If so, who cares about the waste? It depends on what’s in the waste that matters, not its raw volume. The materials used in solar panels are both highly recyclable and environmentally benign, a great combination.
Of course this article is a clever bit of FUD in disguise. By taking the problem seriously and then presenting a solution to the problem that never was real to begin with:
‘We’re gonna have (tens of millions) of metric tons of waste from PV. We’re all gonna die,’”
Actual quote from the article to convince us that there apparently are people that believe that. Classic FUD move. It's really, really, bad but the scientists are on it. So you can stop worrying now. But you had good reason to be worried and you should continue to be worried. That's the message.
Except of course, there never was a problem to worry about. The purpose of this article is perpetuating the myth that there was.
It's a nice business challenge how to recover some valuable metals from solar panels. And several companies are on that; as you would expect. But if they fail, we basically dump some inert material in a landfill. Not a big deal. People dump far worse things into landfills already.
So clearly some people, including presumably some prominent ones, are saying this will be a problem. So I'd say it is good that there is data to address this criticism.
@3D30497420 made the point that the HBR article claiming that solar panel waste is expected to be a significant problem was the first result.
It's good to have prominent articles aimed at the same people who read HBR that give a corrected view.
> Are business leaders the people best equipped to evaluate environmental issues
It doesn't matter if they are the best equipped. The point is that they are making these decisions based on sources of information they trust like HBR.
That information needs to be corrected.
So this kind of thing being consistent with that FUD rearguard action as it fails doesn't make it true (or false). How plausible is it? Getting those who published their deep "thought leadership" while being taken in by the FUD will happily happily go along with it (was serious, not so much anymore) rather than say "yup, I got taken in here, garbage on roller-skates" [1]
[1] I absolutely got taken by the WMD lies. Totally suckered. Believed them all. Occams razor ruled out the big conspiracy for me. The total lack of accountability for the lies I believed after it became completely clear, adjusted my prior to be rather more skeptical and the probability of actual, targeted lies being pushed as being much more plausible. I can overcome both with good evidence but "the NYT/WaPo/WSJ/CNN/CBS/Fox/Harvard/Stanford/etc says X and they wouldn't be in on a conspiracy nor be suckered readily, all of them so..." counts for not much anymore as evidence.
It has to be so much better.
Why not just use 1 reliable power system, instead of having 1 unreliable backed up by 1 reliable?
Solar/Wind, for example, are not reliable.
Nuclear, for example, is reliable.
Instead of having Solar/Wind with batteries and all this nonsense, along with Nuclear for its stability, just skip the nonsense and go straight to Nuclear. Solar/Wind are terrible...
All generation technologies are intermittent - they're just intermittent in different ways.
...great argument?
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37252
doesn't seem like you interpreted this correctly, seems bad faith for sure.
> A scheduled shutdown of a nuclear power plant is generally timed to coincide with the plant’s refueling cycle. Nuclear power plants typically refuel every 18 to 24 months, often during the fall and spring when electricity demand is lower.
It's shut down every ~2 years, not "every year."
> _During the past six years, average refueling outages have become shorter, decreasing from an average of 46 days in 2012 to 34 days in 2018._
They're getting better and better.
So adjust the above 10% downtime number I gave, Nuclear is down ~3-5% of the time it sounds like. With improvements, this can probably get down to 1%. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
EDIT: not to mention this is an implementation problem. You can have multiple small reactors that never need maintenance where you just hot swap an old reactor for a new one.
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/what-are-small-modular-...
The anti-science crowd is nuts on this stuff.. it's not _that hard..._
You accuse me of bad faith for quoting a number which includes both unscheduled and scheduled shutdowns by comparing with a number which only include the latter.
And I don't even understand where this is supposed to be going because even if plants never had unscheduled stoppages, you'd still need back-up.
But anyway, I find your tone overly aggressive. So it's unlikely that any discussion will be productive.
Right, but who said otherwise? Your arguing against a straw man that doesn't exist, no one said: you never have to do maintenance on Nuclear.
Clearly Nuclear is 100x more reliable than Solar/Wind, easily.
> you'd still need back-up.
who said otherwise......... who are you arguing against? not making sense... this isn't relevant to what I'm saying..
> But anyway, I find your tone overly aggressive. So it's unlikely that any discussion will be productive.
fair enough! would appreciate you admitting you grossly misinterpreted the stats on the nuclear data you gave. seems bad faith. have a good one
I have a great solution for nuke plant downtime, this is going to blow your mind, wait for it: for every 14 plants worth of power, built, drumroll please.... 15 plants! Then maintain them on a schedule.
The way you back up your $10/W nuclear plant is with $0.50/W simple cycle turbines, which can burn hydrogen. Or maybe $1/W combined cycle, if you want to do seasonal storage.
Why did you think that breeders are better than using hydrogen for long period smoothing of renewable/demand mismatch?
How do you bring 2TW of new nuclear generation online by 2030 to even play catch up with renewables when you need to extract from tens of millions of tonnes of ore and use hundreds of millions of litres of sulfuric acid for one reactor?
Green hydrogen tends to cost ~$100/MWh, just for the fuel. Building and operating the plants themselves comes on top of that.
