I'm puzzled why we'd have to enter into a relationship with Morocco when nuclear power is proven clean tech, at least a hundred years old.
Am I missing something?
I'm not saying there's no benefit to Nuclear, there definitely is, and it should be part of the mix, but it's not a replacement for a decent investment in Solar.
Finland that you quote was marinating it's Olkiluoto reactor for many years. Then Russia invaded Ukraine and Olkiluoto got from "let's think about approvals for a few more years" to pumping out electricity in a flash.
Yes. Yes, you can.
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Modern nuclear plans with light water reactors are designed to have strong manoeuvring capabilities. Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany [ report from 2011 ] 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.
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% Pr [rated power] per minute.
--- end quote ---
https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
> the more modern reactors have been prone to massive delays with an
This is mostly a political issue. China and South Korea are bringing reactors online faster.
> Fourthly, as we found last year, during heat waves rivers can run dry causing a shortage of water to cool the plants forcing them to go offline.
Again, that was a combination of things, including politically-motivated underinvestment in maintenance of nuclear power plants
The vast majority of the cost of nuclear power (which is very, very, very expensive) is capex for building out the capacity. Building it and then leaving it idle is crazy.
Cost of NPP with load following > NPP paired with storage > solar+wind paired with storage.
(where storage could be batteries, pumped storage or windgas).
The quote literally is: "Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode".
Edit: the requirements are literally "For example, 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 Pr, with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% of Pr per minute."
> but the cost is even more insane than using it as baseload.
And you have sources for that "insane cost"?
"While most nuclear power plants in operation as of early 2000's were already designed with strong load following capabilities, they might have not been used as such for purely economic reasons: nuclear power generation is composed almost entirely of fixed and sunk costs so lowering the power output doesn't significantly reduce generating costs, so it is more effective to run them at full power most of the time.[10][11]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant
France using Nuclear Power for load following is more a signal that they'd misjudged and significantly overbuilt nuclear capacity, not that it's a good idea. EDF has overwhemling financial problems and went spectacularly bankrupt in large part because unlike with, say, solar and wind - that spare capacity is very, very, very expensive.
tl;dr - as I said before, you technically can do it but it's absurdly expensive and just not worth it.
Again. Very, very VERY slowly:
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Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode
--- end quote ---
And these countries have more power plants than the rest of Europe.
If you bothered to read the report, and not just wikipedia, you'd see graphs for plants built as early as 1978 happily operating in load-following mode. E.g. Unterweser, commissioned in 1978, operated between 700 MW and 1400 MW per day in load-following mode. Same for Grohnde (commissioned in 1984). Etc.
And, of course, have sources for this?
https://energiforskmedia.blob.core.windows.net/media/18663/h...
--- start quote ---
Additional Costs for Load-following Nuclear Power Plants. Experiences from Swedish, Finnish, German, and French nuclear power plants
The conclusion from this report is that with a well-prepared load-following, there are very few additional costs...
It is concluded that if the load-following is planned and the regulation is done within determined levels specific for the plant there is no hindrance or addi- tional costs for load-following.
<Summarising: the actual cost is minimal, but may affect the resulting MWh price because nuclear power plants have high fixed costs and low variable costs.>
--- end quote ---
Unlike, say, renewables, that have overbuilding as a requirement I guess: https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1647799729734971396
What this means is that they built enough capacity to counter most requirements for power, and hand handle elastic demand without the need to overbuild or extensive expensive storage (something also absolutely required for renewables).
Right, except at 5x the cost.
Nuclear power, and indeed, load following would make a lot more sense if grid scale storage were prohibitively expensive or impossible.
Source?
> if grid scale storage were prohibitively expensive or impossible.
It's currently both [1].
BTW. Case in point: https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1647799729734971396
---
[1] Edit: This is a nice quick overview from a year ago https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/energy-storage-ana...
"Cheapest" option is pumped hydro storage. To cover Europe's need you only need to build 70 1.5 GW hydroelectric stations at a cost of $92 billion (in reality much higher) while greatly damaging ecology in large areas.
The most expensive option is Li-ion batteries, clocking in at a measely 1.1 trillion dollars.
Cheap and feasible.
Odd that somebody who is trying to school me on the realities of renewable energy is unaware of this, but here you go:
https://energycentral.com/sites/default/files/styles/og_meta...
>>if grid scale storage were prohibitively expensive or impossible. >It's currently both
For something that is prohibitively expensive and impossible we sure are seeing a lot of it rolled out.
>"Cheapest" option is pumped hydro storage. To cover Europe's need you only need to build 70 1.5 GW hydroelectric stations at a cost of $92 billion
Meanwhile, Hinkley point C is projected to cost $28 billion and for that we will get just 3.2GW.
