U.S. Sets Targets to Triple Nuclear Energy Capacity by 2050
energy.gov
energy.gov
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-20/china-app...
China Added More Solar Panels in 2023 Than US Did In Its Entire History
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-26/china-add...
It should be clear from these three examples that some regulatory environments are more conducive to rapidly building infrastructure than others.
It’s not about the “regulatory environment”, which is almost irrelevant when talking about China. What’s driving this is state-led development with clear goals, like reaching peak carbon by 2030, a claim which they can actually back up with developments like these.
IMO Xi/PRC is a little bit TOO magnanimous about enviroment / eliminating carbon. While US continues to increase (and now lead) in oil/lng exports, PRC is leaving good money on the table not building 1000s of coal plants abroad or exporting their centuries of thermal coal stock. That's the kind of irrational behaviour you expect from someone that cares about enviroment.
A couple of years ago in China it was cloudy, non-windy, and dry at the same time for an extended period of time.
The energy transition isn't as simple as "build more solar, shut down coal".
Going against this may lose him is "first buddy" position and influence on the US government
That's about a decade and a half too late. We need to be reducing our carbon footprint right now, and we have that ability: wind and solar. Low initial impact, fast to net carbon negative.
Nukes take decades to dig themselves out of their carbon positive holes, if they ever do so at all (the nuclear industry does not account for most of the CO2 generated from supply and operations.)
Then nuke is much better for low co2 energy mix, cf France vs Germany
https://www.governing.com/infrastructure/5b-for-ev-infrastru...
If you can declare that a failure before most projects have a spade in the ground then this newly announced nuclear plan has already failed.
Vogtle 3 and 4 were completed in the last couple of years, plus Watts Bar Unit 2 8 years ago.
Also let's not forget the work to maintain and upgrade units so they can run beyond the 40 year initial license.
Regardless of those plans and whether they are cancelled or not, renewables are going full steam ahead in most of the world and will likely add essentially all of the planned nuclear capacity in a matter of years. And then some.
At this point renewables are, by far, the most cost effective way to generate power. Wind, solar, and battery storage are growing at a ridiculous rate. That's actually causing headaches for plans made years ago for e.g. gas plants and indeed nuclear plants. Some gas plants that opened fairly recently are actually facing early closures because they are no longer price competitive.
Since they were built with the idea of supplying gas for a few decades and will be obsolete before that planned date, they're started to raise the rates they charge to ensure it gets paid off in time. This then accelerates the pace of people moving off gas.
Also, economics are not equal to climate/carbon. If we want to reduce climate change only nuclear is the way to go - not solar/battery.
I don't think solar+battery is cost competitive if you were to replicate nuclear completely, but I've not looked at the numbers. Need to consider a nuclear plant may have a 60 year life whereas panels would be 20 at best and batteries probably less.
Edit: I can't reply so adding this for context around my comments on carbon intensity:
Even decade old solar was competitive with nuclear on a carbon per watt basis:
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Pricing carbon would mostly drive fossil fuels from the grid (unsurprisingly). It might boost nuclear as a result but it would boost renewables far more.
Solar + battery requires plenty of materials and energy to put together. It also needs to work in the middle of winter for it to be a fair comparison. When you consider it in that way it favours nuclear. It also has a shorter lifespan than nuclear, so that should be included.
And, if you take that crankery seriously, then renewables vastly outperform fossils and are speeding past nuclear on this metric too.
It's basically impossible for energy tech to come down in price by magnitudes and not have increasing EROI as energy inputs cost money. This is predicted to continue.
And despite this metric being great for renewables, you don't hear anyone crowing about it, because it's meaningless.
In other words, if you cut corners you can make nuclear cheap.
This is good for regulatory discussions and historical context:
Why are you commenting then? This is a complex, deeply researched topic. It's contentious enough already, no need to add more noise.
"Looking at the numbers" is literally the one thing one needs to do in order to be able to add to this discussion.
Here's something on carbon:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment
The problem with economic arguments is that externalities are not priced in. We don't price in the carbon of china solar manufacturing for example.
The other problem of economic arguments is that regulations are expensive in nuclear, and it is orders of magnitude safer than next best alternatives.
Which means: economic arguments miss the point when considered in the broader context.
The fact is that state of the art research into this does very much consider those points you think aren't being considered, and has been doing so for decades.
Here is a link to such research: https://op.europa.eu/s/zX4i This particular EU project started in 1995.
You can easily find much more on Google, from US sources as well if you choose to mistrust EU publications.
I'm not commenting with more details ("numbers") because I very much am not qualified to give a detailed, well-founded opinion on this that doesn't randomly leave out half the story.
But I do know enough to tell you aren't either, that the way you are talking about this is way under-complex and totally misses the mark in terms of where the state of the art is. One specific way (possibly of many) in which it does so is in ignoring the absurd exponential learning curve that renewables + storage technology is on.
If there is anything to talk about seriously it hasn't come up on HN in the last few years. The last time something happened that moved the needle on whether there was any real policy question by the numbers was probably Chernobyl.
A diverse and robust energy grid is composed of various generation sources that differ in capacity factors, environmental impact, stability, availability, etc.
The battery industry is expected to grow a maddening percentage in the coming decade. Germany moving their renewable goal from 60-80% by (I’m not sure about the year but I think it’s 2030), alone increased the expected economic growth for supplying battery storage by 800%. There is nowhere near enough storage to make nuclear and fossil fuels obsolete yet however. Especially not if we also increase the EV market share.
Solar isn’t optimal in very hot regions, however, as the efficiency goes down 0.3-0.5% in efficiency for every degree Celsius above 0 degrees Celsius. So in some regions nuclear is going to be a good option. I’m not personally a fan of nuclear because its safety depends on governments being willing to regulate the safety, but there is no denying that it’s still a much, much, better alternative to fossil fuels as far as delivering power on demand.
This is how it looks in Europe. I have no idea how it looks in the US.
There seems a general pattern that if you need to build it outside of china, be that batteries, nuclear power plants or solar panels, it becomes too expensive.
There is also still a couple of years until the European battery factories that are under construction will actually be operational.
Unless the economy picks up I suspect we’ll see a lot of bankruptcies in the coming five years. Currently it’s not just the price of solar panel production that is an issue, it’s also that you make equal and safer money on other investments. Back when the interest rates were basically 0% the 3-7% returns on solar were very attractive but now that is just not the case. This is why you see Japan picking up as an attractive place for solar these years, because in Japan a 3-7% return is still very good.
If you look at UAE building South Korean plants, they were finishing plants pretty rapidly and if they had simply continued, they could have turned 100% green in just a few more years at quite a low cost overall.
It also depends on your energy market and financing. If you have a lot of solar, that simply destroys the market during certain periods, nuclear isn't gone be that profitable. But if you don't have a bunch of wind/solar and you actually value stable energy production. Then its much more reasonable.
A nuclear plant can run for 80+ years. So it depends on interest rates you use.
Pretend you are a metal foundry.
Good luck.
Or just build the metal foundry in the non-blizzard-prone area in the first place, because the blizzard takes out power lines even if there was a nuclear reactor on the other end.
I've done the maths, and I'd it wasn't for geopolitics, China makes enough Aluminium to make an HVDC grid so thick that it would have so little resistance that they could usefully connect every grid in the world for a cost of 250e9 USD for the Aluminium.
Scaled down to just the USA, no international stuff, it's something you can easily do if someone convinces Trump or Musk to delete any internal obstruction.
(As a non American, I may be misjudging this: I don't care too much about US culture wars, they don't connect to me any more than the US or Chinese sports teams whose names I don't know).
You may be correct that I am over-optimistic, though for what it's worth my optimism is not universal to all of the aspects of Musk let alone Trump (mostly pessimistic about him), and not with regard to other greenhouse gas emissions besides electrical, heating, and transportation.
Why don't we just assume that power will be free and infinite and plug our grid into that assumption? We can even write it down on the socket and paint it green, based on how these arguments always read out that's the only thing needed to maintain electrified high tech society.
You: "Thousands of miles of big wires are free"
If anywhere's going to get mixed up between "250 billion dollars" and "free", it's going to be politics.
I reconstructed your argument to be in favor of nuclear power, and because I mentioned Temu as a source it actually have an infinite amount of more ties to reality than your story did.
Wow no wonder people like to argue for green energy if it's this easy to make up arguments for it
You can very easily look up the resistivity of aluminium, which will tell you that if you want a loop around the equator to have a resistance of one ohm over that length, it needs to be about a square metre cross section. You can look up the density and the cost, too. You get around 250 billion dollars depending on the exact market price when you were looking it up.
Just like when you go for a cup of coffee at a cafe and you only pay the commodity price of coffee beans, which at like $5 per kg and 20 grams of coffee per cup means a cup at starcucks is just 10cents. Right?
How do you think aluminium works, that you burn it? These things last multiple decades, and even then the wires are still around, it's mostly the rest of the stuff you need to maintain — one of the recent-ish fires in California was that the tower on which the wire was strung wore through, the wire fell off, sparked, the wood caught fire.
At the scale I'm describing, even if you spread it over 2,500 parallel paths (which you should, not just for redundancy but also because of the magnetic field it produces if you don't), the aluminium looks like a structural member rather than looking like a wire.
> And magically you'll get it delivered as a pre-installed global power grid as opposed to ingots.
You keep putting words in my mouth. I very specifically and deliberately noted that I was just talking about the aluminium material cost itself.
Also, at this scale, you can basically process the ore directly into the metal in a trench in the ground that (1) becomes your wire immediately as you've finished processing it and (2) supplies the energy to the next section you want to electrolytically extract.
Aluminium is unusually good for this specific task, compared to other metals.
> Just like when you go for a cup of coffee at a cafe and you only pay the commodity price of coffee beans, which at like $5 per kg and 20 grams of coffee per cup means a cup at starcucks is just 10cents. Right?
Not at this scale, no.
If you're drinking at Starbucks, not only are you paying for the rent of the shop to give you somewhere to drink it and the time of the staff to prepare it and clean the place after you (and the seat and cup, if you sat down and got a ceramic cup rather than a disposable take-away), you're also enriching Starbuck's shareholders.
At this scale a grid is an international strategic decision even though it's theoretically in the zone where a corporation could afford it, and the surprise extra costs are the opportunity costs and the political capital gained or spent on proposing the thing on the one side, and of encouraging or allowing it on the other.
The USA right now is terrified of China, and only China can make enough aluminium; having a global grid creates a trade opportunity for those with something to gain, and a new risk factor for those with something to lose. America has stuff to lose, most of the world has stuff to gain.
So, if you want a Starbucks comparison, it's the cost of coffee from the point of view of Starbucks itself, not as a customer.
https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...
Of course, we'll never stop building nuclear power in spite of this because it provides indirect subsidies for the military.
Great argument for an energy source
You do seem to be developing a habit of arguing against what you want others to have written instead of what they actually wrote.
That's not going to be effective here.
No, we shouldn't. Pull up charts for energy generation by type for the US, Canada, and Europe. Notice that solar and wind (especially wind) has skyrocketed and far eclipsed the capacity loss of nuclear. In the US, 7 times as much wind power is going in as nuclear plants being taken offline. In the UK, 30% of power generation (and growing) is from wind.
Now, who do you think knows better here? The power companies who have been shutting down nuclear and coal plants because they're more expensive than wind and solar? Or...uh...you?
If your answer is "me", then clearly you should get a job in energy production, or become an investor, and make a bazillion dollars knowing more than everyone else in the industry, in nearly every country.
US, EU, UK...all seeing massive capacity growth in wind, far eclipsing nuclear decommissioning. Several countries have hit days in the last few years where they didn't need to have any fossil fuel plants online.
> indeed, there have been recent campaigns to revive old plants and step up production.
That is because the nuclear industry is lobbying desperately to stay alive.
If you need to lobby the government to force power companies to use you while also handing you a big fat check written by taxpayers, that is proof you're not market competitive.
Energy prices are set by the government and don't reflect the actual cost. French tax payers pay for the difference and have done so for years. The cost price probably excludes quite a bit that tax payers are also paying for.
The sad reality with nuclear is that it's a very unprofitable business unless you get governments to sponsor construction, waste disposal, security, etc. and then bail out failing nuclear companies when they fail anyway. All of these things have happened in France. France has nuclear reactors because it regards being a nuclear power as strategically important. Not because it's particularly cheap. It never was.
As of now, that somewhat artificial cost of 8 cents per kwh is actually on the high side for renewables. There are cheaper ways to get power these days.
Really? Aren't they getting life-extended past 40 years? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fessenheim_Nuclear_Power_Plant was closed down due to Swiss/German objections, but are any of the other PWRs planned to be closed down?
> French tax payers pay for the difference and have done so for years.
Social tariffs are a thing, as is redistribution of wealth.
> that somewhat artificial cost of 8 cents per kwh is actually on the high side for renewables
Let us not conflate the price paid to a generator with the cost to the consumer. Also why do renewables need subsidies in France? https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/files/docume...
https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/fran...
> The full cost of existing nuclear power calculated by the CRE amounts to respectively €60.7/MWh over the period 2026-2030
And the first hit for "wind power cost europe mwhr" shows just how subsidized nuclear is:
https://windeurope.org/policy/topics/economics/
At its cheapest wind is half the cost of nuclear and at its worst is the same cost as nuclear - with none of the massive headaches.
Which is 6 euro cents per KWh. Fully in line with what I said.
French consumers are paying less for their electricity than, for example, Californians (https://www.cnet.com/home/energy-and-utilities/heres-the-ave...) where electricity largely comes from natural gas (https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...).
>And the first hit for "wind power cost europe mwhr" shows just how subsidized nuclear is:
This source makes a vague claim about LCOE estimations not taking subsidies into account. It says nothing to establish the amount of those subsidies, or even to quantify the cost of any power source besides wind.
>with none of the massive headaches.
Onshore wind generation has plenty of drawbacks. Much of what's commonly said against nuclear is baseless fearmongering.
Ugh how long will it take for this to die?
If the answer is no, then the myth can die.
If the answer is yes, then it will survive until wind farms operators no longer seek to be exempted.
For example ensuring plants don’t get built in endangered bird habitats and rules concerning operation during endangered birds migratory periods.
Seems like you want wind power to fail, like nuclear is, and are attempting to sling any potential mud you can find.
So we should allow companies to operate unhindered within (evidence based) rules. Seems like an idea. Let us use that approach for all activities, including nuclear power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model is a model with scant evidence in the range relevant to operating a power station. Having said that the ICRP will be updating their model within a decade or so, so perhaps that barrier will disappear.
The entire industry would shut down tomorrow if they had to pay the true insurance cost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
The flip-side of the Price Anderson act is that the NRC is deeply involved in the operations of nuclear power stations.
Why stop at nuclear; why not aircraft, social networks or unvaccinated people? Also make all companies unlimited liability so their shareholders are accountable when something goes wrong.
Criticism is met with “don’t you dare question the subsidies” and then a stream of whataboutism across completely different industries rather than daring to compare with the alternative: renewables.
Because you already know that comparison makes the nuclear case even worse than it already is.
Renewables don’t have capped liability, at worst if regular insurance coverage is not enough the company will be bankrupted and the assets sold to pay for the damages.
For renewables it is already baked into the price because the risks are near zero.
Remind me how much each eagle is worth? How about power cuts caused by wind farms tripping incorrectly? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49309691 How about disruption caused by failure to provide power in low wind conditions, or is that just a societal risk rather than investor risk?
Then more whataboutism. Typical.
How about the disruption caused by half the French nuclear fleet being offline at the height of the energy crisis?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr...
A recent study found that nuclear power needs to come down 85% in cost to be competitive with renewables when looking into total system costs for a fully decarbonized grid, due to both options requiring flexibility to meet the grid load. > The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources. However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour. For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/06/1091250692/esi-energy-bald-ea...; around 30k USD per eagle. That's the cost of doing business, I guess.
> A recent study found that nuclear power needs to come down 85% in cost to be competitive with renewables when looking into total system costs for a fully decarbonized grid
Per paper you've linked to :-
For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved
Supplementary material chart S1 reveals that the nuclear power is a small part of the overall cost of the energy system. "Transport costs", "remaining investments" and "Operations and maintenance" are over 20B of the 25B EUR cost per year. Figure 6 of the paper needs to be viewed with these totals in mind.
Supplementary material chart S3 shows they model nuclear's availability factor by smoothing outages across the year, only ever producing 6,686MW. EDIT :- actually it goes up to 6,823MW for part of the year, averaging out to 6,743MW.
Overall the paper is rather poor.
EDIT :- Looking at the S3 data again, it appears that heating and unflexible demand add up to at most 9,770MW, so only another 2 nuclear power stations would cover that peak.
Then you try to justify enormous nuclear costs because "it is not too bad" when comparing to what we already need to do.
You know there are similar costs today in the transportation system. Add up what we pay for fossil fueled ICEs and "it's not too bad!!!".
This is quite typical, a complete inability to accept reality calling anything not mindlessly promoting your precious nuclear power "poor".
So Denmark can not change its energy system from intermittents to nuclear because that's impossible, but it can change from fossil fuels to intermittents because it must be done? Given a 20 year lifetime for intermittents it should be possible to manage their phase-out.
> Then you try to justify enormous nuclear costs because "it is not too bad"
I did point out that the nuclear "is a small part of the overall cost of the energy system"; it is unclear how the authors have justified 80% of the system cost and how that varies with intermittency of energy supply and demand (e.g. reduced transmission cost, scope in the summer to use a excess electricity).
> a complete inability to accept reality
It is unfortunate that the model behind this is not available for peer study; https://www.energyplan.eu/atomkraft is not a live link and the archive.org version of this does not hold a copy of the scenario files. The results depend critically on the model used (and software used to solve it) so in the absence of further information all I can do is look at the results in the paper and point out obvious issues.
I've just spotted the cost modelling of the intermittents; rather than using IAEA LCOE data (or state LCOE directly), table 2 states costs in terms of capital, O&M as a percentage of investment and lifetime. Crunching their numbers (with a 3% interest rate) I come to offshore wind LCOE being 29.75 EUR/MWh, onshore wind 24.41 EUR/MWh and solar 33.44 EUR/MWh. This seems on the low side.
Do you believe that this paper is a good example of energy modelling?
Assuming that price is with a 77% capacity factor there is an easy way to reduce the cost per MWh; get them to run with a higher capacity factor. Finland has achieved 94% over the last few years, and the US is up at 93% I believe. https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
Assuming that this is mainly fixed costs the price could be down to 60.7*.77/.94 = 50 EUR/MWh; fuel is a minor input and might bump the price up to perhaps 53 EUR/MWh.
That means battery deployments will have tripled in... 2026.
Just to show the difference in growth rate, if batteries would keep increasing 100% annually, installations will have increased 1*2^25 = 300 million times by 2050. So multiple orders of magnitude different is what I'm trying to point out.
The growth rate that the US government sets here is 4% (1.04^25 = 3).
It's meaningless I think. It doesn't move the needle.