Nuclear energy is more expensive than renewables, report finds

The big question is how to pay for those since they have capital costs and running them means that the power won't be free.

Even is you are half the year at a prize of 0, if the other half compensates you are fine. That's what drives eolic and solar, as they think "OK, in that scenario we would break even in 12 years instead of 6. Not bad either". Gas can adjust to produce only in the positive half of the year, and also "we would break even in 20 years instead of 10". Meanwhile, nuclear reactors and specially new nuclear projects, have to take in consideration than half of the time they will be producing at zero, and the other half barely covers the costs (mainly amortization). They are in a "at those prices we would never break even" scenario.

The key point is that the sources in the margin (i.e. with less profit margin) are the ones to collapse first, while the most efficient ones keep going on with less profits, but profits nonetheless.

Add storage and/or get rid of the inflexibility and the negative prices disappear.

Simply comparing production figures without considering intermittency is one of the most common oversimplifications people make in decarbonization discussions.

We're already noticing that wind farms can't be too close together, because upwind farms slow the wind, degrading the output of downwind farms. https://www.sustainability-times.com/low-carbon-energy/placi...

Solar is limited by available surface area, but more importantly by environmental impact. You're going to start destroying ecosystems if you blanket the land with panels.

Hydro has been mostly tapped out for a long time. At least in the developed world, all the geography that can be dammed, has been. And even here, there's a strong push from environmental groups to destroy the dams to restore ecosystems disrupted.

Wrong, production capacity (distinct from actual production) is at 1,500 GWh. But less than half (closer to a third) of that production capacity is utilized: https://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/research-analysis/growt...

A quick review of terms:

Production Capacity is how much the industries hypothetically could produce if they had unlimited inputs and labor. This is around ~1,500 GWh

Production is how much they actually built. This is ~500 GWh per year.

Production Utilization is production divided by production capacity. Which hovers around 33% for lithium ion batteries right now.

Actual production figures is what matters, not what factories hypothetically could produce if they had unlimited input. Manufacturing costs are only a quarter of the cost of lithium batteries [1]. Battery production is already bottlenecked on the supply of input materials, so growing production capacity is not relevant until the input demands are fed.

1. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...

That gets you a few percent for the things that work like that, but most of the load on the power grid isn't able to do that. You can't turn off the heat in the winter, which is going to be an even larger proportion of the load in the future than it is now as we transition from fossil fuel heating systems to electric. People demand hot water. Refrigeration is a significant load but you turn it off and your food spoils.

Electrifying transportation is also a mixed blessing here. It helps smooth out the day/night load because you can charge them whenever generation exceeds demand, but after a couple days you can't put it off anymore and then you've just got more unsuppressible demand.

You have solar panels that generate 100GW average, i.e. 200GW during sunlight and nothing at night. You have batteries to match this up with the daily load.

But then it's more cloudy than usual for a couple weeks, so your average generation from solar is 50GW, or 10GW, or what have you, depending on how cloudy it is. You need something to make up the difference that week or the batteries run down and the power goes out.

But because averaging 90GW over a day (when the typical average is 100GW) is a lot more common than averaging 10GW, the first 10GW of peaker plants is economical against nuclear and the last 10GW is not. And the total of nuclear + peaker plants has to add up to ~90GW because there will be times when you only average ~10GW from renewables.

A football field sized reservoir isn't going to hold much water unless it's deep. Realistic pumped hydro sites are much larger than 500 square meters. And those two reservoirs can't be too far apart, because excess lateral distance reduces output and increases the energy required to refill it.

It also needs to be close to a source of water in order to fill the reservoir and refill any loss due to evaporation.

It also needs to be close to a major highway otherwise the costs of construction will be immense because of the long distance that materials and equipment must be shipped. This is particularly problematic because most pumped hydro potential is in mountainous terrain where transportation is expensive.

And lastly, this site has to be close to places that have energy demand, otherwise you'll need to build miles and miles of transmission lines. This is also a problem because the places that have pumped hydro potential also have hydroelectric potential, and usually already generate electricity from dams. Norway and Brazil have huge pumped hydro potential, but already generate most electricity from dams.

The conditions for a viable pumped hydro sites are much more narrow than "two football field sized reservoir a few hundred meters apart in elevation".

The paper you cited just ran an algorithm over a terrain height map. It did not attempt to account for accessibility. Good luck developing the immense pumped hydro potential in Tibet. Pumped hydro would be great if we could teleport concrete, excavators, and turbo machinery into some of the most remote parts of the world. But unfortunately this is not in our capabilities.

If masses of people not having power sometimes is a fundamental part of the system design and not an extreme systemic failure, then that's completely unacceptable.

It's also unclear how they're calculating storage costs. Page 41 lists $178 per MWh. The US is currently building out storage at a cost of ~$500 per KWh so this is an insane cost. Are they projecting this as total cost for storage and retrieval over the life of the system? If so, how many discharge cycles are they assuming? What is the actual construction cost that this report is assuming? That figure seems to be absent from this report.

The article is made by a business journalist on an Australian report, with a catchy title. It is a complex subject.

Radioactive water is not usually a concern. There are heat exchangers between an inner loop with a very small amount of water that is radioactive (but not forever or highly radioactive) and an outer loop with just... seawater. Maybe you're thinking about Fukushima, where they dumped a lot of water on an open core?

>Critics allege that the most important subsidies to the nuclear industry have not involved cash payments, but rather the shifting of construction costs and operating risks from investors to taxpayers and ratepayers, burdening them with an array of risks including cost overruns, defaults to accidents, and nuclear waste management. Critics claim that this approach distorts market choices, which they believe would otherwise favor less risky energy investments.[15]