Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Except in some specific cases (Finland, other Arctic regions with long periods of low sunlight) I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage. Storage is the main cost barrier for 100% renewable-powered grids, but this is also an area where technological development is possible.
Much of the discussion of energy in the American media is pretty poor these days. For example, the solar tariff issue on China sourced PV - there are simply no US companies making panels of comparable quality (monocrystalline Si lasts longer and is more efficient). Concepts like requiring Chinese manufacturers to open factories in the USA if they want to sell in US markets would make sense but probably would violate some trade provision or other.
Another factor that this article should have mentioned is the reliability of the global uranium ore -> fuel rods supply chain. Costs vary significantly based on the purity of the ore (18% is the top, 0.1% is the economically viable limit) and like oil, uranium ore is not globally distributed (unlike sunlight and wind).
As far as Russia/Ukraine, the real agenda the US government seems to be pushing there is using that conflict to rapidly increase LNG exports to Europe from the US West/South coast, even though energy prices are spiking due to inflation (and plausibly due to exports of crude oil from the USA, allowed under that 2015 bill lifting that restriction). A far better plan for Europe would be to go 100% renewable asap, meaning no need for fossil fuel imports from any party. Yes, that's technologically possible, but would require massive economic investment.
Sure, if you handwave the unsolved-at-scale technical problems with grid energy storage and make a series of generous assumptions about future technology, that's probably true. Nuclear technology has been up to the task for the past fifty years.
> Another factor that this article should have mentioned is the reliability of the global uranium ore -> fuel rods supply chain.
Seawater extraction is an option if that's ever a real concern, as is using breeder reactors to reprocess spent fuel. And the exact same issues apply to storage.
Yes, the process involves production of Pu-239, which is weapon-grade and may raise proliferation concerns. But for the US, or France, or UK, or India, or China (and a bunch of others) this should not be a concern, since they officially have nuclear weapons.
It's mostly the political will, and the public opinion (which are interlinked) that limit a nuclear renaissance. If you talk about subsidies, please remember how huge were the subsidies that kickstarted the current solar and wind booms; early panels and wind towers were completely uneconomical by today's standards, and R&D costs were colossal. But now, with the technology streamlined and the economies of scale kicking in, solar is competitive even without subsidies.
The same could happen to a new crop of nuclear technology, much cleaner and more efficient than the kind we've inherited from 1970s.
Not if you use Thorium breeder reactors.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/08/10/worlds-largest-grid-f...
> Battery rollout: "AGL Energy has committed to build 850 MW of battery-based assets by 2024. To that end, Torrens Island marks the first project to be constructed at the site of a fossil-fuel power plant. It won’t be the last, however, as big batteries are planned for New South Wale’s Liddell coal plant and Victoria’s Loy Yang facility. In January, AGL Energy revealed that it had secured both Wärtsilä and Fluence under non-exclusive framework agreements to supply up to 1 GW of large-scale battery storage."
So, would it make more economic sense for this 1GW battery-storage system to be replaced by a nuclear power plant? Australia after all is one of the places with the most high-grade uranium ore, being among the top three exporters.
Here's an example of more reliable analysis:
> "To illustrate this point, the 2,430 MW Vogtle nuclear plant could be expected to generate 21 million MWh per year. That is enough to power about 1.75 million residential households. Meanwhile, a hypothetical 3,500 MW solar power plant would be able to produce just under 6 million MWh of electricity per year. This number is enough to power only 500,000 homes, which is considerably less than nuclear power. For solar to produce as much electricity as is generated by a nuclear power plant, it would require about 13,000 MW of utility-scale solar capacity, which about four times as much as built in the existing plants. However, the cost to build this 13,000 MW facility would be $12.1 billion, which is still just 50% of the cost of the $25 billion Vogtle nuclear plant."
https://www.solarfeeds.com/mag/solar-power-vs-nuclear-power/...
As much as I detest the pro nuclear shilling, this isn't a valid comparison. 250MWh of storage is only useful for very short term energy arbitrage and isn't a replacement for always-on power.
The real answer is a mix of solar, solar-thermal, wind, storage, and combined cycle plants for the holes (ideally eventually powered by plant-based and solar-cracked hydrogen/methane/etc.). This mix costs a bit more than nuclear does now, but doesn't have the huge massive downsides of total dependency on and subservience to a handful of companies operating out of the five or so countries that are allowed to produce fuel (as well as all the existential risk stuff, concentration of risk to mistakes/attacks, horrible un-accounted externalities and supply chain fragility). It will also likely cost less to build it at a time such that it would still be completed before a nuclear plant which was comissioned now.
Of course that's all moot because the balance *right now* is running existing fossil fuel infrastructure more vs. building solar and not storing the energy. And in this equation, the cost of solar is a tiny fraction of nuclear.
Wind and solar are cheap now because their fuel cost is zero and the cost of grid reliability is borne by us - consumers. In a better world, the cost of balancing the grid at night should be borne by a solar PV generator because it caused the problem.
Even if you match the energy output of a solar and nuclear plant, the component of time is ignored. On a grid powered by solar, where will energy come from at night? How many batteries will you construct? The scale of these batteries is again something that’s dismissed by claims of continental-scale grids but has that been achieved anywhere? All the batteries in the world combined can power à giga watt scale grid for hours. That’s right, hours.
Nuclear is a solution in the here and now. It buys us time to sort through these problems while we work towards a better future.
Solar + battery is great in those locations, and basically no one is aruging using nuclear when solar and battery is viable for 365 days of the year. Australia has a fairly large desert where such assumption would be true. Finland, Sweden, Germany, France, UK and most of Europe do not have reliable 365 days of sun each year. There aren't many investors spending their money to build solar + storage in northern Finland.
Yes this is generally my argument. If you take the money you would spend on nuclear and spend it instead on solar, wind, gridscale storage, as well as EV and home battery rebates, you end up with a much more robust distributed energy production grid with very low maintenance costs. I think the idea of including rebates for home batteries and EVs is an important one, because it means that when major parts of the power line system are knocked out for some reason, you still have a lot of distributed storage.
You can also begin energy production with a solar and battery roll out MUCH sooner than new nuclear construction. From a climate change perspective, producing clean energy sooner is a big deal.
And we should not overlook that nuclear energy is a single target for terrorist attack and requires a powerful state to manage security for the plant and its supply chain, while batteries and renewables require no such thing. From a libertarian/anarchist perspective, we can have a weaker state and still have good energy production with renewables.
EDIT: I am also realizing that handing out a bunch of rebates to the voters for new stuff (rooftop solar, home batteries, new EVs) would be WAY more politically popular than "lets pay now for a big monolithic nuclear power plant that takes 20 years to build." If you want a plan that actually works, keeping the voters happy seems like an important component.
