*excluding research or military reactors of course.
Edit: Tried to edit the edit but somehow deleted the rest of the edit. It was something to the tune of how a big problem with renewables is the fact that peak solar production does not match peak energy consumption, and storage is very difficult, so realistically we'll need a wide variety of energy options to fully transition to renewables. Nuclear is reliable and to some degree adjustable, helping to alleviate the storage issue. Basically, it's my opinion that nuclear works well with other renewable sources, and a full renewable transition will certainly involve more of it.
Does the US have more 50cm^3 sized blocks of U235, or more square kilometers of land with low land values and high annual insolation?
There's an estimated 6 million tonnes of mineable uranium reserves in the world [0]. Of which 0.72% is U-235, so we have a worldwide reserve of 43200 tonnes, or 43.2 million Kg U-235.
Arizona is about 300k square kilometers. If we covered an area 10% the size of Arizona in solar panels, then they would have produced more energy than all the world's known U-235 in just four years. And would continue producing after those four years are up.
[0] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_in_the_environment
>> Uranium is a naturally occurring element found in low levels within all rock, soil, and water. This is the highest-numbered element to be found naturally in significant quantities on earth. According to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation the normal concentration of uranium in soil is 300 μg/kg to 11.7 mg/kg. ... It is considered to be more plentiful than antimony, beryllium, cadmium, gold, mercury, silver, or tungsten and is about as abundant as tin, arsenic or molybdenum.
How uranium ore becomes fuel rods: (Actually a rather simple process imho.)
https://www.tiktok.com/@nuclearsciencelover/video/7092135813...
Fuel costs are 10% of the cost of nuclear electricity. The vast majority is financing.
Not much different than most HN comments which 90% of the time are only one or two sentences.
And the same is true for solar. In fact, a growing number of agro-voltaic projects are seeing a net positive on crop yields from solar panels due to the increased shading and decreased temperatures.
"Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (AUS) and Austin Energy celebrate the completion of a new solar panel array constructed on the AUS campus that will produce 1.8 megawatts of locally-generated, renewable energy. ... With 6,642 solar panels spanning across a distance that is equal size to two football fields, the array on the top floor of the airport’s Blue Garage is the largest on-site renewable energy installation on the AUS campus. The panels offer shaded parking for Blue Garage customers and will generate enough solar energy to power up to 160 homes per year."
[0] https://www.austintexas.gov/news/austin-bergstrom-internatio...
“Combining two usage modes based on Insolight’s optical micro-tracking technology, these modules focus light on high-efficiency solar cells,” Insolight said in a press release. “When aligned, the optical system can generate energy (E-MODE), but it is also possible to unalign it to ‘leak’ the light (MLT-MODE). The solar modules therefore act like a ‘smart’ shade adjusting the amount of light they let through.”
This makes it possible to optimize the photosynthesis of plants during the seasons and reduce the negative impact of high summer heat on the yields and quality of agricultural products, while recovering the rest of the light in the form of electricity. Starting from July, the panels will be tested for four years on a 165-square-meter surface area. They will replace protective plastic tunnels on strawberries and raspberries.
“Dynamically adjusting the light transmitted to the plants paves the way for increased protection from climate variations and possible increases in crop yields thanks to the matching of the light to the needs of the plants and the lowering of the temperature during heat waves via the shading effect,” said Bastien Christ, head of the berries and medicinal plants group at Agroscope.
A similar project using different module technology: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/10/31/baywa-re-starts-build...
The fact is that agrivoltaics has been very successful, for reasons you probably would not guess in a wholesale void of facts. Looking up the facts, you could actually learn something.
This is a linked graph of solar growth compared to International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook predictions: https://rameznaam.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IEA-Solar-G...
In each of 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, the IEA predicted deployment of solar would stop accelerating (line going up) and steady off into consistant growth (flatline on that graph). Every year they have been very quickly wrong, and the 2019 predition of flatline is so wrong that by 2021 actual production of 190GW was WAYYYY off the top of that chart. At this rate we may not need to figure out storage nearly as much as we think.
> "What people have missed is that reaching cost parity on fuel synthesis will unlock huge new demand centers [and trigger an acceleration in demand/investment/research/cost decline of solar created synthetic fuels]."
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32197012 (article rather than comments)
But there is another catch: nuclear is extremely expensive, even when run most of the time close to 100%. But any time you throttle the reactor, you are driving the costs up. Because most of the costs are in building and operating the reactor, less so in fuel.
I think what you mean is that wind alone is not baseload, not that it is unreliable. It is quite reliable in that its availability is predictable such that it can be coordinated with storage to create virtual baseload. Therefore its failure modes are relatively mild in impact.
In contrast, large centralized plants (whether combustion or nuclear) have far more consequential failure modes - for example, losing 1GW of power with little notice, as can happen with these plants, is usually a grid emergency event.
> Hydrostor, which is based in Toronto, is one of several startups working on fixing those problems. The company says it’s figured out a way to capture and reuse the heat generated when air is compressed, eliminating the need to burn gas. It’s also figured out a way to make the mechanics work in areas where caverns must be dug out of hard rock, rather than salt. <
https://www.latimes.com/environment/newsletter/2023-01-12/th...
This first thing we need to do is align the costs and incentives. What I mean by that is simply allow the market, or government, to dictate the real cost of providing electricity at night. If there are no solar panels (nighttime), and whatever grid-scale batteries are available cost 1$/kwh then so be it, charge that amount to the consumer. People will learn to forego "bathing" in electricity at night endlessly. For decades we've been spoiled with ridiculous "energy on a tap" that just gives us oodles at the flick of a switch, and we just need to take that away.
