Even assuming that's the case, isn't the counterargument "Fine, then governments need to subsidize investment into nuclear power plants, just as we do with other green technologies."
Switching to renewable energy with massive amounts of storage is a world of cheaper energy than today. There has been zero learning curve for oil, and coal, and nuclear. If anything nuclear gets more expensive rather than less.
In contrast, renewables and storage are technologies that behave like semiconductors, or hard disks. There's a fairly predictable improvement in costs over time, resulting in massive changes in capabilities over the course of decades.
So not only is switching to renewables and storage cheaper than our current every sources, the faster we perform the change, the more money we save, the more of our resources we can devote to improving the quality of human lives, instead of devoting all that effort to make-work of welding pipes and pouring concrete.
In the US, Georgia and South Carolina started building with nary a peep. France started building again without any environmental objections.
Yet these builds are all catastrophic failures, to the point that any other financial backer is scared away from even touching nuclear. The decision makers are those with the dollars to invest, not the environmentalists.
don't underestimate the negative influence of "environmentalists"
Usage in California has gone down, and renewables are cheaper, just look at the blog series in the original article. Calling these well-known and irrefutable facts "insane" does not bode well for the plethora of other questionable assertions in your comment. For the usage:
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
their proposal was to spend $2B to lose 2GW of carbon free baseline power
everything in my statement is true and based on documents in the public record
I heard without government subsidies, nuclear power plants would simply not be buildable. No insurance company would insure them. The cost in case of a nuclear fallout is just too high.
But yes, nukes all rely heavily on subsidies, always have.
My personal take is that we should subsidize tech to take it from an early stage to a production stage as soon as possible. We need better power sources yesterday, not next century. So we can't sit around waiting for some sort of Elon Musk to get really passionate and dump heaps of cash into it.
But the assumption there is that once the tech is developed and mature, it'll be good enough to stand on its own. Because if it'll never not be expensive, we're just artifically choosing a power source that's permanently more expensive than the alternatives, and that's an unstable situation. Eventually people will get tired of dumping money into it, or there will be some other urgent matter to throw money at, and then we have a bunch of expensive tech that's falling out of use, and underdeveloped alternatives.
Subsidizing nuclear forever also doesn't make any sense economically. Money is fungible. There's no real difference between say, paying $200/month to your power company, or paying $100/month to your power company, and $100 in taxes that ends up going to the power company. The amount you have to spend at the end of the month is the same either way. Now paying $200/month for 5 years so that then your power bill drops to $50/month afterwards, that's a different proposition.
So, I support subsidizing solar, wind and storage because I believe that in their perfected, mass produced versions they're cheap and competitive. They just need a push now. I don't support subsidizing nuclear because I believe it'll always be expensive because it's a fundamentally complex technology that's not amenable to mass production and will always lose to brute force mass applications of simpler technologies.
If we spend $12B on a 1GW reactor, we have far far better alternatives. A 1GW nuclear reactor has a 90% capacity factor of undispatchable, hard to throttle electricity. At today's prices, thay $12B could instead buy 6GW of solar at 20% capacity factor, and 24GWh of batteries. This combined solar plus storage is more flexible, more responsive, and delivers 30% more overall energy. And this is with a stupid design of splitting the cash to half storage half solar. A smarter design more tailored to the actual demand curve would remove some flexibility but become far cheaper.
There's zero reason to build nuclear unless you want to line Bechtel's pockets.
What does that amount of solar and storage look like in terms of material used for its construction as well as area occupied once it’s deployed?
What current examples do we have of projects at this scale?
What is the lifespan of the solar arrays and batteries?
What are the operating costs? How many personnel are required for maintenance and day to day operation?
What other infrastructure is necessary to support such a deployment? Transmission lines, buildings, monitoring facilities, security, roads, office space, etc.
What is the construction timeline for such a project?
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Also, the scale doesn't matter, we have built far more than 6GW of solar, deployed more than 24GWh of storage, but it doesn't have to be at one location for these resources. Solar and batteries scale far better than nuclear, because they can be deployed on smaller installations without nearly as much hassle as nuclear. Or they can be sited at one location.
Distributed software is good, so why not distributed energy generation? Answer: distributed energy generation is great!
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/05/california-finds-pge-equipme...
Just to get you started with some ballpark numbers: The solar irradiance at ground level on a sunny day is greater than 1kW/m^2 for about 6 hours per day (google for "AM1.5"). Typical commercial panels have a conversion efficiency of 21-22%.
You seem very confident that solar is impossible, so why don't you make some reasonable assumptions and prove it to all of us?
There is a massive bias in the field in favor of nuclear and against solar, and this shows in every single prediction made over the past 15-20 years. The EIA would uncritically put out numbers for "advanced nuclear" that were unbeliever rosy for a tech that had never been built. And at the same time, use out of date costs for solar, and the assumption that solar would stay at the old prices and never improve in price.
Or you will see peer reviewed papers in nuclear that assume ridiculous rosy solutions, that make it all the way through to publication without those rosy assumptions being challenged. For example, using nuclear in remote areas, but it using the actual capacity factor of that sort of system, 40-50%, and instead assuming that the price is coming from using every last bit of electricity at all time. In contrast all the modeling around solar always picks the most conservative estimates, because of the unrealistic hyper criticism of solar, which leads to even the most rosy of solar predictions being underestimated of solar.
Similarly, "concerns" about land or energy density are not realistic concerns, but mere political talk used to delay delay delay as long as possible the obvious solution that solar will be a cornerstone of our energy future, from 40%-70% of most countries' energy.
