Filling Nuclear Power's $5T Hole Is Beyond the Banks
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
maybe we could package up nuclear power into bonds, sell them to people making minimum wage, then bundle those bonds into collateralized debt obligations, then create credit default swaps against different tranches of those CDOs, then we could bundle credit default swaps into a new security and call it a Synthetic CDO, then we could make Synthetic CDOs out of other Synthetic CDOs, then we could bring back Alan Greenspans ghost through an AI machine and he could get on stage at Davos and say there is no bubble in nuclear bonds and there is no such thing as fraud. Then the banks could sell these securities to pension funds of school teachers and firefighters as 100% safe investments, take huge fees, then also buy credit default swaps against these same securitie. Then the banks CEOs could all get 500 million dollar severance package. Do you think the bankers would go for that?
It’s almost like there should be a public institution that does things like this that are for society, with society taking the risks and getting the rewards. For ease, we could call it “government”.
The truth is that neither government or business have been that good at making these kind of decisions. I think the low recourse debt approach has some merits in that an institution is really forced to put skin in the game. And that due diligence is an integral part of making decisions. A nuclear power station that could be funded by a bank would probably be a pretty good design.
You want your power company to run like Amtrak or BART?
The government or a wealthy investment group would need to subsidize building and cover significant cost overruns to make a private nuclear power plant financially viable for banks to invest in them in the future. Their models fail because recent plants are years late to finish and up to billions over budget. Or make it state owned and eventually prove it to be profitable for them to divest from renewables.
“The newest reactor in the European Union — Olkiluoto 3 in Finland — started generating power last year, more than a decade late and three times over budget. Similarly in the US, Southern Co.’s Vogtle facility came in seven years behind schedule and $16 billion over estimates.“
Authoritarian regimes don't need to concern themselves with such pesky things as nature protection or people dying in accidents, especially if the workers are basically modern slaves.
If you want an example for what happens when you cut corners in nuclear, just look at Sellafield (UK) or La Hague (France). This shit is why regulations are so tight, and yet even that didn't prevent people from cutting corners which is why a lot of France's nuclear power plants were down for safety maintenance (corroded pipes) last summer, made worse by the drought that forced a lot of the remaining NPPs out of operation.
Are there good estimates for the cost of nuclear power in China and Russia? The estimates we see for the US and Europe show it to be relatively expensive, but it seems likely that it might be much more cost competitive in an environment with less regulatory overhead.
This article (https://archive.ph/nhdr2) agrees with that: "China keeps the exact costs a state secret, but analysts including BloombergNEF and the World Nuclear Association estimate China can build plants for about $2,500 to $3,000 per kilowatt, about one-third of the cost of recent projects in the U.S. and France."
It attributes most of the cost difference to differences in interest rates, but I'd think that construction standards, regulation, and cost of labor would offer potential savings too. I guess these can help with other renewables as well, but nuclear seems likely to benefit the most.
If you think that cost and cost over runs stop this sort of lending your dead wrong. Commercial lending loves to hand out money assuming that a) it can get a high enough rate of return and b) that if you fail it gets all its money back.
The latter portion, the insurance portion, is where these deals fall apart. NO one wants to take on the bonds to insure these deals. No one. The risks of nuclear are unpalatable to those markets post Fukushima.
Also, the amounts of money are so vast that they would stretch most companies. Without massive cash reserves you are back to raising capital and the problems discussed.
What’s too late is decarbonization based on wind and solar. If everyone in the developed world had taken the same approach as France in the 1960s, the developed world would emit so little CO2 that the entire developing world could afford to come up to the same standard within the same total CO2 budget as today. We would have a decades longer runway to decarbonize the other aspects of the economy—construction, transport, etc.
Instead, what’ll happen now is that developed countries will take until 2040 or longer just to decarbonize their grids, and developing countries will cause global CO2 emissions to blow by every target on the way to a 4C increase in average temperature.
Let's not kid ourselves, Nuclear Plants are mediocre as a carbon-fee energy source, but really great if you want a nuclear arsenal, and france wanted one.
France has nuclear because oil was expensive and they didn't have many other alternatives like the Germans.
That's not true. Once you have the expertise and infrastructure to handle nuclear fuel and waste you can also relatively easily reprocess the fuel to create weapon-grade material. It's certainly much harder if you start with solar panels and wind turbines! :)
Likewise if you have the facilities needed to create nuclear weapons, it makes sense to make some money on the side making electricity as well.
Only doing nuclear research for military purposes is frowned upon by your neighbours and makes you look suspicous, and only having a civilian program is super complex and expensive and doesn't even make you untouchable. Luckily building the infrastructure for a nuclear arsenal goes hand in hand with building the infrastructure for civilian uses, so you have a buy one, get one free situation.
>> The National Assembly approved the initial nuclear energy plan for a five-year term on July 24, 1952. The plan sought to build two experimental reactors at the Marcoule nuclear site, and construction began in 1955. Shortly thereafter, the construction of a third reactor commenced. In addition to generating electricity, these reactors would produce plutonium in sufficient quantities to support a civil advanced reactor program and potentially a military one, at a cost three times lower than highly enriched uranium.[69][70][71]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_France%27s_civil_nu...
>> In 1957 Euratom was created, and under cover of the peaceful use of nuclear power the French signed deals with West Germany and Italy to work together on nuclear weapons development.[18] The Chancellor of West Germany Konrad Adenauer told his cabinet that he "wanted to achieve, through EURATOM, as quickly as possible, the chance of producing our own nuclear weapons".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_and_weapons_of_mass_des...
Civilian nuclear power is not needed to have a weapons programs, it can help tho.
