1) Disrupt the nuclear construction contracting process. Until fleet contractors like Bechtel et al are stopped from parasitizing the industry, it's going nowhete due to spiralling costs.
2) Lower the cost of reinforced concrete.
3) Close the fuel cycle.
3 is technically feasible, 2 isn't very sexy, but possible. 1 seems insurmountable.
Tesla committed to having the Hornsdale Power Reserve built in 100 days or it was free [2]. That is what nuclear is up against. Please don't argue base load; there is no need for base load, only diverse firm dispatchable generation assets [3], robust transmission, and demand response for non-essential industrial loads.
[1] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/solar-plus-storage-poised-t...
[2] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/11/28/167090...
[3] https://energypost.eu/dispelling-nuclear-baseload-myth-nothi...
Once solar saturates daytime demand, provisioning further solar power doesn't contribute to decarbonization. This is why nuclear is really the only known path to decarbonization. Maybe we'll figure out scalable ways to provision hundreds of terawatt hours of storage, but we might be waiting a long time.
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/europe-win... ("Europe has space for enough wind turbines to power the entire world, study finds")
https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/uploads/ee2523dc632c9b01df... ("Australia is the sunniest country in the world and one of the windiest. Australia’s potential for renewable energy generation is 500 times greater than current power generation capacity.")
https://www.afdb.org/en/news-and-events/why-africa-is-the-ne... ("Africa has an almost unlimited potential of solar capacity (10 TW), abundant hydro (350 GW), wind (110 GW), and geothermal energy sources (15 GW). The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) estimates that renewable energy capacity in Africa could reach 310 GW by 2030; which would put the continent at the forefront of renewable energy generation globally.")
Do we have a realistic plan to built a wind and solar grid under that market? I don't think so, wind and solar are useful for taking a bite out of natural gas but not actually serving as the backbone of an electrical grid. The amount of storage necessary to decarbonize with wind and solar is not feasible, and essentially amounts to betting on some future invention of a cheap mass energy storage device that works everywhere.
By comparison we have demonstrable examples of countries going 80+% nuclear, and the US is already at 20% nuclear power generation. Building four nuclear plants for each existing plant is a lot more achievable of a goal than first building a massive amount of solar and wind, and building extensive HVDC transmission, and building tens of Terawatt hours worth of storage. The first step in the latter is cheaper than building nuclear, it's the other two steps that are wildly expensive if they're even possible. If we actually enacted a binding rule of zero emissions by 2050 people would start building nuclear power plants.
Nuclear is by far the best technology we have today so we should go with it until we have better options in our hand.
http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-grid-energy-storage-facts...
* In 2020, the U.S. had over 23.2 GW of capacity in energy storage compared to 1,100 GW of total installed generation capacity.
* Globally, installed energy storage capacity totaled 173.6 GW.
* 1,355 energy storage projects were operational globally in 2020, with 11 projects under construction. 40% of operational projects are located in the U.S.
* California leads the U.S. in energy storage with 215 operational projects (4.2 GW), followed by Hawaii, New York, and Texas.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/broad-reach-pow...
"Two of the planned 10 MW batteries are up and running already, with a total of 10 expected online by year's end, Vavrik said. That means that BRP and Key Capture are running neck and neck for operational capacity in Texas. The title of biggest battery operator in the state could change hands repeatedly based on the order in which those companies' projects wrap up.
The broader story is that multiple experienced energy investors are converging on Texas simultaneously. The interconnection queue contains more than two dozen batteries that are each larger than 100 megawatts; some go up to 300, 400, even 500 megawatts."
Hydroelectric is geographically limited, you can just build dams where people need additional power.
That leaves nuclear. And since nuclear costs just as much to run 100% of the time as it does to run part of the time it makes no sense to use it as a peaker. Just run it 24/7, and install less intermittent sources.
The single salt formation near Delta Utah could store enough hydrogen to supply the entire US electricity demand for 30 hours.
Spanning a continent only helps wind power and not solar power.
Even if you entirely ignore that hydro component and only look at the 3 GWh number, that’s still only ~3.6 orders of magnitude less than what we’d need for a whole day with no power generation whatsoever.
Their numbers are talking about enough storage to maintain current usage for half a year.
To your second comment: spanning a continent does actually help with solar, since the sun is up at different times on the two coasts - that buys you several extra hours of power each day. Also obstructive weather patterns tend to not reach that far.
But almost all (~95%) of the installed grid storage capacity is in hydroelectric storage. The above commenter is posting in terms of battery storage in the 100MWh range. We would indeed need 6 orders of magnitude larger than this even to just have 1 day's worth of storage. Hundred megawatt hours vs a dozen Terawatt hours.
