Uranium demand hits decade high as nuclear renaissance gains traction | Hacker News Reader

Uranium demand hits decade high as nuclear renaissance gains traction

oilprice.com

211 pointsPaulHoule283 comments

This article is plainly wrong. The exclusive driver in the recent spike in Uranium prices [1] is Niger. They had a coup on July 26th. They produce less than 5% of global production of uranium, but they were supplying more than 25% [2] of Europe's needs. Several days after the coup finished, they made it clear that the colonial style arrangements with France, which were driving dirt cheap uranium to Europe, were over. There continues to be yet another proxy war brewing in the region because of this.

Another 17% of the EU's uranium needs comes from Russia, and 27% from Kazakhstan (who in 2022 had an attempted color revolution). It's basically the oil wars, starting all over again. Definitely a good time to go long on uranium prices in any case. Oil prices prior to the 70s were as low as ~$10/barrel inflation adjusted, and uranium is far less plentiful.

Well, excepting oceanic extraction which has vast supplies, but the extraction costs there would also send its price to the Moon. There are also unclear environmental implications there. Uranium is only present in something like 3 parts per billion in saltwater. Extracting meaningful quantities there would be a tremendous undertaking.

[1] - https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/uranium

[2] - https://euratom-supply.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2023-10/ESA... (ctrl+f Niger)

> Definitely a good time to go long on uranium prices in any case.

Is there an easy way for a casual investor to do this?

Looks like there's an ETF called URA

Note that this is an investment in companies at various stages of the nuclear pipeline, not directly a bet on uranium prices.

A company that mines uranium will probably do well if the price goes up, but not if the price goes up because their mine closed or got blocked for geopolitical reasons. A company that produces reactor components should tend to do worse if uranium prices rise, but in practice the demand for new reactors is driven by other factors.

If you want exposure to the price of uranium, you would do better with the Sprott Physical Uranium Trust [0]. The CME also lists uranium futures [1], but they don't seem to trade.

[0] https://sprott.com/investment-strategies/physical-commodity-...

[1] https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/metals/other/uranium.volume...

Screwing up my uranium futures trading and having to take delivery of a couple truck loads.

Yellow Cake PLC, all they do is buy and hold physical uranium.

https://sprottetfs.com/urnm-sprott-uranium-miners-etf/

Probably the best ETF you can buy, owns spot Uranium.

Uranium price will collapse with the rise of 4th gen nuclear power plants, which is meant to reduce waste and use it back to power the fission, making it dirt cheap since it's reusable and abundant

In how many years, though? 8-10, perhaps?

> they made it clear that the colonial style arrangements with France, which were driving dirt cheap uranium to Europe, were over.

France was overpaying the market rate during the past 10 years to keep good relationships with the previous leadership so no it's the opposite, it's the end of the more expensive uranium for Niger most likely.

Do you have a source for this?

I've heard that several time, and I'd like to have a source for that.

You can look a market summary here: https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/70-years-of-global-ura...

and an article here: https://www.lesechos.fr/finance-marches/marches-financiers/p...

Basically Niger already dropped a lot as a source worldwide due to production costs.

Areva even has a mine with permits to exploit in Imouraren which they don't actually exploit because uranium prices are so low that it's not economical to keep the mine opened.

There's been talks to shut down all the remaining mines even before the coup.

The prices paid by Areva were also increased by 50% during Hollande terms (https://www.latribune.fr/entreprises-finance/industrie/energ...) for political reasons and pushed the mines not too far from closing economically.

Well these are mostly French media outlets.

You don't necessarily get the same information elsewhere...

Go wonder...

Could do the same and post this:

https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/economy/1691490...

That's pretty much the same thing but in English, the mine wasn't financially profitable because the global prices are lower and never opened.

Additionally, I don't have any reason to think the medias I posted are biased either. It's not Russia

Not really but alas.

Also the margins that were made don't necessarily depends on the price of the contract on the markets.

The contract with the Nigerien government can be considered OTC.

So people claims that it was fair is disingenuous.

Then again it's a negotiation so the other party is at fault too.

The issue is when one of the other party decides what their counterpart will be in advance, make some arrangements etc. That's not fair and that's what the article also talks about.

But anyway... This is known even in French circles, they don't hide it at all. Just a shame to have such a short-term, outdated vision.

You realize that i24news is also kind of a French media outlet? (it's part of Altice group, same as M6 or Libération and the CEO of the channel is French).

You need to verify your sources.

Just a little search would show you that it's not entirely true, not true anymore, or slightly twisted in the way you present it.

That's the whole problem, a lot of people peddle biased or straight false information.

Even if it isn't malicious in intent, perhaps because of ignorance, it's problematic.

Here's the Linkedin of the channel's CEO for you: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frank-melloul-158470/

Source of the fact that he's indeed the CEO: https://www.i24news.tv/en/executive-committee.

I mixed-up the news Channel owned by Altice (M6 doesn't belong to it), but it's still clearly an important player in French media: https://www.alticemedia-adsconnect.fr/nos-marques/

You're the one trying to muddy the water, first by implying that French media weren't reliable, and then trying again against my refutation.

He is formerly French. And i24news is israeli. It's part of Altice as a buyout by the branch Altice USA...

Please, just stop. This is not a game.

> He is formerly French.

Frank Melloul is French, and he formerly worked for the French government, and he was even active (at a low level) in French politics.

> And i24news is israeli.

Technically it's from Luxembourg[0] actually;).

> It's part of Altice as a buyout by the branch Altice USA...

I wasn't bought out, it was founded by French[1] billionaire Patrick Drahi in 2013.

This isn't a game, you're just flat out lying for gods knows why.

[0]: https://www.i24news.tv/fr/conditions-generales-d-utilisation

[1]: yes he has 5 different nationalities, but his familly arrived in France when he was a teen, studied in France, made a fortune in France, most of his empire are French companies, and so is his political network, so I'll count him as a fellow French, even if he also has the nationality from Saint Kitts and Nevis…

I wasn't talking about the CEO but the owner, Drahi.

It's still israeli owned. Drahi is born in Africa. And he isn't a French national anymore apparently.

Anyway, regardless.

I apologize for the confusion, i24news is broadcast in the USA thanks to a serie of buyouts, from Altice NV to create Altice USA and then another recent acquisition (Cablevision) to acquire broadcasting licenses etc... The details can be found.

I don't dispute the fact that there are links to France (obviously) but the point remains that it's a more global media than what you linked.

I will note that if you want unbiased raw information, you should rather link afp as every true journalist would tell you.

i24news is registered in Luxembourg... Fair enough. I guess a company being registered in Ireland makes it Irish... Who really cares...

From the customs data the Niger was on the expansive side, you can look it up it's code NC8 is 28441090 on the douane website.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F2_pLLfWcAAQswU?format=jpg&name=...

The deals between France and Niger are not public, but Reuters was able to provide some citable data here (2015) [1] :

---

"Reuters has reviewed documents which reveal that Areva’s mines pay no export duties on uranium, no taxes on materials and equipment used in mining operations, and a royalty of just 5.5 percent on the uranium they produce."

---

Areva has been restructured and is now Orano. [2] Alongside the token level royalty rate and exemptions, they're undoubtedly also exploiting local labor. Niger is one of the poorest places in the world, with a nominal gdp/capita of $630 - about $50/month. There's a reason the streets were full of people rejoicing when the coup happened!

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-niger-areva-specialreport...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orano

Not true, the customs data are public and we know the price per kg of each grams of uranium from each counties, the Niger was on the expansive side, you can look it up it's code NC8 is 28441090 on the douane website.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F2_pLLfWcAAQswU?format=jpg&name=...

I'm not sure what that table is showing, but it's not what you are implying. Niger is France's plurality supplier, so them showing 5% is clearly measuring something else.

Beyond that, France is not importing from Niger in the nominal sense. A French state owned company, in Niger, mines the uranium, and then gives Niger a token royalty on profits. So if they claimed e.g. $100, you'd expect about $5.50 of that (unless Niger was able to negotiate a better deal since 2015) to go to Niger. So their "real" cost would be the $5.50 plus labor/supplies.

Except you don’t need very much uranium. Open one more mine and the market is basically flooded.

And it accounts for about 5% of the marginal electricity cost in raw (25% when fully transformed)

Maybe I'm missing something but it seems Uranium prices started rising right around Jan 2021.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/URA/

Depends how old you are, check out January 2011, $130 or so IIRC, more than 4x the current price ... and from my PoV that was after a legendary single day spike a few years earlier. Close of day averages make it look like a decent spike, hourly trading figures on tthe day were a crazy rollercoaster.

Exactly, we can debate the pros and cons of nuclear all we want here but the reality is that the supposed shift in sentiment about nuclear power is way too recent to have had any impact whatsoever on actual world uranium consumption by nuclear plants.

Planning and building nuclear plants takes a very long time and the number of new plants built, constructed, and delivered because of this new sentiment remains at zero. At best there are now more discussions about maybe building some over the course of the next few decades. To say that these discussions are concluded would be very premature.

There's also a lot of talk about small reactors but they are still in the experimental/prototype stage where there are just not a whole lot of them online (zero or close to zero?, I don't actually know). And in addition, they would need relatively small amounts of uranium (by design, they are tiny compared to conventional reactors). So, to have an impact on world uranium demand there would have to be rather a lot of them and there just aren't right now. That will take a few decades if it starts happening at all. Economically these things aren't exactly a proven solution yet.

The easier and more obvious explanation is exactly as you say. And btw. especially the dependence on Russian enriched uranium could speed up the demise of some nuclear plants dependent on that. Running nuclear plants is expensive relative to renewables. And cost increases for businesses that are already struggling tend to have obvious consequences. Short term, there are more planned plant closures than there is new planned nuclear capacity in the US. Mostly that is because a lot of older plants are struggling economically and are reaching their planned end of life.

I'm saddened to see this BS as the top comment. The coup in Niger barely had a visible effect on Uranium price[1], and the Uranium price is on an upward trend since 2018[2].

[1] unlike the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year for instance, as the Uranium price rise in August (after the coup) has been almost equal to the one in July (before the coup).

[2] see the 5-years graph on trading economics

The spot price increased right after.

Contracts on commodities can be long term.

This is also multi-factor.

> The spot price increased right after.

What's your source for that, because the OP's graph shows a significant increase happening 1 month after the coup.

> This is also multi-factor.

Definitely, but I'm responding to someone claimed that “The exclusive driver in the recent spike in Uranium prices [1] is Niger”, which is literally the opposite of saying that it's multi-factor.

You don't have to mine the oceans, there are massive uranium reserves all over the world [1]. The economics of extracting it of course depend on price, but it's not exactly a bulk material.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

USA shares similar story

Uranium source as of 2022:

- 27% Canada

- 25% Kazakhstan

- 12% Russia

- 11% Uzbekistan

- 9% Australia

- 16% ROW

data: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/where-our-uraniu...

What's interesting is, demand for uranium is slowing down since 2015, a year after Ukraine's coup

What's interesting there was no coup in Ukraine.

> Well, excepting oceanic extraction which has vast supplies, but the extraction costs there would also send its price to the Moon. There are also unclear environmental implications there. Uranium is only present in something like 3 parts per billion in saltwater. Extracting meaningful quantities there would be a tremendous undertaking.

Or just build breeders. There's plenty of thorium and it's dirt-cheap.

There's also plenty of depleted uranium and we don't know what to do with it anyway.