The point is that we already had proven technology back then. Even now after massive coordinated effort on wind and solar, we have to burn gas/coal all over the place to handle generation sags at night and when the wind slows.
This is a surprising assertion. I keep seeing it, and each time, when I dig, it turns out it is from someone who does not really know what they are saying and fall for naive ideas such as "but we don't have energy at night and without wind", while in practice, dunkelflaute appear to be as rare as unexpected shutdown of a nuclear plant anyway.
I'm working in the energy sector and I see that solar and wind are considered as a very valid solution. They have disadvantages, but in practice, it's far from being the end of the world, it just makes thing more complicated, but not more than all the other complications that exist for any other sources.
Maybe I'm in a bubble, so it would be great if you can show that what you say is not coming from someone who has no idea.
I would assume that people working in solar and wind believe in it... could it be a bubble?
Jean-Marc Jancovici has really great insights about that. I would recommend looking at them, that's very interesting!
It is very telling that your first thoughts was "if someone says that in the sector, it's not what they say, then, surely this person is wrong somehow". It shows the level of bias.
As for Jancovici, I find him very disappointing on solar. In one hand, he says very interesting things on economics and history. On the other hand, my colleagues and I are just looking each other with total surprise when he talk about solar: it looks like he never worked on the subject (but he did). In fact, few decades ago, he was saying that solar has no future, with predictions that are factually BS, proven by the fact that what he predicted never happened (and not because of a fluke, just because it was unrealistic). It feels like he chose a side and got emotionally invested in it, and now he just denies the reality. He may have been confronted to intellectually dishonest people, and now each time there is just neutral facts, he may be systematically concluding that it is impossible for it to not be something from intellectually dishonest people. It's a bit sad, I'm not sure if he is doing more good than bad: he is informing people on some aspect, but he is also spreading a lot of harmful stereotype (for example, in some places, solar is really an essential element for decarbonisation, there is just no other way that is not mathematically absurd, but these conclusions are labelled "ideological" by people having done zero study, "because Jancovici said that only ideological people promotes solar"). Just to be clear: my colleagues and I are paid the same (or even more if we have to be paid again for another study when they choose a bad option), but I just feel it's not good for society that there is so little rationality.
I said that I would expect someone working in the sector to believe in the sector. I did not say AT ALL that someone working in the sector is surely wrong.
Of course people in renewables tend to say that nuclear doesn't work, and people in nuclear tend to say that renewables don't work. That's how it works. Asking who is saying what and consider they may have a bias seems reasonable to me.
> "because Jancovici said that only ideological people promotes solar"
I have been following him for years, and that is not AT ALL what I understood. He never says "solar is completely useless". He says "it depends on the situation, but it won't scale to replace fossil fuels". He also says that in many situations nuclear is a better fit (because if you have enough nuclear energy, then you don't need renewables, but when you have renewables, you need a solution for the times where they don't produce enough).
I am absolutely certain that renewables are good in many situations. I just say that people selling solar farms have an interest in believing that solar farms will replace fossil fuels. But they won't.
No, you said that you expect someone saying that solar and wind is not that bad to be working IN SOLAR AND WIND and not in nuclear.
You said that my view on solar and wind is biased because I work on solar and wind. I don't, I work on the full energy sector, I don't prefer renewables to nuclear.
> Of course people in renewables tend to say that nuclear doesn't work, and people in nuclear tend to say that renewables don't work. That's how it works. Asking who is saying what and consider they may have a bias seems reasonable to me.
That's exactly my point: you ASSUMED that if I say renewable is good, then I HAVE TO be in renewable.
Being careful is fine, you could have asked precision about my domain. But you did not, it was just obvious in your mind: if I'm saying the renewables are not bad, then there is no way I'm intellectually honest and unbiased.
> I have been following him for years, and that is not AT ALL what I understood.
I have worked on projects where we saw DIRECT AFFIRMATIONS from Jancovici that were, for real, just BS. Not because we were interpreting them badly or something like that, it was very clear cut, such as "we've just done the math for your exact project and we guarantee you you will not get it for less than X euros" and few months later, we got it for 0.001 X euros. You may understand superficially what Jancovici says. But obviously, I've seen, from first hand, the reality, and it will be very difficult for you to convince me that what I've experienced was a dream. Each time he is saying "nuclear is a better fit", you need to be very prudent, he is always comparing the very very worst case scenario for renewables with the unrealistically ideal case for nuclear.
> (because if you have enough nuclear energy, then you don't need renewables, but when you have renewables, you need a solution for the times where they don't produce enough)
That only is stupid. You cannot place "just nuclear", the way they work is just not suited for flexible grid, which is essential if we want to reduce emissions. You can somehow follow the demand, but you will spend order of magnitude more money than if you use renewables for exactly the same result, and you will never reach the needed reduction in time.
You were saying that you reacted to "silver bullet, if you have enough renewables then you don't need nuclear". And there, you are doing exactly the same thing by saying that "if you have enough nuclear, then you don't need renewables". Let be clear: I know you prefer a mixed solution. The problem is that you believe that if you have enough nuclear, then you don't need renewables, which is just not correct.
> you ASSUMED that if I say renewable is good, then I HAVE TO be in renewable.
Wow. Let me quote what I said:
"I would assume that people working in solar and wind believe in it... could it be a bubble?"
If you can draw the above conclusions from this sentence, then there is no need to talk further. And I have to assume that you apply the same kind of logic to everything. No wonder you think Jancovici is wrong.
I still don't understand how you can assume I'm not myself in a bubble, say that I see people considering renewables as a very valid solution, and still this observation is a result of a bubble (a bubble I'm not in, but still I only see things inside of the bubble and not out of it).
