It would have been great if we had built enough nuclear plants in the 20th century, but at this point it’s pretty clear that most countries would better off going straight to cheaper renewables.
http://nuclearstreet.com/nuclear_power_industry_news/b/nucle...
This doesn't seem to support your general argument.
Do you have any evidence that renewables are generally cheaper than nuclear when accounting for storage?
How about asking what conditions would be needed in a different country to make new reactors much more feasible than in Ontario?
> The storage report also shows a rapid drop in the costs of batteries, which leads to wind + storage or solar + storage getting increasingly competitive (and putting natural gas peaker plants out of business). [1] [2]
8 minute energy's blended solar and storage costs are roughly $40/MWh, just above existing nuclear generation per MWh costs (that doesn't fully internalize waste disposal costs and other ancillary costs of that power). “The vast majority of our development pipeline are solar-plus-storage projects, with more than 24GWh of energy storage under development,” 8minute Solar Energy’s Sean Kiernan said. [3] Portugal just signed a deal for a 700MW project at 1.3 cents/kwh, a historic low (mentioned to demonstrate the cost decline continues, and can be expected to continue into the future). [4]
If you're looking for storage that discharges for days, that is not necessary with robust transmission infrastructure (which needs to be built anyway due to aging infra in the US) and overbuilding of cheap (and rapidly cheaper) renewables [5].
[1] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/renewables-continue-to-get-...
[2] https://cleantechnica.com/2019/11/22/solar-costs-wind-costs-...
[3] https://www.energy-storage.news/news/developer-8minute-says-...
[4] https://www.pv-tech.org/news/52925
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23580707 (Hacker News: The US can reach 90% clean electricity by 2035 without increasing consumer bills)
Obviously laws of physics do not bar it from scaling, the question is around cost.
UK current electricity demand is 30GW. So the demand for one hour is similar to the entire lithium battery production for a whole year.
How many hours worth of storage would we need to balance the energy grid using only battery storage? Off grid homes usually aim for around 3-7 days worth. Obviously that's excessive for a whole country where weather conditions vary across the country but I'd think several house would be required to account for peak in demand at times of low production.
Realistically distributed storage and load side control I think are more likely to be a bigger part of making it work.
"In 2019, LG Chem had the most lithium battery production capacity at over 50 GWh. LG Chem [is] increasing EV battery production capacity to as much as 110GWh by the end of 2020."
The design of a modern grid with battery storage would change as well - no reason to have singular giant storage plants. A mixture of solar, wind, and hydroelectric with distributed storage doesn't need to self-sustain 30GWh of storage, it needs to be able to smooth distribution and handle peaks. It'd be far more honest to look at seasonal average loads versus peaks, plus a buffer.
[1] https://energycentral.com/c/ec/world-battery-production
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1103401/predicted-lithiu...
The UKs current installed pumped hydro resources amount to some 28GWh. Clearly we need a multiple of that if that is currently required to balance a grid consisting of largely dispatchable power. Given that, I don't think my estimate of needing several hours worth storage is too far out.
That was the first statistic I found. Even if we say current production is 200GWh of lithium battery storage, that isn't going to go very far if the rest of the world also need to create similar storage infrastructure.
So good luck running the grid on batteries for more than 15 minutes. We'd probably need to cover Alaska with lithium batteries.
At least 40% base load is what is needed and one only gets that from nuclear and geothermal if we discard fossil fuels. Maybe solar thermal with molten salt storage too, dunno.
Point of use energy generation and storage is a much bigger deal than I think people realize. I believe internally Tesla thinks this is many times it’s car business.
We are still struggling store industrial chemicals for mere half dozen years without it causing tragic accidents, while Canada might not be Lebanon today, there is no way to know how well off our future generations will be and whether they can safeguard the waste, both safely and securely from hostile actors without it being an big burden on them .
It will be costly problem at best or a major disaster at worst for all live forms. all this to have some power for 30-40 years.
