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.
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.
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.
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.