For seasonal storage you need a hydrogen economy. H2 is very very expensive and has never been rolled out at scale. Not a single large gas turbine to burn pure H2 has ever been build.
In the middle of a crisis it's better to go for proven and economic technologies than trying to invent something completely new and untestet.
Nuclear's position at this point is "we had a meh run, but next generation will be better, pinky promise".
On a global scale for the past fifty years we had 2 meltdowns, a country attacking another's nuclear facilities as a threat, and no clear replacement plan for the aging reactors in most countries even as they are way past the set date for decommission ing, and se still don't see how to cheaply deal with the waste.
People tend to brush the "political problems" under the rug, but they are real issues either way, so not taking them into account when doing comparisons wouldn't be fair.
There is an argument to say that on balance the pros outweigh the cons.
Grid storage technology is already there with pumped hydro storage(PHS). As 90% of built and newly building grid storage is already PHS. It is political problems and inertia that's holding it back. To be clear, I'm referring to off the river closed-loop PHS, which doesn't need a huge river check dam, flood zone, huge population relocation or ecological issues. All it needs is two places with area of 1sqkm each some hundred meter elevation apart. There is ANU study that claims we have enough of such sites for needed storage. Look at how fast China is building PHS recently. I think PHS approvals, even for closed-loop, in US are as hard to get as nuclear, which is holding it back.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/01/05/sustainable-pumped-hy...
https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2021/10/05/aussie-scie...
> Seawater extraction is an option if that's ever a real concern
Hmmm.... Hand waving unsolved at scale technical problems
They have very high double standards in Nuclearstan.
Don't worry, they're lobbying to lower those standards in order to be more cost-competitive with renewables.
I remind you the double standard involved criticizing renewables "at scale", so a few problematic breeder reactors won't dispel the hypocrisy.
wind/solar/storage are on actively improving cost curves that even gas turbine is losing to. No one knows the price target of wind/solar/battery in 10-20 years, but I'd guess it is at least half the cost in real dollars of today.
Nuclear proponents are pushing all the media outlets because they are in the same boat as coal: LCOE is so much lower for wind/solar that electric companies lose money on them relative to alt energy. Only base load is a viable role onthe grid, and gas turbines beat them at that handily (although with a carbon tax who knows).
I'm not opposed to keeping existing nuclear plants online with some subsidies, but new nuclear plants? Come on. And I am a huge fan of those LFTR presentations and strongly believe next gen nuclear will be viable once a stable price point can be targeted.
What are these problems, exactly? I see videos and news stories about grid batteries being successfully deployed for short term management and how pumped hydro is basically a big cheap gravity battery, but I'm not a civil/electrical engineer, so I accept there could easily be elephants in the room here.
Of course, that 50% efficiency cost seems like a bit of a bear in itself. If you lose half of the stored power, that would seem to significantly drive up the total lifecycle cost of a Watt of wind power. (Recognizing, of course, that not all of it must be stored.)
The cost and inefficiency (==cost) of storage seems like an unfortunate thing to handwave away in a conversation about relative costs.
It's just that since we live in a world where we burn lots of gas, we don't need to do the "generate synthetic methane" step, we can just burn less of it.
Sure, we could spend billions on generating synthetic methane from renewables while at the same time burning natural methane, but that would be stupid.
The more you use it, the less it costs, per kWh.
If you remove liability and the insanity of our current methods of waste storage the costs become outright cheap, especially in an imagined future where there is massive investment into new nuclear infrastructure.
By the metrics people use to judge nuclear, hydro would be the most expensive power source known to man if you were to build one today. Just the land costs would make the entire project nonsensical if viewed solely in that frame.
Those are just artificial constructs though. In a world where there is actual human suffering (in the west) due to physical energy shortages the politics (and thus cost models) may shift rapidly.
The reason costs are high is not political, it's that the systems involved need to be over-engineered relative to say, a coal-fired power plant, where a breakdown or fire will create a big mess, but not a 100-year exclusion zone. Water pumps for nuclear reactor cooling systems, for example, are the most robustly engineered (and expensive) pumps ever built, as far as I know.
For example, California's decision to close the San Onofre reactor was mostly related to maintenance costs, as their steam generator system was shaking itself to pieces and had to be shut down due to the radioactive loop leaking into the non-radioactive steam generation system. The rational conclusion is that long-term maintenance of nuclear reactors is an expensive proposition, due to catastrophic failure modes:
https://www.fairewinds.org/nuclear-energy-education/san-onof...
Which is not an issue with newer reactor designs, which are no less proven than grid storage.
Proponents of new nuclear solutions would argue that reactor design, which is today at 4th generation, has greatly evolved and improved in too many ways to count since the late 60’s.
> If you remove liability and the insanity of our current methods of waste storage the costs become outright cheap, especially in an imagined future where there is massive investment into new nuclear infrastructure.
You are misinformed. Nuclear power operators do not have to covee liability costs (no insurance is willing to cover nuclear disaster, so this is a massive subsidy). Also the cost of long term storage is typically not included in cost calculations for nuclear power either. Despite of this nuclear is more expensive than renewables.
> By the metrics people use to judge nuclear, hydro would be the most expensive power source known to man if you were to build one today. Just the land costs would make the entire project nonsensical if viewed solely in that frame.
Just because you say it doesn't make it true. In fact hydro projects have to typically compensate land owners when building a dam.
I agree, but: It's 100% impossible to replace the need for gas in the short timespan of five months until the next winter, no matter how much money or resources we throw at the problem. The absolute majority of heating is done with gas and major parts of the electrical grid depend on it. We cannot replace it with renewables in time. We need gas or people will freeze to death in the worst case, there are no alternatives to the LNG imports in the short-term, IMO.
And the countries that can export LNG, including the US, are aware of their strong negotiating position and want long-term contracts.
Europe may not have a choice. :/
“asap” LOL
Here in the real world, we have Germany, which has the strongest pro-green anti-nuclear agenda in Europe, but is (1) building coal plants, (2) financing Russian war and (3) blocking sanctions on Russia to save its economy (along with Hungary who are doing it for political reasons).
The green agenda is a massive failure in the real world. Maybe it will work in 50 years (when “possible technological development” in batteries catches up) but not right now.
That claim may be a little out of date, especially as the new government plans to phase out coal by 2030. It's true that a new coal power plant was opened in 2020, but it was "expected to be the last"[0]. Admittedly, it's also true that the country is temporarily reactivating old coal power plants to reduce Russian gas imports.[1]
[0] https://ifrf.net/combustion-industry-news/new-coal-power-pla...
[1] https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/germany-reactiv...
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/05/09/hungary-slovak...
https://www.politico.eu/article/eus-russian-oil-ban-stalls-a...
It's all the same. "Green" energy failed, even for one of its biggest proponents.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-coal-tops-wind-as-primary-elec...
