The four-horse race to decarbonise steel
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energymonitor.ai
All of these processes require an intense amount of energy either directly or indirectly. Where is all this energy to come from if right now it comes from coal/fuel?
I found the following information about the SSAB pilot cavern:
The pilot plant has a size of 100 cubic meters. At a later stage, a full-scale hydrogen gas storage facility measuring 100,000 to 120,000 cubic meters may be required which is sufficient to supply a full-sized sponge iron factory for three to four days.how long does it take to fill, because if it takes longer than 3-4 days to fill, then it's not a matter of storage capacity, but production capacity.
China is building a ton of nuclear at very good prices.
Nuclear power is expensive in the US because of stringent regulations, most of which should be kept. However there are lessons from existing installations, newer designs, and better technology to help design things now, than in the 50s and 60s.
Instead it mostly comes down to:
a) China being a frankly fucking massive place so land is already much cheaper than the US/EU/etc.
b) More realistic regulations on waste processing/storage etc. China isn't scared of nuclear waste because it's not stigmatized as it is in the West and they are able to handle transportation/storage/plan for reprocessing with logic rather than emotion.
c) CCP having a simple and importantly efficient system of requisitioning land from citizens (essentially they buy them out for above market and set them up somewhere new).
The latter one is the big thing that really sets them apart when it comes to infrastructure projects. Yes building a huge dam displaces like 250k people but they do it anyway and move everyone to new homes.
There also isn't a process for saying no or negotiating so said process doesn't get dragged out. In practice that isn't usually a huge problem because in China it's considered like a lottery win if the government decides to build a highway/railway through your house because they will pay much more than the house is worth on the open market.
Obviously such a system would never fly in the West though.
b) is also pretty important. If you keep hand wringing about waste even when the amounts really are inconsequential then you are going to make things really expensive for no real reason.
China also has a huge desert they can use to store waste essentially indefinitely if they really can't find a way to reprocess it. Though that seems pretty damn unlikely.
>China being a frankly fucking massive place so land is already much cheaper than the US/EU/etc.
China is virtually the same size as the US with 4x the population and more unhabitable land.
Iran builds it because it wants the option of having a bomb.
Take out military concerns and it is economic for neither of them.
Every country who builds nuclear power stations is either a nuclear power sharing military costs (France, UK, China...) or is taking out an option on quickly developing a bomb (Sweden, Iran, Japan, South Korea) against geopolitical concerns that are glaringly obvious.
One of the previous commenters above mentioned that China abandoned their own plans bought their design from Germany, so it's conceivable that if China had no military nuclear program they could have still built a reactor. (That's of course if the western world allowed it)
Nonetheless, the cost to the constructor is such that without a military reason it doesn't make any sense to build one.
I expect North Korea will turn its attention to civilian nuclear power fairly soon now that the race to become a fully fledged nuclear power is complete. It would make economic sense to them given the industrial capacity, skills and resource base it has accumulated in the process of building the bomb. For most other countries? Not so much.
It's too bad so many people are indoctrinated to think the way they do about nuclear power in the US.
Problem with solar is intermittent power means intermittent use of capital equipment. How much an issue that is depends on the ratios of electricity cost, capital cost and depreciation.
[1] https://www.dn.se/ekonomi/elprischock-kan-ge-aterbaring-pa-n...
Though they generally need much more power storage/distribution grid construction per GW, to actually deliver a reliable supply to users.
Then you get to countries where the NIMBYs fight tooth & nail over even tiny grid construction projects...
(Vs. the NIMBYs are pretty much fine with 100%-carbon steel.)
In fact it's so much cheaper that it's even more economic to use solar/wind to synthesize natural gas and burn that to generate electricity.
Never mind all of the cheaper short term storage options (pumped storage, batteries).
And this doesnt even account for the storage nuclear power would need (it's even less economic to use it for load following) or the need for taxpayer indemnification against catastrophe cleanup costs.
Interesting. Never heard of this being done in practice before, do you have references of what you're referring to?
