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Comment by maliker | Hacker News Reader

Since it’s coming up a lot, here [0] is a good resource on levelized energy costs (i.e. per kWh).

Energy costs are a tricky subject but in general new unsubsidized solar/wind is about the same cost or cheaper than operating existing nuclear (leaving out the issue that nuclear receives subsidies, which tilts things further in favor of renewables). And existing solar/wind operating costs are small, so their energy can be priced very low on day ahead and hour ahead markets, making it hard for fossil/nuclear to cover their operating costs.

But renewables are intermittent, and adding storage pushes the costs of renewable + storage above existing nuclear operating costs and most new build nuclear options. And storage isn’t lossless—I wouldn’t bet on those batteries holding charge affordably for more than a couple days.

We’ll probably muddle through with fossil + renewables for a while, which is the cheapest combo. When we get to the point of trying to take the last 20% of the fossil down is when we might regret not trying harder with nuclear, and in the meantime nukes will continue to struggle with selling energy at a competitive price. But hey, we’ve got another ten years until we phase out the last of the fossil (at the earliest) so maybe some storage cost declines will make it easier. Here’s hoping. Nukes are getting more expensive not less, so I don’t have much expectation they’ll be in the generation mix by the end of the century.

[0] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

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A way to lower most of intermittency-induced variability is well-known: spreading production units out, at continental level. Europe: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...

A mix (wind, solar, geothermal...) helps.

Next come storage, with green hydrogen (produced thanks to overproduction) and V2G https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid

Curtailing and backup will tackle the last chunks.

More transmission seems like a great option, especially since the lifetime of wires is measured in decades instead of years like storage. Another point in favor of transmission is the potential to apply high temperature superconductors, which are dropping in price similar to renewables and storage and might let us increase throughput in existing rights-of-way.

Doing the analysis to figure out the value of transmission is something beyond my abilities as an armchair resource planner, since it relies on calculating network power flows over many years of forecasted demand and renewable production. Not to mention that transmission project costs are all over the place and, at least in the US, they tend to get delayed for decades. There’s some appetite to address transmission here in the Macrogrid initiative, but it’s a huge (ahem continent scale) problem.

Indeed. A larger grid enhances our ability to tackle any problem (to cope with any broken production unit or powerline) and to select which unit will generate power (thus offering more options, for example from an economic perspective). This is a powerful incentive, and in Europe leads to major efforts since the 2000's.

Renewable are intermittent and seasonal. Intermittency can be solved with batteries, but seasonality can't. The capital cost for batteries is too high to be recouped by charging and discharging only once a year. By a factor of about 1000. So, unless batteries get cheaper by a factor of 1000 (they won't), a different form of storage is needed. Europe is betting on hydrogen. It is betting hundreds of billions of dollars (euros). It's unlikely they are completely stupid. Other solutions sound promising as well (ammonia, iron, syn fuels).

But people need to realize batteries are completely useless for seasonal storage.

Given that, all comparisons of solar vs nuclear are simply not apples to apples.

How about wind? For wind the situation is not as clear-cut but you still have a difficult problem. If you know you can have outages of 3 days about once a year, then you need to build batteries that can provide 3 days of consumption, but they'll be able to sell electricity only once a year. The capital cost of these batteries is going to be very high per kWh. One needs to look at the statistics of power generation with wind to see if batteries can offer the storage solution. My guess is that they still can't, but they are probably off only by a factor of 10 or so. Gas peaker plants may be a good intermediate solution.

I expect we'll overbuild renewables to handle the high demand season and then dump excess renewables in the low demand season. I've seen this result in a couple cost optimization models like [0]. Optimistically, we might see demand react to the seasonal price differences and readjust via e.g. weatherization, or running industrial load seasonally.

But yeah, seasonal storage makes my head hurt. Getting 1 cycle a year out of technology built to deliver 2,000 or more cycles seems like a huge waste. The idea of financing a project to pay back over 2000 years is bizarre. Of course the hardware would fail for other reasons over that period. Hell, the concrete it's resting on would probably crumble in 100.

[0] https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/research/publications/feasi...

>...We’ll probably muddle through with fossil + renewables for a while, which is the cheapest combo.

Only cheapest since the externalized costs of fossil fuels are not accounted for.

>...Nukes are getting more expensive not less, so I don’t have much expectation they’ll be in the generation mix by the end of the century.

China is also planning on building about 228 nuclear plants to provide 250 GW of power. It looks like they are very serious about de-carbonizing their grid. They will likely develop a lot of expertise in building nuclear plants.

https://www.energymonitor.ai/sectors/power/weekly-data-china...

The way I think of storage is that it competes with natural gas peaking plants, not that it is part of the cost of renewables. Even if we had a lot more nuclear deployed, we would need a way to handle short-term variance in load, which is either gas or storage. (An interesting alternative would be scalable sinks for extra power; some people argue that this is why proof-of-work crypto is actually good, just use the extra power to generate hashes, but I would rather see it used for something more useful, like making hydrogen.)

I’m optimistic we could find a way to ramp nuclear up and down. We don’t do it now because it’s easier to run it at full capacity for economic and safety reasons. Adding some thermal storage (which the SMR companies are trying) or varying the reaction rate are in the area of research but certainly seem feasible.

I’m optimistic we could find a way to ramp solar/wind up and down. We don’t do it now because it’s easier to run it at full capacity for economic and safety reasons. Adding some thermal storage (which the SMR companies are trying) or varying the reaction rate are in the area of research but certainly seem feasible.

We can't ramp them up because they are dependent on natural forces (weather patterns and the rotation of the earth) that we can't control.

Thanks for the info. I've asked people this question ("is there a fundamental reason why nuclear can't vary?") but nobody that I've asked yet has known the answer. So this is helpful!

If you can add thermal storage to a nuclear plant, you can add thermal storage to a solar or wind farm and do it cheaper.

Thermal storage is harder to integrate with renewables because you need a recovery mechanism, i.e. a steam turbine. Because nuke plants already have the turbines, it’s cheaper to collocate the storage there. I could see a future where the nuke and fossil plants are converted into thermal storage facilities without the boilers to reuse the existing turbines (and permits to operate, and interconnection agreements).

renewables with a recovery mechanism is still simpler engineering than a nuclear plant.

The only advantage nuclear will have over renewables is simply the ability to bring a reliable source of power online that doesn’t require too much land. You can deal most of a country’s needs with a few projects on a few hundred acres.

Compare that with nuclear indirect (aka solar) which requires a lot of space and a lot of projects to scale.

True if You presume new constructions to be done on empty (farm)land.

Somewhat less true if You take into account that specifically solar can (and often is) constructed on residential / industrial rooftops.

Also onshore wind entirely compatible with most farming. Offshore wind makes land use mostly irrelevant.

You still have to build it out over a large area, even if you can use it for other things or the land doesn’t have any other productive uses.

You’ll never power an aircraft carrier or submarine with it, and even space craft solar collectors pale in power output and longevity to nuclear solutions.

I don't think anyone here says that nuclear should be completely eradicated. Sure, there are valid use cases.

What I was trying to touch is the argument about land use. I don't want to stereotype, but oftentimes these things are a product of simple "back of the envelope" calculations where someone takes surface of one panel per Watt and tries to calculate how big of an area would You need to replace N nuclear reactors of given power.

Not the first time I saw it. It's a sort of a theme I see in discussions around me with people from STEM over 50 (not saying that's You, it's just where I keep hearing it).

Nuclear made a lot of sense in the 60s-70s, sure. But since maybe 20 years or so the alternatives are getting better / cheaper / generally improving way faster than nuclear currently is. And so is the energy grid. Makes sense to update those arguments then.

I am pretty sure this is just not reality. I am reading Vaclav Smil and this is not the picture he paints at all.

From reading Smil though I come away with the idea that informed discussion on this matter is basically impossible because the subject is too complicated. People will just talk their prior beliefs.

It is really a bad situation no matter how you look at it.

The discussion needs to be about gigajoules per hectare but I have never read anyone mention that other than Smil. This of course could be my ignorance.

https://withouthotair.com/

The late Prof. MacKay writes in those terms too.

> The discussion needs to be about gigajoules per hectare

Remember that for nuclear you have to factor in the size of the potential nuclear exclusion zone, which was 4,143 square km for Chernobyl and up to 807 square km for Fukushima.

https://www.britannica.com/story/nuclear-exclusion-zones

Space is not an issue really. Even in a densely populated country like Germany we dedicate around 2.4 million hectares for "energy crops", i.e. mostly ethanol and "bio"diesel. If we replaced just those monocultures with solar panels, we'd have covered the majority of Germany's primary energy needs.

Solar + wind arent the same or cheaper, theyre much cheaper.

Solar + wind + pumped storage approaches the cost of nuclear power (minus its free catastrophe insurance).

>When we get to the point of trying to take the last 20% of the fossil down is when we might regret not trying harder with nuclear

Every kwh of solar and wind produced electricity right now is a kwh not produced by gas and will be for some time almost everywhere.

We will probably regret not building the carbon free power generation that take 6 months to build and is half the price than the one that takes 15 years while gorging itself on subsidies.

> Every kwh of solar and wind produced electricity right now is a kwh not produced by gas and will be for some time almost everywhere.

That assumes that fossil plants can be switched off/on as you wish. They can't. Coal needs several days to start up / shut down and gas several hours.

Betting on coal is now a dangerous game. Gas rules, for now. Recent gas turbines are quite good: low-latency, free modulation, maintaining them in warm-start ready condition is quite cheap and does not emit much greenhouse gases. Moreover they will be retrofitted in order to burn green hydrogen.

Gas still produces pretty large amounts of greenhouse gases, even if it's a bit under half compared to coal:

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11#:~:text=In....

Renewables without storage, but backed by gas when the renewables are not available, will perhaps cover 30-50% of the energy consumed in an area, depending on climate, etc. That reduces total greenhouse gases by about 75% compared to using only coal.

But lets say we want to move to electric transportation, more and more people expect to have air conditioning and in general, we expect more energy to be consumed, this will mean that greenhouse gas emissions will still be high.

Now, some people don't care much about global warming (or only pretend to care). In that case, the above setup is probably fine. (Even though it will be a bit more expensive than the most optimistic numbers from the proponents of this setup, due to extra expenses in the grid and due to the gas plants running below capacity half the time.)

If you care enough about global warming to reach carbon neutrality, then obviously, gas plants are not a long term solution. In that case you need to go to fully renewable, or some combination of renewables and nuclear.

If you want to go to fully renewable, you will need enough storage to cover ALL the variation in demand. In such a case levelized cost must cover, I would say, anything from 12 hours (for solar in deserts) to 48 hours or more. With current technology (and with the exception of a few places with plenty of hydro that can be pumped back), this will range from expensive (for 12 hours) to extremely expensive (for 48 hours or more).

From what I can read from the storage costs, the levelized cost including 12 hours of storage (at the source) starts at about $0.2-$0.4 per kwh of consumption (meaning that it can store 12kwh for each kw of peak capacity).

At the other end of the spectrum, standalonge storage of 48kwh for each 1kw of production capacity (like you may need for wind power, if it is quite intermittent), could cost over $3 per kwh of power produced. (48kWh * $643 / 2000kWh for "Industrial Standalone")

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-....

I don't have number for hydrogen, but I don't think storing energy as hydrogen is cheaper than batteries.

In other words, if you want to be fully carbon neutral, Nuclear is still the cheapest as long as the price of Nuclear is less than $0.2/kwh. Most numbers I've seen put the price of nuclear significantly lower than that. And in places that are not desert, the break even is much higher.

Great analysis, and I agree that renewable + storage is the right thing to compare against nuclear. I think the area where nuclear has the biggest potential to shine is competing with very long duration storage—e.g. month long underperformance of wind + solar up to seasonal differences in demand/renewable output. Battery self discharge is around 1% a day, so it could be totally impossible to use it to cover seasonal differences.

I’ve looked a little at hydrogen [0]. It’s got similar self discharge issues that batteries have (i.e. leaks or cooling energy costs). It’s also currently around 1-2 times as expensive as batteries per kWh cycle, and the technology isn’t getting cheaper as fast as batteries.

Plenty of opportunities left for the world to bet on the wrong technology. Leaving aside all the price variability and learning rates, there’s also the issue of how these technologies will perform hour to hour as renewable supply and demand changes (and more end uses like transportation switch away from fossil fuels). A truly hellish optimization problem.

[0] https://www.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/media/file/Final%20...

> I’ve looked a little at hydrogen [0]. It’s got similar self discharge issues that batteries have (i.e. leaks or cooling energy costs). It’s also currently around 1-2 times as expensive as batteries per kWh cycle, and the technology isn’t getting cheaper as fast as batteries.

From your number for hydrogen, I suppose batteries make more sense for "typical" variance, while hydrogen makes more sense for unusual periods of downtime (rain in the desert, more than 2-3 days without ANY wind).

Also, it would make sense if most of the electrolysis would be performed in areas with high random variance in electricity production (typically wind).

As you say, nuclear will have an advantage for longer in areas with highly seasonal variance.

