Nuclear has never managed to be cheap. The really big nuclear buildouts always had a national security subsidy: either for energy security (France), or for nuclear weapons (US, UK, USSR, China, and also France). This is partly why non-weaponizable reactor designs never became popular either.
> They obviously don't like that, which is why they keep pushing for hydrogen to keep people dependent.
This isn't quite it. Energy production is always going to be dominated by capital owners because it's a capital-intensive business. Doubly so for renewables. No, the real reason fossil fuel companies keep pushing for hydrogen is so they can sell hydrogen produced from natural gas as "green", after they've dumped the inconvenient carbon atoms into the atmosphere.
The medium term real, important uses for renewable hydrogen are (1) Haber process (3H2 + N2 -> 2HN3) and (2) steel production by reducing (removing oxygen from) raw iron ores.
Edit: btw, I think the underlying paper is https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cey2.411
Renewables are really cheap and getting cheaper, so some combination of overbuild with storage is probably the winning formula.
Storage is a little too expensive as lithium ion batteries, but there’s literally a hundred alternative there. I’m fond of pumped hydro, which we can do anywhere with a height difference, we don’t need to restrict that to existing dams. But there’s lots of options there and many are very viable.
So nuclear (including hypothetical nuclear fusion) will probably not acquire significant market share. Unless you can somehow make it cost competitive.
If you look at planned energy projects, the market has very clearly spoken. That doesn’t mean it can’t change, but I don’t think it’s likely.
Ontario is a great counter example.
We have something like 60-70% of our power from nuclear, representing most of the base load. We're building more plants soon too.
Electricity is cheap, and used to be even cheaper before it was privatized.
And we have no nuclear weapons program supporting these plants.
Even china [0] renowned for pushing projects through and "getting stuff done" hasn't been able to push the price and construction time of nuclear down enough to make them cheap and easy to build.
[0]: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/06/renewables-in-china-tre...
Because it can work rain or shine. Wind or no wind.
What happens if we have no wind and have a lot of clouds for a few weeks in an area? The storage is limited and nuclear can still produce. Yes, I understand other areas can likely pick up the slack, but nuclear doesn't have that issue. At a minimum nuclear is a good thing to have as a back up even if we have sufficient renewables.
Also, don't forget climate change is supposed to cause more extreme weather events. We don't know what impact that will have on wind and solar.
The answer is a combination of storage, overbuild, long distance interconnections, and diversification ( which mostly means we keep some natural gas plants around, not new nuclear.)
Sure overbuilding might work, but only getting 10% of the solar and 0% of the wind would require such massive overbuilding it would probably not be practical.
I did mention interconnection. While it can help, there can be extreme weather over large parts of the country at one time. We have fires in Canada blocking out some parts of the North East. Imagine if there was a large fire happening in California and a hurricane in the south. As climate change continues that is only going to get worse blocking out solar in large chunks of the country.
The problem is determining the correct amount of storage. If we get 10% of the normal solar along with no wind for a week or two would there be enough storage? I'm guessing not.
It is good you agree that we need some diversity. So many people are radicals and say we don't need an alternative. I agree with your sentiment, but think we should also have nuclear not just natural gas. Nuclear is reliable and clean. Why use natural gas if we don't need to?
Because natural gas is cheap and nuclear is not. If you’re using tax payer dollars, you absolutely can be wasteful and choose the more expensive option. That may even make sense when you factor in the cost of the carbon dioxide pollution. We’re not there yet, but it could come back around, especially if you implement a high enough carbon tax, which I’ve always advocated for.
I think you can get potentially very long term energy storage via pumped hydro, so I expect that would help as well. But natural gas can also be fired up occasionally on those very cloudy days when the wind is also not blowing. The pollution might not matter if you offset it via other means or you use green hydrogen or ammonia or something to that effect.
Since we already have a lot of natural gas power plants, we might not need to build any more, just maintain the more efficient ones in working order.
Of course, only when the sun is shining. But it’s an incredible Lego block we’ve got to play with in building this new energy system, zero marginal cost generation.
That is mind blowing to me. There’s definitely an argument to be made for decentralizing the grid.
Not really economical unless you've got some suitably-shaped geology to build most of the storage vessels out of.
The lithium issues may be addressed by sodium-ion, which is now mature enough that you can buy it on aliexpress.
Did they ever get rid of the rule that prohibits nuclear from being cost competitive? Its opponents got it so if they ever found a way to make it cost less the money explicitly had to be spent on new safety measures. Which obviously not only makes it impossible to reduce the cost but also removes any incentive to try.
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary/alara.html
Google doesn't want to find a more specific link right now, but you can see the implication from the definition: If you find a way to make nuclear cost less than something else, now it's economical to make it cost more in order to reduce radiation exposure, with no lower limit where you can stop.
