Coal, gas and oil is full of externalities which are nowhere near being correctly included in the nominal prices of these commodities. Arguably neither are solar panels and wind turbines.
If we move to renewables, over 100 years there would be 0 reason to have a single nuclear plant running anywhere, apart from making nuclear weapons fuel. I just wish we were now where we would/will be in 50 years in terms of renewables technology maturity and its spread.
So, if electrification cannot be done on this, industrial society as we know it is doomed, and nuclear cannot save it. Unless you're thinking we're going to have nuclear reactors in our mining vehicles...
Uranium has to be mined.
It really does appear that believing in renewables as a way to perpetuate industrial society at scale has become part of some people's identity, and regardless of any actual study on the subject, this belief appears to be a necessity to be part of non-deplorable human society.
Nuclear reactors are a safe way to electrify as much as can be and reduce the body blows societies are going to take in the coming decades. Some industry is not doomed, and social stability can be maintained, at some cost, if and only if we use all technologies at our disposal for what they are, and calculate the risks and rewards right.
Facts are sadly unmoved by any faith, and the real path forward as painful as it may be, is only open to those that accept that they can always be wrong, and will always have to learn more.
Please pfdietz cite your sources and please prove me wrong.
The lectures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgy0rW0oaFI&list=PLMDQXkItOZ...
The (already provided in a previous comment) EROEI study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X1...
The one specific slide about the low EROEI of solar panel is in: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BJvoAm__WVtumohStkF4KwT66cS... The 2.7 value is from 2019, as calculated for Spain, this one slide is in english. Panels have not made a x10 EROEI explosion in the past 5 years, a lot of the energy costs in that calculation are independent of panel technology improvements.
Elsewhere, with more reasonable boundaries, one finds EROEI is much higher, and has been found to be better than for fossil fuels. An EROEI of about 8 for PV in Switzerland, for example (and Switzerland is not the sunniest place on Earth; the EROEI would be even higher at those locations; it also becomes higher as renewable technology advances, for example with longer lifespans and thinner PV cells.)
That EROEI can't be bad should be obvious. Energy is only a small fraction of the cost of making renewable equipment. If EROEI were bad then renewables could not be as cheap as they are. That they are being sold so cheaply debunks the EROEI arguments directly.
And isn't coal responsible for all that concrete nuclear plants there are built with? The vision of a nuclear-powered world implicitly assumes concrete will produced in some other way; this is a harder task that replacing coal electricity with renewable electricity.
If the world and industrial civilization are going to survive, it's either nuclear or renewables.
Also note that you seem to mean new-renewables (wind and solar) when you write "renewables". At this point and for a long time the large-scale and frequent renewables are hydropower and biomass, that are renewable, but are not new.
What would a disinterested observer make of this?
They'd look for objective evidence to determine which of us is closer to reality.
For example, they might look at what the world is doing right now. What is being installed, renewables or nuclear? Presumably those who are spending money are trying to get the most bang for the buck.
If we look at that, renewables are soundly trouncing nuclear. Even in China, that country that is held up as the last best hope by nuclear advocates. New installs (which reflect the current conditions better than total installed capacity, which is a lagging indicator) are massively in favor of renewables there and elsewhere.
The nuclear advocate who explains away nuclear's troubles as due to the selective omnipotence of greens (selective, since they don't seem to be doing nearly as well on other issues) must really stretch their conspiracy theorizing to explain such a widespread result.
I will also note that you didn't explain how nuclear can power mining in a way that renewables can't.
Show me one model that does work with any technology, please, any source anywhere I promise I will review.
Mining to get renewables to anything like the GWHours needed is very significant, look at the graphs in the data I provided
Instead of any kind of data that would show me how I am wrong, all the data I am getting is downvotes and wordage.
Are these arguments what led you to the belief, or are they rationalizations you've tried to construct after the fact? They don't appear to be things that a skeptical, rigorously rational person would have come up with.
For copper, as with many other underground resources, discoveries eventually decline over time. It's similar for oil: the peak of annual discoveries of "conventional" oil fields—everything except shale oil—was 60 years ago, and 50 years ago for gas.
Additionally, the copper content in new mines tends to decrease: it is now about 0.5% on average (it was ten times higher a century ago). This means that to extract one kg of copper, you need to extract, crush, and process 200 kg of rock. The higher this number, the more energy is required for a mine to maintain the same production.
