This year we saw weaker summer winds in Europe which is part of what has caused the current energy crisis. These weaker winds are expected to become more common as climate change continues.[1]
Nuclear has the benefit that it's reliable. If you design a plant to output X gigawatts - it'll still be able to do so regardless of the weather.
[1] https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-w...
The main problem seems to be that people have invented an entirely ficticious nuclear power that does not and has never existed, just so they can slag off renewables and "elite culture" whatever the heck that is.
The real actual nuclear power, which is better than coal, but not particularly competitive with modern renewables is apparently irrelevant to people who have bizarrely joined a one sided culture war on the side of fossil fuel companies and think this makes them cool, well informed and counter-cultural despite reality leaning the other way.
As someone who lives in Ontario, Canada, where we have 10,000 MW of nuclear (click "Supply"):
This does not happen here.
Plenty of EU countries have coast lines too.
Base power is only a useful term if it's cheaper than peak power, since you can fill 100% of your power needs solely with peak power.
Baseline power can be unreliable because peak power will cover the unreliability.
Clearly, placing any country's energy security in the hands of ever changing climate (less winds and high cloud cover) or at the feet of dictators has to factor in some where.
2) Europe has mostly privatized energy. Who is suppose to set the SLA?
3) Nuclear plants need to be refueled. Does the SLA include a couple of months downtime every few years? That would suggest that the SLA is uniquely tailored to nuclear. 100% uptime? How is nuclear going to deal with that?
4) Power consumption varies over the day. A constant load again favors nuclear. A load that can handle daily and seasonal variation would be quite bad for nuclear.
Basically what we need is flexible electricity production. On their own, nuclear, solar and wind are all equally bad at flexible electricity production. So the questions are: - how do we get cheap storage - how do we minimize the amount of storage we need
Load following nuclear power stations are a thing.
--- start quote ---
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...
Do you have a source for this?
If weather gets hot, the temperature of the incoming cooling water gets warmer, too. And having to operate within the limits of the maximum allowed temperature for the outgoing cooling water, the plant may have to regulate its power output, or maybe entirely pause operation.
The temperature limit is mostly a legal one: There is concern about the environmental effects of releasing warmer water to the water bodies. From an engineering point of view, the plant would probably be able to operate, and just release warmer water.
This isn't a game of Top Trumps where you need to find any one stat that's higher than your opponents to declare victory.
Nuclear has to be better than wind and solar and hydro and batteries and everything else (demand response, better insulation, undersea grid connectors etc.) all working together across a wide range of metrics to find a place in a modern grid.
It is failing at this. The alternatives are cheaper, better, greener, safer, quicker to build.
Narrowly focusing on one tiny aspect does not change this big picture reality.
The problem with what you're saying is that to supply peak power at all times could require building capacity in each method to supply full power, in case the others all fall to zero power. And even then, you hope that they don't all fall to zero, I guess.
Curtailment of nuclear power due to periods of extreme heat has had the effect of reducing European nuclear power output by approx. 0.1% since the year 2000. For France specifically, which with its many inland river-sited plants has been the worst hit country, the corresponding figure is approximately 0.15%
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2019-07-0....
> Now, increasingly, more frequent heat waves and hotter average temperatures are making those waters so warm that engineers are concerned that it can't do the job. Analysts say climate change is to blame.
> In little-noticed but publicly available reports to regulators, nuclear plant owners revealed that unusually hot temperatures last year forced them to reduce the plants' electricity output more than 30 times – most often in the summer, when demand from nuclear plants is at its highest. In 2012, such incidents occurred at least 60 times. At one plant in Connecticut a reactor was taken offline for nearly two weeks when temperatures in the Long Island Sound surged past 75 degrees.
It's not like you can just change the legislation to say "allow hotter discharge water" though -- the plants' very engineering criteria is being impacted. Warmer water has lower absorptive capacity to cool the primary loop so things get dicey when temps increase outside the design specification.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/12/france.nuclear
But we need to greatly improve energy storage if renewables are going to work.
Places like Scotland have generated equivalent to around 97% of their entire electricity consumption from renewables - yet still consume around 13% of their energy from fossil fuels as they export the renewable energy at peak production.[1]
I also just really don't like the misinformation that surrounds nuclear energy. I majored in Physics and it's just irritating to see people so confident in their ignorance. I recommend the book "Atomic Accidents"[2] as an excellent book on the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear power plant engineering in general.
