Nuclear doesn't have a big support base. It's basically only supported by educated technocrats.
And those educated technocrats are already holding their nose, because they know big government projects are often late and over budget. And the designs that are intrinsically safe haven't been built before. And if there was a meltdown, the taxpayer would have to foot the bill. And nobody's going to want the plants built in their area. And a permanent waste repository has been a political football for longer than most of us have been alive.
At the same time, if you squint hard enough when you look at the figures, solar+wind+batteries look cheaper.
Squinting that way is pretty tempting if you were on the fence anyway.
I think it's unconscionable that we chose to emit ~20 gigatons of CO2 instead of pushing nuclear from 20% of our electric supply to 100% -- we would be there today if we had just kept up the pace -- but what's done is done. We killed nuclear and waited for renewables to become viable. We paid the price. The CO2 is in the air. Now we can move forward.
Electricity will never, ever be a free market. The barriers to entry are almost insurmountable, especially capital requirements (production + distribution, especially distribution) but also the myriad safety regulations.
Might as well involve the government and gain some accountability, because with corporations, there is 0 accountability.
Realistically the grid needs to be nationalised or under an arms-length wholly government owned corporation. You can't have competing grids. The grid is the market. The UK tried privatizing it (and the rail infrastructure, and the broadband infrastructure) and ended up taking electricity and rail national again.
On the back end I think the UK market works reasonably well with a light regulatory touch allowing for microgenerators. The retail side is more of a problem. You can't really expose retail customers to the spot price (that went wrong in Texas), so there has to be an intermediary, who is vulnerable to bankruptcy instead if the spot price shoots up.
Well, I didn't say "unregulated". You can have regulation that doesn't create huge barriers to entry.
What would be a free market today? Something with very low barriers to entry (capital, expertise, legal requirements) and with lots of competition.
For example real estate agents in some developing countries. They frequently have only a high school degree (if that), they don't really need a ton of money to get started (just some nice clothes and some time), and the legal aspects are mostly covered by notaries, anyway. In many developing countries the real estate market is not consolidated so you have a million independent real estate agents, who frequently don't even have exclusivity for the property they're selling. So you could literally have 10 agents promoting the same property.
> with corporations there is zero accountability
This is not Somalia, lol. There is rule of law here and it works fairly well. The only problem is who people vote for.
The additional pumped storage needs of solar and wind are more than offset by their vastly lower cost.
If nuclear power could compete on a level playing field it'd be great but it sucks up subsidies like nothing else and puts the taxpayer is fully on the hook for dealing with all and any 800 billion dollar fukishima events.
> The radioactive materials stay fully encased for their entire life and beyond. It's a very robust, strong fuel that's designed to make sure it indefinitely keeps the fuel safely inside the pellet.
> Some of the main differences that the MMR has from conventional nuclear plants is that the reactor cannot meltdown as the heat is passively released into the environment, does not need any active systems to remove heat, and requires no on-site fuel storage, handling, or processing.
This reactor would have been completely unaffected by the events at Fukushima.
Crappy reactors from the 70s are the only financially viable reactors these days. Also the ones Germany is being raked across the coals for trying to shut down.
But some 18 years before the 2011 disaster, new scientific knowledge had emerged about the likelihood of a large earthquake and resulting major tsunami of some 15.7 metres at the Daiichi site. However, this had not yet led to any major action by either the plant operator, Tepco, or government regulators, notably the Nuclear & Industrial Safety Agency (NISA). Discussion was ongoing, but action minimal. The tsunami countermeasures could also have been reviewed in accordance with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) guidelines which required taking into account high tsunami levels, but NISA continued to allow the Fukushima plant to operate without sufficient countermeasures such as moving the backup generators up the hill, sealing the lower part of the buildings, and having some back-up for seawater pumps, despite clear warnings.
We already know that the Chernobyl incident was due to even more egregious human error and poor planning.
Pretty much every country with civilian nuclear energy had some big scandals or incidents around them[1]. Humans just can't be trusted to build a 100% safe process.
[1] Just to name a few: Three Mile Island (US), Sellafield (UK), Brunsbüttel (DE), Saint-Laurent (FR)
Australia absolutely would have egregious chains of human failure and bad planning.
