America aims for nuclear-power renaissance
economist.com
economist.com
But the chances of the US, or practically anywhere really, building substantial new nuclear facilities is close to zero.
Wind and solar are plentiful, cheap , quick to build, and offer immediate returns. If i have a few billion to invest I'd pick one of these over nuclear.
Basically wind and solar don't rely on foreign countries for fuel, are simple to run maintain, replace etc. In the case of wind land use is minimal. Solar can be deployed in already-urban environments. Environmental damage from catastrophic failure is basically zero.
Of course there is the storage problem, but there are various potential solutions to that. Pumped hydro, compressed air, hydrogen production, and others. I expect more innovation in this space.
Don't get me wrong, nuclear is safe, clean(ish), and provides a good base load. But regulation, planning, costs, and all the other layers make actual building of them very unattractive. I'm not confident they'll ever see the light of day.
[1] yeah, I know that's not how it works.
If we build one in Denmark, and it went wrong, then our entire country could end up uninhabitable. And I know the plants are very safe, but look at what’s going on in the Ukraine, or how Russia blew up the gas lines recently. Again something that is probably less of an issue within the USA.
So I think countries like the US should probably do a nuclear renaissance, while other countries should stick with renewables. I wouldn’t worry so much about the storage issue. We currently build and deploy batteries that are inside shipping containers, effectively solving our storage issues. It should be noted that “our” storage issues aren’t the same as the grids issues, ours is intended to be able to store excess power. Basically you cannot sell power when the grid is full, and currently that means solar plants dump it into nothing. The batteries allow us to store it for months. Of course we also use it to sell power at better prices, but I did say we were an investment bank.
Battery tech is only going to improve. It’s sort of ironic that Tesla was so early with some of the storage solutions that other companies actually build today, but sometimes it’s not a good idea to be a first mover I guess? The big push is largely funded by countries like Germany going for full renewables of course, and Tesla didn’t have that at the time.
Sorry but that conclusion is incorrect. Batteries, in their current lithium form, are absolutely not suitable for gridscale storage. They're far too expensive.
In Australia a $100 million battery, if it could discharge at an infinite rate, could only meet the demand of a city of 2 million people for about 48 seconds.
Lithium batteries are for grid stabilisation - the absorb short term spikes in demand and generation.
Funny that you quote the country with the worse energy policy in the world as a good example to follow.
Germany has some of the highest CO2 emissions per capita in the EU, has the highest kWh production price in the EU, imports tons of cheap clean nuclear energy from France to meet depend (exactly because they have renewables and there is no proper affordable storage technology that exists in the real world).
They have a chancelor who was/is openly in bed with Putin (Schroder if you want more info) who basically helped the Russians by making Germany dependent on their gas by making Germany switch to non-continuous energy sources (wind / solar, gas falls in for "the battery" that doesnt exist). All on purpose: got a nice "job" at Gazprom afterwards as a reward.
Now that the gas lines to Russia are gone Germany is importing natural gas in ships from the US. Very green! To fill in the other gaps they reopened their coal mines and started burning more coal once more. They closed their last nuclear power plant in the past year as well, so there will only be more of that.
And that's your good example to follow?
I would not invest at your investment bank needless to say.
My recommendation for German government: make electricity cheap and nobody will think twice installing heat pumps or buying electric vehicles. Current price 0.3-0.5€/kWh depending on location what is insane.
Further, comparing electricity prices in Germany to France is a moot point, because France has a fixed consumer price and pays the rest using taxes.
More further, France is importing more electricity from Germany than Germany is from France. Ironically, because their nuclear reactors are failing. [2] So most of your points are probably false.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/even-crisis-germany-....
Absolutely not. It happened only in 2022 for a very particular reason, maintenance for a defect now resolved. As of right now, France is exporting almost 3GW to Germany ;)
The comment you replied to didn’t make that argument.
Powering the world with nuclear will require breeder reactors. A Chernobyl-like prompt criticality accident in a fast reactor could be an actual honest-to-god nuclear explosion, not a piddly pathetic steam explosion like at Chernobyl.
> This rate is almost completely dominated by one event: the Banqiao Dam Failure in China in 1975. It killed approximately 171,000 people. Otherwise, hydropower was very safe, with a death rate of just 0.04 deaths per TWh – comparable to nuclear, solar, and wind.
The Banqiao Dam failure had much more to do the 1970s Chinese Communist Party incompetence and the Cultural Revolution than anything specific to water power.
It appears to be second in death toll among renewables, after biomass.
> Solar: In an average year nobody would die – only every 50 years would someone die.
It’s like saying Chernobyl only caused 32 deaths because the other ones were outside the plant.
What people don't understand is there has been literally decades of nuclear power generation over hundreds of reactors worldwide with zero issues.
I’d say the current state of American infrastructure, with our collapsing highways and constantly derailing trains that poison entire towns, would suggest otherwise.
From some admittedly quick research, there are apparently 600,000 road bridges in the US, and the continued maintenance of these bridges is dispersed between 50 different state governments. The US 140,000 miles of railroad track that transports 61 tons of goods per American per year. The scale of the size and use of road and rail systems in the United States are off the charts massive. This is not to excuse the issues you're referring to (they are real and they should definitely be fixed), but the context in which these issues are occurring is important when comparing to something like nuclear.
And it's not like it's all bad when it comes to massive infrastructure in the US: 1.7 million people fly in the US every day, and the last fatal crash on a commercial airlines occurred in 2009. It's actually kind of mindblowing that flying in the US right now is probably the safest mode of transport.. ever? Clearly the US is capable of regulating _some_ things well from a safety perspective.
So.. there are only 92 active nuclear reactors in the United States, all of which are regulated under a single independent agency of the US federal government (the NRC). It's a much smaller, more tractable problem than general transportation infrastructure.
The worst accident occurred in 1979 and the total amount of deaths in the US caused by the industry are vanishingly small compared to so many other industries (even if you use the worst estimates from the TMI accident). The regulations and associated costs surrounding nuclear are such that we have fewer reactors now than we had in 1990. And the designs and technology of nuclear reactors continues to be improvements upon (what happened at Chernobyl specifically is basically not possible anywhere in the world besides the Russia).
I just don't think it really makes sense to cast into doubt the entirety of the US government's ability to keep people safe at all (including from scary things like nuclear) just because we are seeing _some_ things go wrong at times (and I say this as someone who does in fact have very little faith in the efficacy for the US government generally speaking). Context and historical performance matter.
This is comparable to the North Sea flood [1] with 2,551 instant deaths.
The requirements are rarely for more than a few hours or a day or two of storage, which significantly reduces the required reservoir volume. And the only requirement is that it be at a higher elevation than the source body of water, so rather than disrupt an entire river and its migration patterns you can have it off to the side.
Because the sites are now a lot smaller and not limited to drops in elevation along rivers, you now have many possible sites; many pumped storage sites are either existing reservoirs or disused mines.
That’s one of the main issues right there. You can’t just plan for the typical case. You need to account for the slightly less frequent cases as well, like 11 days straight of <20% solar/wind generation [1]. And that’s not even an extreme outlier event.
[1] https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/q1-2021/when-the-wind...
Because a simple cycle combustion turbine power plant is maybe 5% of the cost per watt of capacity of a nuclear power plant, we could cover the entire grid with CT backup and not come anywhere close to the cost of powering the grid with nuclear. And because these would be used so infrequently the fuel cost would be negligible.