[1] https://fullfact.org/environment/scotland-renewable-energy/
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Accidents-Meltdowns-Disasters-...
You'd be foolish to believe those projections from salesmen. NuScale's attempt at new reactors has already doubled in cost.
> I am asking you how one determines which regulations are actually necessary.
This is something that experts need to work out.
> Those of you making this "too much regulation" argument never seem to go into detail on that.
Our arguments don't require us to specify specific regulation to eliminate, it suffices to note that we tolerate tens of thousands of annual deaths due to fossil fuels and we tolerate virtually zero deaths due to nuclear. We can be sure that there are regulations which are onerous for relatively little safety gains, but to your point most of us aren't experts here and can't speak to specific regulations or how they work.
> Judging by every other industry that has ever existed, this is not a tractable problem -- one determines what regulations are necessary by failing and learning from the experience.
Not at all. The number of deaths we're willing to tolerate is a choice, largely one driven by lobbyists. For example, we tolerate tens of thousands of annual fossil fuel deaths, transportation deaths, etc. The only reason we tolerate so few nuclear deaths is because of FUD campaigns.
> With nuclear, how many meltdowns are you willing to tolerate to get this experience?
Well, we could look to our own past experience or the experience of other countries which had extensive nuclear experience and virtually zero meltdowns despite far less regulation.
Experts put these regulations into place. To cancel regulations, we will need somebody who is opposite to experts.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/study-transmiss...
Also, this is with technology we have right now that we know works. The problem with SMRs is they have always been 5-10 years away from being ready. We have to plan based on what we know now, not make pipe dreams based on technology we would like to have and which may never pan out.
Yes there are differences, but the fact that the NRC can't certify a reactor class that the navy builds (without interference from the NRC) is itself a problem.
I have a hard time seeing nuclear weapons grade fissile materials spread around in every SMR in every town around the world as a feasible solution.
Same deal with solving for reliability with renewables. We should invest in solving both problems. Moreover, I suspect that "always 5-10 years away from being ready" has a lot more to do with regulators than feasibility.
Apparently, South Korea though has kept the costs down to 1980's levels.
A buddy of mine's joke is that the cheapest way to get new nuke plants in the US is to build a huge naval fleet and park them in ports.
[1]https://www.amazon.com/Power-Save-World-Nuclear-Energy/dp/03...
They invented a conspiracy theory that the entire planet's scientific community was trying to destroy the economy for secret marxism reasons for goodness sake.
You'd need to find someone who thinks Godzilla is a documentary to equal that level of nonsense.
Misinformation isn't suppressing nuclear investment, the all too real cost of nuclear is.
Would that have been politically realistic? I think clearly it wouldn't have been. So don't complain about a level of regulation that nuclear requires in order to exist at all.
Secondly, the whole point of anti-nuclear FUD is/was to make nuclear "politically unrealistic", so it doesn't make sense to argue that "political realism"--not FUD--is responsible for the high levels of regulation.
Thirdly, lots of countries (China, South Korea, etc) have had nuclear programs with much lower levels of regulation and far better economics, which goes to show that, absent FUD, nuclear power can be safe enough to be "politically realistic".
“Modern renewables” aren’t competitive at all, you can’t build a grid based on them. The ginormous amount of renewables in Germany compared to how much CO2 per kWh their grid produces (https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE ) is everything you need to know.
Even in places like California (where I live) where Solar is viable, renewables will require so many battery storage to remove gas plants that it’ll push their co2/kWh way higher that nuclear.
Could you please expand on this? What is the ideal uptime for a nuclear plant vs wind/solar?
There isn't a perfect scalable peaker / clean generation tech unfortunately but storage does the trick instead.
It seems very naive on the one hand to say that climate change is making climate more chaotic and and then turn around and say that we will put all our eggs in the baskets of tech that literally doesn’t work if there isn’t suitable climate (wind and solar).
Unless, of course, the weather is an earthquake followed by tsunami.
Or political weather.
If it takes a tsunami to turn off a nuclear plant, it's about as reliable as it can be.
Every dollar spend on nuclear would deliver more power sooner if spent on renewables.
It only requires over-provisioning of 20%. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify
Here's an anti-renewable paper that quite ironically makes the point quite well that battery storage is quite viable: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
Take a look at the graphs at the back. It shows a 99.99% reliable grid made up of an optimal mix of solar & wind, 3x over-provisioned along with 3 hours of storage and a continental grid.
