I really can't square this idea that "global warming will end civilization" if we don't reduce CO2 with not using nuclear power. (Even worse, shutting down existing, working plants.)
With a trillion dollars the US could build 40-60 new domestic nuclear power plants (we have 54 currently). We can afford it (witness stimulus programs, or the Ukraine v Russia war).
What we can't afford is to not do it and to watch our nuclear power base vanish. And we should be going further than that. We should be leveraging the global reserve currency and trade agreements to assist other stable countries in more cheaply (as cheaply as is possible with nuclear) building their own nuclear power plants. We can help countries either skip the fossil fuel driven economic build-out phase (in regards to fairly stable developing nations), or accelerate their leap off of it. And it can be beneficial to the US economy: export our tech, develop it further, train domestic labor specifically for this program.
The ship has sailed on the current generation of nuclear power.
Sure. I have no problem with nuclear. Where can I sign?
Or we could spend a trillion dollars on 1TW of solar (400GW actual power). Or a mix of solar and wind, or solar and batteries for the off-peak usage. That is enough to wipe out coal. Enough to bankrupt nuclear power plants.
Two trillion is probably enough to decarbonize electricity except for natural gas peaker plants that need for bad days.
To deal with changes, like the evening peak, in the short-term we can keep using natural gas peaker plants. For longer term, we don't know if expensive batteries are solution. There are lots of groups working on storage, and it is possible that cheap batteries, pumped hydropower, something else, or all of the above will be the best solution. I think it isn't worth worrying about storage until we need it and know what to build.
Also, we don't need that much short-term storage, enough to deal with the evening peak and other daily variations. Long-term storage can be dealt with by overcapacity in renewables, which allows making fuels. The remaining calm, winter days can be dealt with generated fuels or natural gas.
There are a variety of potential options for storage. None of them have proven to be economically viable at scale. Hopefully something will work well enough, but until we see solid evidence that's not a reasonable basis for planning.
I think it’s perfectly reasonable to oppose new nuclear on cost grounds; solar/wind are really cheap now.
But lots of people seem to oversimplify to “nuclear bad”.
It's simple: they're looking at the incremental cost of adding one more solar panel string or one more wind turbine, compared to generating that same amount of power with the already existing power plant mix.
> The cost goes way up once you include enough storage and long-range transmission to maintain grid stability.
That cost exists only if you for some reason insist on 100% solar and wind. If you keep already existing power plants (including gas and hydro), the cost to maintain grid stability is much lower. This can easily be shown to be the case in practice: a large portion of the solar and wind power in the world was added to the grid without adding any extra storage or long-range transmission, reducing the fuel costs (or water usage) of existing power plants but not replacing them.
Having a 100% pure solar or 100% pure wind grid is an interesting thought experiment, to probe the limits of what's possible, but it's not very relevant in the real world except on remote areas where delivering fuel is expensive, connecting to a wider grid is not viable, and there's no hydraulic or geothermal alternative.
Since you are implying that you _have_ done the math on this one, would you care to share links to analysis/modeling that backs up your position? I'm always open to being persuaded.
Recently I have been citing https://emp.lbl.gov/utility-scale-solar/ for the claim "solar is cheap on the margin", and modeling like https://theconversation.com/up-to-90-of-electricity-from-sol..., https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g... for "storage isn't going to be too expensive for some time".
To be clear I'm not making any particular case for how we cover the last 10% or so of demand, though I'd note that gas peakers are already a thing that are required to solve this problem, and yes they are expensive, but not unfeasibly so. My claim was it's cheap on the margin, right now. In a decade when we're closer to 100% it might start to get more expensive to replace the marginal % of generation with solar/wind.
Nuclear doesn't help at all with the intra-day variable portion of the demand curve, it's just lower-variance so you don't need to worry about inter-day fluctuations. It seems that most of the time, a diverse blend of renewables averages out the inter-day variability so it's not clear to me exactly how much we need in storage to guard against "no wind / no sun" days. (Is this the mirror problem that we currently have, where a heat wave in TX means the mostly-not-renewable grid can't keep up? Sometimes we see outlier weather-related demand-supply mismatches, and spot pricing / demand shedding are typically how we respond to those outliers.) Over-provisioning wind and solar might still be cheaper than building nuclear and/or storage, or perhaps green hydrogen might be a better option. Or perhaps we keep some gas peakers around.
For the intra-day variability we're already seeing lots of mixed-solar/battery being built (see the LBL report I linked above) which tends to be in the ballpark of load-shifting the generation 4 hours, which is most of what we need for intra-day gap between demand and solar peak production. This is still affordable vs running coal plants, and only going to get cheaper over time.
Anyway, this isn't my field and I'm open to being persuaded, if you want to share some modeling that you think is better.
There's always been people with those kind of needs and impulses, and they had non-civilization-destroying outlets to safely discharge them. Now we don't. Ah well, it will work out or it won't, one way or another Darwin will collect.
Climate collapse will cripple us, but the system is self correcting. The next civilisation will do it better
In the time scales of pollution that nuclear power entails there is room for many such cycles
I really cannot square the greed of "consume now" and "pay for a thousand generations" with any moral framework
We should pay the price ourselves for what we have done to the climate and leave room for the future
If we leave nuclear waste (which is already proven not problem over and over) the next generations will come up with solutions we don’t know yet. If we leave the climate worst, by not doing what we should, they will also figure it out.
The discussion right now is about getting to a reduced carbon footprint per country fast (nuclear, in 10 or 20 years) or keep betting renewables will take less than 50 years to make an impact in reducing carbon emissions.
One could argue it is necessary but it is undeniable that it is not effective -- nuclear power plants take decades to bring online and then they may never see break-even. Not only that but they require vast sums of water for the entire lifetime of the nuclear plant (which is fast becoming a scarcity, if not because of increased consumption but also because of changing water availability.)
On the other hand, renewable (wind and solar) can be brought up MW by MW, on a much faster timescale, privately funded (all nuclear is publicly funded now), and it has much better unit economics even without subsidies. Renewable energy is here to stay, it is going to become more abundant, and it is going to become more reliable with each passing year.
Nuclear is as unreliable as ever, even after 70 years of modernization, the economics of scale, and unlimited access to the public purse.
This plant is already online. That’s what makes the debate interesting.
Better get started
Don’t look too closely at how solar panels are fabricated.