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It's sad that some people would rather see the climate change than to accept that nuclear is not that dangerous. Not only Chernobyl had one of the worst designs, which would not be approved today, but its impact is also widely overstated.
I grew up in the area affected by Chernobyl (Kaluga oblast) and I had classmates evacuated from Chernobyl itself. For the first 10 years, it was important to have geiger counters when you go shopping on farmer's market, but that's about it.
Compare it to the billions affected by the heat today. Nuclear scare is a part of the reason these people suffer.
That said - if solar & wind + batteries are cheaper and available in an area, that's a good way to go. Just don't claim that nuclear is bad. And hopefully microreactors are cheaper and faster to deploy than classic nuclear reactors, and they have a chance to be useful for the areas without large reserves of solar and wind.
The explosion of the reactor at Chernobyl was a gargantuan disaster which still has to be managed. An exclusion zone of roughly 1,000 sq. miles was created. The USSR suppressed information about the disaster, but it killed some thousands of people, we don't know how many, and it cost an unimaginable amount of money and resources to clean up and manage over the decades following.
According to Wikipedia [1]: > In 2018, Ukraine spent five to seven percent of its national budget on recovery activities related to the Chernobyl disaster.
Granted, Chernobyl was a faulty design, but there was also the disaster at Fukushima, which also required the creation of an exclusion zone.
Most projections show slow linear growth in fission power .. meanwhile exponential growth in Wind and Solar plants, which is what we need if we ever want to displace gas and coal power plants.
If nuclear fission was such a safe and cheap form of power .. why did we build coal and gas power plants over the past 70 years ?
If nuclear could have provided most of our power economically .. it would already be widespread and we wouldn't be a +1.5C today.
If there were no Chernobyl nor Fukushima .. people might think nuclear was safe.
Are these the same projections from places like the IEA that have renewable growth suddenly flattening (something they've hilariously been doing for years)?
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/...
I think a reasonable projection of fission is one of long term decline. Even in China the installed capacity curve for nuclear is flattening.
Nuclear power output expected to break global records in 2025
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/24/nuclear-...
And that is before any of the turnaround past 2022 has had a chance to take effect.
And the turnaround after 2022 has been massive. If you haven't significantly updated your priors since before 2022, you are vastly behind the times.
1. We already had the COP28 declaration to triple nuclear output.
https://www.energy.gov/articles/cop28-countries-launch-decla...
2. France
Until March 2023, expanding nuclear power in France (the "poster child" for nuclear) was actually prohibited by law. Absolute capacity was capped at current levels, and the law mandated a reduction to below 50% of total.
This law was repealed in March of 2023. With something like a 75% majority, so overwhelming cross-party support.
Which also largely explains why Flamanville was such a disaster. France knows how to build reactors quickly and cheaply: you build lots of the same design in an overlapping fashion, and you do it continuously, so you maintain the industrial capacity and workforce know-how. Flamanville was the exact opposite on all those counts. And the EPR is apparently a bad design. I mean, good once you have it, but way too complicated to build. Which is why it has been discontinued by the manufacturer. There will be no more EPRs, the successor EPR2 is vastly simplified.
3. UK
While the anti-nuclear lobbyists "know" that Hinkley Point C proved the non-viability of nuclear beyond any doubt, the UK government apparently didn't get the memo. They announced plans to quadruple nuclear generating capacity in January 2024, so well after the HPC problems were well-known.
4. Poland
Is getting into nuclear, in a big way. 2 Westinghouse AP-1000 (the Vogtle disaster) have been ordered, contracts are signed and site preparation work has commenced.
That's just the tip of the iceberg, the paperwork for 2 more reactors from South Korea is apparently being finalized and there are a bunch of SMR projects, in part by private companies who want them to directly power industrial processes (process heat?)
5. Japan
Was going to get out of nuclear. Now reactivating plants and will build new ones once the existing ones are activated.
6. USA
Has identified the need for ~200GW of new nuclear capacity. Is currently figuring out how to create the industrial policy required to make that happen.
7. Netherlands
Wanted to build 2 new reacts. Voted in early 2024 to build 4 instead.
8. Sweden
Was getting out of nuclear. Now wants to build 10 new reactors.
9. China
Tripling of capacity with just what is in the works now (20+ building, 70 planned). Currently accelerating the build out.
10. India
On track for tripling of capacity by 2031.
11. South Korea
Was getting out, now expanding.
12. Italy
Got out of nuclear late 80s. Government policy is to have the legal framework for new nuclear in place by the end of this legislature.
I can go on...and on, but I think you get the picture.
