Take a look at Ontario's power generation data right now: https://ieso.ca/en/Power-Data
We have a steady state of about 8.3 GW of nuclear power generation as our base supply of power, representing most power generation in the province. Electricity prices are pretty good- but they used to be better even before it was all privatized. The CANDU reactor design is safe and practical.
We can't rely on solar this far north- the days get too short in the winter. We have wind, but it's too unstable to be a sole source. You can see in the graphs what happens when the wind dies down- we fire up the gas plants to make up the difference.
We have hydroelectric dams, and they're wonderful for variable supply- like a self-refilling battery- but we only have so much capacity there without damming the whole province.
In conclusion: we have figured out a way to safely and efficiently use nuclear. Renewables are cheap, but not steady enough to be usable here. The alternatives are fossil fuels. Nuclear works.
Also, Ontario’s production is weighted towards nuclear, but it’s second by second usage is significantly less so. They export a lot of nuclear power and import non nuclear power. That arrangement only works because nuclear is less common in other areas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss...
Also, hydro complements Nuclear extremely well as it can shift production across time, thus maximizing each nuclear power plant’s capacity factor. However, wind fills the same niche more cheaply even with significant excess capacity. This shows up as a grid where the wholesale price frequently sits around zero, which makes nuclear even less economically viable.
I personally expect nuclear to stick around for various reasons like bulk radioactive isotope production, but ramping up to become a significantly larger chunk of global electricity production would take dramatically lower unsubsidized prices.
Nuclear arsenals.
It's the only reason I can think of for paying inflation linked £92.50 per MwH for 35 years for Hinkley point c when the UK can build wind or solar for £35-40 now and probably less in future years.
The economics are insane.
And in the mid 2000s, nuclear seemed to be a much better idea. Solar and wind were more expensive, not far less expensive, than estimated nuclear costs. It seemed like nuclear was going to be an absolutely essential part of a carbon neutral or negative society.
Fifteen years later, we have had an energy technology revolution, and we are still in the middle of it. Personally, I don't see a future for nuclear, and for that matter I see only niche applications for thermally generated electricity. Other technology will undercut the steam turbine driven electricity that has been the basis of grids for a century. We might have some chemical storage in hydrogen, methanol, methane, or longer carbon chains that comes from atmospherically extracted CO2 for use in extreme scenarios, but it also seems likely that long-duration battery storage (e.g. vanadium flow batteries) will get cheap enough to replace even that.
Really? Intermittency seems like a very good reason.
It's not like nuclear is dispatchable either, whereas wind turbines can be.
Really? Is that battery storage? Hydroelectricity?
I haven't seen a storage plan, let alone a cheap one, that hasn't assumed some future technology like hydrogen, synthetic gas, or molten salt will essentially be a cheat code to provide nearly-free storage.
For a long time the carbon lobby pretended that lithium ion batteries were the only thing that could be used to manage renewable intermittency. This was precisely because they wanted to charactize it being technology that was impossibly far fetched. In reality it's the most expensive of many options and the best last resort but as a result most people think it's just "the solution".
The price of even those has plummeted though and even they are being rolled out (e.g. in Hawaii, next to solar farms). That's still a lot cheaper than hinkley point C.
However, if you're Germany and you've got a calm and overcast day the most cost effective approach is to tell heavy non time sensitive industrial users like aluminum smelters to ramp down production today and ramp it up extra high tomorrow when it's very sunny and windy. The cost of doing this is comparatively very low for many users like smelters and we've barely scratched the surface of what's possible in this space.
So, investing in capacity on the presumption that dealing with the intermittency costs of solar and wind will be an enormous 160% of production costs is flat out insane without subsidies.
Hence why it's fairly clear that the UK wanted hinkley point c for other reasons - i.e. to keep nuclear capacity and know how local so that the nuclear arsenal can be maintained.
> There's a few papers on managing the mix of this but theyre not widely read or reported on.
Again, great of you to cite these papers.
> For a long time the carbon lobby pretended that lithium ion batteries were the only thing that could be used to manage renewable intermittency. This was precisely because they wanted to charactize it being technology that was impossibly far fetched. In reality it's the most expensive of many options and the best last resort but as a result most people think it's just "the solution".
Okay then: if not lithium ion batteries, what is the storage solution? Pumped hydro is geographically limited. That leaves approaches still in testing, like thermal storage or hydrogen storage.
