Much of North America may face electricity shortages starting in 2024 | Hacker News Reader

Much of North America may face electricity shortages starting in 2024

newscientist.com

31 pointsrustoo70 comments

We have the technology for reliable energy production, it’s called nuclear. For political reasons, we sacrifice our stability, do I get this right? Germany is a great example of a country in distress due to such radical political decisions, while still putting out more carbon per unit of energy than all EU countries except one (Polen).

What distress is Germany exactly in that would have been avoided by nuclear power?

Energy intensive industries are leaving Germany, and energy bills are more expensive that they'd have to be.

I hear that all the time, it doesn't show in actual industrial sites being diamantled. That would take much longer than we had this discussion. It worked so, industry will get electricity subsidies now, so that talking point worked great.

You should google "Germany industrial site shutdown" and see the closing down announcements.

"Chemicals producer BASF to axe jobs at energy intensive production sites in Germany" "Tyre maker Michelin announces closure of German sites" "Rust belt on the Rhine"

These news predate renewable energies, read it started back in the 90s (propably eatlier, but that is when I cared enough to remember).

You know something else? The majority of chemical sites in Germany is old, and environmental constraints became quite severe. Guess where new investment goes then.

These are all closures from 2023

Energy intensive industries do not use electricity but gas.And Germany had some pretty below market deals with Russia for the German chem industry. Now it pays the same as everybody else.

And the gas supply bad new are not over. Ukraine's gas transit agreement with Russia, which allows RU to export nat gas through Ukraine to Poland, Germany and Austria, will expire in 2024 and Ukraine doesn't look in an easy mood to renew it.

Is Europe still geting Russian gas directly so?

Yes, 13% of non-LNG gas imports of 2022 were through land pipelines like those.

You call 13% dependence? If so, the EU (!), because that is an EU number, is equally depedant on Norway (11.6%)...

Well, it is in distress because of their extreme fetish for austerity over a growing economy that is enabling the rise of the far right and Wagenknecht's socially conservative GDR vanity project.

And how would nuclear power have avoided any of that?

what extreme fetish for austerity? Compared to what other countries?

The rise of the fascists, left an right, is due to refugees and inflation - and Trump style conspiracy theroies. And vaccs. But mainly refugees. Just talk to some AfD voters.

Dependence on Russia.

Not a thing anymore, or am I mistaken?

Strange that despite claims that this would have happened multiple times (and people freeze and whatsoever) it didn't even come close yet... not sure if your distress becomes real (it hasb already sometimes despite nuclear..) but in Germany it was always pointless wrong panicmakong so far (we are not talking expensive prices but failure)...

TLDR: Don't claim the wrong counterexamples for your wrong cause.

Nuclear seems all but reliable given all the unplanned downtime.

I guess it is unavoidable given those plants can poison a whole country and their neighbors if not maintained properly.

Oh. And built by the lowest bidder near you where non team players are fired pre-emptivly. There is no way a trust modern corporate management philosophy to build nuclear power plants.

The sudden shift in the nuclear power "public sentiment" is really strange and feels artificial.

I've been screaming it for years but my real guess is the shift to nuclear power is the result of the destabilization of the global geopolitical situation showing that having an energy dependency on foreign nations that you can't always trust to be friendly or behave is a major national security weakness.

So nuclear starts to look very attractive because of the guarantee of continual high power output with few dependencies as long as you have the uranium, and isn't as unreliable as renewables.

Overall mined uranium supplies are quite limited. Numbers back in 2013 [1] put the total uranium available (including estimated undiscovered resources) at enough to maintain current operations for 230 years. Bump up usage by an order of magnitude, and you're running out in 23 years. And Western countries (mostly Canada/Australia) only produce about 20% of that total.

So if nuclear ever became a staple, you'd end up needing to resort to salt-water extraction, or developing breeder reactors. Both would send costs skyrocketing. Salt-water extraction is also going to run into environmental issues given you're talking about processing literally trillions of tons of water (uranium's about 3 parts per billion in saltwater). Breeders also substantially up the stakes in terms of complexity and risk.

If you'd indulge my curiosity, what would be your opposition be to something like solar + artificial hydroelectric? It's relatively cheap, infinite (well subject to access to the materials necessary for construction of solar panels), completely safe in any scenario, and things like artificial hydroelectric take care of the biggest issue of day/night production.

[1] - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo...

Ye it is quite strange. And the timing of the what I believe is an artificial sentiment shift is very much tied to a specific war.

Anyhow, nuclear power plants are in them self a major national security weakness. Especially with these put small reactor everywhere cracy talk. But then again "national security" is about "security" about as much how the "defense industry" is about "defence".

I sometimes feel that nuclear power is a proxy discussion for something else that is also not very popular among the voters. It kinda makes sense if you just replace "power" with "war".