Superconductors aren't the limiting factor for that, on paper we can already make a 40,000 km long 0.5Ω power line for costs comparable to current annual fossil fuel mining (Chinese annual coal alone is expensive enough for the aluminium).
The problem is geopolitics and that it's a megaproject.
It will highlight many of the engineering issues and some of the political ones, and ideally will seem like an overpriced mess when we reach the level where we even want to optimise design and process for a full-size grid.
For a true planet scale grid, think half a trillion dollars of aluminium, 3.75 years of current annual worldwide production: its doable, just not what you should jump into without smaller scale experiments.
I suspect battery storage will reach that point before any nuclear plant started in the West today generates its first watt: about 10-15 years.
do not underestimate the sticky pull of collecting ̶r̶e̶n̶t̶^C ̶t̶a̶x̶e̶s̶subscriptions from people
Oddly, H2 aircraft seem to be promoted with inboard tanks. The natural place for the tanks is in nacelles slung under the wings, for safety. (Hydrogen would not fit in the wings.) Hydrogen tanks in an enclosed cabin is a formula for disaster.
OPEC paving their deserts with PV and synthesising fuel (whatever that is: hydrogen, Sabatier methane, aluminium for burning) or just exporting that electricity along a 2m^2 cross section solid aluminium rod to the other side of the planet? Sure, plausible.
[0] I was going to say "and rockets", but then I realised we don't launch anything like as many rockets as we fly planes, so even then rockets might still be running on green hydrogen or methane derived from it.
Solar and wind farms supplying international airports would probably need to send power via HVDC transmission lines. But, yes, the airports will need much more than just overage from the farms, and probably booster shipments of LH2 from farms in the tropics, besides. Imagine how big must be the project of refining, transporting, storing, and distributing kerosene to gates, today. Yet it is made almost invisible.
(That doesn't mean they will do it, it's just the consequence of failure).
? Are you suggesting this will be a result of regulatory action? Since it would most likely be more expensive for the first decade, even if I gave you a tap on the airfield labelled "free H2"
In the future when we have more solar power than we know what to do with during the day it may become economical to run the Sabatier reaction with hydrolyzed seawater and atmospheric CO2 to make methane, which can be burned in a lightly modified aircraft turbine.
(It's a bit like saying we shouldn't use AC power because look what Edison did with those poor elephants. It's interesting anti-technological propaganda that made sense socio-politically at the time but isn't that useful to today's discussions.)
So if the efficiency of generating hydrogen is increased, that's a win for endusers no matter if they do it themselves or pump it somewhere from 3rd party.
You are correct about the subscription model though.
Once GPU production is fully ramped up, I would expect AI to become energy bound. Can we install enough renewable energy and nuclear power plants to fulfill the demand to the point that energy will be ridiculously cheap?
when a query is asked of an AI it has to generate a response from all of that data and the query and response themselves become data
running an LLM on local consumer hardware can take upwards of 20 minutes for a single query, so an AI service that may be responding to up millions of requests a day would need a massive hyper-parallelized server infrastructure
But there’s ways to solve that through energy generation and DC investments.
I got my computer engineering degree back in the 90s because superscalar VLSI was popular and I wanted to design highly-concurrent multicore CPUs with 256 cores or more. Had GPUs not totally dominated the market, Apple's multicore M1 line approach with local memories would have happened in the early 2000s, instead of the smartphone revolution which prioritized low cost and low energy use above all. We would have had 1000 core machines in 2010 and 100,000-1 million core machines for 2020, for under $1000 at current transistor count costs. Programmed with languages like Erlang/Go, MATLAB/Octave, and Julia/Clojure in an auto-parallelized scatter-gather immutable functional programming approach where a single thread of execution distributes all loops and conditional logic across the cores and joins it under a synchronous blocking programming model. Basically the opposite of where the tech industry has gone with async (today's goto).
That put us all on the wrong path and left us where we are today with relatively ok LLMs and training data drawn from surveillance capitalism. Whereas we could have had a democratized AI model with multiple fabs producing big dumb multicore CPUs and people training them at home on distributed learning systems similar to SETI@home.
Now it's too late, and thankfully nobody cares what people like me think anyway. So the GPU status quo is cemented for the foreseeable future, and competitors won't be able to compete with established players like Nvidia. The only downside is having to live in the wrong reality.
Multiply this change of perception by all tech everywhere. I like to think of living in a bizarro reality like this one as the misanthropic principle.
But it was never, and will never be "cheap".
Also not all places might be suitable for nuclear, for various reasons. Hydrogen might be a good option.
but the per kw cost is relatively low as i understand it since the fuel is so efficient and its getting cheaper as new reactor designs get cheaper and safer
In reality, people are spreading a conspiracy theory to mentally distract from this fact. They do not want to admit that they have been fooled by battery makers, so they create a narrative that the alternative is somehow an ever bigger scam.