Anyway, I tend to agree that going forward solar + storage is probably workable. The storage part isn't proven yet but I have faith we'll figure it out. There are lots of promising options under investigation and the proven fallbacks aren't that horrendously expensive, all things considered.
It's just a pity we stopped building nuclear 40 years ago because it was viable all the way back then. Heck, we got to 20% nuclear! Compare to 2% solar today. If we had merely continued building nuclear at the same pace instead of stopping in the 1980s our grid would be 100% low-CO2 today instead of maybe 30 years from now if we hurry. But that didn't happen. We made the super-mature and responsible decision to fill our atmosphere with CO2 instead and now we get to live with that decision. So it goes.
This is a very flawed and short-sighted argument. Averages don't matter when you are talking about fat-tailed/power law risk distributions. Nobody would be opposed to PVs on roofs in their neighborhood b/c some construction workers fall to death every year - this risk is well calculable. But (almost) everyone would be opposed to a fission plant or nuclear waste facility next door - and rightfully so.
Without enormous direct and indirect subsidies, nuclear (fission) isnt commercially viable anywhere in the world. Heck, you still can't insure a fission plant.
Yes, in theory fission would have been the best option for carbon-free energy. No, in practice humanity never figured out how to safely and efficiently use this power source and now renewables are a way safer and cheaper bet. You won't find any objective economic analysis (that incorporates such indirect subsidies as the implicit state guarantee and realistic building and waste handling/storing costs) that can show otherwise.
How is this even an argument.
Nuclear risks are also calculable. The regulatory hurdles nuclear has to go trough, even for testing reactors, to meet risk criteria (among others), are enormous. The vast majority of nuclear, as exposed by deaths/TWh generated, is extremely safe. Flying vs driving argument.
Take the worst nuclear catastrophe. Take the wildest overestimation in deaths. It's still less than most other sources, including renewables.
No, in practice humanity never figured out how to safely and efficiently use this power source
What? France. All their active residues probably fit in one or two football fields. 3th/4th Gen will consume them, making medical radioisotopes in the process. You can't contain megatons of CO2 this easily.
In the meantime, air pollution kills in the range of 6-8 million people a year. German support for keeping nuclear grows
https://twitter.com/hh_mikawe/status/1284770806090825728?s=2...
Reading this kind of debate from France is a good laugh.
If you're interested you can check where our electricity comes from here: https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-delectricit... (between 60 and 70 percent of nuclear energy today).
New nuclear is dead in France just like it is in the US.
It was not economic for them either (tho back in the day it displaced coal - try having a coal plant next door)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme...
France demonstrated its first fission bomb in 1960 and its first thermonuclear bomb in 1968:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_and_weapons_of_mass_des...
The 1970s and 1980s build up of nuclear power in France had nothing to do with desperation to have its own nuclear weapons. France already had them before the Messmer Plan.
No. Oil is much cheaper
To maintain a nuclear arsenal a nuclear industry is needed.
It is the only economic justification for nuclear power
Just because something has more concentrated risk doesn't make it fat tail. Nuclear power's winning safety record already includes Chernobyl and Fukushima.
On the safety tail risks, IMO it's more of a psychological/perception problem than a problem of actual risk. We've had a number of serious accidents in the history of nuclear power, and none of them have led to anything close to the death toll of a single year of running coal plants.
It hasn't helped that no civilian nuclear operator has demonstrated the ability to sustain safe operations with zero incidents and consistently prioritize safety over the course of decades. Every operator has a string of nuclear incidents of varying severity and i think more than anything, the Fukushima thing shook people up because while you could excuse away Russian and American accidents with cultural factors nobody perceives Japanese to be careless or irresponsible (and this was expressly the reasoning that led Angela Merkel to reverse her stance)
So yeah in abstract at a nation level, it's not a major risk but for the families possibly affected, it's a catastrophe - as opposed to increased chance of a few people getting cancer over their lifetime from Coal.
Therefore given the asymmetric risk and demonstrated inability of the nuclear industry in ensuring zero incidents, there's naturally grassroots opposition which translates into political pressure that no amount of "risk is so low" data-flashing can wave away.
I know a lot of Germans who think that reversal was just opportunistic pandering to environmentalists to grab votes from the Green party.
