Yeah, that's true, but you've taken a reading there at the worst time of day whilst it's not windy here. The other week we achieved the second lowest carbon intensity daily average ever (the lowest was in the summer last year).
Here's what the UK carbon intensity of electricity looks over a larger time scale (8yrs) https://electricityproduction.uk/carbon-intensity/?t=8y
Also, I don't believe that (whilst I love their visualisation) the Electricity Map UK gCO2/kWh measurement is very accurate. For starters, they don't appear to separate out different types of gas plants. The CO2 intensity of OCGT is 3x that of CCGT.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 [2] http://electricityinfo.org/real-time-british-electricity-sup...
What makes you believe that? They list CCGT and OCGT separately, it's just that (unless every site I've seen about UK energy is wrong) there isn't a lot of OCGT generation in the UK because it's uncompetitive. Which would be for the same reason it increases CO2 intensity - it's inefficient to run. In the UK market it doesn't make up for that enough by being cheap to build and fast to spin up so as to create an incentive to build a lot more.
The efficiency of OCGT is about 40%. The efficiency of CCGT is about 60%. So, no, the CO2 intensity is not "3x".
⇒ chances are a normal-sized bulldozer is half the height of that one.
It's impossible to go 100% renewables unless there's a breakthrough in battery storage.
By the time that happens, it will be too late for climate change. That's why phasing out nuclear without having any other solid low carbon plan was irresponsible.
At this point, nobody that is serious is talking about 100% renewables. As is 100% nuclear which has similar problems of being inflexible. However, not all of this has to be battery storage, having a power full, europe-wide grid is equally important. Without that already now when they are still allowed, nuclear plants have shut down at times voluntarily because there was no demand. Phasing out nuclear may not have been the smartest of all moves, but its still far from the top ten of most stupid moves done in the german energy strategy. And especially not in the top ten of the most stupid moves of the conservative party.
Long term storage is better handled with hydrogen. Using batteries and hydrogen at plausible (or even conservative) costs, one can get to a 100% renewable (PV + wind) grid more cheaply than one also using new nuclear power plants.
I believe a deus ex machina type carbon capture solution is a far more likely scenario than getting industrialised nations, let alone emerging ones, to actually reduce their energy usage.
I see what you mean, but even if a magical carbon capture solution was invented, it would take several decades for it to be implemented on a sufficient scale - given that the current emissions don't increase even faster!! I can't consider it as part of any "likely" scenario.
Also, emerging nations don't really need policies to reduce their own energy usage, as long as most of their own energy usage is linked to the production chain of industrialized nations, it will decrease by itself.
À significant part of the population accepted a drastic and sudden lifestyle change over the last few months. Suddenly remote work and visio conferences are acceptable alternatives to driving 2tons of metal through 30km of asphalt 2x a day. Change is possible.
We're already seeing large numbers of people reject the "stay at home" narrative , simply because they want to, rather than it being driven by improving conditions.
Using this as evidence to suggest that people will adjust to a "new normal" is arguing against your point.
Technically though, being locked down is more restrictive than forcing people to move in small electric cars or e-bikes. Just like remote work has jumped up in the lead few months, if proper measures are taken and enforced, demand for bike /rail infrastructures will increase immediately.
People can adapt. How many will resist to change, is the question.
In practical terms that means years of Covid19-style lockdown.
We don't have time to wait for a breakthrough in battery storage or carbon recapture. We have a solution now and it's nuclear power. It's a bit late for starting a nuclear programme now, but countries with current a nuclear power capacity (including Germany) should absolutely delay or cancel phasing it out until climate change is solved.
But that gas has to come from somewhere, and I don’t think they like knowing that “somewhere” is Russia.
I'll assume any hydro opportunities are tapped out. Conservation is already big in Germany.
Wind and solar can only go so far. And natural gas would provide better peaking capacity to balance it out.
The only reason to do so is to end up with high value in "biofuels" category. Just for show.
I mean, yeah, it's slightly ironic, but is it not irrelevant?
But seriously, I do agree that's not aesthetically pleasing.
Now Germany imports nuclear from France, has the biggest investment in green energy with little to show for it, and is clammering onto their belief that nuclear is the bogeyman.