If the world continues on a high-emissions trajectory, and people do not later pursue active remediation measures to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, it will take hundreds of thousands of years for natural silicate weathering to draw down atmospheric concentrations to preindustrial levels. More than half will be removed by faster processes, within 1000 years, but a significant minority of the excess will go away over the course of ~400,000 years:
https://www.nature.com/articles/climate.2008.122/figures/1
This is actually longer than the time it will take for the majority of fission products and actinides generated in nuclear fuel to decay. The waste CO2 problem is also distributed over the whole globe rather than easily confined to storage casks like spent nuclear fuel is.
Neptuimum-237 has half life of 2.144 Million years and is produced as nuclear fuel waste and one of most mobile nuclides at the Yucca repository. It will take 100's of millions of years for sizeable quantity to go through its decay chain and be safe.
There are safer better options than nuclear to coal. A 1000 year time line of natural restoration is not acceptable and needs to be addressed, but trading it for millions of years is not the right solution.
Where do you imagine billions of tons of CO2 will go? It does not have a half-life like nuclear waste, once you've taken that carbon out of the ground, it is here to stay for tens of millions of years. There will never be enough trees to sequester this carbon. We must expend trillions of dollars to reprocess it back into oil or rock-like formations.
Also in the entire history of nuclear industry there has been no credible case of 'hostile actors' coming close to stealing nuclear waste. That's because doing so doesn't make any sense - it is useless to nations, and if someone like Taliban tried to handle it, they'd probably die in the process.
Nuclear waste is not a liquid that might spill and run away if you aren't careful. When properly handled it is vitrified in solid glass, and it doesn't go anywhere. Sweden is placing it in underground storage in solid rock, in a region that's geologically stable for millions of years - it will never bother anyone again or cost a penny more.
Where do you think the fancy chemicals in the fiberglass turbines or the exotic metals in the solar panels comes from?
>We are still struggling store industrial chemicals for mere half dozen years without it causing tragic accident
Oh boy are you going to love the high tech chemical industry that underpins the manufacture of wind turbines and solar panels.
All these things are dirty if you don't clean up after them. Nuclear is pretty clean just by virtue of how little material you need to process per kilowatt. A kilo of uranium gets you a lot more energy than a kilo of turbine or a kilo of solar panel.
They're all better than fossil fuels because they don't crap byproducts into the atmosphere but you need to have so much less underlying industry per energy generated with nuclear that it's just inherently cleaner than anything else. This is assuming that you're cleaning up after whichever one you choose.
Sure plutonium-239 with half life of 24,000 is not particularly radioactive, neptunium-237 has half live of more than 2 million years, both are extremely dangerous to humans for multiples of that time.
Half live is not directly related to the level of damage gamma decay can do to you. Elements are perfectly capable of emitting hazardous amounts of radiation for thousands and millions of years time.
We cannot barely build a phone to last 3 years, The incentive to not create problems for future generations is simply not there. If it was, we would doing a lot more for pollution and plastics and the mass extinction event we are currently causing.
I don't believe our track record as a species warrants any trust on the ability to build containment to last thousands of years.
Meanwhile, fossil fuels generate so much waste per kWh that it's impossible to contain it, so we just spew it over the globe at day one, changing the Earth's climate and driving mass extinction (and killing a million per year), but it's OK, because if stop using fossil fuels today and wait a few hundred years then things will be back to normal. Maybe.
Of all the ideas on nuclear waste disposal including launching on rocket into the sun, this is the most dangerous[1].
Firstly If you are replacing Coal and other methods of energy generation with Uranium the amount of waste is not small anymore ( it already is not small in any sense).
Cooling down the temperature is not the only problem. Neptunium-237 has half life of 2Million years!, plutonium 239 of more than 24,000 years, these materials will be radioactive for a longer time than we as species have been on this planet. Grinding them fine and spreading them everywhere may very well kill all life on this planet for ten of millions of years, it may never come back.
