Sure, if you handwave the unsolved-at-scale technical problems with grid energy storage and make a series of generous assumptions about future technology, that's probably true. Nuclear technology has been up to the task for the past fifty years.
> Another factor that this article should have mentioned is the reliability of the global uranium ore -> fuel rods supply chain.
Seawater extraction is an option if that's ever a real concern, as is using breeder reactors to reprocess spent fuel. And the exact same issues apply to storage.
Yes, the process involves production of Pu-239, which is weapon-grade and may raise proliferation concerns. But for the US, or France, or UK, or India, or China (and a bunch of others) this should not be a concern, since they officially have nuclear weapons.
It's mostly the political will, and the public opinion (which are interlinked) that limit a nuclear renaissance. If you talk about subsidies, please remember how huge were the subsidies that kickstarted the current solar and wind booms; early panels and wind towers were completely uneconomical by today's standards, and R&D costs were colossal. But now, with the technology streamlined and the economies of scale kicking in, solar is competitive even without subsidies.
The same could happen to a new crop of nuclear technology, much cleaner and more efficient than the kind we've inherited from 1970s.
Not if you use Thorium breeder reactors.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/08/10/worlds-largest-grid-f...
> Battery rollout: "AGL Energy has committed to build 850 MW of battery-based assets by 2024. To that end, Torrens Island marks the first project to be constructed at the site of a fossil-fuel power plant. It won’t be the last, however, as big batteries are planned for New South Wale’s Liddell coal plant and Victoria’s Loy Yang facility. In January, AGL Energy revealed that it had secured both Wärtsilä and Fluence under non-exclusive framework agreements to supply up to 1 GW of large-scale battery storage."
So, would it make more economic sense for this 1GW battery-storage system to be replaced by a nuclear power plant? Australia after all is one of the places with the most high-grade uranium ore, being among the top three exporters.
Here's an example of more reliable analysis:
> "To illustrate this point, the 2,430 MW Vogtle nuclear plant could be expected to generate 21 million MWh per year. That is enough to power about 1.75 million residential households. Meanwhile, a hypothetical 3,500 MW solar power plant would be able to produce just under 6 million MWh of electricity per year. This number is enough to power only 500,000 homes, which is considerably less than nuclear power. For solar to produce as much electricity as is generated by a nuclear power plant, it would require about 13,000 MW of utility-scale solar capacity, which about four times as much as built in the existing plants. However, the cost to build this 13,000 MW facility would be $12.1 billion, which is still just 50% of the cost of the $25 billion Vogtle nuclear plant."
https://www.solarfeeds.com/mag/solar-power-vs-nuclear-power/...
People might even keep a stock on hand.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrie_nucl%C3%A9aire_en_Fr...
Currently the capacity factor for french nuclear reactors is less than 50% because of various technical issues and maintenance schedule slippage.
It will go further down because of a very hot summer and regulations on maximum released water temperatures.
Nobody would use this kind of lithium ion battery for grid storage. Instead use Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePo4) batteries- no cobalt needed. LiFePo4 batteries are absolutely good enough right now for grid storage.
Utilities are not generally in a habit of reflexively choosing the most expensive alternative, even if some have plumped for nukes in places where ratepayers have no say.
Lithium batteries have the momentum and are dropping in price because of the EV cars revolution happening right now. When solar revolution will happen i utility scale, the utility-type batteries that will emerge may be seriously different.
If you can do it by this winter it would solve inflation, enable a complete sanction packet against Russian oil and gas, solve several political conflicts within EU in regard to the Ukraine war, eliminate the food shortage problem and significant reduce the cost of farming, make a large dent in reducing global warming, improve GDP, and boost prosperity in general.
What I can't predict is when some of them will become competitive enough to matter, and thus used in some large infrastructure projects.
Just this week in Europe, during the summer vacations and when energy usage is at the lowest point during the year, the energy market price still jumps by 3000% when the wind go from high to low.
A couple years back, "60 Minutes" ran a segment of somebody developing grid batteries with seawater and dirt. They didn't store much energy per weight and volume, but who cares for grid batteries. I wonder what happened to this technology.
Even if less efficient, you can get enormous potential storage from pumped water with relatively simple machines compared to massive battery farms.
He also said the inertia of a falling weight is enormous, and would help stabilize the grid.
Now if you use water, pipes and pumps, instead of solid materials, now we’re talking. It’s called pumped hydro storage and is the number one grid scale storage in the world.
It is #1, just now, because a lot already existed. They cost a great deal to build, back when. New ones would cost as much, but a small variation is much cheaper, not needing a dam or a watershed.
A small variation on a bad idea can be a very good idea.
Except if water, pipes and pumps are used, as water is heavy, and pipes and pumps can transport a lot of it very efficiently and cheaply. That’s called pumped hydro storage and is currently the #1 grid scale storage in the world.
Trying to do the same with solid materials can sound like a genius idea but it’s really not.
That is why vertical motion in a disused mineshaft is attractive. A single 10,000t weight hanging from a winch has just one moving part, the winch, and cable all in tension, with no preparation of the shaft sides; everything is concentrated at the top. The mineshaft provides isolation from environmental disruption.
You get much the same effect with a float attached to a cable down to a pulley augered into the sea floor; thence to an onshore winch. The cable and pulley are exposed to sea (or lake) water, but you get the advantage that the winch may be shared among as many cable reels as you like, with only simple clutches. A 20m diameter float displaces 4000 tons of water, and the sea floor may be much more than a km deep.
(In principle you could share a winch drive among lots of mineshafts, but they are rarely close enough together. You could bore more, but that drives up cost. The world is absolutely perforated with disused mineshafts.)
Assuming utilities will do the stupid, expensive thing leads to failed analyses.
Sounds like an Elon Musk solution. Make it bigger, taller, make more of it, and somehow it’ll bend basic physics facts to become the ground breaking disruptor technology of the next century.