It doesn't seem as if many Germans saw further than their nose and fear when they voted against nuclear (and still continue to do so)
Baseload power in the traditional sense (its always on) isn't always a great think either, what you really want is the ability to have it on, or off, or in between depending on the gap in demand that changes and needs to be filled. By this metric, combined cycle gas plants and hydro are the dispatchable options. While the French have figured out rampable/dispatchable nuclear - it is not the standard in reactor designs and the actual desired attribute here is the ability to dispatch energy on demand.
(also, another reason why German electricity emissions are so bad are those plants use lignite (brown coal) - the least efficient and most polluting form of generating electricity (lots of Poland is dependent on brown coal too).
1) decommissioned battery packs from electric cars will eventually have 2nd lives on the grid
2) the manufacturing capacity of li-ion globally today is paltry compared what’s needed just in the batteries for mobility, let alone grid storage. Just like underestimations done for solar and wind, I expect current projections to be undershooting where we’ll end up
3) effective demand response (ramping up and down variable loads like commercial refrigeration, heating water, among others) based on renewable generation levels can effectively replace large chunks of battery storage requirements.
4) wind and solar generation profiles compliment each other - when it is usually sunny, it’s not too windy and when it’s colder (night, winter) wind generates more. Add in negative energy prices in periods of excess generation / curtailment - that is economic opportunity for energy storage to come in and capture value
5) li-ion batteries as they are today are effective for “peak shifting” applications of moving energy across a few hours, but not across weeks or even across seasons. Where it is applicable, pumped hydro and other tech can better fill those other spaces - but we can still make lots of progress prior to those ramping up.
6)Investing in broadening the connectedness of grids across states / countries / continents is another way to reduce generation variability with renewables as across, say North America - it may not be very windy in one state at a given moment but 1000mi away it could be either sunny or windy elsewhere. Smoothing the generation across geographies and types ( connecting hydro and nuclear to more grids) is another way to reduce the amount of energy storage required on a grid.
The source is a curve of projected battery production. You take the integral of the curve. The US consumes 4TWh of electricity per day. 3 days of storage is 12 TWh. The 3 day capacity estimate already includes solar and wind generation complementing each other. Wind can produce energy at night, but is more variable over the long term.
Decommissioned battery packs don't change global lithium ion battery production. We're currently producing 300GWh of battery capacity each year. Even if we stopped making electric vehicles and electronics and dedicated 100% of global battery production to grid storage we'd still have 40 years to reach 30TWh at current production capacity. Production capacity is projected to increase year over year so the overall time to reach this capacity would be less. But it's still nowhere remotely feasible, especially when you consider that we can't actually dedicate 100% of battery production capacity to grid storage.
This is even further compounded by the fact that batteries wear out after a few thousand cycles. There are theoretical ways to recycle batteries, but we'd need to recycle them in extremely large capacities.
The notion that battery storage is remotely feasible comes from the erroneous idea that technologies applicable to household use can scale up to heavy industry. This is not the case. This is why places like Germany and California hit a wall and have been unable to generate more than 50% of their energy from carbon free sources. It's no possible without highly scalable storage. And the only storage we have that's remotely scalable is geographically limited (hydro).
Apologies for not clearly stating that what I wanted to know was not how you did your math, but your source/the modelling behind the '3 days of storage' number which I didn't see in your source.
The points in my previous reply were all in questioning the need for everywhere to have '3 days of energy storage' in order for us to significantly decarbonize. While it might represent a theoretical metric based on the state of the world today, I am doubtful it includes the points I mentioned, particularly demand response and continent wide grids connected with HVDC transmission lines (both of which are under discussions in various parts of the world).
Additionally, the same principle applies with a server/service uptime reaching 100%. Realistically, we talk about 'how many 9s'. 99% uptime is much easier than 99.999%. Pushing the last 10% of fossil fuels off our grid will be hard, and the last 1% even harder, 0.1% etc as you start covering all the edge cases until we get to 100%. Probably will not get to 100% in our lifetimes. But I'd bet that we will get to 80% and maybe even 90% much faster than what status quo projects.
