We know roughtly what it costs to build solar or wind. There is a bit of subsidies and commercial parties take care of the rest. In the short term we need natural gas as a backup for solar and wind. But even that is not hard to build.
And then we have nuclear. Projects that are late, projects cost way more than projected. Building a nuclear powerplant takes so much time that financing the project is almost impossible.
Today, nuclear is just not a practical option. We need to build as much non-fossil capacity as we can and as quick as we can.
In future, we have to solve the storage problem for wind and solar. If that becomes a problem, then nuclear may make a comeback. At least, if somebody can figure out how to accurately project the cost and construction time.
https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/05/billion-dollar...
> And as the plant blows through deadlines, the cost has ballooned dramatically: An original price tag of $1.8 billion has swelled to $6.2 billion.
Nobody wants to admit they are still considering coal, but everyone wants to take credit for blocking nuclear and building renewables. So at a glance it seems like it's nuclear vs renewables, when it's always been nuclear vs coal.
Energy is a fundamental need for society to flourish.
Fossil fuels have one of the highest energy densities and hence have been used for ages. We have much to be thankful for thanks to fossil fuels being around.
We are in a position today to bring change and I’m all for that. Losing sight of the benefits of energy simply because some sources have a negative connotation attached sets us up for failure.
We needed fuels as a society for those 3000 mile flights over the pacific that ships your iPhone here.
Energy “subsidies” are a strategic investment in securing your lifestyle. Just look at Europe right now as they head into winter with sky high natural gas prices. They’d go ahead an strike any deal that secures their supplies so they do t freeze half to death like they did with Russia.
Energy is a strategic asset and simply saying “it gets subsidized” makes it sound like charity.
Oh no, heavily polluting (and not only CO2) energy sources are being villanized...
Yes, yes, I am going to villanize Coal, which spews more radioactivity than nuclear.
Natural Gas, Gasoline, Oil, are "ok"ish. Not coal.
I'd much rather find a way to maintain people's lifestyles, reduce emissions (and make it even better in the process).
I don't own a car, I don't eat meat, I consume very little and try to buy used things instead, I repair all my things as much as possible, I try to steer my investments away from anything close to fossil fuels.
Now you.
We have to accommodate these lifestyles (and build tech to make it more sustainable) - people generally don't want to go 'backwards', even if you or I don't perceive that as a problem.
Ultimately it's irrelevant, because both of our lifestyles are still heavily carbon negative without offsets. We both own a computer or live in a house I assume? That's why I'm sceptical of the "just live more sustainable" movement.
Everything we consider advanced tech today is built on an economy made possible by vast, cheap and accessible energy sources such as the ones we're dissing.
I agree that we need to stop using energy sources in a way that threatens our existence. But i assert that there are massive benefits we have to be thankful for as well.
Comparing to gas burning power stations coal is very inefficient in terms of energy produced per per ton of CO2 emitted.
far lower than nuclear
Energy is needed for basic modern services.
Humans have survived a long time without electricity. It could be simpler to 'go without' or 'find a workaround' for a lot of conveniences if we were serious at combating climate change.
We did an ok job with nuclear weapons but only just.
So your just suggesting we go back to the middle ages? No, thank you.
Well that's the question right? Without nuclear there may not be a middle ground as an option for a lot of people.
>So your just suggesting we go back to the middle ages? No, thank you.
I'm not suggesting anything, simply declaring it an option.
What? The energy density of primordial fuels is six orders of magnitude higher!
I’m not saying the parent is necessarily wrong, but given the recency of the industrial revolution and the length of time between which it “began” and when many of the most useful industrial applications for coal were discovered, I can’t take it at face value “centuries” is correct. It might be close to correct, it might be technically correct, but it’s not merely an pedantic point: his comment reads as hyperbole because of the vagueness of what centuries even means here. Even if it has been technically two centuries, century plural technically, that’s overstating his case. Overstating your case is a good way to get people to turn off to what you are saying if they perceive it that way.