You've only got to look at the present state of this country to see that that is how we, evidently, prefer to do things.
No, coal plants have spent-fuel disposal problems due to "human error"/poor management too. This one cost over $1b to clean up and required them to scrape off the topsoil and rendered the area essentially uninhabitable, just like fukushima. TVA ended up having to buy out the inhabitants and move them elsewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
And the fun part is: that shit is actually radioactive too. Coal plants put out as much radioactive waste as nuclear plants do... but they put it straight into the air, and then put a bunch more into spent-fuel pools besides.
I don’t have an issue with nuclear power but IMO the industry should be forced to pay for a ~1T insurance policy to avoid bad incentives rather than the government simply taking on the associated risks.
Good idea; let's start by applying that incentive to the externalities generated by the fossil fuel industry first though, so that the playing field is fair.
Ed: spelling
Unfortunately, fossil fuel externalities cross national boarders which creates perverse incentives. Do only price in the costs to your own country or accept an economic disadvantage? Essentially countries need to start doing pollution tariffs not just taxing externalities.
Economically the correct choices are obvious, but politics is rarely so simple.
This is seriously glossing over details. The cost of pumped hydro is highly geographically dependent. If you happen to have an alpine lake handy, then yes it can be cheap. But building pumped hydro in flat terrain is much more expensive.
True for cost per Watt, but there are other factors. A good replacement for burning fossil fuels is solar + batteries, which is more expensive right now. Even if batteries get cheap, you still have to protect yourself from black swan events e.g. volcano eruption which hides the sun. Also, it seems Australia would need nuclear weapons to protect its independence in the future. It's critical to have nuclear experts at home.
No they wouldn't. To quote https://globalroadtechnology.com/uranium-mining-australia-hi...
> Australia is home to 31% of the world’s recoverable uranium. Australian uranium is exported and consists about one-quarter of its energy exports. Australia uses no nuclear power and depends on coal. The uranium mining industry is a billion dollar industry in Australian dollar ... In 2019, Australia produced 7790 tonnes of uranium and was ranked the world’s third best producer behind Kazakhstan and Canada.
If that is true, Australia would have to export natural uranium and import back uranium enriched in 235U, unless they would choose to build a reactor with heavy-water, which can use natural uranium as a fuel.
Australia is one of the most affluent countries in world history and hyper resource rich.
They should have a third of their energy supply coming from nuclear.
Nuclear is expensive (commonly said)? So what. Australia is hyper rich ($67k GDP per capita) and can afford to do it and can afford to subsidize it for consumers. What's a lot more expensive (risk) is having a weak, unreliable grid with a poor diversity of energy sources.
It's insane not to subsidize nuclear, if one believes even the calmer side of environmental warnings re climate change. It's extremely potent energy technology, we know how to build it, and we know we can keep improving on it yet.
About 60% of Australia’s electricity came from coal over the last 12-months, but this proportion is rapidly declining and all the large coal plants are losing money and slated for closure.
Expect a big uptick in coal usage to offset Russian oil
Not in the very long term. Upfront it's really expensive yeah.
>(uranium ore is a small proportion of the cost stack, and Australia would still need to import nuclear fuel)
A very small portion and isn't Australia a big exporter? Might as well set up refinement capabilities.
>with very high levels of variable renewable energy where they have to be economically curtailed on an almost daily basis (our coal plants are all closing for this reason)
I went to check gov sources and it still seems to be mainly fossil fuels tho renewables are growing. What will be kept as backup for days with little production btw? Here our greens are pushing for gas.
Australia is different to Germany. We get high solar output every day, even in winter, and while we do get some wind droughts, they are less long and widespread than in Europe. We don't need to 'back up' anything close to 100% of our renewable capacity, and we don't need 'back up' for very long durations.
Doesn't electricity usage vary quite a lot throughout the day? Especially in the evening.
And to make matters even worse, you generally want to run nuclear at 100% all the time because of the high initial costs but summer peaks can be twice winter lows which means you would need to have a ton capacity that hardly ever gets used whereas gas is by far the cheapest option for handling variable demand.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
And it is still extremely inefficient to my knowledge with some roadblocks towards improvement that are hard to overcome. Hydropump storage doesn't seem grand from an intuitive perspective but probably ends up doing better.
