Vogtle Unit 3 starts nuclear fuel load
georgiapower.com
georgiapower.com
I wondered how much actual power that was. More context is on wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...
The site has two nuclear reactors already, in use since the 80's. 3 and 4 are each 1250 MWe reactors.
By way of comparison, the Zaporizhzhia NPP (largest in Europe) has 6 950 MWe reactors. (Edit: that's six 960 MWe reactors, not 6,950 MWe reactors.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Pla...
It's not 6950, but 5700. And 5700 is the total output (950x6 reactors).
1250 is among the most powerful reactor in the world. I think the most powerful is the EPR (French tech), but this has been delayed, and delayed, and ...
this is what the OP is saying, there are six 950 MWe reactors. might be a cultural difference on how we'd read "6 950MWe"
1) it's not on any standard keyboard layout
2) it requires copying and pasting from a character map, alt code or html entity
3) it is usually reserved for mathematics
I was just talking to a buddy of mine in Colorado - quick back of the envelope looks like he pays double ($0.26/KwH) what I pay in Mesa ($0.13/KwH) - and I think we're still on 'summer rates' ?
The two EPRs in Taishan, China are even more powerful and at 1660 MW are the most powerful reactors in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taishan_Nuclear_Power_Plant
That is why I almost always prefer to write out single-digit numbers.
e.g. Zaporizhzhia NPP (largest in Europe) has six 950 MWe reactors
Yeah, I'm no fan of nuclear power. I'd like to be, but I subscribe to the "black swan" school of thought, basically refusing to accept miniscule probabilities with extremely high downsides predicted over long timespans...
Those "extremely high downsides" are a few tens of square km dead lands and a few irradiated workers. Not such a bad perspective for a worst case scenario.
And you probably underestimate the probability of such things happening. Bad intent is unpredictable. Bad intentions plus negligence plus accidents usually turns out to be worse than imagined, especially on this timeframe.
> Cost overruns at Vogtle and the cancellation of Summer [Nuclear Generating Station in South Carolina] led to Westinghouse's bankruptcy in 2017.
This raises a somewhat-scary question: in this case, Westinghouse's bankrupt remains were bought out by a private equity firm, and they presumably took on Westinghouse's obligations toward in-progress nuclear plant construction, but... what if that hadn't been the case? What if Westinghouse had just completely failed and ceased operations? Who would support the remainder of projects like Vogtle 3 & 4, and ongoing maintenance for the next however-many decades?
I guess a company in a heavily-regulated sector like this must have some sort of succession plan, but it's not clear to me how this would work, in the case of e.g. the company going bankrupt, and all the staff with institutional knowledge about a reactor design dispersing to various other companies. Hell, that could have even happened in Westinghouse's case.
If that fails, the government sometimes will setup its own company to take it in hand either at the state or federal level (this would almost certainly be federal).
Failing that, the projects would cease.
I guess there's still one failure mode: project is completed and plant is running, and then the manufacturer goes out of business. I guess in that case the government would have to act as a backstop no matter what, and worst-case they would just operate until the plant could be decommissioned.
For maintaining and decommissioning built plants, there are reserve and bonding requirements [1]. For new developments, that's a risk inherent to every construction project. Some hold that risk on their books, others sell it to an insurer. (One of the many reasons fuel is loaded last.)
[1] https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part030/p...
Yes but I would argue that the level of risk involved is different between different energy options. $20B worth of solar and wind plus energy storage (including subsidies for home solar/storage and EVs with V2G capability) would carry less risk for this scenario than a single nuclear power plant.
I still think based on my back of the napkin calculations that solar + wind + storage (with the above mentioned subsidies) can be a compelling alternative to nuclear. It can be built faster, avoids the risk of a single large terrorist attack target, provides more energy independence for those who receive the subsidy for their own solar and storage, diversifies the grid, and avoids the need for a powerful government to control risky nuclear production facilities.
You can do a quick calculation and see that $10B of solar and $10B of storage will produce similar continuous base load power as the $20B Vogtle system.
In contrast, there is exactly one company that fully understands a particular nuclear reactor design. If that company disappears, it will take a lot of specialized knowledge transfer (likely requiring the continued employment of many of the original designers and builders) to allow another company or the government to take on that maintenance burden.
Still, I'm not convinced solar + wind + storage will come along soon enough at scale to eliminate enough fossil-fuel burning in order to dig us out of our climate change hole without things getting so much worse first. Then again, if it takes 16 years from permit application time to get a nuclear plant project completed in the US, maybe we're screwed either way.
We are, generally, pretty screwed though yes.
Why only during the day?
Yes, I always had the impression nuclear proponents vastly underestimate the time and work such a plant takes.
Storage cost is falling even faster than renewable generation did.
Big wind projects have had issues reaching viability due to insufficiency of the transmission grid. T. Boone Pickens and the Texas Panhandle comes to mind.
1. https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2022/growing-plants-power-...
Ah yes. The magical immediate construction of dollars and windows. Blink, and it's there.
Wind and solar farms off similar capacity take about as much to complete as nuclear and often cost about as much.
Many western countries haven't built a nuclear power plant in ages, and are only ramping up (against unending pushback). China takes about 2 years to build a reactor.
Does it? And does this math scale?
https://energypost.eu/dispelling-nuclear-baseload-myth-nothi...
There is ~1TW of renewables in US grid queues, and ~427GW of storage. While many of these projects might not get built, the velocity should be noted. ~95GW of nuclear generation capacity remains. It takes 10 years and billions of dollars to build a single nuclear generator.
https://www.pv-tech.org/nearly-1tw-of-renewables-in-us-inter...
https://www.energy-storage.news/estimated-427gw-of-energy-st...
This is a lie repeated by anti-nuclear types. Base load is simply the year round constant electricity demand.
How are we actually going to build hundreds of billions of dollars worth of batteries? How are we going to dispose of them?
With battery factories. The very same that will be required to electrify vehicles when jurisdictions are enacting combustion vehicle sales bans at the end of the decade. 74-78 million new vehicles are sold each year. That's a lot of battery demand, which will be a forcing function to scale up battery manufacturing, driving down costs.
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/electri...
> How are we going to dispose of them?
We recycle them. We already do today. https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/ (Redwood has battery recycling agreements with several automakers)
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/electric-vehicles-wor...
The world could face lithium shortages by 2025, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says, while Credit Suisse thinks demand could treble between 2020 and 2025, meaning “supply would be stretched”.
About 2 billion EVs need to be on the road by 2050 for the world to hit net zero, the IEA says, but sales stood at just 6.6 million last year, and some carmakers are already selling out of EVs.
Lithium supply faces challenges not only from surging demand, but because resources are concentrated in a few places and over half of today’s production is in areas with high water stress.
Sure, and rare earth metals aren't really all that rare. The problem is that the processing cost is well beyond economical for most of it.
Abundance alone is irrelevant; you need certain concentrations for the mining process to be viable. AFAIK that is the challenge with Li: the necessary concentrations are only found in several places of the world.
In the future, we might be able to mine lithium from some sources that are now useless, but the environmental cost might be enormous.
In an ideal world we would innovate with better chemistries which would render the need for lithium obsolete before we cause more damage. I know the technology exists (particularly for grid scale storage), but knowing humans, we will probably ruin more environments (and foreign economies) before such technologies will be meaningfully explored.
Anyway, consider: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4994054
This paper explains how one can storage power at an efficiency of 65-75% using machinery made with ordinary materials operated at modest temperatures.
A number of alternative chemistries exist, which are much less expensive and less flammable. They of course have lower energy density, but it does not play a major role: batteries sitting on the ground can afford to be be bulky and heavy.
A good summary is at https://www.ceem.unsw.edu.au/sites/default/files/uploads/pub...
and https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-thr...
The truth is that a "base load plant" is one that can only supply the base load, as it has to be kept running most of the time to have a possible chance of making economic sense. Being a base load plant is a negative thing, indicating inflexibility.
Not if they are generating base load. This is why base load is an important concept.
As an example: the combination of wind/solar/storage that could be used to provide the equivalent of a nuclear power plant's output could ALSO be used to provide some flexibility, by altering when the storage is charged and discharged. This flexibility would allow it to generate more value for the same number of kWh provided to the grid.
The variability of wind and solar is actually a HUGE problem. It makes managing the grid much harder and required a large amount of idle generating capacity as backup. This is why proponents love to argue against the very fundamental concept of base load.
Variability is in fact a trivial problem solved by storage and transportable backup. Even NG suffices as backup. Even coal suffices as backup. In the future, ammonia will take up that role.
We have the tech (you're almost certainly already using it), we have not deployed it at sufficient scale yet.
But we are building the factories to make the batteries, and the mines to feed the factories, as fast as we can raise money to do so.
I'm not sure what's happening with hydrogen (apparently it's much cheaper than batteries?); but regardless, that technology predates all forms of generating electricity more complex than the etymological origin of the word (ἤλεκτρον, amber) — "rubbing things together" was the only option when Deimand and van Troostwijk charged their Leyden jar back in 1789 and demonstrated electrolysis.
It's fine to say "the factories need to be built", as long as they can be built at a manageable price. But price is a huge factor that cannot be ignored, and it's high enough in this situation to make the word "trivial" incorrect.
No new problems need to be solved, so in that sense it is trivial.
It costs a lot of money in absolute terms, so in that sense it is not trivial.
The cost (for global battery based storage, the most expensive serious storage option) is in the order of 6 months global supply of crude oil to turn rocks into batteries (i.e. the dumbest possible limit on the cost of recycling), those batteries last at least three years even using the worst cycle-count estimates I've seen and throwing the batteries away at 70% of initial peak capacity, that's trivial.
Opening new mines and factories, even if the new mines provide new work for workers currently in fossil fuels, may be a significant geopolitical and economic shift, so in that sense it isn't trivial.
And so on.
For hydrogen, it's "build a tank that only leaks a little bit". (We'd probably be better off adding some carbon to that hydrogen, but I have no idea if anyone is working on that at sufficient scale even though the tech is over a century old).
Factories for any form of storage are not different in any material way from a thousand other factories we know work. We have been making factories for going on three centuries, and know we can. Making and operating factories is expensive capex, but exploring, extracting, transporting, and refining fossil fuels is an even more expensive opex. If we could afford fossil opex, renewable capex of similar order is strictly better.
If an inflexible source is cheaper, then it may better a fit as a high capacity factor supplier to meet constant demand.
We first need to agree on the problems and the solution, using levelised costs for lifetime of plant, and safe disposal, preferably using real examples, but theoretical best case examples are also worth discussing.
I'm inclined to believe there is no best pasta sauce, only best pasta sauces. One size does not, in face, fit all.
You must be misreading the comment or something.
They didn't say it's the only factor, they said it's a negative. It's a negative no matter how the costs align.
In what world is it reasonable to implement unrequired, unnecessary, and costly, features and call that a net positive in all cases under all circumstances.
Also, some sources are more flexible by their very nature and get the flexibility for free.
But more generally, lacking flexibility is a negative by itself. It's an acceptable negative if adding flexibility would cost more than the benefit, but it's still a negative.
Not for baseload generation.
And most people would call "can't be used for the more difficult parts of power generation" a negative too.
Lol, is that supposed to impress? Tens of trillions, and you're talking money.
Global spend on oil and gas is in the neighborhood of $4T per year. Coal is another $1T. Per year.
$0.1T or $0.8T spent on making batteries, that last ten or twenty years apiece, is small change in comparison.
The argument is about who gets the money.
A 4 hour battery for the entirety of world primary energy is about the same cost as one year of auto industry revenue. SIBs require no scarce resources and no toxic elements -- they're basically fancy dirt.
For longer scale storage, there are electrolyser industries spooling up in multiple countries. Some of the individual factories are big enough to produce the entire presently installed base in 5 years. Existing OCGT plants have minimal capital and fixed costs, and can burn hydrogen or ammonia basically at cost -- yielding indefinite storage for what is effectively a fixed 4x multiple of the cost of energy.
Storage isn't measured in GW, but rather in GWh.
I'd take any source that doesn't know the difference between W and Wh with a very, very large boulder of salt.
I also don’t want every appliance in my house connected to the cloud and collecting usage data.
I sincerely doubt I’m in the minority on the former, and I hope I’m not in the minority on the latter.
So, I guess my point is, why are you reducing a panacea of mutually beneficial options down to a binary decision?
> and ~427GW of storage
Got a source for this claim? That's an order of magnitude off [2] from what I've read before.
1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
2. https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
It's of course the fossil fuel industry which profits from this relentless mendacity. Renewables are great, but they aren't coal's competition and coal knows it. Nuclear is.
Show me the $13/MWh nuclear reactor (or even fuel for that matter).