It's not done at scale because we don't actually have that much spare renewable energy capacity. Whenever renewables power over 90% of current usage on one particular day anywhere it tends to hit the news.
Pretty much every MWh generated by green energy these days is just a MWh of natural gas extracted from the earth that is not burned. This actually means that while we use as much natural gas as we do that the economics of nuclear power are even worse by comparison.
The above study is a hypothetical solution to solar and wind routinely overproducing what batteries and pumped storage can keep up with. Even then it probably wouldn't make economic sense until natural gas extraction gets hit with import or carbon taxes. Just because it's cheaper than nuclear power that doesn't make it cheap.
But as a technology it exists. The early outputs will be for things that can't be replaced with cheap renewable generated electricity, like e-fuels for spacecraft, which Tesla is doing in Texas.
I'll wait here for any other country to do remotely as well with 'renewables'.
Lets see how Germany did after 20 years of their Green revolution ... mmhh yeah they would have done a lot better with nuclear.
Nuclear was the fastest scaling of any energy source ever discovered in the US. Faster then even oil. But then regulation changed and basically forced all plants to be totally re-engineered and new designs had to be made. At the same time coal became massively cheap and at that time the idea that a green source should have some kind of advantage was simply not viable.
Had nuclear given the same intensives as renewables, it would have been adopted in huge numbers. For example, a simple law that states all utilizes need some X% of nuclear would have totally changed the US. Renewables got that incentive, nuclear never did.
Various other countries/places/people/organisations contributed too, but still, it's weird that something can be considered as so dramatically successful on such a scale and also such a complete failure by different groups.
Their removal of perfectly well functioning nuclear plants that could have run for another 50 years is nothing less then criminal, Ill talk more of that later. Their strong anti-nuclear position influenced the countries around them to also get ride of their perfectly well functioning nuclear plants.
Belgium for example turned of a perfectly well functioning plant in the middle of the energy crisis. Switzerland stopped investing in its own energy production because Germany would just produce so much cheap energy that can easily be imported, yeah great policy.
Even France had been persuaded that nuclear is bad and in 2015 they basically also followed Germany and tried to do a nuclear phase out far earlier then technically possible. All in blind trust that they can just replace 20+ nuclear plants with a few solar panels. They also forced the potential profit of the utility (from nuclear) to be reinvented into solar (not to mention forcing them to support fossil as well).
All nations around Germany have to breath the coal ash that Germany distributes over all off Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland and Eastern France. And have done so for decades and it has measurable effect on air quality and health in all those places. Somehow Switzerland (where I'm from) doesn't get coal ash from France, funny how that works.
France on the other hand has had clean energy for 40 years. Even home heating in France is usually done with electric. Its baffling to me that people see Germany as this great success, when their coal plants are still going strong and will be for another 10 years at least. Housing in Germany is still often oil and gas as well.
Anti-nuclear people love to just ignore the last 50 years of coal use in Germany and have for over 30 years insisted that nuclear is to expensive and slow, despite the evidence from France that you can change a economy to nuclear in 20 years and having paid very little for it. Don't believe people who claims France has high taxes because of nuclear, that is nonsense.
Its countries with the cleanest energy use the most nuclear, Switzerland, France, Sweden, Finland. Some countries with a lot of wind do decently well but also build a lot of gas capacity so it isn't as cheap as people claim.
Just look at the electricity map right now:
https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE
611 gCO₂eq/kWh right now, France 28. And that is with all the idiotic anti-nuclear policy France has adopted in the last 20 years. Germany currently has almost 25 GW of coal on the network, and only 2.7 GW nuclear. At peak, Germany had enough nuclear capacity to replace all the coal use they have today, but they made the choice to shut down all nuclear before all coal, and this was widely supported by Greens and environmentalists.
How anybody can call this a success, because they invested in some solar panel production is beyond me. Germany played itself up as the environmental savoir nation in the international press, everybody around the world tried to 'be like Germany'. And yet, France had literally already achieved more then Germany decades earlier but of course that was never mentioned anywhere.