>Here in the states nuclear is now about 3x as expensive as wind/solar
Now spread that costs over a proper lifetime, calculate in the costs of storage and/or variable demand backup and the adjusted distribution infrastructure and don't ban things like fuel reuse technology to reduce waste at the behest of fossil fuel industry and it looks a lot better.
https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/image/png/2020-12/lco_b...
>but summer peaks can be twice winter lows
Is this in Arizona and the likes? I feel like America really need to get it's head out of it's ass and dis-incentivise living in deserts with water problems to boot as well as some other common sense things. The CO2 output per capita being twice that of the EU and a bunch of other countries and that after a whole lot of improvement on the US front makes it clear this is not just a developed world thing but rather that some core issues are not being looked at.
>whereas gas is by far the cheapest option for handling variable demand.
And a fossil fuel with a climate change impact much much higher than most people expect.
The link I posted is from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) published the Annual Energy Outlook (AEO) which uses LCOE. It doesn't include hydrogen/methane storage but we are talking 3 times the cost which leaves a lot of room to come out ahead.
> Is this in Arizona and the likes? I feel like America really need to get it's head out of it's ass and dis-incentivise living in deserts with water problems to boot as well as some other common sense things. The CO2 output per capita being twice that of the EU and a bunch of other countries and that after a whole lot of improvement on the US front makes it clear this is not just a developed world thing but rather that some core issues are not being looked at.
Um, like almost everywhere? Honestly, west coast places like SF/LA are pretty unique in not having as much variable temperatures. We definitely get heat waves here in the midwest and it is definitely not a desert.
And now that I think about it, if we are truly to decarbonize that includes heating and heat waves [0] would be childs play compared to polar vortexes [1]. Good luck building enough spare nuclear to heat the entire continent by 40-90 degrees.
[0]: https://cw39.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/06/NATL-HI...
[1]: https://mashable.com/article/polar-vortex-2021-cold-temperat...
Which non carbon heating or energy source do you suggest? The US doesn't seem to be warming up to heatpumps much and it's not like those are grand in those extreme conditions. The insulation standards there from what i've heard and compared are still quite bad (Not helped by the fact that AC and pure heating solutions common involve lots of airflow)
We're not even using pumped storage nowhere near enough where possible and it's the vast majority of all utility scale storage but the amount of people that somehow champion power to gas as this grand thing that's anywhere close to being able to compete with it at scale is staggering.
I've asked time and again for costed *TWh-scale* storage, the proposals are never forthcoming. Because, on first principles, they're far too high and unlikely to ever decrease. Ask actual investors - which I have - in private, and they'll admit it.
Almost nowhere are renewables outcompeting nuclear. What is outcompeting is greenwashed gas.
Our state with the highest share of renewable energy, South Australia, has not seen gas use increase as renewables have replaced coal.
The idea that 100% of all renewable capacity has to be ‘backed up’ with firm capacity is not true in general, and certainly not true in the specific case of Australia given the solar and wind resources we have.
But there is still plenty of coal production no? Here Nuclear which is the vast majority of our production is being phased out due to political pressure. Our Greens push gas plants to cover the lowdays for renewables. Which variable production source is kept in mind in South Australia in the scenario where coal is pushed out all togheter? Is there a hydro dam or so?
Coal accounts for about 75 per cent of Australia’s electricity generation, followed by gas (16 per cent), hydro (5 per cent) and wind around (2 per cent).[1]
About 92% of electricity in Ontario is produced from zero-carbon sources: 59% from nuclear, 24% from hydroelectricity, 8% from wind, and 1% from solar.
[1] https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/energy/overview#:~:t....
[2] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr....
1. Nuclear is a more expensive sources of energy than our alternatives (uranium ore is a small proportion of the cost stack, and Australia would still need to import nuclear fuel)
2. Nuclear isn't commercially viable in energy markets with very high levels of variable renewable energy where they have to be economically curtailed on an almost daily basis (our coal plants are all closing for this reason)