Mineshaft storage is very, very efficient, but has an upper limit on energy per mineshaft determined by its depth and how much weight fits in it. The cost of the winch apparatus is amortized over that amount. More mineshafts means more total storage.
Pumped hydro has very, very low cost per Wh stored, but kinda high per W in and out. But thousands of pumped hydro systems were already built, almost, so seem free; they just needed pumps added.
Synthetic H2 and NH3 are very, very cheap per Wh stored. W out uses existing turbines, so seems cheap. W in depends on your electrolysers, which are improving fast.
In batteries, cost per Wh stored has been large, but is different in different chemistries. In a better chemistry it is lower. Flow batteries have lower cost per Wh stored, for any liquid chemistry, but higher per W in or out; and need plumbing and pumps.
Details matter. Numbers matter. Dumb choices make dumb designs. Dumb designs can be improved on.
Drawing conclusions based on dumb choices is just dumb.
Musk is dumb, but just barely smart enough to hire smart people and, sometimes, let them be smart. So, Hyperloop was just dumb, no matter who works on it. Starship is kinda smart, depending on what you can think of to do with it. Mars colonization is dumb. Starlink could possibly be smart, depending on a lot of details.
A wholly new capability, like radically cheaper mass to orbit, can often enable smart ideas. Super-expensive mass to orbit was good enough for weather satellites, planetary probes, and geosynch COMSATs.
That one had the winch and motor / generator at the sea floor, and a big rack of floats. It was, of course, too expensive. This is a common feature of energy storage ideas: people seem to love to promote the most stupidly expensive version of a good idea, and then give up when it is shot down for that.
Certainly, any scheme where you put complicated electromechanical stuff on the sea floor, it will be expensive. And likewise, where the expensive part is only usable with one "unit" of storage. Or anyway it just costs too much or needs perfect weather or something. (E.g., Energy Vault (NRGV) is stupid and their investors will lose their shirts.)
But there is usually a simple variation that lacks these problems.
The weight system only requires part of a hillside, has a pretty small environmental footprint, and there are lots and lots of hills.
The rail system needs maintained rolling stock and maintained rails. The mineshaft method is overwhelmingly cheaper and more reliable, because all that must be kept working is an electric winch. There are lots and lots of disused mineshafts.
There are indeed many unused mineshafts, but a shaft would be only suitable for a small weight, maybe enough for a single house. This does not scale.
Algorithms have been created to use GIS data to automatically find potential PHES sites. There are lots of candidates. Australia, for example, has 300x more potential that it would need for a 100% renewable grid.
If not, maybe there is a box canyon you can close the end of with a dam.
In places, they have flattened a convex hilltop and used the material to make a dike.
Usually you don't need anywhere near as much storage volume as a typical hydroelectric dam reservoir holds.
> efficiently
Are you sure about that? He said the losses due to pipe friction were considerable.
If the railroad is already built, and disused, that drives down cost.
Cost is what matters most.
The sweet spot for storage is near-zero opex, very low per-Wh stored capex, and cheap capex per-W in and, particularly, out. Thus, weight for watt-hours, and simple motor / generator for watts in and out.
Synthetic fuel has the appeal that the stored energy is readily tanked and transported, and very saleable; enough so to overcome low round-trip efficiency, expensive electrolysers for W-in, and complicated combined-cycle turbines for W-out.
This is partly because it needs no watershed, and partly because transmission lines mean it need not be local.
Anyway pumped hydro is only one of many equally viable alternatives. All will be used. Eventually which ones are cheapest will become clear.
None of these things exist at a large scale except for pumped hydro / water gravity, and that requires very convenient topography and geology to work. Generally, any non-chemical storage system is overpriced (too inefficient) or a maintenance disaster.
Not much storage exists because it has not been built yet. It has not been built yet because we haven't the renewable generating capacity to charge it from yet. Thus, we are spending on renewable generating capacity first, and lately factories that will build storage systems.
Battery storage is the most expensive variety. Round-trip efficiency is not very important anymore. I.e., other concerns dominate now. Anyway, gravity storage efficiency has always been fine.
With current and projected reserves we can manage intra-day requirements for the whole world. This is the we mine it all option.
But we need intra-year storage capacity.
Nuclear is clearly the easier and only option (and the most environment-friendly to me, considering the mining requirements)
Electricity to H2 to electricity has horrendous efficiency (about 20% at most IIRC). We'd be much better off CO2-speaking using it to replace coal in steel production, and replace gas in fertilizer production. Both of which are proven tech (but not globally deployed, as coal and gas are cheap)
https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/round-trip-...
The round trip efficiency is 30% or more and rising with better electrolysis and reverse electrolysis being developed.
For hydrogen, we have to solve the horrible cycle efficiency of its storage. It's not so bad for use as a fuel (e.g. for airplanes), but as static storage hydrogen is currently a very bad choice.
But hydrogen efficiency is improving as fast as all renewable tech.
I tell you what: show me a cost optimized renewable energy system in which the electrolyzers have a capacity factor of 5%.
It's bizarre how anti-nuclear activists point at problems caused by anti-nuclear activism and ask, like Eric Andre, "how could nuclear power do this?"
That anti-nuclear movement was huge in the 1970s, and was successful in many states and countries at creating major roadblocks to new power plants. Their success in California back then is big reason why the last plants are going offline now, and there haven't been any new plants since Diablo Canyon, which was started in the 1960s. To say that anti-nuclear groups weren't influential until the 21st century is absurd.
The insurance issue is similar identical to other energy sources. Why isn't hydro power insured in the case of accidental flooding? If they were it wouldn't be possible to run them at current energy prices. We don't see fossil fuel plants being insured against increased air pollution, nor do they have to pay if people around them get sick. If a hydrodam causes a flood, then there will be a flood. Hopefully those people downstream has their own insurance.