For the current production of 20 million tons of copper per year, a few billion tons of ore need to be processed annually—more than for iron! Incidentally, over a billion tons of rock is also processed annually to extract 3,000 tons of gold.
The International Energy Agency has long pointed out that copper production may start to decline in the coming years (even though more is needed in its decarbonization scenarios). A 15-year forecast is reasonably relevant because it takes this long—or even 20 years—to bring a new mine into operation after discovery.
It's not just about permits: roads must be built, a power network for high-power machines, water supply and wastewater treatment facilities, processing plants, etc.
Thus, the production from existing and planned mines is fairly predictable over the next one to two decades. Is it serious if there's less copper?
Maybe, for electrifying 1.5 billion two-ton vehicles. For having only half or a third of that fleet consisting of small vehicles (an electric bicycle requires 100 times fewer materials than an electric car, and there are, of course, intermediate possibilities), maybe not.
For energy, the economic world has not understood that the signal of its decline won't be an indefinite price increase but a contraction of "physical" production (happening in Europe since 2007). A decline in energy means a shortfall in production, hence incomes, leading to less energy but less solvent consumers, with a new price that could settle "anywhere."
For a systemic metal, it will be the same: reduced supply will result in decreased material production, but not necessarily an indefinite price increase. The economy is primarily about the physical!
Of course if we ignore the need for batteries. Renewable advocates conveniently forget to include that in the calculus (there’s active action in progress to strip mine the ocean floor creating untold ecological damage to try to keep up with requirements for batteries). And they also tend to ignore the fact that renewables can’t be used in various industrial processes. Nuclear fission remains the best option for large scale power and is still cheaper than directly comparable renewables with batteries included despite being divested from raising overall costs.
Hopefully we get fusion soon and renewables and fission become a thing of the past.
They are needed for transportation, whatever the way we produce electricity (even with nuclear).
> renewables can’t be used in various industrial processes
Why? There is no difference between nuclear-produced electricy and renewable-produced (or battery-stored)-electricy.
> Hopefully we get fusion soon
Does some optimistic scientist hope to enjoy an industrial prototype before 2050?
Indeed. So? There are more and more vehicles, and the average amount of electricity they store (reflected by their autonomy) grows. One of the reasons is well-known: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
> no forward movement
This isn't true, many experiments are running ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid#Research )
Even EDF, France's leader of the nuclear industry, field-experiments it: https://www.edf.fr/entreprises/transition-energetique/mobili...
> JB Straubel, then chief technology officer of Tesla Inc, discounted V2G, claiming that battery wear outweighs economic benefit.[87] A 2017 study found decreasing capacity,[88][89] and a 2012 hybrid-EV study found minor benefit.[90] A 2015 study[91] found that economic analyses favorable to V2G failed to include many of the less obvious costs associated with its implementation. When these less obvious costs were included, the study reported that V2G was an economically inefficient solution.
... didn't at the time (circa 2015) like V2G because it competed with its Powerwall project. This is a completely obsolete consideration: https://zecar.com/reviews/2024-tesla-model-y-bidirectional-c...
> decreasing capacity
This is true. However this is to put in perspective with the financial impact: batteries are (from a technical viewpoint) more and more able to cope with this and charging during cheap electricity times then partially discharging when electricity is expensive will reduce the overall cost of the vehicle.
> A 2015 study
Obsolete.
I understood that one benefit of molten salt reactors is that the fission products were easier to process or burn.
Edit: "MSRs enable cheaper closed nuclear fuel cycles, because they can operate with slow neutrons. Closed fuel cycles can reduce environmental impacts: chemical separation turns long-lived actinides into reactor fuel. Discharged wastes are mostly fission products with shorter half-lives. This can reduce the needed containment to 300 years versus the tens of thousands of years needed by light-water reactor spent fuel."
Artillery was fired around Zaporizhzhia when the reactors were still online, Ukraine is currently invading Russia near Kursk where two of the mad-graphite RBMK reactors are still operational today. I hope they try to avoid those when blowing stuff up. Because they don't have containment vessels.
And then see how difficult it is to clean up an accident like Fukushima where the containment mostly held. It feels like playing with fire.