> In the first half of 2021, coal shot up as the biggest contributor to Germany's electric grid, while wind power dropped to its lowest level since 2018.
If you eliminate gas and coal powered plants then the costs of nuclear plant lifecycle is incidental compared to economic losses that a country would encounter if they relied on solar and wind.
The dirty secret about "clean energy" is that it isn't actually very clean. When you eliminate big coal plants and try to use solar or wind, what you are actually doing is moving your dependence from coal to natural gas.
Those wind farms and solar farms require significant investment in numerous smaller style natural gas plants in order to function correctly.
So, right now, when people think they are moving away from fossil fuels they are really just moving to natural gas that is supplanted by solar and wind when conditions are ideal for them to work properly.
If you want to eliminate your dependence on natural gas, then, the only feasible option is nuclear.
no. you need gas for nuclear AND renewables. it really does not matter. it's bullshit to argue against it unless you show the world a way to have an on/off button for a nuclear plant. (if you do, you might be very very very rich)
Why the progress is possible only for Solar and storage and in your opinion not possible for nuclear? Nuclear could be cheaper if people would not be paranoid about it. What I think could happen is this new smaller reactors could be deployed in countries more rational, irrational countries will have to buy energy from the others.
Each decade, nuclear builds also trend towards getting more expensive. Like it or not, it at least partially Fukushima Daiichi that killed the nuclear expansion US. The AP1000 had new missile shield requirements that was slowing it down before that happened, and then the Japan accident added even more regulation. There was an anti-nuclear chair of the regulatory commission at the time, and yes, this is fundamentally political, but it's hard to push back on these specifics.
> Why the progress is possible only for Solar and storage and in your opinion not possible for nuclear?
Nuclear had more than triple the amount of time and significantly more subsidies for showing this technological scaling.
> Nuclear could be cheaper if people would not be paranoid about it.
People were super enthusiastic about nuclear for the first 40 years. Even after Tschernobyl nuclear opponents were largely portrait as unrealistic hippies in most countries and policies were certainly driven by people very favourable to nuclear. Even Germany one of the most nuclear sceptic countries only decided after fukushima to stop nuclear.
What is the technological breakthrough that we already know about that would suddenly change the progress massively?
>What I think could happen is this new smaller reactors could be deployed in countries more rational, irrational countries will have to buy energy from the others.
What people tend to forget is that about 40-50% of a nuclear power plant is the same as any other thermal power plant. We generally don't build small coal plants either, the scales don't work well.
The reason why wind and solar have very different scaling is because their principle of electricity generation is very different.
If you have two stocks one in exponential just starting and the other being slowly growing linearly for a long time, which one would you invest in? In particular if indications are that both stocks will continue on the same curves. That's the situation we have with nuclear vs renewables.
Very unlikely. Nuclear costs are sky high only because in the last decades it was suppressed rather than invested in and improved. Had it seen the same level of support the wind and solar energy have, we'd have a dirt-cheap abundance of nuclear power, with very little carbon emissions. Take away the red tape and scaremongering, and wind/solar/storage combination will be left very far behind in costs and efficiency.
> Very unlikely. Nuclear costs are sky high only because in the last decades it was suppressed rather than invested in and improved. Had it seen the same level of support the wind and solar energy have, we'd have a dirt-cheap abundance of nuclear power, with very little carbon emissions. Take away the red tape and scaremongering, and wind/solar/storage combination will be left very far behind in costs and efficiency.
And your sources are? Nuclear power has received significantly more subsidies than solar and wind combined [1] (note you can find similar numbers for Europe) . The myth that somehow solar and wind received more subsidies is just propaganda.
[1] https://cen.acs.org/articles/89/i51/Long-History-US-Energy-S...
[1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Too_much... [2] https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/greenpeace...
Nuclear cost in South Korea, Japan, and India is generally under $3000/kW, according to this peer-reviewed study. See Figure 12: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
Now let's model overall grid costs, here: https://model.energy/
Pick a country and "fetch wind and solar." By default the modeler doesn't include nuclear, so click "show advanced assumption settings." Check "dispatchable technology 2."
This defaults to a nuclear cost of $6000/kW. Leave it there or try $3000. It assumes a nuclear plant lifespan of only 25 years; the average plant age in the US is 40 years and expected lifespan for many plants is 60 years, so set it to whatever you think is more realistic. The default also sets the discount rate for nuclear to twice what it has for everything else, so fix that.
Run the model. With any reasonable assumptions, many countries end up with at least some nuclear on their grid, and some get their lowest grid cost with all nuclear. The US has some of the best wind and solar resources and relatively high nuclear costs (for now anyway), but the US situation doesn't generalize to the whole world.
If governments provide guarantees for the loans, a discount rate of 3% is not unreasonable.
Set it like that, and it spits out a price of €32.6/MWh.
Now, to make it even more reasonable to emerging economies, assume that through mass production and a relaxation of security requirements to less paranoid levels, the overnight cost can be reduced to €1500, you get $21.3/MWh.
This is what the price of electricity SHOULD be, if we want the world to stop depending on hydrocarbons. (Not just a few rich countries.)
If we are talking about Korean export NPPs, the Barakh NPP has four reactors for a total of 24.4B$, producing 5.6GW(e). THis is about $4B/GW. If I plug in 4000 per MW (its euros, not $, but they're not too different right now) for the capital cost of nuclear in model.energy, increase the NPP lifetime to 40 years, and use US 2011 weather data, nuclear optimizes to zero.
I'll add that model.energy is looking at the best case for nuclear: providing baseload. Handling variability will incentivize storage, which means renewables will be at an increased advantage. Dispatchable demand of any kind, even slightly dispatchable (allowed to be off 10% of the time, say) also tilts the game toward renewables.
The 25 year lifespan for nuclear there may reflect economic obsolescence rather than technical lifespan. Energy technology is evolving quickly now, so investors may simply refuse to credit the promise of such long lifespans. Even in the US, there have been existing NPPs that shut down because they could not recoup their operating costs (granted, much of that was due to gas and also renewable subsidies, but with solar having dropped in cost by nearly an order of magnitude in the last decade it's a bold move to assume it won't keep falling.)
Which isn't a ridiculous assumption, given their caveats and default options, unless you're trying to argue for 100% nuclear, in which case it renders any conclusion totally nonsensical.
Attempting to build just one hour of storage via lithium ion batteries would case the cost of batteries to skyrocket because 1 hour of global electricity use equates to 2,500 GWh. And annual battery output is only around 300 GWh. Supply shock would immediately drive up the cost of batteries.
So we're building those batteries anyway, because EVs are cheaper and better than ICE. It's just a bonus that they'll help roll out renewables too.
In fact, it's quite exactly like saying that, because nuclear is the fastest path to solving climate change.
Starting a nuke, we get no power out for a decade or more, and get much less power at the end than building renewables with the same money, which furthermore start displacing carbon immediately.