Using Germany and California as an example, where many of my points above do not apply (and they are still able to get to 50% renewable generation) I view as a good sign. Neither grid has a particularly large amount of installed storage, connectedness to other grids or integrated demand response either. Getting the world to even 80% renewables will require no-where near the '3 days of storage', particularly as other tech (like storing energy as heat in blocks when there is excess energy) becomes viable in this decade. Many parts of the world have less than single digit penetration of renewables today - we have lots of room to go.
Additionally, solar's cost is declining quickly (disclaimer & note: I am in the solar industry and see these cost declines continuing apace) and have seen first hand people starting to 'overbuild' their solar sites. Factor overbuilt solar, and that it has a unique property of 'predictability' (you KNOW for sure the sun will rise tomorrow, you don't know if it will be windy at all in the next 2 weeks). Given that even a very cloudy day can still generate a large fraction of the peak energy capacity - any excess can be curtailed until that capacity can find somewhere valuable to go as the grids and other energy storage tech beyond li-ion evolves.
Declining cost of solar does nothing if there's no way to store that energy. Daytime energy use is already saturated in many markets. This a big reason why German emissions have remained mostly flat for the last 5 years despite substantial increases to solar power.
Energy isn't just a matter of installing X watt-hours of capacity. It's about delivering energy when it's needed where it's needed. Heat engines are the only way we know how to do this reliably (hydro and geothermal too, but those lose out on the "where" part). That's why the only country that have successfully gotten their electricity generation to mostly non-carbon sources without geographically dependent sources is France. They use heat engines, but with a non-carbon source of heat (nuclear energy).
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187661021...
2. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Co...
What's the rationale for comparing indirect deaths from coal to direct deaths from radiation?
Yet nuclear is labelled dangerous and unhealthy.
I have seen it alleged (I have yet to confirm) that the coal funded scare campaign about nuclear power in the 1960s was where tobacco learned its science-denying tactics used in the 1970s-1990s, which were later adopted by the climate change denial astroturfers.
My main concern with nuclear power is that they still haven’t managed to create any active long term storage of the nuclear waste. And before that, we don’t know the full actual cost of the energy.
Completely and utterly insignificant, to the point where it is downright insulting when they are brought into a discussion about how 10000 people die of coal-related air quality problems every year in Europe.
> My main concern with nuclear power is that they still haven’t managed to create any active long term storage of the nuclear waste. And before that, we don’t know the full actual cost of the energy.
Sure we have.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
Do you have any sources for that? And no sensible person is advocating that we should continue burning coal as we have. So it is not nuclear vs coal, but nuclear vs renewables.
The Onkalo repository is still not active. It is projected to begin storing this year, I can't find any more exact status. And that is one site for the whole world. You have to agree that that is a rather meager result considering that they have been trying to find a solution for at least half a century.
And yes, commenters in this post are saying that the casks will leak and the uranium will float up to the surface: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23477854
Re: "underground isn't dry" (HN is rate limiting this thread)
Yes, it is. These story facilities are built in bedrock. You seem to be under the impression that these digs are in some random back yard. They're not. They're built in places with no groundwater and no geological activity. The only way this waste is getting out into the environment is through human intervention. I have indeed read through the waste storage plans. I suggest you do the same.
Yucca Mountain's cancellation is entirely due to political posturing, not feasibility.
[0] http://www.posiva.fi/en/final_disposal/research_and_developm...
And for the second time, Yucca mountain is a cave dug out of bedrock. In a desert. It's abandonment was done by politicians, not by scientists raising concern over safety. We're not using it because there's so little nuclear waste to store.
The concern over waste storage is laughable in comparison to environmental damage done by fossil fuels, solar power, and hydroelectricity. We're concerned about uranium buried deep underground, miles away from any population center. Despite the fact that uranium is a naturally occurring resource that we dug from out of the ground in the first place.
Think of it this way: right now there are veins of uranium unknown to us. We're taking this uranium and putting it in a known location. In between we use it as a carbon free power source.
It doesn't matter why Yucca was abandonned. It isn't active. If it is technical or political reason behind it. It doesn't matter because you still don't have anywhere to store the waste. If it is political or technical problem doesn't matter, because it is still not solved.
