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Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

> nuke generation is cheap if you push all the risks for construction cost overruns onto someone else.

I am a big fan of nuke as the generation source that is mostly environmentally benign right now today full stop. It's well known, though, that the main problem with nuke is that it's very expensive to build because we're quite worried about the safety so we have a lot of process and regulatory approval built into the design and construction. That extra process and regulatory approval is quite expensive.

Of course it's a lot cheaper if you just disregard those things.

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There are certainly a lot of excuses for why nuclear is so expensive. As far as I can tell they are all just that, excuses. Korea is by far the largest producer of nuclear power plants today. They have the scale that people claim is necessary to reduce cost. They have the pro nuclear regulatory environment that would never be politically possible in the states. Nuclear still costs them more than solar and wind.

> Nuclear still costs them more than solar and wind

...if you ignore storage.

Solar and wind will continue to be the most expensive, difficult to scale method until the issue of energy storage is resolved.

Batteries are getting cheaper, but they're not being produced on the scale necessary to supplant base load power. Until then, you need to calculate the full cost of base load into the cost of solar and wind if you want to consider them a substitute, rather than a compliment.

You are my hero, been telling this at clouds for years after I took a power engineering course. Solar and wind are cheaper until you consider storage and grid reliability. Grid storage battery can be used for peaker/frequency regulation regardless of what you used to charge them full stop.

> Solar and wind are cheaper until you consider storage and grid reliability.

Counter example. South Australia hit 80% of it's electricity production from renewables in the last two quarters:

    https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australia-enjoys-80-1-pct-wind-and-solar-share-in-blackout-free-summer/

Power prices are now cheaper then before renewables were took over:

    https://www.aemc.gov.au/sites/default/files/2021-11/sa_fact_pack.pdf

Grid reliability remains about the same as everywhere else:

    https://reneweconomy.com.au/five-years-after-blackout-south-australia-now-only-state-with-no-supply-shortfalls/

They're five times cheaper when you dont take storage into account. Theyre cheaper after you consider storage too.

Indeed, if you use solar and wind to synthesize natural gas and burn that for electricity (a process that is ~40% efficient) it's still cheaper.

https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...

This means that even on the darkest most windless winter days when the grid has to eat into long term seasonal storage, solar and wind energy is currently still cheaper than an MWh of nuclear power is on the sunniest, windiest days.

I too, am pro-grid scale solar (and wind). However, solar and wind require both land, or at least suitable locations. It aint compact. The decision to do solar might be constrained by population centers - you can't build it too far away, but can't be too close; there may not be such an available space.

Nuclear is compact, and can really be built anywhere (may be consider earthquakes and don't build near tsunami zones). Therefore, a country that does not have suitable solar or win terrain would necessarily have to consider nuclear. A place like South Korea.

But of course, countries like australia (and to some extend the USA, and many other countries that's not in europe) would have the land, and it's just political and financial reasons that these power sources aren't more invested in.

> Nuclear is compact, and can really be built anywhere (may be consider earthquakes and don't build near tsunami zones). Therefore, a country that does not have suitable solar or win terrain would necessarily have to consider nuclear.

It really isn't if mining is expanded. Low yield mines (the only kind left for new resource) produce tens of watts per m^2

It has also shown no evidence of being viable without a river, coastline or lake. It needs specific geological and geographic features and it can't be too close to population centers or important watersheds.

Contrast with wind where the land right up to the base of the tower can be used and solar where the land under the panels can be more productive than it would without partial shade (effectively a negative land use).

Not that the quantity of land matters because for solar it's over 20W/m^2 and usually over 50W/m^2 -- more land is reserved for the average US car to park in than required to power someone's life.

It doesn't monopolize that land though. There is already a vast amount of farmland, for instance, which is hosting wind and solar and operating about as efficiently as before.

In theory nuclear power being compact would serve it well for small countries without a lot of space (e.g. Singapore), but because of the risks they want nothing to do with it.

South Korea builds nuclear power for the same reason as Iran and Sweden: it's part of their national strategy to be able to quickly develop nukes. It's not about economics.

So you're advocating for a base load of natural gas power plants, with wind and solar supplementing them, which was my original point- that they only work as a supplement, rather than a replacement, for nuclear and fossil fuels.

Maybe nuclear isn't a great alternative to natural gas. I'm down with that. I'm not going to ignore the fact that wind and solar are at best complimentary, and that we can talk about pricing them without also talking about pricing in the base load that they're supplementing.

I'm advocating for solar+wind+batteries+pumped storage+windgas long term which provides supply matching demand cheaper than nuclear power.

Windgas (synthesized natural gas) is carbon neutral, for what it's worth. It's inefficient to make but stores for long periods very cheaply so it's good for when the pumped storage and batteries run dry - e.g. rare long spells of relatively dark/still weather.

Short term while grids are 60% natural gas powered with no need for baseload it makes even less sense to build nuclear instead of solar or wind. 5x more expensive and 5x-20x as long to build? Why?

> Theyre cheaper after you consider storage too.

What's the price of the Ukraine war?

Sure, but the biggest problem with nuclear is it takes a decade to build the plants, at best. It's impossible to plan on that time scale because you have no idea what the alternatives will look like once the plant is operational. You may have just spent billion on an energy source that is already obsolete.

That's a figure with some bounce to it:

    Nuclear reactors connected to the grid in 2021 had a median construction time of 88 months. (7.3 years) [1]

and

    According to an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) study, Tuesday, 15 countries have built a total of 83 nuclear plants over the last 20 years among the 31 countries with nuclear power. It took on average 190 months to build each plant.

    During that period, Korea has built a total of 13 nuclear power plants. The average construction period for each plant was only 56 months (4.6 years), more than three times faster than other countries building nuclear plants. [2]

South Korea insists it meets Nuclear Safety and Security Commission standards, by contrast:

    In France, [ ... ] taking an average of 126 months to build each plant, nearly three times as long as Japan. [2]

    The United States has a total of 100 nuclear power plants, taking on average 272 months to complete one. [2]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/712841/median-constructi...

[2] https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/2027347/south-korea-s...

You should definitely add the timelines for Japan and China from [2]

  Japan, which has built a total of eight nuclear power plants since 1996, was the fastest, taking only 46 months to build each plant, while China ranked third, building 28 nuclear power plants during that period and averaging 68 months to complete each one.

  Japan’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant Unit 6 is the world’s fastest-built nuclear power plant, taking only 39 months for completion, while of Korea’s Wolseong Nuclear Power Plant Reactor 3 took 49 months to build.

> The United States has a total of 100 nuclear power plants, taking on average 272 months to complete one.

Looks like one or two plants never finished.

You don't build a nuclear power plant for in ten years though, you build and plan it for the next 100. If there's better sources once it's been built, that's fine, they can be operated alongside the nuclear power plant - or the plant can be decomissioned, it wouldn't be the first one that gets decomissioned even before being put into production.

From the point of view of someone providing a stable grid no matter the cost this is correct. But from an investor's point of view this is problematic.

Most of the cost of nuclear power is in building and demolishing the plant, not in operating it. So if you plan a plant now to go operational in 10 years and run for the next 50, you are locked in to producing electricity for (amortized) $60/MWh for the next decades. Or shut it down early and eat a giant loss, if the projections for solar, wind and storage costs become true. That's a hard sell when you also have the option to build a wind farm in 5 years or a solar installation in two, decommission them after 20 years and repeat with whatever is the most cost effective then.