[1] Somewhat loose translation of "kolare" and "bergslag", here.
Renewables need to be combined with power sources that can be turned on and off quickly and on demand. Nuclear emphatically cannot provide that.
Talking about baseline power – as if that‘s needed – is highly misleading in that context.
> Historically, nuclear power plants were built as baseload plants, without load following capability to keep the design simple. Their startup or shutdown took many hours as they were designed to operate at maximum power, and heating up steam generators to the desired temperature took time.[2]
> Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope. Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode and so participate in the primary and secondary frequency control.
Also this is what we are capable of now. Imagine what we could do with advances in thermal storage. Nuclear has one huge advantage over other power sources: you can simply throw more power at the problem. E2E efficiency is less of a factor when you have excess capacity you can't otherwise do anything with.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant#N...
On the other hand, your comment presumes that there is such a thing as too much power. Once hydrolyzers mature, we could use all of the current renewable power in Europe just for producing hydrogen for steel production to replace coal there.
But, very broadly and simplistically speaking.
We are not even remotely close to living in a "We have too much power" world. ( Markets will change drastically then.)
All the nuclear supply has already been sold and is being constantly used 100% of the time. It never makes sense to turn off the nuclear power plant.
There is more demand then that, not meeting the demand is catastrophic.
If a popular sports is on TV and halftime everybody boils water, or the wind is unexpectedly low, or some part of the grid is having trouble.
We must still meet the demand.
Turning on a gas plant is the cheapest solution we have at the moment.
This couldn't be further from the truth, at least for France: hover over the lower graphs to animate the source upper graph here: https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/FR
Every single day nuclear oscillates between 60% and 80%, in strong anti-correlation with wind, solar and border exchanges.
With hydro and pumped storage, this margin is well enough for attending to peak demand. And it is economically viable; This is the thing about nuclear: it costs practically the same wether you're at 20% or 95% of the plant's capacity. You consume your fuel faster, but it is only a small fraction of the cost (15% IIRC). And you still get 0 CO2 emission.
And with current gas prices this is the cheapest solution we have at the moment. (not the cheapest in terms of political will, but educating masses can solve that)
The point I was trying to make in my second paragraph is that when hydrolyzers get sufficiently cheap that you can buy enough to cover your peak over-production and let them idle when you are missing power, then you have effectively moved the elasticity from the production side to the demand side -- and then slow baseload does not require you to derate down your renewables.
This is far from the situation today where hydrolyzers are so expensive that you need to run them at pretty high utilization to make the economics work out.
BTW there is a very efficient way to run hydrolyzers at 95%: run them on nuclear power. Problem solved?
Assuming the plant operations are running smoothly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Belgium#Hydro...
Which will be less and less the case for the European nuclear champions whose plants are approaching their 40-50 years lifespan of commercial support and safe operations (or so I am told) and it's going to cost a lot to replace them, more than going full renewables apparently.
In Belgium, at some points we had to shut down offshore wind turbines because there was not enough demand on the grid and turning off and on our nuclear plants would take too much time.
Gas plants don't have that problem (or so they say). So we are building some to compensate until we have enough renewables to shut them off for good.
Also, SMR are gaining tractions so who knows.
Disclaimer: I hear both sides, one claiming we don't need nuclear to reach our emissions carbon target and the other claiming we need classic nuclear plants to manage climate change and I don't know who's right.
Not a "world", but this happens locally in Europe due to wind/solar momentarily producing more than demand. There have been instances with negative prices.
Anecdotally, one mitigation seems to be adjusting the local base voltage to 220V so that peaks due to solar stay below 240V (or something like that).
Nuclear can, at least theoretically, be throttled hour-by-hour over the day to compensate wind, although hydro is probably more cost-effective if available.
I don’t think the question is “is natural gas better than nuclear?”. It’s more “nuclear isn’t quickly dispatchable, which is what we need”. It’s not that gas is better than nuclear, it’s that they solve two different problems. Solar and wind need something to fill gaps when production fluctuates. Today that can be hydro or fossil fuels. In the near future, that will also be storage. For the foreseeable future, nuclear can’t fill that role.
