It's important not to dismiss good ideas just because you dislike the people saying them
If more nuclear gets us away from Fossil Fuels faster it's a good thing
If more nuclear gets us away from Fossil Fuels faster it's a good thing
His point is that in Australia, it won’t. And it doesn’t matter how much evidence you put in front of these people to show them that. You can’t even tell them it’s costly because they reject even that provable fact.
Renewables plus firming is orders of magnitude cheaper and faster than any form of nuclear ever will be in AU and getting cheaper every day to boot. To which the response will simply be “nuuhh uhhh”.
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Ene...
All of Australia has 18.4GW of coal generation capacity remaining (per ElectricityMaps.com). To replace this with solar, wind, and batteries will be trivial (China deployed 217GW of solar last year [2023], for comparison). There is already 40GW of batteries in their pipeline.
https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2023/12/coal-will-be-a...
https://aemo.com.au/energy-systems/major-publications/integr...
https://www.woodmac.com/press-releases/australia-leads-globa...
I love nuclear but have to admit it’s dead until we figure out how to build these things faster. You can get 10MW of wind built in 2 months. A nuclear plant gives you 1000MW (1GW). You need to build that in less than 50 months (4 years) to compete with wind. And wind can already deliver incremental value for most of those 50 months so lead times aren’t a problem.
When’s the last time anyone built a nuclear plant in 4 years?
Here’s a better number: https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-many-homes-can-average-wind-tu...
> At a 42% capacity factor (i.e., the average among recently built wind turbines in the United States, per the 2021 edition of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Land-Based Wind Market Report), that average turbine would generate over 843,000 kWh (843MWh) per month—enough for more than 940 average U.S. homes
For comparison, an actual nuclear reactor in practical use produced 4,697,675 MWh in 2017. That’s the equivalent of 5572 of those wind turbines.
That’s a lot of wind turbines. But if we can build 278 wind turbines per year and it takes 20 years to build a new reactor. They’re even.
USA currently builds 3000 turbines per year. https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-many-wind-turbines-are-install...
So I think even with 42% capacity, wind is winning. We’d need to build 10 reactors per 20 years (1 every 2 years) for nuclear to beat wind.
It depends. If you're adding wind or nuclear to an already existing grid (which is usually the case), the already existing power plants can usually take over whenever the new power plants are offline or generating less power, and you don't need to budget for any extra storage. In these cases, the average output is the most relevant metric; it shows how much fuel (for a mostly fossil fuel grid) or water (for a mostly hydroelectric grid) it will save.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100pct-renewable-grid-for...
It basically found that you can get close to 100% relatively easily with minimal storage (5 hours average demand).
The issue with getting over the mid-90s and to handle 100% is that you need to cater for the edge-cases (conditions that may occur 1-2 times per year max).
Either way from memory, LCOE (in $/MWH) for grid-scale solar is around 50-60, adding storage brings costs up to 80-120. Nuclear is in the range of 200-300+, so even with storage the economics of renewables are better with costs trending downward. Especially when you can build them and scale them up quickly (compared to 10-15 years of nuclear builds).
Possibly, but nuclear TCO is also extremely well understood, and it's possible that the TCO for these new systems is not. I'd say the error bars are likely to be much longer on the renewables for the next 20 years or so, as we flush out the details.
It doesn't; for instance, the nuclear reactors near where I live have to power down for a whole month once every year, for refueling and maintenance. That's around a 92% capacity factor.
Wind turbines have additional maintenance downtime too.
It’s a shame we aren’t building more smaller reactors quicker. I think it would solve a lot of the problems that come from treating every plant as a unique one off megaproject.
That said, I hear that China is building nuclear. We might be able to import the know-how, or develop the political will to spin ours back up. A bit of national jealously goes a long way.
South Korea is one of the world leaders in commercial nuclear power, and as of 20 years ago they were able to build plants in under 5 years[0]. Seems like recent construction has slowed down there as well, for reasons unknown to me.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_South_Korea
The sheer expense just means it's vastly too expensive to do anything about climate change.
The military industrial complex will still try to sell it as better or at least equivalent to solar and wind though - and people will buy it.
Building (roughly) plants 1 through 3 will be the hardest, take the longest, and cost the most, but after that—assuming you use the same design throughout—you can build quite quickly. Japan averaged ~5 years between beginning of construction and commercial operations:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
France build 58 reactors in 25 years:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_France%27s_civil_nu...
It helps if you don't start and stop projects/plants: many cost over-runs are because of wishy-washy decision making.
> When’s the last time anyone built a nuclear plant in 4 years?
2004 to 2009 is five, Tomari 3 in Japan:
He said they were people who were provably lying about the very existence of the problem that they now claim nuclear will fix (in 2 decades, at great expense).
See also: think of the children.
Here's a leading hint: the main campaign page in Australia for the pro nuclear push is the Murdoch press. The political party leading the push is the conservative party, and it is being led by the right wing conservative leadership against the wishes of the middle ground and soft-left side of the party.
You aren't wrong that any movement has some stink: this movement is lead by the nose.
The great problem with that is it drowns out any chance for any considered debate on the future of Australia's energy mix - there is an engineering case for a small percentage ( <10% ) of nuclear generation in parts of the Australian grid.
Nuclear in OZ is estimated at ~$300+ compared to $150+ for firmed renewables as a "unit cost" and we can be confident of the renewables cost because it's been experienced while the Nuclear one is speculative and as has been pointed out in this HN thread, highly subject to cost overruns in legal and construction delays
(the size of the unit isn't the point, the difference in the outcome in terms of charges to be recovered from the system is)
If in the future SMR prove economically viable and we can save on transmission line builds to have some serving major cities, I'd be fine. I would have no problem living near one, or near ANSTO's lucas heights facility.
The current "go nuke" campaign in the Oz has nothing to do with energy, and a lot to do with increasing shareholder value and in objectifying the labor/green parties as "anti technology" and even "anti working class" if you define the working class as engineers and miners, not hairdressers and farmers
> The current "go nuke" campaign in the Oz has nothing to do with energy,
Yep - purely political, in many ways Australia simply doesn't have the breadth or depth of skills here to efficiently carry this off; I'd be happy to see "drop in" pre built "Westinghouse" reactors ( insert appropriate company ).
There's much in parallel here with Australia's other current nuclear debacle:
https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/03/25/aukus-nuclear-submarine...
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%...
Is there though?
The global percentage required is about that, and is mostly existing nuclear plants.
And every year the projections for renewables tick upwards, leaving less room for anything else. So by the time any new nuclear actually arrives it'll be even less needed.
And that's global, where industries already exist, working plants already exist, and where some small percentage of people live in near polar regions.
Australia has none of that.
I think this is probably true. Their reasons for promoting nuclear power have nothing to do with that.
of course one shouldn't "dismiss good ideas just because you dislike the people saying them", but if your country doesn't already have a nuclear industry then it's too late to get to net zero with nuclear.
of course you can plan for using it later, but you can't get distracted by it now or fall victim to scams by well-funded and malicious groups.