But if you actually are interested in the land usage, it's a question that has been studied to death. NREL is usually a good source, but one caution is to look at the date of any publication, and realize that if it's more than a year old, a lot of the data will be out of date. Here's a 2013 report on land use:
Both coexist synergetically with reservoirs, canal, pasture, even crop land. So, zero acres of land needed.
Now, only a fraction of these will get connected, because only the marginal best investment dollar gets the invested, but the scale is there.
Really the limit it current solar and wind production capacity, which is ever increasing at absolutely terrific speeds.
This is one of many reasons that I think a focus on nuclear is the wrong place. It's not going to be able to scale to catch up to these other technologies, even if after 60 years of development, nuclear finds a learning curve for the first time ever.
My question is given this market where you have high prices and high demand, why do I not see any entrepreneurs building small solar installations and cutting deals with municipalities to provide some of their grid power?
That tells me that the technology, cost, and/or regulation isn’t viable yet. Promises of future developments do nothing to address current needs. I have a feeling that 100% renewable generation is fast becoming a “20 years away” problem since I’ve been hearing the same promises for at least 20 years now and those older than me likely remember even older promises.
I don't know where you live, but generalizing from one small locality with an out of wack market is leading you to the wrong conclusions.
In places where there's a free market for new generation, like Texas, there's more GW of storage being added than GW of natural gas. There's an order of magnitude of new wind and solar generation being added than natural gas, and this is the place with some of the cheapest natural gas in the entire world. Having trouble finding ERCOT, but for the entire US, 1.3TW of the 1.4TW on newly proposed projects are renewable or storage:
https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/renewables-do...
So your local utility, which is charging you high prices, probably has a process that disincentivizes renewables to a large degree. And if there are zero independent funded ventures, then your utility must be actively stopping renewables, and those investors are working in the far more fertile rest of the US.
In particular, small projects can be the hardest to get through. There's zero reason for a utility to cut a deal, they are a monopoly, they are raking in far checks by doing nothing. Utility executives are some of the people least likely to adopt any sort of new technology.
The biggest impediment to renewables sweeping through the grid and giving us cheaper electricity is politics, conservatives, and rentierism. In areas where there's a market set up to allow lower costs to win, fossil fuels are toast. But in most places, electricity is not a market.
I don't think that can actually be done. The world's largest battery installation is less than 1 GWh AFAICT. OTOH we're not doing great at nuclear either.
Similarly if we can build a 1GWh battery we can build also a 24 GWh battery.
Yet we can't and aren't.
Frankly, whenever this comes up the handwaving about storage just seems hopelessly optimistic even for places where it is practical, let alone places where you're lucky to get 4 hours of sunlight a day for a bunch of the year.
Nothing is ever that simple. If carbon zero is an imperative, then there will sometimes be need for something other than solar and wind, and it will inevitably be "impractically expensive" compared to the carbon emitting sources we're moving away from.
It's certainly important to improve the economies of scale of renewables, but doing so is not the goal. Saving money is not the goal. The survival of the human species is the goal, and we aren't going to get there by nickel and diming our way to it.
Even if it takes 20 years to build a nuke, that might still be sooner than "power to x" becomes a viable, affordable option for most of the world.
This is the weird thing about this argument: it so often rests simultaneously on an argument for practicality and/or cost effectiveness, but literally any criticism is met with a gish gallop of unproven technology. You can't have this both ways.
In the end, my central thesis here is just that if you think the be all and end all of this issue is cost effectiveness you are optimizing for the wrong goals and it leaves open a giant window for carbon emitting sources to justify their use when renewables don't work for various local reasons.
The thing to be black and white about is carbon emissions. "What energy mix works for place X right now if we try to eliminate carbon emissions asap" is not a decision that's gonna be made on an internet forum.
A nuke powered world will either require radically new sources of uranium (like sea water uranium extraction) or breeder reactors. Neither is available now, unlike cheap electrolyzers for making hydrogen (< $300/W in China).
Again, this is not a duel to the death. The only thing that should be dismissed out of hand is carbon emitting fuels.
But instead of being so "black and white" and insisting it must be nuclear that powers things, also evaluate options like thermal storage to gather summertime heat in reservoirs for use throughout the winter. It's super cheap, and makes a ton of sense in most areas, yet it's so low tech that it gets ignored.
I will be black and white that fission is not a feasible solution for the vast majority of the human population for at least the next 20 years, and probably forever. Despite more than half a century of experience, it has not improved as a technology. There would have to be some sort of drastic breakthrough for nuclear to be a realistic power source for most of the earth's surface.
It sure is a good thing I didn't say anything of the sort or wow I'd be a hypocrite.
I am definitely not the person trying to shoehorn the entire earth into one energy mix box in this conversation. I think the answer to this is likely to vary a lot all over the world.
Also a lot of the world's population is far enough north that winters produce relatively little solar or wind energy. And those places also tend to be massive energy consumers because it's also very cold.
Right now that doesn't show up in electricity stats because of how common in-home gas heating is. In order to decarbonize the northern parts of the world we will need to dramatically increase both electric energy consumption and production, during winter, because heat pumps will almost certainly be replacing gas furnaces.
I'm concerned about the tonnage requirement of strategic minerals for battery storage. Supplies for EV batteries are currently choked; we need to scale far beyond that for grid storage.
Pumped hydro at the required scale will be a feat of engineering comparable to nuclear engineering. Millions of tonnes of Portland cement will be an input.
And renewables are land-extensive; that's an impedance mismatch for us.
https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/07%20D... (now being commercialized by Babcock & Wilcox.)
The big question of storage is not if it's possible, but which of the many options will come out on top.