More nuclear energy means less mining
thebreakthrough.org
thebreakthrough.org
[1] : https://www.cnet.com/home/energy-and-utilities/how-to-make-s...
[2] : https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
[3]: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=228&t=3#:~:text=Be....
[4]: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity#....
Outside most extreme events nuclear plants in general are repaired if some component fails.
Folk in my area replaced panels on their 15yr old install. I didn't get hard metrics from them but, they said it's worth it. Got some state provided rebate too.
Solar on contrary means "just" install some panels and batteries with relevant inverters and you have energy, at least a bit for a potentially inconstant time. p.v. + storage means quickness and small distributed scale, nuclear means slow and big. Here the issue:
- we need MUCH MORE nuclear, but it took some decades to build it
- we need to being able to adapt in a changing world where populations will move en masse and keep moving for a little while, with wars and so on
Long story short we might be late for nuclear, at least in the current state of available tech today (small reactors are a promise, but economically are a failure today) and we are too far from good enough energy storage for renewables.
Or less mining on getting the uranium plus digging the nuclear waste into an intermediate storage, plus digging it from the indermediate storage that‘s been recently flooded, plus throwing it somewhere else, and so on, for the next 100k years?
https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2024/04/choose-your-own-radiat...
There are two types of reactors that hold the promise to burn a higher fraction of the fuel: thorium based thermal reactors and uranium fast reactors. Many such reactors are MSRs, but so are other reactors. Honestly, you can think of MSR as an orthogonal dimension.
In any case, to answer your question about which designs moved forward. You can think of a design moving forward if the company that promotes that design has applied for NRC approval, and how far they are in the approval process. Here's the page where you can find these details [2]. There are 12 companies listed there. Any north-american company that is not listed there, you can think of their design as "pie-in-the-sky". Among the 12 companies, there are 3 molten salt reactor designs. One is in a reasonably advanced stage (the Kairos-Hermes), but that is a classical MSR: it uses uranium and thermal neutrons, so there are no ambitions to breed new fuel or anything. That's good, you want a design to be as conservative as possible if it were to get an NRC approval. The Terrestrial Energy design is also thermal, the only fast MSR is Terrapower's Molten Chloride Fast Reactor design. However, Terrapower is in a much more advanced stage with its Natrium reactor, its MSR is basically on the back burner. My guess is we won't hear any news about this design for at least 10 years.
However, the Natrium design of Terrapower has some promise, and quite solid funding. It is a sodium-cooled fast reactor. If it succeeds, such designs can burn U-238, and that is somewhat of a game-changer.
[1] https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/STI-DOC-010-4...
[2]https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/advanced/who-were-...
This seems like a nitty-gritty detail argument between, as the article describes them, “traditional” and “pragmatic” environmentalists. Does it matter who wins? Does either have the bribe money to challenge petrochemical companies?
As far as I’ve heard, the main obstacle to overcome for nuclear power is that the permitting process is too slow, because the public is irrationally frightened of the stuff. On one hand this is not a fair problem for nuclear power. On the other, unfortunately, the uninformed general public is making all the decisions, not people who care about % differences in quantities of rocks mined.
Plants that are completed on time and under budget are rare and they also suck up billions if not tens of billions of dollars. The amount of entities with that kind of investment power is very small, and only a few of those are interested in nuclear power because of the delays and cost overruns.
Small modular reactors are supposed to fix at least the “tens of billions of dollars” problem but there aren’t any working examples, and the closest one I am aware of (NuScale) pulled the plug on its demonstration project, so the benefits of SMR remain theoretical.
Compare that to a solar or wind project where individual units are small so it’s easy to scale up, scale down, and iterate through economies of scale.
Mines are job providers, so at least some policymakers are actively opposed to reducing it.
I don’t get it at all. I mean, who would want to work in a coal mine? I’d think the change of coal mine worker to solar panel maintainence would be a massive QoL improvement. Go around outside. Get some sun and fresh air.
But I guess we can’t tell people how they want to work.
What if we compare the count, wage and type of labor?