> However, if you're Germany and you've got a calm and overcast day the most cost effective approach is to tell heavy non time sensitive industrial users like aluminum smelters to ramp down production today and ramp it up extra high tomorrow when it's very sunny and windy. The cost of doing this is comparatively very low for many users like smelters and we've barely scratched the surface of what's possible in this space.
So we have to tell people not to use energy. Because we have no effective way of addressing intermittency.
You're assuming that industries can just "ramp up extra high" when there's excess energy. Not all industries work like that. If a factory uses 100 MW at peak capacity it can't just produce 3x as much product if you feed it 300 MW. The reality is that few industries can be flexible like this.
What about things like street lights? Or sewage and water distribution? Hospitals, data centers, and essential services? There's plenty of things that cannot shift load like this.
Also, the 1,000 year figure for fissile fuel does not consider reprocessing which reclaims over 80% of fuel used.
A lot has changed since then - the costs he specifies, for instance, might as well be from the previous century.
Energy use has also decreased.
So its real. but, its not perfect. All systems have losses. The losses in PHES are not necessarily a huge problem.
This is why retrofitted dams generally increase the maximum power production rate even if the average remains the same time shifted power is extremely valuable.
Anyway, reducing power output regularly is straightforward in the moment but requires reactors to sit idle for ~90% of what it costs to run at full power. That extra capacity is therefore what’s expensive. France got around that by exporting a lot of nuclear power rather than see rates spike due to that excess capacity.
Essentially you can pay between X$/kwh for nuclear on a grid with storage or peaking power plants or 2.5X$/kWh for near 100% nuclear without storage or peaking power plans. The second one is what’s completely uneconomic and gives rise to the term base load power as it’s poorly suited to cover peak demand.
> managing nuclear wastes for thousands of years
There's a fun way to think about this: the more dangerous the isotopes in terms of radiation, the faster it becomes safer. That radiation is the isotope breaking down into something else, something more stable. For the most dangerous waste, the stuff that has proliferation risks, in a few decades it's not nearly as dangerous. So "thousands of years" is a popular misunderstanding, in my view.
> There is such a woeful global record of adequate safety measures
There have been a small number of incidents- Chernobyl and Fukishima primarily- but that mostly boils down to poor initial designs or choices for locations. No CANDU[0]-based reactor design has ever had a dangerous safety incident.
I know I'm trying to convince you of something you don't agree with, but give this link[1] a chance. It has a lot of answers to some of your oppositions- maybe you agree with them, maybe you don't, but I think it's well written at least.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor
[1] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...
"Thousands of years" comes from the half life of Plutonium-239, which is 24,000 years.
Pu-239 isn't unusually dangerous for an isotope. It's chemically toxic and somewhat radioactive but so is tons of stuff. The biggest problem with it is that you can make nuclear weapons from it.
Most commercial reactors make both Pu-239 and Pu-240. They're infeasible to separate (harder than separating U-235 from natural uranium) and enough Pu-240 makes the plutonium unsuitable for weapons.
But Pu-240 has a shorter half life than Pu-239. So if you take the plutonium out of a legacy reactor and bury it in the ground for a long time, it turns into weapons-grade plutonium. Burying it in the ground is very stupid because then you have to guard it for tens of thousands of years to keep anyone from going in and taking it to make nuclear weapons from.
But that ship has sailed. We have a half century of the stuff already. Half again as much or not makes no difference, we need a solution for what do with what we already have regardless of whether we make any more.
The solution is that newer reactors can use plutonium as fuel, which permanently eliminates it. So far from nuclear waste being a reason not to build newer reactors, it's the reason we should, so we can get rid of what we already have before it becomes suitable for weapons.
I think proponents of nuclear welcome the cost comparisons. Nuclear stacks up really well when you start factoring in externalities.
I'd recommend looking into long term storage. The story there is a lot better than you'd think. It's kind of funny that this is even brought up at this point.
These arguments from the '60s are why we have a warmed planet.
So, no, I don't think your analysis applies here.
2. There are countries that cannot rely on renewables because there's not enough wind or sun.
3. Renewables don't really work at the moment without stable source that can quickly kick in when there's no sun or no wind. The Nuclear energy is stable and clean. That combination of features is hugely underappreciated in favour of natural gas mostly for political reasons (at least in Europe). Natural Gas is not clean and won't prevent the global warming. Also Natural Gas and Coal have environmental impact and kill people all the time, not only when there's highly unlikely accident.
4. The small modular reactors (SMRs) may be the solution for a huge capital cost required for building a classic Nuclear Powerplant.
It's all well and good saying you can produce solar + wind en masse for 3c/kWh (even without govt incentives), but if you need to have a gas plant running extremely inefficiently to pick up the shortfall, I'm not sure you can say it is 3c/kWh.
