Finland's climate is an outlier:
One-third of energy consumption in housing was electricity in 2018. [...] 47% of electricity was used to heat indoor areas and 36% to household appliances. The remainder of electricity was used to heat domestic water and saunas.
https://www.thenomadtoday.com/articulo/finland/energy-consum...
There's going to be an obvious error of margin either side of my napkin calculations but I think the order of magnitude is in the ballpark.
Whereas making something warmer can be done without a heat pump, by releasing stored chemical energy, at nearly no losses.
Nuclear, as it stands, is the only solution to decarbonizing the energy grid for much of the world. Until some breakthrough in energy storage transpires, or fusion becomes feasible, fission plants remain necessary for decarbonization.
Storage cost is falling much faster, even, than solar and wind generation. The only question today is whether to put a euro into solar or wind now, or into storage that will be much cheaper next year. Thus far, in most places, the former is still favored. More carbon tax can help move the choice the other way.
As solar and wind costs continue down, synthesizing methane and kerosene from captured CO2 and synthetic hydrogen will shortly be cheaper than mining, refining, and transporting them, even without the carbon taxes. Synthesis of those, and of ammonia and hydrogen itself will absorb unlimited "overbuilt" peak generating capacity, and stocks of all of those serve also as storage. That their round-trip efficiency is less than, say, hydro or batteries matters little where they rarely need to be used for that.
In response to your edit:
> As solar and wind costs continue down, synthesizing methane and kerosene from captured CO2 and synthetic hydrogen will shortly be cheaper than mining, refining, and transporting them, even without the carbon taxes. Synthesis of those, and of ammonia and hydrogen itself will absorb unlimited "overbuilt" peak generating capacity, and stocks of all of those serve as storage.
Nobody has successfully built a grid-scale energy-to-gas plant, ever. It remains the stuff of prototypes. This approach is very much in the "hypothetical" phase. There are serious unsolved problems in energy-to-gas:
* It needs a source of carbon to convert H2 to methane. This could come from biofuels, but those aren't available in sufficient supply.
* Producing large quantities of hydrogen without CO2 emissions remains difficult. Almost all methane comes from steam reformation (CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2), which emits carbon dioxide. Electrolysis can't be done effectively.
Currently, power to gas storage is way more expensive than either lithium ion or hydroelectric storage and it's unclear whether it'll ever be cheaper than existing options.
1. https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
And, obviously hydrogen will not continue to be made from hydrocarbons. It will instead be feedstock for synthesizing hydrocarbons. Carbon would need to be extracted from air, or at least from exhaust, to get carbon credits.
In short, converting electricity to methane and then back to electricity again is not a presently available option and it's unclear whether it'll ever be viable at stale. Grid-scale energy storage remains an unsolved problem
It is so economical nonviable that there isn't even small scale experiments to get the ball running as a storage medium. There is however some bright spots for green hydrogen when hydrogen itself can be used. Green hydrogen is only a few times more expensive than using fossil fuel in order to create hydrogen, and in that situation green hydrogen has found a place. It also reduces those industries CO2 emissions which can then be turned into profits in terms of trading existing emissions rights. As fossil fuels prices goes up, the economical viability of green hydrogen in hydrogen using industries goes up, but the price compared to nuclear remain the same.
Other storage media being built out for full-scale production use include iron-air batteries, where (IIRC) $1.5B is going into factories, a liquified-air storage system in Chile ($0.5B), and synthetic ammonia in Norway. Nobody can track even a fraction of the utility-scale pumped-hydro projects under construction world-wide.
We will need hundreds times as much of these, and of others, in the end, which will all take decades to build out.
You said it'd be stored in caves, so perhaps it's a different project. It'd be good to link to this project.
The Utah project looks like it's still trying to secure funding, and hasn't broken ground. https://power.mhi.com/regions/amer/news/20210511.html#:~:tex....
Similarly in Texas. The plans for this project were unveiled only a couple weeks ago: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/green-hydrogen-inte...
Nobody announces billion-dollar physical construction projects for untested tech.
Things still being built need to finish being built before they go into service.
Just yesterday, you said some unspecified "breakthroughs" would be needed. Now you point to construction not finished. You are clutching at straws. The more honest course would be to admit you were just wrong.