It's not like one has jobs and the other has zero.
The arguments usually brought up are the consequences of accidents, the lack of long term solutions to nuclear waste, it’s too slow to build (we need to reduce our carbon footprint now, not in 15 years), and that it is too expensive to compete with sun and wind.
My personal position - let's allow building both; nuclear and solar/wind are complementary, not exclusive; but the government funding should mostly go to solar/wind at the moment, as they are the fastest & cheapest way to reduce CO2 emissions in the places, where these resources are available. And there are a lot of places like that.
...is being obstructionist and deceptive. Nuclear is already a thing.
Conservative opposition are pushing heavily for nuclear energy in a country that has more access to renewables than almost any other.
And what happens is that the arguments over why you need it, where the reactors would be placed etc. are causing doubts from investors that long term, bi-partisan support for renewables exists. And investors need stability to invest.
It's an insidious plan that is actually working.
So consensus shouldn't matter because if Joe the hairdresser or Jane the mechanic decide they, personally, want to do renewables, they can. Just by themselves. Hell, in most Australian cities ... I bet it would work in anything but the CBD.
Even small scale needs stability in government support because you need to invest in the grid and energy storage to handle the excess in power generated by solar panels during the day.
"Investing in the grid" means expanding capacity in order to meet increased electricity demands as electric vehicles replace fosil fuel vehicles and increasing switching and grid intelligence to better handle a more distributed supply and demand.
More solar + more batteries and thermal storage + better grid are all things that grow hand in hand.
Of course investment in the grid is required to meet large scale population demands.
But you can also invest in the grid and have excess energy shifted to other regions that can make use of it.
One thing solar excels for is providing shade and reducing water loss from the soil. Australia might reclaim some land that way.
"Nobody is going to propose a tax on all Americans and the cynical side of me says, yeah, we kind of know that but it gives us a talking point that we can say, well what is ExxonMobil for? Well, we’re for a carbon tax,"
Source: https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2021/06/30/exxon-climate-ch...
It would have to be offset with some kind of tax rebate, but it’s harder to explain a more complex program like traffic to the voters.
I might have a naive view of this but a dual strategy would seem to make more business sense. I mean — every dollar invested in lobbying for fossil fuels seems to have a higher expected value of money if it was spent on expanding renewable and nuclear operations.
Edit: In addition, if the environmentalits were to "win", that would turn essentially the entirety of these companies' existing capital into 0 value. So not lobbying to stop that is extremely dangerous.
But someone is still doing that investment and will eventually reap the returns, so it still seems short sighted for existing energy companies not to try and outcompete them.
>that would turn essentially the entirety of these companies' existing capital into 0 value.
Honestly, I'd be kind of happy if these companies invested in renewables (even with government subsidies) and were lobbying the government to buy back the fossil fuel infrastructure that isn't needed anymore...
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/V-Gloves-are-off-in-fossi...
To help this they can get governments to pay subsidies for ongoing operations in the name of grid stability. The plants can also be used in theory with bio gas, so subsidies for construction is also on the table.
In Europe, natural gas even got declared as being green and the energy of choice to stop climate change. They also managed to get a bunch of exceptions added regarding oil, especially when used in industry and shipping. Coal was really the only thing fossil fuel companies needed to sacrifice in order to have a profitable future.
There are only 436 nuclear reactors in the world (for comparisons sake, there are more than 2400 coal power plants worldwide, and the US alone have more than 980 natural-gas power stations (2022).
And yet this small number of nuclear reactors produces 10% of global electricity.
> becoming exponentially cheaper
"Exponentially" is very unlikely. It may become somewhat cheaper, at first, if supply increases. Which btw. is also true for nuclear power.
But then what? We cannot power the world with solar alone, for the simple reason that we cannot store that much energy during the dark hours. Hydro storage is geographically limited, and batteries, well, let's just say the entire world output of Lithium over the last 3 decades didn't make enough to even store the electricity the US alone requires in a single day. And that is before be electrify further.