Hmm...you think it's ridiculous, but it's from the US government's energy.gov website:
https://www.energy.gov/lpo/articles/sector-spotlight-advance...
"The United States will likely need 200 gigawatts of new nuclear generation by 2050 to meet national decarbonization targets. "
This was also the official policy statement of the United States at the Nuclear Energy Summit hosted in Belgium in March 2024.
"For the USA, John Podesta Senior Advisor to the President for Clean Energy, Innovation and Implementation, said the summit was a 21st Century update for the Atoms for Peace vision, and referenced the commitment by countries at COP28 to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050, which he said means 200 GW of new nuclear capacity in the USA. He said a start had already been made and added that the country would also aim to help tackle the climate crisis by helping other countries across the world "build safe, secure, reliable, nuclear power"."
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Leaders-back-nuc...
The problem with nuclear was never technical, it was always political. Technically, it's a slam-dunk. For example, the entire nuclear industry cost France € 228 billion. It produced 11000 TWh of electricity. That's cheap. 2.07 Ct/kWh cheap. And reliable. And clean. Quick, too, France converted their electricity to nuclear (and virtually no fossil fuels) in 15 years, from a standing start.
And of course, all that action is accompanied by statements, yes.
So the fact that the politics have now changed is significant, even if "renewable bros" find that hard to accept.
My sweet summer child, you are in for a world of disappointment.
We hear rosy plans like this all the time. They don't come true. In China, for example, nuclear construction has been way behind the statements, and this was before the latest massive reductions in PV and (particularly) storage costs. India has had a long history of all talk, little action on nuclear, and now PV is exploding there. In the US, generous federal subsides and loan guarantees were and are going unused. The problem is getting anyone to actually commit, and they don't because nuclear just doesn't make any financial sense.
1. There has been a lot more action than just "politicians saying things"
2. Politics was the only thing holding nuclear back. Thus the change in the politics is, obviously, significant.
3. Nuclear construction in China is ahead and accelerating.
4. India is not talking, they are building. The 2031 goal is stuff they are in the process of building.
5. Nuclear is cheap. France built its nuclear industry for € 228 billion and got 11000 TWh of electricity out of that. 2,07 Cents/kWh
6. Nuclear is not expensive, but it has been extremely risky, mostly because little to none has been built and also because the best plants are very large. We have now built some, so that's been a tremendous de-risking.
For example, both Ukraine and Poland bought Westinghouse AP-1000 reactors. That's the reactor that just went online at Vogtle-3 and Vogtle-4. So are Ukraine and Poland nuts, buying into a design + company with this track record?
Nope, because those plants have been built, so we know we can build them. And we also know what can go wrong, because pretty much everything did. And we know how to not do the things that went wrong.
For example, one of the biggest drivers of delay and cost was the fact that Westinghouse started building before the plans were actually completely done.
Problem is that that they had to submit those plans to the NRC before they started building. And then build to those plans. In theory, this process is a Good Thing™ because it allows a standardized design to be checked once and then built repeatedly, whereas previously the regulations were ad-hoc per construction, making each reactor a custom build, a one-off with no economies of scale.
Alas, it turns out that the plans they submitted, due to not being complete, were not actually buildable as submitted. Oops. So they had to get almost 200 changes approved, and other times had to tear up stuff they had already built, and start again.
We now have designs for the AP-1000 that are buildable. Because they have been built, Vogtle-3 and Vogtle-4 exist and are delivering power to the grid.
We also built or are building a bunch of EPRs. There, one of the major problems (apart from FoaK and no experience in the industry) is that the design simply is difficult to build. So unlike the AP-1000, no more EPR orders. As a matter of fact, EDF has discontinued the EPR, and instead have created a vastly simplified design the EPR2. Which loses some capabilities, but should be dramatically simpler to build.
So different things went wrong, and thus there are different corrective actions.
Engineering.
Perception. Coal has killed far more people than nuclear ever has, despite the compounded blunders that led to Chernobyl and Fukushima (storing MOX on TOP of the reactors? Really?).
Wind is a fine thing to build out as a supplemental power source, but it can never satisfy baseline needs, and isn't even putting a dent in replacing fossil fuels -- at best it is helping to marginally slow the expansion of fossil fuel reliance as we add more and more consumption of power with the advancement of technologies across the world. The anti-nuclear movement was heavily funded by the fossil fuel industry from the get-go, and their propaganda has been more successful than they could have dreamed of.
But these perceptions are changing. Even Greta and her green minions are going pro-nuclear these days. It's a slow boat to turn, but there's a sign we might just turn this ship around to avert at least a portion of the looming energy crisis.