Even if the fuel comes down to $40/MWh by 2050, as predicted in this article[2], it will still be competitive with properly organized nuclear.
[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
[2] https://www.energytech.com/renewables/article/21238510/ridin...
And here I thought it was actually due to the manufacturers living in Fuckupstan, not being able to build their products at costs they had promised. The recent French experience with the EPR is astoundingly bad.
Of course that cost could be lower if any screwup could be excused by greasing the appropriate regulatory palms. The regulation would be "over" in the sense that it adds to cost, but is it "over" in the sense of not being necessary? You do not have the contrafactual evidence of what nuclear safety would be like without that regulation.
The first link you gave there presented assertions that French reactors were cheap back when they were building lots of them. But those cost figures are opaque and unauditable and cannot be used as evidence that the reactors actually cost what they claimed. Those making those claims had every motivation to lowball them.
It's also improper to assume nuclear and renewables are assigned the same discount rate. Nuclear presents larger risks to investors (from technological obsolescence and from failure to complete the power plants at all), which should properly be accounted for by imposing higher interest rates. Assuming renewables and nuclear get the same interest rate is an implicit subsidy.
Ultimately, the pronuclear antiregulatory position boils down to "why don't you just suck it up and let us subject you to more radiation, which really isn't bad? You're being so unfair!" One sees this in the whining about the LNT hypothesis for radiation effects.
Well, actually, yes. Coal plants cause 100 times more radiation than nuclear plants per unit of energy produced:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
And typical background radiation is 10x more than even that.
And this is for plants built in the 1970s. Tightening requirements beyond that while still allowing coal power to continue their emissions, was completely absurd.
> You do not have the contrafactual evidence of what nuclear safety would be like without that regulation.
To the contrary. Most nuclear power in existence is still produced by plants that was built BEFORE many of the excessive regulations were put into place. That's part of the reason they were so much cheaper to build. (I'm not making an argument for building Chernobyl type plants, but rather plants with safetly levels corresponding to those built in the 70s in Western countries.)
> LNT hypothesis for radiation effects
The LNT hypothesis has little to no evidence supporting it over a null hypothesis that radiation below a threshold of about 80 mSv/y. Which is based on statistics for huge groups of people. And the typical radiation received per year from living next to a nuclear plant is around 0.001 mSv/y, 80000 less than the amount where we have any data to indicate that the exposure is harmful.
If you have 1 xray taken in a hospital, that's as much radiation exposure as living next to a nuclear plant for 100 years. If you have a CT scan, that's like 1000 to 10000 years. Or, if you fly from LA to NY, you get 0.035 mSv of radiation, the same as 35 years. Do a round trip, and it corresponds to a lifetime.
Whether or not you believe in the unfalsifiable hypothesis called LNT, the risk from nuclear power is incredibly tiny compared to ANYTHING we do.
Meanwhile, the potential benefits of cheap nuclear power would be massive, both in terms of local air polution (when it becomes cheap enough to replace coal and natural gas), economical benefits or global warming mitigation.
And it has a proven track record. France was able to almost completely cut fossil fuels for their electricity production over a few years, with a moderate investment into nuclear. Meanwhile, Germany has spent 100s of billions of € on "renewable" energy, but has almost as high percentage of their electricity produced coming from fossil fuels now as when they started. (They did have some reduction in CO2 emissions due to moving from coal to natural gas, at the cost of becoming highly dependent on Russia)
> You're being so unfair! ... whining about the LNT hypothesis....
This kind of emotional response makes it seem that something else is at stake.
Of course, if we were able to provide clean air and stop global warming using nuclear energy, some people would lose their jobs, both people selling other forms of energy (fossil, wind, solar) or people working for "environmentalist" organizations or political parties.
Now do living near Serpent river, or Church Hill, or Kadapa, or Ranger or Mailuu-Suu or the cumulative worldwide effect if we got 15% of our power from a reprpcessing facility like La Hague. Make sure to include the effects of heavy metal poisoning, not just radiation. Also would you like to replace your drinking water with aquifer water from Inkai?
> the potential benefits of cheap nuclear power would be massive
Here's a riddle. What fraction of world energy can 40,000t of fissile material provide and for how long? Where do you propose to get more?
I'm a bit lazy. Maybe you have some numbers available for this? My guess is that deaths caused by this (associated with nuclear power), if at all measurable, would be orders of magnitude lower than deaths from the extraction and pollution associated with fossil fuels (Per GWh).
> Here's a riddle. What fraction of world energy can 40,000t of fissile material provide and for how long? Where do you propose to get more?
There is around 40 trillion tons of uranium in Earth's crust. How much of that we can utilize, depends on how much we're willing to pay for the extraction. The current fuel price (after processing) is about $5/MWh, and reserve estimates are based on that price. Should fuel prices go up a bit, more mines and excavations will be profitable.
You're also completely failing to distinguish between fertile and fissile.
So realistically, at the same scale of ore extraction as coal mining. How much power is available?
This article estimates that regular supplies is enough for 230 years at the current rate of consumption:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo...
If we triple the the number of plants, that would be approximately a 75 year lifetime for existing plants.