Yes, we should build more solar. There is no reason to have roofs not covered in panels. But all solar can do, is help. It is not the solution to our energy demands.
Not “at first” but demonstrably over time and ongoing. Yes it will cease eventually but it seems like that’s not near.
> But then what? We cannot power the world with solar alone, for the simple reason that we cannot store that much energy during the dark hours. Hydro storage is geographically limited, and batteries, well, let's just say the entire world output of Lithium over the last 3 decades didn't make enough to even store the electricity the US alone requires in a single day. And that is before be electrify further.
Powering the us on batteries for a full day is not a realistic goal. But batteries are already cost competitive and shuttering gas peaker plants.
> Yes, we should build more solar. There is no reason to have roofs not covered in panels. But all solar can do, is help. It is not the solution to our energy demands.
Rooftop solar is actually more expensive than nuclear actually. Or at least a year or two ago.
If you build a bunch of nuclear you will not be able to compete on price with cheap renewables during the day. But you can’t just turn a nuclear reactor on and off so you’ll have to still generate and operate at a loss. Which means to be profitable you have to raise prices to make up for it in the off hours. Which, in turn, makes you less competitive and makes it more commercially viable for batteries.
Tl;dr, market forces will punish you. Renewables and batteries and fossil fuels as backup are the clear winners
No, but I can regulate its output up and down. You don't have to turn a reactor off entirely, its output can be regulated up and down without shutting down completely.
> and makes it more commercially viable for batteries.
The problem with batteries isn't commercial viability. The problem is physical availability. There simply isn't enough Li in the world to make Solar as powerful as it would need to be to stem a majority of our energy requirements, and as of now, we don't have another battery technology that would be suitable.
At a macro view, the whole thing isn't an economic question.
Here are the three facts:
1. We cannot continue with fossil fuel power as we did before (because climate change)
2. Solar isn't up to the task of taking (among other reasons because we don't have the storage required)
3. The worlds energy demands are increasing. Maybe it could be made to grow slower, but reversing it is unlikely
So, what options does that leave us with? Wind suffers from similar problems as Solar. Hydro is geographically limited, as is Tidal. Geothermal is likely too weak. Fusion power doesn't exist yet. And as cool as a Dyson-Swarm would be, that's even further away than Fusion.
So, what technology remains?
2) there are competing materials for new battery tech besides lithium
3) battery capacity deployed per year is growing exponentially
4) when you have large over supplies of energy you can pursue hydrogen. Green hydrogen should be at parity with grey hydrogen in less than a decade. Not cost competitive with just using fuels or batteries for utility scale, but slowly getting there.
5) commercial viability absolutely matters. Subsidizing an expensive source of energy rather than building more and more capacity for cheap energy is a bad strategy while using fossil fuels as a crutch in the interim is a bad strategy. Running a nuclear plant at low capacity craters its financial viability.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/electric-vehicles-wor...
> there are competing materials for new battery tech besides lithium
And which of those are mass-production ready and are being deployed? Maybe one day, one of them will. Until such time, this argument is about the situation as-is.
> when you have large over supplies of energy you can pursue hydrogen.
The over supply would need to be truly enormeous, because Hydrogen is a cryogenic gas. It needs to be pressurized and cooled, both of which requires a constant expenditure of energy which is lost as usable power. It also carries [safety risks][1], and is [infamously hard to keep under control][1].
> commercial viability absolutely matters.
Long term, preventing climate change matters more. Alot more.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_safety
[2]: https://gizmodo.com/nasa-hydrogen-leaks-sls-rocket-space-shu...
Sodium ion batteries are doing just fine. The drawbacks are not significant. Lithium is simply cheap enough to be preferable at the moment and likely will continue to be.
> The over supply would need to be truly enormeous, because Hydrogen is a cryogenic gas.
It is. Negative energy prices at peak generation times are increasingly a thing.
> Long term, preventing climate change matters more. Alot more.