And about that desert, maybe you have heard about this thing climate change that sometimes they mention in the news? That might actually mean that in even a hundred years there isn't any desert there any more.
Arsenic occurs naturally in many places. Would you mind me burrying a few gallons of it in your backyard? You'll know where it is, so you don't have to worry about it.
In concrete casks, buried 500 meters deep in bedrock, sure.
And I don’t know what US proposed disposal site you have in mind, but you do know that Yucca Mountain was abandoned?
Basically we just bury it and hope for the best, it will be someone else's problem anyway.
> The Onkalo repository is expected to be large enough to accept canisters [...] until around 2120.[13] At this point, the final encapsulation and burial will take place, and the access tunnel will be backfilled and sealed.
We go from "dig it out" to "dig it in". Very sustainable. /s
It's rather more involved than that. The short version is that we find a place where the rock has remained undisturbed for more than a billion years, and bury them deep enough that they should remain undisturbed for the next billion years.
Then it's no-one's problem.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/Internationa...
They don't seem to define "specific conditions" in this article.
Also, tried to get a non-amp link and failed...
I recall reading somewhere that it’s a very manageable amount.
The first is that they are more expensive than burner reactors. With uranium ore being cheap and plentiful, and with the energy cost of enrichment so low now (gas centrifuges using 50x less energy than gaseous diffusion), there's no economic case for reprocessing, let along breeding.
The other problem is that fast breeders are inherently dangerous, with the possibility of fast supercriticality lurking in a serious accident. Edward Teller famously pointed this out publicly in 1967:
"For the fast breeder to work in its steady-state breeding condition you probably need something like half a ton of plutonium. In order that it should work economically in a sufficiently big power-producing unit, it probably needs quite a bit more than one ton of plutonium. I do not like the hazard involved. I suggested that nuclear reactors are a blessing because they are clean. They are clean as long as they function as planned, but if they malfunction in a massive manner, which can happen in principle, they can release enough fission products to kill a tremendous number of people. […] ...But, if you put together two tons of plutonium in a breeder, one tenth of one percent of this material could become critical. […] I have listened to hundreds of analyses of what course a nuclear accident can take. Although I believe it is possible to analyze the immediate consequences of an accident, I do not believe it is possible to analyze and foresee the secondary consequences. In an accident involving a plutonium reactor, a couple of tons of plutonium can melt. I don't think anybody can foresee where one or two or five percent of this plutonium will find itself and how it will get mixed with some other material. A small fraction of the original charge can become a great hazard."
http://www.mit.edu/~jparsons/Presentations/090501%20CEEPR%20...
See slide 18 for the key result:
"Closed cycle costs are higher by 42%"
This slide deck also gives references to more detailed reports.
Fans of traveling wave reactors, molten salt reactors, and other not-actually-operating reactors will quote rosily low cost projections despite the lack of any empirical evidence. They're not worth arguing with. If/when commercial TWRs or MSRs actually exist, then we can compare costs. Right now the advanced reactor cost claims are on par with Battery Breakthrough of the Week stories about how a laboratory experiment could revolutionize energy in 10 years, if it's followed up with a lot of funding and absolutely no problems crop up along the way.
There was an argument made last year [1] that the problem with nuclear power generation is that everything we have in production is 50+ yo technology. Modern reactors are far cleaner, far safer, but the political hurdles for regulatory approval and NIMBY hurdles are enormous barriers.
Incidentally, if we're considering mining and transport of base resources to be part of indirect deaths, let's not forget that our renewable infrastructure relies on very dirty mining and transportation processes for quartz, rare earth minerals... and coal!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor#Fuel
The main barriers for building new nuclear plants are that they aren't cost effective, so no one wants to invest in them. I'm certain they could be built cheaper without regulations about safety and funds for long term storage of waste. But I don't think we want to go there.
(Your second link directs me to a documentary about Bill Gates. How is that relevant?)
This is cheap, good for at least some centuries, and forecloses no future options for its disposition. Why do anything else now?