Much safer to burn the rest of the planet instead.
We're just adding more risks to the mix. And externalising more issues to the future which is how we got into this crisis to begin with.
> externalising more issues to the future which is how we got into this crisis to begin with.
is this the "nuclear would take 20 years" we've been hearing for the last 60?
You’re comparing rubber ducks and battleships
The others created big headlines, but the real human casualties were smaller than a bad traffic accident.
The core argument here is "you never know!". And that argument is always true. But people only apply it to things they're afraid of.
Presumably these are from very long-lived isotopes, so will continue to emit at this rate for the forseeable future.
In contrast, the fission products (from Chernobyl) tend to have short half lives of the order of a few days, giving a short burst of radiation. Caesium 137 looks to be the most troublesome isotope in the long term (with a half life of 30 years). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Relative_is...
The great thing today is that we don't need to accept radioactive releases from either nuclear power or coal. Simply build the cheap scalable option instead: renewables.
You mentioned China. Last year, China brought more than 100x more PV on line than they did nuclear (on a rated power basis; levelized basis maybe 30x as much.)
Please name an industrial ready-to-deploy fast reactor. AFAIK there it doesn't exist, therefore its (after decades of expensive R&D in many nations) just a vague hope, not a potential part of the solution.
Russia BN-600 is obsolete and was so leaky (sodium!) is isn't even funny. It was superseded by the BN-800 which started in 2014 and has various problems (most related to fuel, the core of this challenge). This path is officially paused (a planned BN-1200 project didn't start). If it works satisfactorily, as you implicitly claim, please state why it isn't declined (other units built) while Russia tries another breeder architecture (BREST-300, using lead instead of sodium)?
India is even farther away, encountering major difficulties with a prototype ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_Fast_Breeder_Reactor ).
China is also exploring ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFR-600 )
Nothing industrial and ready-to-deploy, as I wrote it.
Phénix is not pertinent, it worked perfectly but was a research reactor (small, expensive...).
Superphenix never reached the industrial stage, even the enterprise exploiting it (NERSA) never said so. They simply declared that they were willing to continue and hoping to reach the goal (13 years after first reactor divergence, 24 years after project start, with gigantic amounts of money poured at the project).
So, if your fathers started coal plants, you close them, stop paying for them and can forget about them. this is not at all the case if your fathers started nuclear plants, not only do you have to pay, your children have to pay, all their lives, and all your grandchildren, and so on.
What bugs me is the tendency of proponents to pretend that the decision is no biggie. It is a biggie. At least understand that, then we can have a rational discussion about it!
Energy storage solutions and infrastructure for generating synthesized fuels (hydrogen and others) will require investments, but those investments will be a gift to the future. We will bear the burden of building the infrastructure now, but future generations will benefit from what we have built.
Nuclear is the opposite, we get the benefits and the future gets the burden.
Nuclear costs are way higher than anyone has ever accounted for and they are kicked to future generations. This is a fact and we can do better.
The right thing to do is surely to spend now on tech that continues to pay dividends in the future. Maybe we ourselves won't see the benefits directly in our wallets but the future will.
I suspect you don't live in e.g. Tuvalu? Or in a country experiencing desertification like Spain?
My issue is that this statement is wrong, though. All the greenhouse gas from coal that was burned in the past, and all the coal we're still burning, will still be around and is still going to slowly bake the planet we live on for the next millenia [1].
Effectively, coal emissions are only considered this way because, after we stop producing, we stop seeing the smokestacks and we forget that the byproducts are still there. This is also true for most other pollution sources: industrial sites with heavy metal pollution don't magically clean themselves when the factory closes. WW1 battle areas are still deeply polluted and some are still unfit for agriculture. "Eternal" chemicals are never going back to the oil well. And, for us technologists, ewaste does not magically disappear [2].
It's really maddening that some people develop an acute perception that radioactive waste is "forever", but somehow fail to understand that the same is true for a very large part of the waste we create now, for which nature hasn't (over millions of years) evolved organisms able to eat them.
[1]: https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/climate-cha... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41765334
So at least 15 years of effort to get one plant online during which time the country will continue to pump CO2 to the tune of 70% coal in their electricity mix. CO2 that will, as you say, continue to bake the earth. Nuclear is a terrible choice for decarbonization.