What you said is a tautology and brought nothing new to the table. (non cheap) nuclear can't compete against cheap renewables. Everyone knows that but almost nobody knows why nuclear is so expensive today.
The reason why nuclear power is not commercially viable is that it doesn't benefit from economies of scale. If you build custom tailored humongous monolithic nuclear plants you're going to pay a huge amount of money. Just think about how expensive it would be to build one giant solar panel with a total area of 1 km² instead of a million 1m² panels. It's absolutely nonsensical yet it happens every single time a nuclear plant is being constructed. The few success stories like France simply standardized on a single design. General corruption and budget bloat probably did more to stop nuclear than all anti nuclear hipsters combined.
[0] https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/09/correcting-anti-renewab...
There are other alternatives, and grid scale batteries are viable now. Just cheaper to burn gas/coal and fsck the future!
The obvious alternative is pumped hydro, that is well established. Another is demand management, unexplored because the greed heads in control do not believe that our society can work together for the common good.
Coming from Aotearoa, as I do, I know that is a fat lie.
Demand management is also a great idea in concept but the commercial viability is questionable as long as people can just turn on the cheap gas burners. Commercially, turning off production and keep the industry closed when renewable are not producing is much more expensive compared to just paying what ever price society currently demands when burning fossil fuels.
Remove fossil fuels from being viable choice in the energy grid and the economic viability would change dramatically for every other energy source, including hydro pumps and nuclear. Demand management might even become a possible strategy to a point where it can have an significant impact on the energy grid. For now most grids operates by combining cheap renewable with cheap fossil fuels, with the environment taking the real cost when the fossil fuels burns.
So it is not my job, it is taken care of.
Here is some info on it via the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences: https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2016/11/human-health-risks...
"Microbes convert naturally occurring mercury in soils into potent methylmercury when land is flooded, such as when dams are built for hydroelectric projects. The methylmercury moves into the water and animals, magnifying as it moves up the food chain. This makes the toxin especially dangerous for indigenous communities living near hydroelectric projects because they tend to have diets rich in local fish, birds and marine mammals such as seals. "
Most solar power will not be distributed power, but large-scale solar power plants. All large-scale solar power plants I've read about are on the ground, which makes sense since, unlike with wind power, increasing the height of the panels on a solar power plant gains nothing.
If people are putting installing solar panels at ground level in expensive urban settings, then yeah I think that's pretty weird. (It might be an artifact of land use planning rules in some towns where people put solar panels in places where they aren't allowed to put buildings or parking lots, for whatever reason.)
Then you also can't practically do certain things like install trackers, because they break more often and it's too expensive to maintain them if you have to have a crew go out there instead of your on-site maintenance people just go over to the broken tracker/panel.
Overall the costs of rooftop solar are just more expensive than a central solar farm. Plus, you can site the solar farm where there is better sunlight and land is cheap.
Ultimately this is the problem I have with solar: It puts an effective cap on our energy use. Solar will never be more than 100% efficient, and there is only so much land that it is reasonable to use, so if we say, wanted to expand our worldwide energy usage 10x, it's not really feasible.
Isn't this exactly why we should be installing solar on rooftops. It might be more exensive, but it's a bettet use of space. Plus most of the extra cost is labour, and aren't we constantly worrying about how their aren't enough jobs. Seems like a win-win to me.
The limiting factor is cost of instalation and eqioment, not land. Additionally there are mnay deserts which are totally uninhabbited and uninhabbitable.
Once the solar energy output is established then the shed can be used for productive work. Preferably with some level of energy storage but a lot of productive sheds don't need much overnight electricity.
Well, not nothing, since less atmosphere means less energy dissipated before light hits the panels, but certainly it’s a better tradeoff cost-wise to keep them low.
As to nuclear, it’s horribly expensive when you try to scale it. France was regularly exporting and importing vast amounts of electricity to other countries and their power plant utilization was still 10% below the US etc. That directly equated to significantly higher prices.
Really, this makes me think one thing, jobs. We can take steps to make jobs safer, but if solar/wind get even close to nuclear but employ a lot more people, then that's a huge gain overall.
Reducing personnel costs is a gain for a company's bottom line. Increasing personnel costs is good for society, as it means either more employed or higher wages (assuming it's not higher wages that somehow results in fewer people). Decreasing company/product costs with a new technology that also does so while employing significantly more people is a huge win for everyone (except those that refused to diversify from the old technology).