The storage problem has not been solved because we do not have the technology. There is no evidence that the technology os possible.
The long term waste (not much in quantity, but it does mount up. A few million litres at the moment I believe ??) has to be stored for periods of time on the order of hundreds of thousands of years.
There is no way we can write a warning sign that we know can be read for that long.
We cannot build a structure that will last that long.
There are no places on this planet that we can be sure are stable for that long.
It is making future generations pay for our current consumption.
Okay, then in places where wind/solar/storage aren't up to snuff we'll just keep burning coal.
O_o There's been a significant and influential anti-nuclear movement for the last 60 years...
The technical issues are solved.
The political issue is that the "green lobby" will not accept any nuclear waste storage solution.
Biggest, by a large margin, is capex which simply prices it completely out of the market.
Storage has /been solved/ for decades.
High Level Waste is only a tiny fraction of total waste. As it stands, all of the HLW created by all the nuclear plants in the world could be kept in a football field sized area. The vast majority of the rest of the generated waste will decay to to harmlessness during the lifetime of a plant.
HLW regulations around transport are so high in most countries that the standards for transport casks has made them practically indestructible. They can literally be hit by trains and no be breached. Solutions like those developed by Deep Isolation also effectively solve any long term storage problem for the HLW.
Operation will start next year.
Lithium Sulfur looks VERY PROMISING, and other schemes and grid-specific chemistries will be developed.
Within the timeframe of any new nuclear construction, you cannot predict the cost targets with respect to any of these industries/technologies: they all are in prime economies of scale and technological improvement curves. I don't think they will improve as well as the last decade where solar dropped double-digits per year, but we'll see.
Nuclear keeps trying to say the scale isn't solvable with wind/solar/battery. That is a completely unproven/unsubstantiated claim. It's basically FUD. The materials being targeted for near-term alt energy will be massively scalable.
In France it is, and has been successfully for more than 33 years [1]
That is, assuming that grid scale storage is in fact viable.
France's nuclear fleet has an all-in cost of 7c/kWh, which is roughly the same as the cost of solar or wind power in France, but without the need for storage or smart grids that doubles the cost of solar/wind. (For all this remember that France has about a third of the insolation of California or Arizona per year, or maybe half at best in some places.)
I don't think that is correct. This is a table of average insolation for different cities around the world derived from NASA's Surface meteorology and Solar Energy data set: http://stalix.com/isolation.pdf
Los Angeles gets 5.4 kWh/m^2/day. San Francisco gets 4.9. Lyon, Paris, and Toulouse get 3.7, 3.3, and 3.7 respectively.
So you don't have power outages on windless nights.
> backup fossil fuel
In practice this means fossil fuels become the baseload power source.
False. In the immediate future, synthetic anhydrous ammonia will displace it. Extracting NG will be too expensive to compete, because the only cost of ammonia will be capex. The more you make, the less it costs.
The previous poster talked about using fossil (or any other means) to supply the mismatch between the supply and demand at the times where such a mismatch might exist. This is completely unrelated to baseload, it could in fact be larger than baseload. Note that such a mismatch would also exist for nuclear (dependent on overprovisioning). However it would in general be only needed of short periods of time.
Because if your baseload is your minimum power consumption (which generally occurs at night) and you have a windless night (therefore your renewables are generating 0 power), your "gas peakers" will have to provide the entire baseload amount of power.
China is building solar in Chile, at their antipodes, and a transmission line back to China with only 50% loss, for solar energy through the night.
As the name baseload power implies, it would have to be providing power all the time and that's not what is needed.
It is one of the main reason why investing in fossil fuel energy when countries turn to wind power is fairly good choice. The plant has lower costs in terms of fuels, when it burn fuel it does so when the market price is at the highest possible, and it get paid regardless from the government. The government are also locked into continuing this scheme as the alternative is to not have the reserve energy when needed which makes voters very angry.
Burning fossil fuels when the price is lowest and without any government subsidies is just something people with too much fossil fuel can afford to do.
As much as I detest the pro nuclear shilling, this isn't a valid comparison. 250MWh of storage is only useful for very short term energy arbitrage and isn't a replacement for always-on power.
The real answer is a mix of solar, solar-thermal, wind, storage, and combined cycle plants for the holes (ideally eventually powered by plant-based and solar-cracked hydrogen/methane/etc.). This mix costs a bit more than nuclear does now, but doesn't have the huge massive downsides of total dependency on and subservience to a handful of companies operating out of the five or so countries that are allowed to produce fuel (as well as all the existential risk stuff, concentration of risk to mistakes/attacks, horrible un-accounted externalities and supply chain fragility). It will also likely cost less to build it at a time such that it would still be completed before a nuclear plant which was comissioned now.
Of course that's all moot because the balance *right now* is running existing fossil fuel infrastructure more vs. building solar and not storing the energy. And in this equation, the cost of solar is a tiny fraction of nuclear.
Wind and solar are cheap now because their fuel cost is zero and the cost of grid reliability is borne by us - consumers. In a better world, the cost of balancing the grid at night should be borne by a solar PV generator because it caused the problem.
Even if you match the energy output of a solar and nuclear plant, the component of time is ignored. On a grid powered by solar, where will energy come from at night? How many batteries will you construct? The scale of these batteries is again something that’s dismissed by claims of continental-scale grids but has that been achieved anywhere? All the batteries in the world combined can power à giga watt scale grid for hours. That’s right, hours.
Nuclear is a solution in the here and now. It buys us time to sort through these problems while we work towards a better future.
Also why do you only mention solar and not wind? Maybe because eit would make your argument less convincing? The wind still blows at night, so you do not need battery storage to provide all the demand during the night.
Why are the same simplistic arguments being brought forward again and again. They have all been debunked.
