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Comment by Gwypaas | Hacker News Reader

Great that the alternative in 2023 in renewables then! You're arguing a strawman comparing nuclear to fossil fuels.

Renewables are great but they don't provide a good base capacity capability. That means you still need hydro, geothermal (both limited), coal, gas, oil or nuclear in your grid, with enough capacity to provide energy in case it's not sunny or windy. Large scale storage using batteries is simply not feasible at this point, which is why nuclear is still a good bridge technology until we figure that out.

Unfortunately your misconception is very popular, and I think a large part of why a lot of people don't support nuclear.

Of course they do.

> Indian developer secures 300 MW renewables project with $0.050/kWh bid

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/05/19/indian-developer-secu...

Nuclear costs $0.12 - $0.20/kWh in comparison.

https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...

Sorry but your source is bad - no details whatsoever about which storage solution they are aiming for. Regardless, we know for a fact that not a single country has storage capabilities for even 1% of their energy needs. Lots of initiatives want to change that, such as the one you posted, but there is absolutely no large scale solution for this issue at all. Once you accept that fact, you realize renewables are not a replacement for nuclear at this point.

I greatly appreciate your second link and will have a look at it later. I'm very curious how they got such a high figure for the nuclear cost given a look at even more expensive modern nuclear reactors costs gives a number of around $0.07/kWh.

The manufacturers say they are cheap, well 0.07/kWh is super expensive, but in your reality yes, cheap, before starting to build. Then reality hits.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-dream-of-mini-nuclear-plants...

The $0.07/kWh is for recently completed plants. The industry estimates they publish for new plants are more like $0.03/kWh.

You appear to be employing rhetoric a lot more than hard numbers. If you want a productive discussion I recommend sticking to the latter.

$0.07/kWh is not even close to reality in the west. $0.12 - 0.2/kWh is the reality. This is whole sale prices, so you can not compare it to your power bill.

https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...

Like Hinkley Point C clocking in at a fair $0.16/kWh.

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

I think you is the one blinded by the industries promises rather than the reality it produces.

Take IEA and their special report on Nuclear power. They generally are super conservative and in favor of traditional methods.

> As an established large-scale low emissions energy source, nuclear is well placed to help decarbonise electricity supply. In the IEA’s Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario (NZE), energy sector emissions fall by about 40% from 2020 to 2030, and then decline to zero on a net basis by 2050. While renewable sources dominate and rise to nearly 90% of electricity supply in the NZE, nuclear energy plays a significant role. This narrow but achievable pathway requires rigorous and immediate policy action by governments around the world to reshape energy systems on many fronts.

> Nuclear has to up its game in order to play its part

> The industry has to deliver projects on time and on budget to fulfil its role. This means completing nuclear projects in advanced economies at around USD 5 000/kW by 2030, compared with the reported capital costs of around USD 9 000/kW (excluding financing costs) for first-of-a kind projects. There are some proven methods to reduce costs including finalising designs before starting construction, sticking with the same design for subsequent units, and building multiple units at the same site. Stable regulatory frameworks throughout construction would also help avoid delays.

Essentially - Nuclear as it exists today is dead, if it can get it costs down to less than half it may play a tiny role.

https://www.iea.org/reports/nuclear-power-and-secure-energy-...

It looks like you've been posting overwhelmingly on one topic. Single-purpose accounts are not allowed here, regardless of their purpose or topic, because they go against the spirit of intellectual curiosity that we're trying to optimize for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). We therefore ban this sort of account.

I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please stop doing this on HN, we'd appreciate it.

p.s. please also follow the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) when responding to other commenters. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36345123 broke the rules badly. Fortunately it doesn't look like you've been making a habit of that!

Actually, no, you're the one stuck on a misconception.

Renewables + storage can provide "synthetic baseload" at a cost that will likely be lower than nuclear in most places, especially for a new nuclear plant whose construction has not started yet (it will compete with renewables + storage of the future, since they are installed much faster and don't have to start now to be done at the same time.)

An important reminder is to not use just batteries for storage. Many bogus attempts to show renewables can't do it assume batteries are used for long term storage. This is a technological strawman argument. Use e-fuels instead. With renewables and electrolysers crashing in price, green hydrogen will become remarkably cheap.

Can you point me to a country that can store even 1% of their energy needs currently? If not, you're talking about unproven technologies that may or may not fix this problem. I hope they do, but until then we are in a world where closing a nuclear plant means opening up a carbon-intensive one. Renewables are not currently a replacement for nuclear, and this is not a misconception, it is a fact.

Pretty much all of them? That's because they burn fossil fuels, and fossil fuels are also storage. There's no sense making a synthetic fuel for storage when you're still burning a natural fuel.

Care to show me a country with a breeder-based nuclear cycle? Oh gosh, by your logic nuclear cannot use breeders, since it hasn't been done yet. I guess nuclear is ruled out so we're totally doomed. Fortunately, your logic is entirely specious.