This comment is wrong. Countries relying on nuclear energy (United States, China, France…) certainly don’t struggle with “unplanned downtime”. Nor can a modern reactor, built to modern standards, “poison a whole country and their neighbors”. Chernobyl is the worst radiological accident in history and the only one of its kind. Modern reactors can’t explode and burn like Chernobyl. It’s impossible. And nuclear power plants are not built by the lowest bidder, because the number of corporations that can build nuclear reactors is already vanishingly small. Chernobyl isn’t a good argument against nuclear anymore than the 9/11 attacks are a good argument against skyscrapers.

Well, France was constantly paraded aroubd HN for their failure to keep their nuclear reactors running. Usually not as an example for nuclear power failing, but rather as examole of the state (who doesn't like neo-liberalism?) and France as a counzry (because who doesn't like dumping on France?) failing.

“ Modern reactors can’t explode and burn like Chernobyl. It’s impossible”

Isn’t the impossibility proof only as strong as the assumptions put in?

Yes? If the assumption is fail safe is better than fail unsafe.

Passive cooling and automatically, gravity controlled control rods to deactivate the reaction are major innovations. Smaller sized reactors that have better neutron economy also reduce waste and have lower total risk

Here's a link to a map by the EIA documenting current nuclear outages: https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/outages/

Uhh... We have plenty of nuclear plants being run just fine. Built by the lowest bidder is an easy way to misrepresent how things are actually built. They still have to build it exactly to spec which is like a million pages long and they cant cut corners. So in reality its who can build this exact spec for the lowest amount. Otherwise we'd be overpaying for all of oue public infrastructure. The sudden shift is due to people realizing nuclear really is the way to go and were only fooled in the past by fossil fuel propaganda. Its not artificial, the fear of nuclear however is.

Last time I bothered discussing this on HN, I looked up the numbers (too lazy to do so again): in short, we built 10x renewables per months as we do nuclear. And most the new nuclear capacity replaces NPPs that are shut down. And wind as well as solar are way cheaper than nuclear since Hinkley C got its MWh prices approved.

Nuclear is dead for everything except science, medcine, political or military reasons. All of which are valid ones by the way.

I’ve read about so much crime and terrorism these past few years. I don’t want to live near such a dangerous target.

It is reliable and dependable compared to weather dependent renewable energy sources. As about reliability of e.g. wind, Siemens Gamesa has e.g. some stories to tell.

I agree; there has been a sudden shift. It used to be that people were anti-nuclear because they seemed to be scared of it. Now, they just outright dismiss nuclear despite it being more necessary than ever.

This misses nuance. Nuclear is brilliant in providing baseline power, but at the same time it's often extremely expensive when compared to the lifetime cost of other options, especially renewables. The ideal setup would be to strike a good balance between the two that covers demand without being prohibitively expensive. Where that balance lies is a topic of constant and loaded debate.

Small Modular Reactors (SMR) to the rescue: https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/what-are-small-modular-...

Which has been an idea the nuclear industry has continuously been pushing for the last 70 years whenever large scale reactors become too expensive.

It has never panned out. Most recently the company furthest along the licensing process, NuScale, cancelled their project in Utah due to spiraling cost increases, before they even started to build.

THE FORGOTTEN HISTORY OF SMALL NUCLEAR REACTORS

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc...

True small nuclear reactors have never been tried! /s

Wind has been used for hundreds of years and only recently started being relevant on a system-wide scale, so I don't think it's good argument.

In both cases, the underlying technology has worked for a while, and the challenges are only tangentially related (NIMBY, lack of production scale, scaremongering for nuclear), but solveable.

If converting entire countries electricity grids to nuclear, while failing to lower costs, is not enough, what scale do you propose? How many trillions of dollars in subsidies to give nuclear "one more chance"?

All while we have solutions, on the market, that are cheaper, faster and easier to deploy.

The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

This study does not include their most recent attempt at Flamanville.

> Construction on a new reactor, Flamanville 3, began on 4 December 2007. The new unit is an Areva European Pressurized Reactor type and is planned to have a nameplate capacity of 1,650 MWe. EDF estimated the cost at €3.3 billion and stated it would start commercial operations in 2012, after construction lasting 54 months. The latest cost estimate (July 2020) is at €19.1 billion, with commissioning planned tentatively at the end of 2022.

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

One basic cost problem is that nuclear power plants are built as one-of-a-kind. If they were built in serial production, the costs could be brought down significantly. But this is all heavily related to the scaremongering and hysterical opposition to anything nuclear (serial production -> smaller sites -> more NIMYism...).

If everything was rosy in the renewables, then why not. But we don't have storage, we don't have high-capacity long-range (thousands of kms) energy network, most of the production capacity is in China ...

Both directions have its risks, I think a wise choice would be to pursue both to avoid putting all eggs into one basket.

You can let the market figure that out. No need to debate.

The thing is, there is no pure market in the energy sector. Everything is controlled by subsidies, government zoning for projects, political power plays and so on.

True. I think we would end up with a more efficient and also greener energy system removed more of these subsidies and zoning restrictions and instead used futures markets to somewhat shield consumers from extreme power price spikes.

