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melling

“The French were able to hold their build times below 6 years up to about 1985”

You’d think if the future depended on it, build times could be reduced.

8500 global coal power plants produce 20% of emissions.

Retiring coal power plants was a no-brainer decades ago.

Instead we’ve been building more.

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> You’d think if the future depended on it, build times could be reduced.

Possibly not! We have gotten worse at building large things. One interesting explanation comes via Poppendieck's "Tyrrany of the Plan": https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of...

Her prime example here is the Empire State Building, which was built on time and on budget even though they had not finished designing it when they started building. The basic notion is that contrary to the current paradigm, more planning does not necessarily make things better.

On my own account I'd add that the rise of The Plan corresponds to a rise in a managerial caste (driven in part by the invention and rise of MBAs) that took power from people with domain-specific expertise. Much of that managerial work relates to developing, maintaining, and enforcing The Plan. But this is so much the dominant paradigm that it's hard for many to even imagine alternatives. A good book here is Spender & Locke's "Confronting Managerialism": https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec...

So it may be that even if the future depended on it, build times could not be reduced because it's paradigmatically impossible. For basically the same reason that a lot of large software projects are clusterfucks: the POSIWID-type purpose of many organizations is not the work they're supposed to be doing, but protecting and benefiting the people supervising the work.

I think largely I agree but I'm personally sensitive to too much disparagement of having a plan at all. I doubt the empire footers were dug and poured prior to a plan. The important part is knowing when phase 1 can be executed and then phase 2 until the last phase so that all the layers are in the correct order. If you have incompetent planners or perhaps even people with disincentive to complete then you wind up digging out the electrical after the walls are finished.

I suspect that having up to 3000 people per day working for a pittance in the middle of a global financial crisis was a larger factor in getting the Empire State Building built on time and budget than lack of planning or middle management...

Either way, I'm not sure Depression-era construction approaches are really what we want for nuclear plants.

This could just mean that the ESB had a budget and schedule w/ sufficient margin. The rise of more managed planning meant that everything is pre-optimized and all margins are slashed - the planning process as it is operated in the modern day is generally all about getting to minimized commitments.

It could mean that. After reading the article, would you like to make that claim?

I think there’s another thing driving “The Plan,” which is that each party involved is trying to race to the local maximum of efficiency. We need the plan to be finished so that the whole building can be value engineered to reduce waste (material, labor, whatever).

If you plan the whole building and know the exact forces it is going to encounter in different conditions, you can then spec the exact amount and type of materials you need, which means those have to be created to more exacting standards and there is less tolerance for deviation from The Plan.

There is an environment component to this in that we shouldn’t be intentionally wasteful, but trying to engineer in too much precision seems less efficient when you zoom out for anything that is not mass manufactured.

I agree, but think it's even worse. I think the key local maxima being pursued are the personal interests of managers.

Long ago I worked on a project for a financial company. The exec in charge, known to us as The Hammer, had made big promises to poobahs higher up. So for no real-world reason, his employees worked death-march hours to have everything done by the arbitrarily chosen date. As the year's end approached, it was obvious that there were big problems in performance and quality, with a lot of bugs in place and absurd operational requirements. (If I recall rightly, it was so over-complicated a single in-house release took a conference call with more than a dozen people going over a checklist of more than 40 steps.)

Did The Hammer pause the work, do some root cause analysis, and improve the situation? Of course not. He demanded everybody work even more hours and ignore anything but the highest priority issues. And so the project limped across the finish line at the last minute, with an enormous backlog of cleanup to do before they could add a single new feature. The team was exhausted. And after the celebratory lunch the next week, they were also demoralized, as they all got The Hammer's hearty congratulations and $50 gift cards.

But none of that mattered, because The Hammer's bosses got positive status reports with everything in the green. He was then quickly promoted to a more impressive position in a different area, meaning that the code base he had created, which resembled a pile of manure covered with Christmas paper, was now the problem of some other sucker. I'm sure it eventually had to be rebuilt, providing another hero story for another ladder climber.

If I had to guess, the amount of waste on that project was north of $5 million. But by The Hammer's measure and that of his bosses, it was a great success, because they either didn't know or didn't care about the waste.

We like to refer to manager "fiefdoms" as being "feudal" but they really aren't - feudal lords couldn't just leave their lordship and jump into another larger one somewhere else.

I'm not sure it's a problem that's entirely solvable without some kind of outside force.

> a rise in a managerial caste

That's the problem right there.

Pro-nuclear people like to scream about the hippies putting up too many barriers to nuclear plants.

Really it is just all the same middle-managers and dynamics at the jobs that they work at everyday.

Everyone is willing to spend another few million dollars and a few weeks of delay, which only increases the fiefdom they control, to mitigate some risk and diffuse any possible blame to the rest of the committee.

But that also means that we're not going to ever build like China unless our management culture fundamentally changes.

An alternative is that nuclear pushback got better in that same time period, and is now more able to cause delays.

The same applies with building construction - the governance process have evolved to check for more things with more ability to say no and delay, but without being able to say no(or what needs to change) more quickly

If that's the framing, solar and wind are the clear economic winners right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...

There's been rapid progress with those two in particular that's made it shockingly cheap. Solar cost is down about 95% in 10 years.

If that trend keeps up in the 2020s, anything else will have a real hard time catching up.

I'm still pretty excited about the idea of fusion space travel though. Trips to Mars could be done, depending on what thrust system can be built, in about 1-3 months (compared to about 9 now) and because the fuel is denser, longer high speed trips become feasibly possible, like to Jupiter in 4 months. For a comparison, it took Galileo 74 months to get there when it launched in 1989.

The idea of humans, say, landing on Europa in the 2030s might now be on the table.

Measuring cost by installed capacity is highly misleading because solar and wind need storage to be reliable sources. The cost of storage dwarfs the other costs, and battery prices have stagnated.

The reason battery prices are down 97% since 1990 is because of better battery chemistries coming along.

Currently there's a few more in the pipeline (including silicon) that lead market forecasters to predict the long-term (think 2030) trend will continue.

The downhill road of pricing has had some bumps but it's very assuredly, extremely downhill

So Wright's Law applies to batteries but not to nuclear power?

Yes, that's what the historical data from the last 50 years supports.

There's giant periods without any movement. Batteries have been around for centuries for instance.

These model can be a bit imaginative at times and nuclear may start its journey on it any day but so far it doesn't look like it has.

I'd love something absurdly cheap like a working Ponz-Fleischman bubble fusion to come around but if I was advising say a $100 million fund I'd say "solar + wind + chemical batteries" is the foreseeable future. It's just the reality.

Wait, that has happened with fission too, just not at grid scale because there hasn't been funding for it. If you look at military, academic, and space nuclear reactors, you will see Wright's law playing out. Solar and wind got the chance to ramp investment and scale. Grid-attached nuclear never did.

Personally, I see more risks to massive-scale battery production than to modest-scale nuclear fission, both of which solve the same problem.

The battery price graph tells a different story. Improvements have been slowing down for a long time, and have been almost zero the past couple of years and we've actually had a price increase this year. Switching to an entirely new technology is speculative at best, not all that dissimilar from putting all hope in fusion. Could work, but betting the future of the planet on it is silly.

That graph just really says it all haha. It’s all we need to look at. Which way are the arrows pointing? No need for millions of words trying to justify and explain a way for nuclear to work.

And PV is now off the bottom scale of that chart.. Some combination of overbuilding PV and Wind capacity + ever-improving battery tech "won" the energy market. Gas peakers and other stand-by sources will contribute for decades to come but when they're pricing out new nuclear builds at >$0.10/kwh wholesale, no amount of "but capacity factor!" will matter.

Solar and wind are fantastic, cheap sources of power, but they have their limits. They generate power when the sun shines and the wind blows, which is not necessarily when humans need it. We still aren’t very good at storing this power for use later, at large scales, in cost effective ways. So for now solar/wind needs to be paired with power sources we have greater control over, which mostly means nuclear, coal, natural gas, hydro, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current

By the time we cover all the daytime load with solar, they will probably have better batteries though.

By then we'll probably have figured out fusion too.

Yup and when there's no sun and no wind, like in winter in most places, you need something else, or batteries, which are ridiculously expensive both in $ and CO2 per kwh. Solar and Wind just can't do base load today, and you can't turn off the natural gas / coal plants that back them when they don't work.