Comparatively, renewables are set to add 800GW this year. Yes that will translate to "only" about 130GW of average power which is an energy equivalent of about 150GW of nuclear capacity, but that still means replacing all of the world nuclear (372GW) in 2.5 years.
Wind already produces as much overall energy as nuclear (around 2550 TWh/y) and solar, 2/3 as much and will equal nuclear in probably 1 year. And almost all of this capacity has been built in the last 5 years for solar and last year 10 years for nuclear, with deployment speeds fast accelerating.
There's simply no comparison. Nuclear has already lost.
In the 1980s wind & solar had already lost; and by a substantially bigger margin. Yet here we are. The potential for nuclear energy is still substantially greater than that of renewable power and eventually one of these companies will find a way to exploit that potential if we let them look.
Nuclear works fine. So does Wind and Solar. All three have proponents and opponents and which has more pace, or likelihood of deployment is not subject to their actual ability to supply power, but to external forces which do not relate to that power at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation
They are OK as an addition to dispatchable sources, which is why the vast majority of industrialized nations are now planning for a mix of nuclear and intermittent renewables.
A popular political strategy to avoid calling attention to the new thermal power stations is to not call them power stations. They are reserve energy, to be used when intermittent renewables do not produce enough.
The objection to overbuild and storage is economic more than innately about turbines.
Dispatchable and Base load are classic models of nuclear advocacy which are fine, but not unanswerable.
Solar overbuild and batteries alone generally can't handle the burden. You need overbuild and batteries and gas backup. And if you want that gas backup to be hydrogen, you need even more overbuild and electrolysers on top. So quadrupling the very expensive infrastructure that you then have mostly sitting around idle.
You can't get rid of the intermittency problem. You can only move it around, somewhat, at enormous expense.
And the generating capacity required you need is also insane. And that's a quote: "...which challenges the economic sanity of 100% intermittent renewable targets."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...
Your comments about intermittency are demonstrated to be wrong by detailed modeling. Using the tools available (various kinds of storage, transmission, demand dispatch, efficiency) intermittency can be dealt with at an overall cost lower than trying to use nuclear at its current cost.
I believe that link you are pointing to assumes batteries are used for long term storage. This is a common error (if error it is rather than deliberate deception) that inflates the cost of a 100% RE system considerably.
The "insane" comment is just a handwave. The world is going to spend something like a quadrillion dollars on energy this century. Renewables are very likely going to be the least-cost way of powering the world, when the $1000/tonne externalities of CO2 are included.
The situation is similar in most of the developed world.
> Your comments about intermittency are demonstrated to be wrong by detailed modeling
Actually: they are not. All the detailed models show this exact problem, such as the paper I linked.
> The "insane" comment is just a handwave.
No, the "insane" comment is exactly the conclusion of the people who do the detailed modeling.
As this paper (and many others) show, renewables are great as long as they are used for part of energy production. Trying for 100% renewables is the part that's insane.
I recently had a close look at one of the "studies" by Fraunhofer that are frequently touted by renewable advocates as showing how feasible 100% renewables are.
I can't imagine they actually read the study.
For Germany, they say we need 750 GW of Wind/Solar + 500 GWh of batteries + 150 GW of gas plants + the electrolysers to produce the gas. In addition they also assume a massive increase in efficiency and thus reduction in consumption.
Our current electricity generation needs are around 70 GW. OK, some of that is for electrification of other sectors, but for that they also assume massive synergy effects.
This is fantasy-land material that makes the Brexiteer visions of "sunny uplands" appear to be voices of restraint and reason.
That's primary hydro. As I already told you, that's not pumped hydro. You don't seem to be understanding this point, so let me explain in more detail.
Primary hydro involves exploiting natural water flows, extracting energy from water that falls at higher elevations as it flows down to lower elevations. It is limited by these natural water flows, and the need to be on the rivers in which the water is flowing.
Pumped hydro, on the other hand, creates its own water flow. It does not need to exploit natural precipitation. It can recycle the water it uses, getting much more energy flow per unit of water (until the water seeps or evaporates away, but that is slow.) It can be placed in locations that aren't on rivers. As an example, consider this PHES project in an arid part of the Great Basin in Nevada:
https://www.whitepinepumpedstorage.com/
Notice the graphics with two reservoirs, constructed on flat areas by surrounding them with earthen walls, sitting in the middle of a desert without any permanent rivers in sight.