The problem is that there no simple “just build breeder reactors” plan. Breeder reactors are complex and have completely different safety concerns than regular reactors (mostly because the coolant cannot be water) so it's actually a lot of work to make one.

The worst problem facing breeders, I think, is fuel fabrication. France has developed a process that uses a high energy ball mill to “alloy” plutonium and uranium oxides to make very high quality fuel. The trouble is this also makes carcinogenic plutonium nano particles and protecting workers from them is problematic because workers need to pick up plutonium pellets up with gloves and stuff them in a tube.

The factory Karen Silkwood worked at made excellent quality fuel for the FFTF with something like the French process but had trouble controlling plutonium dust. The U.S. wanted to build a MOX fab with help from the French for destruction of weapons grade plutonium but construction was halted not long after studies shown that workers in French fuel fabs were getting lung cancer (at a low enough rate thar French and Russian regulators seem sanguine about it.)

Some other process like what

https://www.moltexenergy.com/

uses might address the occupational safety problems plus the high capital costs that have affected breeders. If a breeder could replace the steam turbine with a supercritical CO2 or some other high temperature heat acceptor, capital costs could possibly be less than the LWR.

I wasn't aware of that issue, thanks. That's yet another example of what it takes to switch to a radically new tech.

(I'm not convinced with the assessment as being the “worst problem” though, as not using water as a coolant forces you to rethink nuclear safety from the ground up in a way that makes “controlling dust in the manufacturing process” sounds like an easy problem in comparison)

In some ways breeders might be safer.

There is no risk of a steam explosion. The core shuts itself if it overheats so it has been demonstrated that reactivity insertions and loss of cooling can be resolved passively

https://gain.inl.gov/Shared%20Documents/Fast%20Flux%20Test%2...

There was fear in the early days that in a meltdown the core might become denser and produce a small nuclear explosion but after thinking through the problem for years and a lot of experience it seems the core disperses in a worst cast. Dangerous iodine isotopes dissolve in the coolant and are trapped in case of fuel damage. Potentially a fast reactor can capture almost all the tritium produced for use.

You can have a sodium fire but most sodium fires are pool fires which aren’t very dangerous. Fires happen all the time in industrial facilities, you detect them and put them out. They aren’t necessarily a big problem.

It's not about which one is safer.

At this point we have a deep understanding of what can go wrong in a PWR or BWR, with part of this knowledge deriving from accidents (TMI and Fukuahima) and smaller incidents.

And we've developed a significant amount of mitigations and operators training to cope with these potential failures.

Doing the same thing for breeder isn't trivial at all.

I studied nuclear engineering ( before changing path in 2011 due to Fukushima) with one of my teacher having worked on SuperPhénix, and my wife is a nuclear engineer specializing in accident scenarios and operators training at EDF, so I'm actually pretty familiar with the topic.

Australia has worlds largest uranium deposits, they can just buy it from us

> oceanic extraction which has vast supplies, but the extraction costs there would also send its price to the Moon

That is often repeated, but incorrect.

It would indeed multiply the price of uranium about 4 times, but the end result is that the price of electricity produced by the nuclear power plants would increase with less than 1 cent per kWh, and that's what matters. For comparison, the average retail price of electricity in the US is about 15 cents per kWh.

Here's the math, if you are curious: on average a PWR nuclear power plant produces 50 GW-day of electricity from one ton of enriched uranium, and you need about 10 tons of natural uranium to get that, so that's 5 GWd per ton of raw uranium. The current market price of uranium is $74/pound [1], or $163/kg. It is estimated that it would take $640/kg to extract uranium from sea water [2]. So, this is roughly $480/kg more expensive. 1 kg of Uranium results in 5 MWd or 120 MWh, so the increase in uranium price would result in $4 more for 1 MWh, or 0.4 cents per kWh.

[1] https://www.cameco.com/invest/markets/uranium-price

[2] https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...

The problem with nuclear is that while we need base-load, base-load doesn't pay.

Let's say I have a $billion to invest. My goal is return on investment. Why would I pick nuclear over solar?

Solar is cheap, quick to build, low maintainence, requires a small amount of "cheap" labor, and "worst case" stops working.

Nuclear takes 15 years of planning, costs a fortune just to get started, will guarantee endless fights with pretty much everyone, has long-term clean up questions, requires lots of very expensive engineers to keep running. (And worst case is pretty much as bad as you can imagine).

Oh right, nuclear makes electricity at night. When it's cheapest.

I get that we -need- electricity at night. But frankly, there is zero incentive for me to put my billion there. Its high risk with no reward.

Utilities don't invest on ROI the way someone does investing in equities. Usually a utility gets a fixed return based on capex. The incentive, outside of the return on capex, is to provide clean base load power to stabilize the grid.

I get that in different places utilities would have different mandates. And would potentially have different mechanisms to calculate costs and prices.

A govt funded utility could of course then focus on things that are not good (financial) investments. In which case sure, I can see that in play. (Not sure the US is leaning in that direction though.)

>> Usually a utility gets a fixed return based on capex

This would imply that funding is from sources other than consumers right? Because as a consumer I'm billed on usage, not on utility-capex.

> funding is from sources other than consumers right?

funding is never going to be from the end consumers. It will be from long term financiers such as large pension funds, PE or some other long term funding sources.

The consumer is the other end - they are the 'returns', rather than the funding.

> Oh right, nuclear makes electricity at night. When it's cheapest.

Applying naive market logic to this, as solar becomes a larger share of the energy supply mix, the price of energy at night will increase, making baseload supply more attractive. There's probably other effects that could complicate this, but it seems like a problem that could solve itself over time.

It will solve itself. But I don't think the solution is nuclear. The solution will be storage.

Again, the issue is cost, and externalities. On the one hand the cost of nuclear electricity is low, but the externalities are extremely high. Time, public opinion, and long-term liability are all against it (and that's assuming it goes as planned.)

Sure, optimal storage has yet to be figured out. Batteries and pumped-water-schemes are working in some cases, but are not necessarily grid-scalable [1]. But work in this area has potential, and we've not reached any maxima here yet.

Technologies like compressed air, hydrogen and so on are sll in their infancy.

I should note that I am pro-nuclear. It's a lot cleaner than coal or gas. I'm just not sure it'll ever be economically attractive.

[1] on a household level, batteries that can store over-night amounts of power exist, send are easily available. This provides a cap on how expensive night electricity can be.

if I had to bet on the grid storage solution, I'm going with a mix of hydro and molten sodium batteries. for grid storage the only variable is price per joule, and when the system gets big thermal loses get way easier to manage.

IMO you are only partly right. It will have to be a mix until storage can scale to the level nuclear can provide cleanly.

I say this because there is a category of power consumers that is often forgotten by us mere mortals: industry. To produce the things we consume, all kinds of industrial plants and operations exist that we know little about, but that have gigantic power needs. Just one example (out of many more): metal processing. Or industrial fans, where one fan could need 5MW at a time.

All I‘m saying is, if you dig deeper and discover what power needs our society has, it is not straightforward. Peak demand, baseload demand, time of day, distribution networks to get it where its needed, location of primary sources (wind/solar/nuclear), etc. It is a difficult optimization problem.

> It will have to be a mix until storage can scale to the level nuclear can provide cleanly.

It would, if it were easy and quick to scale up nuclear power. The story for scaling storage is much clearer, simpler, faster, and cheaper than building new nuclear supply.

Industry demand is massively overblown (although still a very real problem), because AIUI ~75% of the demand is for heat.

Heat can be stored directly, without need for batteries - get a giant (like, 20ish metre diameter) tank of sand (or other thermal mass, but any crappy asbestos-riddled sand will work just fine), wrap it in a metre or two of insulation, and the cube-square law will ensure it stays heated for months when heated.

This has drawbacks such as not working well with heat pumps (if you need 1000C temps then heat pumps flat-out don't work, and if you cap your heat at lower then your construction costs go way up, not to mention giant heat pumps are expensive compared to resistive heating, so electricity prices had better be high enough to justify the investment), but they let you turn surplus intermittent renewables into on-demand heating for literally dirt-cheap.

If there's any sort of battery crunch, then direct heat storage will win by virtue of being available and trivially deployed wherever there's a construction industry. It's very boring 20th-century (or 19th-century?) tech, and that's an absolute blessing, logistically.

Storage will never work. Quote me on this. Nuclear or a mix of nuclear and renewables will be the only way to seriously get away from fossil fuels. Also, even if storage works some day, hoping we manage to discover how, scale and implement it across human civilization in time is a crazy bet to make. Even if we seriously go all in on nuclear and renewables tomorrow - it might already be too late, so betting on some miracle tech to be found, scaled and implemented in time is not only unwise, it would require several miracles to have any hope.

The storage plan for the EU is a mix of battery and hydrogen storage. It has a timeline that will take a while, but so does nuclear. There is a roadmap for converting europe’s gas transport and storage infrastructure over to hydrogen as part of the EU hydrogen strategy. I know there are people who don’t believe in the feasibility of the hydrogen strategy, but the people actually in the field working as experts seem to believe in it, so I remain unconvinced by the critics.

By the way, wind is already getting close to nuclear’s share in the EU electricity mix. https://mastodon.energy/@matteodefelice/111335718838014650

>Storage will never work.

It already does work though, and it growing exponentially without any tedious political debates since just about anyone can do it at any time, at any cost and any scale. Companies store their own energy, counties store their own energy, private individuals store their own energy.

I see no way of stopping it unless corruption somehow manages to make private power production and storage illegal. There certainly are no technical or economical showstoppers.

That "expensive power at night" price signal is much weaker if fossil fuels are burned without paying for carbon removal.

I completely agree that fossil fuels don't price in external costs, while nuclear is expected to.

But this is not nuclear vs coal. Both are (imo) effectively dead, killed by economics, not politics. Solar is cheap. Storage has a lot of potential winners. Put together the long-term outlook for fossil or nuclear is not great.

Batteries will become economical for base load at night before nuclear does.

Whatever is wrong or bad with batteries, nuclear is in some way worse.

The only economical way to produce nuclear power is as a side-effect of weapons production.

i dont see lithium-ion batteries be economical for grid level storage, since grid level storage is very different from a car, which require portability and the car buyer pays a premium for portability.

The biggest criteria for grid level storage is price to energy ratio. Cheap cost beats all, since size is not really a problem.

So i want to see molten sodium, or heat based storage, which uses cheap materials. Or have cheap electricity produce green fuels for storage and use long term (e.g., synthetic "natural gas" from CO2 capture).

I do believe nuclear has a place tho - diversification is security, but this might have to be subsidized rather than be naturally economically competitive.

'Side effect'?

You can stop your refinement process a lot sooner with nuclear power vs weapons.

Nuclear energy is partially funded by weapons requirements. That’s why nuclear-armed states have a lot of nuclear power plants. It’s like the space program — partially funded by military ballistic missile requirements.

>the price of energy at night will increase

Thought green energy was supposed to save us all money ?

It's more like drastic drop in energy price mid day.

And that's exactly why private markets do not work for electricity and will never work.

The grid needs to work 100% of the time and the policies should reflect that.

On the one hand I agree on the other hand I think this is an issue with nuclear, not markets.

For example, the market may complement cheap solar with cheap storage. Certainly cracking grid-level storage coupled with cheap solar, will change the game. (And be very profitable)

If you start a new nuclear plan today you're betting the storage problem won't be solved for 15 years (until nuclear operational) or 40 odd years after that (payback period.) That's a bold bet.