On what basis do you make this assertion?
Because when it comes to renewables, I very rarely see any inclusion of the costs of additional large scale energy storage (probably because it still remains an unsolved issue) and I never see any inclusion of the cost of new transmission lines from any new renewables site.
The Germans have invested billions upon billions in becoming wholly renewable, with miles of new grid infrastructure (but next to no energy storage) and they are still at the mercy of Russian gas supplies... and dependant upon French nuclear power.
It's time to face reality and start investing in fission again, at least until fusion becomes a viable alternative.
The issue comes when people think that renewables are a panacea, and we should start building renewables capacity where it doesn't even make sense. For example; wind power is great in and around the North Sea, but makes little sense in central and eastern Europe. Solar power is great in Spain, Portugal and Italy, but the ROI is very poor anywhere north of the Alps.
Over the past decades, a couple of hundreds of plants have been build globally. Doing nuclear fission safely is a massively complex technological undertaking. While the basic principles are by and large the same, the concrete designs of each of those plants aren't similar. Therefor, decommissioning a nuclear plant is equally complex and expensive, and requires a per-case approach. And currently, there is a growing number of plants which are pretty much EOL, where upkeep costs outstrip revenue.
Sure, there's an argument to be made about the operational costs per kWh between solar / wind / nuclear relative to the revenue they generate over their lifespan. But compared to solar / wind, the perceived economical benefits of those solutions are also offset by their initial cost of construction and their decommissioning.
If consumers / voters / taxpayers assume that they get to enjoy cheap power while the costs of those won't ever land on their doorstep, they are in for a surprise.
For waste, there's a separate fund called the Nuclear Waste Fund in the US (and other nuclear-operating countries) that has a current balance of $55B.
Finland has proven this to be false.
...and frankly, so did the US even in the 1980s. The roadblock to storage misguided activism, not science or tachnology.
Reopen the Yucca storage facility. It has the space for literally ALL the US's spent fuel storage.
It took them more than a decade beyond schedule, and 5 billion euros beyond quoted cost.
The finally delivered only because it was clear the money would dry up either way. If they could have strung it out further, they would have
Now the problem with solar and wind is that those also have pretty large energy investment needs at the beginning and given that we still mostly run on hydrocarbons these will also look cheap (include a sizeable amount of externalities).
Other than that, you're right that these articles rarely mention the problem of the fissile uranium supply. From what I've read and heard, without breeder reactors, the known U235 reserves won't last long if we plan to switch the world over. (Not that it's a viable plan to build so many reactors in time.)
How is this possible, technologically or economically? It sounds like absolute fantasy in anything less than a decade.
> plausibly due to exports of crude oil from the USA
Our refineries are at max capacity. How is hoarding crude going to help anything? Exporting crude allows foreign refineries to assist with relieving the global shortage of refined products.
How are they pushing this and you claim it's "the real agenda", what are they claiming instead? Are you claiming the US got involved with the Ukrainian conflict in order to sell LPG to other countries?
There is little storage, yet, because it would be stupid to build out storage there is not enough renewable generating capacity, yet, to charge up. When there is, then storage will be built. All without you lifting a finger.
2021 figures:
> China was the biggest contributor, adding 121 GW to the continent’s new capacity. Europe and North America—led by the USA—took second and third places respectively, with the former adding 39 GW, and the latter 38 GW.
81% of new electricity generaton build globally was renewables last year.
True solar with storage is not economical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
(you have to compare cost of nuclear on first page with wholesale PV+storage energy on subsequent pages).
Did the pumped hydro dams they built alongside nuclear power plants replace the baseload? No, they took the cheap energy that was produced at times when it wasn't needed and provided it back at peak times. They literally increased the base load by propping it up when it would otherwise droop at night (mostly).
The only studies you'll see are that they proved to be economical on a certain day, or maaaybe overnight. ...but there are zero studies that any solar and/or wind (even combined), can provide consistent power for a full year. ...because that is not currently possible with economical tech.
The problem is that “100 year”, “1,000 year” or worse events will require more than currently stored. Then, potentially millions of people will be at risk of injury or death from cold or heat.
Reliable generation of at least enough to cover survival seems necessary.
China – 288.32 GW. ...
United States – 122.32 GW. ...
Germany – 62.85 GW. ...
India – 38.63 GW. ...
Spain – 27.24 GW.These are just PEAK numbers that are totally useless when planning a grid.
It's tough to really get that ball rolling if that's your goal due to this marketing issue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
Duration: 23 min
Speaker: David Ruzic, Prof of Nuclear Engineering at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
It isn't enough to build solar and wind, you also have to build backup. This is currently done by coal and gas but in the future it has to switch to climate friendly sources of energy. A hydrogen economy is very very expensive.
Here's an example: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...
Also, I’m not sure those comparisons take into account the ~20 year lifespan of solar panels and windmills, versus the ~40-50 year lifespan of nuclear plants.
Finally, another factor that may drastically reduce the cost of nuclear is the fabrication of small modular reactors which eliminate custom construction/permitting and simplify installation.
The 40-50 year lifespan of a nuclear plant is also somewhat illusory, as planning on achieving that is a bet that competing technologies don't keep getting better.
SMRs are talked about as being cheaper, but they have inherent diseconomies of scale. They need more materials and components per unit power output than large NPPs, and have inherently worse neutronics (this is why NPPs got large). The putative economies of scale of manufacturing are first consumed clawing back this loss, and it's not clear they can even do that.
No, but there are limits on the amount of raw materials that said factories can use to produce equipment.
Aluminum is the most abundant metallic element on earth. Cobalt demand is already peaking. Copper and nickel have been produced in the millions of tons annually for a century, and will not slow down.
Personally though I really have always liked Geothermal!
Nukes, of course, have lots of other opex on top of the turbines, and also crippling capex.
Geothermal might be able to compete at very high latitudes where the alternative is shipping in synthetic ammonia from the tropics when wind flags and transmission lines don't deliver.
But steam turbine s are absolutely not getting any cheaper or more reliable.
It should be possible to say, given that power grid and this amount of solar, wind..... this would have happened in this region during that year.
"U.S. oil refiners’ margins smash records, but few plan to build more plants"
https://www.marketplace.org/2022/05/23/u-s-oil-refiners-marg...
Something I've been thinking about for a while: the best course of action to secure a nation is to build out renewables until the need for external fossil fuels is zero. Even if that means using renewables to make fossil fuels via a process like Fischer–Tropsch as a stop gap.
I also think it would be advantageous to start thinking about how to drive the cost of generation and distribution down until electricity is free or nearly free. This might sound utopian but imagine how secure and prosperous a society could be if energy was super cheap or free? We are moving towards an electrified future and at some point we will have to heat homes and charge cars with electric that will place significant demand on an ageing grid.