I'm very pro renewables but think it is increasingly getting missed. You often see charts that solar/wind is significantly cheaper than nuclear, but never taking into account this.
Assuming that the investment in nuclear power from inception was equally matched in renewables for the same period of time, would anyone bother attempting to make this argument? The affordability of electricity from solar power alone would have likely have overtaken nuclear power long before the end of WWII. Nuclear (fission) power is mind-bogglingly expensive. The costs can not be handwaved away by suggesting it could be less expensive with even more investment into a method of power generation that is orders of magnitude more expensive than the most expensive renewables. Comparatively, we have barely scratched the surface of investing in renewables. If no one ever believed nuclear bombs were necessary, and instead of fission all that effort and cost had been put into developing fusion energy instead, we would have been building clean fusion plants for under $2B a piece by the end of the last millennium. Forget everything you think is wonderful about fission, forget all of it, and focus only on the economics. Then forget about it entirely and focus efforts instead on something, anything else, that is viable.
Windmills fall over and kill people.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
The interesting thing is that nuclear power is at 90, and Windmills at 150, but only if accidents in undeveloped nations be included, if they not be, and only developed nations are included, then the death toll is 0.1 from nuclear.
The overwhelming majority of accidents with nuclear energy happen in undeveloped nations.
> Nuclear – global average 90 (11% global electricity w/Chern&Fukush)
> Nuclear – U.S. 0.1 (19% U.S. electricity)
The article you linked makes no claim about developed or undeveloped nations. And the data here simply marks 0.1 as the US death toll from nuclear, and 90 as the global average death toll including Chernobyl and Fukushima.
US is not the only developed nation, and Japan is not an undeveloped nation. I'm not sure I'd consider any country with the capability to run a nuclear power plant "undeveloped", including USSR in 1986 or Ukraine specifically, but this isn't an argument I feel strongly about. IMF data (seen on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developing_country) would put current day Ukraine out of the list of developed, and I suspect the same for 1986.
Also, it's unclear if the death rate on wind is a global average. It's difficult to infer substantive information from the labeling on the data in this article from 8.5 years ago. There is no distinction between developed and undeveloped nations, for nuclear or for wind power. And the proxy you're using (US or non-US) is not listed for wind.
No, in 1986 Ukraine was one the richest and most developed states in USSR (Baltic states were close) and probably quite well-developed on the European scale. But since it became independent it gradually became the poorest country in Europe.
I would say that a sign of development is an ability to build reactors, not to run them. Today countries can easily order a reactor if they have sufficient funds for it and a certain level of political stability. A producer country probably will be even willing to give you a cheap credit to finance the construction.
> The interesting thing is that nuclear power is at 90, and Windmills at 150, but only if accidents in undeveloped nations be included, if they not be, and only developed nations are included, then the death toll is 0.1 from nuclear.
The distinction seen in the article between the 90 and 0.1 numbers is global average vs. U.S. death avg. You cited those numbers and re-labeled them as "undeveloped" (for the global avg including Fukushima and Chernobyl) and "developed" (for US).
You cannot directly map "US" data to all developed nations, as this mapping does not include all non-US developed countries which should be included. Nor can you directly map "global avg" data to all undeveloped nations, as this mapping will include developed countries which should not be included.
That's patently false. Nuclear has the fewest deaths per TW generated of any power source.
Yes, but its doesn't have the fewest We-have-hours-to-abandon-this-entire-city-because-no-one-can-live-here-for-the-next-100-years per TW generated of any power source.
Risks don't have to be counted in deaths. The risks of nuclear are very low, but risk is not just about the chance of an accident, its about the acceptability of a potential failure.
Meanwhile, twenty thousand people had just died from a tsunami. Twenty thousand. Not to mention the complete destruction of infrastructure in a populous city, and the ramifications of that.
Apparently follow ups of the evacuees suggest that we may have only given them an extra few days of life on average. The stress of uprooting people had nearly as large a health impact as the potential radiation. And not all of the evacuated area is uninhabitable. It was abandoned as a precaution.
Even if Fukushima is uninhabitable for 100 years, that could be a small price to pay to counter climate change. I don’t think the anti nuclear crowd are taking climate change as seriously as they should.
The costs are caused by legal challenges that cause massive delays and interruptions to construction, the transport of fuel and spent fuel, and to storage. There are egregious regulations that place unreasonable and outdated requirements on nuclear plant construction and operation.
Nuclear isn't a science or engineering problem. It's a political and legal problem.