As a side-effect of this whole "switching off the endless tap", micro-grids are the future. Small communities with mini-grid-scale batteries and sharing of electricity will take over this stupid "national synchronized grid" idea that has gimped our ability to be agile wrt local energy generation.
I take it you live somewhere warm in the winter. We are already looking at removing other heating options like propane and natural gas furnaces, coal and oil heating is mostly phased out, and burning wood isn't great for the environment either. So electrical heating is necessary anywhere where its normal to freeze for several months. Telling people to stop bathing in electricity at night when that what keeps them alive is bullshit.
"micro-grids are the future. Small communities with mini-grid-scale batteries and sharing of electricity will take over this stupid "national synchronized grid" idea that has gimped our ability to be agile wrt local energy generation."
Why don't you ask Texas residents how not being part of the national synchronized grid worked out for them 2 years ago?
You heat your home up during the day and evening, and as you retire for the night it's switched off. With sufficient insulation and warm bedding you don't need active heating overnight.
So it's absolutely compatible with an electric supply that's heavily biased towards the daytime.
I never said anything of the sort. You're taking a really bad-faith and extreme straw-man of what I said, and I refuse to participate.
Why shouldn't I be able to have oodles of energy at the flick of a switch?
Why is it bad that people had more than 100 years of using energy at a reasonable price point? Why do you think it's good for the energy to become more expensive or not to be available at all?
We do need energy for everything.
For the high energy consumers it's more a perceived need than an actual need.
Further, energy availability appears to work akin to road availability; if you build a six lane highway traffic expands to fill it.
The obvious reason for wanting lower global energy use at this particular point in time is reduce the still increasing by products of energy production, greenhouse gases.
Once the climate parameters return to safer values energy production without those side effects can expand .. while we look at addressing the unwanted toxic by products of our new sources of energy - less greenhouse gases, more acids and waste associated with nickel, copper, lithium, et al.
Pardon me, but there's zero future for the micro grids.
Surface wind is not reliable. I've seen proposals to put turbines on large kites or gliders tethered to the ground. There's pretty much always strong winds over most of the United States somewhere between the surface and 10000 feet.
Also, a failure scenario would mean tonnes of windmill crashing down from high altitude. Hmmmmm
10000 feet is less than 2 miles. Even in high winds it wouldn't get more than a a couple or miles or so before hitting the ground.
There are plenty of places in the US where you could fly where it would be centered over a 6 mile diameter circle that contains no people or valuable buildings except for people and buildings that are part of the power facility.
Also, solar panels don't need any land. There are so many places we can install solar without 'consuming' land. They can be roofs, floating on tops of lakes and reservoirs with the added benefit of preventing evaporation, agrivoltaics combined with farmland, vertical panels, superfund sites, deserts, along the highways, etc.
Not saying this is a reason to keep the subsidies, but I'm sure it made sense at the time.
Technically you need to factor in the fact that a nuclear plant can be built relatively near the places where its power will be consumed; some mass of solar power in Nevada is highly inefficient for powering New York or Virginia, even if you built HVDC lines to cut down on total line losses, so you'll need to pick land tracts reasonably near battery banks that would in turn be near cities.
Is there something about Ohio that means they have no atmospheric wind nor natural sunlight?
And what are the various Friends of Rare Bugs and Small Furry Animals groups doing in the meantime?
I joke, but even I would balk at the environmental impact of that. Certainly it's going to be greater than any equivalent nuclear installation.
> Of which 0.72% is U-235
Fortunately we're not limited to U-235. With breeder reactors, there's enough nuclear fuel to run human civilization for billions-with-a-b of years.
[1] https://www.archdaily.com/976069/when-5-percent-of-the-unite...
The people who will be screaming about covering the desert with solar panels are exactly the same people who scream about covering the land with car parks.
Exactly.
The only energy source radical environmentalists like is one that exists only in a fantasy. As soon as it starts being built, it becomes evil.
Note that they're already up in arms about windmills killing birds.
Also, covering the desert is definitely going to change the local environment. At a minimum, every joule that goes into the power transmission lines is a joule that will not be available for use by the desert ecosystem.
There is enough Uranium on the planet for a few centuries. Make it a few millennia if you breed it, and lots and lots of millennia if you expand your reactors to use other fuels. But most of it is way more expensive to get than what we use today... what actually makes very little difference for the final costs.
Covering a desert in solar panels seems like the exact opposite of that plan.
Would covering a desert in solar panels cause more thermal solar absorption in that area than would otherwise happen? Yes.
But if we're optimizing for "offsetting the heating effect of human GHG emissions", then installing 4.5TW of solar (about 4x what has been installed worldwide to date) would have a much more positive effect.
The world currently has 1.1TW of solar installed, producing about 6% of all electricity. So our new installation would be on its own capable of supplying 25% of global electricity usage. The corresponding drop in GHG emissions from the shutdown of coal, gas, and oil power plants would far outweigh the fact that part of the desert has been turned black.
This depends on the efficiency of the PV modules. When it's greater than the albedo of the desert, it will cool the desert, not warm it. Remember, the electrical energy produced isn't heat. It's turned to heat at the consumer, but that's true of electrical energy from a nuclear plant too. Oh, and did you know that nuclear plants also add 2x as much heat energy in the exhaust of their cooling system?