Also, the amount of storage could be substantially more than a day in a predominantly wind + solar grid. Part of variability is mostly daily, with the sun going up and down. But both solar and wind are also affected by weather. That requires much more substantial amounts of storage to get the grid through consistent days of reduced production. Estimates to provide a 100% carbon-free grid with renewables go as high as 3 weeks [1]
It says that 3 weeks of power storage would be required in total absence of a serious overhaul in transmission capabilities. I had assumed that was a clear, if unspoken, assumption when I was discussion continent scale entities.
Also, the poster you originally responded to was discussing the literal dozens of installations that singlehandedly meet the 100 MWh mark. HN guidelines require that I assume this was a simple failure of reading comprehension.
Where on earth is six orders of magnitude coming from? You’re off by a factor of a hundred.
The point is that dozens of 100MWh stations is basically nothing. You'd need millions of these sites to make renewables a feasible primary source of energy. Our current technology is not sufficient to make energy storage available to make grid storage viable.
Yes a dozen 100GWh facilities is 1.2 GWh, and that's an order of magnitude less in difference, I don't doubt your ability to multiple by factors of ten.
2. Relying on such a tightly coupled national grid as required to deploy that storage is a recipe for disaster in the event of any war or unconventional conflict. A few shut down transmission lines or stations could cripple entire national economy.
3. Overbuilding completely ignores the very real human and environmental costs of doing so. Rare earths are not very green, forced labor as used by much of the solar industry not very humane. You are condemning millions today to hypothetical harm to thousands tomorrow. It's insanity.
Again, you either think climate change is an existential problem in which case relying on magic pixiedust in the future is an absurd, or you don't. There's no two ways about it.
https://www.evolved.energy/post/2016/02/16/deep-decarbonizat...
- where those demand projections came from
- the feasibility of building capacity for the projected dispatch
- the cost of doing so
I'm not saying that the premise/conclusion is wrong, just that this article in particular adds nothing to the discussion. I can only hope that the linked reports actually address those questions.
re: demand projections "the carbon neutral and carbon negative scenarios were required to meet the same demand for energy services, for daily life and industrial production as the business as usual reference case from the EIA's Annual Energy Outlook and used its assumptions for population, for GDP and industrial production. So that's very much nothing changes in the world except for the energy system... kind of a view. And the modeling only allows technologies that are commercial today or that have been demonstrated at large pilot scale today. So in effect, I think that really sets a pretty high bar because in reality, I would expect a number of those things to change over the next 30 years. For example, I would expect probably lower population growth than EIA projects and considerably lower demand for energy services and industrial production as a result of a slowing economy. And I would have said that before we have the added effects of the pandemic. " re:feasibility "I think at it's core backcasting is about trying to understand what's entailed in the physical transformation. So the legacy of this work is in that discussion about feeling like that's the analysis that's needed. Not necessarily understanding what does a carbon tax do on the margin or what to other approaches do sort of in the short term and in the macroeconomic system. But really understanding how many more widgets do we need and how quickly do they need to be deployed if you don't want to do early retirement. So that context of the questions we're trying to answer really sets up the insights that come from backcasting. So one of the things we think a lot about is stock turnover. So sort of one of our modeling principles is that we don't do early retirement of any resources except for potentially an electricity supply. So for things like light-duty vehicles or industrial boilers, we really need to understand how long do those resources typically stay online? And that means if it's a 15-year turnover rate for something like a furnace or maybe it's a 30-year turnover rate for something like an industrial boiler."
re:cost "And we find that that case at a net cost of 0.4 percent of GDP in 2050 is able to achieve carbon neutrality. So that 0.4 percent of GDP in 2050 over the reference case, it really represents some major shifts in terms of monetary flows. So we're spending $950 billion on efficiency, new supply for low carbon solutions, and we're saving $800 billion on fossil fuels that are no longer being burned. So our analysis really only looks at the energy costs for the total system for that transition. We're not accounting for things like co-benefits or economic benefits from the avoided damage of climate change or other potential impacts, as well as potential health or environmental benefits. That total energy spending declines from about five percent of GDP for the energy system today to around four percent in 2050. " -quotes from podcast linked in first article
https://www.unsdsn.org/Zero-Carbon-Action-Plan
https://irp-cdn.multiscreensite.com/6f2c9f57/files/uploaded/...
So you are saying that there is some business that has always been certain to lose money, and had never had government help, and nobody ever invested on it. And you are using this fact to suggest that in the near future, when that business will become needed and profitable, nobody will invest on it either... what isn't a conclusion one can make.
The reason nuclear costs so much is because we've stopped building plants. There's no industry anymore, let alone economies of scale. It's a fallacious argument to say it costs too much. If we went all in on nuclear to tackle climate change the costs would quickly collapse. After all, they were built in the 70s and dramatically decarbonized the industry at the time.
