It's a good thing to have a diverse portfolio of energy solutions to help avoid single points of failure in the network. Especially as something like solar continues to become more and more efficient.
https://www.wired.com/story/nuclear-power-plants-struggling-...
"Amidst a slow-burning heat wave that has killed hundreds and sparked intense wildfires across Western Europe, and combined with already low water levels due to drought, the Rhône’s water has gotten too hot for the job. It’s no longer possible to cool reactors without expelling water downstream that’s so hot as to extinguish aquatic life. So a few weeks ago, Électricité de France (EDF) began powering down some reactors along the Rhône and a second major river in the south, the Garonne. That’s by now a familiar story: Similar shutdowns due to drought and heat occurred in 2018 and 2019. This summer’s cuts, combined with malfunctions and maintenance on other reactors, have helped reduce France’s nuclear power output by nearly 50 percent."
France is about the best existing case for nuclear, incidentally.
Furthermore, nuclear plants don't need to be cooled with potable water. They can be cooled with ocean water, or with waste water. In fact, seawater cooling is the most popular form of cooling. Only 15% of nuclear plants are cooled with river water.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu....
> Nuclear power plants in Europe have been forced to cut back electricity production because of warmer-than-usual seawater.
And YES It is a problem which needs to be fixed, increases risk and costs. Don't say its not a problem.
Renewable generation itself is cheap. But what's expensive (or straight up unfeasible) is everything required to mitigate the intermittent production. Storage at the scale of tens of terawatt hours can't even be feasibly built with current technologies. Moving electricity over thousands of miles, across mountain ranges, would require HVDC lines to be constructed in very rugged terrain.
Renewables, due to their low energy density and specific weather requirements, need to be built in remote areas. This has led to situations where the grid cannot accommodate transmitting the amount of energy that proposed renewable plants will produce: https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...
People often cite the decentralized nature of renewables as an advantage. It's not. It's a significant disadvantage as it has a much bigger burden on the transmission infrastructure.
solar on roofs doesn't take anything from local ecosystem. Solar above car parks neither.
Solar on a home is such a simple, affordable and save solution, why are you 'non-fan'? which indicates you hate it? How much are you against it? So much that you prefer burning coal over it?
1. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph241/duboc2/
2. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...
And even in France this was only a problem because of their terrible delayed maintenance.
> France is about the best existing case for nuclear, incidentally.
No it isn't. France has done essentially nothing for 30+ years. Has done little maintained, their reactors aren't up to date.
The generation after the generation that built the reactor has always resented the system and wanted to rip it out. They literally decided to retire it by 2035 despite having no plan to replace it.
I mean, we aren’t disagreeing.
They’re the best case, and that’s not great. It a bit like true communism - real success is just over that next hill.
Lakes can dry up. So that's no better than a river I would think.
Either way, there are no fully safe and permanent sources of cooling water, is what I'm taking away from this.
Which ones? The North American Great Lakes, maybe? Anything else?
The Aral Sea was the third largest lake in the world. Within the human time scale of the last six decades, it's lost 90% of its area.
Hopefully this changes once every nuclear project isn't some complex bespoke thing that is likely to be late and over budget.
In fact, any country that has built them in mass figured out how to do it cost effective and quickly.
The reality is, its only not cost effective and quick when a country only builds a single reactor as a vanity project to keep the industry alive.
No country that seriously tried to quickly increase production with nuclear has failed.
"Yes sir, all went according to plan!!"
Even though it obviously did not all go according to plan.
The market doesn't want it, banks don't want to finance it, researchers aren't interested and startups can't afford to.
You can't fight against market dynamics when you're talking about capital expenditure this high.
Edit: also, sodium fast reactors have existed for 20 years. The R&D has mostly already been done for that tech. But the lack of projects make it stuck to TRL 8.
Thats just not the case.
Solar is used together with wind and storage.
And there are very little energy systems which rwould relia only on solar. More north you go, there is often water.
All moot points if they last indefinitely where you are, serious points if they don't.
And those dumb turbines and solar panels produce power at a fraction of the cost of nuclear. And every year they get cheaper and more efficient. Which is why the market has continually decided over and over again to go in this direction.