In theory, darkening a portion of the Earth with high albedo (snow, sand) is worse than darkening a portion of the Earth with low albedo (roads, roofs, forest). Then it should be better to use a greener area for solar panels so long as the capacity factors would be similar.
That's missing the huge and expensive nuclear power plant around that kilogram of uranium.
If you don't account for the conversion device (for which solar is cheaper per GJ than nuclear power plants), then light is a much better medium: assuming 15% efficiency, which is a conservative estimate, solar panels can convert one kilogram of solar light (remember e=mc^2) into 13.5 terajoules of electricity.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1+kg+*+c%5E2+*+15%25+in...
The sun bombards our planet with around 61 metric tons of light per day:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2+*+pi+*+radius+of+eart...
Where the 6 kwh/m^2 come from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance#Irradiance_on...
Any chance you could help compare the construction cost of this nuclear plant to another recently constructed solar or wind farm measured against... I guess capacity?
Given the intermittent nature of solar/wind, does capacity even make sense to compare in a context without supporting batteries?
I'll give it a shot but I am probably super wrong.
** Nuclear:
I'll use the plant from the article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...
Construction costs 18b USD (does that include loans?)
Nameplate capacity of 2302MW
Used capacity is 91% so 2094MW
$18b / nameplate capacity = $7.8 USD per rated W
$18b / used capacity = $8.60 per realized W
** Solar (excluding batteries):
I picked a relatively large, recent, US based solar farm from the list of plants in wikipedia
Agua Caliente Solar Project (2016) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agua_Caliente_Solar_Project
Construction costs 1.8b USD
Nameplate capacity of 290 MW
Used capacity is 28% so 81 MW
$1.8b / nameplate capacity = $6.2 USD per rated W
$1.8b / used capacity = $22 USD per realized W (that can't be right?)
** Note:
I don't know if my math is right, I don't know if the costs factor in loans, also the nameplate capacity for the nuclear plant is MWe and the solar plant is MWac so I am unsure how that works out.
I found mention of a bond issuance and someone purchasing the project here [2]. If it’s $1b, then it’s $5.26. If $2b then $10.53.
So they’re in the same ballpark. But one type of plant runs 20-30 years and the other for 50-80 years @ 90% capacity factor. The CANDU reactors are especially cool in that they can use natural uranium and refueled without a shutdown [3].
—- [1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Star [2] - https://www.sustainablebusiness.com/2013/06/1-billion-bond-o... [3] - https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/On-line_refueling_of...
> Agua Caliente Solar Project (2016)
Note that solar being cheaper than nuclear is a more recent phenomenon than 2016. The solar panel prices went from $0.63 to $0.26 in the time span between 2016 and 2022.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices?time=2002...
A better example is Spotsylvania Solar/Highlander Solar: https://www.sheppardmullin.com/assets/htmldocuments/PFI%2020...
Construction costs: $905m USD
Nameplate capacity: 618 MW
I couldn't find used capacity factors but Yuma is one of the sunniest counties in the USA while Spotsylvania county is further north and also has less sunny days. With an assumed capacity factor of 18%, one gets 111 MW.
$905m / nameplate capacity = $1.48 USD per rated W
$905m / used capacity = $8.24 USD per realized W
I'm certain nuclear running costs would dwarf solar - I think solar just needs fresh water, cleaning and hardware maintenance (replacing inverters, and such).
Would be interesting to work the running costs into the "$ per realized W" calculation.
I'd also like to see how battery-backed solar compares. I assume the objective would be to solve the intermittency issue, but I am hopeful it would increase the capacity factor as well.
Another thing that's interesting to consider is multi-purpose energy utilization you get with nuclear - like desalination and hydrogen generation - though the latter is uneconomical because hydrogen produced from fossil fuels is much cheaper.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38303819
Self citing:
Better not use biased opinion pieces, when there numbers from government sources (US, but eho cares):
LCOE (total, incl. CAPEX, in USD per MWh):
coal 82.6, combined cycle 39.9, advanced nuclear 81.7, geothermal 37.6, biomass 90.1, onshore wind 40, offshore wind (that one was a surprise, since offshore wind should be quite cheap, mainly driven by capital cost of 104 USD per MWh) 105, solar 33.8, solar hybrid 49 and hydro 64.
Variable cost (same as above):
coal 23.7, combined cycle 27.7, adv. nuclear 10.3, geothermal 1.2, biomass 30, onshore wind 0, offshore wind 0, solar 0, solar hybrid 0, hydro 4.1
All number from here:
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation...., page 9.
Whereas I think you are missing the huge and expensive battery array for solar to be useful outside of peak times? And the fact that the best sites for solar are far away from the transmission network?
1) "Water batteries" - highly efficient (far more than the 'chemical' you are apparently referring to) & responsive
2) Methods for using 'renewables' to produce &/ support production of chemical fuels - with the added draw / potential goal of 'closing' the 'carbon cycle'
As to #2, one of the ideals that has been kicked around for decades is to do something like: use 'renewables' to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere and convert it into something like butanol, for example.
Now, last I was up-to-date on any of this sort of work (~10+ years ago), the economics were not favorable. Certain types of commodity chemical production with 'biological basis' (another type of renewable, typically) had much more favorable properties economically. And, indeed, you do see, for example, (thermo)plastic products made from chemicals like "PLA" increasingly. But, the "biofuels" concept is / was much more challenging, especially as "fracking" technology made great leaps etc.