Granted that's variable wholesale, and a full 100% renewable system costs $50-100/MWh in countries with high labour cost and without optimal climate, but this is still vastly cheaper than nuclear.
Solar is indeed better than nuclear if your goal is to reduce the amount of fossil fuel use by shutting coal and gas plants down during sunny days. But if the goal is a total elimination of fossil fuel use, then the cost of storage has to be included and nuclear wins out.
Yes. Bringing the total price to almost that of nuclear.
But unlike nuclear -- the price of which increased continuously from the 60s through early 90s while production was the highest it has ever been -- they are both dropping precipitously. So much so that the whole system cost could plausibly be lower than just the steam turbine and heat exchanger component before a new reactor would open (which is already mass produced more than any other production technology).
By all means build nuclear, but do it on a level playing field. Either give 60 year guaranteed prices at 2-4x current market rate, zero risk loans, and free insurance to all zero carbon sources with >90% availability or none.
This is the complete opposite of reality. Nuclear saw it's largest period of growth during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Following the mid 1970s growth tapered off, and higher prices ensued as economies of scale were lost.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
Here's a chart from that paper plotting plant construction vs cost over time. The big cluster of cheap plants in the late 60s and early 70s is what nuclear looks like when economies of scale are leveraged: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03014215163001...
It's like talking out of one side of your mouth about how advanced and safe your new electric SUV is (for the driver), whilst claiming it would be cheaper than a bicycle because you could in principle manufacture something with the same performance and safety as a model T for $5k so taxpayers should give you free loans and infinite insurance. The people of Niger are the pedestrians in this analogy.
If you're going to accuse me of dishonesty, it'd be good to at least try to explain what I lied about. Did plant construction not slow down? You have the history of nuclear plant construction available to you in the previous comment. If you want to make the claim that it was plant designs changing that led to raised costs, then it'd be good to explain how nuclear plants changed.
> If you're going to accuse me of dishonesty, it'd be good to at least try to explain what I lied about.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=2030
You showed a graph of prices which decreased a little with the first few large scale PWRs (before the industry had much experience with grid scale facilities), then continuously increasing from late '67 through '72 when construction was at its peak. Then resuming higher than it had been when when there was no experience and continuing to increase for the second peak of construction start (which was when those first set were just finished).
If what you said was remotely true, then the graph -- which you showed me -- would have its lowest price at the reactors which were permitted around '75 and finished around 85 because this is when the number of recently finished reactors was at its highest (and on par with the late 80s) and when the number of just started reactors was roughly as high as it has ever been.
This is the opposite of what it shows.
You are showing a direct contradiction of your thesis and claiming it somehow proves it. Ergo you are directly lying whilst showing proof you are lying. This is what gaslighting is.
The graph shows a negative learning rate, a positive correlation between under construction plants and price, a positive correlation between recently finished plants and price, and for the non-demonstration section, a negative economy of scale.
There are reasons outside that graph many of those aren't true or aren't the only reason for expense due to confounding factors, but that's not what you said.
If we pretend electricity can teleport, then you can reach an emissions level under half of the net zero target (and well within the range of emissions from open pit uranium mining and diffusion centrifuging) with today's tech at roughly the post-subsidy marginal cost of energy from a nuclear plant.
https://model.energy/?results=e56f13ff1a1728e76048a94a0a37d9...
Unlike the solar panel factories, battery factories, and replacement distribution network required to replace the entire US electrical grid, which can be online tomorrow morning at the snap of someone's fingers?
The impression that I’ve gotten is that there isn’t a huge amount of slack panel production capacity sitting idle. If we’ve learned anything the last two years, hopefully it’s that supply chain problems can take a while to sort out.
On the other hand, likely all of that will be needed to meet Xi's 2030 target for PV power generation in China. (12,000 GWe capacity, up from 800 now? Something like that.)
So near exponential but not much slack for others to use, probably.
China hasn't stopped building nukes, you'll notice.
Edit:
See: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...
What this does require is significant investment in grid infrastructure which has been criminally neglected in years.
And I bet local storage is more economical to build and maintain than an additional network of huge continent-wide transmission lines.
This is something you have to factor in when reading boldly optimistic claims about how somehow solar and wind can work everywhere without even storage.
Maybe if we never stop pumping natural gas into our homes to burn it, but that's not exactly in line with the goals.
In reality, for anything north enough to get snow on the regular you can't use today's electricity consumption numbers to judge future needs. When everyone switches to heat pumps base load at night is going to skyrocket.
Gas (methane) doesn't have to come from the ground. The price of electrolysed hydrogen is dropping. It's early days; there's a lot of learning curve ahead, so we can expect further falls in price. Once you have hydrogen you can use it as-is or combine it with air-captured carbon for synthetic methane and re-use existing infrastructure.
Electrolysis is quite complementary to solar. It uses DC voltage (direct from the panels); and PEM (polymer electrolyte membrane) electrolysers start in a second or so, so passing clouds and such are not a problem. Solid oxide and alkaline methods have slightly longer startup times so may require an hour or so of battery storage alongside the panels. Carbon capture is similar to these latter two as I understand it.
That shouldn't be how an argument works.
> *B. Dealing With Variability and Stability*
> Much of the resistance towards 100% Renewable Energy (RE) systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible since these energy sources are variable. Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276].
> However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]–[282]; storage (battery, compressed air, pumped hydro)[40]–[43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]–[92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place.
> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive. Variability, especially short term, has many mitigation options, and energy system studies are increasingly capturing these in their 100% RE scenarios.
Given that renewables and storage will have to be made to work, and are likely to be cheaper, I don't see the point of nuclear in this scenario.
I don't want to be here in 30 years time wishing we'd built reactors 30 years ago (which is where we are today)
The current situation where you might regret not having built more reactors 30 years ago is not comparable. Renewables were not competitive with nuclear 30 years ago. But that situation no longer obtains.
Eventually, all fossil fuel use must be replaced, but that has nothing to do with the issue of responding to Putin that I was addressing. And the backup generation can eventually be non-fossil also, particularly hydrogen. Europe has massive amounts of potential capacity for underground storage for hydrogen, far more than would be needed.
It is my impression both pro-renewables and pro-nuclear like to downplay the resource sourcing issues.
Lithium is best for mobility applications and lithium formulations are much further down the learning curve than other chemistries.
However, all of vanadium redox, iron-air, organic polymer-based, calcium salt, and sodium chemistries are very nearly competitive, or actually competitive with lithium in various grid storage niches despite being at the very beginning of their learning curves. Is there ever going to be a shortage of iron or sodium? Or calcium or carbon, for that matter? No.
Grid scale energy storage doesn't exist.
1) grid connections fail sometimes. Do you want people freezing to death in NY when the Texas interconnect goes down for a day or two, or vice versa?
2) regional storms (Florida hurricanes, NY ice storms, etc), periodically take out large swathes of grid and would take out grid interconnections too.
Currently, the scope of the impact of these things is quite limited because everyone also has regional capacity.
But if you’re in a giant storm, you’d be super screwed and the whole region would be blacked out for awhile, because renewables also are impacted by these storms - far more than a gas turbine, for instance.
And that’s not even counting demand spikes and the like due to weather issues (longer than usual hot or cold, etc.)
Have you ever had a useful discussion after accusing the other side of wanting to kill people?
I was pointing out the real risks involved, and asking them if they were ok with them. Statistically, such a plan would result in that outcome pretty quickly.
Personally I just assumed they had no idea, not that they didn’t care.
Cites appreciated! I currently see zero.
> I heard recently of a study that found 2-4 hours is sufficient along with an interconnected grid.
That, literally, is not the same as:
> Really, 100% of experts think we need only a few hours of storage and reserve if we connect all the grids?
Again, you're not going to have a good conversation if you keep on doing this.
Tell me where those two statements you quoted are materially different (keeping in mind I was including the 0% of experts reply later), if you’d like to continue. Or don’t.
* The parts describing the grid look the same to me, and the percent of experts came from you, when you said 0% of experts agreed with their skepticism.
We could back up the entire damned grid with these things at a cost small compared to the cost of powering that grid with nuclear power plants.
As for "not actually existing yet", that's not anything close to a valid argument. Also, hydrogen storage doesn't require anything new -- all the component technologies exist, they just have to be integrated. This is the easiest and surest kind of innovation. It would be nice if higher demand drive electrolysers down their experience curve some more, I will admit. Cheaper is always nice.
I really want this to be true, I just don't think it is.
I suppose you may be meaning there's no good upper bound on how bad the expected unexpected cost overruns in nuclear can be.
Given that, it gives me pause that you don't actually know that information, given how eager you are to represent your "knowledge" on this subject.
Hydrogen could also be stored in aquifers and depleted natural gas fields, just as natural gas is stored in those.
Geological storage like this involves very thick layers (hundreds or thousands of feet), so the leakage will be low in any case. If geological formations can trap methane for millions of years, they can trap hydrogen for much shorter times.
"The total bill for the reactor expansion project at the Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia is now expected to exceed $30 billion"
Seems doable.
> And that's back of the envelope numbers assuming a 100% duty cycle for the batteries and no degradation.
Okay, toss on another 50% to make it $15 billion.
If the factories don't exist, the time scale of a nuclear plant should be enough to make more factories.
If the limit is materials bloating the costs horribly, then keep going until it stops being cheap.
And the batteries don't have to be lithium ion.
And no, the technologies do exist. There is nothing new that has to be invented. They need to be run down their experience curves, but aside from that maturation everything is there.
Is there as much grid-scale storage now as there will be later? No. There will be lots more, of numerous kinds, in many, many places. They all work.
Also, consider that the second Vogtle class reactor will cost less and be faster to build, and the third even less and even faster... if they bought 50 of them, the cost per reactor would be pretty reasonable.
Solar power also benefits from economies of scale, but solar has already gotten much of the up front scale cost reduction, whereas modern nuclear hasn't even started yet.
This is, I assume, the point that gp is making. We’re about to learn whether the same cost reductions from repetition that happened in Japan will happen in Georgia.
Solar cells have an awesome reduction in cost over time
Wind has an awesome reduction in cost over time
Nuclear is a clown showNot to mention that Georgia has a multi billion dollar government budget surplus. Personally they should use that to keep power rates low. With the additional rate increases being requested by Georgia Power the citizens of Georgia are looking at a 40% rate increase in the next couple of years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Nuclear_Power_Technolo...
> Generation III+ reactors incorporate extra safety features to avoid the kind of disaster suffered at Fukushima in 2011. Generation III+ designs, passive safety, also known as passive cooling, requires no sustained operator action or electronic feedback to shut down the plant safely in the event of an emergency. Many of the Generation III+ nuclear reactors have a core catcher. If the fuel cladding and reactor vessel systems and associated piping become molten, corium will fall into a core catcher which holds the molten material and has the ability to cool it. This, in turn protects the final barrier, the containment building.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor#Develop...
(Couldn't resist. Accept downvotes. I'm sorry)
Wow, that's actually pretty cool
https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...
"Integrity of the Reactor Vessel is protected by surrounding it with water in the event of a threat of core melting, and therefore no core catcher is required"
In other words "we don't need a core catcher because we promise to keep refilling the boiled-off water after a blackout." There are other reactor designs that can safely shut down without any human action.
I'm not sure what all the pros and cons are for each approach, except that the wet cavity design has a higher risk of a steam explosion because of the direct water contact. But this seems to be addressed by containment structures designed for higher pressures.
EDIT: The succinct comparison of each approach is in the introduction to the second paper: "Some plants adopted the 'dry cavity' to enhance the spreading of the core melt on the cavity floor as well as to remove the steam explosion risk, while other plants use pre-flooding strategy to make the 'wet cavity' in order to enhance the coolability after RPV failure or to reduce the RPV failure probability."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000#Design_specifications
But yes, if an operator (or more likely a whole shift of operators) was malicious, they probably could defeat the safety systems. The main innovation is basically just a huge tank of water that can drain into the reactor by gravity, so if you emptied this tank then the safety system is defeated. They could also just take a fuel rod, break it apart and dump it into a schools water tank. You can't really create a system that defends against murderous intent.
In any case I was actually thinking about a foolish operator, not a malicious one.
Even with the previous generation of reactors it takes multiple failures all at once for an accident to happen, so who's to say one day we're not going to see some new unforseen issue happening just at the wrong time.
In fact this kind of touches on why some folks are looking at more radical changes. There are thorium reactor designs which require active, maintained energy to become critical at all. A melted block of thorium is sub-critical! None of these systems are any where near productionizable though.
Overall, remember this isn't the first time someone thought they finally "cracked" safety. This is really about us getting more experience and refining our practices over time, not some "now nuclear is totally safe" threshold.
https://how.complexsystems.fail/ was on hacker news a while back, you might like to read it to get more of a feel for how the progress of nuclear safety really happens.