I'm genuinely baffled why people are so positive about Germany. They have been selling themselves as this green nation for decades. But reality this is not supported by any evidence what so ever.
They didn't do very much to get away from oil and gas heating. Their strongest industry is the car industry, and they are backwards in terms of the new green urbanism. Their high speed rail network is still patchy, sub-optimally designed and incredibly delay prone. 'Die Bahn' the German railway operator is generally regressive in its European policies, opposing many major European rail reforms. The Autobahn high speed is polluting. Their car makers are currently trying to prevent the adoption of laws EU laws that push EVs.
They had international obligation and agreements to increase cargo rail transport North-South in Europe. A real all electric rail cargo highway, from North Sea ports all the way to Italy. Switzerland build the longest rail tunnel in the world and everything else. Even f*ing Italy build its part of this project. Germany, mmmhh, maybe they will do it next decade. Well I guess at least the Autobahn will be used for more diesel trucks instead, thanks Germany.
I can't think of a single area of environmental policy where Germany is actually leading. Germany is everything that is bad with the environmental policy. Its a success of marketing over results. 3rd world nations around the world should not look to Germany, they should look to France (in the 70/80, not so much lately) for electricity, to Netherlands for urban policy, Switzerland for public transport.
Unfortunately they can't let that legacy go in the face of new evidence so they still campaign as hard as ever against nuclear which has was less vested interests protecting it than coal and thus it falls first.
A possible future scenario might be a base load infrastructure fed by reliable nuclear power plants and hydropower where possible ensuring power is always available. Renewables feeding into hydrogen storage or hydropower storage facilities to create hydrogen for those processes which can make use of it - e.g. steel production, synthetic fuel production etc. - and to keep the hydropower reservoirs filled. Domestic solar may play a role as well since it is feasible to use battery storage at a single-home scale, especially when used EV batteries start to become available at scale - for now it is just too expensive.
Nuclear's tagline since the beginning was "energy too cheap to meter" which turned out to be one of the biggest frauds in the history of mankind.
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/german-government-does-nuclear-waste-d... [2] https://theintercept.com/2019/02/06/south-caroline-green-new...
But they are, and Ive never heard of a single pro nuclear advocate ever argue that nuclear power is safe enough that this enormous subsidy should be unwound. They generally pretend it doesnt exist.
Meanwhile solar/wind/storage is a lot cheaper even without taking this subsidy into account.
Meanwhile coal plants keep spewing slightly radioactive ash into the air and into our lungs and the cost is paid by us all in life expectancy. And soon by our whole civilization in global warming.
Its totally ok to argue that the government should have shared responsibility for health care. But arguing that government should control the energy production in a sensible way and adopt the risk for that is somehow crazy. And yet they end up doing it anyway as we have seen in the recent crisis.
Had the government simply adopted a nuclear strategy from the beginning it would be vastly cheaper, population would be vastly healthier, grid operation would be far easier and energy security for the next 100 years would not even remotely be in question. It wouldn't have forced the German right to make a devils deal with Russia and the Left would have gotten their carbon free grid.
Where are you pulling these numbers from? Your ass?
The last 30 years were also one of best times to be alive as an average person on the globe generally.
How nuclear idiots can spin everything negatively is pretty funny.
If the world decides to go all in on nuclear it would take decades to decarbonize a tiny percentage of the grid and horrendous costs.
If nuclear works for the world's subs, it works on land too. It will probably be a mix of energy sources anyway, each with its own strengths and weaknesses and it’s own place in ecosystem.
Kind of like saying that if solar panels work on the ISS then they work on land too.
It's surface level true while missing the broader issue.
But sure, get rid of all subsidies on everything and let the market sort it out. We can agree on that.
And if you have things like a public health care system then, it matters a whole lot if coal and gas plants blow smoke into the air or not.
