We need to compare the cost to what other countries are doing to achieve similar goals. Countries like Germany is planning to create green hydrogen in order to replace the current natural gas plants, and we don't know the price tag for that. Europe is currently also seeing the consequences of relying on natural gas and energy trading, with record high energy costs for the end consumer, despite building a lot of solar and wind farms. The high demand for natural gas is also creating additional problems for industries that depend on that limited resource, like agriculture. With uranium there isn't many other industries that compete for that resource.
High cost would actually still be manageable if it was predictable. However, that is becoming exactly the issue. It swings between too low for exploitation to be even profitable due to over supply and then too high because of Russian and OPEC policy resulting in supply disruption. Kind of a bad situation to be in if you are dependent on that. The smart move would be to eliminate such dependencies as soon as possible. Energy companies are going bankrupt right now because they are locked into contracts with consumers they no longer can afford.
The reason why it got so expensive is because we fell down the curve. Intentionally. So that we could fill our atmosphere with CO2 while we waited 40 years for wind and solar to become viable. The mind boggles.
The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
When you are building one offs, and something goes wrong and you redo it, you don't gain benefit from knowledge of not making same mistake again. As there isn't next time. Now when you have done same mistake before you won't repeat it. And these mistakes are the reason behind delays and part of cost over runs.
Does Helion have a demonstrator plant or a pilot? Or even a prototype? All I see is ... nothing.
It is impossible for them to be in commercial operation in nine years even if they did have a working demonstrator. NIMBYism, fear of H-bombs, and the slow speed of regulation guarantee it.
Helion's only got about 80M of venture investments, which in the field of energy innovation is basically chump change.
I mean call me a sceptic, but I have a feeling they may not be able to completely deliver on their promise hah.
Helion is trying to do something very different and much smaller.
That doesn’t mean investors haven’t seen prototypes.
Elon is quoted in HBR, “We have essentially no patents. Our primary long-term competition is China. If we published patents, it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book."
You see nothing, they see opportunity. You can't both be right.
They also have the local mayor and governor saying good things about them, and given that they're aiming for aneutronic fusion I wouldn't expect regulation to be a huge hurtle, it's a very safe scheme with very minimal waste.
(Just based on googling them a lot yesterday, and mostly from comments on /r/fusion)
The design is quite interesting - twin electromagnets shove plasma at a million miles an hour into the middle chamber and then hopefully fusion flings it out again pushing back on the currents in the electromagnets and producing electrical output directly. Bit like a petrol engine where the piston / crank compress the mix and then after ignition it shoves back harder adding energy to the crankshaft.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210622005366/en/Hel...
But it also needs a great deal more electricity, for a few reasons.
Away from the coast and the mega cities, there is still a lot of energy poverty.
If China is going to replace coal in iron smelting and steelmaking, it needs to electrolyze a lot of hydrogen.
It also needs electrolyzed hydrogen to replace fossil methane for making ammonia for fertilizer, and for wintertime peak electricity plants (and possibly for engines for ocean-going ships, if it can't use nuclear for them).
If it's going to capture the carbon from its cement plants, it needs power to do that.
Electrolyzed hydrogen and captured CO2 will have to be the new feedstocks for many industrial chemicals and plastics.
I don't think it's either-or with nuclear and wind/PV, it's not hedging bets, it's whatever works locally, ASAP and AMAP.
This assumes massive advances in battery tech to support seasonal and week-to-week weather changes. Even the new iron-air tech is still very expensive - $300 million for enough capacity to power 50,000 homes for just one day.[0] By my rough calculations that's 28 trillion dollars to buy enough batteries for all homes in China, assuming 600 million homes, and 7 days of capacity.
But that's quite optimistic, because it's not that hard to get more than a week of unfavourable weather, and you don't want your country to shut down every time that happens.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-30/iron-batt...
Probably no damage was done by lead electrodes in Fukushima. Lots was probably done by dry-cleaning establishments, hardware stores, machine shops, pesticide inventories (in factories, stores, and farms), paint factories and stores, etc., but metallic lead? Lead is so stable that even bullets inside people's bodies, where they're constantly exposed to hot, salty, corrosive bodily fluids, usually don't cause any toxicity. Even lead sulfate (the mineral anglesite) is somewhat challenging to get a toxic dose of.