Sadly, also for a fraction of the time.
Until storage is solved in a satisfactory way, solar and wind will remain auxiliary. And the capacity should be in gigawatt-days.
But trying to hit some purity target of 100% is irrelevant. There are lower hanging fruit for decarbonisation than the last few percent of power generation.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
We need a battery that is safe and mandate every home to have one. Or provide incentive for it to be installed. We shouldn't wait for super battery to be install in a central place, instead every home could afford one an provide high quality electrical power.
Surely instead of a giant Water boiler in a lot of homes we could have a giant battery instead.
And storage is being solved as we have more batteries being deployed and grid supply capable EVs becoming more popular.
The market is deciding where money should be allocated and it's simply not going towards nuclear.
Because you'd get paid for it, and you like free money.
And it should be pretty trivial to set an option to ensure you always have the necessary range for your daily commute by a little bit before you leave your home.
And why wouldn't it be? The whole point here is for power companies to avoid buying as many batteries themselves, and their own batteries depreciate too.
This isn't hard -- the power company adjusts the price it pays minute per minute, and you set the threshold at which it is profitable for you, taking battery cycles into account. And it becomes a classic supply and demand curve -- it's Econ 101.
Do you think most Uber drivers drive for the $0.7-$0.12 = $0.58/mile or the actual cost of $0.70-$0.50=$0.20/mile? Sustainable Supply/Demand doesn't work until all costs are measured.
A Rivian battery is roughly $17k. Estimating 1500 charge cycles [2], that's roughly $11/charge. If you "give back" half a cycle, there's only $1.50 worth of electricity sold back, but its $5.50 worth of battery. Are you expecting to get paid $1.50+profit or $7+profit?
[1] https://www.stilt.com/careers/how-much-does-uber-pay/ [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Rivian/comments/10onhud/ev_battery_...
I have a 100kWh battery and can drive with this 3 weeks around without charging at all.
Why would i not want to leverage this?
And results from storage systems show that you can charge and discarge car batteries a lot more often without real degeneration when you do this a lot more stable than when driving.
Also it reduces the overall straine to the power grid. If you fill your cars battery with local solar, you are transporting less energy across the whole grid. If you discharge it locally, again less overall energy which needs to be transfered across the whole grid.
How this would work at scale? easy: in my city for example there is one local power company and they offer a charging solution for my EV. They have a few powerplants locally here too. They have everything they need.
Also overall solar energy prediction for the next day is very good. You can easily save a lot of money by leveraging this up front.
https://assets.solar.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Carbon-f...
I'd say 1-5% of coal is pretty good.
Also as we make the power grid cleaner and switch to electric vehicles, the CO2 used in manufacturing goes down.
Energy return in investment is <10x for solar, but more like 100x for nuclear. We have an energy budget to solver climate change. This is nothing to do with how much things cost.
Rooftop solar is worse, but 4x worse than wind/nuclear is still quite good (and non-rooftop solar is almost certainly better than that). Solar's energy return on investment is higher than 10x by my searching, and we should be mass producing all three technologies at this point.
I suppose that instead of eliminating the processes that produce large amounts of CO2, we should embrace them, learn to capture the CO2 where it's produced in high concentrations (like steel plants or cement furnaces), and either bind the carbon in non-volatile ways, like in plastics, or produce fuel from it again and close the loop.
Energy return in investment is <10x for solar, but more like 100x for nuclear. We have an energy budget to solver climate change. This is nothing to do with how much things cost.
And if we could build nuclear properly in a reasonable fast way around the globe, i would be for investing it heavily anyway i'm just not controling it in anyway and the only thing actually working is solar, wind and battery.
Low risk, broad spectrum investment (private, small companies, big, basically everyone can)
If you need baseload, and need it carbon-free, your only option currently is nuclear. It's terribly encumbered, but apparently it's still less of an impasse that large-scale electricity storage currently is.
What about geothermal, tidal, hydro, etc?