Can you see my situation? You have to admit that my reaction is just legitimate.
> If you can draw the above conclusions from this sentence, then there is no need to talk further. And I have to assume that you apply the same kind of logic to everything. No wonder you think Jancovici is wrong.
How convenient. I think Jancovici is wrong about solar (not about everything) because I saw him saying things that are factually wrong, not because he said "bubble", "people" or "it" and that I have misinterpreted that. Firstly, even if I am somehow unable to understand your sentence (which I'm not), I don't need this skill to notice that the numbers we are obtaining are dramatically not the same as the numbers the guy provided. It's like saying "you don't understand Italian language, so I don't believe you when you say that this mathematical development has a sign error in it". Secondly, even if I'm myself an idiot, then you still need to explain why all of my colleagues (including the ones enthusiastic about nuclear development) are also very perplexed regarding Jancovici conclusions on solar.
This whole discussion does not help my impression that there is a lot of irrationality and deny. It really feels you are jumping on an excuse to exclude the possibility that Jancovici may not be right. Again, it fits very well with my first interpretation that you jumped to conclusion that I may be myself in a bubble just because I was saying things that you don't want to hear.
No no no no no! Try to read it slowly. You wrote:
"I'm working in the energy sector and I see that solar and wind are considered as a very valid solution."
And I answered, quoting exactly the line above:
"I would assume that people working in solar and wind believe in it... could it be a bubble?"
I was NOT saying that you worked in solar and wind, and I was NOT saying that it was a bubble. I was saying that it would seem reasonable to me that people working in renewables would indeed see it as a very valid solution. And given that you work in the energy sector, I was merely asking whether it could be the case that the people around you consider solar and wind as a very valid solution just because they believe in it (e.g. because they work with solar and wind).
Again I did not say "it has to be a bubble", I asked: "given your sector, could it be a bubble?". Then YOU proceeded in looking into other discussions and assuming things about me. Instead, you could just have said "well we don't work in solar and wind and don't benefit from it at all, so I don't see reasons for them to be biased" or "obviously I may be biased because we sell solar panels, but those are researchers and they really seem knowledgeable about it".
Or anything you wanted. Basically you said "I work in the energy sector" as if it mattered (and it could, I don't know), and this was my way of asking you to elaborate. Instead you proceeded in attacking me. So here is my answer: from where I stand, you are not able to draw correct logical conclusions from what you read. Seriously, how can you jump from "could it be a bubble?" to "you jumped to the conclusion that I am in a bubble" (and I'm just mentioning one here)? That's insane.
How can I be outside of the bubble if the people around me are all in the bubble.
If I'm outside of the bubble, I will see people who work in solar and wind AND people who work in nuclear. And according to you, people in nuclear will not act like people in solar and wind, so the overall observation would not be that I see that solar and wind is considered as a very valid solution, because I will see people saying it's not a valid solution.
You even say:
> given your sector, could it be a bubble?
And you also say, I quote again
> Of course people in renewables tend to say that nuclear doesn't work, and people in nuclear tend to say that renewables don't work.
So, how does it work? How is that possible that, according to you now, you are not assuming that I'm working in solar and wind and not in nuclear, and at the same time, assuming that I cannot work in nuclear because, then, I will see people saying that solar and wind is not a very valid solution?
As for what I've said next, it's the pot calling the kettle black: even right now, you need a tortuous gymnastic to twist your words so we may slightly imagine a version in which you did not assume anything about me. As for what I've imagined, the rest of the discussion just make me think I was 100% right.
> how can you jump from "could it be a bubble?" to "you jumped to the conclusion that I am in a bubble" (and I'm just mentioning one here)?
Anybody with basic training in basic logic can do that.
1) you say people working in wind and solar may be biased and think of it as a very valid solution
2) you say people working in nuclear may be biased and think of it as very not a valid solution
3) THE ONLY LOGIC POSSIBILITY FOR ME TO SAY I ONLY SEE IT BEING CONSIDERED AS A VERY VALID SOLUTION IS THAT I ONLY SEE PEOPLE WORKING IN WIND AND SOLAR.
There is absolutely no other logical solution.
(oh, and you would notice that I did not say "I see some people considering it as a very valid solution", which means I would also see others not considering it as a very valid solution. I'm saying it's a broad consensus to the point that this solution is very generally taken seriously. If you think I was saying "I see _some_ people", who is unable to read what the other has written?)
> So you are saying I'm not in a bubble, BUT I'm in a bubble because
Last time: I asked if what you described (i.e. a large consensus for an idea) could be a bubble. I A-S-K-E-D. That's what the question mark means (this is a question mark: "?").
>> how can you jump from "could it be a bubble?" to "you jumped to the conclusion that I am in a bubble"
> Anybody with basic training in basic logic can do that.
You and I seem to have a very different view of what the word "logic" means.
You lecture me (badly) on "what I should have written". Well, there are tons of things that you could have written. I've even said it before, I quote:
> Being careful is fine, you could have asked precision about my domain.
But you did not, you just "asked innocently" a question that only someone with an idea already in mind would ask.
> I A-S-K-E-D
What if I tell you "how old are you?" (and I will: "you're so stupid you could be a LLM" ... seriously? how old are you?).
Does it mean that I did not assume anything about you? After all, I've just asked a question, it's the proof I'm not biased towards a specific hypothesis, no? Surely, by your own logic, asking "how old are you" is not implying that I consider you not very sophisticated, you should understand "maybe they think I'm young, but maybe they think I'm old and wise, they don't assume anything, as proven by the fact that they are asking a question".
