Saskatchewan, Ontario to roll out mini-nuclear reactors
westerninvestor.com
westerninvestor.com
The article was published on July 11, 2022, but opens with: "Saskatchewan and Ontario have each chosen GE-Hitachi as the supplier of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), which could be deployed in the Prairie province by the 2030s and in Ontario by 2018." Then, the article concludes with: "GEH and Ontario plan to construct up to four 300 MWe small module reactors, with the first coming online by 2028."
A separate source by The Canadian Press [0] also reflects an estimate of 2028 for Ontario: "The governments of Ontario, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Alberta have put forward a nuclear plan that they say will transition them toward cleaner energy. The provinces’ energy ministers agreed today to a joint plan for small modular reactors, with the first 300-megawatt plant to be built in Darlington, Ont., by 2028."
[0] https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/renewables/onta...
Saskatchewan wants to have a mining contract. While Doug Ford of Ontario, wants to maintain the energy monopoly in the province, and has actively torn down recently completed and functional wind farm projects.
I would gather that you will be hearing less about this after Doug Ford leaves.
[1] https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/canadians-support-gove...
[2] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...
https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/energy-sources...
> Mining of underground uranium has environmental challenges not encountered with extracting it from the oceans. And Wai says the fibers, which have affinity for more heavy metals than just uranium, can likely be used one day to clean up toxic waterways themselves. He says the fibers have potential to extract vanadium, an expensive metal used in large scale batteries, from the oceans instead of mining it from the ground.
I defer to the researcher.
> "We have chemically modified regular, inexpensive yarn, to convert it into an adsorbent which is selective for uranium, efficient and reusable," said Chien Wai, president of LCW Supercritical Technologies. "PNNL's capabilities in evaluating and testing the material, have been invaluable in moving this technology forward."
Yes, but that's not so easily mined. Point being that the cost of nuclear power will go up once the easily mined material is consumed.
This is why we don’t use breeder reactors right now. The cost of uranium is a rounding error relative to the value of the generated electricity.
There are also reasons to use breeders beyond fuel cost, such as dramatically decreasing the amount of waste and the time the waste is hazardous; both are reduced by 100x each IIRC.
"Meeting high case demand requirements through 2040 would consume about 28% of the total 2019 identified resource base recoverable at a cost of < USD 130/kgU (USD 50/lb U3O8) and 87% of identified resources available at a cost of < USD 80/kgU (equivalent USD 30/lb U3O8)."
Apply some exponential growth to that, and those allegedly 10.000 years would actually end up looking more like not even 50 years.
[0] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/worlds-uranium...
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...
WTF?
Well, yes. $230m to prevent power being generated, either for ideological reasons or bribes.
Makes sense for a lot of reasons. The most costly energy was the fixed rate 75c per hour that was for ideological reasons going to transform Ontario into the solar power maker of the world. That went to California then and now China.
What do you see as the problem with that?
Yesterday, all day without variation, Ontario was generating 9300-9600MW of nuclear power.
They aren't even in the same universe.
Source: https://www.ieso.ca/power-data
So they need to either build a lot of nuclear or build a lot of wind.
One of these is cheap, easy and fast, one is hard, expensive and slow.
3-4 years of German rollout of onshore wind would probably do the job.
The nuclear plants they shut down were a drop in the bucket compared to gas, solar and wind.
If Russia stops delivering gas, then ultimately that will translate to a higher German oil demand, as a lot of formerly gas tailored usage will be retooled to oil.
As Russia is sitting on the single largest gas supply on the planet, nearly a quarter of the worlds supply [2]. While with oil there are a few somewhat competitive non-Russian alternatives [3]
So if Russia's resources will continue to be geopolitically taboo, then a lot of Europe will shift back to oil instead of gas.
[0] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/11/f68/Products...
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.ZS?location...
[2] https://www.worldometers.info/gas/gas-reserves-by-country/
[3] https://www.worldometers.info/gas/oil-reserves-by-country/
Obviously if you will rely on wind or solar for baseline, you will need to build out storage. And, equally obviously, you don't waste money building out storage you don't yet have capacity to charge up.
It is a trivial observation that adds no light.
What is known now is that costs are falling even faster than did solar and wind, and are already of similar order.
Wind and solar are not, in fact, environmental disrupters. Waste panels are not an environmental hazard, and are in fact extremely valuable. Anyone not warehousing their dead panels is an idiot.
Nukes are lately the darling of big coal, because they guarantee another ten years of sales that in total exceed the cost of that much solar generation capacity. Spent on solar, it would displace the coal immediately.
You're right, they aren't. Yes, thanks to decades of power-lobbying, viable wind and solar energy were both kept as low-key and forgettable as possible - and shut-down whenever possible. Apart from the vast sums of excessive money involved, lurking in the background was the fearful and sure knowledge that everyone, everwhere had potential and certain access to endless power ... without any constraints or arm-twisting politics.
Yes ... wind and solar ARE in a different universe ... one where all of humanity can and will survive and be free of the pernicious influence of centralized energy overlords, and their wars.
> pernicious influence of centralized energy overlords, and their wars.
My centralized energy overlords are extremely well run and regulated nuclear power operators. Seems great to me!
And I can't remember the last war over nuclear fuel...
I live in Windsor-Essex and still see new windmill projects going up all the time.
But if you've ever been to Chatham-Kent you'd notice that there are places where you can do a 360 degree turn and never see fewer than 10 windmills in your field of vision. Ontario has 2,600 wind turbines.
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/10/23/news/wind-turbin....
So, only the towers, really.
Just saying.
https://www.ieso.ca/power-data
Nuclear is the base load, alternatives supply what they can, and hydroelectric dams and gas plants act as the variable load supply.
If we can just lose the gas plants, we'd be pretty close to zero carbon. And I think that achievable.
Another 2500-3000 MW of nuclear would take up some more of the base load, and allow hydro to deal with most of the variable load.
Look at Texas- they only fall apart 1-2 days per year, but that's enough that it's a crisis every time. How confident are we that our hydro dams can sustain us in the worst case every year or decade?
I think to achieve it, we would need to see financial incentives, direct or indirect, to have everyone buying up power batteries for their homes, reducing the variable load. Maybe price incentives like nearly free electricity at night and extra costs during the day, etc.
Perhaps the magnitude of the failure is lower, but it's still failing if they're having as many blackouts as they might have later this summer.
We've had zero blackouts where I live in Texas. Not saying they don't exist, but they haven't been happening in my area and people seem to be very hyperbolic about it.
