Given China appears able to build quality reactors quickly, this would seem to be the result of European policy preferences with respect to nuclear.
We don't know how they'll perform as they age. If we calculated quality as you suggest, they would probably win.. but we would expect brand new plants to have fewer issues than 30 year old plants.
That's a strange expectation to have. Ever heard of the bathtub curve ?
China excels at hiding important information from public view, so I would take their data, and data indirectly sourced from them, with a grain of salt. And oh, by the way, one could say the same about the nuclear industry and its captured regulatory bodies in general as well.
Which is half of their lifetime by American standards.
> In 2019 France had 5580 reactor days with zero production.
That means 75% of availability. Good luck finding any renewable source with such a figure ;).
BTW, the list of cancelled power plants (even ones under construction) in the US is pretty long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cancelled_nuclear_reac... and even the only reactors currently under construction where are risk of being abandoned. The budget is of course overrun and completion set back by six years, so far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...
Those 5580 were 1700 more than planned. It's like saying: I can use my car two months a year due to maintenance and being fine with it not working for a third month. I
> Those 5580 were 1700 more than planned. It's like saying: I can use my car two months a year due to maintenance and being fine with it not working for a third month.
Welcome to the real world of industrial processes, these aren't cars. Maintenance are run on tight schedules[1], so there can easily be delays (this isn't specific to nuclear though, you'd find delays during maintenance for every kind of electric production site). Also, small problems happen all the time, and because of nuclear's super high safety requirements, when those small things happen, you stop the reactor and fix it.
BTW, around one third of those 1700 days came from small issues at Fessenheim that EDF decided not to fix and keep the reactor off because the plant was planned for closure by the end of the year. You're not gonna fix you car if you know it's gonna be seized soon right?
[1] mostly because like in every business, project manager are like “it's late: workers were lazy. It's dine before the deadline: we gave them too much time”.
In fact, I like to say that the only viable option to get 100% RE is to lower our energy consumption until hydro can cover the majority of our needs.
It’s also worth pointing out that while hydro is renewable, it isn’t clean. Dams are ecological nightmares.
Hydro will like be part of our energy profile indefinitely. But it will never be more than a small fraction. And in the long run that fraction will get smaller as global energy demand continues to grow.
IMO, most industrialized nations have already tapped hydro about as much as it can be tapped, given some constraints about wildlife habitat. But I'd be happy to be corrected -- what new hydro projects do you think we should be doing, and how much power do you think they'd provide?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_ch... and the more alarmist https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/impact-climate-change... say that the global economic impact of climate change will likely amount to about 10% of world GDP, and perhaps as much as 20%.
Those are huge, huge numbers! But to put them in perspective, it's less than the difference between living in, say, present day US vs present day UK. Big impact, but hardly planetarily existential.
And, yes, there's more to live than economics. But if life goes on normally enough that we can even not only still talk about GDP with any meaning, but even say that we are going to preserve 80% to 90% of GDP, things won't be too apocalyptic.
Keep in mind that this is 80% of a far larger pie than today, since normal economic growth will continue.
So maybe that's why governments don't act, relying on abstract GDP numbers. «A good chunk of the tropical era of the world is going to be uninhabitable[1]? Who cares, it's only gonna cost us 10% of GDP».
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/08/climate/climate-change-he...
> it's less than the difference between living in, say, present day US vs present day UK. Big impact, but hardly planetarily existential.
Like, the difference between living in Birmingham or living in the death valley?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/world/canada/bc-canada-he...
Well, no, the planet will not be destroyed. The issue is the lifestyle of the semi-hairless apes on the planet.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_ch... and the more alarmist https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/impact-climate-change... say that the global economic impact of climate change will likely amount to about 10% of world GDP, and perhaps as much as 20%
No, its that it will grow to that share by 2050 (which is less than 30 years away) and keep growing.
> At a (somewhat generous) 3% baseline growth rate,
At a fairly generous 3% baseline growth rate, 2.35× current world GDP, for a projected population of 9.7 billion to todays 7.9 billion, so (pre-climate change impacts) a little under double the current GDP/capita.
Of course, the losses arent, expected to be evenly distributed among countries, regions, etc., so if you aren't a well-diversified capitalist (say you are working class) and in the wrong place or industry, you have a good chance at seeing dramatically* greater impacts.
> Of course, the losses arent, expected to be evenly distributed among countries, regions, etc., so if you aren't a well-diversified capitalist (say you are working class) and in the wrong place or industry, you have a good chance at seeing dramatically* greater impacts.
Yes, averages hide a lot of variance.
Of course, this is another good reason in favour of allowing freer migration around the globe.
From the perspective of the people in places likely to see lesser adverse impacts, its a reason against freer inbound migration.
Of course, now we'd have to discuss who 'you' is. If you are talking about individual people, or about eg some statistical measure of the country or county as a whole.
See also https://openborders.info/keyhole-solutions/ which would suggest to eg just charge people to immigrate.
Totally renewable - and not just hydro, but also solar (which takes care of the water you let in)!