Europe used 2785 TWh last year. Even if you assumed that storage is free, that still requires a minimum of 317GW, which would require about 100 Hinkley Point Cs, which would cost $2.7 trillion to build.
$100 billion would be a bargain.
Odd that someone who keeps reeating falsifiable untruths about nuclear couldn't be bothered to provide their sources even when repeatedly asked
> https://energycentral.com/sites/default/files/styles/og_meta...
This is a graph with no context and no explanation. And of course it doesn't include things like the need to overbuild and projected costs of storage.
> Meanwhile, Hinkley point C
Meanwhile if you selectively look at a single nuclear plant built in conditions which the FUD you spread around has been the norm for the past three decades, sure.
> $100 billion would be a bargain.
Of course you continue to ignore everything from what I write but what makes your FUD look plausible and good. Of course it won't be 100 billion because there's literally no way you could build that many PHS (and not at that cost). You'd know that if you actually read the links I provided, and not cherry-picked whatever you want from my words.
I have no interest to continue talking to someone who argues in bad faith.
Adieu.
But with solar you must include the cost of large scale energy storage, which makes it more expensive
>Secondly, it's not a responsive source of electricity - so you can't modulate the output easily. 1) that's what pumped hydro is for, 2) modern reactors can alter their output by as much as 5%/minute
It doesnt really matter what kind of storage you have to pair with solar (batteries, pumped storage, windgas) it still delivers cheaper power.
Only if you omit cost of energy storage infrastructure and grid upgrades necessary for VRE.
> Secondly, it's not a responsive source of electricity - so you can't modulate the output easily.
Repeated often by nuclear critics even though there's evidence out there of German nuclear modulating load within 24 hours.
> Fourthly, as we found last year, during heat waves rivers can run dry causing a shortage of water to cool the plants forcing them to go offline.
French powerplants did not go offline last summer, a few of them that lack sufficient cooling tower infrastructure had to eject hotter than usual water into rivers.
I am not so sure about that. At least not if you ONLY rely on nuclear.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/electricit...
France massively profits from being part of the European grid. While the above is about a year time frame, France is frequently an importer. That's why there's big grids with different producers, consumers, and forms of storage, like pumped-storage.
Having just nuclear power would be really dumb. Just like just solar, just wind, etc.
It's still horribly expensive and slow to build.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_... : approval in 2012, 50% cost overrun, projected completion in 2027.
People will counter that with various other reactor designs, but if it's a new design, it no longer counts as "proven", does it? Not until the first one is running.
Then there are two other risks:
- the "black swan" disaster, where a Chernobyl cloud takes out European agricultural production for months and in a few places years. Very low probability, but things can go wrong; the shelling near the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, for example.
- nuclear proliferation. Everyone's forgotten about this since we're fine with the existing nuclear powers, but does that apply to every country?
Many of those delays are political rather than technical.
On top of that, imagine if instead of deriding, denigrating and spreading FUD about nuclear energy for the past 20-30 years we would instead invest in it and improve it.
> the "black swan" disaster,
Literally yesterday there was a black swan for renewables in Germany. They shut down the last reactors and... https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1647799729734971396
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Germany's 66.5 GW of installed wind is only producing as much as the 3 reactors that turned off last night used to produce.
400% expansion of wind would only provide half present need
--- end quote ---
But of course no renewables proponent will ever mention this as a black swan event. Because "sometime 40 years from now, maybe, we will have overbuilt all the renewables and energy storage we need"
You're not wrong, but that also applies to, for example, an international collaboration to build a global HVDC power grid that can shift enough power from antipodes that we could do a pure PV electricity supply without any storage.
Would only take, like, a decade of global metal production, making it faster than that specific reactor.
But hey, politics.
> But of course no renewables proponent will ever mention this as a black swan event.
That's a misuse of the term, black swans are the unknown-unknowns, not predictable bad things.
Also, at current rates, more like 10 years. Electric cars use so many batteries that having the capability to make all-electric road transport necessarily also makes grid storage trivial.
The other day Finland finally connected its latest nuclear power plant - Olkiluoto 3 to the grid. It will play a crucial role in securing the country's access to energy.
Took 18 years instead of the 5 originally planned and €11bln instead of €3bln.
Mind you, it was still worth it, but given the upfront cost it's hard to work on several such projects in parallel.
And this here is a success story - Hinkley Point C is still in development despite consuming over £30bln.
China is doing great regarding nuclear, but after 20 years of intensive development they still don't have the capacity of France - a country with a single digit percentage fraction of the population.
So there's that.
The bigger problem is we only want things without downsides, which don't exist.
Moebius things?
(I suppose they will be both "all upside" and "all downside". Does not work.)
It's risky to put all your eggs in one basket.