The potential for this sort of pumped hydro is enormous anywhere there is sufficient vertical relief. In Australia, for example, the potential is some 100x what would be needed for a 100% RE grid. They've built a global PHES geographical database for finding places around the world (where they have data; Russia is excluded for example).
http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/
Go play with this; the opportunities are vast.
PHES is not suitable for flat terrain, so it can't be a complete solution in general, but to call it maxed out is very wrong.
> Actually: they are not. All the detailed models show this exact problem, such as the paper I linked.
Let's look at a review paper.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
"With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive."
> For Germany, they say we need 750 GW of Wind/Solar + 500 GWh of batteries + 150 GW of gas plants + the electrolysers to produce the gas. In addition they also assume a massive increase in efficiency and thus reduction in consumption.
Battery storage is approaching $100/kWh (not cells, the whole turnkey system) in China now. So, 500 GWh would be $50B. If the batteries have a lifespan of 20 years that's $2.5B/year (+ interest). Can you not afford this? That's less than half of what Germany spends on pizza.
Also, consider how many GWh of storage in cars would be needed if all the cars in Germany were BEVs (I get about 3 TWh).
Yes, you made that claim. However, it's not true. The page is about all hydro in Germany.
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/themen/klima-energie/erneuerb...
You also need geography for pumped hydro. Somewhere to pump the water to.
> Battery storage is approaching $100/kWh
"Approaching". A Tesla Megapack is more than 3x that.
It's funny how EE fanboys just extrapolate trends into the future. At the rate nuclear power plants were getting cheaper they'd be free now. Well, had we not stopped building them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Of course, this is very little battery, because that particular Fraunhofer study did most of the backup using gas. With 150 GW of gas fired plants.
150 GW.
Let that sink in. That's more than double the current total demand. Just for backup of the 750 GW of intermittent generators. No wonder that scenario doesn't need all that much battery.
Now add the cost of the electroylysers needed to create all that gas.
> "Approaching". A Tesla Megapack is more than 3x that.
If your argument depends on selecting expensive rather than cheap versions of a technology, I'll do the same with nuclear. Let's use the most disastrous expensive nuclear efforts as representative, shall we?
Or, we could just acknowledge that once a lower price point has been demonstrated for storage, the market will move in that direction. Storage, unlike nuclear, doesn't experience out of the blue cost escalation, and many forms are easily shipped worldwide.
> Of course, this is very little battery, because that particular Fraunhofer study did most of the backup using gas. With 150 GW of gas fired plants.
> That's more than double the current total demand.
The gas generators would not run in baseload mode; they'd be for seasonal and Dunkelflaute coverage. Most energy from the renewables would go either directly to the grid or through batteries and then to the grid. The fraction into gas would be modest.
BTW, simple cycle gas turbine + generator is about 1/20th the capital cost of a nuclear plant per unit power (combined cycle, 1/10th). So 150 GW is not nearly as much as you might imagine.
It doesn't. It depends on available versions of a technology. Not "approaching" versions of a technology.
> Read it again. The limits it discusses are on hydro generation, not hydro storage.
That turns out not to be the case. Try reading it again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> The gas generators would not run in baseload mode;
That is EXACTLY the point. You need to overbuild enormous amounts of very expensive infrastructure triply-redundantly and then have it sit around idly most of the time.
So all of this highly expensive triply-redundant and massively overbuilt infrastructure has to be financed by subsidies, as it can't be paid for by producing electricity. As it isn't actually producing any electricity most of the time.
To quote the study again: "...which challenges the economic sanity of 100% intermittent renewable targets."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...
> about 1/20th the capital cost of a nuclear plant per unit power
Yeah, not even close.
Anyway, I think we've reached the limit of what can be accomplished by discussion.
Let's say if we take all the (normal, not "pumped") hydro we have and increase number of turbines on them 10x, or 100x, and make them reversible, that will easily cover all the storage needs in terms of power. Of course, it will not produce more actual electricity than currently because the water in dams in finite, but it will produce almost as much as desired in terms of storage volume. Essentially it's up to "annual hydro output in TWh x 365". In reality, less because hydro output fluctuates in different seasons with the rainfall/river water release, but still... Isn't it way more than we could ever need?
Don't get how pumped hydro can ever be "maxed out".
Playing devil's advocate: once you've run out of places with enough height difference to build one upper and one lower reservoir. It's going to take a long time (there are many more places suitable for pumped hydro than places suitable for traditional hydro), but it's possible.
> Let's say if we take all the (normal, not "pumped") hydro we have and increase number of turbines on them 10x, or 100x, and make them reversible, that will easily cover all the storage needs in terms of power.