For example, EnergyAustralia just announced that they're pulling forward the retirement of Yallourn coal powered station by four years [1], and building a 350MW utility scale energy system to absorb and discharge renewable power to offset the coal plant being retired:
"Under the agreement, EnergyAustralia will retire Yallourn in mid-2028 and build new storage capacity through a 350 MW, four-hour, utility-scale battery project that will be completed by 2026. This ensures energy storage is built to firm increased renewable energy in Victoria, before Yallourn exits the system.
EnergyAustralia’s goal is to be carbon neutral by 2050. Yallourn’s retirement will reduce the company’s emissions profile by 60 per cent, accelerating the pathway towards achieving this ambition."
As we speak (mid day local Victoria time), renewables are providing 48% of total electrical demand in Victoria [2].
[1] https://www.energyaustralia.com.au/about-us/energy-generatio...
[2] https://opennem.org.au/energy/vic1/?range=1d&interval=30m
"But what is clear is that there is a massive shift happening here. Coal is on the way out, as is “baseload” gas, and wind and solar and storage facilities, particularly battery storage, are on the way in. And many of the biggest batteries are being planned at the sites of coal and gas generators already closed or expected to close in coming years or decades."
"The sizes it is mooting are up to 500MW (and maybe two hours storage) for Liddell, 250MW and four hours storage at Torrens (1,000MWh), and 200MW and four hours storage (800MWh) at Loy Yang A. The final call on storage duration will be determined by the sort of market opportunities it sees for the batteries in the different states – longer for storing excess wind and solar, shorter for grid security services."
2. Look at Texas's recent "hiccup" around Feb 15 and compare it to year before. Wind dropped to <10% reliable capacity and it was almost all picked up by gas/coal. The drop wind/solar production starts a week before the cold snap that disrupted everything else.
https://www.eia.gov/beta/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/e...
https://www.wsj.com./articles/texas-spins-into-the-wind-1161...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-political-making-of-a-texas...
The power density of a gas turbine is so much greater than that of a steam turbine that a closed-cycle gas turbine powerset for a sodium cooled fast reactor would fit in the employee break room of the turbine hall of an lwr. Running at higher temperatures with liquid metal, molten salt, or gas-cooled reactors poses many practical problems, but means building a machine that processes more energy with less mass thus drastically lower capital cost.
A molten salt reactor is at atmospheric pressure and has nothing to cause a chemical explosion. You still need containment, but you don't need to contain a large empty space.
A supercritical CO2 turbine runs at 1000+ psi but if the pipes broke and the CO2 sprayed out into that salt, you might get an overpressure around 10 psi in a not-too-big confinement because the volume of working fluid is tiny.
Is this doable? What's keeping it up? Is it anything artificial, like a business cartel or something similar? If not, lowering the price would practically mean subsidies.
On the other hand, once they're available, switching to them is perfectly fine, and the 50+ lifetime of LWRs exists for a reason. Maybe we will even have workable fusion by then.
Keeping nuclear power safe is very easy, you just have to decommission old power plants that aren't up to modern standards. That's all it would have taken to prevent Chernobyl and Fukushima. So why on earth do we build nuclear power plants that are difficult to rebuild? Why did we believe that immature technology is going to be enough for the next 50 years? You need to build more, to replace the crappy old power plants, you need to build more, to expand the fleet, you need to build more, to update previously built plants to a new safety standard, you need to build more, just to maintain a workforce.
It's done all the time with solar power and wind. Build it for 20+ years, if new tech comes out you just replace the old tech once it proves uneconomical.
My personal favorite boondoggles are still housing, internet, electric grid and road maintenance. We really need to put pressure on the job market through fiscal stimulus. That pressure will force companies to wake up and actually do something productive.
Renewables are getting better and cheaper fast and if you have you're not convinced by that, I see no reasonable argument for nuclear.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22146...
Think of it this way. If unemployment/underemployment is high then it's like having random people sitting in a bar doing nothing. A government official comes to the bar and sees people doing nothing and tells then what to do. What's being lost by telling these people to do something? The biggest loss is that these people could have done something even better than what the government came up with, however they are in a bar doing nothing, clearly nobody needs them right now.
The question is, does the nuclear industry actually generate jobs that would lower unemployment? Is the type of person that is qualified to work on a nuclear reactor unemployed? I am leaning toward no, I simply cannot imagine the highly vocal trump supporter base being filled with academics in hard sciences. If we are going to do a nuclear jobs program it might backfire because it fails to employ the right people.
All of which is nontrivial amount of investment nobody does where there is unemployment, because it's cheaper to do it in China as the base and subcomponents are already there... (there's also unemployment)
Trap of deindustrialization runs deep.