Historical data from the US shows this well. If coal plants would have had to pay even a fraction of the health cost the caused, nuclear would have been universally adopted 1990. And that is before we even talk about coal sluge and other issues. Its before we talk about all the stuff the US did in the middle east to keep the oil flowing. Nuclear in the US even paid a fee for nuclear waste, while coal paid no fee for its waste.
If you look at societies total energy cost over the last 50 years, France looks incredibly good. They had very low energy prices for many decades now and had not no health cost from bad air from electricity production. Nuclear plants are also stable high quality healthy employment for many.
Its almost as if nobody tries to do something it doesn't happen, shocking insight.
> It's because it plainly doesn't work.
Except that its actually proven to work and renewables are not proven to work. Because there is actually a major world industrial economy that worked on nearly 100% nuclear and there is not such a nation that runs on only renewables.
So maybe if there is prove of anything, its that one works the other doesn't.
> The plants are reaching their end of life
Complete nonsense ... there are many far older plant operating. Nuclear reactors can run 80-100 years.
> the prototype replacement
Like the innovative Superphénix that was killed of by the Green-Leftis coalition.
> was nationalized as a consequence
France has had 40 decades of the lowest energy prices in Europe and still has very low cost. All the construction cost of the whole nuclear fleet were on the books of the utility and were paid off over decades. If French utility was allowed to charge as much as energy prices in Germany, it would be wildly profitable.
The French state forced them to invested profit from nuclear into solar that hurt their own networks operation and also forced them to cheaply sell bulk nuclear electricity to support fossil and then the utility had to buy that capacity back at a way higher price, losing billions in the process.
France has for 25 years now had governments that didn't like nuclear, they have let go the whole industrial base that built up. The were so spoiled by nuclear that they didn't do any of the basic maintenance and upgrades done in pretty much every country in the world (including ironically Germany). Had they just done so, they wouldn't have had any of the problems they had last year.
France treated its amazing nuclear capacity from the 70/80s like the tree in 'The Giving Tree'. The reality of course is France saved incredibly amounts of money in their health care system because they had 50 years of nuclear rather then 50 years of coal. Nuclear in France was one of the best energy policies ever done by anybody.
> If the world decides to go all in on nuclear it would take decades to decarbonize a tiny percentage of the grid and horrendous costs.
Lets look at a case study, UAE. They decided in 2009 to do nuclear, first plant active in 2020 and finishing 1 reactor a year. So a nation with no nuclear and no experience in 1 year will have 25% nuclear and these plants will last 100 years or more. The could have just continued this and by 2030 the could have 100% nuclear. But this is political.
Let me do some basic math for you. Even at the still high unit prices UAE was charged. Starting in the year ~2000, when Germany really adopted 'Grünewende'. At that point they had 20% of well functioning nuclear. At that point the total cost of going 100% nuclear in Germany, even with a very high very conservative cost of 5 billion $ per plant, for like 250 billion Germany could have gone 100% electric. That is approximately 5% increase in debt to GDP. Realistically it would be much less as data shows that if you are building many of the same plant with the same workforce it gets vastly cheaper. Germany could have done this in 20-30 years no problem, if France can do it so can Germany. This would have guaranteed Germany clean green energy for the next 100 years or more.
The failure of nuclear was and is about politics, not about the technology.
Even with pessimistic assumption of paying 5 billion $ per plant. If Germany had done what France did in the 70/80s they would be much better off now and for the next 100 years. And the cost per plant would be far lower once you start mass production.
If you actually did it right rather then incredibly stupidly, nuclear waste would be a resource for the future, and the idea of disposing it would be utterly ridiculous. Just as with all these idiotic disposal solution that governments like to waste money on. In typical fashion the anti nuclear people first create problems, demand that money is spend on them and then blame nuclear for those problems.
A sensible approach would be have a government fuel bank responsible for securing reserves of nuclear fuel, supplying and recycling nuclear fuel to the nations nuclear fleet. This fuel reserve centrally managed and it controls access to fuel for both commercial operates, research, ESA and so on.
Maintenance of spend fuel is not actually expensive and it places little burden on government to do, even if its for 100s of years. Its literally just a bunch of containers in a warehouse. And that could of course be supported by fees for rate payers.