"Free" (as in, your taxes) energy for all is very likely to entirely wreck the economy.
Not to mention there are costs involved with maintenance which make that energy not free. Even ignoring the huge debt incurred by implementing such a solution, who will pay for the maintenance? Our taxes again?
What are the benefits of not paying energy? What innovation is not happening because the pesky electricity has a cost?
Most likely it would just become the country of choice to run computations (whether meaningful research or pointless crypto mining) - if we ignore the gargantuan tax rate this country will have.
Being independent is valuable, that's why I think everybody should source their electricity independently (eg. solar)
Probably the last big holdout for hydrocarbons will be aviation, but anywhere LH2 airframes start to move in, the old stuff will be wholly unable to compete. Transitioning the whole fleet will take a long time, though.
- To reduce carbon in the air, getting clean electricity is key. If we can do that, we can more easily reduce emissions from other areas.
- There are no paths to clean energy by 2050 without nuclear power.
This is either stupidly wrong or stupidly right.
Stupidly right, there's fairly new nuclear plants in operation that there's no real reason to shut down, so will probably be running in 2050.
Stupidly wrong, it seems to be placing some entirely unwarranted implication that without nuclear we'd be lost, when most serious analysis agree that renewables will be about 80% of energy production, which doesn't really leave much room for nuclear to take all the credit.
IEA's net zero roadmap:
> In the net zero pathway, global energy demand in 2050 is around 8% smaller than today, but it serves an economy more than twice as big and a population with 2 billion more people. More efficient use of energy, resource efficiency and behavioural changes combine to offset increases in demand for energy services as the world economy grows and access to energy is extended to all.
> Instead of fossil fuels, the energy sector is based largely on renewable energy. Two-thirds of total energy supply in 2050 is from wind, solar, bioenergy, geothermal and hydro energy. Solar becomes the largest source, accounting for one-fifth of energy supplies. Solar PV capacity increases 20-fold between now and 2050, and wind power 11-fold.
> Net zero means a huge decline in the use of fossil fuels. They fall from almost four-fifths of total energy supply today to slightly over one-fifth by 2050. Fossil fuels that remain in 2050 are used in goods where the carbon is embodied in the product such as plastics, in facilities fitted with CCUS, and in sectors where low-emissions technology options are scarce.
> Electricity accounts for almost 50% of total energy consumption in 2050. It plays a key role across all sectors – from transport and buildings to industry – and is essential to produce low-emissions fuels such as hydrogen. To achieve this, total electricity generation increases over two-and-a-half-times between today and 2050. At the same time, no additional new final investment decisions should be taken for new unabated coal plants, the least efficient coal plants are phased out by 2030, and the remaining coal plants still in use by 2040 are retrofitted. By 2050, almost 90% of electricity generation comes from renewable sources, with wind and solar PV together accounting for nearly 70%. Most of the remainder comes from nuclear.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
[2] https://imgur.com/a/xvkZSRi
[3] https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/1064529619951513600
Conversion efficiency of Solar/EV/battery storage vs. extraction/refining/storage/burning just for transportation is like 10x better.
If EVs go with their curve (especially with petrol prices) we can project 80% are EVs on the road by 2040, that'd be a massive improvement in transport alone.
Since we're going to stop doing that, by electrifying lots of things that currently burn fuel, we can achieve both goals at the same time.
The text on top of the graph you cite says this:
"Primary energy is calculated based on the 'substitution method' which takes account of the inefficiencies in fossil fuel production by converting non-fossil energy into the energy inputs required if they had the same conversion losses as fossil fuels."
It would be clearer to reduce the fossil fuel amounts by that percentage, since we currely don't use that energy, and in fact expend more energy trying to get rid of it as waste heat in many cases.
And, note the difference betwene energy and electricity, they say electricity will grow by nearly 3x ("To achieve this, total electricity generation increases over two-and-a-half-times between today and 2050").
You should look up recent graphs of renewable growth, with hydro seperated out, to see that your quick mock-up looks positively sedate by the recent standards of growth.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-change-renewables?...
global renewables including hydro. Solar and Wind are barely noticeable until 2000, when wind, then solar (in 2010) grow from nothing to octuple previous hydro within about a decade:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-change-solar?tab=c...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-change-wind?tab=ch...
They have an article about why this is occuring too: https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
I didn't choose IEA to demonstrate because they are the only outlier that support my point. My whole claim is that even the boring, cautious industry analysts are saying broadly the same thing.
I think their assumptions about carbon capture are silly and more renewables will be built instead, but even their numbers make it clear than nuclear is a sideshow at best.
>IEA's net zero roadmap...
I'd like to make a slightly vague rebuttal to your slightly vague rebuttal (ofc not your fault if the IEA doesn't explicitly say anything about nuclear, not blaming you). The IPCC has said that nuclear is necessary if we want to hit our climate goals.
> By 2050, almost 90% of electricity generation comes from renewable sources, with wind and solar PV together accounting for nearly 70%. Most of the remainder comes from nuclear.
So "no path to clean energy without solar" and "no path to clean energy without wind" are a bit more defensible, though in both cases, we'd just build more of the other one.
"no path to clean energy without hydro"? Maybe, again we'd just build more solar and wind.
So, if someone waves a wand and magically makes nuclear disappear (or just economically unattractive) then I think the our path is still fairly clear. No real need to take that path unless nuclear becomes much more relatively expensive, but it's definately an option, and possibly one we'll gladly take because it's cheaper.
Well, let's see them; and see how much they rely on yet to be proven industrially new storage tech (and without humongous mining activity)
Once battery storage doesn't pan out(and it won't currently for trucks), I see synth hydrocarbons picking up the transport slack. But that will require alot of energy..
He is personally responsible for "have you tried turning it off and on again?". Before MS, that was plenty of reason to demand a refund.
Well there's no opportunity for him to make inflated profits off a technology that he can't patent...
https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bi...
28 times that, ignoring the shutdowns (I don't actually know how long wind lasts, IIRC nuclear is "about 50-70 years" and PV is "about 30 years"), gives a total of: 5124 GW PV, 2800 GW wind, 218 GW nuclear.
But that's a lower bound for PV, as that's growing with what looks like an approximately exponential long-term trend (since 1992) of 36.5% per year.
While such a growth rate is physically possible to maintain for 28 years even without going into space, given that if we did make so much we wouldn't merely give everyone an American lifestyle but also be able to get the entire human population continuously flying[3], I'm assuming it will turn into a sigmoid before then.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
[3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28105*1.365%5E%2828%2B...
Storage seems hard and expensive. We're going to need a whole lot of approaches:
- Wind taking a bigger share of renewables
- Whatever storage we can reasonably build, including some exotic stuff like power-to-gas-to-power.
- Nuclear filling in a little bit
- PV comically overbuilt and routinely throwing away a lot of power midday on most days.