Having 5x more energy available to do useful work, per dollar, is going to enable a lot more… useful work. if you’re willing to increase the cost of energy by 5x, then you should probably also be willing to just raise the price of energy during off generation hours to try and align usage to generation and mitigate the battery necessity altogether. Because that would STILL be cheaper for customers than the high prices you’re introducing by suggesting we go for nuclear
Again, this discussion is about the as-is situation. If and when Na-ion enters mass production on a comparable scale, I will happily discuss it.
> Negative energy prices at peak generation times are increasingly a thing.
That does not indicate that we over-produce to a degree that would make H2 as a storage vector viable. Plus, alot of over-capacity has more to do with lagging infrastructure (e.g. Germany has enormeous problems getting SOlar power to where it is needed) than it has with actual net-overproduction.
> f you’re willing to increase the cost of energy
Again: Economic concerns lose lose long term to environmental and physical ones.
Your complaint about hydrogen seems indefensible in light of industry forecasters all saying hydrogen is likely to grow pretty darn fast over the next two decades
> Again: Economic concerns lose lose long term to environmental and physical ones.
My dude, Economics is the allocation of scarce resources. The most efficient way per dollar to remove carbon from our systems is by definition the most efficient way to do so.
Given a fixed budget, choosing a less efficient method will result in removing carbon more slowly. Even if you want to say “fuck the budgets man”, those newly inflated budgets are still better off spent on the more efficient tools
Since we were talking about economic viability:
"The global Lithium-ion Battery Market in terms of revenue was estimated to be worth $56.8 billion in 2023 and is poised to reach $187.1 billion by 2032" [Source][1]
"The global sodium-ion battery market was valued at USD 0.5 billion in 2023, and is projected to reach USD 1.2 billion by 2028" [Source][2]
Please explain how a difference between 0.5bn and 56.8bn constitutes "comparable scale".
[1]: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/lithium-ion...
[2]: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/sodium-ion-...
1) they are mass produced which was your original point of contention
2) they are growing very fast
3) 1:100 is pretty comparable. Utility storage batteries are only commercially feasible within the past several years. Sodium batteries aren’t a great choice for EVs so those numbers aren’t apples to apples as we’ve largely been talking about utility scale power.
4) the biggest reason sodium is not growing even faster is because lithium is better and cheaply available in large supplies.
And so we are here again. If you have x billion dollars, and you want to remove the most carbon; you would very likely remove more carbon, faster, by building a battery plant of either variety than building a nuclear plant.
The limiting factor of our clean power right now is in fact just hooking it up to the transmission grid tbh
Edit: downvoting someone you disagree with is not cool. Go outside, touch some grass.
Sorry, your confidence betrays you here. Please, look up the altitude of Helsinki. In January they get 6 hours of sunlight per day and it's almost universally cloudy winter-time.
Nuclear & wind are better options for Finland and they pursue both ([1], [2], [3])
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Finland
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loviisa_Nuclear_Power_Plant
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/10/19/future-of-ener...
There are other problems with solar that make it beneficial to offset with other energy sources. For example, lack of ability to generate any energy for 50% of the year, and reduced efficiency depending on weather.
Wind has its own problems as well, but are map to somewhat different circumstances than solar, so is a good supplement for some of the power.
Nuclear has its own problems as well, but unlike wind and solar, many of those aren't inherent to the source, but to how we've developed methods to harness it and deal with produced byproduct (waste). I suspect a first principles approach to nuclear energy might eventually be a very useful source of energy. I think it would be beneficial if we still kept some nuclear around to keep developing it towards a better source. It does well to offset some of the requirements of other systems, which are limited by time, geography or climate.
And Finland absolutely could provide energy to its entire population with renewables excluding nuclear. They haven't and that's their choice, but you cannot claim with any legitimacy that it's not possible because of latitude.
thanks!
> And Finland absolutely could provide energy to its entire population with renewables excluding nuclear. They haven't and that's their choice, but you cannot claim with any legitimacy that it's not possible because of latitude.
That was not my claim. I would appreciate if you re-read my comments in this thread.
Because wind works for Finland and it's a good idea for them to invest in it (and they do). But putting solar & Finland together is nonsense.