Edit: whoops s/jobs cheaper/jobs safer/
This is your brain on capitalism. :p
More seriously: more jobs, more human effort, more accidents and injuries and death, less free time... this is objectively a bad thing. It's only from the lens of the current economic system that it becomes a positive thing, which speaks volumes in itself.
We keep automating away jobs. People want/need work, mostly for money, but also because want to feel they are doing something and part of something. So I don't take it as a given that less free time and more human effort is objectively a bad thing. It really depends on the person and whether they feel a sense of accomplishment in their work.
As for death and accidents, that's somewhat addressed by my typo fix.
> It's only from the lens of the current economic system that it becomes a positive thing, which speaks volumes in itself.
The thing about the current economic system is that it's the current economic system. It can change, in small ways and big ways, but I'm not not sure it will (even if we're probably in the absolute best time to try out UBI we'll see in our lifetimes, and it will be a shame if/when it passes us by in that respect, even if it means life is much better overall).
Solar's main problem is that it's not reliable everywhere. Try setting up solar in Chengdu and you'll find that there's just not enough cloud free days in the year to make it worthwhile.
We need baseline power and renewables are not usually enough. If you're lucky enough to have a river or sunny climate then great, but that's not possible in some places.
There were some studies claiming nuclear has lower deaths/kWh, but as I recall they (1) used old numbers for wind that do not reflect current safety figures, (2) assumed solar was rooftop instead of utility-scale which is now dominating installations (because it is so much cheaper), and (3) ignored deaths from uranium mining, which is where most of the release of radioactive material is in the fuel cycle.
Are solar roofs significantly more dangerous to work on than a normal roof for some reason? Roofs are going up whether they have panels or not.
And it was fine, until said robber barons decided not to maintain the dam.
That may be so. But solar and wind are clear winners when it comes to cost/watt, and that's what determines which gets built.
Safety is not a real problema in rebewavles, they are much safe than mining/ fossil fuels of any kind.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy#:~:text=....
Rooftop solar is an option but the models I have seen show a theoretical max around 1,200 MW which is about 1/30th of the NYC metro area electricity requirements.
I just don't see how solar is even close to being viable for anything outside of small cities with access to massive swathes of empty land.
Generally, low latitude places want more solar + batteries, high latitude ones want more wind + hydrogen. When optimizing with these four, plus nuclear, with the costs at that site, nuclear typically optimizes to 0%.
Right now I don't think people are pragmatic enough for that to be politically viable in most western countries, but that may shift as the adverse effects of AGW start to be more acutely felt (and, hopefully, as more and stricter carbon taxes are implemented across the world).
Using the 2030 data is proper, since any nuclear reactor we begin to build today won't be available until about then (which renewable and storage systems can be built in just a couple of years.)
Some of their cost figures are already too high, btw. Their 2030 estimate for the cost of electrolysers was 600 euro/kW; it's already down to half that (or even less, in China).
Unfortunately, power transmission suffers from line losses. Even a few hundred miles requires several hundred thousand volts to avoid losses. Maybe that's an easier problem to solve than fusion.
You know, easy stuff to build and maintain.
source: http://en.people.cn/n3/2018/0622/c90000-9474097.html
But I am not even remotely concerned about nuclear safety. If noise and traffic were no concern I would live right next to a nuclear power plant.
Personally I don't think solar is ever feasible for industrial scale work, covering like 1/3 of your landmass is a ridiculously large project and needed to fuel industrial operations that currently use fossil fuels to fuel them including fertilizer production. Even if you can shrink that down a bit, how much of it is competing for farmland? Or replacing natural forests or plains or other wildlife housing.
Apparently, hydro produces a significant amount of greenhouse gases within the first 100 years or so, resulting from decaying plant matter and so on.
There was a story on HN a few years ago, IIRC it listed hydro providing 4% of the world's electricity while being responsible for 1% greenhouse gases.
I couldn't find the original story, but I didn't look too hard. Here's the first other source I found:
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/66/11/949/275427...
There are many efforts underway removing old hydro dams to restore the environments and ecosystems that were totally devastated by them.
