Solar and wind of course are great, but has anyone figured out how to make those supply 100% of a nation's power needs, 24/7? I don't believe so: we don't have the storage technology yet.
You say weakness - and I say that more people die from falls, from installing rooftop solar panels, than do in nuclear accidents.
Power generation is inherentantly dangerous. Just because you distribute the danger around, instead of centralizing it, does not mean that you've reduced the danger.
As for the economics of nuclear, as time goes on we are finding that the actual alternative to nuclear is not renewables. It's natural gas, sourced from either fracking, or Russia.
Compared to the uptick in natural gas, renewables are a rounding error.
The economics of non-nuclear are terrible, though. All roads that don't include it as a major generator of electricity rely on burning carbon, in the form of natural gas.
If you think I'm wrong - would you mind explaining why natural gas deployment last two years (~20% increase, so about ~5% of global energy generation) was as much as the deployment of renewables, for the last decade? (also ~5% of global generation)
If you are right - could you give me your best guess for when you expect gas plant deployment to go net negative? 2020? 2025? 2050? 20-never? What mechanism (political, economic, etc) do you expect to drive that inflection point?
[1] https://yearbook.enerdata.net/natural-gas/gas-consumption-da...
[2] https://yearbook.enerdata.net/renewables/wind-solar-share-el...
in your dream
Coal production is growing last three years
When all externalities are taking into account, then we can talk about the cost of Nuclear.
My impression is that battery storage tech and infrastructure is nowhere near able to provide 100% of US power when it's night and the wind doesn't blow (which is surprisingly often)
It's just like the calls to rely on fusion power instead of building fission plants. Fusion doesn't exist (as a usable power generation method), so calling for it to be planned for now is ridiculous. It's the same with storage systems; we don't have any that can supply the entire grid yet. We're having a hard enough time just getting enough lithium to make batteries for the relatively small number of electric vehicles on the road now. There are things like pumped-hydro, but those only work in some places, and we already have them (i.e., we can't make more of them, because we've already exhausted all the available hydropower sites), and they're not enough.
Don't get me wrong: renewables are great for what they're good at: supplying variable power, especially on sunny days, and the US in particular could definitely stand to deploy much more, particularly in the sunny states where a lot of power is used for A/C. But it's not a solution yet for baseload power.
Using the existing nuclear that you have for an additional decade or longer is much better than switching to coal.
A lot can happen in a decade.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Energiem...
Because coal is so bad in terms of carbon intensity (800 gCO2/kwH), Germany's greenhouse gas emissions figures are still terrible on average.
"Why Aren't Renewables Decreasing Germany's Carbon Emissions?" https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/10/10/why-arent...
"Why solar and wind won’t make much difference to carbon dioxide emissions" https://blog.oup.com/2017/10/solar-wind-energy-carbon-dioxid...
"German electricity was nearly 10 times dirtier than France's in 2016" http://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/2/11/german-e...
I don't and you are posting links to outdated articles.
see: - https://www.newscientist.com/letter/mg23531450-700-7-generat... - https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...
etc... of course it's way less than coal. but it's stupid to let some countries "export" their emission to third world countries. the map bases their nuclear plants with 12gCO2eq/kwh. which is basically just insanly low and is only the median and does not factor everything in (no build, decomission of the plant (because that is unknown and different for each reactor) and basically the icc does in fact not factors in mining with all their transport routes, mostly it's just a nuclear energy favored estimate)
"We use a life cycle analysis (LCA) approach, meaning that we take into account emissions arising from the whole life cycle of power plants (construction, fuel production, operational emissions, and decommissioning)."
It just demonstrates that even a strong and "remarkable" drive towards renewables alone such as what Germany did, just isn't enough to sustain a developed economy, unless you're lucky like Sweden and have a geography that allows a lot of hydro.
Germany helps the world more, since renewable energy scales much easier and is cost effective, low-danger, ... that's why exporting energy efficient systems and renewable energy production technology is the way to go. Whether we use coal for a decade longer or not does not matter much in the larger picture. We need to develop scalable renewable technology and deploy it, for billions of people. Nuclear is too slow and too risky. If we look at the world-wide numbers for electricity production from nuclear, its mostly stagnating and it will be tough in the coming years when aging reactors will be taken off grid to sustain the level of production, enhance the life of existing reactors by upgrading them, build storage, have money for both decommision of old reactors and money to build new ones. France will need to invest upwards 100 billion Euro just for their aging fleet ... good luck with that. There is a single new EPR in the works and its expensive and late. With an old design from decades ago. The real battle for emission reductions will not be with 80 mill Germans, but with billions of people in Africa and Asia - where the growth is. We need to develop together with them fast scalable electricity production.