Finally, even if all of the above was overcome, it’s just a way to push the problem to future generations. I’d be quite upset if our generation would have to deal with a hundred thousand tons of radioactive waste in old corroding containers without getting anything for it.
Where did this uranium come from before it was used as fuel?
That's a red herring. The "waste" has a lot of energy remaining (otherwise, it would not be radioactive [1]). There are reactor designs that can use "waste" from current reactors as fuel.
Only, we're not building them. Because coal is better or whatever.
[1]: that's bit of a shortcut, but elements that undergo radioactive decay on timescales that make them dangerous are unstable enough, you can put them in a reactor and poke them to undergo that decay faster and get you electricity.
No, we're not building them because they are more expensive than ordinary LWRs, uranium is cheap, and separated plutonium from spent fuel has negative value.
Don't these reactors produce nuclear weapons products? Seems like that may be a reason we don't want a lot of them around.
If they makeup the second part of the statement, I assume that the first is also embellished and that the "but estimated 10.000 deaths" part is also false.
Why they still try such silly strategy first with Chernobyl and now with Fukushima, is a mystery to me. It does not work.
I guess Wikipedia doesn't have any credibility left then. Most of the casualties were from the tsunami : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
> "but estimated 10.000 deaths" part is also false.
Actually you are right on this one, my mistake. It's 23.300 premature deaths each year across Europe, not 10.000 : https://endcoal.org/health/
And here's the source for German plants : https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-lignite-plants-e...
Many by the evacuation, other because the hospitals in the area closed, other by stress of losing its home... and all of this happened because there was a damaged nuclear plant in the area. Not more, not less. Most of them had a slow death instead being instantly fried, but there is nothing here to rejoice. In the end is the same result.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fukushima-evacuation-has-...
To claim that only one people died by Fukushima and compare indirect deaths by coal with direct deaths by nuclear is an insult to the intelligence, specially when the consequences are still deploying and the process is far from being over. Nuclear kills thousands of people indirectly, for decades. The nuclear plant killed more people yet than the Tsunami did in the same area.
"stress of losing its home" = direct deaths by nuclear ? That may be the actual insult to intelligence :)
Both are indirect deaths of course. The only difference is perception : this is similar to the discrepancy between the much better air travel safety record compared to driving, and people being irrationally scared of flying.
Even assuming your indirect deaths figure is true, we'd still be talking about 2000 deaths in a single incident triggered by a natural catastrophe (most nuclear plants aren't in highly seismic zones), of which there have been two in ~50 years of nuclear power.
That's in contrast to 23.000 yearly deaths in Europe alone, from air pollution from coal alone.
We could stop the math there, but what about the death toll from displacement and migrations caused by climate change ? Or actually, the existential threat it poses to the human race ?
South Australia installed the largest lithium ion battery in the world[0], and the federal government rubbished it as not fit for purpose and to small too make any difference.
Have you ever known the government of any country to play down the installation of the biggest X in the world, in their own country, rather than using it as an advertising opportunity for how technologically progressive and advanced the country is?
Australia's Prime Minister compared the usefulness of the battery to "the big banana" in Coffs Harbor, a tourist attraction[1], and the Energy Minister, of all people, compared it to Kim Kardashian.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve
[1]https://m.coffscoastadvocate.com.au/news/scott-morrison-mock...
Vale John Clarke, yet another great Australian who happened to have been born in New Zealand.
and in reply to LilBytes, I think, unfortunately, the increasing ridicule of our Government still resides within an echo chamber. There's a fair way to go before critical mass. The opposition just don't hold them to public account on much other than trivialities.
electricitymap uses http://pv-map.apvi.org.au/data for this feed (https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap-contrib/blob/maste...) but that source now 404s.
He has a 13.5 KWh PowerWall and 5.2 KW of solar. He's barely used the grid in months and that's powering his Tesla 3 too.
We live on an entire continent.
In case of this map it isn't. This map could be just a list of country names.
Let's not pretend germany is agile in any way, anyone who lives here knows that's not true, but things ARE actually moving.. Slowly.. :}
We also buy less stuff and are not really into eating cows.