A few years ago went looking at producing hydrogen by electrolysis for ammonia production. There was the usual 'well maybe' stuff but nothing showing anyone was doing anything concrete. Few days ago checked a again and there are a bunch of corporate news items about building electrolysers and hydrogen storage to replace natural gas reformer units.
The problem the fossil fuel companies have is they can convince low information stupids that oil, gas, coal and nuclear are the only viable technologies. But they can't convince the accountants.
For that matter oil companies invested in battery tech as well. For the most part they just want to appear like they are doing something. But their green washing shouldn't discredit the green tech itself.
Nobody wants to be the next Kodak.
When it comes to building out a deep water oil rig they have no competition. But when it comes to set up an offshore wind farm marine services companies have the experience, equipment, and are nimble.
Build solar panels? That's manufacturing and there is a whole other industry that makes commodity manufactured goods at scale. Batteries and solar panels are both extremely high volume commodity goods.
Neither can "pure renewables" in many places. I acknowledge that this article is 10 years old but... https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/nancy-pfotenhauer/2014/...:
> "For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit."
I'm an electrical engineer and am personally mixed on wind and solar. I'm in a Canadian province that has fantastic solar and wind potential but doesn't have the geography for effective pumped hydro storage. Battery storage, currently, is so ridiculously badly priced compared to nuclear. For the same price you can get a battery plant with 8 hours of 300MW capacity, or a SMR with 18-24 months of capacity before scheduled downtime for refueling. Even if you're in the "nuclear always goes over budget" camp, that SMR would have to go dramatically over budget to cease to be cost competitive.
I'm quite convinced that in the medium term it's pretty much got to be wind + solar, hydro, natural gas, and nuclear as a mix. They're complementary! Wind and solar are great at providing "free" energy into the grid when they're producing. Hydro is great but there's only so much available for a given geography without having other negative environmental effects. Natural gas is good for handling peak capacity quickly for situations where the other sources can't ramp up quick enough. Nuclear's great for providing steady baseload.
During the winter my province only gets 8 hours of sunlight per day and it's often enough -40 outside. Right now the vast majority of our homes are heated with natural gas; on a per kWh hour on an annual basis the gas company sells 3x the energy that the electricity company sells. If we're going to drop our carbon emissions dramatically then we're going to need to convert to either electric heat or district heating (probably via massive geothermal plants, which we can get heat out of but the reserves aren't good enough for electricity generation). And if we do switch to electric heat we need to do so with zero fear that we're going to freeze when we have a prolonged -40 degree stretch of calm cold 8-hour days.
As far as the battery capacity and pricing goes, that math was done using the Wikipedia pricing for Tesla Megapacks quite recently.
The vast majority of sources I've found for trying to actually compare prices typically involves levelized-cost-of-energy (LCOE), which as far as I can tell completely ignores the intermittency problem; that's where I did a dive into the battery storage prices and found them eye-wateringly bad.
I'm strongly not opposed to wind and solar; I'm just strongly suspicious of anyone who suggests that, in my climate and geography, we're capable of replacing all of our electricity generation and heating (currently natgas) with solar and wind without some form of baseload long-term backup. I prefer that baseload backup to be nuclear and not coal or natural gas, as is the current status quo here.
I did just do a relative cursory search to try to find some current numbers but the majority of articles had theses like "wind is struggling due to inflation and interest rates but is going to bounce back this year!" so that's... not super useful.
Fossil companies fund both camps. They are especially interested in closing-down existing nuclear plants, as it immediately creates a big market for them, but it's also useful to them to delay deploying new solar/wind capacity (and thus, funding the wait-for-new-nuclear or even wait-for-fusion campaigns)
Solar is the solution now because America dithered and fumbled nuclear energy in the 60s - 80s. Now nuclear cannot be built because every estimate has been 1/10th the actual cost for plants built in this millennium. Glow rocks are dead - use fusion power from the sky.
Then they’ll attack nuclear and, maybe, promote deep water thermal differential ammonia generators or geothermal sources.