Energy storage is far from a solved problem. You insist that it's been solved, but none of your proposed solutions have actually been implemented.
That is not to say there won't be breakthroughs, too, that make storage even cheaper to build out. But any storage already built will continue working as well as ever. Any hoped-for breakthroughs that don't pan out will not stall build-out. The worst that can happen is costs plummeting not quite as precipitously as had been expected.
We already see utility-scale hydro storage in use, and utility-scale iron-air battery factories under construction, and utility-scale liquified-air and ammonia-synthesis plants under construction, and utility-scale investment in hydrogen synthesis and storage. Each additional storage technology that begins to come online only improves the picture.
Repeating, again and again, that things that still need to be built out have not been built out yet sheds no light.
In the mean time, nuclear is a nice thing to invest in.
Even a massively-nuclearized France produces 7% to 12% of its gridpower thanks to fossil-fuel plants.
French official historical data: https://www.statistiques.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/editi...
Pertinent document (French ahead!): https://new.sfen.org/rgn/expertise-nucleaire-francaise-suivi...
« un réacteur peut varier de 100 % à 20 % de puissance en une demi-heure, et remonter aussi vite après un palier d’au moins deux heures, et ce deux fois par jour »
Proposed translation: "a reactor power output can vary from 100% to 20% in 30 minutes, then after 2 hours can go back to 100% at the same speed, and can cycle this way 2 times per day".
This is quite a good performance when it comes to load-following (French engineers are very good at this), however it is insufficient in the real world (save any ridiculously expensive over-provision of nuclear reactor, most idling) and very weak compared to gas turbines performances.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kori_Nuclear_Power_Plant
This is an understatement. The three largest nuclear power reactors in the world (Taishan 1, Taishan 2 and Olkiluoto 3) are all EPRs.
It is feared that all other current EPR suffer the same design mistake, but there are currently no plan to stop them.
A few people were vocal about this before it happened, and things did not go well for them. The Maureen Kearney case is simply unbelievable, this woman was working for Areva and blowing the whistle hard on this transfer of technology, after receiving threat she was found tied up in her bedroom, a letter A engraved in her abdomen, with a kitchen knife handle inserted in her genitals.
The police decided she probably did that to herself and jailed her, while the state attorney prosecuted her. And she was sentenced to prison time and a hefty fine. it took a while before the sentence was overturned and for the truth to come out that she had not faked anything.
In the end, what she was warning actually happened, France is no better and even worse in its ability to build nuclear plants with no actual plant put in service (ITER is a mess, Flamanville EPR is plagued), while China started both Taishan EPR reactors and is now able to sell its ability to build plants to other countries.
Or we stick with the status quo, force everyone into their lane, and probably need like 3000 to 4000 reactors to serve current needs, and 150 to 200 per year. Give or take.
I think that's still in the same ballpark orders of magnitude-wise.
Please try and bring your knowledge to the table not your offense at someone else's error. I seriously think you could have a lot to offer.
How many more meltdowns per decade?
In Finland's case, the realistic alternatives are burning coal or burning Russian gas. (If the Finns dedicated a substantial chunk of their forests to this one generator, they could maybe use biomass.)
Coal kills two orders of magnitude more people per GWh than nuclear--and it does that when operating nominally, not when malfunctioning--and it produces three or four orders of magnitude more waste and more environmental harm from mining.
Russian gas has geopolitical/national security problems.
Biomass is a roundabout way of burning diesel fuel and gas, while degrading and eroding forest soils and polluting watersheds.
The number of new meltdowns per decade rounds to zero, to five significant figures.
That's a weird metric (one meltdown is quite a catastrophe) and the calculation seems suspicious too. Between Chernobile and Fukushima I don't see how this could be correct.
I do find your other points more convincing, though with some "citation needed" wrt. coal.
And that's before we consider the environmental and health risks of ash ponds[2], which can (and have caused) heavy metal pollution in nearby groundwater supply. The largest industrial spill in US history happened barely a decade ago, and was an ash pond[3].
Edit: I can personally recommend "The Buffalo Creek Disaster" (ISBN 9780394723433) as a writeup by a lawyer involved in a similar coal ash accident (one that directly killed over 100 people).