This is a classic case of "doing the first 50% is easy, doing the last 50% is 99% of the work".

Why wouldn't there be sun in the winter in most places?

I don't know what GP meant about "most places", but I guess generally places that have a winter (away from the tropics, that is) are cloudier in the winter, as well as by definition having lower solar irradiation. Most of Europe is in the unenviable position of having higher power requirements precisely when solar potential is at the lowest[0].

[0]: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-winter-and-summe...

The power requirements are fixable by better insulated housing (see eg passive houses).

Practically free natural gas has kept people from investing in energy efficient housing, just like in warmer places where people use AC wastefully in poorly insulated buildings.

Ironically during a nuclear winter event which may or may not be a fraudulent science meme concocted during the cold war. And yet we have had points in fairly recent human history where we had years long stretches of problems caused by volcanic activity. All we need then is some way to turn nuclear fuel directly to enriched calories.

In the northern hemisphere the winter solstice is five days from today.

Where I am, in Seattle, the sun will be above the horizon for only about 8.5 hours. It will also likely be cloudy.

Contrast this with the summer solstice, where we get about 16 hours with the sun above the horizon.

Less sun, more wind, vs no wind and no sun.

Pretty sure you can turn natural gas on and off to some degree to back the solar, that's part of why everyone likes it so much.

Turning on a power plant is a slow and cumbersome process. If you need them to handle loads in excess of renewable capacity, or to handle sudden lows, you unfortunately need to keep them running...

What about this? https://www.ge.com/power/transform/article.transform.article...

Seems like some types can start in five minutes.

Uh, winter is windier than summer, caused by the stronger temperature gradients.

In the last 12 months in Denmark, wind produced over 3 times more power in January and February (the coldest month of the year) than it did in August. This is completely opposite of solar which peaks in July. In that sense they complement each other quite well.

Reference: https://ens.dk/service/statistik-data-noegletal-og-kort/maan...

Renewable energies are much more diverse than just solar and wind. There is also waterpower and biomass which makes a considerable part of renewable energy in many countries.[1] Niche sources like geothermal and tidal power might become more important in the future. There are other types of energy storage available and in research than batteries.

Then there is the path to improve energy efficience in industry and private consumption, which both have a lot of potential, and to replace fossil energy sources outside of electricity production with renewables, such as heat-pumps for buildings.

[1] E.g. for Germany, biomass is almost as important as solar for electrical energy. Source: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energ...

Um, isn't biomass just burning wood and waste? How is that helpful? It seems to be pretty regressive.

https://energytransition.org/2020/07/the-secret-burning-of-t...

Burning wood/biomass or gas generated from biomass releases the CO2 that has been captured by the plant while growing. Replanting the same plant will capture the same amount again. It’s effectively solar energy using photosynthesis instead of solar cells. So it’s a renewable energy, as long as you replant what you harvest.

The problem correctly pointed out in the article is that often the replanting comes after the harvest, or does not effectively happen at all - at least for wood pellets.

I would imagine it taking out plenty of minerals and nutrients from the soil though, needing constant fertilizer usage which comes with its own set of problems.

The minerals remain in the ashes. Other nutrients may be an issue, but for example when producing biogas, they’re essentially in the leftover parts of the plant. Biogas is mostly methane, so carbon and hydrogen.

Oh I see, thanks!

Isn't that an inaccurate simplification? A lot of harvested wood is not from tree plantations but from old(ish) growth forests. It also takes decades to regrow trees so the carbon capture is taking place over an extremely long time compared to the near instant release from burning the wood. Add to that the emissions from harvesting the trees using heavy equipment, transporting them, and processing them into pellets. Burning wood is also pretty inefficient when it comes to energy or heat production and it releases a lot of particulate matter. Of all the renewable options it's obviously the worst.

There is promising process to burn biomass a low oxygen environments producing biochar(black carbon residue) without releasing CO2. This process is still in testing stages and is not deployed at scale with unclear scaling and costs.

https://www.american.edu/sis/centers/carbon-removal/fact-she...

There's plenty of wind across the world in winter.

What an antiquated argument. If you can't understand Geoffrey Moore's crossing the chasm and what those trends look like in market segments, I can't help you

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_California#/media/...

I don't need a degree from HBS to see where this is going

It's comparing apple and orange. Solar/wind aren't available on demand. How much would cost a wind power plant that has the same guaranteed power as a nuclear plant, including batteries for storage? what would be the environmental footprint of such a thing?

The whole purpose of electrical grids is to stabilize such things.

The word "guaranteed" is about lowest variance - most predictable. What is prone to unscheduled maintenance, breakdowns, forced outages, etc.

The forced outage rate of solar is almost 0, wind is about 1%. https://rmi.org/fuel-hand-make-coal-nuclear-power-plants-val...

In practice, forced nuclear outage is 1-2%. An additional 7% downtime is scheduled outages for refueling. Coal is about 15%.

Here's a live report: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/... You can see about 7 are offline.

Disruptions are normal, daily, common occurrences and in practice, solar is pretty reliable in places like the Southern California desert where the grid-scale installations are built (example: https://www.google.com/maps/@34.7923792,-118.4060493,17707m/...). They are subject to occasional monsoons, but that's why there's more in other places such as down near the mexican border (https://www.google.com/maps/@32.7188416,-115.6454361,19457m/...). That's not farmland being replaced with solar panels btw. Instead it's called agrivoltaics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics)

This is still early, scroll down to the map here: https://www.seia.org/research-resources/major-solar-projects... ... that's the kind of redundancy we're talking about.

Right, forced outage of solar is 1%. Meanwhile, Germany is back to building coal plants because solar/wind doesn’t get you through the winter. Also, they postponed closing their nuclear plants. Jee, I wonder why?

You must read a lot of right wing media. That's a very nonlinear cherry picking of news items out of context and a packaging of them to puppet a talking point.

You can wonder why all you want but hobbling together headlines some of which are 3 years apart and pretending they're related is the thing you actually should be wondering about.

The facts I cited above directly contradict the myth of solar having a small forced outage. The fact of the matter is that solar is an intermittent source of energy. Sure, you can get away with saying that solar has a small forced outage, if you conveniently forget that solar generates a minuscule amount of power when the sun is out. You’ll have a hard time heating yourself with that, as the Germans discovered.

By the way, my source of information is mainstream French media.

> The whole purpose of electrical grids is to stabilize such things.

Except it doesn't. Which is why Germany didn't decrease its gas plant capacity. They're needed when there's no wind.

> The forced outage rate of solar is almost 0, wind is about 1%.

The issue with wind/solar isn't forced outage. It's that the wind doesn't blow all the time, so comparing how much cost 1MWh of wind when the wind blows with 1MWh of coal is dishonest. You're comparing apple and oranges.

If it’s cheaper than coal then why are we still building so many coal power plants?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/26/too-many...

Coal is at record levels.

https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Business/wireStory/report-worlds-...

Removing coal power plants would have made a noticeable difference.

We're adding a lot more renewable than anything else.

80% of power plant capacity added in 2020 was renewable.

https://www.irena.org/news/pressreleases/2021/Apr/World-Adds...

if we only have 8500 coal power plants globally and this is the single largest source of emissions, shouldn’t we be trying to eliminate 20% of global emissions?

Furthermore, if renewables are cheaper shouldn’t we immediately stop adding to the coal problem?

We need to replace a billion gasoline powered cars, etc. Coal power generation seems like an easy thing to do.

Electric cars are betweeb 2x and 4x more efficient than gasoline powered cars. Take a look at the MPGe.

https://insideevs.com/news/597460/tesla-efficiency-depends-o...

Of course that varies with temperature and driving style.

My question is-

What is better for the environment, A gas powered car or an electric car where the electricity comes exclusively from coal?

Short and long term.

> What is better for the environment, A gas powered car or an electric car where the electricity comes exclusively from coal?

Rhetorical question, I assume. A coal powered EV is still something like 15-20% less polluting than a gas powered car. And the EV gets instantly more efficient when the coal plant inevitably gets replaced with something cleaner.

Sounds great until you remember you're not get even half of that nameplate capacity. Capacity factors of solar/wind is between 10% and 30%. Offshore wind can be as high as 45% but your link says it's only 5% of wind capacity (in 2020).