Nuclear has its pros and cons - blanket disavowal is fatuous. Nevertheless, there are substantially more options, systems, technologies, etc. in development and production than are often discussed in too many of the pro-nuke(s) / no nuke(s) 'sniping' chains that have been prevalent in society & on the internet since I was a wee tyke myself.
are you referring to P2X? I think P2X is an awesome solution for existing infrastructure, but it's obviously not particularly efficient. I am excited about pumped storage as well, but my fear there is we'll run out of sites, and obviously the 80% efficiency is still not ideal.
By no means am I arguing nuclear is a one size fits all solution.
"Highly efficient" is very vague.
What matters here are the numbers:
W/$
J/$
% round trip losses
% losses per hour
Number of cycles before replacement needed
Response time
Do you have them?
how about we as a society finally fulfill the promise of power to cheap to meter that we were told back in nuclears golden age before the carbon industry start the smear campaign against nuclear.
It's funny-and-sad to see the old behemoth of nuclear power begging for government support as they last chance to be alive.
The environmental Greens had a lot to do with the smear. Even recently, they were the ones who pushed for the shutdown of German nuclear power which ended up increasing German CO2 output.
That's temporary, soon that will go back down again
There is nothing innately wrong with over building renewable and storage, and a transmission network.
It's an argument about economics, not physics.
But that's averaged over the month, what about a run of December days with heavy cloud cover, misty foggy atmosphere, still air, maybe some Icelandic volcano soot in the atmosphere, what's the worst we'd have to plan for, and how much overprovisioning would that take?
They're also published as open data.
The dark and dreary days tend to be the ones with the most wind power. The tides around our coast are in constant motion.
But, the big challenge is still storage. Domestic solar panels provide 100% of our yearly electricity use. At the moment I can only store 4.8kWh of excess.
So we need to over provision and over store - hopefully both at the same time.
Here's a worked example based on real weather data that suggests a wind capacity of double peak demand and converting about 8% of all demand with power-to-X would be the the low cost option.
https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...
Edit: also, the economics are such that you rarely want to drop load from a nuclear plant unless it's offline or for system reasons. The fuel cost is negligible so you'd rather turn off your gas plant or lower the coal plant and save on those fuels.
Thermally it is difficult to dial a reactor up and down. Generally the way nuclear power is modified is by not-sending the steam to generators through a by-pass and quenching their heat in some fashion.
So thermal generation stays at 100% (or whatever), but electrical generation output can be dropped.
It just doesn't make any sense to use reliable nuclear as the "backup" to unreliable renewables.
Because this "backup" is already CO2 free. It is also reliable. And cheap to run. So just run it all the time (nuclear tends to have >90% capacity factor).
You then simply don't need the "primary".
Nuclear reactors absolutely can vary their output to match demand, this is what France has been doing for 50+ years (and what Germany was doing before switching back to coal). It's not as reactive as coal/gas, but you can still vary within 30-100% of output power at a speed of 5% change per minute. Way more than enough to react to 1-day-ahead forecasted supply/demand, and way more than enough to react minute-by-minute if you've got a tiny bit of storage to stabilize the grid's frequency (e.g. pumped hydro).
This is very far off from working well together with a mostly renewable grid, where renewables can cover 100% of the load on most days, but there are larger gaps to be quickly filled.
Ramping once is easy. Ramping continuously through the entire fuel cycle requires a meticulously planned fleet.
Move to a mixture of wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, nuclear - whatever makes sense.
When the last coal powered plant is shut off in US, we should celebrate that as a day off for everyone.
Otherwise you might as well say a teaspoon (or whatever) of water has as much potential fusion energy as 1 Kg U235 at a fraction of the price. ;-)
Here's why.
The Sun transforms hydrogen into helium. But that's a fairly complex chain and nobody in the industry or academia is trying to replicate that.
When people talk about fusion, here's [1] the reactions they are considering.
The best yielding fusion reaction is deuterium-tritium and deuterium-helium3 [1]. Tritium and helium-3 virtually don't occur naturally on Earth, and deuterium is very rare, at about 0.02% of the hydrogen. A teaspoon of water contains about 0.5 grams of hydrogen, and out of that about 0.0001 grams of deuterium. Let's say that someone magically brings the necessary tritium or helium-3. How does that compare with 1 gram of U235?
The fission of 1 nucleus of U235 yields about 190 MeV of energy. 1 MeV is one megaelectronvolt, and is a unit of energy. It does not matter how it translates into joules or watt-hours. It is the unit used when talking about fission and fusion. So, 235 nucleons produce 190 MeV, which is about 0.8 MeV per nucleon.
The two reactions mentioned involve 5 nucleons and yield about 18 MeV, which means 3.6 MeV per nucleon or 4.5 times more per nucleon than U235.
So, even if all the hydrogen in the one teaspoon of water was Deuterium and Tritium, in the correct ratios to do the fusion, we'd get only 4.5 times more energy than from one gram of U235. In reality, from one teaspoon of water we'd extract a very tiny amount of deuterium that's usable, and we'd need to breed Tritium or Helium-3 separately. By the way, separating deuterium from water is a very expensive process. The Nazis tried to do it during WW2, and they were doing it in Norway. Once the British special forces destroyed the plant, the Nazis could not restart the heavy water production, and their atomic project basically stopped then and there.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Criteria_and_ca...
And trees. Clearcutting forests to make room for a solar panels just seems wrong, a Captain Planet style of evil. There are all sorts of places where the terrain just isnt suited.
Most of the US isn't wooded. I don't think a significant number of projects propose clear-cutting to build solar farms. I don't know where that came from.