You could have said "people in nuclear will down-play the importance on renewables, you are saying that around you, renewables are considered as a very valid solution, but are you sure renewables are not in fact a very very valid solution, because maybe you are in a bubble dominated by people working in nuclear". Why not having asked that?
You can even take more extreme examples where a person asked a foreigner person if their parents are apes, or bankers/moneylenders, or jihadists? If this person is asking an arab-looking person, why this person is, what a chance, asking if their parents are jihadists but not if their parents are bankers or part of the mafia? Do you really think the person is not assuming anything? After all, this person asked the question, so it's the proof they don't assume, right?
You see, language is a tad more complex than just LLM and out-of-context word-by-word interpretation, and apparently, I understand that. I don't know (and don't care) about LLM, but, you, you certainly don't.
I won't address the rest, it makes no sense to me.
You cannot say "how old are you" and then scream and cry that someone has interpreted that as a normal person will do.
And I have provided all the elements that justify (even if there is a question mark, I know, amazing!) why I've interpreted the way I've interpreted. And these elements makes sense (and I know you will say "naa-ha they don't", the same way you have used logic similar to "if you don't agree with Jancovici, the only possibility is that you are an idiot").
You were lecturing me on what I should have written. But somehow, if indeed you did assume absolutely nothing, you expressed yourself incredibly badly, in a very unnatural way for someone who don't assume anything. But again, I guess you are allowed to lecture me and you are the good guy for doing so, but I should give you all the benefice of the doubt and forgive all of your bad writing, otherwise, I'm the bad guy.
And I know, you are going to say "naa-ah, it was not badly written". But it cuts both way, if I cannot say what interpretations are valid and are not valid, why do you think you can?
And all of this discussion does not change the fact that you are ignorant on the subject of energy generation, only come up with naive and cliché arguments, and that you focused the discussion on small elements rather than answer for all of the other aspects where indeed you cannot really answer.
I've also seen some of your other contributions, and, hum, for someone who concludes "we need both nuclear and renewables", you seem strangely only interested to criticize renewables while not accepting any of the problems of the nuclear side (I'm not talking about nuclear incident, but just things like "not a single cell has been produced fully with renewable energy": not only it's totally absurd, but this argument would apply identically to nuclear, and yet you thought of it as something against renewables while it does not bother you when it's about nuclear)
Probably my fault, but I was answering to comments that did sound to me like "we don't need nuclear, renewable is the silver bullet". To which I say "I think it is extremely dangerous to think like this, because we are not in a position where we can make mistakes for another few decades, and nobody has deployed renewables at scale yet".
If I look at Germany for instance, they pushed a lot for renewables, which was great for the fossil business (e.g. coal and NLG) because renewables are apparently not enough on their own (e.g. when there is no wind and no sun). And that's only for their current electricity needs, we're not talking about replacing fossil fuels in any way (rather they seem to have replaced nuclear with renewables + more fossil).
My experience as an engineer is that it's easy to say "yup we made a small prototype, it will most definitely work at scale, just give us the money!". Then you start doing it at scale, and you realize it's a whole new problem. I feel like in HN too many people make a quick calculation ("with a fraction of Earth covered with solar panels, we're good for a thousand years") and forget that in practice, you can't just throw solar panels in the desert and call it a day.
Where I come from, solar farms are used at a fraction of their capacity because the electrical infrastructure cannot get their full production. It was just not built like that. But the people working in solar of course did not say it upfront (or did not even know it, I don't know?).
Of course there are issues with nuclear plants. But there are countries (e.g. France) who did it at a scale that renewables haven't reached yet. Again, I don't mean that renewables don't work at all. I just think that it is very risky to just hope that all the fundamental problems of renewables (e.g. storage) will be solved in the near future because unlike autonomous cars or AGI it's not just meant to convince VCs: in this case it matters.
There were a lot of mistakes in the way Germany exited nuclear. Concluding from that "not exiting nuclear is a silver bullet" is as stupid as saying "renewable is the silver bullet". There are plenty of ways of exiting nuclear, the way used by Germany was bad and we are learning for their mistakes. Concluding that all way of exiting nuclear is bad based on that is not true and demonstrated incorrect by plenty of examples where renewables are doing their job very well.
Same with France: the way they have deployed nuclear is very bad, they sold electricity way too cheap and don't have accumulated enough money to pay for renewing or dismantling the plants. You were saying that some idiots are just thinking "the prototype works, it will work at scale", and you are behaving exactly the same way by looking very superficially at France.
The peope who reacted to are demonstrating less naivety and botched conclusions than you. They don't really say "renewable is the silver bullet", they just say something that is true "renewables is way more promising than nuclear", which is just a conclusion that experts are reaching, not because there are prototypes, but because they've studied the simulation from beginning to end, with renewables and nuclear, and it is what the math is telling them.
The fallback on all 3 of the major grids are coal and gas. It’s not even close to a closing solution without them.
Maybe things are different in the tiny grids in Europe or people are getting really creative with accounting where they take renewable credits from other jurisdictions during excess and then use those to greenwash the fossil fuels they burn during deficits.
Either way, there is no large grid running without coal, gas, geothermal, nuclear, and/or hydro anywhere in the world. Even Hawaii’s tiny grid with its excess solar is backstopped by diesel/gas generators.
You're implying this is a showstopper. It's not.
> Either way, there is no large grid running without coal, gas, geothermal, nuclear, and/or hydro anywhere in the world.
"Nothing can ever been done for the first time." Why, oh why do you imagine this matters?
It has been so far. Nobody has done it in a meaningful enough deployment to make a dent.
My entire point is that we willfully did massive climate damage for 50 years to get to today because we didn’t want nuclear. We will still do damage for 20+ years because we’re still waiting on something to replace peaker plant load on solar/wind.
