Germany has been taking both nuclear and coal offline and renewables have been plugging the gap for both for some years now and will likely continue to do so.
It boggles my mind that the nuclear industry itself demands that all disaster cleanup costs over $300 million be shouldered by the government yet it is trying to project an image of how it is the "safe" option. If they don't have enough faith in their own safety to raise the cap why should we?
They produce 3x the CO2 of France, despite their commitment against global warming.
In an ideal world, renewable would replace everything. We are not yet in this ideal world, and we don't know the time frame to get to it (there are huge technological challenges, while the challenge for nuclear reactor are solved since 50 years. Of course they are still RD to be done on the nuclear side too, like molten salt reactors).
Given the economic and human cost of global warming, investing into nuclear too alongside renewable (rather than instead) seems the safer bet. Again, I am not saying that nuclear is a miracle energy that will solve all our problem (fusion would be). Nuclear energy does have a lot of problems. But these problems are trivial which respect to global warming, and we should solve global warming first (which again will involve even more electricity than we produce right now).
Focusing on closing nuclear first (like Germany did!) is like worrying about a leak under the sink while the whole house is on fire.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
>They produce 3x the CO2 of France, despite their commitment against global warming.
That's because France started replacing fossil fuels with nuclear in the 80s. That was the only sensible approach to reducing CO2 in the 80s. This isn't the 80s though.
>In an ideal world, renewable would replace everything. We are not yet in this ideal world
I mean, it's half the cost of nuclear and it doesn't include the risks (however small) of catastrophe.
In an ideal world we could swap out fossil fuels for something clean overnight - obviously it takes about 30 years. The question isn't "what can we replace fossil fuels with overnight", it's "what can take over from fossil fuels?"
However, from this point onward it makes little difference. It makes little economic sense to build new nuclear plants given that they are more expensive and no sense to build coal. Renewables are more than capable of taking over as old nuclear and coal plants are phased out.
The issue now is how fast to phase out rickety old nuclear plants and rickety old coal plants.
If I look at wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany Germany went from 60% fossil, 23% nuclear, 17% renewable to 49%/13%/38% respectively.
How much further down do you expect fossil to go in ten years? I am pretty sure that by investing both on nuclear and renewable germany could have been at close to 0% right now or in a few years.
Look at France, they have zillions Euros to invest to get ONE EPR reactor online. They are losing huge amounts of money on another one they are building in Finland. Germany lost a lot of money on the EPR, too. The EPR France builds in the UK will be the most expensive power plant on the planet with >20bn pounds costs.
> How much further down do you expect fossil to go in ten years?
The projections for 2030 are around 65% electricity from renewable energy.
Why didn't Germany close its coal plants first? This would have saved several Metric Tons of CO2 and saved the life of a few thousands people (due to air pollution).
When is Germany going to reach no CO2 emissions? (Expanding nuclear along renewable would have meant it could have reached this goal right now). You talk about the costs of EPR (which exploded I agree), but this is nothing compared to the cost of climate change, which Germany contribute three times more than France. This cost is shared across the world, but this is hypocritical to not take it into account.
I don't miss your point, I just don't think nuclear is a viable complement to renewable in Germany.
> Why didn't Germany close its coal plants first?
Because it wanted to get rid of nuclear first and as fast as possible. The reasons for that is all known and a little research can explain it to you - beyond the believe that it was 'irrational'. It's not that you need to agree with it, but people here had other priorities than you have.
Still CO2 emissions were reduced by 27% from 1990 to 2016.
The next two decades will bring the end of coal-based electricity.
> When is Germany going to reach no CO2 emissions?
When do you stop going to vacations via airplanes? Stop eating meat? Stop driving a car?
> Expanding nuclear along renewable would have meant it could have reached this goal right now
No, nuclear and renewable are not compatible. Nuclear is centralized monopolistic, mostly state-owned form of energy. I sucks up huge amounts of investments and corrupts everything around it.
> This cost is shared across the world
Germany invested into renewable energy and jump-started the PV business. That's equally important.
And this killed a few thousand persons and rejected MegaTons of CO2 in the atmosphere that could have been avoided.
> The next two decades will bring the end of coal-based electricity.
This is 30 years later than could have been, and gas instead of coal is not the solution either. Will Germany have 100% renewable in 20 years?
> When do you stop going to vacations via airplanes? Stop eating meat? Stop driving a car?