All it takes us for compressed-air-in-old-mines (or whatever) to work well, and you're out of luck.

The private market will exhaust storage ideas before investing in new nuclear. Which is your point. Which means a govt betting on storage failure. That's a bet I'm not sure govt wants to make.

There's no cheap storage being able to sustain grid loads, that doesn't exist regardless of what the futuristic articles will tell you on the internet.

That might happen for sure but if we go that route of non existing tech, there's even better than the magical storage, there's fusion and unlike the magical storage tech, we know for sure that it exists.

> If you start a new nuclear plan today you're betting the storage problem won't be solved for 15 years (until nuclear operational) or 40 odd years after that (payback period.) That's a bold bet.

If you bet on a full renewable grid, you're betting that some unknown tech will appear in the next decade to solve all your problems, yeah no thanks, that's not how you plan infrastructure on the long term. R&D and deployment are two very different things. And while you are waiting, any cost to sustain the load (like gas plant) is unrecoverable.

> The private market will exhaust storage ideas before investing in new nuclear. Which is your point.

Hence why I'm saying we don't need the private market which is creating more problems than solutions here.

The private market solution was to use more gas which is bad for climate change and bad for the diplomatic relationships as seen in the EU during the Russian war.

We're on the same page here. Grid level storage does not exist. Then again 20 years ago grid level solar didn't exist.

All infrastructure investment involves some degree of fore-sight, and good luck (in picking the winner.) Private markets will tend to favor the most likely winners, leaving govt to support the outsiders. And govt may get lucky. But more likely they'll just do nothing. Politically no choice is better than the wrong choice.

We could observe models from public-monopoly places. That frees up long-term planning while locking in fixed prices. That approach can be very effective and efficient. It can also go badly wrong.

I'm not discounting any possibility here. Anything could still win. But the odds for nuclear are not looking great to me.

> Private markets will tend to favor the most likely winners, leaving govt to support the outsider

I don't really agree, private market favors tend to favor not the winners but the most profitable part of the grid and let the state or other people manage with the rest.

Electricity is one of the worst place to get private markets, it's hard to divide (natural monopoly), critically need 100% uptime regardless of the costs and the only reason we're even switching generation tech at all is because of bad externalities which private market are also bad at. Then there's also the diplomatic angle, we can't depend from Russia or China from our energy either, regardless if it's cheaper or not.

Sure there's other issues with the public model of electricity but at least it can work if done well whereas I'm betting on a 100% failure rate with a private one, like we're heading right now since we opened up the markets in the EU (and elsewhere)

By picking gas as the backup solution and solar (+ some wind) as the main source of electricity, Europe has picked the most likely overall winners of the energy transition. Many countries in Europe are rapidly approaching 100% solar electricity and the plans are looking to vastly overprovision today's demand because we need to reduce the non-electricity fossil consumption next.

This market has very different needs than the 100% grid stability of today's electricity usage. We might for instance not be able to charge cars in winter nights if there is no wind.

Gas peaking plants will be there but their consumption of gas will become much less.

it sounds like a parallel universe, in todays Europe (the reality), the grid got almost shut down by the Russian war in Ukraine and its gas dependency. The only salvation went from some even dirtier gas imported from the US and there's further talks with Algeria, Qatar and Azerbaidjan to increase gas imports (all great democracies aligned with the EU that won't cause any issue I'm sure).

The renewable policies in the EU were a diplomatic and an environmental failure.

And for now it's "only" the gas dependencies causing issues, everybody can just pray that China doesn't block panel exports to make the situation even more explosive than it already is.

> We might for instance not be able to charge cars in winter nights if there is no wind.

The issue with wind is that when it's down, it's really really down to single digits. It's not just about charging electric cars or not but bringing something else to stabilize the grid.

> Many countries in Europe are rapidly approaching 100% solar electricity

What ? Spain is barely at 25% solar and it's basically a desert with sun all year round.... can't find a better place for it. Try that in Sweden lol

https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/11/09/the-netherlands-ge....

You're confusing so much that I don't even know where to start. Maybe with "rapidly approaching 100% solar electricity". In reality, it's news when some country, in perfect weather, runs on renewables for few hours in a day. Then coal plants start.

Germany today runs on 70% renewables and is looking to triple its solar generation until 2030.

Coal is massively down since the Ukraine war made it necessary.

The energy transition is happening and faster than anticipated.

The bold, bold bet of building time proven solutions instead of hoping we'll come up with better tech just in the nick of time.

Don't build nuclear, don't build rail, just cross your fingers and pray we'll solve mass energy storage and self driving in time.

But nuclear doesn't just provide energy at night, it provides when there is heavy cloud cover and/or the wind isn't blowing.

Also, depending where you are in the world, days get awfully short in winter.

Yes, the mythical cloudy days with no wind over large extensions that basically never happen.

Right now where I live, we are "enduring" our third week without seeing the sun. Cloudy day after cloudy day, non stop rain (i.e. more hydro). But to nobody surprise, we are also enjoying our third week with continuous wind, and the electricity is often at 0.03 the kWh: virtually free.

I'm not saying that an occasional day cloudy but without wind cannot happen. But in real world, cloudy almost always means windy where the turbines are.

It happens regularly in winter in Europe, there were several instances just last winter where wind power was under 10% capacity for over a week. Good luck building that much storage for that long.

If it's so cheap and so good why does literally nobody in the entire world does it ?

Are you implying that nobody has solar panels or wind turbines?

They're stacking them on top of existing energy sources,virtually no one replaced fossil or nuclear by solar

Germany is the perfect example, they use as much dirty energy as twenty years ago: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...

You've moved, at least, from literally nobody to virtually nobody.

On the nobody side there's South Australia which has had long periods of fully renewable energy supply to residents with excess energy being exported to neighbouriong states, and currently stands at fully 70% renewable supply (including to heavy industry) which isn't too bad given they have alumina smelters and other massive power sucks.

https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/industry/modern-energy/le...

Remind me what's the population density australia ? And how much sunlight do they get ?

Of course if your country is a literal flat desert getting 2-4x the sun it's a bit easier to make it work, for anything north of Maghreb it's game over, too many people, too energy dense, not enough sun.

> Remind me

Why, is your internet down?

> what's the population density australia ?

Very much the wrong question for several reasons:

* Australia's population is seriously urban, to the point of ridicule by Jack Davis[1] who referred to the european descedents as "fringedwellers" for their habit of clinging to the fringes of the continent in a few very large cities - you'd be wanting to look to the population density figures for Sydney / Melbourne to get a sense of how the majority of Australians live

* More importantly the energy demands of Australia, the country, are quite different to the energy demands of the Australian people - as a bulk exporter of raw materials the bulk of energy used in Australia goes towards goods used by an very large number of others in the world poplation. By way of example, W.Australia a single state with a population of 2 million exports 16x more iron ore every year than than the USofA ever achieved in a single year - this goes towards a being a major percentage of the global demand for steel.

* You're looking more for the kind of figure that relates to the energy demands for the size of the market served and less to the energy demands of the few individuals that happen to live nearby.

> And how much sunlight do they get ?

This is, of course, irrelevant for the question of the example I gave, Adelaide in South Australia. They do not use the total sunlight that falls on the total area of the country of Australia. That project uses the sunlight that falls just outside a city on the 35th parallel south which gets the same amount of sunlight as a city on the 35th parallel north.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Davis_(playwright)

To back up your point: [half the population of Australia](https://i.imgur.com/dA92oJp.png), marked in red.

That said, I think this misses the parent comment's point: Australia has a bunch more empty land than Europe. Which is true but not that important, as Europe has plenty of land to build renewables on, and quite often the reason for "lack of land" in Europe is political, not geographic - Germany is a particularly famous example, with absurdly restrictive zoning restrictions on wind turbines, based on pseudoscience.

> That said, I think this misses the parent comment's point

My answer might appear to have but I knew what they were attempting to convey under their attitude. I chose to address a few other important considerations.

Leaving that aside, Australia might be back on track to export sunlight via cable to Singapore.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38148409

The distance and the technology don't concern me nearly as much as the route; it's a hotbed of faults, a few deep trenches, and prone to earthquakes and volcanoes.

I also question the implied snub of Indonesia - they have a very large population and might appreciate some power, Australia may also benefit from the diplomacy aspects also.

Virtually everyone is replacing fossil with solar and wind. In Spain or UK coal is gone. In Europe coal went from 30% to 15% since 2000, wind + solar went from 0% to 25% in the same timespan. All of it while nuclear is also falling.

But of course you bring up the only one case in the world that net replaced nuclear with coal. And you "support" your claim with a graph that shows coal and nuclear falling and being replaced with solar and eolic, and Germany using less absolute dirty energy than 20 years ago despite doubling production.

Any time there is a high pressure weather system in winter, you have cold still weather. Solar of course doesn't produce much either in that case, as it's winter.

It takes anyone one minute to check ElectricityMap or an equivalent historical data source to debunk your disinformation about grid balancing and aggregation.

It's not rare for Europe to have no wind throughout vast land areas for days, affecting most countries at once. Same for solar.

Securing a low-carbon base load is critical and nuclear is basically the only option in most places. I'm saddened by the fact we're still arguing about this in 2023, while Germany casually unloads megatons of CO₂eq each month burning coal and gas, and actively slows down the development of cleaner energy through its EU seat.

> It takes anyone one minute to check ElectricityMap or an equivalent historical data source

Those data are about the current fleet of wind turbines production, not sufficient when it comes to determine whether a continental-scale fleet (which doesn't exist yet) could reduce the resources needed to solve this challenge.

Adequate studies results are pretty clear: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-... Similar studies exists for the US, China...

Storage (V2G, hydro...) and clean backup (green hydrogen produced during overproduction periods and burnt in turbo-alternators during under-production periods...) will complete this approach.

Storage will not complete anything in time to be useful. Hydro storage is dependent on geography, and most locations are already tapped. Battery storage is much more expensive than nuclear, and requires astronomical amounts of precious mined resources.

> Storage will not complete anything in time to be useful

You have a case here, however this is even truer for nuclear reactors, especially considering the known uranium reserves (max 2 hundred years for the existing fleet).

Hydro: yes, it is not negligible (robust, vasts amounts of energy, low inertia, flexible...), especially as continental grids are quickly progressing.

Battery storage is a prerequisite for transport (Electrical Vehicles), this considerably reduces public investments. About mined resources the challenge is to ramp up mining, moreover substitutes and recycling will reduce the pressure. Case: https://twitter.com/_HannahRitchie/status/161094857979065549...

200 years is plenty of time to deploy fast neutron reactors. Hell we had a large non-experimental one in France until it was killed by ecoterrorists.

There is no industrial fast-neutron reactor, and therefore nothing (yet) to deploy.

Superphenix, in France, never reached the industrial stage. Incidents-riddled, its best performance was, after 13 years, a .31 annual load factor.

It was running properly when it was shut down. Development had it issues, but they were mostly sorted out when the entirely political decision to shut it down was taken.

During it's last year its capacity factor (.31) was way too low for an industrial reactor.

They happen all the damn time in December in Poland.

> with no reward

For a few countries, the reward is many people not freezing to death mid-winter.

If your goal is pure ROI, you may not be interested, but since we can't not have electricity at night, the cost of providing it will raise until the ROI makes sense to someone.