People who pushed for solar/wind instead of nuclear are as much to blame for climate change as the fossil fuel junkies for the last 50 years of no effect. At least the fossil junkies didn’t righteously pretend to care.
Nobody has done it because nobody has HAD to do it. If you're still allowed to burn some fossil fuels, it's not necessary. This doesn't mean it isn't possible, and it certainly isn't strong evidence it won't be possible.
And by "possible", I mean possible at an acceptable cost. Even you should agree it's possible at sufficiently high cost.
I will add that no economy has been nuclear powered yet either (not even France, where most of the energy is still coming from fossil fuels, if one doesn't limit examination to just the grid.)
This is a baldfaced lie. Batteries + e-fuels, coupled with predictable decline in cost of these with demonstrated experience effects, will enable 100% renewable energy at a cost competitive with current fossil fuels.
We are also increasingly seeing batteries as part of PV fields, charged directly with DC from the PV, where they share the same inverters and grid connection, reducing overall cost.
Any projects that include battery costs are not competitive at all with fossil fuels unless you price in externalities that people don’t pay for right now. There are no proposals on the table to make them pay for that either.
The "running the numbers" you refer to very likely is a scam argument that requires batteries be used as the only storage mode. This can be much more expensive than properly engineered 100% renewable solutions, especially at higher latitude.
lol, after selecting a state it suggests a hydrogen electrolyzer and 22GWh of hydrogen storage. I hope you realize how dumb it is to think that would be achievable in 2030 (< 6 years from now).
There are several paths, they just need to be walked.
Gas is a known method to spread heat and electricity, hydrogen is a gas that is entirely downside-free from a eco-fuel perspective. We can burn as much of it as we want 24/7 and we can make it from sunshine and seawater, returning the water in the process.
A 6-lane highway to perfect stability right there.
What hydrogen does is provide a way to store energy for long periods of time much more cheaply than batteries. The cost of hydrogen storage capacity underground is maybe $1/kWh. Of course the round trip efficiency is much lower than batteries, but for long term storage (or when the input energy becomes very cheap) that doesn't matter as much.
The latter makes the former worse (because we lose some of that energy in the storage process).
The truth is that we need a mix of nuclear, renewable, and a ton of sobriety because after fossil fuels we will just live in a world with a lot less energy. And I don't think we can afford ignoring nuclear power.
BTW, just compare France and Germany. It seems pretty obvious that the french model (with nuclear power) works a lot better.
Basically, you're complaining that CO2 pollution isn't going away on its own, and that's the fault of anyone but the polluters. No, it's the fault of laws that allow the polluters to impose their negative externalities on everyone else.
No, we don't need "a mix of nuclear, renewable". There doesn't appear to be any good place for nuclear in a future energy system of cheap renewables. There are all sorts of ludicrous energy sources we won't be using, and one cannot just presume nuclear is not also in that set.
Of course it is not. But with nuclear + renewables, we are still heading towards a world without e.g. aviation because we won't have enough energy for all those planes we fly today.
Everything will be more complicated, and we can't afford to be picky with the low-carbon energy sources. Going with nuclear and renewables is infinitely better than what we are doing now (which is... going towards a catastrophe).
Even assuming we want to increase the world average from the current (roughly) 2.3 kW to average consumption of the single most intense nation (Qatar, at roughly 23 kW) while also using 20% cells, this is still less than 1% of the surface of the planet — for comparison, about 4% of the US land area is "urban", and a further 21% is cropland, and 35% is pastures and ranges.
We love to speak about "potential" and extrapolate given current numbers. But the fact is that we have never done anything like that at scale. We do not know if we are capable of replacing fossil fuels. It's not just a "potential", it's really an engineering problem. The devil is in the details.
And when you start looking at what would need to change to run fully on electricity... you realize it won't fully replace fossil fuels. Not even remotely.
Not a single nuclear reactor today has been produced fully with nuclear energy.
But this is a ridiculous constraint, since it says the entire problem has to be solved in one shot.
Which I did not claim at all. I keep saying that we need both nuclear and renewables, and you keep opposing renewables to nuclear. We won't go anywhere, let's stop here.
From the analysis I've seen, nuclear has no place. It's simply too expensive and constrained.
Irrelevant, and also probably false on a technicality.
All those things can be powered by renewables, each sub-component demonstrated, the question is cost and what scale at which they have been built so far.
> We love to speak about "potential" and extrapolate given current numbers. But the fact is that we have never done anything like that at scale.
Only if you ignore all the things which form the very industrial base we want to update.
> And when you start looking at what would need to change to run fully on electricity... you realize it won't fully replace fossil fuels. Not even remotely.
If that were true, we all die miserably (in the next 40 or so years as the things driving the last century of fossil fuel use imply an exponential growth pattern) while being painfully stupid thanks to the fact CO2 in the air impedes human cognitive capacity.
(And nuclear won't help because your claim was "electricity" not "renewables").
Fortunately, roughly half of our total (20 TW) final energy consumption is "make things hot", which is very easy to electrify — given the way I use words, I think this by itself would be enough to disprove your "not even remotely" all by itself.
A further 3 TW is transport, of which 0.3 TW is spent on each of aviation (short-haul flights can be electrified, only longer distance ones are currently hard), and marine fuels. The rest is all stuff which can easily take batteries or hydrogen.
There's some overlap here with the 2 TW of electricity, but that means I've shown somewhere between 70% and 80% the energy use problems are easy.