A notable recent example is the Elwha River Dam removal that finished about 4 years ago in Washington: https://therevelator.org/elwha-dam-removal/
Keeping in mind that electricity production has to increase significantly to absorb the shift from ICE to EV vehicles I would tend to agree that there is no way to meet demand without nuclear even if renewables are, and should be, pushed.
Being part of does not mean being sufficient.
Solar is still negligible in terms of penetration in many places in the world (even though it and wind are the cheapest new build primary energy today, so expect this to rapidly change). As well, you can add quite a bit of solar to a grid before curtailments become necessary.
Add that solar and wind pair together (when it’s not sunny, it’s often windy and visa versa). Many grids today (Uk, Denmark, Germany, etc) can have decent penetration of renewables with 0 energy storage.
Add in large scale grid interconnectivity (sunny in Nevada, windy in Idaho, Hydro in pacific north west) it will always be sunny and windy somewhere.
This is clearly not my assertion.
I don't really see that as a huge problem. There's loads of free area for solar panels on rooftops. Sure, it's more expensive to build solar there. But that's not even an engineering problem, it's simply a matter of allocating funds to it. And most of the cost is labour. Which is arguably a bit of a bonus in a world where we're constantly worrying about there not being enough jobs.
Of course, things get much more complicated once we start talking about lifetime emissions and external environmental impacts.
His argument is that sometime in the next 275 years we have to make some change to our economic system, unless economic growth decouples from energy use growth during that time.
What he doesn't say is that it has been decoupling for decades even before he wrote that post, and, by an equally valid extrapolation argument, economic growth will become completely decoupled from energy use globally in another 50 years:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-intensity-of-econo...
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qj4z9p/green-economic-gro...
It's possible that our inability to recycle (in an economically efficient way) will end up putting some limit on economic growth, but this is very different from the global thermodynamic argument being made by the article that I was responding to above.
It's an odd choice to use global accumulated wealth rather than the global equivalent of GDP (GWP). What are the error bars on the calculation for how much the entire planet is worth in dollars?
For reference, GWP growth rate has been between 3% - 6% in the period considered by that paper. If the net world wealth growth rate was 1.82% during that period, it would suggest that depreciation effects are significant in determining that figure.
No, it isn't. If you own a house that has already been build it does not influence GDP. Yet you need to finance repairs and maintenance (and therefore Energy).
The problem with most infrastructure is actually not to build it but to sustain it.
"According to US News and Freddie Mac, homebuyers should actually budget up to 4% of the property’s value in annual maintenance costs." [0]
"house price rises have averaged more than 5 percent over the last few years." [1]
[0] https://www.upnest.com/1/post/what-is-the-annual-cost-of-mai...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/06/us-house-prices-are-going-to...
A lot of smart people would beg to differ.
Said HN reader as the Three Gorges dam was about to burst in China, submerging millions of households.
https://www.google.com/search?q=three+gorges+dam&newwindow=1...
"Meanwhile, Wang Hao, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and an authority on hydraulics who sits on the Ministry of Water Resources’ Yangtze River Administration Commission, has also assured that the dam is sound enough to withstand the impact from floods twice the mass flow rate recorded on Saturday."
- https://asiatimes.com/2020/07/three-gorges-dam-deformed-but-...
Citation needed for your claim "was about to burst"
That's all you need to know. If you don't understand what I'm telling you, go watch "Chernobyl".
Personally, I think nuclear (fission and hopefully fusion) are the best options, though I can accept a minor niche role for tech like solar.
So I dislike these conversations because they seem to be framed as Solar/renewables VS nuclear. When really the conversation should be "should nuclear be part of the solution?" I do believe that the answer is yes (because above factors), but the phrasing matters. This is because it leads to the next obvious and more important question: "If yes, how much?" Clearly a fully nuclear grid is not a smart idea, just like a fully solar grid wouldn't be. But the framing matters. It isn't a "OR" debate, it is an "AND" debate.
This is also not true if we dealt with the massive overpopulation of the earth instead of acting as its some sort of moral crisis not to stuff as many people as possible onto a planet with finite renewable resources.
Also "we don't know where the point is, but we have passed it" is a very bad argument. "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence".
As for land, well Europe is the same size as America and has twice the population. And neither have anywhere near the density that China or India does. So there's quite a bit of evidence that we shouldn't be overly concerned about these issues.
