Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
austinvernon.site
austinvernon.site
Uh...Germany's actually recarbonized by shutting down their nuclear [increasing coal and imported electricity to pick up the slack].
"The nuclear electricity production lost in Germany's phase-out was primarily replaced with coal electricity production and electricity importing. One study found that the nuclear phase-out caused $12 billion in social costs per year, primarily due to increases in mortality due to exposure to pollution from fossil fuels." --[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany]
California's likely to have serious shortages [again] if they shut off the rest of theirs. Plus: "California's electricity rates are among the highest in the United States as a result of the changing energy mix within the state, including aggressive construction of new natural gas power plants." --[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_California]
I don't know enough to check the rest of the article, but this certainly gives me some doubts as to its accuracy.
disclaimer: I'm pro nuke if we can do it right, a la LFTR/SMRs etc.
Is this statement about climate change, or nuclear safety, or a bit of both?
At least for those worrying about safety, isn't this simply the wrong way round? New nuclear plants would have to be constructed to the latest safety standards, older ("paid-for") plants are the ones which were built in an era before them and have grandfathered-in approvals which might not be granted today.
The crazy bit is climate change -- they intentionally moved backwards to more coal.
[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w22454/w224... Does anyone have a more up to date citation?
Many US nuclear plants are incapable of cycling power output up or down without changes to procedures or equipment.
If you compare France and Germany gas portion of the overall electricity production is quite similar (it's a bit tricky to compare, Germany produced 12% and France 7% but in different years, France gas accounts to 10% of their installed capacity)
To summarize: we already have gas plants, and gas storage, leaving them turned off except as a fallback insurance is the sensible option. Even when building new plants, gas plants are the cheapest to build and simplest to run which matters a lot if they're mostly idle, which is why they get used as peakers.
https://austinvernon.site/blog/gasredemption.html
I don't agree with everything they write (they seem to think "virtue signaling“ is a real thing and that renewables had nothing to do with sensible government regulation but rather the free market which reveals a bias that runs through their conclusions) but the facts are fairly incontrovertible if you actually look at them so they come to the reasonable conclusions anyway.
The author's article on renewables and batteries states "The cost of these batteries is plummeting. Material constraints are not an issue because storage batteries do not require top-tier energy density" [1]. This was reasonable to think just two years ago but now is obviously wrong- and this assumption underpins most of the author's writings on energy.
Energy policy is very unforgiving- missing one important fact or one wrong assumption can dramatically alter the outcome.
There's been a lot of attention paid to nickel recently, but nickel may have enough availability with Tesla getting New Caledonia mining back online and Indonesia being ready to mine their nickel deposits. Still, the price of nickel is up ~2x right now. Cobalt is also up ~2x and has major ethical issues. But let's assume the industry can move at least grid storage applications to the LFP chemistry and reduce the pressure on these minerals.
The price of lithium is up ~5x. It's easy for this author or Elon Musk to say that there is plenty of lithium in the ground, but it's a lot harder to actually produce it. Tesla is experimenting with new lithium extraction techniques in Nevada- this will take a lot of time to come to fruition. The easiest scenario is existing mines increasing their production, but even in these cases it can be a long process to satisfy environmental concerns. Historically commodity super cycles last 10+ years with metals being much longer.
I would be interested in someone with more knowledge than me projecting the future here on both the demand and supply side, but instead in the article you linked we get "Lithium is not rare, but demand is growing so fast mining may take a few years to catch up". I don't think the author appreciates how long it takes to bring significant mining capacity online. And certainly the stated assumption that the "cost of these batteries is plummeting" is completely untrue at this point. Those with a deeper understanding are warning of a possible battery shortage [1].
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/rivian-ceo-warns-of-looming-ele...
> Three years ago, when the Gigafactory was first proposed, "I thought it was crazy," said Yamada. "At that time, production capacity of this Gigafactory would exceed total production of the industry. Not Panasonic. Not Japanese companies. All Japanese, Korean, and Chinese companies combined. I thought it was a crazy idea.
"But I was crazy. And I was wrong. After seeing extraordinary success of the announcing of Model 3, there is a strong demand for this battery. So, three years ago I thought this was a crazy idea. But I was crazy at the time
The new aspect is the price signal that Lithium is now sending. This means that lithium will limit the ability to increase battery production and that battery prices are not going to decline as they have in the past. The history of commodities means this situation is more likely to hold for a decade than a year.
Germany outsourced their nuclear to France.
Remember that Germany and France are no longer countries, but states in the Eurozone within the wider European Union.
It's the same effect as, say, New Mexico exporting nuclear power to California and California then calling itself 'nuclear free'.
Very difficult to interpret that fact when dealing with renewable-heavy grids. Germany probably doesn't have a lot of control over when the energy is being generated - so it is entirely possible that they are exporting but still reliant on electricity imports - if power is being produced when it is not needed.
Not to mention that some people think Putin could attack other countries after Ukraine. That's not the time you want nuclear power plants as possible target.
If somebody attacks my region I would rather not like to worry about nuclear to be honest.
In any case, I have not heard of any fears that Russian missiles could damage Ukrainian wind or solar power plants.
This is an ecological concern, not a technical one. If the French are ok with frying fishes, they can let their nukes run.
So unless France has significantly changed their energy production for their domestic usage (or reduced their energy consumption by a lot), this myth is simply false. Germany is not replacing their domestic nuclear energy with France’s.
Well, no. The entities united in the European Union are still Countries - Sovereign States, "governments over permanent populations in defined territories enabled to relate with peers, entering as part of the international community after recognition from at least one peer". They have embassies and deal with embassies.
The distinction you are trying to convey, allegedly changing the scenario in energy trade, is not clear.
The EU Council and the EU Commission can issue "Directives", which States must implement, and "Regulations", direct laws, with power to override national ones. (Plus "Decisions", "Recommendations" and "Opinions" - see https://european-union.europa.eu/institutions-law-budget/law... ) The possibility of "Regulations" is clearly and explicitly a delicate matter which has to find the right space for movement in a collection of Sovereign States.
Constitutions and laws are very different entities: a Constitution is the Social Contract to which citizens subscribe, the collection of the guidelines defining the National Project. This already entails, a Constitution indicates a Country - it strengthens the point.
This said, I am still confused about that original idea some proposed, according to which Countries and Not-Sovereign States have critical differences in energy trade.
One situation where this almost happened was during the discussion on Eurobonds. [0]
[0] https://www.dw.com/en/eu-launches-infringement-proceedings-a...
> The revolutionary case of NV Algemene Transport-Expedite Onderneming Van Gend en Loos v Nederlandse Administratie der Belastingen (9), addressed this matter, but also the issue of supremacy. In regard to Article 12 EEC (now Article 30 TFEU), The ECJ held ‘the objective of the EEC treaty… implies that this treaty is more than an agreement which merely creates obligations on individuals but is also intended to confer upon them rights’ (10), giving the article direct effect. This permits the rights of individuals and organisations to be enforceable in national courts, as a way of creating uniformity amongst member states to maximise the efficiency and application of EU law, despite the fact that the treaty articles generally regulated trade between member states [0].
This is known as the Doctrine of Direct Effect. The ECJ is effectively a 'supreme court' for the EU.
[0]: https://www.lawteacher.net/free-law-essays/european-law/eu-l...
Since there are in a fixed currency arrangement, it makes no sense to see 'nuclear' stopping at the German border. The price is the same across the Eurozone, and the grids are interconnected.
Compare that with the current imports from the UK which not only varies with the exchange rate, but the export influences the exchange rate.
Germany declared itself a nuclear free zone in the same way that Derbyshire declared itself a nuclear free zone in the UK. They knew the nuclear power would come over the grid from areas they were pegged to that weren't so bothered.
1) All countries are states.
2) EU countries are still countries.
(Source: https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/germany?country=DEU~F... )
https://theecologist.org/2017/mar/16/edf-facing-bankruptcy-d...
Actually, Germany did not have a long term increase in coal/gas due to the nuclear shut down but a decrease. Coal has been in a slow but steady decline in Germany (mainly due to cost); which is on track to decline all the way to 0 as Germany is committing to getting rid of coal based production completely by 2035 or so. Gas production did grow but mainly to offset declines in coal. And even there you might argue Recent events in the Ukraine are cutting off cheap Russian supply of both coal and gas, so that looks like it might actually accelerate decarbonization and short term raise the ambition levels even more.
The thing that grew absolutely massively in the same period was wind and solar. Vastly more capacity of the latter was added than ever existed in nuclear form. It now dwarfs everything else in the German market. All without blackouts BTW.
This is not the impression I have gotten from recent events.
The reason Germany hasn’t experienced blackouts is because they are funding the Russian Federation’s war in Ukraine in exchange for energy. Germany has advocated for the continued purchase of Russian gas and has pushed back against the EU admitting Ukraine to the union. It’s obvious that the decarbonization had not succeeded in solving their need for base load power, in fact you could argue that their denuclearization is the very reason Russia has so much leverage in the situation. So while they may be saving the planet, this is a great example of a government missing the forest for the trees.
Regarding nuclear in Germany, I think you are a bit short on the facts. Nuclear in Germany was always pretty minor. What little they had is now nearly gone. During the same time, they cut coal generation from 47% to about 25%. Gas grew a bit during that time but is still smaller than their remaining coal generation and even the amount of coal capacity they got rid off. Coal is going to be gone by 2030 according to the latest plans. Indeed cheap Russian gas was part of this plan until recently. But those plans are shifting rapidly now for obvious reasons.
Even worse, they can't "cancel their nuclear shutdown process" even if they wanted. First of all, the shutdown deadline had been firmly set in law twenty years ago, so it would require a major legislative effort to make another law. Second, even if they somehow managed to instantly change the law, the shutdown was "baked into" the operation and maintenance schedule for the nuclear plants. They were simply not expecting to have to run them beyond early 2020-ish so a lot of money was almost certainly saved by delaying maintenance. Hence, if they suddenly changed their minds about shutting the plants down, they'd almost certainly have to invest massive amounts of money to fix them first.
“ On 14 March 2011, in response to the renewed concern about the use of nuclear energy the Fukushima incident raised in the German public and in light of upcoming elections in three German states, Merkel declared a 3-month moratorium on the reactor lifespan extension passed in 2010.[29] On 15 March, the German government announced that it would temporarily shut down 8 of its 17 reactors, i.e. all reactors that went online before 1981.”
And this was described as “The decision to phase-out nuclear power has been called the swiftest change of political course since unification.”
So if a disaster was all it took for a swift change in politics then the current situation is certainly a disaster.
At least not without changing the infrastructure for that completely. Which is not going to happen overnight. And even then it can't replace chemistry.
So, no, Germany couldn't have. No matter how many Internet armchair commenters repeat this.
Was replacing that infrastructure considered when plans were made to shutdown nuclear a decade ago? At some point you have to show you're better than "armchair commenters" and actually do what needs to be done.
I understand that the propaganda works, but lets not fall in the error of blaming Germany for this war. Germany are victims in this situation, not aggressors.
This narrative just divert the focus from the only responsible.
Paying somebody for a product will not force him/her to invest the money in crimes. Russia could have spent this money in buying ice-cream for each Russian child or anything. If they choose war crimes and promoting rape and murder instead improving the Russian's lives, is not Europe's fault.
From my point of view, his behaviour in 2014 was much like Hitler in 1938. What he did this year, was similar to Hitler's attack on Poland in 39.
Some people were maybe surprised in 39, but I think most reasonable people had stopped trusting him at least by the time he marched into Prague.
Just like France and England should have started much more serious rearmament after that, I would argue that EU countries should have started preparing for a conflict after 2014.
Germany is not an aggressor, per see, but their poor judgement in their relations with Russia has certainly contributed.
Germany may point to WW2 and say "Never again", but if they insist on looking that far back, one could even argue that they made the biggest contribution of all to the apparent of Putin to surround himself with buffer states.
And while we are back in WW2, German aggression in the 1930's is one of the primary reasons everyone in Europe (except, it seems, Germany and Hungary) become so paranoid when a powerful a country start to annex it's neighbours.
Had Hitler stopped after taking the Sudetenland in 1938, modern Europeans might have been much less likely to assume that Putin would annex all of Ukraine and then proceed to Poland, the Baltics etc.
By no means to I blame modern Germans for what happened 80 years ago, but I do hope that Germany can put WW2 behind them, and do their share in contributing to stability in Europe going forward.
Imagine what the situation in Europe would be if someone like Trump wins in 2024, and decides to pull the USA out of NATO?
At a large trade show, I once ran into a retired nuclear engineer and we had a long conversation: he had been called back into service by the state out of desperation. There weren't enough knowledgeable folks who could do safety audits of the plants for TüV. This was 14 years ago and things would be far worse today.
Restarting a complex industry (and it's ageing plants) that's been out of favor for literally decades is difficult and in this case also dangerous.
I'm a (German) physicist by training and worked at a nuclear research facility at the time.
The anti nuclear power movement started from Denmark and they have at least two high profile nuclear startups. While they are of course not direct short term solutions to the current gas crisis, these things change how people can think about nuclear energy.
Again, so much of German writing around the subject has this very peculiar air of complete passivity, to someone looking from the outside. Things seem to just happen to Germany with no role of their own. Look outside Germany to see some counterexamples.
The process of shutting down or reactivating a nuclear plant is not something you just do.
You should look for statements from our Minister habeck.
Also nuclear like in France has huge keeping up issues.
For whatever reason nuclear is always depicted as the simple solution but nothing is easy with nuclear.
Reasonable politics is always about weighing effort against benefit. Of course, anyone can have her or his own opinion where to draw the line in a particular case. But it is usually not black and white. In my opinion, the German government has done an excellent job in the last months in reducing dependence on Russian primary energy imports. It rather failed in another area: military support for Ukraine.
BTW: Does anybody know whether US's extensive uranium supplies from Russia and its sphere of influence (Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan)[1] have now ceased? I could not find any recent information about it.
[1] 46 % in total as of 2020: 16 % Russia, 22 % Kazakhstan, 8 % Uzbekistan -- see: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/where-our-uraniu...
On Friday, Russia stopped gas exports to Finland. Electricity export to (and import from) Finland was stopped earlier already. Was Finland in a crisis? No, most people didn't even notice, because Finland had prepared for this. It certainly would have been convenient to build our heating to depend more on cheap Russian gas, but it was restrained by law, because of the risks. Finland was willing to tolerate the inconvenience of higher energy prices, to keep its political independence and safety.
But it seems Germany is not yet capable of this introspection. Germany has been too lazy and corrupt and has let itself become very dependent on cheap Russian gas. Now it's saying "we can't do anything, we are too dependent". It's not the world's fault, it's the fault of past German governments and German voters.
Germany is an industrialized and rich nation. It can start building heat pumps if the people are ready to do it. The very recent nuclear shutdown decision can also be reversed. But it would first require admitting that you have made serious errors in the recent past and then make a turn around on those decisions.
Was Finland better prepared to ensure its energy independence? Absolutely. Nevertheless, they were about to forfeit some of the independence if Russia hadn't attacked Ukraine.
The reactor dome by the way would have been forged in Ukraine.
There is a two reactor plant in Loviisa that uses the Soviet VVER technology (but not Soviet automation). It has worked very well. Olkiluoto plant's reactors 1 and 2 are from Sweden, and have had extremely high uptime. Both plants were built in the seventies. Olkiluoto 3 is the infamous French EPR that is finally coming online now.
Hanhikivi would have used an eastern-western mix of technology like Loviisa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanhikivi_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loviisa_Nuclear_Power_Plant
I would agree in 99% of cases. But when it comes nuclear power vs coal and gas, the only data I can find seems to make this issue completely black and white (at least for developed countries).
As far as I can tell, nuclear is not only safer, but even MUCH safer than coal and gas, regardless of what parameters you look at. All argument to the contrary, seem to follow one of the following patters: - Not understanding the science and math (claims about how long used fuel will be dangerous) - Not even tryting to understand the science and math (not willing to even listen to arguments) - Worst case interpretation of findings (ie assuming the LNT model for cancer risk) - Treat Nuclear as an alternative to renewables instead of as an alternative to coal and gas. - Demanding orders of magnitude more safety from Nuclear than from other energy sources. - Some argue that from a scientific point of view, nuclear is obviously better than coal and gas, but it is not realistic to move the public opinion
Obviously a lot of this is generated from (irrational) fear of the unknown. But there is so much of this anti-nuclear propaganda being spread, that I wonder if there could be bad actors involved. It's almost like some climate activists and politicians don't want nuclear for some other reason.
Maybe they are worried that the replacement of coal with nuclear would make people less worried about the climate, remove the support for environmentalist organizations, and that this could cost them their jobs? Or it could be that the particular people who support environmentalists happen to be especially irrational on this topic, so even if the leaders understand the science, their base would not accept nuclear energy?
I think you are confusing a conclusion, which can be rendered as a Yes or No decision, with the reasons that lead to such a conclusion. Even if your own conclusion is very clear, the process of weighing pros and cons can still be quite complex and difficult. This is what I meant when I said that such issues are usually not black and white. In such debates as how best to support Ukraine or how best to care for our planet, I think one should first and foremost recognise that people, who come to a different conclusion from oneself, do so with the best ethical intentions and are perhaps no less intelligent or manipulated than oneself is. Of course, there might be a lot of people on either side which are not, but I am sure there are also a lot of people, who know there math and physics very well and nevertheless come to a different conclusion. Then the real intellectual work starts: listen, listen, listen and refine your arguments. I do not mean that you should not be allowed to completely disagree, but that showing respect to other smart people's opinions is an important individual virtue as well as an important public virtue in a democratic society, which benefits much more from a reflective style of debate than from a confrontation of We against the Others.