> if you plan a plant now to go operational in 10 years and run for the next 50, you are locked in to producing electricity for (amortized) $60/MWh for the next decades. Or shut it down early and eat a giant loss

Time will tell if that hypothesis remains true, but inflation is a thing. What you build now with an amortizing cost over decades may weight much cheaper on your debt than you thought.

In that aspect, if you're a state actor, paying more to get lower maintenance costs is usually a good choice.

I did the math on this myself earlier to understand the problem. Solar is VERY expensive if you include storage, if you can even get it. We will need natural gas and coal until we do. In the future I expect that this will change as battery production gets off the ground at the scale we need. But that will take a lot of time we don't have.

Nuclear makes a lot of sense if we want to be off coal and natural gas in the next 5-10 years. If we want to burn fossil fuels until 2060 then solar and wind are okay I guess. There is a reason that fossil fuel companies lobby heavily against nuclear and fund immense campaigns against it. It's a direct competitor. Solar and battery on the other hand are just barely off the ground right now.

Nuclear reactors typically take about 100 months to build--and that's just the construction phase, not the pre-construction design and permitting--so no, they won't help in the next 5 - 10 years.

1. https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/nuclear-construction-ti...

The article you posted said 6-8 years. 100 months is in the US due to the legal and political climate that supports fossil fuel generation. In the US there is even backlash against wind power of all things... It's part of the reason why nuclear plants are built so large in the US.

This is one problem I have with anti-nuclear propaganda. It uses the fact that it's been so successful at destroying nuclear power, as evidence that it's right in the first place.

I would bet money that storage is a solved problem by the end of the decade, about the same amount of time it takes to build a nuclear reactor.

What stocks are you buying and how much of your retirement fund are you betting?

LiCycle and GMET, and also exercising my own company’s stock options. As soon as Form Energy goes public I’ll put a significant amount of money into them as well.

Most of the companies I'd like to buy aren't public yet. As for retirement, I'd probably put 20% into energy storage, again if I could.

It's a false dichotomy anyway, because I wouldn't put _any_ money into nuclear stocks.

Storage IS a solved problem, it's just not scaled up yet (batteries) or depends on geography (water / hydro).

Battery storage is still mostly LiIon, simply because it has a lot of preexisting investment in R&D and large-scale production. I expect battery storage to become much more economical once a technology developed for the requirements of grid-scale storage takes off. There are plenty of good candidates, but none of them seem to be quite there yet.

I also expect a lot more hydro to be built eventually, it's not as dependent on geography if you just build two ponds at different elevations for pumped hydro, or repurpose old mineshafts to get the elevation difference on flat ground.

The investment and energy going into solving energy storage will bear fruit long before any of the many technical and regulatory hurdles in the way of cheap nuclear power are cleared. And I’ve put my money where my mouth is on this.

how much storage capacity do you think is needed to deal with the worst cases for solar/wind that are encountered during the year? Last time I did a rough calculation on this, I quickly realized there is a fairly low upper limit on how much wind/solar capacity one can install, because the storage required is so immense.

One of the biggest blind spots in this conversation is people who think renewables need lots of storage, but nuclear doesn't.

What's your calculation on the amount of batteries needed for a nuclear grid to meet all peak needs?

Once you've done the sums you'll almost certainly say something like, "well we can just overbuild nuclear and find uses for the excess, including timeshifting".

It's the exact same problem (matching demand and supply), with the same solutions but one gets hyperfocus at the same time the other is totally ignored.

Nuclear doesn't need any storage because the power is generated continuously at the same pace. On the other hand, there's no sun during the night and wind strength is variable and cannot always be harnessed.

If you want to have all the power generated by renewable, you would need big enough storage to hold all the power consumption during the highest peaks - like really hot summer nights where everyone is running AC at maximum. And it tends to cost quite a lot to have a giant UPS. And, because we need power 24/7, you need to have that in a redundant fashion, which basically boils down to two giant UPS systems in the gigawatt range. And I have this feeling that doing this is very dirty and very expensive to build and maintain.

but demand isn't flat.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35441549

right, but that means you still have to over-build capacity

So are you complaining about changing demand? Or about overbuilding?

Note: it's much easier to "overbuild" nuclear because nothing can compare to it in terms of power density.

Demand isn't flat and nuclear can't scale quickly enough to meet the daily peaks and troughs.

> Demand isn't flat and nuclear can't scale quickly enough to meet the daily peaks and troughs.

Of course it can. https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...

--- start quote ---

Modern nuclear plans with light water reactors are designed to have strong manoeuvring capabilities. Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode, i.e. they participate in the primary and secondary frequency control, and some units follow a variable load programme with one or two large power changes per day.

... according to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100 % of its rated power P. with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% of P, per minute.

Most of the modern designs implement even higher manoeuvrability capabilities, with the possibility of planned and unplanned load-following in a wide power range and with ramps of 5% P, per minute.

(Where P is rated power)

--- end quote ---

So you're overbuilding nuclear, and then throwing the extra power away when you don't need it with (at best) no savings on fuel or running costs? That doesn't sound cheap.

Wouldn't it make sense to take some of that power and make hydrogen or something that can be stored for later peaks? Then maybe you can close the nuclear plant you only turn on 1% of the time and fill that peak with hydrogen instead and save a lot of money.

Maybe offer cheap rates at night so EV users fill up on cheap nuclear power when it's available. Or store heat in water tanks or brick. Or use some of that power to pump water uphill like nuclear plants have been doing for half a century already.

You could do like France and schedule refueling during the summer when the demand is lower and taking a plant offline has less impact.

Lots of boring sensible things you can do to match nuclear supply to demand.

But of course if you admit these things exist, it kind of puts a big hole in your argument, so best to pretend they don't happen and are only needed for renewables.

> So you're overbuilding nuclear

So are complaining about changing demand or about overbuilding?

> Wouldn't it make sense to take some of that power and make hydrogen or something that can be stored for later peaks?

Yes, you could probably do that if any if those solutions scaled in any meaningful shape or form.

> But of course if you admit these things exist, it kind of puts a big hole in your argument

My argument was that your claim that "demand isn't flat and nuclear can't scale quickly enough to meet the daily peaks and troughs" is a lie.

None of the weird tangent you went off on makes a hole in this argument: nuclear power can scale quickly and is literally used to do that right now.

The fact that it isn't used for something that you want it used for is completely orthogonal to whether it can be scaled or not. For example, no one stores nuclear power in hydrogen or whatever because it's literally not needed because nuclear power can be scaled quickly on demand.

> My argument was that your claim that "demand isn't flat and nuclear can't scale quickly enough to meet the daily peaks and troughs" is a lie.

That was someone else's argument, and the second part is kind of irrelevant, but it's also true.

The speed that Nuclear can ramp, even in the best case is not enough to match demand spikes. It doesn't ramp as fast as gas plants and gas plants don't ramp as fast as batteries.

So even if you ramp nuclear, at an increased cost, you still need gas or batteries or hydro for fast ramps. So you might as well use the power you ramp down to fill batteries, make syngas or hydrogen or fill pumped storage.

Just like you'd do with excess renewables.