One advantage of hydrogen, though, is that it is relatively easy to transport to where it is needed.

Still, by combining our numbers, it seems to me like for projects starting today, Nuclear is still competitive to, if not outright cheaper than renewables, if the goal is 100% carbon-free power within 10-20 years. Breakthroughs in battery production (or hydrogen production, but less likely), might change that.

But then again, if Nuclear was built with enough volume, minimal corruption and with a rational balancing of cost/risk, the cost of nuclear should also come back down quite a bit. I definitely think it should be possible to reach levelized costs well under $0.1/kwh if contracts are given to international construction/operations companies able to utilize economies of scale.

> If you care enough about global warming to reach carbon neutrality, then obviously, gas plants are not a long term solution. In that case you need to go to fully renewable, or some combination of renewables and nuclear.

btw. a lot of people say that, but it's wrong. you need gas for renewables OR nuclear OR you need storage, no matter if you go full nuclear OR renewables, the outcome is the same. at least as long as there is no solution to turn of nuclear power on and off, which will probably never happen.

Nuclear plants can be ramped up and down, at rates that depend on type. Look at energy production in aircraft carriers or nuclear subs, for instance, they are almost 100% nuclear.

While you are right that a baseline of nuclear can benefit from some complementing by gas and/or storage, there is almost an order of magnitude difference to the degree.

There is even a trend of making nuclear plants more flexible, to such a degree that they may help reduce the reliance on gas to keep renewables viable:

https://www.powermag.com/flexible-operation-of-nuclear-power...

Obviously, that comes at a cost, since nuclear is by far most economical if run at relatively constant loads, but to claim that nuclear suffers from the same problems when it comes to adjusting output to demand, is so inaccurate as to the degree, that I would consider it a false equivalence.

A nuclear sub throws away uselessly generated electricity. Doing so in a civilian environment would be economically absurd.

Nuclear's load-following capacity is quite limited and not sufficient for a grid: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=natmaka#31559869

France is a leader at this game, but nonetheless uses fossil fuels (nowadays 91%) to generate electricity (it is also due to peak consumption).

> but nonetheless uses fossil fuels (nowadays 91%)

You mean 9.1% fossil fuels for electricity, right? Anyway, that's already pretty good, at least 6x better than comparable countries

As for the load-following capacity, it is getting better with newer reactor types. And according to wikipedia, reactors built after 2000 were designed with pretty good load following capabilities, but have not necessarily been used that way, primarily for economic reasons.

Anyway, we're talking about only the last 5-10% of electricity production, if that. Whereas for renewables, this is about 60% of the production, and even that is only possible for Germany through depending on their neighbours to compensate for the variance in output.

> You mean 9.1% fossil fuels for electricity, right?

Yes, I do.

Yes, emissions-wise it is very good! A 'renewable'-based energetic system could do the same.

Yes, load-following capacity, it is getting better, but not good enough. And compensating it by over-provisioning would be, economically, a deal breaker.

Which source states that "60%" gas backup is needed in a renewable-based energetic system?

Denmark already more than half of its electricity thanks to wind power, officially plans to reach 84% in 2035 and AFAIK nobody stated that it cannot be done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Denmark

As stated above we know how to compensate for most of intermittency by spreading out (at continental scale) production units and using a mix (wind, solar...): https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...

> Yes, emissions-wise it is very good! A 'renewable'-based energetic system could do the same.

Norway has 110% renewable electricity production compared to consumption, despite having almost 100% of heating be electricity (or "biomass"=firewood) based. Fossil heating of residential housing has been banned since 2020. So you are right, in theory, 100% renewable for electricity is possible. If you have a lot of hydro.

For countries with little hydro, and especially for those who rely primarily on wind power 90+% becomes exceedingly expensive without massive investments in storage, given current pricing for storage

> Denmark already more than half of its electricity thanks to wind power, officially plans to reach 84% in 2035

Denmark's current wind power productin already relies on Sweden and Norway to store surplus production in hydro plants. As more wind power is built in most countries, and with directly lines from Norway to Germany and the UK, this storage capacity will reach its limit soon. (Also, the electricity trade is becoming extremely unpopular in Norway and Sweden, since consumers, who in those cases rely on electricity for heating, are getting tired of paying Danish prices.)

And this is for a small country for Denmark, with the perfect neighbours for this trade. Such storage is not available for the larger Europen countries, such as Germany, France, Poland, UK, Italy, Spain, etc.

> As stated above we know how to compensate for most of intermittency by spreading out (at continental scale) production units and using a mix (wind, solar...): https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...

As far as I can tell, the development has been in the opposite direction. More trade has led to greater fluctuations, since many countries produce too little for their own consumption. (Denmark imports 17% of their consumption, for instance). If this continues, it is highly likely that the Norwegian (and possibly Swedish) governments is forced to withdraw from such cooperation due to public outrage. One thing is to pay $0.2 to $0.4 per kwh if your heating is done by natural gas. Another is to pay that amount when you live in an arctic or near-arctic climate and rely on electricity for everything, including the car, when you are used to historical prices of about $0.05 per kwh. (And that is with high taxes, production cost for hydro in Norway is about $0.015 per kwh)

In my opinion, the only way to reach 100% non-carbon-based power is for consumers to be able to buy it at prices no higher than about $0.1 per kwh, preferably $0.07 or so. That means that levelized costs need to be a bit lower, perhaps around $0.05 per kwh.

For renewables (apart from hydro), a lot of storage must be added (several days to over a week) to reach such levelized costs, even if there is plenty of trade. Also, transfering power from Naples to Stockholm is pretty expensive, both in transfer loss and grid capacity.

The estimates I've seen, is that this (ie acceptable prices for stable/stored renewables) will become realistic around 2050, possibly a bit sooner.

Meanwhile, levelized costs for nuclear may, for countries able to do it as efficiently as Korea and China, already be there.

https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/report-claims-uk-nu...

If there is enough focus on building affordable nuclear, Europe should be able to do the same. At such prices, Europe would be able to shift a significant percentage of its energy production over to emission-free production, without breaking the bank.

An ideal mix for the total EU area, given current technology might be something like: 50% nuclear 40% renewable 10% other (hydro, gas, hydrogen, etc)

As storage technologies gets better, nuclear can then be gradually phased out over the next 100 years or so (or be replaced by fusion if/when it arrives).

I believe such a mix would enable a stable supply, at a price that people are willing to pay use for heating/air conditioning for their houses, recharge their cars, and not just to keep the light on using LED bulbs.

> given current pricing for storage

https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

Complement: V2G will be a key, here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid

Many other ways to store will emerge as complements?

> Denmark's current wind power productin already relies on Sweden and Norway to store surplus production in hydro plants.

Such efficient use of available resources is one of the (already actively pursued) benefits of a large grid.

Fully-nuclearized France is nowadays very happy to benefit from Germany's electricity: https://twitter.com/HolzheuStefan/status/1529874075220381696

> this storage capacity will reach its limit

This depends heavily on the efficiency of many parameters, mainly: spreading unit out, mix, other vectors (hydrogen), curtailing, backup.

> the electricity trade is becoming extremely unpopular

A global price raise then ratchet is very probable, and maybe already triggered. Fossil fuels are very convenient and cheap, but the good'ole days are over.

> Such storage is not available for the larger Europen countries, such as Germany

Germany already does it with Switzerland. Some nations need more storage (and other indeed already have too much of it). Storage characteristics (volume, min/max discharge rate, term...) are more and more clear

>> we know how to compensate for most of intermittency by spreading out (at continental scale) production units and using a mix (wind, solar...)

> As far as I can tell, the development has been in the opposite direction. More trade has led to greater fluctuations

Prices fluctuations? I petition that it is an effect of the transition towards renewable sources (from the relative comfort and stable logistics of fossil fuels) more than a problem intrinsic to renewables. Competing markets will cope.

Grid stability is up (by impressive margins) everywhere.

> since many countries produce too little for their own consumption

> Denmark imports 17% of their consumption

Denmark officially targets 84% electricity wind by 2035.

> If this continues, it is highly likely that the Norwegian (and possibly Swedish) governments is forced to withdraw from such cooperation due to public outrage

This is mainly a financial matter. A 'cooperation' achieved thru a market lets some buy production surpluses on the spot market at a bargain, store them then sell with a profit wipes out such outrage. This is already the case for the Germany-Switzerland deal, and a natural way for such deals: surplus is cheap, needed energy isn't. It will boost storage projects and innovation, adjusting the market.

> the only way to reach 100% non-carbon-based power

There is no way, each and every type of source emits and needs combustible fuel backup. The next goal is to transition to reach approximately 10% (max) of such backup, just like France's production fleet does for decades.

> is for consumers to be able to buy it at prices

Yes, a very low LCOE offers financial provisions for the infrastructure (grid, storage...). Renewable sources' LCOE is low and falls sharply. Nuclear-produced electricity cost, on the other hand, is way higher and raises. Surprises (real building costs, waste management, decommission, accident...) may further extend the gap.

> need to add a lot of storage capacity, at least several days

A continental mix reduces this need.

> that this will become realistic around 2050, possibly a bit sooner.

The current (awful) nuclear-building capacity needs a miracle to adjust, restart and gain significant and reinsuring successes before 2050. Even France best hope is to start more than 3 new reactors by 2040.

> levelized costs for nuclear may, for countries able to do it as efficiently as Korea and China, already be there.

China? Not really. There is some opacity, but established facts aren't keen for nuclear projects. 2 to (rarely) 6 new reactors per year. At least some are problematic. Their pair of EPR (Taishan), for example: 5 years late, 60% overbudget, and out of 2 reactors one is stopped since mid-2021 after an incident, and the other one works at low capacity in order to avoid problems.

This trend is old and clear: nuclear produces 6% of China's electricity with 50GW nominal electric power, long-term plans for future capacity are 120 to 150 GW by 2030 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China ) while China already has 253GW solar and 281GW wind (plan for combined solar and wind: 1,200 gigawatts by 2030) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_China ). In 2020 alone China added 71.6 GW windpower... Even taking into account the load factors (nuclear may reach .9 while wind-solar combined are at .3 to .5, mainly depending on the proportion of off-shore wind turbine power) this seems quite clear to me.

Korea was somewhat efficient while building the Barakah plant (in the United Arab Emirates), however it is not fully started (then time will tell if it runs well), and maybe thanks to some now known dirty tricks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal The last Korean president was against nuclear and practically froze it in Korea.

> If there is enough focus on building affordable nuclear

There is focus. What nuclear needs is successes.

> Europe would be able to shift a significant percentage of its energy production over to emission-free production

Nuclear isn't emission free (building, obtaining the fuel, waste management, decommission... aren't emission-free). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...

> An ideal mix for the total EU area > 50% nuclear

This seems impossible, at least if we hope for real progress towards an adequate energetic system by 2050.

See https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/elec-mix-bar?time=latest&...

Year 2000: 27% nuclear / 19% 2022: 23% / 35%

There are 106 active nuclear reactors in Europe, producing 23% of its electricity. Therefore to produce 40% of it we need to build approx 80 new reactors. Theoretically a bit less, as more recent types are more powerful, however we have to account for replacements (many existing ones are quite old). Who really hopes to build ~80 new reactors in Europe before 2100?

In any case who will build them?

Even France, historically nuclear's king, tries hard to build but: 27/19 (2000) to 23/35 (now)

French Areva NP is dead. Its successor EDF, with its hands full thanks to 2 projects (a disaster at Flamanville and a difficult one at Hinkley Point C)?

Westinghouse filled for Chapter 11 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westinghouse_Electric_Company ) and Toshiba recently sold it to BBP ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookfield_Business_Partners ): not sure which european nation would order anything from them(?)

GE Hitachi is fleeing the European market after the Horizon debacle ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_Nuclear_Power ), and probably busy for quite a while in Canada (Ontario, BWRX-300) because they never worked together, while GE is being divided after a major loss of revenue ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric ).

KEPCO (Korea) may be interested in deals, but some european nations may not be enthusiastic.

Another potential candidate is Rosatom, but which European nation is willing to sign with Russia, especially after its inept move in Ukraine?

China? Maybe, albeit reserves are probably even higher than towards Korea: their recent efforts towards UK weren't well-received nor conclusive, and they are busy obtaining mediocre results at home.

Canada may be able to propose but didn't build for quite a time, has its specific architecture (CANDU) and now prefers to target a SMR.

SMRs may be an option, but at best in 2030 (Rolls-Royce's announces it), and with the usual "let's someone else suffer with the first project then wait to be quite sure" will add latency. Moreover SMRs amplify the NIMBY effect.

Who/what else?

We more and more know how to build 'renewables', and less and less know how to build nuclear.

> https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

If the price of batteries continues to decline exponentially, then absolutely, renewables will be great. I don't they will be 4x cheaper per decade going forward, though. Maybe 2x cheaper per decade for a few more decades is more likely, if so 2050 might be a break-even point.

> Complement: V2G will be a key, here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid

V2G can absolutely make some contribution for very short-term fluctuations (such as for from Nuclear ramp up/down cycles, but the capacity several orders of magnitude too small to compensate for a few weeks of almost no wind in the North Sea.