This doesn’t sound accurate.
If you have a reservoir with zero head you can’t recover potential energy because there is not.
https://www.whitepinepumpedstorage.com/
You can see from the image how small the reservoirs are (go to Google Maps and find the spot north of Ely up the valley; it's eye opening how tiny this all is compared the size of the state of Nevada). The initial charge is 5,500 acre-feet of water (and 600 acre-feet per year makeup water, I presume for evaporation). It stores 8 GWh of energy with a power capacity of 1 GW. The estimated economic lifespan is 75 years (conservative, since very few PHES systems worldwide have been retired.) Cost is $2.5B.
The Basin and Range province has an embarrassingly large potential for pumped hydro, due to the geography: all those intermixed linear mountain ranges and valleys. This province is also where UAMPS is trying to get utilities to buy into that cluster of six NuScale reactors. Utterly dumb, when they have practically unlimited storage at a shade over $300/kWh of capacity and could use renewables instead. Utah also has the potential for enormous hydrogen storage in Miocene salt formations near Delta (~15 TWh).
The pumped hydro projects do seem to have long build times; it would be interesting to know why that was. This one is not projected to come online until 2031. The company has 11 projects in the pipeline.
There are very few on most similar terrain in the Bay Area and there are no wind farms blocking development there. Why haven't houses been built?
Take your pick. There are a ton of American cities where solar does not work like how you imagine
Nor is the entity who sold the land. So, if there ever was any opportunity cost involved, it is already factored in.
However, there are places in the world (Japan) where a modern design nuclear power plant is built in 3.5 years. South Korea is very close behind. And it's not just a one off. Japan built 8 new nuclear power plants and South Korea built 13 in last 20 years. These plants are every bit as safe as plants built elsewhere, perhaps even safer as they're new designs.
This suggest it is not technology that's holding us(US and majority of EU) back, but bad project management practices. We too could have a new plant built in few years.
Add to this SMRs (small modular reactors) which are hopefully becoming available in next 2'years and anyone that can't see nuclear is the only hope for decarbonisation is misinformed.
Then take a country like Germany that has recently shut down perfectly working nuclear power plants and opened the first new brown coal burning plant in Europe in a very long time (also they activated many others that were doing very little before). I don't know if this is irony or what, but when "green" efforts make an industrialised country give up nuclear and switch to coal there is something seriously wrong.
Also few words on the type of coal they burn there. There are (broadly) two types of coal. There is coal proper (resembles black stone, mined in deep mines, high quality, little sulphur and oil/tar content) and there is lignite. A brown smelly thing that crumbles when you squeeze it leaving a tarry residue everywhere. It's "mined" from just below the surface by gargantuan machines that destroy thousands and thousands of hectares of land leaving a moonscape behind. Why is it used? Because when you build your power plant next to a source of lignite the electricity is really cheap. This kind of "coal" emits a lot more pollutants when burned. This can be mitigated somewhat by using modern tech, but still it should be our last power source choice. Not first.
If the people say no to nuclear they'll not get renewable for base load, but lignite burning plants. BTW, CO2 is not really the worst these plants emit. They emit tiny particulates that get in your lungs. Incidence of child asthma is a lot higher near such plants as well as many other diseases.
The US demolishes any and all of its state capacity anytime a company calls the congressman they bribe to complain that the government doing (insert project here) intrudes on their right to make money. That’s the difference. The Navy has been running nuclear power plants underwater for 50+ years at this point, but having a state organization that builds and maintains energy infrastructure would compete with all the existing energy sector interests, so it can’t be allowed to happen. Contrast this to China, where businesses do not have authority to override the state and this difference is obvious.
Blame where blame is due, please.
Germany's energy issues don't stem from green policies themselves, they track back to a single individual directing energy policy while in bed with Russian gas providers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der
Schröder was criticized for his policies towards Vladimir Putin's government, his work for Russian state-owned companies, and his lobbying on behalf of Russia. On 1 March 2022, Schröder's entire staff including long-time office manager Albrecht Funk resigned due to Schröder's alliances with Russia and Putin directly.
Since leaving public office, Schröder has worked for Russian state-owned energy companies, including Nord Stream AG, Rosneft, and Gazprom.
These are serious failures to be sure but failures of the kind that occur with any policy, be it green, military procurement, national parks, housing, etc.
And you know, do so my emitting it into the atmosphere.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
The chances of experiencing adverse health effects from radiation are slim for both nuclear and coal-fired power plants—they're just somewhat higher for the coal ones.
"You're talking about one chance in a billion for nuclear power plants," Christensen says. "And it's one in 10 million to one in a hundred million for coal plants."
McBride and his co-authors estimated that individuals living near coal-fired installations are exposed to a maximum of 1.9 millirems of fly ash radiation yearly.
To put these numbers in perspective, the average person encounters 360 millirems of annual "background radiation" from natural and man-made sources, including substances in Earth's crust, cosmic rays, residue from nuclear tests and smoke detectors.
So, bugger all in both cases particularly when compared to normal background radiation exposure.
> digging up a whole lot of coal (particularly in Australia, which also has a whole lot of uranium)
Australia is kind of big (the same land area essentially as the contiguous United States of America) and I don't see the major uranium deposits in Australia being especially close to the massive coal beds.
For comparison, the USGS database on Coal quality states [2][3]
In the majority of samples, concentrations of uranium fall in the range from slightly below 1 to 4 parts per million (ppm). Similar uranium concentrations are found in a variety of common rocks and soils, as indicated in figure 2. Coals with more than 20 ppm uranium are rare in the United States. Thorium concentrations in coal fall within a similar 1–4 ppm range, compared to an average crustal abundance of approximately 10 ppm. Coals with more than 20 ppm thorium are extremely rare.
These figures for coal are all less than typical crustal concentrations.
The below link [5] is a throw in that doesn't address U-Th-K in Australian coal but does address the major properties of Australian thermal coals.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
[2] https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html
[3] https://ncrdspublic.er.usgs.gov/coalqual/
[4] https://publications.csiro.au/rpr/download?pid=csiro:EP11424...
[5] https://minerals.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Best-in-C...
The claim of that title "Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste" is a baldfaced lie, btw. The radioactivity in the spent fuel is many orders of magnitude higher than in the coal ash for the same generated power.
14 years longer than promised, not expected. I don't know what drugs the salesmen were on, but they promised delivery 50% faster than any serial-built french plant for a model that was 1) more complex, 2) never built before and 3) with half of the experienced team missing.
Far more likely they’ll open new coal plants than nuclear, wind, or solar - nuclear and renewables are anathema at the polling booth, whereas the status quo is a safe bet.
40% of Americans do not believe in climate change, and the 60% that do include a good chunk who are not yet of voting age, and people who are otherwise unable to vote - and on a district by district basis, only about 35% of districts believe in climate change.
So, coal. It’ll be coal.
And regardless of what politians say, when something is a good investment, somebody does it. Hence the continious growth of solar, wind seems to run into way more hurdles, from regulation over NIMBY to technical issues.
That's not really true anymore:
Learning how to do nuclear means learning how the french did it in the 70s. You need knowledge sharing and expertise in the construction of these things to achieve nuclear within time and budget.
The first reactor is always going to be a colossal failure because, but essential to know where the problems are.