And yes, this has been proposed and is physically possible & it alreadyhappened for geological reasons in the past:
Also takes care of shipping. ;-) Although I guess you could build a near shore shipping channel, possibly filled with fresh water from rivers.
Well, then you still need to deal with the salt both as a onetime measure.
But throughout the year capacity varies.
And, of course, there's only so many sites that can support dams. So you have to ask 100% of _what_? And is that enough?
Not to mention the power transfer to pump water up & down being possibly a big multiple of what a regular hydro plant on that one spot would even need to transfer.
Of course, you could let’s say transport the energy produced by wind farms from Northern Germany to hydro projects built in South Germany, but that opens a new can of worms: loss of energy because of the transport itself, extra costs, actually building the energy transport infrastructure (a huge task in a NIMBY world).
Most of the existing HVDC interconnects are undersea.
You don’t need to deal with 10k different landowners each wanting their own special deal if you’re connecting Tunisia and Spain, vs North and South Germany.
If you’re covering significant distances that people live in, you can expect to spend a decade or sometimes more in court before being able to build - if ever.
Because of course there are the environmental reviews, the impact assessments, etc. and each of those will be hundreds to thousands of pages long, and you’ll likely have to fight over each page, also in court, with folks who don’t like that you’re going to dig up that random patch of flowers to install your power line or whatever.
And that is assuming you’re lucky enough to not have any endangered species in the way, in which case you might literally not be able to build at all if it is in an area you have no choice to go through.
So far no one is staking out patches of ocean floor, and generally even if they did, the topography is usually more forgiving there. So all you need is landing approval, which means one government and one compliant landowner on each side somewhere along each coast that is close enough to an existing grid that you can interconnect to it. Much more solvable. Still not easy or straightforward.
In California it took me 4 years and $18k worth of professional help to get approval to do completely standard fuel reduction work on a completely uninteresting plot of land that was super overgrown with brush and dead trees - with no one objecting to it - in the middle of a historic wildfire crisis in California that actually expedited the process.
I had to notify 10 something local native tribes (in case they maybe were somehow attached to the land, which they weren’t), had to do a detailed archeological survey, had to have a licensed biologist do a detailed walkthrough to look for endangered species (there were none).
Meanwhile the 3 largest fires in the states recorded history burned nearby, and they wouldn’t let me clear brush and remove dead trees from a clear fire hazard area and it’s a miracle the place didn’t burn to the ground.
The details will have to speak for themselves and this is not the forum, however I strongly encourage you to seek some kind of outsider, and avoid those for whom the reputational damage occurs..
I got my thing approved and done with (finally), zero interest in getting involved any more. Everyone else involved knows this is how it goes too.
If you think me going to some news agency is going to do anything but get me stomped on in some future year (and it ending up being a decade instead), you might want to take a look around first.
edit: all these records and more are also public records and should be trivially available via FOIA requests - which said PRcoughnews outlets would be pulling if they wanted to know what was really going on.
There are only 100k private timberland owners in CA (and mostly nutballs like myself that seem to like pain and suffering in the form of paperwork), so it’s an easy group to stomp on, relatively speaking.
You can remove small amounts of nuisance stuff in small areas, and burn in small piles during days you are approved to burn (which are limited). Maximum pile height of 3 ft, and 3x3 ft diameter if I remember from the last burn permit I pulled?
You can clear up to 1/3 of an acre, or emergency thin I think up to 3 acres if you comply with those rules, but the 3 acres they reserve the right to come in and fine you if you do something they don’t like, and you have to file a permit to do that too. Any trees about a certain diameter or of certain species, regardless of level of disease or danger they might require you to keep. A dead tree that might have an owl or protected animal in it? Ho boy.
It would take several lifetimes to even attempt that on 60+ acres of overgrown timber. I spent a week and barely did 1/4 of an acre working full time, and it still wasn’t adequately thinned.
In the end, it took a crew of 4 with purpose built heavy equipment (a masticator), working full time over 4 months to do it to state standard -once the paperwork finally cleared this summer.
Each one of which has some plausible reason for it to exist that nominally make sense, but starts of choke out a ton of reasonable behaviors pretty quickly.
See http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.981...
Oil pipelines are bit different because there are tons of people and organizations outside of those directly impacted who are willing to join the fight.
Most utility corridors are in the middle of nowhere and already established (and people stay away because of this), so reusing an existing corridor is relatively easy - unless it widens into someone’s yard. Then it’s a matter of how much money that person has.
For connecting previously not connected areas with a new line, especially if it goes through somewhere folks are living? Be prepared for the actual work making whatever you are doing to be a tiny tiny percentage of the time and costs involved.
You can't take the experience of a private citizen trying to clear some brush, bridge widening delays in one of the most regulation heavy states in the country, and oil pipeline opposition, and apply it to building HVDC between countries in Europe.
Unlike your examples, HVDC lines have no real negative impact on anyone but the immediately impacted property owners. If you're building HVDC transmission lines between countries, you can also very likely reuse existing utility corridors for much of it, and build through lower density areas for most of the rest. The actual number of property owners directly impacted won't be high enough to make an impact on elections.
Even in the US (which is very low density compared to most places), most people live in cities or denser suburban areas (80.7%). 97% of all land Area in the US however is Rural.