Pessimistic 5 billion per plant -- what a joke. Flamanville 20 years under construction, 20 billion. Olkiluoto 15 years under construction, 15 billion. Hinkley C, deadline for 2027 already clear will not be held, price tag already estimated now to be 40 billion in the end [1].
If Germany had done what France had done in the 70s and 80s it would be in the same situation as France is today: every other month a plant goes into emergency maintenance because of cracks in the pipes, and relying on neighbors to keep its lights on.
If it had invested in nuclear 20 years ago it would be sitting on heaps of unfinished uneconomical plants and it would still use coal for the majority of its electricity. The plants even if finished would take decades to make up for the lost opportunity to reduce emissions during the decades of construction.
Rubbish! Nuclear energy's days are numbered. That industry will need to find another way to take tax payers' money.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/cost-edfs-new-uk-nuc...
And that is when you produce 4 in a row, when you produce 50, it would actually be much cheaper.
But I know how anti nuclear people always have to look at 1 off builds to justify their position, and ignore evidence from mass builds such as France.
> If Germany had done what France had done in the 70s and 80s it would be in the same situation as France is today
Germany actually did proper maintenance on the plants it had and they had excellent uptime.
France is in this position because the anti nuclear government tried to phase out nuclear and they had so much nuclear that they failed to keep their plants up to date.
Anybody that denies that Germany would be vastly better off if they had followed France in the 70/80 is so blinded by hate that it's actually fucking sad.
> In the extract that we offer to you at the head of the article, Marcel Boiteux described what could be the probable origin of the appearance of cracks in the conduits leading to the tanks, in particular the differences in temperatures. A risk clearly identified from this time as shown by his words: « these tanks are subjected to thermal cycles. When the factory is in full power, it is hot, when it is in low power, it is cold ». The temperature of the water heated by the fission of the uranium atoms reaching according to him at 350 ° C ( it is in fact 320 ° C ). He continued: « The result is that the steel is diluted by heat and contracted when it is less hot. And it is this thermal respiration that is involved. »
> EDF president wanted to be reassuring, stressing that these risks were minimal, insofar as the power stations have a shorter lifespan than that where corrosion of the steel and the appearance of cracks would appear. The longevity of the steel had been calculated « per 12,000 cycles. According to him, there was no risk that this deadline would be exceeded. It was « totally excluded », he said.
> Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber, who was conducting the interview, asked him to specify the effective duration planned for a power plant: « 12,000 days a power plant ? That is to say 40 years ? ». Marcel Boiteux confirmed this estimate, even minimizing it: « Yes, just over 30 years old. »
I don't want to look at UAE, I live in Western Europe. All of the countries comparable to the country I live in are facing exploding costs and incredible time delays. That nuclear builds don't get cheaper as you build more of them is a well documented phenomenon, we have 70 years of proof.
[1] https://www.ina.fr/ina-eclaire-actu/president-edf-risque-fis...
Again, anybody who looks at nuclear other then threw trying to prove its bad, will figure out that 1 off builds are expensive. Had Europe with German/French leadership agree on a single plant design and started building it all over Europe we could be building these plants in 5 years or less of build time.
France in the 70/80s managed to find locations. I turns out that local populations actually love their local nuclear power plants. People living close to nuclear are far more pro nuclear then anywhere else.
The promise of jobs, improvement in rail infrastructure and cheap electricity convinces more villages that it is a good idea then people would think.
France faced a lot of opposition to their plan in the 70/80s and yet they found lots of locations and the population there are the most pro nuclear people now.
Its funny how people always call for European cooperation but EU universally building the same nuclear plant 100+ times was not considered. There is no question that this could have been done at a very low unit cost price. If you build that many with the same work force, and supply chain the price drops massively.
That kind of a strange thing to say. Boston Metal has been progressing just fine and have been sharing some of their progress online and are in talks with lots of different partners.
I don't think the industry is confused of where they are.