Be careful with physics-backed statements! It seems many in this thread don't appreciate the energy density requirements of modern baseload. Don't want to crush their solarpunk dreams.
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.
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.
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.