Did you spend the same amount of money on solar/wind instead? How did that turn out?
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.