For most of the state, there appear to be no blackouts so far. Be careful and safe. I'd have some sort of back up plan for AC if I were you. This heat sucks. A few links for someone's edification and perusal.
https://poweroutage.us/area/state/texas
https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/farmersville-immedia...
https://www.kiiitv.com/article/news/local/is-your-power-out-...
https://www.newsweek.com/texas-power-shortage-electricity-er...
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/07/10/texas-blackouts-powe...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-11/texans-as...
https://news.yahoo.com/texas-power-breaks-record-heat-122512...
My concern is that we'd be talking about perhaps doubling the variable output needed from the existing system if we turn off the gas plants. Instead of needing 1 MW from them on a hot summer day, we suddenly need to ask them to provide 2 MW. Maybe it's doable, but it's asking a lot.
Imagine you've got a proposed project that will double the peak demand on my database. I say "What's the problem? The database works fine. There's no need to upgrade the hardware!". Same idea.
And climate change just adds more uncertainty, because droughts and floods are more common- while hydro does best with a steady input of water. I'm certain Quebec will be fine, because it's not planning to try to double the peak load on its plants.
e.g. refurbishement of Darlington was hundreds of millions over budget: https://globalnews.ca/news/3795801/darlington-refurbishment-...
I just came back from a few days up in Grey-Bruce and there are signs all over the place angry about the proposed NWMO waste diposal site up in Teeswater there. Very divided community about the issue. (Then again the same rough area or just east of it was extremely bitter about wind turbines some years ago, too, so can't please everyone...)
Unfortunately, a lot of the local communities consider the wind turbines eyesores and the current Premier is against them for that reason.
https://www.google.ca/maps/@42.2920464,-82.2696581,3a,75y,14...
Personally, I find the overhead power lines to be far uglier. The wind turbines look cool, but are barely visible from the road.
Agrivoltaics:
The calculus will surely be different for somewhere else that doesn't have those solutions in place.
So yes, there were new power plants coming online, but after budget overruns and missed timelines.
Anyway, nuclear is still great baseline source of energy, so pity we don't build it better.
In the UK, the Hinkley Point C project is over-budget and late, partly because they had problems with their initial concrete pours that necessitated exceptionally costly and time-consuming rebuilds. But as Hinkley gets closer to completion, the lessons learned are being transferred to Sizewell C, another EDF plant. [1]
The world needs these large nuclear plants and we can’t just give up because the first few constructed went over budget and took too long.
[1] https://www.economist.com/briefing/2022/06/23/energy-securit...
The world is notably worse for these projects diverting money away from renewables that would have already been displacing carbon emissions for a decade by now.
In what way? For the price that they actually cost after construction you can get double the capacity in wind, and double the capacity in solar, and a CAES plant capable of storing several days of energy at the same capacity, and the same capacity in a combined cycle gas plant, and a redox flow battery with 12 hours of storage, and a hydrogen electrolyser capable of producing enough hydrogen or methane to run the gas plant with change left over.
All so you can make your energy infrastructure beholden to one fuel supplier where your country is not allowed to produce any yourself. Then you have to find somewhere to put the waste for millenia.
And that only if you're on the short list of countries that the US, China, or France will even sell fuel to.
That's a lofty claim and I have heard CAES storage at economic scales is still unsolved, else we'd see a rocketship company in the space. If you do know of a stealthy rocketship here, who is it?
Production increased from 2.3 TWH in 2015 to 7.8 TWH in 2020, and capacity keeps increasing jumping from 2.3GW in 2020 to 3.3GW in 2021. And that recent growth has been without subsides.
Wind really scales best with hydro as you only get so much rain per year, but you have a great deal of flexibility when you release it. As Finland has a great deal of hydro they can make use of plenty of wind.
If I can choose the time and place for when to do the trade, I would make a huge profit trading 2 units of energy and getting 1 unit back later at my specified time and place. The top price is around 40cent per kwh when the wind is still and demand is at its peak, compared to ~3c kwh when the wind is at the maximum production and demand is at the lowest. paying 6c worth of wind power and getting 40c when I specific it would be massive profit.
Green hydrogen if burned for energy would cost about 3-10 times that of nuclear per kwh. In the future that cost might go down but for now that is a bit (which is why no one are producing green hydrogen in order to produce energy). Again, if you are willing to sell green hydrogen for the price of nuclear, eating the loss, then sign me up. I will happy buy that and sell it for minimum 3x of what I pay for it since there are plenty of industries that want energy when demand is high and supply is low.
The cost of energy is not determined by how much it cost to produce. It is determined by the time and place it is delivered. 1 unit of energy produced today is not fungible for 1 unit of energy produced tomorrow. Only energy produced at the same time can be evaluated based on how much they cost to produce.
Think a high-altitude reservoir where water is pumped up all night and then released all day when it's required.
The biggest problem is getting permission to move that much water around. I live next to a lake and shudder at the regulatory hurdles I'd encounter building something like this. There'd be at least 4 government agencies before I even negotiated to sell to the public utility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
Wind power doesn't work like that. Instead of a daily pattern of high and low supply, you get random amount of weeks and days of high supply followed by random amount of weeks and days of low supply.
Storage need to discharge in order to generate profits. If you get 30-50 discharge cycles each year, then those periods need to provide profits for the cost of 365 days of operations and it also need to repay the original investment.
One way to get around this is with subsidies. This is how some fossil fuel plants operate, called "reserve energy". When the wind blow they don't run the generator, but they still get paid through tax money. Then they start the engines when the wind isn't blowing and demand exceed supply. This scheme helps to reduce the peak price in northern Europe, through obviously it isn't really that cheap. It mostly just hide the true price behind subsidies.
And the capacity factor of wind is ~33%, which means you need ~3 times as much wind as nuclear. The capacity factor of solar is ~25%, so you need four times as much:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#United_States
It's also with noting that nuclear has a higher capacity factor, but it's not 100%.
And then LCOE isn't even the right metric, because what matters is the CO2 produced by 2040, not the CO2 produced between 2040 and 2100 as we have to solve this now, or the world will be too unstable to finish a nuc.ear reactor, let alone run one until decomissioning. This makes the LCOE of renewables a little higher, but for nuclear it is between 10x and infinity times the cost per unit carbon.
None of this have ever happened beyond "research" projects at extremely small scale. You can't take nuclear "actually cost after construction" - which in some countries like Korea or China is maybe 20% more than original estimations - and apply assumption that anything of this is actually able to scale, not even talking about cost of this.
you are aware that you are posting on an article about Ontario and Saskatchewan, correct?
How about you go review the tables showing how little solar energy these provinces receive in the winter?
So when we need energy to heat our homes and power our lights, our solar output is also greatly reduced?