Let me quote the World Nuclear Report (!) from 2019:
* Non-Nuclear Options Save More Carbon Per Dollar. In many nuclear countries, new renewables can now compete economically with existing nuclear power plants. The closure of uneconomic reactors will not directly save CO2 emissions but can indirectly save more CO2 than closing a coal-fired plant, if the nuclear plant’s larger saved operating costs are rein- vested in efficiency or cheap modern renewables that in turn displace more fossil-fueled generation.
* Non-Nuclear Options Save More Carbon Per Year. While current nuclear programs are particularly slow, current renewables programs are particularly fast. New nuclear plants take 5–17 years longer to build than utility-scale solar or onshore wind power, so existing fossil-fueled plants emit far more CO2 while awaiting substitution by the nuclear option. Stabilizing the climate is urgent, nuclear power is slow.
The amount of energy required to run France's trains for one whole year is 9 TWh. In terms of waste you can take your pick between :
* assuming 100% nuclear energy : 200kg of nuclear waste
* assuming 100% coal : 700.000 tons of solid ash (usually stored in the open air), plus 1.000 tons of soot and fine particles, including tons / dozens of tons of arsenic, lead, thallium, mercury, even uranium and thorium.
(Source : http://www.sfen.org/rgn/dechets-radioactifs-verite-faits-exa...)
Option 2 is what German coal plants are pumping into the European air right now (34% of total electricity production as I write), for years, contributing to dozens of thousands of premature deaths.
That is the clear and present danger. And there is no credible plan to get out of this, because no matter which way you put it (and as much as I'd like the opposite to be true) you can't solve the renewables intermittence problem without a major breakthrough in battery storage.
All of your arguments will be valid when and if that happens. In the meantime, this stance is betting on a future that may or may exist, whilst causing immense and certain harm right now, in the middle of the climate emergency.
Storage of electricity can be done in multiple ways and we will see larger new installations in ten years from now. Models for running countries like the US with electricity from 100% renewable are looking feasible.
Since there has been almost no expansion of nuclear in the past 30 years on a global scale and everything looks like we will see a long and slow decline for nuclear, it's easy to see that it's the wrong technology and its further contribution to reduce carbon emissions will be likely zero or less.
I'm glad that China proves you wrong. If they had gone all in with coal+renewables like Germany, climate change would be an even bigger issue than it already is.
> Renewable energy is expanding rapidly. That's currently the only viable option. The best is to phase out all costly nuclear reactors and invest the money into renewable energy expansion.
No, again Germany has tried that. It. doesn't. work. 20 years later, even now at 46% from renewables, the country still has one of the worst carbon intensity figures of all European countries.
Besides, there's an upper limit to the expansion. Wind farms require 360 times (!) as much land area as nuclear, solar 75 times as much for the same output.
It's a beautiful idealistic dream that I hope will work one day, but causes us all terrible harm in the meantime.
> Storage of electricity can be done in multiple ways and we will see larger new installations in ten years from now. Models for running countries with like the US with electricity from 100% renewable are looking feasible.
This is hot air, nothing more than wishful thinking. And you can't build a power grid on wishful thinking. Also we can't afford "hopefully, one day" to tackle the climate emergency. Another commenter put it best : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21996271
It doesn't. And China is not the world.
Nuclear is 4% in China for electricity production. Tiny. Renewable production & investments in China are much higher that the ones for nuclear. Wind power already is larger in China and fast growing.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Electric...
> No, again Germany has tried that.
of course it works. Renewable will grow year over year. In a decade it will be more than 60% in Germany.
> Besides, there's an upper limit to the expansion.
That limit hasn't been reached. By far.
In the EU basically most new deployment of electricity production is renewable. Basically none for nuclear.
Check the trends: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/-World-Nuclear-Industry-S...
It's clear where this is going. Nuclear's contribution to reduce CO2 emissions will be minor - the large share of reduction will come from large scale deployment of renewable energy. The numbers are clear, just read the World Nuclear Report from above...
> This is hot air, nothing more than wishful thinking
It's not. For example I live in North Germany. There is a large power line under construction to Norway and more can be build (some are already under planning). These will combine electricity from on/offshore windfarms with Hydro-Electric storage.
We also have very large storage facilities for gas, which can be generated from surplus electricity. The areas here will have huge amount of surplus electricity.
This will all get more important in a decade or so.
There are various other technologies for storing electricity either existing or under development.
It's politically motivated to the extent that people are scared of nuclear and any political move to support it or finance research could be career suicide. Without any attempt to research improvements we are stuck using old technology and anyone advocating against nuclear power has good reason to keep doing so. It's a bit of a vicious cycle where the only way to break it is to hope for some unexpected breakthrough.
Failed costly experiments. Nuclear is simply not cost effective in a democratic society.
Phrased this way, this is less of a problem with nuclear and more a problem with said democratic society.
It's exactly a problem with Nuclear, because it thrives only in centralized, monopolistic, authoritarian, non-market situations and actually supports those structures.