Lithium is a relatively abundant element in Earth's crust, about the same abundance as nitrogen, and more abundant than boron, tin, tungsten, or iodine. It's fairly nontoxic: the lethal dose of lithium salts for a person is measured in tens of grams, and it doesn't bioaccumulate. There are a few lithium minerals that can form (lepidolite is a lithium phyllosilicate, spodumene is a lithium aluminum silicate) but probably most lithium ions released would remain soluble, spreading into the environment. But it would take an enormous lithium release to cause problems: there's 230 billion tonnes of it in the sea without causing any toxicity. In the USA, the EPA hasn't established any limit on lithium in drinking water. The usual therapeutic dose of lithium is about a gram a day, a few times lower than the usual intake of sodium or potassium. 7-Up used to be full of lithium.
I don't think you need to worry about arson in China.
Scale matters, and while I’m optimistic about batteries etc., I want us to solve problems rather than ignore them — we can only do that by being open about them, and I’ve seen enough occasions where others have claimed risks “don’t exist at all” to be more comfortable with a claim of “1% risk” than of “0% risk”.
> I don't think you need to worry about arson in China.
I’m more concerned with the effect than the cause, the cause was a mere suggestion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7FXeaahRsg
This is bad engineering. One would not use batteries for that sort of long timescale storage, one would use something like hydrogen. The round trip efficiency is much lower, but with the much smaller number of charge/discharge cycles that doesn't matter. The effect of efficiency on the cost of storage scales inversely with the average storage time; it's important for diurnal storage, not important for seasonal storage. The energy capacity cost of hydrogen storage could be maybe $1/kWh of capacity.
For a timescale of a week, thermal storage is an option, with sand heated to 1200 C. Round trip efficiency would be 53%.
But overproduction and diversity of the type of renewable is probably even cheaper.
If you have to rebuild your entire supply chain to handle that kind of demand you're prices will start to go back up again.
(That “something else” can be nuclear).
Shame we'll never find out.
People keep saying how solar is the cheapest capacity to install, at 1 dollar per Watt. 1200 GW would be 1.2 trillions, and only offering around 240GW "constant" production, whereas nuclear is half the price to build but more like 1000 GW constant production
the half trillion comment came from the original article, that stated an estimated cost of 440 billion.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
Without battery or natural gas, solar and wind are not useful. You have to have some sort of backup, sufficient to avoid brownouts or blackouts, and so you end up with the full capitalization and maintenance cost of not-solar anyway.
To properly compare solar with nuclear, you must add on the cost of battery and / or natural gas (or equivalent fast backup), at which point nuclear is cheaper.
That's at least half the cost of nuclear, maybe as much as a fifth.
PV capacity costs about 1 dollars per Watt and achieves a 20-25% capacity factor. In the article they say less than 0.5 dollars per watt of nuclear. If they can achieve that, it's obviously cheaper to go nuclear than PV. Nuclear has higher operating costs, true, but also a 90% capacity factor, meaning you need 5 times less capacity installed than PV. 1200 GW of nuclear for 440 billions is the equivalent of 5000GW of PV for 5000 billions. This is just to produce the same amount of energy, at any time during the day/year, before considering the cost of storage or intermittent power on the grid.
I truly hope China can pull this off at the advertised price. Because of the sheer size of the initiative they might be able to just do it using the economy of scale. France did it in 10 years in the 70s-80s, no reason China can't do it today.
We need all the energy sources, being PV+wind+battery purists won't be enough.
I found this article with a more global take https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
Apparently France managed to build it's nuclear plants at a cost of 1 dollar per Watt. Going to 0.5 dollars today might be a challenge for China, even with economies of scale. The article estimated 2.5 per Watt.
Even at 2.5 USD per Watt installed, that would still be about the same price as PV installed. But you gain stability in the grid for a slighter higher operating cost.
It costs 1 dollar to install 1 W of solar PV with no batteries. To include a 2-4 hour battery it's double that. Long term storage for day to day or seasonal is much much more, and likely impossible to do with the current tech.
And in regards to France, compare France's electricity cost with Germany's, Nuclear clearly beats PV and wind on cost. People will say that wholesale prices are the same, and Germany pays such a huge price solely because of taxes. But the point is...those taxes are so high in order to support renewables subsidies.
This being China, all comparisons are moot. They can reduce costs significantly, like they showed with the PV modules. They are the ones that truly commoditized the modules.
It costs $40/MWh to install solar with batteries[2]. That's 35 cents per watt.
1: https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/888004cf-1a38-4716-... 2: https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-...
I think you should understand first what MW and MWh mean. One costs 1 million dollars to install, and then will proceed to produce 8000 hours per year divided by the capacity factor. So about 2000 hours * 1 MW = 2000 MWh per year. At a price of 5 cents per KWh, you can sell that for 100k dollars.