Whereas with solar and wind, you need to do both, because you need the overprovisioned capacity to recharge the batteries.
But this is really a question of economics, the mix of how much storage you want to include is really a question of cost and the specific grid. One should also say that pretty much every grid already has some level of overprovisioning, because otherwise you run into problems when some exceptional events hit.
In the end why would you pay for more expensive nuclear if you can get more capacity for the same price with wind/solar. So it is cheaper to build the overprovisioning with that. Moreover if the current trends for storage prices continue then things become cheaper still.
Is it enough wind to meet all the demand at night? And what happens when it stops blowing as much as expected for a long period of time[0]? You still need baseline power generation for quite some time to come until those questions that, well, keep getting hand waved away are solved.
0: https://fortune.com/2021/09/16/the-u-k-went-all-in-on-wind-p...
The wind doesn't blow as strongly at night. It's much calmer.
Solar + battery is great in those locations, and basically no one is aruging using nuclear when solar and battery is viable for 365 days of the year. Australia has a fairly large desert where such assumption would be true. Finland, Sweden, Germany, France, UK and most of Europe do not have reliable 365 days of sun each year. There aren't many investors spending their money to build solar + storage in northern Finland.
The state where the mega batteries are installed uses about ~32 GWh total a day. An 850 MWh doesn't even come close to covering their needs. Covering ~2.6% of their load is equivalent to keeping power on for about 40 minutes.
>Solar + battery is great in those locations, and basically no one is aruging using nuclear when solar and battery is viable for 365 days of the year. Australia has a fairly large desert where such assumption would be true.
Deserts actually make for the worst place to install solar. Dust / sand covering panels substantially lowers their efficiency (to near zero), and keeping them clean involves a lot of water (Can you guess where it's hardest to get water? Yep, a desert). And lastly, because the deserts are so far away from everyone else, there is significant transmission loss.
Yes this is generally my argument. If you take the money you would spend on nuclear and spend it instead on solar, wind, gridscale storage, as well as EV and home battery rebates, you end up with a much more robust distributed energy production grid with very low maintenance costs. I think the idea of including rebates for home batteries and EVs is an important one, because it means that when major parts of the power line system are knocked out for some reason, you still have a lot of distributed storage.
You can also begin energy production with a solar and battery roll out MUCH sooner than new nuclear construction. From a climate change perspective, producing clean energy sooner is a big deal.
And we should not overlook that nuclear energy is a single target for terrorist attack and requires a powerful state to manage security for the plant and its supply chain, while batteries and renewables require no such thing. From a libertarian/anarchist perspective, we can have a weaker state and still have good energy production with renewables.
EDIT: I am also realizing that handing out a bunch of rebates to the voters for new stuff (rooftop solar, home batteries, new EVs) would be WAY more politically popular than "lets pay now for a big monolithic nuclear power plant that takes 20 years to build." If you want a plan that actually works, keeping the voters happy seems like an important component.
But you need to add that Renewable solution only last 20 years vs 60 for nuclear. That can be seen like triple the cost you factored in already.
And also, your renewable energy source won’t work 100% of time and not at 100% of the capacity. Which also implies that you need to build multiple time what you planned to really get that planned capacity.
I don’t know what you mean. I proposed spending the same total amount.
> And also, your renewable energy source won’t work 100% of time and not at 100% of the capacity. Which also implies that you need to build multiple time what you planned to really get that planned capacity.
This was already factored in to the calculation I was agreeing with. They said that to get sufficient capacity in renewables considering reduced availability, it still costs 1/2 what nuclear costs.
I will copy and paste the relevant section from that comment for clarity:
>> "To illustrate this point, the 2,430 MW Vogtle nuclear plant could be expected to generate 21 million MWh per year. That is enough to power about 1.75 million residential households. Meanwhile, a hypothetical 3,500 MW solar power plant would be able to produce just under 6 million MWh of electricity per year. This number is enough to power only 500,000 homes, which is considerably less than nuclear power. For solar to produce as much electricity as is generated by a nuclear power plant, it would require about 13,000 MW of utility-scale solar capacity, which about four times as much as built in the existing plants. However, the cost to build this 13,000 MW facility would be $12.1 billion, which is still just 50% of the cost of the $25 billion Vogtle nuclear plant."
> https://www.solarfeeds.com/mag/solar-power-vs-nuclear-power/...
For seasonal storage you need a hydrogen economy. H2 is very very expensive and has never been rolled out at scale. Not a single large gas turbine to burn pure H2 has ever been build.
In the middle of a crisis it's better to go for proven and economic technologies than trying to invent something completely new and untestet.
Nuclear's position at this point is "we had a meh run, but next generation will be better, pinky promise".
On a global scale for the past fifty years we had 2 meltdowns, a country attacking another's nuclear facilities as a threat, and no clear replacement plan for the aging reactors in most countries even as they are way past the set date for decommission ing, and se still don't see how to cheaply deal with the waste.
People tend to brush the "political problems" under the rug, but they are real issues either way, so not taking them into account when doing comparisons wouldn't be fair.
There is an argument to say that on balance the pros outweigh the cons.
Grid storage technology is already there with pumped hydro storage(PHS). As 90% of built and newly building grid storage is already PHS. It is political problems and inertia that's holding it back. To be clear, I'm referring to off the river closed-loop PHS, which doesn't need a huge river check dam, flood zone, huge population relocation or ecological issues. All it needs is two places with area of 1sqkm each some hundred meter elevation apart. There is ANU study that claims we have enough of such sites for needed storage. Look at how fast China is building PHS recently. I think PHS approvals, even for closed-loop, in US are as hard to get as nuclear, which is holding it back.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/01/05/sustainable-pumped-hy...
https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2021/10/05/aussie-scie...
> Seawater extraction is an option if that's ever a real concern
Hmmm.... Hand waving unsolved at scale technical problems
They have very high double standards in Nuclearstan.