I changed my way of living already. I could still do more yes, but the most efficient way would be to convince policy makers to close coals/gas before nuclear.
> No, nuclear and renewable are not compatible. Nuclear is centralized monopolistic, mostly state-owned form of energy. I sucks up huge amounts of investments and corrupts everything around it.
Again, the drawbacks of nuclear power are nothing compared to the drawback of climate change, and gas corrupts too.
Probably yes. They seem to be poised to get there quicker than anybody else.
The inhibition to us achieving this goal earlier wasn't a lack of faith in nuclear power - it was a lack of belief in the importance of dealing with climate change at all.
Moreover (and this is the critical part), it's not like nuclear power is going to get us to 100% renewables any quicker than solar/wind will at this point - not since they broke the cost barrier in 2014.
In the 1980s nuclear was the only way to go zero carbon. 10 years it would have helped us get there quicker. Since 2014, there's no real point to building out nuclear capacity any more - new nuclear can't compete on cost only rickety old plants can.
One Fukushima or Chernobyl scale event in a densely populated country like Germany on a densely populated continent like Europe? Having reactors with molten cores near my home town with a 5 mill people metro area?
Japan had massive luck that the wind wasn't blowing in the direction of Tokyo.
Fukushima: how many deaths? Even if the wind was blowing in the direction of Tokyo?
But sure, let's close the nuclear reactor who killed nobody in Germany, and keep open the coal plants which still accounted for 228TWh in 2018, meaning they killed around 22800 persons per year. And let's only close them in 2038, 30 years later, having wasted 350 Million Tons of CO2 by year and killed hundreds of thousands of people in total.
We are lucky that the gas lobby is way less evil than the nuclear lobby <https://twitter.com/Senficon/status/1110278976654794753>
> Even if the wind was blowing in the direction of Tokyo?
Millions of people trying to escape...
it's not https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2015/7057-proj-costs-elect...
so ?
>Given how rapidly PV costs have continued to decline (and how major nuclear efforts collapsed with cost explosions since then), that's useless.
you say so, but the one with evidence is me not you
Compare 2015 prices to current prices.
Anyone with even cursory knowledge of this area would have know how fast PV prices have fallen.
not an argument , bring proofs he's wrong
Germany's Energiewende is a many decade long plan with going beyond 80+ renewable energy for electricity in 2050.
The Energiewende is not just about CO2 reductions, it is about making renewable energy viable in an industrialized country. This has impact for all of us. Not just in Germany.
If the US had a forward looking government and population, we would much further along the way. The energy consumption in the US is twice as high per capita as in Germany and there is no credible energy policy beyond fracking gas. The current US president is a coal lover and he was voted for that into his office. Imagine the amount of research money and infrastructure money the US COULD invest into a new energy systems - instead it wastes money on wars, consumption and trillion dollar deficits.
> investing into nuclear too alongside renewable (rather than instead) seems the safer bet
That's why it has to go and somebody has to invest to make that viable. Germany is doing exactly that.
> Focusing on closing nuclear first (like Germany did!)
Germany did focus on renewable energy and the most incompatible industry had to go first.
Renewable energy is not about nuclear and renewable side by side - this won't work.
Nuclear is a huge state owned monopolistic system. Renewable is market oriented, decentralized, non-monopolistic. The break-up of the old system was inevitable to jump-start the new energy system.
It's a complete paradigm shift like going from Mainframe computing to a distributed Internet.
Nuclear can be made smaller (molten salt reactor, but I do admit that there are huge challenges for that too), and more flexible. Germany's plant were not as flexible as France's, but France's can be quite flexible: for those of you who can read French <https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1102620969808658432.html> a variation of 10GW of nuclear production in a few hours.
will have zero impact in the next three decades. There is no market offering and no buyer.
No one is investing in yet another fuel cycle and nuclear technology. There are no reactors of scale and there is no industry surrounding it.
> Germany's plant were not as flexible as France's
Germany had a few flexible nuclear plants. But all old.
> a variation of 10GW of nuclear production in a few hours.
The result is that France has invested very little in renewable energy in the last decades and created a very inefficient and state owned energy system.
France's centralized nuclear state owned energy system and distributed multi-producer/owner renewable energy are largely incompatible systems. Proof: the lack of investments into renewable in the last decades in France.