Seriously, while a lot has been written about the need to update the grid and install more long distance transmission lines to support renewables, even with the current grid it makes much more sense to install wind and solar in locations where it is more efficient and then transmit the electricity elsewhere. In Texas, most of the wind farms are in West Texas hundreds of miles away from Houston, for example.
But the thing is: the pacific northwest should be ideal for wind power. So that would be the main emphasis. And then build a high power line to Nevada. Which delivers solar to the northwest and in the nights wind power to Nevada.
Germany already has a 1.4GW powerline to Norway operational, where we network the grid to optimize renewable utilization.
It's very common for utility-scale solar to use single-axis trackers (the panels move from pointing east to pointing west through the day), unlike small-scale solar which usually has fixed panels (normally pointing south or north depending on which hemisphere you're on). The gain from single-axis trackers is high enough and their cost is low enough (a single geared motor can move a whole row of panels) to make it cost-effective.
(I haven't, so far, seen any large photovoltaic solar power plant which uses two-axis trackers to really track the sun; but thermal solar power plants with a central tower need these two-axis trackers to aim each mirror at the correct angle.)
"But there are also other ways to boost the energy production of solar panels – such as by tilting them to follow the Sun's path in the sky, similar to the way young sunflowers follow the sun from east to west during the day. Tracking technology, which is already in use on some land based solar arrays, helps increase the overall electricity production, as the panels constantly adjust to face the Sun."
1) www.bbc.com/future/article/20221116-the-floating-solar-panels-that-track-the-sun
Clear cutting forest to put in solar isn’t likely to be cost-efficient. There’s plenty of shitty desert and mountainside land available.
This is very untrue both measured in absolute numbers, and in cost/kwh. Nuclear is 2x solar and wind, both of which are decreasing in cost rapidly YoY. https://www.statista.com/statistics/194327/estimated-leveliz...
I highly doubt this
- More energy
- Energy diversification
That includes nuclear, solar, and even more fossil fuels as we wean ourselves off of them.
Writing off any form of energy is ideological, not practical.
Let's not forget that the externalities of nuclear power are generally much more costly than solar / wind.
And wind and especially solar have more economies of scale and materials research to make them even cheaper.
This comes from a LFTR fanboy. Boy howdy do I wish economical nuclear existed. But 6x as expensive? That ain't all red tape.
I think of course that LFTR has a path to cheaper nuclear with breeding and near waste elimination, full fuel use, safety, and scalability. But I don't think it will ever beat solar, especially once mature multifunction silicon perovskite cells or something like that and salt water batteries develop.
I hope to be proven wrong.nyclest power is so cool.
If we embarked on a sustained plan to invest in nuclear the way we have in solar and wind, nuclear's all-in cost would be far cheaper. I guarantee it.
[1] https://www.gao.gov/products/emd-79-52
[2] https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-establishes-6-billion-pr...
Nukes might make sense on the moon.
Without the storage, all of that day time generation is pointless, we need either gas or nuclear at night anyways, so the cost isn't really affected.
Someone who builds a solar array will be able to go directly to build another, not have to lick their wounds and repair their reputation or business.
Even if you could design a reactor that itself can be mass produced at that scale, you still need to do the same with selecting and getting environmental and public safety approval for installation sites and production, transportation, and disposal of the fuel and waste.
I'm not against nuclear from a technological perspective, but I just don't see it being economically competitive with effectively printable devices like solar and batteries given the current direction of the cost curves on each.
This wasn't just due to regulatory influence, it was also due to economies of scale. But the two are related, more regulation results in fewer builds. Fewer builds reduces economies of scale and thus increases costs. Which results in even fewer nuclear builds, and so on.
> (economies of scale)
Why do you blame economies of scale? The paper doesn't say that, afaict.
Also they say, "increased environmental and safety regulation ... may have led to cost increases", which does not sound conclusive.
Also, I think we really need to be talking about lifetime cost, including construction, operation, and decommissioning. In many things, spending more up front reduces later costs.
So yes, if you will, thank the hippies for preventing several nuclear incidents.
The simple question to ask yourself is why do battery installations always get quoted in units of power - GW - and not units of energy, GWH - which is what we actually use?
(The answer is: because they're terrible for it. Batteries hold about 3x they're rated power value as energy - which means the 10 GW or whatever someone quotes is good for about 3 hours at that output. Great for grid stability, expensive and useless for long term storage).
For the same reason gas power plants and hydroelectric power plants are quoted in MW units, and not on the size of their fuel tanks or reservoir volume (converted to MWh as appropriate): it's the most important number for balancing the grid. If you have 90 GW of power demand on the grid at a given moment, you need 90 GW of power generation on the grid at that same moment (simplifying a bit, since transmission constraints mean you also need some of that power generation to be at specific places).
Which means they're irrelevant to the idea of grid scale energy storage, because they don't meaningfully store anything.
How does it feel when the Overton windows moves while nuclear is stuck in the past?
However, we have a number of companies working on building reactors in factories. Rolls-Royce for example is talking to Ukraine to upgrade some of their old (not sure if already decommissioned) coal plants to nuclear with small, factory-built nuclear reactors.
Modular reactors are the solution to not having enough capital or a long enough timeframe to launch and fund megaprojects at a pace that creates economies of scale anymore, which is exactly the US problem.
That's going to be tough: What happens if the day comes and they don't yet know? They can't just approve it, so just deny it?
Various agencies are constantly missing FOIA deadlines, and often the only way to get them to actually do the jobs they are legally required to do is to sue them in court, asking for both the information and to have court costs covered.