Key quote from the second link: "The key feature of the AP1000 plant is the replacement of complex redundant safety systems that are powered with AC power with passive safety methods such as gravity and heat transfer by conduction, convection and radiation.....
.....The AP1000 plant does not require AC electric power to achieve safe shutdown nor to establish and maintain, for an extended period of time, safe shutdown mode while removing decay heat from the nuclear fuel. By removing the reliance on AC power, you solve the paradox in which you need AC power to remove decay heat. With the AP1000 plant design, you don’t need AC power. You just need the laws of physics and stored energy from DC batteries, compressed gases and gravity to remove decay heat, and that is what achieves the simplicity and robustness."
Safety features overview page: https://www.westinghousenuclear.com/energy-systems/ap1000-pw...
Interviews with engineers for a salesy focused magazine (Not mobile friendly): https://digitaleditions.nuclearplantjournal.com/JA18/22/
Product overview page: https://www.westinghousenuclear.com/energy-systems/ap1000-pw...
This is the most straightforward way to progress energy generation, increase fuel energy density
Renewable energy will find its place after batteries decrease 10x in price
Cost, sure, but LiIon is already on par with nuclear in that regard despite not being the cheapest storage.
You wrote:
> It seems many in this thread don't appreciate the energy density requirements of modern baseload.
Density does not matter for baseload. It is a red herring.
Energy density can be both important for transportation and also be important for the ability to accelerate energy production without a proportional growth in mining/resource harvesting that harms the planet.
A melon sized chunk of uranium powers an Aircraft carrier of the US navy for over 2 decades while it circumnavigates the globe hundreds of times, launching aircraft off its deck and powering remarkable levels of energy demand from on board systems.
For comparison, a single trip around the pacific for a conventionally fueled aircraft carrier costs 125 MILLION GALLONS of fuel.
It’s incredibly hard to wrap one’s head around what 20 years x 125 Million Gallons x Num_trips per year looks like.
I agree.
> A melon sized chunk of uranium powers an Aircraft carrier of the US navy for over 2 decades … a single trip around the pacific for a conventionally fueled aircraft carrier costs 125 MILLION GALLONS of fuel.
Are you sure you didn't add a few zeros in there? I think the real energy density difference there is about a million, but you're at least 200 times more than that, depending on Num_trips?
(But yes, to the core point, transport is the one thing where energy density matters, and a nuclear powered aircraft carrier, or sub, is totally a thing where atomic power shines. Subs especially. Just that they're not a major part of the problem, and while this is a fun diversion I had been more interested in baseload here).
And how much does a civilian nuclear reactor weigh?
Even compare a solar panel (there are panels on the market that produce 50GJ/kg over their life, and it's almost all sand) to the fuel assembly plus a type A storage cask.
Even if we accept your ridiculous premise, solar wins.
For transport, the limits depend on the nature of the transport. Cars are fine with LiIon; aircraft can be fine with LiIon for a few hundred miles but not thousands; hydrogen from electrolysis can power aircraft or rockets but are a bad choice for submarines; PV in a spacecraft means an ion drive and not a launch, the higher specific impulse doesn't make up for the lower absolute thrust in that scenario; nuclear spacecraft would be great except everyone's terrified of it.
But none of this matters either way with the power grid.
My point is, even if we accept the broken premise then the conclusion is still to plan and fund as much solar and wind as possible until we've provisioned about 80% of net energy. At that point you consider the tradeoff between LCOS of whatever battery tech can be scaled and the cost of nuclear (or if we're still operating under the faulty premise, the extra land and mass the reactor will consume).
Just the fuel and storage cask of nuclear fuel weighs almost as much a solar panel for the same energy content -- the discarded depleted uranium weighs more.
If you look at low concentration Uranium mines like Inkai (which are already close to a majority and will be comparatively high yield if nuclear is expanded) you have hundreds of square kilometers of poisoned and unusable land and poisoned ground water that will probably never be properly remediated producing about 15W/m^2 . Even Husab which is open pit only produces about 180W/m^2 from the currently occupied land and 30W/m^2 from the whole strike.
1) https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/news-and-latest-activity/news/2...
2) https://declassifieduk.org/royal-navys-gunboat-diplomacy-is-....
>A melon sized chunk of uranium powers an Aircraft carrier of the US navy for over 2 decades while it circumnavigates the globe hundreds of times, launching aircraft off its deck and powering remarkable levels of energy demand from on board systems.
You've made a bit of a mistake here, thinking that energy density and resource harvesting are always opposed. They're not. The aircraft carrier uses 93% HEU, while most reactors use uranium that is 10-20x less enriched. The same amount of earth has to be mined either way, but the HEU used in the core of an aircraft carrier or nuclear sub has to undergo a lot more expensive and resource intensive (and downright dangerous) post-processing.
It's more about nuclear being too expensive. If nuclear's great value and doesn't need the state to underwrite everything from the disaster liability insurance on downwards, great, go knock yourself out; get finance, get approvals, build a plant, go sell your product on the market.
Just don't expect consumers to sign up for a multi-decade deal to guarantee to buy your output at a higher price than any other provider before you'll even pour any concrete.[0][1][2]
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-61519609 [1] https://www.iisd.org/story/the-united-kingdom-is-to-subsidiz... [2] https://www.ft.com/content/945d8b79-ba82-4ebc-894e-73eec3892...
Every significant solar energy installation in the world was built with massive government subsidies.
The upper bound is the cost of a global power grid or a lot of storage, either of which would cost roughly half as much as the current annual spend on just unrefined crude oil.
> We're talking about reinventing our society to revolve around several transient energy sources.
No, that's just your failure of imagination.
> the input cost is so insignificant that even if the cost of uranium increased 5x, it would barely change the cost of energy for consumers.
The the reason for that is also why nuclear is the most expensive major power source right now: all the other things in nuclear power are much more expensive than the fuel.
Storage is a huge one, we don't have effective means of storage besides hydroelectric dams which are geographically limited. Lithium ion batteries still take over $500/KWh to install (the <$200 figures are for the battery cells themselves, omitting the cost of installation, transformers, maintenance, etc.). And they're set to increase as raw materials are strained [1][2]. This is why plans to transition to a majority renewable grid typically assume that hydrogen, or some other form of storage will provide storage at a fraction of the cost of existing storage methods. Nobody has actually built commercial hydrogen storage, though, so this is a big assumption.
There's also the cost of transmission. Energy dense sources like nuclear power can be placed close to electricity demand. But low-density sources by definition need to be spread out and distributed. Decentralized generation is not a good thing, as it requires more transmission infrastructure to support. It's not uncommon for renewable projects to be denied because the infrastructure can't handle the transmission requirements [3].
Nuclear avoids these issues. It's a non-intermittent source with the greatest capacity factor of any generation system. Downtime is usually scheduled. This eliminates the need for storage. It's also energy dense. It can be used in place of existing fossil fuel heat engines, avoided in the need to make large build-outs of transmission infrastructure.
1. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/7/7/lithiums-insane-c...
2. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium
3. https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...
And proponents of solar forget that they have to cover large swaths of land with solar to begin with. Some places don't have the luxury of converting land to solar farms
Likewise, PV cladding on electric cars, even though this is absolutely not the optimal place for PV, can generate 50-80% of the mean demand for that vehicle in most places.
But PV scales up and down, so you can also use it as a roofing material in a car park (one of the reasons cladding cars themselves in PV isn't the best idea), or on otherwise worthless land like the gap between the eastbound and westbound I-80 [0], or on top of reservoirs and rivers where we want to reduce evaporation [1].
Given where the sunlight mostly falls and where people mostly live, the biggest discrepancies are the UK (mostly as bad as the coastal mountains on the strip of Canada between Washington state and Alaska), and China (the people mostly live in the east which is relatively cloudy, the desert where they put some (but not all) of their PV is in the west).
For the small settlements that can't use PV and which it would be uneconomical to connect to a grid, there's wind and geothermal, and the rest may be so few as to not actually matter for environmental purposes if they do keep using diesel or methane. But probably not nuclear, because you can get a lot of transmission cable for the price of a reactor.
[0] I'm not sure how big that gap is, but a few random samples suggest 15 meters width, which means 20% efficient PV there has a nameplate capacity of 14 GW, and even assuming just 10% duty factor that's still more than a nuclear power plant, but the capacity factor is mostly going to be 18% in the area the I-80 goes through.
The entire US interstate network, assuming 15 m direction separation and 20% efficiency, has room for 235 GW nameplate, adjust accordingly for capacity factor.
There's much more length of railway line in the US, though I have no idea what the average width is over its length, and I don't understand the engineering constraints well enough to know how close PV could be placed to the rails (between the sleepers?)
[1] Lake Mead by itself would be enough for 128 GW nameplate, looking at the solar potential in that area it probably has a capacity factor of 22%.
A nuclear plant is pumping out electricity 24x7, but the problem is, no electricity consumer needs that kind of supply, certanly not at the prices nuclear needs to charge. When the wind is blowing and/or the sun is shining, every single electricity consumer would prefer to pick a cheaper, renewable, option.
The only way nuclear can even pretend to make the math work out is by going on and on about "baseload" and hoping that they can lock in buyers over several decades rather than having to actually look the spot price in the face.
There's no "pretending" about base load. The vast majority of electricity demand is base load, and the peaks beyond base load happen when solar stops working.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load
"Base load" on the power generation side has only ever been a side effect of economics, not an intrinsic property of the electrical grid.
Not economic, but functional.
For a grid to serve “production traffic” or be used in the real world, there is a minimum amount of power it must reliably deliver 24x7 ;
Nothing intrinsic to functioning of the grid, simply an economic consequence.
It isn’t simply economic. I don’t think you understand the fundamental purpose of an energy grid.
It isn’t just a bunch of wires existing on their own. It is the energy delivery infrastructure for all of society.
“Baseload” is an attribute of the grid itself that indicates the minimum energy capacity these wires at present carry.
Baseload is NOT a constant value or a constant consumption pattern across time of day/day of week alone.
Baseload reflects the consumption of energy by society that the grid is DESIGNED to serve at any time.
In other words, were one to use your definition, the grid would no longer be considered a functioning grid anymore but one that is broken since it is incapable of meeting its minimum design specifications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup
> The base load[1] (also baseload) is the __minimum__ level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load
It is a constant value. The rest used to be filled by peaker-plants or hydro. While slowly regulating the inflexible "base load" plants to follow the seasonal cycles.
There is nothing inherent to this definition that it must be slow inflexible plants that provide it. More interesting discussions comes from how do you provide system strength, frequency regulation and so on when you decrease the synchronous components in the grid, because those are actual hard questions.
For example, there is ongoing research in grid-forming inverters. This is what you do if you run your solar-powered home in island mode, and as anyone who has done it knows starting electrical engines sucks. It becomes a much more complex problem with destabilizing factors in continent-scale grids.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/08/29/grid-forming-inverter...
Baseload as defined by Wikipedia that you cited does not contradict my point, you don’t seem to understand the nuance of what economic demand is and why that is different from an attribute or minimum design spec.
It isn’t the consequence as you originally declared, it is an attribute of the grid itself. That’s a very important thing to understand. Anything can provide that input to the grid, but that means the source providing input to the grid must meet that very basic design specification.
Flexibility of generation capacity coming online is easily compensated by other parts of the grid such as the storage or load shifting characteristics of the grid.
'Flexible' generation is gas and oil, as well as most storage systems. Either we need an enormous overprovisioning of both renewables and storage so that we can handle the 0.1% of cases (~= 1 day every 3 years), or we have something we can actually schedule when we choose, not when nature's chaotic systems choose for us.
Overprovisioning plus a wide regional distribution could work, but then you need lots of extra power transmission capacity, which is also expensive, and will be 80% idle 99% of the time.
Remember, we're engineering for the worst case scenario where we still need to provide power here. If we can think of it, it will happen sooner or later. Nuclear power plants are designed to be safe even if an airplane is flown into them, it's not good enough for renewables to then turn around and say "you need to redesign your entire society around our power being intermittent".
I'm hugely pro-renewables, but only for remote areas. For cities, wind/solar don't make sense due to reliability and energy density.
Yeah, but x0 only happens at night. I'm not sure what the multiplier is in a really bad storm, nor how long that lasts (~= night would be fine, you're already putting in that kind of storage).
> Overprovisioning plus a wide regional distribution could work, but then you need lots of extra power transmission capacity, which is also expensive, and will be 80% idle 99% of the time.
IIRC a global grid is (naïvely) ~= the cost of 6 months crude oil. Expensive in absolute money terms, but not relative money terms; though political cost is something else entirely.