What's harder is that I just said "energy" not "carbon", because some of what we do releases CO2 or other greenhouse gases without being related to energy use. Fortunately there are plenty of people working on solutions to the problems with cement, cattle, and metal oxide reduction — but they're not a correct part of the framing for energy specifically, even though they're totally relevant for the environment as a whole. Likewise the use of hydrocarbons as chemical feedstocks for plastic: very important when we care about running out of oil, not a big issue when we care about CO2 emissions.
There's no reason to think that's true. I will add that the carbon in waste streams in the US is more than enough to provide current US consumption of jet fuel (with hydrogen added so all the carbon ends up in the fuel, not going into CO2).
Electricity generation just has to make money to be viable. Peak electricity use and cost is still during the day when the sun is shining. Both methods make money and their costs are still dropping, that's why they get used.
we have to burn gas/coal all over the place
We had to burn a lot more gas and coal "all over the place" before wind and solar picked up.
https://electrek.co/2024/02/06/eu-coal-and-gas-collapse-wind...
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=54519
https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Price-of-electri...
Why make these claims if you can't back them up with anything?
> We had to burn a lot more gas and coal "all over the place" before wind and solar picked up.
I think you’re struggling to grasp the problem here. It isn’t that we won’t find a way to use energy when it’s there. It’s that the wind/solar fall short at calm/night and need something to fill in those gaps. That’s when fuel burning picks up the tab and drives us into more climate change.
I think you're struggling to even say the same things in one comment to the next, let alone give any evidence.
First you said Solar and wind still have no path to stability. which is vague as a statement because "stability" doesn't mean anything, but they both make money and are displacing fossil fuel. I showed you this through sources I linked.
Peak solar generation does not align with peak demand
Part of the reason why solar is useful is because it generates electricity when the demand is the highest. Solar is profitable, that's why people use it.
https://www.nrel.gov/state-local-tribal/blog/posts/phrase-of...
https://www.cnet.com/home/energy-and-utilities/peak-and-off-...
need something to fill in those gaps
Where do you think the electricity came from before solar and wind took off? It was all "gaps".
We aren't even at the point yet in most places where solar or wind fill the demand for electricity while they are at their peak.
Next time remember to back up what you're saying with links and real information.
Solar shows up and generates electricity when the sun shows up. It peaks around solar noon which is not when grid demand peaks (late afternoon).
Wind generation works when the wind is blowing. To make it reliable there is a lot of statistical spreading across the grid. Even then it’s subject to wind falling off.
>Where do you think the electricity came from before solar and wind took off? It was all "gaps"
It’s not gaps, it’s constant generation on demand outside of the maintenance windows.
Solar and wind are unreliable sources of electricity and have to lean on dirty energy to give people a reliable end result.
This has nothing to do with “solar makes money when it’s on”.
They are fundamentally unreliable power sources and until there is still some yet unproven breakthrough in battery technology, we’ll keep burning fossil fuels to cover their inadequacies and mark forward into further climate change.
Nuclear was a solution to this that we knew worked for this problem (CO2). We still chose to bet on solar/wind and still 50 years later have no viable solution that lets us shut off fossil fuels.
It’s a colossal fuckup globally and every new coal and gas power plant being built has solar and wind advocates to thank.
still have no path to stability.
But what you seem to keep trying to argue is that solar and wind don't work because they aren't 100% of all electricity generation.
Meanwhile they are profitable and as they expand, less coal and gas electricity needs to be used.
https://electrek.co/2024/02/06/eu-coal-and-gas-collapse-wind...
Have you noticed you have no link and no evidence in any of your posts? That's because what you are saying isn't true.
This has nothing to do with “solar makes money when it’s on”.
It has everything to do with that until demand and price isn't highest during the day.
Solar and wind are unreliable sources of electricity and have to lean on dirty energy to give people a reliable end result.
And before, it was all dirty energy.
Coal generation fell by 26% in 2023 alone.
https://electrek.co/2024/02/06/eu-coal-and-gas-collapse-wind...
It’s a colossal fuckup globally and every new coal and gas power plant being built has solar and wind advocates to thank.
There is zero evidence for this. Even the things you wrote here don't connect to this wild and ridiculous assertion.
Again, you have no numbers, no data, no links and no evidence because what you're repeating is nonsense propaganda. You can keep saying the same things that aren't true, but if you try to move past bleating the same claims, you will need to look up real information and you'll find that it doesn't say what you are making up here.
Meanwhile in the UK, coal consumption has gone down 96.5% per capita since 1965 despite an increasing population (95.7% in absolute terms). Germany and the USA have also had (smaller) reductions per capita, though the world average is up about 16%: https://ourworldindata.org/energy#explore-data-on-energy
Also relevant: we will continue to burn fuels until the storage/long distance grids catch up with the generation.
Storage is a completely separate axis to generation, which the UK also found out during the coal miner's strikes in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s; as the storage needed for road vehicles is more than sufficient for a national electricity grid, your expectation should be "around the time cars have renewable fuels, be that battery or hydrogen, not significantly sooner or later".
Grids are my personal preference (a global 1Ω aluminium grid would cost only about $265 billion in metal, using 1.7 years of current global aluminium production for something that will probably last about a century), but clearly require more international cooperation than the world wishes to engage with at present. As batteries (/hydrogen) are needed anyway for the cars, we're going to get batteries (/hydrogen).
> Storage is a completely separate axis to generation
It’s not when you can generate on demand from a fuel source that doubles as energy storage.
The overall faction from all fossil fuels has also declined, in the proportion I would expect from the current deployment of the various alternatives: https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/united-states#what...
> It’s not when you can generate on demand from a fuel source that doubles as energy storage.
It is when your fuel tanks are finite in size.
Also we can't generate fuel yet at sufficient scale, and that's just as relevant regarding hydrogen as it is about batteries for electricity storage.