Presumably, for a regulatory agency to be held to a deadline, they would need to outline up front (or with reasonable notice) all of the things they would need to know and the inspections they would have to make. Those time tables would have to be defined early on.
This is where the idea breaks down.
How does a regulator devise a fixed schedule to regulate a novel technology?
How do you hold government employees accountable without upsetting powerful interests like politicians and unions, or get staffing funded properly on demand?
How do you even get the government to hold itself accountable on something like this when the DOD can't even *complete a clean audit*?
I'm not sure we are 'winging it' at all, or doing badly. It may just be an irreduceable problem.
In the 72 years since then, in what meaningful ways has "Nuclear tech" improved?
It's not cheaper to build.
It's not cheaper to operate.
It's not cheaper to dispose of the waste.
It's not cheaper to decommission.
It's not faster to build.
?
Proponents of a primarily solar + wind grid are betting on a breakthrough in energy storage. If that breakthrough does not transpire, we'll either have to give up on stopping carbon emissions or use nuclear power.
1. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Overnight-Construction-C...
There's a reason why plans for a primarily renewable grid assume that compressed air, synthetic ammonia, giant flywheels, or something else will provide storage for orders of magnitude cheaper than batteries: because existing storage systems aren't capable of meeting the storage demands of intermittent generation. Will one of these systems deliver a storage breakthrough? Maybe. But it's not wise to bet the future of your electrical grid on a technological breakthrough that hasn't happened yet.
It's indeed not a lot. At a great cost. That kind of is the point. Nuclear is very costly.
Solar, wind, battery storage, and other cheap alternatives are indeed being rolled out at a plural orders of magnitude larger scale.
China also builds nuclear reactors, and we can't fall behind them. I cannot abide an SMR gap.
I, uh, have some uncomfortable news for you.
China are currently building 22 nuclear reactors [1]
China installed 230GW of solar and wind in 2023 [2]
China has over 40,000kms of High Speed Rail, and continues to expand [3]
By any measure, you're falling way behind them.
[1] https://www.economist.com/china/2023/11/30/china-is-building...
[2] https://www.asiafinancial.com/china-seen-installing-230-gw-o...
[3] https://www.statista.com/topics/7534/high-speed-rail-in-chin...
In other words, their CO2 emissions are set for structural decline simply by the amount of renewables being built. China is way ahead of the west.
https://theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carbon-e...
Though there is still a lot of work to do to go fully CO2 neutral due to cars, trucks, ships, planes, fertiliser production, etc.
Nameplate capacity. For actual average output, divide by 6.
And it doesn't even deliver that 1/6th consistently, so you unless you want blackouts you also need an alternative that delivers power reliably.
Big batteries? https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-07-28/making-waves-e...
Hydrogen fuel? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen-powered_ship
Yeah, those options seem simpler.
Second, CO2 is at very low concentrations in the atmosphere. Direct atmospheric carbon sequestration is expensive and slow. The biggest startup in the synthetic fuel business is behind schedule and is struggling to solve these two main challenges [2].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming
2. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/25/1050899/promethe...
Also something I learned recently is that the idea that biofuels are a no go because they compete with food is a simplistic deflection. Looking at Brazil as an example the biofuel crops like sugarcane and groundnuts are grown in marginal land in the south that wasn't being used for agriculture. The main driver of Amazonian deforestation is cattle ranching.
- costs for a single ship reactor (shipping is extremely price and cost sensitive)
- time, and lost revenue (a ship not carrying cargo is only costing money, see above) for refuelling
- piracy and terrorism (I am not really convinced risking having some pirate group somewhere capture nuclear reactor is a good idea)
Imagine one target being nuclear powered.
It’s almost all cars, trucks, and electric power, so those are the things it makes the most sense to worry about as opposed to things that are much harder to decarbonize and account for less emissions.
[0] https://www.transportenvironment.org/wp-content/uploads/2023...
>> In the short term, advanced biofuels will play a key role in the reduction of CO2 emissions. In the medium and long-term, green hydrogen-based fuels are set to be the backbone for the sector’s decarbonisation.
Hydrogen is currently produced via steam reformation [1], which emits carbon dioxide. Electrolysis is less efficient and corrosion of electrodes inhibits scale.
Nuclear maritime propulsion is far more mature than any of the alternatives. Submarines and warships have been using it for over half a century. Could a technological breakthrough create a better alternative? Maybe, but we can't move ships with potential technologies until said technologies make the transition from "potential" to "real".
But heavy oil is much cheaper and will be used forever untill gasoline/diesel cars/trucks will pass away.
Anhydrous ammonia will be produced at massive scale in tropical synthesis facilities for delivery worldwide. This is why long-term storage is not considered important.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#Civi...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_212A_submarine
The reason why those systems aren't deployed to civilian surface ships is easy: cost.
That submarine also does not use batteries for energy storage, it uses hydrogen gas (almost certainly produced via steam reformation).
But no, 2,800 km isn't short. Not feasible for commercial ise, sure, but then no submarine technology is commercially feasible. It is too specialized.
Hence, green fuel as the preferred, and most realistic, option to decarbonize shipping.
We only did a demo ship, which was combination cargo and passenger. The principal cost was being rejected from ports for their lacking acceptance procedures, a first-mover cost. Nuclear shipping has never been “found to be a stupid idea.” It was simply never explored.
I was referring to the NS Savannah [1]. Put her engine and crew requirements on a modern supertanker and you have an economically viable, environmentally friendly ship.