The main question is this: where are CURRENT investments going. Not nuclear, but renewable. This future had been made possible by investments like the German Energiewende, while other countries did invest in mostly nothing. They even failed to bring nuclear forward (-> US). The US sits on a bunch of outdated reactors and not much idea how to replace them economically with newer and better ones.
Natural gas had the big advantage of being burned in combustion turbines, which are cheaper than other thermal cycles. Heat exchangers are costly, but a simple cycle turbine doesn't need any (if it doesn't have a regenerator).
The biggest nuclear operator here (Exelon) is shit talking new nuclear, putting their investment into CO2 capture, renewables, and storage.
Then, take into account the goal of making of vehicles electric in the next 20 years.
There is no viable alternative to nuclear as of today even if renewables should of course be pushed as much as possible.
Germany is emitting heavily because most of its electricity comes from fossil fuel and it decided to kill nuclear power of purely ideological reasons. (wood fired plants are counted as renewables in the EU, by the way)
The absolute priority should be to get rid of emissions, i.e. fossil fuels. Germany decided to get rid of nuclear energy first.
They are not a good example to follow.
It does because it is a relatively industrialized country. CO2 emissions fell last year by 4.5%.
These are actual numbers for electricity production in Germany: from 2017 to 2018:
5.6% more wind electricity, 6.3% more solar electricity.
2.7% less coal/lignite, 6% less hard coal, 9% less gas.
The share of renewable energy of electricity production is 40%.
In 2030 it is projected to be at around 65%.
This is going to be a revolution. We now have working days in 2019 where >60% of the electricity are coming from renewables. There was a week this year with 64.8% renewable energy for electricity, with wind providing 48.4%. Two decades ago this was thought to be impossible.
No, it does because its electricity comes from fossil fuels.
You are completely avoiding the point of my comment. Germany could have much, much lower emissions with nuclear but it has decided to continue emitting for political reasons, while trying to claim that they are 'green'...
It's not helpful to try to kill the discussion by stroking irrational fears.
No, we really don't. We know how to make all sorts of things reasonably safe. Yet planes still fall out of the sky, refineries catch on fire, dams fail, etc. In essence: Any nuclear reactor will have a probability different from zero for producing an incredibly expensive nuclear accident.
Much about accidents in complex high risk technologies has been said in "Normal Accidents" by Perrow in the 80s. The reasons he identified why complex systems fail will always be with us. Especially the notion that it is more often than not the organizations and not the technology which enables major accidents.
A coal fired power plant will also have a probability different from zero for producing nuclear waste.
In fact, AFAIK the radiation risk from living near a coal powered power plant is significantly larger than living next to a nuclear reactor.
I guess if this was taken into account coal powered power plants would also require incredibly expensive cleanup.
That said as long as renewable is cheaper we should go with that going forward.
This is again spreading irrational fears.
Hinkley Point = 3200 MW Average wind turbine generates = 3 MW
That's about 1,100 wind turbines at current tech. GE is working on a 12 MW wind turbine - it would take 270 of them would replace Hinkley point.
Load factors for wind turbines are rarely over 40%. Nuclear's is 80%. So you'd need 2200 turbines to replace one Hinkley point. And all the gas power plants to make the energy when the wind is not blowing...
Quite right, my mistake.
GE's new turbine has a 63% capacity apparently. So, 428 of them are needed, apparently.
Either way, I don't see what is so intrinsically unrealistic about setting up 500 of these things offshore as compared to a hinkley point.
Gansu Wind farm in China is 8,000MW - already 2.5x onen Hinkley.
Why is that?
I'm sure we're all broadly in favour of free markets. Do electricity consumers buy nuclear because it's good value?[0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c...
It's not 100% because you need to do maintenance at times.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, I was alluding to the lively debate about how the selling price for electricity is set, and how it should vary depending on market conditions.
I see no reason to lock-in minimum pricing for any kind of electricity generation many decades in advance. Why is that necessary for new nuclear plants?
In other words: do we need to guarantee a minimum market price 30 years in advance in order to make it look like building a nuclear plant makes economic sense?
(Source: http://www.ewea.org/wind-energy-basics/faq/)
That's an actual average of 685 kW, so 4,700 turbines for Hinkley Point. But that's still the _average_ production. If, or rather when, there's no wind during a high demand period you get a nice blackout.
Also:
> So a 2-megawatt wind turbine would require a total area of about half a square kilometer
(Source: https://sciencing.com/much-land-needed-wind-turbines-1230463...
