""" Excessive concern about low levels of radiation led to a regulatory standard known as ALARA: As Low As Reasonably Achievable. What defines “reasonable”? It is an ever-tightening standard. As long as the costs of nuclear plant construction and operation are in the ballpark of other modes of power, then they are reasonable.
This might seem like a sensible approach, until you realize that it eliminates, by definition, any chance for nuclear power to be cheaper than its competition. """
The thing is, we want more power. Like, a lot more power. Power is wealth, there is an unlimited number of good things we can do with it.
Nuclear power is qualitatively about the best power you can have. Absolutely enormous amounts, available on demand, constantly. You just can't beat it.
We should heavily subsidize reasearch and development on new nuclear energy, until we have ten times as much nuclear power as we have now.
And we should do that in parallel with building out so much solar that we can rapidly retire coal completely, because we want to do that in ten years and that is completely feasible with solar + batteries. The new nukes will barely be coming online when that happens.
But the 40s will be a renaissance of human culture if we have that nuclear power.
Battery storage can scale large, but more importantly, it can scale really small. This means that you can throw a couple shipping containers of it at one side of a congested transmission link, and save tons of money. It means that we can make all our houses self reliant for hours at a time.
Storage will help us solve the problem of transmission lines causing massive wildfires. It will provide massive reliability and resilience across the grid. Small nuclear won't help much with that, unless is also paired with storage.
If nuclear can provide electricity at rates competitive with solar and wind, then storage will help nuclear too. But if nuclear is not beating the cost of solar and wind, then we will have less wealth if we spend our labor building nuclear than if we build renewables and storage.
A world built on solar wind and storage will probable have peak power capacity 2x-4x more than we need, with 2-3 days worth of storage. The ratio between power and storage will largely depend on the relative costs of storage versus power.
And I think it's time to start thinking about the sort of word where we have an over abundance of energy that renewables will provide. We will have lots of excess energy being produced, and with the right applications that can tolerate intermittency, that excess energy will incredibly cheap.
Storage (especially at the current rate of growth) is nowhere close to meeting our capacity needs for a 100% renewable grid. We can't store enough energy for a single day of consumption. Keep in mind we would need to store enough energy to handle long periods of low production. We're an order of magnitude away from that. On top of that, the vast majority of global energy storage is not actually provided by batteries, but by pumped-storage hydro (expanding this capacity would run into environmental issues and physical limitations; we don't have enough water in convenient locations).
Battery tech seems way off from providing us the needed capacity. Even Tesla is bottlenecked by battery production. We'd need to see Moore's Law level growth to have enough storage capacity to mitigate climate change, but we're only seeing 30% to 40% growth, which is just not enough given that it's currently less than a fraction of a percent of our total energy storage needs for 100% renewable power.
People are also seriously overestimating the time table needed to build a nuclear power plant. India, China, and Russia have been able to build plants in a few years vs 10 years in the West. If we're not pushing nuclear now, we'll be burning coal and natural gas for the next century.
Only about 14% of what we pay in Denmark and probably a comparable amount in Germany goes to paying for the actual electricity.
The rest is for "Green taxes" that pays for our new green infrastructure, R&D and lots of things that will benefit the transition.
So if we just said "we good now", 86% of the cost would disappear, and probably not be much more expensive than US energy, or even cheaper, at least soon!
Also it works as a magnet for business surprisingly maybe.
We have enormous new datacenters from Google, Facebook and Apple being built right at this moment, even though Denmark is tiny.
Taxation is extremely important when it comes to transitioning to green energy. As long as the taxation scheme favours green energy - granted that is difficult to define exactly.
We've had to same scheme with electric cars giving you about half the price of a conventional car.
This is exactly how government should help the green transition, instead of the exact opposite that for many years has been happening in the US with the corporate welfare and grotesque subsidising of heavy industry. Though again this is a contentious issue as Tesla has sucked a lot of green subsidies from the pool. So there definitely is problems to tackle.
This is too important to leave to the back of a napkin, is what I'm saying. Breakthroughs in nuclear energy would be a big win. The aesthetic and ecosystem costs of transforming hundreds of square kilometers of desert into solar farms are bearable, but they're real.
The power yield of solar panels in the Belt is also not superb given the launch costs. Pretty dangerous to go blasting uranium into space on top of a rocket, no matter how reliable, but we can go to where the uranium is, for the most part.
We don't want to be behind the curve when that time comes. Extracting metals from Earth's surface is just going to get more environmentally noxious and less profitable, as we work through the good veins. We might luck out and find a few more rich lodes, but we shouldn't count on it, and mining in the ocean is a whole unexplored world (just like the Belt): it's closer, but it's also an ecosystem, and water is capable of spreading solid pollution quite a bit more promiscuously than the air is. Groundwater and surface water leaching from mine tailings is already very bad, we don't want that happening in the ocean. We only have one of those and we already beat it up pretty badly.
This is a lie at our current technology levels.
Neither of these are true. We are current at 200-300GWh of production per year, and consistent with recent history are expected to grow capacity 10x every five years, so that by 2031 we will produce 20-30TWh of new batteries per year. That's 500-750GW per year, at a 4 hour duration.
In contrast, the idea of scaling nuclear production to 100GW of new capacity per year by 2031 is simply inconceivable.
In 2021, with current technology, nuclear simply can not scale as fast as storage, or for that matter solar or wind.