The truth is that both sides need to update their knowledge of the state of the art in nuclear power generation, learn how the power grid works in depth and learn the patterns of power consumption both by residential locations and industrial ones.
Once you have all the knowledge about what's needed to avoid a significant decrease in our standard of living, you'll understand that a power generation technology with certain characteristics (foremost it has to be carbon neutral) is required... not optional, in other words, and simply adding more renewables is not enough to solve the problem.
The only practical solution (barring spending trillions of $$ and time to completely rebuild the US power grid and invent power storage technologies that don't exist as well as the industrial processes to produce them and infrastructure to handle their whole life cycle) is modern nuclear technology.
A serious response to climate change would be large government support of both nuclear power and renewables.
Are we going to tell our children that the main reason we did nothing to fight climate change was because fossil fuels were more competitive economically?
First replace every coal and gas power plant, then we can argue about nuclear vs renewables.
If a proper price on carbon existed, would nuclear and renewables not automatically look a whole lot cheaper without subsidies?
We're doing exactly that.
Likewise with lithium batteries. It just takes use, iteration and scale nuclear energy can easily be cheaper than everything else out there.
The improvement in IC technology more or less dealt with marginal price reduction.
The price of nuclear power is the price of a lot of nickel alloy parts, and huge pressure vessel, and huge containment structures.
If you want to build huge reactors. If you want to build small modular reactors, not so much. For example, the US navy is not flitting around in giant concrete domes.
Yes, power levels make difference there, but there is no inherent advantage of smaller sizes in this context.
If reactor explosion happens even with small reactor sizes, containment building makes no difference unless you size it to contain even an explosion, which will make it even more expensive. And you will still have to deal with meltdown products in the end.
If you have enormous amounts of coolant at hand, you can equally well cool a bigger reactor too.
Man, any reactor is critical, by the definition.
You have a few gigawatt water heater, and an extremely large pressure vessel.
Modern reactors physically can explode, with, or without positive void reactivity coefficient.
I urge you to disable the control system on any working PWR reactor, and stand by to test your hypothesis.
Rapid power excursions with, or without coolant inside come from many phenomena, not just void reactivity coefficients.
What is factual is that the nuclear industry has been around for many decades and has not been able to solve this problem, despite there being lots of pretty clever people involved in it.
A contributing factor to making the learning curve negative is that the security guarantees underlying the plant designs are built on what we know can go wrong. As we learn more about the problem, we also learn of more weird failure modes, complicating the design of future plants.
I've seen people handwave this away with paper designs. Paper designs are comparatively easy to make safe. Real reactors are much, much harder. If you think this is bullshit, try looking up a certain admiral Rickover and see what he has to say about this.
Meanwhile, renewables keep falling in price.
You might want to take your own advice. You did the exact same ting, make an assertion without supporting evidence, in your previous comment.
> What sort of logic can you provide to back up your assertion? Any such reasoning must also include actual numbers and costs
Nuclear power was built with an average cost of $2-3 billion dollars per GWe of capacity when nuclear was built at scale during the late 1960s through much of the 1980s [1]. The US was building nuclear plants at a rate of several plants per year, rather than several plants per decade. The same pattern holds true in France. During the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s, plants of the same design were built in serial production. Now, when they're building plants one or two at a time it's more expensive.
There's a clear pattern of cheaper plants when built at scale, and this pattern holds true across the two main nuclear power producers.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...
You seem to be backing up my point with your claims. Nuclear has consistently gotten more expensive over time. The designs you point to from the 1970s will never be built again, because nuclear engineers realized their flaws and don't want to build them again.
With each new generation of nuclear, it gets more expensive, not less. As we refine the designs, we spend more per GW, not less. And not just a little bit more, but massively more. Even if we build the AP1000 serially, do you think it could reach $3B/GW? That's a huge hike in reasoning, and I'm not sure where in the long long Wikipedia article for nuclear power it states that serially production of the same design could drop costs by a factor or 4 (or more).
Everywhere it has been studied, nuclear has a negative learning rate. See, for example, Figure 1 and the many articles it cites:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
And we're also building fewer nuclear plants over time. Let's revisit your point:
> Even worse, nuclear very clearly gets more expensive the more if it we build, not less expensive.
This is not only untrue, it is the opposite of true. The more of it is built, the less expensive it is. The less of it is built, the more expensive it is.
You're right that nuclear has gotten more expensive. But that's because we're building less of it. If what you said were true - that nuclear get more expensive the more we build it - then today's nuclear plants should be cheaper than the ones built in the 1970s and 1980s during the nuclear boom.