But with so many nuclear startups I fear all investment will be dispersed into a range of different approaches, none of which will achieve what is promised. This will be the final nail in the coffin for western nuclear.
Except for the 2020 MIT study[0] which showed that
"contrary to expectations, building subsequent plants based on an existing design actually costs more, not less, than building the initial plant"
"Many of the excess costs were associated with delays caused by the need to make last-minute design changes based on particular conditions at the construction site or other local circumstances, so if more components of the plant, or even the entire plant, could be built offsite under controlled factory conditions, such extra costs could be substantially cut."
In fact, later in the article an expert says that is happening precisely because the US does not have much expertise in this area that leads to exorbitant costs. Precisely what OP is saying.
A bit like the EPR design?[0]
Unfortunately it's not really the poster-child for efficiency.
I think we should refresh ourselves on the timeline[0] of Flamanville 3, although this should probably come with a trigger warning.
First concrete was poured for the demonstration EPR reactor at the Flamanville Nuclear Power Plant on 6 December 2007.
In December 2007, construction of the unit itself began. This was expected to last 54 months, with commissioning planned for 2012.
In April 2008, the French nuclear safety authority (Autorité de sûreté nucléaire, ASN) reported that a quarter of the welds inspected in the secondary containment steel liner are not in accordance with norms, and that cracks have been found in the concrete base.
In May 2009, Stephen Thomas reported that after 18 months of construction, and after a series of quality control problems, the project is "more than 20 percent over budget and EDF is struggling to keep it on schedule".
In August 2010, the regulator, ASN, reported further welding problems on the secondary containment steel liner [..] EDF announced that costs had increased 50% to €5 billion, and commissioning was delayed by about two years to 2014.
In July 2011, EDF announced that the estimated costs had escalated to €6 billion, and that completion of construction was delayed to 2016.
In December 2012, EDF announced that the estimated costs had escalated to €8.5 billion
In November 2014, EDF announced that completion of construction was delayed to 2017, due to delays in component delivery by Areva.
In April 2015, Areva informed the French nuclear regulator ASN that anomalies had been detected in the reactor vessel steel, causing "lower than expected mechanical toughness values" [..] [it was] reported that Areva had been aware of this problem since 2006.
In June 2015, multiple faults in cooling system safety valves were discovered by ASN.
In September 2015, EDF announced that the estimated costs had escalated to €10.5 billion, and the start-up of the reactor was delayed to the fourth quarter of 2018.
In April 2016, ASN announced that additional weak spots had been found in the reactor steel, and Areva and EDF responded that new tests would be conducted, though construction work would continue.
In February 2017 [it was] stated the project was six years late, and €7.2 billion over budget, while renewed delays in the construction of the EPR-reactors at Taishan Nuclear Power Plant prompted EDF to state that Flamanville 3 remains on schedule to start operations by the end of 2018, assuming it receives regulatory approval.
The discovery of quality deviations in the welding led to a further revision of the schedule in July 2018. Fuel loading was delayed until the end of 2019, and the cost estimate was increased from €10.5 billion to €10.9 billion.
In June 2019, nuclear regulator ASN determined that eight welds in steam transfer pipes passing through the two wall containment, that EDF had hoped to repair after startup, must be repaired before the reactor is commissioned [..] estimated costs were €11 billion.
In October 2019, EDF announced that because of this issue costs would increase to €12.4 billion and that fuel loading would be delayed until the end of 2022. [auditors] revealed that the costs could reach €19.1 billion instead of €12.4 billion when taking into account the additional charges due to the delay in construction.
In January 2022, it was announced that more time was needed for the repair of faulty welds and the solving of other issues.
In December 2022, EDF announced a further delay of at least six months with an estimated cost increase of €500 million due to more work to establish a new process for the stress relieving heat treatment of some welds close to sensitive equipment.
Fuel loading is now forecast for early 2024.
Estimated total costs increased to €13.2 billion.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanvi...
...or just check the state of EDF S.A.
Umm, the sites are the sites.
We're going to somehow attempt to leverage our one standard design and rule out the very existance of any local circumstances by adding enough expertise?
Good luck with that.
I need to see this report because as phrased it comes across as a joke. Which is not unexpected from the DOE, which has shown not so great ability to predict the future. But still...
Assuming we start in 2030, the first time we expect a new SMR to hit the grid (and quite optimistically), we need to build an additional 100GW to replace retiring current nuclear for a total of 400GW between 2030 and 2050, or 20GW/year. At 10 years per GW of construction, that's 200GW of sites under construction at any given moment.
These numbers are simply not plausible. We will be adding 100GW/year of new solar car before 2030, at current rates of increase. That's about 20-25GW/year when corrected for capacity factor.
Given the extreme disadvantage that nuclear has on price, the DOE estimating 20 GW/year of new nuclear has to be from someone with rose colored glasses and no concept of pricing or economics.
As for "economies" I can't quite understand what you mean by that.
If people find a way to drop the cost of nuclear by an order of magnitude to finally deliver on its potential, I'm all for it. Great stuff otherwise but it's just too expensive currently.
In short, I don't see that happening any time soon. We might actually get fusion before that happens. And we shouldn't be betting on that either. It might happen, it might not happen. Either way, we need to get rid of fossil fuels. Right now wind, solar, and batteries are looking pretty good in terms of mass production and deployment of new capability. There's a gap with nuclear and it's widening rapidly.
Most of that is cost driven. It's just a lot cheaper/faster/better/less risky/etc.
There's probably more battery being added to grids than nuclear pretty soon.
This is necessary because solar and wind are intermittent and will slew their output very quickly due to ambient conditions. It's also helpful if a plant has to throw its breakers offline.
It's only viable because if you have a good monitoring system, you can target the wholesale market at moments the demand curve spikes and you can service the spike faster then anyone else can come online. This makes you money, and makes the electrical infrastructure require less over-build and over-production because it means online generators have time to increase their output.
It doesn't somehow make batteries viable as long term storage, because there's a big difference between servicing partial grid load for an hour, and servicing the entire grid load for 16 hours.
If the grid actually fails - goes right down into a black start condition - it's potentially a multi-week exercise to bring it back up. And it takes everything else with it. So the question is, how much storage do you need? What level of overbuild do you need to accommodate for when you no longer have reliable generators (currently fossil fuels) on the grid? The sun shines every day and the wind always blows, but does it blow enough? How much battery capacity do you need to ensure there's functionally never a chance of prolonged under-production from driving you into rolling blackouts?
I would suggest it's instructive to look at just how much water cities actually store, compared to their daily usage, and how low they're willing to let those resources get before they declare emergency measures - <80% is considered serious, <70% critical. Electricity is every bit as important - not least of which is because without it, there is no water delivery.
EDIT: Keeping the cost of overbuild in mind, for example, it costs about AUD$0.08/kWh to deliver electricity from the cheapest LiFePO4's I can find on the market as a consumer. And that's being very generous about their cycle life.
> [batteries] can balance electricity supply and demand for periods ranging from a few seconds to a few hours
If the market solution is not satisfactory add something like Karlshamnsverket in Sweden. Oil power plant getting a tiny subsidy to be in standby during the winter months.
Convert it to synthetic fuels when the paltry emissions a few of hours of runtime produces becomes significant in the grand scheme of things.
https://www.uniper.energy/sweden/power-plants-sweden/karlsha...