Solar may be great further south, where it is sunny all year round, but in the north we need reliable power all year long, including our cold and dark winters.
It doesn't get cold and snow here for no reason, it is caused by the reduction in solar energy we receive.
Other significant projects to check is the building by KEPCO and ENEC, I think BARAKAH-1 was the first unit connected: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails....
There are a lot of teams working on this issue, like Oklo: https://oklo.com
[0] https://www.french-nuclear-safety.fr/asn-informs/news-releas...
One more thing though that makes this calculation even more ridiculous: They're comparing today's wind+solar prices with a tech that's supposed to be available in the 2030s. Like, they're assuming wind+solar won't progress in the next 10 years. That's... a very unrealistic thing to assume.
Renewable prices are computed as : "I put $XXX and got this much electricity during the year, so price per watt is $YYY -> renewable is cheap"
That calculation is not reflective of the reality of the needs. People - and anyone in charge of maintaining a power grid - think like so :
"I need YYY watts of electricity now, how much $XXX do I need to put down to get it ?"
That amount is massively higher in price per watt with renewable, because renewable can sometime works at >90% of their potential, and provide cheap and abundant electricity or they can decide to work at < 1% and be completely useless. And I have never seen anyone advocating for renewable that is willing to say "Please do cut my home line to save electricity when it's dark and windless - even in November - if batteries are low. I think it's better than building reliable backup supply".
Nuclear is the preferred choice here because you are going to get electricity in those situation at the push of a button. Maybe prices will be higher than the price per watt of renewable, but it will provide electricity when no amount of wind farms and solar panels are going to do the job. Meaning when prices of renewable are approaching infinity. In that case, expensive nuclear is still cheaper than failing renewable. Batteries can help renewable, but no one in anywhere near the ability to store energy for a whole country for weeks in cold countries, when days are very short and wind can just decide to stop blowing. There are other options than nuclear - like the usual coal, gas and oil, but they have their own problems - like CO2 emission. Other options include geothermal and hydro but they have ecological aspects as well, and tend to be more expensive than nuclear.
And it's STILL cheaper than nuclear watt for watt.
That being said, I think nuclear power is a necessary part of a sustainable energy mix, because it is much easier to satisfy ground load with it, and you don't have storage issues. (But this article is stupid at best and disingenuous at worst)
Fascinating that we've managed to get solar panel working at 40% capacity at night.
Sure they do, the storage is just called hydroelectricity. There are parts of the world (eg Tasmania) with months of energy storage.
For the realised cost of nuclear and construction timeframe of nuclear, you could build a resilient supply with a distributed transmission grid and a mix of batteries and pumped hydro.
We need energy at a specific place and time. Renewables don't meet those needs. We get them where the weather permits when the weather permits.
This is not fine, for multiple reasons:
1. Nuclear is probably not the lowest number. See Lazard's analysis of levelized energy costs: https://www.lazard.com/media/451881/lazards-levelized-cost-o... on the whole / on the average, Nuclear in 20221 is $167 / MWh while solar is $36 and wind is $38. Now, granted, maybe these mini-reactors are cheaper than the average, and maybe solar and wind are effectively more expensive etc. - but I doubt it's that much of a difference; and the figures quoted are not "levelized costs", so they may be neglecting various factors, such as maintenance of older reactors or waste storage (which needs to happen for hunderds or thousands of years).
2. The reason you yourself gave - "over schedule, over budget" : Even if you want to choose what's cheapest, it can't be what's cheapest as proposed, but what's cheapest as projected to cost.
3. Price is not everything. On the one hand, there's the question of availability of the renewables (e.g. you might need some storage as well); and on the other, there are the grave safety concerns from nuclear reactors.
4. Price is not everything. II : Greenhouse gas emissions. Nuclear is not "emission-free", since you need to count emissions due to Uranium-mining and processing, not just the electricity generating reaction. IIANM, there are significant emissions to take into account as well relative to solar, wind, geothermal etc.
It will make their operations cheaper, saving on transfer losses alone on their scale is significant gain.
[1] https://media.kghm.com/en/news-and-press-releases/kghm-plans...
see https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run... for more info.
That's one gargantuan "once", let's plan our energy generation assuming it doesn't materialize, we can always recalibrate if it does.
Let's not take it for granted, for sure, but let's maybe dial back on the "fusion is always 20 years away" jokes. There isn't a bigger win for civilization than fusion, leaving aside unknowns: immortality might be possible, fusion was our only source of energy until the discovery of fission.
See Prof. Dennis Whyte, one of the of cofounders of CFS explain why he believes that fusion is coming sooner than you might think.
I hope you will allow people still being sceptical and cautious about counting on fusion for at least another 20-30 years.
The progress that the physicists and engineers made is tremendous and I appreciate everyone's sacrifices to make fusion a viable energy source.
However, it isn't one yet and likely it won't be for decades. There are still plenty of engineering challenges, and once those are solved, comes the economical, bureaucratical challenges (just take a look at how bad most countries are in building new fission reactors).
Both can be true at the same time.
I don't know about you, but I am planning my life with the assumption that the energy I use won't be coming from fusion for the rest of it (and I am around 30).
I'm on the optimism side of that coin though.
It's by no means necessary for a joke to have been made in the comment I was replying to, for me to refer to it. The cliché is well known.
That being said, fusion will come too late to do something about climate change, so we should be building renewables as quickly as we can, and, if we have too much money, perhaps add a bit of nuclear.
Fossil fuel companies are parasites.
If the answer is steam then fusion is as dead as coal and nuclear. Or is there some solid state like solar or very non-complex working method like a wind turbine which is the target?
That cost difference is the reason coal has died out, it's simply not economical to run a large steam turbine.
Today we also have LNG, but that seems to mostly be about energy independence. Russia can't simply turn off the tap for Lithuania or Poland, because they have a more pricy alternative method of delivery.
For reference see the dramatic decrease of coal in the US in favor of natural gas.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
- "If not for CANDU reactors, D-T fusion would be an unattainable dream. “The luckiest thing to happen for fusion in the world is that CANDU reactors produce tritium as a byproduct,” Abdou says. Many nuclear reactors use ordinary water to cool the core and “moderate” the chain reaction, slowing neutrons so they are more likely to trigger fission. CANDU reactors use heavy water, in which deuterium takes the place of hydrogen, because it absorbs fewer neutrons, leaving more for fission. But occasionally, a deuterium nucleus does capture a neutron and is transformed into tritium."
