer and faster to go with renewables, doesn't it?
For now, we should certainly keep rolling out wind and solar as fast as we can. But whether they can run entire countries reliably through all seasons is unproven so far. They're backed up everywhere by hydro where available, otherwise fossil. It's entirely possible that mass-produced passively-safe nuclear will end up cheaper and faster than the vast amount of storage/transmission/etc we'd need for a 100% wind/solar grid.
I do wish it was a thorium based project though. Gordon McDowell was active in Calgary trying to spread awareness of the technology. Sadly it always feels "a decade away" ...
A generous interpretation might be that the "year" is a statement about an average taken over seasons, during which power consumption might vary. But I fear that the article instead betrays simple ignorance, as is the case in many non-technical discussions of power.
I wonder what is it about power that seems so difficult for soft-science writers to comprehend. After all, their readers are paying power bills that are expressed in kilowatt-hours.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAREM
https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Nucleoelectrica-cont...
It seems like Canada has only been talking about nuclear power for, what, a decade or two?
I mean, how long did the U.S. wait before getting on board with nuclear energy? We were ahead of Canada on that one by at least half a century!
Just because nuclear power is more expensive and less safe than the alternatives doesn't mean I think Canada should reconsider its ambitious plan to open a new nuclear plant by 2028.
https://www.ans.org/news/article-2830/a-first-triso-fuel-mad... https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/triso-particles-most-robu...