The problem with the global grid is that it would need to be similarly overprovisioned so that during low-probability failure scenarios the few remaining power nodes could supply the entire thing. 10x overprovisioning here looks a lot more expensive.
Is trivially true, and applies to everything. It's not really worth bothering to mention because everything else also sufferers this.
> The problem with the global grid is that it would need to be similarly overprovisioned so that during low-probability failure scenarios the few remaining power nodes could supply the entire thing.
The need to over-provision a grid is obvious, but…
> 10x overprovisioning here looks a lot more expensive.
First: Why do that by a factor of x10? Best redundancy here is geographical diversity rather than a fatter… I was going to say "cable", but it is (or collectively, they are) the order of a few square meters cross section and that feels wrong as a name. But that thing is best spread out, not kept singular and made wider, whatever you call it.
Second: Even x10, the main limit is "that's a lot of stuff to mine, how do we reorganise the miners from coal and oil to metals" rather than the $ cost — while "a trillion" of anything is a lot for one person to contemplate, compared to the cost of what is currently dug up and then set on fire to provide the same power, it's quite cheap.
They're both.
When they are able to generate power, they can turn on and off on a moment's notice. Nuclear and coal plants often need hours for a significant change in output.
So even if pumped hydro remains our best technology for large scale storage at the moment, I still remain optimistic that in a decade we will have market ready chemical batteries that rivals pumped hydro in places where geography does not favor the latter. I’m particularly looking at molten salt (or liquid metal) batteries here, with some storage facilities being under construction already.
https://www.oregonlive.com/environment/2022/09/north-america...
It seems like there should be better options than lithium batteries but for some reason they decided to use them.
I’m not sure how these kind of over simplified look at technological progress are useful at all (except as a fun exercise and maybe as a tech tree in a video game).
In reality this is never this simplistic, and you actually run the risk of whitewashing history or whole industries. There are still very good use cases for wood energy (and there will be for all foreseeable future) while coal energy is pretty much just legacy at this point and will probably only be used recreationally in a decade or two. Natural gas on the other hand might get a boost with on-site carbon capture technology and might actually end up cleaner [in some cases] then nuclear or renewables + batteries. You also completely skipped hydro-power which has existed longer then coal and is still on a good run.
You should also look at the cost curve of batteries. It's linear decreasing on a log scale. A lot will change while we wait a decade for nuclear to be built.
This is just... incorrect. Bare minimum, you need massive upgrades to the grid in order to be able to move power around at night from places where the wind is blowing to places where it isn't (I've been told the wind is always blowing somewhere and it's always enough, but I'll believe that when I see it done at scale with no other power source). Keep in mind we'll likely be seeing a significant increase in night time power use to charge EVs as well.
In the absence of such grid capability (i.e. our situation today), on a windless night your renewable production is zero-- so you either need massive batteries, fossil fuels or nuclear.
Also, the fact that batteries have been getting cheaper isn't a guarantee this curve will continue, especially with lithium battery demand going through the roof and supply chain bottlenecks being likely. There are promising signs of lower costs with some of the larger, heavier battery types, but that's still in very early R&D stages and who knows how it will pan out.
If we're not adding more fission generation, I don't see how we can avoid burning a whole lot more fossil fuels for a longer time unless we make our peace with regular blackouts. Every other solution seems to involve banking on tech we don't have yet and don't know when or if we will.
We may need some gas peaker plants to occasionally run in the short-term, but they wouldn't be a significant fraction of energy generation. And the implication of that isn't that renewables leads to more fossil fuel usage than nuclear. You've also go to factor in that we can build out renewables a lot quicker.
A mere sixteen years from NRC application to coming online.
Ask yourself if those things are possible in your life and whether that means perfect should be the enemy of good when bringing in a responsible solution demands responsible care. Your needs for immediate satisfaction do not supersede the longterm welfare of your progeny.
From the outside looking in, valuing current demand over the lives of our children is what got us in this mess.
Yes, people should consume less oil (but big corporations don't).
Yes, people should use less power (but big corporations just count power as a cost of doing business).
Yes, people should make less people (but big corporations need manpower).
> Ask yourself if those things are possible in your life and whether that means perfect should be the enemy of good when bringing in a responsible solution demands responsible care. Your needs for immediate satisfaction do not supersede the longterm welfare of your progeny.
I have no intention of creating progeny in this fucked up world. Moreover, nuclear power is far safer, per watt produced, than coal or oil.
> From the outside looking in, valuing current demand over the lives of our children is what got us in this mess.
It's not individual people who've got us in this mess. Or rather, it is... individual people working for individual corporations who don't consider individual people anything other than feedstock for corporation profits.
My partner and I just need to figure out who can support us when we’re old… (e.g. help us steer our finances in case we can’t ourselves)
There's nothing inherent about society that requires more people than the current workforce to run things in 20+ years, though admittedly, generations are not of equal size (booms and busts in the birth rate over time) and there are often demographic issues as particular generations age out of the workforce.
I too support people's desire and right to make choices about reproduction, but at some point it just becomes irresponsibly selfish for a couple to have more than some replacement-level N number of kids. Not just for the planet, but at a smaller level, too, when considering a family's financial resources, etc. I wish more would-be parents would take this sort of thing into account before choosing (or unintentionally not-actually-choosing) to have a(nother) kid.
Most of the rich world is already doing this [1]. The change was enforced by rising living standards and costs of living. Not proselytising.
Game theory (and several economic theories) suggest that relying on voluntary collective sacrifice is never going to work. People simply will not do it, at least not in numbers large enough to be effective.
I do try to consume less, but I'm sure I'm still above average consumption-wise, and I'm not sure what other cuts I could make while still maintaining the lifestyle I like. At the very least, I have decided I won't reproduce, so I guess that's something.
Political solutions can force people to do things they wouldn't otherwise voluntarily do, but politicians who make their constituents miserable tend to be replaced with politicians who will... not do that.
I think the only feasible solution is the one we are already pursuing: continue consumption growth, but find and build cleaner, renewable ways to fuel that consumption. It's not happening nearly fast enough, though, is hindered by special-interest groups who have an incentive to fight change, and it's unclear if we'll be able to dig ourselves out of the hole we've made for our species' future generations.
It doesn't necessarily involve sacrifice though. Will your life be worse if you have 2 children rather than 3. Or even none instead of 2. For some people it will, but for many it won't. Will it be worse if your house is insulated and requires less energy to heat/cool? Will it be worse if we replace highways with public transit in cities? No, it'll likely actually better (even if you still need to drive, because they'll be less traffic).
It also doesn't need to be voluntary. We could mandate these changes, or strongly incentivise them through tax structures. Many countries have already started doing this in some limited cases.
We should certainly try to find cleaner ways to fuel consumption, because we're of course still going to need to consume a lot. But much like the easiest way (and often the only way) to make software faster is to make it do less work (while still achieving an equivalent or close enough to equivalent result), the easiest way to meet our energy needs in a clean way is to reduce our energy needs.
Authoritarianism on the march again.
> Your needs for immediate satisfaction do not supersede the longterm welfare of your progeny.
not really sure why you are beeing downvoted apart from 'less' always beeing a tough sale.
There's nothing magically "right" or calculated about 16 years, it's just the time it took the gears of apathetic bureaucracy to turn. It's a fallacy to use this as a guidepost for a "responsible" amount of time.
I suspect a lot of it is red tape without a real benefit...
Former commercial nuclear fuel vendor employee here. I did my time with the NRC being part of my life.
"a paper [..] provides some empirical evidence that safety changes have contributed to the cost of building new nuclear reactors. But the study also makes clear that they're only one of a number of factors, accounting for only a third of the soaring costs. The study also finds that, contrary to what those in the industry seem to expect, focusing on standardized designs doesn't really help matters, as costs continued to grow as more of a given reactor design was built."
Imagine writing bug-free code put in continuous, mass population-critical use for the better part of a century.
Can't possibly go tits up. These new reactors are surely infallible, right?
A few plant and supply chain workers have been killed, but again, fewer than with any other source (mining coal and climbing on roofs and towers to install wind and solar is dangerous, yo).
Since I've been muzzled again:
> Climbing on the roof of a two story house to install solar panels is considerably less dangerous than building a nuclear power plant. Yo.
In terms of workers killed per watt-hour generated?
No, it isn't. It's not even close. Yo.
> climbing on roofs and towers to install wind and solar is dangerous, yo
Climbing on the roof of a two story house to install solar panels is considerably less dangerous than building a nuclear power plant. Yo.
> without a single fatality to a member of the general public.
No immediate fatality is the only accurate claim you can make. Over 150,000 people were evacuated from the Three-Mile Island disaster. Due to the stress, there were some increases in consumption of alcohol, cigarettes, and tranquilizers immediately following the accident. The eventual long term effects of those behaviors surely resulted in shorter life spans for at least some of the people.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/003801...
> for over 70 years
That's a short time. Unless you can show the US is somehow exceptional in its quality controls compared to Japan, then a huge disaster like Fukushima is inevitable, and life will be lost.
No one complains about the dangers of the neighbors who use solar energy. No one wants a reactor in their backyard. And it has fair reasoning behind it. You'll never have to evacuate 150,000 people due to your neighbors' solar panels failing.
> No, it isn't. It's not even close. Yo.
This source says you are wrong. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
What source were you using when making your claim?
1) Ground level installations have a greatly diminished risk of dangerous falls during construction/maintenance and have come to account for more wattage than rooftop systems.
2) Installing a solar panel in a large farm instead of on a roof yields more energy output per year, since it usually has mechanical sun tracking [2] and will be oriented for optimum output even if installed with a fixed tilt.
3) Newer panels generate more annual energy output per panel, per kilogram, and per square meter. That means that the same number of full time solar installation workers now produce more energy over the system's lifetime than in the past.
The information from OurWorldInData that you linked is more up to date and therefore shows low deaths-per-TWh for solar. Probably Turing_Machine was remembering an older report like this one from 10 years ago: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
[1] https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/81325.pdf page 9
[2] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2017/09/20/trackers-dominate-u-s...
No, I was talking about the United States. Not Chernobyl.
The Soviet Union (and now Russia) is notorious for having crap technology.
Adding Chernobyl into the mix is like adding the (outrageously high) air crash rates from the Soviet Union into the mix and claiming that it's "evidence" that flying is dangerous.
> You're simultaneously claiming that the US can somehow safely build the tall and complex structures for a nuclear plant
Yes. We can. 70 years, no accidents.
> but cannot safely install solar panels on a 2 story building
I'm saying that the fatality rate is HIGHER for solar panels. Which it is.
I think we're done here.
And Japan too? They had a major and recent disaster. How do you explain that? Crap Japanese technology?
> Yes. We can. 70 years, no accidents.
That's absolutely false.
1961. Steam explosion and meltdown results in three fatalities at National Reactor Testing Station's SL-1 Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One
1986. Feedwater line-burst at Surry Nuclear Power Plant kills 4
2013. One worker was killed and two others injured when part of a generator fell as it was being moved at the Arkansas Nuclear One.
> I'm saying that the fatality rate is HIGHER for solar panels. Which it is.
It's not. You're confusing correlation with causation. There is nothing particular about solar installations that would result in a higher fatality rate compared to building tall nuclear cooling towers. You'd need to point to some sort of causation to be believable.
The real difference is probably something like big construction sites versus small construction sites. Which says nothing at all about the safety of nuclear vs. solar.
In fact it would be a safe bet that large scale solar installations are far safer to build and maintain than nuclear installations.
I explain that with 1) outdated plant, 2) magnitude 9.0 (!) earthquake 3) devastating tsunami, 4) massive fire, 5) total loss of power to all control systems.
Followed by:
6) still didn't kill anybody due to radiation leaks.
So what? Solar isn't killing anyone due to radiation leaks either. The subject is death rate, not death due to radiation leaks.
This is yet another example of you trying to get away with cherry picking data. And failing at it.
Besides the fact that the radiation deaths from Fukushima will come.
At least six workers have exceeded lifetime legal limits for radiation and more than 175 (0.7%) have received significant radiation doses
That will never happen with a solar power plant. Never.
And you avoided the question. Does Japan have crap technology? Is that your explanation for the Fukushima disaster? That was your excuse for Russia. What's your excuse for the Fukushima disaster?
There have been nuclear power disasters requiring evacuation at the minimum in Russia, the US, and Japan. Can you name a solar power disaster?
Several comments ago you said "I think we're done here". And in another comment "Again, I think we're done here". You called that wrong, didn't you? Twice.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Even giving you the benefit of the doubt there, it's clear that nuclear is extremely safe. Plus it has the added benefit of, actually, you know, working (and by "working" I mean "producing energy in quantities sufficient to run a modern industrial society", not "works in someone's pipe dream").