It's such in many countries. That's why Nuclear is on the way out in the West. The struggle will be to build new ones and even keep the current level. The French EPR is way over budget&time in France and Finland.
Basically Nuclear is also not insurable. That's why all risks are state owned. Building them is only possible with large amount of state money and protected markets (see the new EPR for the UK).
> In “Der Atomstaat” (“The Nuclear State”) Jungk quotes the Austrian scientist Helga Novotny, who back in the day worked at the IIASA (International Institute für Applied Systems Analysis) in Vienna/Laxenburg. She said that “the opposition against nuclear energy roots in the resistance against those who profit from the increasing economical and scientific focus. The opposition is directed against large-scale industry that makes common cause with big states and big science. It is the resistance of those who feel powerless and small in the face of the developments” (Der Atomstaat, 1977, zit. n. Ausgabe 1979 p. 77ff). This finding is still relevant today and still undermines democracy.
In the mean time (tens of) billions of Euros are spent on projects where some still have no end in sight (Stuttgart 21; Berlin Brandenburg Airport; Elbphilarmonie) but that's an easier sell because they look fancy.
Nuclear research of any kind has a massive stigma associated to the label. Since most people's "education" related to nuclear power is "Chernobyl and Fukushima" politicians will become populists and won't risk their cozy seat. If all your education about flying machines was "Hindenburg" you'd walk.
Energy policy has been widely discussed in Germany for three decades. There was even a party founded which had this as one of their main political topics. That party has been relatively stable and has been in the federal government for a few years.
> Stuttgart 21; Berlin Brandenburg Airport; Elbphilarmonie ... that's an easier sell because they look fancy
None of these decisions were particular popular.
> Nuclear research of any kind has a massive stigma associated to the label
Rightly so. But worse is nuclear deployment in the form of large scale nuclear power plants in densely populated countries.
The battle for finding cancer cures had so many dead ends but it's the worthiness of the cause that keeps you going. The promise of single power plants able to produce an almost endless supply of cheap, clean(ish?) energy still tickles the imagination more than vast swaths of land covered by PV panels or wind turbines.
> Nuclear is simply not cost effective in a democratic society.
Democracy is about picking your aim, not making the target more cost effective. And the more complex the topic, the less qualified regular people are at even guessing if something is cost effective or not. Also absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because we failed to make the tech cost effective until now doesn't mean it cannot be and never will be.
You suggest anything that we've failed at for a few decades (even if some attempts are half-hearted) should just be halted because that's proof it cannot be done. Some of our greatest achievements came from people who wouldn't give up. Some are yet to come. Or we can just stop it all because democracy and cost effectiveness.
This is exactly why the move away from nuclear is politically motivated. Not because it's a foregone conclusion that it cannot be solved but rather because a politician will find it easier to convince "the democracy" that spending tens of billions on a stealth democracy dispatcher is more cost effective than spending the same on trying to improve nuclear to the point of eliminating the key downsides.
Such a promise does not produce any power and does not scale.
> Just because we failed to make the tech cost effective until now doesn't mean it cannot be and never will be.
We are making solar and wind cost effective. It's already happening. In scale.
> It's already happening. In scale.
Again, you are evading the fact that (the as of yet unfulfilled promise of) better nuclear power would actually deliver more than that. In the mean time our energy needs are increasing faster than the efficiency of PV cells and generators is. There's nothing wrong with researching even better alternatives.
Just over a decade ago so many were insisting EVs were dead in the water. We had tried and failed and ICE tech was delivering and constantly improving. You're not arguing that nuclear is bad, you're arguing that we should not even attempt to make it better or good. Why build cars when we can already do it with horses and horses scale...
You could be correct but not based on the arguments you brought so far.
If a horse is dead, you might as well climb down.
The market was wrong so many times that using it as a source of ultimate truth sounds like a last ditch argument. The same market that still goes for oil and coal and would have barely touched EVs or clean energy if it wasn't for subsidies.
You either didn't understand the problem or are just like anyone who ever said "why invest in clean energy when we have perfectly good coal and oil today, and it scales". We did and now we reap the benefits of clean energy. There is no reason to not invest in getting even better, even if this requires research. But I think you just see the label "nuclear" and any reasonable argument based discussion flies out the window.
In the mean time Germany is closing nuclear plants to burn coal. Lungs rejoice.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/15297-if-i-had-asked-people...
It's true that Germany has a historical anti-nuclear and green sentiment but other countries are no different. Nuclear energy may be clean, but it is also exceedingly expensive and unable to compete in price in most countries including the US.[1] Even China, the large last country to buckle the trend as of late seems to have reduced the role of its nuclear energy policy and seems to be missing targets [2].
[1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/industry-meltdown-is-era-of-n... [2] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-...