No, the decision on what energy sources to use is not a Yes or No decision, unless you are willing to seriously reduce your energy consumption. This is more like a budgeting process, where the total has already been decided. Just like in a budgeting process, where you have to choose between welfare, healthcare, defence, environmental improvement, etc, a country is not likely to significantly lower their energy consumption.
In other words, "No" to nuclear is AUTOMATICALLY "Yes" to something else. And realistically, that "else" is going to be fossil fuels, since renewables are getting a lot of funding anyway.
The way I see it, there should be a hierachy: 1. Get rid of all energy from brown coal. 2. Get rid of all energy from black coal. 3. Get rid of all energy from natural gas/oil. 4. Only then, consider shutting down, or at least stop building more capacity for nuclear.
> do so with the best ethical intentions and are perhaps no less intelligent or manipulated than oneself is
There are two different groups to compare to. One is the average voter in a country. Most of them will not understand the "math and physics" involved, unless it is provided to them in an extremely well digested form.
The main problem with this group is that they (mostly) see things as either/or, good/bad, black/white. For instance, they think something is either radioactive or not, but do understand the difference between uSv (micro Sv), mSv and SV. If someone tells them they just received a dose of 300uSv, they probably worry just as much as (of not more) than if someone tells them the dose was actually 70mSv.
Similarly, with waste, if they see a picture of low level radioactive waste form 20 years back, they think it is the same as fuel that was taken out if the reactor the day before.
Similary, they tend to think that if the waste is dangerous for 100 000 years, it is almost as dangerous after 50000 years as it is after 50 years. While in reality, around 300 years is what it takes for it to become "relatively safe", even if it is still not completely harmless.
In other words, the general public is relatively easy to mislead with propaganda. Many have a natural fear of the unknown, and for those who want to, it is easy to introduce enough complication and confusion to prevent them from accepting the scientific arguments in favour of nuclear.
Then there are people groups of people who do understand enough "math and physics" to at least have ability to understand this from first principles, if they put some energy into it. Here on HN, I would expect most to be in that category (including myself, my MSc is from particle physics). It seems to me, though, that too few of these have actually looked into the information available. That would have included me, just out of university.
An the topic of Nuclear energy vs Coal/Gas (after actually doing some investigation), the data I have been able to find, indicate that the case is almost as clear as Evolution vs Intelligent Design. The difference is simply so large (around 2 orders of magnitude or more), that even if there is significant bias/skew in the data I have available, it is not likely to be enough to alter the conclusion.
I would be happy to review sources that reach a different conclusion. But those I've seen so far have relied on such huge errors that the writers either didn't know the math/physics, or was perhaps writing it with the intent to convince the general audience, rather than in search of truth.
But by any means, if you have quality scientific sources that contradict me, I will be happy to update my view.
This is not exactly what I meant. With "can be rendered as a Yes or No decision" I meant that any more-or-less question "can be refomulated, so that someone can vote either in favour or against", which is what happens when a debate needs to be brought to a practical conclusion. (Well, there is of course also the option to abstain from voting, but the question is nevertheless finally a Yes/No decision.)
> a country is not likely to significantly lower their energy consumption.
There are already a lot of laws and regulation targeting energy and resource consumption in the EU. And a lot of new ones are on the agenda. However, there might exist conflicting goals: for example, shifting towards electrical cars to lower CO2 output results in larger energy consumption, because an electrical car is much heavier than a comparable conventional one. It may not always be the best solutions that end up being implemented, but the general direction is to look not only at renewable energy, but also at energy and resource conservation.
> Similarly, with waste, if they see a picture of low level radioactive waste form 20 years back, they think it is the same as fuel that was taken out if the reactor the day before.
I think that a lot of people in Germany understand the general concept between low-level, medium-level and high-level radioactive waste quite well. My generation and people older than me were victims of Tschernobyl. We were all told that radioactive iodine was an immediate threat, but will become irrelevant very quickly. We hear that radioactive ceasum is still a problem with mushrooms and wild boars from the Bavarian Forest. The concept of its accumulation in the food chain is common knowledge.
> Similary, they tend to think that if the waste is dangerous for 100 000 years, it is almost as dangerous after 50000 years as it is after 50 years. While in reality, around 300 years is what it takes for it to become "relatively safe", even if it is still not completely harmless.
The problem for long term storage of high-level radioactive waste is that after a few hundred years, when all short and medium active material has more or less decayed, the decrease rate itself almost stoped to decrease further. The waste is then about 100 times less active than initially, but it will take between 100,000 and 1,000,000 years for the waste to reach the activity level of natural uranium ore, which itself is not yet harmless.
> In other words, the general public is relatively easy to mislead with propaganda.
We are talking here about a decade long debate in an open society, where not only ordinary people, but thousands and thousands of expert of different related fields and various opinions participated. The tale of a general public that had been mislead with propaganda is a pattern of argument that is typically used by anti-democratic movements. The general public does not consist of stupid individuals. The general public of an open society is a collective rationality where people with all their different backgrounds and level of expertise can freely debate the issues that concern everyone. Its conclusions might not be perfect and not always be right, but it is the best we can hope for. If the arguments you favour do not get through, it is not because of propaganda, but because they have not (yet) been convincing. Try again. There is always another election.
> An the topic of Nuclear energy vs Coal/Gas (after actually doing some investigation), the data I have been able to find, indicate that the case is almost as clear as Evolution vs Intelligent Design. The difference is simply so large (around 2 orders of magnitude or more), that even if there is significant bias/skew in the data I have available, it is not likely to be enough to alter the conclusion.
I would say that "Nuclear energy vs Coal/Gas" is a debate of the past. Germany wants to switch completely to renewable electrical energies by 2035 (all energies by 2045). This renders plans for new nuclear power plants obsolete. Realistically it might take one or two decades to go from planning to operation. So when the plant starts it will already be obsolet.
You might argue that in the light of the current situation, Germany's last three nulcear plants to be shut down this years should run a little longer. This option was briefly considered even by the Minister of Economic Affairs, Robert Habeck from the Green party, but quickly dropped again. There were a few voices in favour of such a proposal from the industry and the Conservative opposition, but others, even from this circles, said that it was too late to realistically postpone the shutdowns already scheduled and underway. So after a few days, no one followed up on this idea.
> We hear that radioactive ceasum is still a problem with mushrooms and wild boars from the Bavarian Forest. The concept of its accumulation in the food chain is common knowledge.
I did a quick google of this, and found this article:
https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...
According to the article (or rather one of the linked papers), the mean radiation level for some sample of meat was 4340 Bq/kg = 0.05mSv/kg. (EDIT, mSv, not mv)
Accoring to this overview, cancer risk is not measureable below 100mSv, and gradually increasing from there:
https://www.radiationanswers.org/radiation-and-me/effects-of....
Taken together, that means that in order to have any measureable increased risk of radiation, you need to heat 2000 kg of that kind of meat.
The maximum radiation level of meat to be sold, seems to be 600Bq/kg. At this level, you have to eat 10000kg before there is any increased risk.
By comparison, massive amounts of air polution from coal and gas plants, as well as transportation is allowed. According to this article, in Germany alone, there are 62300 yearly deaths from air polution:
https://epha.org/eu-air-quality-laws-protect-our-health-germ....
Most "normies" that I know, if presented with the first article, would get the impression that eating boar would be quite risky, and many would stop eating boar because of it. If they read the last one, they would just shrug. Pollution is not nice, but it is far less scary than those becquerels.
While in in fact, if every person in Berlin would eat 5 big fat boars (200kg meat each) from the contaminated area, the risk (not counting risk from obesity) would be insignificant compared to the air they breathe every day.
When presented this way, I definitely would count this as disinformation.
> The tale of a general public that had been mislead with propaganda is a pattern of argument that is typically used by anti-democratic movements.
When I claim that the general public is being mislead, it is because I crunch the numbers (hopefully without miscalculating). Air polution very measurably increases risk of death from cancer and a number of other diseases, while the case provided for Boars, for normal intakes of Boar meat, is extremely unlikely to be measurable.
Obviously (I hope) I do not suggest that we set democracy aside. But it wouldn't hurt if educated people were more active in spreading more accurate information, to counteract what I see as fear-mongering.
> You might argue that in the light of the current situation, Germany's last three nulcear plants to be shut down this years should run a little longer.
(or at least, that's how I interpret "You might argue that").
From my point of view, shutting those down had been a bad decision for a while, and was still wrong. You seem to argue that even if this was considered, it shot down for political reasons. I would argue, from my limited knowledge about German politics, that it is not a surprise that the Green party would not take that path.
I suppose from the perspective of the perspective of government in Germany given the pre-existing situation as the war started, this may not be black and white.
From my perspective, and I suppose many peple who see Germany from a distance, we may see this over a longer time period, back to March 2011 and perhaps beyond. In that context (and with my view on nuclear power), shutting down the plants this spring is just the culimination of a string of bad decisions. So with my context, it was clearly wrong, even if inertia may have made it inevitable.
So I suppose it depends on perspective.
> Germany wants to switch completely to renewable electrical energies by 2035 (all energies by 2045).
Germany wants to do that, clearly. But is it realistic. I'm reading articles such as this one:
https://energywatch.com/EnergyNews/Policy___Trading/article1...
This does not instil confidence, to say the least. Also, this clearly illustrated the problem with renewables, namely their intermittent nature. For ALL energy to be provided by renewables (and not depend on non-renewable production in other countries), the grid probably needs several days consumption worth of storage capacity.
Actually getting a point where Germany is able to produce a number of GWh equal to the yearly production is quite easy by comparison. Storage is the hard part. The numbers I've seen so far, indicates that many houses with solar panels have batteries with the capacity to store 5-10 kWh, but if you want to rely on batteries for a few cold, cloudy days in the winter in a row with no wind (and addition have power for your commute in your electric BMW, at autobahn speeds), you may need ~100x that, for EACH house.
Hopefully we will se a revolution in the cost of batteries over that period, but I still consider this pretty optimistic.
Because that would anger their western benefactors.
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/russia-ukraine-latest-news-...
Cheap Russian gas might make a brief comeback depending on if Russia is able to fix its leadership issues that are causing the current crisis. Right now it is looking pretty bad. But nothing that a Russian revolution wouldn't be able to fix. If that fails to happen, I doubt the Russians are going to get a lot of gas business from Europe with Putin remaining in power. Basically right now they are dealing with the stick part of this stick/carrot strategy. But even if that does happen, the message that they can't be trusted was received loud and clear. Business as usual is not going to be a thing any time soon.
Whatever they currently still receive in terms of gas revenues will start drying up either way. Oil is going to stop flowing pretty soon. And either the Russians close of the gas or the Germans will diversify their supply to the point where it won't matter if they do because the threat of the Russians cutting them off is now both very credible and completely unacceptable as a status quo.
That will make gas a lot more expensive permanently for the Germans and will only increase their ambition level with respect to reducing their dependence on it. If heating prices double or triple permanently, people are going to be pretty eager and creative getting into more cheaper ways to heat their houses. That's already happening in a lot of places.
About 25% is done or currently being build, about 50% is in the approval phase.
If the war lasts for long, that gas can easily become uneconomical.
This is simply not true. According to https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/29295/umfrage... nuclear's share in Hermany's total power generation was 30,6% in 2000, staying around 30% until 2009.
From 2000 to 2009, 6 years were below 30%, 5 years below 28% and 2 years below 27%, with a low of 25.9% and a high of 32.1%. If you take the 32.1% as the maximum value with 100%, that is a little over 20% fluctuation with a clear, negative trend.
Pigs are especially bad since they eat basically what humans can eat. So stopping producing pigs will solve both energy and food crisis.
And if Denmark managed to stop pigs production in 1917 almost instantly when facing a war crisis [1], then surely modern Germany can do the same.
[1] - https://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2012nl/jul/hindhede.pdf
These can't easily be replaced by nuclear power.
Also, in the German climate and with its many 'old' buildings, merely switching the heat source won't do. One also needs additional isolation, and new radiators.
[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/heating-40-millio...
Who's talking about a year or two? Germany has been pushing for russian gas since the 90's, against all logic.
If we had more nuclear power, this wouldn't change much, if anything
And you may have noticed that Russia is not cutting off delivery of Russian gas to Germany. Which they would if the damage was unilateral.
Also, electrical heating is one of most wasteful and damaging ways to do heating, and Germany has been moving away from electrical heating for this reason for decades now.
Not disagreeing with the rest of the arguments, but electrical heat pumps are actually the most efficient way to heat your home (theoretically you can get about 5 W of heat for every 1W of electricity, for practical ones it's a bit more than 3W IIRC).
That said, it's not trivial to convert old houses to use heat pumps. Cost is one issue, but they typically require better insulation because they don't have the same power that you can get with a gas heater.
What if the EU had not bought Russian gas? Then Russia would probably have sold more to others like China or India and Ukraine would not have earned money from transit fees, nor would there be any leverage against Russia at all.
Also If EU did not buy Russian gas and China and India were the only buyers then that lowers the price and profits Russia commands. In a liquid marketplace the number of buyers available contribute to profits.
Providing the electricity for those pumps is the easy part of the problem. That just requires doing a bit more of what they are already doing at scale, which would be installing wind and solar all over the place.
In any case, not all heat pumps are that expensive, and it is also possible to have hybrid heat pumps and air conditioners.
Had Germany decided to phase out natural gas for heating in 2014, and replace it by nuclear power, ovens and heat pumps would definitely be able to keep up with the reactor build rate.
Even if the denuclearization hadn't taken place, they'd still be dependent on Russian gas for at least a significant part of their gas supply. They can always substitute basically any gas shortfalls in the electricity sector simply by increasing coal generation, since there's a lot of unused capacity now that renewables leaped massively, and even replacing all the gas currently being used for electricity generation (because there's so little of it!) with coal would not even reach the levels of coal generation that Germany had as recently as just five years ago, so the coal plants can simply somewhat increase their output for a while. What Germans currently don't have is any way to not freeze to death and keep the industry running without Russian gas.
I’d argue that it’s not about % coming from Russia that reflects dependence, it’s how easy you could switch to another supplier.
How difficult would it be to find a different provider for that Uranium?
The biggest exporter of Uranium to Europe is Niger. We also have Kazakstan, Canada, Australia, and then a bunch of smaller ones. Being close geographical isn't a major benefit for Uranium imports. Blocking Russian Uranium imports should already been done, and if its not, should be made into policy. Since it only is a small portion of the overall imports the effect should be very minor.
I would expect that the American company, by the fact of being American, are already required to follow sanctions related to Russia.
> but if it's easy to switch suppliers it should be a nobrainer, no?
Unfortunately it's not that easy since Russians control over 40% of fuel production capacity, and additionally Western manufacturers need to learn to manufacture Russian fuel assemblies and test them and certify them for safe operation first, so even if Western production capacity were sufficient, there would probably still be some delay in the switch.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanhikivi_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
[1]. https://thebreakthrough.org/articles/historical-construction...
> In November 2012 it was discovered that over 5,000 small components used in five reactors at Yeonggwang Nuclear Power Plant had not been properly certified; eight suppliers had faked 60 warranties for the parts. Two reactors were shut down for component replacement, which was likely to cause power shortages in South Korea during the winter.[23] Reuters reported this as South Korea's worst nuclear crisis, highlighting a lack of transparency on nuclear safety and the dual roles of South Korea's nuclear regulators on supervision and promotion.[24] This incident followed the prosecution of five senior engineers for the coverup of a serious loss of power and cooling incident at Kori Nuclear Power Plant, which was subsequently graded at INES level 2.[23][25]
> In 2013, there was a scandal involving the use of counterfeit parts in nuclear plants and faked quality assurance certificates. In June 2013 Kori 2 and Shin Wolsong 1 were shut down, and Kori 1 and Shin Wolsong 2 ordered to remain offline, until safety-related control cabling with forged safety certificates is replaced.[26] Control cabling in the first APR-1400s under construction had to be replaced delaying construction by up to a year.[27] In October 2013 about 100 people were indicted for falsifying safety documents, including a former chief executive of Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power and a vice-president of Korea Electric Power Corporation.[28]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_South_Korea
Anyway, despite these cases, I would expect corruption to be a smaller problem with a Korean vendor than with a Russian one. At least in Korea, corruption is being prosecuted.
I'm not suggesting that investment in renewables should be slowed down, only that coal and gass should be removed BEFORE nuclear. If Germany is able to produce the energy they need from renewables only, and to provide a stable supply, all the power to them.
But to bring up renewables in a discussion about nuclear vs natural gas, is just a diversion tactic (or at best a dilusion).
Oh, btw, I'm Norwegian. My country is making a $100 billion profit from the current energy situation in Europe, just this year, meaning that my household of 4 indirectly profits about $80000 from this in 2022 alone. So I'm not arguing from personal interest....
[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
I can't pretend to know how feasible it is in practice, but long term strategic uranium stockpiles should be doable. Long enough to weather any reasonable war. Much, much more doable than trying to store a decade of nat gas.
Anyway, my argument i built on the premise that Germany should never have shut down their nuclear power plants (except when they truely are "spent") and instead built a large number of new ones.
If their nuclear capacity was about the same as the French, it would make a lot of sense to have a strategic stockpile of ready-to-use fuel, both in case supply is restricted for political reasons and because it would serve as a hedge against price fluctuations.