Beyond that, the main directions to take would be to use breeder reactors, which would be enough for 30000 years at today consumption, using regular fuels or to extract uranium from seawater, which would provide enough uranium for 60000 years at present rates (and much more if combined with breeder reactors).
In total, there is enough uranium to last thousands of years, even consumption goes up 10x or more.
Obviously, costs will gradually go up, or at least the extraction will require more advanced technology. Even just 75 years is a long time, and a lot can change by year 2100. Thorium or fusion power could be solved by then, or we could have space based solar covering our needs.
Tripling generation by adding 600GW is nothing.
8 years.
2TWe net installed by the end of it and producing around 300GWe net of new capacity per year.
Renewables are on track (and 2TW is extremely pessimistic). What's your plan? How much ore? Where is the scale?
Ignore the cost. You gotta demonstrate it's possible before you can gaslight about costs.
8 years is barely enough to start changing course in how things like energy production is organized.
Is there a specific reason you insist on this kind of velocity? Global warming is going to gradually increase as a problem over the next 200 years, if we continue our current course, it's not like the world is ending in 2030. In fact, on our current trajectory, the truly hellish outcomes are not expected until around 2150-2250 (based in IPCC reports).
But precisely because it takes so long to change course, we need to start turning the ship now.
> Tripling generation by adding 600GW is nothing.
Watts is not a unit of energy, it's a unit of power. Peak capacity is not very interesting. What matters is actual production as well as the cost of producing the power when there is demand (including the cost of storage, if needed).
Nuclear produced 2.8TW last year, which is roughly identical to Solar+Wind. That's about 10% each. If we add hydro to this mix (currently 15%), we have a total of 35%. The depressing part is that this has been relatively constant since 1985, meaning we haven't made any progress over the last 37 years.
https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
However, if we restart investments in nuclear, while continue our renewable investments, we may be able to triple both over the next 15-20 years. If hydro remains constant, we may produce enough energy to cover 75% of 2021 consumption by 2040 (which would perhaps be 50% of 2040 consumption). That should be enough to replace most fossil fuels for electricity in the EU+US, at least.
To reach such a level is highly non-trivial, both for nuclear and wind/solar. For nuclear, it means a u-turn is needed on several fronts, and for wind/solar, there are economic and geographic limitations (some areas are getting saturated).
For this plan and time horizon, there are plenty of uranium deposits that can be mined, perhaps most interestingly for western countries, a lot of this is in Australia and Canada.
If we restart construction of nuclear plants, we will also drive incentives to go looking for more sources elsewhere.
As for your "Peak Uranium" hypothesis, I suggest looking at the history for "Peak Oil". Oil was predicted to reach its peak in year 2000, but the reality is that production is still increasing. I would be very surprised if the same is not happening for uranium.
And as far as I can tell, we DO need it (or nuclear in some other form), if we're supposed ween ourselves off fossil fuels this century. Wind and solar may be competitive in some locations up to some production volumes, but they seem to have very diminishing returns above some level, due to storage costs and available land areas.
Maybe we can, some day, have solar panels carpeting the Sahara or even in Outer Space, but that's definitely scifi.
Just as you said: renewables exceeded the nuclear fleet last year, growing by 50GW net. Production capacity is online for another 100GW net this coming year. China alone has an achievable plan for half a terawatt of new net production, and renewable targets have been consistently exceeded.
> Is there a specific reason you insist on this kind of velocity? Global warming is going to gradually increase as a problem over the next 200 years, if we continue our current course, it's not like the world is ending in 2030.
This kind of velocity is the pace the renewable industry is operating at, with a clear roadmap to meet the target, and the pace it is necessary to move at to avoid the worst outcomes.
If the nuclear industry can't scale to meet it, that's fine. We'll use the technologies that can.
> we may be able to triple both over the next 15-20 years.
So you're saying if we invest heavily in nuclear it may be able to contribute 5% of primary energy in 15 years? Wind is on track to triple in under half of that, solar in around a quarter. Both are on track to provide a meaningful portion of primary energy in 15-20 years.
> Nuclear produced 2.8TW
TWh. Which is around 320GW.
> As for your "Peak Uranium" hypothesis, I suggest looking at the history for "Peak Oil". Oil was predicted to reach its peak in year 2000,
And drilling has gotten more destructive and energy intensive ever since. Oil and gas platforms are resorting to using nuclear, solar, and wind to keep extracting because oil is not a sufficient energy source to extract oil. The predictions about the resources were accurate. The predictions that we'd lean into the insanity of continuing extracting ultra deep oil or tar sands when it's barely energy positive are where it went wrong.
> And as far as I can tell, we DO need it (or nuclear in some other form), if we're supposed ween ourselves off fossil fuels this century. Wind and solar may be competitive in some locations up to some production volumes, but they seem to have very diminishing returns above some level, due to storage costs and available land areas.
Very nice weasel words. I've never asserted that nuclear can't contribute, only that it cannot match the scale of renewables and suggesting we stop renewable investment to focus on it because only nuclear can scale is a blatant lie that serves only delay decarbonization. You've just reasserted that this is true. Thank you for agreeing.
> Maybe we can, some day, have solar panels carpeting the Sahara or even in Outer Space, but that's definitely scifi.