Demand response is an interesting concept, and a subset of researchers have been pushing it for years. I’m skeptical that the economics would work out (large fixed costs mean that there’s pressure to run 24/7 and eat the high electricity prices), but I’d be happy to be proven wrong. That said, it doesn’t fix the fundamental problem that sometimes the wind dies at night, and something needs to turn on in the next 5 minutes or streetlights start going out. Right now, nuclear isn’t capable of filling that niche.
> something needs to turn on in the next 5 minutes or streetlights start going out. Right now, nuclear isn’t capable of filling that niche.
Depends on the reactor. A single ~1GW reactor should be able to adjust its output up by 150MW or so in 5 minutes. If you have multiple that number multiplies obviously.
For example a typical reactor in France with a max output of 1300MW can be adjusted all the way down to 400MW within 30 minutes (and up to max 1300MW output from minimumn 400MW in the same time). If they could not do that there is no way France could generate 70%+ of their electricity with nuclear.
(obviously the reactor has to be designed with the goal of being adjustable for it to be able to do this. France started to do this in the 80s)
edit: Though because the vast majority of the costs of running a nuclear power plant is in building/maintaining it and running it at max vs min output costs the same amount of money most owners want to run their reactor at max output always.
Ah yes. We already have enough storage capacity to provide for hundreds of megawatts of daily power fluctuation. See Figure E.2 https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/2011/load-following-npp...
We certainly need gas in the short term. Sure. But you can’t let nuclear take over the role of gas (and other potential on demand power sources, pumped hydro and maybe batteries in the future). That just doesn’t work.
Also, I‘m all for producing an overabundance of power and using that in a meaningful way. But that’s not the issue we are talking about here. Baseline framing of the current problem we are facing makes no sense and that is my point.
Nuclear and renewables don’t work well together.
If so, you've failed to convincingly articulate how. It's a meaningless assertion to me.
The power available from nuclear is useful full stop.
There are multiple utility scale competing battery technologies becoming quite mature and Thats a good thing. Especially if one or more of them are viable.
It’s almost certainly easier and faster to scale battery tech than it has been nuclear.
No we can't. Not in the amounts required. We're not talking about 100kW Tesla batteries.
> There are multiple utility scale competing battery technologies becoming quite mature
You mean, there are multiple competing battery technologies that are barely at the theoretical level with multiple significant challenges and no implementations beyond theoretical or impractical for the use case in question.
Flow batteries: low energy density, requires large tanks to be anywhere useful. Low charge and discharge rates, so are not practical for load following applications
Iron-air: only theoretical so far with first small plant potentially in operation by 2023, and its efficiency is yet to be seen (so far it's mostly marketing materials and hype).
> t’s almost certainly easier and faster to scale battery tech than it has been nuclear.
Ah yes, it's certainly easier to scale non-existent and non-scalable tech.
This assumes your goal is to meet energy demands reliably with clean power at the lowest possible overall system cost. If instead your goal is to maximize wind/solar no matter what, then of course nuclear doesn't fit in.
It seems obvious that it's extremely useful to be able to produce so much electricity and reduce the need for fast switching power by 2/3. Surely 100MW/min of fast switching energy storage is not without its own massive environmental footprint, something that significantly reduces the calculated impact of nuclear.
If we could ramp up construction of solar, wind, and long range transmission capabilities to the point where they could effectively respond to all demand, we would not need to have a conversation. But in the midst of worldwide supply chain disruptions that will likely last for years, it seems irresponsible, even extremely irresponsible, to push aside the parallelization of additional low emission energy production capabilities. Seeing as this is all very time sensitive at this point, and the consequences of failure are likely a widespread collapse of society and suffering for generations.
There is a lot of things you need to do if you take a plant out of operation, and there is a significant amount of decay heat from fission products that does require external power (basically what caused fukashima's fires) to cool over days if you turn a plant off, but you are oversimplifying solved engineering challenges to present them as intractable challenges.