Don't worry, they're lobbying to lower those standards in order to be more cost-competitive with renewables.
I remind you the double standard involved criticizing renewables "at scale", so a few problematic breeder reactors won't dispel the hypocrisy.
Also, the main reason we haven't invested in breeder reactors is that it turns out uranium isn't actually scarce enough to justify it.
wind/solar/storage are on actively improving cost curves that even gas turbine is losing to. No one knows the price target of wind/solar/battery in 10-20 years, but I'd guess it is at least half the cost in real dollars of today.
Nuclear proponents are pushing all the media outlets because they are in the same boat as coal: LCOE is so much lower for wind/solar that electric companies lose money on them relative to alt energy. Only base load is a viable role onthe grid, and gas turbines beat them at that handily (although with a carbon tax who knows).
I'm not opposed to keeping existing nuclear plants online with some subsidies, but new nuclear plants? Come on. And I am a huge fan of those LFTR presentations and strongly believe next gen nuclear will be viable once a stable price point can be targeted.
What are these problems, exactly? I see videos and news stories about grid batteries being successfully deployed for short term management and how pumped hydro is basically a big cheap gravity battery, but I'm not a civil/electrical engineer, so I accept there could easily be elephants in the room here.
We need O(100x) current production to fully switch away from hydrocarbons. That's a lot of reservoirs or a lot of cobalt that have to be mined.
"Rare earths" are a column (edit: ha ha see below) in the periodic table, and are not used in batteries.
Some types of electric motors use rare earths, others do not.
Here's a primer: https://blog.ucsusa.org/josh-goldman/electric-vehicles-batte...
Of course, that 50% efficiency cost seems like a bit of a bear in itself. If you lose half of the stored power, that would seem to significantly drive up the total lifecycle cost of a Watt of wind power. (Recognizing, of course, that not all of it must be stored.)
The cost and inefficiency (==cost) of storage seems like an unfortunate thing to handwave away in a conversation about relative costs.
It's just that since we live in a world where we burn lots of gas, we don't need to do the "generate synthetic methane" step, we can just burn less of it.
Sure, we could spend billions on generating synthetic methane from renewables while at the same time burning natural methane, but that would be stupid.
The more you use it, the less it costs, per kWh.
If you remove liability and the insanity of our current methods of waste storage the costs become outright cheap, especially in an imagined future where there is massive investment into new nuclear infrastructure.
By the metrics people use to judge nuclear, hydro would be the most expensive power source known to man if you were to build one today. Just the land costs would make the entire project nonsensical if viewed solely in that frame.
Those are just artificial constructs though. In a world where there is actual human suffering (in the west) due to physical energy shortages the politics (and thus cost models) may shift rapidly.
The reason costs are high is not political, it's that the systems involved need to be over-engineered relative to say, a coal-fired power plant, where a breakdown or fire will create a big mess, but not a 100-year exclusion zone. Water pumps for nuclear reactor cooling systems, for example, are the most robustly engineered (and expensive) pumps ever built, as far as I know.
For example, California's decision to close the San Onofre reactor was mostly related to maintenance costs, as their steam generator system was shaking itself to pieces and had to be shut down due to the radioactive loop leaking into the non-radioactive steam generation system. The rational conclusion is that long-term maintenance of nuclear reactors is an expensive proposition, due to catastrophic failure modes:
https://www.fairewinds.org/nuclear-energy-education/san-onof...
Which is not an issue with newer reactor designs, which are no less proven than grid storage.
In comparison to something like grid storage where one can site, build and operate, in less time than the make a minor nuclear design correction. Grid storage can correct mistakes at very low cost and on a very rapid cycle compared to nuclear.
Newer reactor designs are well simulated but have zero real world implementation.
To cite uncertainty about storage is only to admit you have no argument.
Proponents of new nuclear solutions would argue that reactor design, which is today at 4th generation, has greatly evolved and improved in too many ways to count since the late 60’s.
> If you remove liability and the insanity of our current methods of waste storage the costs become outright cheap, especially in an imagined future where there is massive investment into new nuclear infrastructure.
You are misinformed. Nuclear power operators do not have to covee liability costs (no insurance is willing to cover nuclear disaster, so this is a massive subsidy). Also the cost of long term storage is typically not included in cost calculations for nuclear power either. Despite of this nuclear is more expensive than renewables.
> By the metrics people use to judge nuclear, hydro would be the most expensive power source known to man if you were to build one today. Just the land costs would make the entire project nonsensical if viewed solely in that frame.
Just because you say it doesn't make it true. In fact hydro projects have to typically compensate land owners when building a dam.
I agree, but: It's 100% impossible to replace the need for gas in the short timespan of five months until the next winter, no matter how much money or resources we throw at the problem. The absolute majority of heating is done with gas and major parts of the electrical grid depend on it. We cannot replace it with renewables in time. We need gas or people will freeze to death in the worst case, there are no alternatives to the LNG imports in the short-term, IMO.
And the countries that can export LNG, including the US, are aware of their strong negotiating position and want long-term contracts.
Europe may not have a choice. :/
“asap” LOL
Here in the real world, we have Germany, which has the strongest pro-green anti-nuclear agenda in Europe, but is (1) building coal plants, (2) financing Russian war and (3) blocking sanctions on Russia to save its economy (along with Hungary who are doing it for political reasons).
The green agenda is a massive failure in the real world. Maybe it will work in 50 years (when “possible technological development” in batteries catches up) but not right now.
That claim may be a little out of date, especially as the new government plans to phase out coal by 2030. It's true that a new coal power plant was opened in 2020, but it was "expected to be the last"[0]. Admittedly, it's also true that the country is temporarily reactivating old coal power plants to reduce Russian gas imports.[1]
[0] https://ifrf.net/combustion-industry-news/new-coal-power-pla...