We don't need 3x over-provisioning because the paper doesn't include hydro or existing nuclear. And 3 hours of storage is a lot of batteries, but it's a lot cheaper than building new nuclear.
Until renewables displace a lot more fossil fuel power, those costs are not a consideration. That might happen within a decade in places like New Zealand.
Still, capex on grid scale storage is up and costs are trending down: https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/storage/investment-tren...
Let’s say you can fit the waste from a certain amount of nuclear energy in a barrel. How much energy can you create with the other methods, given you can only fill up that same barrel?
With battery-supported renewables, my guess is: a hell of a lot less.
All energy storage solutions we have are low capacity, slow to charge, slow to bring online, and often are extremely harmful to the environment to produce.
Of course, you can close your eyes, and pretend this will be solved by magic in the nearest future. It won't. And we need solutions now.
The physical attributes of existing batteries (and related energy storage technologies, like hydrogen for long term storage) are perfectly compatible with a 100% renewable grid. We're just haggling over the cost at this point.
I was addressing the shallow objection that it's a "lot of batteries". That's fine; the budget is will allow purchase of a lot of batteries, and all sorts of other stuff too.
Pretending that I made this argument is an even more despicable lie.
> The physical attributes of existing batteries (and related energy storage technologies, like hydrogen for long term storage) are perfectly compatible with a 100% renewable grid.
It's also not what I argued against.
> I was addressing the shallow objection that it's a "lot of batteries". That's fine
No, it's not fine, and I listed the reasons why. However, you decided to invent an argument I never made and argue against that.
"All energy storage solutions we have are low capacity, slow to charge, slow to bring online, and often are extremely harmful to the environment to produce."
This is 100% bullshit. Energy storage solutions can be scaled as high as we want. They can charge as fast as is needed. By "slow to bring online" you might mean two things (cannot be switch on to deliver power to the grid from an off state quickly, or cannot be built quickly), both of which are false. As for "extremely harmful to the environment", I also see no reason to believe that is true, especially compared to either the harm of CO2 or the harm imposed by the existence of industrial civilzation at all.
So, you listed reasons, and they appear spurious. Care to defend your claims?
Current storage solutions: batteries, water in a dam, molten salt.
Energy density: low
Environmental impact: Dams: need to flood a massive area to make a dent. For example the utterly colossal Three Gorges supplies only 1% of China’s power.
Batteries: filled with extremely bad heavy metals. It’s barely OK right now; if we covered the planet in huge battery farms, it would be a catastrophe.
Molten salt/other temperature-based methods: works with turbine-based generators, not solar/wind.
Responsiveness: low, except for batteries.
Ultimately this whole thing needs less shouting and more spreadsheets.
Batteries are not necessarily filled with toxic heavy metals. Consider lithium-iron-phosphate batteries. Iron is not a toxic heavy metal, phosphate is neither toxic nor a metal, and lithium is anything but heavy. Saying batteries categorically have heavy metals is lying. And no, it would not be a catastrophe to build large quantities of batteries.
You don't even mention underground storage of hydrogen, which is by the lowest cost/kWh of storage capacity, much better than batteries for long term energy storage.
Sorry about the emotion, but I get annoyed at the cavalcade of nonsense you people spew on this issue.
The sibling comment has already showed all the ways in which you are wrong. So I'll address only this part. " I also see no reason to believe that is true". That's the problem with starry-eyed proponents of anything really: they chose belief over facts.
seems like that can minimize seasonal storage requirements once higher level of renewables are in the grid
Why wouldn't it be fatalaties per TWh? It's TWh by the way.
> Second, even with the correct metric, solar and wind are now beating nuclear and projected to continue to do so, widening the gap over time. Comparing the very start of the renewable rollout gives misleading stats as the total power generated is low, and many stats that get quoted on this are more than a decade out of date.
> You can build a wind turbine and ritually sacrifice someone on completion of the build and the fatalities per TwH is infinite as it's not generated any power yet, but with every year of operation it gets lower.
No, wind towers don't have infinite generation, require maintenance and decommissioning, and have been well around for long enough that statistics are quite well available throughout the lifecycle. People have been acting like we've been at the very start of the renewable rollout for the past 30 years, which is longer than the operating life of an average wind turbine.
> Basically the same applies to carbon output, nuclear does well, but wind/solar/nuclear have been basically tied on both metrics unless you're relying on some very, very old data.