Solar is by far my favourite _personal_ power source, but nuclear is a bit more resilient. Suppose a volcano erupts and ash block the sun for a year - which happened before - then solar is pretty much bust. Also there are climates where you dont get sun throughout the year, so it’s not just nights that are the issue. But i do agree that solar, and wind, need to play an important role.

So we should plan our daily lives for events that happen maybe once per thousand years. And at the same time ignore events like Chernobyl or Funushima that will never happen again... until they do.

Not our daily lives, but our critical infrastructure such as that which provides energy. I am not saying _every_ source should be nuclear. All I am saying is we should plan contingency. And yes, chernobyl and fukushima are at the back of my mind. The risk is very real and even if the probability is low the likelihood increases as we increase the quantity of nuclear reactors.

This is more of an argument for how pure economic thinking and the current constraints/processes have poor correlation to actual impact and desired outcomes. It's similar to how Enron would make the most money when California had rolling blackouts - by operating right at the edge of the network crashing, they would make the most money because reserves were low, so they intentionally shut power stations down and caused small grid crashes.

If you really believe in renewables, if anything, we need to go all in on nuclear for the base load, but no one seems to be headed in that direction other than China and India, because the don't have the same market failures we do.

When you're so far down the rabbit hole that cheap virtually unlimited clean electricity is bad because it cannot make you rich...

If killing children was profitable and somehow legal we'd find people like you investing billions in it I assume

I doubt you understand how many solar panels you'd need to replace nuclear, I also doubt you understand how some countries cannot live on solar power for size and geographical reasons alone

Moral outrage won't make the economics work out.

Why are countries who invested in nuclear enjoying the cheapest and cleanest electricity then ? The "economics" seem to work very well for them.

Why do I pay 47ct/kwh in Germany while my parents pay 13ct/kwh in France ?

Because France already has a ton of installed nuclear capacity and Germany stupidly got rid of it. But as alternatives get better and better it makes less sense to start a 20 year process to install new nuclear.

Call me when Germany's electricity is clean and cheap then, I bet we'll be in the same place in 25 years, in the meantime it's reality VS sci-fi, and so far reality is harsh

In France fossil fuels produce ~65% of final energy, and the project aiming at building the first instance of a series of reactors (EPR) planned in 2004 is a failure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanvi...

Germany generates more and more clean electricity while not loosing too much of its industrial sector, with a higher GDP and while getting rid of its nuclear: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/low-carbon-electricity?ta...

France emits less partly thanks to the dramatic reduction of its industrial sector: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-co2-embedded-in-tra...

The net difference between France and Germany isn't as high as sometimes claimed: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...

> The net difference between France and Germany isn't as high as sometimes claimed: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...

How can you say it's not massive? Germany hasn't even reached the 90s levels of France yet..

The major factors are: France was massively less industrial than Germany, its industrial sector is way less developed than 30 years ago (not emitting is easy when you buy more imported goods), its GDP is quite lower, its climate warmer.

Maybe it's also due to the fact that France has 40% electric heating and in Germany it's something like 5%...

Because you chose the most expensive energy provider? I pay significantly less than 47ct/kWh in Germany.

Why do I pay eye watering rents to live in a shoebox while my parents pay 0 rent to live in a massive house?

France's electricity prices will either sky rocket when their paid off 70s nuclear plants finally age out or they will keep running them and open up an exciting new world of nuclear disaster risks.

Germany, meanwhile, will be sitting pretty once it has paid off the capex on its far cheaper green energy.

> Germany, meanwhile, will be sitting pretty once it has paid off the capex on its far cheaper green energy.

Well no, not really. what's preventing that is the low lifespan of renewables.

They are close to 0% of the way of their 2050 goals and will understand the meaning of exponential installation pretty soon.

This is just wrong. They produce roughly 50% from renewables.

The lifespan is baked into LCOE - the measure where nuclear power is 5x as expensive.

That's exactly what I said yes, everything (or very close to) will be decommissioned by 2050.

If you have 50GW of renewables installed and you have a goal of 100GW, you need to install ... 100GW.

The renewables they have right now of course count towards their 2050 goals, that they need to get replaced eventually is a given but doesn't zero out their current contribution towards that goal.

No they don't for the most majority since they have to be decommissioned.

They have to install renewables every month just to keep the existing capacity running, not even talking about expanding it.

You can just look at the data to see they're constantly expanding so I'm not sure where you got this from?

The data is going the exact same way as I'm saying, they are planning an exponential install curve to counter the low lifespan effect. Next year, they double the solar installation rate compared to last year, then by 2025, they almost double it again.

The install curve has been exponential since the beginning.

The thing I responded to wasn't really that though, it was your peculiar conclusion they had come nowhere, 0% as you called it, towards their 2050 goals. And the reason for that was the EOL renewables that needed to be reinstalled.

I didn't say that they have come nowhere, just that they'll have to do it all over again by 2050 which is often forgotten.

The projected lifetime of these assets is baked into the LCOE and the LCOE is still 5x lower.

Theres also very little risk to continuing to run solar panels or wind turbines past their projected lifespans whereas if you do that with a nuclear plant the risks of disaster start increasing exponentially. Germany will probably find that a lot of their green energy built today will last a lot longer than projected and this will reduce their electricity prices.

That debate is moot, the renewables cant sustain the load by itself unlike nuclear anyways. So you need both, you need to replace them as they break down every year AND build additional backups, in case of Germany they chose gas and coal.

Electricity is less expensive in France than in Germany because the French taxpayer pays a higher share of the energy system.

https://data.oecd.org/chart/7eRr

When things are not profitable-- meaning people who expend resources in it are constantly having to add external resources just to stay involved-- those situations result in shrinking engagement and resources. You can have all the passion and altruism in the world, but hypothetically if you make an investment with -10% annual return, let's say, you will eventually be unable despite your best efforts, to expand this investment or even to maintain it in its original condition. Contrast this with a +10% annual return, it will be self-sustaining and someone who believes in it will have the resources over time to do a lot more of it.

Ok then I guess it's time to cancel roads and schools in most Europe, they cost too much. And health too, that's not profitable, ah and trains too ...

Did we collectively lost our minds ? What's going on ? The economy is here to serve the people, not the other way, it's fine to lose money here and there for _critical_ infrastructure

It's not about greed. Even if you're the government would you rather spend the same amount of money for 1 GW in 20 years with a ton of difficult environmental and other questions or for 0.7 GW right now?

>Did we collectively lost our minds ?

We would have if we deliberately chose to build roads that are 5x more expensive and took 10x longer to build with taxpayer money. Thats where the pro nuclear movement is right now though.

Nuclear power is stupidly expensive. It only gets built because the industrial base shares costs with the nuclear-military industrial complex.

They realize that it's harder to rally concerned citizens around keeping nuclear weapons and subs cheap so instead they tell you that it's green and try to gloss over the fact that it's eye wateringly expensive even when the very expensive disaster insurance is almost exclusively covered by joe taxpayer.

Roads and schools are chronically underfunded, for this reason. In my area for decades one highway was self-sustaining by tolls and was immaculately maintained, pristine pavement, excellent, dedicated maintenance teams, fresh paint. The rest were on a public budget and looked mostly forlorn and forgotten. Same with many schools, probably more, and that's despite public-minded altruists like yourself.

I make this point as someone who poured my time for years into public-minded pursuits like that. And, the roads, or schools, or transit ecosystems gradually deplete the resources of the people making those contributions until they have less, or no more to give. It is the antithesis of a flywheel. It is not something to have an opinion about or downvote, it just is. It's math. Do you see people down voting posts relevantly pointing out `1 + 1 = 2`? No, you don't.

The United States is not the only country in the world. Roads and schools are underfunded by choice. Mostly by small-government advocates who believe everything should be privately funded so taxes can be as low as possible.

Other countries successfully fund their public schools and my country of the Netherlands has extremely well-maintained public roads. We pay more in taxes, but the benefits far outweigh the costs.

"cheap"?

Nuclear is almost 600% more expensive than wind/solar. Lazard LCOE numbers.

https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april...

Solar PV+storage is 1/4 the cost.

Look, I love nuclear as a cool concept, and admit that the regulatory barriers are unfair, but the industry simply is not cost competitive. Is regulatory barriers entirely responsible for being 6x as expensive? I doubt it. I'm guessing at best you can get down to 3x as expensive with more rational policy.

Then MAYBE the next gen reactors will bring it down another 50%, but by the time anything new gen rolls out to a substantive degree, guess what solar and wind will probably drop again. Solar has perovskites on the horizon, wind has the usual economies of scale improvements, and battery storage has sodium ion in the immediate future and sulfur techs in the medium term.

I say keep the current plants operating as best they can (otherwise coal will be used, or gas). And keep investing in scalable reactor technology. Best that can be done for nuclear now.

Countries should build nuclear power as public infrastructure.

National freeways were not built as private projects because it was deemed important for the economy to provide access to base traffic infrastructure, even if it wouldn't be profitable for a commercial operator. Why shouldn't the same apply to base-load power?

This is what boggles my mind in the discussion.

The political right, typically for free markets, small governments and against state owned companies, is rooting for an energy supply that is the most regulated, government ran and government depending, of all alternatives.

Yet the political left, is against this system, which is the most socialist of all. And is rooting for an energy system that is the most decentralized and least government depending of all (every person with a solar panel an individual producer).

I find this remarkable at the least.

The only Western countries that seems to have got this “right” (in the logical sense you describe, not necessarily as an absolute value judgement) are France and Finland where mostly left-leaning governments built a lot of nuclear over the decades.

"It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter." --US Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss, in a 1954 address to science writers[1]

[1] https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/history-10...

> I get that we -need- electricity at night. But frankly, there is zero incentive for me to put my billion there. Its high risk with no reward.

Which is exactly why we need countries to take responsibility on the state level.

Because they can, and should, invest in the long-term well-being of its people despite it not generating the highest returns.

> I get that we -need- electricity at night. But frankly, there is zero incentive for me to put my billion there. Its high risk with no reward.

That's why we aren't getting nuclear right now. Once the regulatory hurdles come down and all of these questions get answers it'll be clear how to make a return on nuclear investment and that will attract investors.

Also, solar (and all other "renewables") are only quick to build assuming you have raw materials. We are probably going to be hitting a raw materials crunch soon because virtually all new technology is pulling from the same resource pool (copper, molybdenum, nickel) and cheap extraction is effectively gone.

Also, from an investment point of view, I'm not sure why you'd prefer a more volatile commodity. All commodity markets were set up to reduce volatility and base-load power is a huge reduction of electric grid volatility. You are telling me you'd prefer a world where you have intermittent failures because you could set it up more quickly than have reliable, constant, always-on base power for cooling/heating, food, hospitals, etc. Most people think that's a bad trade-off, hence the desire to have nuclear become the base-load provider fuel of choice.

The regulatory hurdles are already low enough and nuclear is usually lavished with subsidies and good PR as well. This is because it shares a lot of the costs of running a nuclear-military industrial complex.

Baseload with 5x the LCOE of intermittent sources that takes 10-15x as long to build just isnt valuable to civvies when there are plenty of cheap enough storage options.

It's valuable to the military though.

It's not 5x, it's more like double AFAICT. Which isn't great, but compares reasonably to fossil fuels once you factor in greenhouse emissions.