- "If too much tritium builds up in the heavy water it can be a radiation hazard, so every so often operators send their heavy water to the utility company Ontario Power Generation (OPG) to be “detritiated.” OPG filters out the tritium and sells off about 100 grams of it a year, mostly as a medical radioisotope and for glow-in-the-dark watch dials and emergency signage. “It’s a really nice waste-to-product story,” says Ian Castillo of Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, which acts as OPG’s distributor."
"Whats your annual yield?"
"100 grams...."
I wonder if there are other elements being produced and sold that have such low yearly yields. Bonus points if they are super expensive.
In some cases the half lives of the isotopes are so short they literally have to be produced on demand at a facility nearby, which usually means they can only be produced/used by facilities with their own equipment for producing them, or they are colocated on some sort of larger campus where they happen to have a suitable isotope producing accelerator as their neighbour.
Fluorine-18 is used in certain kinds of PET scans for cancer imaging, and has a half life of 109 minutes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorine-18
Technetium-99m is one of the most commonly used radioisotopes for medical imaging and has a half life of just over 6 hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technetium-99m so the usual mechanism is to ship the material that decays into Technetium-99m because the Molybdenum-99 parent isotope has a half life of 66 hours so lives long enough you can actually ship usable amounts around. So while this one is obviously not a low yield isotope, it really shows how the half life of the isotope can be worked around to make an an isotope a useful product.
Its a little hard to give simple numbers for a lot of these since they get measured by "activity" in Becquerels (Bq) as that's the useful metric based on how they get used, so giving "mass" would involve a lot of math and some guesses based on how efficient supply chains are (since you might produce twice as much and just "eat the difference" letting it decay if you have no other good way to get it to the user faster) but its a very fascinating industry.
Theres some fascinating information about how this sort of stuff gets made https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/te_1340_web.p... if you want to find out just how "fiddly" it can be to do chemistry with elements that might just decide to change what they are while you're working with them.
Most of the synthetic elements (like technetium, it's in the name) probably have similar or far lower yields to tritium since they all are produced by transmutation and that requires monstrous amounts of energy.
Not an element, botulinum toxin has billions of doses made, but the total production is well under a gram.
How much botox is produced per year: 800 million units [1] = 0.04 grams
Average cost per injection is $466 [3]
Allergan’s $2.8 billion Botox empire (2017), on track to grow to $4 billion by 2020 [4]
[1] https://www.brightnewme.co.uk/want-to-know-what-its-like-ins...
[2] a unit is 5.0 x 10 power -11 grams: https://toxedfoundation.org/botulinum-toxin-and-botox/
[3] https://www.plasticsurgery.org/cosmetic-procedures/botulinum...
[4] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-10-26/inside-fo...
Total worldwide annual production of tritium is under 10 kg.
It is just barely possible Helion could succeed someday.
I forget which company, but I know one of these were sold as being tested to be safe under a direct missile hit in case of an attack! Super cool.
Edit: Territories, not provinces. All three of them.
You mean territories?
[1] https://www.nunavutnews.com/news/quassa-says-next-step-for-n...
I get that this is coming from a website whose name contains "investor". As combustible based options go, I think nuclear is the least worse, and a site-C equivalent in Sask is probably not even an option.
I find it dangerous to a) put nuclear and hydro/wind in the same "non-emission" category, especially when nuclear does emit radioactive solid waste and the occasional radioactive cloud when they go boom, b) to reduce the comparison to a price-tag, where indeed nuclear will win
There are very uncontroversial answers to your questions, even if you personally don't like them.
If you have an uncontroversial answer to his question, simply say it.
You seem to have taken personal offense to his question in general.
Intuition says hydroelectric dam is almost carbon free for a century or more after you build it (not counting watershed disruption). Solar is basically free up front but the panels wear out quick and so the supply chain must run. Nuclear and wind seem to be in the middle with nuclear being closer to the damn and wind being closer to solar. But there is no good way to actually get the numbers and other stuff you need make the comparison.
Hell, even just trying to compute the amount of diesel used per kwh over a given timeline (and this should be a really easy thing to quantify in a demonstrably honest way) is basically impossible because you wind up having to sift through reams and reams of material written by people who are just lying with plausible deniability.
I don't care what my power source is. I just want to be informed. And the amount of lying I have to identify and discard on my way to being informed is too damn high.
What I definitely do not "like" is the dismissal of nuclear by saying "nuclear waste" without considering all the forms of waste associated with other supposedly "greener" solutions.
Solar panels and the stands they are placed are shipped (half way round the world) wrapped in acres of plastic, cardboard and polystyrene for shipping that is then just discarded at worst, and possibly partly recycled at best. Broken wind turbines, which happens frequently, are often just buried, and so on. Digging the raw materials out of the ground and refining them causes waste. Doping chemicals to get the rare earths cause waste. Just because in the West we recycle much of this, doesn't mean that, in the race to the bottom, factories in Asia aren't just dumping this stuff out of sight.
https://weather.com/science/environment/news/baotou-artifici...
Unless you are taking about the blades? Sure, they are discarded. It has not been and will not be a problem.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...
It's like I said in another post, nuclear is held to some mythical higher standard of scrutiny than other forms of energy generation despite it being better in every way except for up-front cost. All the spent nuclear fuel, ever, takes up less volume than the picture in the bbg article.
What's your point?
I'd love to see some figures that prove or disprove that. I'm inclined to disagree and say that more waste is produced making solar panels and wind turbines due to the sheer volume of them that are being mass manufactured.
> What's your point?
My point is that everyone talks about nuclear waste, but no one talks about the toxic chemical waste produced the mass manufacture of hundreds of thousands of solar panels and turbines, versus the one-off construction of a few hundred nuclear power stations, and the extraction of a relatively small-by-weight amount of fuel.
Nuclear power is always under minute scrutiny compared to "green" power.
The sheer mass of nukes is revealed by their cost. That cost is for concrete and steel, both with well-documented impact. The cost of solar and wind equipment is concentrated in high-grade material refinement involving very small actual mass.
So, your inclination misleads you, and you seek to similarly mislead others.
The effective opposition to nukes is based on thoroughly rational analysis of costs. Simply, by any rational accounting, nukes cost much more than favored alternatives.
storing it safely is a bit more complex than "large indestructible concrete bins"
nb. I'm not anti-nuke, just pro good risk analysis
Unless that means burning more coal/gas/oil...
All of these factors and more (except cost) are on different scales and dimensions, so comparing them requires human value judgements - inevitably people disagree.
There are ways to minimize this of course, like building giant storage tanks, but dammed rivers are going to (usually) dwarf man mad retention pools.
As soon as storage for intermitent sources is economically competitive with gas (not nuclear, it already is), nuclear as we know it is done.
As soon as we start building more NPPs thereby training a workforce for building NPPs building costs will go down 10x and renewables as we know it is done.