- Still peaking off natural gas, a little bit.
What business have they gotten into? Thermal storage of grid energy with a > 50% round trip efficiency. It heats sand with a compact resistive heater, stores the sand in insulated silos, and recovers the energy by a Brayton cycle system with a really interesting and compact fluidized bed heat exchanger. Storage capacity is sized for 100 hours of operation. Not just overnight, but four days.
https://www.babcock.com/home/about/corporate/news/babcock-wi...
Westinghouse is also doing thermal grid storage now. Pumped TES can have a round trip efficiency > 60%.
https://www.energy-storage.news/nuclear-power-company-westin...
Some things I found interesting:
Under development: 11 in China, 3 in US
Operating: Over 40 in the US and no major accidents since Three Mile Island (1979).
1: https://www.tva.com/newsroom/watts-bar-2-project
2: https://www.chooseenergy.com/news/article/failed-v-c-summer-...
3: https://www.southerncompany.com/innovation/vogtle-3-and-4.ht...
So... is it unreasonable to have lots of fairly low-regulated nuclear power plants in, say, 50 mile uninhabited areas (maybe even make it a nature preserve or something for animals)? And if one or two meltdown, oh well?
This is why they go on and about the "sarcophagus" required to keep it contained. They had to build a proper containment unit after the fact. You want that stuff built BEFORE you have a nuclear reactor. Not wait until after one blows up.
I, very literally, would love to have a nuclear reactor in my backyard if it's off the correct design. A design that depends on physics to be safe, not human operators.
Which is entirely possible. You can build a nuclear reactor in such a way that if the worst possible case happened it would meltdown and dump it's guts into a container. Then just sit there until it cooled to the point were it could be processed correctly.
Or, indeed, any at all. Thus, also no Fukushimas, and no TMIs, and no Santa Susanas.
Below 100mSv, there is "no evidence" that exposure leads to any elevation of cancer risk. At levels covered by the article, ie 1000Bq/kg / 80000 Bq/mSv = 0.0125 mSv/kg.
In other words, you can eat 8 tons of those mush before there is any measurable increase in cancer risk.
And breating the air in Berlin for 1 year is MUCH more dangerous than eating those 8000 kg of mushrooms. (Not to speak about taking a single shot of covid vaccine.)
In other words, dispite being scientifically "true", the net effect of an article like this, is to mislead people into thinking that radiation is a lot more dangerous than it is in reality.
If nuclear were to be treated like other health hazards in our environment, the thresholds should be set somewhere between 10000-100000Bq/kg, depending on how much people would eat of that food in a year, not at 600Bq/kg.
Such disasters should only be a small - if bright red - footnote to a good policy: "NEVER build anything resembling this historic disaster. And if anything ever shows operational characteristics remotely resembling it, then shut it down IMMEDIATELY."
Starbase, e.g.
Nuclear is unique in that it's the only geographically independent, and non-intermittent energy source. Hydroelectricity and geothermal are non-intermittent but are geographically dependent. And also fossil fuels, but those emit carbon dioxide.
We have one use for the nuclear industry - building scientists who can then build nuclear bombs. IMO this is a reasonable use of public funds - the strategic needs of nuclear weapons are not going away.
But please please just accept that and move on. Stop getting in a vital public debate.
Nuclear fission is a terrible civilian technology - vastly expensive, the effects of a catastrophic failure are massive and the costs to avoid it (yes you can build safe nuclear plants) are huge - basically nuclear projects need to be on the A game - all the time, year after year, constantly upgrading and improving for decades to come.
I might believe that for five or six plants run to just build weapons. But i refuse to believe we can build 1,000s of the fuckers in every country on earth and think that they will be all maintained to standards better than Fukijyma
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...
They told us it was safe back then. They tell us its safe today. They will always tell us it's safe. The fundamentals tell us they're wrong.
That will save us from an absolute rash of accidents as habitually corrupt administration fails to operate at necessary standards. With some luck, most of those planned will be cancelled before completion as their operating cost is recognized as already undercut.
And this is my argument - the reactors were not on their A-game. One slip, one B-level decision, one in decades and decades and the price is paid.
And this is for one of the richest countries on Earth. Who is going to build and run the nuclear reactors in Argentina, Sudan, Belize. Will they be on their A-game in 2045?
Why choose the option with the high cost and the nasty downside when you literally do not have to.
France gets ~75% of its power from nuclear, safely and economically. France inhabits the same physical world as the rest of us, but is different politically.
If there were a will, there would be a way. If the environmental movement had paid more attention to James Hansen's testimony in 1989 than it did to Chernobyl in 1986 then we would be living in a different world.
There is no amount of damage from nuclear accidents that will be worse than what we are suffering from climate change, with no end in sight. Proliferation is another story, but how's that going anyway...?
So yes it is a political decision, France is willing to highly subsidise their nuclear industry.
And most of the world is willing to subside Oil and Gas to the tune of $5.9 trillion in 2020 or about 6.8 percent of the _world's_ GDP. [0]
Tax payer's money will be sunk anyway, choose your poison.
[0] https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2021/09/23/Sti...
However, they are by far the most practical and safe way to generate ludicrous amounts of environmentally friendly energy out of all technologies that we have available. Even solar can't match up. If you factor in the really long term cost on every country on this planet due to climate change for example, this footed bill is chump change.
Why is the EU more trustworthy on these estimates than the French?
The high cost of nuclear is due to the inherent complexity of nuclear power plants, and the rise in particular is principally due to a nuclear industry that no longer knows how to construct plants affordably, with increased regulatory compliance a minor contributor.
Source: https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118
The result of that high cost is that nuclear is a lot more expensive to build than renewables for the same amount of energy. This difference is growing and not shrinking, because the solar and wind industries keep getting better at cheaply rolling out capacity.
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
Because most of a nuclear project’s cost is upfront, earned back over the lifetime of the plant, a profitable project has to be able to assume it can outcompete renewables + storage over multiple decades. This already is not the case today, and less so in the coming years. No private business can make these numbers work, so no private business is willing to fund a nuclear plant without subsidies. Renewables however can and are being funded privately to a large degree, because they turn a profit more quickly and can be built in smaller increments.
Subsidies come out of taxes, which means the money can’t be spent on something else. Government budgets are already stressed. Between the choice of a largely privately funded solar/wind/hydrogen/storage path and a mostly government-funded nuclear path governments around the world are choosing the cheaper option.
And yes, there is the public perception of nuclear which doesn’t help. But people are also opposed to solar and wind projects. NIMBY is always a thing. Besides, even if you could convince people of the safety of nuclear energy, the numbers still wouldn’t work out.
There are challenges to rolling out solar and wind at scale with grid redesign and hydrogen storage and distribution, but nuclear at scale has similarly sized problems. TANSTAAFL when it comes to energy production.