Revealing further that you can't comprehend how renewables scale. As a demonstration of how terrible a representation of scale this is:
World primary energy is about 17TW or 2kW per person. In the regions that 93% of people live, this takes under 50m^2 per person. There are a few cities like Milan with more people than sunlight, but there is enough space in Tokyo to provide this much net energy for every resident and still have plenty left over for outdoor spaces. The denser regions can import energy heavy goods, and still have enough space for electricity if they really didn't want to put a few shades up on some livestock farms.
Simply covering the space rendered uninhabitable by Inkai Uranium mine would provide more energy than the mine does.
I disagree. The "worst outcomes" are 200 years into the future, and a ramp up speed of 10 years doesn't matter much for that.
> So you're saying if we invest heavily in nuclear it may be able to contribute 5% of primary energy in 15 years?
There are different ways to calculate "primary energy". Adjusted for inefficiencies, nuclear is 4.3%. In other words, tripling that means we can shut down at least ~9% of PE worth of fossil fuels plants.
Renewables get a similar boost from this approach, of course, at least long as we don't have to store it.
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-substitution-method
> So you're saying if we invest heavily in nuclear it may be able to contribute 5% of primary energy in 15 years?
No, I'm saying we reduce the unneccesary costs, and let it pay for itself. By comparison, Germany has to impose a 25% "green energy" tax on electricity (including nuclear) to stimulate renewables.
> Oil and gas platforms are resorting to using nuclear, solar, and wind to keep extracting because oil is not a sufficient energy source to extract oil.
Oil is more valueable as a transportation fuel than as fuel for electricity production. And extraction uses electricity. This is about market price, not EROI. (Also, for instance in Norway, it's about CO2 quotas. Norwegian oil platforms are moving the land based electricity instead of the natural gas they extract alongside the oil for their electricity needs.)
EROI for nuclear is still around the highest there is, around 100x. There is massive headroom before EROI for nuclear goes down to unviable levels. (3x)
> .... weasel words ... because only nuclear can scale is a blatant lie ...
I didn't say only nuclear can scale. I do claim that nuclear is a better source of energy when it's dark and there's no wind.
Also, ad hominem attacks doesn't help your case.
> Revealing further that you can't comprehend how renewables scale.
More ad hominem. Do you want to start a flame war?
> 2kW per person. this takes under 50m^2 per person.
Maybe you should re-read your sources. Pretty sure you will find that 2kW is around the average output of 50m^2 during the peak of the day. This illustrates a risk of measuring energy in watts. Most such calculations use 4-6 as estimates for number of "hours" worth at such an output, meaning the area needed goes up by a factor of 4-6. So let's say 250m^2.
Now, on top of this, the energy tends to be needed either in a different location or at a different time. Batteres with a 70% efficiency increase this to 350m^2 while storing it as H2 at 25% full-cycle-efficiency increases it to 1000m^2. Multiply by the number of people on Earth, and you get a square of 2800 km on each side (8 million km^2). Which is close to the size of the Sahara.
That's all if you're planning to use the energy in the same location, and not transporting it anywhere.
To be fair, this would be electrical energy, which has higher value than the average primary energy. So only half the size of the Sahara (maybe 1/4 if it's located in the ACTUAL Sahara, since that place is rather sunny.)
On the other hand, world energy consumption is going up every year.
Btw, unless you put away those ad hominem attacks, I'm not going to reply further.
So the renewable targets (which are being met) need to slow down and wait for nuclear energy which is somehow necessary to meet those decarbonization targets which ... would then result in not meeting those targets but that's fine because they're too aggressive? Sounds almost like the goal is to delay partial decarbonization by claiming there is a better solution later.
> There are different ways to calculate "primary energy". Adjusted for inefficiencies, nuclear is 4.3%. In other words, tripling that means we can shut down at least ~9% of PE worth of fossil fuels plants.
> Renewables get a similar boost from this approach, of course, at least long as we don't have to store it.
So if you ignore all the non-low-grade heat and inefficiencies entailed in turning electricity and low grade heat into chemical feed stock and the countries in energy poverty you can manipulate a number? Well done. Nice frozen world fallacy. 10% is still a tiny part of the problem.
Now after moving the goal posts 2/3rds of the way across the field, show some evidence that they can be met by demonstrating a potential contribution to a meaningful chunk of the problem. How do you get to 2TW of nuclear production in the same timelines as the renewable energy targets where does the Uranium come from?
> More ad hominem. Do you want to start a flame war?
Demonstrating ignorance or willful misrepresentation consistently on every single point that can be checked is more than sufficient grounds for requiring positive evidence for the claims for which your strongest argument is: 'you can't prove categorically that it's impossible for a solution to very obvious issues to appear later'.
> Maybe you should re-read your sources. Pretty sure you will find that 2kW is around the average output of 50m^2 during the peak of the day. This illustrates a risk of measuring energy in watts. Most such calculations use 4-6 as estimates for number of "hours" worth at such an output, meaning the area needed goes up by a factor of 4-6. So let's say 250m^2.