- Hydrothermal: great if you're in Iceland, or near Yellowstone, or other such place blessed by heated rock being close to the surface. Not as great if you need to drill 7 km to reach it.
- Hydro: great if you have a lot of mountains and rivers, like Switzerland or Norway. Harder if you don't, like in much of Texas, to say nothing of Florida.
- Tidal: great if you have a sea shore, preferably with narrow bays / fjords. But if you're in a place like Turkmenistan (one of the two doubly-landlocked countries), you resort to drilling for and burning methane %)
* most of the "good sites" have already been taken
* hydro will regularly silt up, requiring constant dredging
* hydro does not work as well or at all in drought conditions, which are increasingly common
* hydro dams require reservoirs, which in addition to the obvious disruption of the displacement of thousands or even a million plus people in the case of Three Gorges, can end up emitting large amounts of carbon as flooded vegetation decomposes.
* hydro is extremely disruptive to migratory fish. the success rate of interventions like fish ladders is in the low single digit percents. so you can get a bunch of carbon free power but also destroy an ecosystem in the process, not to mention any downstream fishing. and you see similar effects with other things that downstream users might want from the river like fresh silt.
That they don't work when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow is such a tired and trite remake.
Yes, they don't provide consistent output on their own, but storage exists. If you need electricity store it in batteries or pumped hydro. If you need it for heating store it in thermal batteries.
I think this varies depending on where you live. In California, Cal-iso has a really cool dashboard that seems to show that they have enough battery storage to hold about 90 minutes of daytime solar generation.
Definitely not something that can handle a fully cloudy day yet (presumably it's cheaper to keep some natty gas plants ready to spin up or import than to store more excess solar?)
We need 30x, or maybe 100x more storage. After that, we could live on renewables only, and keep gas-fired plants only as a disaster-recovery tool, like diesels in datacenters.
Until then, we need stable generation which does not spew CO2, which is, well, nuclear. It's hard to tell if ubiquitous cheap utility-scale batteries emerge in 5 years or 50 years.
It’s just insufficient. Solar + storage is cost competitive with nuclear. The problem is we have a bajillion needs for batteries, a Balkanised global market and wholly insufficient production forecasts over the next decade without gas or nuclear support. Voters seem to like gas. Private participants are choosing nuclear where they can.
Good to be a gas exporter for the next half century or so.
We need batteries that cost, say, $10 / kWh, are not (as) flammable, not toxic (not Pb, not NiCd), and don't degrade too fast.
With that, they can be large, heavy, have low specific charge, require high or low temperatures (within reason), etc. For a large utility-grade installation all these qualities are not hugely important. There is plenty of space under solar panels and around wind turbines anyway.
Before that, selling methane remains a very good business indeed.
China is building a lot more, too. It will probably have 80% of the world’s energy storage capacity in a decade.
We just don’t talk about them in the West for some reason. I guess battery tech is more appealing somehow but it’s not cheaper nor more environmentally friendly, all in all.
I hope that now once there are some serious users of power, they might build some of these plants, and then governments in the West will wake up to how good the plants are.
Cool. Yes. Now scale that by two orders of magnitude.
Here’s the kicker: getting approval to put an SMR in Wyoming is easier than flooding another valley or buying massive contiguous plots. Nuclear, if these guys can execute, which is a big if, promises to be as agile as gas generators. Our current default when we have energy shortfalls.
You might be thinking in an all-or-nothing way. Some solutions don’t need to scale well on cubic scales, etc. Moreover, there is hardly a reason pumped storage power plants can’t be done along side nuclear investment. There isn’t a dichotomy of choice, expanding use of both — or either — would benefit us all.
In fact, there are synergies between pumped storage and nuclear power — pumped storage allows nuclear to more closely meet the peaks and valleys of electricity demand throughout the day.
I think the biggest problem is that the energy sector isn’t making big plant investments due to capitalistic incentives. Why invest into plants if less supply of electricity means a higher unit price, and any state investment into private power companies can go straight into retained earnings/dividend? It would be improving things for technological advancement sake, against investor interests. Things work differently when the power companies are state-owned, of course. But that doesn’t completely flip the script either — technological advancement for advancement sake is still not often pursued. And it’s often even seen as wasteful by the electorate.