Going as heavy on natural gas as they have over the last generation, more or less ensures that they are in Russia's pocket. Shutting down nuclear plants does not make that better. In fact, I argue, it makes it worse.
Except I'd already refuted that claim, so it didn't make sense to labor under this misconception any further to begin with.
Your refutation of the possibility of to use Nuclear power to gain independence of Russian energy seems to depend on German inability to achieve indepencende of Russian fuel by setting up a stockpile(1).
Which in turn is justified by claiming that the stockpile would not be needed, since they would shut down their nuclear plants(2).
Which is justified by (1), which is justified by (2) and so on.
My argument is that, had Germany decided in 2014 to increase, rather than decrease their use of nuclear power, with the aim to reduce dependence on Russia, it could be done. But given that, they would have to start looking for (possibly in cooperation with their allies) other sources of fuel to really become independent, in other words, set up agreements to buy fuel from countries like Australia and Canada, on top of whatever fuel was being bought from Russia before 2022.
Basically, my argument requires BOTH of these steps to be taken:
- Decide to keep or increase energy production from nuclear
- Decide to work towards independence of Russia by funding alternative sources + by putting any extra fuel they purchase into a strategic stockpile.
(Edit: formatting.)
These are clearly decisions that were available to Germany (as a country, provided the public had been primed to support them). I don't find the spot in your argument that refutes any of them, without already assuming that the other is impossible.
Also, I don't find where in your argument, in what way these decisions, if taken together, would NOT ensure that Germany would have more energy production capacity in 2022 than they have now.
No, my refutation hinged on 1) the fact that German nuclear power is NOT a substitute for the vast majority of German uses of natural gas (chemical and other industry, residential heaters -- neither of which is near-term replaceable with nuclear power without massive investments in electrolysis), and 2) the fact that German nuclear power has the cheapest substitute in form of unused capacity of coal plants (which recently massively dropped in their capacity factor) and accelerated expansion of renewable generation. There is no circularity in this that I see. 1) means that keeping or expanding the nuclear fleet does not decrease dependency on Russian gas, and 2) means that ditching it does not increase dependency on anything else coming from Russia.
So ditching the German nuclear fleet has no downside in terms of reducing dependency on Russia. In fact ditching the German nuclear fleet might somewhat reduce the dependency on Russia on part of the remaining global users of nuclear power, owing to the reduction of uranium fuel consumption in light of the fact that Russia possesses 46% of world's uranium enrichment capacity -- any enriched uranium on the global market that Germany would have to use in their reactors could be used by someone else at that poitnt, with less money paid for enriched uranium flowing into Russia.
> My argument is that, had Germany decided in 2014 to increase, rather than decrease their use of nuclear power, with the aim to reduce dependence on Russia, it could be done.
They could have certainly acted in that direction with such an aim, but since such actions would not have lead to achieving this aim (see above), it would have been a completely irrational course of action.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1293065/natural-gas-cons...
Only a tiny sliver is for non-energy, and that part could easily be purchased from other countries.
In Norway, a large percentage of heating used to come from oil, but in 2020 any fossil fuel for residential heating was banned. As long as the power is cheap, electric heating is affordable. And if the electricity is slightly less cheap, heating is still affordable if one installs a heat pump (even a cheap air-to-air pump helps a lot).
And even if you were correct in your claim that a large part of the natural gas could not be replaced by nuclear (which is just lack of imagination), your argument would be flawed.
From the link I sent, only 2% of the consumption is non-energy use, but even if that were 50%, reducing dependency by 50% is still a big deal.
You are aware that heating is energy? Residential burners, industrial burners, etc. So this does in no way contradict what I said. Still, none of this gas consumption is directly substitutable by electricity without massive infrastructure changes, not even by nuclear electricity.
> As long as the power is cheap
In Germany, it's not, so there's that.
> And if the electricity is slightly less cheap, heating is still affordable if one installs a heat pump (even a cheap air-to-air pump helps a lot).
That's a part of the massive infrastructure changes that I'm talking about. I've already mentioned elsewhere the 2010 and 2012 EU directives that will make this happen on a timescale of decades as the building stock is progressively replaced, but you can't do this on a timescale of years.
> And even if you were correct in your claim that a large part of the natural gas could not be replaced by nuclear (which is just lack of imagination), your argument would be flawed.
It's not "a lack of imagination". I've never said these uses can't be replaced -- in fact we know exactly how these uses will be replaced (natural gas in chemistry with electrolytic hydrogen, natural gas in heating with passive houses, etc.), so no need to invoke "imagination". The problem at hand is that you can't do this transition on a timescale of a war (...and in the middle of a pandemic, and during a recession, and with a famine coming). This will not be done in months, or even years. Think two decades instead. So this will help us deal with the climate issues, but won't help with the war.
> From the link I sent, only 2% of the consumption is non-energy use, but even if that were 50%, reducing dependency by 50% is still a big deal.
It would, except this has nothing to do with keeping or ditching nuclear plants. This reduction would have to come from the fields where natural gas is being used and neither keeping not ditching nuclear plants would affect the success of such gas-saving measures.
Yes. My house, that was heated by oil 2 years ago, is heated by electricity today.
> In Germany, it's not, so there's that.
Because Germany has underinvested in electricity plants that cannot be shut down by Putin.
> It would, except this has nothing to do with keeping or ditching nuclear plants.
If Germany had kept their nuclear plants electricity plants (and ideally built a number of new ones) electricity in Europe would be cheaper. Thats just supply and demand.
> The problem at hand is that you can't do this transition on a timescale of a war
I agree you cannot transition in 2 months. I talked about starting in 2014. Shutting down the plants this year is only the culiminatino of a chain of bad decisions about energy.
But I suppose in 2014, the psychological damage was already done. It appears like Germany had already decided to get rid of Nuclear after 2011 / Fukushima. This seems to be driven by fear, more than anything.
Which I suppose is the real problem. This never was about making ration decisions about energy security, being dependent on Russia, etc. All along, this was about fear of "nuclear". The rest just looks like rationalization.
Meanwhile, energy prices have gone up all over Europe, since Germany is only the biggest country to have underinvested in electricity production. Even countries that produce an excess of electricity, like Norway, have the same prices. And believe me, ACER is getting really unpopular here, I would not be surprised if Norway is out of ACER by winter.
Good, so you see how the argument that only 2% of natural gas in Germany are not used for energy applications is irrelevant for the issue of replacing residential and industrial heat sources. These are major energy applications alright -- ones that can't be readily switched to electricity without major infrastructure transitions -- which are already taking place but can't be sped up 100x on a whim.
> Because Germany has underinvested in electricity plants that cannot be shut down by Putin.
No, actually it's largely because Germany overinvested in electricity plants that cannot be shut down by Putin. Their renewable investments, just like the renewable investments in the neighboring Czech Republic, led -- rather than trailed -- the recent decreases of prices of renewable generation equipment around 2010. As a result of this, Germany has to spend much more money than they would have had to, had they waited just a few years. This made their electricity around six Euro cents per kWh more expensive. (Investments do have to be repaid, after all.)
> I agree you cannot transition in 2 months. I talked about starting in 2014.
Germany started with the transition seriously around 2005. It still takes time, and also isn't a thing that happens at a constant rate because the industrial landscape is evolving. As things such as PV panels, wind turbines, or heat pumps get more affordable, their rate of installation increases.
> If Germany had kept their nuclear plants electricity plants (and ideally built a number of new ones) electricity in Europe would be cheaper.
Debatable, judging from the recent events in the European nuclear industry (Hinkley Point-C, Olkiluoto-3, etc.). The mandated feed-in tariff for HP-C electricity is now more than double than what a wind power plant would deliver. It's inflation-adjusted, so for example around now the electricity straight from the HP-C plant should be worth around 14 Euro cents per kWh, whereas for example new German PV auctions take place at under 5 Euro cents per kWh. And European wind power as well has similar price levels to the latter nowadays.
> But I suppose in 2014, the psychological damage was already done. It appears like Germany had already decided to get rid of Nuclear after 2011 / Fukushima. This seems to be driven by fear, more than anything.
It does not "appear" that "Germany had already decided to get rid of nuclear after 2011/Fukushima". They had mandated the shutdown in binding law almost ten years before Fukushima, so Fukushima had nothing to do with this.
> Meanwhile, energy prices have gone up all over Europe, since Germany is only the biggest country to have underinvested in electricity production. Even countries that produce an excess of electricity, like Norway, have the same prices.
You know, that just might have something to do with energy trading across Europe. The fact that Norway's electricity rates are increasing is a sign of healthy market, because it shows that arbitrage works.
Actually the opposite. If I personally could switch away from heating my house with fossil fuels, so could Germans. In principle, it could happen over a few months (depending on the number of electric ovens available in the market, the capacity of the grid, etc), but it is cheaper to do over some number of years.
Obviously, this would cost some money. But basic electric ovens are quite cheap, and Germany is not a poor country. Also, since I already paid that cost personally, I'm not super-inclined to feel sorry for them....
> No, actually it's largely because Germany overinvested in electricity plants that cannot be shut down by Putin.
At best, I would agree that Germany has chosen to switch to expensive energy production. The net output (as opposed to theoretical peak capacity) of renewables is still only about the same as renewables was in 1990, so that is not super-impressive, from a global warming perspective.
I don't believe that the 1990 nuclear industry was as dependent on Russian fuel, as it is today. Har Germany continued to produce electricity in their nuclear plants at the same level as 1990, it would have had the same effect on global warming as their "investment" in renewables have had so far. And any dependence that was created on Russia over this period, was by choice, and could have been reversed.
> but you can't do this on a timescale of years.
Norway made the decision to ban fossil fuels for heating in 2017, effective from 2020. Granted, it affected a smaller (but not insignificant) part of the population. But if there is a will, there is a way.
> You know, that just might have something to do with energy trading across Europe. The fact that Norway's electricity rates are increasing is a sign of healthy market, because it shows that arbitrage works.
I agree. In principle, it is not different from Norway paying full price (and then some) for gasoline/diesel. But they/we are used to to the low prices on electricity, from when local consumption was prioritized. Also, especially after the ban on oil/gas for heating, some feel tricked. So the public reaction is similar to what I imagine it would be in Germany, had Germany stopped all gas imports from Russia overnight. The government may be forced out of the common market before next winter, because of this.
> The problem at hand is that you can't do this transition on a timescale of a war
Maybe I'm being too harsh. My measuring stick is from my own (Norwegian) experience. Britian is not doing much better than Germany, and I would not expect countries like Hungary, the Baltic states, Poland etc to have the economy to turn this around quickly.
Also, Norway is obviously spoiled. We are 100% self-sufficient with renewable electricity, AND we make really good money from exporting oil and gas. We never really had to do the hard choices. (Also, Norway has still had high emissions, due to cold climate and low population density making both heating and transportation very energy intensive, as well as emissions from the oil industry)
France, though, has significantly lower CO2 emissions than Germany, and has had that since forever, even without having the resources that Norway possess. All due to nuclear, and they do it without making massively expensive investments into renewables. More for less, in other words.
So I suppose I predjudiced (postively, but maybe unfairly) when it comes to Germany. I generally expect Germany to be best-in-class when it comes efficiency and rationality, and especially implementation.
So when, in a case like this, it seems like German policies are irrational, especially when compared to French policies, it pops out as an outlier (to me, as an outsider to both Germany and France). I suppose there are good ways to explain this, based on local culture and politics, that go back more than 30 years, maybe all the way back to when France needed their nuclear industry for military use. I suppose these differences, when seen from the inside, are almost invisible because they may be taken for granted.
Maybe, from the German perspective, it is an establish fact that nuclear power is "bad" or "dirty" somehow, while fossil fuel consumption is relatively more acceptable. Maybe the Russian threat is not felt the same way that some other countries feel it. Maybe there is guilt, or maybe the taboo around annexing neighbours is not as strong.
Anyway, maybe best to end this thread. Thanks for staying reasonably polite, and good luck going forward!
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
It seems like nuclear power genertion started going down for real around 2006.
This corresponds roughly with the time electricity prices for households were nearly doubled:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Elect...
This doesn't work with natural gas because they needed a lot of it and moving it around is capital intensive. The situations are completely different. The energy densities here are wildly dissimilar, and that matters a lot for the economic of building a stockpile.
So do you.
> Transporting and building a uranium reserve would be relatively easy; maintaining a 10 year stockpile and importing from Canada, Australia or Kazakhstan via a circuitous route are all feasible.
See, that's the problem. One of the differences between natural gas and uranium is that (outside of CANDU reactors) you can't use the uranium "as is". To use uranium for pretty much anything useful, you need certain high-tech facilities. By production capacity, almost half of those facilities (according to [1], it's 46 percent) is in Russia.
The way things are, you can't build a stockpile if the expected value of uranium fuel production outside of Russia is lower than the expected value of uranium fuel consumption outside of Russia, which I believe is currently the case. As long as this remains to be a case, any stockpile will dwindle, not grow.
[1] https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/research/commentary/re...
What seems "uninformed, if not dishonest" to me is the argument that fuel price matters here. Imagine this: Your country needs seven doohickeys per year to run. What exactly those doohickeys are is unimportant; the only important thing is that you need then. Russia can provide you with four doohickeys per year. The rest of the world can provide you with only five doohickeys per year, and for many years they won't be able to provide any more than that. So you need at least two doohickeys per year from Russia, no matter what, otherwise your country stops running. So Russia can stop your country from running at any moment. Did you notice how price never entered this discussion?
> The reserves of Uranium across the globa are still huge, much of which can be found in (relatively) politically stable places such as Australia and Canada.
Reserves of uranium matter here much less than enrichment and fuel assembly production capacity. Russia has over 40% of enriched fuel production capacity (as per https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...). Until you build new plants for this, it doesn't matter that you can get natural uranium from Australia or Canada. You won't be able to do anything useful with it (unless your reactor is CANDU).
As long as the supply is NOT cut off, it matters quite a lot what Germany is paying for it. If the choice (for a set period of energy supply) is to pay either 100 billion euros for natural gas, or 20 billion euroes for uranium, the difference is 80 billion euroes less that Russia could spend to keep their war machine running. That's as much as their peacetime yearly military budget.
As for Russia's enrichment capacity, that is something any advanced country could set up, just as several countries have deposites they could start mining. Ones mining and enrichment has started, it could be kept running for as long as needed.
For natural gas, on the other hand, there are fewer good sources. By far the cheapest source is from wherever it can be transported in pipes. Other countries can convert their gas to LNG for transport to Germany, but that also requires expansion of LNG facilities in both ends, and perhaps construction of more LNG ships.
I don't know which take longer, between LNG from other sources or uranium from other sources.
And even when the transfer has been made, natural gas is a more limited resource than uranium, so even if it is purchased from, say, Saudi Arabia, the global supply and demand situation isn't changed much, so Russia will still be able to find buyers for their gas. (For instance, Germany may start to buy up gas that would otherwise be exported to China. If so, China can just buy from Russia.)
This doesn't even start to go into having dependencies on fundamentalist islamic monarchies in the middle east. I would think it would be preferrable for Germany to import their energy from Canada and Australia, countries they that share most of Germany's values.
Finally, with nuclear there is always the option of setting up strategic fuel reserves. This would be analogous to strategic oil reserves, except with massively lower storage costs. Nuclear fuel is stable for 100s of years, and so dense that reserves able to last a few years could probably be fit in a single warehouse (or several small ones):
Except that's NOT the choice that Germany is faced with. In the short term, the cheapest way for Germany to cover for any decrease in nuclear generation is to increase her lignite mining, not to buy more gas, which has grown even more expensive. And also notice that this decreases the money Russia would get from 100 billion in your hypothetical example not to 20 billion but rather to 0 billion, all while being even cheaper for Germany.
> As for Russia's enrichment capacity, that is something any advanced country could set up
It would take many years to replace the 46% [1] Russian share of the global enrichment capacity. Maybe more than a few years -- a decade perhaps. After all, this is all highly controlled, specialized equipment. You can't just go and buy it in a supermarket.
> I don't know which take longer, between LNG from other sources or uranium from other sources.
It would absolutely take longer for the world to replace Russian uranium fuel production. They've built is up as a Cold War Project-Manhattan-level strategic project over more than a decade.
> Finally, with nuclear there is always the option of setting up strategic fuel reserves.
As I already responded to someone else, you can't set up a fuel reserve if your expected value of fuel consumption is higher than your expected value of of fuel production (or, acquisition in this case, really).
[1] https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/research/commentary/re...
As I said, I don't know. (EDIT, meaning that I don't know, not that I dispute your claim. It would be nice to have actual numbers.) It does also take years to set up transportation capacity for LNG, including the tankers, terminals and other infrastructure.
Anyway, had the west realized this exposure for real in 2014, I would have expected that at least some increased capacity would be available outside of Russia already, with an increase in capacity every month as we go forward. And had the output of that capacity been put into strategic reserves, one would have some level of reserve while building up more capacity.
What it looks like from your link, is that there was an initative started last year to reduce dependancy on Russian fuel. I suppose time will tell how long it takes to reach reasonable production volumes.
And one thing is obvious. Storing and transporting nuclear fuel is orders of magnutudes cheaper than storing and transporting natural gas.
This is even true for France, as most of its uranium comes from Kazakhstan.
The current leadership is very much indebted to Putin though for saving them during a recent near-revolution, so they're walking a tightrope.
Edit: and also used in Russian domestic affairs, didn’t mean to leave that out!