[1] https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/germany-reactiv...
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/05/09/hungary-slovak...
https://www.politico.eu/article/eus-russian-oil-ban-stalls-a...
It's all the same. "Green" energy failed, even for one of its biggest proponents.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-coal-tops-wind-as-primary-elec...
> In the first half of 2021, coal shot up as the biggest contributor to Germany's electric grid, while wind power dropped to its lowest level since 2018.
Nuclear on the other hand which, if you read what proponents said in the 50s, 60s and 70s, was going to give us unlimited free energy, is somehow deemed a success?
Now that renewables are essentially eating fossils and nuclears lunch we are supposed to believe that some sort of nuclear technological revolution is just around the corner and all the high costs are due to the "bad government regulations" anyway?
If you eliminate gas and coal powered plants then the costs of nuclear plant lifecycle is incidental compared to economic losses that a country would encounter if they relied on solar and wind.
The dirty secret about "clean energy" is that it isn't actually very clean. When you eliminate big coal plants and try to use solar or wind, what you are actually doing is moving your dependence from coal to natural gas.
Those wind farms and solar farms require significant investment in numerous smaller style natural gas plants in order to function correctly.
So, right now, when people think they are moving away from fossil fuels they are really just moving to natural gas that is supplanted by solar and wind when conditions are ideal for them to work properly.
If you want to eliminate your dependence on natural gas, then, the only feasible option is nuclear.
no. you need gas for nuclear AND renewables. it really does not matter. it's bullshit to argue against it unless you show the world a way to have an on/off button for a nuclear plant. (if you do, you might be very very very rich)
> Load-following plants are typically in between base load and peaking power plants in efficiency, speed of start-up and shut-down, construction cost, cost of electricity and capacity factor.
as said, they don't remove gas and it's stupid to assume since your article specially talks about france which is heavy on gas for peaks.
Why the progress is possible only for Solar and storage and in your opinion not possible for nuclear? Nuclear could be cheaper if people would not be paranoid about it. What I think could happen is this new smaller reactors could be deployed in countries more rational, irrational countries will have to buy energy from the others.
Each decade, nuclear builds also trend towards getting more expensive. Like it or not, it at least partially Fukushima Daiichi that killed the nuclear expansion US. The AP1000 had new missile shield requirements that was slowing it down before that happened, and then the Japan accident added even more regulation. There was an anti-nuclear chair of the regulatory commission at the time, and yes, this is fundamentally political, but it's hard to push back on these specifics.
The alternatives are cheaper and cause no such problems.
> Why the progress is possible only for Solar and storage and in your opinion not possible for nuclear?
Nuclear had more than triple the amount of time and significantly more subsidies for showing this technological scaling.
> Nuclear could be cheaper if people would not be paranoid about it.
People were super enthusiastic about nuclear for the first 40 years. Even after Tschernobyl nuclear opponents were largely portrait as unrealistic hippies in most countries and policies were certainly driven by people very favourable to nuclear. Even Germany one of the most nuclear sceptic countries only decided after fukushima to stop nuclear.
What is the technological breakthrough that we already know about that would suddenly change the progress massively?
>What I think could happen is this new smaller reactors could be deployed in countries more rational, irrational countries will have to buy energy from the others.
What people tend to forget is that about 40-50% of a nuclear power plant is the same as any other thermal power plant. We generally don't build small coal plants either, the scales don't work well.
The reason why wind and solar have very different scaling is because their principle of electricity generation is very different.
If you have two stocks one in exponential just starting and the other being slowly growing linearly for a long time, which one would you invest in? In particular if indications are that both stocks will continue on the same curves. That's the situation we have with nuclear vs renewables.
Very unlikely. Nuclear costs are sky high only because in the last decades it was suppressed rather than invested in and improved. Had it seen the same level of support the wind and solar energy have, we'd have a dirt-cheap abundance of nuclear power, with very little carbon emissions. Take away the red tape and scaremongering, and wind/solar/storage combination will be left very far behind in costs and efficiency.
> Very unlikely. Nuclear costs are sky high only because in the last decades it was suppressed rather than invested in and improved. Had it seen the same level of support the wind and solar energy have, we'd have a dirt-cheap abundance of nuclear power, with very little carbon emissions. Take away the red tape and scaremongering, and wind/solar/storage combination will be left very far behind in costs and efficiency.
And your sources are? Nuclear power has received significantly more subsidies than solar and wind combined [1] (note you can find similar numbers for Europe) . The myth that somehow solar and wind received more subsidies is just propaganda.
[1] https://cen.acs.org/articles/89/i51/Long-History-US-Energy-S...
[1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Too_much... [2] https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/greenpeace...
Nuclear cost in South Korea, Japan, and India is generally under $3000/kW, according to this peer-reviewed study. See Figure 12: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
Now let's model overall grid costs, here: https://model.energy/
Pick a country and "fetch wind and solar." By default the modeler doesn't include nuclear, so click "show advanced assumption settings." Check "dispatchable technology 2."
This defaults to a nuclear cost of $6000/kW. Leave it there or try $3000. It assumes a nuclear plant lifespan of only 25 years; the average plant age in the US is 40 years and expected lifespan for many plants is 60 years, so set it to whatever you think is more realistic. The default also sets the discount rate for nuclear to twice what it has for everything else, so fix that.
Run the model. With any reasonable assumptions, many countries end up with at least some nuclear on their grid, and some get their lowest grid cost with all nuclear. The US has some of the best wind and solar resources and relatively high nuclear costs (for now anyway), but the US situation doesn't generalize to the whole world.
If governments provide guarantees for the loans, a discount rate of 3% is not unreasonable.
Set it like that, and it spits out a price of €32.6/MWh.
Now, to make it even more reasonable to emerging economies, assume that through mass production and a relaxation of security requirements to less paranoid levels, the overnight cost can be reduced to €1500, you get $21.3/MWh.