Intermittents like solar/wind aren't suitable for grids without a backing firm energy source. Today that is fossil fuels. We don't have a proven viable replacement right now. Most people think that we'll use batteries instead but that's a pipe dream with today's battery tech. We literally don't have enough minerals. See this report: https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf

Lots of people are trying to address this storage problem but there's nothing that is proven and manufacturable at scale today.

Lithium (element #3) is a very abundant resource and widely distributed across the Earth. Saying we don't have enough is laughable. At certain price levels some of it is uneconomical to extract, but the price today is very different than the price when that report was written.

The report doesn't even mention price. That is a whole other level of analysis. The fact is, the known global reserves of several minerals (not just lithium) needed for a primarily wind/solar grid are insufficient for today's battery tech. We need a new plan. Underground hydrogen storage looks more promising than batteries, but again we don't have anything scalable ready to go today in terms of cheap energy storage.

That's why the report is completely useless. "proven reserves" is a function of price.

It's not like fossil fuels where it is plausible that there are limited amounts. Elements are created by the same processes that formed the universe.

And all the elements in a LiFePO4 battery are exceedingly common.

> It's not like fossil fuels where it is plausible that there are limited amounts. Elements are created by the same processes that formed the universe.

This is a non sequitur. There is a limited amount of anything on Earth. The pertinent question is: can we get enough of these minerals economically to use them as storage by 2050. If it is not economical, it won't happen.

If you think extracting more than 4x the known global reserves of lithium is going to be economical, I don't know what to tell you.

The 10x price increase that Lithium has experienced is going to expand reserves by a heck of a lot more than 4X.

It hasn't even doubled in the past 10 years. At today's global lithium mining rate, it would take 220 years to get today's known reserves out of the ground. Nevermind 4x. And then there's the human and environmental impact of all that mining. We're just talking about a single element. There's several more that are just as constrained if not worse.

Today's batteries just aren't suited for grid storage.

> It hasn't even doubled in the past 10 years.

It was set to triple, except reasons. Still, "almost tripled" is better than "hasn't even doubled".

35K metric tonnes in 2012,

38K metric tonnes in 2016,

69K metric tonnes in 2017,

95K metric tonnes in 2018,

100K in 2021.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/606684/world-production-...

[2] https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...

That's production. We were talking about global reserves. Which hasn't even doubled in 10 years.

Why would they though?

There's sufficient known and proven reserves to not put any pressure on proving known resources.

Why expend the capital on techical reports and economic feasibility studies to raise resources to reserves ahead of lead time on production demand?

Because mines take 10 years to open on average from minerals found to minerals being moved out of the ground. 1% of surveyed mineral deposits become mines.

Because for the better part of a decade, the green transition plan has been to move to solar/wind plus energy storage. The obvious question is, how many machines will we need? What kind? How much will it cost?

The author of this report described how he convinced his management to fund this work. He works at a Finnish government geological survey organization. He told his management, "Who do you think the EU leadership will blame when they realize that we don't have anywhere near the resources needed to complete the green transition as it is imagined today?"

They haven't done the math.

The spglobal link connects to a product (global database + updating tools) that S&P acquired from it's source here in Western Australia, between here and the Toronto TSX you'll find the vast weight of companies and capital that form the bulk of global transnational mining (sans Russia and China, although they are threaded in and tracked also).

> Because mines take 10 years to open on average from minerals found to minerals being moved out of the ground.

Bear in mind that "minerals being found" is when they first become "resources" (see JORC terminology which has become standard across the global mineral industry) .. when minerals have been proven (tightly estimated by volume and density) and had an Economic Feasibility Technical Report completed and filed they become "reserves" .. known amounts with a costing to extract.

Also bear in mind that mines can open much faster when there is a demand .. mines generally don't open faster unless there is a demand, now that past global supply issues and ramping production of end goods upwards you'll see mines open on proven reserves and more resources being advanced toward reserve status.

I agree with your general point about general EV resources (there's a looming Copper issue and with the processing of rare earths in general) .. but your argument here WRT lithium is overly simplified, there are political issues that weigh more on mid future lithium extraction more than known reserve issues.

I'm just paraphrasing (likely poorly) Associate Professor of Mining Engineering Simon Michaux. He wrote a ~1000 page report on this. I assume he understands those definitions of reserves etc. Lithium is only one of the minerals we seem to be short of.

https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf

A report which contains delightfully scientific assumptions such as:

- All solar panels are thin film or polysilicon from the late 2000s

- All wind and solar stations are the same size as an average pulled from a single report and "number of power stations" is a metric that matters.

- You need to put energy in a 4 week buffer of 6 year old NMC811 batteries which use double the lithium of a new one (along with nickel and cobalt even though noone would pay more for a battery that is worse at grid storage than LFP, and other chemistries have been scaling since before he started writing this) before putting it in a car battery, and this is more likely than just convincing most EV owners to leave their cars plugged in when parked by offering a discount.

- You need to put energy in the same battery before electrolysing hydrogen with it for transport or feed stock.

- Air conditioning must be able to run during cloudy days in the middle of the night in hot regions backed by the same obsolete NMC battery storage.

- All heating must be backed by batteries and not thermal storage.

- It's impossible to build pantographs, rail, or LEVs.

- That all EVs and Electric motorbikes in india, africa, and southeast asia will be long range US/EU style with built in batteries rather than the already popular battery swap systems for bikes and LEVs.

- Some incoherent mess where km/kWh is used interchangeably with kWh/km and then drivetrain and motor losses were added to get battery capacity for EVs when that was already based on their range for some reason and then multiplied by distance travelled and then thrown away.

- All shipping can only run on NMC batteries or fuel cells, and refuelling or recharging at a floating platform near one of the many areas with world class solar or wind resource you pass is less likely than giving up 75% of your cargo space for battery on short trips just in case you need to do a 25000km trip.

- Meeting demand during off season can be achieved with chemical storage alone, and not by curtailing loads that are added for that purpose such as electrolysers and multi-month thermal storage.

- Improving electrolysers or using CSP to run them or running them in good climates and transporting ammonia is impossoble.

- Burning any amount of that ammonia you made or any amount of fossil fuel gas in the turbines you already have as a last resort is impossible, even if only for a few tens of hours a year.

- All storage must be battery, and using the existing hydro production for dispatch or any of the 1000s of TWh of undeveloped PHES sites is impossible.

- 0% of variability in demand can be met with long distance transmission.

- The 50% of the planet that lives within transmission distance of cloudless deserts cannot tap them for CSP+thermal storage that is available 8000 hours a year.

And on top of that, the report completely rejects the idea that a nuclear fleet could meet the required power in any reasonable timescale on similarly shaky grounds. So even if we believe it, you're still completely wrong.

Unless, of course the conclusion you're trying to push is to delay the transition for a century on the faulty premise that adding renewables achieves nothing.

FWiW and just as a note, I'm ~60, have written several million SLOC of exploration geophysics code, first worked in a mine at 16, have an engineering ( and math and Comp Sci ) degree, and put together that global registry of mineral resources with a few others I know, most of whom are mining engineers, geologists, etc.

In the course of tracking resources we'd find ourselves dealing with four to five 300 - 2,000 page technical reports for each resource across several thousand companies spanning the globe. Come Annual report and quarterly report filing times we'd also have to deal with each company dropping several hundred pages of report and finnacials.

Prior to onselling that business to S&P some 15+ years ago we sold mineral intelligence to most of the large players in the mineral exploration and production game, from Rio Tinto and BHP down.

While I still have a large contact list I must say I've never spoken to or heard of Associate Professor of Mining Engineering Simon Michaux in Finland ... although I did visit Finland several decades back and was given a nice SAKO rifle system for efficiently finding a target drum of nuclear waste in a forest from 80m altitude in a two second window at 70m/sec.

Still, a great many people have written about and modelled the boom | bust dynamics of mineral exploration and production and time to life of mining operations and their retirement, etc ... specially those large organisations do this on daily basis.

> it would take 220 years to get today's known reserves out of the ground

That doesn't strike me as particularly constrained then - it's highly unlikely known reserves won't expand in that time or that we'll find no alternatives.

I think you need to reread the previous comments.

The question is: do we have enough minerals to switch to a solar/wind plus batteries energy system as a species? There is a controversial report from a mining professor who says the answer is 'not even close'. https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf

Fortunately I don't believe we'll need to. From a previous glance of that report, scenario F is pretty close to what I'd imagined we'd likely aim for. It would've been a lot smoother and less costly if we'd started 40 years ago, but it's not shortage of minerals like lithium or cobalt that have been holding us up. If the "Big rare-earth-metals-mining" industry had anything like the clout of Big Oil/Gas/Coal, we'd probably be half way there by now.