So for those 4,700 turbines you need more than 2,350 km^2, so the whole of Dorset covered and as said, you'd still need a backup.
it doesn't work like that , capacity factor of wind is almost half of the capacity factor of nuclear
* The wind is always blowing somewhere.
* At current prices it makes sense just to overproduce and figure out ways to time shift demand (e.g. start using electric storage heaters again)
proof? beacuse using solar and wind bring a rise in the cost of energy https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/05...
Gee. They have a bunch of nuclear reactors whose cost has already been paid for. That cost is not reflected in current electric rates. When they try to build new ones, the cost is ridiculous, and they find building renewables sources would be cheaper.
"Replacing nuclear with renewables would save France $44.5 billion"
https://futurism.com/the-byte/nuclear-plants-renewable-energ...
nope ''In fact, the carbon-intensity of French electricity has increased. After years of subsidies for solar and wind, France’s 2017 emissions of 68g/CO2 per kWh was higher than any year between 2012 and 2016.
The reason? Record-breaking wind and solar production did not make up for falling nuclear energy output and higher natural gas consumption. And now, the high cost of renewable electricity is showing up in French household electricity bills.
According to Eurostat, although French households pay 41% less than German households, electricity in France has, over the past decade, been increasing in price much faster than electricity in Germany.''
Because they don't pay the real price. The whole show is government owned (EDF, Areva (or what they are called today)). and thus a lot of money is coming from the government - like financing for acquiring Areva parts. The government keeps nuclear power afloat with huge amounts of money.
Example: http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Europe-checks-Fre...
EDF is 56bn€ in debt and can't pay for the maintenance/replacement of its aging reactors. The new Flamanville reactor is now at 11bn€ cost...
Way too many power plants are from the 80's and before. Maybe they've had a few upgrades, but they're mostly at the end of their lifespan or even over their recommended life.
Just replacing eol reactors in the west will be hard.
"A vital tool agains global warming" means that it's our only possibility. It's not about cost, it's about what is physically possible.
they assume ~1,3 Billion per 1 GW nuclear capacity[0], but right now it looks like 3-5 Billion per 1 GW is more whats happening. [0] http://withouthotair.com/c28/page_216.shtml [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...
If you take single fuck up, that's been shown in court to be fuck up and then deduct from there that nuclear power is all over as expensive Olkiluoto 3, then umm.
Do you also smoke because your granny smoked and lived to her nineties?
As the direness of the climate situation becomes more and more urgent, cost becomes irrelevant.
During times of emergency and total war, dollars don't mean anything. If you have the manpower and the raw resources to do something, it gets done.
Ignoring the politics and economics of energy production, from a physics standpoint nuclear is a high outlier in terms of energy density per resource spent or per unit climate change impact, and that fact will increasingly override dollar costs or public perception as the the climate gets increasingly hostile.
Until the crisis becomes apparent, I am sure nuclear will continue to be a mostly ignored option across europe and the west while political forces dominate the issue. China on the other hand isn't bothered by public sentiment[1]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/china-nuclearpower/china-lik...
As far as public utilities go, the problem is that people who give them money expect a small but static return on investment. For almost all the 20th century they were a mostly safe place to keep money. That was part of the reason why Enron was one of the few companies where the white collar criminals were actually punished.
One of the major problems is that the people running them don't know how to manage projects that are more risky and the people doing the investing don't know how to account for the uncertainty around fossil fuels, versus intermittent renewables, versus huge nuclear projects. The message from the politicians is always "your money in these projects is safe", and they've made sure to keep that promise even if they've put a different spin on it because the underlying shockwaves would be as bad as government bonds going bad.
You'll need to answer real practical questions like the UK currently faces: who will build the proposed reactors and who will pay how much for it. It's not like this is an easy question, just check the news the UK from the past few years, with Hitachi and Toshiba giving up.
France's state owned nuclear industry builds another plant in the UK - with a proposed cost of 20bn pounds... The decision for this reactor took almost ten years.
1: It's not actually cheaper than nuclear. The majority of the cost associated with nuclear is regulatory compliance and political rather than practical in nature (see: China). Discounting this cost makes nuclear the dominant option. Factoring for lifecycle costs pushes it much further ahead. Fun fact: there is currently no way to recycle photovoltaics whose useful lifespan is 20 years.