> Prices fluctuations?

Yes. The extreme price fluctuations seen this winter (both from day-to-day, but also compared to earlier years) is due to coming very close to reaching max capacity. For Norwegian consumers, this is already extremely sticky, since many households are experiencing increased costs of $1000-$2000 per month (more in some cases), even after government subsidies.

Also, the reservoirs in the hydro systems are already unusually low. so next year may be worse. I don't think any Norwegian government will survive that.

In other words, Denmark should expect that at some point soon, Norway will shut down exports until the situation has normalized.

>> Denmark imports 17% of their consumption

> Denmark officially targets 84% electricity wind by 2035.

What happens to Danmark's electricity market if they are no longer able to import power from Norway and Sweden?

> This is mainly a financial matter. A 'cooperation' achieved thru a market lets some buy production surpluses on the spot market at a bargain, store them then sell with a profit wipes out such outrage.

You would be right if Norway were able to coordinate that internally in ways that did not hurt the population. But in Norway, since electricity is used for heating (and it is cold here). That would have to mean a setup where households were able to buy electricity at prices close to the historical prices, in other words, it would require us to do the very thing that stops a market from working. We could still sell excess production (after reservoir levels return to "safe), and could also offer foreign energy companies to "rent" available storage in our hydro systems.

But being a full member of the open energy market simply doesn't work for Norway at these price levels. It's kind of being members of an open market for food when your population is starving, even if you're a net exporter. (I'm sure Denmark would strangle food exports, if the price became so high that danes could no longer afford to eat.)

> Yes, a very low LCOE offers financial provisions for the infrastructure (grid, storage...). Renewable sources' LCOE is low and falls sharply. Nuclear-produced electricity cost, on the other hand, is way higher and raises. Surprises (real building costs, waste management, decommission, accident...) may further extend the gap.

The prices of nuclear is caused by political choices. With rational (or only sightly paranoid) regulations, nuclear would be a lot cheaper.

> The current (awful) nuclear-building capacity needs a miracle to adjust.

You may be right. Still, there are a lot more pro-nuclear people now, than when I advocated for nuclear 15 years ago.

> A continental mix reduces this need.

Not below "several days". Also, long distance energy transfers are expensive, and require massive investments in infrastructure. Not only that, it depends on a lot of countries participating. Maybe Greece has other ideas?

> The last Korean president was against nuclear and practically froze it in Korea.

The newly elected president is pro-nuclear, though. I'm aware of some shady dealings with earlier plants, but I didn't see any good argument that it shifted the cost enought to really matter for the long term electricity price.

> Nuclear isn't emission free (building, obtaining the fuel, waste management, decommission... aren't emission-free).

True, but the same goes for all other energy sources, and Nuclear seem to have lower emissions than all "renewable" sources, as far as I can tell from your link.

> In any case who will build them?

I said ideal, meaning that should be the goal. Every movement toward that goal would be positive. 30% is much better than going to 15%.

However, if there really is will to do it, it absolutely can be done. Unless there is some extreme event (such as a Russian nuke landing in Poland), Europe is unlikely to act with such resolve, though.

> We more and more know how to build 'renewables'

Yes, but like with nuclear, there is a lot of fudging the number even when not accounting for storage needs.

And for the storage part, all we have is some kind of hope that it will become cheap enough in the future.

And without enough storage, Northern Europe is almost at "Peak Renewable" already (and Southern Europe doesn't seem very interested). For every new windmill we build from now on (without storage), we are going to add to price fluctuations, meaning that the sales price for wind (before subsidies) will be reduced for each mill.

Being about 30 times lower than natural gas (without carbon capture) is only a rounding error away from zero, imo.

> V2G can absolutely make some contribution for very short-term fluctuations (such as for from Nuclear ramp up/down cycles, but the capacity several orders of magnitude too small to compensate for a few weeks of almost no wind in the North Sea.

As noted we know efficient ways to reduce intermittence-induced production variability. If you are interested in all this the very scientific study described by the article I refenced is of interest. Note that other studies deliver similar results, see "How synchronous is wind energy production among European countries?" -- Monforti, Gaetani, Vignati). Those conclusions are sound for other continents, for the US see "Is it always windy somewhere? Occurrence of low-wind-power events over large areas" (Handschy, Rose, Apt), for China see Liu, Xiao Wang, Dai, Qi "Analysis on the hourly spatiotemporal complementarities between China's solar and wind energy resources spreading in a wide area"...

> The extreme price fluctuations

Yes, the context (economic crisis, energetic transition, international tensions...) isn't keen. I didn't know how hard it hits in Norway. In many Western nations it hits very hard but this is hidden from public sight by throwing public money at the problem (usually by sacrificing usually perceived energy taxes in order to create provisions or even pay for the current high market price), leading to more debt and therefore higher taxes (as usual the taxpayer and consumer will nonetheless pay, and more because the very government has a cost, burning part of taxes).

> the reservoirs in the hydro systems are already unusually low

Yes (climate...), and the planners have to keep some reserve in order to preserve necessary margins (emergencies and follow-up).

> Denmark should expect that at some point soon, Norway will shut down exports until the situation has normalized.

A huge grid offers more potential commercial partners, and the probability of an extreme "nobody is able to sell" case gets lower and lower.

> What happens to Danmark's electricity market if they are no longer able to import power from Norway and Sweden?

There are many factors: how much parties can plan for it in advance, find others sellers, curtail, backup... The composition gives the net result.

>> This is mainly a financial matter. A 'cooperation' achieved thru a market

> You would be right if Norway were able to coordinate that internally in ways that did not hurt the population. But in Norway, since electricity is used for heating (and it is cold here). That would have to mean a setup where households were able to buy electricity at prices close to the historical prices

We can predict a fair part of the parameters, therefore many cases are manageable. Even worst-case scenarios, leading to throwing public money at the problem, are in a way useful because they trigger adequate reactions (innovation...). Ways to cut down a huge part of heating-related needs are known, for example by enhancing thermal isolation or heating buildings in "anti-frost" (no freezing) mode while wearing heated clothing.

> But being a full member of the open energy market simply doesn't work for Norway at these price levels. It's kind of being members of an open market for food when your population is starving, even if you're a net exporter.

Yes, there always is a limit, even for our ability to counter limits by multiplying ways to cope. Compare various approaches merits is difficult, for example France touted its nuclear fleet as a sure way to be autonomous but now detects corrosion inside pipes, has to temporarily shutdown reactors (load factor now floats around .7) and therefore was recently very happy to import electricity from Germany (which is usually mocked because "wind & solar are intermittent,: Germany needs France"...). Moreover France imports most of its uranium from Kazakhstan (one may imagine Putin's going full LOL ahead upon reading that "France loves not to depend upon other nations").

> The prices of nuclear is caused by political choices. With rational (or only sightly paranoid) regulations, nuclear would be a lot cheaper.

Political choices are only part of the problem, and apparently not part of the main ones (there is a very interesting report about the French Flamanville-3 case, named the "rapport Folz", however it's in French I could not find any English version). Not being paranoid probably increases the probability of incident/accidents (contesting this is saying that some safety-related new specifications are totally useless: this is a bold statement), and on the long-term reducing the amount and patent effects of boo-boos, even at a non-negligible cost, may be the best bet when it comes to public opinion. This is not necessarily badly-invested money and time.

> there are a lot more pro-nuclear people now, than when I advocated for nuclear 15 years ago.

This seems globally true, however the amount of people willing to see a reactor installed in their vicinity rather than wind turbines in the ocean is low and stable.

>> A continental mix reduces this need.

> Not below "several days"

At continental scale several days without a fair part of the baseload and peaks, starting with storage at low charge, with not enough curtailing and backup capacity? I doubt so.

> long distance energy transfers are expensive

Indeed, however the huge grid is justified whatever the type of source: even going full-nuclear would justify it, for safety (see the current French 'corrosion' case) and to be able to use more sound sources (avoiding production units which burn fossil fuel). As showed this is already launched ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta... ) and will very be be further developed ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_super_grid ).

The impact of renewable sources is here limited to dimensions, not the very existence of most lines, therefore the real cost (specific to renewable sources) is limited, and way below many models proposed by nuclear or fossil industries.

This limited specific investment will be recouped thanks to a way lower LCOE, as producing electricity thanks to renewable sources is way cheaper than using nuclear (and getting more and more so).

> Ways to cut down a huge part of heating-related needs are known, for example by enhancing thermal isolation or heating buildings in "anti-frost" (no freezing) mode while wearing heated clothing.

Building standards for new buildings are aleady very strict when it comes to isolation.

But I don't think you understand the mentality of most Norwegians on this matter. Norway produces electricity at extremely low prices. This is 110% renewable. Most Norwegians don't feel obligated to reduce their quality of life just ot provide cheaper electricity to Denmark, Germany and the UK.

If you take commodities where the price difference is the reverse, like meat, (EDIT:) I expect most Danes would be equally reluctant to pay Norwegian prices for beef and pork.

In fact, Norway fully intends for people to INCREASE their electricity consumption, even beyond what we currently export. Much of Norway's greenhouse gas emmisions come from petrol/diesel, but currently 2/3 of new cars are electric. This means that ever more electricity is needed domestically.

As long as most European countries use natural gas for heating, or rather, as long as natural gas is a cheaper way to heat buildings in countries like Germany than electricity, I predict that it will be hard to have a common electricity market across the North Sea / Skagerak. If electricity is not used for heating, it is kind of a luxery good. But when all you have for heating is electricity, it becomes a fundamental need, similar to food and water (when it's -40 degrees Celsius outside).

Many countries in Eastern Europe have winter temperatures almost similarly low, and for those to use electricity for heating, the price also needs to be at similar levels (or lower, since they have less wealth than Norway).

For many of those countries, it's hard replace fossil fuels, and if they cannot use Russian gas, they may have to go back to coal (LNG may be too expensive).

Hopefully you're right, and they can get affordable prices by using windmills. But for countries like Hungary and Romania to be able to heat their houses with electricity, prices have to be RADICALLY lower than current prices in Germany or Denmark.

Obviously, modern nuclear plants are not cheap enough in all places, either. But even if the effect is just that using Nuclear in place of gas for electricity production, that should ensure that (non-Russian) natural gas remains viable for heating purposes througout Europe for the next generation.

Or (admittedly a bit unrealistic), one could revise standards for Nuclear production to lower safety standards (in terms of expected deaths per GWh) to a level more similar to competing energy forms.

> Building standards for new buildings are aleady very strict when it comes to isolation.

Yes, however in many nations there is a huge fleet of old not retrofitted buildings.

> Most Norwegians don't feel obligated to reduce their quality of life just ot provide cheaper electricity to Denmark, Germany and the UK.

This is perfectly understandable and thinking "let's provide for ourselves first, and then sell our surpluses without any rebate" is welcome. The market will cope.

> I doubt most Danes would be equally reluctant to pay Norwegian prices for meat and pork.

True, and there may also be some dynamic equilibrium to reach there.

> Norway fully intends for people to INCREASE their electricity consumption

Nearly all European nation does so, AFAIK, and those who deny it doesn't have any other plan: the most realistic way to replace fossil fuels remains 'electrification', and even with major efforts towards saving energy achieving it implies to produce more electricity. A few years ago some denied it, but nowadays it seems clear(?)

> As long as most European countries use natural gas for heating > If electricity is not used for heating, it is kind of a luxery good

During a very cold season in the North it may not be as vital as heating but everywhere many households, even out of cold/hot seasons (heating system and air conditioner OFF) just cannot cope without electricity. Many professional setups, especially secondary and even more tertiary sector, just cannot proceed without it.

> it's hard replace fossil fuels, and if they cannot use Russian gas, they may have to go back to coal (LNG may be too expensive).

> for countries like Hungary and Romania to be able to heat their houses with electricity, prices have to be RADICALLY lower than current prices in Germany

Yes, but how would nuclear be a better option, given its upfront costs, high LCOE...?

> natural gas remains viable for heating purposes througout Europe for the next generation.

Is it compatible with an IPCC scenario?

> one could revise standards for Nuclear production to lower safety standards (in terms of expected deaths per GWh) to a level more similar to competing energy forms.

It will be known, thus amplifying the NIMBY effect.

> even out of cold/hot seasons (heating system and air conditioner OFF) just cannot cope without electricity

30 degrees C is uncomfortable, -20 is another level. Affluent people will always have air conditioning, as can workplaces, simply based on profit. I think most people in warmer climates still see air conditioning as a kind of a luxery (at least the ones I know), even if it is a very welcome luxery.

> Yes, but how would nuclear be a better option, given its upfront costs, high LCOE...?

Nuclear would rely on going back to more reasonable prices, partly through a review of regulations, and partly by focusing on efficiency during construction and operation. We know this is all doable, if the will is there.

>> natural gas remains viable for heating purposes througout Europe for the next generation.

> Is it compatible with an IPCC scenario?

Probably not with the most optimistic one.. But better than to continue large scale coal power.