Again I've been hearing that renewable energy will solve all this and nothing else can for the past 20 years if not more. Hundreds of nuclear plants could have been built and running in that time now.
Funny thing is it keeps getting repeated. Again, and again, and again, by people who don't understand the fundamentals. Coal was doomed, completely on the way out and destroyed by wind and even solar just a couple of years ago according to these very same anti nuclear people. Today, thermal coal prices have been at record highs for the past year. Coal production is ramping in many countries and global consumption is near record highs and will take many decades to drop. Coal plants are being built with 40 year lifespans.
Where's wind and solar? Still only make up little more than 10% of global electricity generation. Most of the stats for renewables quoted includes hydro which exceeds both of them combined.
Only? Not very long ago that stat was less than a percent, if it was mentioned at all.
About 2/3rds of new capacity being added in 2022 is renewable: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50818
And "capacity" of course means something very different when it comes to the wind and solar, which makes that 2/3 not as great as it sounds.
No, the anti-nuclear luddites and conspiracy theorists have no credibility. They are dangerous climate deniers who should not be listened to. The amount of damage they have already caused may well be incalculable.
And nuclear would never happen thanks to the anti-nuclear / pro-fossil-fuel "green" lobby. I'm not saying it would, I'm saying it's been killed and along with it the climate by these lunatics.
Big coal is happy though, they're making some astounding profits in the past year or two, wind turbines or no wind turbines.
The rambling anti-nuclear / pro-carbon rhetoric somehow handwaves about how you can't do that and how renewables will magically solve everything. They were wrong 50 years ago, they were wrong 20 years ago, they're wrong now. Nuclear power still provides as much electricity as wind and solar combined. Today.
GP was making the opposite point that 1 (sacrificial death) ÷ 0 (TW generated from a brand new tower) is "infinite" (fatalities per TWh) which would really be undefined, not infinite, but a silly point regardless.
* stop shutting down current nuclear electrical generation capacity
* build more solar and wind capacity
* as more renewable capacity comes online use it retire fossil fuel generators
Once all the carbon-emitting stuff is offline then perhaps look at shutting down current nuclear.
You know: the opposite of what Germany is doing.
Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ausstieg_aus_der_Kohleverstrom...
Could Germany reduce its dependency on Russian gas with more nuclear?
Probably, but it's not just the politicians and the population who don't want nuclear power, it's also the operators. They're not interested anymore as they can't plan ahead. If the current government decided that the nuclear power plants should run longer they would all need to get modernised first, meaning the operators would have to invest and who says the next government won't shut down them down again. Nobody is going to invest in building a new nuclear power plant that may or may not enter operation in 15-20 years.
> Could Germany reduce its dependency on Russian gas with more nuclear?
Short answer: No. Germany mostly relies on gas for heating, not for electricity.
No where in my post did I say anything about new plants. Simply keep the current ones going until (a) coal/gas is retired, (b) enough renewables are built to then start retiring current nuclear plants.
> Short answer: No. Germany mostly relies on gas for heating, not for electricity.
How cold does Germany get? Some heat pumps can work down to -20C:
* https://www.mitsubishielectric.ca/en/hvac/professionals/fs-s...
* https://www.fujitsugeneral.com/us/residential/technology/xlt...
(I'm Canadian, so there's cold and then there's "cold".)
Winters can get cold depending on the area, but probably warmer on average than Canada. There are currently around 30 million households (around 75%) heating with either gas (50%) or oil (25%). Don't get me wrong, they will all eventually have to switch to some other heating method, most likely to heat pumps, but that will take a few years to maybe a decade.
I'm talking about absolute numbers here, not TWh, and I'm comparing to fossil fuels, but even if we talk about just wind:
> In England, there were 163 wind turbine accidents that killed 14 people in 2011. Wind produced about 15 billion kWhrs that year, so using a capacity factor of 25%, that translates to about 1,000 deaths per trillion kWhrs produced (the world produces 15 trillion kWhrs per year from all sources).
> These are pretty low numbers. By contrast, in 2011 coal produced about 180 billion kWhrs in England with about 3,000 related deaths. Nuclear energy produced over 90 billion kWhrs in England with no deaths. In that same year, America produced about 800 billion kWhrs from nuclear with no deaths.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/09/29/forget-ea...
I'm sure deaths are going to increase in the production, erection, and servicing of tens of thousands of wind turbines, by tens of thousands of employees.