Coal is bad, nobody is saying it is better than nuclear, but replacing coal with nuclear is opening a whole new can of worms, we are not equipped to handle, there are plenty of other safer alternatives .
[1] In in interest of a civil discussion, I will leave it at that.
The energy density of uranium is roughly 80,620,000 MJ/kg [1]. Existing nuclear power plants have thermal efficiency between 30-40%, roughly speaking [2], so let's be pessimistic and choose 30%. That means actual usable energy density of uranium is 24,186,000 MJ/kg, or 6,718,333 kWh/kg.
The world produced 27,644,800 GWh = 27,644,800,000,000 kWh of electricy on 2019 [3]. If we used nuclear to generate all of this, we'd need 4,114,830 kg of uranium, or 4,115 ton per year. Let's round up to 5,000 ton.
Spent nuclear fuel contains about 0.8% plutonium 239 [4], so our 5,000 ton of uranium will generate about 40 ton of plutonium 239, with half-life 24,000 years and radioactivity of 2.3 GBq/g [5]. So our hypothetical nuclear waste will have radioactivity of 2.3 GBq/g * 40 t = 92 PBq. Which is a lot.
...or is it?
Potassium, naturally occurring and essential for life, is naturally radioactive (31 Bq/g), because it contains 0.012% K40 [6]. Seawater is about 0.04% potassium [7], which contributes to a natural radioactivity of 12.4 Bq/kg, or 12.4 kBq/t from potassium alone.
Actually, let's forget the earth. Let's spread the nuclear waste evenly on the Mediterranean - volume 3,750,000 km^3 [8] - who needs Italy anyway?
It contains 3,750,000,000,000,000 ton of seawater, or 46,500,000,000,000,000 kBq of natural radioactivity, which is 46,500 PBq. So our hypothetical dump of plutonium 239 will increase the Mediterranean sea's natural radiation level by about 92/46500 = 0.2% per year [9].
A far cry from extinction of all known life, I have to say.
* By the way, you may want to re-consider before saying stuff like "Pu239 has half-life of 24,000 years - it's not safe!" Coal, for example, contains tons of mercury, which is not radiactive (i.e., it has a half-life of infinity). After 24,000 years, there will be 50% of Pu239, but 100% of mercury left from coal ashes. Which is worse?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
[2] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-an...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239#In_nuclear_power...
[5] https://www.radioactivity.eu.com/site/pages/Plutonium_Proper...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawater
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Sea
[9] Of course the actual effect will be higher because there will be other isotopes, shorter-lived and more radioactive. That's why I proposed keeping the waste in a fridge for 200 years first. I'm not a monster.
Also, I highly doubt that if humanity makes it even a thousand more years that we'll have trouble finding a productive use for depleted uranium or other spent fissile fuels. They have many interesting properties.
I was not arguing for coal in any way I am merely pointing saying Nuclear is not as clean as pro nuclear people argue.
Yes the NORM released by Coal and other human activities is substantial, However it is not remotely comparable to Fukishma, Chernobyl and bikini atoll . I don't trust any of the world governments to build a safe reactor and I don't share your optimism on that we will find ways to handle the waste. Instead of trusting luck that we will find clean ways to handle, we can start building plants when we do find them, .
It is recency bias to think we will be able to keep technologically innovating at the same pace we have in the last few decades or even few hundred years, most of our history innovation has happened rapidly only under certain conditions, it may be that those conditions will continue to favour, or maybe physical limits such as moore's law slowing down, resource limits stuck on single planet economically or socio political structural problems can slow down innovation substantially, Any of them could be a great filter in the Fermi Paradox sense.
We'd certainly like for those people to keep the mess stored safely, but there are incentives for them to not do so, even assuming they had the ability to.
And you'd better not ignore how much radiation is released by coal.
It is not:
https://www.sortirdunucleaire.org/Nuclear-power-a-false-solu...