> Even if we build the AP1000 serially, do you think it could reach $3B/GW? That's a huge hike in reasoning, and I'm not sure where in the long long Wikipedia article for nuclear power it states that serially production of the same design could drop costs by a factor or 4 (or more).
It's not a huge hike in reasoning. It's based on the price history of previous plant construction. Click on those plants built in the 1970s and early 80s. Many were built at a cost of only $2B. AP1000s are fundamentally not much different than previous PWR designs. Iterative improvements extend life and generate a bit more power, but the overall layout is the same.
In short we did build nuclear plants at scale, and it was 4-5x cheaper. This is a claim based on demonstrable patterns in price history.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
> nuclear very clearly gets more expensive the more if it we build, not less expensive.
We've been building less nuclear not more. So if what you say is true, costs should have been going down over time. The reality is that nuclear is cheaper when built at scale. The larger number of plants being built together was cheaper than a handful of plants.
Your own source shows this. Look at this graph [1]. You see that cluster of plants around 1970? When we built a lot of nuclear, it was a lot less expensive. $1-2,000 per KW of capacity, or $1-2B per GW. This was actually cheaper than the figures I originally cited, thanks for the source I'll be sure to use it to demonstrate how nuclear is cheaper when built at scale in the future.
1. https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03014215163001...
Increased nuclear safety. Proponents often tout nuclear's relative safety. Good, but that safety is hard won through regulation. Compliance is costly, and improved safety has been subject to diminishing returns.
Economies of scale. Building a nuclear power plant is a massive undertaking, so the world simply hasn't been building a lot of nuclear power plants. Supply chains (parts, know how) are getting smaller and more uncompetitive with every passing year as other forms of energy production have become more attractive.
Why do they get this money but not renewables? The name of the subsidy program makes that very clear. Reserve energy. The oil fueled power plant get paid to simply exist in the case where demand exceeds production of renewables. Before they shut down the latest nuclear reactor this was mostly to address cold windless winter nights, but now its operating basically all year as dips in renewable energy regularly cause situations where that reserve energy is required for a stable energy grid.
I get how people do not like subsidies for nuclear, but I really dislike subsidies for fossil fuels and I hate how oil is being burned just because it now is called "reserve energy".
One would think that if storage costs were the cheaper choice then we would be phasing out fossil fuel from the "reserve energy" strategy. There is no such plans. In contrast, the current plan and government investments goes to increase the reserve energy capacity from fossil fuel in every way possible. To my knowledge there does not exist a single commercial operated storage system that get charged with wind and later sold, here or globally. There does exist solar and battery, commonly with about 75% capacity for 4hrs, and a charge cycle of a single day. The economics for wind require massively higher capacity (weeks rather than hours), and the charge cycle which will repay the investment is significant slower (several weeks rather than a single day).
It may be that sodium cooled fast breeders had a fundamental materials flaw that was not recognized soon enough.
30 some nations use nuclear power, or are building nuclear plants. Only nine countries have nuclear weapons.
Pursuing nuclear weapons is obviously a choice, it's not automatic with nuclear power. It requires an immense, concerted effort to build nuclear weapons.
The US has begrudgingly learned to live with North Korea and Pakistan having nuclear weapons, it'll learn to live with Iran having nuclear weapons as well (and shortly after that, Saudi Arabia). Will Israel accept that outcome? I guess we'll find out, there is no scenario where Iran doesn't acquire nuclear weapons at this point. It's guaranteed.
It's Trump who did messed everything up, not Iran. Unfortunately it does not look like the Biden administration is eager to fix it.
Yip. a) because 3.67% enriched Uranium fuel is not a weapon and will never be b) civilian nuclear energy is part of the multi-national JPCOA deal that they kept their side of c) its really not your call to tell other sovereign people what energy to use d) you should be happy they are using less coal.
I do wonder, though, what the costs would look like if a big country like the US built, say, 400 Hinkley Point Cs. What economies of scale would you see? You could probably get a sense by looking at the marginal build costs were associated with some of the last French plants during the 1970s-early 1990s construction boom, when they built over 50 plans.
We also don't have the nuclear reactors that would supply that energy (particularly at global scale, where breeding would be needed). Why is building those reactors conceivable, but building energy storage systems not?
As I wrote in a smililar thread some time ago: 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. Renewables are already significantly cheaper, even if you incorporate necessary storage costs or DCS grids. Nuclear is only barely competitive when dismissing everything except the direct construction and operation costs which is very misleading.