I'm not saying it's great. We are bad, but in total not as bad as this map suggests: https://knoema.com/atlas/ranks/CO2-emissions-per-capita
Hmmm, in theory, it seems like overbuilding Wind/Solar might work.
Solar continues to generate electricity on cloudy days, its just diminished. Wind works from 5mph all the way to 50mph or so, it makes less energy on 5mph days but the wind almost never truly stops.
Overbuilding Solar/Wind to make up for this however, would cost significant amounts of money. Batteries would be best for storing the excess energy, but maybe other plants (ie: Aluminum manufacturing) can also be used (variable amount of Aluminum based on energy demands).
Both Solar and Wind can "ramp down". Solar panels can safely generate zero-power if you prevent current from flowing. Wind turbines must continue to move, but you can slow down wind turbines by controlling the angles, and grossly "ramp down" the energy produced.
As such, it is safe to overbuild both solar and wind plants... and later "ramp down" if the grid gets too hot.
-----------
But overall, I agree with you that nuclear seems like the simplest solution. Its a shame that the world in general is afraid of uranium. Despite the geopolitics involved, I really do think its the simplest solution to worldwide energy problems.
Edit: I will say, at the other end of my home county there is a coal plant.
One way 'around that' is to use gravity storage -- of which dozens of examples already exist around the world. China has at least 21 pumped-hydro facilities (19GW capacity [0], working on 30GW more [1]) and Britain's been using one for 'tea-time' demands for decades.
'Waiting for batteries' is decisively not a useful argument. They're very far from the most economical and environmentally-friendly storage.
[0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/chinas-amb...
[1] https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201901/09/WS5c353bb7a3106860...
For instance, the Yukon Territory in Canada shows on electricitymap.org as 100% hydro with 24g Carbon Intensity score (and 3x that only 12 hours ago). Which is great, but a look during winter surely must be a different story. Having lived at a similar latitude, I know the water powering the hydro plants freezes up at some point during the winter months, at which time the small communities I've been in switch exclusively to diesel generators for part of the year (fuel for which is trucked in). Indeed, quick research of the power suppliers in Yukon (YEC/YECL) indicates several diesel generation facilities probably for exactly this purpose.
This is an important consideration when looking at the cost of scaling nuclear power as it gets far more expensive the lower the utilization. You can get to around 40% across an electric grid such as Europe or an island, but scaling past that needs truly massive subsidies.
This is why diversified solutions are best. You get ~40% from nuclear and the same from solar and you're 80% carbon-free. Even using natural gas for the last 20% would put you well ahead of most countries as it is, and as storage or other alternatives improve you can move even that to solar+storage or whatever alternatives.
For example, at the moment, Germany produces at 415g/kWh but consumes at 382g/kWh, mostly thanks to 3 GW import from France and 2.7 GW import from Switzerland.
PS: It’s not uncommon to see a country export and import electricity at the same time. In that context using nationwide numbers is clearly missing important details.
https://www.electricitymap.org/map
As I write this, the UK's intensity is 326 gCO₂eq/kWh, which is nothing to write home about.
This is better than the worst European offender (coal-loving Poland : 652g) as well as Baltic countries, the Netherlands and Germany (373).
But it's far from the best in class : Nordic countries (around 20-30, thanks to hydro) or for a more comparable country, France (around 60, thanks to nuclear)
Germany is interesting because it consistently has one of the worst carbon intensity figures of all developed countries, in spite of a record-setting share of renewables that its green activists like to boast about, and hundreds of billions of € in subsidies poured into them in the past 20 years.
That's of course the consequence of its decision to phase out nuclear power in the early 2000s. Wind/solar are intermittent and there's no way around that (battery storage isn't nearly mature enough).
That leaves 4 options for handling the base load : nuclear, hydro, gas or coal. Only 2 of those are low-carbon. And if you don't have the geography for hydro (like the Nordics do) but still decide to go nuclear-free for political reasons, guess what you're left with ?
IIRC, German coal power plants have 7 spots in the top 10 worst air pollution emitters across the EU. Coal-related air pollution causes an estimated 10.000 extra deaths each year across the continent. Radiation caused one direct death in Fukushima. Thanks, Die Grüne.