If we wanted technological advancement, we have several clear ways to achieve it, even without scaling the current technology exponentially. The problem is that we didn’t want it enough. But now some companies do.
The current baseline power demand forecasts from the DoE and IEA.
> Even storing 50% more energy this way
Is in the broad scheme meaningless. It would still require massively increasing our investment in gas generators.
I think it's good to think about investing into energy at these scales, it would open a lot of exciting doors for humanity, as Kardashev described. But we are at the very start of this investment and I think we need vastly different novel technologies to think about 100x, 1,000x, 10,000x, etc.
We will probably have to do with what we've got for now.
To replace fossil fuels we need to scale renewables by an order of magnitude. To do that without nuclear we need to scale storage by orders of magnitude.
My ancestors (along with natives) were run off from their valley home in PA when a dam was built. Out here in the Sonoran Desert, we've got a lake where the river should be, and the indigeneous (among others) are still pissed about the dam that was pretty much politically forced on all of us.
Conversely, there are groups who absolutely rejoice when a dam is decommissioned and demolished. It's party time when that land is reclaimed, and the water flows again naturally.
As with any land development, they require land, of course. But all power grid elements do.
Damn or not, pumped hydro requires flooding and then unflooding, turning the Alpinesque ecologies into tidal pools. That's disruptive.
The truth is that we are developing a lot of land every year for different purposes, from industrial to residential. The question is whether we will develop it for everyone's benefit, or for some yet another tax exempt monopoly's warehouse.
We could even build these plants in place of abandoned industrially exploited land, such as quarries, which conveniently already form quite large water reservoirs. We could reclaim a completely dead parcel of land and once we stop using the reservoir, it could blossom into a set of new natural ecologies.
Don't take the worst case scenario and present it as the only one when there is a world of possibilities.
Where do you think large, regular flows of water in natural valleys that can be economically dammed with large gravitational potential energy sit?
This is a consideration but I don’t think it’s the real reason we don’t consider these plants.
You’re flooding gorgeous landscape near high property values.
A nuclear plant in the USA takes oh about 18 years to build. That's 18 years of solar, wind, and storage growth and cheapening.
In my region wind generation dipped down to only 1pc of capacity for a day or two last winter which seems to be the floor as far as I can tell.
That tells me that we only need to increase capacity by 100x to get the coverage we want, and as a bonus we get all that surplus capacity most of the time to use on non-essential industry.
Try doing the figures, we can't scale batteries to cover these drops.
Especially on continent-sized electrical grid scales. We put the farms in windy spots, and we pick a variety of spots.
First of no one is saying its just wind and solar. You say wind, solar and energy storage (batteries).
And second, if more people would buy EVs, we would already have A LOT MORE storage available. My EV has 100kWh and could heat a whole modern build house for 2 full days in winter.
But we need, as you said, a baseload. Nobody is really discussing how to create this, they're just saying we should magically invent an incredibly dense battery (more energy-dense than hydrocarbons, ideally, or let's say within 50% as useful) using technologies nobody can even fathom. Meanwhile, we're seeing breakthroughs in fusion tech, miles ahead of the usefulness of fission, which is miles ahead of anything else we have right now.
I just don't understand the aversion to a clean, renewable power source.
Solar growing about 30% a year, nukes about 0%.
Storage is coming along too.
(some source stuff https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601621)
This Amazon investment aims to only have 5GW of nuclear on the grid 15 years from now. That's not a solution to climate change, it's not even a rounding error. It rises to a rounding error on the suddenly discovered need for new energy for AI, but it's a decade late for that. In 15 years, the grid will be completely decarbonized by solar and batteries and wind, existing nuclear/hydro, and probably some new tech like enhanced geothermal. This is 2039 energy environment that nuclear will enter into, and it will have to compete with 15 more years of prices falling on batteries and renewables. SMRs can't compete on price with today's price for new large nuclear, todays new large nuclear can't compete on price with today's solar/wind/batteries, and today's solar/wind/batteries sure as hell won't compete with 15 years of prices falling. SMRs like this have no hope to be a competitive product.
