For example, in Denmark[1] a solar-dominated grid would cost around 565 EUR/MWh. A nuclear-dominated grid would cost around 141 EUR/MWh.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422... Fig. 3
That's not what it says. It says that would be the cost assuming the current grid and power came from only solar or only nuclear. The majority of the cost then is for overprovisioning and storage, especially to handle the lack of sun in the winter.
The actual low cost power comes from mixes of renewables, that they note nuclear can't compete with (especially in their hypothetical future energy system with things like scheduled EV charging). They give an example of offshore wind (66%), solar (8%), CCGT (26%) (primarily natural gas) for 66 EUR/MWh, or, restricting to biomass for the gas plant: offshore wind (84%), solar (13%), CCGT (3%) at 99 EUR/MWh.
(it's also worth noting that this is for Denmark. Something like 98% of Canadians live south of Denmark's southernmost line of latitude).
The claims of endless nuclear energy rely on salt-water extraction which is like 3 parts per billion and not at all economical, or the development of breeder reactors which as of yet also remain prohibitively expensive, significantly more dangerous/finnicky owing to using liquid sodium as a coolant, and offer much easier weaponization.
Back in the 70s Exxon predicted the impacts of widespread CO2 output, but hand-waved it away. I feel people are doing the exact same thing with nuclear, and probably under the exact same motivation. They are biased towards nuclear and want it to work, and so are either ignoring the issues or assuming/hoping for a future technological breakthrough to resolve them, but as of yet that breakthrough appears nowhere in sight.
[1] - http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2026/ph241/flanagan2/
[2] - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-global-uranium-rese...
"Copper and lithium are major exceptions where expected mined supply from announced projects falls short of projected demand in 2035, with implied deficits of 30% for copper and 40% for lithium"
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-critical-minerals-outlook...
Note that we kept extracting copper long after people said we would run out. We even increased production AND lowered prices.
But copper price is still up by >500% since the early 2000s.
Seawater extraction is already comparable to most expensive land mines looking at China so it's no longer prohibitively expensive. India is moving fast with it's Thorium design https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/first-criticality-fo...
"feel people are doing the exact same thing with nuclear, and probably under the exact same motivation. They are biased towards nuclear and want it to work, and so are either ignoring the issues or assuming/hoping for a future technological breakthrough to resolve them, but as of yet that breakthrough appears nowhere in sight." - France decarbonized in 90s and to this day no country got similar emissions/kwh in similar timeframe with similar or lower hydro resources.
The hopium lies in exactly the opposite way where ppl hope H2 will become dirt cheap and will be used for firming
In the mining industry reserves are a technical term. They can be proven, probable, likely, etc. qualifying a deposit as a reserve of a certain grade costs money. Reserves are used as colateral for secured financing, so in some cases the cost is justified. But if the sum of reserves is about 100 years of current consumption (our case here), mining companies will not spend one dollar more to certify new reserves.
For all practical purposes, uranium is an inexhaustible fuel, even if we never develop fast reactors.
"The utmost amount (46%) of wood pellets comes from the Baltic countries (Latvia and Estonia) and 30% from the USA, Canada and Russia.6 Estonia and Latvia have steadily been the primary exporters of biomass to Denmark, mainly in the form of wood pellets and wood chips."
(So it depends how much CO2 the ships used to transport it there)
2. I could not imagine scaling biomass to country like India or China to cover the same share in electricity production mix as in Dermark (Denmark currently produces 20% of electricity from Bioenergy).
2. No, it is not and I doubt anyone claimed that this is possible.
John Sterman is the Jay W. Forrester professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management
"The EU, UK, US, and other nations consider wood to be a carbon neutral fuel, ignoring the carbon dioxide emitted from wood combustion in their greenhouse gas accounting. Many countries subsidize wood energy – often by burning wood pellets in place of coal for electric power – to meet their renewable energy targets. But can wood bioenergy help cut greenhouse emissions in time to limit the worst damage from climate change? The argument in favor seems obvious: wood, a renewable resource, must be better than burning fossil fuels. But wood emits more carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour than coal – and far more than other fossil fuels. Therefore, the first impact of wood bioenergy is to increase the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, worsening climate change. Forest regrowth might eventually remove that extra carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but regrowth is uncertain and takes time – decades to a century or more, depending on forest composition and climatic zone – time we do not have to cut emissions enough to avoid the worst harms from climate change. More effective ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions are already available and affordable now, allowing forests to continue to serve as carbon sinks and moderate climate change."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2022.2...
Utterly irrelevant since that carbon came out of the air to grow the tree in the first place.
> Forest regrowth might eventually remove that extra carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but regrowth is uncertain
Of course it's not! Trees are grown as a crop. These aren't ancient forests, they're fields of trees for harvesting. If it was uncertain no-one could make money from forestry.
...while also having a colder climate than the Danish. At least while the Gulf Stream is still working.
Commissioning reactors that won't come online for 10-15 years makes no sense at all, economically and practically.
Because we won't need base load in 15 years? Or because you're arguing that we'll have so many batteries, and they'll be so cheap, and they'll be so over-provisioned regarding summer/winter variance, that we won't be able to sell excess nuclear power to the states?
Personally, I wouldn't make either bet, no matter what odds you give me
https://freeingenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Graph-s...
Edit: this is exactly what your link is showing > Demonstrates that mixed wind–solar portfolios outperform single technologies.
...
> At the case level, we find that in countries such as Denmark with available wind and solar energy resources, nuclear power does not seem to be part of the least-cost solution, neither in today's energy systems nor in future systems of climate neutral societies. This conclusion is valid for the present cost of nuclear power in Europe as well as for IEA/WEO future expectations. The future overnight cost for nuclear power of 4500 EUR/MW in 2050 represents the so-called “nth-of-a-kind” cost for new reactor designs, with assumed substantial cost reductions from the first-of-a-kind projects, while this violates the historical experience of nuclear power technology.