It's clear that solar is extremely safe. And doesn't have a history in the US of evacuating over 150,000 people. Which nuclear does.
> Plus it has the added benefit of, actually, you know, working (and by "working" I mean "producing energy in quantities sufficient to run a modern industrial society", not "works in someone's pipe dream"
Modern solar works and continues to be installed at a rapid rate all over the world. Even France is phasing out nuclear. Westinghouse Electric went bankrupt over the Vogtle nuclear plant in discussion. The U.S. government has given $8.3 billion of loan guarantees to help finance construction of the Vogtle reactor. It's not viable anymore compared to very quick and simple to maintain solar plants. The future is sunny. Which is after all just nuclear energy at a safe distance.
Sorry, you don't get to count media hysteria as a "risk" of nuclear energy.
It wasn't media hysteria. The evacuation was to protect people. On the seven-point International Nuclear Event Scale, it is rated Level 5. It was a partial meltdown, and there was a risk of explosion, releasing radiation into the general area. Not evacuating would have been grossly irresponsible.
It is a matter of historical record that Met Ed had not informed state officials before conducting a steam venting from the plant. Convinced that the company was downplaying the severity of the accident, state officials turned to the NRC.
Twenty-eight hours after the accident began, William Scranton III, the lieutenant governor, appeared at a news briefing to say that Metropolitan Edison, the plant's owner, had assured the state that "everything is under control".
Later that day, Scranton changed his statement, saying that the situation was "more complex than the company first led us to believe". There were conflicting statements about radioactivity releases. Schools were closed and residents were urged to stay indoors. Farmers were told to keep their animals under cover and on stored feed.
Governor Dick Thornburgh, on the advice of NRC chairman Joseph Hendrie, advised the evacuation "of pregnant women and pre-school age children...within a five-mile radius of the Three Mile Island facility". The evacuation zone was extended to a 20-mile radius on Friday, March 30.
Where do you see the press taking action in any of the above except to repeat what state and NRC officials had decided?
Can you name a US evacuation over a solar power accident?
It absolutely was media hysteria. Add "stupid and cowardly politicians" if you like. I'd be okay with that.
> Add "stupid and cowardly politicians" if you like.
Do you expect the average politician to be highly educated about when a nuclear meltdown in progress becomes dangerous enough to evacuate?
Do you think politicians should be brave about the lives of others when faced with a nuclear meltdown? You can be brave with your own life -- that's your choice for sure -- but asking political leaders to risk the lives of hundreds of thousands of people just in order to make sure nuclear has a good name, seems quite off. Asking people to not be "cowardly" when faced with an actual nuclear meltdown in progress sounds more like a sociopath than of a leader tasked with the responsibility to protect people.
Has any political leader ever had to be brave about a solar power plant disaster? Can you even name a solar power plant disaster?
I have been following closely, and never once have I heard of a delay because of regulation changes. Not once! It's all construction.
And with the costs of delays, blaming this on an external party like the NRC would be an essential thing to do to explain it to the backers.
If you have any knowledge of regulations that caused the big delays, I would love to know, and would be very surprised.
Although to fair on the NRC, there was a case where, due to lack of experience, the contractor cast an enormous slab using the wrong rating of concrete, which then had to be removed at great expense and delay.
And that's what it comes down to, EPC and design not understanding each other and mucking it up. Regulations and rules have not gotten in the way or caused ballooning budgets or massive delays.
IN fact, if the NRC had more regulations and required the design to specify how to construct and other parts, then perhaps these projects would not be in so much trouble. But instead all three sides of the deal seem intent on mucking up the construction and then suing each other at the end when everything falls apart.
And that's the problem with the entire nuclear construction industry: no accountability or reliability, and tooooons of corruption. Some of the execs involved with the Summer project are going to jail, and if executives in the US are going to jail for something other than medical regulations (the only regulations with real teeth for executives), then they are hopelessly corrupt.
I've seen 16 year old bugs get fixed though. Usually just need to get them retriaged as a security bug, and then all things are fixable.
I thought they meant American Permanent Resident (aka green card), which has a notoriously long waiting period.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/how-does-permitting-for-c...
We sorely need a safe, cost-effective and reproducible blueprint for manufacturing nuclear infrastructure at scale.
But given two options, one twice (or more) the cost of the other, and with the more expensive option being slower and less scalable, why choose the hard and expensive route versus the cheap and easy route?
Most utilities use five-year resource plans, and even then they tend to use out of date publications for cost guidance, which themselves took several years to be written and get through peer review.
So traditional utility deployment is done on 10-year old info. In more open markets, like Texas, storage is a huuuuge amount of the capital that's being deployed on the grid. And in places with more active residents that force the utility commissions to force the utilities to use realistic numbers, like California, storage is already deployed in GW range. For example, existing storage on the grid today was a bigger player than nuclear during California's recent and massive heat waves.
And one dirty secret that they don't tell you about nuclear: it's also going to need storage. Nuclear is not dispatchable, it can't be turned down on demand, and can't be ramped up. But real power demand varies a huge amount throughout the day.
The only reason France was able to get up to 70% nuclear energy on their grid was by using the continental grid to trade energy with other countries. France has a small number of super expensive nuclear "peakers" but they can only deal with very small fluctuations in demand.
So if nuclear were ever going to be a really major power source, or the only power source, it would require lots of storage to balance load.
I advize doing the maths on this. Look at graphs of how much solar and win vary, check total elecricity consumption, look up latest price of li ion batteries and then do a bit of maths to see how much you need so that you get no blackouts in a 10 year period. Then realize you should use compressed air storage instead...
Last I checked, if we use the cheapest form of storage (compressed air) and assume there are enough suitable caves for the huge amount we want, we'd triple electricity costs by switching to renewables+storage.
> And one dirty secret that they don't tell you about nuclear: it's also going to need storage.
Not really, you just need to be able to burn excess power. Which is a very easy thing to do (you can spend as much as you want on turning atmospheric CO2 and water into methane).
As for CAES, if it can scale and be cheap, great. But there isn't nearly as much evidence of that for CAES as there is for batteries, which are being deployed by the GWh on the grid now, and which have massive plans for expansion in areas where the grid is market based and profit driven, instead of a regulated monopoly that can rest on its laurels.
I occasionally hear about liquid air too, and though everybody I have encountered that works on it is a bit nuts, I am more optimistic about liquid air than CAES for massive scale, as liquid air can be deployed many many places.
No technological breakthroughs are needed for arbitrarily scalable power storage with good efficiency.
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4994054
"Insofar as the numbers I have presented in this paper are correct, they demonstrate that energy storage is a problem of 19th century science. No future laboratory breakthroughs or discoveries are required for solving it. All that is needed is fine engineering and assiduous attention to detail. Said poetically, this is 21st century rocket science.
Moreover, it is clear from Fig. 11 that the storage capacity of months becomes feasible once the engine (including the heat exchangers) exists as a product one can purchase at a known cost, particularly if the heat is further transferred into cheaper media for longer-term storage, such as rocks underground. Thus, pumped thermal storage with heat exchange is not a niche solution to the energy storage problem but a global one. This is the reason I think it will prevail."
I'm not impressed with the costing methodology used, but it's probably at least in the ballpark.
And what about fusion, we spend a lot on R&D but it's pretty clear it will be even more expensive than fission, if you were in charge would you cancel that effort entirely and shift funds elsewhere?
If fusion can compete once it happens, bring it on. But it should be targeting a cost of $1-5/MWh instead of $50/MWh.
Helion's approach might make engineering sense, but it's still a longshot. But that's ok for research.
Well, that was part of Areva's branding circa 2009: nuclear's nespresso and selling combustible and reactor in the same package. Full vertical integration: uranium mining, enrichment, reactor building, recycling.
Areva used to be top in their field (mine prospecting, geological stuff) and then discredited. Ended up being bought back by EDF (which is to say, bought back by the French state).
The company (Uramin) that Areva bought (to get the uranium deposit fields) seem to have lie about their deposits' potential. It was before Fukushima sent the price of Uranium down, so they were expecting a lot of return on investments from this move.
The whole affair is riddled with corruption, insider knowledge, betrayal and incompetence at some key high level ranks at Areva. Too much easy money if you ask me, then someone (Uramin + insider ?) wanted a bigger part of the pie and the whole cake turned bad.
edit: also too much money (~10billions) invested in different fields ultimately led up Areva to bankruptcy.
Maybe. Or maybe nuclear is actually just too expensive, and we need to stop pretending it's a commercially-viable technology.
Each of the two reactors mentioned in the article produces 1250 MWe.
OTOH maybe a row of smaller reactors could offer a better economy of scale for production, even if they require more parts and more maintenance overall.
Their core life relies on highly enriched uranium. Production and delivery at commercial power scale is a weapons proliferation risk in addition to being more expensive.
Refueling a naval reactor is a multi-year operation that happens only a tiny handful of times in the life of the ship. Current-gen submarines don't get refueled at all. They can get away with this in large part because they aren't running at 100% power. They are shut down in port, and even at sea they only operate at low power most of the time.
To reduce LCOE, commercial power reactors run at full power all the time. Refueling a commercial power reactor takes a month or so and happens every 1.5 years.
In the west, nuclear plants were more affordable when built at scale. It's not just reactors that are costly, specialty parts like steam generators and turbines are cheaper to produce in runs of 40 instead of 4. It's not so much the blueprint that makes a plant cheap. It's building two dozen of the same blueprint.
We'll just multiply that same ratio by the price of Vogtle and get.. what? $30k/kW?
"The reactor achieved its design output power 30 September 2022."
Regular production will mean all tests have been completed. They are currently ongoing and yes we can notice it in the electricity price when they test shutdowns and 1600 MW (15% nation-wide) disappears from the supply.
This is VERY concerning as prices where very high as the plant was operating then?
Here you can see the current and past national totals for nuclear/hydro/wind/solar etc. production. Choose 12 October to see what it looks like when they tested turning the whole 1600 MW off at once: https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/
Many things have affected the prices recently including imports (or lack of) from Sweden and Norway, exports to Estonia, wind and rainfall situation, as well as other nuclear reactors being offline for maintenance.
Decades ago the United States didn’t get to 20% electricity from nuclear power by being so inefficient.
The job market is also a lot more diverse now then in the 70s. There used to be a lot of highly skilled construction workers back then. Generally large infrastructure projects take longer and cost more, regardless of the project type.
It is very surprising in that context that Governments haven't pushed harder to secure their energy security more aggressively.
Some governments have, to the tune of millions of dead people in the middle east. Sometimes aggression is misdirected.
Are they recycling fuel in this reactor, or were they just using the spent fuel pool to store the new fuel while waiting approval for install?
https://www.siliconranch.com/portfolio-item/snipesville-ii-s...
"These units are important to building the future of energy and will serve as clean, emission-free sources of energy for Georgians for the next 60 to 80 years."
Do nuclear power plants have an expected lifetime of 60 to 80 years? Then must be shut down, with all the radioactive problems that present and a new one must be built?
That seems like a short time to make good on the investment of building it. (from an environmental standpoint, based on the lack of reuse of the real estate it was / is sitting on top of)
Re-used for another power plant, sure. But cleaned up and used for something else? Has that even been done once?
It doesn't happen much because it's economically smarter to keep operating a plant or replace it with another plant given that the site is already prepared for a nuclear power station.
It is also quite feasible to move the spent fuel and any other radioactive material to another location... there are politics involved, but the physics are pretty straight forward.
The nuclear industry is necessarily incredibly fastidious about where the radioactive stuff goes. Every milligram is accounted for in triplicate. If nothing goes wrong, after decomissioning you can be far more confident that the site is free of harmful levels of radiation than basically anywhere else on earth.
Something will go wrong somewhere if we keep building them, and we'll have a multi trillion dollar publicly funded cleanup, a large area for forest to reclaim that used to be two large cities, and a few tens of thousands of people dead (which is a vanishingly low cost compared to an oil war or a lithium coup).
There will be a lot of steel and similar that counts as low grade waste that will take decades to deal with, but can be moved around safely and wouldn't really do large amounts of harm even if it were lost.
Then there will be 2000t or so of high grade waste. This is the really nasty stuff. The plant operator will claim that the tiny amount of money they put in a fund for it means that they have no responsibility. Everyone will point fingers at everyone else and it'll sit in some temporary site for a while. It will probably eventually find its way into a breeder reactor or some reprocessing method at horiffic taxpayer expense. Alternatively someone will put neutron emitter A in barrel type B and put them half a meter to close together for an instagram photo at some point, and we'll have a permanent no-no zone the size of a state.
People will happily buy EVs if it fills the gap their present vehicles do and proponents of EVs will do well to remember that not everyone leads the same lifestyle, living in dense cities with lots of highway driving.