The operating cost is essentially independent of power output.
They typically are run as close to 100% as possible because so much of the cost of the plant is divorced from the power output at any one time. Framed a different way, they are somewhat more expensive to idle or run at lower utilization fractions than other sources of electricity. But they certainly can (and do) operate this way when needed.
The arguments against nuclear are not really technical, and are overall incompatible with our energy supply getting rid of fossil fuel in the near term.
That's true of current nuclear, but it's not an intrinsic property of nuclear power. Proposed plants that use molten salt as a working fluid, for example, give you the option to run the plant all the time, but at any given time either use the heat in the molten salt for power generation immediately, or move the molten salt into a storage tank for later use. Molten salt is already used this way in concentrated solar plants, and works fine for that purpose.
As a side note, every time someone points out the shortcomings of nuclear power plants (not easily adjustable, huge investment costs/expensive, storage ...) there's the replies about, "but those new future plants that we are researching will solve all this". We don't know if reality will actually deliver on those promises (nuclear has quite a history of broken promises), especially if we are talking about acting fast.
To your second point: all technologies have the property that we can't know for sure if they'll deliver on their promises without trying them, and the very reason we don't know in the case of nuclear is because opponents of nuclear power undermine attempts to try out novel architectures, pointing to limitations in current technologies as justification.
Let’s consider something like desalinating water from the pacific and continuously pumping it inland to the Australian Outback or the middle of the Sahara.
With an investment in Nuclear, hypothetically, it’s cheaper. Present nuclear reactors have a high cost of operation simply because they’re aligned to energy consumption and regulatory patterns not suited to them.
Also, Small Modular Reactors are a thing. They’re available today for use and that’s what France is going all in on, but in the US, the first entity to try will be sued to the ground.
Saying that fossil fuels + renewables works well doesn't really have a place in a dialog about the best way to eliminate fossil fuels.
What?
> Renewables need to be combined with power sources that can be turned on and off quickly and on demand. Nuclear emphatically cannot provide that.
--- start quote ---
Modern nuclear plans with light water reactors are designed to have strong manoeuvring capabilities. Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode, i.e. they participate in the primary and secondary frequency control, and some units follow a variable load programme with one or two large power changes per day
The minimum requirements for the manoeuvrability capabilities of modern reactors are defined by the utilities requirements that are based on the requirements of the grid operators. For example, according to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100 % of its rated power Pr, with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% of Pr per minute
Most of the modern designs implement even higher manoeuvrability capabilities, with the possibility of planned and unplanned load-following in a wide power range and with ramps of 5% Pr per minute
--- end quote ---
https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/2011/load-following-npp...
The basic nuclear value proposition is [negligible fuel -> enough energy to power a country]. We should be exploring the options, vigorously. There will be less pollution than the alternatives where [large amounts of stuff -> enough energy to power part of a country].
This idea that they can't is a weird meme in internet forums. The reason they don't is primarily economic, not technical.
Other countries can do the same if they build the option into their plant control (many do):
https://www.powermag.com/flexible-operation-of-nuclear-power...
Charging the electric car during the night sounds like a no brainer for me. Same goes for the water heaters.
The only heavy argument agaisnt nuclear is NIMBY.
Each power source has disadvantages, and this bickering isn't helping.
Nuclear doesn’t produce radioactive materials it reduces radioactivity. If you mix the spent fuel from a heavy water reactor back into the ore, it’s radioactivity will have been reduced.
If there wasn't a huge stigma against nuclear energy they would be making advancements, but nobody is going to fund advancements while there is no guarantee they will be allowed to apply them.
What would happen to the JavaScript language if every year half of congress gave speeches condemning JavaScript and calling for a prohibition against any new JavaScript code? How many new people would bother learning JavaScript.
Tell me about the storage and disposal costs of all the solar cells and wind turbines.