> The speed that Nuclear can ramp, even in the best case is not enough to match demand spikes.

Because Nuclear isn't 100% of all power output. Of course it can't ramp up from, say 20% to 100%.

And yet, it does ramp up quickly.

> It doesn't ramp as fast as gas plants and gas plants don't ramp as fast as batteries.

5% of rated power per minute is plenty fast. Not as fast as gas plants, true. And for batteries... There's this funny little things of: there are literally no batteries at scale required by demand spikes. And won't be in any near future.

Meanwhile if you followed the links, you could see the graph showing how nuclear power plants go from ~650 MW to ~1400MW to meat demand (which is mostly predictable day to day).

How many batteries you need to have extra ~800 MW per plant every day? And how many renewable sources to provide that excess?

(Edit: largest energy storage seems to be Ouarzazate Solar Power Station with 510 MW of storage, thermal storage. Everything else is lower. To keep up with a single nuclear plant in the report you'd need two of those)

> Just like you'd do with excess renewables.

Except, for "excess renewables" you need to both overbuild them significantly more, and provide significantly more batteries because besides fast load following (which they can't do, and nuclear can) their base load is literally zero (and it's never zero with nuclear unless you take the plant completely offline).

Spikes occur at various timescales. There are seasonal spikes (due to heating/AC), daily spikes (more power in morning and evening), and spikes on the millisecond to minute level due to random chance. Nuclear can't deal with the short spikes, and while it can deal with the long spikes, it's not efficient to do so since roughly 100% of the costs of nuclear are initial construction and personnel so running at reduced power levels doesn't save any cost.

Batteries already exist that handle demand spikes on the shorter timescales (e.g. in Australia). and hydro is currently the best for medium timescale storage (that said there's a bunch of R&D currently into better grid batteries since they have very different performance requirements than portable batteries since weight and volume don't matter, just cost and cycles).

Nuclear is pretty much the worst tech to overbuild because it's already expensive and it's price per kwh goes way up if you use it infrequently.

> Spikes occur at various timescales. There are seasonal spikes (due to heating/AC), daily spikes (more power in morning and evening), and spikes on the millisecond to minute level due to random chance.

The first two are easily handled by nuclear (which you'd know if you read the report).

Literally nothing can handle "millisecond spikes due to random chance".

Renewables like solar and wind can't really handle any of the three because their power generation is intermittent. So you have to overbuild both them and their storage.

> Batteries already exist that handle demand spikes on the shorter timescales (e.g. in Australia).

Of course they don't exist. Not anywhere near the scale required.

> and hydro is currently the best for medium timescale storage

Ah yes, hydro. That is so easily available and easy to build just about anywhere, and on the required scale.

> Nuclear is pretty much the worst tech to overbuild because it's already expensive and it's price per kwh goes way up if you use it infrequently.

Of course it's the best tech to "overbuild" (because you don't need to overbuild much).

Once again:

- it's the highest energy density we know

- it's stable power generation (not intermittent like most renewables)

- it requires significantly less storage (because it can scale up quickly: most renewables can't even handle daily power spikes)

- it requires significantly less area to build

- the costs for renewables somehow never include the costs for the required overbuilding and the costs for required storage.

Again: in the report you can see just one of the power plants easily scale from 650MW to 1400 MW during the day. And that's for power plants built 45 years ago. What are your renewable + battery solutions capable of that, and their cost?

> The first two are easily handled by nuclear

I never said or implied otherwise.

> Literally nothing can handle "millisecond spikes due to random chance".

Batteries can (see https://energytransition.org/2015/06/batteries-stabilize-the...)

> Of course they don't exist.

Wrong. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/08/australia-switches-on-victor...

> That is so easily available and easy to build just about anywhere, and on the required scale.

I know, right! It's so cool! https://www.energy.gov/eere/water/hydropower-program

> because you don't need to overbuild much).

Based on variation of demand, you need to overbuild any source by at least 50% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...

> it's the highest energy density we know

Doesn't matter at all. We don't pay by land used, we pay by total cost.

> it's stable power generation

True. That's why it makes sense to have for baseload (but is stupid to overbuild)

> it requires significantly less storage

Not really since no one would ever build a purely nuclear grid because it would cost way too much.

> it requires significantly less area to build

Again. Irrelevant

> the costs for renewables somehow never include the costs for the required overbuilding and the costs for required storage.

That's because the amount of overbuilding and storage needed depend strongly on a bunch of factors and aren't that useful.

Using https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e... as a source for LCOE numbers by power plant type (there may be a better one). Solar has LCOE of (very roughly) $70/MWH while nuclear has LCOE of roughly $175 if you ignore nuclear's decommissioning and operational costs (which are both significant and would almost certainly push the figure up to over $200).

This yields a pure nuclear grid cost of approximately $85B. Alternatively, you can overbuild solar and wind by 3x and have a couple days of storage (which is doable with hydro), and you come out ahead.

What I said was the Nuclear can run at 100% all the time to account for peaks with little to no impact on the amount of nuclear fuel used. I see it as a super win.

> nuclear doesn't.

nuclear "battery" storage is the uranium or plutonium inside the plant.

Don’t have the number in my head, but my day job is building software to enable (among other things) moving load around to avoid the “worst case,” which is just as good as building the storage.

> Don’t have the number in my head

That’s because it’s weeks, if not months, in places that have actual seasons.

> moving load around to avoid the “worst case,”

There is no such thing with base load in winter. You either provide constant heating or people freeze.

There are places where rearranging the chairs works and there are places where it doesn’t.

There hasn‘t been a single day in Germany last year where renewable energy dropped below 30% of consumption. So overbuilt geographically dispersed systems can handle a very wide range of weather conditions, even without battery and hydrogen storage taken into account.

German grid must be very low in terms of CO2 emissions then, right? Not just marginally better than neighbouring Poland?

Sodium ion batteries will change this equation. 150 wh/kg, not even lithium is needed.

The tech for sodium ion batteries have been around since the 1970's or 80's. The problem is capacity fade- the most stable anodes require titanium or molybdenum, and even then they're not a great deal better than lead acid batteries.

The cheapest low-end estimate for sodium-ion batteries is $40 per kw/h of capacity. The Texas grid at any point had about 85 gigawatts of available generation capacity in 2021 (100% would be around 115, but solar and wind aren't always producing, plants are sometimes offline for maintenance, etc).

So, with no nuclear or fossil fuel production, you're looking at $27 billion just to buy the batteries (not counting installation or maintenance costs) to keep the lights on for 8 hours in Texas on a windless night.

That's at the cheapest option, so you can figure that you'll need to pay roughly 1/4 of that a year making up for batteries that have lost capacity. If you double it, that drops to 1/5 to 1/6 the total cost, unless a miracle occurs in anode tech or the weather is wonderful and they don't cycle as frequently.

Of course, three days of mild, cloudy weather means brownouts or blackouts, because 8 hours of storage is not very much at all. If it were connected to other grids, they could import excess energy from across the continent, but that means those places won't be recharging their own batteries, and you now need to factor in more HVDC lines, and over-provisioning to cover transmission losses into your base price.

Nobody is saying replace ALL energy generation with wind and solar. It’s ok to have a baseline to keep the basics running at least. Also I never understood why is the default that we all have to have as much energy at our disposal as we want, with a bit of preparation on our end we can easily deal with any intermittent power issues. This is such a consumerist, comfort-over-everything view

> This is such a consumerist, comfort-over-everything view

I wish this bad-faith nonsense would vanish, and people would stick to issues.