> It will be known, thus amplifying the NIMBY effect.

This would absolutely require some education/propaganda efforts by governments and other authorities, similar to the kind of education being done for climate change.

Starting with thourough documentation of the harm done by coal to lungs in media and schools would be a start. Start adding a tax on coal power (and a smaller one on natural gas), and increase it every year, until both are unprofitable. Then let the market decide how to distribute the replacement between renewables and nuclear.

> 30 degrees C is uncomfortable, -20 is another level

I really think heated clothing will gain ground. As for air conditioning its typical use is in sync with solar-panel production.

> Nuclear > focusing on efficiency during construction and operation

In France and the US results of real efforts towards this show how difficult it is.

>> NIMBY effect.

> This would absolutely require some education/propaganda efforts by governments and other authorities

I doubt so, because the root cause is here a lack of trust, for many in governments and authorities, and for some even to the very underlying technical system (most "solutions" leading to worse problems).

> similar to the kind of education being done for climate change.

I doubt so, because climate change is perceptible, therefore the message is "See? We have a problem! Nearly all scientists say that fossil fuel use is a prominent cause and we all can do something about it" is way more easy than, after many blunders of all kinds and in every field, touting "We, the gov, checked this nuclear thing. It is above the adequate level of safety, so let's optimize in order to quickly build many reactors". It may be true (even if I doubt so) but this is IMHO out of the current Overton window scope.

> harm done by coal

Yes, avoiding any "manufacturing of consent".

> tax on coal power

Yes, there is reason to accept that some can use it without compensating for bad externalities.

> let the market decide how to distribute the replacement between renewables and nuclear.

Yes.

> I really think heated clothing will gain ground.

Maybe, but it seems dystopian to me to have to rely on that in your own home. In places like Norway, where there is plenty of clean energy, I don't think the population will be willing to go there.

Yesterday, our prime minister declared that current energy prices are not viable. The labour movement and farmer organizations (and many others) are demanding that Norway pulls out of ACER, or renegotiates the agreement. During the summer, the problem is not so great, and given the situation in Ukraine, nothing will happen right now. But I would be surprised if some "solution" hasn't been found before December.

https://www.nettavisen.no/okonomi/raseri-mot-hoye-stromprise...

> In France and the US results of real efforts towards this show how difficult it is.

Again, I already consider France to have achieved success, they just need to keep it up.

> I doubt so, because the root cause is here a lack of trust,

This varies from country to country. Scandinavia and parts of northern Europe has traditionally had relatively high trust in government. In other places, governments have no such authority.

In both cases, trust is built and maintained by attemting to tell the truth and make reliable predictions. For instance, overselling renewables (for instance by underestimating the need and/or cost of storage) is dangerous, as it can cause long term harm to this trust relationship.

Similarly for nuclear, if there is a meltdown that kills thousands or hundreds of thousands of people in a plant the government claims to be "safe", trust is broken. If there is a minor incident, the population needs to be educated about the real effects.

> It may be true (even if I doubt so) but this is IMHO out of the current Overton window scope.

This is a good point, and just as important is that most politicians don't even have the scientific understanding themselves, so they too are controlled by whatever Zeitgeist is ruling at any time.

Having this discussion on Twitter, for instance, is basically useless. At least here on HN, even the people with another opinion will argue more from reason than pure emotion or partisanship. Within educated people, there may exist another Overton windown than what may exist in the general population.

To add complication, in the general population, there is even a risk that there are two "camps", each with their own, non-overlapping Overton windows. If enough people lose trust in official government sources, one can end up in scenarios where the majority ends up believing things that are in direct conflict with scientific knowledge. (And this can happen on both sides, simultaneously, for different topics.)

And here is one of my fears. I'm generally supportive of investments in renewables, but I fear that if unrealistic projects are started because the "sound good" to politicians, the weaknesses of such projects will eventually become obvious to the population. And the more some source of authority has tried to downplay such weaknesses, the more likely it will be to get a reaction in the opposite direction. In other words, if huge investments are put into wind power, and the technology doesn't deliver what is promised, there can be a huge backlash that leads to countries starting to build more coal power plants instead of tearing them down.

> Yes, avoiding any "manufacturing of consent".

In the sciences, goverments should not manufacture consent. The scientific debate needs to be free. As for the general public, some level of government sponsored "education" can be beneficial, but as I wrote above, it is critical that such communication is as fact-based as possible, non-partisan (when possible) and that it delivers on predictions (or, if predictions are uncertain, avoids making hard predictions).

> > let the market decide how to distribute the replacement between renewables and nuclear.

> Yes.

> Norway pulls out of ACER, or renegotiates the agreement > I would be surprised if some "solution" hasn't been found before December.

This is indeed highly probable and could boost efforts towards a larger cooperation, relieving the burden of 1-to-1 relationships by diffusing risks.

> I already consider France to have achieved success, they just need to keep it up

We (I'm French) try hard, but couldn't adequately built any new reactor since 1999.

>> the root cause is here a lack of trust,

> This varies from country to country. Scandinavia and parts of northern Europe has traditionally had relatively high trust in government. In other places, governments have no such authority.

Indeed, however it seems to me that the level of trust gets lower even in those nations(?). See local 'Pirate Party'

> trust is built and maintained by attemting to tell the truth and make reliable predictions. For instance, overselling renewables > can cause long term harm to this trust relationship.

Indeed, but on this very account trust on nuclear was already dented because many don't see past accidents as 'minor'. This may be wrong, but they sure don't want to be exposed to such risk.

> most politicians don't even have the scientific understanding themselves, so they too are controlled by whatever Zeitgeist

This is a sure way for them to be able to communicate with the electorate, a necessary way to be elected.

> Within educated people, there may exist another Overton windown than what may exist in the general population.

Indeed, however the case at hand is difficult to settle even among them because there are reasons to think that 'renewables' can be sufficient, and therefore to prefer avoiding problems raised by nuclear (risk, waste, dependency to uranium, daunting decommissions...), reasons to think that the level of risk associated to nuclear plants is higher than estimated or would become intolerable if we build many of them...

> there are two "camps", each with their own, non-overlapping Overton windows

There are! And the integrated window defines the very limited spectrum were politicians seeking power are constrained.

> If enough people lose trust in official government sources, one can end up in scenarios where the majority ends up believing things that are in direct conflict with scientific knowledge

Indeed. Worse: even fully-gov-trusting people can err (or be fooled) this way.

There is no sure source clearlyu indicating what is preferrable, or even (esp. outside of pure mathematics) what is really 'true'.

> I fear that if unrealistic projects are started because the "sound good" > if huge investments are put into wind power, and the technology doesn't deliver what is promised, there can be a huge backlash that leads to countries starting to build more coal power plants

The risk is real. However since the 2000's the objective reality is "huge investments were put into nuclear, and the technology doesn't deliver what was promised..."

> In the sciences, goverments should not manufacture consent > some level of government sponsored "education" can be beneficial

I highly doubt so, as it will be quickly distorted (even non deliberately: 'an end justifies any means')

> it is critical that such communication is as fact-based as possible, non-partisan (when possible)

In theory it can be done, but I'm not aware of any historical success.

> if predictions are uncertain, avoids making hard predictions

This induces a tension with the necessary 'motivation'. Politicians avoid "maybe" along with "let's go!".

>> I already consider France to have achieved success, they just need to keep it up

> We (I'm French) try hard, but couldn't adequately built any new reactor since 1999.

France is not what it used to be. On the other hand, that statement has been true for a while. (France used to be the dominant power in Europe for almost 1000 years.)

> Indeed, however it seems to me that the level of trust gets lower even in those nations(?). See local 'Pirate Party'

Still, Northern Europe + Switzerland has way higher confidence in government than France:

https://data.oecd.org/gga/trust-in-government.htm

> Indeed, but on this very account trust on nuclear was already dented because many don't see past accidents as 'minor'. This may be wrong, but they sure don't want to be exposed to such risk.

Common people used to believe the earth was flat, even a millenium or two after the Greeks knew it was round. Even today.

> Indeed, however the case at hand is difficult to settle even among them because there are reasons to think that 'renewables' can be sufficient, and therefore to prefer avoiding problems raised by nuclear (risk, waste, dependency to uranium, daunting decommissions...), reasons to think that the level of risk associated to nuclear plants is higher than estimated or would become intolerable if we build many of them...

"Renewables" sound good. "Nuclear" sounds scary. "Chemotherapy"/"radiation therapy" sound scary while "Energy Crystals" sound good. Most cancer patients will still chose the treatment recomended by doctors, because they trust him/her.

Trust like that, is built over time.

>> there are two "camps", each with their own, non-overlapping Overton windows

> There are! And the integrated window defines the very limited spectrum were politicians seeking power are constrained.

At the point of elections, public opinion has already been set. The shaping of public opinion is mostly not done by politicians, though. But politicians is noe group that can affect the institutions that shape public opinion.

> There is no sure source clearlyu indicating what is preferrable, or even (esp. outside of pure mathematics) what is really 'true'.

You realize that the sentence above is logically inconsistent with itself? ;)

Seriously, though, properly executed science is the best approach we have to determine the level of confidence we can have in certains sets of propositions. (I believe this almost axiomatically, since even the way I come to this conclusino is based on scientific thinking.)

Someone who is reasonably bright and educated in the metods of science will have some ability go to the literature and investiage for themselves. I can, by using math, common sense and personal experience come to the conclusion that the earth is roughly spherical. (Primarily by flying to different places, and notice what path the plan is following, and the evalute what hypothesis (round vs flat earth) explains the path best, with the common sense element being that the airline wants to minimize fuel consumption). I can do similar investigations in most of the "hard" sciences, and so far, my investigations have been compatible with the scientific consensus, where one exists.

In the social "sciences", this becomes much harder. At best, their predictive power is weak. In many cases, they seem like they're simply rationalizations of a previously held ideology.

Climate science, cosmology and economy are fields that I find to be somewhere inbetween. With good methodology, you can make some predictions, but the error bars are really huge. (For cosmology, we will obviously not live long enough to see the outcomes.)

But the medical significance of exposure to radiation is pretty hard science. Error bars are relatively small when exposure is large enough to create measurable increases in cancer risk. This is also what matters to a given individual that is exposed. At doses lower than 100mSv, especially if spread out over weeks or years, there is simply no reason to be scared.

We know pretty well how much risk comes with an exposure of, say 200, 500, 1000 or 5000mSv. Near the top of that range, there is reason to be VERY scared. But even at 1000mSv, you'll probably live.

We know this for similar (and largely overlapping) reasons that we know that radiation therapy (for some set of patients) reduces their likelihood of dying when they have cancer.

> In theory it can be done, but I'm not aware of any historical success.

I think there is a lot of science that is being taught with reasonable success in schools, especially hard sciences. That includes things like the health risks of radiation. (Certainly, I learned the basics in school.) For subjects where there is a lot of knowledge, a lot of the effect has to do with repitition, practical experiments, excercises, etc.

Obviously, there will be students that find any subject involving numbers and calculations to be hard, but if one can reach the other students, thay may be enough.

> Northern Europe + Switzerland has way higher confidence in government than France:

Indeed, IMHO because France is way too jacobinist (centralization + bureaucracy : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(politics) ).

In Northern Europe and Switzerland subsidiarity is key.

> "Renewables" sound good. "Nuclear" sounds scary. "Chemotherapy"/"radiation therapy" sound scary while "Energy Crystals" sound good. Most cancer patients will still chose the treatment recomended by doctors, because they trust him/her.

Indeed, however there is no serious scientist (bar Placebo effect) working on 'Energy Crystals', but many do work on renewables.

> At the point of elections, public opinion has already been set. The shaping of public opinion is mostly not done by politicians, though. But politicians is noe group that can affect the institutions that shape public opinion.

Indeed, this is a complex and dynamic system, hosting retro-actions and hidden vectors.

>> There is no sure source clearlyu indicating what is preferrable, or even (esp. outside of pure mathematics) what is really 'true'.

> You realize that the sentence above is logically inconsistent with itself? ;)

Yes, and it seems quite 'consistent' (!) because it asserts that no pure logic can, alone, provide a definitive answer when it comes to policies.

> properly executed science is the best approach we have to determine the level of confidence we can have in certains sets of propositions

Yes, a stable scientific consensus should never be neglected.

> Someone who is reasonably bright and educated in the metods of science

Yes! One can check the ability of science to explain, and therefore to efficiently predict. Teachings may benefit from this.

> Climate science, cosmology and economy

Only teaching stable consensual thesis would be a major progress.

> At doses lower than 100mSv

Details/devil. Internal exposure? Nearby which organ? And so on...

> even at 1000mSv, you'll probably live

Someone eating a 1Sv source or inhaling dust may, a few years later, disagree.

> we know that radiation therapy

They target tumors, and use various ways to protect what has to be protected.

> there is a lot of science that is being taught with reasonable success in schools, especially hard sciences

Yes!

> That includes things like the health risks of radiation

I don't consider it as hard science.

> it depends on a lot of countries participating. Maybe Greece has other ideas?