Some numbers to boggle your mind:
1 smallish EV is 50kwh of battery. 100 kwh is 2 EVs 20 EVs is 1 mwh 20,000 EVs is 1 gwh 200,000 EVs is 10 gwh 2,000,000 EVs is 100 gwh
Tesla is producing around 2 million EVs/year right now. That's about 100 gwh of battery. Of course Teslas have larger batteries (60-90ish) so it's probably closer to 150 gwh of battery. That's aside from their mega packs and domestic storage of course, which is on track to becoming at least as big of a business as their car business currently is. Lets call it at around 200-250 gwh. Right now. Also, they plan to grow to 10 million vehicles produced per year. So, just Tesla should be producing well over a twh of battery per year pretty soon.
That's just Tesla. They are quite big of course but other companies are catching up fast and Tesla actually buys a lot of battery from external suppliers. These batteries have thousands of cycles and last quite long. So, the cumulative battery capacity of this planet is going to range in the tens to hundreds of twh pretty soon. We'll soon have lots of trucks, buses, and other vehicles switching to batteries as well. Millions of them. Very large batteries. And of course grids are deploying batteries by the tens of mwh already. That's a lot of battery production. All that battery production adds up to some pretty significant capacity. Growing by the hundreds of ghw right now every year and thousands of gwh pretty soon.
Relative to the total electricity production, that's getting close to potentially keeping up with that if you assume ~365 cycles per year for each battery (on the high side of course). The total electricity production globally is around 25 phw (1000 twh). 25000/365 ~= 70 twh per day. So having a few tens of twh of battery in the market is going to provide plenty of buffer for whatever severe electricity production dips might happen locally. Yes, 70 twh of battery wouldn't last long if you relied on that exclusively. But it won't have to because we can interconnect places with cables and there's always some wind somewhere and the sun comes out pretty reliably every day somewhere and it's not going to be cloudy everywhere at the same time. On average renewable production fluctuates a lot locally but not regionally or globally. We can plan for this with overcapacity, storage, and cables.
The bottom line is that we'll have way more battery than we actually need pretty soon. And that's before we start considering long term storage that is also being developed. To be fair, using lithium ion batteries for that would be pretty inefficient from a cost point of view. But it seems we might have tens of twh of that deployed pretty soon anyway.
My expectation is that most of that battery capacity will be just sitting there fully charged most of the time.
Sorry but you don't inspire confidence. Anyone can come up with optimistic numbers.
That's the point: as soon as you're talking overcapacity planning, the straight cost of solar and batteries (and for batteries it is not favorable) is out the window. You're now talking multipliers. And not small multipliers - big ones.
Because even with the assumption of regional stability, you still need to meet the Volt-Amps demand at every instantaneous moment of the grid. So how stable is your output regionally? How much overcapacity? 2x? 3x? 10x?
If you're overbuilding by that much, then suddenly does solar and batteries really look so good compared to nuclear. Is it even cheaper?
EDIT: And I'll note - you can't just pile all those electric cars into any calculation and say "these are free to have". They're not. I'm not selling you cycles on my electric car battery - why would I? I can barely make money on the cheapest stationary batteries I can find in the market, and my EV battery costs a lot more then that. It doesn't matter how many are made, you don't own them. They exist to run vehicles people want to use.
The term you are looking for is demand response, it has the same effect on the grid as V2G.
With a variable rate contract it is cheaper for you to charge your car either at night or when the sun is out because energy is more abundant. Or even skip charging for a day unless truly needed because the prices are high.
Again: I'm not selling you cycles on my battery because they cost more to provide then the electricity is worth.
The idea that I might modify my charging behavior based on price is quite separate. The point is you don't have electric vehicle capacity available to run the grid - you have disconnectable loads at best. And they're not that disconnectable: after all, if all cars are electric, then all logistics is electric, and a huge amount of that is no longer optional load - it needs to run day in, day out.
Your link states that respondents may provide multiple answers. That means that someone buying batteries for frequency regulation may also decide, should the opportunity arise, to do some arbitrage.
Because of that, it's pretty hard to claim that storage is viable for a single use case.
We don't have the option of nuclear today; we have the option of nuclear 10-20 years from now. By that time the 1.5°-2° question will already be settled, one way or another.
Meanwhile we also have the option of wind and solar, which come on line ten times faster than nuclear at half the price with far less risk. Seems pretty clear where the investment money will go.
> 6bn fund to help keep existing plants running
> [law] made nuclear power eligible for the same tax credits as renewables like wind and solar
And the small/modular nuclear projects seem to be going the same way as traditional reactors
> NuScale, a startup building a small modular reactor on inl’s campus, recently said the cost of its project would surge by 75%, to $9.3bn
A CO2 tax and no renewable or nuclear subsidy would be better, but that's not politically possible.
There are big PR pushes, trying to convince people that nuclear is back as if it's a political problem or people just need to have good vibes. But in reality it's all a massive construction project, and the best vibes in the world are no substitute for a dedicated team of highly skilled planners with deep knowledge who don't put up with any bullshit. That dedicated team is what nuclear has been missing, not the rah-rah bystanders cheering from the sidelines. Yet I never see much effort out into the actual management of these projects...
Surprisingly, at very high latitudes there's a ginormous amount of wind. Also, using batteries as the only storage modality is Dumb Engineering.
(Polar regions are not a good use case for nuclear anyway, due to almost total lack of people. The largest grid in Alaska has an average power flow of just 600 MW, btw, and Alaska is highly populated compared to, say, the nothern provinces of Canada.)
But I think nuclear has a problem internationally. Proliferation. I once heard personally the former defense secretary Robert Gates that if Japan wants to build a bomb, they could do it in a matter of weeks. Online I heard numerous times people agreeing with this assessment, and adding South Korea too. One might say that Japan and South Korea are the "good guys", what's the problem?
The problem is of course that you can't guarantee how long good guys remain good guys. And that there is nothing special about South Korea and Japan, basically any country that has a few nuclear power plants can at some point acquire whatever know-how Japan and South Korea have. How comfortable would you go to sleep at night if Turkey had nukes? What if there is an Islamic revolution in the United Arab Emirates and ISIS takes possession of 4 GigaWatt scale reactors?
Japan's fast reactor program has enabled them to do a kind of deniable proliferation, stockpiling enough Pu for ~1000 bombs, without actually building the bombs yet. Smart of them; it's an insurance policy against China in case the US nuclear umbrella were to suddenly disappear.
To power the world with nuclear needs breeders, so Pu separation will likely be everywhere. And the Pu obtained from the blanket of a fast breeder is even purer 239Pu than so-called "weapons grade".
I just searched wikipedia, and it appears this ability is widely known and acknowledged. It even has a name: nuclear latency [1], the ability of a state to develop a nuke on a short notice, also known as the "Japan option". Wikipedia lists that these countries have this ability: Japan, Canada, Australia, Germany, The Netherlands, South Korea, Taiwan. All these countries want to have friendly relations with the US, so presumably they would not build a nuke without first asking for permission. But if these relations were to go sour then we'd see a few new nuclear states.
Just today there was discussion here on Hacker News about Sweden pursuing more nuclear power towards its goal to decarbonize. Sweden is not a NATO member yet. Could they one day decide that a few nukes could be the best insurance against Russian aggression? Finland is a new NATO member, just like Poland. Both share an uncomfortably long border with Russia. Both have numerous nuclear power plants. Will they one day seek nukes? Or at least seek to acquire "the Japan option"?