OR, you put the nasty and long-lived radwaste into (say) lead barrels, and bury those below some nice, deep, easily-monitored ocean trench. Absolutely nobody's going to accidentally dig those up. And if the effort needed to intentionally do so would be greater than the effort to brew their own fresh radwaste, then nobody will bother trying that, either.
Also note my phrase "bury them". Radwaste is not some magical Sealed Evil in a Can. If bound in compounds with substantially higher density that the ocean sediments, and emplaced a few tens of meters below the sea floor, then gravity will quite strongly discourage its upward migration.
Geological studies of the locations where the nuclear waste is burried show that it would take millions of year for the isotopes to escape.
Meanwhile, the effects of low dose radiations on health are vastly exaggerated. Every industry is releasing pollution in the ecosystem that are way more toxic and dangerous. And these get barely any attention for some reasons.
https://archive.nytimes.com/green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/...
> Absolutely nobody's going to accidentally dig those up
Read about the concept of vertical migration
If so, Wikipedia's first para makes it clear that that migration occurs at vastly shallower depths than an ocean trench.
To achieve the same effect of leaving a barrel of nuclear waste in the middle of the sea (hoping in vain that nothing will move from there) we could better to put nuclear dust in the way of a stampede, or leave the barrels in the beach before the tornado season. Would achieve the same effect but saving much more money.
*EDIT - I'm referring to the US-centered anti-proliferation lobby. Though "national security establishment" might be a better term. And yes, its ability to influence French, Japanese, etc. domestic nuclear power policy is much more limited.
These is a constant whataboutist argument from nuclear apologists, but it falls apart when examined closely, as all pro-nuclear power arguments do.
1) System cost
Sure, it's high. That's because we spend huge amounts of money on energy. ANY system to replace fossil fuels will be expensive, in the trillions of dollars.
But if this is an argument against renewables, it's an even bigger argument against nuclear. Because nuclear is much more expensive than renewables.
2) Recycling
At worst, we can bury the stuff. Recycling it is not necessary. After all, the amount of material is small compared to everything else we do in society, and it's not some special kind of waste (like high level nuclear waste) that requires some particularly unique handling.
3) Lithium and cobalt
Lithium is abundant. If you hadn't been paying attention, the price has been crashing, as it pretty much always does after a price spike of a mineral resource, when the price spike encourages investment to increase the amount available. As for cobalt: probably the same is true, but why do you think cobalt is needed?
4) poison the environment
This is just emotional bullshit. No, renewables would not "poison the environment". You beclown yourself with this nonsense.
5) absurdly high energy cost
As opposed to those still burning fossil fuels where they are foisting off the cost of the externalities on others? Ignoring those external costs doesn't make them go away.
In any case, the place that's normally pointed to is Germany, where they made a large investment in renewables from 2009-2012. Solar was much more expensive then, and they are still paying that down. But the costs of renewables crash with time, so pointing to past expenditures is grossly misleading. Going forward renewables will be much cheaper. That's why we're seeing so much investment in them now globally.
One can tell the intellectual barrenness of the pro-nuclear position when you have to resort to this sort of deplorable nonsense.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Not all opinions are created equal.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/01/the-man-in-...
So to clear the air I propose you look at this substantive set of answers:
https://youtu.be/Z4teA8ciuRU?si=9L-_bHawmM8MI5UA (cc to english should work ok)
After having gotten 0/5 in terms of correctness on actual facts, maybe tone down the sneer?
No, at scale recycling doesn't become a "real issue" in the sense of being a showstopper. It would be nice if it could save some money (recover aluminum frames, say) but it's only a "nice to have".
"High enough concentration" is dependent on technology. Like other mineral resources, one can expect lithium extraction technology to keep ahead of demand. The doom and gloomers on this sort of thing are never right. Stationary storage doesn't even require lithium; there's a large variety of storage technologies that could be used instead (including some like pumped thermal that use nothing more than cheap materials like common steel.)
> solar panels, read the docs please
Empty nonsense. Solar panels are not toxic. Please stop making things up.
> again, it's the EROEI, maybe panels and wind scrap a 3
Completely wrong.
About your "Completely wrong." I hope you take the time to consider sources, for example:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X1...