I consider this a good thing. Wasting energy ain't good, especially when it isn't completely climate neutral
There's energy poverty in Germany. A lot of it. You don't even have to go to any “3rd world” areas of the world to see it.
Cheap energy is CRITICAL for the elimination of poverty and suffering. I know that single-mindedly obsessing about the single goal of climate change is currently popular, but please, let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.
For none-household consumers it's the same as the EU average: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
At the same time Germany has one of the most reliable electricity nets with less outages than other countries.
Unplanned shutdowns are a increasing occurrence in France because of aging reactors and overheating/freezing rivers
Is this really what German press is reporting? What a gross lie. The "overheating" is neither due to the reactor (simply it getting hot naturally) nor actively threatening to the reactor: they are just stopped to avoid making the situation slightly worse. Temperature difference at the output of a nuclear plant is barely a degree.
And then you have the Austrians who try to cancel our nuclear power plants directly through activism, etc.
> "Gas production did grow but mainly to offset declines in coal"
This is dishonest at two levels.
First, nuclear power fell and, at the same time, renewables and gas sharply rose in Germany's energy mix. Power is fungible. It is not as if power generated by renewables substitutes for nuclear, but power generated by gas doesn't. Germany had to add up it's energy inputs to meet 100% of its needs, and it used both sources to do so.
Second, everyone in Germany knew they were supposed to get rid of coal by 2030. That's the international deadline for coal in advanced economies. But the national phase-out law, until very recently, was eliminating coal at a far slower pace - aiming towards a terminal date of 2038. One reason why was the decline of nuclear.
Gas "sharply" rose to much less than the coal and nuclear reductions combined. Renewables are on track to grow to about an order of magnitude more than the nuclear capacity Germany ever had. New gas plants might still happen as that is part of their plan to decommission coal. Or at least it was until a few months ago. But it will probably never grow to close to the level of coal production Germany had 12 years ago when it started shutting down nuclear plants.
The decision to get rid of coal by 2030 is fairly recent. There are no international deadlines other than what was agreed at Cop 26, which thanks to China and India avoids any big explicit commitments. However, there is a lot of peer pressure especially in Europe to clean up the energy sector. Germany actually resisted that peer pressure quite long. E.g. the reason brown coal is still a thing in Germany is because until a few years ago, the CDU essentially blocked all attempts to kill that massively polluting industry to protect jobs. I think at the time of the Paris agreements they were thinking/hoping a 2050-2060 time frame. Germany even opened new coal plants as recent as two years ago. The ambition levels have of course increased dramatically in the last few years; mainly due to the success of renewables. Mostly this is driven by simple economics. People like cheap wind and solar energy. Nuclear they don't like for lots of reasons; including the bad economics.
In absolute terms the combined capacity of coal and gas is the same now as it was in 2010. It has fallen as a share of the total because output has increased.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/p...
> "The unspoken implication of nuclear proponents is that Germany started putting out more CO2 because they shut down nuclear. The reality is that there was a continuous decline in fossil fuel related emissions related to electricity production."
I am not a partisan in this argument. But clearly that's a strawman. The argument is that if Germany hadn't taken its nuclear capacity offline then it would have been in a better position to more rapidly decarbonise its energy mix. In one simple sense that's true: nuclear energy is clean, and so by getting rid of it you need to add more clean energy that you would have otherwise to decarbonise. That is, Germany would not have had to increase gas imports at the rate it did, and would not have had to drag out its coal phase-out.
Showing that fossil fuels have decreased in relative terms as a share of the energy mix does not show that it would not have fallen faster with nuclear online.
> "There are no international deadlines other than what was agreed at Cop 26, which thanks to China and India avoids any big explicit commitments."
I was writing in a hurry. I meant that the most respected models of the pathways to net zero tell us that coal needs to be eradicated across advanced economies by 2030. The IEA's Net Zero scenario, which is widely taken as a benchmark by policymakers around the world, says just that. Everyone in Germany knew their original 2038 phase-out date flouted their responsibilities.
I agree with the point that we should have phased out coal before nuclear, but you have to state it like that and not cling onto some dream that nuclear and not renewables are the way forward for decarbonization.
> 2030 That's the international deadline for coal in advanced economies
Of the countries that have a pledge of a phase-out of coal, most have an even earlier deadline. However a lot of countries like the US or Poland don't even a deadline.
https://beyond-coal.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Overview-o...
Arguably this is semantics. But that's because the semantics of your claim is unhelpfully ambiguous. In absolute terms coal and gas make up approximately the same share of Germany's capacity as it did in 2010. In relative terms, because the total output has increased, it's share has fallen. But I say it is unhelpful because one has fallen, the other increased.
> "Gas production did grow but mainly to offset declines in coal"
I don't think this is semantics. For the reasons given, it's just wrong.
The statements together make it look like you're trying to misrepresent the facts to support a particular view about nuclear energy.
Total output decreased from 632 TWh in 2010 to 588 TWh in 2021. Coal and lignite decreased substantially 117 TWh + 146 TWh in 2010 to 55 TWh + 110 TWh in 2021 (with a substantial reduction in CO2 emissions). gas use remained stable with 89 TWh in 2010 and 90 TWh in 2021. At the same time nuclear decreased from 141 TWh and 69 TWh and renewables increased from 105 TWh to 233 TWh.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/p...
https://ag-energiebilanzen.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/STR...
Actual generation:
https://ag-energiebilanzen.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/STR...
gas use / CO2 emissions may actually be lower than electricity generation implies if more modern plants are installed.
You're being very disingenuous here talking about capacity. What matters is how much fossil fuels actually are getting burned:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Germany_electricity_produ...
Electricity production from fossil fuels went down from 360.3 TWh in 2010 to 328.5 TWh in 2021, which is a reduction of almost 10%, while increasing electricity export from 15 TWh to 19.3 TWh.
https://ag-energiebilanzen.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/STR...
https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&...
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/installed_power/chart....
https://sminpowergroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Renewa...
and what happens to that massive coal+gas infrastructure?Apparently , wind+solar don't work at night and you will always need the same level of coal+gas+oil
2. You need to buy the batteries
2) Yes, lots of them. Luckily, people are buying EVs (aka. batteries with wheels). Soon in the order of tens of gwh per year. Those batteries will be perfect for absorbing supply peaks (just plug the car in). And a growing number of cars can also return power to the grid. And mostly the second life for EV batteries is grid storage after they survive the car they were in. Of course other storage solutions are available as well.
Compare this to racks on land with far less stringent requirements.
One the other hand, EVs can fill the same role by simply being smart consumers. You don't even lose any round trip efficiency - because storing energy in the car's battery is the work being done.
Consider a future where you can set your car to have at least 60% each morning and then 100% on Saturday, because you are going on a trip. The car will then optimize the charging times for the lowest cost. Thus balancing the grid.
Dynamic demand has the same effect on the grid as dispatchable energy. No need to complicate it further.
Deploying dedicated racks-on-land with the proper total capacity and throughput would be a nightmare, without even considering locality.
And yes, a "minimal charge-level" parameter will be enforced.
Dynamic demand offers low-hanging fruits, and then it becomes more and more a constraint... alleviated by dispatchable energy.
This line of argument is either disingenuous or ignorant.
https://m.dw.com/en/new-energy-storage-facilities-in-high-de...
Wind + solar isn't a reliable energy source, period. You need a base load, whether that comes from hydroelectric, nuclear or, unfortunately, fossil fuels. Wind and solar are great at topping off things and should be deployed as much as possible for individuals to reduce the demand on the overall network, but they will never be a credible energy source, no matter how much people say "but batteries are just around the corner!". They are no, they are a waste of valuable metals and they are horribly polluting to produce.
The situation completely changed now the highly variable loads are cheaper now than the former base supplies. So you would always use your money to overbuild on the variable supplies not build constant supplies. The thing is solar and wind don't compete with gas, they compete with coal solar. However with the way solar and wind costs are going, we will likely reach a point where it makes more sense to overbuild so much to even cover the load peaks instead of using gas peakers.
Everyone has had the experience of walking around on a windless night. You can have many such nights in a row.
Energy storage is not a short or medium term solution. Pumped hydro is already maxxed out pretty much everywhere it's possible as not all dams are suitable -- in fact most aren't. Battery storage for large grids currently covers minutes of use, a few hours may be attainable. But wind can be absent for days or weeks, and there's such a thing as winter when you're as far from the equator as Germany.
Ignorant. Right.
The Australian National University recently disagreed: https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-530000-potent... . But even very large amounts of pumped hydro storage are probably not the cost optimum -- according to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001429211... , the optimum lies in the direction of significant overgeneration, which reduces storage requirements massively (even while allowing opportunistic consumers of electricity such as for example hydrogen production).
> But wind can be absent for days or weeks, and there's such a thing as winter when you're as far from the equator as Germany.
Interestingly enough for Germany, the period less likely to suffer from prolonged lack of wind is winter. So the more likely periods of decreased wind happen in summer, where they're interrupted daily by significant solar generation. At the very least in German conditions, these two events (lack of wind and lack of sun) are not only not independent, but they're actually anticorrelated. That also helps deal with the whole situation.
This is a worldwide assessment. Look at Northern Europe, and notice the complete lack of dots on the map.
> Interestingly enough for Germany, the period less likely to suffer from prolonged lack of wind is winter
Want you bet your freezing bottom on it? "Less likely" does not cut it for a vital commodity. Famine, drowning and thirst also occur when a commodity that's otherwise readily available on average isn't. They're considered somewhat unpleasant.
I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say here. Northern Europe generally doesn't need the kind of sites that this study was looking for (a pair of locations vertically separated and horizontally close with a river close to the lower location); they already have "once-through" hydro plants on rivers with reservoirs high in the mountains.
> Want you bet your freezing bottom on it? "Less likely" does not cut it for a vital commodity.
I don't have to "bet my freezing bottom" on it. The "less likely" part means lower expected value of energy needs not satisfied by a combination of solar and wind power. This lower expected value translates into lower expenditure of backup supplies such as synthetic gas being expended for that purpose, and therefore the lower average annual cost of using such supplies. That makes this approach viable.
Either disingenuous or ignorant, yes.
> Energy storage is not a short or medium term solution.
The primary role of energy storage systems in renewable energy sources is to balance supply and demand. Your assertion makes no sense because it ignores even the most fundamental aspects of the problem domain.
> Pumped hydro is already maxxed out pretty much everywhere it's possible as not all dams are suitable -- in fact most aren't. Battery storage for large grids currently covers minutes of use, a few hours may be attainable. But wind can be absent for days or weeks, and there's such a thing as winter when you're as far from the equator as Germany.
Irrelevant. You're trying to put up a strawman based on a fictitious scenario where energy production comes from a single source: wind. It's the tired old meme from two decades ago.
Meanwhile, back in the real world not only are power grids distributed at a continental level but there also multiple sources of power feeding into that grid, including imported energy generated from renewable sources.
There is nothing close to the grid capacity to make this statement true.
Germany lacks base load capacity and imports energy from coal and natural gas burning neighbors when their renewables go offline. To offset this, Germany is building more base load capacity in the form of gas driven plants. This isn't a secret, it's not disingenuous to point it out.
The better option, from the point of view of carbon neutrality, is to make up that availability gap with nuclear. The Germans are unwilling to do this, and likely they hope that eventually they can import energy from neighbors that are willing to make up this gap with nuclear plants the Germans themselves were unwilling to build.
Today, and in the future if hydrogen hits unforeseen snags, nuclear remains the proven option.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2019/07/f65/Stora...
Depending on how reliable you need your energy you'll need various energy storage mixes. Judging by the uk, wind can spend an entire month producing at 15% of it's normal output and can spend days at 3%. So you need a LOT of storage if you want to be sure the lights stay on. In the high hundreds of billions of Euros (and considerable ongoing costs given they need the equivalent of replacement eveey 10-20 years) in the case of Germany.
(And yes, we are going to need a lot of storage. On amounts close to 1/3 of our daily generation capacity. We also need some long-term and transportable solutions. And yes, there are currently no options on the market, for very obvious reasons. All of those can be done.)
By "nearly no" do you mean "tens, possibly hundreds of billions"? Batteries alone have had tens of billions in investment in the last few years.
> On amounts close to 1/3 of our daily generation capacity.
What kind of mix and overproduction are you thinking of that gets you ratios that low without brownouts? I suspect that if you want to live off wind and solar you'll need a week of capacity to get no brownouts when it's still and gray for a week unless you get nameplate capacity 10x your average needs.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=47776
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/12/nyregion/indian-point-pow...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-utilities-nypa-energy-ind...
Wikipedia contradicts your claim.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany
From wikipeda's article, Germany has been constantly shutting down it's carbon-based energy sources for the past half decade, with dropping to a fraction of its contribution in the past six or seven years alone.
Germany currently relies primarily on wind, and wind+solar contribute more than all types of coal.
What you may have missed is: Germany is in the middle of Europe surrounded with a bunch of neighbor countries. Most of them are in the European Union which worked for years on building a joint energy market. Thus various electricity exports and imports are NORMAL. Note also that electricity may travel through more than one country in Europe.
Germany imports huge amounts of energy from other countries, given that it doesn't have much own resources of Gas, Oil, Uranium - it has some coal, though. Coal, too is imported.
Exchanging electricity with other countries will increase massively. In my region there is now a 1 GW power line to Norway to exchange electricity both ways.
Another example: Germany, Denmark, Netherlands and Belgium are investing 135 Billion Euros in a joint offshore wind project.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/germany-denmark...
It does not mean anything if they can't decide when they export it.
Waht matters though, is that most of the time their electricity has an awful carbon footprint w.r.t what the wealthiest country in Europe should afford. All the rest is but mental gymnastics to try to justify that.
That makes no sense. The market (demand & supply) decides. The static model is long past.
> Waht matters though, is that most of the time their electricity has an awful carbon footprint w.r.t what the wealthiest country in Europe should afford.
Germany isn't the wealthiest country in Europe. That it has more inhabitants than, for example Norway, does not make the average German richer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_distribution_in_Europe
What really matters is that the we move fast to renewable energy.
Indeed, the supply. And what is the very charateristic of Germany's renewable supply? That they do not have any inluence of it. They have to sell when the weather is sunny and windy, and have to buy or burn coal otherwise.
> does not make the average German richer.
That does not really matter, as the average German does not pay for a nuke plant; the federal goverment does.
> What really matters is that the we move fast to renewable energy.
What really matters is that we move fast to low-carbon energy; renewable is the cherry on the cake.
There are more renewable energy sources than wind and sun. Buying electricity is also a good option. Retrieving stored electricity is another.
> That does not really matter, as the average German does not pay for a nuke plant; the federal goverment does.
The federal government does not pay for nuclear power plants.
> What really matters is that we move fast to low-carbon energy; renewable is the cherry on the cake.
Renewable is the only viable option.
Is that supposed to be a good faith argument?
> Renewable is the only viable option.
A lot of words without arguments, isn't it?
Germany and Austria severed their single electricity pricing zone in October 2018[0]. "Slow grid expansion" was identified as one of the major factors in this decision.
[0] https://www.apg.at/api/sitecore/projectmedia/download?id=24f...
No, they did not -- look at the fourth chart in https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c... . There's no "increasing coal". The recent changes in nuclear and coal generation correlate rather than anti-correlate. You'd need them to anti-correlate for the thing that you're claiming to be true.
More important to the discussion, note the sharp rise in coal when there is a renewable availability dip. This need to burn coal and gas when renewables have less-than-perfect availability is the conundrum for the Germans.
While this is true, the claim that carbon emissions could have decreased even more than they actually decreased is very different from a claim that they increased (as opposed to decreased).
> More important to the discussion, note the sharp rise in coal when there is a renewable availability dip
Annual fluctuations are to be expected. They don't change the long-term trend. In fact you can see on the charts that the fluctuation was comparable to one year of recent trend. Additionally, this rise happened together with the abatement of the pandemic recession effect which impacts consumption of electricity. Without the anomalous electricity consumption dip in 2020 (which you can see clearly in the third chart), the rise in coal in 2021 vs. 2020 would have been about halved.
Germany has most definitely not recarbonized. Germany has consistently reduced CO2 emission over the last few years, it would have been quicker if Germany had kept nuclear online no question, but that's really how impressive renewables have become. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption...
This is a misconception.
Germany invested in renewables because we wanted to get rid of nuclear, not to save the climate. Germany has a population of about 80 million. That's a sufficiently large sample, so one cannot expect Germans to be psychologically or morally different to any other large population in the world. And none of those countries has managed to do something about the climate in any meaningful sense. Consequently, neither would have Germany.
Without a nuclear phase out, there would have been almost no investments in wind & solar from Germany. Consequently, neither wind nor solar would look as impressive as they do now because today's prices would have been reached only in a decade or so.
The level of coal power would have been mostly unaffected.
"Share of renewable energy in gross final energy consumption": 13.7% in 2013 then many nuclear reactors shut down, and 19.3% in 2019 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/nrg_ind_ured/...
This graphs shows the carbon intensity of their electricity dropping for years. There's a small uptick in the estimated number for the most recent year, but even with that it's a massive drop, so where is the recarbonization you mention?
https://www.bmwk.de/Redaktion/EN/Infografiken/stromaustausch...
Germany increased imports of electricity from France and Czech that is generated by nukes.
This is similar to my purchase of “green power” in Palo Alto which really just changes the allocation of how much hydro generated electricity California imports.
Neither case affects domestic production.
https://whatisnuclear.com/reactor_history.html
My take on the more modern economics is here
https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html
And waste here https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
https://info.westinghousenuclear.com/news/four-westinghouse-...