This is what the price of electricity SHOULD be, if we want the world to stop depending on hydrocarbons. (Not just a few rich countries.)
"Has Russia Been Financing Western Environmentalism?" (2022) [1]
"Putin Is Funding Green Groups to Discredit Natural Gas Fracking" (2017) [2]
"German green group branded a Russian ‘puppet’ over Nord Stream II gas pipeline" (2021) [3]
[1]: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18330/russia-funding-envi...
[2]: https://www.newsweek.com/putin-funding-green-groups-discredi...
[3]: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/german-green-group-brande...
The greens in Germany have consistently worked on destroying Germany's nuclear energy generation, and now it is completely dependent on gas import from Russia, funding Putin's war with Ukraine.
I call bullshit on the absurd idea that the global failure of nuclear is due to these groups.
Indeed, the NYT article in the topic is discussing this very question.
Germany elected to build out a great deal of wind generation capacity rather than refurbish a much smaller capacity of aged, ramshackle nukes. That has worked out extremely well, and they continue.
Really? It has worked really well?? Thanks to these really well policies, Germany has an unbreakable dependence on Russian has [1] and has paid billions of euros to Putin's murderous regime since the start of the war with Ukraine [2].
If this is 'really well', I'd rather pass.
In conclusion, I suggest you start looking more rationally on energy generation, I sense a lot of anger and unexplained hatred towards nuclear power ('aged, ramshackle nukes' is not a rational sensible argumentation).
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/world/europe/germany-gas-...
It is a fact that the nukes shut down would have needed a great deal of expensive work to continue operating. Germany elected to spend the money on wind, instead, and it bought them more actually delivered wattage than the shut-down nukes had provided.
If nukes were not the most expensive power source going, I would be all for it.
Everyone including Germans have understood by now that phasing out nuclear was a mistake, but you still repeat that no, gas dependency good, nuclear power independence bad.
For some reason, you (incorrectly) presume that maintaining nuclear energy prevents building wind generators. Also, the money 'spent' on reactors is kinda paid off by customers who pay for the generated electricity.
Electrical power is also fungible. A kWh delivered is a kWh, whether generated on a nuke or in a wind turbine.
If we are talking about Korean export NPPs, the Barakh NPP has four reactors for a total of 24.4B$, producing 5.6GW(e). THis is about $4B/GW. If I plug in 4000 per MW (its euros, not $, but they're not too different right now) for the capital cost of nuclear in model.energy, increase the NPP lifetime to 40 years, and use US 2011 weather data, nuclear optimizes to zero.
I'll add that model.energy is looking at the best case for nuclear: providing baseload. Handling variability will incentivize storage, which means renewables will be at an increased advantage. Dispatchable demand of any kind, even slightly dispatchable (allowed to be off 10% of the time, say) also tilts the game toward renewables.
The 25 year lifespan for nuclear there may reflect economic obsolescence rather than technical lifespan. Energy technology is evolving quickly now, so investors may simply refuse to credit the promise of such long lifespans. Even in the US, there have been existing NPPs that shut down because they could not recoup their operating costs (granted, much of that was due to gas and also renewable subsidies, but with solar having dropped in cost by nearly an order of magnitude in the last decade it's a bold move to assume it won't keep falling.)
I would very much like to see a similar model that includes a demand curve. Preferably, customizable demand curves, to allow for modeling of e.g. flatter curves due to electric vehicle charging at night.
This is all just delaying the crossing point though. Nuclear fans are betting nuclear's costs fall while renewables and storage run into brick walls and stop getting cheaper. It's not clear why one should assume this, or why an investor should bet on that outcome. And it is just a financial bet; in the worst case for renewables they just come in a bit more expensive than nuclear, so it's not like the economy explodes.
Solar historically declines in cost by 24% for each cumulative doubling of production (of the solar hardware). Solar is about 4% of global electricity production now, so scaling it to saturation (just for current electricity demand, which will grow as the world becomes richer and more electrification replaces fossil heat) would drop the cost by another factor of 3.
This only worked while panels were the lion's share of the cost of a solar installation. These days, costs of real estate, installation and grid connection far exceed the cost of panels -- and those costs go up every year with labour costs rather than coming down.
Or are you talking labor-intensive installation onto residential rooftops? Well, stop doing that, it's kind of stupid.
Real estate costs are a tiny fraction of the cost of installed solar in much of the US, and in much of the world. A solar powered global economy will not be putting many panels on the small fraction of the world's surface that's unusually expensive, but will focus those panels on places where it's cheaper. It's the same reason we don't grow wheat in Manhattan.
Which isn't a ridiculous assumption, given their caveats and default options, unless you're trying to argue for 100% nuclear, in which case it renders any conclusion totally nonsensical.
(But if we start charging a lot of electric vehicles at night, the demand curves will flatten out anyway.)
Attempting to build just one hour of storage via lithium ion batteries would case the cost of batteries to skyrocket because 1 hour of global electricity use equates to 2,500 GWh. And annual battery output is only around 300 GWh. Supply shock would immediately drive up the cost of batteries.
So we're building those batteries anyway, because EVs are cheaper and better than ICE. It's just a bonus that they'll help roll out renewables too.
And as you correctly point out, most of these batteries are going to go to EVs rather than grid storage.
But if, as basically everyone acklowledges, we'll all be driving EVs, then we will charge them from the grid. So they'll be better than grid storage, they'll be responsive demand (with grid storage you need to send the electricity back to the grid, which incurs another efficiency loss).