Germany's electricity production has emitted about 8 times more CO2 emission than France over the last 30 years: I blame the german political ecologists for being directly responsible for a massive amount of our current ecological woes by demonising the nuclear industry and limiting it's spread across the world for the last 30 years.
It's really a sad story to be so misguided to end up contributing to destroy the one thing you wanted to save...
We built them so fast, that even if we had cross-partisan will to keep forever using nuclear, we'd still have 30-40 years of gap without making any new reactor. And after a generation of engineers, we need to make reactors again and we're basically doing it from scratch again.
There are other reasons: people's fear of nuclear became quite real (either because of greenpeace, or local green political parties). There's also a bit of hubris I think, rather than making some "easy" "usual" reactor model, we decided to do our brand new own, which has its own cost: If Flamanville's EPR had succeeded, we would likely have made more reactors and we would already be producing >100% of nuclear power
HBO with their Chernobyl miniseries single-handedly undid years of progress in the perception of nuclear energy.
Both should be sort of ok, fingers crossed.
But this is only replacement. If we're serious and want to reduce iron ore with hydrogen for our steel needs, and use the same electrolytic hydrogen for fertilizers, we would need to build about 50 of them.
The technology is there, but yes, it is more of a political issue in France as well.
EDF, Areva have a long history of bailouts, buyouts and subsidies by the French government. You are right that it's a political decision that France has so much nuclear, but it is not an economical one.
Even though they decided to replace old reactors with new ones, they do not manage to build enough reactors fast enough and especially not economically. Flamanville has a budget overrun of around 500% and time overrun of around 300%.
Nuclear is neither fast nor economical enough to be built. Only building renewables can help push down CO2 emissions fast and cheap enough.
Theres a large difference between building new reactors vs running the old ones until the end of life (in terms of economics).
Also the modular reactors that are getting a lot of hype right now also still have a nuclear waste disposal issue.
I would like to see Nuclear thrive but until it gets the cost / waste disposal resolved it's a tough sell.
On the contrary! Nuclear plants pay a fraction of their revenue through their life into special decommissioning funds that have so far been more than enough to perform full greenfield decommissioning.
For waste, there's a separate fund called the Nuclear Waste Fund in the US (and other nuclear-operating countries) that has a current balance around $50B.
It was very very expensive. It was also nothing to do with global warming.
Those plants are fully paid off but nearly all close to death. Replacing them will still be very very expensive. Extending their lives will be dangerous. France isnt quite sure what to do.
If there's unlimited money and patience for years long delays then yes nuclear power is just fine.
If you want it reasonably priced it either wont happen at all or you're risking catastrophe.
Yes it is ( big nuclear buildout to replace most of the current fleet, while also doing lots of renewables and experimenting with small modular reactors):
https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20220210-announcing-new-r...
No, these plants are close to the end of their original grant for exploitation. Many of them get renewed for 10, 20 years easily. The US has had plants renewed for 40 years and are still running just fine.
> France isnt quite sure what to do.
We know what to do, every single scientist from the ASN knows what to do, every economist knows what to do. The non-renewal of nuclear plants is purely a political play to gain votes.
Stop spreading your ignorant, fearmongering, unsubstantiated opinions.
And his conclusion was pretty grim. Paraphrasing: If we bet on nuclear for mitigation of climate change, it is inevitable that nuclear accidents will happen more often. Also each accident causes a major setback in peoples minds regarding nuclear safety and the next Fukushima might kill off a lot of progress and the opportunity cost lost would be huge.
I don't know how to argue with this. I personally think nuclear is really safe. If the worst accidents have killed a few hundred and caused premature deaths to at most hundreds of thousands. Compared to the millions of premature deaths PER YEAR for fossil related energy and the possible billions coming from climate change, nuclear is as safe as it gets (I mean probably more PV installers will fall off roofs than get killed by nuclear accidents), but peoples fears might not be surmountable.
Any newspaper mogul could make that happen.
Any time there is any accident, people interviewed need to start with "There is a risk this incident might stop nuclear from being the safest energy source. But to be honest, I think we'll still keep the crown".
Planes are crashing all the time and kill tons of people (way more than nuclear power plants anyways), yet flying is more popular than ever (before Covid, anyways)
It is many, many times safer to fly than to drive the same distance. This is almost miraculous. It is also almost miraculous that the measures to make it so safe do not make flying enormously more expensive than it is.
The only cancer that clearly went up in immediate connection to Chernobyl was thyroid cancer, and that was in most cases very treatable. It's also unclear how much of the increase in incidence, was due to increased screening. Thyroid cancer seems to have affected the general population, but in a dose-dependent manner, where the increased risk became really low when looking outside the cleaning crew.
On top of that there is some evidence to suggest that the risk of leukemia and other blood cancers increased in the cleaning crew. (But still really low numbers). And as far as I know no signs of increased blood cancer rate was seen in the general population.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28929329/
It actually appears that the largest loss of human life from Chernobyl happened because of panic. Women chose abortion because of the perceived increased risk of malformation in offspring. As far as I am aware, the actual increased risk of malformations has not been detectable, and I presume it to be negligible.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8516187/
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ywyqzv/why-hundreds-of-thous...
I used to be very bullish on Nuclear. The numbers just don't pencil out in the US under the current constraints. We would need a vast reduction in the overhead to build a Nuclear plant, or a vast increase in the costs of the alternatives.
The chance of someone in the US dying from a terrorist attack is about 1 out of 3 million. It's a rounding error compared with heart disease (1:6), suicide (1:93), storms (1:35k) or even sunstroke (1:6k). Yet, the US spends $52B / year on the department of homeland security.
Whether or not this would be cheaper overall is anyone's guess. There are also questions about the reliability and efficiency of small modular reactors in general; past novel nuclear reactor designs like the pebble-bed reactor were similarly promoted but never went anywhere.
For example, let's say you use hydrogen (by far the most promising candidate as of now). You need to build a plant to perform the water electrolysis and a power plant to convert the hydrogen into electricity. Both these plants will work at most half of the time, but in reality, much less. So, whatever capital costs you have for an electrolysis plant, you just double, triple, or multiply by 10. The same for the hydrogen power plant. A hydrogen power plant will cost at least as much as a current natural gas power plant. That is not a lot, but if you multiply by 5, then it becomes a lot.
But what if you could run these plants 100% of the time. Now we are talking. Let's say you build lots of solar capacity in Morocco, run an electrolysis plant year long, liquefy it, ship it to Germany, where it is burned in a power plant 365/24/7. Or make the hydrogen in Australia and ship it to Japan. Or make it in Nevada and ship it to New York and Toronto.
Do you still need nuclear? I'm not 100% sure. But if lots of people who were against nuclear before changed their mind, then maybe they ran the numbers, and it turns out we need nuclear.