I really wish we could get a few more orders in the USA so that we could leverage the learning and supply chain being so painfully built in Georgia for the AP1000s there.
The fact that this hasn’t happened is a testament and an indictment of dysfunction in our society.
I’ll turn into a single issue voter if any candidate for the President is pro-nuclear in a big way.
If uranium was used much more, there are economic amounts that are filterable from seawater even.
very good point though on end cycle efficiencies!
Most Uranium mines (15000 worked claims in the Midwest in particular) no one even bothers with. Cool or not, if one of the 5 major mines decides to cut prices, you’d better be awfully efficient right now.
https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...
Realistically the quickest way to get to the stage where you don't need to think about your electricity usage is put a solar installation on your roof + battery. Now you have to invest up front (and it might not even be a good investment), but it shows that nothing comes for free.
We have at least 6 magic wands: 1) if the VVER 1200 truly cost 1.4 billion to construct in 4 years, nuclear economics are saved. 2) building a lot of marine nuclear plants https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html#economies-of-scale-... They require far less concrete (no need to protect against seisms) and much less redundancy because the cooler (water) will always be there (the ocean won't disappear) hence preventing radiations escalation in a passive way. 3) using disruptively simpler/cheaper models https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi... 4) using more complex but significantly more efficient models (I'm mainly talking about the underresearched supracritical reactors) 5) if SMRs are not a scam and can really have a fordism era 6) rationalizing et reconciloating regulations with cost effectiveness.
Assuming we do build 1000+ gigawatts soon, then we will need to look into nuclear fuel recycling with breeder reactors. The most popular Gen-IV concepts in this area are sodium-cooled fast reactors (SFR) and thorium molten salt breeder reactors (T-MSRs). We have 450 reactor-years of experience with SFRs and like 5 with MSRs. Many of the SFR years were not great, and the MSR tech performance has never been seen at industrial scale (though China is about to turn on a T-MSR really soon!)
So yeah I'm kind of a "decarbonize now with what we know 100% works" person. Focus on Gen-IV is fine for some people, but I think the industry and fans of the industry are way too overhyped on Gen-IV and not nearly hyped enough about Gen-III+. Japan can build gigawatt-class ABWRs in 36 months.
We had a ABWR licensed and ready to build at South Texas Project but we just let it sit there. What a sad sad thing. That's a billion carbon-free watts we are not using.
[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-01-26-offshore-power-sys...
The most advanced one is Russia's BN-800 (now burning 60% MOX). Its planned big brother was cancelled "In 2015, after several minor delays, problems at the recently completed BN-800 indicated a redesign was needed. Construction of the BN-1200 was put on "indefinite hold", and Rosenergoatom has stated that no decision to continue will be made before 2019." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-1200_reactor
This is not due to a lack of interest or funding because Russia launched a new project towards another architecture and builds a small reactor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BREST_(reactor)
There's NO WAY a new LWR will ever beat LCOE of solar + wind + battery. And that is current day prices that doesn't count forthcoming sodium ion storage, LFP, and solar/wind cost improvements.
And it won't come online for a decade at best, with inevitable massive cost overruns.
LWR/PWR is all the crap with waste, fuel rod reprocessing, only using select isotopes of uranium, and while I'm not an expert at nuclear plant economics and accounting, have tons of unpriced externalities.
I wouldn't support any LWR/PWR unless it had LFTR or other reactors built with it that could "online process" the waste. And if we had those, why bother with the huge shield domes?
I'll read your blog posts though carefully, maybe I'll change my mind. But a cursory look seems like it is caged too much in the baggage of the last century of nuclear, which IMO are just dead ends that won't practically advance nuclear for the next century.
As in, we need a couple decades of wind/solar to wipe clean the current slate of nuclear, from politics to actual installations.
Edit: The old designs are interesting, but they are huge and expensive.
What I look forward to in next gen nuclear is basically all of these:
- breeds (so you can use thorium and reprocess old spent waste to usable stuff)
- meltdown proof (LFTR has the melt plug and cooling tank that will decriticalize the liquid)
- scalable to a bunch of shipping containers or smaller (LFTR allegedly fit in a closet for the demo)
- 99% fuel use (per the docs, no idea if this is true or not)
LFTR promises those, if it can deliver due to containment degradation issues, who knows.
When I look at the gee-whiz LFTR presentations, what sticks out to me is the closed fuel cycle/complete usage, promise of breeding old waste to non-waste or new fuel, and so many other things that fix the errors of nuclear history.
The other thing that is missing is computer simulation. We should be able to develop far more usable designs with modern simulation software. We know the military has a lot of fission simulation software. Materials degradation and so many other things can be calculated far better than was available in the 1960s.
The final thing holding back nuclear is that despite a lot of their idiocy, the fact of the matter is that the "greenies" were correct about nuclear energy. It was poorly designed from a long term perspective, played fast and loose with waste, and many other considerations which probably derived from its military inception. The military only cares about the end result, and giving a 100,000 people cancer from spillage/meltdowns, dealing with the full cycle of waste, or actually maintaining safe operation.
Tepco, a japanese company with all the supposed strict adherence to process, was operating the reactor incompetently. Fukushima wasn't an outlier, it was an indictment of the large reactor design over the long haul.
LFTR design addresses SO MUCH of that. Far better meltdown protection, and full fuel use so there's practically no waste (not by the old solid fuel rod standards).
So if the nuclear industry doesn't reformulate around things that LFTR can do, then it will just fail in the long run again.
Industry and even the modest of living standards depends on energy density & reliability. So there's really no way to get completely off of fossil fuels without nuclear or literally starving people. That's your choice.
If Fukushima wasn't an outlier, then I wouldn't want to live anywhere close to a traditional reactor. Yet accident statistics & population trends don't really support that conclusion.
Nuclear was undergoing a series of massive technical improvement as humanity discovered an exciting new technology. Then people got scared and strangled all innovation out of the nuclear industry some time in the 70s.
Heavy regulation makes it really, really expensive to experiment with new approaches. If we'd kept pushing on with nuclear, the existing nuclear technologies would probably have been obsoleted by now and we'd be using something different, cheaper and better with much more attractive cost structures. There is no point trying to improve a technology that governments are trying to regulate out of existence.
Bookmarked to read on my next vacation!
Of the 104 operating nuclear power reactors in the United States:
The last construction permit for a nuclear power plant was issued in 1978 for Progress Energy Inc.'s Shearon Harris plant, near Raleigh, North Carolina.
The last operating license for a nuclear power plant was issued in 1996 to the Tennessee Valley Authority's Watts Bar Unit 1, near Spring City, Tennessee after initial construction began in 1973.
vs $4 billion for a gigawatt wind farm that takes up 100-1000x the land, always has a few % of its installed capacity down for maintenance, and doesn't provide predictable output unless you mine about half a million pounds of lithium
We can not build nuclear at $10/GW, that's a fantasy.
The use of the land is quite different too. When a wind farm "uses" 100x-1000x the land (and I am not accepting those numbers, just quoting you), that land is still available for other uses. The fraction of "used" land is so neglible as to not matter at all. So to discuss it in the same terms as a reactor doesn't make sense at all.
even with mixed use i'd still say renewables have a footprint problem, but the bigger problem i see is that the output is unstable and too low relative to input, and we're already seeing blackouts in part because of just that. we can't move down the energy ladder if we want to keep improving everyone's standard of living, and we have a moral imperative to do that
This severely limits the amount of nuclear we can use in the biosphere, as every TWh of useful energy results in roughly a TWh of heating that needs to be dumped somewhere without negatively impacting the environment.
Meanwhile, solar and wind do not have that scaling problem, and there is way more spare land available to generate more energy that we can currently imagine what to do with.
As for intermittency, we will simply design the future electrical grid exactly the same we design it now: we build our minimum capacity to the the maximum usage. We haven't done that yet with renewables because we are still building. Anti-renewables nuclear advocates never seem to realize that about our current grid, that we have huge huge huge capacity that is almost never used. It will be the same in the future, with renewables, to an even greater degree. The difference is that renewables don't have fuel, so unlike all those peaker gas plants, the cost of using that additional energy capacity is near zero, as long as there is transmission capacity.
A grid powered by renewable energy is one where we will have incredibly energy abundance, huge amounts of curtailed energy that are not used because the energy is not in the right time or place. The amount of excess energy will be determined by the relative cost of generation capacity versus arbitrage capacity for place (transmission capacity) or time (storage).
A renewables powered grid is a huge step up on the energy ladder, and will enable far far cheaper and more abundant energy than a nuclear grid ever could.
Which isn't to say I'm against nuclear; if the industry ever gains some basic competence and can keep their promises, and the promises are competitive or complementary to storage plus renewables, let's build more. But it is the responsibility of the industry to improve, and prove to others that it has finally improved. And as long as people are running around blaming nuclear's decades of failure on everything except the true root cause, poor construction, nuclear will never have a chance to improve.
How many uses are there that exclude prolonged presence of living things?
Practically irrelevant unless you're Singapore or the like.
> always has a few % of its installed capacity down for maintenance
That's true for a nuclear power plant fleet as well. There's always some downtime for maintenance and/or refueling (although usually you prefer to do both at the same time, sometimes unplanned outages are still a thing).
> and doesn't provide predictable output unless you mine about half a million pounds of lithium
Nonsense. Why would wind power plants require any lithium?
BTW in my country, $10B are close to providing 1 GW in average solar PV power output -- that is, capacity-factor-adjusted -- and it would have been more than 1 GW of average output if it weren't for our terrible PV capacity factor, so other countries fare much better. But even that would be on par with your 1 GW reactor (since that is slightly below 1 GW on average due to its own capacity factor). Yet PV costs keep decreasing year by year while reactor costs are increasing. The future will be very interesting...
No. Very many Countries have very dense territories, and not much land naturally destinable to that kind of degradation.
Look at the situation in Germany. "An" acceptable place, yes, but given how many of the Windräder you need, finding enough such places is a different task, because many less populated places are wildlife refuges.
And yes, German wind power is expanding into old growth forests and mountains, which provokes embittered fights with classical nature protectionists who do not want to allow such damage to the last remnants of preserved landscape. The entire "do we need to protect local vulnerable species or do we have to sacrifice them to reduce global climate change by 0.1 per cent" debate is very bitter and as the Green party leans towards the latter, it may yet lead to emergence of an anti-Green pro-Naturschutz movement, which, in all likelihood, would be co-opted by the far right.
In fact, it remains a good idea to place wind farms at least far away at sea, unless you have the comfort of hosting deserts.
And sea based ones in the Norwegian trench are not exactly cheap to build, due to rough seas and the depth of the water.
I think the idea is to ameliorate the unpredictability of wind capacity by storing excess off-peak power for low-generation periods.
There are better solutions, but they are mostly less generic and often better implemented close to the point of use.
That's a good euphemism for "this solution is a spectacularly bad one". Storing electricity in lithium batteries is the last thing you want to do when balancing the grid. You want to start with demand response, then continue with overgeneration, then continue with pumped hydro. In the future (when we will have replaced natural gas by synthetic hydrogen as part of the demand response) then possibly continue with expending stored synthetic gas in a CCGT plant (this would be especially suitable for the "dunkelflaute" events).
Grid storage lithium batteries for large-scale storage (not things like frequency regulation) are somewhere at the end of the cost scale and it's not something you really want to do since you need those batteries primarily for mobile applications. Even if you wanted lots of stationary batteries, there might be better candidates -- I still want to see some company to cut their teeth on advanced NiFe batteries, for example.
One thing you could do as part of the demand response step, however, is modulating the charging rate of BEVs. But personally I consider this to be more a part of the transportation sector than energy generation as such.
Pumped hydro is in the class of solutions I had in mind. An example would be a refrigerated warehouse using off-peak power to freeze large blocks of ice to be used later as heat sinks.
> Even if you wanted lots of stationary batteries, there might be better candidates
For some applications (an orbital LINAC/railgun, for example) you would want large banks of capacitors rather than batteries.
And before that, at the Alvin W. Vogtle plant in Georgia, there are 2 new reactors under construction. Approved by the NRC in 2009, they are projected to open next year at the cost of over $30 billion. Initial planning had the reactors open in 2016-2017 with an upper estimate of $16.4 billion. Big surprise, there is also a bankruptcy case aligned with this construction, which is the only nuclear project under construction in the USA.
I honestly don’t know where parent got 1978 from.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-regulatory-council-nrc-...
> In 1957 the internationally recommended limit for radiation exposure was about 15 times the natural background radiation that people absorb from rocks and cosmic rays. Without evidence of harm from exposures within the 1957 limits, the U.S. had by 1991 ratcheted its public limits down to less than a third of natural background radiation.
This is a common theme that the WSJ opinion pages push. Much of the regulation put out by Washington isn't about safety, but more about bureaucrats protecting themselves from every being too loose with regulation. It's rare, if ever, that a federal agency gets in trouble for having rules that are too strict. They do get blamed if something happens in an industry they regulate, and people scream that more regulation is needed.
> study shows that Hanford workers were 11 times more likely to develop mesothelioma, a cancer of the lungs strongly tied to asbestos exposure, than in the general population.
I know that Hanford was an exceptionally bad Nuclear Plant, but it is also a plant which was build in the laxer regulatory environment of the military with an excuse that appeals to "national security". But that is kind of the point though, without the regulations I would expect these plants to be at least as bad as Hanford.
This rhetoric about nuclear power plants being to heavily regulated is starting to feel a bit conspiratorial.
What does this have to do with nuclear energy? This was almost certainly due to asbestos, which affected tons of other industries equally.
Cancer risk is not the only thing that made Hanford a terrible site. They also systematically leaked radioactive water into the Columbia river for over 25 years. The cleanup effort is now one the the biggest employer in the region and the cost is estimated at $113.6 billion
I would expect that if the nuclear industry wasn’t as regulated that we would see numbers like these (including the deaths by asbestos) throughout the country.
How many people working in that facility, too? Without ignoring safe working environments, his is a somewhat rare cancer and making precise statements about incidence may be tricky.
Finally, regardless of any of this, I’d probably rather work at a nuclear plant than a coal mine or oil platform.
For what it’s worth. You might only be saying that because the nuclear industry is regulated. Nuclear workers aren’t dying of new asbestos exposures any more (but the would be barring regulations). The coal and the oil industry are notorious for their lax regulations. Environmental disasters and bad working conditions are aplenty.
Do nuclear power plants cause pollution in the surrounding territory?
So personally, I'd be happy to trade the small risk of a nearby industrial accident for the small risk of a massive fucking bomb exploding in my general vicinity.
That's over and above the possibility of catastrophic disasters, which are covered through other regulations.
Some regulations are bad, sure, but there's generally a ton of thinking and precedence behind those related to safety.
Anyway, a lot of old nuclear plants are still in use, and the total number of deaths is extremely low. We would have to lower safety standards quite a lot for the average safety of the new plants to be lower than the average of the pre-existing ones.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Bj%C3%B8rn+Lomborg+site%3Aws...
https://www.google.com/search?q=jenkins+climate+site%3Awsj.c...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fiddling-while-th...
Am I reading this correctly when I take it to mean that you think something being on the WSJ opinion pages gives it credibility?
Opinion pages don't mean they lie, it means they will use facts to back up an opinion the writer is expressing. Their opinion pages have a slant for sure, but tend to be much on the rails that some other papers.
You are welcome to argue against the point WSJ editorial board (or guest writers, such as the piece I linked) is making on their pages, but outright discounting an argument because of a source is intellectually lazy. Yes, we need to discriminate by source at least some, but that should make us skeptical, not out right reject a point being made.
This is simply untrue of the WSJ opinion pages, they've been publishing climate change denials for the last 30 years, so "factual" is absolutely not something you can just take for granted if you find it there. This is why I found it incredible that you implied it would be a mark of quality.
Why is that?
And then there's climate change.
It's wild that nuclear has to insure against things that may happen while 80% of our primary energy sources don't have to pay at all for the deaths and climate change they cause during normal operation.
Heh yeah if we did apples to apples, then compared to that nuclear insurance would be an amazing bargain.
[1] https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1
Such a good dream
With the energy industry changing so rapidly at the moment, that's a huge risk for anyone wanting to invest.
In that ten years for construction its likely that battery, solar, and wind prices all drop by two or three times. So by the time that the nuclear plant is completed its very likely to be far too expensive.
As the article mentions, the only future for nuclear is going to be small, cheaper reactors that are quick to construct.
But even those will be nonstarters unless the regulatory environment is fixed. Nuclear has always been held to much, much stricter standards than any other energy source, for no good reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvert_Cliffs%27_Coordinating...
As far as the general regulatory requirements for large scale power generation, that may be true. But there are additional requirements that nuclear has to meet that no other power source does. One is the completely irrational requirement for a waste disposal plan that has to last ten thousand years or more--instead of just reprocessing the waste, which is what every other country that uses nuclear energy does. That requirement alone basically killed nuclear power in the US for several decades.
What do you mean? There does not exist a fully worked out waste disposal plan anywhere in the world AFAIK. All larger long-term deposits are still in the investigation phase. So by that argument no nuclear power plants should have every been built. Also saying it is irrational to require this, why should nuclear be exempt from requirements that everyone else has to follow? If I build a house I have to specify what I'm going to do with the waste. Regarding reprocessing, unless you plan to make nuclear bombs, reprocessing is uneconomical. Moreover it actually increases the amount of waste. The produced waste is lower grade, but still needs special long-term disposal, especially because its half-life is typically very long.