Nuclear has overpromised and underdelivered for 60 years. We should have kept existing plants running. If our anscestors had lit money on fire to produce a bunch of reactors 40 years ago, we'd be in a much better position.
But we'd also be in a much better position had they not pooh-poohed solar and made bigger investments sooner, driving forward solar revolution by 15-30 years from where it is now.
We'd have been in a much better position if there had been a massive investment in battery technology 15-30 years earlier, making EVs feasible sooner, and revolutionizing the grid with storage sooner.
Solar and batteries will be the foundation of the future, because they are technology that gets cheaper the more we invest in them. Nuclear might be around in 50 years, maybe not, but it won't be any cheaper or more affordable. It's a technology that barely moves the more we spend on it, and can sometimes be economically efficient in the best of cases. But the average case for building nuclear is big price overruns, and it's not uncommon for utilities to be brought to the point of bankruptcy.
We have better technology available, today, to be deployed. Let's do it. Nuclear is a pipe dream from people that haven't run the numbers, or have run the numbers they have gotten them drastically wrong. The entire history of nuclear energy in this country is of people not running the numbers or running the numbers and getting them drastically wrong.
Take a look at what Germany did to itself. Compare France.
The anti-nuclear wind/solar proponents are dangerously wrong.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
Isn't that the goal? If they can do that without nuclear power - great.
Despite France's >50% nuclear power they have a much higher ratio of "dirty" power compared to Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:...
Germany's energy is 80% fossil fuels. France's is 50%. I'm not sure how you reached the conclusion that Germany's energy mix is less "dirty" than Frances.
Where did you get that number from?
https://www.iea.org/countries/germany
> Renewables 39.4% share of power generation, 2022
vs. France's 26.1%.
Edit: I guess you might be talking about consumption whereas I'm talking about production.
Again, Germany emits 6 times as much C02 for every MWh of electricity generated as France.
It's not an issue of production vs. consumption. You're counting nuclear power, which is heavily utilized by France, as a "dirty" energy source despite the fact that it's cleaner than most renewables.
Climate change fact #2: energy consumption is not a cause of climate change, except for when it causes CO2 emission.
Climate change fact #3: reduced CO2 emission will not stop climate change.
Reducing energy usage is a losing climate strategy in three ways 1) it doesn't solve the problem, cutting emissions 50% does jack shit, we need to get to 0% emissions and then negative emissions. 2) It's politically ineffective because only some people and countries will actually reduce emissions. 3) It's political suicide because it validates false anti-climate change propaganda. 4) It's highly socially regressive because these dictates demand that the burden be placed mostly on developing countries.
Reason #1 is enough to disqualify the "reduce energy usage" as a climate strategy, but really there's zero way to look at it and think that there's any validity. Please find better sources and stop spreading this counterproductive idea.
The reality is that this is all nuclear can rest its hopes on. Industry specific applications, because for general electricity generation it is hopelessly non-competitive.
Thermal/Fast Breeders are needed to use those fuel sources. Only Russia commercialiced them, because western nations stopped funding r&d (EBR2 in the US and Superphênix in France)
There's a good article on the technical problems here https://thebulletin.org/2022/06/molten-salt-reactors-were-tr... One quote from that:
>During its operational lifetime, the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment was shut down 225 times. Of these 225 interruptions, only 58 were planned. The remaining interruptions were due to various technical problems, including: “chronic plugging” of the pipes...
>...These problems remain relevant. Even today, no material can perform satisfactorily in the high-radiation, high-temperature, and corrosive environment inside a molten salt reactor.
I'm not sure anyone has made one that powered anything or produced electricity. The MSRE just intermittently heated the air when it was working.
Apparently although it only ran from 1965 to 1969 and produced a peak of 8MW, it's still costing about $10m per year to manage the waste produced. In the 1990s they found uranium in the waste had migrated leading to the possibility of an accidental criticality.
Still the Chinese supposed to be running an experimental one similar to the MSRE in the Gobi desert next year. I'm not holding my breath for commercial operation though.