So you are right in that this is not a problem in most of the US (by land area), and this isn’t a problem in elections in those areas either - it won’t negatively impact enough individuals, and problem cases can often be routed around, because the pop density is low.
However, this IS also a problem for most of the US (by populations), as this directly impacts costs and infrastructure upgrades for the majority of the population in the US.
Europe is even denser, and some locations have just as bad if not worse regulatory environments, so it’s the same factors at play. Some countries in Europe excepted of course.
Or some random place in Ohio for that matter.
The regulatory hell that cities and states wealthy enough to afford it impose on themselves is not representative of the entire country.
Europe is at least as regulation heavy as California.
HVDC is (I think) the only thing that can be used for underwater connections, so it’s used where the price makes sense. If the question is regulation we should also see all proposed and recent AC lines in Europe.
(Edited for clarity)
Yet essentially all planned or existing HVDC lines (at least ones notable enough for the map), are undersea cables.
Why would that be?
There are definitely undersea HVAC interconnects - https://www.nkt.com/products-solutions/high-voltage-cable-so...
They seem non-notable enough I had a hard time finding a good combined list anywhere.
I ran across plenty of references to HVAC being used for offshore wind turbines and the like too.
And they were the default standard (and still are for shorter runs and where the grid frequency matches). There are AC solutions for lack of grid frequency matching and the like.
I can’t find a list or easy map for major new on land grid connections - if you can find one, that would be great. Might be national security concerns or something?
I know of at least one such solution between Germany and Sweden trough the Baltic Sea.
edit: This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Cable
I found this neat paper on HVDC grounds and interconnects too [http://b-dig.iie.org.mx/BibDig2/P13-0399/files/PESGM2013-001...]
The point is that right of ways and permits are super hard on land, which is why most of these are run via the sea.
If it’s a 1000km single run, the math is definitely different, but there aren’t a lot of those. If there are transformers, taps, generators, or other live equipment in the middle, those also change the equation, and in a grid environment, there are a ton of those.
Yes, governments really need to pass laws to muzzle NIMBYs.
This would increase democracy - no longer would small minorities be able to veto government actions for the benefit of all.
Like Trump vetoing a wind farm because it could be seen from one of his golf courses in Scotland.
can that be done in all cases? Most dams I've seen IRL didn't seem to have an area downstream big enough to collect the water to be able to pump it back up.
Still not super cheap of course, so then the classic ‘what will this get us for the cost, and does it pencil out as profitable’ (generally a good proxy for worth the time and expense) starts to come into play.
Edit: According to the paper, it's economically viable when the output power price (post-pumping and running through the turbine again) can be > 2X the price of the hydropower, which with seasonal variation and spikey but 'free' sometimes power, could definitely help. Preferring something like solar over running a turbine could also help.
The challenge of course is that many times hydropower is nearly free and available in large quantities, as the dams are also used for flood control, so they either toss large quantities of water over the spillways (wasting it), or run it through a turbine - but they can't NOT move the water.
That's actually the positive thing about covid, is that we had a preview of how the climate crisis is going to be handled. That's going to be a mess, everyone will think they are an expert
The possible liability from a nuclear accident so large that it basically isn't insurable, because insurance agencies won't promise to pay a sum that large. A dam may be located in such a spot that the worst-case liability is insurable, ie. the electricity can be fairly and properly priced in our present model of society.
(Not necessarily. If the dam could flood Paris and the smaller cities further down the Seine, insurance agencies might refuse to insure that one fully, of course.)
The central bank can print money without bound. Some of the effects of money printing changes with confidence in the currency, but the core effects that it targets don't really change until people radically change behavior to reduce use of the currency as a medium or even measuring stick for routine transactions.
Anyway, this isn't relevant to my argument upstream — it just changes the reason why nuclear reactors aren't properly pricable in our market economy, from "can't be insured due to worst case" to "worst case can destroy the currency". (It also doesn't rule out other argumens, pro or contra.)
They are not ever strictly power plants, rather they provided the much needed buffer to store energy during fluctuating demand and/or supply.
Pumped storage is also completely compatible with both nuclear base load (store extra from base load that can't be easily throttled) and unpredictable renewables sources (store extra when needed, cover - reasonably short - periods of no supply from the source.
If you look at model solutions to a renewable/storage/nuclear grid, the solutions tend to flip from "mostly nuclear" to "mostly renewable" with little overlap, depending on cost assumptions.
What the grid really needs is transparency at the customer level of real time power costs.
So first buy goes to power plants (including virtual power plants) that can provide stable power generation given a specific window of time - whether that that's nuclear, hydro, or solar+wind+battery+hydrogen - so long as it's close to zero emissions and will pump out required power no matter the weather over specified time.
Let wind/solar fight over peak power, or consolidate into virtual power plants with storage operators (it should also incentivize buildout of storage, so win-win in my book)
The problem is you can't just expose the prices without appropriate infrastructure support on the consumer side.
You can build a lot of wind and solar parks in that time and updated old one-way dams with pumps to have them a large scale batteries. All that decentralized, thus creating jobs all over the country.