> But even those will be nonstarters unless the regulatory environment is fixed. Nuclear has always been held to much, much stricter standards than any other energy source, for no good reason.
The stricter standards are addressable. What's missing from the above is the word "standardized". As it is, practically every large reactor built is a custom implementation. Smaller, cheaper, standardized reactors that are built in a dedicated facility (I'm not sure "factory" is quite right) and then shipped to the installation site should fix that problem.
What "disasters" are these that you speak of? In the US, which is the country with the most dysfunctional regulatory requirements on nuclear power, there have been no incidents with commercial nuclear reactors that have caused harm to the general public. The worst US incident, Three Mile Island, caused harm to a fair number of plant workers, but no members of the general public were harmed.
In comparison to the harm done by fossil fuel energy sources, nuclear isn't even in the same ballpark. For example, orders of magnitude more coal miners have been killed or severely injured than nuclear plant workers, even if we normalize by units of energy generated. Plus, if we take into account things like air pollution and its contribution to respiratory illness, there has been significant harm done to the general public by fossil fuels. Yet fossil fuels are regulated much less strictly than nuclear.
> You seem to be arguing some of the added regulations were unnecessary for safety?
I am saying that if we were really concerned about safety, we would have looked objectively at the harms caused by each energy source per unit of energy generated, and regulated them accordingly. That would have meant we would have shifted a large fraction of our base load power generation to nuclear energy decades ago, since per unit of energy generated it causes much less harm than fossil fuels. And when an incident like Three Mile Island happened, instead of panicking and acting like it was a world-shaking disaster, we would have looked objectively at what flaws in the plant design and operation the incident exposed, and fixed them, and gone on with nuclear power.
Could the difference perhaps be that one has the capability of venting radioactive materials into the surrounding countryside?
Nuclear power is not profitable. It has nothing to do with regulation and everything to do with economics. If nuclear power were profitable, you could not stop it. If nuclear power were profitable, the regulations would change with a quickness, because motivated investors remove any and all roadblocks to their money. If it wasn't for the absurdly bad economics, bad track record proven bad for 7 decades bad, you could not stop investors from building a nuclear power plant in every county in the US.
I promise you that you can have all the nuclear power plants you want, but all you need to do is make it make money. Make nuclear power profitable, and the world is your oyster. Because we need it, and the pronuke crowd is stuck in the mud moaning about regulations and doing nothing but being annoying. It isn't the regulations. Even if the nuclear industry were entirely unregulated, it still couldn't generate profit. There is a huge problem, and it isn't the regulations. Every new plant design is more expensive than the last. Make cheaper nuclear plants. It is that simple. Scale it down or scale it up, I don't know, but do something other than allow it to be unprofitable and keep bitching about regulations... rather than design a plant that has a sane build and operating cost, draw in investors, let them deal with the regulations, and retire with a fortune. But no, instead we get blaming and finger pointing. It is the money, and that is all it is. Make it make money, please, make it make money.
I mean, I would like to say that "people have made them profitable" "but then they blew up"
But I would be being too hyperbolic, as I would not say per se that the rmbk reactors where all that profitable at the time, tho they were certainly cheap tho
But yeah, issue with nuclear is a cursed triad of
Having nuclear reactors be cheap Having nuclear reactors be on schedule Having nuclear reactors be safe
Choose 2 from above
Even the AP1400 fail the test above, as more than a couple of them at least in China have been build over/close by seismic faults and in shores with tsunami risk
The fact that Toshiba nearly went bankrupt trying to build ap1000 nuclear reactors ought say it all
Too much regulation leads to death of economies of scale.
If software was regulated like nuclear power, say because of hypothetical AI risks; then we'd never have anything. Software would have been written by large corporations who have the funds to penetrate the regulations.
Let's not take one iota of blame away from regulations. It needs to be brought naked to people to see why environmentalists have gotten themselves into a chinese finger trap (want to save the world but without nuclear).
A nuclear power plant costs between $6B - $9B to build, before it generates any electricity, that is just the construction cost these days for a 1100MW plant
Regulatory costs for a nuclear power plant will range between $7M - $15M annually.
Do the math: it is definitely not the regulations. Any time someone complains about regulations, you know there is a Republican agenda. We need regulations, because they are the only thing preventing Big Business from enslaving you and me and worse. Regulations are good. Unless you make more than $400K/yr, stop doing the 1%er's jobs for them making sure most of the wealth is controlled by just a few by... removing regulations which really only bothers them because it means they make slightly less of the fortune they'd make without it.
The money is what is important. Your money should be important to you, so please make sure you only support agendas that work for your personal economic interests rather than the interests of the richest of the rich. If everyone always voted in their personal economic interests, we'd see a boom economy. The problem is, 99% of the Republican Party is literally voting adversely to their economic interests. They are voting to keep themselves economically stagnant and also to make sure the rich stay rich, for that day that will never come when they are rich, or maybe it is the absolute distractions that do not affect economy, like abortion or 2nd A. issues. If everyone only voted in their personal economic interests, and ignored all other concerns, there could not be a Republican Party. Well, there would be, but it would only have about 20 members, all listed among the top 25 richest Amercans. Most people aren't rich, and could benefit from better opportunity, which will never come so long as a minority party somehow has and has had control of the Senate for 18 of the last 20 years. If you care about your money, you should be on board with making DC and Puerto Rico legitimate US States, tax them and let them vote, and let's progress as a nation, rather than stagnating.
Why? Why not $20M or at the absolute worse $200M?
> Regulatory costs for a nuclear power plant will range between $7M - $15M annually.
This is disenginous number. Every single supplier, compliance, proposal, EVERYTHING about nuclear is regulated.
Behind this $7M-$15M on paper costs, lies the true cost of regulations: $6B-$9B.
> The money is what is important. Your money should be important to you, so please make sure you only support agendas that work for your personal economic interests rather than the interests of the richest of the rich.
Strange thing to say.
The discussion whether certain regulations (OSHA) are needed or not is an entirely different conversation, but having worked on large government/military contracts ($1B+); I have seen the shitshow with my own eyes and mind.
Gross incompetence of Gov (and its contractors) x Regulatory Capture x Lack of Innovation = Current dysfunction.
I am not saying China is the role model for safety regulations, but we need to take a deep look at what's necessary and what's not.
SpaceX will make reusable rockets a few orders of magnitude cheaper than anything NASA has produced. And current NASA administration has been forthcoming in working with private industry (SpaceX, BO, Rocketlab, Firefly, etc.). Good.
The difference is in manufacturing and labor costs. If you want to build cheap, you can do so in Mexico at half the manufacturing and labor costs of China, which is about 1/7th that of good ol' fashioned USofA manufacturing and labor.
You should have already known this. Nothing to see here.
I feel like if you need to ask a question like "Why can't this thing be built for $20m, or 0.03% of the cited $6bn cost?" then you don't understand the problem well enough.
Literally everything needs to be questioned. We can do that with humbleness and without arrogance.
Last I checked, we are on a tech forum known for starting companies.
They got there by solving some hard problems over multiple decades by understanding the domain and the difficulties in it. They didn't start by saying "Why aren't rockets 1000* cheaper?" They started by saying "What happens if we solve these problems?" and ended up with cheaper rockets. In another domain they might have had a different outcome, or failed to solve the problems.
The incumbents are corrupt, the regulations are overbearing and bloated, the government has no interest in solving the problem. Fortunately, it doesn’t really matter what we think, the Chinese will continue to advance and deploy the nuclear state-of-the-art and become an energy superpower, while the US and Europe debate the issue until we’re made irrelevant.
A nuclear power plant is "just" a steel cylinder in a concrete building, attached to a very ordinary steam turbine hall and a set of transformers.
The expensive part is not the building! That steel is not some unobtanium, and while the concrete is the highest grade, it's not $billions expensive. The fuel pellets are surprisingly cheap also. That's... kind-of the point! You're not burning thousands of tonnes of coal in these things. The low fuel costs are a selling point.
The reason for the expense is because every single nut, screw, and bolt needs to have a mile high pile of paperwork. Because every pipe, pump, and filter needs to be certified. Every sensor needs to be purpose-built and documented by expensive PhD-wielding scientists, not just obtained at the local engineers shop. And so on, and so forth.
The Westinghouse design paperwork specified the type of paint used for the dividing lines between the parking lot divisions.
Not to mention the lawsuits by NIMBYs, which means you often can't even start construction for 6-15 years. No other business in the world is held up in red tape for as long, or as intensely.
PS: This is why China can slap down AP1000 reactors down half a dozen at a time, like they're playing Sim City. Over there, with an authoritarian government, they simply don't have these red-tape / certification problems. Some high-up politicians simply make the decision, and that's... it. Time to start pouring the foundations.
PPS: It seems that on further research, China is having troubles with the high base cost of the plants, even with the reduced overheads due to mandates at the highest levels: https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/12/12/138271/chinas-lo...
... so the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Nuclear is expensive, but too expensive in western countries. Realistically, they're probably not worthwhile long term unless subsidised by the nuclear weapons industry...
Electricity generation by renewables: 27.3% in 2020, growing at an astounding pace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
If you save the quite expensive steel cylinder and concrete casing, that quite ordinary steam turbine and set of transformers can run on coal just by themselves. And guess what, this is already too expensive to compete with the alternatives nowadays.
(And no, there is nothing ordinary about that steel cylinder.)
And let's not discuss the fact that regulation affects many markets which work perfectly fine and when lifes depend on it they should be. I'd rather not that the CRT gives me a deadline dose of radiation because the programmer was playing fast and loose with his unit conversions.
In that case, the problem wasn't conversion units, but race conditions. Anyway, three people died because the radiation therapy unit burnt them with lethal doses of radiation, because of a software error.
I'm unconvinced a sane person could look at the other most heavily regulated market, healthcare, and say it works "perfectly fine".
> The article goes through the calculations, it shows that even with deregulation LWRs would not be competitive.
The numbers given in the article of $53/MWh are currently less than half the current UK wholesale electricity price and renewables impose increasing costs as they become a larger share of your electricity mix (renewables are not even remotely competitive if you also had to pay for even a single day of electricity storage, which would cost at least $4000/kw[1]).
Deregulated nuclear would be much cheaper than wind&solar+storage.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2019/07/f65/Stora...
Environmentalists have made minimal headway against Murdoch media here in Australia, struggled to make progress against coal/mining, etc. Industrial lobbyists have far more money and power.
Part of the problem here is encapsulated in "every new plant design". What you aren't saying is that practically every new plant is a new design.
There are multiple reasons for this. One is a bit of a chicken and egg issue: because starting up new nuclear power projects is rare, it has probably been quite a few years since the last time someone started one. So the last plans you used probably need a serious update. Another is NIMBYism that takes the firm of objections thrown up arbitrarily that require changes to be made.
The answer is as you suggested, to scale the plant size down, and the number of them up: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor
I recommend doing some simple arithmetic here. This is simply false:
As the article points out, reactors used to be under $2000/kw (this is with some regulation, just not onerous amounts). The UK electricity wholesale price is currently at £100/MWh, so at current prices your new plant in the deregulated world (which will take 5 years to make) will make back its construction costs (ignoring operating costs for now as nuclear is dominated by capital costs) in two years of operation.
That's a damn good rate of return compared to most businesses.
There is no way you can recover the investment costs of a modern nuclear plan in two years. It takes a very long time to recover the money (decades), and this is the main reason why investors are just not interested in nuclear plants. They have to lend money long term, and in that time lots of things can happen - from renewable technology being discovered, to changes in prices of nuclear fuel and geopolitics. You essentially can't predict the profit of a nuclear plant in the far future, and that means you can't predict how fast the investment is going to get repaid. It's just not an attractive investment, which is why some modern nuclear plants can't go ahead without some kind of government support.
These regulations are only cost effective if you have a value of human life at a billion dollars!
Looks at the actual accident rate and how bad they were in the 70s when nuclear power was reasonably priced. It is very much not worth increasing the price of nuclear by 5x, can just keep the regulations as they were and invest that money in healthcare to save 1000x as many people.
> It takes a very long time to recover the money (decades
In the overegulated world where nuclear power is 5x more expensive than it once was, yes. We aren't talking about that world though.
If other energy souces were regulated to the same degree of safety, I would expect nuclear to become the cheapest one again.
The main reason nuclear is expensive, is because people consider it to be worse if a person dies from radiation than from air polution, construction accidents, etc.
If by "nuclear" you mean pressurized solid fuel reactors, well yeah I agree.
But EVERY nuclear idea out there? Come on, the orders of magnitude of power density, availability of thorium an others for fuel, there has to be SOME design that is safe and economical.
But "economics" is a moving target with Solar/Wind cost improvements year on year.
That will eventually stabilize. Then there's a fixed target.
I hope that:
1) this target puts all the PWR people and their entrenched regulatory influence and reprocessing and lobbying to death. That does exist, and it is a major blocker. Too many people are making money as old nuclear circles the drain.
When that gets permanently put to bed, then ...
2) Then some LFTR/pebblebed/whatever design starts getting actually researched and invested in. The LFTR people claim that it's illegal to do liquid reactor research, which is why the pebble bed is being researched. I don't know the regs to know if they are telling the truth, but it does show lots of "chilling effects".
Then you target an actual number. Probably would require an iterable and scalable design.
Space may be the other good pusher.
But it's going to be a couple decades before nuclear should think about pushing anything to market, and the old nuclear should be shut down when battery storage gets good enough to replace it.
A couple decades is a generation, and it will clear the table of the old guard.
That's weird, since many believe that the US nuclear industry is a fine example of regulatory capture.
Except that San Onofre just shut down because we couldn't engineer the water tubes in the system properly in the face of being irradiated.
The real problem is that we have poured orders of magnitude more subsidy at fossil fuels than we have at fission or fusion.
If it weren't for the fact that it can ride the semiconductors R&D gravy train, solar would be in the same bad shape as nuclear.
And the article is a bit misleading in that, sure there has been new permits, for new plants, but there are several plants being added on to most notable Vogtle which has been for the last 10 years building 2 new generation units. they are currently some $15 billion dollars over budget. and still not fully operational.
And attempting to building nuclear plants in N.C. and Georgia, bankrupted Shaw, and Westinghouse in 2008-20013.
it honestly seems that it is an unappealing investment, that only applies to those that look at profits over decades not quarters and are willing to gamble billions on projects that nearly 1 in 3 fail.
If you read the article, it goes through the cost analysis and even calculates the numbers for heavy deregulated, it still does not add up.
Note: the AP1000 isn't French: its a Westinghouse reactor. This Westinghouse division filed for Chapter 11, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westinghouse_Electric_Company
The French one is the EPR (European Pressurized Reactor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)
2 of them were built in China. The project reached 60% overcost, was 5 years late and according to the French financial Court of Audit may not reach the break-even point. Then one of the reactors had an incident and is shutdown since mid-2021. Not sure all this is "thriving"... https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/31/asia/taishan-nuclear-plant-in...
Regulation has increased the cost of new nuclear sixfold (see Hinkley Point C).
> Most fusion concepts are just a more complicated way to heat water.
It's kind of wild that our means of power production do ultimately mostly boil down (pun intended) to turning a turbine with steam and, as the article notes, this is an inherent cost problem whereas solar is a direct form of energy. I hadn't really thought about it in those terms but it's true.
It's also kind of wild to consider that we want to heat up hydrogen to a 100 million degrees... to boil water and turn a turbine.
I'll also highlight this:
> As we've seen, traditional LWRs have a cost problem. That is why the PR ignores costs or focuses only on operating costs.
My own view:
1. There are several hundred nuclear power plants in the world. Not one of them has been built without government assistance. This goes to the capital cost issue;
2. Nuclear power plants take too long to plan, build and bring online. IIRC it's at least 11 years;
3. We still don't have a good long-term plan for dealing with processing waste at scale;
4. We still don't have a good long-term plan for dealing with fuel waste at scale; and
5. I just don't trust humans, particularly within the corporate structure, to build and operate nuclear power plants safely. The temptation is simply too high to increase profits by cutting costs.
It's crazy what people come to believe. To generalize the pathetic bureaucratic failures like the EPR to all model couldn't be farther from reality.
Russian commercialized VVER 1200 models take 57 month to build. Their successor, the VVER-TOI take 40 month, so 3.5 year to build. It output 1300MWe Besides the russian competitive advantage, China build plants in 6 years.
These things are massive projects, utterly massive. There's no reason to think they should be cheap.
It's just rank incompetence, bad management, and three-party contracts where each party is preparing for failure and a gigantic lawsuit in the end.
Meanwhile, the latest excuse for the recent US failure in building was that they commenced building before design was complete, and if we just try again now that designs are complete, everything will proceed smoothly. Meanwhile others in this thread are complaining that the NRC requires complete plans before building.
Those who complain about imaginary regulations can neither state the regulations that slow things down, nor describe suitable regulations, nor apparently even agree on what the current regulations are.
I've been asking "which regulations" for years, nobody has ever, literally ever pointed me to which. They just have supreme confident that it's the answer, despite not knowing specifics.
Well it looks like you have been asking in the wrong places: https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html#public-concern-grow...
-Triaxial accelerometers and spectrum recorders were added to much equipment, piping, and containment.
-Reg Guide 1.117 required protection from 360 mph tornado winds, in some cases increasing building wall thickness from 18 inches to 24.
-Drain systems for firefighting waterflow had to both prevent fire from spreading and also sample water for radiation.
-Swing diesels at multiunit plants were prohibited by RG 1.81.