The problem with nuclear industry is that there isn't some single key piece of tech - you need shit load of expensive nuclear infrastructure, different recycling plants and different types of reactors running various nuclear materials at different stages of their lifecycles for years - if you want to have anything resembling a closed loop, without dumping tons radioactive materials you have no idea how to deal with.
I wonder how the US is going to fast-track this kind of work involving extremely hazardous materials. I see that the topic of "spent fuel" is still a distant mysterious benchmark, since the US can't even supply itself with nuclear fuel without buying from evil incompetent Russia.
We have wasted real estate on top of people's roofs we can safely cover with solar and wasted energy going to empty parking lots (buildings, offices, etc.). Why not work on the workable rather than throwing nuclear at the problems? Is this really the quickest and most logical action to take?
I ask these questions in earnest, I am not being paid by an oil company...
I agree, America has no business building a nuclear plant anywhere near a fault line. But America isn't like Japan: there's tons of safe places within American territory where there's almost no risk of significant earthquakes. The same isn't true in Japan.
"[Palo Verde] evaporates the water from the treated sewage from several nearby cities and towns to provide the cooling of the steam that it produces." - according to Wiki
https://www.caiso.com/todaysoutlook/Pages/supply.html
Also interesting to compare supply of renewables today vs. a year ago.
Nuclear is an unnecessary complication.
As an example: A nuclear reactor in Sweden had a severe incident in 2006 when many of the "defense in depth" layers had been accidentally removed through freak occurrences and upgrades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filtered_Containment_Venting_S...
What is unfortunately not on the bill in Germany is the price of nuclear waste storage. The producers of nuclear power paid a fraction of the actual costs (that could end up at over 100 billion) to rid themselves of the responsibility. If it was on the bill where it belongs, that would really kill nuclear forever.
EDF made a 18 billions loss in 2022 mostly because of government decisions. Welcome to French state-owned companies, the government giveth, and the government taketh away. This doesn't happen to German electricity companies.
> My family of four would thus pay around 1200 Euros in taxes just to make up for that loss, which is almost two years of "expensive" German electricity we actually spend.
Your family of four spends €50 per month on electricity? You're heating and cooking with gas right?
Our electricity bill is currently 60 a month (used to be 50), and we usually get a tiny bit paid back. Heating (warm water in general) is gas, but everything else is electric including cooking which we do daily. There was a price cap of 40c per kWh (or something like that) introduced recently, but other than that it's "what you pay for is what you get". A transparent system where you have the true price stimulates energy efficiency. People that want to waste energy are free to do so, but should not have the rest subsidize the behavior. There are dozens of tiny things that you can do every day that have no effect on your life, yet save a lot of energy and money: avoiding being straight up wasteful, e.g. leaving things on for no reason; paying attention to energy efficiency of the devices you buy and run; paying attention to what you do, e.g. when you boil an egg, put a lid on, boil the water and switch it off, it will keep boiling until it's ready since the stove is hot (this becomes mostly irrelevant with induction). On a level beyond that, is your fridge normal sized, or does it store food for three weeks, that you then buy with you gigantic car in a huge shop 15km away (and the shop is there because the land is cheaper, and the energy spent on having that system work is massively subsizidized). Etc. etc. A lot of things you think are tiny, but as a whole end up being significant.
We spent a few months abroad a couple years ago, and there you'd get a note on your bill comparing your consumption to the same month the year before. We were routinely at 50% of the previous tenants.
The point is, just because the system works differently doesn't mean you can't do proper accounting of electricity costs. You just need to measure where it makes sense. And when you do this, well, power has been pretty cheap for a while in France.
The claims about "french electricity funded by your taxes" doesn't really hold water when you realize that, in the last 20 years, EDF has been returning sizeable dividends to its shareholder most years. It's not really surprising when you do the math and realize that EDF has paid about €3-4bn per GW of installed capacity.
> Our electricity bill is currently 60 a month
With a low price of €0.2/kWh, that's about 10kWh per day. For 4. That's extremely low. Anyone working remotely can't hope to get that little used, for instance.
Our consumption is a lot lower than that, we are almost always around 1500kWh per year, this was the case even as a household of 3. I sort of work remote, I have a shared office with 5 other people, and we spend less than 100kWh per month (we checked a few times since we moved in). So if you want you might add around 300-400kWh per year if two people were working remotely, but then again we would not have two fridges at home, and we already frequently work from home.
That's irrelevant to electricity prices. Amazon made huge losses early in its history, but their unit costs were sound (ie they made money for every item they sold). Likewise, EDF makes money for every kWh they sell. Their debt is unrelated to their activity as an electricity producer.
> France has a price of 22c per kWh for consumers.
It's more like 20.5cts right now. A decade ago, it was 13cts [1], and EDF was profitable [2].
> despite the fact that wholesale prices in Germany have been drastically below that of France for at least a year now.
EDF doesn't usually need to buy power on markets. They produce what they sell. This year, exceptionally, they needed to buy for two reasons:
1) some of their reactors were down, which hurt a bit.
2) the French government forced EDF to buy an extra 20 TWh on the markets at the worst moment (market price > 200€/MWh), and sell back this power to its competitors at 46€/MWh [3].
Do you understand how some losses showed up now?
> The additional irony of that is that prices in Germany and other European countries shot up last year because of electricity deficit partially caused by France's nuclear plants going belly up.
Yeah, well, you could also say that the prices were low for the last 20 years because France consistently exported power when its neighbours needed it. Or that Germany's (and other European countries') reliance on gas for power generation contributed heavily to European electricity markets' exposure to Russian gas squeeze. I guess the narrative you subscribe to depends on what you want to believe.
> Our consumption is a lot lower than that, we are almost always around 1500kWh per year
4 kWh per day is pretty rad when it comes to optimizing power. Kudos for your efforts! I assume you have extremely recent appliances, considering an old fridge would be almost 1/4th of it. Would you have a breakdown of your electric uses and material age?
[1]: https://prix-elec.com/tarifs/evolution/2013 [2]: https://www.edf.fr/sites/default/files/uploads/2013edfgroupr... [3]: https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/edf-...
"Some" reactors were not down. Half of the fleet was down, and half of that entirely unplanned. Maybe they made a 20 billion hole because they couldn't fix the problem for months and had to fly in welders from the US? [2] ARENH exists for a decade now, and whether it's the right thing or not is for the sake of this discussion entirely irrelevant (I really don't have an opinion, you can argue either way). What's relevant is that it exists, and if you run a business you can't say "well, we only made a loss because of reality". If you are sane, you include that risk into the price and insure yourself of the risk. Once those 100TWh per year caps started getting maxed out a couple years ago it should've been a clear signal they will be in deep shit if something bad eventually happens. And their electricity output has been going down every year for years now to boot.
> Yeah, well, you could also say that the prices were low for the last 20 years because France consistently exported power when its neighbours needed it. Or that Germany's (and other European countries') reliance on gas for power generation contributed heavily to European electricity markets' exposure to Russian gas squeeze. I guess the narrative you subscribe to depends on what you want to believe.
Both of those things can be true, my point was that if you are creating a hole of 1-2 billion per month, you at some point need to plug the hole. Especially if what you're selling you don't have enough. Law of supply and demand? My electricity provider didn't jack up prices the moment the prices started going up, but eventually when it became clear they need to, they did. Same thing for my heating. Otherwise they would be bankrupt because they are not too big to fail. But this was a signal to consumers to be more conscious about how they spend electricity or energy in general.