2: Use of landmass. Deploying wind or solar consumes landmass which must be cleared of flora/fauna. The landmass required to power a nation via these means is not at all negligible. This is contrary to managing climate change for obvious reasons.
Geothermal power stands as an exception here and should absolutely be deployed over nuclear where permissible.
3: Excess capacity. The climate debate is converging on the fact that we are past the point of no return and we need to actively sequester carbon out of the atmosphere to get back to a healthy scenario. Ignoring the specifics, this basically means that we need to 'un-spend' all the energy that we have consumed over the last 50 years via fossil fuels. While still meeting the growing energy demands of civilisaion. We need to be producing a huge excess of energy for this strategy to be viable.
Renewables are nice, but pragmatically they are not nearly enough to dig us out of the hole where we have found ourselves.
An engineer in Shanghai costs $20K/year. You can't point to the cost of nuclear in China and pretend it will reflect the cost in the west.
Any opposition to the the energy policy in China will see themselves in a labor camp. That's a cheap way to deal with it.
If you think that nuclear is cheaper in China than in the West, then part of the reason is that it has other hidden costs.
If nuclear proponents want to be taken serious, they need to answer those kinds of questions. Currently nuclear is stagnating on a global scale.
>How many?
As many as you can build. You run out of engineers and carpenters before you make too many reactors in time.
>What timeframe?
Now.
>Costs?
Doesn't matter that much. Easily cheaper than climate change.
>Who builds them?
Whoever can.
>Which models?
Hardly matters, any model is safer than burning coal.
>Where do we build them?
Doesn't matter. Any location is safer than burning coal.
>What effects does it have when?
Hope that we might have climate change to stop below 3 degrees.
This will convince nobody.
If you don't believe the IPCC storyline, nuclear is still best power source right now. But there is no hurry. We can safely dabble with renewables and batteries and such until oil, gas and coal run out. No political hard decisions are needed, because prices of fossil fuels will increase well in advance to any catastrophe. So it will become economically sound to produce energy in some other way. Maybe it won't be nuclear then, I don't really care.
- Will you volunteer to live by the nuclear plant or waste storage facilities?
- Will you work at or advise your friends & family to work there?
Future cannot be researched, calculated or predicted. You can just be worried about stuff and bet on some solutions to give your children a decent place to live in.
Sure it can. Otherwise you wouldn't know about the effects of climate change.
> You can just be worried about stuff and bet on some solutions to give your children a decent place to live in.
Use a bicycle. Don't fly. Don't make vacation on a cruise ship. Don't buy flown in goods. Don't eat meat. Don't reproduce. Recycle stuff. Get solar onto your roof. Heat with electricity from non-fossil fuels. Don't use a car.
Well actually we don't know. We have maybe a sophisticated guess at best. Knowledge requires data, that by definition cannot be gathered from future. At least not before someone invents a time machine.
Even the best forecasts we can make about anything are very poor. Look at a simple things like construction budgets or projected congestion of particular traffic system upgrade. They are usually off by magnitude of order. And this is well documented by Kahnemann.
In regards of atmosphere, it might be that IPCC has overestimated the whole thing with a fat margin. Or it might be we are all dead no matter what we do.
>Don't reproduce.
If I don't do that, then I'm not going to give a shit about this phenomena anyhow.
>Heat with electricity from non-fossil fuels.
Where I'm from, that's impossible without the whole state going non-fossil fuel. Which again is practically impossible without nuclear.
Heating accounts probably about half of my carbon footprint. And with rough winters that's a lot. I've already minimized everything else.
I fear that any savings in CO2 emissions will be useless, due to an increasing world population.
> Heating accounts probably about half of my carbon footprint
Heating, travel, transportation, industrial production, production of chemicals, production of concrete/cement ( https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46455844 ), food production, ... all those need to be addressed across the whole spectrum of climate-active gas - not just Co2, but also Methan and others.
Not having kids would help, but suicide would help more.
Many things matter, but big things matter more than small things. Electricity, traffic, industrial production and heating are all big things. All linked to energy production.
Not if the small things come in large numbers.
'a vital tool agains global warming'? What does that mean in numbers? How many nuclear power plants of what types for what amount of effort would be built in what timeframe for to make any sizeable contribution? How would it work?
A single reactor in the west is >10bn $ and takes a decade or more to build, while not being able to be financed on the market (see the UK).