I was in South Africa when the blackouts really started, in 2014 and 2015, and every person and business that could afford it bought a diesel generator. Not for their comfort, except in an extreme definition of the word. For their survival. Businesses cannot survive without power. Hospitals cannot. Communications networks cannot. Electric cars cannot.

But diesel and petrol generators and vehicles can. That's the most likely "preparation on our end".

I’m not talking about those extremes for fucks sake. A smart grid can prioritize hospitals and industry while not allowing you to spend energy on cooling your whole house at 19 Celsius. I’m not talking about going to the level of South Africa, I’m just saying we can be much smarter and deliberate about our energy usage.

We should do anything that is necessary to have power available anytime, even a bit in excess in case of potential spikes that are not usually accounted for.

I do not believe "smart-grids" or blackouts are the solution. And especially not having my power cut because someone somewhere decides that I should cook inside my house because the power consumption priority lies elsewhere.

Your baseline has to come from somewhere, which means the cost of that baseline has to be added into solar and wind. It's been my central point all along; intermittent generation can only complement, not replace, nuclear or fossils. At that point, you're better off building nuclear at scale using reproducing designs (or as close to as possible) to bring costs down like South Korea.

There's a solar install not too far from the Canadian border that has produced zero energy for months. It had to be shut down because, despite the panels being 16 feet tall, there are 12 feet of snow around them from accumulation and drifting. Over the next two days, they're getting another 6-12 inches of snow and sleet- conditions which cause wind turbines to draw energy from the grid to heat the blades so they don't build up ice and get damaged.

Is the answer to everyone not on the coast north of Arkansas to move somewhere else? For the whole of Canada to just get fucked?

No. All these answers use some extreme example. Fossil fuels are very useful, but they come with drawbacks. Let's not use them for everything just because it's currently conventient, let's make a scientific, engineering and manufacturing push to mitigate the bad effects as much as possible and use smart grids, renewable energy, nuclear and behaviour changes where possible. What a stupid answer. Don't put solar where it's covered in snow for months at a time, nobody is saying that.

So you want a future where the electric energy supply is unreliable. Such an infrastructure is orders of magnitude less useful (read cost efficient) than the current one.

There’s big difference in 95 percent reliability and 100 percent. Also with a smart grid we can prioritize industry but limit the cooling of the house to something like 25 degrees C. I’m talking about doing smart things with energy without just having a free for all

> Also I never understood why is the default that we all have to have as much energy at our disposal as we want

And there it is. Active hostility to improving our civilisational capabilities, celebrating decline. "People shouldn't have so much", and of course they never mean themselves. Politburo mindset.

You think the world's scientists constitute some kind of Politburo?

While the fossil companies - the ones that suppressed the research from those scientists for decades - are the freedom-loving heroes in this story?

This is the laziest strawman reply I‘ve received so far.

Yes let's improve it but not by boiling the planet and destroying it for the next generations so we can be nice and comfy. I honestly don't understand your point - either development is sustainable or it's not. If it's not it's selfish. IF you think that any care for others or a sense of responsibility leads to communism, you're the one that's brainwashed

Every generation since the dawn of time has had its doomsday prophets. The underlying psychology is "I can not imagine a world without me", in other words: pure narcissism. There is a reason its called "Extinction Rebellion" - look at their manifest [0], and tell me this is isn't a death cult.

I'm not saying climate change isn't real or that it isn't a problem, but we're certainly not "boiling the planet", and attacking the most vital foundation our societies are based on, namely reasonably cheap energy (everything depends on this), is insanely dangerous.

If the medicine is worse than the illness, its time to get rid of the doctor.

[0] "Advice to Young People as they face Annihilation" https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xlEbMab_dRs4Wx3nESYT0bkF...

Funny how all rationalizations we come to are conveniently the ones that alleviate us from any responsibility or blame. I'm advocating for taking responsibility, tackling the problem seriously and making sacrifices if necessary. I believe we can solve the problem and I'm all for improving the world of atoms instead of everybody working on stupid service industry jobs or pushing ads and widgets, but I don't see it happening - especially looking at responses to my post.

[0] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/

> Funny how all rationalizations we come to are conveniently the ones that alleviate us from any responsibility or blame.

See, you accuse me of rationalizing, because I apparently choose „the easy way out“. Making sacrifices is a feature, not a bug! This tells me climate activism satisfies a deep human need, the need for redemption, now that Christianity is dead. We sinned, and thus must atone. I get it, we all like to feel like Good People.

The problem is just that so much is at stake, namely our energy supply.

Man I don't know how to talk to people like you. It's like I'm going crazy. Imagine we're a tribe and most people are burning all wood supplies and wasting food having parties constantly. And some people are saying "hey winter is coming, we have to prepare, we'll be hungry and die" and all you get is "but look how comfy we are, look at all the warm jacuzzis we made, stop bugging me." Depressing.

To repeat myself: I'm not saying climate change isn't real or that it isn't a problem. We need to get off fossil fuels due to climate impact, finite deposits and health reasons. There are several ways how this can be done without dooming our children to significantly worse prosperity.

I take issue with the "if it doesn't hurt, it doesn't count" sentiment I so often encounter in these discussions. This tells me that it is not about solving a physics problem, which it is, but something different and potentially much more dangerous.

A good historical parallel to Extinction Rebellion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Cape_Colony_fro...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nongqawuse

They had a real problem with cattle diseases -- and a more imaginary problem with Europeans in "their" land -- and somehow imagined killing ALL their cattle would help solve both problems.

(Both the Xhosa and the Europeans were recent immigrants to the area.)

Because comfort matters? Essentially every advancement in society/technology is about making things easier and humans more comfortable.

Also, changing my home’s thermostat to 72 from 68 isn’t going to make renewables-only (or mostly) feasible. It would barely make a dent.

The only question is is it sustainable or not. I'd be very happy if there were many kWh of energy cheap and easy energy available to all. With how we currently approach the issue, the supporting systems will give out way before we reach that point. So, when your grandchildren ask why did you let things get to a point where whole cities need to be rebuilt, parts of the ecosystem have collapsed and constant wars are occurring over resources and migrations, show them this post and say hey at least I was comfortable.

You mean you will show them all of recorded human history?

Humans have always fought over resources. The idea that we should sacrifice advancement for purported sustainability is a very recent idea.

I’m overall still very happy the Industrial Revolution happened (despite global warming effects) and that we aren’t still living in an 1800s society where I have to worry about dying from an infected papercut or toiling away with a pickaxe.

We are living in the most peaceful time ever recorded. It’s hubris to think we are the “problem generation” or that the problems we face today aren’t solvable.

No, it's hubris to think we'll easily manage a system that's handling 44 quadrillion watts of power

nit: compliment → complement (in this case)

sigh I blame my phone's auto-correct feature.

>Batteries are getting cheaper, but they're not being produced on the scale necessary to supplant base load power

Snowy 2. Fengning.

In Poland literally overbuilding wind/solar by 10x would not sustain consumption on multiple days in December or January.

Funny you should say that: Poland installed 4.9 GW of solar in 2022 [0] compared to 5.3 GW capacity (nominal) of nuclear connected to the grid worldwide in 2021[1].