As for my appliances, the only new one we have is a washing machine. The fridge we inherited from the previous tenants, so I don't really know, but 400kWh is quite a lot for a fridge these days. Even something like 250 would get a very low rating. I was thinking about a new one and you can even find some larger ones at 50kWh per year. It really doesn't take much of an effort. I guess the only thing "modern" households usually do that we don't is tumble drying, but every time I do do it, I mess some clothes up, so I don't like it anyway. I only use my laptop since a couple years, but more for convenience than for saving electricity by avoiding desktop machines.
[1] https://www.ina.fr/ina-eclaire-actu/president-edf-risque-fis... [2] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/welders-wanted-franc...
That being said, a few notes on your other points:
> It's relevant because they are making less than what they spend.
It's not necessarily a big issue. A large expense item for 2022 was the work necessary to extend plants' life by 10 years. That is the reason for about 60% of the plants being down last summer. Sure, the timing was unfortunate, but the production loss was offset ahead of time, and the return on that investment should be extremely profitable.
> ARENH exists for a decade now, and whether it's the right thing or not is for the sake of this discussion entirely irrelevant
My link wasn't about the mechanism itself but about its surprise extension. There is a difference between knowing ahead of time that you need to provision 100tWh for your competitors, and learning overnight - at the same time as any market participant - that you need to provide an extra 20 tWh, on short notice, while market prices are already over the roof, while your own production is already sold. The cost to EDF of this one political decision was about €8bn [1].
EDF wasn't doing great before that, but it had a positive EBITDA, which should tell you that its core business is profitable.
> How much will it cost to replace 50+ reactors?
It is no big secret that EDF is under-capitalized. That's expected when your main shareholder raids your coffers [2] and uses you to buy and recapitalize its other companies [3]. As I said previously, the issue here is government decisions, not EDF's electricity pricing.
> you can even find some larger ones at 50kWh per year
That's low, 50kWh per year means the fridge draws 6 watts on average, that's less than a LED. I guess nothing prevents it theoretically, but I suspect that was calculated for a perpetually shut fridge. The numbers I find are around 100-200 kWh per year depending on the rating, more for one with a freezer.
Anyhow, that's interesting numbers. I guess I'll have to recheck my appliances (even though, since I heat on electricity, that's not my main draw).
[1]: https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/dedicated-sections/journ... [2]: https://www.bnains.org/archives/action.php?codeISIN=FR001024... [3]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-edf-areva-idUSKBN1EG2AS
Also for the EDF being forced to buy Areva, I mean, you need to pick a side. Either you are a real business and you don't need to do that, or you are a state owned political tool. If it's a real business, will it go to a bank or issue bonds for hundreds of billions it will take to eventually replace the current plants? If not, then that investment in Areva will be very cheap when the time comes for the state to fund the new plants. Macron is talking about new ones for at least four years.
The "grand carénage" isn't maintenance, it's an investment to extend the lifetime by 10 years. Operations and maintenance are factored in electricity prices and aren't the reason these plants were shut down in 2022.
> I don't understand why this is so difficult. [...] I mean, you need to pick a side.
It feels like you're misinterpreting my position. My point is that 1) production costs are low and well reflected in consumer prices and 2) the business is viable.
It is completely unrelated to whether EDF is a private company or a state-owned company, whether the leadership and shareholders and are making sound decisions or whether the money made from current operations will be reinvested into new production facilities.
I am not a free market zealot, but you cannot compare the final price to the one in Germany. The electricity market there contains hundreds of companies that all need to be profitable, or at least not lose money, or they will simply be removed from the market. The only exception I can think of are the four electricity distributors which have regional monopolies for obvious reasons. Even the made up number of 500 billion for renewables, even if true, would not mean it cost anybody anything other than what they paid for electricity - the renewables surcharge was always a part of the bill until it was removed. Every model has flaws, but at least here you always know what the true price is, and Scholz or Merkel or whoever doesn't go around making plans on how they will build nuclear plants, which Macron does all the time.
Well, I don't disagree with this. You were the one claiming that electricity is cheaper in Germany, and trying to find a way to compare the two. Germany's prices are taxed for future investments, while France's prices are calculed to amortize past investments. That's a significant accounting difference.
However, when you measure electricity costs, you have to understand which production systems create it. France's current power (and therefore prices) comes from nuclear system built in the 70's to 90's, which happened to be extremely cheap and reliable, and that is why we have cheap energy 40 years later.
I can't claim that the next generation of nuclear plants (or anything else, it's not obvious that France will have nuclear plants in 30 years at the current pace) will be as cheap, so we may have to pay more in the future.
> Whatever it is, it costs EDF money, and therefore it needs to be a part of the price.
I have no doubt these investments will be amortized in the next 10 years, and factored in French power bills.
> The electricity market there contains hundreds of companies that all need to be profitable, or at least not lose money, or they will simply be removed from the market.
No offense, but as a French person interested in the electricity industry, the German model isn't a great example. With the money poured in the Energiewende (and, I mean, good for them, they have enough money to waste it), the results are almost criminal. France doesn't have that money, so we can't afford quixotic, inefficient policies.
> Here is an article from 2012, where it was already back then clear change is needed
My guess is that after Hollande's election, no one wanted to build new nuclear (which they probably should have considering France's low interest rates) but no one had a good plan for an alternative energy source. Honestly, there's nothing good to say about France's electricity policy between 2007 and 2020.
> Scholz or Merkel or whoever doesn't go around making plans on how they will build nuclear plants, which Macron does all the time.
Well, yes. That's Macron. Be happy you only hear about his international policy lies.
There's a lot of misinformation on the cost of the "Energiewende", I routinely see the same people throwing around numbers of 300 billion, 400 billion, 500 billion etc. 500 is the most common one, but it's baseless. I believe it was an estimate on what it might be in 2025 or something, but it has no relation to reality. In the end, whatever the correct amount may be, the result is not only not criminal, it is amazing. A whole new industry was kickstarted, that resulted in deployment of terawatts of renewables capacity worldwide to date. It almost singlehandedly killed deployment of new fossil fuel plants in many countries of the world and is now starting to retire existing fossil fuel plants. And it's still growing exponentially, we will realistically see 1TW per year deployment very soon. The IEA makes estimates on future deployment and it's a joke at this point because every year their updated estimates for 2030 are shattered. I cannot imagine a more successful policy if your goal is to decarbonize the world.
My point about Macron is not that his policies are wrong or that he is dishonest, I actually don't have a real problem with french nuclear, old or new. The point was that he is involved at all, and that's because the EDF cannot proceed without the government, it cannot really fund them on its own (hence, their prices are not real). You say they should've built new ones 10 years ago, but that's exactly my point. If they'd done that when they should've, the price now would not be 20c per kWh today, but a lot more than that. Now the price is "low" but at the cost of the infrastructure running on fumes.
Why? If we build new plants now, they will be amortized over their lifetime, not the very minute they're out of the gate or using existing plants. For that reason, it would take quite some time before prices shift significantly, even if we had started building 10 years ago.
> the result is not only not criminal, it is amazing.