A large portion of the country can't realistically or cost effectively build enough renewable plants to provide reliable energy in all seasons. With current and foreseeable technology, only nuclear can provide the guarantees we need - this of course doesn't prevent renewable investments, but it will be a fatal mistake to not build nuclear plants under the impression that we can just build renewable options instead.

Conflating primary energy usage and electricity and will not get us anywhere.

Electricity, especially by the usage of microreactors could address much more than just “the classical view” on electricity. Still, electricity is a huge chunk of the problem to solve, and the main topic in this post.

Unfortunately in the US we've had our fair share of nuclear boondoggles and outright scams. Recently, Florida began allowing utilities to collect from ratepayers during planning/etc. for new nuclear and FPL got a billion bucks for a new reactor that will never exist.

Source?

Florida doesn't make the best decisions.

Besides a grudge against Florida, can you show any harm nuclear energy has caused in the last 20 years in the US?

What do you mean by political? It is not a major issue for either party, candidates almost never bring it up.

It’s not political, it’s unpopular broadly.

Not all politcs problems are one side against the other, sometimes a political problem does mean “this is a good idea, but too generally unpopular to be implemented”.

For nuclear it’s also a local politics problem, not national problem generally: people don’t have an issue with nuclear in general, but they do have strong opposition for it being built near where they live.

Nuclear power is mainly an economical problem, meaning it is too expensive to be viable.

I think the economics are why you don't see industry pushing it. If they thought it was an easy route to lots of $, they would start pushing it (and against the anti-nuke movement).

> It is not a major issue for either party, candidates almost never bring it up

Uhh yeah? Because it's been dead since the 1990s? You can look at a graph of new nuclear power platnts and see it curtail off after a peak in the 90s.

> It’s not political, it’s unpopular broadly.

When it was a major political issue, the anti-nuclear advocates were almost entirely on the left. It was seen as part of the environmental movement (which has been left-leaning).

Trying to justify another attempt at nuclear in the face of Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer and NuScale is insane.

But sure, this time it will certainly be different!

Humans tried to fly for thousands of years before the Wright Brothers. Things get better over time. Humans are improvement machines. So yes, I think it will be different.

All while we have solutions, on the market, that are cheaper, faster and easier to deploy.

The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

This study does not include their most recent attempt at Flamanville.

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

It's petty/antagonistic to pretend you don't know that people even make honest arguments against nuclear at all (i.e. that it's purely political). You may certainly disagree with them - I do.

I know exactly what the drawbacks of nuclear energy are. I still see it as the best reliable source we have, with the lowest fatality track out of all energy sources, once you factor in facts/everything. Especially the hidden costs of solar power and wind power on the environment (through e.g. dirty energy and chemicals used during their production, or lack of recycling) is overall something that is understated in the grand scheme of things. And on top of that, they are not reliable with regard to energy production, so they are not even in the same ballpark as nuclear.

The critique of your comment was not that you don’t know of the drawbacks, but that you imply opponents don’t. You say their opposition is “political “, commonly a way to deride an argument as lacking real substance.

> e.g. dirty energy and chemicals used during their production, or lack of recycling) is overall something that is understated in the grand scheme of things

And that is as far your knowledge goes.. just please put real valid numbers to it, and don't start shaming.

Finland recently had to offline 14% of it's national electricity production due to a single incident. Not only is that unreliable, the effects of the lack of reliability are much worse than with any other power source.

Nuclear only exists in the first place due to political decisions. It's massively unprofitable if you actually include all costs even at current inflated electricity prices.

Why not build gas and battery storage for renewables instead? It would be better by every measure, including cheaper, faster to build, safer, and more reliable (due to being distributed).

I think this is a non-story.

They say that demand is expanding faster than ever. They claim that this will lead to shortages, but they forget that the power market is a market, and thus:

* prices will rise in peak hours, and industrial demand will respond

* the raised prices will cause a lot of new supply to be added, bringing prices back down.

It’s only a problem in places that cap industrial power prices or that prevent the construction of new power plants. (This will be mostly solar and batteries.)

Gotta love our electricity state monopoly in Quebec. You can say many bad things about it, but planning correctly for expanding demand is not one of it. And price, still the cheapest electricity in North America.

One thing lots of people miss is you have to invest in reducing demand for heating by subsidising good practices like heat pump and renovations. This is what a state monopoly can do even if the government doesn't want to invest.

Few places in North America have the type of hydro capacity that Quebec does, and nowadays new build hydro isn't generally considered "green" anyway due to environmental destruction.

All useful hydro sites have been used at this point. There just aren't any places left to build large hydro dams.

The ones being removed are all older facilities that mostly don't produce much power.

That kind of is my point about demand reduction...

This is because Quebec has hydro.

Unpaywalled https://archive.is/kWxBn

Thank you!

Is it just me or has this fortune been repeated for the last several years with the only place seemingly showing any indication of true struggle being Texas?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com