It shouldn't be the default, but it has plenty of niches where it's clearly the best choice - for instance, in Japan/Korea/etc where the bulk of their energy is imported liquefied natural gas. There's very little space to build solar/wind and so nuclear makes a lot of sense there.

Also, the more the personal transportation fleet electrifies, the more electricity we will need during the night/evening: everyone will want their car/bike/scooter/autogyro ready for commuting in the morning.

Transportation charging at night will be a drop in the ocean, something like 10-15% of our total energy needs, much of it happening during the day time. If half of vehicles are charging for a few hours of the night night, that's a couple percent of night time demand coming from transportation. A couple percent, maybe maxing at 3-5%, will be far less of a worry than the double digits required by home heating and electricity or industry or agricultural needs.

Yet another reason we need more trains. Trains don't need batteries, and are far more efficient than cars anyway.

No, energy is cheapest in mid day - when solar works. Energy is most expensive in the evenings when there's no sun, yet the demand is high.

Moreover decommissioning a nuclear plant often is a nightmare (check U.-K.'s current program), and storing electricity needed during the night (for example in the car's battery) is easy and costs less and less.

https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

On the European electricity markets base load pays rather well so.

Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast had a good episode on nuclear last week, "What's Really Standing in the Way of a Nuclear Renaissance?":

> The US is taking a fresh look at nuclear power. After a dearth of construction, and de-commissioning of working nuclear plants, people are talking, yet again, about it as a source of steady, affordable, carbon-free electricity. But of course, nuclear has its drawbacks, particularly on the financial side, as new plants have been plagued by cost over-runs, contributing to utility bankruptcies. So what would need to happen to get the economics working again? On this episode we speak with Mark Nelson, the founder of Radiant Energy Group, to discuss the state of the industry, the state of the technology, and what it would take to bring nuclear back into the mix.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d084PIspUwk

* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/whats-really-standing-...

* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/whats-really-standing-in-the-...

Raw uranium price is not even a footnote in the overall nuclear power cost. I've checked it a bit ago, and it was something like 0.3% of the total cost.

Uranium enrichment and fuel manufacturing was about 3% of the total cost for Russian reactors.

Even increasing the price of uranium by 10 _times_ won't visibly affect the price of nuclear power.

At a certain point you just use breeder reactors and the price plateaus.

They're not going to run out anytime soon regardless. If the price increases it makes it economical to extract deposits that currently aren't and then supply increases at the higher price.

But breeder reactors would also make it completely irrelevant as you say. U-238 is >99% of natural uranium but breeders can turn it into reactor fuel and then scarcity is a joke.

This is before we even consider Thorium.

breeder reactors run the risk of weapons grade fuel, which i think is a risk. Also, you'd need a different reactor to use breeder fuel rather than refined uranium fuel - it'd have to be designed up front, rather than a pivot.

There is no industrial breeder reactor, albeit many projects aiming at obtaining one burnt huge amount of resources for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Development_an...

Not quite. BN-800 is in commercial operation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor

The BN-800 didn't reach industrial stage.

Moreover it only runs MOX now (far from a complete closed cycle), just as many classic REP do (for example in France).

It has problems and there is no plan to build another one: "problems at the recently completed BN-800 indicated a redesign of the fuel was needed. Construction of the BN-1200 was put on "indefinite hold". It could restart by 2035... Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-1200_reactor

Therefore Russia doesn't decline those 'BN' reactors, and it isn't because they aren't interested in industrial breeding because they are back to the drawing board with a small (lab) reactor of another architecture (lead-cooled): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BREST_(reactor)

"Not quite"... industrial, indeed.

It's a large 800MW reactor that is used to produce commercial power. I think it does qualify as an industrial.

> Moreover it only runs MOX now (far from a complete closed cycle), just as many classic REP do (for example in France).

It's right now the only commercial reactor that runs _completely_ on MOX. French reactors can work at most at 25% MOX fuel load, I believe. CFR-600 in China will be the second commercial reactor capable of 100% MOX fuel operation some time next year.

This is a step towards the closed fuel cycle. MOX fuel in BN-800 uses natural uranium (not enriched) and plutonium. It does not _breed_ enough plutonium to sustain itself, though.

> Therefore Russia doesn't decline those 'BN' reactors, and it isn't because they aren't interested in industrial breeding because they are back to the drawing board with a small (lab) reactor of another architecture (lead-cooled)

I know :) I've been following this for a decade. BREST-300 is developed by a competing organization, but they are even further from the actual reactor construction.

Right now, Russia just doesn't need more electricity, there's an excess of generating capacity. The plan had been to export electricity and technology to Europe and other countries, but "something has happened". And now all the financing goes towards "other needs".

Sigh.

> I think it does qualify as an industrial

Russia acknowledges BN-800 problems, doesn't want to deploy it, and postpones its successor (BN-1200) to 2035 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-1200_reactor ) while investing on a different architecture (indeed: way less explored) => BN is not industrial.

> It's right now the only commercial reactor that runs _completely_ on MOX.

True, however this 10% is quantitative, it isn't qualitative step forward (burning MOX is not new), and therefore not the giant leap as sometimes argued.

> CFR-600 in China will be the second commercial reactor capable of 100% MOX fuel operation some time next year

It is a demonstrator , and "will be". There is quite a road to an industrial version (only planned now, and named "CFR-1000"). The real objective here may not be some future industrial reactor but to efficiently obtain military-grade plutonium ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFR-600#Controversy ).

Impact of Ukraine invasion: sigh, indeed, and from this point I don't see any path towards relief.

> BN is not industrial.

I think we can agree to disagree on what "industrial" means. I think that the BN-800 reactor is an industrial reactor, just not a very good one.

> while investing on a different architecture

Not really investing. It's just that the committed BREST-300's financing will last a bit longer. But it will run out some time in 2025, and I'm pretty sure that they won't receive any new funds. The organization that develops it has some income of its own, as it is developing uranium nitride fuel (it's more uranium-dense compared to traditional oxides), but it won't be enough to finish the construction.

> True, however this 10% is quantitative, it isn't qualitative step forward (burning MOX is not new), and therefore not the giant leap as sometimes argued.

Pretty much nothing in the nuclear industry is a giant leap. It's all mostly a collection of small steps. Even lead-based fuel is not all that new, lead-bismuth reactors were used on submarines.

Most of the complexity arises because industrial reactors pack several gigawatts of power generation in just a few cubic meters of space. That has to last for decades without significant maintenance to be cost-effective.

> we can agree to disagree on what "industrial" means. I think that the BN-800 reactor is an industrial reactor, just not a very good one.

Fair enough. IMHO 'industrial' here (power-producing equipment) means "ready for large-scale deployment".

BREST: I didn't know, thank you! The path seems even longer than I thought.

Small steps: indeed, and those small steps pace has to be bumped up if Gen4-proponents really hope to survive the renewables wave.

For those that like "just the facts" re: supply, demand, exploration

Uranium 2022: Resources, Production and Demand

    Uranium is the main raw material fuelling all nuclear fission reactors today. Countries around the world use it to reliably generate low-carbon electricity, process heat and hydrogen as part of their plans to reduce carbon emissions and increase energy security and supply. There is no nuclear fission power possible – of whatever kind – without uranium.

    This 29th edition of the “Red Book”, a recognised world reference on uranium jointly prepared by the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), provides analyses and information from 54 uranium producing and consuming countries.

    The present edition reviews world uranium market fundamentals and presents data on global uranium exploration, resources, production and reactor-related requirements. It offers updated information on established uranium production centres and mine development plans, as well as projections of nuclear generating capacity and reactor-related requirements through 2040.

https://www.oecd.org/publications/uranium-20725310.htm

D/loadable PDF (568 pages): https://nucleus.iaea.org/sites/connect/UPCpublic/Documents/U...

https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...

Besides the point, but why would you abbreviate "Downloadable" as "D/loadable"? The confusion vs. two extra letters trade-off doesn't seem worth it at all to me.

People vary a great deal, for example the trade-off in making a lengthy comment from a meconium account doesn't seem worth it to me.

I'm uncertain if this was a joke or not, but either way I laughed.

Same and it only cost me time to laugh and comment. In those seconds, the wavefunction of the universe shifted to a hellscape. Use your time carefully /Fluke/Luke/s!

reminds of the plastic vs cotton bag carbon footprint debate

It's particularly funny to me to save two characters while linking to a 568 page PDF.

My favorite conspiracy theory is that Soviet leadership actually orchestrated Chernobyl disaster to scare Europe of nuclear and secure its oil/gas profits. Of course, objectively, its most likely false, but it's still curious that nobody even talks about this possibility.

> My favorite conspiracy theory is that Soviet leadership actually orchestrated Chernobyl disaster to scare Europe of nuclear and secure its oil/gas profits.

mfw you don't know the actual truth about Chernobyl <https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail/>

I have no idea what kind of dramatized bs I was just tricked into reading but 9 paragraphs in it even lost me. And I'm about as hard as hard sci fi/ space exploration nerd as you can get.

That's a shame, it's a fun story and worth sticking with.

Another Stross favorite: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm

Try this then, which is a factual description of FOOF:

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...

Nah, CIA orchestrated Chernobyl to prop up soviet oil revenues to maintain a constant threat to US interests to assure CIA funding.

Every time I think I've seen the funniest conspiracy theory ever, someone goes and raises the bar. Thank you Sir/Madam.

Maybe they did it to ensure the Soviet Union and then Russian Federation wouldn't go completely broke and start selling off nuclear weapons to the highest bidder.

Guys on high horses are not funny

What do you mean by that? What was 'high horse' about my joke? Or are you mad at me for some other thread?

Genuinely confused how that joke could offend you.

The other day I tried getting a ballpark number for how much energy we can actually generate per kg of raw, natural uranium in an LWR, and ended up with 50MWh - 100MWh. That includes what is lost during enrichment, average reactor efficiency, etc.

Whether it costs a dollar or a thousand really doesn't matter much.

With a geiger counter in my hand I'm goin out to stake me some government land.

Why bother?

Central north america (south of Canada) is relatively uranium poor - the mines that were|are in that region are relatively low grades and uneconomic to mine unless backed by DoD "prop up home supply" funding .. the bulk of the resources are trace leach mined deposits not especially detectable with a hand held from the surface.

There are already publicly available U-K-Th maps from USGS surveys over USofA federal lands, just as there are U-K-Th maps of Australia, Mali, Canada, Russia & the -stan states, etc.

There are geological reasons why other parts of the world are the major suppliers of economically feasible uranium ore.

I don't think the person you responded to was being serious. His post contains the lyrics from a song called Uranium Fever by Elton Britt.

I recognised that it was likely a quote and replied regardless to point out that the USofA isn't especially uranium rich .. making that oddball claim from some year back that "Hillary sold 'our' uranium to the Russians" all the more ludicrous.

( 'our' quoted as I'm Australian )

When you buy uranium (or anything else) it becomes yours. It doesn't matter where it came from. Similarly if you are a uranium mining company that digs up and/or refines it.

You call that thing you're typing on "your" computer, don't you? That much of it came from Taiwan or PRC is irrelevant.

What was actually sold was a company that had mines all over the world, and several large scale refineries in the United States.

I'm familiar with the details - it was a Canadian company listed on the Toronto TSX put together as a grand package by a consortium of Anglo-Australian miners over the course of several years.