Nameplate watts aren't net watts. Everyone knows this. You know this, you just stated so. So double counting capacity factor can only be an intentional lie. 2kW peak would be a sixth of that with state of the art mass production panels -- on the order of 8.5-10m^2 or as little as 7.5 for bifacial panels with <100% coverage. Some utility systems have 50% coverage ratio, others have 98%, the 50% ones are usually optimized for more than the fixed tilt solar resource.
If you were covering an equivalent in urban land of a certain area in the form of walls, roofs, footpath shades etc. then by definition the area you are shading is the area you are collecting light from, so by shading a third of tokyo you can still make net exports from tokyo for a substantial portion of the residents' industrial production. The land use is both a non issue and smaller than the land use from Uranium mining.
> Now, on top of this, the energy tends to be needed either in a different location or at a different time. Batteres with a 70% efficiency increase this to 350m^2 while storing it as H2 at 25% full-cycle-efficiency increases it to 1000m^2.
Very few people live anywhere with less than 3.5kWh/day and the overwhelming majority of those who don't have existing nuclear and already developed hydro and wind resource. So around 40W/m^2 is accurate when sourcing mostly electricity and some low grade heat (this is very shocking, I know, but things get hot when left in the sun and you don't need to use an element and a PV panel to heat water or sand).
Even using exclusively winter sunlight from regions within AC transmission distance of >93% of the population would only double this.
30% battery losses are fairly old technogy or a system like PHES, direct thermal storage exists, you don't need all energy to go through seasonal storage as hydrogen and for every joule to be created in seattle during winter. You especially don't need hydrogen to be burnt or put into a fuel cell to create hydrogen for chemical feed stock or high grade heat. PEM electrolysers are much more efficient than alkaline and improving monthly. Hydrogen doesn't need to go through a rankine cycle steam engine to be used for electricity. Finally solar resource in a good area is closer to 80W/m^2 average than the 40 I used above.
If we needed every single joule to be from sunlight rather than as a salient example of how ridiculous the land use argument is then high energy intensity goods can just be created in sunny areas using PV and CSP (which is dispatchable) and shipped.
Care to try again but without the bit where every single number in your calculation is an intentional misrepresentation of current established technology (let alone emerging mass production technology)?
> Btw, unless you put away those ad hominem attacks, I'm not going to reply further.
Need an out to claim you're leaving because everyone is mean rather than because all of your bs has been called and you're out of new angles, huh?
https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html#:~:tex....
You need fissile material to start a reactor of any kind.
Working breeders with a real closed fuel cycle don't exist but if we pretend they do it's about 5 tonnes per GW. You can't start breeding until they're built and the breeding ratio of proposed designs takes on the order of a decade to fuel another reactor.
How many billions of tonnes of ore do you need to extract the uranium from per year to meet net zero installed power roadmaps? How do you get to 2TW by 2030 to come close to the scale of the renewable roadmap?
The competition isn't fossil fuels. Everyone wants to get rid of them.
The competition is renewables.
When those regulations were introduced, the only renewables were hydro. And nobody was worried about the tiny amounts of radiations coming from coal plants, it was the soot that killed people.
Still, the "green" movement in Europe have been fighting nuclear power since at least the 80s, usually with more fervor than they've been fighting fossil fuels. The nuclear scare must have been easy to sell (and so an easy source of contributions), especially in the years after Chernobyl. With catastrophic effects both for the local environment and the climate.
Utopianists may indeed see nuclear as a threat to their dream of a perfect world. To me, nuclear is simply one of several energy sources with very low impact to the environment and climate, one that we _could_ have elected to produce at a low price. And still can.
All of the examples of cheap nuclear power are ridden with corruption scandals and incredibly unreliable.
If you decide the CCP are suddenly trustworthy and ignore that finance and insurance have costs then the very limited fraction of nuclear power that can be produced might be both, but that doesn't make mining uranium any less horrific.
Cry bullying about the mean greens that have never been in power and only rarely held minority coalition positions just makes you look pathetic.
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/WorldStatistics/ThreeYrsEnergyAva...
And what happens when the same issue is found in all 15 plants that requires an immediate shutdown?
What happens when you try to run more than 3TW of reactors for more than 4 fuel cycles?
> I have a great solution for nuke plant downtime, this is going to blow your mind, wait for it: for every 14 plants worth of power, built, drumroll please.... 15 plants! Then maintain them on a schedule.
So what's this about long distance transmission to join uncorrelated wind being completely unfeasible that nuclear stans keep harping on about?
Each kg produces 30-80TJ with maybe another 20 if you spend even more money to scavenge the last little bit via reprocessing. Newer reactors hold about 6 years of fuel and cycle some of it every couple of years.
World energy consumption is approximately 550EJ.
How are you proposing to fuel your reactors more than once?
That's all known and inferred accessible reserves. Not current mines. There are about 8-10 million tonnes of natural Uranium which has 0.5% extractable U235 (a bit more if you're willing to pay 10x as much for enrichment). There might be another big, high yield mine in Canada somewhere, but you probably want to check before putting down all our chips on it. U238 is not fissile.
> We also have viable LWR designs for Th-232 and are in the process of creating the first 5 Th-232 SMR test reactors at grid-scale right now.