For many years, this has been a debate about nuclear’s supposedly huge potential in the face of actually existing solar and wind capacity running circles around actually existing nuclear.

0. https://notesfrompoland.com/2022/12/20/poland-has-installed-...

1. https://www.world-nuclear.org/world-nuclear-performance-repo...

What is installed in one year has little relevance to what eventual installed capacity will be for solar/wind/nuclear. Once solar/wind becomes a larger amount of installed capacity the immense problems with storage will likely become a huge limiting factor. Have you considered how much storage poland (or any country with large seasonal variation in sun/wind) would actually need for having 50% of it's capacity in solar?

> Funny you should say that: Poland installed 4.9 GW of solar in 2022 [0] compared to 5.3 GW capacity (nominal) of nuclear connected to the grid worldwide in 2021[1].

With less than 30 hours of sunshine in December it contributes to the grid amount known as "fuck all": https://i.imgur.com/QVNpl06.png Capacity was over 10GW at this point.

It was installed only because of net metering policies, so you generate energy in summer when it does not really matter, and receive it in winter where there's lack of it. Bad policy.

Even wind generally fares better: https://i.imgur.com/2R2nfF2.png 1,3 GW out of ~8GW capacity.

On the other hand, the 5,3GW of nuclear capacity displaces 10x more fossils, because it's actually 5,3GW you can generally count on.

>For many years, this has been a debate about nuclear’s supposedly huge potential in the face of actually existing solar and wind capacity running circles around actually existing nuclear.

Yet, we install tens or hundreds of solar "capacity" that end up not generating any power or overgenerating when we have too much of it. It's pointless, especially in our climate.

The batteries are going to get better and cheaper so much faster than you think. It will seem obvious in hindsight!

5.3GW global nuclear power capacity globally seems off. Individual plants are on the order of 1-5GW

edit: checked your source and it in fact says global operating nuclear comes to around 370GW which makes more sense. Not making a comment on your point, the numbers just seemed off in my experience

> Poland installed 4.9 GW of solar in 2022 [0] compared to 5.3 GW capacity (nominal) of nuclear connected to the grid worldwide in 2021[1].

This will not extrapolate linearly into the future though. The grid is already being destabilized by all the local generation of solar (most of the installations are on roofs of people's homes). This caused the government to change the law on how much it's paying the individual producers who sell their excess electricity to the grid and now, you're getting paid the actual, momentary price of kWh (which means that, on sunny days, you'll be paid hardly anything at all), instead of a fixed sum that was paid out before. This decreases the profitability of new solar installations by a lot.

That's a political choice being made by those who oppose renewables. It's not a limitation of the technology.

It's not opposition, it's just not overpaying any more.

I'm not sure thats true, it kind of depends on what the 10x is based on, but regardless its not realy a sensible grid mix:

https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...

32% solar and 60% wind, with an overbuild of 2.5x peak demand each (so 5x peak combined) is the cheapest option, according to the above analysis, filling the remaining 8% with other low carbon options.

In practice, this site shows you need to have ability to fulfill pretty much 100% of your demand via gas alone: https://i.imgur.com/TKGbsHK.png

There's zero chance, just politically, that anyone in this country will agree on additional gas dependency. Does this "cheapest option" actually includes cost of 30GW gas plants anyway?

Anyway I don't see any actual numbers on this page so it's hard for me to treat this seriously. "Cost comparison" only talks about whether "could POLAND run by only building new solar, wind and batteries?" which is very not interesting to me compared to having 30-50% of nuclear generation.

Its not a gas dependency. It's synthesised within your own borders from the overprovisioned solar and wind.

The model has several conservative assumptions that mean no power is imported as fuel or via cross border wires.

Thats fine, its just a model, the main point is that even with those constraints, renewables can provide 92% of power directly, and provide the power to meet the other 8% too. In Poland! (many other countries are more blessed with renewables).

Just use the existing fossil fuels plants on those days and build some extra capacity for carbon sequestration...

Are there any realistic carbon sequestration methodologies (other than planting trees) that scale?

planting trees isn't a realistic carbon sequestration. it just delays when the carbon is released (dead decaying tree). The only proper carbon sequestration is to capture it and stick it back in the ground from where it came. there's obvious challenges with that.

Standing forests are perpetual carbon storage. At some point a given area of forest reaches maturity/stability and the rate of tree decay is more or less matched by the rate of tree growth. Once in a while the forest burns down, grows back and reaches maturity again, and once again becomes stored carbon. On average, an area of land that is forest will be carbon storage (as well as wildlife habitat etc).

Trees are great: solar-powered, recursive, self-assembling, carbon sequestration tech.

Forests can't be the only solution to carbon, because of the scale of emissions, but they can be a fraction of the solution.

I agree with your reply. As long as the amount of stored carbon by the forest increases, it is a valid form of carbon sequestration, and, IMHO, the most beautiful.

Regarding other methods, people should Google for: norway carbon sequestration. Note: The volumes are very limited -- not enough to burn coal as your primary energy source, then capture all the CO2 and pump it underground.

To be clear, I am not shilling for non-forest/peat based carbon sequestration. To me, it is mostly a green washing game by big oil, gas, and utility firms to delay action and avoid responsibility.

You're describing temporary storage. That's very different from sequestration. If you don't do something like bury charcoal, it's more or less irrelevant to trying to drain a continuing large supply of carbon.

If you're only using the carbon-intensive power sources as backup power for calm cloudy days, then you don't necessarily need great sequestration -- the expensive crappy natural gas sequestration plants "work" but you wouldn't want to run your whole grid with them. They'll do just fine in a low-carbon world;

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/6/1/17416444...

They all scale if somebody goes and scale them up.

It just a money problem, if the technology has money momentum scaling up issues will also be solved with the same momentum. The collective west just decided nope on nuclear. Which i think will not bite them in their asses now that China and Russia are moving forward.

I'd say that the immediate problem is the electricity generation.

There is no reason at all to scale carbon capture before the electricity generation is mostly carbon-free. As there is no reason at all to scale storage before most of the generation is intermittent.

What leads to ignorant people deciding that since nobody is doing it, it must be impossible.

Pity they can't just connect to their neighbors grids then.

As of 2020, South Korea generated 29% of electricity from nuclear, while solar and wind together amounted to 4%:

https://ember-climate.org/app/uploads/2022/02/Global-Electri...

I'd gladly take expensive nuclear power that exists over non-existing cheap renewables. (Of course, renewables are great, I'm totally rooting for them. I just wish that they are actually, you know, available, instead of being only theoretically available and being used as a rhetorical device against nuclear power.)

Also you omitted some relevant details on South Korean politics: the previous president Moon (2017-2022) and his party was staunchly anti-nuclear and tried hard to phase it out, for the sake of the "environment." Which predictably resulted in continued usage of fossil fuels, which these idiots see as a lesser evil.

(Sadly, his successor, the sitting president Yoon, is a raging buffoon. I mean, he muttered "Wouldn't it be fucking embarrassing for Biden" in front of reporters, what more do you want. Being pro-nuclear is probably the only positive thing I can say of him, but I'm not really counting on that - Yoon being such an idiot, there's a very good chance his policies would be put in reverse by whoever succeeds him.)