That's usually not feasible. Pumped hydro needs both a lower and an upper reservoir, while non-pumped hydro normally has only an upper reservoir, and discharges water directly into a river. That is: even if you made the turbines reversible (or added pumps in parallel with them), there would be no water for them to pump upwards.
For example, Europe is quite far to the north and that means very cloudy winters over most of the continent. If the wind blows, fine, but you can also have several days without wind, when both wind and solar north of the Alps generates basically nothing.
Oh yes, the Spanish meseta will probably still be sunny, but the amount of solar that would be needed to power the rest of Europe for several days probably won't even fit there (not to mention how robust would the pan-European grid have to be to tolerate such flux of energy over thousands of kilometers and ten country borders); and if it does, what will you do with all that extra power in summer?
The fact that real (as opposed to nominal max) output of wind and solar fluctuates in a 1:100 range based on factors that are hard to predict more than a few days in advance is really hard to square with the demand for stable grid. It is a big, fundamental problem.
A simple cycle combustion turbine power plant has a capital cost of maybe 5% of a nuclear power plant; combined cycle, about 10%. So one can substantially back up the entire grid with these at a capital cost low compared to that of powering the grid by nuclear.
That infrastructure is expensive.
And will be sitting idle most of the time.
And, nuclear is not dispatchable either, because it can't be regulated, it's either "on" or "off" (and going from "off" to "on" takes several days due to xenon poisoning).
https://www.energy.gov/articles/cop28-countries-launch-decla...
And you're wrong about nuclear. Brief intro:
Those who plan to use both nuclear and wind/solar don't do it for the dispatchability.
That turns out not to be completely not the case. As in not even close.
First, modern nuclear power plants can do load-following just fine, you often just don't want to because their variable costs are so low that it just makes more sense to keep them running.
Second, the problem with intermittent renewables is that they can't provide power when you need it. Even when you don't load-follow as much, that is not the problem of nuclear.
> As soon as you've ramped up a nuclear reactor to full power, the weather has changed
That's a problem of the intermittent renewables, not of nuclear. You don't make the clown-energy the primary and force everything else to adapt to that.
> Those who plan to use both nuclear and wind/solar don't do it for the dispatchability.
Yeah they do. Dispatchability in terms of grid demand, not in terms of compensating for intermittency.
So, I read a bit and this seems to be actually true, just looking at it from a technical feasibility standpoint [1]. (This is actually the first time someone refuted this point when I made it. ;) )
> Second, the problem with intermittent renewables is that they can't provide power when you need it. Even when you don't load-follow as much, that is not the problem of nuclear.
I didn't say they were, though, and this is not an argument regarding your premise.
> Yeah they do. Dispatchability in terms of grid demand, not in terms of compensating for intermittency.
From a technical standpoint that is true, but, as you've mentioned above: Load-following is not something you can do with nuclear, as the LCOE then quickly meets the other sources of energy ([1], chapter 4).
> That's a problem of the intermittent renewables, not of nuclear. You don't make the clown-energy the primary and force everything else to adapt to that.
Yeah, it's just that that the grid does not end at the gate of the nuclear power plant. Maybe a bit less snark would be helpful in a discussion that can be had based on available data. Referring to solar and wind as clown-energy essentially ends all discussion. Otherwise, people could also bring up arguments such as the limited availability of fuel and the fact that thermal energy generation itself would become a driving factor for global warming if we would still depend on it by the end of the century.
[1] https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
Yeah, you kind of did:
"Nuclear is almost as non-dispatchable?"
That "almost as" implies not just similarity in degree (which we saw isn't true), but even greater similarity in kind, because otherwise the two are just not comparable in the first place.
"My iPad M4 is almost as fast as a Ferrari" doesn't really make sense, except as humor.
> limited availability of fuel
Not true.
> the fact that thermal energy generation itself would become a driving factor for global warming
Also not true.
Nuclear is only "dispatchable" if you are willing to burn epic, titanic, gargantuan stupid amounts of money.
The only reason to build civilian nuclear power is to aid the provision of skills and an industrial supply chain for the nuclear-military industrial complex. Not the climate. Not cheap, clean power. DEFINITELY not dispatchability.
Nuclear is cheap. According to the Court of Accounts in France in 2012, the whole nuclear industry had cost € 228 billion by that time and produced 11000 TWh of electricity. 2.07 Cents/kWh.
Renewables are expensive, in particular if you want a 100% renewable grid.
There is very little overlap between nuclear and civilian nuclear programs. Lots of countries operate power plants without nuclear weapons, and Israel for example has a military reactor yet does not use nuclear power commercially.
