Hacker News Reader

Comment by AtlasBarfed | Hacker News Reader

"Nuclear power can play a major role in enabling secure transitions to low emissions energy systems"

No it can't, it has fundamentally lost the LCOE war with Solar and Wind, and those are still improving in cost.

The steady drumbeat of "please save the fundamentally uncompetitive nuclear industry" is getting annoying.

This is an industry that, probably due to its regulation, is used to lobbying and astroturfing to try to sustain political relevance.

But it has no economic relevance.

China is getting an MSR/LFTR power planet up soon. That will be fascinating to watch, but just doesn't work in free markets. And you can't even legally research them in the US. I would recommend research and development around next gen nuclear, but all the regulations in the US are so poisoned we'd never accomplish anything radical that would be needed to make nuclear competitive.

View on HN

> just doesn't work in free markets

> You can't even legally research them in the US

I think I see a contradiction here.

Research results are portable.

Every single nuke put into commercial operation, since the first, has depended for continued viability on coercion, either by direct taxpayer-funded handouts or by overcharging ratepayers in captive markets, usually both. There is no reasonable prospect for improvement.

Nukes were always the most expensive choice, and are less competitive now than ever before.

Basically you're saying that Nuclear energy bad. No fix. Trust me.

Nuclear energy found to be far from cost effective, less so every year. Ten year prospect not looking good.

I can only assume you are heavily invested in natural gas. The Diablo Canyon plant in CA has a cost basis around 10c per kWh, which covers all expenses including reactor construction, fueling, waste disposal, maintenance, operation, and decommissioning.

And indemnification? No, that is picked by taxpayers. And, steam turbine maintenance? Doubting. I know that they are not paying into a disposal fund anymore, and are instead actually getting massive payouts, a product of a dodgy lawsuit.

(Court decided the feds had no actual plans for disposal, and therefore the money for that was collected fraudulently and had to be given back: NOT to ratepayers, of course, but to operators of still-running plants.)

I just found out the US DoE fronted $1.4B of taxpayers' money to some utility to turn around and hand over to NuScale.

China will mothball its nukes as their power gets undercut by renewables. We have great difficulty mothballing expensive stuff, so instead continue operating them at a net loss for years, making ratepayers or taxpayers pony up the difference.

>”China will mothball its nukes as their power gets undercut by renewables.”

What is the basis for this? Is there any indication from the Chinese Government that this is a real policy or is this just pure speculation?

Chinese are quite aware of cost disparities, and abandon what is not performing. They do tend to overbuild. They have scheduled a great deal of renewables, but those will not be enough to displace everything else for some time.

Comparing levelized cost of energy between intermittent and non intermittent sources is comparing apples to oranges. The reality is that until some fantastic storage system comes along that makes storage effectively free, intermittent sources cannot provide a path to decarbonization.

We do not need a "fantastic" storage system. Ordinary dirt-cheap storage will do fine. Batteries are the most expensive alternative.

Of course it would be stupid to build out storage until after there is enough renewable generating capacity to charge it from. In the meantime, money is overwhelmingly better spent pushing toward that goal.

When the time is right to build out storage, it will be very cheap, as storage cost is falling faster than solar ever did.

And what system will provide this "ordinary dirt-cheap storage"? It'd be helpful to actually specify what you're proposing.

Furthermore, some energy markets have seen saturation during peak production hours of intermittent sources for years now. But this unspecified dirt-cheap energy storage isn't being built to capture and resell this energy.

This "ordinary dirt-cheap storage" is precisely the fantastic storage system I'm referring to. Plans for a primarily renewable grid assume that some breakthrough is going to happen in order to make storage dirt-cheap.

Or, maybe they are not stupid, and recognize the excess is because the gas plants cannot be shut down and restarted fast enough, and there is not actually enough renewable capacity yet to charge anything much.

Until there is a lot more such generating capacity, it would be stupid to divert capital from building that out to building only minimally useful storage.

Gas turbines can be rapidly activated and deactivated, they are not the cause of excess production.

Again, what is this "ordinary dirt-cheap storage" technology? Sure, you say it's not going to be built until there's an even bigger energy surplus. But at least just specify what technology is going to provide this dirt cheap storage. Because I'd really want to know. All of the alternatives I know of like compressed air, hydrogen storage, ammonia storage, all have significant drawbacks impeding cost effective deployments.

> there is not actually enough renewable capacity yet to charge anything much.

What is this trash? Excess solar output is already an enormous problem. https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-solar/

You may pretend, of course. But any solar farm producing enough power to be a "problem" may simply be shut off.

And, an occasional excess, a few hours in a few days out of each month is not the same as enough to usefully charge storage.

Also: 2017.

I always wondered if some sort of "closed loop fuel" model was viable.

The appeal of conventional fossil fuels are high energy density and well established tech to convert it back to useful energy.

What if we had a station with some tens of thousands of litres of petrol sitting around. When the grid is strained, we burn the fuel, but in a generator carefully engineered to capture all waste. When renewables exceed demand, we use the available cheap energy to distill the waste back into burnable petrol.

Now, obviously "petrol" and "generator" can be replaced with other options to optimize performance or economic viability (maybe it's hydrogen and a fuel-cell rather than petrol and a generator, but I'm not sure if those are actually working at scale or just trotted out by Toyota to distract from them being late to the EV party)

It probably wouldn't be hugely efficient (the distilling would consume more energy than burning ever generated, after all), but it could be a way to handle "I'll pay you tomorrow for a hamburger today" with more flexibility on siting than, say, pumped hydro.

I suppose the big question is how tight the closed-loop can be. It's not a winner if you end up losing 1% of your fuel stash on every daily cycle.

Essentially you're proposing capturing the CO2 emitted by fossil fuel heat engines and converting it back to hydrocarbons using the Sabatier process. There's several barriers to this:

1. Capturing the carbon emissions. The exhaust if a gas turbine is a high temperature mix of air and C02. Separating out the CO2 requires either cooling it or a chemical process to capture the carbon dioxide. Both of these processes are every energy intensive.

2. The Sabatier process needs a source of hydrogen. Typically this is done through steam reformation, but that emits CO2. Electrolysis or thermochemical water splitting needs to be done instead, and these are both energy intensive and expensive to do.

3. The Sabatier process itself also requires energy, as it's putting the carbon in a higher energy state.

It'd probably be easier to just use the hydrogen in step 2, but that's still a difficult undertaking that nobody has done cost effectively as of now.

You're making bad future assumptions about wind/solar.

What is impressive to me is that wind/solar are now beating the best LCOE "old power" scheme (gas turbine)... and they are not done dropping in cost. There are a variety of future economies of scale and advancements yet to come that will drop them even lower.

When they drop low enough and batteries get cheap enough, then yes, effectively batteries are "free" because battery+alt energy is cheaper than any other dirty alternative.

I would guess in 5-6 years we'll have a convergence of ultracheap wind+solar and good-enough sodium ion batteries that no existing nuke design or fossil fuel can beat.

There's nowhere near sufficient battery supply to make intermittent sources viable. Annual battery output amounts to less than 15 minutes of global electricity consumption, and an even smaller fraction of total energy consumption. Inputs to batter manufacturing like lithium have sixfold since 2000: https://www.metalary.com/lithium-price/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com