As you wrote about "well debunked" studies then please please^3 debunk this one. Thank You
> But if this is an argument against renewables, it's an even bigger argument against nuclear. Because nuclear is much more expensive than renewables.
I agree that the nuclear power stations are more expensive per kW of generation capacity. But that does not mean that the overall system must be more expensive (fallacy of composition?). It would depend on the quality of the intermittent resources, their location, demand profiles, cost to build, cost of transmission and storage and so on.
Production costs: renewables are way cheaper than nuclear ( https://www.lazard.com/media/xemfey0k/lazards-lcoeplus-june-... ) and this is not a new trend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
Last but not least... there is no running project.
Therefore writing "US nuclear capacity has the potential to triple from ~100 GW in 2024 to ~300 GW by 2050." in a title is for sure easy, however there is now sign of such potential to become anything else.
As long as the source is not consuming any fuel nor producing much waste any EROI greater than one seems OK to me.
> why they assume 4h storage?
AFAIK because they consider that electric vehicles' batteries will be useful (through V2G).
> What you'll do in case both solar&wind will be low?
AFAIK the idea is to interconnect at continental scale, as this is useful whatever the type of sources (even if it is mainly nuclear), then to benefit from diverses wind (or even solar) regimes.
> overcapacity will need to be subsidized heavily because excess solar capacity will be unused a lot of the time
Not with an electric fleet of vehicles, to begin with. Green hydrogen will also absorb part of it (for industrial applications, electric backup...).
> if it'll be used less and less, youll need subsidies
This will kill nuclear (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udJJ7n_Ryjg ).
> AFAIK because they consider that electric vehicles' batteries will be useful (through V2G). - lol, kinda interesting assumptions, especially considering that it'll still imply additional costs
> AFAIK the idea is to interconnect at continental scale - lol, at such scales that sounds as a bigger pipedream than cheap h2 emission free generation
> if it'll be used less and less, youll need subsidies
> This will kill nuclear (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udJJ7n_Ryjg ).
This will kill basically any peaker plant be that fossil, hydro or nuclear. That's kinda the point. With a renewable grid you'll need huge overcapacity of both production, peaker and storage that'll be rarely used. No matter the technology - any of it will get extremely expensive the higher the renewable share will get. Even Norway starts facing similar problems since they import cheap renewable in peak production, meaning their hydro is earning less
No, your "Advanced Nuclear - Pathways to Commercial Liftoff" plays the usual "we benefit from failures because we learn" card, and concludes with promises "The next AP1000s would also realize substantial cost reductions". This is not IMHO solid, especially given well-known pertinent experience (about gaining from experience!), such as https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
V2G seems solid to me and to most experts (even France seriously studies it!).
The continental scale ('copper plate') is an official objective in many continents, and already actively and for quite a while pursued: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Network_of_Transmissi...
> With a renewable grid you'll need huge overcapacity
Not at continental level ( https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-... )
Unit 4 proved that work units in a given project, sharing the same lapse of time and space, can benefit. Extrapolating it to a whole set of projects is another matter (see the referenced study).
> a continental scale grid
Already exists and is continuously extended: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Network_of_Transmissi...
> dunkelflaute
Its real impact (surface, frequency, duration...) is vastly overstated. In a glimpse: https://x.com/JonaSalKupper/status/1707035071394238889
> huge overcapacity
You didn't source this. This vastly depends on many parameters. Moreover as renewables machines are cheap, recyclable, and can be installed in unused places (or even protect them, as offshore wind does for oceans) you have yet to show which challenge this 'huge overcapacity' stems.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/sweetwater-wind-t...
https://cen.acs.org/environment/recycling/companies-recycle-...
The same is true for solar panels. These are NOT unique problems to renewables, of course, except they tend to produce more waste compared to their energy output than other methods at the moment.
Recycling is a big area of research, but is not yet especially CO2 positive for solar versus just burying them, and non existent for wind.
The point isn't that the problem is impossible, but that these things are overlooked and green washed.
> The same is true for solar panels
I doubt so, details will be welcome.
Instead, they supply 1/5 less power than they were originally rated for, which means the system needs to be expanded or replaced to do what it was provisioned to do.
This next round of criticism is also weak, it seems to me you just have an axe to grind.