The meat in the package was the (contentious) leases to extremely high grade reserves in Russian adjacent territory, the contention came about due to a bit of "Brooklyn Bridge" style overselling by ministers from the former USSR country, the Clintons were called upon to add gravitas to the preferred ownership path in order to seal a deal that had as one result Russian miners RosAtom supplying the US with uranium from the former USSR grounds via the Uranium One leases.

The refineries in the US were very much the paperclips in an office table drawer that happened to go along with the company sale, in economic terms they weren't of any great interest, save to the pundits on the US right who spun mad tales about the deal.

For anyone wanting to hear it (quite catchy!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acMqxcdxE0E

Why is there such a high demand despite nuclear power production being stagnant?

>“Uranium demand has been lifted by governments from Washington to Seoul and Paris seeking energy independence by extending the lifetime of the existing fleet of nuclear reactors as they contemplate building new plants after gas prices skyrocketed due to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine,”

Meanwhile Biden just banned mining in one of the most uranium rich area of the US ... US loses again

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/07/us/politics/biden-grand-c...

Nuclear disasters get written off as outliers (even though there are multiple of them). The focus is on the small number of daeths even though that's only one aspect of many (eg the Chernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone is literally 1000 square miles almost 40 years later). Chernobyl gets ignored extra because it's an old Soviet design.

But what about Fukushima? The clean up will take decades and cost upwards of $1 trillion [1].

Humans are incredibly bad at managing long-term risk. We wouldn't be in this climate crisis if this weren't true. Any private companies will seek to cut costs to improve profits increasing the risk but that's OK because years of lobbying will simply shift the downsides of a potential disaster onto the public.

Don't believe me? It's already happened [2]:

> The U.S. Price-Anderson Act limits the liability of nuclear plant owners if a radioactive release occurs to $450 million for individual plants and $13.5 billion across all plants

Fission power generation just isn't the future.

[1]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...

[2]: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear...

Your $1T guy just made up a bunch of numbers, added them up, and then decided that he was going to...raise the total cost by 25 percent. Because reasons.

So your counterargument is that it might only be $800 billion in clean up costs?

Nuclear energy is so insanely safe that of the three worst accidents in its history, only one actually killed people and its on the order of hundreds of people. Hydro dam failures have killed on the order of hundreds of thousands but no one is trying to ban hydro.

Meanwhile, lawnmowers kill over a hundred Americans a year.

Nuclear energy is safe by any reasonable standard. The land around Chernobyl and Fukushima are for the most part usable today. It is only because we cling to the unscientific LNT standard that anyone thinks otherwise. Thankfully the misconduct and fraud that led to this state of affairs is becoming more known thanks to the work of Dr. Edward Calabrese.

Many accidents have happened, most never heard of.

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

Hell, Hisashi Ouchi's death could just been handed down by a medieval like Ivan the Terrible.

Someone burned to death atop a wind turbine. Is this a reason why wind turbines should be banned? Of course not. What matters is costs vs benefits and nuclear is just as safe if not safer than wind/solar energy per TWh.

> Nuclear energy is so insanely safe that of the three worst accidents in its history, only one actually killed people and its on the order of hundreds of people

You're leaving out the cancer and birth defects part for generations to come.

Considering how few reactors there are in the world, I'd say the failure rate is unacceptably high. A single failure is enough to contaminate an area for hundreds and thousands of years.

Pls, show me the nrs of ppl with increased cancer risk from these accidents. I'm sure the number should already be calculated

> A single failure is enough to contaminate an area for hundreds and thousands of years.

A single coal seam fire can do that too. A dam failure can even render an area uninhabitable forever.

Nuclear isn't quite as green as many of its advocates claim but its environmental skeletons in the closet aren't born out of plant accidents (which are few, far between, and generally well contained in Western plant designs), they're born out of the chemical horror show that is the rest of the uranium fuel cycle.

> A single coal seam fire

Nobody wants coal anymore, this is about renewables vs. nuclear.

> A dam failure can even render an area uninhabitable forever

Source?

That is complete nonsense. The UN Scientific Commission, Harvard Medical School, Kyiv University found no evidence for increased cancer after Chernobyl.

https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/areas-of-work/chernobyl.h...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31454285/

Radiation simply isn't as dangerous as everyone has been led to believe. We live in a radioactive world and the most basic aspects of our biology is designed to deal with it. Even in a hypothetical world with zero radiation, every single one of your cells on average experiences between ten thousand and fifty thousand DNA breaks a day. Because of the Oxygen our cells need to produce energy. You have to be exposed to significant amounts of radiation before you start to even approach the damage from normal wear and tear of life.

The real amount of victims of nuclear accidents is hotly disputed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...

Fukushima: more than 2200 victims from the evacuation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident

Hydro victims are mostly those of the Banqiao disaster, which is a fluke. In similar conditions anything would go boom with way less latency. It took place during the Chinese Cultural Revolution when most people were busy with the "revolution" which began in 1966 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure )

A well-placed expert whistle-blowing was totally ignored and even punished https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure#Whist...

This Revolution followed the "Great Leap Forward", with famines and millions victims. Moreover all this came after a civil war and violent Japanese invasion, during which dams were bombed, causing "massive flooding in Henan" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henan#Modern_Era )

In such a context an otherwise avoidable catastrophe may happen.

Then a huge typhoon closed the case ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Nina_(1975) )

Predicting and adverting this catastrophe was possible, but given such a context nobody was able to do so. One may imagine what an active nuclear reactor would become/trigger in such a context.

Ah, the infamous NYAS hit job. It wasn't even peer reviewed, yet it was published on behalf of a supposedly scientific community. That should tell you everything you need to know.

Meanwhile, the UN Scientific Commissions and Harvard/Kyiv medical studies have found no increase in cancers due to Chernobyl.

https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/areas-of-work/chernobyl.h... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31454285/

The Fukushima evacuation was wholly unnecessary and was only done because of the illogical fear of radiation that is spread by anti nuke orgs. That blood is on the hands of those who uphold and spread these lies.

This book is an analysis of scientific literature, and the authors pedigrees seem convincing to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...

Most authors of negative critics are authors of reports this book criticized, and other ones are weirdos. The book's authors answered to all critics.

One of the critics is Monty Charles. His own work, done for the UNSCEAR (a pro-nuke UN agency) in 2006, is heavily criticized in the book. He then criticized this book.

Another critic was published by Mona Dreicer, who worked for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) (another UN pro-nuke agency) and the book criticized her work.

Another one is M. Balonov, long-time contributor of reports published by UN-agencies, and the book criticizes his work.

S. Jargin, another author of a negative review, sees flaws in each and every publication criticizing a powerful industry. For example asbestos is in his opinion not a concern and its use unduly prohibited ( https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321527973_Asbestos_... ) His 'debate' with Rosamund Katz and Janette Sherman is surrealistic. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278732482_Who_Is_Af...

The UN is notoriously pro-nuke, and the UNSCEAR only composed of nuclear-energy related nations (exploiting reactors, extracting uranium...). About the WHO: http://independentwho.org/

> The Fukushima evacuation was wholly unnecessary

During such a disaster very few are able to assess the real risk, in real time, and even less to predict it. Panic ensues. This is intrinsic to the underlying physical and biological phenomenon, and therefore to nuclear.

> illogical fear of radiation

If there is nothing to fear how comes Japan disburses hundred of billions in order to clean up the nuclear mess? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup

LNT: the controversy rages over... in each direction.

See for example: https://danielcorcos.substack.com/p/bca

It really doesn't. Even the BEIR radiation safety council has had to admit recently that LNT has no scientific basis. (They refuse to stop using it out of 'an overabundance of caution'). And this is the institution that basically started and promoted the LNT way of thinking.

We know the basic mechanisms of cancer, DNA damage. We also know that on average each cell in the human body experiences around 10,000-50,000 single strand breaks per day due to...

Cellular respiration, ie Oxygen.

This fact alone kills LNT because in order to take LNT at face value you have to assume that radiation damage is cumulative and never repaired. If that were true, we'd all be dead.

Yes, the dose rate (and type of exposure, bioaccumulation of radioisotopes...) is one of (if not the) key parameter. As for its role the document I referenced seems pretty convincing to me.

> but that's OK because years of lobbying will simply shift the downsides of a potential disaster onto the public.

> Don't believe me? It's already happened [2]:

> > The U.S. Price-Anderson Act limits the liability of nuclear plant owners if a radioactive release occurs to $450 million for individual plants and $13.5 billion across all plants

That seems to be some sort of insurace/reinsurance policy of the act.

According to Wikipedia: "Under the Act, the administrators of the fund have the right to further charge plants if it is needed." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

And these are some nice benefits of the act:

> Companies are expressly forbidden to defend any action for damages on the grounds that an incident was not their fault.

> An open-ended time limit is applied, which allows claimants three years to file a claim starting from the time they discover damage.

> Companies are expressly forbidden to defend any action for damages on the grounds that an incident was not their fault.

That's a small price to pay when your corporate liability for an event like Fukushima is limited by law to $450 million.

This Act set up the NRC administered Nuclear Insurance scheme, which is largely self-funded [1], which claims to have a pool available of $13.5 billion through private insurance, industry self-insurance and a surcharge.

Let's go back to the Fukushima cleanup costs. The estimate keeps going up and is rapidly approaching $1 trillion. So far (as of 2022), $82 billion has been spent [2], which is six times the entire nuclear insurance fund. The revenue of the entire industry is listed here [3] as $38.2 billion.

Which brings us to my original point: in the event of this level of disaster, it would be the government footing the bill for the clean up.

Who do you think would pick up the tab in the US for a Fukushima-like disaster? The commercial nuclear power industry

[1]: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n...

[2]: https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14762193

[3]: https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/market-research-repo....

For a $1T cost it's always the government footing the bill (or the bill being left to those who were hit). No insurance company, energy LLC, or even unlimited liability energy company can cover that.

Yes, indeed. Humans are tragically bad at underestimating the cost of pumping trillions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Also coal power releases more radioactivity into the atmosphere than nuclear ever did.

Fukushima Could be argued as a success as the power plant shut itself down correctly when the earthquake hit. It was the tsunami that damaged the pumps and destroyed the cooling.

So far there’s no documented effects of any radiation issues.

Chernobyl Was entirely preventable if they were not fucking around and experimenting.

There was no radiation cloud released (unlike, say, Chernobyl). This is true. But it's left a mess that will take decades and hundreds of billions to clean up. Plus all the secondary effects to this region (eg fishing).

The simple argument against the idea that it's no big deal is: why not just leave it and do nothing? And the answer is "you can't". Why? Because what remains of the plant still requires active cooling, which is why there's over 1000 tanks on site storing millions of gallons of irradiated and contaminated wastewater.

This problem is so large that a lot of money is spent on removing contaminants and radioactivity so the water can be heavily diluted with seawater and released into the ocean. Otherwise the tanks will just keep building up. The wastewater releases started this year (which some still strongly oppose).

And this is just from keeping the core cooled. As for removing the core, this may take 50-100+ years [1] and has so many unsolved technical problems.

[1]: https://apnews.com/article/japan-nuclear-fukushima-plant-dec...

That "nuclear renaissance" is entirely artificial - driven by lobbying, not sound economic/environmental policy, nor demand from energy grids (we don't need more base power, which is the only thing nuclear is capable of providing.)

Nuclear is the most expensive form of energy generation possible despite being a supposedly "mature" technology. Wind, solar, and energy storage have plunged in cost and continue to do so.