You might want to look at figure 26.10 of Scenario F. We still hit mineral constraints.

The author says outright the report is not an attempt at simulating a realistic transition because it's asking first order questions: along the lines of "do we even have enough stuff to try this?". There's no attempt to ask if this is economical or logistically possible because it is not.

The author is convinced that we're all about to be much poorer because the IV drip of cheap energy that the world has enjoyed for at least 50 years is about to be ripped out. Personally, I think what's most likely to happen is that we will fail to get the world's nations to stop using fossil fuels and we will suffer the environmental consequences of that. Plus all the consequences of the resource wars that will follow. It's a shame.

I think our best chance to avoid this is to rush research on mass manufacturable gen 4 nuclear reactors. We need a factory that spits these things out so we can ship them to developing nations because otherwise, they build coal plants. I have high hopes for Thorcon. They plan to use shipyards to build annually up to 200 GW of modular shippable reactors.

That report is a pathetic attempt at a hit piece from a coal shill.

Cherry picking reports from 2014 that refer to technologies from 2008 and assuming an order of magnitude more batteries than anyone is seriously suggesting of an old version of a chemistry that is never going to be used for bulk storage isn't science. It's just pathetic.

And dredging up this report in order to try to sell people on a solution that actually is resource constrained every time the subject comes up is even more pathetic.

Ah good old ad hominem. Never fails to show up.

It's true he worked in Australian mining (I assume coal). The guy has been working in industrial recycling and 'circular economy' since 2015 https://www.simonmichaux.com/current-work

> And dredging up this report in order to try to sell people on a solution that actually is resource constrained every time the subject comes up is even more pathetic.

We will literally never run out of fissile material.

An ad hominem is where you use someone's character as a faulty reason their argument is flawed. Pointing out someone's argument is flawed and is a standard part of the coal propaganda machine as a valid reason to question their motives is not ad hominem.

The absolute most generous interpretation of the report you linked is that it was a mastubatory exercise by a completely naive person who thought he was the first person to think of problems that have been studied for decades and have detailed roadmaps for overcoming the real roadblocks (which are not even issues he considers).

> We will literally never run out of fissile material.

There are no commercially viable or even prototype closed loop breeding programs and there never have been. The current stock of economically accessible fissile material is around 40,000 tonnes and each GW of reactor needs 3-20 tonnes. There are no processes with a doubling time under 10 years because spent fuel needs time to cool, so rolling out your non-existent reactor in place of renewables rather than after one or two generations still requires mining all of it.

Even in the scifi world where breeding is viable, we still need a 70-95% renewable transition to fill the 20-40 year gap.

You started by trying to discredit the work based on the author's work history. Then you threw out a few unspecific attacks on his data sources. Hardly convincing. Essentially name calling.

> The absolute most generous interpretation of the report you linked is that it was a mastubatory exercise by a completely naive person who thought he was the first person to think of problems that have been studied for decades

Here is a paper published by IEEE this year, On the History and Future of 100% Renewable Energy Systems Research. It is a comprehensive review of the research in this field. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

Section D. Raw Material Demand for 100% Renewable Energy Systems

As the previous criticisms are starting to become less and less tenable, increasing attention is now shifting towards the more salient point of raw materials needed for the transition towards a sustainable energy system. Practically all research in this field finds critical limits for material availability. This may be a major concern and should be addressed with more consideration and analyses to truly test the material limits.

Hardly mastubatory, then.

> As the previous criticisms are starting to become less and less tenable, increasing attention is now shifting towards the more salient point of raw materials needed for the transition towards a sustainable energy system. Practically all research in this field finds critical limits for material availability. This may be a major concern and should be addressed with more consideration and analyses to truly test the material limits.

Yes. There are real critical minerals, as well as real broad overviews that highlight them without going into industry specific roadmaps for addressing them.

The limits are entirely unrelated to the paper you first linked because the Michaux analysis does things like assuming all new PV will be CdTe or there will be weeks of battery storage for any electrolysers built in the form of NMC811 batteries.

Trying to conflate the former with the latter or use overviews to pretend said roadmaps don't exist is just as dishonest as your first attempt.

Lithium batteries (as focused by the paper) are attractive for mobile applications, for grid storage the energy density is not very important and li-ion batteries have disadvantages like going up in flames frequently.

There are lots of overlapping options for running the grid with renewables from other battery chemistries to hydrogen, pumped hydro storage, long distance hvdc, hourly pricing to cut demand peaks, etc.

Yes there are many competing battery technologies in the works right now and I sincerely hope that one of them turns out to be manufacturable/scalable. Or any kind of energy storage becomes cheap at Terra-watt hour capacities.

But right now, it's just a bunch of 'maybes'. The fact that we don't have a solid plan RIGHT NOW for something so important is alarming. Everyone is just hoping it will work out. Maybe we'll find a good cheap battery. Maybe we can unify our grid and build thousands of miles of HVDC interconnects. Maybe we can find more pumped hydro sites.

In the absence of a buildable storage solution for renewables today, we should be building the only other scalable clean energy technology we have: Nuclear energy. No energy storage. No brand new grid. No massive expansion in mining. Thankfully, more people are coming around to this. No it won't cover 100% of our energy. But it is an incredibly underutilized tool. We should at a minimum, replace all coal power plants with nuclear.

Even if we keep looking at only batteries for grid storage instead of all the estabilished and proven ways: the predicted lithium shortage would happen gradually over O(100 years), leading to rising cost of lithium batteries which should give lots of lead time for investment in alternatives, of which we have many, both in old ones (pre-lithium) and many prospective ones under development.

IMO the more alarming problems currently in climate change are the missing plan for global fossils rampdwn and solving the international-relations collective action problem of enacting the required energy saving policies in a coordinated and fair way.

You're trying to use this to push nuclear, but 1kg of lithium gets you 1kW of diurnal storage for a decadeor two, whereas 1kg of Uranium gets you 1kW of power production for at most 8 years.

Lithium has larger reserves, is mined in larger quantities at lower impact than uranium, and won't even be relevant to grid storage because in contradiction to Michaux's claims that he's the only one to ever consider the idea of a different chemistry, nobody is assuming there will be a week of NMC batteries for every watt of renewables.

There were multiple news items about sodium ion, zinc bromide, iron batteries, pumped hydro, thermal storage, and a-caes being released the entire time he was fishing through ancient LCAs and IEA reports to try and claim there isn't enough Tellereum to make solar panels that don't contain any or not enough Niobium to make dual wound generators with no permanent magnets.

He considers LFP in his more recent work and you still run into mineral constraints. Even if you take his 4 week buffer to 48 hours.

> 1kg of lithium gets you 1kW of diurnal storage for a decade or two, whereas 1kg of Uranium gets you 1kW of power production for at most 8 years

That is an absolutely cursed comparison. What forms of these elements are you talking about? Why are you comparing energy storage to energy generation? It doesn't matter. We have enough U and Th to power humanity for millennia. We only use 0.7% of the U we mine for fucks sake. We're not even trying.

> There were multiple news items about...

Oh please, the news is saying we've solved nuclear fusion. The report was constrained to tech that was commercially available in volume. Come back to me when we're pumping out gigawatt hours of storage. Pumped hydro is great, there's not enough suited geography for it. No we can't just dig the reservoirs anywhere because then the energy payback goes negative.

> Even if you take his 4 week buffer to 48 hours.

Stil 4x as long as any serious proposal and still assumes all low grade heat and all energy that will eventually drive an electrolyser will be stored in a battery for no reason. Any report that suggests an electrolyser needs guaranteed 100% uptime backed by chemical storage has the same amount of credibility as a report that suggests all PV will be polysilicon or thin film.

> That is an absolutely cursed comparison. What forms of these elements are you talking about? Why are you comparing energy storage to energy generation?

Because you are trying to say that storage is a constraint to using renewable generation. And the form to compare doesn't matter. It's the elemental material you need to extract used in technology that is currently commercially viable.

> It doesn't matter. We have enough U and Th to power humanity for millennia. We only use 0.7% of the U we mine for fucks sake. We're not even trying.