Big honking power plants of all flavors are just not economically viable. The SMR thing might work, but it'll have to do better than wind+solar+batteries which have enormous economies of scale.
RIP, only France did nuclear right :(
Batteries will never have sufficient capacity to delivery any meaningful amount of storage. This is why any realistic plan for a wind + solar grid assumes some silver bullet will solve the storage problem: synthetic methane, hydrogen, thermal batteries, something else.
But who knows if any of those will actually pan out. California has already hit saturation with solar power. Adding more solar only marginally displaces carbon emissions. As far as actual decarbonization goes, nuclear is more valuable than raw generation figures present because this power is generated 24/7.
> RIP, only France did nuclear right :(
And Belgium. And Slovakia. And China.
What physical limit prevents this?
It would be expensive, but cheaper than building nuclear power plants, especially the breeder reactors that would be needed for a fully nuclear world economy.
That said, improvements in the transmission grid might be able to remedy that issue, honestly not sure.
If nuclear takes, hypothetically, 200 acres to build a power plant, containment, and all the supporting services necessary to generate enough power to feed a city, and solar takes 600 acres to generate an equal amount (and be much safer as well) I'm ok with that compromise, but I would have expected that the ratio would be much higher. Can you tell me where the ratios you have quoted come from?
And you are right - the land needed to actually generate the power is much different than that ratio.
The strata report is also counting the land use for transmission lines which is a big part of the land use for any power source and makes the land use for different power sources look much more similar than they are.
From the report:
>...Because nuclear energy accounted for 19.55 percent of the nation’s electricity production in 2015, approximately 938,388 acres of land were used to transmit nuclear energy in 2015, or 10.312 acres per megawatt.
So of the 12 acres they attribute per megawatt for nuclear, 10 acres of that is for transmission lines which are going to be needed no matter the source of power.
The report gives an example later:
>...The Arkansas Nuclear One Station requires only 1,100 acres (1.7 square miles) to produce 1,800 megawatts operating at a 90 percent capacity factor. A study by Entergy Arkansas estimates that for modern wind and solar plants operating at the same capacity, they would require 108,000 acres (169 square miles) and 13,320 acres (21 square miles) of land respectively to produce the same amount of power.
https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf
As another data point, in a report on the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, PG&E reported:
>...To build the equivalent of a 1,000-Mw nuclear plant, a solar park would require 11,000 acres of PV solar panels and a wind farm would need 50,000 acres of wind turbines. By contrast, Diablo Canyon is able to produce twice as much power (2300 Mw) in a footprint of approximately 545 acres.
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/hyman1/docs/may...
(Land use isn't the only factor obviously, but it is a factor.)
I'm on the same page in terms of pro-solar, but I also think having nuclear ready to go is a nice fallback (e.g. if rare earth metals for solar and batteries become prohibitively expensive or embargoed).
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/business/economy/china-so...
However, I'm surprised that it's not done to expand the military. It's really weird that someone is being forced to work for the sake of the entire planet when every other nation is trying to wiggle itself out of its responsibility.
I understand people dislike when nuclear get subsidies, but its nowhere as bad as the amount of subsidies we pay right now to fossil fuels. We need to stop throwing money at fossil fuels. I rather have my tax money go to batteries or nuclear than fossil fuels disguised as "reserve energy".
Solar and wind are ONLY cheap if you ignore the costs for backup power plants and extra landlines.
We have the highest electricity prices in Germany worldwide. I really wished people stopped claiming renewables are cheap, they are not.
Instead what happened is that anti-nuclear activists put up arbitrary regulatory barriers to construction. Three-Mile Island provided the political catalyst for a massive regulatory burden on new construction. Most of these burdens have an at best minor impact on safety, but at the cost of astronomical impact on cost.
Now maybe you can debate about whether loosening nuclear regulations to decrease cost is acceptable or not. But at the very least that's at least a debate we should be having. It's certainly the case that a lot of people will die from unmitigated climate change. Not to mention the enormous economic and environmental toll. Against that, I would gladly trade off a Three-Mile Island incident every decade or so.
So, what was the policy that caused Vogtle 3/4 and the Summer plants to go so wildly over budget? Was there a policy for Westinghouse to screw up badly? And similarly for Flamanville 3, and the new plants they're trying to build in the UK.
The argument for "less regulation" is really the argument "who needs expensive containment and emergency systems, because radiation is no big deal".
So as much a nuclear advocates wish more nuclear plants would be built, unless they want to provide significant subsidies, it's just not going to happen. For the same reason you don't shop around by finding the highest price you can... no one is looking to throw away money. Energy is energy.. no one cares about the type of plant it came from.