I'm very hopeful for the future seeing the swarm of Nuclear startups pushing the boundaries in the United States. It feels like we're in ~2004 of the space startup phase with Nuclear tech startups.
Yes, but...
The dense cities are where the pollution is, and is low hanging fruit. Converting the rural areas with much less dense population is not achieving much. So it makes sense to target those dense population centers first.
Edit: here's an example of online pollution maps: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/10/climate/drivi...
Urban areas have way more construction going on which is the larger, dirtier fuel using, etc equipment. And if you're trying to compare farming equipment to dense population areas, then I'd love to see some proof of what you're claiming that they are producing more rurally than in urban centers.
How does installing the most expensive generator in the country not work directly against that principle? Per a quick check on Wikipedia, it looks like the ~1.2GW Vogtle 3/4 is going to cost $28.5B, which is about eighteen times what an equivalent windfarm (at $1.3M/MW) would cost to install. And that's just counting construction costs, operating costs are even more skewed against nuclear.
Sorry, but to be blunt: nuclear is snake oil being marketed to right-leaning tech bros who think wind and solar are something only granola munching hippies should love. It doesn't work on a balance sheet. And frankly it's not remotely close.
If you genuinely care about the goals you espoused, you need to get off then nuclear horse. Once we've filled the channel with actually cheap renewables, it's time to go back and cover the remaining 2-5% or whatever with expensive stuff. Not now.
Does that include storage costs?
Because a windfarm alone cannot replace a nuclear power plant no matter how cheaper or how much electricity the windturbines generate because on days without wind they generate zero Wh.
What fraction of the time is whole-grid-amortized wind capacity running at 5% of average? Has that ever even happened? I don't have numbers, but I'm willing to bet that this has never actually happened.
What you've done is try to counter my overwhelming quantitative argument with a qualitative hedge ("but storage"). Please, (please!) look up the numbers here.
Nuclear is a borderline scandal. If it was some other federal subsidy of an industry you disliked, you'd almost certainly call it fraud.
[1] i.e. no use of gas peaker plants, legacy nuclear, solar, pumped hydro, batteries, etc... Literally trying to run the whole grid on wind and wind alone.
And in any case the two biggest "meltdown" events in recent history in the USA were in... Texas, and had to do with weather effects on fossil fuel generators.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/story/2020-10-...
https://medium.com/@alkidel/the-land-footprint-of-solar-and-...
Land usage or energy density or amount of materials used are all red herrings.
I sometimes see mention "laws of physics" as a reasons renewables won't work, but nobody has ever, literally ever, been able to point to the law. Or run the numbers on why renewables would be be feasible for supplying all our power and even an order of magnitude more than we currently consume.
Since you say "laws of physics" prevent renewables from supplying out energy. I call bullshit.
Name the law.
So, I maintain that this is 100% BS, just an argument to authority. If there is an argument in hat book, do you understand enough to give a sketch? Or point to the principle?
Replace all energy and not just what is already electrified, and also boost global energy use to the per-capita rate of Qatar (I think the highest in the world at about 2.5 times the average of the USA), and also boost world population to 10 billion, you can still do this 30 times over with PV placed slightly worse than if it was randomly scattered.
There's a lot of land on this planet of ours.
That's why land use is a red herring.
In famously sunny washington state a current technology solar storage system with the same net capacity factor as US nuclear and the same number of days where >0 backup is needed as European nuclear for less than what Vogtle cost per watt. Add wind and this goes down dramatically. Allow the builder to sit on their thumbs for a decade before starting and they'd open before a new nuclear build while providing 100% capacity and a quarter of the cost using batteries made of abundant materials and solar panels made with the silver and copper that came out of existing uranium mines.
The average american has 200-400m^2 dedicated to parking their car. Worldwide average per capita primary energy is 2kW. Even at 20W/m^2 this provides enough. Even wind at 5W/m^2 can produce enough final energy in that much area (with the side benefit of not really affecting other uses).
Wind is much better than solar economically at high latitudes and is slightly anti-correlated with solar.
There are terawatts of tidal sites available in high latitude coastal areas and the LCOE is already lower than nuclear with a much better learning rate and only a few hundred MW of preexisting capacity.
What law of physics contradicts this?
The inkai uranium mine is one of the largest mines in the world. It spans about 760km^2 of desert. At that latitude current generation solar has about 16% capacity factor of 230W/m^2. There are much denser uranium reserves, but if land use being significantly low than solar is your overriding concern then there's only a few decades worth of reserves available for use in PWRs.
A solar project there would produce about 25GW net.
The uranium mined produces 50GW gross at typical burnup. Mining, transport, enrichment, and post burn lifecycle consume ~10-20% of this.
The exclusion zones for those reactors would be roughly another 170km^2 so the nuclear is only ~30% better.
Add wind turbines at 10W/m^2 and do it not in the arctic and the renewables win handily by net output. You can also use all of that land for other things as well without getting radon poisoning or being shot by armed guards. Modern multi megawatt wind turbines don't meaningfully use land as being able to see two or three turbines off in the distance doesn't really prevent you from doing most things.
As to variability, the people of france would like a word. Less facetiously you should consider cost to meet a minimum power target. With the $23k per kw of Vogtle, hitting higher reliability than any nuclear reactor is trivial -- you also get 10 or so kW of variable power.
Wind power etc will produce its rated power only when it feels like it with no warning or predictability. To get actual continuous reliable power you need either massive grid-scale storage that nobody's even seriously proposed constructing, or massive over-capacity distributed over a continent-sized area with enough grid capacity to transfer sufficient power from areas with access to areas with shortages, which we also don't have and don't seem to have seriously proposed constructing. Probably both actually.
IMO there's no question that we've gotta get out metaphorical shit together and build lots more nuclear faster if we ever want to actually decrease carbon emissions in our lifetime.
I'm not saying that everything is just great with nuclear now - my impression is that it's vastly overpriced due to excessive regulation and red tape and being over-cautious. Part of my argument is that one of the things we need to do is cut way back on all that stuff to make more plants faster and for less money than we currently spend on them.
If you total up all of the deaths from all nuclear power incidents that have ever happened, including Chernobyl, the total is orders of magnitude less than what the Global Warming people tell us is going to happen if we keep pumping out CO2. We know how to build the plants now, we know we need to get CO2 emissions down now, so let's do it.
Bottom line IMO, either A) the Global Warming people are full of shit and they know it or B) we absolutely must get serious about nuclear power now, evaluating the cost both in dollars and lives against what unchecked CO2 emissions will do. We should be building them fast and cheap and cutting corners - I don't want people to die in nuclear accidents, but if we don't have anybody dying in accidents, then we're probably not building them fast enough. Kind of like how Elon Musk said about his rockets, if you're not failing, then you're not moving fast enough. We've got to get it done yesterday, waiting on grid-scale storage and transport improvements won't be fast enough.
Yes. That is exactly what is happening in france.
If you are willing to spend $23000/kW you can get a wholly renewable + storage system with 5 or 6 9s of uptime in months rather than decades vs. best case of 93% for nuclear. You'll also get 10kW net or so of variable power on top of your guaranteed 1kW.
The time to spend $1 trillion on renewables to cover 90% of the load and another $1 trillion on reduction such as electrified rail, active transit infrastructure, insulation, and industrial efficiency and another $1 trillion on nuclear + tidal + mmwave geothermal + whatever other technologies work in principle but not in practice.
But if you are going to cut one because we would rather spend it on military it should be the least effective one.
For ex. I read that you lose a ton of efficiency if you start hauling or carrying a heavy load.
A tesla converts nearly 100% of it's potential energy into kinetic energy, but "refueling" is not convenient as an F150; which converts something like 15% of it's potential energy into kinetic energy, but can hold a _ton_ more energy and refueled in minutes.
It's ok to be far less efficient if convenience to the consumer is increased, as long as the power source was carbon neutral.
F150 is kind of a small truck, in the world of work trucks. It should be fine as a standard EV for most contractors, etc.
We can also have things like extra batteries that one can rent and stick in your trunk for longer journeys or times when you don't have time to wait.
> It's ok to be far less efficient if convenience to the consumer is increased
It's also ok if convenience to the consumer is decreased. Nobody is owned convenience.
These two statements are at odds with each other, however. Every new nuclear plant we build like Vogtle will end up increasing our cost of carbon-free energy rather than decreasing it.
Buying a nuclear power plant locks the energy price for 40-60 years, and all the current buildable designs are more expensive than current renewables plus the cost of storage to make the renewables a firm energy source.
And the trend for renewables and storage is drastic price decreases, slowed down only by occasional supply shortages that get innovated around, which in turn drive prices even lower. So when we replace the storage in 15-20 years at EoL, the replacement will be vastly cheaper. And we get 2-3 of those price drops during the time that we would be locked into the cost of current nuclear.
Our energy future is one of energy abundance, and cheap cheap cheap energy, but it's very unlikely to include nuclear as part of that mix. And any nuclear we do invest in will hinder energy abundance and energy cheapness.
Also, why are energy prices locked for 40-60 years? The energy required to create a nuclear plant is equal to what it can produce in ~5 years.
I don't understand how you believe the future is "very unlikely to include nuclear". How else do you provide base load requirements? It's naive to think we can transition to a "green grid" without nuclear.
Not the guy you responded to, but: a combination of traditional batteries, molten metal batteries, liquid air or CO2 storage, pumped hydro, gravity storage, stored thermal energy, and more. All of which are around the commercial demonstration plant phase right now.
> Where are you going to get the metals?
Many of these don't require much metals. Molten metal batteries use metals that are extremely abundant.
> How much fossil fuel is going to burn in order to extract it?
In a decarbonized world? Zero. What? You think climate change can be solved without making mining zero-emission? If you're wondering how this will be done, it'll be battery/hydrogen/ammonia/e-fuel for mining equipment, trucks, ships, etc. We have to do that no matter what, otherwise we've just postponed climate change, not solved it.
> How else do you provide base load requirements?
Personally I believe a good share of base load will be provided by nuclear in many countries. I have nothing against nuclear. But I also think the base load problem can be solved without nuclear quite easily, assuming we actually solve CO2-emissions. This is because solving CO2-emissions means we'll produce batteries/hydrogen/ammonia/e-fuels on the same order of magnitude needed to balance renewables to provide baseload.
If you want to dive into more detail, look at Marc Z Jacobsens studies: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601...
I think advanced geothermal may become a significant part of renewable base load in the future. It would be a huge hail mary for the climate change cause, because it'd make it SO much easier to get political willpower and investments from the whole oil/gas-sector. Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2P2stuQ_KY
> It's naive to think we can transition to a "green grid" without nuclear.
Optimistic, but not naive. There's a clear path. Difficult, but not much more difficult than rebooting the nuclear energy industry.
And you have to be optimistic to think we can get to zero CO2-emissions anyway.
We have the tech for nuclear, today. In fact, we could have switched the entire country over to nuclear 30+ years ago.
Instead, we’ve been burning fossil fuels for decades because, for so-called environmental activists, an impossible perfect solution is the only thing they’ll accept.
Do the same calculation for renewables. Both need storage, and renewables need a bit more storage, but their primary energy is also 5-10x cheaper than nuclear.
Calling something "naive" or "fantasy" requires evaluating the current state of the tech, and where the tech is going. From that perspective, especially with the data coming from the nuclear build at Vogtle and Summer, thinking that nuclear GenIII+ reactors have any place on the grid is completely unrealistic.
We can not even build four of these nuclear reactors . We started plans to build about a dozen, started on only four, and had to abandon two mid-build. Nuclear is not a good fit for advanced economies, anymore than complex Victorian style wood carving is a fit for advanced economies. Nuclear requires way too much skilled labor, too much construction versus manufacturing.
We no longer live in the 80s, we have much better tech, 40 years of advancement, and we need to use the best tech, not the one that was best in 1980.
Very tiny amounts are needed. It's pretty straightforward to make reactors that can ramp along with daily power use.
China aggressively pushed nuclear over the past 20 years and they still haven't caught up with France in terms of generating capacity.
Almost 10 years ago wind power in China overtook nuclear in terms of GWh delivered and things stayed that way.
Unless there's some kind of breakthrough, nuclear will remain this safe, stable, clean but really slow to build and expensive energy source.
Where do they come from for electric vehicles? Also where do you get the uranium from? If we significantly increase nuclear energy production we run out of uranium in 40 years or so.
> Also, why are energy prices locked for 40-60 years? The energy required to create a nuclear plant is equal to what it can produce in ~5 years.
Maybe you should have a look how contracts for these things are made. Nobody would invest into a nuclear power plant if they don't get a guaranteed price.