-Liquid radwaste had to be solidified before shipping with cement systems costing $20/kW.
-Anti-sabotage measures attempted to avoid any one person in the maintenance crew from working on a set of redundant equipment
Are you suggesting that these should be changed and that these will reduce costs significantly?
Because it's not these regulations that caused massive overruns in Georgia and South Carolina, so I don't know why that will help. There are far far deeper issues in the industry, which is deeply troubled and incompetent.
Later on the venerable 2018 MIT report is cited, which is a far far far better root cause analysis of nuclear failure than "regulations." It doesn't recommend changes in regulations, but it does suggest more speedy approval of design changes during construction, to which I say, great. Make nuclear construction agile.
In contrast, the EPR reactor built by Areva only needed 3 years from the political approval to the construction permit. While Rosatom is probably more competent in the actual construction, they seem to have major issues in operating in countries where the regulatory authorities are strict (but still pro-nuclear).
It's not crazy to believe the reality of what is actually happening in the US and Europe
Assuming that the US and Europe can build the way that Russia or China can might be crazy though.
Yes, these machines produce plutonium suitable for nuclear weapons. But plutonium is a perfectly good nuclear fuel, too, and the US already has nuclear weapons, longer than any other country.
I'm still a bigger fan of stable geologic disposal.
https://www.iaea.org/publications/7112/implications-of-parti...
I will say that if those LLFP can be separated, it's probably simpler and cheaper to just shoot them into space for disposal.
But it's moot anyway, because the US doesn't reprocess it's waste. So today's nuclear waste is a source of fuel later and it's be a waste to bury it before reprocessing anyway.
Who is 'we' that should come up with the plan? Government? Most westerners don't like government planning - your own post considers government involvement as a downside. We expect the market to manage most things, but markets don't come up with long term plans, that's not their function.
If you come with a subject at random and ask, 'do we have a long term plan for X', generally the answer is no.
We don't have a good term long-term plan for dealing with global warming, the oil running out, falling birthrates for some nations, rising house prices, or for anything really.
I think an even broader we was implied, that of human civilization as a whole.
Because if there is no area of life that we can indetify a plan for, then the whole criticism doesn't make any sence.
Over longer time frames we see the pattern failing periodically when inequality gets too severe resulting in societal breakdown in the form of wars or revolutions that end up redistributing assets through various means, including less direct ones like increased labor costs, no matter who "wins".
Because there isn't enough waste produced to make such a thing economical versus current storage method i.e. there isn't enough economy of scale.
> 5. I just don't trust humans, particularly within the corporate structure, to build and operate nuclear power plants safely
Fukushima was built despite studies warning of the dangers. At some higher level, there wasn't enough caution in the planning stage.
https://www.powermag.com/blog/former-nuclear-leaders-say-no-...
>Dr. Greg Jaczko, former Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Prof. Wolfgang Renneberg, former Head of the Reactor Safety, Radiation Protection and Nuclear Waste, Federal Environment Ministry, Germany Dr. Bernard Laponche, former Director General, French Agency for Energy Management, former Advisor to French Minister of Environment, Energy and Nuclear Safety
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Jaczko
>A report by Nuclear Regulatory Commission Inspector General Hubert T. Bell accused Jaczko of "strategically" withholding information from his colleagues in an effort to keep plans for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository from advancing.
>In October 2011, all the other four NRC commissioners—two Democrats and two Republicans—sent a letter to the White House expressing "grave concern" about Jaczko's actions at the NRC. On December 14, 2011, Commissioner William Ostendorff, a Republican, told a House oversight committee that Jaczko's "bullying and intimidation... should not and cannot be tolerated."
Well I giggled but it's a pretty far off reference for the standard HN audience
That's a pretty difficult environment for investors. The reactor people said just breaking the process into phases would be a huge help. The NRC person was unsympathetic, said it wasn't the NRC's job to help develop nuclear technology, and was uninterested in climate change.
Federal civil servants are trained early that their opinions are irrelevant.
Why would that be different for a nuclear regulatory body? Moreover, they are designing new reactor technology much more complex and less understood than a house. I imagine for safety assessments one would need to look at the whole design, just look at the example on cable trunks given in the article.
I wonder what the startups would say if the agency would approve their first steps, but then disapprove the full blueprints, because even though the steps made sense the whole does not meet requirements. Or do they want guarantees?
Truth is, if South Korea had pipeline connection to Siberian natural gas field (not an absurd supposition, there was fairly concrete plan proposed in 2012 which fell through due to politics), nuclear power would be uneconomical in South Korea no matter how it keeps construction cost cheapest in the world. Therefore, economical nuclear power in the United States can never happen by copying South Korea, because natural gas is cheap in the United States.
It's an example of politics trumping economics. Russia has the largest gas reserves in the world by far. Japan and Korea are relatively wealthy but energy poor nations. A pipeline between Russia and Japan/Korea makes all the economic sense in the world. You'd expect there be a bunch of pipeline already and more scheduled to be built in the future. But no. Not a single pipeline.
Unfortunately it also has the paranoid aggressive Russian security apparatus in charge that brought us to where we are, which for some strange reason you entirely omit.
Also, we have climate change, remember? We are supposed to not use up all the available fossil carbohydrates! The more we bring up the more even more large-scale issues we will have. Making fossil fuels cheap and easy does not lead us to somewhere good.
> It's an example of politics trumping economics.
Which is good especially in this case, so I don't understand your point.
One thing I don't understand is why nobody in German government (I'm German), not even the Greens, mentions that the kick in the rear that we get from the threat of Russia cutting gas is actually good for us, otherwise we would happily continue to rely on lots and lots of cheap natural gas and climate goals be damned because it's soooo convenient.
We would need to make big changes to our (German) economy to use significantly less fossil fuels even if Russia had a nice and peaceful government.
> Russia has the largest gas reserves in the world by far.
Which should remain where it is, underground! Or 50 °C will be the new normal in some heavily populated areas of this world, and other very inconvenient changes.
The plan for some seems to be to ignore the laws of thermodynamics and spend even more resources and energy on collecting carbon from the atmosphere and returning it underground using technology, instead of just letting it sit where it already has been sitting for several hundreds of millions of years. Funnily enough, this inefficient and leaky and destructive busywork adds much to GDP, compared to doing nothing (leaving the carbohydrates and not raising and using them).
Given the politics (fission) and uncertainty (fusion) of nuclear, I think it is highly unlikely that there is a long term future for the industry (100 years). Even though we will need some level of baseline power for when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing, I think it is likely that geothermal or natural gas plants will fill that role.
Nuclear is too bespoke, and you need a massive amount of capital before you generate one watt of power.
I simply don't see how we can decarbonize at this rate. Now with residential panels, that's for sure.
The degradation seems to be quite slow in practice. Below 0.5% per year, i.e. less than 15% after 25 years.
> on average 850kw per year (again, looked it up online, if you have better figures, please!)
I think the number is closer to 900-1000kWh per year for Central Europe and 1200KWh/year for Southern Europe and California, but I don't know whether the higher average temperature at those places increases aging.
> This means you need to run your panel for 4 years
Sounds good to me?
In New Zealand, we are dependent on seasonal rain for our hydro-power, and in some years we run dry and the whole economy is affected. In NZ the 1992 power crisis due to a 1:100 year drought required 10%-15% reduction in power usage nationwide, which caused a 0.6% reduction in the NZ GDP: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/how-we-learned-the-lessons-fro...
Even a predicted security of supply risk of 1% has consequences (even thinking we could run dry causes costs). Fantastic article: https://www.newsroom.co.nz/will-nz-run-out-of-electricity-th...
NZ is lucky that if we install solar electricity, we can effectively store it in our existing lakes, no batteries needed. We are unlucky that politically our government wastes money[1] on subsidising electric cars, when they could subsidise solar instead (in fact it just needs political will, private investors have $X*100 million plans already designed for solar, but surprisingly held up by lack of interest by government).
[1] https://www.1news.co.nz/2022/05/16/29b-climate-change-boost-... “A new scrap-and-replace scheme to help low-and-middle income New Zealanders buy EVs and a nationalised curbside waste collection service is part of a significant $2.9 billion investment into tackling climate change and reducing New Zealand's emissions.”
Main reason: end-user subsidies of any kind (whether for cars or for rooftop solar or $asset) are merely a transfer from poor taxpayers to high-income or wealthy people, those who own their homes or can afford to purchase the asset. They entrench inequality.
I'd be able to tolerate subsidies if NZ funded them with a smallish fraction of a capital tax/land value tax and/or a capital gains tax. (Such taxes being recommended by the Tax Working Group but rejected by successive governments).
The idea of low-income people buying EVs is ludicrous. The typical budget for a "good" car where I work is NZD $2000 - $6000, and it's a very significant purchase.
Second reason. NZ doesn't actually have a lot of land suitable for solar that doesn't have higher-value uses, but it does have a lot of wind, and wind power can share land use. Although wind is not as cheap as solar, it's cheaper than everything else (except already-built hydro). Wind farms are being built now in unsubsidised projects with ordinary commercial leases from land owners.
Bonus reason: hydro operators don't need subsidies; it's worth them installing some solar on their lakes today. They are merely as anti-entrepreneurial as the governments.
> NZ doesn't actually have a lot of land suitable for solar that doesn't have higher-value uses
Do you have any references? I know somebody involved with a bid, and solar could heavily outbid farming ($ per hectare per annum) for the location they looked at. A solution only needs some land, not “a lot of land” as you put it, although there are constraints and objective function variables (hours of sunshine, nimby, high voltage network access, land value per hectare, , etcetera).
> rooftop solar
Expensive wasteful rooftop solar makes economic sense for some individuals, which really shows up the inefficiency of our electricity market design, since utility scale solar generation makes more economic sense in New Zealand. Government intervention would be useful if it fixes market failures.
> hydro operators don't need subsidies
Psychologically loaded point. An electricity market should be designed to price in long-term requirements (like security of supply, CO2 costs, network reliability), which could be thought of as cross-subsidisations. Of course, be very careful of perverse market incentives (law of unintended consequences). . . https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/540/handouts/french/unin... The government could invest in high-risk research, even if network generators/operators are freeloading, so long as it helps NZ much more than it costs, we all win.
Sometimes the government can take on risk, for example the broadband fibre rollout. I strongly disagreed with that at the time: the goal of technology literacy was a lie and the system looked to me like a subsidy to NetFlix et al. Although it happened to work out well during Covid lockdowns, and it looks like it will make financial sense to the government, and hopefully the social gains well outweigh the social losses.
Private markets can’t make long term investments if the cost of utility scale infrastructure is dropping too fast. This is a market failure that can be fixed by appropriate financial incentives (regulation or market design to pay for the long term gains to the country).
I live not far from "NZ's largest grid-connected solar power plant" (2.1 MW nameplate: feeble), and also not far from one of the larger wind farms. The solar plant is on valuable dairy land, that's true. I wish Todd would publish some figures for it, although it hasn't been operating for long.*
When I wrote "higher-value", I had just been thinking about NZ's trade problem: it exports dried milk, red meat and a few other low-value-add bio-materials in order to buy everything else. Land is valuable to the country as a whole for its export revenue.
I had also been re-reading Vaclav Smil's Energy in Nature and Society, in which he says the areal (per square meter) power intensity of PV production is approximately the same as the areal power consumption of cities, so we need the same order of magnitude of land that cities take up if we use PV primarily. And it can't be too erosion-prone.
That (value/national interest) is also an issue (and this is specifically what I had been thinking about) for carbon farming conversions of hill country sheep and beef stations into Radiata monoculture plantations. Privately profitable, but probably against the national interest, and due to policy.
> Private markets can’t make long term investments if the cost of utility scale infrastructure is dropping too fast.
Design, legal, permitting, interconnect, civil, structural and electrical balance of system, and present value of O&M collectively dominate now,* and they are not subject to the same rate of cost decline as panels and inverters (and batteries), so overall, the cost isn't dropping super fast any more. (The PV version of Amdahl's law, perhaps.)
* Total installed capacity of wind power seems to be at least two, possibly three orders or magnitude higher than that of PV solar in NZ. Maybe this is due to the "social licence to operate" / nimby factor, but maybe not. It does suggest that rooftop solar is a tiny niche in the ecosystem, so maybe the market structure isn't all that bad?
* In NZ finance costs a lot too, because policy privileges residential real estate investment so greatly.
personal opinion but the modern american investor has no patience for anything but instant profits. nuclear could be great but the executives you have to convince are all well familiar with and scarred by their 60 year old reactors.
Each cycle leaves behind a tranche of books that reprise the last crisis, with the interesting effect that the literature often looks like a stopped clock.
One bit of stoppage is that people still compare nuclear to coal, although coal has been uneconomical in North America since the 1980s. One issue is that a coal burning plant (like a current nuclear plant) has a huge steam turbine that's more than 10 times the size of gas turbines used for aircraft engines and for generating power from natural gas.
It's no accident therefore that we stopped building coal and nuclear plants at the same time. The Amory Lovins "soft energy path" was not a transition to renewables but rather a transition to methane.
There's not just the capital cost of the steam turbine but also the cost of the heat exchangers, if you look here
https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/pwrs.html
the image is roughly to scale and you see that there are multiple "steam generators" that individually are as large as the reactor vessel and are every bit as safety critical as the reactor vessel because a breakage could lead to a loss of coolant accident.
The cost of the heat handling parts is substantial enough that even if the cost of the core was zero and the heat was free the LWR would still struggle to compete.
A reactor that runs at higher temperature using liquid metal, liquid salt, or a gas coolant like helium, could drive a Brayton cycle gas turbine powerset which would fit inside the employee break room of the turbine house of an LWR.
Of course it's tricky: we have quite a bit of experience with liquid metal reactors, and a little bit with other types. The closed-cycle gas turbine however is a work in progress
All the other nuke expenses just add to that.
1. https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iceland_Export_Tre...
Very little new geothermal is being built because it cannot compete, most places.
I am seriously skeptical of the claim that a renewable grid would be cheaper for Iceland. Do you have a source to back up this claim?
And, intermittency does not, in fact, require importation of fossil fuels, as has been explained to you numerous times before.
Energy storage could theoretically avoid the need for alternative energy sources during periods of non production. But storage solutions capable of being deployed at relevant scales only exist in white papers, as has been explained to you numerous times before.
It has already been explained to you numerous times that spending on storage would be foolish until we have enough renewables built out to charge it while also meeting demand; for now, money is much better spent on generation capacity. When it does become useful, storage will be radically cheaper to build out than now, as its cost is falling very, very fast.
The gating condition has not been met since the last time it was explained to you. Be assured, you will know when it comes about. We will not require further such reminders in the meantime.
You can keep telling yourself that cheap, scalable energy storage is just around the corner. But fantasy is not reality, and energy storage remains a fantasy.
One very interesting grid energy storage concept (currently being commercially developed by Babcock & Wilcox) involves heating sand using electric resistance heating to about 1200 C, storing then using that heat to drive a gas turbine (round trip efficiency > 50%). I mention this because you can transfer heat from sand to compressed air in a very compact and cheap device that mixes the two, then separates the air with cyclone separators.
(This concept would likely also need something to destroy thermal NOx in that air, though.)
Nuclear is going to have to compete with heat from cheap renewables stored in sand, then turned back to power using a machine like this with only the one really cheap heat exchanger.
Better visualization of the key chart here: https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2022/~/media/Im...
Some are engineered for changing their output power quicker, but that means higher costs (lower usage), more complicated design and for short periods (<30 Minutes) some other energy source/sink while the power is adjusted.
Nuclear energy costs about $170/MWh, coal about $100 and solar/wind about $50/MWh.
For comparison, the average price of electricity in the US in 2021 was $140/MWh.
It's almost guaranteed that in 2022 it will be much higher, because the jump in price of both natural gas and coal.
I'm just imagining what a shit show it would be if the "move fast and break shit" Silicon Valley mentality was applied to nuclear energy. No thanks.
I would strongly prefer a cautious but ambitious government plan spear headed by physicists from the national labs.
And they have decided that nuclear is scary. Honestly we get what we deserve.
Goop is worth billions. People eat this stuff up.
Immediately a shit storm brew up and he was forced to publicly apologize. Keep it vague. We all love nuclear now. But not a single spade in the ground by order of NIMBY!
But, it turns out they still can't deliver what nuclear proponents claim.
Sabine Hossenfelder explains it very well:
They very well could be slightly cheaper over the first 15 years, but nuclear reactors are designed for ~50 year lifespans and are really expensive to decommission.
Look at say Palo Verde it’s close to 4GW with a 82.80% lifetime capacity factor, but needs 2,055 full-time employees and that’s the best case.
Nuclear plants are cheap to run once you have them built, but they are expensive to build when everything goes right and frequently they don't.
There has been a lot of hand-wringing about the costs of the nuclear fuel cycle and frankly it's a bit ridiculous. For instance, they were expecting Yucca Mountain to cost $100 billion to run back when they were planning to run it.
People look at that and think "that's a lot of money" but a nuclear reactor makes about $500 million worth of electricity a year so that is 2 years worth of electricity from the 100 reactors that operate in the US.
(It's more absurd that we'd bury nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain when 98% of the energy content of the fuel remains in the waste! A reprocessing cycle would cost "more" but not much compared to the capital cost of building the reactors.)
2000 staff represents well over 10 billion dollars in just salary over 50 years. Add in replaced equipment, fuel, insurance, etc and it’s a long way from cheap.