Of course, their plants are aging out in the meaning that those costs are spiking immensely. 2012 is the absolute sweet spot.
The LCOE of nuclear power is ~5x solar and wind.
As a client state of the US, Israel can rely upon and tap the US's nuclear supply chain and skills base.
Its main "not nuclear but not far off it" rival Iran does have nuclear power though, precisely in order to be able to build a nuclear weapon.
Only if you do something insane like the infamous Lazard study that was used to come to this "conclusion": they took a single power plant and used that as "the cost of nuclear".
That alone is enough to disqualify those numbers, but it gets worse. As their one single data point for nuclear, they didn't pick a random sample, but instead they hand-picked the most expensive commercial nuclear power plant in the world: Vogtle-3. That one screwup is their entire dataset for nuclear.
And of course LCOE doesn't actually cover the full cost. When you look at system cost, the renewable get even worse, at least when you try to 100% renewable. As you approach 100% renewables, the costs rise almost asymptotically, "...which challenges the economic sanity of 100% intermittent renewable targets.7".
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...
Citation? As far as I know they come out with new numbers every year and they dont just base it on one nuclear power plant.
>And of course LCOE doesn't actually cover the full cost.
It doesnt count the cost of load following, but neither the LCOE for nuclear power. Gas plants are generally used in France to supplement nuclear power when it isn't sufficient to cover their power needs or when they are taken down.
And of course, 5x cheaper = 2-3x cheaper when paired with storage under conservative assumptions.
>As you approach 100% renewables, the costs rise almost asymptotically
If you make some really bad assumptions about how storage will be handled (e.g. assuming you need 2 weeks of lithium ion batteries) sure.
>Citation?
This is v16, April 2023, the most recent I could find,
https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april...
Page 5, Footnote (3)
"Given the limited public and/or observable data set available for new-build nuclear projects and the emerging range of new nuclear generation strategies, the LCOE presented herein represents Lazard’s LCOE v15.0 results adjusted for inflation (results are based on then-estimated costs of the Vogtle Plant and are U.S.-focused)"
So v15 is the same. v14 has been withdrawn.
What's really funny is that this footnote has always been there, in plain sight. Yet everyone quotes the Lazard figures as if they were gospel. And if they don't name the source, it's always Lazard anyway.
> [LCOE] doesnt count the cost of load following,
Maybe that as well, but more significantly, it doesn't count system costs, which rise dramatically as more and more of your power generation capacity becomes intermittent.
I don't see exactly where the cutoff is, but most of the industrialized nations seem to betting it's around 80%. The number will obviously vary depending on how willing you are to take on risk. Germany is currently going all-in on that, so I guess the other countries can wait and see how that experiment works out.
Classic nuclear did lose. Microreactors have a chance unless irrational fear prevents it from entering the game.
And yes, it gives me a great pleasure to see the rapid deployment of wind & solar installations.
How many microreactors do we need to replace all the world's final energy consumption (ok around 20% will be replaced by heat pumps net energy gain)? That's 11,000 GW of continuous power. A million 10 MW ones? How many people does that take to build and maintain across the entire value chain? Sounds like hundreds of millions people, easily 10 or maybe 20% of entire world's workforce. Not going to happen.
Solar is cheap because it has hit the economy of scale. Hell, fences made of solar (sometimes, not even connected!) are now more cheaper than those made of wood (at least, in some countries).
While I would not bet my money on the economic feasibility of nuclear microreactors, I would like them to have a fair market trial. If they do succeed, we all win.
For one-offs, the economies of size win, because then the economies of production don't actually get a chance to do their thing. So kick-starting is a problem. However, the problems with the EPR and the AP-1000 hint (do not prove) that we may be hitting size limitations.
The strategy that Rolls-Royce is pursuing seems promising: factory-built microreactors (so economies of production) that you can plop into existing coal-powered plants to upgrade them to nuclear. That way you reduce the issues with the non-factory-built parts.
There’s room for both solutions here, and frankly we need all of them because it’s not just about intermittency. We urgently need to quit fossil fuels entirely, implying nuclear energy sources are rolled out even if they cease to become necessary. That’s a lot better than ignoring the option and continuing to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and polluting our air.
Let me come and defend the California strategy for the energy production. As can be seen on the California grid status page ([1]) (click on the Supply tab, find batteries and play with dates), the battery capacity grew from negligible to something that eclipses imports in the peak consumption hours. I fully expect that in 2-3 years, California will have enough of solar + storage to stop firing its gas generators and importing coal electricity from Utah.