Nuclear is sold as a "green" and "carbon neutral" energy source - a claim only made possible by completely ignoring the massive carbon impact of its supply and operations chain.

People love to bitch and moan about the impact of mining for batteries and magnets for Priuses - all of which can and are recycled - but point out the impact of mining the fuel (and massive quantities of high-grade metals needed for the reactor and its supporting infrastructure) and people dismiss you with a waive of the hand.

You’re a bit behind. The green folks have already started reinstating reactor licenses because of shortfalls in capacity and storage - [https://www.nrc.gov/cdn/doc-collection-news/2023/23-015.pdf]

And it’s either that or fossil fuels.

> The green folks have already started reinstating reactor licenses because of shortfalls in capacity and storage

Then it's mighty odd that in the US, installed solar only counting grid-scale projects outpaces nuclear decommissioning at a 6:1 ratio in terms of GWhrs.

> And it’s either that or fossil fuels.

...aside from wind, solar, hydro, etc which are all cheaper, safer, and do not represent anywhere near the danger and risk.

Not at all - solar isn’t base load, and can never be base load. Same with wind. And hydro has already been built out in almost every location it’s useful in the US. And your cost numbers are junk because they aren’t ’cost per kWh when we actually need it’, they’re ’cost per kWh when nature cooperates’. Which is not reliable. So over provisioning and storage costs start kicking in, and which, somehow, never get included in a those numbers. Weird huh?

Predictable base load is useful, as California (and other locations) has been finding out, again, now that they have to actually do the math and can’t just hand wave things away.

It’s going to take awhile and a lot of churn before this all stabilizes though IMO. A lot of folks haven’t had to do the math yet.

Where are you getting that hydro power is safer?

Hydropower accidents have killed far more people than nuclear accidents both in real numbers and normalized for energy produced. The ecological downsides to hydro are also hard to overstate.

This is interesting and news to me -- got any links?

https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy

Just this year there was a dam failure in Libya that killed between 5k-20k people.

And a series of dam failures on a reservoir in China in 1975 likely killed somewhere north of 200k, destroyed more than 5 million homes, and displaced more than 10 million people.

Eh.. dam failures are indeed catastrophic but the Derna dams in Libya were just clay embankments that had nothing to do with hydropower.

Earth filled embankment dams are used around the world for hydropower. The primary danger from hydropower is flooding due to dam failure, so it stands to reason you’d look at all dam failures when quantifying the risk.

As one of many examples: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam]

With bonus 'recently almost failed due to construction defects and would have killed thousands of Californians if it did' history.

Dam collapses are rare, but when they happen they can kill thousands. Go through the wikipedia list article "list of hydroelectric power station failures" and look for the ones that are actual dam collapses.

> Then it's mighty odd that in the US, installed solar only counting grid-scale projects outpaces nuclear decommissioning at a 6:1 ratio in terms of GWhrs.

In _nameplate_ GWs. If you actually want your power to work during winter time or polar vortexes, you need WAY more than that.

Yes, a minimum doubling of nameplate capacity (much more than that in most areas), plus a lot of expensive and environmentally-nasty storage to boot.

"hydro"

Not even close to being safer. Dam failures have killed magnitudes of order more people than nuclear plants.

In order to avert catastrophe we need to expend energy to actively fight global warming. Things like carbon capture.

There is also the ongoing switch to vehicle electrification.

There is massive need for multiplying our current baseline energy generation.

That first part is not true. What we need is not carbon capture, but to stop burning fossil fuels.

We can worry about bailing the boat after we patch the massive holes.

Until then, and likely even then, carbon capture (especially direct air capture) remains “Chevron’s fig leaf” [0]. I.e., a blatant predatory delay strategy by the fossil fuel industry.

[0]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/12/chevrons-fig-leaf-part-...

That first part is not true. What we need is not carbon capture, but to stop burning fossil fuels.

A large number of people will die if you force this to happen without providing an adequate substitute.

There’s a few things worth saying. The first is that plenty of people will die and will be displaced by climate change because the world, especially the developed world, has dragged their heels and not acted in earnest for decades.

Those alternatives do exist. The levelized cost of energy for renewables (especially solar) has seen a dramatic drop over the past 2 decades, and is continuing to drop. As it stands, they are already equal to or cheaper than fossil fuels. And this is before we start pytting a price on carbon that’s commensurate with the externalities it produces.

The same is true for energy return on investment [0].

As for carbon capture. It is an incredibly expensive process, both energy and money wise. Implementing it on a fossil fuel plant would dramatically raise the price of the electricity it generates.

Direct air capture is even more expensive.

And like I said, carbon capture is extremely energy intensive. If you want that carbon capture to really do much (other than predatory delay) it needs to be powered by new renewables. We’ll you’re better off just hooking those renewables to the grid and displacing the fossil fuel plants.

[0]: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/12/7098

> As it stands, they are already equal to or cheaper than fossil fuels.

If they were actually cheaper, there wouldn't be any need to ban fossil fuels. Everyone would switch on their own accord.

I’m not sure where you got the idea that I’m arguing for their ban.

What I’m arguing for is that we stop treating the atmosphere as a public sewer and put a durable price on carbon (one that’s reflective of the externalities it creates).

You didn’t address the point that your claim they are actually cheaper doesn’t seem to make any sense.

See for example page 5 for a comparison of LCOE [0].

For the issue of intermittency see page 11. Even after firming for intermittency (and without subsidizes or a price on carbon) solar and wind are cheaper than gas peaking plants, very competitive with coal, and competitive/more expensive than combined cycle gas. If you put a price on carbon (I.e. stop treating the atmosphere as a free sewer) the renewables become even cheaper.

This analysis considers a carbon price of 20-40USD/tonne CO2. (It’s unclear if they only consider that price on literally CO2 or on CO2e.) but that hypothetical 20-40$ is lower compared to what currently Canada is doing (48$ USD) and a lot lower than were the Canadian number is going (~112 USD). It’s somewhere in the middle for the Europe since there is a huge spread in price [1].

[0]: https://www.lazard.com/media/nltb551p/lazards-lcoeplus-april... [1]: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/carbon-taxes-in-europe...

Neither solar nor wind can substitute for a peaking plant, no matter how much "firming for intermittency" you apply. Apples and oranges.

The entire raison d'etre of a peaking plant is that you can bring it online immediately when a sudden peak in demand occurs.

Solar and wind simply can't do that. You can't simply pick up the phone and order the sun to shine or the wind to blow.

That’s simply not true. One option for firming is to overprovision to account for the capacity factor. The other kind of firming, talked about in the slide I mention, is about short term (hours) battery storage.

Taking California as an example, their solar causes negative electricity prices during the day meaning that fossil fuel/nuclear need to dump electricity on the market and pay people to take it since ramping down would be even more expensive. This in turn requires peaking plants on either side of that solar peak.

Introducing short term storage allows for that access electricity to be shifted a few hours to address that demand.

A complementary, and orthogonal, change is demand side management. People already voluntarily change their behaviour to take advantage of time of use pricing. With strong solar penetration mid day can become the cheap electricity price rather than night time.

No amount of overprovisioning is going to help you at 2am with solar (or during a really bad storm), and wind has similar but even less predictable issues.

Either way, overprovisioning, storage, etc. add significant costs and it isn't clear what those costs would actually need to be to avoid serious problems with high frequency if we actually take fossil fuels out of the equation.

We have experience with fossil fuels enough to say 'store x amount of diesel (or natural gas) onsite so you can handle a 100 year storm' or similar. We have no such experience with solar, battery storage, wind, etc.

Also keep in mind, California has pretty much the ideal climate for 'green' energy - almost all it's population is in temperate, sunny climates, and it has huge sunny deserts and wind generating mountains all nearby. Most electrical usage will be air conditioners, and in that climate those are near ideal solar loads.

And they're the ones that just pushed to keep their major nuke plant online they were shutting down.

It's going to be a lot harder for almost everyone else.

Demand side only goes so far - sometimes people do actually need that energy now, and it tends to be when there are real issues that need that energy to address. Like emergencies, storms, cold snaps in the winter, etc.

2AM is not the usual use case for peaking plants.

Yes, voting to keep operating your existing fleet in operation for an extra 5 years is one thing, paying up for a major refurbishment or a brand new plant is another thing.

But this is beside the point. If we still need use gas peaking plants for emergencies and outlier events and only that, then 99% of the energy decarbonization battle is won.

2am is the case for base load. Because significant load still occurs then. And there is zero insolation.

Before your comment the discussion was about comparing the price of renewables to that of fossil fuel plants, specifically it got onto the discussion of peaking power plants. If you wish to change the topic to base load, then you're going to have to make that clear.

As for night time, see my comment about storage; build out pumped hydro or dam-based hydro and use it as your battery. When you inevitably have excess solar/wind during the day pump water uphill, and/or decrease you hydro production rate, and then at night time use that pumped storage and/or increase the rate at which you run water through your turbines.

If a particular region doesn't believe that it's realistic for them to do this, or show that nuclear will be cheaper, then build that.

Nope.

> A large number of people will die if you force this to happen without providing an adequate substitute.

We have adequate substitutes. Replace base load with nuclear. Electrify transportation and charge the batteries with renewable generation.

The true barriers are political. The fossil fuel industry doesn't want to be replaced with nuclear and renewables. The auto industry (which makes a large proportion of profits from maintenance) doesn't like simpler vehicles that need less maintenance. So they dig in their heels and put regulatory barriers in front of the alternatives.

But it's past time for them to lose.

Yeah this is that thing you’re talking about. This is us stopping burning fossil fuels for energy.

We can talk about everybody just riding their bike, which I agree would be better for all involved, but so far the data coming back from that experiment has been absolutely dismal.

At this point I think ignoring peoples reluctance to bear any inconvenience, and the consequences that has on policy in a democratic society, is dangerously negligent if you take the climate crisis seriously.

The data is emphatic and unambiguous. We could do more, but we refuse to, and the steps we could take to force the issue would be catastrophic and extremely risky. War is not carbon neutral, and victory is far from assured.

Building some nuclear power plants is arguably the least bad option. I don’t expect that medicine to taste good going down but I, as well as a great many around here, am in the solutions business. And this will take a bunch of coal plants offline in a fashion that we could get people to choke down.

While I agree with some of the points you make, I genuinely don’t see how your comment relates to mine.

You were insisting that we stop burning fossil fuels, withijt a suggestion on how to replace the base load. The base load must be replaced.

I inferred you didn’t like nuclear power because most folks who are focused on climate do not. EVs and nuclear power plants aren’t a panacea but they can make a dent, a big one, they’re politically possible, and we can start today.

Yes I can see how you would draw those conclusion.

I would start by saying that a) I don’t have an ideological problem with nuclear, I have an economic one. While wind, solar, and hydro (and the rest) have been getting cheaper (sometimes drastically so, as in the case of solar) year over year, nuclear has only been getting more expensive. The longer we run the plants, the more problems we learn about and the higher the cost becomes.

And no, I don’t think the SMNR will solve that, if anything I think they will be even more expensive ($/MWh) because they lose the economies of scale within the plant. It’s argued that you’ll get that price down since they can be mass produced and modular, but the 400MW scale currently being made are neither small nor mass produced. Building enough of them to actually take advantage of learning rate effects is a dubious proposition, especially with the market fragmented behind dozens of designs.

Whether nuclear retains a spot for itself remains to be seen and will be dictated (I believe) primary by the cost being brought down faster than the alternatives.