Given their financial state I'm quite sure they will be interested in obtaining and selling gridpower. Even if they aren't the geographic regions where wind regimes are not well-correlated with those of rich nations (Western Europe) are huge, hosting many nations.

>> The last Korean president was against nuclear and practically froze it in Korea.

> The newly elected president is pro-nuclear, though. I'm aware of some shady dealings with earlier plants, but I didn't see any good argument that it shifted the cost enought to really matter for the long term electricity price.

This is very difficult to say, however incidents and accidents do wildly raise costs, and shady practices raise the probability of incidents/accidents.

> Nuclear seem to have lower emissions than all "renewable" sources

This is contested as there was no solid assessment since 2014, and in the meantime recycling of renewable units progressed quite a bit, to the point of now being mandatory in more and more jurisdictions. Not to mention better load factors. On the nuclear side those are current estimated emissions, but they may sharply climb if more reactors are built as we will need more uranium => lower and lower ore grade => more emissions: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2051332

>> In any case who will build them?

> I said ideal, meaning that should be the goal. Every movement toward that goal would be positive. 30% is much better than going to 15%.

This, indeed, is not an option for the time being. I doubt it may become one before at the very least 2040. Too little, too late. In the meantime I can't see why the renewable boom won't continue.

> if there really is will to do it, it absolutely can be done

France really wants it, and struggle in a quagmire since the mid 2000's.

> Europe is unlikely to act with such resolve, though.

Indeed: member nations have too different conceptions and hopes about energy.

>> We more and more know how to build 'renewables'

> Yes, but like with nuclear, there is a lot of fudging the number even when not accounting for storage needs.

Very probably, however not being able to build nuclear reactors at realistic delays and costs stops it in the starting block, without even considering other potential problems (potential major accident, uranium dependency, dangerous waste disposal, effective decommission costs...)

> And for the storage part, all we have is some kind of hope that it will become cheap enough in the future.

This is fully determined by a detailed perspective (characteristics of an adequate (continental) mix).

> Northern Europe is almost at "Peak Renewable" already

There is potential (in Germany the current challenge is grid-related: North to South), and it becomes huge while going a little bit towards the South. France offshore wind potential, for example, is gigantic and completely untapped.

> (and Southern Europe doesn't seem very interested)

As far as I understand due to a lack of financial resources. Saturation of production units in Western Europe will diverse investments.

> For every new windmill we build from now on (without storage), we are going to add to price fluctuations, meaning that the sales price for wind (before subsidies) will be reduced for each mill.

This is only true globally and on average. Any new turbine implanted in a geographic zone enjoying wind regimes with sufficiently low correlation to the zones were existing fleets exist will produce when the spot price is high, and therefore be a very good investment.

> Being about 30 times lower than natural gas (without carbon capture) is only a rounding error away from zero, imo.

As long as it is profitable there will be investors, for example willing to play low risk (compensating low ROI), and satisfying the demand (energy consumption) usually leads it to grow.

>> it depends on a lot of countries participating. Maybe Greece has other ideas?

> Given their financial state I'm quite sure they will be interested in obtaining and selling gridpower.

Ok, so we disagree. My experience is that initiatives like this that depend on the participation of large numbers of independent entities to even get started, usually fail.

>> Nuclear seem to have lower emissions than all "renewable" sources

> This is contested as there was no solid assessment since 2014,

I was just referencing the link you provided.

> France really wants it, and struggle in a quagmire since the mid 2000's.

France already succeeded, the way I see it. My main concern is when countries like Sweden and Germany tear down their plants. France actually intends to build new ones.

> Any new turbine implanted in a geographic zone enjoying wind regimes with sufficiently low correlation to the zones were existing fleets exist will produce when the spot price is high, and therefore be a very good investment.

Your entire argument seems to hinge on the ability to average out production by a huge grid. You linked to a an article that references a Nature Climate Change paper, which is paywalled. The abstract from that paper doesn't provide numbers for exactly how much reduction in variability can be achieved, and what it would cost in terms of investments.

In the 1960's, forecasters promised that nuclear would provide energy so cheap it would essentially be free. Then there was a backlash that lasted almost two generations. Now, maybe, the understanding of nuclear is approaching neutral again.

My expectation, based on the hard numbers I've been able to find, is that wind power will hit a similar wall. The public will be disillusioned in many countries, and optimism will be replaced by pessimism. Maybe Denmark will remain pro wind power (like France has been for Nuclear), but in many places wind will simply be rejected.

At some point, renewables surely will take over, and maybe eventually solar will be so cheap that hydrogen can be produced at a lower cost than natural gas.

Until then, I think we should make sure we keep up our nuclear production, and add as much as possible.

>> Given their financial state I'm quite sure they will be interested in obtaining and selling gridpower.

> Ok, so we disagree. My experience is that initiatives like this that depend on the participation of large numbers of independent entities to even get started, usually fail.

The entire European Union was aggregated this way. One can doubt it is efficient or even good, however participation of a large number of nations is a done deal.

>>> Nuclear seem to have lower emissions than all "renewable" sources

>> This is contested as there was no solid assessment since 2014,

> I was just referencing the link you provided.

As noted there is AFAIK no solid more recent meta-study.

>> France really wants it, and struggle in a quagmire since the mid 2000's.

>> France already succeeded

France built its nuclear fleet starting 50 years ago. It was then a rich (thanks to the 30 Glorieuses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trente_Glorieuses ), shock-full of industries, electricity consumption is then the third of current amounts, and the project is highly strategic (due to the risk of oil embargo, as illustrated by effects of then recent wars in Israel).

Nothing of this is true anymore, and it makes for a huge difference.

> France actually intends to build new ones.

Indeed, since 2004 France tries to build an EPR reactor, the building process started in 2007 and was planned to deliver the reactor in 2012. It may be delivered in 2023, for nearly 6 times the budget...

> paywalled

You may find a copy at usual 'unofficial' sources (not that I hint to commit any potentially illegal action).

> what it would cost in terms of investments.

It studies wind regimes, not economics. This is a valid argument. The bottomline here is mainly the proportion of production surpluses which will become consumed electricity.

> In the 1960's, forecasters promised that nuclear would provide energy so cheap it would essentially be free. Then there was a backlash that lasted almost two > generations.

The real backlash started after TMI and was at its highest after Chernobyl (1986).

> Now, maybe, the understanding of nuclear is approaching neutral again.

In 2010 (just before Fukushima) it could be so.

> wind power will hit a similar wall. The public will be disillusioned

This is possible, however the probability of a major blunder à la TMI or Chernobyl implying wind turbines is very low.

> renewables surely will take over, and maybe eventually solar will be so cheap that hydrogen can be produced at a lower cost than natural gas.

Why not? However I doubt anyone now alive will see this.

> Until then, I think we should make sure we keep up our nuclear production

This is rather solid, but one has to consider some implications (risk of major accident, dangerous waste to be disposed of, I know: waste isn't a problem for you, however no nation (bar, to an extent, South Korea and Finland) have potentially proper long-term storage for it, and strictly not a single one has sufficient storage for its active fleet. This may not be as simple as some think, and this is not only a matter of "extreme" (useless) political measures: this stuff is nasty.

> and add as much as possible.

This is debatable, as building reactors become more and more slow and expensive, even in zones where the local power wants it and can enforce its will (China). Moreover each buck spent for this isn't available for a 'renewable' project.

> ...due to the risk of oil embargo ... > Nothing of this is true anymore, and it makes for a huge difference.

Technically, I suppose the risk now is gas embargo.

Also, I'm pretty sure GDP per capita is higher today than 50 years ago, even if they have not had the same growth as other countries.

> In 2010 (just before Fukushima) it could be so.

Maybe that depends on what sources you are exposed to. Those feeds that hit me are more positive now than in 2010, even if there was a setback after 2011.

Just a few days ago, Japan decided to restart nuclear plants:

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/5/27/japans-kishida-p...

> This is possible, however the probability of a major blunder à la TMI or Chernobyl implying wind turbines is very low.

Seen through my lenses, TMI and Fukushima were non-events that were blown out of proportion by a mislead and scared populace. Chernobyl was a real incident, but still nearly insignificant compared to deaths from coal based power plants every year.

For every radiation related death from these incidents, I would guess that 1000-1000000 died from the irrational fear that was generated, as it lead to increased use of coal based power.

If somehow the public could be made to understand that, they may actually learn to appreciate the benefits of nuclear power.

"Renewables" on the other hand, would not get a bad rep from an accident like that. Instead, if there is a period of high enery prices and maybe at some point even brownouts caused by uncontrolled variability of availability, I think more and more people are likely to feel mislead by the "renewable" proponents, and permanently lose trust in them.

At that point, I worry that an increasing number of people will start to demand their coal plants back.

> dangerous waste

Nuclear waste ranges from 30 year old medical lab gloves to freshly spent fuel.

Scary pictures like below tend to be from almost-harmless low grade waste: https://static.dw.com/image/17629832_401.jpg

The global amount of high grade wast, primarily spent fuel, is miniscule. Properly educating the public of the dangers (and lack thereof) of such fuels unfortunately requires some mathematical and science understanding (half-lives, exponential declines, isotopes).

But when I do the math, I don't see any kinds of existential dangers after 300-500 years. Any relatively stable deep mine is suitable to store the used fuel.

There are a few isotopes that are slightly more radioactive than background radition over a longer timeframe, but that's a tiny risk compared to naturally occuring radon gas. And if you are at all concerned about global warming, the risks from storage are infintisimal by comparison.

At worst, I think the expected harm from nuclear plants can be compared to the harm being done by windmills to natural wildlife (birds, mainly).

> This is debatable, as building reactors become more and more slow and expensive, even in zones where the local power wants it and can enforce its will (China)

Prices per kwh in China still seem quite reasonable. In general, as technologies mature, prices SHOULD come down over time. When that doesn't happer, there tends to be external factors.

> Moreover each buck spent for this isn't available for a 'renewable' project.

Maybe, or maybe not. So far, France has been far more successful in phasing out fossil fuels than Germany. For a generation, their emissions have been much lower than Germany's. I don't know exactly which country has had the greatest expenses in doing so (including energy price, subsidies, direct government investments, etc), but I would not be surprised if the total investments by France have been lower.

My bet is that France will continue to be performing better than Germany well in to the 2030's, or perhaps further. When and if Germany finally catches up, it will take another 30-50 years of low greenhouse gas emissions to "catch up" to France's performance, in terms of aggregate emissions.

To add insult to injury, the German energy model has created a massive reliance on Putin's Russia for their natural gas. Russia has already started to cut off deliveries to countries not complying with their demands. If Germany is going to wean themselves off Russian energy, it will require pretty massive investments in all of the LNG value chain. And in doing so, they will replace dependency on Russia with dependency on autocratic monarchies in the Middle East.

> Moreover each buck spent for this isn't available for a 'renewable' project. (repeated quote)

So, instead of making this an either/or, all or nothing experiment, I claim that a 50/50 split (or therearound) of those investments is rational. Nuclear for most of the base load, at least until all coal is gone. As much renewable energy as we are able to build without reaching instability in the supply. And some combination of natural gas, hydrogen and storage to even out the bumps.

All should be required and incentivised to focus on keeping costs down. Special interest groups should be prevented from causing too many price increases.

>> France's capacity to build nuclear reactors (in the past and now)

> I'm pretty sure GDP per capita is higher today than 50 years ago

They do, but money doesn't replace industrial know-how and tools. France massively relocated various (especially heavy) industries, starting in the 1980's.

> Just a few days ago, Japan decided to restart nuclear plants: > https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/5/27/japans-kishida-p...

This is a pledge, about only a few ones, after quite a delay (since 2011), formulated because this nation cannot do otherwise (lack of other types of sources, as it has to phase-out a huge amount of coal-burning plants and lacks on renewables. Moreover this politician "is not considering any new facilities". Before Fukushima nuclear produced 30% of Japan's electricy, and plans were to let this grow to 40%...

Moreover even restarting some plants is not necessarily easy, accepted by the population, and legal: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20220531_12/

> TMI and Fukushima were non-events that were blown out of proportion by a mislead and scared populace

For all those accidents there is no consensus about the long-term impact on health and the environment. Chernobyl's victims scientific evaluations range from "a few hundred" to "nearly 1 million", with many intermediate values (4000, 19000, 60000...)

TMI: I never could find any technical explanation for the miracle (the meltdown was partial, not complete).

At Fukushima cleaning-up (its efficiency is disputed) and compensations amount to hundreds of billions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos...

> Chernobyl was a real incident, but still nearly insignificant compared to deaths from coal

Nobody here advocates coal!

> For every radiation related death from these incidents, I would guess that 1000-1000000 died from the irrational fear that was generated, as it lead to increased use of coal based power.

Maybe, albeit in at least some cases preferring some renewable source was possible but neglected.

> If somehow the public could be made to understand that

Convincing the public is a burden for the nuclear industry, and it tries hard.

> "Renewables" on the other hand, would not get a bad rep from an accident like that

How exactly could they trigger similar accidents: dangerous particles (radionucleides) floating in wind and rain, polluting vast amount of land (in some places for decades)...?