> Of course, renewables are great, I'm totally rooting for them. I just wish that they are actually, you know, available, instead of being only theoretically available and being used as a rhetorical device against nuclear power.

They are actually available, maybe Korea just doesn't want to build them? They don't play that well with constant output systems like nuclear so it would make nuclear unprofitable in the longer run. Although this obviously depends on the energy mix, maybe up until a certain percentage renewables would be fine for example.

Tell me more about these available renewable energy sources that work when the sun doesn’t shine, the wind doesn’t blow and aren’t dependent on local geographical features being available.

It has been a long time since such a day existed. You are talking about a situation that is mostly theoretical. I could come around and claim that nuclear is also totally unreliable, with all the maintenance necessary and the cooling issues, especially in a heating world. Bullshit? Not exactly. Look at the issues France has been having with their reactors in the last 10 years, importing vast amounts of electricity from Germany.

I have a hard time seeing how this is relevant for what I wrote. Can you doublecheck to be sure you didn't misunderstand the context?

Admittedly the grandparent is somewhat ambiguous about what constitutes availability, but my point was that widely available renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, are intermittent.

Sure, they're intermittent which is a downside but they still compete away constant output sources. I didn't mention it in my previous reply but it is possible to vary the output to a certain extent (depending on the technology), the problem is that the economics assume a pretty constant output. This equation doesn't add up in certain places anymore. Therefore I expect that we will have a lot fewer constant output energy sources and a lot more variable energy sources. This will be combined with a certain amount of storage, fossil fuel backup plants, systems to timeshift our energy consumption, probably more usage of district heating/cooling systems and a lot of other stuff of course.

That's why we have grids and storage. Perhaps you should investigate those before making definitive statements about what renewables can and can't do.

We have very little storage and the grids require electricity generation from something. With lots of HVDC connections we could conceivably move enormous amounts of electricity around on a continental scale and thereby reduce the need for storage. That would be great...

...but it still won't be enough. We need something that can produce power when renewables can't.

Your example of South Korea, a country with a good record on nuclear power, and a new government with a pro nuclear stance is still aiming to add 2 or 3 times more renewable power than nuclear between now and 2036.

They also intend to make 10% of their power from hydrogen/ammonia which is presumably going to be generated from some combination of nuclear and renewables when demand isn't peaking.

Nuclear fission power apologists frequently make a claim like this when trying to establish why costs are so high (it doesn't necessarily explain why cost overruns are so high, as presumably the regulation set is known at the time of project initiation).

If this were the / a major factor in cost competitiveness, we'd expect to see much higher uptake of nuclear fission power plants in places where, as you might say, those things are disregarded (to varying degrees).

I don't believe that's the case, but can't find convincing data one way or the other.

I wonder if there are examples of massive cost overrun / delayed commissioning nuclear fission plants - say Hinkley in the UK - that could be pointed at to substantiate the 'process and regulatory approval' costs, where those process and regulations changed after the initial cost calculations.

About delays and cost overruns, I highly recommend that people read about the Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant in Finland. The delays and cost overruns are totally insane, yet they claim (on Wiki):

    Even taking into account all OL3 construction delays the long term LCOE target for all three plants is 30 EUR/MWh. LCOE for the OL3 reactor alone is estimated at 42 EUR/MWh.

My "envelope maths" tells me that generating electricity from OL3 is twice the cost of OL1+OL2: 18 EUR/MWh vs 42 EUR/MWh.

The main Wiki article includes a long list of reasons for delays and cost overruns.

The construction project also included very long term, underground storage. On YouTube, you can find a great, if slightly creepy, documentary about it called "Into Eternity".

The long term waste repository is a separate project, it is not included in the same project. The LCOE does include it however, as financing waste storage is mandated in the law. I think what makes the LCOE so low is the fact that the plant vendor offered the construction as a turnkey solution with them covering the risk of overruns. So the price paid by the plant owner does not cover all the construction costs. In fact it's less than half of the costs.

edit: less than half

The French tax payers have through EDF taken a loss of €5-10B on Olkiluoto 3.

Definitely cheap, if you make someone else pay.

EDF was not involved in building Olkiluoto.

EDF bought the bankrupt carcass of Areva to preserve the French nuclear industry. The construction is kept in a separate company, but the French bore the losses.

> but the French bore the losses.

I know, my point is that EDF is not related to that.

> EDF bought the bankrupt carcass of Areva to preserve the French nuclear industry.

Some parts were sent in other entities, like Framatome.

Framatome is owned by EDF.

> Framatome (French pronunciation: [fʁamatɔm]) is a French nuclear reactor business.[1] It is owned by Électricité de France (EDF) (75.5%), Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (19.5%), and Assystem (5%).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framatome

When every easily verifiable statement turns out to be a lie like this one, is it any wonder nobody believes you about the ones that aren't?

Excuse me, but have we discussed in the past? You seem to be extremely antagonistic, and I don't exactly know why.

You seem to be expecting people to treat your lies and propaganda as if it's being stated in good faith and I don't exactly know why.

>If this were the / a major factor in cost competitiveness, we'd expect to see much higher uptake of nuclear fission power plants in places where, as you might say, those things are disregarded (to varying degrees).

Historically NPT treaty prevented a lot of those countries from pursuing peaceful nuclear energy.

Sure, but the NPT(T) can't explain this.

I'll reiterate my earlier two claims slightly more succinctly:

a) we should see a strong correlation between nation states with laxer attitudes towards safety AND more fission nuclear power plants brought online on budget and on time.

b) absent regulation changes through the life of any given project, we should expect to see any given plant brought online on budget and on time.

I don't believe we have a wealth of examples of the latter, and for the former the semi-obvious candidate would be China, however:

" ... China’s government has become more cautious about nuclear power [...]. The target in the 13th five year plan was only 58 gigawatts by 2020, and, as of April 2022, China is yet to reach that capacity target. Judging by what is under construction, China will miss the target of 70 gigawatts by 2025 as well.

"Many Chinese nuclear plants have been delayed and construction costs have exceeded initial estimates."

Citing: https://www.colorado.edu/cas/2022/04/12/even-china-cannot-re...

>"Many Chinese nuclear plants have been delayed and construction costs have exceeded initial estimates."

Important to note reasons for targets being unmet, apart from safety reevaluation delays due to Fukushima Daiichi (PRC laxer but not that lax on nuclear safety), delays and over cost can be attributed to foreign nuclear tech - french EPR underperforming, US AP1000s trouble with Westinghouse and sanctions against China General Nuclear as part of tech war. Recent indigenous CPR1000 plants post above drama have rolled out according to expectations. A lot can be explained by nuclear simply being hard, and domestic regulation around nuclear power in western countries capable of infra exports led to them consistently underdeliver. NPT and moat around nuclear tech also prevents many countries from indigenous nuclear power development. Few countries have the resources and expertise regardless of NPT to pursue indigenous nuclear power programs at all, but so far PRC plants with indigenous tech is performing alright. Other consideration is simpler and scalable renewable tech costs coming way down. Renewables are over performing while nuclear now performing at about expectations.

> If this were the / a major factor in cost competitiveness, we'd expect to see much higher uptake of nuclear fission power plants in places where, as you might say, those things are disregarded (to varying degrees).

Aircraft carriers and submarines.