There is no easy way to economically produce a synthetic fuel at scale as you suggest. It is irrelevant whether breeder reactors work or not, I can point to dozens of countries with a significant impact of nuclear in their mix, but you cannot provide a single country that uses synthetic fuels or any other type of storage at scale (>0.1% would probably still be challenging).

My logic is that we are currently shutting down or creating regulatory hurdles for the cleanest base load technology, which is proven safe and reliable, in favor of pipe dreams such as that renewables plus storage is all we need.

Hydrogen can be produced and stored on a massive scale. Electrolysers are now below $300/kW.

"Economically"? Compared to current hydrogen from methane, sure that would be hard. But compared to electrical power from nuclear? Much easier. Exelon stated in 2005 that nuclear could be competitive if natural gas (with a $25/ton CO2 tax) were around $14/MMBtu (note that natural gas at the Henry Hub is a bit over $2/MMBtu right now). That's about $.05/kWh(thermal). Electrolysis could pretty easily make hydrogen at that cost, given today's cheap renewable energy. Given that those 2005 nuclear cost estimates were optimistic, I doubt existing nuclear could compete with combined cycle plants burning green hydrogen. Of course, on a renewable grid, a great deal of the energy will go directly from the renewable sources to the grid, not through hydrogen, so nuclear will do even more poorly.

Why don't you answer my question? Can you point to a country that uses electrolysis and hydrogen at scale currently? Because if we are going by estimates and projections, I can also talk about fusion and other pipe dreams on the nuclear side. Not to mention a lot of electrolysis is currently done with fossil fuels.

Hydrogen projects are sprouting up like crazy. It's pretty much a repeat of the early days of wind and solar.

Indeed. And yet, there's the stubborn idea that the prices of electrolysers will not continue to decline along an experience curve. The same blindness occurred with critics of solar and wind.

Agreed. Hydrogen is going to be nearly free in terms of production cost. It will just follow the curve of wind and solar.

I don't answer obviously bad faith questions. It doesn't matter whether hydrogen is being done at scale right now. What matters is whether it could be done at scale when fossil fuels are out of the picture. And the answer to that is clearly that it can.

> Renewables + storage can provide "synthetic baseload" at a cost that will likely be lower than nuclear in most places,

Try actually calculating this. Last I did I got around $100 billion per year needed for storage+renewable for the UK, which was triple the wholesale electricity annual revenue.

Got the numbers for hydrogen (energy conversion loss, storage costs per kwh, drain, cycle numbers, costs per kw)? The 2019 US department of energy storage costs paper I used didn't include it and I suspect this was because the numbers are atrocious. Compressed air storage seems like the best for day+ energy storage with batteries for hourly storage.

What do you mean by "storage"? Short term storage only, like batteries? This would lead to an overly large renewable installation to power the country in the winter.

The round trip efficiency of hydrogen is indeed bad, but for long term storage that's is overwhelmed by the much lower cost of hydrogen storage capacity, vs. batteries.

The round-trip efficiency isn't actually that bad once you realize that we're dealing with large installations here. For instance, heat can be used to make hydrogen, which is why you sometimes hear about nuclear power making hydrogen. Large installations can recapture heat, either as co-generation or use it to drive a gas turbine.

Yes, by "storage" I mean storing the hydrogen for those rainy days.

Can I take this to mean you don't know where to find reliable numbers on this?

You can look at the assumptions under https://model.energy/ which were based on cost data in Europe (I believe there's a link to the source).

Per-kW cost of electrolysers is already 1/2 of the total per-kW cost given there in the 2030 assumptions (but that may include other equipment).

Cost of storage caverns is well known from natural gas, as little as $1/kWh of capacity. Cost of combined cycle plants to convert the hydrogen back to power is also well known, as these will be nearly identical to natural gas fired CC plants (just the details of the combustors will change.)

Last I checked switching to pure renewables would triple electricity costs due to storage needs.

You'd be way better off spending that money on nuclear (including accident cleanup) and healthcare.

Given that nuclear on marginal price markets would require 5-8x the costs from renewables that is a win? Stop living in the 70s.

Actually model it. Go look at gridwatch and use the graphs to calculate total storage needs if using a wind-solar mix, then check out the US department of energy 2019 report on energy storage solution characteristics.

Calculated total cost when I did it would have tripled UK electricity prices.

Pure French nuclear, on the other hand, resulted in a mere 30% increase in electricity prices.

French existing nuclear paid for completely opaquely to support the military nuclear program.

Now input Flamanville 3 costs for your buildout.

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

Yes, over regulation leads to massively spiraling costs as delays lead to financing issues (both interest and uncertainty), knowledge loss, project management timing issues, etc etc

And yet even with that you're getting 400 billion kWh over its 40 year lifespan for €13 billion construction costs (multiply by 1.5 for lifetime costs), for electricity production price of €0.05 per kWh. Which is honestly decent.

Btw: did you actually do the calculation before posting?

Hahahahaha. Yeah, a 20 year project + 40 year lifespan and you get a "decent" number. You are guessing about 2083.

Do you even listen to yourself?

Your reply seems to just be empty mockery unworthy of you. Do you dispute the figures I gave? Do you think the price given makes nuclear nonviable?

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