Fertile material isn't fissile material. Even in a closed fuel cycle (which is not a thing that exists in reality) you still need startup fuel material, and none of the proposed over unity breeder scenarios have a fast enough doubling time to be useful. That's a very nice double standard where the technology that actually exists and has a tens of GWh/yr supply chain already 90% built has to have already solved the problem to be feasible, but vague hand waving at reactor designs and fuel cycles that don't even exist as a prototype get a pass.

> Pumped hydro is great, there's not enough suited geography for it

There are thousands of TWh of sites with suitable geography. Only a fraction of a percent need to pass environmental feasibility to cover the plurality of storage.

> The report was constrained to tech that was commercially available in volume.

Then why did he repeatedly say thing like sodium ion has yet to show industrial scale feasibility mere weeks after CATL announced that they were building out an industrial scale pipeline having already finished proving feasibility? Why not include Zinc Bromide that was developed in the university whose logo he put on the report?

> Stil 4x as long as any serious proposal

I'd love to see this serious proposal that says we can globally replace fossil fuels with intermittents and 4 hours of energy storage.

> That's a very nice double standard where the technology that actually exists and has a tens of GWh/yr supply chain already 90% built has to have already solved the problem to be feasible, but vague hand waving at reactor designs and fuel cycles that don't even exist as a prototype get a pass.

You're conflating my explanation for why U/Th supplies are not a concern with your assumption for what my proposed solution is. PWRs are sufficient for today and can be built today. We can and should work on new reactors and fuel cycles that don't just leave 90% of the energy on the table. US energy usage alone is 26,400 TWh a year. 10's of GWh a year may as well not get out of bed.

> Then why did he repeatedly say thing like sodium ion has yet to show industrial scale feasibility mere weeks after CATL announced that they were building out an industrial scale pipeline having already finished proving feasibility? Why not include Zinc Bromide that was developed in the university whose logo he put on the report?

You must a different idea of what "in-volume" means.

> I'd love to see this serious proposal that says we can globally replace fossil fuels with intermittents and 4 hours of energy storage.

Not only is 48 / 4 not 4, but serious proposals like this one https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z don't involve trying to replace the last 20% of electrical generation in the few areas without PHES resources before tackling the much larger and more cheaply solved emissions involved in currently non-electrified industries.

Once you have your ammonia, hydrogen, and ethylene supply chains mature, then you can just burn some of those in the handful of areas where a dunkelflaute can't be managed with 12hr storage and dispatchable loads.

> You're conflating my explanation for why U/Th supplies are not a concern with your assumption for what my proposed solution is. PWRs are sufficient for today and can be built today. We can and should work on new reactors and fuel cycles that don't just leave 90% of the energy on the table. US energy usage alone is 26,400 TWh a year. 10's of GWh a year may as well not get out of bed.

Putting U235 in a burner ractor just lengthens the time before your burner can come online. There is not enough viable uranium for a single fuel load to provide primary energy in existing designs. Your serial production of Gen III+ reactors cannot put a dent in world emissions before it needs to change course to breeders and all your new built reactors are mothballed for 20 years while fuel supplies are bred.

> You must a different idea of what "in-volume" means.

Your statement about what was in the paper was a lie as evidenced by the statements made in the paper referring to industrial feasibility. Those statements were a lie as evidenced by industrial feasibility being already proven. Why does your reasoning about the transition from an imaginary PWR supply chain to an imaginary Gen IV supply chain not apply to transition from a real TWh/yr battery supply chain transitioning into a real drop in replacement already mostly built that uses the same equipment?

> Not only is 48 / 4 not 4,

Sorry it is late here.

> but serious proposals like this one https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z don't involve trying to replace the last 20% of electrical generation in the few areas without PHES resources before tackling the much larger and more cheaply solved emissions involved in currently non-electrified industries.

That's your example? That paper is about electricity demand and they don't even manage to meet that. We're talking about global primary energy here. Surely you can do better.

You see, the thing about energy that needs to be available in chemical form is that it can be stored in chemical form. And the bizarre thing about low grade heat is it can be stored as low or high grade heat. And the absolutly wild thing about energy that needs to be stored in a vehicle for an average of a week is it's stored in a vehicle for an average of a week. Weird twist, huh?

The next thing that would shock you if you were arguing in good faith and not just trying to spread FUD to delay the death of coal is that provisioning 5x electricity to meet those dispatchable loads reduces the storage required for the electricity even further.

If renewables can meet 95% of the goal with just the previously industrially deployed technogy stack and have proven but not deployed technology for the remaining 5%; then it makes no sense to stop deploying them and instead switch to a technogy that can meet 40% at much higher cost and has no answer even in the demonstration stage to the remaining 60%.

Just because the 5% is contained in the 40% doesn't make it a sane strategy. Especially when in most of the world that 5% already has preexisting hydro that can serve it with a simple turbine upgrade.

The expensive part of coal power is the coal itself. The upfront costs for the power plant are quite low. This is the opposite of solar. It has an very high upfront cost, but for the next couple decades, you only need to pay a little for maintenance, so the amortized costs are cheaper. However, poorer areas of China can't afford this large upfront cost, but they still have a lot of demand for energy, so they build new coal plants.

Also this is always how transitions look. Incandescent bulbs were still sold next to LEDs, CRTs were still manufactured during the LCD transition, platter drives are still for sale during the SSD revolution, people still buy gas cars.

There is a time before commodity prices are hit at scale but when it happens, the price floor of the new technology will be below the price floor of the old technology (for instance the cost of a big screen TV) and that's when the old technology finally exits. Solar still has a long way to fall.

We're in a transition and they always look like this.

China doesn't build coal plants because areas cannot afford nuclear. They do so because need they need stop gap solutions. Their new coal plants use supercritical CO2, and phase out older, less efficient and more polluting coal plants. Check out this thread by Chinese energy sector consultant David Fishman which states that the new Chinese plants are amongst the most efficient in the world: https://twitter.com/pretentiouswhat/status/16004256242919055...

He explains that these more efficient coal plants are not only motivated by climate targets, but also by market prices.

Even these new plants aren't going to be around forever. They're going to be phased out eventually as China moves towards their 2060 net zero goal.

Coal plants are also digging coal to directly use in steal processing.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't one of the reasons we are building MORE coal (and biofuel) plants because the addition of solar and wind have added volatility to the electricity supply?

With few exceptions in the world, in a electricity grid the supply and demand of electricity have to be 1:1, and if wind and solar is adding volatility to that supply, another flexible power source suddenly becomes very profitable and useful.

Nuclear is costly to turn on/off, but coal, biofuel and natural gas isn't. So turning it on/off based on the shortage caused by sustainable sources is why they're coming back, have been my understanding

Coal is not flexible. They are massive heat plants, so an on/off cycle takes about a day.

Ah ok thanks for correcting me

Perhaps they don't turn off but merely down? Is that a day? Is there even such a thing as different levels of operation?

Even if not a day, maybe still not responsive enough.

Then again, maybe it gets you close enough that now you only need a smaller more doable version of some otherwise unrealistic gap filler like batteries or thermal mass or gravity mass etc.

That is not correct. Coal and gas fired power plants have turndown capabilities where they can decrease their power genration very quickly by 75%-90% or so depending on the plant.

https://www.babcockpower.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/exte...

Is it common for those huge old plants to use pulverized coal?

I imagine all the new ones use it, and thus all the new ones can change their outputs in a matter of minutes, instead of hours. But that still makes coal one of the slowest sources to react to grid volatility, and sill basically useless to compensate wind oscillations, only useful for the solar cycle.

I've seen some really old plants and they've all used pulverized coal, since it burns more consistently. It basically explodes when it ignites due to the temperatures involved. Coal and gas are both really good at responding quickly to varying load requirements.

I think you have to be very careful with the word "we" here.

Coal's market share in the US has been eroding for 15 years and will likely fall below nuclear soon. It has been replaced by natural gas and, more recently, renewables.

The reason that we "worldwide" have been building lots of coal plants is that China has been building lots of coal plants. This is despite China also building world-dominating quantities of nuclear, wind, and solar.

The reason China is adding so much coal appears to be that provincial officials get to book coal power production as economic growth internal to their province. By contrast, the electricity from renewables in Xinjiang shipped over HVDC transmission lines does not boost their province's economic growth numbers so they do not want to use it even if it would be cheaper.