It's not like turning nuclear reactors on and off is trivial, nuclear power plants are not used as peakers either so either we use batteries or we'll rely on gas for a while.
That's why I'm advocating for nuclear. It's not meant to turn on and off -- fine, but it will buy us time to invest in storage infrastructure and develop plans to move those electrons around at a moment's notice. We're not there yet -- not by a long shot. Someone pointed to California as a leader in this field. Even if California manages to piece together something, do you think the 49 other states will follow suit? Certainly not with this federal government at the helm.
Speaking in general terms, I'm guessing these nuclear facilities probably have a capital runway of a few decades. Hopefully in that time, we'll have the storage networks and plans to offset peaks and cover intermittent lulls at the energy source.
The priority is to stop GHG emissions, and it's absolutely absurd to me that we're willing to sit on this technology from irrational fear while we poison our planet and our bodies. It should outrage people here how many die from pollution and how many more will die from climate changes. Enough is enough.
One of the objections against nuclear is that it takes way too long to build (for instance, the latest nuclear reactor near where I live has been on construction for decades, and is still far from being complete). Which means it can't help "buy us time".
A Tesla has maybe 70 kWh of batteries. There are 283 million motor vehicles in the US. Electrify them all at that rate and it's 20 TWh of storage, about 40 hours worth of the average US grid consumption.
It's not. Without nuclear scare the developed world electricity mix could have look like France's as early as the 90s, saving countless tons of CO2 emissions, and millions of lifes. Renewable are eventually coming but the tech took 40 more years to come, and that's how much we're late.
Of course reductions over “the last two decades” aren't due to nuclear, since France was already all nuclear two decades ago, duh.
Most of emissions reductions over that period where due to: improved efficiency (car engine, notably), but also massive disindustrialization unfortunately (which ultimately raised the emissions, since we now import goods produced with a more emissive electricity mix than us), renewables are only marginal in that regard (it mostly substituted nuclear production…)
The reasons why we shut down (or reduce the power, more often) of some nuclear plants during summer is because we set environmental limits in terms of river temperatures, to protect wildlife.
This is a good thing, don't get me wrong, but it's also am example of the incredibly high bar we put on nuclear operations on every aspects (which we could afford for years, because how efficient they are compared to pretty much any other industries). Another example of that is how coal plants are actually allowed to, and do, emit more radioactive elements in their neighborhood than what's allowed for an NPP.
I wish more industries (and agriculture) would be set to such high environmental constraints but in the meantime there's a clear imbalance against nuclear (the fact that leveling entire forests for coal mining or to install solar fields is allowed, despite being much more damageable in comparison to localized increase in water temperature never cease to appall me).
> including many private entities (Elon Musk for sure but quite probably, many much smaller ones, plus churches as well)
Modern (that is since the end of the middle ages) State exists because they enforce the “monopoly of violence”, there's no way any private individual could be allowed to have nukes. Even in Russia, the realm of Oligarchs' PMCs (well before Prigojin assassination) the State always maintained full control on its nukes (and when Russia was a failed state at the beginning of the 90s, the US worked hard to make sure it was the case). Private entities with nukes could only happen in the event of a complete collapse of the US as a State, in which case nuclear proliferation would be the least of your problems (and even then, I don't see China not intervening to stop that from happening anyway, like the US did in Russia)
There are a lot of countries that can match $25 billion in expenditure - Musk spent almost twice that on Twitter - and the real cost is probably lower. We've also got a lower-bound on the difficulty of producing missiles based on what North Korea can do.
It wouldn't even have been approved in the west (maybe Britain would do it, considering what they did with the Windscale piles) when it was originally built in the Soviet Union
PWR reactors that were built around that time in the west, which are already physically safer, have strong containment buildings in case something happens. Chornobyl had a more dangerous design no containment building.
The first thing that will be mentioned is that Chernobyl is an absolut outlier, an event that can never ever happen again or is so unlikely to happen again that it basically equals never in practice.
The second point typically raised is that Chernobyl wasn't as catastrophic as the public remembers. Despite the fact that a significant number of the 600k liquidators who worked on the cleanup received radiation doses that resulted in cancer one or two decades later with a statistical much higher chance, when compared to the overall population.
Then, they will argue that while green energy is beneficial, we need a combination of energy sources due to storage challenges. They often cite France as a perfect example, highlighting its successful use of nuclear energy alongside renewable sources.
Chernobyl only happened due to the way that particular reactor type was made, and even back then nobody but the USSR did it that way, and the accident ensured nobody else ever did. Its failure mode is not inherent to nuclear but specific to the RBMK design.
This new design has nothing to do with the RBMK.