> I don't understand how you believe the future is "very unlikely to include nuclear". How else do you provide base load requirements? It's naive to think we can transition to a "green grid" without nuclear.
Wind, solar are provide base load, they are not load following, to quote wikipedia:
Base load demand... can be met by unvarying power plants,[2] dispatchable generation,[3] or by a collection of smaller intermittent energy sources,[4] depending on which approach has the best mix of cost, availability and reliability in any particular market.
Which metals are you talking about? There are energy storage systems that use no rare (or even uncommon) materials.
Because of the $30 billion dollar loan and $40/MWh of O&M costs.
> How do you envision energy storage of the future? Where are you going to get the metals?
Sodium ion is made purely of abundant materials. There are electrolyser chemistries that use nothing less common than Nickel.
Current PV tech is made of sand, copper, and silver. Olympic dam is one of the largest Uranium mines in the world. For every joule of uranium fuel for a PWR it produces, it produces enough silver for 0.5 joules of solar at the current 9mg per net watt (as well as enough copper). This is improving by 10-20% per year. So by the time your nuclear reactor opened you could get more energy from that mine from PV than solar.
The nuclear reactor will also require most of that silver and a bunch of indium, cadmium, zirconium, chromium, molybdenum, iron, and almost as much copper as the PV (if using 1.5kV strings).
> I don't understand how you believe the future is "very unlikely to include nuclear". How else do you provide base load requirements? It's naive to think we can transition to a "green grid" without nuclear.
Base load is a myth. What matters is being able to provide a joule at the time it is required at a given resource, carbon, and labour cost, if you have surplus joules available at other times for the same cost that's an upside, not a downside. France's continued unreliability or any of the recent western nuclear plants show that the nuclear is an absolute joke from both the time and cost perspective. Whenthe >0.04% concentration uranium mines run out it will also be a joke on the carbon front.
There's no need to ban it. Just give all installations that hit a low carbon threshold (without loopholes like CCS or 'biofuel') and net availability the same deal with regard to public insurance, guaranteed loans, decomissioning obligations, and guaranteed electricity prices and see if anyone even considers nuclear.
The cost and time for the construction of new one not included and the risk of sabotage not mentioned. I bet russia will at least try to damage them as a revenge for the help of Ukraine.
It's funny how the Green idea of a large grid that shares power, i.e. it's always windy somewhere, suddenly falls flat when the neighbors wind(nuclear, in this case) is no longer blowing.
The only fault of France is trusting Germany to have a sane power production plan when they entered a peering agreement with them.
More problems like Asse and Brunsbüttel
There is a difference between the outage of an nuclear power plant and the outage of wind turbine.
One power plant less has a much bigger effect than thousand wind turbines without wind. Nuclear power plants are the equivalent of Cloudflare, one outage has massive effects. Wind turbines are decentralization and that's better especially since Russia return as the bad guy.
Didn't hear much fear about Ukrainian wind turbines but lits of worries about nuclear power plants.
The analogy is about how people pushing for wind and solar only/main are relying on every other area to be able to pick up the slack when their area is down. And the fact that they are not able or willing to pick up the slack when someone else's area is down.
Your comment was that Germany is having to support France while they have their reactors down and viewing that in a negative light. If France was supplying power to Germany during a lull in the wind, the response would be "This is just so, even though the wind does not blow all the time, with enough interconnects we can ensure that a green grid is possible."
There was even talk about expanding Europe's grid across to Libya in order to ensure that the wind would be blowing somewhere.
That is just holding one energy source to an impossible standard(i.e. zero downtime) while giving generous excuses to the other.
Last I checked 1840 was not 20,000 times 16. And an ancient leaking nuclear plant barely has a higher capacity factor than current gen offshore wind.
> And an ancient leaking nuclear plant
According to whom? Not the nuclear safety bodies at least.
> current gen offshore wind.
Those are a bit worse than nuclear plants but take roughly the same time to build anyways, the one in France which just went into production took 10 years of development + 4 years of planning so about 14 years.
Which is still about half of the net capacity of new onshore wind. And every year the turbines get bigger.
Dogger bank is a first of its kind project and is on schedule for first power 5 years after site selection.
Hornsea one was one year from construction start to first power and two years to full operation.
Hornsea two was six years from planning start to full operation
Gemini was two years from construction start to full operation.
Triton knoll was five years from planning approval to full operation
Part of the reason that the construction took so long was that the containment building was redesigned to be stronger, that caused a redesign of all the internal components that were already being built.
> In December of 2011, a 19th revision was written for the AP1000 Design Certification, which effectively included a complete redesign of the containment building: >The wall is appropriately reinforced and sized where the composite wall module joins the reinforced concrete sections and as appropriate to accommodate seismic loads and aircraft loads. This design is new to the amendment; previously the structure was all reinforced concrete. >As this change to the design requirements was made after engineering contacts were already signed and manufacturing had begun on the reactor's long-lead-time components, it resulted in a halting of construction as the containment building had to be re-designed.
For a large scale project that had the design changed drastically, I think 10 years is not bad.
> On August 26, 2009, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued an Early Site Permit and a Limited Work Authorization. Limited construction at the new reactor sites began,
13 years and counting, 14 if nothing else goes wrong (unit 4 scheduled for end of 2023).
Then there's all the projects that go the way of VC Summer which get conveniently forgotten about. Vogtle is the 'success' story.
California is building a new desalination plant, a fairly straightforward project with no surprises or midstream design changes, construction is expected to take 3 years.
Let's look at something simple, such as a railway in California. >On December 2, 2010, the Authority Board of Directors voted to begin construction on the first section of the system from Madera to Fresno. >In July 2012, the California legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown approved construction of the high-speed system. >Fresno hosted a groundbreaking ceremony on January 6, 2015, to mark the commencement of sustained construction activities.
It took 5 years from the vote to begin construction to groundbreaking. In 2022, there is still not a ride able section of track yet. The Fresno station, where groundbreaking occurred is scheduled completion in 2029. 14 years, or about the same length of time as Vogal if everything stays on track.
The point is, big construction projects take time and are complicated. If they whipped up a nuclear plant in 3 years, there would be fear mongering about how they must have cut corners and it is unsafe.
We could get the plant completion times down by committing to build more of them. Then all the large and specialized components would be built in more of a production manner rather than a bespoke manner, allowing for both cost and time savings.
If that's true then go for it (it never happened in the past -- costs increased exponentially even before three mile island), but don't ask for special treatment. Whatever deal you demand in terms of fast tracking environmental assessment, guaranteed loans, billions of dollars for free insurance, public resources for security and 40 year guaranteed price for generation should be available for anyone who can meet the 50g carbon intensity target, risk of major accident, and a minimum availability. If you need just two (or ten) more $13/W projects to get you started, then offer the same $30 billion guaranteed loan to tidal and see what happens.
On a level playing field noone in their right mind is going to choose to build nuclear.
I give you the nuclear heat source up front for free. Brand new AP1000 appears up to the second cooling loop by magic.
Steam turbines sans the emission control equipment are about $3k/kWe
Fuel rods are $10-20/MWh. Take it at a constant $10 for an AP1000 (costs of uranium and SWUs go up, but fuel efficiency and fabrication improves at about the same rate).
Decomissioning is underfunded at $10/MWh but we'll pretend this is enough
O&M costs for a steam turbine sans fuel is $10/MWh
Demonstrate how nuclear makes sense with these constraints vs wind at $2000/kW net or solar at $2500/kW net while the gas turbines still run.
Demonstrate how nuclear makes sense vs. Projected costs of pv + wind + h2 + batteries.
How is France dealing with their waste? Can Germany pay France to take it?
Germany's CO2 output is thanks to some politicians who sabotaged the expansion of renewable energy on purpose.
The crisis in both countries is caused by renewables, just in different ways
The reactor France builds is many years late and extremely expensive. France has for decades extremely nuclear friendly governments. The actual problem is money, number of engineers, technical capabilities, ...
To my knowledge, that's the only form of energy with a specific target of reduction in the law, not even petrol is subject to it.
The truth is that the nuclear grid is holding up quite well considering those facts, I don't know anything else where which would still work after two decades being forced to sell electricity below production costs to "competitors" (another subject)
> France has for decades extremely nuclear friendly governments
No it hasn't since the 90s at best.
There were never greens in the French government.
> they even put the reduction of nuclear straight into the law
after decades of little investing in renewable energy, which is now cheap. France has a long coast and lots of sunshine...
Example: there are thousands of offshore wind turbines in Europe. A tiny fraction of those are in France.
> two decades being forced to sell electricity below production
The French nuclear industry now is mostly government owned. It picked up the failed business of EDF, which had debt of around 60 billion euros from exploding costs of new reactor constructions. It was always a political instrument to sell cheap electricity, while the tax payer pays for the hidden additional costs.
France is a democracy, you don't need to be in the governement to have an influence. They had agreements with Chirac and then Hollande against nuclear for their votes.
> after decades of little investing in renewable energy, which is now cheap. France has a long coast and lots of sunshine...
France has invested half of the total price of the nuclear grid in renewable. I do agree that those tremendous renewable investments went poorly though.
Since you're talking about wind turbines, the last one opened took 14 years to build.
> The French nuclear industry now is mostly government owned. It picked up the failed business of EDF, which had debt of around 60 billion euros from exploding costs of new reactor constructions. It was always a political instrument to sell cheap electricity, while the tax payer pays for the hidden additional costs.
Again, I don't see how anything else would have been better. Renewable companies won't last 20 years without investments (that's the full lifetime of solar and wind turbines anyways...) and forced to sell electricity below production cost to their competitors.
Real influence is when a party is part of the government, has ministers, etc. Like the greens in Germany.
Just see the difference renewable energy for electricity production in France is at 20%. In Germany it's currently at around 50%.
If the 'greens' had any influence in France, this influence is not very visible in the results.
> I do agree that those tremendous renewable investments went poorly though.
The investments in nuclear went much worse: half of the reactor fleet is offline and more than a hundred billion Euros is needed for this fleet just to keep it running and replace some of these aging reactors. No wonder EDF is nationalized, with huge debt and billions of more needed - a normal company would already be bankrupt.
> Renewable companies won't last 20 years without investments (that's the full lifetime of solar and wind turbines anyways...) and forced to sell electricity below production cost to their competitors.
Renewables are currently the cheapest source of electricity and its getting cheaper.
Nuclear is only getting more expensive. See the French nuclear power plant in UK (Hinkley Point C), which a very expensive way to produce electricity. Delayed. Cost increases.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/may/20/hinkley-poin...
The new cost increases are paid by the French tax payer.
Yes that's what happened. Real influence is when you sign agreements for your votes at the presidential election in exchange for a few ministers, exactly what the greens did during the past 20 years.
> If the 'greens' had any influence in France, this influence is not very visible in the results.
I can point at actual laws propped up by the greens against their votes if you want, at this point it's just denying reality.
> The investments in nuclear went much worse: half of the reactor fleet is offline and more than a hundred billion Euros is needed for this fleet just to keep it running and replace some of these aging reactors. No wonder EDF is nationalized, with huge debt and billions of more needed - a normal company would already be bankrupt.
Well that's what happens when you stop investments and force selling electricity to below production costs yeah, again you're lucky it's nuclear we're talking about, it would be renewables, the production would have dropped to zero at that point.
> Renewables are currently the cheapest source of electricity and its getting cheaper.
France spent around half the price of the nuclear grid on renewables ... for 7% of the production. This puts it at around 5 times more expensive than the existing nuclear grid without taking into account the backup infrastructure.
The french investment on renewable was one of the most expensive with the lowest output ever performed by the country
This also did not help the current situation either.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
These are last year's numbers, but I don't expect that we will see much of a drop later this month when the new numbers come out, since demand is still way outpacing supply at the moment.
Additionally, we do not expect nuclear to decrease in cost. Throughout its entire history, it has not, and there's no tech on the horizon to expect a change. Nuclear is primarily a construction project, not manufacturing. Construction does not see the massive productivity gains that manufacturing does. In France and the US, one country with favorable regulatory conditions, and one with supposedly bad regulatory conditions, subsequent builds of the same reactor get more expensive, not less. South Korea managed to figure out how to decrease costs with subsequent reactors, but SK also sent many of their suppliers' execs to jail for corruption on certifications.
In contrast, solar, wind, and storage see massive innovation year after year, for decades. They are in a true tech curve, and have scaled to hundreds of GW/year of deployment.
Scaling nuclear to the point of deploying hundreds of GW/year is pretty difficult to imagine. We don't have the labor force to enable something like that, and couldn't build it in any reasonable time frame. Nuclear simply does not scale as well as the manufactured technologies of solar, wind, and storage.