But you can simply tally up all the deaths for nuclear accidents, direct or indirect, and they're still less than other forms of energy generation.
Presumably you're disputing the deaths, but the link you gave is deaths per TWh is lower. Except by absolute deaths it's.... higher. Which was my point, and is reinforced in the quote above.
> Second, even with the correct metric, solar and wind are now beating nuclear and projected to continue to do so, widening the gap over time.
Yes, deaths per TWh will go down, but power generation will go up, as there is more solar/wind, but so will deaths as more people build, install, and maintain those systems. Those absolute deaths keep rising.
"Of any form of energy generation" you said.
This is true but not very significant since nuclear is still forty times safer than the next safest energy source, natural gas. Solar, nuclear, and wind all have a niche in a green future. Nuclear fits in locations with insufficient wind and solar resources and provides reliable base supply.
Does this include stringing them across the Pacific Ocean, which covers thirty percent of the Earth's surface?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_–_New_England_Transmiss...
And several large floating sea cities full of engineers to maintain it all.
So remote islands basically (places not worth adding to a super grid). Fair enough. That's a very small niche though.
Neither solar nor wind can provide base power. Unless you can make hyperefficient batteries and guarantee that we'll see cloudless skies and constant wind.
The larger your grid, the more reliably you can source renewables. It's not cheap to install the necessary high frequency inter-connectors but it is still waaaay cheaper than nuclear (see a different thread where i posted a link on an MIT study).
Edit: also, you still need a lot of storage (probably 12-48 hours worth) but i posted another link showing how that's also way cheaper than nuclear.
Take a look at the graphs at the back. It shows a 99.99% reliable grid made up of an optimal mix of solar & wind, 3x over-provisioned along with 3 hours of storage and a continental grid.
Also, three hours of storage for a continental grid? Nice dream.
And continental is what makes 3 hours possible. The wind is always blowing somewhere.
Ah yes, so trivial.
> 40,000 square miles would provide enough energy to power the entire US with solar
No, it wouldn't. As the document yo link shows, even countries with similar makeup have very different solar and wind profiles.
Also. You can't just wave your magic wand and say: "here, we now have 40k square miles". You're saying "oh, let's just randomly find an area larger than Austria (population: 9 million people + farmland + industry + ...) and cover it entirely in solar panels (without taking into consideration the place for all the required infrastructure to go with them".
It is so, so trivial to dismiss, true.
> The wind is always blowing somewhere.
Only... What is the amount of that wind? Is there enough wind in Denmark to cover non-windy days in Spain? Will the grid be able to switch fast enough? (answer is: no, because renewable sources are notoriously slow to ramp up production)
> Only... What is the amount of that wind? Is there enough wind in Denmark to cover non-windy days in Spain?
That is the question the paper answers, but on a national basis.
Comon, if we can't store energy for 3 hours that's an armutszeugnis. The battery of my electric bycicle can store the energy needed to power my flat for 3 hours.
I don't think over provisioning would fix that and you'd need about 12 hours of batteries to cover the shortage.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
Most other sources repeat either numbers.
And it is not surprising, because we are talking about very different things. Solar-related deaths are mostly people falling from rooftops, Hydro-related deaths mostly come from a single event: the Banqiao dam failure, and Nuclear-related deaths depend a lot on how you count Chernobyl and Fukushima. Coal goes through the roof, mostly because of pollution.
We simply don't know how many people die from the Chernobyl disaster, from 31 to hundreds of thousands, yes, it is that fuzzy. I think the most official number is around 4000, but who knows what number they used to make these numbers? It is probably in the fine print somewhere if really look for it.
Mining operations are also taken into account, but how deep shall we go into the supply chain? Do we count the fatalities related to the raw materials that make the plant? What about the guy who dies in a car accident going to work at the power plant?
Do these numbers even make sense or are they just politics? By carefully picking my metrics, I could probably make coal looks very safe and solar very dangerous if I wanted to.
The link I used used those numbers before they updated them with newer data.
Projected is the operative word.
One useful concept that was introduced a decade ago is a "cubic mile of oil", or CMO. To yield the equivalent power, one would need to produce 250,000 roof-top solar systems a day for 50 years, or 1200 turbines a week for 50 years, or 1 nuclear power plant a week for 50 years. Innovation is still desperately needed here. Nuclear has been unfairly sluggish in this department.