Sure, you can say that the operators at Fukushima were negligent (they were), but that is something you have to account for. Negligence happens. Earthquakes happen. Hurricanes and tornadoes happen. Tsunamis happen. Wildfires happen. Terrorism happens.
IMO, the most important thing about Fukushima is not how much damage it might or might not have caused.
The most important thing about Fukushima, is that it counters the argument that "Chernobyl could only happen because it was a bad Russian design" (often with an implied emphasis on it being a Russian design, instead of just being a bad design). The Fukushima reactors were not of a "bad Russian design", and yet the containment was breached and radioactive isotopes escaped.
That is: before Fukushima, one could dismiss Chernobyl with a "this can't happen here". After Fukushima, it's harder to make that argument.
Fukushima was not as bad as perceived ...
Lets continue nuclear energy, just look at france.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not intending to troll. I'm honestly interested in new arguments, not the same copy and paste all over again.
Maybe not to them personally, but the reason they were needed, and died at all was the design.
The RBMK's design was uniquely awful in that it had a positive void coefficient that lead to it blowing its top off, lacked a containment building to contain the mess, and the graphite moderator burns in the air and spews radioactive material into the air. That's a whole lot of things that could have been done far better, and are done better in modern designs.
Better designs can still melt down, yes, but they lack such an awful failure mode. Liquidators were needed because the burning reactor was contaminating everything around it every second it was burning and uncovered.
Better designs are less prone to failure in the first place, and when they fail it's more on the side of being a very expensive problem. They destroy the reactor but they don't require throwing lives at the problem to contain it.
Human factors further complicate safety measures, as the potential for human error or intentional sabotage (e.g., a terrorist attack) remains a constant threat. Moreover, natural disasters are indifferent to the technology used; they can devastate any facility, especially with increasing likelihood in the context of climate change.
The only rational approach is to acknowledge that incidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima are, in a sense, 'normal'. They fall within the middle of the probability spectrum, which explains why they have occurred. The critical question is whether we are prepared to accept these kinds of accidents as a normal part of nuclear energy production. Much like car crashes, which no one wants, they happen despite all safety measures and are, statistically speaking, normal occurrences.
It's important to understand the way different kinds of power plants deliver energy:
- renewables (wind, solar, tides) are highly variable in their output and the amount of energy produced by each individual wind power plant or solar panel is very small; the output can be dialed down by turning off individual power plants but the amount to which it can be dialed up depends on the weather and is outside of human control
- fossil fuels (gas, coal, lignite) and bio fuels are highly dynamic in their output because you can literally just add or remove fuel to control it, making them very predictable; they are however also literally just burning fuel, i.e. producing energy by producing CO2, and usually have some costs associated with restarting (i.e. reheating) after being fully turned off
- nuclear reactors are extremely stable and can generate a consistent large amount of energy highly predictably; however shutting them off and turning them back on can take literal days and they usually need constant water supply for cooling in order to operate
In other words, water-cooled nuclear reactors are a bad choice in any region that may experience frequent droughts (which may be hard to predict with the changing climate) and they can best be understood as an "offset" for the baseline production.
A real-life energy grid is in constant flux. Loads change as appliances and machines get turned on or off, frequencies drift all the time and need to be readjusted and renewable production supply can change at a moment's notice.
If there is a high baseline that is currently served by fossil fuels, nuclear is worth considering as a replacement for that. But in most places where nuclear would be an option, that baseline can already be easily served mostly by renewables. What's needed is a way to time-shift the overproduction to a later time when renewable production drops. That means storage technologies, not power plants. And as a stop-gap fossils are better suited for filling in the gaps by idling at a low output and being boosted up as the output from renewables drops.
> [Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station] uses sewage; people are very regular at producing waste water.
Not really, no. Germany for example ran very successful campaigns for limiting water use in the 1990s and earlier and a lot of household appliances (shower heads, faucets, toilets) were made "more efficient". As a consequence some municipalities had issues from sewers running dry due to too little waste water and had to flush them with (clean) water to continue operating them.
This likely won't turn into a problem in the US in the near future but if your plan hinges on consumers being excessively wasteful with resources, you might run into some snags as soon as those resources become more limited or more expensive.
> Pumped hydro can work very well to smooth out variability from the baseload.
Yes, that's an energy storage technology that isn't a battery. The reason Switzerland makes heavy use of it is that it only works when you have a landscape with a lot of changes in altitude (i.e. large hills or mountains). It doesn't help in very flat regions. It's a great solution but it's just one solution. We need more. And we also need to improve the grids themselves.