It doesn't emit anything, radioactive waste is captured entirely on the other side. They also don't go boom.
They're in the same category because they're both zero-carbon power. If you want to compare safety, deaths per TWh has nuclear right in the same area as wind and solar - less than rooftop solar.
If you’re concerned about human health, nuclear waste disposal is well studied and so are nuclear reactor safety. In fact, these small reactors are designed to be too small to create any catastrophic event in the astronomically unlikely event of a critical malfunction.
It’s odd to me that we all take planes despite the fact historically many have gone boom, and many a life has been lost. Must be something to do with no other viable alternatives…
It's worse than that. Let's say you get 12 hours of steady sunshine every day.
What to do the other 12 hours? For that you'll need storage.
Therefore, you will need to double the capacity of the solar array so that during that 12 hours you can both store power and deliver power to people who need it.
But then no power store is 100% efficient, so you'll also need to add more panels for that.
But then you're never going to get 12 hours of steady power every day. You're going to have to increase storage and panels to account for that too.
We really have come a long way in bringing down prices for wind and solar!
Per the article, they estimate wind and solar to produce at ~40%. The reactors will operate at ~98%, some downtime for maintenance.
I don't think handwaving away the long term storage of nuclear waste and the risk of contaminating large areas can just be ignored, especially with a new unproven reactor design.
The Fukushima disaster is expected to kill precisely no one from the surrounding area due to radiation exposure, and the highest exposure among 36,478 dosimeters in Fukushima city in 2011 was 2.7 millisieverts with an average of 0.26 millisieverts. The 2.7 millisievert is believed to have come from a badge left in luggage that was x-rayed. A dose of 0.26 millisieverts is the same as the exposure from to round trip flights between NYC and London.
Add 50% to the nuclear cost because they always go over cost and time budgets.
That's probably a fairer overall estimate.
In case this hasn’t already been shared
Why would it?
I mean, we have trade barriers between provinces. It's insane.
I assume 300W is actually 300MW. If that's correct, solar panels are still much more convenient, also considering that power plant will require many acres of land for the building, pipes, etc. Solar panels have zero waste too. What am I missing?
Edit: I wonder why you had to copy/paste only part part of the line. They literally address this in the next word:
> ...provided the 1,500- to-1,800 acres of land needed was free and the sun shone steadily
Oh, and bonus, wildfire smoke blotting out the sun regularly in the summers now!
Seems sensible to pick a power source that doesn't depend on the sun with that many variables.
Even during overcast or rainy days, you'd be surprised how much sun energy still comes through.
We're also talking Canada, which isn't the best for consistent sunlight.
Nuclear plants also need decommissioning of course. Seems to be expensive due to all the radioactive material.
Canada has plenty of sun. Most of the populated parts are at the same latitude as central Europe. They have hydro and wind too. And not a very large population.
Also, latitude is irrelevant. If central Europe got as much snow as Canada they'd probably have far less solar panels.
Nobody talks about recycling coal. Not a thing. You burn it, it's gone and added to our atmosphere. Burning the equivalent in coal for even a single solar panel's life time production in energy, is probably quite a lot. Latitude is very relevant. Germans put lots of solar on their roofs for the same reason that that is probably a popular thing in Canada. Because they are at the same latitude.
Toronto is at 44 degrees latitude. Berlin is further North at 52 degrees latitude. Madrid would be 40 degrees latitude. Most of the US is below 49 degrees latitude. Most of Canadian populated areas get more than enough sunlight.
You might have a point with northern Canada or Alaska. Though those too get awesome amounts of light in the summer, which is why you might find people investing in solar there too. Just lots of economic benefits even if they work less well in the winter (or not at all in the polar circle). As it is, it makes plenty of sense for Germans to put solar on their roofs.
They are being warehoused against the time that they may be sold.
Until night hits. Then it turns out you need a ton more solar panels to overproduce in the day to store energy in your expensive energy storage system. Which is inconvenient.
Solar aligns very well with daily energy demands, and storage helps smooth it out. In the end we will have a massive energy surplus and finding ways to use that extra energy will be big business.
At higher latitudes, the sun doesn't shine nearly as long, and the days are often overcast for weeks on end. Your storage needs to smooth over weeks, not hours!
The cost of that storage, and the solar array, would be much higher than the nuclear plant.
Optimally, you build an energy mix for the worst day of the year, not storing *electrical energy for the long term (other types like heat/pimped hydro may make sense at those timescales)
Saskatchewanian here! Your use of the word "energy" here is critical. We use a ton of _energy_ non-stop through the winter. Looking through the last year worth of statements, my wife and I used 1,794 m^2 of natural gas in Feb 2022, and 59 m^2 of natural gas in June 2022. Conversely, we seem to average about 700-800 kWh of electricity every month, but last August we used 1,456 kWh and the most recent bill had 1,159 kWh (electric air conditioning).
We use a crap load of natural gas to heat our homes throughout the winter, and that basically drops to nil during the summer (only the hot water heater). Electricity varies less, but there are huge summer spikes.
What nuclear does, from my PoV, is give us not only a road out of burning coal (ick) for our base load electricity, but also makes electric-heat-conversion a more viable proposal. While the temperatures do get cold enough sometimes that a heat pump/HRV loses its effectiveness, getting to a point where we have a COP of 3-4 using the heat pump and backing it up with resistive heating is a huge win if the electricity powering those devices isn't coming from a coal-fired plant.
Typically the coldest days are near peak darkness with clear skies and no wind.
They sit still for 22-23 hours per day allowing making them perfect as long as we have chargers wherever you park your car. Which should be an easy mandate to enforce.
You also need to modify (heavily) the electricity distribution lines and infrastructure to add the capacity to actually power such a large number of chargers.
Well, people don't but heating does. It is quite popular to produce heat for floor heating during the night (because there are tariffs where night energy is cheaper) and disable it at (part)day - floor heating has large inertia and keeps the house (or at least feet) warm for longer.
Solar has this issue, that a lot of people mount them and the highest amount of electricity produced is during the same period of time and during summer, where you have the most production you don't need heating - some use air conditioning, but it is not necessary in cooler parts of the world (and it uses less energy than heating).
Storage cost.
Isn't it better to put more effort into a big one instead?
> The IC [Isolation Condenser] pool has an installed capacity that provides 7 days of reactor decay heat removal capability. The heat rejection process can be continued indefinitely by replenishing the IC pool inventory.
It would be nice if we were building reactors that could shut down without any external input. NuScale seems to be closest to production with a walk-away safe design. In other words, change "7 days" to "infinity days".