And the latest Russian buold programm delivered:
- Artika, laid down in 2013 and delivered in 2017, entry into service delayed from 2019 to 2020 and again to 2021 due damages during trials
- Sibir was laid down in 2015 and delivered operationally in 2022
- Ural was laid down in 2016 and entered service in 2022
- Yakutia was laid down in 2020, planned entry into service is 2024
- Chukotka was laid down end of 2020, planned entry into service is 2026
Source: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-...
That's it for civilian nuclear vessels. Meanwhile, in 2022 (a slow year apparently), 182 tankers, 350 container vessels and 69 car transporters were ordered. I didn't find actual deliveries after cursory search.
Source: https://insights.clarksons.net/2022-shipbuilding-review/
As for the small, mass producable reactors needed for civilian use:
"At the moment, several technology providers are dealing with manufacturing of prototypes, the development processes of which are at different levels of maturity, envisaging more or less a decade before completing proof of concepts."
Source: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/maritime-industry-exp...
The first source also has this to say about NS Savannah and the Herman Otto Hahn:
Development of nuclear merchant ships began in the 1950s but on the whole has not been commercially successful. The 22,000 tonne US-built NS Savannah, was commissioned in 1962 and decommissioned eight years later. The reactor used 4.2% and 4.6% enriched uranium. It was a technical success, but not economically viable. It had a 74 MWt reactor delivering 16.4 MW to the propeller, but the reactor was uprated to 80 MWt in 1964. The German-built 15,000 tonne Otto Hahn cargo ship and research facility sailed some 650,000 nautical miles on 126 voyages in 10 years without any technical problems. It had a 36 MWt reactor delivering 8 MW to the propeller. However, it proved too expensive to operate and in 1982 it was converted to diesel.
Meanwhile, the US Navy has nuclear subs and aircraft carriers, but all other nuclear surface vessels have been retired.
In short, we are at least ten years away from a suitable proof of concept reactor design (tue NS Savannah one already showed to be not economical), let alone from having an industrial base to build hundreds of those each and every year.
And therein lies the big problem with nuclear power: it is too expensive and takes too much time to be of any good short term. And if we managed to find a solution short term, and in a lot of cases we already have technical solitions that are deployed, we don't need nuclear mid to long term anymore.
https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/projects/edwards-sanborn-so...
Battery prices keep falling, but the supply chain is still constrained and there are huge expenses involved in building storage facilities that go beyond the cost of the cells. Other storage systems such as pumped hydroelectric or electrolyzed hydrogen may play a role but aren't cheap either.
Instead, a good chunk of grid storage is getting deployed right at the generation site of solar (and some wind), which allows more efficient use of that transmission line.
Instead, we should be looking for large amounts of total install. However, this still won't happen much until it's actually needed by the grid, which starts to happen at much higher amounts of renewable generation than most states are using.
The tech is there, it's being deployed at massive scale where needed, and it's dropping in cost as fast or faster than predicted.
This is why proponents of a primarily wind + solar grid assume that hydrogen, ammonia, compressed air, giant concrete weights, or something else will make energy storage nearly free. Delivering the required storage scale with existing technologies isn't feasible, so people just assume that some other heretofore unproven technology will be orders of magnitude better.
Things won't be 100% Solar, Wind, Battery because other minor techs like nuclear, hydro, tidal, biomass or whatever already exist to some degree and can be part of the system. But current solar, wind and battery tech is enough, we just need to build it. The first 80% is the easy bit, with the greates payback, so there's no need to wait around.
"No new tech is needed" is a pointless statement if it can't reach the required scale. You might as well say "just build more dams". We don't need any more wind or solar. Just build dams everywhere.
We can't build more dams because there really is a hard limit on the geographical sites. With batteries, we already have commitments for factories to build 1TWh/year within the US alone by 2030. Worldwide production will be several times that.
Average US electricity production is 500GW, at 8-10 hours that's only 4TWh. With batteries lasting 20 years, only need 200GWh/year of production to fill that diurnal need.
Batteries are cheap and scaling at a scale that we couldn't dream of scaling our construction capacity. Our limited construction capacity should be reserved for high speed rail, subways, and housing in urban centers.
> Average US electricity production is 500GW, at 8-10 hours that's only 4TWh
Again, it's 12 hours for diurnal storage not 8 hours. More than 12 hours during the winter, actually. And diurnal storage isn't the only type of storage that's necessary. Factor in storage to even out seasonal fluctuations and you're looking at days maybe even weeks of energy storage. And again, 500 GW is going to turn into 1,300 GW as the rest of our energy use is electrified.
Batteries don't last 20 years, not even close. Diurnal storage is going to be cycled daily. A typical lithium ion cell lasts 300-500 charge cycles [2]. You can prolong this by limiting depth of discharge but this has the side effect of reducing the usable capacity. Let's be generous and assume 2,000 cycles that's only 5 and a half years.
200 GWh per year is still a massive amount of batteries. We're talking about over a third of global battery production to provide 8 hours of storage for just one country. And again, in reality we need more than 8 hours of storage and batteries don't last nearly as long as you claim.
There's a reason why plans for a primarily renewable grid assume that compressed air, hydrogen, or something else will account for the majority of storage: batteries aren't available in sufficient quantity, and deploying grid storage at any significant scale will severely reduce availability of batteries for EVs.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States
2. https://au.renogy.com/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about....
Compare this to nuclear. Let's increase our production levels 100x. Where does that leave us, assuming that it was magically economically acceptable to electricity customers to pay higher prices than necessary. 15 years for 2.2GW is about 150MW/year. 100x would be 15GW/year. That's nowhere close to being where we need for a full energy transition in the US.