I'm optimistic about batteries, but that optimism is realistically that we'll get there over the coming decade, and in the meantime have to deal with naysayers who can't imagine a future different to the past.
With hydrogen, I'm pessimistic. Given that hydrogen electrolysis is so easy that I did this before I turned 10, you need to wonder why the USA (and all the other targets of the fuel embargo) failed to do this in any significant level even at the height of the 1970s fuel crisis back when nuclear power was still fashionable.
This isn't an unanswerable question, nor is intended to be anti-hydrogen rhetoric — if you can solve the problems that made it unviable back then, that's fantastic and we can use it now.
But we do actually have to solve those problems.
This doesn't mean green hydrogen can't work, any more than the large amount of local air pollution before the passage of the Clean Air Act meant air pollution was impossible to control. It's just a matter of making fossil fuel users fully pay for the externalities they impose on others.
Nuclear power was “shovel ready” by 1960. The unpredictable fundamental research was done and the “investment” that remained was to build power plants. The majority of France’s power was nuclear by the 1980s.
Solar was not shovel ready in 1960. Perovskite solar cells were invented in 2009. The battery technology necessary to support grid-scale solar also wasn’t close to commercialization. By the time the first commercial lithium ion batteries were demonstrated in the late 1980s, France already had a majority renewable grid based on nuclear.
The utility of nuclear for weapons is a plus, not a minus. That meant a lot of the fundamental research in nuclear had already been done and paid for by militaries. If clean energy was the goal, it was a no-brainer to leverage that work that had been doing and was going to be done anyway. But the environmental movement has always been unfortunately susceptible to being hijacked by other liberal causes.
Shovel-ready, perhaps. But consistent-safe-operation-ready? Highly debatable.
(Source: In the 1970s I was a Navy nuclear engineering officer, qualified among other things as [chief] engineer officer aboard the eight-reactor aircraft carrier USS Enterprise during three years of sea duty there. I became convinced that the then-existing pressurized-water-reactor designs simply weren't safe around populated areas because of the possibility of cascading human error — see, e.g., Three Mile Island and Chernobyl — and the potentially-catastrophic nature of a black-swan event. Relatedly, I'll be interested to see what the cause of the loss-of-power accident was aboard the container ship that dropped the bridge in Baltimore.)
Undoubtedly there would be deaths from accidents. But people die. Way more people were killed by the tsunami that caused the Fukushima meltdown than by the nuclear accident. Every few decades the US will see an influenza-type event that kills 100,000+ people. Nuclear wouldn’t come close to that.
They also likely prevented more Chernobyls and Fukushimas. Whether that was a net gain is something that can be debated, of course.
Everything has an impact on the environment, you won't find a silver bullet here. But you have to compare the solutions. Fossil fuels are orders of magnitude worse than nuclear, even considering a Chernobyl once in a while.
Still, I think nuclear is just not viable anymore. Here in The Netherlands for instance, we have quite a few days where energy prices are negative due to an (over) abundance of solar and wind energy.
A commercial nuclear power plant is out of the question, as it won't be price competitive with wind or solar. So tax payers will have to foot the bill anyway. I'd rather foot the bill for something more economical, battery storage and other solutions.
The 'real' problems we face in The Netherlands is that our grid can't be expanded fast enough to deal with increased wind and solar production.
Yes, yes, wind and solar are intermittent and that's something that we have to deal with somehow. However, for the price of a nuclear powerplant (or four) you can buy ungodly amounts of battery storage that we very likely can do without nuclear.
>The International Atomic Energy Agency convened a summit to build momentum for a low-emissions technology that many expect will be critical for hitting climate targets. A group of mostly Western countries pledged to triple nuclear generation by 2050. But lenders balked at the eyewatering cost of doing so.
Why aren't lenders jumping at the opportunity?
>Projects in Western economies have been plagued by construction delays and ballooning costs in recent decades. The newest reactor in the European Union — Olkiluoto 3 in Finland — started generating power last year, more than a decade late and three times over budget.
That explains things yes.
>“We need state involvement, I don’t see any other model,” Ostros said. “Probably we need quite heavy state involvement to make projects bankable.”
If the state would be involved, please put the money in something else. Something better.
California is trying to mandate a high percentage of electric vehicles in a timeframe where they will not be able to keep up with electricity demand. We already have notorious brownouts when it's too hot, etc. Our electric providers have taken profits over infrastructure maintenance. Improving and expanding the infrastructure will take decades.
https://www.caiso.com/Documents/Grid-Emergencies-History-Rep...
I happen to have a coop that has been more stable the last 8 years mainly because when there is a PG&E outage, there is back up power from Nevada Energy (or whatever it's called).
Also on the line maintenance front - Dixie Fire. Granted there are tree maintenance, property owner problems, etc.
For an all electric infrastructure, more generation and better maintained infrastructure is needed. I think microgrids for areas that have the open land would be something to consider.
Well no you can't in a meaningful scale, and that's why the Netherlands isn't using batteries for that but gas plants (40% of the total generation).
https://www.energy-storage.news/semperpower-starts-operation...
Nobody does it because that's not feasible with the current tech.
At best you smooth out the daily production.
The cheapest solution varies depending on how close you are to the arctic circle, but for most of the world's population the best is to have a bit more generation capacity than you need on a winter's day combined with a mere few days worth of storage.
This is about x100 less energy storage than shifting from summer to winter, at a cost of x3 in generation, and generation is still the cheaper part of the two.
Close to the arctic circle, the only solution is a power line to somewhere further south; this is much cheaper than the nay-sayers claim (in $ terms even a planet-spanning 1 Ω grid is only about $265 billion), but is still a political PITA.