But it's certain we need nuclear if we ever want to explore the outer solar system. And if we climb again the knowledge ladder of commercial nuclear fission, then maybe one day we'll be able to make efficient nuclear rockets.
How bad of a solution is this? How bad does solar/hydro output get during the off season in most places (presumably wind is more consistent than those two when averaged out over shorter time frames than a whole year)?
In June there's 6 times more solar generation than in December.
That's it, if you want to build enough solar capacity to cover you in December, then it's going to be 6 times more than you need in June.
Solar might be cheaper than natural gas, but not by a factor of 6.
[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/monthly-gener...
Because the public has been anti nuclear energy for the past 4 decades.
> And one big difference is the renewables are actually built, while the fission projects never make progress.
Nuclear energy regulations are an absolute nightmare and make building anything virtually impossible.
You're not necessarily wrong with your point, but man the world would've been so much cleaner if we didn't abandon nuclear energy 40 years ago. Now that we've lost all expertise and have neglected research, yes it's very hard for nuclear energy to make a huge resurgence.
If nuclear power depends on lowering the safety regulations to be economically viable, it is not economically viable, at least for now.
Take for example the infamous Flamanville third reactor: it could be opened by 2014, but "nightmare" regulations detected flawed components. A year later, regulations detected faults in cooling valves. Three years later, the secondary cooling systen didn't meet regulations. A year later, a failure in steam pipes delayed more the opening, literally more than 100 defective welds. All of the delays combined more than tripled the costs, but to me they sound valid requirements.
The odd catastrophe didnt help though.
Why there is a resurgence of interest now when dirt cheap solar and wind have effectively rendered it a costly relic of the past is somewhat puzzling.
I guess PR campaigns like the OP's link are one reason.
Nuclear provides the so called base load (the minimum level of electricity demand required). To replace base load with renewables + energy storage requires so much CAPEX and battery manufacturing that you don't have money to fill gaps between caseload needs and renewable energy production.
Your article links to capacity not effective production when customer needs it. The issue with electricity production resides in being able to reliably produce electricity when customer needs it, not when planet aligns for [insert preferred electricity production method].
It's great to say "I can produce 100Gw of green electricity", but if I ask you "Give me 30GW now" and you tell me "Best I can do now is 5GW, there are clouds in the sky", I'll kindly ask you to shut up about your "100GW capacity".
As the recent price hikes in Europe have shown, the prices paid by customers is dictated by the cost of the most expensive megawatts. Solar and wind have not suddenly become pricier, but gas has. And as a consequence, prices paid by customers have increased proportionally.
Batteries might seem like a good answer, but basic physics shows us that it is not remotely doable on a large scale, if we want to guarantee reliable supply. The energy density simply isn't there.
California is building battery storage at a rate of ~2500MW/year. There are ZERO physics problems standing in the way of this. And there is considerable innovation in fixed batteries like iron-air flow batteries, ones that exist and aren't just VC scams like most of the nuclear stuff.
https://www.energy-storage.news/california-utility-pge-propo...
Nuclear is definitely a good idea for the future, but only if SMRs are the basis of moving forward.
Whether it's human error, terrorist attack, or natural disaster, nuclear facilities are vulnerable in a way that solar and wind facilities are not.
[1] https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactor...
It would have made more sense though to first replace coal plants before shutting down nuclear plants.
They could have chosen to continue operating the old contraptions unsafely, but chose not to shoulder Fukushima-style risks.
Armchair second-guessing is misleading. Each euro spent on one is a euro not spent on the other.
And don't get me started on the political cost which the news make so obvious now.
And even if, Germany is more densely populated than the Ukraine. The Chernobyl exclusion zone in Ukraine is the same size as the state of Saarland.
I actually feel sorry for them.
I felt similarly. Then I learned about Bonhoeffer's theory of stupidity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc
No progress in the conversation and no discussion of more subtle aspects, like centralization of control/power, systemic risk, nuclear proliferation etc.
One problem is that France's nuclear industry has committments to use something like 2/3rds of the world's reserves of Uranium Ore.
Another problem is, we've had 3 once-in-1000 years accidents in 40 years. By my calculations, the entire world will be a radioactive waste dump in 250,000 years, given the rate of land contamination by nuclear accidents.
Why do nuclear cheerleaders ignore this fact? They must.
That means that the oil, gas, wind and solar industry has more money and interest in spreading FUD.
On top of that the fear that has been succesfully deployed, has pushed nuclear energy into a bureaucratic nightmare, driving up costs, and also incentivizing a large part of the nuclear industry (the part living off the regulation and bureaucracy) to continue the FUD.
The total number of causalities and environmental impact from non-weaponized nuclear power, including Chernobyl, Fukushima and three mile island are so small, that I guess a larger number of people have died or been injured from rare-earth metal mines for solar panels or floods due to dams for water turbines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
Electricity generation isn't the only way we use fossil fuels and cause pollution. Fertilizer production needs hydrogen, where does that hydrogen come from? Natural gas. Why? Because not using natural gas increases the energy costs of fertilizer production near 10x over. Since it is currently 1% of total world electricity consumption already, that is a near 10% global increase in electricity demand for one (admitedly large) product. The replacement of plastics with other materials like paper, glass, and metal? All require higher energy input to produce than plastic. Not to mention that plastic will eventually breakdown and release carbon also. As the most economical mines start to dry up and we seek lesser ores to mine, mining and processing electrical requirements will continue to rise. Nearly every chemical reagent all around you causes pollution during products, but it can be 90% solved, mostly by the addition of more electrical electricity for heating, cooling, high and low pressure chambers, ect. to not create so many waste products that we trash into both the atmosphere and the ground and water. We don't use those cleaner methods now mostly because using the electricity to do so costs a LOT more. Nearly every industry on earth can be cleaner, but it costs significantly more electricity which needs to be fairly cheap. Something like concrete production could be done more far more cleanly, but again, massive amounts of additional electricity needed. And that is before we get into things like active carbon sequestering.
Or goals shouldn't be a direct replacement of fossil fuel electricity sources, our goals should be exceeding currently world electrical output multiple times over without fossil fuels, which means we should be producing nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal power across the board in an attempt to meet our extreme future demands.
Maybe solar and wind and batteries will be up to the task in the future with some new technology, but also maybe not. Nuclear is a known feasible solution to providing as much power as we could ever want or need with technology we have right now. Solar and battery tech is often assuming we will continue on the same path of increased efficiency and reduced costs seemingly indefinitely, but you know what, they thought the same thing with nuclear energy until they started hitting some walls in generation efficiency and costs. And if it ends up not being significantly cheaper or easier, you gotta start bringing up questions of land usage and grid complexity on top of everything else.
Meanwhile the price keeps rising...
years of anti-nuclear propaganda all over EU past decade, thanks Germany, only to end up depending on the US even more, while boycotting their friend France