The assumption they are cheap to operate simply doesn’t hold up even the most basic investigation.
requiring about 35% fewer operational personnel than the VVER-1000
This was for VVER 1200 however the new VVER TOI will be the first to use software? > United information space is a multi-platform software and hardware complex intended for control of the engineering data for engineering, designing, as well as arranging communication between territorially-distanced project participants.
edit: can someone help me calculate the construction costs of a VVER 1200 ? it output ~1200MWe of energy Specifications include a $1,200 per kW overnight construction cost if 1 MWe is 1000Kwh (don't know if we're talking per hour..) then total construction cost would be 1200 * 1000 == 1200000 dollars 1200000 is a mere million, that doesn't make any sense, how to calculate? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER#:~:text=Specifications%20... edit I was dumb the equation is 1200 * 1000 * 1200 == 1440000000. Therefore, if that is to be believed, a VVER 1200 produce 1200MWe and only cost 1.4 billion in construction costs (without the small interest rate and the operating cost) That is extremely cheap, the pathetic and hyped small reactors from rolls royce cost 1 Billion per unit and produce < 200 MWe... That makes the VVER 1200 6 times cheaper and probably the cheapest energy source on earth (again assuming those numbers are true), and the VVER TOI successor should be even cheaper given it is constructed in 17 months less.
Not sure that's necessarily true. Building a lot of something allows you to learn fast and update designs for higher reliability/maintainability. Building smaller units could also free up costs that go into current designs, just because of their size. Certainly designing for zero-staff, eliminates one big source of unreliability.
It’s the same thing with steam turbines, they last a long time but not 50 years. So initially they are part of construction costs but eventually they are part of maintenance costs.
Essentially 50 years is used because cooling towers, buildings, plumbing, etc can last at least that long so decommissioning early is a waste. But eventually repair or replacement gets too expensive.
For instance it is completely practical to run the output of a fossil fuel power plant through
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amine_gas_treating
compress the CO2 to 1500 psi and inject it underground into a saline aquifer. Hardly anybody does it because it's expensive and nobody pays them to do it.
If there was a carbon tax that made it uneconomical to not do that, or if there was a subsidy for pumping carbon underground then people would do it.
It is all the same for nuclear power, extensions of renewables and other technologies that aren't profitable on their own.
It is a deal with the devil however to do so because it is a withdrawl from the government's legitimacy bank account. It's certain that any carbon trading system is going to lead to a few carbon traders getting rich and them feeding back 1% of their profits to politicians to keep their privileges. It's less certain that the planet gets saved.
It seems to be a more realistic plan to develop a technological revolution that really is cheaper than the alternatives... Because then you've saved the planet and the job is done
Compare that to conventional nuclear reactors where a single reactor does 400MW and the entire plant does 1.6 GW
Carbon taxes are hated by average citizens more than nuclear power because of the evil tax word.
"Even if you think that natural gas should be banned or taxed away, nuclear will still end up uncompetitive. By the time you finish a single LWR, investors will build enough solar and storage to eat high daytime electricity rates. If you assume current nuclear plant operating costs and a very optimistic OCC then only a modest decline in cost makes solar + storage cheaper for 24/7 power. Solar and batteries have declined over 90% in price over the last decade, and the learning curve powering growth looks to continue."
The neo-liberal economy is at total odds with this industry.
For a private enterprise to succede at nuclear power, it would take someone crazy and with very deep pockets like Elon Musk, but even then, his model wouldn't work as failure is not an option. You can't fail and iterate.
So what we have instead is privately run nuclear power plants, that are entirely publicly funded, with 0 risk taken, in typical neo-liberal fashion: socialisation of the costs and risks, privatisation of the profits.
People may say that they worry about the risks, but that's just a rationalization presented to others.
Note: not a tree hugger. I believe nuclear power (in conjunction with significant restrictions on consumption) must play a big part in decarbonization. But...so many lies for so long. Put down the Kool-Aid and admit these things are not safe and therefore need to be sited well away from human populations (as they were originally in the 1950s).
It sounds like the fuel utilization is at least 10 times more efficient?
You are proposing an intervention so it should be benchmarked against other interventions.
Also, why not benchmark $10^x in nuclear vs. $10^x in coal or fossil fuels?
It might however that money could spend making solar panel factories for enxt gen solar cells which yields real results.
> Also, why not benchmark $10^x in nuclear vs. $10^x in coal or fossil fuels?
You can do that comparison, however since coal is not competitive in that metric you will not learn anything about how society should allocate money. We are proposing an intervention in the economy. We should try to only do the most efficient allocations.
A 10^x investment in solar & storage now will curb the need for 10^x being spend on fossile stuff over the next 10 years.
Maybe in 10 years, batteries will be cheap enough for renewables to be competitive without relying on fossil fuels or hydro plants during cloudy days with no wind.
It's the history and detailed analysis of every nuclear accident, from the discovery of the radium to current days. You'll learn in passing that people used to drink radioactive cola to "improve" their health...
My main take away is that if you don't know exactly what you're doing, nuclear will kill you very very quickly. It's been quite reassuring about the security of existing plants
1) the 'greens' in the 60's were authentic but then they were co-opted by fossil fuel and military industrial complex that didn't WANT competitive nuclear power construction industry.
2) corruption and incompetence: unions killing big construction in general. when is the last major water project...dam or otherwise (alaskan water pipeline project planned since 1950's) that the u.s. was able to pull off. ?
3) conspiracy: the only thing really stopping nuclear power being built all over the west , and being built properly in the east ( there is a construction explosion in india/china) ---is proper spent fuel reprocessing.
nuclear spent fuel is the biggest impediment to building plants. and despite how seemingly simply the problem would be to solve if you threw enough money and regulatory power at it----it is still 'unsolved'. this is ridiculous. and the solution is not 'thorium' or other as of yet unproven technologies. it's just 'processing' the waste in any number of existing processes--that are feasible if the engineering is built out. but it's not.
the opposite. yucca mountain used the idea of 'burying the fuel' to steal money for skunkworks in a tunnel, or just for more tunnels.
Ppl dont understand that we can build reactors that not only can be powered up bu old nuclear waste but also are physically impossible to explode.
But yea.. lets subsidize coal and oil industries more putting one more nail to humanity coffin.
Corrupt politicians and stupid ppl voting for them are the issue, like always.
we would be able to yes, but we can't. not because it's technically impossible, but because people are stupid. fukushima did not happen because it wasn't safe, fukushima happend because people were stubborn. Tepco knew what will happen and dismissed it because they were greedy (their offical report on that matter was "we did not do it, because it would scare people...").
thats why nuclear will never work, because we humans operate it. if we would build as much plants as we need, it would be 100x the amount we have right now which would also raise the death tool by accidents. and there is also no reason for nuclear, since wind and solar is cheaper and can replace nuclear.
I also will never understand why people write about nuclear that often. what nuclear provides is solved with wind and solar. however no matter if we go the nuclear route or the renewables we still need to figure out how to reduce gas and built peaker plants that run on technology that is way more carbon friendly, but nobody ever writes about that.
If its not windy -> turbines are useless. If its cloudy -> solars are almost useless.
Nuclear Plant on the other hand produces stable amount of electricity everyday.
And molten salt reactors are resistant to human stupidity. Its literally impossible to cause a disaster with this type of reactors. Its physically not possible to do anything that will cause the core to meltdown.
the problem with the grid is that it's hard to support a wind/solar grid somewhere else.
nuclear is not as stable as you wish, just look at france the last months. they imported energy from germany, because a lot of their power plants were down.
> And molten salt reactors are resistant to human stupidity. Its literally impossible to cause a disaster with this type of reactors. Its physically not possible to do anything that will cause the core to meltdown.
there is no such thing. really not even in wind and solar. most deaths there were because of stupidity. and while it's physically impossible to do so when correctly built, people will always find the most stupid cost measures...
Thise reactors are just overall more expensive than the ones using water as coolant.
Ps.france reactors were built over 50 years ago.. ofcourse they will require maintenance. Newer projects require less often maintenance.
This discussion seems pointless. I wont convince you and you wont convince me either.
Here you go:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31474041
Dig away
This is not what OP said.
Also: those "sources" are all right from the nuclear circle jerk...lol
They can't even stop government sponsored mass wolf kills.
--
"At the top of the list of sources of antinuclear rumblings is, not surprisingly, the fossil fuel industry itself. There’s been a long and rather nefarious history of attacks from the fossil fuel industry against both supporters of nuclear power and the industry itself. We’ve seen documented instances of the funding of ads opposing nuclear power plants, such as this one by the Oil Heat Industry opposing the construction of the Shoreham Nuclear Power Station by LILCO, using the deceptive slogan “SOLAR, NOT NUCLEAR.”"
"Instead of actively engaging in the almost-expected business behaviour of criticising and opposing market competitors, they have followed a strategy of allowing surrogates to be the public faces of the opposition to nuclear energy.
As anti-nuclear surrogates successfully waged battles over safety, nuclear waste, siting, financing, regulations, radiation protection and exports constraints justified by carefully stoked fears of nuclear weapons proliferation, the fossil fuel industry took advantage of a slowing competitor."
[1] http://climatecoalition.org/how-american-petroleum-institute...
[2] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/V-Gloves-are-off-in-fossi...
She said, based on her background with horses and by watching which of her friends had the most kids, she was not very optimistic about future generations.
From the stats, it looks like it is only the rich (7 digits) and the very poorest that currently have fertility above the replacement rate:
https://twitter.com/CSchmert/status/993934031174725632/photo...
How much that affects the genes, is hard to say, apart from what the horse-breeder's gut feeling was.
Nuclear is still part of the UK's strategy and new nuclear is still being built.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_powe...
Nobody is paying for this anymore. "Oooh but the efficiency" the efficiency of something that produces 0kWh is 0
Nuclear needs its SpaceX moment where you attack the costs and processes (without compromising safety). As SLS has shown, building on top of old projects is just a money sink.
Here in the US it's been shackled and shamed out of existence but it's also had all innovation and improvement barred as well.
Look to buying nuclear technology at a premium from India or China in the future just to catch up with where we should have been.
That was is just the fuel and fuel is just a small part of all the waste.
Yes it is very radioactive but that doesn't mean that the rest can be stored on a landfill. It is still so radioactive that we don't have a proper solution for it's storage. Only because the fuel is SO MUCH MORE radioactive, doesn't make the rest disappear or the football field argument valid in any way.
Remove those elements plus the higher actinides (Neptunium, Americium, Curium, ...) and almost all of the radioactivity in the fission products has decayed by 500 years... It's less radioactive at that point than the Uranium ore was when it was mined.
Burying the fuel rods was a half-baked idea that was come up with in a hurry in the 1970s because of racist fears that brown people would learn to reprocess nuclear fuel and develop nuclear weapons. Now we are facing the certain danger of getting fried by global warming as opposed to a hypothetical threat of nuclear war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_weapons_of_mass_d...
with this result
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/read...
Regulations. Lack of investments. Lack of scale. Scare mongering. Lack of research.
After 60' not much money went into research for nuclear power. While solar power, betteries etc. become much cheaper due to a huge stream of money flowing into research for that area. If comparable sums would be used for research into nuclear power, probably the power plants would be cheaper and nuclear energy would be cheaper to produce.
Solar and wind definitely benefited from lots of government support. Just like nuclear did back in the day. Unlike nuclear, wind and solar are now commercially viable even without subsidies.
Nuclear works only as a way to have a constant (as much as possible) amount of power over time, something for the whole society something that's only viable if done by FULLY public utilities only owned by States who just need to deliver electricity to power anything.
My only hope in this regards is that as much as the crisis bite more and more people realize that the neo-feudal society neoliberals have built is against 99% of the people and so react ERASING the private-public sector confining to States-only public show for ALL essential services like:
- natural resource management
- energy production and supply
- water supply
- health, pharmaceutical sector included
- TLCs
- academia (well founded public research, for the public, powerful and strictly not patentable or obtainable in any exclusive way by the private sector)
- weapons
- basic food production to ensure survival of resident in any area for an undefined period of time
- basic nation-wide logistics
Like it WAS in the very recent past. Of course such changes accompanied with life sentences for most relevant private-sector and public traitors and criminals against humanity not to punish them, that's simply impossible, but to teach others not to never ever try again their criminal path.
Yes, I'm serious, no, I'm not at all "an extremist" from the right or left part of the spectrum.
That last one is tragic. We could have a massively smaller carbon footprint right now if we'd gone big down that path, presuming we also dumped resources for research into alternative uses for spent fuel & safe long-term storage. Instead of buying an electric cars that right now are powered by fossil fuels producing electricity (potentially even less efficient if the energy still comes from coal) electric might have hit their "killer app" stage a few years ago. (I'll concede that battery tech might not have advanced any faster with cheaper clean electricity and so we might still be just as ICE dependent as we are now)
At this point nuclear might be moot. I'm not sure, honestly. But we seem to be approaching a tipping point where off-peak storage mechanisms for renewables are almost maturing enough for national-grid scale build outs. This would make the faster & cheaper build out of renewables (compared long expensive nuclear builds) more viable as replacements for plants that are currently needed for base load capacity, which is where nuclear's economic sweet spot is at. It takes a relatively longer time to ramp up/down the output of nuclear plants compared to others, and they have high overhead to begin with relative to others (natural gas plants that ramp down in off-hours don't have to pay for the gas they don't but) so while more flexible variable output nuclear plant designs are maturing they may be too late in the game. Right now the future for nuclear appears to be more niche applications. Relatively portable rapidly deployable units for instant infrastructure, for example. (I believe this is currently under research by US military)
Anyway, that's a bit of a digression. The TLDR is sociopolitical facts killed nuclear (caveat: China is going very big on nuclear, they still see value there) and we've now reach a point where the issue is moot(ish).
A real institution doesn’t need a genius at the helm
There's plenty of more specific stories worth telling, but for the big picture around much such infrastructure work, this is the elephant in the room.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER#VVER-TOI If anyone has more info on those seemingly disruptive VVER-TOI, please share
I wonder how long it will take until the nuclear fan club starts recognising the risks which will result from this development. Not only in Russia but also in countries which bought into a nuclear/energy dependency from Russia.
Same considerations should go for countries which buy into nuclear dependencies from China.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkuyu_Nuclear_Power_Plant
and on to
?
Which is about a project in progress in Turkey, having 4 of them. Just skimming [2] gives:
> The stake of Rosatom State Corporation in the project is 99.2%. The total project cost is estimated at 20 billion US dollars.
(According to the graphics from Wikipedia)
Competitively priced to renewables is a moving target. You do not just need to match it the moment you build it but over the expected life time.
What is the overnight construction cost for China and Russia??
for some countries it is more profitable to keep using gas
it is as simple as this, really
Nothing competes with nuclear. It's just pure physics - atom is the biggest source of energy on this planet according to current physics. Whoever can't agree with that reality fact should see a psychiatrist.
Despite all the obstacles, nuclear constantly develops and will continue to do so, because market.
Industries can't run on calculator batteries. Sorry.
If only we had an absolutely massive fusion reactor that could passively manage its own containment.
It would be so powerful that one such nuclear reactor would produce millions of times more power than we could ever consume.
The reactor could be designed to run indefinitely. No fuel or decommissioning costs incurred.
We could site the reactor at a large enough distance from population centers that we would not need to deal with its waste.
We could decouple the reactor from power generation. Just use safe EM radiation to freely distribute power wherever it would be needed.
The reactor itself, perhaps funded by some benevolent quadrillionaire, having no operating costs would be literally "too cheap to meter".
(A similar argument applies to materials. Compare the materials used by a renewable energy system to the materials used by industrial society as a whole.)
And while nuclear is expensive at first, its longevity and reliability pays for itself. As it's further developed, that initial tax will only be reduced.
As if you guys don't realize that this "renewable" stuff is pushed by a nuclear reaction that happened thousands of years ago in the core of a plasma ball that is 8 light minutes away? That is not efficient.
And no, power and energy density do not determine cost, in general. They might if all else were equal, but all else is NOT equal. Renewable sources can omit entire categories of equipment that thermal power plants require, and have a much lower requirement on reliability (both because the individual units are smaller, and because the consequences of their catastrophic failure are vastly smaller.)
And no, nuclear's longevity and reliability do not pay for themselves. You're engaging in a bit of confrontation with economic reality there.
Pointing to nuclear reactions occurring in the Sun and pretending that justifies using nuclear on Earth is just completely absurd.
Learn to express yourself better. It's like building a house - your first choice is what ground you build it on - quick sands, swamp, or solid rock. If you don't take power density into consideration you're not going to make the right choice and then all your efforts will be meaningless.
Denmark is almost 100% renewable (it imports some). France is 70% nuclear (net exporter). Denmark household pays 170.5% more than french household. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Here's a lecture on nuclear economics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
Yes, it makes sense to focus some R&D on nuclear. However after seven decades, it would seem that an alternative to turbines is not so straightforward. The alternatives mentioned in the article are at least a decade (and probably much more) away from commercial use. Even then the other overheads would remain.
As with many engineering problems, an apparently decisive advantage can be overwhelmed by secondary effects.
Same is true of renewables, but the cost is enormously lower.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Check the above. Denmark is 100% nuclear free (runs on mostly renewables but it imports), Germany i think runs on about 10% nuclear. France runs in 70% nuclear. The cost speaks for itself.
What makes this comparison with nuclear energy even remotely viable?
Is it? Especially if counting by miles of travel, I'm not sure about it. Also, if by "carbon emissions" I believe we mean "greenhouse gas emissions" -- including methane yes.