Storage is quite a bit more expensive than nuclear, and while the cost is dropping it has a long way to go. At the same time, new nuclear technologies like molten salt reactors could well drop the price of nuclear. For that to be a factor, we'd likely have to get more aggressive with licensing new nuclear technologies; i.e. we'd have to treat climate change with the urgency it deserves.
Here's a Lazard report on levelized cost of storage: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019
I can get behind the idea of pushing for nuclear in the case of baseload and even in the case of high population density areas where wind/solar are simply not practical. But, if there is anywhere to dump a bunch of money, it is wind and solar. We can have those producing electricity within a year, easily. Even if you want to talk about manufacturing costs, those are payed back within 1->5 years. Still shorter than the timeframe to getting a new nuclear plant online.
I'm not saying this to be anti-nuclear. I think it was a great solution. I just think that solar and wind have become the better solutions (at least for the shorter term).
The deployment time is a solvable problem though. We've built nuclear faster in the past, and some places still do today. France converted to 80% nuclear in 20 years, South Korea has recently built modern reactors in about five years [1], and some new designs can be mass-produced in factories. Thorcon is working on building molten salt reactors in shipyards, at massive scale [2].
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/06/21...
I do thing there is some peak amount of producible renewables that we aren't really anywhere near. New nuclear would work well to decrease the amount of new renewable build-out required year over year.
Particularly, I think nuclear is a great option for islands (Hawaii, for example) where land is at a premium anyways.
The optimist in me believes that we'll eventually get good enough at solving the unit commitment problem in the energy grid that we'll reduce the need for carbon-intensive peaking sources and eventually even eliminate nuclear power. But we're not there today.
Storage is a problem that simply needs to be solved for any green solution. Nuclear and wind included.
A big issue is that solar, wind, and nuclear simply don't play well together. Nuclear wants to be a base load, solar and wind push down the maximum base load feasible.
Without storage to smooth out the demand curve, you can't efficiently operate either.
I think the latter is more feasible without too much wind, since solar predictably goes to zero when demand is lowest. I don't think it's at all clear that a grid with high amounts of wind instead of nuclear would be cheaper.
Today, I agree that if we could make the switch overnight that solar + storage would probably be a lot more expensive than nuclear + storage.
However, who knows in 10 years. I could see liquid metal batteries becoming extremely economical.
Regulatory decisions seem to be made on the basis of hysteria moreso than scientific merit. For instance, that in the US secondary waste is treated equally as dangerous as primary waste, leading to ludicrous disposal costs. And nuclear 'waste' isn't even an issue with many modern reactor designs.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that the _current_ cost of bringing a new nuclear plant online is astronomical, but that doesn't mean that the cost can't be brought down tremendously with sane regulation and modern designs. In many ways, the nuclear industry is still in its infancy (how many of the reactors operating worldwide right now are boiling water reactors, literally the oldest and most dangerous design??). No one expects nascent technologies to be cheap, you look to the future.
And beyond that, nuclear and solar/wind are not directly comparable. Solar/wind cannot provide the base load that nuclear is so apt at. What you really need to be comparing is a nuclear plant vs renewable PLUS energy storage. And last time I checked, grid-level energy storage is still extremely expensive.
I don't think you can dismiss nuclear so easily. Not by a longshot.
It still blows my mind that we found an almost magical solution to use of fossil fuels over 60 years ago and fumbled it so hard. Shame on big oil, shame on our regulatory agencies and politicians.
Agreed! Nuclear could be much cheaper were there not so much fear mongering and red tape in the path. Chernobyl and TMI taught us the wrong lesions as a society. However, fat chance getting those policies, politics, and activists minds changed to decrease those regulatory costs.
> And beyond that, nuclear and solar/wind are not directly comparable. Solar/wind cannot provide the base load that nuclear is so apt at. What you really need to be comparing is a nuclear plant vs renewable PLUS energy storage. And last time I checked, grid-level energy storage is still extremely expensive.