And that alternative (point b) is the modernization of the electrical grid (something that we need to do regardless of the path forward) to create larger electrical grids. The intermittency problem is lessened when large geographical areas share their generation capacity. Similarly with storage (hydro one solution that already exists).

“The intermittency problem is lessened when large geographical areas share their generation capacity.”

Are we having a serious discussion here? We’re pretty darn good at transmitting power and there are physics problems at work here that are really frustrating to have to explain over and over to people who desperately want to believe there is some silver bullet around the base load problem.

There isn’t. There is no grid scale solution. There is no mix of renewables that is going to get around the base load. It doesn’t exist.

We. Can’t. Afford. To. Wait.

We are having a serious discussion. If you have good sources showing why HVDC and/or hydro are a less economical solution please share.

But to your point about not being able to wait, I agree. So if we were to greenlight a new nuclear power plant today how long until it produces electricity? (Let’s even assume we have all of the trained personal available to build and operate it.)

The Vogtle plant took 14 years, and that was at an existing site. I’m putting my bet on a solid 2 decades if a new site is needed. To say nothing of the cost overruns.

But, let’s be generous and say 14 years. We can’t wait for 14 years to remove fossil fuels off the grid, to say nothing of growing demand. We need to build something that will produce green electricity next year.

Again, nuclear can certainly have its place. But it has a bunch of economic challenges to overcome to earn that place.

> We can’t wait for 14 years to remove fossil fuels off the grid

'We' == just the US that struggles to build a nuclear plant, or 'We' including, say, South Korea with 25 reactors operating and another four under construction and due to be finished by 2030 (along with boofing up and extending some of the older plants in the same time period)?

The US could ask South Korea for assistance, of course, but they might be tied up building nuclear reactors in Uganda and potentially other one or two other countries in Africa.

It’s true South Korea is doing a little better. Shin Hanhul 1 and 2 only took 10 years (a mere 100% schedule overrun) to build. So that is better. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what that 2030 estimate turns into in the end.

They have their work cut out for them with countries in Africa, I didn’t believe they currently have the local expertise or supply chains.

If we suddenly stopped burning fossil fuels, billions of people would likely die.

Billions.

That seems like a pretty "massive hole" to me.

Then it’s a good thing I didn’t say suddenly.

What we do need to suddenly do however is act like we care, not just pay lip service to solving the problem.

> We can’t wait for 14 years to remove fossil fuels off the grid, to say nothing of growing demand. We need to build something that will produce green electricity next year.

"Next year" looks a lot like "suddenly" to me.

I ask you to reread that sentence and try a non-inflammatory read.

I am discussing the building of new electricity production, not the forceful removal of fossil fuel production.

You don’t need to ban coal burning, you simply have to make them pay for the externalities they create. Gas power plants replace coal ones for the simplyfact that they’re cheaper. Unless we actively subsidize coal, they aren’t cost competitive and will fail on their own.

There is a massive need for degrowth. Carbon capture is a scam — the thermodynamics just don't make sense. It's far easier to not pollute the first place than to pollute and then expend even more energy trying to undo the damage.

The answer is less, not more: compact housing, compact communities, compact cities, efficient transit, etc.

The way we have built the world relies on assumptions about limitless resources, and in order to get through this problem we need to fundamentally reconsider how we approach using resources.

What can be done today:

- zoning reform (in the USA especially)

- investment in small dense housing

- investment in transit

What isn't going to help:

- Business As Usual (BAU) But "Green"

- Dumping more energy into the system

Nuclear reactors can be great, but they do not resolve the civilization-level energy waste problem.

> driven by lobbying, not sound economic/environmental policy

So just like the rest of the energy market?

Britain is importing wood pellets from trees chopped down in the Amazon and burning them in Drax powerplant as 'Sustainable low-carbon energy'

We import oil from India which originally came from Russia.

We import natural gas from America which has higher CO2 emissions and cost than Coal, while we sit on deposits of Coal.

Its illegal to build a win turbine on land because they ruin the view. Solar farms are illegal on any land that could potebtially be farmed, which is like 80% of all land.

The other day solar farm has been rejected planning permission because there were hundreds of objections, especially noise complaints.

The idea that energy market is a free market is a total face

> We import natural gas from America which has higher CO2 emissions and cost than Coal,

Not true. Virtually all of the energy from coal comes from burning carbon, while a significant amount of the energy in natural gas results from burning hydrogen.

In fact, burning natural gas emits only about half the carbon for a given amount of energy output.

It could go the other way if the coal is domestic and the natural gas has to be shipped across world on a sludge-burning oil tanker. But why burn either of them?

> we don't need more base power

This reads as "building nuclear is pointless because we have already have plenty of coal"

I think you'll have a hard time persuading anyone of anything after dropping that turd.

The only reason new power sources are even a topic of discussion is because continued use of fossil fuel is off the table. The existing base load sources need to be replaced with something, and nuclear is the only game in town.

> In 2013, the plant achieved continuous production, operating 24 hours per day for 36 consecutive days

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

This is a molten salt system heated by solar. It can output power for one night, but only when there is enough latent heat from the previous day. Any number of consecutive days of operation is a lucky streak. A single day of non-ideal sunlight will shut it down.

Make the solar plant and the molten salt battery larger, and build more of them, they can store power for up to a week. You can also charge the battery off of excess wind (or run nat gas in some kind of power emergency).

There are significant issues that limit the scalability of these systems in terms of power, capacity, and duration.

Building larger heat storage capacity, for example, would be useless if it cools down before being used. Long-term storage is an area of active research. There is reason to believe[1] that the technology could improve in the future, but until that is proven to be viable the state of the art for duration is "a few hours".

Speculation doesn't keep the lights on. The grid can only be powered by things that actually work in the present.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/long-term-energy-storage-molten-sa...

> With proper insulation of the tank the thermal energy can be usefully stored for up to a week.[15]

> [15] Ehrlich, Robert (2013). "Thermal storage". Renewable Energy: A First Course. CRC Press. p. 375. ISBN 978-1-4398-6115-8.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage#Molten_...

That book[1] speaks of the Andasol Solar Power Station, and makes several dubious statements about it. The one being cited is:

> The well-insulated tanks where molten salt is stored contain enough thermal energy for up to a week

A false claim. It has enough energy for 7.5 hours. (149.7MW/1123MWh)

In any case, is says nothing about duration. The wiki writer may have just mistaken capacity for duration. I couldn't find any evidence of this power station storing energy for any amount of time. It's used on the night immediately after the day that charged it.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=Y693JNsoS4gC&q=375

> we don't need more base power, which is the only thing nuclear is capable of providing

This is wrong both ways. First, we need more base load power because most of the existing base load is fossil fuels which we have to stop using.

Second, it's very difficult to have "too much" base load generation once you electrify transportation because the extra base load generation is useful to satisfy normal demand when demand would otherwise outstrip supply and useful to charge vehicle batteries when it doesn't.

> Nuclear is the most expensive form of energy generation possible despite being a supposedly "mature" technology.

This was done on purpose. There is nothing inherent in the technology that makes it expensive. "Generate heat to generate steam to generate electricity" is fundamentally the same for nuclear and coal or natural gas, so the only explanation for the former having a significantly higher cost is regulatory, which was intentional and could be different given a different intent.

> Nuclear is sold as a "green" and "carbon neutral" energy source - a claim only made possible by completely ignoring the massive carbon impact of its supply and operations chain.

Nuclear has a low carbon impact even if you include its supply and operations chain. Also, most of those things apply to any form of power generation (you also have to manufacture and transport solar panels), and most of the CO2 emissions required are from energy and transportation, so if your energy comes from non-fossil fuels you don't have to burn carbon to build power plants.

> point out the impact of mining the fuel (and massive quantities of high-grade metals needed for the reactor and its supporting infrastructure) and people dismiss you with a waive of the hand.

Because it isn't massive quantities. One kg of uranium has the same energy content as two thousand metric tons of oil. A 1GW nuclear power plant generates as much power in a day as ~25,000 acres of solar panels.

> This was done on purpose. There is nothing inherent in the technology that makes it expensive. "Generate heat to generate steam to generate electricity" is fundamentally the same for nuclear and coal or natural gas, so the only explanation for the former having a significantly higher cost is regulatory, which was intentional and could be different given a different intent.

Nuclear is vastly more complicated and the ultimate failure condition that everyone worries about can cost hundreds of billions to clean up.

That results in a lot of engineers and administrators sitting around tables and dreaming up possible ways things could fail (particularly with humans in the loop) and dreaming up ways to mitigate them. The designs get more complicated and expensive over time because nobody wants to say 'no' to mitigating those risks.

The engineering of the plant also needs to be built to exacting standards and none of the pipes or concrete are what you find slapped on buildings in your local neighborhood.

Contrast that with a solar or wind plant or even a coil or nat gas plant and nobody cares that much about the engineering. If something breaks you just shut it down and fix it and maybe retrofit the design (bit more care needs to be taken in the case of a coal or nat gas plant since you don't want it blowing up but nothing out of the ordinary for any refinery or other industrial plant). With a nuclear plant you can't just pull the plug and shut it off to fix it without creating a 40-year long cleanup disaster.

You're explaining why they cost more to design, not why they cost more to manufacture. The kind of redundancy you need for this doesn't require an excessive amount of raw materials. The cost of a diesel generator that can run coolant pumps, or five of them, isn't a meaningful percentage of the construction cost. A large proportion of the plant isn't any more safety critical than it is in any other kind of turbine-based generating plant, because it's doing the same thing in the same way.

It's also working against one of the most effective design criteria for ensuring safety: Simplicity. Things with fewer moving parts fail less. But they also cost less. It shouldn't cost more. Something's being done wrong.

And if your argument is that nuclear plants are required to have higher safety standards than anything else does even for doing the exact same thing with the exact same risk as it is in some other kind of facility, yes, that's the point -- that's why it's a regulatory problem. Uneven application of standards. Either one of them is too loose or one of them is too tight, but they shouldn't be different.

They're different because one of them has a risk of a meltdown with hundreds of billions of dollars of damage. That's the asymmetry and why a nuclear plant costs more than a refinery.

I agree with most of what you say, but you can find reasonable attempts to calculate the carbon impact of nuclear electricity along the whole chain. As of the latest figures around a decade ago, it was in the same ballpark as solar and wind for carbon intensity, and human health impacts.

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

That source has historically been very pro-nuclear, but even more critical sources don't change the fundamental conclusion too much:

> Results for the process-based, input-output, and hybrid methods range between 16.55–17.69, 18.82–35.15, and 24.61–32.74 gCO2e/kWh, respectively. These are either well above or at the upper end of the range of possibilities (5 to 22 gCO2e/kWh) stated in a report for the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, and significantly higher than the median value of 12 gCO2e/kWh presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03062...

Obviously wind and solar have improved massively since then and continue to improve while nuclear is stagnating but still the numbers suggest it's in a totally different league than fossil fuels on those metrics. It's primarily cost that makes modern renewables preferable.

> nor demand from energy grids (we don't need more base power, which is the only thing nuclear is capable of providing.)

This is exactly the opposite in Europe. Base power is what we need, so we can replace coal and gas.

> Nuclear is the most expensive form of energy generation possible despite being a supposedly "mature" technology. Wind, solar, and energy storage have plunged in cost and continue to do so.

You're wrong, replacing nuclear with storage would be much more expensive.

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