And what looks like the best way to solve them is by helping other countries develop more rapidly (which is actually a bonus for tackling climate change too!) but this is a pretty unpopular opinion.
We need nuclear to meet baseload because the storage requirements (for PV particularly, by far the largest renewable) would be absurd without it. But since peak load can be several times average and nuclear plants can't be spun up in a day, we also need storage, and with storage around renewables can be cheaper than nuclear. It's not an either-or question; both should be used.
Climate agreements have largely avoided the thorny question of providing nuclear power to the developing world, but if they're to achieve a prosperous standard of living in a sustainable future based on foreseeable technology, this has to be addressed.
The property you really want is “dispatchable”. There when you want it. Not when you don’t.
That doesn't make sense. At all hours of the day there is some demand on the grid:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
If you only have to store for the fluctuations vs. having to store all night you end up with massively less storage.
Electric cars won't do it either. There are less than 300 million registered vehicles in the US and a car battery holds about 100 kWh. That's 30 billion kWh and overnight demand may be as high as 5 billion kWh/night. You'd need an extremely high compliance rate to pull that off.
But seasonal productivity fluctuations are the bigger issue with solar and wind. You might get way more power in July than you need and way less in January -- wind is also seasonal, but the peak month varies by region. You're not going to store months and months worth of electricity in cars and even grid storage facilities would become cost-prohibitive, and you can't reset a nuclear reactor on a weekly basis, but one or two starts a year might be achievable if you design for it. Currently that's not legal:
http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2013/09/03/why-dont-we-mothball-nu...
Go there and model (with real historical weather data) how much a solar/wind/battery/hydrogen system would cost to deliver steady power. Then compare against new nuclear. Sorry, nuclear.
(The hydrogen part is essential in some places, like northern Europe, and its impact is not fully appreciated by many nuclear fans.)
The problem with statements like this is that when they're proven wrong (they aren't always, but when they are), it's often because of some massive underlying shift that makes a bunch of assumptions wrong, leading to a wrong prediction.
If we envision a system where not only delivery, but storage is centrally managed, then yes, there's a massive amount of energy storage required, and that's hard to justify and invest in for large companies.
If instead you assume that maybe electric cars will act like large battery reservoirs, and stuff like the powerwall will also be used to supplement it, then we end up with a massive amount of battery storage already distributed to different endpoints, an d paid for by individuals instead of a few massive companies.
Whether that's all that likely, or even possible at a huge scale because of required rare materials is a question, but that's an entirely different type of scenario than "energy companies invest in massive batteries to leverage solar/wind for efficiently", and the type of thing that's hard to predict and because of that often overlooked. That doesn't mean stuff like that doesn't happen all the time. In fact, I would say there's a major shift like that every decade or so, we just don't necessarily notice them unless we look at them.
The internet itself was a major thing. Just relating to the internet, there have been major advanced every few years. The rollout of new major advancements is unevenly distributed and often over the span of a decade, leading to it being hard to notice them. Just this last year, the massive increase in remote work will likely cause a major shift in the economics of many markets, and change how many predictions would play out.
Bringing this back to energy, consider that it seems like every year California is having massive fires, and is bankrupting its public utility provider to the point that the state is prepared to take it over if it gets much worse. At that point, if the state decides it needs to actually replace a lot of infrastructure that PG&E needs to maintain, maybe pushing for some partially distributed model starts to make sense.
These are all things that go into making predictions about energy really hard, since we're at an inflection point where a lot of stuff that used to work is not working very well, and new technologies are just at the cusp of being useful.
This is not true. With a properly designed solar/wind/battery/hydrogen system, a steady stream of power can be delivered more cheaply than what you could get from a new nuclear reactor.
This wasn't true even ten years ago, but it's true now, and many (such as yourself) have not updated your priors.
>nuclear power is the only realistic way to solve the looming energy crisis of the 21st century while still maintaining the same standard of living for everyone
This is just not true, there's no way you can say this. Solar costs are going down massively. Hydro is dirt cheap already. So renewables can absolutely be part of an energetic transition in the near future, while fusion is at best many decades away. So while I think fusion energy has the potential to transform energy generation, and by extent everything about our life, it's wrong to assume renewables aren't probably our safest bet in the near future.
Also there's something amusing about "Here's my sure assessment. Anyway I checked the wiki page on fusion power and".