I don't discreet per say. However, for the US, most power grids simply aren't at the point where storage needs to be considered. A large portion of power is coming from fossil fuels (more than the tipping point where storage needs to be considered).
In those cases, the clear path forward that will cut carbon emissions the fastest is deployment of renewable tech. You can bring online new solar and wind plants in less than a year. Nuclear requires at least 10->20 years of time before it can be brought online (mostly due to all the regulations surrounding it).
Storage will enter the equation when a large percentage of the grid is renewable (30->50% someone cited). We simply aren't even near that point yet. However, even before we hit that point, natural gas can provide a stop gap to allow us to have even higher mixes of renewable generation.
Nuclear doesn't solve the storage problem. You still need a peaker plant with nuclear.
> It still blows my mind that we found an almost magical solution to use of fossil fuels over 60 years ago and fumbled it so hard. Shame on big oil, shame on our regulatory agencies and politicians.
Agreed. We SHOULD have been ramping up on nuclear usage. I would MUCH rather have to deal with localized nuclear waste problems vs our current issues with climate change. It was simply a societal failure that we didn't go nuclear for everything from the 1960 onward.
It was the best solution to climate change for nearly a half century and the very people that should have supported (environmentalist) killed it with fear mongering.
(Yes, of course we need to have electricity in hospitals and for heating 100% of the time - but if the newspapers are unavailable three days per year, or if some non-essential TV channels turn off when it's really cold - maybe not as bad.)
Natural gas is currently the peaker plant solution to renewables. The fact that more of these plants exist is primarily driven by the fact that larger portions of the grid are being pushed towards renewables.
A little bit of nuclear in the mix, plus storing biogas, and aggressively pursuing thermal solar is very important, IMO. It just isn't possible to overprovision wind enough to meet 99th percentile supply/demand mismatch, but having a few percent of nuclear base load really helps.
If we want people to stop burning natural gas and heating oil for their homes, and more to move to electric cars, we'll need a ton more base load, too.
Yes, nuclear can't compete with natural gas base load, but we want to stop burning so much natural gas, so...
Even with a pure nuclear grid, you'd still need a peaking source. That would be provided, probably, by natural gas or hydro if available.
A storage solution is simply required regardless of where the grid goes. I think that Liquid metal batteries look to be the best solution for grid level storage. (relatively cheap, super long life, if massively adopted would likely become a lot cheaper).
Gee, what are all these combined cycle gas plants that take 12-24 hours to start/shutdown, and require high duty cycle use to be economically competitive, if they're not base generation?
(Yes, I know we're starting to get faster combined cycle plants, but they're still not fast, and they still require to be producing power most of the time to be viable).
> Even with a pure nuclear grid, you'd still need a peaking source. That would be provided, probably, by natural gas or hydro if available.
I suggested use of biogas and hydro in the comment you replied to! Did you not read it, or just talked past it?
> A storage solution is simply required regardless of where the grid goes.
Sufficient overprovisioning of renewables and smart grid greatly reduces the amount of storage/peaking needed. A bit of reliable, carbon-neutral base load greatly reduces the amount of overprovisioning needed.
:) Fair point. I generally don't think of NG as being used for base load but you are correct.
> I suggested use of biogas and hydro in the comment you replied to! Did you not read it, or just talked past it?
I missed it in your original comment.
I've not looked in enough to biogas, honestly, to fairly say anything about it. Hydro is a little different though. It requires a lot of land and the right geography in order to work. While I think there are more places where you can add hydro, I think it they are generally running out. It also doesn't help that a lot of well meaning, but IMO wrong ;), environmentalist really oppose hydro for the effects it has on the river critters. That sort of red tape makes gums up new deployments about as bad as new nuclear deployments are gummed up.
That being said, states with a lot hydro in place (north west states, primarily) would be foolish, IMO, not to simply go all renewable. They already have the storage problem solved in the form of hydro power.