> If that trend keeps up in the 2020s, anything else will have a real hard time catching up.

That's the problem though: *IF* that trend holds. Past performance doesn't guarantee future performance.

Climate change presents an existential threat to civilization so relying on a single trend holding seems like a fairly risky bet to make if you ask me.

In that vein, I'd argue for throwing everything at the problem. Build it all, wind, solar, geothermal, and nuclear. If we overshoot and spend billions more than was necessary, great, that's a hell of a lot better than undershooting and losing trillions from entire economies shutting down.

Solar power including storage is already the cheapest form of energy. Any further improvement is just gravy.

Regardless of how cheap it may be, the storage of solar power is still a big problem. If we're on the topic of cost trends and batteries, the price of lithium is up ~500%.[1] That's making batteries more expensive than in the past and given all of the demand for them I don't really see it going down any time soon, at least not until new lithium mining plants are built mainly in South America, which still isn't likely to drop prices again in the near future.[2]

1. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium

2. https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2022/06/09/...

Global production of lithium has doubled since 2015.

I think it's reasonable to expect energy storage to become cheaper purely by the mechanisms of capitalism. The market for energy storage scarcely existed 4 years ago -- there were a handful of pumped hydro storage plants and one compressed air energy storage plant and that was it. The US had 1.5 GW of battery capacity in 2020; we added 5.1 GW of capacity this year and currently scheduled projects will bring 30 GW of battery capacity online by 2025 (per the EIA).

It's clear from the current buildout and the current price of solar that there will be a large market for energy storage in the next 10-20 years. That means there is a large market opportunity to build grid energy storage and to increase production of the entire supply chain for grid energy storage. I would be surprised if it is not met.

There are alternatives for grid storage that are being deployed right now. Sodium or Flow batteries, CAES and underground pumped hydro. As lithium prices increase, alternative technologies will be deployed in scale and come down in cost.

If it's so cheap, batteries included, why are the most optimistic industry projections only putting it at 20% of the US grid by 2050? [1]

Why are they projecting that coal gas consumption will continue to grow, year over year for that same time period? [2]

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50357

[2] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/production/sub-topic-03.php

The EIA is very consistently very wrong.

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/07/12/has-the-international...

Your link talks about the IEA, which is the International Energy Agency. I was citing the EIA, which is the US Government Energy Information Administration.

They are not the same thing.

The second link shows that natural gas increases steadily for exporting and for domestic industrial consumption. If you click the Excel link under the table graphics [1], it shows that natural gas consumption for generating electricity remains below 2020 demand levels until 2047. As for why they think that demand will pick up in the late 2040s after decades of stagnation, I'm not sure; maybe it's projections of population growth finally overcoming trends in fuel efficiency.

I will note that the EIA has badly underestimated renewable electricity growth in the past. Their projections are very restrained, far from "optimistic industry projections." You can read a retrospective on their past forecasting here:

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/retrospective/

In particular look at the electricity section of the table, "Comparison of AEO Reference case projections with realized outcomes, 1994–2021." The EIA underestimated future usage of solar power 80% of the time and future usage of wind power 84% of the time. The magnitude of the underestimates was actually worse for solar power, though.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/production/excel/subtopic3_...

It's also vastly underestimated growth in natural gas energy generation. By that reasoning, we can only assume that the 21st century will continue to be a century of fossil fuels.

This is just Clayton Christensen/Geoffrey Moore/SteveBlank stuff. It's the same patterns of growth, price, adoption curves, irrational exuberance, etc down to the bad predictions by entrenched industry experts.

It's remarkable how cleanly it's playing out. There's probably some easy academic opportunities on writing about it if someone wants some easy first authorship opportunities while sitting in their pajamas, it's there for the taking.

The EIA almost always projects boring linear growth for everything. Their data is a terrific resource for what is currently happening, what has happened recently, and what is already scheduled on the pipeline. I would not put much stock in their projections beyond their Short Term Energy Outlook. I would certainly not describe them as the most optimistic industry projections.

They project that the solar growth rate will drop after 2023 when the ITC would have expired, but it was extended in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. From there, they expect the growth curve of solar to slowly decay. It's basically all a linear projection and scarcely any more insightful than that.

They expect that electricity generation from coal will be flat (except for already-announced early coal plant retirements). They expect nuclear to be flat. They expect generation from natural gas to increase (unless renewables are cheap, in which case they expect it to be flat). They fail to anticipate the replacement of coal by natural gas or renewables and they fail to anticipate the replacement of natural gas by renewables.

Finally, as a point of comparison, take a look at their projections for EVs and hybrids. The EIA projects that EVs and hybrids will still only make up about 20% of the market for new cars in the US in 2050. (See page 9 of [1]).

[1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/AEO2022_ChartLibrary_Tr...

This isn't just hopes and dreams though. There's an economy of scale argument called Swanson's law which is expected to continue for the forseable future: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law

There's also quite a bit of research going on into different cell technology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-cell_efficiency). The current physics wall puts it at about theoretical 4-fold increase in electricity per square meter compared to what we have today without consideration of the cost of manufacturing or longevity, which is expected to again, continue to improve.

Also as far as land goes, people are really bad thinking at scale. If you look here: https://www.seia.org/research-resources/major-solar-projects... you'll see all the installations and the ones planned. The sun doesn't shine every place, on every day, sure, but when you have that kind of coverage it's a different story.

There's a lot of arid desert out there and lots of potential for combining solar panels with existing food farms through something called agrivoltaics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics ... many crops do as good or better with shade so this is just a straight increase in profit per acre for those crops with the dual use of energy generation.

This is all pretty new. The cost tipping points in favor of solar just happened a few years ago. We're seeing one of Clayton Christensen's graph of disruptive technology in real-time right now (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity where solar went from being the most to the least expensive in about a 5 year period)

Everything hits a physics wall, of course but not only does it look like there's still plenty of runway with solar before we get there but there's also lots of unexplored opportunities such as, just throwing this out there, a solar capturing wind turbine that can cleverly capture energy both ways. The point is this is still extremely greenfield

To be clear, I'm not arguing against solar here. We should be building as many forms of non-carbon-emitting energy generation as we possibly can.

A challenge of large solar plants like you're describing is getting the energy to where it's needed and when it's needed. A ton of solar panels in the desert does no good if there's no way to store that energy or get it to a city a few hundred miles away. All of that requires significantly more investment in storage mechanisms and interconnectors to move it around the grid. The latter actually being most concerning to me simply because of NIMBYs fighting projects to build more high voltage power lines because they're ugly and ruin views from their properties. It's hard to quantify that, but when you need to run so many power lines over such long distances that touch so many people's properties it becomes a permitting nightmare which dramatically slows down, or even cancels, projects.

I also touched on this in another comment below: In terms of storing solar energy with our current method of lithium-ion batteries, well, the cost of lithium is up ~500% in the past two years and is expected to stay that way for the foreseeable future: https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2022/06/09/...

As to Swanson's Law, sure, I get where the trendline currently is, but as a counterexample: How's Moore's Law holding up these days?

I'm sure there's plenty of articles about different battery storage methods and all that being researched, but the fact is that we need proven, on-demand energy generation that drops into the existing grid NOW and nuclear provides that. But by all means, build all of it: nuclear, wind, solar, etc. Having too much carbon-free energy is a much better problem to have than too little.

First let me dispatch this "existing grid NOW and nuclear provides that" - it's a 7 year average lead time as of 2022; solar is 2. And if you granted all the accelerations you're going to propose to solar or wind as well, it'll still beat nuclear. It's just simpler and cheaper to deploy. It's also expandable and upgradable and you can start producing after the first station is done. Your 2022 nuclear reactor will still be based on 2022 technology in 2072. The solar farm, however, will be current with the times as the parts are swappable.

The predicted end to Moore's law had been anticipated for many years. This took nobody by surprised. The only surprise really is that it went on longer than expected.

From all indications we're in the solar version of the 1980s right now on the Moore's law timeline and in the future we'll see a solar PV equivalent that's as remarkable as say, the 2TB microsd card - imagine cheap, high-efficiency newspaper thin panels that you buy packaged like those plastic ponchos from a 7/11 that you just unfurl onto the ground, plug in and power whatever you feasibly need.

The future of solar will be like telling someone in the 1980s that we live in a time where we give away 32gb of storage for free with company logos stamped on it at trade shows and it is so normalized that nobody takes any notice.