By comparison nuclear costs $131-$204/MW, so it's still cheaper after storage. The Lazard estimate also didn't include the transmission expansions necessary to support the distributed nature of renewable generation (explained further here: https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...)
Firstly nuclear also requires storage otherwise you're paying $400-600/MWh on account of the idle capital. Secondly you don't need to lead with storage, you can build out up to 50% or so renewable without.
Thirdly if the costs of battery were to halve or quarter, such as by the conversion of lithium ion to sodium ion production which is already happening, then the reasoning evaporates entirely.
Nuclear doesn't need storage, since it's power output is not intermittent. The amount of wasted capacity varies with season, but minimum demand is usually 80% of peak demand. In the summer, this increases and the peak demand occurs during the day. This is a good place for solar: rooftop solar mitigating A/C is a great application of solar. But to fulfill base load, which is the vast majority of electricity demand, it is an ineffective choice.
(Assuming you mean MWh here and it's just a typo.). Where are you getting those numbers
Lazard's estimates that I linked have solar at $130-$230/MWh when charging directly from the grid, and $85-$160/MWh when charging from attached solar which shares the same inverters. (And for additional duration, just add more batteries and discharge them at less power)
So if you blend 50% stored electricity with 50% delivered from primary renewable generation at a fraction of the cost, it's way below nuclear's costs.
Finally, we don't even really know that those are nuclear's costs. We haven't finished Vogtle, so we are at scientific-wild-ass-guess stage of how much it will be when it finishes. Go back 10 years and the estimated cost of nuclear is almost reasonable, but every single year that we have had Vogtle delays and cost increases, the general estimates of nuclear's cost goes up. We don't know when it will stop going up, until we have a few more reactors built. And when you add in the cost of potential construction failure, like at South Carolina's Summer addition, started at the same time as Vogtle, nuclear goes up even more.
People always overestimate the potential of nuclear, for some reason, and reality bites them. In contrast, people always underestimate the potential of storage and renewables, and reality delights them. It's time to reset our expectations based on the copious amounts of data we have collected over the past decade.
Why not just measure in MWh? Because storage is useless without means to put that energy back in the grid. The electrical transformers to do this are not insignificant. So 100 MW / 100 MWh is more than a quarter of the cost of 100 MW / 400 MWh because of this overhead.
Current nuclear builds have indeed been expensive, the plants last a long time. As per your own source, it's still less than intermittent sources when you include the cost of storage. Furthermore, Lazard is not examining the transmission infrastructure needed o support low-density sources like solar and wind. So, yeah, despite the expense nuclear is still the most cost-effective option.
Furthermore, Lazard's estimates about nuclear are actually quite conservative. Nuclear plants were cheaper when built at scale. During the 1960s through the early 1980s, nuclear plants were often built for less than a quarter of what present builds [1]. Nuclear doesn't need technological improvement to get cheaper, it needs the economy of scale that previous plants enjoyed.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
Solar is not $30/MW in any part of the world. The raw module cost is $200/MW (gross) presently and might reach $30 in an optimistic 2050 scenario.
Solar LCOE for recent projects is $15-50/MWh depending on climate and land/labour cost.
> And 4 hours of storage is pretty thin - most plans call for 12 hours of storage. And storage costs are only projected to increase: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/18/ev-battery-costs-set-to-spik...
> By comparison nuclear costs $131-$204/MW, so it's still cheaper after storage. The Lazard estimate also didn't include the transmission expansions necessary to support the distributed nature of renewable generation (explained further here: https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...)
There's no reason to compare a peaking storage facility to a net capacity buffer one.
For the use case of 8-12hr storage you can use the same inverter and frequency matching equipment as the solar panels use. If transformers are a cost factor then why would you transform the energy three times at 4-6x the needed power load? Put it in a battery on site and decrease the size of your solar farm's inverter. You need to add an efficient buck charger for the battery but that will cost much less than the money you saved from the smaller inverter. At current grid storage prices of $260/kWh you need about 7 years. Give it a year for price spikes related to EV adoption to settle and you only need 3 years -- sodium ion batteries are well on the path to industrialisation.
In the counterfactual world where you're offering guaranteed $130-200/MWh for 60 years and guaranteed loans and free insurance building such a system from solar and battery would be immensely profitable,
> Solar LCOE for recent projects is $15-50/MWh depending on climate and land/labour cost.
Do you mean MW here? Capacity costs is nowhere near $15 / MWh.
> For the use case of 8-12hr storage you can use the same inverter and frequency matching equipment as the solar panels use. If transformers are a cost factor then why would you transform the energy three times at 4-6x the needed power load?
This is why storage costs include both the output and the capacity. 100 MW / 100 MWh is different from 100 MW / 400 MWh. Why would someone use a 1:1 output to capacity ratio? So that renewable builders can advertise "100 MW of storage", without actually specifying the actual capacity. In fact some plants have a output to storage ratio less than 1. I've seen 200 MW / 100 MWh facility before.
> In the counterfactual world where you're offering guaranteed $130-200/MWh for 60 years and guaranteed loans and free insurance building such a system from solar and battery would be immensely profitable,
I think you're misunderstanding that figure. It's the levelized cost of energy: meaning every $200 MWh of energy stored and retrieved, you have to pay $200, or $0.20 per KWh. Existing energy costs are less than that. In the US it averaged $0.16/KWh. Storage alone would amount to more than what we currently pay for electricity, for half the energy we use. And remember you need to add generation, and transmission costs on top of that.
Solar. LCOE. Joules put on the grid and money received https://renewablesnow.com/news/portugal-reaches-record-low-p...
> I think you're misunderstanding that figure
No, I'm saying if you offer me a contract where you give me $200 and I give you 1MWh of electricity distributed over the day proportional to demand. You guarantee my loans and I have free insurance. I can spend $30-80 of that on the energy (doubling for seasonal demand), $80 on storage and pocket $40. Then in 10 years I'll replace the worn out battery and start pocketing $160/MWh. I will also be able to sell my other variable MWh for another $15.
LCOS is presently much higher than current electricity costs, but you're not proposing current costs, you're proposing the deal the nuclear industry gets.
Then there's the cost of storage: how much does it cost to store 1 MWh of electricity, and retrieve it later. The total cost of generating 1 MWh of solar energy, storing it, and releasing it into the grid later is the sum of both of these: 1 MWh of electricity is $30-40 from solar according to the Lazard doc. Then storing it and retrieving it is another $160 to $279. So it's a round trip cost of $30-40 to generate 1MWh of electricity, and $160-$280 to store and retrieve it, for a net cost of $190 to $320. But only half that energy is getting stored and retrieved, so the effective cost of producing solar energy round the clock is $120 and $180 per MWh
> you give me $200 and I give you 1MWh of electricity distributed over the day proportional to demand. You guarantee my loans and I have free insurance. I can spend $30-80 of that on the energy (doubling for seasonal demand), $80 on storage and pocket $40.
Except storage costs are more than that, and they're actually rising [1]. Furthermore you'll also need to pay money to build transmission lines to solar farms and wind farms - something not included in Lazard's estimates, it just lists transmissions costs as N/A and says it's too hard to estimate. Even at a high cost of $200/MWh, 3-4x the price of natural gas as per the Lazard doc, it's dubious you'd turn a profit.
Thus is why the vast majority of solar power is used without storage, and we just burn fossil fuels to make up for intermittency.
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/18/ev-battery-costs-set-to-spik...
You said a solar facility plus a storage facility has a cost of $120-180 (this is not neccessarily correct as in some places you might need to store 70% of energy).
Then said you could not combine them (eliminating half of the conversion loss and shrinking the transforming electronics) for less than $200.
Additionally storage isn't increasing in price. Lithium is. And LiFePO4 is already being replaced for this purpose with sodium with prussian blue and carbon (which also does not need copper bus bars). Manufacturing hits GW scale next year, and price parity will follow shortly thereafter.
You are right in that solar is largely used without storage. That is because solar + storage is only marginally cheaper than heavily subsidized and insured for free nuclear and thus is unaffordable. It is also because a mix of solar and wind is a vastly better strategy for reducing emissions with limited resources than anything else.
You also haven't included electrolysers in your calculus (which have just started doing what the solar and battery market did over the last year).
Steam engines are obsolete. Throwing away 70% of your energy with a huge complex machine which wears out quickly due to operating conditions just doesn't work.
We should extract 30x times more lithium and rare earths to make your strategy work [1]
And 80% of rare earths is extracted in China [0], creating a similar situation Europe has with Russia
[0] https://www.mining-technology.com/analysis/china-rare-earths...
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in...
We are currently at one of those non-linear increases in demand. Additionally, we are experiencing massive supply chain bill whip effects across the entire economy.
Increasing extraction is happening and will continue to happen. But also take into account that a lot of the price drops come from needing to use fewer input materials.
Rare earths are not relevant for current battery technologies. Further, there are plenty of other sources of rare earths that will open up as we need more in the future.
I don't know why everyone focuses on lithium, as if battery tech has reached its pinnacle and will no longer change. Lithium is only the latest element used in batteries, it will not be the last or necessarily even the best. Sodium batteries are already in production, for instance, and sodium is ridiculously abundant and cheap and the power density is comparable to lithium ion. Solid state batteries are also starting production. Lithium and rare earths are not needed for any of these.
And someone else made the same point I made (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33209837), so I don't even need to repost. Thanks!
Freakonics podcast E516 (https://freakonomics.com/podcast/nuclear-power-isnt-perfect-...)
Also, there was a paper written by a NYC analyst firm from approximately 5 years ago that spends significant time crunching the numbers between green vs nuclear solutions and demonstrates the pros/cons of both solutions. This paper provides a very good baseline to start the process of assessing costs of either solution relative to the amount of power output from a specific solution. Unforunately, I seem to have misplaced the link but I'm sure someone can dig it up.
IEA (https://www.iea.org/reports/nuclear-electricity)
Energy.gov (https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-power-most-reliab...) - Demonstrates the sheer capacity that nuclear has over other solutions. Spoiler alert - you might be pleasantly surprised.
TL;DR - Nuclear offers significnantly more benefits than most ppl (in this thread) seem to realize after you actually consider the output capacities of the different solutions.
Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
The title is not the place to do this; on HN, being the submitter of an article doesn't confer any special right to frame the topic for everyone else. That's super important, because titles are overwhelmingly the dominant influence on discussion.
Editorializing headlines of a press release directed at a different audience with likely more context to make it accessible shouldn’t be seen as a bad thing. It spurs discussion.
Perhaps the boundaries of editorializing headlines need to move to accommodate for this. So long as there isn’t opinion inserted, it seems fine.
The earlier submissions title was imperfect for being too short and missing the qualifier “The first . . . In the US”
It often ends up spurring discussion about titles. Plus, HN has no shortage of discussion and comments do a pretty adequate job of spurring discussion. The 'level playing' thing in the linked bit is the key part, though - you don't get a megacomment (which is what writing your own title essentially ends up being) just because you posted something.
If the title, as we see here is very niche, it will not spur discussion from people not inherently familiar with why “Vogtle Unit 3” is any different from 1 or 2.
You’re adding layers of friction and reducing accessibility to information. People won’t research every oddball title they see and thus get stuck in content/ranking bubbles.
The title of the press release is targeting people with a lot of context. This industry has very long cycles and thus not a lot of people will have all the context.
If you haven't had a chance, you should take a look at some of the decade's or so worth of Title Thought that's gone into the way it works now - dang's link is a good jumping off point. The results are surely imperfect but if you want to promote change, it helps to have some familiarity with the system you want change.
These are press releases. They will be sterile. Compare that with someone linking to their personal website where they can choose to add any title of their choosing. I'd humbly suggest that those two categories being treated the same on HN isn't right given how the latter may or may not be an originating story.
I respect the work you guys put in to offer such a service to the community and for the patience in putting up with a nobody who's challenging your historical decisions in the comments :) I hope i don't come across as rude by saying that the experience for niche topics might be a little better if the headlines are made accessible without adding opinion.
Other than that, i respect your work and will not editorialize the titles anymore.
There are a lot of other mechanisms that deal with this stuff though. One is that press releases tend to be disfavoured in general - that takes care of press releases being boring.
The 'you can write your own blog post with your own spin and title' thing - you totally can, and the level playing field then is competing with all other submissions. If the commentary is interesting enough, it will end up on the front page. If it's just content recycling, someone will notice and the URL and title will be replaced with the original by the 'use original sources' rule.
If you follow dang's comments (essentially the public moderation log) you'll see most of these in action pretty quickly, at the price of having to trudge through a bunch of generic dang scoldings about other, more boring things.
The pair of reactors at Sanmen also only cost CNY 50.1B (just under US$7B) to build, while it seems costs at Vogtle are at $30B and counting.
(At least if the figures on their respective Wikipedia pages are accurate.)