MWh is a much better figure than W when comparing disparate technologies because it takes into account capacity factor, operating costs and disposal costs as well as installation costs. It also relates directly to the price consumer pays. It's also why all the links are pricing in MWh.
So 1 watt of PV with a capacity factor of 33% and 30 years of lifetime would generate 86.7KWh. $20/MWh is thus $1.80/W total for installation, operating and decomissioning costs.
If China can build 150 reactors for $500 billion when it costs the west over $20B to build a single one, then yes nuclear is cheaper than solar.
33% capacity factor is unheard of, US is around 25%, and even that is higher than most of the world. Not even excellent desert states in the US don't break 30% https://www.statista.com/statistics/1019796/solar-pv-capacit...
Currently the West has massively inflated prices because there is no economy of scale. A planned economy + economies of scale might just pull it off. Especially if they're going to build the nuclear plants in factories, like the west is trying to do now. We'll see.
I'm personally rooting for all the technologies, except coal. Even gas is good as a temporary measure - it allows us to get off coal faster.
People significantly overestimate the amount of batteries that a solar+battery project requires. All you need is enough batteries to handle a single night (and demand is low at night), and enough overcapacity to handle a moderately cloudy day. That'll get you above nuclear's 90% capacity factor.
Those batteries only add $20/MWh to the project. https://www.energy-storage.news/battery-storage-at-us20-mwh-...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343184782_Capacity_...
Btw, ask France about cost of nuclear, I've heard their new reactors are absolutely in time and budget ;)
Of course China might have the same motivations of many nuclear powers have - which is a desire to also maintain a baseline manufacturing capacity for nuclear technologies in general.
China is set to build 43 new coal plants in 2021, and they have a big power supply problem. So shutting any plants down is not happening anytime soon.
Supposedly this is all about climate change and limiting or even stopping emissions, to counter climate change, yes?
While these emissions can be especially annoying when they are near you, they work globally because they give a shit about borders. Supposedly, Yes?
So, from a global ecosystem point of view, considering 'cradle to cradle' without any externalizations, what exactly is won by that, considering the emissions from producing and transporting all that stuff?
Wind turbines require large concrete foundations, you can't put them into the ground like a toothpick into a piece of cheese.
If not in some flat desert, stable roads for the construction and transport, requiring cutting down parts of the forest.
Same for the cables, no matter if over land, or underground transmission.
At Sea it's even more complicated and material intensive.
Solar is requiring large areas to be effective, similar considerations apply.
The production and transport of all that stuff, and the mining and refining of the necessary raw materials is causing emissions.
While of intermittent use, without storage, which again requires mining, refining, transport, production, transport, construction, maintenance, causing more emissions again.
Whose intermittency could be lessened by large HVDC super smart grid, but again, 'this doesn't grow on trees'!
One order of magnitude increase in production capacity would do the trick. At which magnitude of more emissions, counted over the whole lifecycle from mining raw materials, refining, producing, transporting, constructing, decommissioning?
Compared to a few 100(0) reactors, be they modular/small/gen-whatever/fast breeder/liquid salt/traveling wave/fusion/I don't care.
If the goal is to reduce emissions globally, nuclear it is!
If need be maybe implemented in a Hyman Rickover way, not some crazy lowest bidder contractors. That worked for the US-Navy, so far. Why shouldn't it for the world?
If this is The Emergency as it's supposed to be, it needs an emergency answer.
Solar/Wind it isn't.
If we throw a big pile of money at the problem, we get more bang for our buck from renewables. And, since wind and solar are on cost learning curves such that the more we build the cheaper it gets, the money we throw at wine and solar gets multiplied in the future by private industry.
Wind construction is fast. Solar construction is incredibly fast. Nuclear construction takes 8-15 years.
Renewables also require batteries and transmission. Batteries are getting cheap too, having dropped 89% in price since 2010. Transmission is a bit more politically tricky, but I think it's doable.
We might be able to get the US grid to 40% renewables by 2030. I doubt we'll have more than 5 GW of additional nuclear capacity in the US by 2030. The revolution will be well underway before nuclear can get its boots on.
Make work! Make more work! Make more workers make more work, so that even more workers can make even more work!
And money, of course.