> First let me dispatch this "existing grid NOW and nuclear provides that" - it's a 7 year average lead time as of 2022; solar is 2.

Nuclear can certainly be made quicker if we had the political will to do so but I'm not going to try to argue that it's quick. That said, if we would have invested in this 20 years ago like we should have it wouldn't have been a problem. The argument has been "wind & solar are going to ramp up so quickly in the near future so why build nuclear?" and then it takes longer than we thought and underwhelming progress is made.

Regardless of how long it takes:

> The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

> It's also expandable and upgradable and you can start producing after the first station is done. Your 2022 nuclear reactor will still be based on 2022 technology in 2072. The solar farm, however, will be current with the times as the parts are swappable.

This argument doesn't really make sense. You can't add reactors to a nuclear plant? Or retrofit them as needed? The primary form of generating all forms of electric other than photovoltaics uses steam to spin a turbine; that's the same now as it was 100+ years ago. Who cares if it's 2022 technology in 2072 if it's producing useful electricity?

I'm sure solar panels have some runway to the technology, but that's not the point here. Solar currently does not have the ability to drop into the existing grid with large scale, on-demand energy nor will it in the foreseeable future. It's a slice of the energy pie, but to say that it's going to improve so much doesn't mean it's a wise idea to put all your eggs in that basket.

It’s questionable whether the price can stay as low as it currently is though. The three major manufacturers of wind turbines are basically operating at a loss on the turbines themselves. The price can’t go much lower.

But we really should not make energetic decisions into a free market question. Of course market prices are a fundamental aspect, but going all-in on a single, cheapest source will be a huge liability and the whole thing should be planned for. E.g. it really makes sense to have a base load and a quick to turn on/off load for spikes in energy usage. Nuclear is very useful for the former and I don’t see not using it (besides renewables of course!) a great decision.

As an aside, we don't need fusion to go anywhere on the inner Solar System. Fission is more than sufficient for that.

(Fission looks like enough for interstellar travel too, but it's way harder to refuel.)

Comparing intermittent sources with non-intermittent sources is comparing apples to oranges. A realistic comparison would also include the cost of energy storage, as well as transmission line construction to support energy transport [1]. Intermittent sources are shockingly cheap if you naively compare on a watt-hour basis, ignoring the cost of storing and releasing energy. Unfortunately, storage at the scale required remains expensive and unfeasible [2] and are actually rising due to lithium prices rising 10x over the last few years [3].

1. Wind and solar need to be built in specific places, and thus have to move large amounts of energy over long distances. This frequently requires expansions to the energy grid: https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...

2. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-co...

3. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium

> Wind and solar need to be built in specific places, and thus have to move large amounts of energy over long distances.

That's not exclusive to wind and solar. From the ones I've seen in my country:

1. Hydroelectric power needs particular geographic features, and an abundance of water. Of the 4 long-distance HVDC links in my country, 4 of them are there to move large amounts of energy from large hydroelectric power plants to the region where most of the power demand is.

2. Coal is cheaper when it doesn't need to be transported for long distances. Not coincidentally, most of the few coal power plants in my country seem to have been built close to (or directly next to) coal mines; the exception I've seen was built next to the coast, and receives coal by ship.

3. Gas power plants tend to be built either next to already existent gas pipelines, or next to the coast to receive LNG by ship.

Ok I'm going to explain the bit that no one wants to accept about those "shockingly cheap" wind/solar W's. Which the cheapest I think I've seen are only about 1/2 the cost of carbon based energy (which swings between NG and coal being the cheapest).

Lets talk solar because its initially easier to reason about:

So when you see $X per (K/W/G)watt compared to $Y per (K/W/G)watt for coal/ng/oil/nuke/etc your comparing what is basically the nameplate generational capacity of a renewable resource with the nameplate generational capacity of a reliable source. Then everyone gets happy and walks away.

But really lets say that you get 12H of solar production a day (which is a bit hand wavy because it won't ever produce peak power in the morning/evening).

So now on a given day your actually producing 12Wh of energy, but lets say for a moment you need 24Wh of energy evenly spread over the day. That same 1W NG plant can provide that. So to reach the 24Wh of reliable generation you need

2*SolarW

But because 1/2 of it is at night what you need is

1xSolar during the day+1x solar to charge a 12Wh battery+1x battery*12 (which we are going to call a 1x battery from now on)

Now what happens if the sun fails to shine 1 day every two weeks?

Well now you need 1xSolar during the day+1x solar to charge for the night+1x battery+2x solar to charge the dark day+2x battery

1xSolar * 4+1xbattery * 3

And once every 3 months the sun doesn't shine for two days.

1xsolar*6+1xbattery*5

So, lets assume batteries cost 3x per 12Wh what 1W solar does and they last 1/2 as long (15 years say).

Now lets say the battery cost per unit solar is 6x.

So to just handle the case of two dark days in a row its:

6*x+(5*x*6)=36x the installed W price of solar.

But in reality lets say you want 3 9's generational reliability (which is probably still two more than you get with that 36x above) how much redundancy do you need? The answer in many places where its possible the sun doesn't shine for a week or more at a time is further multiples of the above! Making solar by far the most expensive sources of energy, only comparable with wind, in just how bad it actually is.

So, how does it work today? Well generally the wind/solar plants serve to green wash, and depending on the environment and the fuel costs of NG either make it slightly less expensive or significantly more vs the just running NG plants. The equation works out that one installs NG plants equal to the peak load, then installs just enough wind+solar to reduce to 0 NG consumption (usually for month or so in the spring) at peak renewable production. Any installed capacity beyond that just drives up the price. Put another way, the "battery" today is a natural gas combined cycle generator, and you can only install enough renewables until the constant operational costs stop reducing the fuel costs of the NG plant. Beyond that the prices shoot up.

Now the really bad news, energy utilization has been steadily increasing, and the carbon savings have generally been going down per W generated, but the total carbon production has been holding steady or going up. In other words 0 progress over the past three decades in reducing carbon footprint.

And there is literally nothing changing over the next ten+ years. We might get another order of magnitude or two of battery production but it won't make a dent. That might be enough to electrify the personal vehicle fleet, which is ~15% of carbon emissions, it won't do anything for all the new NG plants required to back up the extra electricity generation requirements for those vehicles.

In ten years though, if we started today we could shutdown every coal plant and replace it with nukes while still increasing overall generational capacity to meet the demand created by the electric cars. And at least in the US we wouldn't have to open another mine, if we just took the existing waste and reprocessed it. And if we passed some national laws stopping some of the NIMBYism we could probably build them cheap enough to make the energy price competitive with carbon sources.

We can play around with the install vs operational cost model, but that is sorta the summary.

So, when I hear people talking about "renewables" (ignoring hydro) I hear people who don't understand energy markets, politics and engineering because even if you manage to get the market+engineering in place to support a lot of wind+solar consumption people are going to be in the streets burning down your house when they get the bill.

So, yah, there is really only one replacement for a coal plan, and its a nuke plant, and it can in theory be cheaper (Nuke plants were cheaper than NG in the past) but until the NIMBY's get out of the way its going to cost more, how much more to save the planet is a political question, but even today it should be fairly easy to do without doubling the generational price.

Yes, a 100% solar grid would be very expensive. But a 90% renewable grid backed by 10% natural gas would be pretty cheap. And it's already rapidly under construction right now, and the natural gas infrastructure for it already exists. It would get us 90% of the carbon benefits, and buy time to figure out how to clean up the last 10% of the grid.

90% nuclear plus 10% hydro would be a fine end state. But we're at a standing start. The incremental change from "we're building 1 nuclear power plant which is years behind schedule and wildly over budget" to "we're simultaneously building 50 new nuclear reactors" is immense and I do not see how we get past it.

Except that its nearly impossible to get to 90% with either wind or solar by itself because when you look at the weather data the average capacity factors are really misleading. If you look at the data and say, I'm at 40% what does it take to get to 60% its many multiples overbuild. Mixing them helps a bit, but is nowhere near a solution either.

The problem boils down to the fact that you can't overbuild enough to solve the problem of the wind not blowing or the sun not shining for days at end. Which sounds uncommon but that is what happens. The wind goes gangbusters for months on end then sits there doing nothing for a week or two and your producing at <10% of the rated capacity. Sometimes you can replace it with solar, sometimes not if you have two random sequences with probabilities that they produce nothing for a while, eventually they overlap and you are SOL.