So yeah, nuclear looks awful in that context but you have to keep in mind that the market prices are really mostly about dispatching generation by short term costs. As complex as these auctions are, they're still far too simple to really take into account some of the advantages of nuclear like being able to run as long as there is some water, while wind and solar can be unavailable at times (they're usually pretty good), but dunkelflaute is a thing where you may have an entire week of having very little renewable energy (something where we don't have enough batteries to fix either).
This is one area where a centralized planner (like a vertically integrated utility) can do a better job than the wholesale electricity markets in looking at the bigger picture and the overall costs. Nuclear is certainly financially risky, but it and gas often make sense in a portfolio.
In both case, nuclear or not, when building a network, you will need to build some redundancies and flexibility. A lot of the problems of renewables have an equivalent in the nuclear plants (for example, even with nuclear, batteries are needed because nuclear starts to be more expensive if they have to turn on and off to follow the demand, so it's cheaper to build battery).
This is a big topic right now. Both views are important. We need to decarbonize, but we have to do it without leading to other major issues.
For example, the initial conversation was about Netherlands and negative costs. People who are creating the situation in that country put grid stability very high in their priorities (because it would be catastrophic for them), and still ended up with the situation that currently exists. So, the initial analysis was not far off, and arguing that we should not only look at negative cost is a fair point, but it is incorrect to imply that looking further than negative cost will change the strategy in Netherlands: the strategy in Netherlands is both compatible with "looking at the negative cost" and "looking at network stability".
Ok, so, once again, you are just some random dude "having an opinion" with nothing more than prejudices on the subject.
There is a lot of things to say about the mistakes of Germany. And a lot about the mistakes of France, who painted themselves in a corner and is nowadays mentioned as an example to not follow when deploying nuclear. If you apply your own logic, it means that wind and solar is out of question because of Germany, and it means that nuclear is out of question because of France.
(edit: just to be clear, my point is that it is ridiculous to say that the problem of France demonstrates that nuclear is not an option. I'm not saying wing+solar is better than nuclear. I'm just saying that the "Germany argument" is hypocritical, because if you really think it's valid, then you should also be against nuclear)
This ridiculous idea that "a few people on the internet" are the ones in charge of managing the network is just laughable. You are saying "a lot of groups in the US are trying the same". So, what are they doing: they are going to the electricity network owners and are saying "can you give it to me one sec, I don't have any qualifications, but I just want to play with it"? If in US something is changed in the network, it is the results of advanced studies done by very advanced experts. Some expert groups may disagree on strategies, but pretending that idiots who are not even understanding what is happening in Germany will just be able to change things is just ridiculous.
More realistically, the tensions you are talking about are from difference of opinions of two EXPERT groups, but you are just being intellectually dishonest by saying "their idea looks a bit like Germany, so obviously, they are idiots who haven't thought about it".
As you say, decarbonisation needs to happen but we need to think about how. You are not part of the group "thinking about how" if each time you see a plan that superficially looks like Germany, you conclude it can only be "not thought about how".
[0] see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39809804
No. They are actually much more frequent than renewable-advocates claim.
> events where a nuclear power plant has to stop production for an unexpected reason.
That turns out not to be the case, well-managed nuclear power has a capacity factor of well over 90%. But you're missing a much more important point: unforeseen events at nuclear power plants are independent and uncorrelated. So maybe 1 plant goes down, the others continue to operate unaffected.
A Dunkelflfaute knocks out all your power over a large area.
As for the well-management and the area: a "well-managed" central is not worth much if so far the majority of the centrals are not reaching that level, and nuclear centrals are too expensive to be build to be redundant, so when one central goes down, it's a big chunk of the generation that is missing, and cannot be covered by the central next door because the electricity of the central next door is already used to satisfy the demand the next door. If you use the central next door to fill up the gap, who is going to fill up the gap in the demand next door?
Funnily, if we go deeper in the question, people always end up explaining that of course they will install redundancies and flexibility (either by battery, by demand response, ...), shooting themselves in the foot because it itself mitigates a lot any problem created by dunkelflaute.
This is a high quality display of current and past supply. You can see everyday you get a huge slug of energy from solar. You go through history and you can see a few days a month in the winter when the output drops by 50%.
Also notable is California exports power during the day and batteries are providing a lot of power during the morning and early evening.
https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html
This gives the mix over the last 12 years.
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
The amount of hydro varies a lot. But it seems solar and wind are slowly depressing the demand for import and nat gas sources.
It's an interesting compare to Germany. California never went in on nukes and hasn't forced existing plants to close. Wasn't dependent on Russian gas for power and chemical feedstocks. California continued to build out solar while Germany stopped. Bonus German dependency on baseload imports from Frances aging nuclear reactors.
Feels like Germany has an excess of black chickens coming home to roost.
Also notable, that hippy progressive unicorns and rainbow state of Texas has about the same amount renewables as California. Which says the Accounts books tell them the same story.
Exactly. And we can see that they happen much more frequently than the advocates claimed they would.
...the Dutch parliament just voted for 4 new nuclear reactors instead of the 2 that were initially planned.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/dutch-parliament-votes-...
> energy prices are negative
Yes, this is one of the many problems with renewables. Negative prices do not reflect cost, but rather how much the supplied energy is currently worth to consumers. Negative prices mean that the energy that is produced is currently less than worthless, it is harmful.
The reason for this is the volatility/unreliability, which means you have to massively overprovision.
> for the price of a nuclear powerplant (or four) you can buy ungodly amounts of battery storage
That tuns out not to be the case. Not only can you not buy sufficient storage at any price currently, the prices are also astronomical.