Well, that's your opinion. My issue with Germany's current plan is that for renewables to effectively become the bulk of a country's production, there are many things that need to be done. Investments in transport infrastructure, in electrification, in storage, in research about how to handle all of those, etc. But to date, most of the effort goes to the easiest problem (adding renewable production) and the other ones are a bit neglected.
The hands-off stance of Germany's leadership is a direct source of this problem: some planification is required to succeed in this task. As an example, how often have you heard about south Germany's north-south grid issues [1], and why was this not tackled at the very beginning of Germany's renewables push? Why did germany not restructure its 4 (!) TSOs when it started greening its energy?
I get that German HNers would tell me "It's political, things don't work like that in Germany". But the logical consequence is that tons of money have been spent in the wrong place.
[1]: https://www.powerengineeringint.com/smart-grid-td/td-infrast...
Is it really my opinion, or are the things I mentioned actually facts? There was no renewables industry before the Energiewende, Germany implemented a transparent way to fund its creation and the whole thing blew up worldwide. As a consequence of that, a whole lot of co2 emissions in the world were not only removed but prevented entirely. I don't know why anyone would call this a failure.
The North-South issue is discussed frequently, maybe not so much in the mainstream (although I honestly wouldn't know), but e.g. I see it mentioned in social media among people reporting on or dealing with energy. One of the proposals that made sense to me is that Germany should no longer have a single market and a single price, but several regions. This would force states that are blocking development like Bavaria to finally put up or shut up, e.g. either build more or pay more. Regardless of that it's clear there needs to be more grid buildout, it's really not the case this is not discussed.
That you ask me why this issue wasn't solved initially is I guess not an unexpected viewpoint considering the differences in the way France and Germany work. France is more centrally planned whereas the states hold a lot of say on regulations in Germany. For the sake of this discussion it's not important which way is better, but it just is like this and it makes no sense to solve problems in a way they're otherwise never solved. Also in the end the same questions could be raised for nuclear plants: why were any built before e.g. there was a plan to store nuclear waste? We are over 60 years into their commercial use and only a handful of countries even have a plan on what to do with it. A lot of money was spent on temporary storages worldwide, it would've been a lot cheaper to first solve the problem completely. So I'd dare say it's anyway not possible to solve problems completely before you actually did anything, so renewables shouldn't be kept to a non-existing standard.
Money can always be borrowed for a profitable investment.
> Regardless of that it's clear there needs to be more grid buildout, it's really not the case this is not discussed.
Yeah, that was my point. It's been known forever, and is only being tackled now. With proper planning, it would have been online for a while now. France is way lower in terms of renewables use, but we're already pumping investment in our TSO in order to open our options for future electric production and interconnections.
> Also in the end the same questions could be raised for nuclear plants: why were any built before e.g. there was a plan to store nuclear waste?
Work to determine how to store waste has started 30 years ago. That's the reason we have a solution on the way now. That's a good example of long-term planning.
> renewables shouldn't be kept to a non-existing standard.
My point isn't even about renewables, Germany is rich enough to live through that expense. My point is that a little planning would probably have resulted in funding split more evenly between the different issues. The problem Germany currently has is that by offering subventions without much plannings, most of the effort went in problems that could be solved easily, and optimized to extract subsidies. A French approach would have been to nationalize and merge the 4 TSOs. That would be unlikely for Germany. But a more balanced German attempt could have been to earmark a significant share of the subsidies to grid innovations and investments, whether it's batteries, new lines, interconnections, automated stability mechanisms, etc...
Renewables exist realistically for 20 years now, with a big expansion in the last 10. Nuclear exists for 60 years now, and still has no real long term storage solution, spending dozens or probably hundreds of billion worldwide on temporary storage. In the first case you say "wait until you figure everything out", in the second "the research is ongoing". I understand both approaches, as long as it's consistent, so either "plan and solve everything ahead", or "solve issues along the way".
Whatever issues and cost grid connections cause, it's nowhere near the costs of nuclear waste, which will cost the taxpayers in Germany over 100 billion until it's solved. https://www.dw.com/en/german-government-does-nuclear-waste-d...
I can't do much in terms of discussion if you're not willing to accept the existing designs for subterranean storage as a long term solution.
> If you are struggling now with "paid off" plants
Besides the scare quotes, the previous plants were, indeed, paid off. That is the proof that they worked as an investment.
But, as with storage, you seem to be uninterested in how the company works, what the unit costs are, or where the debt comes from. It seems pointless to keep discussing the matter, as you're unwilling to listen.
> In the first case you say "wait until you figure everything out", in the second "the research is ongoing".
I have explained my position in the previous message. It's ok if you don't want to acknowledge it, but please don't put words in my mouth.
Also, storage research has been completed for about a decade now.
They are paid off, but if you are struggling with debt with those, you will not be able to finance anything new. Look at residents of South Carolina: their cancelled nuclear plant cost 9 billion, and they are now paying for non-existing electricity on their bills because the company needs to pay it off [1]. It's simple. Relevant quote:
"Thanks to a state law passed in 2007, residents in South Carolina are footing the bill for a massive failed nuclear reactor program that cost a total of $9 billion. Analysts say that corporate mismanagement and poor oversight means residents and their families will be paying for that failed energy program — which never produced a watt of energy — for the next 20 years or more."
[1] https://theintercept.com/2019/02/06/south-caroline-green-new...
Nuclear fission facilities are a subsidized loss-leader 1950's technology.
1. No one wants the waste, and every dump has leaked (erasing these off google maps doesn't unpin the Geiger-counter net downstream)
2. No one wants to live near Reactor facilities cooling ponds
3. micro-reactors and the like... are fools errands that ignore the costly reality of securing the life-cycle of these facilities.
4. A $7B Fission facility could also equip every home on a distributed infrastructure in Texas 7 times over. Many homeowners are getting non-subsidized solar themselves, as they realize they will end up paying for the same boondoggle centralized projects.
The AstroTurf and scientific hubris is not enough to pass off this technology as sensible. Nuclear power only makes sense for deep space probes, the north pole, or a large submarine.
Have a wonderful day =)
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/pho...
Seems like cool stuff. Photolithography is very expensive compared to offset printing, so it would be interesting to see low-efficiency but very low cost solar modules using processes more like offset press.
We're very close to the point where solar + battery quickly and easily replaces the majority of new electrical generation. I live in a place where solar is not even especially viable and it's starting to make economic sense even here.
Given the timelines involved in building a nuclear plant, you're better off saving your money for 8 years and then spending 2 years building a solar plant with current tech - prices will drop significantly over the 8 years, so nuclear compares even less favorably.
* Nuclear requires an extremely expensive initial investment that needs to be recouped. For that to happen, the finished plant needs to make as much electricity as possible. This means ramping down a nuclear plant because the sun is high and there's a steady wind spinning all the turbines at max capacity for the next couple of days makes zero economic sense. This is the reason why nuclear powerplants in the US don't even really have the technical means to reduce their output. They are designed from the get-go to be run at 100% capacity, always. And while this argument holds for all powerplants, the economics of nuclear are cut so close, they risk becoming a net loss at current electricity prices if they are ever forced to throttle down. Even if you run them 60, 70 or 80 years.