> Sufficient overprovisioning of renewables and smart grid greatly reduces the amount of storage/peaking needed. A bit of reliable, carbon-neutral base load greatly reduces the amount of overprovisioning needed.
Perhaps. You'd have to somehow incentivize some industrial businesses to participate in the grid smartly. For example, an electric smelter which only operates during overproduction periods. IDK, maybe the power companies get involved in the steal milling business.
You might be able to get there with things like smart ACs and electic car charging, but it seems like the required cost of deploying that sort of equipment would be pretty high (Higher than a special purpose steal mill? I'm not sure).
Yah, I'm not really saying to add hydro-- there's few opportunities to do this.
But lots of hydro installations are already suited to "peaker" use, where you draw from reservoir just when you need to, and many more can be adapted this way. (Really doing this effectively may require large capital costs to increase the amount of peak generation available from them, drawing down the reservoir more quickly).
> Perhaps. You'd have to somehow incentivize some industrial businesses to participate in the grid smartly. For example, an electric smelter which only operates during overproduction periods. IDK, maybe the power companies get involved in the steal milling business.
This already exists. You can get a big discount on your power if you are a big industrial customer and willing to be turned off with little notice. We need to extend this out to delaying house heat slightly, etc, electric car charging points, as you say.
> the required cost of deploying that sort of equipment would be pretty high
Ain't nothing compared to the capital cost of overprovisioning further or doing storage.
That's what I'm saying: use nuclear as part of a series of things to limit the amount of wind overprovisioning needed. We're going to have extra power during the day most of the time.
But the intermittency at night of wind alone is a big problem. It seems like burning some gas-- hopefully mostly biogas-- is part of the solution, along with leveraging hydroelectric to the maximum extent.
As we add things like electric heating and electric cars charging, etc-- nuclear has a big opportunity to address this increase in base load (and can be effectively combined with smart grid on these uses).
In the end, we cannot build out just wind fast enough, anyways, even if we ignore the overprovisioning required for availability. Might as well build out nuclear in parallel.
If everyone does it, then there would be no place to export excess, what do you do then?
You can always turn off renewables during periods of overproduction. Whether you build nuclear+renewables or just renewables, you need to overprovision the renewables and be willing to turn them off. You just have to do this more with only renewables.
(Of course, you'd want to use all available strategies to reduce required overprovisioning-- including maximizing use of dispatchable hydroelectric and biogas, some storage, and agreements with utility users to reduce usage during times of critical supply shortages).
We simply aren't at the point where there are enough renewables on the grid that adding more would ultimately cause more natural gas emissions. Until the renewable profile starts pushing into base load generation (particularly eating into green base loads like hydro and nuclear) then it is pretty much a pure win to add solar and wind. The natural gas peakers ultimately produce less CO2 with renewables than with base load fossil fuels.
However, there is a time where storage becomes the main issue. We aren't there yet. Until we hit that point, deploying as much solar and wind as possible is going to be the fastest, most efficient, and cheapest way to decrease our carbon footprint.
The lead time for new nuclear is 10->20 years. It is, frankly, too late for nuclear (at least without serious regulations overhaul). It might make sense to start building plants, but if we want to curb climate change then the only path is renewables.
I say this because the cost of building a new nuclear plant is more expensive than wind and solar.
Nuclear might still be a good solution for northern and southern habitats. But, at this point, where most pollution is produced, solar and wind are viable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
With all that said, the real viability of renewables is partially going to be determined by storage costs. Nuclear doesn't really solve the storage problem though (it is a base load only power source). Eventually in order to hit a 7.6% reduction goal we'll have to phase out natural gas peaker plants. To do that, we need storage.
We certainly shouldn't be decommissioning nuclear plants in favor of renewables. I just don't think the time to build new nuclear is here. The cheaper and faster solution is new renewables.