The fundamental problem is nuclear physics itself. Running a nuclear reactor produces Xenon-135, which has a huge potential to soak up neutrons, and therefore given half a chance will try to shut down the nuclear reaction. When the reactor is going full pelt, then there are enough neutrons flying around to burn up the Xenon, and all is good. When you reduce power output, then there is still a large amount of Xenon in the reactor, and it will soak up lots of the neutrons and reactivity of the reactor, shutting the reaction down. The Xenon takes about a day to decay by itself down to a level where it is safe to restart the reactor again. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon-135 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_poison
One of the contributing factors towards the Chernobyl accident was the reactor controllers trying to overcome the effects of Xenon by pulling the control rods of the reactor out. This made the reactor highly unstable, because as the reaction rate increases the Xenon will be burned off increasing the reactivity, which can lead to the reaction ramping up very quickly.
The high cost in the west is lawsuits and storage facility closures, and outdated regulations.
Do most fossil fuel power plants currently serve that purpose? Only running when there is excess demand, instead of continuously?
As long as the answer is 'no', there is no reason to prefer them over nuclear (even ignoring the ways nuclear could be made to load-follow).
Why not? Unless you're ok with not having reliable baseline power at all.
However, the new reality is that wind/solar are cheaper than the old baseline plants. Now wind/solar do not supply us a with a constant power like those old baseline plants, but instead with variable supply as well. So we still need fast adjustable sources (or storage), which now even out both variable supply and demand. By over provisioning (and net interconnectivity) we can reduce the need for adjustable sources. Essentially if you have enough renewable sources to cover the high demands at low wind/sun you can always turn off the sources when you overshoot and because they are cheap it is economical unfeasible.
Overprovisioning by how much? Currently ( at least since a month or so) across Europe there's a meteorological phenomenon that makes for cold temperatures, lower than usual wind speeds, and clouds. 2 out of the 3 main renewable power sources ( solar, wind, tidal) are heavily impacted ( wind most of all iirc) and producing less electricity than usual, while people need to warm themselves. And this is expected to continue into the winter.
To combat such a scenario if everyone was on renewables+storage+interconnects, you'd have to built massive storage ( which we don't have the tech/space for) or massive interconnects from really far away places like Africa.
Not if you take into account land use. A single nuclear plant can supply about a GW of electrical power. The equivalent capacity in wind and solar--even without taking into account the overprovisioning that, as you note, is required because of the lack of reliability of those sources--takes up far more land than that nuclear plant. That has a huge environmental impact that nobody takes into account when figuring the actual cost of wind and solar--though of course the same people are quite happy to hunt down every last little environmental impact of nuclear and point out how it increases the actual cost.
(The requirement for massive amounts of storage, which others have pointed out, is another environmental impact of wind and solar that nobody takes into account when figuring the actual cost.)
There is an illogical assumption underlying this claim - if both power sources are zero-carbon, why does it matter which one we turn off? Why do have to turn off nuclear instead of disconnecting a wind turbine? What difference does it make?
But of course this makes it even more expensive per MWh as the utilization drops but the mostly fixed costs don't.
No they don’t. Wind and solar energy output can be very well predicted for hours and days ahead.
Second. Even if you knew two days ahead about wind speed fluctuations that lasted for 10 to 20 minutes. What, then? You can't inform the population there will be 10 minute outages, in advance, or ask them to turn off appliances for exactly 10 minutes, in advance.
Solar and wind aren't reliable. The plan is to turn on thermal plants when the wind stops blowing. In my very humble opinion, solar and wind aren't THE long term future of energy production. They have their uses, but the way it is being marketed obeys to political discourse, not reality.
You can. And there is companies specialized in that for the Wind and solar industry. [1]
The reason is pretty simple: Weather variability tend to be high at the local level but pretty predictable at the national level (the energy grid level).
And to answer to the original post, yes Nuclear energy can also be fine grained controlled to compensate the renewable energy intermittency. It is done every day in France. It can be done yes, Is it efficient ? Not really.
But somehow the idea took hold that nuclear would be built instead of solar, and not instead of coal.