* Even if you build your reactors in a way that allows them to be run at reduced output (the French did that, you obviously need this capability if your entire grid runs on nuclear), doing so is complicated and requires many reactors to work in concert. The reason for this is technical: if you significantly reduce the output of a nuclear reactor, it poisons its own fuel rods with radio-isotopes that make any significant increase in output impossible for tens of days, sometimes for over a month. So if your nuclear reactors do grid-following, you need 30+ of them to take turns, reducing output one night and recovering for a month afterwards while the other reactors take turns doing the same.
The exception to that is of course hydro. Nuclear loves hydro, they complement each other perfectly.
I had never considered that a surplus of energy is actually a "bad thing" but I suppose without the means to store it its just useless work, or am I missing something?
I wonder if the new modular reactors allow to better micro-manage the amount of capacity you are adding to any grid.
It's more complicated than that. Let's say you have just one reactor powering one city, nothing else. What happens as everyone goes to bed and turns of their appliances?
The number of consumers goes down and the amount of electrical power consumed drops. What does that mean in terms of the electrical circuit between the city and the steam turbine? The electrical current drawn by the city decreases.
Less current flowing out of the generator connected to the turbine means there is less back-action pushing against the turbine shaft. But the reactor is still producing the same amount of heat/steam - which means the turbine immediately speeds up. Because the turbine is spinning faster, the generator is now spinning faster, so the AC power is not 60Hz anymore but also increasing. With higher RPM on the generator, the voltage also increases. So the city now gets higher frequency at higher voltage. Both are very bad.
Long before the frequency reaches 60.1 Hz, grid operators would normally switch on storage facilities or drop powerplants that can easily just shut down (all renewables and fast cycling natural gas turbines can throttle down or just go offline in seconds, but the other fossil fuel plants and nukes take hours).
If you can't do that, you need to dump large amounts of power in other ways. And that's not easy. There are load resistors, that just turn electricity into heat. But you can easily burn those with a gigawatt plant, its not easy to get rid of a couple of unwanted megawatt.
In theory you could also vent steam before the turbine to prevent it from accelerating. Just turn more of the nuclear energy into waste heat instead of electricity. But that's a really bad idea in a nuclear reactor, because you need to keep the reactor cool at all costs and messing with where the heat flows seriously threatens not enough heat flowing away from the primary cooling cycle - after all, this entire thing is designed for around 30% of the energy flowing to the generator. So doing something like that would mean engaging the emergency systems of the reactor.
So, there's a widening gap between nuclear and renewables that is investment and cost driven. To fix that, cost for nuclear has to come down by quite a large factor. Most current nuclear projects don't have the right level of ambition on this front. Which is why there just isn't a whole lot happening there.
People keep trying to phrase this in ideological terms when it's a simple economical issue. Nuclear cost needs to come down by an order of magnitude or so for it to start competing. More actually as that would be just about catching up with the current state of the art in renewables. Assuming that won't drop further would be a very bad assumption.
The cost will never go down if we don't start increasing investments in the industry itself.
If economics weren't an issue would you find nuclear a better solution than other renewables?
My view is that some portion of should be invested on the off chance that the economics might improve if we do. But we should not bet our entire future on that happening any time soon. Balance risk and reward basically. I would say that's more than fairly covered by current budgets and I see no need to burn much more than that. And what we do there could probably be allocated more wisely. For example building more really expensive reactors seems like a waste of both time and money here. You get more energy for less $ with renewables. Given 5 GW of nuclear or 30 or so of renewables, I'll have some renewables. Easy choice. Also for the people that invest in these sort of things apparently. Nuclear is a hard sell to institutional investors. Basically it can't be done without tax payer money right now. Renewables are very easy to finance; even without subsidies.
But if one source of power is 10x more expensive than the other, you don't have a business model.
There is not going to be substantially more energy in solar coming from bad angles or blocked by partial shade. And however cheap you make the panels, you've still got to get the energy onto the grid with inverters.
Though I think 40kwp looks like a lot of energy for two people to use.
So we have the facades of the buildings left to produce additionl energy. And all the facades of glass facade office high rises.
The roof tops of all factories.
Safety regulations are extraordinarily robust one-way ratchets so the price of nuclear power will probably be forever burdened by excessive regulation*, which is unfortunate.
I do believe if nuclear power is pursued it will quickly benefit from many of the economies of scale and technological advancements that have been seen renewable power, especially solar - although whether this will be enough to counter-balance safety regulation costs is unclear, leaning towards pessimistic.
Unfortunately, the strongest argument against nuclear power is simply that its time has passed. The ‘window’ for nuclear power opened in the 1960s, and it closes forever when battery technology gets good enough to cover baseload/offpeak requirements using stored solar power. If we assume that’s 20 years away, we can conclude that nuclear power has squandered three quarters of its ‘window’ (this is a more conservative estimate than you might think - recently the entire state of South Australia has posted several seven- and ten-day runs of solar and wind providing 100% of power needs, partly due to hundreds of megawatts of large battery storage).
On the topic of Australia, incidentally, one of my hobby horses is for Australia to become a ‘nuclear fuel superpower’ country. It is estimated that we have almost a quarter of the planet’s total uranium deposits, and we have a significant mining industry capable of extracting it, even after its decline from its former vibrancy. All we are really missing is a significant nuclear fuel processing industry, we instead simply export mined nuclear ore. We will probably never be a nuclear power superpower (nuclear power plants are banned in every state and territory), but it is still quite practical for us to become an ethical and trusted supplier of nuclear fuel to first-world countries pursuing nuclear power, relieving them of their dependency on Russian nuclear fuel.
*: It is possible to perform low-touch retrofitting of most (base load) coal power plants by simply replacing their coal-burning heat source with a nuclear heat source, leaving every other part of the power generation and transmission infrastructure in place. The plant would produce the same power output, but cut emissions by ~100%. However if you did do this, the retrofitted plant would immediately be forced to close, because the radiation levels from prior years of coal-burning pollution would already exceed some regulated standards for nuclear power plants. I have seen estimates that living in the shadow of a coal plant is roughly 0.1 mSv while living in the shadow of a nuclear plant is roughly 0.02 mSv - both well below the 1 mSv exposure limit, which is in turn well below the total radiation load of ~3 mSv natural background and ~3 mSv manmade radiation experienced by an average US citizen in an average year.
This is possible in the sense that it doesn't violate the laws of physics. One could not substitute existing LWRs though, as the temperature of their steam is too low.
For a retrofit project you would use a liquid metal cooled reactor, almost certainly sodium metal since this is a fairly well-proven nuclear technology. LMRs give you the 550C outlet temperature that coal plants want.
If you’re building a nuclear power plant from scratch, water-cooled reactors are ideal for several reasons, and so we mostly chose to build LWRs (and thus LWRs became the most proven nuclear technology, which means we chose LWRs even more often…). But they are not the only type of reactor out there.
I'm surprised the government is even pushing this. Nuclear is such a long term investment, and is so politically toxic among loud extremists in particular, that it doesn't make any political sense to push. Yet it is happening.
Germany says hi
Lobbyists and campaign donors who donate 10s of millions of dollars would strongly disagree.
I'm familiar with both sides of the debate and am not strictly against new nuclear power plants, but you comment is a microcosm of what I think is wrong with the pro-nuclear side of the debate. We do have a history of devastating accidents and close calls, so why dismiss our concerns as those of loud extremists?
But when it comes down to it, I think the metdown risk is worth modest investment in new and existing reactors, in reasonable locations, using low risk designs. The scenario where the world leans too heavily into fission seems impossible.