If every mid sized+ city in the world started building one today, and it took 5 years to construct, and they started a new one every other year (so they were being built in parallel). The problem would be solved within a decade.
A year or so ago, I looked at the cost of South Texas Project in Texas, and how much power it generates and figured out that for roughly a single year's state budget one could build 10x those plants, which would remove all natural gas, and coal electric production in the state. Do it a second time, and there would be enough to actually move a significant part of the cars to electric too.
You would need ~1.4 million barrels of oil per day for 50 years.
edit: it is still weird to see Venezuela at the top spot and just how badly they squandered it
Total power generated doesn't matter as much as you think it does. Base load and load following matter never factor into the starry-eyed discussions of renewable power sources. Weak winds at night? Boom, suddenly you require other means of producing energy.
So, back that up with burning natural gas.
> so backing up the entire grid this way is cheap (in capital cost) compared to the capital cost of a nuclear-powered grid.
> To cut down on that fuel cost, you can also add some batteries to reduce the fraction of time the turbines are required to operate.
So, the "cheap" is in reality:
- many gas powered energy plants (that are not there, and need to be built)
- plus many batteries (that are not there, and need to be built)
- plus cheap natural gas to burn
So much for "green energy already has the capacity to replace something"
You didn't read my whole comment there. One could use green hydrogen.
Ah yes. It's a thing that
- can be cheaply produced at scale
- can be easily transported to large distances
- infrastructure can be easily and quickly converted to using it
Note that the application of green hydrogen I'm talking about here, grid backup, does not require replacing existing natural gas use with hydrogen. Nor does it require long distance hydrogen pipelines.
There's no "but". The situation right now is that starry-eyed proponents of renewal energy sources claim that they have already surpassed nuclear etc. When in reality they can't cover the basics. And the answer to that? "Oh, yeah, sometime in the future there may be something to complement this".
> Note that the application of green hydrogen I'm talking about here, grid backup, does not require replacing existing natural gas use with hydrogen. Nor does it require long distance hydrogen pipelines.
Ah yes. Because green hydrogen just magically appeares every time you need it when you say "green hydrogen" three times
I am being extremely sarcastic, that's true :) For all the reasons you listed :)
We aren’t debating obscure energy sources anyway, so I don’t see what the point is. This is absolutely the correct unit.
> solar and wind are now beating nuclear and projected to continue to do so, widening the gap over time
Rooftop solar is still losing, but yes renewables in general are still competitive. If the anti-nuclear lobby would allow nuclear to advance beyond 70s tech we could probably see a lot of advances on the nuclear side as well, especially with smaller mass-produced reactors. It’s pretty crumby to criticize nuclear when you’re putting your thumb on the scales.
Moreover, are these figures measuring the actual production or just the capacity? You need a lot more than 1TW of solar or wind capacity to produce 24TWh of energy in a 24 hour period because these energy sources aren’t reliable. You also need something to store the energy (or transmit excess energy to places that can use it)—the construction of which increases the cost, carbon footprint, and fatality count.
Frankly, all of these sources blow fossil fuels out of the water so I don’t much care which of them we use, but we should have a diverse mix for reliability and we should prioritize what works rather than waiting for a technological miracle for economically storing renewable energy.
They aren't though, how many people do you know with an electric car, solar panels, a battery, without a grit tie? AKA they get all their power from renewables?
I personally don't know anyone like that, although I know plenty of people with solar, an electric car, or even a small solar+battery setup.
Why is that, because its super expensive, the tesla will be the cheapest part of the equation when your done.
And that applies to PV and wind at grid scale too, because for every MW of PV+Wind being installed there is a MW of natural gas plants being installed. So the actual cost of a wind turbine isn't just the turbine/panel, its the gas plant and its fuel. Which means that until we get magic pixie dust batteries that are less expensive than a gas plant, the price of wind or PV will never really go lower than whatever the cheapest backup source is. And that is the fundamental issue with the economics of solar/wind. Worse, battery costs can't just be added in because one has to take the duty cycle of the renewable source and multiply it enough (maybe 5x-10x) to get a 100% average duty cycle sufficient to charge those batteries.
So, at this point to get a rough approximation of the price of wind + PV needed to compare it fairly against the legacy power generation one needs to multiply by maybe 10x. And that is why every random person with a farm isn't covering turning their land into power generation.
So, maybe solar thermal solves the battery problem, but AFAIK its crazy expensive at this point too.