Someone should really build a proper weather + price simulation that shows what having 8x idle windmills and a couple overbuilt solar farms and idle gas-plant (which all need maintenance and their bonds paid) for 70% of the time does to the price of electricity. Because that is what happens to get to 90% when your not selling the excess/buying it back from C02 sources and then confusing people with gross consumption vs net. Maybe someone can dump all that excess power into CO2 recapture or something, but at the moment the economics are crazy bad.

And I might buy that every bit helps, but we are in many cases going backwards, doing the same thing we did for the past 10 years for the next 10 is going to be even more disastrous as its been from 2010-2020. The carbon output needs to go to 0, not 90% of what we did last year. The richer countries should all absolutely be economy wide carbon neutral, and that isn't going to happen because no one has airplanes or new electric rail, or electric plant build plans to get the 2x electric demand increase required to start actually reducing transportation and heating Co2 much less actually have a grid that only sources 10% of its energy from carbon which isn't already there via Nukes or Hydro.

And I love the downvoters who are having their feeling hurt because they don't want to believe that renewables and batteries wont solve this problem anytime soon.

So the short version is, that until you understand that a solar farm at 40% or a wind farm with an average 30% capacity factor can't produce 100% of the required generation when you 3x overbuild them, you won't understand why solar+wind doesn't work.

>You’d think if the future depended on it, build times could be reduced.

That seems to be what Japan did until Fukushima went boom.

>Instead we’ve been building more coal plants.

That seems to be what Japan did after Fukushima went boom.

To be fair, coal has quite widely replaced all around the world in the last 8 years by a mix of wind, solar and gas. It's now almost as unattractive to investors as nuclear power is.

At this point, there are multiple well-developed western economies with regulatory regimes that are generally trusted to adequately keep the perverse incentives of business in check. It would be an interesting regulatory experiment to charter a project that would be subject to a different regulatory environment than the country in which it was physically built. For example, a nuclear plant in the US that was exempt from all US regulations, but had to meet all of the French ones - built by French companies, inspected by French inspectors, etc. Just a wholesale transplant of the entire business/regulatory culture, as a point of competition.

(Obviously there are a thousand ways for this to go wrong, but entertain the idea anyway)

If you follow French next gen design builds, this has not been the case. Not as bad a US builds, but not exactly on time as the earlier builds.

Thus far only a couple of the French next gen builds have been built in France. During the Messmer plan, dozens of the same design were built. The fact that the former is more expensive than the latter isn't contradicting the claim that serial production is cheaper than one-off production.

It's not magic, when you build series like France did in the 70s and 80s (I think they were building 8 or 9 reactors a year), the time and cost reduce. When every project is a unique design, they cost a lot and have lots of delays. Wind and solar would be much more expensive without economies of scales (and if the cost of dealing with their volatility would be factored in).

Many solar & wind plants do have the cost of dealing with their volatility built in. For example, 8minuteenergy is developing several solar+battery projects and selling that energy for 4cents per KWh.

Exactly.

Also should be noted that even at the height of France’s building the bigger and more complex reactors took longer and never got down to the build times of the smaller ones: the CP (900MWe) series got down to about 5 years, the P4 (1300) all needed 7+ iirc.

It would really have helped the argument if coal had not been turned into a culture war. Are we all ready to admit that coal sucks now?

My grandpa didn't die of black lung just so you can go around spreading baseless lies that coal might be harmful. (/s)

The very first nuclear reactor went from idea to operating in 2 years. In the middle of WW2.

The only reason nuclear projects take longer than other industrial projects is regulatory capture.

During WW2 the US could build a ship in 39 days. Now it takes 10 years.

I know this point is made a lot but I’m not sure it’s that meaningful.

WW2 boats were not the enormously complex network and sensor systems that today’s are. While, yeah, 10 years is extreme, but I don’t think 39 days is physically possible.

The 39 day boats built in WW2 were probably more similar in complexity to a modern boat than a WW2 reactor is to a modern reactor.

I would be surprised if some of the systems were actually harder to work on back then. Old battleships always seemed to have insane amounts of wiring and cabling, because they used the nightmarish one signal per wire protocol in the pre digital age.

> because they used the nightmarish one signal per wire protocol in the pre digital age.

Can you say more about this? I find that kind of thing fascinating.

https://softsolder.com/2017/11/05/battleship-wiring/

They presumably used to have to run an individual wire for every. single. signal, or at most, they'd have extremely simple multiplexing.

I have no idea what these cables do, but I'm glad I'm not the one repairing it. Not only is there physically a lot of wire, 90% of it looks to be going directly to something mechanical.

I don't know how modern ships do it, but with civilian digital logic , you'd probably run a few redundant ethernet(Or fiber, or CAN) links to some kind of fan out box right near the switches or motors.

Cars these days are very extreme about it, sometimes even running the entertainment system commands over the fairly critical CAN bus for some reason.

If one of those cables went bad, spanning tree protocol would save you till you fix it, and probably tell you which cable broke and maybe even where. Mix them up, no problem, firmware knows what to do.

Plus, everything goes through a computer, so you've got logging and all kinds of stuff to help spot issues, rather than the classic "Oh well, noise and intermittent connections, we live with it till it gets bad enough to be all the time".

The only rats nest is right from the mechanical switch to your PLCish thing, but that's short enough to trace by eye.

You might have zero concern about interference in cables, because they might be fiber.

You won't have complicated color code schemes or wiring diagrams, or cut off wires that nobody knows where they go to anymore, you can just test it, because you don't have 50 thousand things to sift through.

People argue about whether digital or analog is more reliable, but digital is definitely easier from a hardware perspective, the hard stuff is done in factories by robots.

I'm sure the technicians had special training and it was a lot better than average civilian industrial uses of the pile o wires system, but I would think it would still be time consuming and not paralellizable, only so many people can fit around one of those giant bundles at once.

I could also be vastly misinterpreting how modern ships are wired, I know some industrial setups today insist on home run wiring instead of condensing to digital.

That picture makes “cable management” take on a whole new meaning, my goodness.

It was Liberty ships—slow, high-capacity, not especially durable cargo ships built as fast as possible, assembly-line style. The median construction time only got that low after the assembly line really got going and they were able to work out some kinks. It was over 200 days early on.

Warships—none of the capitals ships, certainly—weren't built that fast. Not even the cheap-as-hell escort carriers we built tons and tons of, I don't think. Destroyers and little corvettes and other smalls screen and utility ships, maybe some of those weren't too far from 39-day construction times.

And you think the safety record of those ships was the same as today?

A hell of a lot safer than a WW2 reactor!

Or because covering half of Europe to the level that in some places you, even to this day, have to measure the radiation levels of mushroom and wild game is irrelevant?

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Distribution-of-radiatio...

Well, and that the nuclear reactors back then commonly had terrible accidents and after Chernobyl (and TMI in a lessor manner) we realized that you can really screw up the planet with a nuclear oopsie whoopsie.

The planet? No, you can’t.

The wartime Hanford reactors did not produce any electricity. They had no safety containment systems. And they released cooling water containing radioactive contamination directly into the Columbia River:

https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Proce...

Aside from "possible catastrophes" involving control rod failures, enemy bombing, or sabotage, DuPont's greatest concerns about reactor operations involved pumping Columbia River water through the reactors for cooling purposes. Using a "once-through" system, water was taken from the river and chemically treated before passing through the core of the reactor at the rate of 75,000 gallons per minute and being released back into the river. The reactor used canned fuel slugs, which prevented radioactive fuel from getting into the coolant as long as the cans did not accidentally rupture. Even if no fuel escaped, however, there was induced radioactivity of the impurities and treatment chemicals within the water. Radioactivity thus inevitably entered the Columbia. To alleviate possible dangers, DuPont engineers diverted the heated and "somewhat radioactive" exit water, containing mostly, but not exclusively, short-lived radionuclides, as well as certain chemical contaminants, to a 12,000,000 gallon retention basin. Each basin was divided in two, with the two sides operating in parallel. Monitoring for radioactivity occurred at the inlet to the basin, at an intermediate point, and at the exit. After six hours, radioactivity diminished by a factor of about twenty. With radioactivity below the then tolerance dose for complete immersion, the water was further diluted with wastewater free from radioactivity and returned via underground pipes for release in mid-river.

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