[1]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2017936118
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash_pond
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
Just as you wouldn't factor Amelia Earhart's plane into 2022 air safety prognoses, you shouldn't use Chernobyl reactors for nuclear safety.
Nuclear fision reactors safety technology have moved further. There are challenges, but we havent even tried to solve them fully (as we were busy improving gas burning efficiency)
TMI and Fukushima were both "modern" when built. All reactors that melted down did because operators ignored construction, maintenance, or operating safety standards. Other plants not yet melted down show evidence of more construction standard failings: pumps installed despite failing to meet specifications, bolts of substituted, inadequate steel. Diablo Canyon is built directly on a fault line. Now we learn that new EPR plants are inherently flawed, by design.
Ignoring standards is, by the evidence, itself standard procedure for building and operating civil nuke plants. Our global society, as it is conducted, is by the evidence unable to produce and operate a safe civil nuke.
The RBMK reactor is quite an elegant design. Simple plug-and-play architecture for adding and removing fuel and other assemblies while the reactor was running, perfect for things like doping silicon for semiconductors and producing plutonium for weapons. But to get this capability you have to either give up affordability or safety, and they chose to give up safety.
Energy generation is always a trade off. Right now the world is reacting to the fossil fuel funded wars created by one such trade off. We are also in the middle of causing irreversible climate change, which would cause more damage than any amount of meltdowns or nuclear waste could ever get near.
Naturally there are alternatives. If money were no objection then green hydrogen looks pretty nice, and one could always extract heat from the core of the earth as long the technology was safe enough to do so. As soon we have a technology that get proven to be cheaper, safer and more scalable than nuclear we should all switch to that. Buying natural gas from Russia is for multiple obvious reason not that.
Less radioactive EMISSION during NORMAL OPERATION than coal plants (and I think that ignores radioactivity released in uranium mining). The amount of radioactivity in the spent fuel rods of a nuclear plant is vastly higher than that liberated by a coal plant.
BTW, your chance of dying from cancer in your lifetime is about 20%, so I'm not sure that the 1/5 figure you gave there means anything.
There is a place in the US that has a rather peculiar name of Cancer Alley. It is not a nuclear testing area, nuclear waste deposit area or area for nuclear plants. It is an area know for its petrochemical plants. It illustrate quite well the difference of nuclear waste that people are scared of, and fossil fuel waste that people accept as just normal part of life.
Maybe the problem is the uranium mine tailings are safely off in some poor country, not in the US where the coal ash would be?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p...
Moreover the more we obtain uranium (prospecting, mining, milling...), the more we add to the associated carbon footprint. Therefore a sustained growth of installed nuclear capacity will lead us to exploit mines at always lowering ore grades => more emissions.
Scientific studies are clear: M. Lenzen ("between 10 and 130 g CO2-e/kWhel, with an average of 65 g") and E. Warner et G. Heath ("9 to 110 g CO‐eq/kWh by 2050")...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222817608_Life_cycl...
The popular YouTube channel The B1M has an interesting video on how Finland is tackling nuclear waste:
Finland might have solved nuclear power's biggest problem (2021): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYpiK3W-g_0
And even after all that it's still far less expensive than remediating coal output.
Hoping to know enough and for sure about all this is... a hope.
Stating that we know what our descendants will need/do in a so distant future is even more funny.
They "considered" such facts using a somewhat light approach: 'Bob Loux, the executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, expressed amazement that the US Department of Energy had only just carried out the "11th hour" drilling tests.
"It certainly looks like DoE has encountered a surprise out there, and it certainly speaks to the fact they haven't done the technical work they should have done years ago," he told the paper.
"It's going to have to cause some change of the design in the final analysis. It's going to impact the safety case."'
Oops...
They also "considered" those metal containers as adequate during the 1990's, then... (what, you think "they" are omniscient?)... problems related to brines and high temperature arose...
https://www.nwtrb.gov/docs/default-source/board/mrs_duquette...
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0335/ML033500420.pdf
Oops...
It’s like complaining that a wool blanket is itchy so it might be better to catch hypothermia and die.
The plants are also located away from cities, so utilizing the waste heat for district heating is uneconomical.
(edit - assuming everyone uses the same amount of power globally as the average person in Finland which - why shouldn't they be able to - and - obviously they don't)