> maybe at some point even brownouts caused by uncontrolled variability of availability

Maybe, indeed, if the ways to alleviate variability aren't sufficient.

> Nuclear waste ranges > I don't see any kinds of existential dangers after 300-500 years

No, for example if this waste reaches a water table...

Moreover this is also tied to ethic standpoint: do we have the right to let such bad stuff to future generations (and yes, this also applies to fossil fuels)?

> Any relatively stable deep mine is suitable to store the used fuel.

That's some touted for Asse II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine

> if you are at all concerned about global warming, the risks from storage are infintisimal by comparison.

Renewable sources don't produce such dangerous waste.

> the expected harm from nuclear plants can be compared to the harm being done by windmills to natural wildlife (birds, mainly).

This is a difficult exercise. In many nations wind turbines proponents (many 'greens') don't neglect this, many jurisdictions enforce more and more strict rules (albeit they sometimes are neglected in order to accelerate deployment) and pertinent groups suggestions are considered https://abcbirds.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Bird-Smart-W...

> Prices per kwh in China still seem quite reasonable

Auditing is very difficult.

> as technologies mature, prices SHOULD come down over time. When that doesn't happer, there tends to be external factors.

Yes, multiple factors. One being that what was deemed adequate safety-wise isn't anymore, leading to new costs.

>> Moreover each buck spent for this isn't available for a 'renewable' project.

> So far, France has been far more successful in phasing out fossil fuels than Germany

It was true until the last nuclear reactor was built in France, in 1999 ('Civaux-2' reactor). Afterwards France is trying hard to obtain a reactor since 2007, while Germany deploys renewables. By far the main reason France enhances its emissions since 1999 is its renewables deployment. Nuclear didn't further reduce emissions (no new reactor => no new decarbonating nuclear equipment).

> My bet is that France will continue to be performing better than Germany well in to the 2030's

Thanks to nuclear? This is impossible, as France doesn't hope to have more than 3 new reactors by 2040. France may keep up because it also deploys renewables, but using only nuclear will set it way back.

> aggregate emissions

Yes, this is a major point! Germany's quick phasing-out of existing reactors done without even considering reducing its consumption was a terrible decision, however renewables aren't 'guilty' of this.

> the German energy model has created a massive reliance on Putin's Russia for their natural gas

Please allow me to insist: the main France's uranium provider is Kazakhstan, which obeys to Putin, and this side of the challenge exists even for the US: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exclusive-us-utiliti...

> a 50/50 split (or therearound) of those investments is rational. Nuclear for most of the base load, at least until all coal is gone. As much renewable energy as we are able to build without reaching instability in the supply. And some combination of natural gas, hydrogen and storage to even out the bumps.

Calculating the amount of reactors it implies then considering the global capacity to build them is taunting. Given the result I doubt simply accepting way lower safety standards will fix the problem, and as noted the NIMBY effect will soar. Then after any non-trivial incident all the project will be thrown out of the window. Investors know about this, therefore such a project may not even be able start.

> All should be required and incentivised to focus on keeping costs down.

Most incentives have at best mediocre effects. In France subsidies were lampooned by the Court of Audit for failing to boost national industrial capacity.

> Special interest groups should be prevented from causing too many price increases.

I don't know of any sure way to do so devoid of any serious risk.

> For all those accidents there is no consensus about the long-term impact on health and the environment. Chernobyl's victims scientific evaluations range from "a few hundred" to "nearly 1 million", with many intermediate values (4000, 19000, 60000...)

This is like saying there is no consensus about climate change. You will always find nuts on each end. Some claim humanity will go extinct around 2030-2040, and some say climate change does not happen or if it does, it is mostly beneficial.

If we cut away the crazy people on either end, the last three scenarios you listed (4000, 19000, 60000) represent the "mainstream" estimates. Regardless of which of those you use, Nuclear power in aggregate come out as remarkably safe per GWh.

> At Fukushima cleaning-up (its efficiency is disputed) and compensations amount to hundreds of billions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos...

Japanese response was irrational. There are areas on earth where natural background radiation is higher than what they were "cleaning up".

> Nobody here advocates coal!

Up until today, the only real alternative to nuclear has been fossil fuels, and for a long time, primarily coal. Maybe that will change in the future (you seem to think so), but since Chernobyl until today, lack of investment in Nuclear has certainly been made up for primarily by coal. (Some of the development in wind and solar would have happened anyway.)

>> Nuclear waste ranges > I don't see any kinds of existential dangers after 300-500 years

> No, for example if this waste reaches a water table...

That's pretty unlikely if the mine is deep enough. It's not like one would bury it in the sands under the beaches of Denmark. Anyway, even after such a time period, the dilution that will happen in such a case means that the polution from such an event would be marginal.

Say it gets burried in the bedrocks of central Scandinavia, which has been geologically stable for billions of years, you're pretty safe.

> That's some touted for Asse II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine

That wiki page mentions low- and medium grade waste, I don't see high grade waste mentioned.

Also, 100Bq/l is not really scary, unless you use it directly for drinking water, before it is diluted.

This is the thing about radioactivity, most people don't know the difference between 100Bq/g, 100Bq/l and 100Bq/m^3.

And this is a worst case similar to Chernobyl, from the early days of Nuclear.

> Moreover this is also tied to ethic standpoint: do we have the right to let such bad stuff to future generations (and yes, this also applies to fossil fuels)?

This applies to almost everything we do, from plastics to various chemicals DNA modifications and so on. Not to speak of existential dangers, such as nuclear war, technological singularity, gray goo, etc.

Imagine a world where humanity has already used up all economically available fissile materials as fuel. Maybe we can stop being scared about nuclear war? One could argue that it is our responsibility to make that happen.

> Yes, multiple factors. One being that what was deemed adequate safety-wise isn't anymore, leading to new costs.

Obviously paranoia, resulting from anti-nuclear scare-mongering. ;) But this is not the only factor. Even between reactors of the same nominal security class, there is huge variation in cost. I would claim this is due to poor execution, corruption, political medelling, etc.

> Thanks to nuclear? This is impossible, as France doesn't hope to have more than 3 new reactors by 2040. France may keep up because it also deploys renewables, but using only nuclear will set it way back.

My bet is that France will have lower per capita greenhouse gas emissions than Germany in 2032 and possibly all the way to 2040. Due in part to nuclear, in part to "renewables", and where nuclear is the differentiating factor, since Germany will have more "renewables".

Again, nuclear and "renewables" are not mutually exclusive, and if France is able to deploy both, it proves that point.

> Calculating the amount of reactors it implies then considering the global capacity to build them is taunting. Given the result I doubt simply accepting way lower safety standards will fix the problem, and as noted the NIMBY effect will soar

I'm not arguing for lowering safety compared to what is in operation today. Just that maybe, most current plants have shown themselves to be safe enough. (Obviously, no Chernobyl-level plants should be constructed again). So what I'm arguing is that safety levels should be approximately at a Gen3 level, and that modern technology should be aimed at lowering prices instead of improving safety even further.

> and as noted the NIMBY effect will soar.

Take school (around 12-17 years old) children on school trips to places of high air polution, show them pictures and videos of what air polution is doing to human and animal health. Let them breathe the air near some old dirty coal plant for a few hours.

Then take them to a nuclear plant. Teach about the relative dangers of nuclear and coal, in some visual way. (Ie 1000 corpses dead from lung diseases vs 1 corpse dead from cancer.) Teach about radiation from cosmic rays, radon gas and nuclear plants, and let them understand how radiation from the nuclear plant is going to be less dangerous than the cosmic rays of a single plane trip.

Then take them to a windpower plant. Let them listen to the music of the windmills, and maybe allow them to see a few dead birds.

This can be done in the very same manner that is used to teach about climate change, polution, etc, and indeed may be part of the same programme. Keep it fact based and within the scientific mainstream.

Make them understand why coal that is really, really bad, on every dimension, and that nuclear vs wind power is debatable. Not through propaganda, just by facts and science.

Obviously, in ares where the generic population is already heavily anti-nuclear, chances are they will not invest much in nuclear over the next 5-10 years. But in areas where nuclear is partially accepted, eductation through government controlled channels can absolutely be used to move the needle from "mixed" to "accepted". I'm not talking about spreading false propaganda, but rather to spread mainstream scientific knowledge and to (within legal limits) counteract misinformation from fringe special interest groups (whether in the fossile fuel industry or some kind of irrational climate activist group).

And every contribution helps. If such an activity can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 10%, this will push back climate change by years or maybe a decade, and we will be that much closer to have fully developed the renewable technolgies needed to make renewables a fully viable approach. (If renewables are able to fully replace nuclear in this role in 2030, then great, if renewables continue to struggle with the stability and capacity issues until 2050 or beyond, having additional nuclear capabilities will postpone the adverse effects of global warming.

>> For all those accidents there is no consensus about the long-term impact on health and the environment

> This is like saying there is no consensus about climate change.

No, as there are very few and less and less scientists claiming that climate change cannot be observed. Can you quote one? Even those claiming that anthropogenic causes are negligible are only a tiny and quickly disappearing group, while polemics about the effects of exposure to radionucleides (hormesis, external/internal...) stems many polemics among scientists since at least the 1950's until now.

>> At Fukushima cleaning-up

> Japanese response was irrational

Without even challenging this thesis: the population in Japan is well-known as organized, highly educated, obedient and ready for sacrifice.

> since Chernobyl until today, lack of investment in Nuclear has certainly been made up for primarily by coal

In many nations (France, the US, Russia...) Chernobyl didn't really impede nuclear development.

>> Nuclear waste

> That's pretty unlikely if the mine is deep enough

The depth of our knowledge about all this is quite limited. Plate tectonics was only accepted during the 1960's...

> This is the thing about radioactivity, most people don't know the difference between 100Bq/g, 100Bq/l and 100Bq/m^3.

This is tied to uncertainties about long-term effect of low-level exposure.

>> Moreover this is also tied to ethic standpoint: do we have the right to let such bad stuff to future generations

> This applies to almost everything we do

This doesn't preclude the logical conclusion: the cleaner way has a major advantage.

> Imagine a world where humanity has already used up all economically available fissile materials as fuel. Maybe we can stop being scared about nuclear war?

Even in such a world some will obtain a nuclear weapon, even at a very high price.

>> One being that what was deemed adequate safety-wise isn't anymore, leading to new costs.

> Obviously paranoia

This is subjective. In the 2000's many touted that, obviously, a western-designed reactor, well-built, supervised and exploited by serious people just cannot let any dangerous material wander away, then Fukushima happened.

> Even between reactors of the same nominal security class, there is huge variation in cost. I would claim this is due to poor execution, corruption, political medelling, etc.

This is indeed part of the causes.

> My bet is that France will have lower per capita greenhouse gas emissions than Germany in 2032 and possibly all the way to 2040

Maybe, however since 1999 both nations only further decarbonate thanks to renewables.

> nuclear and "renewables" are not mutually exclusive, and if France is able to deploy both, it proves that point.

It doesn't prove that a dollar (or euro, for this matter) invested in nuclear stays available for 'renewables', and this doesn't come as a surprise. Therefore lenghty and overbudget nuclear projects delivering clonky plants aren't as efficient as 'renewables'.

> most current plants have shown themselves to be safe enough > safety levels should be approximately at a Gen3 level

Aren't all current models (EPR, AP1000...) exactly of this kind?

> modern technology should be aimed at lowering prices instead of improving safety even further.

As far as I know that's exactly the trend since the 2010's, well-illustrated by the quest for SMRs.

> and as noted the NIMBY effect will soar (leading to new problems, such a shttps://news.stanford.edu/2022/05/30/small-modular-reactors-... )

> Take school (around 12-17 years old) children on school trips to places of high air polution, show them pictures and videos of what air polution is doing to human and animal health. Let them breathe the air near some old dirty coal plant for a few hours. > Then take them to a nuclear plant

Don't forget to let them talk to people who lived near Chernobyl and Fukushima during the accidents...

> in areas where nuclear is partially accepted, eductation through government controlled channels can absolutely be used

In my opinion and whatever the subject such 'education' quickly becomes sheer propaganda and may even transmute into totalitarianism.

> to spread mainstream scientific knowledge

There are scientists, including nuclear scientists, against nuclear energy (in France: B. Laponche), and many explicitly prefer 'renewables'.

> If such an activity can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 10%

The main aspect of this is trust placed in politicians and science, and from what I see it falls down. More and more think that nobody can understand, and therefore predict, and therefore adequately govern anymore. Many technological 'solutions' were implemented then created a major problem. The real outcome of 'techno-solutionism' is debatable and subjective, it may even be positive, however this defiance seems ubiquitous and government-induced 'education' aiming at countering will IMHO at best fail flat.

> we will be that much closer to have fully developed the renewable technolgies needed to make renewables a fully viable approach

That's the core of the argument. In my opinion there is nothing new to discover/develop (it could be useful but isn't necessary), only building is needed: production units adequately spread out (to reduce storage needs to a level we can satisfy), powerlines, storage...

> No, as there are very few and less and less scientists claiming that climate change cannot be observed. Can you quote one?

Here is an article that is climate sceptic without being completely crazy : https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-climate-change-is-go....

It's not arguing that climate change is not happening, only that the net effect is positive, if the warming is only moderate.

> In many nations (France, the US, Russia...) Chernobyl didn't really impede nuclear development.

I don't really believe that, Chernobyl certainly seemed to affect the zeitgeist when it happened. But these things are hard to prove one way or another.

> Plate tectonics was only accepted during the 1960's...

Almost nothing is 100% certain, but the probability that some bedrock formations are stable over the next 1000 years is pretty high (really close to 100%). And minor leakage 800 years from now is unlikely to cause much harm, especially if we have not already blasted each other with nukes before that time.

> This is tied to uncertainties about long-term effect of low-level exposure.

We actually know quite a lot about this. The LNT model that is often used, is a worst case scenario for dealing with risks too small to measure. Even if it is true, for any individual, such exposure exposes them to a risk that is so small it cannot be measured. One could say "There is no evidence that such small doses are harmful." Another way to put it, is that the risks of such low levels of radiation are smaller than getting a covid vaccine.

And that is the worst case scenario. There are also good arguments why even the unmeasurably tiny (but still assumed by LNT) is too pessimistic. Here is a relatively recent paper arguing for dropping the LNT model:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6043938/

Radioactivity exposure below 100mSv is the limit for what leads to measurable increased cancer risks. During the cleanup from Fukushima, only about 174 workers received doses higher than that. In that group, the lifetime expected expected increase in cancer cases is 3 people. (From a baseline of 70 to an increased level of 73).

https://www.irsn.fr/EN/publications/thematic-safety/fukushim....

Compare that to the 15899 deaths from the Tsunami itself, that we never talk about anymore.

> This doesn't preclude the logical conclusion: the cleaner way has a major advantage.

Two fallacies here:

1) You assume that a better choice is available. That is only true if we will actually go for an alternative policy that is, in the end, cleaner. I don't see the proof of that yet. (Coal can also cause long term harm, and already has.) (Nirvana fallacy) 2) Even if you do end up in a cleaner scenario, you still have to prove that the difference is "major", or leave that word out.

> Even in such a world some will obtain a nuclear weapon, even at a very high price.

If the price of nuclear weapons go up, I'm all for that. I'm not worried about 1 or 100 or even 1000 nuclear weapons going off 500 years from now. But 1000000 bombs going off at once would be a shame.

Oh, and even 100 going off will cause way more damage than some leak in a storage pool.

>> Obviously paranoia

> This is subjective. In the 2000's many touted that, obviously, a western-designed reactor, well-built, supervised and exploited by serious people just cannot let any dangerous material wander away, then Fukushima happened

Whether is paranoia is not subjective, but it may be whether or not it is obvious may be subjective.

Whoever promised that western designed reactors would never have a leak, over-promised. Over-promising is risky. But the real damage caused by the leak (from radiation) is low-to-none, even if you just compare to the damage that would have been caused by any alternative cause of electricity over the Fukushima plant's lifetime. This is objectively true.

> It doesn't prove that a dollar (or euro, for this matter) invested in nuclear stays available for 'renewables', and this doesn't come as a surprise. Therefore lenghty and overbudget nuclear projects delivering clonky plants aren't as efficient as 'renewables'.

I don't think you're right, but let's assume that you are. But what it DOES prove, is that whatever policy France as been conducting has been much more effective in limiting greenhouse gas emissions, even if the French investments in renewables are tiny compared to Germany's. Maybe the French overpaid, but I don't think so.

>> most current plants have shown themselves to be safe enough > safety levels should be approximately at a Gen3 level

> Aren't all current models (EPR, AP1000...) exactly of this kind?

No, there are also Gen 3+ reactors in operation.

My claim is that capping the security level at what Gen 3 can provide (or even slightly lower) will make future reactors cheaper, since alternative means can be used to achieve that security (advancements in gen 3+ or gen 4 can be used to compensate from some compromises in gen3 security measues, instead of being added on top of those measures).

> Don't forget to let them talk to people who lived near Chernobyl and Fukushima during the accidents...

For most kids in the world, travelling to Ukraine or Japan is economically unviable. Also, it's not good education to focus on worst cases. What effect do you think it would have to have school-kids talk with survivors of gang-rape by african immigrants? Maybe we don't want the kind of racism that would generate?

> In my opinion and whatever the subject such 'education' quickly becomes sheer propaganda and may even transmute into totalitarianism.

There are certainly expamples that favour your prediction. But we have to teach the kids SOMETHING, and I prefer that they learn what is scientifically defensible, instead of what is preferred by some ideology.

> There are scientists, including nuclear scientists, against nuclear energy (in France: B. Laponche), and many explicitly prefer 'renewables'.

Name a belief, and there will probably be at least 1 scientist believing it. Those who are particularily commited to some religion or ideology may very well support opinions that are far removed from the scientific consensus.

B. Laponche doesn't even have an English Wikipedia page, so I have to presume he is not an authority in the field.

> The main aspect of this is trust placed in politicians and science, and from what I see it falls down.

This is a good point. "Science" has been compromised over the last few years. Which is why there is a need to educate the population, and in particular the youngest generation, about what is real science and who masquerade as science (and who are in-between). Ideologes who use "Science" as a weapon must have their pants pulled down.

> That's the core of the argument. In my opinion there is nothing new to discover/develop (it could be useful but isn't necessary), only building is needed: production units adequately spread out (to reduce storage needs to a level we can satisfy), powerlines, storage...

You may hold this opinion, but the fact is that it hasn't been done yet. Also, I've yet to see a full-fledged plan that covers all aspects in detail, including cost estimates from anything from storage needs to building and maintaining super-high-voltage grids to enable long-distance transfers.

As we speak, the spot price of electricity in Southern Norway is 10-15x higher than Northern Norway, due to limitations of the grid. (about 0.011 vs 0.145 euro/KWh). This difference is entirely due to exports.

Further up you claimed that renewables are cheaper than nuclear power. My counter argument that, whether or not you're right, France has already paid the difference. My estimate is that for renewables to be price-competitive as a stable energy source, huge investments in grid-capacity and/or storage is needed, which will bring the price up to a level that is likely to exceed the cost of nuclear, given currently available technology.

If storage technology continues to fall exponentially, we will surely/hopefully get there within this century, but I don't fully buy that simply distributing production is enough (until a full economic analysis is presented).

>> there are very few and less and less scientists claiming that climate change cannot be observed

> Here is an article that is climate sceptic without being completely crazy : https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-climate-change-is-go.... > the net effect is positive, if the warming is only moderate.

It dates back 2013, and many studies were published since, showing that the warming isn't moderate. The main argument revolves around Pr. Tol (he is an economist, not a climatologist or physician) arguments, which since evolved and are to be put in perspective https://www.desmog.com/richard-tol/

>> In many nations (France, the US, Russia...) Chernobyl didn't really impede nuclear development.

> I don't really believe that

In France the plan ('Plan Messmer') was executed, not a single planed reactor was canceled (some sites were because the project infuriated local people, but other sites replaced them), until its end in 1999.

>> This is tied to uncertainties about long-term effect of low-level exposure. > the risks of such low levels of radiation

This (LNT...) is not settled among scientists. Critics (for example in the very article you quoted) argue about observation made upon bomb survivors. One of the main problem with that is the way those studies were conducted. In Japan after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example, scientists examined people and paid them for this. Therefore a large amount of people who were not exposed (too far away from the impact) lied about this in order to be examined, severely biasing the study. Moreover dead or very ill people tend to not go see scientists in order to be examined. Nuclear workers are also difficult to assess because many of them were (and even are, right now) not permanent workers (temporary/interim). Same for the 'liquidators'. And so on. As already stated some meta-studies paint a not-so-reinsuring reality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...

> Compare that to the 15899 deaths from the Tsunami itself, that we never talk about anymore.

Because we cannot decide upon tsunami activity, however we sure can decide to abstain from running nuclear reactors. Some deaths were due to the panic triggered by the Fukushima nuclear plant accident.

> 1) You assume that a better choice is available

This is the core of the argument.

Renewables are cheaper (and going cheaper), induce no major risk nor dependency towards uranium (geostrategic risk + growing amount of emissions due to declining ore grade), nor difficult decommission, nor very dangerous waste.

And we know how to build them en masse, right now (this is not true anymore for nuclear reactors).

Adequately mixed (solar, wind...), spread out, and with help (storage, curtailment and backup) they generate continuously.

Storage solutions exist: hydraulic, V2G, green hydrogen...

Backup with modern gas turbines burning more and more green hydrogen (less and less methane) is OK (remember: even in nuclear-champion France fossil-fuel-burning plant produce approx 9% of the electricity, that is to say ~30 days per year).

Frankly this seems a no-brainer to me.

> the real damage caused by the leak (from radiation) is low-to-none

Many details are of importance here, for example only 3 reactors (out of 6) were active (all suffered a meltdown), there were not too may fuel assemblies (reactor #4 was even empty)... The main point is that any health-related assessment is difficult and can only be conducted at least 15 years after the accident («radiation-induced solid tumors usually take 10–15 years, and can take up to 40 years»).

> is that whatever policy France as been conducting has been much more effective in limiting greenhouse gas emissions, even if the French investments in renewables are tiny compared to Germany's.

France's nuclear program started in 1970's, while France was very industrialized and rich (30 Glorieuses : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trente_Glorieuses ) and under a real strategic duress (trying to alleviate the risk of oil embargo, well-perceived as strategic there after Arab-Israel wars then OPEP), not phasing-out existing (fossil-fuel) units and with a total consumption of electricity 1/3 of what it is since the 2010

Germany's program (Energiewende), really started in 2010, after many major economic crisi,s they weren't as (relatively rich) as France in the 1970s, they also were more de-industrialized (esp. heavy industry), they quickly phase-out nuclear existing units, the quantity of electricity to be produced is vastly superior, this was not a strategic program (and one may argue that is isn't really right now, compared to France's)...

> Maybe the French overpaid, but I don't think so.

It is very probable, as even the Court of Audit could not estimate the costs.

>> most current plants have shown themselves to be safe enough > safety levels should be approximately at a Gen3 level

>> Aren't all current models (EPR, AP1000...) exactly of this kind?

> No, there are also Gen 3+ reactors in operation.

AS far as I know the only one were running at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant and are shut down https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashiwazaki-Kariwa_Nuclear_Pow...

> capping the security level at what Gen 3 can provide or even slightly lower) will make future reactors cheaper

This is very probably true, however the slightest incident happening to such a reactor may then impede this approach.

> Don't forget to let them talk to people who lived near Chernobyl and Fukushima during the accidents...

> it's not good education to focus on worst cases

Nor is it to completely hide them.

> What effect do you think it would have to have school-kids talk with survivors of gang-rape by african immigrants?

The point here is to insist upon the fact that african immigrants aren't the only type perpetrating such crimes. Local, white, christian or atheistic... one can easily find representatives of any type guilty of this.

> we have to teach the kids SOMETHING, and I prefer that they learn what is scientifically defensible

I agree, and when it comes to risk detailing in this way the renewable/nuclear debate may prove interesting and useful.

>> There are scientists, including nuclear scientists, against nuclear energy (in France: B. Laponche), and many explicitly prefer 'renewables'.

> Name a belief, and there will probably be at least 1 scientist believing it

I doubt most scientists would (explicitly and upon purely scientific criteria) favor nuclear over renewables.

> B. Laponche doesn't even have an English Wikipedia page, so I have to presume he is not an authority in the field.

He is old but used to be, in France. One cannot survive in any field without supporting it anymore.

> Ideologes who use "Science" as a weapon must have their pants pulled down.

Yes, and this is very difficult because tedious (not spectacular enough to stay present in mass-media).

(renewables)

> the fact is that it hasn't been done yet

The challenge (transition towards a new energetic system) is immense, the pursuit started recently, and our time of crisis does not facilitate. However the results already are IMHO quite good: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/nrg_ind_ured/...

> I've yet to see a full-fledged plan that covers all aspects in detail

This is very difficult as even simply predicting the amount of electricity needed isn't possible, there are many (very distinct) hypothesis.

> including cost estimates from anything from storage needs

> to building and maintaining super-high-voltage grids to enable long-distance transfers.

Those are useful even with a 100% nuclear approach. Renewables only impact their dimensions.

> the spot price of electricity in Southern Norway is 10-15x higher than Northern Norway

Yes, a huge grid is key (whatever the type of production units).

> you claimed that renewables are cheaper than nuclear power. My counter argument that, whether or not you're right, France has already paid the difference.

As stated no one knows how much public money costed the French nuclear program. Moreover the outcome will only be known after complete phase-out and decommission, because decommission-and-waste-mangement costs may skyrocket. Moreover any serious accident may completely change the total picture.