I'm far from well versed in this area but I was under the impression that renewables really suffer in this department. The lifespan of a wind turbine is about 20 years. We don't know exactly what the lifespan of a nuclear plant is but it's certainly longer than that. And of course the availability on solar and other "harvesting" type mechanisms can be inconsistent, up and down as a function of weather, etc. What am I missing?
There are two reasons why everything is still built for 20 years: Firstly, there is not pressure on the projects to increase lifetime, because the deprecated value today of further production in year 21 is basically zero. Secondly, the turbines we installed 20 years ago were so small that there is really no reason to keep them going.
It does require running the grid differently. But part of that is becoming more responsive to constantly changing conditions, and a grid that it used to that will have far fewer problems then one where a GW reactor trips off because of some sensor problem (as happened in Texas). As we get closer to 80% renewable grids, then we will be used to running backup natural gas plants to keep everything running. And the ultimate in resilience and reliability will happen as we add more storage. With batteries everywhere, we will have buffering all over the grid that will make it far far easier to make sure everybody has power, and to limit outages to the smallest areas possible.
The first year of power shut offs for PG&E's public safety in the face of high wind and fire conditions covered massive areas. This last year they covered far less, as they could focus the power shut offs far better with an extra year of work. This sort of finer grained granularity and control is what happens as more renewables and storage will be added to the grid, as we update this impressive machine that we started building a century ago. Adding modern communication and control will come along with more storage, demand response, and home-to-grid power from solar.
And I think that you have some serious metal fatigue in some critical nuclear reactor core components.
Current state of the art storage with solar is commercial viable around 75% capacity for 4hrs, with a charge cycle of 24 hours. Those numbers are a good improvement over 0% storage, but there is a good reason why there are not a single commercial operated wind farm that use the same technology. Wind does not have a 24hr charge cycle, and 4hrs of 75% capacity does not do much when there first several weeks of good weather followed by several weeks of bad weather.
When northern European countries plans for stability, we are not talking about hours. This is why oil power plants get subsidized in countries who invest heavily in wind power. The reserve energy source need to be profitable while the weather is creating negative energy prices, regardless for how long such period last, because afterward you will need a lot of it to be available for an equal long period of time. This is the problem that storage need to solve and have yet to find any suitable commercial viable answers. You could improve the economic viability of current batteries used in PV by 1000% and it would still not be economical viable for wind.
When it comes to individuals and personal homes, the answer that most experts seems to conclude on is that solar and storage is something which comes after more fundamental improvements such as heat exchanges and replacing internal combustion engines with electric ones. Solar and batteries are nice, but the planet is still going to be quite damaged if we continue burning massive amount of coal, oil and gas in order to generate power that electric heaters demand during the winter.
I wouldn't get hung up on paring battery storage with a particular generation technology. Just connect it to the grid and let the market decide when to charge and discharge.
One good reason for colocating battery storage with renewables is that you get to share the grid connection. That connection can be expensive and will be under utilized due to intermittency. So store some of the energy in batteries and spend less money on expensive AC cables. You can even reverse the flow and take energy from the grid.
Costs are dropping so rapidly that typical 5-year timelines for utility planning and procurement is running into some problems. People who make bids have to anticipate their costs in the future, so there's considerable betting going on.
Agreed on the heat pumps versus fossil heat. I moved in the past few years, and replacing all the natural gas is my first task before installing solar. By replacing natural gas with a heat pump, my total energy consumption has plummeted drastically. However, my utility charges only about 15% as much for a unit of natural gas energy as it does electrical energy, which eliminated the cost savings! So now that I better know my total energy consumption the switch to solar will happen very soon, and save me a ton of money.
The event that is precipitating CA's shutdown has been planned for more than a decade. And the cost of keeping the nuclear plant would be $7B-$14B, before any of the inevitable cost increases that accompany large construction projects. $7B for solar and storage will easily replace nuclear. At $1/W for solar, and $250/kWh for storage, $7B will buy 4GW of solar and 12 GWh of storage, and cost overruns are unheard of for solar and storage installations.
The nuclear plant that is shutting down is already at the end of its original license, and the $7B of work would be for 20 years or less of nuclear.
Seemingly just in time, solar, wind, and storage are scaling both in production capacity and in falling costs to solve our climate problems. These will be the backbone of getting to 80% carbon free electricity in the next decade, and 0% carbon not that long after. This will be far cheaper than any other source of energy generation we can use, and will save us massive amounts of money.
One of the better grid modelers out there, Christoper Clack, who has no opposition to nuclear and in the past has made strong arguments for it being a cheaper way to get to 0%, also has an amazing new mode out this year that says we should do something very unintuitive: deploy massive amounts of distributed solar and storage close to power meters (e.g. on people's homes). This will result in a much stronger distribution grid that can both shave peaks of demand, resulting in far less very costly distribution infrastructure, and which will empower far even cheaper deployment of larger amounts of utility-scale solar and wind in future decades.
Nuclear would be nice if it weren't so expensive, and if it were our only option we should keep it around, but there's little reason to create make-work when we have cheaper options, and options that will have additional benefits for the grid such as greatly increasing reliability and resilience. Massive distributed solar and storage will create an absolutist rock solid grid that will be able to weather disruptions far better than one with large generators that become almost like single points of failure.