Nuclear, if it figures out its huge problems with construction, will be a small player to help with climate change. But in the year 2023, we know the big players: solar, wind, and batteries. There's no more time for anybody else to scale to catch up. Nobody else has a tech that can compete with such fast dropping costs. The numbers and pace of change are hard to compete with.
Nuclear power already produces 10% of the world's electricity [1]. A 100x increase leaves the world with 10 times as much electricity as is needed, all coming from a decarbonized energy source.
Wind and solar are cheap because we don't currently have to even out their intermittency. Take away peaker plants and then intermittent sources become way more challenging. Solar produces energy in a sinusoidal pattern daily, requiring at least 12 hours of storage for truly non-intermittent solar plants. It also fluctuates over the course of the year due to weather and inclination of the Earth [2]. Wind power similarly sees fluctuations over the course of the year [3].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#Methods...
2. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Estimated-normalized-mon...
There's this cry for absolutism in this thread that's just absurd, on both sides. You want a wide multiplicity of power generation plant sizes and technologies, for what should be, at this point in history, solidly obvious reasons.
So, you want lots of Nuclear _and_ Solar. Seeing the two as competing shows just how monopolized our energy markets truly are.
It's less either|or, more swings|roundabouts.
A pure solar solution requires (on the order of) 2x excess daylight production and 10 hours of offset storage to buffer against the night (and compensate for energy transfer (daylight power -> storage -> night time power) losses).
Solar is great, sure, but there's a long way to go to replace the energy production of fossil fuels, that comes with a lot of reqource mining and waste.
Somewhere in the middle is an optimal solution with much solar and wind, a little bit of nuclear OR gas fired OR <somethig steady> and a whole lot of varied storage (battery + gravity + thermal + green gases).
I mean as an example many companies, especially PG&E can't maintain adequate powerlines, who is banking on the fact that they'll do an even better job when we quintuple the amount of infrastructure and they have to develop a whole new domain of expertise based in battery technology.
Not to mention even the supposedly clean, solar and batteries, still have an enormous amount of carbon emissions involved in their supply chain, and need to be replaced on a fairly regular basis.
If anything a solar field requires much less operation expertise and staff to manage than a nuclear power plant. And when it goes bad, it might leech some acid and heavy metals into the soil over years, not leave a 10k year radioactive exclusion zone.
That question dovetails into nuclear's biggest hurdle; the risk for catastrophe is high, both in reality and especially politically, so regulation is high, and thus the cost to build, operate, and decommission is immense.
Solar on the other hand scales down to 50MW instillations just fine so you can put it near substations etc. Huge solar parks make sense in locations with lots of sunlight and cheap land, but they aren’t the only option just a trade off in terms of transmission costs vs generation costs.
NYC has large power plants in Manhattan (East River 1, 2, 6, and 7), Queens (650MW Astoria Energy II power station), and Brooklyn (Narrows 1–1 to 2-8) plus a few more.
Chinese nuclear can compete just fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
So the current plans are for roughly tripling installed capacity.
Preferably something that's also CO2 free.
Ideas?
If nuclear could compete, China would be building the hell out of it, and selling it internationally. Getting other countries to use your nuclear supply chain for their electrical infrastructure is such a huge geopolitical win that if it were possible, it would be one of the key political and economic strategies of China.
If China, one of the few countries with a mastery of large construction projects, can't make nuclear cheap, what hope do more advanced economies have with their higher labor costs?
And of course average is not good enough for an electric grid, the variance is highly relevant. As my statistics professor used to quiet: if your left leg is standing in liquid nitrogen and your right leg is standing in boiling oil, you are enjoying a perfectly comfortable mean temperature.
Variance matters. A lot. In an electric grid, you need to be able to cover minimum requirements even when solar and wind are having a bad day or night.
China got their solar industry financed by German subsidies, and they have plentiful deserts with lots of sunshine. The Gobi desert is the place on earth with the most sunshine hours, apparently more than the Sahara(!). It would be insane for them to not take advantage of that to reduce their use of coal, now at what, 65%?
But they also apparently think that safe, reliable and cheap nuclear energy is an important part of their energy mix, otherwise they wouldn't be planning on tripling their generating capacity, would they now?
The catastrophe of Germany's "Energiewende" has made a lot of countries re-evaluate their nuclear strategy, culminating in the COP28 nuclear pledge.
What's more ridiculous than this oversight is the idea that the cost of wind, solar, or batteries is somehow never going to go up. News flash: all advanced industrial processes that depend on a global supply chain are subject to price fluctuations.
Zero. Few people are unaware that the sun doesnt shine at night. It never needed repeating.
What theyre less educated about is that pumped storage, hydrogen, batteries, solar/wind anticorrelation and demand shaping are, together, more than capable of accomodating renewable intermittency.
What's most ridiculous is that even the most expensive form of viable power storage (hydrogen) is still cheaper when paired with solar or wind than nuclear power is alone. This isnt to say that we should go all in on hydrogen/solar, just that nuclear power's cost is unconscionably high.
Indeed, if it werent for the nuclear military's reliance on civilian supply chains and skills it would never get built and the 'environmentalist nuclear' PR offensive of the last ~8 years that resonated with so many people wouldnt have happened.
Emissions or nuclear waste.
Seems like natural they would?
Making up shit just because you want it to be true isn't helping anybody.
On the contrary, solar and wind are _waaaaaay_ too expensive if you actually want your generation to be reliable. Just ask Texas.
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4088
“The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.