So a technology that hasn't made it to the test bench, has no evidence as to its longevity or economics, probably requires more Beryllium than exists, and requires at least twice as much fissile material as is available for startup to breed fissile material from fertile thorium is your solution? One where the only proxy for how the extraction step might work is MOX reprocessed fuel which is more expensive than renewables on its own and releases more radiation under normal operation than Fukushima and TMI combined?
Why are you suggesting diverting funds from a technology that works to build a completely different technology from your solution that destroys precious fissile material it needs to scale quickly then? Even in the most optimistic scenarios it will take decades to breed up a fresh load of U233 to double your fleet, and you will have to throw away all your multi billion dollar PWRs.
Why not keep doing the thing that's provably working. That way if you solve the whole breeder thing then it will only take a few generations to breed enough fuel rather than hundreds.
Resources, not reserves. Resources are turned into reserves when they are proved.
So nuclear then? Plants take on average 1-year longer than natural gas plants and a single nuclear plant produces thousands of hectares worth of solar panels with a tiny fraction of the resource usage. We have viable and in-use grid-scale U-235, Pu-239, and Th-232 reactors. We also have viable and in-use military operated U-233 breeder reactors in multiple nations that are in active production. Converting from a military design to a grid-scale design isn't really that hard as you loosen a ton of the space and thermal management requirements making manufacturing, operation, and maintenance cheaper.
> So a technology that hasn't made it to the test bench
The technology is fully proven in test reactors. The first 5 grid-scale reactors being built in the USA are part of a US Department of Energy program looking to create shovel-ready Th-232 SMR designs. There isn't a shortage of any of the isotopes we'd need for nuclear. Even if we used only U-235 and Pu-239 reactors using existing reserves to replace all current and projected global energy needs, we'd have 79 years to find more fuel or build something else. Meanwhile, with solar and wind, we still haven't figure out how to cheaply and safely store the energy to smooth the power supply curve. We could buy ourselves over 79 years to figure this out by building nuclear with only existing grid-scale technologies starting today.
https://www.powermag.com/controlling-schedule-quality-and-co...
Water moderated reactors provably cannot work. Breeders do not exist. You don't get to start gaslighting about build times until you prove it's possible to make the fuel rods.
Here's a few hints on how to tell if something works: What was the largest ever deployment of nuclear generation in a single year? For how many years in a row have renewables exceeded this? How many Joules of wholly unsubsidized, non-state-controlled, self-financed, insured nuclear generation have ever been produced? Now how much does unsubsidized solar or wind generation sell for?
> a single nuclear plant produces thousands of hectares worth of solar panels
How long did Inkai block 3 Uranium mine take to develop? What is its area in km^2 including the exclusion zones where the ground is too poisonous to live on or grow anything on? How many GW net of solar could be placed there in Kazakhstan's climate? How many times less energy does the Uranium it outputs produce? Now do a Namibian open cut mine with 0.01% concentration (the Uranium might even break even). How much fossil fuel does it take to mine the fifty billion or so tonnes of ore you'll need?
If you were to expand production significantly that would be a comparatively high concentration mine.
> with a tiny fraction of the resource usage.
A solar panel produces >100GJ per kg of sand with roughly 10x the silver investment of a NPP or ~50g/kW and traces of B and P.
The power density is around 3-6W/kg for high durability panels depending on how they are mounted. A nuclear reactor produces 5-10W/kg.
The solar panel doesn't require indium or chromium or cadmium or all of the exotic materials required for a gas centrifuge. A kg of Uranium ore from Rossing produces about 30-80MJ.
You can't just repeat a lie based on 20 year old data. You're making a claim that renewables (which have now surpassed the world nuclear fleet and are adding 20-30% per year) are insufficient compared to Nuclear. Prove it. Show me where the fuel can possibly come from.
> Even if we used only U-235 and Pu-239 reactors using existing reserves to replace all current and projected global energy needs, we'd have 79 years to find more fuel or build something else.
It's ~79 years at current consumption. Which one of the facts I stated about the available energy are you disputing?
Is there not roughly 8-10 million tonnes of Uranium resource?
Is it not 0.7% fissile?
Does 20-30% not get left in tailings?
Does a current generation reactor not require roughly 3.5 tonnes net of fissile material per GW?
You can't just repeat the lie. Where is the fissile material hiding and how do you start your breeder reactors once you are done without taking a century to build up the U233?
> The first 5 grid-scale reactors being built in the USA are part of a US Department of Energy program looking to create shovel-ready
So you have a program to maybe finish building the test bench in 10 years?
> The technology is fully proven in test reactors
No reactor has ever run start to finish at non-negligible capacity factor with a multi year fuel cycle (whether constant reload or not), created >80TJ/kg of usable steam the whole time and ended with more fuel than it started. It is as proven as a 1000Wh/kg AlS battery that costs a few dollars a kilo or a quad junction 45% efficient paintable PV. 'I kinda tried one of the steps but am ignoring the really hard part of separating fission products or not having it corrode' isn't proven.
If not it's just MOX, a slightly radioactive sodium fire, or a graphite pile with extra steps.
yes? do the research. you're making assertions you haven't done research on, apparently.........
By your logic we don't need to worry about storage because an AlS battery worked on a test bench and has a theoretical energy density of 1000kWh from $5 worth of materials.