> for renewables to be price-competitive as a stable energy source, huge investments in grid-capacity and/or storage is needed

Both are, however probably to a lower extent than one may think as (as already stated) supergrids are useful (renewables only change the scale), and some storage (V2G...) may prove way cheaper than planned. Not even considering the cost of a really adequate insurance policy covering long-term nuclear risk.

> distributing production is enough

The core point is here: what effect does it have with respect to baseload, that is to say qualification of "insufficient production" state (to which extent? how often? how long?), and studies show that spreading out has a major beneficial effect (in a detailed case it divides overprovisions by 5).

When it comes to reducing production variability (providing a near-baseload) spreading production units out at continental scale is key ( Europe: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-... ), and using a mix (wind, solar...) helps.

Then comes storage, and one of the gorillas in the room (cost, ubiquity, total power and aggregated throughput...) name is "V2G" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid ).

> Gas still produces pretty large amounts of greenhouse gases, even if it's a bit under half compared to coal:

> https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11#:~:text=In...

That link only talks about CO2 emission. When you include other greenhouse gases, mainly methane and methane leaks in the systems, gas becomes closer to coal, no longer under one half. Gas is about as bad as coal if you'd only count the CO2 from burning coal. But coal actually also releases methane into air, so including estimates of leaked methane for both gas and coal mining and transport, in this German study gas comes out 30% better than coal (Global Warming Potential 20 years time horizon), or 55% better (GWP 100 years horizon).

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-90839-7

Gas also has staffing advantages over coal. A handful of people gan operate a bank of gas turbines; coal plants take dozens; nuke plants take hundreds.

Pumped storage depends on geography, and it is not viable in most places. Hence, your claim that it is cheaper than nuclear is unreasonable.

> minus its free catastrophe insurance

Many more people have died from dam collapses in the last fifty years than nuclear accidents.

> Every kwh of solar and wind produced electricity right now > is a kwh not produced by gas and will be for some time > almost everywhere.

We don't have a general-purpose solution to storage. As a result there is waste overproduction of solar and wind at some times, and under-production at other times. Those under-production windows need to be covered by base-load forms of energy production such as gas and nuclear.

No, even with low estimations of the amount of nuclear victims (those published by UN's Word Health Organization) solar/wind/hydro are the safest ones and any new major nuclear disaster may further imbalance: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Hydro is very terrain-dependent, solar and wind can't do baseload, so for baseload nuclear is still best applicable in most parts of the world. Nuclear saves a lot of lives by displacing other, way more dangerous baseload operations. [0]

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy#contrary...

> solar and wind can't do baseload

Not really, as we know how, at continental scale, adequately use wind and solar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31557422

The data used by that study is actually based on the pessimistic estimates from the older WHO analysis. If you use the more modern estimates by the UNSCEAR (the United Nations body dealing with effects of radiation), nuclear power is safer than any other kind of power on a per-TWh basis. It's not really honest to say that an already pessimistic estimate (which is now considered by at least some scientists -- including the UN body dealing with the topic -- to be incorrect) might be underestimating total deaths from Chernobyl.

There is no universally accepted way to estimate the amount of victims.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...

The Wikipedia article you linked to says that work was not peer-reviewed and four academic reviews were published criticising it (with only one positive review which still said it had shortcomings). You can choose to believe that Chernobyl killed just shy of 1 million people but that's at odds with all peer-reviewed research on the topic (which projects it will reach the mid-to-low thousands in total, with the current death toll in the hundreds at most).

Everybody can read about the authors and methods, abut the critics and their answer to it.

> mid-to-low thousands in total, with the current death toll in the hundreds at most

... isn't exactly summarizing the (quite large) spectrum of estimations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disas...

Chernobyl killed millions or tens of millions of people:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/09/fossil-f...

Let's say Chernobyl didn't happen, then I would guess around 10% of those fossil fuel deaths would have been prevented.

Quick calculation 8.7mill/year * 10 % * 30 years = 26.1 million.

So, lets say that the pessimistic side of "mainstream" research on number of deaths from Chernobyl is 26000, the "nuclear scare" effect still caused maybe 1000x as many deaths.

Even if I'm off by an order of magnitude, that's still 100x.

I agree that anti-nuclear sentiment has killed millions of people, but the comparison being made here is how different forms of power kill people. In that comparison, including fossil fuel deaths as "deaths caused by Chernobyl" is not reasonable since it obfuscates which source of power is causing the deaths.

Irony can be hard to communicate in text. Sorry for causing a misunderstanding.

My point was that I fully support that nuclear is not only safe, but a technology that saves millions of lives every year, since without it, the world would use coal instead.

Furthermore, if more coal could be replaced by nuclear, it would not only delay global warming, but also potentially save tens of millions of lives.

The extra cost per GWh is more than made up for in health benefits. But if the costs are seen as too high for current powerplant models, it should be possible to bring the costs down a lot if they are mass-produced and some more to gain from slighly relaxing regulations where the price/benefit of regulations is unreasonable.

>Pumped storage depends on geography

It does but unlike for dams that geography is extremely common:

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-spot-530-000-potenti...

>We don't have a general-purpose solution to storage

We're already building this general purpose solution at large scale. Snowy 2, fengning, coire glas.

The cheap, safe mass produced nuclear reactor, meanwhile, remains just as vaporware as it was 20 years ago.

> More more people have died from dam collapses in the last fifty years than nuclear accidents.

And vastly more lives have been saved by dams preventing flooding (something nuclear isn't particularly good at) and providing a stable water supply (again, nuclear doesn't do so well here).

People seem to forget that dams aren't just built for electricity generation.

Also, a lot of the dam/flood deaths are horrible corporate mining bund collapsing etc, not high end public power infra. Would be interesting to see the numbers on 1) first world countries and 2) first world countries excluding the US which seems to have such a dysfunctional attitude to public works. I very much doubt scandi countries or Germany are killing many people this way.

What solar/wind displaces varies a lot by location. Coal is used much more than gas. According to https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by... the top 3 are coal, gas, hydro.

For places with hydro it's effectively energy storage for wind/solar.

Your post seems to imply that solar and wind have not been heavily subsidized.

>Solar + wind arent the same or cheaper, theyre much cheaper.

Wind has received many different government subsidies over time. The GAO found 82 different types of subsidies even 9 years ago: https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-13-136.pdf

The largest subsidy was likely the production tax credit of $23 per megawatt-hour through the first ten years of a turbine’s operation. I think starting last year that one is being phased out.

But no power source has been as subsidized as roof-top solar. That has never been cheap and won't be cheap in the future. Rooftop solar lives off of huge subsidies from the government. Wealthier home owners are often paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid and are subsidized by higher electricity bills by those who can't afford to put panels on their roof - sort of a reverse Robinhood scheme.

I'm not at all implying that they haven't been subsidized. I'm implying that, unlike the nuclear subsidies, A) those subsidies were good value for money and B) these technologies are viable without subsidies, which nuclear isn't.

>But no power source has been as subsidized as roof-top solar.

This simply isn't true. Rooftop solar has been slammed with heavy import tariffs ever since Obama and while feed in tariffs have been generous in the past they haven't been generous for some years now.

The subsidies for nuclear likely saved more than a million lives that would have been lost to air pollution if the industry did not exist and coal had been used instead. One might argue those subsidies were a good value for money - if you care about human life.

>>But no power source has been as subsidized as roof-top solar.

>This simply isn't true. Rooftop solar has been slammed with heavy import tariffs ever since Obama and while feed in tariffs have been generous in the past they haven't been generous for some years now.

The import tariffs have little impact on the costs of rooftop solar. The big price for rooftop is the large amounts of human labor and the inverters etc that aren't needed for utility grid solar. While feed in tariffs might have been lowered in some jurisdictions, they certainly aren't lower in big markets like CA. There the PUC was going to lower the credit to 5 cents a KW and the uproar from wealthy people was large enough that the plan was put on hold. The 5 cents is still more than the 3 cents it costs PG&E for nuclear power, but if the change was implemented, "The manufacturers of solar systems predicted the death of solar in California,". Rooftop solar was never, is not and will not ever be cheap.

https://www.ocregister.com/2022/04/29/ghosted-by-the-puc-fol...

Is it possible that we could have a permanent (small) presence of fossil fuel energy to smooth out capacity?

Not if we want to stop global warming. What we can do instead is store renewable power as methane or hydrogen and burn that when batteries are insufficient to cover. But perhaps advances in grid scale batteries will make even that obsolete.

There is some leeway in global warming as on net the earth sequesters more carbon the higher the atmospheric CO2 levels, it’s just nowhere near fast enough to keep up with current output.

Unfortunately we already emitted enough carbon to force pretty catastrophic warming, so we'll need to become net negative for at least a couple of decades before we can talk about low net positive emissions.

You are far more optimistic than I if you assume net negative is a possibility any time soon. A significant reduction in methane might be possible which would provide similar benefits.

It’ll be interesting to see what role hydrogen plays. Prices for using it to store energy are currently a couple times battery energy storage systems, and the component parts are not getting cheaper very fast (turbines + storage + electrolyzers), whereas battery storage is rapidly falling in price. But as you point out: we know how to use hydrogen/synthetic methane/ammonia as a storage asset if we need it.

I think it will be difficult to satisfy global storage demands with lithium batteries. But most countries already have infrastructure to store a couple of weeks to a couple of months worth of methane. Perhaps it makes economic sense to just use that infrastructure and pay the 60% conversion loss. Maybe other battery chemistries will be better options.

I’ve seen analysis that says we have enough lithium globally, especially if we use existing working recycling techniques widely. And there are other battery chemistries with earth abundant materials (e.g. iron redox) that could ease the lithium supply concern. But I think you’re right that geopolitics will play a huge role. As we’ve seen with the war in Ukraine and Russian gas, resources are not uniformly distributed, and we can’t rely on frictionless international trade to work consistently.

I think there's certainly a lot of potential for us to drastically reduce fossil fuel usage with renewables while supporting off hours with something like gas turbines in the interim. The ultimate goal is to remove those too, but we could probably cut overall fossil fuel use by 70% or more in the meantime pretty easily, I'd imagine.

Hydro can largely fill that gap, it’s currently ~15% of global electricity generation.

Most of our good hydro projects are already built out. Maybe a few more projects in deep remote Tibet, but the ice packs are quickly disappearing and not building up much over winter, so I don’t expect hydro’s share to rise, and it will probably shrink in the recent future.

My point way you don’t need additional hydro to back up renewables.

15% of 24/7 is 100% of ~7h, 3.5 days a week. We would need some batteries, but nowhere near the kind of excess people calculate for a pure wind/solar grid.

The nice thing about hydro is that most projects come with their own battery. Wind or nuclear can be used to fill reservoirs back up. If the ice packs are drawn down too much, this might be the main use for hydro in the future, though I’m not sure it would save something like lake mead (though a project is planned).

I haven't seen an estimate done for the US, but for Germany one estimate is that to rely on solar and wind would require about 6,000 pumped storage plants which is literally 183 times their current capacity.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/144985/1/cesifo1_wp5...

If making more grid storage was cheap and easy, we would have built it decades ago.

That’s exactly the kind of meaningless and inflated number I was talking about. Notice how they exclude hydroelectric dams.

Existing hydroelectric dams currently store vastly more energy than the average pumped hydro facility and they can easily be adapted to add additional turbines for relatively minimal costs. Collectively North American dams are storing at a minimum several days of total grid output and theoretically much more depending on how you do the calculation.

Adding turbines doesn’t increase annual production, but it does increase flexibility as it makes minimal difference to discharge 1x water for 24 hours or 5x water for 4 hours and the rest over the other 20. Several dams have already been retrofitted like that as peaking power plants are simply vastly more valuable per kWh. It’s even better for the environment as rivers naturally have significant variability which is normally smoothed out by dams.

PS: Rarely mentioned in those kind of analysis is how sensitive the required storage number is to the exact mix and oversupply of wind/solar. A grid with 1.001x average annual demand looks very different than one with say 1.1 or even 2x.

TLDR: yes

It helps during the transition, and even afterwards.

France, by far a leader when it comes to nuclear (used to produce 90% of its gridpower this way) always used fossil fuel energy to complement it reactor fleet (each year fossil fuel produces 7 to 12% of France's electricity), mainly because maintaining enough reactors in order to cope with peak consumption (thus letting many underused) would be way too expensive, and also because nuclear load-following capacity is insufficient (bar over-provisioning reactors) due to their limited flexibility (at this game a gas turbine is way, way better): for security and burden-of-maintenance -related reasons one just cannot freely pump up/down the power delivered by a nuclear reactor, modulation limits and pauses are to be strictly respected.

I wonder if biomass + carbon capture and storage could play a role here. If the biomass was source in a controlled way (and that's a big if) you could have the characteristics of a thermal power station and be carbon negative.

I think yes, when combined with carbon capture and storage. The technology has worked for some time (both the capture and storage parts), some of the new direct air methods are hitting $100/MWh when paired with generation, bringing prices of gas + capture around the price of solar + storage. However, siting it is tricky since you need the right geology, and there have been some very expensive failures to deploy. Maybe it will have a niche role until we solve storage + transmission + demand management (as someone else pointed out).

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