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.
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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
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...