So are we talking about Power or are we talking about Energy?
The second is a unit of power because the silver isn't used up (it's made very very hard to recycle in the NPP, but it's still technically possible after a few decades), the issue is how much is occupied by the equipment.
If you can't understand the distinction between power and energy maybe we shouldn't consider your position on power and energy credible.
If you were to start a new city disconnected from the rest of society then a combination of wind, solar, hydro, and batteries is the cheapest and most reliable system to power that city.
who said to do otherwise ???
> If you were to start a new city disconnected from the rest of society then a combination of wind, solar, hydro, and batteries is the cheapest and most reliable system to power that city.
No it'd be hydro/nuclear.
Degradation is one thing, but are the interconnects between the embedded cells failing so they're outputting 0V? Or over-integration and the micro-inverter fails? Or?
I realize we aren't up to 25 years yet, but I know a bunch of people with solart systems over 10 years old now and they are mostly fine.
I do know some people who replaced perfectly good panels because they could get higher efficiency panels than they could 10 years ago at a cost where it made sense.
to me it seems like our CO2 emissions are not bad and the effects on climate are very minor. this is playing out in real time as we make dire predictions that never seem to come to fruition. the world is ending in 12 years, said someone popular in ~2016. Well, halfway there, lady!
Also, idiots stating unscientific garbage (like the world ending in 2028) doesn't mean that there's no science behind it... Just that there was an idiot making up BS.
Edit: it was a 2019 quote, not a 2016 quote. So we have all the way until 2031 until the world "ends"... Still an idiotic quote
...source?
Solar is unreliable, you _need_ another system, so you have to install 2 systems now. It _will_ be cheaper/less co2/etc.etc. to just install and use 1 system.
The real solution to reducing overall CO2 is clearly Nuclear. Do you disagree with this?
Here's one source. Plenty more if you Google it https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf
solar does not, you need tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of panels. it does not scale. this seems so self evident. like people are holding their hands over their ears and eyes, ignoring the obvious...
Solar is scaling just fine. Installing 5-20 panels per person is hardly prohibitive. It's like claiming wheat can't feed people because it needs trillions of grains so we must stop wheat farming and only eat novelty sized pumpkin and elephant.
it is so clear solar/wind is worse than nuclear.
it is increasingly clear that our co2 output isn't that scary. we are "greening" the Earth. Sea level rise is well within normal bounds. Everything is _great.._
Energy payback time. Passive Emitter Rear Contact photovoltaics They're made of sand and a tiny bit of silver. The amount of silver used total is going down per year in spite of production going up, and there are technologies being commercialized to make it use less silver than a nuclear reactor.
Similarly LFP batteries only require a few dozen times as much energy to produce as one charge. Sodium uses even less, only requires abundant materials and is scaling up now. Then there are all of the other storage and load shifting methods.
You'd have to increase uranium mining 5x to meet last year's renewable capacity additions, and 8x for next year's. The mines would make more land uninhabitable than the solar panels would cover (even if they weren't compatible with other land use). Trying to make a puny backwards imitation of a star with a few tiny scraps of left over supernova dust is woefully insufficient. Getting energy directly from the source is the only place there's enough available unless we want massive degrowth.
Was I wrong about something ?
> Energy payback time.
Right. This doesn't scale as close to as well as nuclear ..........
> You'd have to increase uranium mining 5x
??? if things actually do become expensive, welcome to breeder reactors bro
Extremely.
> Right. This doesn't scale as close to as well as nuclear ..........
Using extremely generous assumptions about high grade ore, and old, much simpler reactors you can come in slightly under that for about a month. https://world- nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and-the-environment/energy-return-on-investment.aspx
EROI is significantly worse than solar because of ongoing energy costs for fuel and O&M. Especially if you use ore that is typical rather than the low hanging fruit. A perc module is around 60-120 depending on where it is placed. NPP is 15-60 depending on where its uranium comes from, how it is enriched and whether it uses reprocessing.
>> Mining: Ranger ore in 2008 was 0.26% U head grade. Energy: 273 GJ/t U3O8, 322 GJ/tU, including significant development work. (Note that if ore of 0.01% U is envisaged, this would give 1638 TJ/yr, 70 PJ total for mining & milling, hence total 108 PJ for the centrifuge option, thus inputs become 3.3% of output and energy ratio becomes 30.) All Ranger inputs are thermal (it generates own electricity). The Schneider 2010 figure for mining & milling is similar to Rössing.
> ??? if things actually do become expensive, welcome to breeder reactors bro
You can't start a breeder reactor without fissile material so new capacity still needs just as much (they don't exist so can't say for sure, but about double per GW by fairly generous estimates, actually). Additionally most of the concepts need about 2-10% of annual Beryllium production per reactor.
You have to fit something into the industrial capacity of the world before you can start gaslighting about costs that consistently go up or about costs of technologies that don't exist and might maybe start figuring out the hard bit of extraction and refuelling in ten years.
Expanding Uranium mining 5x would require processing a billion tonnes of ore per year. For reference Iron Ore production is about 2.5 billion tonnes. You'd need at least 30 million tonnes of sulfuric acid (world production is about 180 million).
Then for the reactors you'd need the most of the world supply of chromium. For a PWR you'd need half of the indium, and significant amounts of Zirconium, Cadmium and silver. Reliable Molten salt reactors don't exist and there's one MSR with okay capacity factor, but no information about how kuch noble metal they need is available.
This is just to match renewables now mind you, not where they will be when you finally open your mines (which takes years or decades).
The idea that Nuclear could scale to match renewables in under 50 years is laughable. Which is why fossil fuel shills butt into every conversation to claim renewables can't work and must be replaced with it.
> Extremely.
Can you concisely explain this without writing a book obfuscating your arguments..?
> You can't start a breeder reactor without fissile material
Who said otherwise? We stopped the breeder reactor journey mostly because fuel is so cheap. This will become more relevant over time, if necessary, due to natural market forces. dude, what? stop trying to obfuscate the obvious..
> it is increasingly clear that our co2 output isn't that scary. we are "greening" the Earth. Sea level rise is well within normal bounds.
Someone making those claims isn't really arguing in good faith.
It also helps distribute reality in contrast to the usual talking points. Most people don't know that nuclear is very limited in scale and actually and quite poor from a land use and energy perspective if it were to be expanded, or that the overwhelming majority of radiation comes from sourcing fuel.
I've seen a few bystanders go 'oh shit, you only get 100-500mW per kg of mining?' Or 'wait, none of the breeders have actually done the thing?'
Anything a nuclear plant can do a long distance transmission line can do better, with already proven technology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...
I like this quote:
For example, a recent report by researchers from the Earth System Research Laboratory published in Nature Climate Change found that a UHVDC transmission line in the US could cut emissions by as much as 80% by harnessing Wyoming’s abundant wind power potential and transporting the electricity to California.
https://www.power-technology.com/analysis/chinas-mega-transm...
Unless and until the budget and plans for around 5TW net of renewables is allocated, then starting any new nuclear is just a way of delaying the death of fossil fuels.
EBPT = Energy payback time.
> how does this scale? is it the same cost at 1000x the demand to support things?
It scales wonderfully. Increased demand means the costs go down.
Rough guess is over 30 years a 300W solar panel puts out 20,000 kwh. And weighs about 40lbs. 20,000kwh would require burning about 4000lbs of natural gas. So the weight ratio of the panel/nat gas is 1/100.
That's an aggressive ratio.
Another weight vs fuel calc. An F150 consumes it's weight in fuel every 20,000 miles.
Its not like they are an old car or something where the decrease in efficiency uses more energy / pumps out more emmisions.
The only resource they are using is roof space.
At some point the inverter (a separate box, usually inside the house) will fail and need to be replaced. At that point you'd have to balance the price of a new inverter vs. the expected return of energy from the panels.
CdTe was briefly a thing for abiut 30% of the market, but peoplewill want the Telerium soon enough. Modern panels are sand and about 50g/kW net of silver. Recycling is mandatory.
It looks like there is some motion towards responsibility though https://www.solarrecycle.org/copy-of-vendors
And even paid decomissioning if they have some limited life left https://fabtech.net/
Plus even if you don't tear it apart it's still a piece of hail resistant glass that could have various uses. Frost the top and you have a table. Find use for 20 such items in your lifetime and none will make it to landfill.
But that's gallium dopant rather than GaAs.
There's also CIGS and CdTe "thin film" solar cells, which are extremely toxic in even small amounts. But those chemistries were never very popular.
As far as I can tell most cells currently installed are poly or monocrystalline silicon cells, which contain phosphoros/boron dopants and aluminium metallization for the contacts. Those are the cheapest and also least toxic formulation.
(Fun fact: you know what popular component uses GaAs? Red LEDs!)
This represents about 50g/kW net of silver depending on location, but there are methods in the production pipeline to reduce it to 25g/kW. Tandem cells will reduce it to less silver than a control rod uses, but the commercialisationnpathway isn't set in stone yet.
Worst case scenario, we hit silver limits, they get switched to Al front side and efficiencies drop back to 17%
Copper metallization works (usually with a nickel layer and a silver electroplate on top which uses substantially less Ag than a nuclear reactor of the same net power), but is presently considered cost prohibitive process-wise as it adds a few steps. The current process being rolled out is silver plated copper paste (each copper bead has a 10-30% silver coating) as well as some techs for laying it down more consistently (aligned screen printing where the line never crosses two layers of mesh, and once it matures, depositing it with laser).
Silver consumption may briefly increase if the above facilitate a switch to heterojunction or topcon cells, but as soon as one of the 3 tandem chemistries being tried per day shows itself as a winner the voltage will increase and the fingers will get significantly smaller (to the point where Al may not cause a shading problem). At that point the shills will start whining about a 100nm thick layer of lead containing molecules while ignoring that it's less lead than your average tuna.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8200097/
There was a company, Alta Devices, that planned to commercialize GaAs thin-film (so light on materials usage) solar panels with nearly 30% efficiency, but they were bought up by Hanergy which ran into financial troubles and shut it down. It's not clear what happened to their patent portfolio, but their equipment was liquidated in 2020, and the founder now works for UC Berkeley.