For that matter, even if they're on great terms with all their trading partners, those trading partners might ask themselves "why are we selling coal to some other country so they can get the benefit when we have to live with the CO2 emissions as if we had burned it ourselves?" To be honest, I don't understand why the U.S. exports coal at all; it just doesn't seem worth it. (Though I can see where the coal lobby might have something to say about it if such legislation was proposed.)
Am I reading that right that the US has less then 4 years of coal output ?
Although that is a LOT of nuclear waste they will be creating. Hopefully the also advance waste storage technology in parallel.
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
"In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards."
OTOH, It would be nice if the nuclear waste could be stored that way. But that concentrated football field can be used for all sorts of nefarious purposes. Ultimately it requires a large amount of infrastructure to prevent leakage, exposure, theft, explosion, degradation of infrastructure, terrorism, etc. So maybe the football field turns into a billion-dollar-a-year "small-town-sized" facility that has to be maintained for as long as humanity exists (10,000 years?). Now it seems much bigger.
Fly ash produced by coal just in the US dwarfs it in both volume, total toxicity AND total radioactivity, and is in the 30+ millions of tons a YEAR. And that is only the tip of the iceberg. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_ash#Disposal_and_market_...]
Thankfully a lot of it is used in cement and similar that entrains it decently safely (dilution is the solution), but just the portion that doesn’t on any given year outweighs all nuclear waste ever produced
Thus if you have 3 countries, it may be worse for just one of the countries to pass environmental constraints on the production of tradeables. Either all three countries do it, or none do it, or you don't trade at all with those that don't do it.
Why people don't take these arguments to their logical conclusion is beyond me.
If you have a dozen of regular eggs, a dozen of cage-free eggs, and a dozen of pasture-raised eggs... If you pick the regular choice you know you are contributing to less humane conditions for chickens. Now it is your choice.
1. very easy to cheat. E.g. during Trump's tariffs on China, there was mass cheating as goods were imported into Vietnam, relabelled as made in Vietnam, and exported to the U.S. When there is big money at stake, the incentive to cheat goes way up. Trying to audit every exporter's Asian supply chain in search of Chinese inputs is tough.
2. Imposing a country-wide tariff does not incentivize any producer to adopt more efficient processes. Imagine if the EU decided the US gas taxes were too low, and so they slapped a tariff on American cars. Would that incentivize Americans to use less gas? Would it make Americans favor an increase in gas taxes?
3. They lead to retaliatory tariffs by the other side. There's no such thing as pure one way punishment, no matter how justified you think you are. The other side will punish you by the same amount, if they can, in order to punish what they view as your bad behavior in trying to punish them.
Now I'm a big fan of trade reductions, but that's because it's part of my personal war on globalism. But make sure you are signing up for the same mass trade restrictions - e.g. blanket bans on certain products coming from all of East Asia - because that's what this is. Don't think you can wage a war against CO2 without also waging a war against globalism. International conferences are fun, but they have no teeth and don't get the job done.
Since 1GWa* ≈ 8 million tonnes of CO₂ †, this is about a billion tonnes saved every year.
Sadly, we're about 3,000 Gt of CO₂ in excess in the atmosphere.
*: GWa: 1 GW 24h/d, every day, for a year
†: or about 1 Giza pyramid
I think it will cost them financially though. This won't come cheap. Half a trillion for about 1200 GW of capacity is a lot and not necessarily the best value for money. However, they have about that amount of coal to replace as well. The issue with wind and solar is that we're only adding in the order of a few hundred GW per year. China needs an order of magnitude more just to get rid of coal.
The interesting thing will be if production capacity for wind turbines and solar panels will grow quickly enough to make this investment unnecessary. One order of magnitude increase in production capacity would do the trick. Not trivial; and China is already going as fast as it can with this. But also not impossible. It's going to be a close race.
China might simply be betting on multiple horses here; which is the smart thing to do. I don't think they are picking winners here; just losers. Which would be coal. It needs to go, hence the need to fix 1000+ GW of power demand while also accounting for continued economic growth. They aren't ready to commit to that at COP 26 just yet. But the timing of this announcement is no coincidence either.
Another horse in the race would be fusion. Apparently there is some serious money flowing into some companies now. Helion just did a 500M series E: https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/05/helion-energy-will-use-500.... That may or may not work but it's kind of a really big deal if that hits commercial viability this decade rather than in 2050. And as the US has less of a coal problem at this point (most of it will be gone by the middle of this decade), nuclear is less urgent as a solution. And unlike nuclear, fusion actually might have a shot at being cost competitive with other renewables. Helion is pitching 0.01$/kwh. That's the right level of ambition here.