So, we keep pumping carbon out our tailpipes because we can't even get renewables to grow significantly, nevermind actually dealing with the impact of doubling or tripling the electric production needed to heat peoples houses and charge their cars.
The only question is how many more decades we will pump C02 into the atmosphere before we say enough, and either dump massive amounts of money into renewables, deal with grid instability, and try to "conserve" out way out of a crisis, or just get out of the way and start reprocessing the "waste" we have sitting around into new plants that can for a small fraction of the construction costs actually solve the problem.
My "still competitive" remark was in reference to deaths per kwh. But to your point, I'm not sure what the deaths/kwh are if we factor in the supplementary natural gas / battery / etc required to bring renewable reliability up to par with nuclear.
Isn't this precisely the metric you want? If you want to convince me (and perhaps others as well), I think you need to go a little more into the details why this is a bad thing. It's not obvious to me.
> You can build a wind turbine and ritually sacrifice someone on completion of the build and the fatalities per TwH is infinite as it's not generated any power yet, but with every year of operation it gets lower.
Related to my above point, should it not be expected fatalities over the projected lifetime of whatever plant/turbine/etc.?
Only for the first wind turbine. For your Nth wind turbine, you sum all the TwH generated by all previous turbines as well as their deaths, including those ritual sacrifices.
There is no way in even napkin math for this checks out. The amount of construction per generation capacity is orders of magnitude lower for nuclear. For nuclear you build one fancy concrete box and then feed it a fairly minimal amount of fuel for 50+yr. With wind and solar you need far more expansive facilities for equivalent generation capacity and you need to replace them far more often.
Even if you assume a zero carbon supply chain the larger supply chain means that solar and wind have a far larger environmental impact (more mines, more factories, more roads, etc, etc, etc).
Considering the amount of lip services paid to externalities in these sorts of conversations I don't know why this point keeps getting missed but I will note that is is very convenient for some people to miss it.
You screw up 1% of the modules in a solar field, your output is down 1%.
You screw up 1% of the welds or concrete pours in your nuclear plant, it's time for enormous pain.
Now, people will say "bUT tHe sUn dOeSn'T sHiNe aT NiGhT", and that's true for the moment. Right now, we cannot shift everything to solar and wind. But if you pay attention to battery development, you don't need to be Einstein to see that pretty soon, we will be able to cost-efficiently store large amounts of energy, distribute it and use it in a way which will solve this intermittency problem.
You can look at the data and read more about this here: https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
For long term (like seasonal) variations in wind/solar output, you're probably not going to be building enough batteries to bridge that gap, so to stick with just wind/solar you would need to either overbuild (perhaps massively) your generation capacity, or build a global grid.
A global grid introduces geopolitical risks (your neighbor becomes not-so friendly and cuts the link when you don't have sufficient generation), whereas massive overbuilding would be expensive. Having some nuclear plants may be cheaper route.
I don't know how many batteries it would take to make up for the losses. I suspect we will have gas and nuclear plants for a long while yet.
Maybe you have data on:
- total installed storage capacity as percentage of daily electricity usage (preferably 95th-percentile daily usage). Hopefully this percentage increases every year.
- how often should we expect to replace batteries. Wikipedia says 400-1200 cycles. Does this mean that whole world storage capacity must be replaced every 400-1200 days?
And it's the same with the turbines and all the rare earths that need to be mined to make the current most efficient dynamos.
If people want to promote wind turbines and solar, they should at least compare like for like, which includes the costs of digging the materials out of the ground, and the disposal of old panels and turbines, in the same way people say 'but nuclear waste!'.
Will you stop repeating this if I explain why it's false?
So first up, the stat is usually fatalities per TwH, since that skews things in Nuclear's direction, not just number of fatalities which would be won by some obscure but not very successful power source.
Second, even with the correct metric, solar and wind are now beating nuclear and projected to continue to do so, widening the gap over time. Comparing the very start of the renewable rollout gives misleading stats as the total power generated is low, and many stats that get quoted on this are more than a decade out of date.
You can build a wind turbine and ritually sacrifice someone on completion of the build and the fatalities per TwH is infinite as it's not generated any power yet, but with every year of operation it gets lower.
Basically the same applies to carbon output, nuclear does well, but wind/solar/nuclear have been basically tied on both metrics unless you're relying on some very, very old data.
Of course if you have a limited amount of money to spend, then you'll generate more energy and save more lives with whatever the cheaper form of energy is, so we should really take that into consideration too.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy