> the costs of these solutions are rarely included.
Solar plus storage is included in all the major levelized cost reports, like from the NREL.
Solar plus storage is included in all the major levelized cost reports, like from the NREL.
https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost...
just mashes together a PV array with about an hour of storage and quotes a price for that which is low and is certainly not going to get you through the night.
So many things drive me nuts about that report and the discourse around it that, I think, contribute to people talking past each other. For instance, quoting one price for solar energy is nonsensical when the same solar panel is going to give much more energy in Arizona than it is in upstate New York. The cost of a solar + battery system is going to be different in different places. In upstate NY we deal with a lot of retailers that are based in places like Bentonville, AK who just can't believe you might need an electric space heater in late April or otherwise your chickens might die. Since 95% of the world's population lives in a milder climate it's no wonder our needs don't get taken seriously.
The intermittency problem involves: (1) diurnal variation (overnight), (2) seasonal variation (do you overbuild solar panels 3x so you have enough generation in the winter or do you invest in very long term storage?) and (3) Dunkelflaute conditions when you are unlucky and get a few bad weeks of weather.
I've seen analyses of the cost of a grid that consider just smoothing out one day, but not one that covers seasonal variation. (So much of it comes down to: "how many days of blackout a year can people tolerate?")
With a significant overbuild or weeks worth of storage capacity costs are not going to be so favorable against nuclear energy. The overbuild offers the possibility that you could do something useful with the extra power but it is easier said than done because "free" power from renewables is like a free puppy. You have to build power lines to transmit it, or batteries to store it, or you have to feed it into some machine whose capital costs are low enough that you're not going to worry about the economics of only running it 20% of the time. (Go tell a Chemical Engineer about your plan to run a chemical factory 20% of the time and that's probably the last time you'll hear from them.)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
Generally: Renewables and storage solve somewhere high in the 90s percent.
Then throw some gas turbines on it. Low CAPEX high OPEX. Just like we’ve done for the past decades with the previous ”base load and peaking” paradigm.
Those gas turbines will be a minuscule part of the total energy supply.
When it finally becomes the most pressing issue the gas turbines can trivially be fueled by green hydrogen, green hydrogen derivatives, biofuels or biogas from collecting food waste. If they are still needed.
Lets wait and see what aviation and shipping settles on before attempting to solve a future issue today.
Or that by far the easiest way to produce massive amounts hydrogen without emitting carbon into the atmosphere is… wait for it… nuclear power.
Also, even in a Fallout Future where everything is nuclear powered, hydrogen is still needed! Some 6% of today's global natural gas consumption goes to making hydrogen, and a good chunk of that is for ammonia synthesis, which is necessary to feed eight billion people.
Why do you speak on topics you obviously know so little about? Where did you get this nonsense?
Fast neutron designs aren't without their challenges, but causing an atomic explosion is not on that list. Hydrogen explosions? Possible. Steam explosions? Possible.
Atomic explosions? Not even theoretically can you get enough U-235 to clump together to do that without cancelling known basic laws of physics.
To build a bomb, you need a purity of 90%+ U-235. Nuclear power plants have what? 2%? 3%? Might even go as high as 5%? Might as well expect a pack of bubble gum to spontaneously explode.
Sodium has its problems (burns in carbon dioxide!) but the chemistry is favorable for a meltdown because the most dangerous fission products are iodine and cesium. The former reacts with the sodium to make a salt that dissolves in the sodium, the second alloys with the sodium. Either way they stay put and don’t go into the environment.
Edward Teller famously warned about this is a nuclear industry trade publication in 1967.
The only fast reactors I'd trust would be ones with fuel dissolved in molten salt; it's hard to see how that could become concentrated in an accident that doesn't boil the salt. But such reactors have their own problems, in particular exposure of reactor structures to intense fast neutron fluxes (not as bad as in fusion reactors, but worse than LWRs.)
Teller may have warned about this in 1967, but nuclear technology hasn't been stagnant since 1967. Folks read his stuff and designed systems specifically to fail safe, not run away. Stop fear mongering based upon a 60-year-old supposition. Stop assuming everyone working in the nuclear industry is an idiot that hasn't thought about safety.
The safety arguments for fast reactors are typically that a serious scenario will not occur, for example that fuel won't melt, not that if it does occur the results won't be bad. Do you trust that sort of argument? I don't.
Those are NOT the safety arguments used within the industry. For example in a molten salt reactor, the fuel is already melted! If it gets too hot, thermal expansion moves the radioactive isotopes further away from one another, reducing reactivity. If heat increases past a certain point, plugs at the bottom of the tanks will melt, allowing gravity to dump the fuel into multiple separated storage vessels sized to prevent further activity.
You do not know what you're talking about. You've read a bunch of fear mongering, and bought it. Do you really believe the entire industry of nuclear engineers and support staff are just blindly YOLOing their way through their jobs, damn the consequences?
I swear, you sound like the power production equivalent of antivaxers convinced the medical industry is trying to poison all of us.
"Passive safety" doesn't mean "stuff shouldn't go wrong."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety
It means "we're actively exploring everything that could go wrong and having the worst case scenarios fail to a safe state without requiring human intervention."
Those two positions couldn't be further apart.
I already said MSRs would be the one kind of fast reactor I could see the analysis work, so thank you for agreeing with me on that.
As a charitable act toward you I will ignore the rest of your comment.
Classic argument from ignorance fallacy. Because YOU cannot see how it could be done, no one has ever figured out how it could be done.
All the analyses I've seen for fast reactor safety are about avoiding fuel melting, not what happens if the fuel does melt. The variability in this latter scenario is so great that conclusive analysis ruling out disaster doesn't seem possible. Maybe you could explain the unexpected principle that enables one to do that? Or, lacking that, point me to a paper where such analysis has been performed.
https://www.swri.org/markets/energy-environment/power-genera...
could fit in the employee break room of the turbine house of an LWR and could make it competitive. It’s a big if though.
No, that isn't the easiest way.
The easiest — not best, easiest — way to produce massive amounts of hydrogen is whatever your electrical power source is plus some low corrosion rods in a river.
If you want the cheapest, well, in most cases PV is the cheapest source of electricity — there's variance, sometimes it's wind.
Nuclear is so expensive that it's the same range of prices as PV plus batteries. And when you're using the electricity to make hydrogen, with the hydrogen as the storage system, batteries are redundant.
And no, hydrogen as the storage system doesn't make batteries redundant. Law of conservation of energy. You are talking about using electricity to split water molecules, presumably more electricity to compress and store the collected hydrogen, and then you have the losses associated with converting back to electricity in a fuel cell or conversion to mechanical energy through combustion.
A square meter of PV provides a theoretical maximum of ~1KW at 100%. Even the experimental perovskite cells only get 45% of that. 450W/m^2. Whereas nuclear is measured in gigawatts per reactor with multiple reactors per plant.
Then a storm hits. Far less sunlight. Then something like hail hits. Damage to panels. Then there's the issue of security if someone wanted to cripple the grid.
Nuclear is 24/7, rain or shine, wind or no, impervious to even hurricanes, and already has a robust security and logistics apparatus around it.
I have PV panels on my home. I love the idea of decentralized power. But the hydrogen economy is pretty theoretical at this point. Hard to store for any length of time, comparatively low combustion energy, low energy density overall, etc. It may happen, but "may" is a bad bet for long term national policy. I'd rather push more toward electrified high speed trains than hydrogen.
Needs storage*, what that storage is depends on other factors.
(* there's a "well technically" for just a grid, in that China makes enough aluminium they could build an actually useful global power grid with negligible resistance, but it doesn't matter in practice)
As it happens, I agree with one crucial part of your final paragraph — hydrogen is hard to store for any length of time (not sure you're right about comparatively low combustion energy but that doesn't matter, low energy density overall is accurate but I don't think matters).
I favour batteries for that because battery cars beat hydrogen cars, and the storage requirements for a power grid are smaller than the requirements for transport, so we can just use the big (and expanding) pile of existing factories to do this.
But hydrogen has other uses than power, and where it's an emergency extra storage system you don't necessarily need a huge efficiency. That said, because one of the main other uses of hydrogen is to make ammonia, I expect emergency backup power to be something which burns ammonia rather than hydrogen gas — not only is it much more stable and much easier to store, it's something you'd be stockpiling anyway because fertiliser isn't applied all year around anyway.
But you could do hydrogen, if you wanted. And some people probably will, because of this sort of thing.
> A square meter of PV provides a theoretical maximum of ~1KW at 100%. Even the experimental perovskite cells only get 45% of that. 450W/m^2. Whereas nuclear is measured in gigawatts per reactor with multiple reactors per plant.
This is completely irrelevant for countries that aren't tiny islands or independent cities.
Even then, and even with lower 20% efficient cells, and also adding in the capacity factor of 10% that's slightly worse than the current global average, Vatican City* has the capacity for 11.1 kW/capita: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=0.5km%5E2+*+1kW%2Fm%5E2...
They are of course not going to tile their architecture in PV — there's a reason I wrote "that aren't … independent cities" — but this is a sense of scale.
(* Number 7 on the Wikipedia "List of countries and dependencies by population density": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...)
> Then a storm hits. Far less sunlight.
That's what the storage is for
> Then something like hail hits. Damage to panels.
Panels are as strong as you want them to be for the weather you get locally. If you need bullet-proof (FSVO), you can put them behind a bullet-proof screen.
> Then there's the issue of security if someone wanted to cripple the grid.
The grid isn't the source; if you want to cripple a grid, doesn't matter if the source is nuclear, PV, coal, or hamster wheels.
> Nuclear is 24/7, rain or shine, wind or no, impervious to even hurricanes, and already has a robust security and logistics apparatus around it.
Really isn't 24/7, it's 70-80%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Worldwide_Nuclear_Power_C...
And mis-estimating the environmental risks is exactly what went wrong with Fukushima.
It took a massive earthquake and tsunami to cause this, and the number of deaths/injuries due to the power plant is a rounding error compared to the earthquake and tsunami. Fukushima actually did most things right with the notable exception of not putting the backup generators on the roof. Had they put the generators on the roof, neither of us would have ever known the name "Fukushima".
When evaluating the Fukushima exclusion zone, compare it to the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. In that case, we still haven't cleaned up all the oil, and up to 450 miles from the initial spill. By comparison you want to transition to ammonia as a fuel source, which you correctly note is easier to store long term than molecular hydrogen and far more energy dense. Sounds like a good deal since molecular nitrogen is incredibly abundant as well.
Now I want you to imagine there's an ammonia spill in the magnitude of Exxon Valdez. Long term, the ammonia would almost certainly dissipate faster than crude oil, but the immediate acute toxicity would be far worse. You're killing basically all sea life in the area, the fumes would take out most birds and even quite a few people. If the spill were on land, it could severely compromise the ability to grow crops in the region for a long time. And that's not in the face of a massive earthquake and tsunami, but inattentiveness on the part of a single ship's crew.
The point being that large scale energy production and storage will NEVER be fuzzy and completely safe. The most common metric is deaths per unit of electricity. If a power source is small, even one death can be unforgivable. For massive amounts of power, statistics matter.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Note that the nuclear stats include both Chernobyl and Fukushima. This is notable since Chernobyl was a worst case scenario with a flawed design that has never existed in Western commercial reactors precisely because it was so unacceptably dangerous: no containment vessel, graphite moderation, graphite fuel rod tips, lack of education for its staff, a culture of secrecy, etc.
In the meantime, nuclear has provided obscenely large amounts of electricity since its inception. I'm all for expanding solar and wind, but folks really need to understand the real enemy is fossil fuels: coal, oil, natural gas, etc. The single largest threat to our survival as a species isn't a multi-kilometer exclusion zone but a CO2-laden atmosphere that makes the entire equatorial zone uninhabitable, and that's precisely what we're looking at within a century.
The faster we can move off carbon-based fuels by any means necessary, the better. That includes nuclear. Excluding nuclear from the conversation out of hand is lunacy.
Decommissioned 28 years ago. Because it didn't work? No. Because it wasn't safe? No. Because it wasn't reliable? No, it had a 95% availability rate.
It was taken out of service due to political pressure and legal maneuvering, not technical reasons.
It's a bit of a weird measure anyway, since it's just the ratio of storage to inverter, so it's the time it could run for when working flat out.
For your wider point, if anyone, anywhere was really contemplating a near full nuclear grid they'd have the exact same issues. Do you overbuild and curtail? Export? Store in batteries? The problems and solutions are incredibly similar now batteries have basically solved the daily variation for solar.
The fact that no one is even bothering to think that far ahead for nuclear is a recognition of how totally out of the race it is.