I STM reading (via HN!) that submarine nuke plants are designed not to require (or even have the affordances for) significant maintenance — that when they are “done” (fuel spent?) the power plant is discarded. If this is in fact the case I can imagine it would make for a more reliable and less expensive device.

The economics of nuclear powered subs is quite different from a commercial product. But it’s interesting to consider.

(And just for fun: imagine what effect a “right to repair” law would have…)

Good points.

In addition, military spend capabilities will more readily compensate for the other two sides of the project management triangle. And AIUI a lot of those systems, once initial development occurred, were cookie-cutter / evolutionary designs.

I also understand the mini-reactors for seafaring vessels are much less efficient - but they don't need to be hugely efficient, primarily for the reason you mention.

In any case, I expect the regulatory-driven quality of those devices is ridiculously high. Well the USA systems at least -- obviously Russia had a much less pleasant experience with small reactors on submarines.

Yes, the cost per MWh must be insane. Any nation building nuclear-powered subs and carriers have essentially unlimited R&D and construction budgets.

that only further proves the point, those cases may have more lax safety thresholds but they still wind up wildly over budget all the time.

That argument doesn't make sense. Nuclear power plants are capital intensive; countries that would have a higher tolerance for safety and environmental shortfalls would find nuclear power too capital intensive to be financially viable.

All? And all equally?

That's where the original argument fails to compel.

There's ~ 50 countries with nuclear reactors, and about 30 with nuclear power plants. (Australia's an example of having one reactor, for research, but not wanting any for power production.)

Anyway, it's unlikely those 32 countries that have nuclear fission power plant, which presumably is a subset of countries that could build them today, all have near-identical regulatory / process requirements that in turn are the reason they're uneconomical to build there.

> it doesn't necessarily explain why cost overruns are so high

Few projects means little standardization and shaky forecasts.

It’s really not build costs alone that make nuclear expensive. Just as an example, you’re looking at roughly 500 employees per GW of capacity. Assuming they cost 100k/y including benefits that’s ~50 million per year or roughly 0.6c/kWh. Multiply that by * 50 years and your talking 2.5 billion over the plants lifetime just for the workers.

Ore is cheap, natural uranium is still cheap, enriched uranium isn’t, and making fuel rods isn’t. Insurance, land, replacement equipment, decommissioning, etc it all adds up.

People love to talk about how cheap various aspects of nuclear power are compared to other types of energy, but it’s the total costs that matter not just individual parts in isolation. Small modular reactors still need cooling, they still need turbines, workers, spent fuel cooling ponds and processing, security, etc etc.

There are plenty of communities that would be happy to see hundreds of jobs that they could expect to last for an entire working lifetime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Jobs for 500 people vs cheaper electricity for 1 million people which allows them to spend more money elsewhere and thus also creates jobs. The second option might seem roughly equal, except those new jobs are creating value and thus society is better off with increased efficiency.

Of course those benefits aren’t spread equally, but being poor today is still better than being poor 500 years ago. Hopefully being poor in 500 years will be a similar improvement.

Which also applies to renewables.

Actually it applies even more, because renewables are decentralised and small scale, so there's a wide range of jobs from house-level local installations to international infrastructure.

> nuke generation is cheap if you push all the risks for construction cost overruns onto someone else.

This is what France tried to do with the reactor they built for Finland. There was a budget hole of a few billion and an argument/lawsuit over who would pay for it.

Nuclear costs are a hot potato.

Further to your point - South Korea built 4 reactors for the UAE at the Barakah site. Took 11 years from deal to first grid connection and cost $25 billion for 5.3 GW of nameplate capacity. It's expected to cost another $20 billion for operation, maintenance and fuel

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant supply.

Contrast that to the Al Dhafra PV project also in the UAE - $1 billion for 2 GW of nameplate capacity. One can apply whatever discount is wanted to account for solar's shortcomings and it still comes out ahead when planning an energy generation portfolio. Further away from the equator a similar case can be made for wind.

The Barakah reactors will be generating 5.3 GWh from 6 pm to 8am which of course solar can't do. In that time it will deliver 14 hours X 5.3 GW ~= 75 GWh of electricity.

Capital costs for 4 hour utility scale lithium storage are expected to be $250 million per GWh by 2025. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/79236.pdf

75 GWh x $250 million = ~$19 billion to get those gigawatt hours from storage.

The nameplate capacity of the solar plant to generate 75 GWh for night time use in the hours from 8 am to 6pm is 7.5 GW. To prove my point let's double that to 15 GW.

The cost of that 15 GW solar plant, based on the Al Dhafra PV plant would be $7.5 billion. Another 5 GW solar plant to deliver the same day time GWh that the reactors do...let's double that to 10 GW so another $5 billion.

So my back of the napkin calculations say that the cost to replace the Barakah reactors with solar + storage are: - $19 billion for Li-ion storage - $7.5 billion for a solar plant to charge that storage for nighttime use. - $5 billion for a solar plant to deliver (more than) equivalent daytime use.

$31.5 billion in total. Very much competitive with the nuclear option taking into account a) time to completion / general project risk b) the falling cost of storage plus the development of new options like sodium ion storage c) radioactive waste risks, solvable as they are d) security concerns - Houthi rebels fired a few missiles at the Barakah site a while back. e) construction and operational workforce skill requirements

To make the costs more comparable, in the report he mentions, they estimate 2.5% per year of the installed battery capacity cost as the ongoing maintenance costs. And, the batteries have an 85% efficiency rating meaning they'd need 92 gwh of installed battery capacity to meet the 75 gwh demand, so tack on an additional $4.25 billion so the battery cost which is now $23 billion.

Based on the lifetimes of these South Korean plants(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_South_Korea), I'm just going to use 40 years as the lifetime for these calculations as I couldn't find any numbers for how long the UAE expects that plant to be operating regarding that operational costs of $20 billion which gives us:

Maintenance costs for solar of: 40 years x $23 billion x 2.5% = $23 billion

So now we're at a total current cost of $46 +7.5 = $53.5 billion for Solar vs. $45 billion for Nuclear.

Edit: Forgot the actual cost of the solar array that G80z said was $7.5 billion

The amount of solar/wind paired storage drops significantly if you take into account wind energy's anti correlation with solar, demand shaping and overproduction.

It isnt just a matter of getting 2GW of solar and getting enough batteries to supply 2GW through the night.

Worth pointing out here that nobody is planning to do large scale 12-hour storage with lithium ion batteries.

Even leaving out better battery chemistries for the moment, you can use pumped hydro (even with seawater - some of the UAE’s highest mountains are near the coast) and thermal storage (you might think you don’t need it in such a hot place but you’ve still got to bake bread etc etc).

Word on the street is that locations for pumped hydro are, for a variety of reasons that vary by locale, pretty much maxed out already.

You're mixing it up with hydroelectric dams which need a river. Pumped hydro needs two close bodies of water at different heights. That geography is very very common.

> That geography is very very common.

Could you provide some more info for this? My understanding was a lot of the sites that could do this, have done. If that's not the case it'd be good to see what the real picture is.

There's no point if you don't have energy to store. Only 1% of potential sites need to be developed

https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/

Probably won't happen because batteries will be even cheaper by the time much of it is developed.

That link is what makes me concerned when talking on these topics. Far too much certainty and trust seem to be derived from and placed in such studies.