> they consider things like the possibility of using a central facility to produce high-performance concrete parts for the plant, as we have shifted to doing for projects like bridge construction. But this concrete is often more expensive than materials poured on site, meaning the higher efficiency of the off-site production would have to more than offset that difference. The material's performance in the environment of a nuclear plant hasn't been tested, so it's not clear whether it's even a solution.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...
I know there is the storage problem. But most energy is directly consumed or has to be stores for a short period . Heat for example. And heat is stored in water.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov
Not without its fair share of criticism, budget overruns and all other problems associated with building new nuclear reactors these days, but it did happen
It produces far less harm to the environment than fossil fuel generation, which should be decommissioned as quickly as possible. Every time a government chooses too replace nuclear generation with fossil fuels out of choice (I'm looking at you, Germany), they're a traitor to their own people, and to all humans.
And I'll never understand "green" people who actively protest against nuclear power. Yes, renewable power is better. But most of the power generated comes from fossil fuels, that needs to stop as soon as possible, which isn't happening in the short term via only renewable power.
I highly recommend watching this video by Kurzgesagt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhAemz1v7dQ.
• our past failures to get long-term storage of nuclear waste right
• the cost and time overruns for building nuclear plants in the last several decades
• the possible catastrophic failures even in a country like Japan
• the long term storage issue and its cost.
These serious unsolved issues are being hand-waved away again and again.
* Any cases of that are management issues, not nuclear power generation issues.
* Making safe nuclear reactors is a well-understood challenge. Even if you do include all incidents that have happened with outdated, flawed reactors, going all the way back, nuclear reactors have cause far less environmental damage and far fewer deaths per power unit than fossil fuels do. Also, this article is about SMRs, which have very different requirements.
* Nuclear waste storage is a solved issue, this just repeats the first point.
These costs are astonishingly!
If the 10,000 year costs fell on the producers and consumers directly (this is how it should be), they would quickly have a different point of different view
It's really not that hard, except from a political standpoint.
I wonder why it's so cheap when calculated this way it seems competitive with solar panels when I expected it to be a factor ten more expensive (of course solar panels wouldn't really work that far north).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY&ab_channel=Illin...
Also the land requirements for huge solar / wind installations is another downside. Nuclear at scale is a clear winner especially in seismically stable regions of NA.
> If other sources meet demand 5% of the time, electricity costs fall and the energy capacity cost target rises to $150/kWh.
So just 5% of grid supply from something like gas lets you use storage for baseload now!
Battery storage is now available for as low as $55/MWh.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
The source is "Lazard estimates", but I can't find anything close to this in reality. Pumped hydro is meant to be super cheap, but is currently ~ $100/kWh. I'm starting to agree with the other commenter that Lazard is bunk.
"Pumped hydro is already the cheapest energy storage technology in the world in terms of cost per installed kilowatt-hour of capacity. Total project costs range between $106 and $200 per kilowatt-hour, compared to between $393 and $581 for lithium-ion batteries, World Bank figures show." https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/pumped-hydro-mo...
BloombergNEF says $145-167 per MWh.
> If you do that calculation at the global level, we evaluate the LCOE for recently financed projects is at US$150/MWh including charging costs. That’s our benchmark. We have a range around that benchmark which goes from US$115/MWh in China.
https://www.energy-storage.news/behind-the-numbers-the-rapid...
So the critical question is: how long will grids connected to renewables need reserve? 4 hours doesn't seem like much but I'm not sure the best way to find this info. Edit: from a 30s google search, 4 hours is only good for <80% renewables in Aus. [0] https://reneweconomy.com.au/much-storage-back-high-renewable...
And in the mean time gas peaker plants provide a viable, cheap and safe compromise without needing nuclear!
> We found in some cases the battery requirement becomes very large relative to the load, at greater than 20 hours. In these cases, it was concluded that additional gas peaking capacity would be more economic (and biogas was used when the emission constraint did not allow for natural gas).
This is the original report: https://www.energynetworks.com.au/resources/reports/electric... and these graphs are on page 98.
Biogas use isn't practical to replace existing gas supply.
I honestly really wish renewables + batteries could take over but it's too early. Aus has heaps of Uranium, is geologically stable, has strong regulating authorities and geopolitically secure. The perfect spot for low-emissions Nuclear which is practical and possible now in all respects except for politically.
No they're not, as already pointed out in response to your other comments (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32092280), yet you continue to cite them as an authority.
Not to mention the other comments that refute those numbers using the same paper - projects would be closer to ~$100/KWh when storage is taken into account, as shown graphed in the paper itself.
The price of $150 is capacity of a battery. If i want a battery that can store 4 kwh i pay $600.
The other number referencing $55/MWh is referencing levelized cost of storage. I have a a MWh but instead of using it right now i store it for 4 hours. Now this MWh costs its initial price + $55.
Apply this example to a KWh where i would pay $0.1 for it if i used it right now if i want to store it for 4 hours and use it later i have to add $55/1000 to the price or about $0.055. So a directly used KWh would cost me $0.1. One stored for 4 hours would cost me $0.15.
Hope that makes sense and explains these different numbers.
* $300 million for equivalent solar
* $200-400 million for equivalent onshore wind (they don't mention offshore wind which is more cost effective over it's lifetime)
* $1.5 billion for the SMR
Assuming solar and wind stay the same price for the next decade (which they definitely won't) that's a 4-5x construction price difference. The article didn't mention lifetime, decommissioning or running costs, which is likely a significant difference too.
Coal plants in particular are dramatically unsuited for the rapid changes in output to respond to changing demands for power.
Gas plants on the other hand are. And gas plants are cheap!
Overbuilding renewables with combinations of solar, geothermal (where available) and wind gives pretty good availability on it's own and with gas plants as a backup it gives you plenty of grid stability.
Edit: A link you posted elsewhere (thanks!) points out how well this works:
> If other sources meet demand 5% of the time, electricity costs fall and the energy capacity cost target rises to $150/kWh.
Battery storage is already well below this $150/kWh price.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/solar-wind-and-battery-storage-n... gives "Utility-scale battery (four-hour storage duration) $145-167 per MWh" and references BloombergNEF
Better link for Bloomberg reference: https://www.energy-storage.news/behind-the-numbers-the-rapid...
As an example, for most of Aus, 5 hrs storage will only work for <80% renewables [0]. It's only practical on smaller scales which doesn't mean it isn't useful now but just means that the ~$100/MWh systems will not be practical everywhere, especially when renewables become more ubiquitous.
[0] https://reneweconomy.com.au/much-storage-back-high-renewable...
Edit: I had a deeper look at the NREL paper and most of their costs seem to be in the $100s/kWh rather than MWh. E.g ~$300/ kWh for 6 hour systems on Fig. 6.
However can we figure out how to get the same result with twice the energy and the ability to store it indefinitely at 40% efficiency. Especially given that the costs of all these technologies are going down at two digit percent per year.
2028 is 6 years from now.
> ...
> A 300W-solar power farm would require 1.5 million solar panels and cost approximately $300 million.
... watt??
India has a plan based on a three-stage fuel cycle, where the third stage runs on thorium. However they've had significant delays and the first prototype breeder reactor of the second stage is projected to be finished at the end of this year. The third stage is probably still some years away.
India and China are probably the most ambitious in terms of thorium fuel cycle research. India has the world's largest thorium reserves, and hope to utilize it for their power generation. China's most pressing concern is their smog crisis, which they hope to solve partly with nuclear power. They are also aiming to own most of the intellectual property with regards to thorium reactors, and it is part of Xi Jinping's drive toward making China carbon neutral by 2060.
Other countries have some small research initiatives but no concrete plans to build anything so far as I know.
. . . with bonus '0' and misplaced comma at no extra cost I trust?
Note the "could be".
Can the myth of cheap, safe and quick to deploy fission energy please die?
It's not cheap, for good reasons[1]:
> Among the surprising findings in the study, which covered 50 years of U.S. nuclear power plant construction data, was that, contrary to expectations, building subsequent plants based on an existing design actually costs more, not less, than building the initial plant.
> The authors also found that while changes in safety regulations could account for some of the excess costs, that was only one of numerous factors contributing to the overages.
It's not safe:
> US nuclear regulators greatly underestimate potential for nuclear disaster, researchers say[2]
> Now I was serving on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, [snip] In 2009, President Barack Obama named me the agency’s chairman. [snip] > Afterward, the falling cost of renewable power changed the calculus. Despite working in the industry for more than a decade, I now believe that nuclear power’s benefits are no longer enough to risk the welfare of people living near these plants. I became so convinced that, years after departing office, I’ve now made alternative energy development my new career, leaving nuclear power behind. The current and potential costs — in lives and dollars — are just too high. [3]
It's always slow to deploy[4]:
> Finland's long-delayed Olkiluoto-3 nuclear reactor connected to the power grid for the first time on Saturday, the plant's operator said, 12 years after its planned launch. Located on Finland's west coast, Olkiluoto-3 is the country's first new nuclear plant in over four decades and Europe's first in almost 15 years.
[1] https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118
[2] https://phys.org/news/2017-05-nuclear-greatly-underestimate-...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/i-oversaw-the-us-nucl...
[4] https://www.dw.com/en/finlands-much-delayed-nuclear-plant-la...
1) Burning fossil fuels is why we are facing global warming right now.
2) Anti-nuclear sentiment is why we aren't living in a nuclear waste right now. Even nuclear advocate's argument that "nuclear plants are much safer now and the accidents that happened at 3 Mile Island/Chernobyl/Fukushima are impossible now" implies that anti-nuclear sentiment was correct in the 1960's, 70's, 80's, 90's and early 2000s at the very least!
If Chernobyl itself was built today, without the post-accident modifications, and it ran 5 years and then exploded, it'd still be safer than a coal plant running normally.
Fossil/biofuel particulate emissions killing ~8 million people per year is no joke.
This is only based on the official number of deaths (31 I think?). This is known to be false.
Better estimates are hard, but "the Ukrainian government pays benefits to more than 36,000 widows of men who have died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster".[1]
There were also at least 200,000 people who had to be relocated.
I agree 100% we should get rid of coal ASAP! No dispute there at all.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-kno...
Actually, it's based on the UNSCEAR number of 4000 deaths including latent cancers. Don't use the Ukraine political numbers. Use the UN panel of scientist numbers.
https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/areas-of-work/chernobyl.h...
If they used your 4000 number then Nuclear becomes twice as unsafe as solar.
(But the point here isn't the number of deaths in the past - because that was moderated by the strong anti-nuclear movements. The risk is higher usage leads to dramatic increases, because deaths are dominated by accidents not constant one-off deaths like from pollution which are more predicable)
Woah I did not realize they used that figure. Everyone agrees that there were between 0 and 1 deaths from radiation due to Fukushima (vs between 31 and 4000 radiation deaths at Chernobyl). There were deaths caused by the prolonged evacuation at Fukushima, which must be where this figure comes from.
That seems a pretty reasonable thing to consider since it is one of (or the?) major risk with nuclear power.
To your second: 3 Mile Island was not an accident that caused significant environmental damage.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec....
Chernobyl was a terrible design that should never have been built.
Fukushima is an example of the dangers. It was however hit by an earthquake 1 magnitude higher than it was designed for and a Tsunami. Given it's location it should have been designed to handle these possibilities.
I know it's tempting to say "oh, if we just don't do these 4-5 dumb things-- the risk is gone".
It's s small risk, but boy the end of the tail in what it costs is pretty dang high.
Even things like oil spills? I know it's hard (or even impossible) to reduce to "overall damage" as the common unit, but I know oil spills are catastrophic.
But we happily live with oil drilling and transport.
Countries like France show how safe nuclear can be.
The magnitude of the risks we're contemplating when we're discussing nuclear are completely insignificant in relation to that.
No death tallies from the accident will be complete until the products have decayed to background levels.
I think this study will take sometime to complete.
All you can do is look at the dose and estimate the deaths. Pretty obvious the evacuation-related death toll is going to be one order of magnitude, and perhaps 2 orders of magnitude higher than Fukushima.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
You're absolutely correct when you say that less regulated nuclear would have caused more incidents. You may also be correct when you say the risks aren't properly calculated at present. The thing is, that doesn't matter unless they're off by three orders of magnitude. Coal kills so many people through pollution that the world could suffer a Three Mile Island once a year without killing anywhere near as many people as coal does.
It is now theoretically possible that solar, wind, and pumped hydro could provide a substantial chunk of global baseload power. We could have gotten there decades ago with nuclear. It's the fault of the green movement that we didn't.
Every nuclear disaster so far has been unique, and this will remain the case going forward, because the nuclear sector is always defending against yesterday’s failure mode. Nuclear power plants are some of the most complicated machines mankind has ever built. In such a complex design there are too many permutations of failures that can arise to allow for designing away all risk. We need to fundamentally accept this risk and embrace it if we are going to adopt nuclear power on a grander scale. This is a big ask on a psychological level for humanity, and that’s one reason why I think a nuclear upscaling is not going to happen. (The other is high and rising cost of construction, which is the biggest problem facing the nuclear power sector that is on them to solve.)
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It is unfortunate we have made Earth into hell though.
citation needed
> If other sources meet demand 5% of the time, electricity costs fall and the energy capacity cost target rises to $150/kWh.
Battery storage is already well under $150/kWh!
Here are volume weight prices by time for Australia, which has been doing a transition:
https://www.aer.gov.au/wholesale-markets/wholesale-statistic...
They increase at less than the rate of inflation!
Australia is the poster child of what not to do.
I'd take that headline with a grain of salt. A lack of investment in power generation because of unclear policy goals by the previous conservative government is the real issue - combined with another odd policy where long term gas supply export contracts meant it was cheaper to turn off gas plants than run them!
Basically the previous government wanted someone to build a new coal fired power station(!) but no commercial company wanted to do it and no investors could be found (coal fired stations just cost too much now). The then Prime Minster is famous for bringing a lump of coal into parliament to show how much he loved coal[1].
It's worth noting that no blackouts occurred.
Ironically, the state of South Australia also had a conservative government at the time but had a very pro-renewables policy (this is where the first Tesla big battery was) which took power prices from the highest in mainland Australia in 2018 to the lowest wholesale prices[2]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea5bOaPkZpc
[2] https://reneweconomy.com.au/sa-renewables-surge-bringing-dow...
Now you wanna store enough solar-generated electricity for when the sun doesn't shine, worldwide? My napkin math says that either the price per kWh will go up, or that some poor country with enough lithium will be "politically destabilized" soon.
For one thing they can use a bunch of tech that doesn't work well in cars (flow batteries for example).
And the price goes down because the primary constraint is production capacity. More demand means more factories mean cheaper prices. See eg the growth in manufacturing capacity in batteries and their price decreasing:
If you look at 2008, there was 6GWh of battery manufacturing in the world and 97% of it was in China.
In 2019, there was around 365GWh worldwide, split into: China (75%), US (9%), South Korea (7%) Europe (5%)
By 2023 we estimate there will be 1,230GWh worldwide: China (65%), Europe (10%), US (10%) and rest of the world (15%).
But none of these solve the issue of months long weather fluctuations and disasters entirely in regions where pumped hydro isn't viable. For that, grid flexibility (such as variable rate Al production and electrified steel smelting), gas or hybrid heating/cooling, generator backup for essential uses (minimal heating and medical facilities), and methane produced from electricity and biomass is the answer and the only reason it hasn't happened on its own is we don't price in the (absolutely massive) externalities of fossil fuels so they're marginally cheaper. We also need to cut the low hanging fruit that are responsible for most of the emissions either directly or indirectly (poorly insulated, overly large detached homes, cars, and cows).
About half for heating and cooling in EU, https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/energy-efficiency/heating... iirc 40% of that or around 20% of total was domestic -- it often looks small because it is broken dowm into two subsets of electricity and two subsets of methane use (and decreasingly kerosene) being for water and space heating. Detached homes use at least double compared to a row house (twice as many walls, but they also tend to be larger and have more windows) or far more than a similarly built apartment with one wall, and tend to be poorly insulated in places like the US.
Heating and cooling represents a lower proportion in the US for a variety of reasons (primarily driving/trucking and some differences in industry as well as a colossally wasteful military), but a huge amount is caused by cows, clearing land for cows, moving cows, cooling cow products, moving feed for cows, and producing fertilizer to grow feed for cows.
Unrelated, but detached home suburb design is also responsible for a lot of other emissions indirectly. Larger living space and fewer communal areas leads to more travel and more stuff. Things being spread out leads to low labour high emissions big box store stuff rather than local hand crafted and second hand markets and local in season produce. Transit and pedestrian hostile layout leads to more driving (and one car per person). Car dependent infrastructure leads to more trucking and less freight trains. Large centralised shopping centers like walmart leads to more uniform goods and just in time logistics which depemd on planes. Flight, trucking, driving and fossil fuel heating leads to more dependence on oil and gas. Oil and gas security is maintained by military activity which is responsible for a huge portion of emissions. None of this stops if you build a 5 over 1 and a train line or a medium density village instead of a suburb of course, but you make a small dent in every step.
I'm not convinced. I tried a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but there were a few too many variables, but I think the 1.5 billion smartphones sold each year edge out EVs (my main difficulty was comparing smartphone battery EV battery)
Utility scale wind = $26-$50/MWh + wholesale 100MWh storage ($55-$97) = $81-$147
Coal = $65-$152/MWh
Nuclear: $131-$204/MWh
These don't include pump-hydro which is a widely used and very cheap storage mechanism.
It's much cheaper and better to overbuild renewables and put a few cheap gas peaker plants around as backup.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
But this is besides the point. Energy companies spent money on long range power cables because they calculate they can make a profit on the transmitted energy. Nuclear power stations spend taxpayer billions because they can't possibly compete commercially. That's the key difference.
Lazard uses the worst possible nuclear builds and ignores the good ones. They ignore China, Korea, Japanese, and Russian builds. In 2006 Japan was churning out ultra-modern ABWR reactors in 36 months (not the old Fukushima kind). Unbelievably cheap and effective. Today, China's Hualong One builds are fully serialized. Yet Lazard keeps on looking at the worst 2 nuclear builds in history and ignoring e.g. the necessary cost of new transmission and overbuilding in order to actually decarbonize at scale with wind solar and gigatonnes of batteries.
Lazard numbers are a farce. Please ignore.
This is why you have a blend of solar, wind and HVEC transmission lines across windzones!
Rolling blackouts (which is the kind of thing that batteries prevent) average less than 2 hours across the US and Europe, so 4 hours is great.
Did you know that the measured availability rates for non-renewable technologies is as follows:
> Historical estimates of 1−EFORd for competing technologies are 89.7%, 92.0%, and 97.3% for natural gas, coal, and nuclear plants, respectively.[1]
[1] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9#se...
My understanding is that there is no long term solution for storing dangerous nuclear waste. They try burying it super deep in mountains. But can't be sure that it won't get out in the next few thousands of years.
Everybody watch the documentary "Into Eternity" on the subject. Amazing.
Compare the risks of living near a nuclear waste storage facility and living downstream of a hydroelectric dam. I know what I would choose! If you demand absolute certainty over a thousand year period you'll be paralyzed into inaction. Any new technology and any political action could result in the eventual collapse of civilization. But inaction guarantees disaster because the status quo is unsustainable. So we have to make mundane risk/reward evaluations and from those we conclude that we can't do without nuclear energy.
Would you rather live next to an active nuclear power plant or next to an active hydroelectic dam?
There have been cases of increased cancer near nuclear power plants.