In this case, from the study:

> None of the PHES sites discussed in this study have been the subject of geological, hydrological, environmental, heritage and other studies, and it is not known whether any particular site would be suitable. The commercial feasibility of developing these sites is unknown.

> makes me concerned

There it is. Always so concerned" about whatever imaginary downside alternatives have, but completely credulous about nuclear which has failed over and over again.

You're claiming without any evidence whatsoever that at least 99% of geographically appropriate sites are unusable.

> Always so concerned" about whatever imaginary downside alternatives have

It's not a downside. It's a problem with the study.

> completely credulous about nuclear which has failed over and over again

Can you cite where I've done this?

> You're claiming without any evidence whatsoever that at least 99% of geographically appropriate sites are unusable.

And where I've done this?

yes and no. we've put dams in the obvious places, but we're mostly using them as generation rather than storage. switching them to be run as batteries will massively expand the amount of grid storage.

Pumped hydro is storage by definition, is it not?

A dam in a river can either be used as generation (if you always run it) or as storage if you vary the output. Most pumped hydro is already storage, but most hydro currently isn't pumped.

And it’s worth pointing out here that conventional hydro is being optimised in some places for a world with a lot of wind and solar in the grid.

In a nutshell, you put in more generators to maximise your peak generation capacity, and operate them only when required.

Ah, understood. But this isn't to do with renewable power storage at this point, just using artificial lakes as separate peak power storage?

Pumped hydro doesn't require mountains, you can also dig an underground reservoir.

Pumped hydro requires a large volume of fluid and a height difference.

Valleys are useful as they provide a large volume that can be capped with relative ease.

An underground reservoir requires a large volume to be excavated (or a pre existing cave system) and a deeper chamber again for the turbines to powered by the fall .. to yet another deeper underground reservoir.

I'm not saying this is impossible, I stating that as an engineering venture (actual civil engineering not software "engineering") there are some real challenges and greater ones than using existing topography.

You're hand waving a lot away with your comment.

To be honest I'm pretty doubtful the economics of excavating a reservoir are going to work. It needs to be very big and very deep, which is going to be very expensive unless you're planning to go all Edward Teller (don't go all Edward Teller).

Outside of the enormous engineering pitfalls of dealing with seawater, you would even get a slight boon in energy storage because it is 2-3% more dense than pure water.

The math here seems pretty well reasoned. But it assumes that the price doesn't change as the amount of materials increases. Can an organization just write a $10b check and get the batteries? Does anyone just have the stock of them sitting around?

I'd have to imagine not. And that it might take as long to get all the batteries built and installed as it does to build a nuke plant.

If you cut a $10 billion check, I think you can negotiate yourself to the front of the line. Also, we are talking about the UAE - $30 billion for energy is a significantly better investment than a large number of Softbank bets.

Total global battery production seems to be 200-300GWh/year. If you want to buy approx 30% of total yearly output it's very unlikely you can negotiate your way to the head of the line. In fact, buying that much might raise global prices for batteries.

If I want enough solar panels and batteries to make my house off grid I can just write a check and the stuff shows up in a few weeks. But that doesn't scale upwards without limit. Eventually the limits on global supply kick in no matter how much you want it.

Nobody said the installation had to happen overnight. A five year plan would be impressive and still feasible.

The EPR design is bloated because germany wanted to sabotage the project and achieved to increase the cost through additional security no other nuclear plant ever needed.

That's an interesting idea, any source? Certainly the containment building is very heavy construction, supposed to be able to withstand a passenger jet collision. Keep in mind the design was made right after the WTC attacks.

> That's an interesting idea, any source?

Sadly, I had one months ago but I can't find it again.

The EPR have a double containement layer where EPR2 have a single one. The EPR was also an industrial demonstrator.

> supposed to be able to withstand a passenger jet collision.

Our autorithy of nuclear safety says any regular nuclear plants should be able to whistand an passanger jet collision, but added extra protection on the EPR for it: https://www.francetvinfo.fr/replay-radio/le-vrai-du-faux/seg...

> Even if "they are not built to withstand such a shock without damage, nuclear power plants would offer a good resistance capacity", assures the Nuclear Safety Authority. But no evaluation exists because this type of accident was considered at the time as totally improbable.

That said, after the authorities and EDF claim to have made arrangements for the construction of the future Flamanville EPR. "The specific protection against falling aircraft called aircraft hull is a reinforced concrete structure covering the following buildings: the reactor building, two divisions of the safeguard auxiliaries building and the fuel building".

The fact remains that zero risk does not exist, as Jacques Repussard, Director General of IRSN, affirmed during his hearing before a parliamentary commission of inquiry last February: "I could not affirm under oath that in the event crash of a very large aircraft, loaded with tens of tons of fuel, the consequences of the fire would be brought under control"

We should disregard the cost and aggressively subsidize a massive expansion of nuclear power, guaranteeing the price for consumers (matching something reasonable re the market).

Some might proclaim that's not fair competitively. I have no interest in being fair about the matter, I don't want my government to be either.

I really hope the mini nuclear reactors that are planned take off and you can just order them for residential power generation.

It is astonishing the amount of red-tape when it comes to nuclear power, just because of all the FUD pushed by environmental groups, when it is the cleanest form of energy in the world.

>main problem with nuke

Is waste. The main problem is waste, we need to store it somewhere and it’s never in my backyard

It's absolutely not. Waste is a solved problem, you bury it VERY deep using the same borehole technology currently used for fracking. And I think you grossly overestimate the amount of waste a nuclear plant generates.

Here's a source (also check the sourced on the video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uU3kLBo_ruo

The problem is more likely PERCEPTION of nuclear waste.

"PERCEPTION" == politics, which is very much not a solved problem. It's the same reason we can't tax carbon emissions to properly account for its externalities.

That is not solving the problem. That is hiding it. Our civilization needs to move beyond the caveman level thinking that burying somethibg in the ground is solving it. Solar panels are highly recyclable. We are figuring out how to recycle the composite materials used for windmill blades. We need to move to a circular economy.

> That is not solving the problem. That is hiding it. Our civilization needs to move beyond the caveman level thinking that burying somethibg in the ground is solving it.

It came out of the ground, if we put it back there then how have we made things worse than they were? There are natural nuclear reactors in places untouched by humans.

> Solar panels are highly recyclable.

Really? At what energy cost?

> We are figuring out how to recycle the composite materials used for windmill blades.

Which is a fancy way of saying we can't and don't currently recycle them. There are reasonably advanced plans for reprocessing nuclear waste too.

> We need to move to a circular economy.

Fundamentally impossible. We need to keep pollution at manageable levels and expand into the universe. The environmental impact of nuclear waste is tiny in comparison to virtually everything else we do in everyday life; it should be a long long way down the list of concerns.

> It came out of the ground, if we put it back there then how have we made things worse than they were? There are natural nuclear reactors in places untouched by humans.

This is facile. Plutonium 240 isn't uranium 238. Nor is Cs, Tc, Pu241 etc.

You can just say you're not remotely interested in truth or reality. It's simpler for everyone.

When it was in the ground, it was greatly diluted and bound in rocks. Now it has been highly concentrated and ground up several times. Lead also came from the ground, doesn't mean that it is harmless to live near a dumpsite for lead. Your argument is bullshit.

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