But if we are going to predominantly use intermittent energy sources we'd need massive amounts of grid storage. Delivering this through batteries is not feasible. We need to conserve battery supply for things that cannot be directly powered from the grid, like vehicles. It's too precious to be squandered on grid storage
I'm not opposed to investing heavily in solar...it's the best long-term energy source we can hope for until we crack the fusion nut. However, until we have the resources in place to make it happen, fission is our best bet. This shouldn't be an either-or: we should be building both, as fast as we can. And once we have enough solar to power our collective needs consistently, we can decommission our nuclear plants and put this behind us.
Installing wind and solar is also much easier than installing NPPs. Solar installation does not require expensive highly trained labor, again because the installations are robust to installation mistakes.
That's why the number of solar power related deaths (Mainly, falling from roofs) far exceeds the single fatality from nuclear related incidents we had this century.
By insisting that storage is a trivial problem to solve, yet neglecting to actually share what your supposed solution is?
By insisting that storage costs are falling yet neglecting to specify the cost and for what technology?
By all means "correct" me all you like.
In fact, it's quite exactly like saying that, because nuclear is the fastest path to solving climate change.
Starting a nuke, we get no power out for a decade or more, and get much less power at the end than building renewables with the same money, which furthermore start displacing carbon immediately.
There is no reasonable expectation for substantially better costs for nukes. Anywhere they have to compete with $0 opex renewables, they will run at well under 50% capacity, thus more than doubling their per-kWh cost, making them even less competitive.
Thus, costs are not falling, and new starts are negligible. Even China, which asserts they will build 220 of them, has only started 10. The rest will be cancelled as their price is undercut, unless politics forces the matter. China is not cost- or value- driven. (Cf. "Ghost cities".)
On what basis do you make this assertion?
Because when it comes to renewables, I very rarely see any inclusion of the costs of additional large scale energy storage (probably because it still remains an unsolved issue) and I never see any inclusion of the cost of new transmission lines from any new renewables site.
The Germans have invested billions upon billions in becoming wholly renewable, with miles of new grid infrastructure (but next to no energy storage) and they are still at the mercy of Russian gas supplies... and dependant upon French nuclear power.
It's time to face reality and start investing in fission again, at least until fusion becomes a viable alternative.
The issue comes when people think that renewables are a panacea, and we should start building renewables capacity where it doesn't even make sense. For example; wind power is great in and around the North Sea, but makes little sense in central and eastern Europe. Solar power is great in Spain, Portugal and Italy, but the ROI is very poor anywhere north of the Alps.
Over the past decades, a couple of hundreds of plants have been build globally. Doing nuclear fission safely is a massively complex technological undertaking. While the basic principles are by and large the same, the concrete designs of each of those plants aren't similar. Therefor, decommissioning a nuclear plant is equally complex and expensive, and requires a per-case approach. And currently, there is a growing number of plants which are pretty much EOL, where upkeep costs outstrip revenue.
Sure, there's an argument to be made about the operational costs per kWh between solar / wind / nuclear relative to the revenue they generate over their lifespan. But compared to solar / wind, the perceived economical benefits of those solutions are also offset by their initial cost of construction and their decommissioning.
If consumers / voters / taxpayers assume that they get to enjoy cheap power while the costs of those won't ever land on their doorstep, they are in for a surprise.
For waste, there's a separate fund called the Nuclear Waste Fund in the US (and other nuclear-operating countries) that has a current balance of $55B.
Finland has proven this to be false.
...and frankly, so did the US even in the 1980s. The roadblock to storage misguided activism, not science or tachnology.
Reopen the Yucca storage facility. It has the space for literally ALL the US's spent fuel storage.
It took them more than a decade beyond schedule, and 5 billion euros beyond quoted cost.
The finally delivered only because it was clear the money would dry up either way. If they could have strung it out further, they would have
Now the problem with solar and wind is that those also have pretty large energy investment needs at the beginning and given that we still mostly run on hydrocarbons these will also look cheap (include a sizeable amount of externalities).
Other than that, you're right that these articles rarely mention the problem of the fissile uranium supply. From what I've read and heard, without breeder reactors, the known U235 reserves won't last long if we plan to switch the world over. (Not that it's a viable plan to build so many reactors in time.)
How is this possible, technologically or economically? It sounds like absolute fantasy in anything less than a decade.
> plausibly due to exports of crude oil from the USA
Our refineries are at max capacity. How is hoarding crude going to help anything? Exporting crude allows foreign refineries to assist with relieving the global shortage of refined products.
How are they pushing this and you claim it's "the real agenda", what are they claiming instead? Are you claiming the US got involved with the Ukrainian conflict in order to sell LPG to other countries?
There is little storage, yet, because it would be stupid to build out storage there is not enough renewable generating capacity, yet, to charge up. When there is, then storage will be built. All without you lifting a finger.
2021 figures:
> China was the biggest contributor, adding 121 GW to the continent’s new capacity. Europe and North America—led by the USA—took second and third places respectively, with the former adding 39 GW, and the latter 38 GW.
81% of new electricity generaton build globally was renewables last year.
True solar with storage is not economical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
(you have to compare cost of nuclear on first page with wholesale PV+storage energy on subsequent pages).
Did the pumped hydro dams they built alongside nuclear power plants replace the baseload? No, they took the cheap energy that was produced at times when it wasn't needed and provided it back at peak times. They literally increased the base load by propping it up when it would otherwise droop at night (mostly).
It charges, when electricity prices are low, which generally means off peak overnight.
In a future renewable grid, with zero dispatchable power it might be used on occaision to help meet the baseload, but it's almost certainly going to be used more during demand peaks, because that's when most electricity is used. Maybe in equatorial regions with a lot of solar, not much wind and no other energy sources it'll share baseload duties with the solar that charges it during the day, but unless the term baseload has lost all meaning (which I fear it has) storage is not ever providing baseload, since that would imply supplying that amount constantly and storage needs to absorb more energy than it returns.
I can't see a definition of 'baseload' provider that storage meets that solar doesn't for example.
The only studies you'll see are that they proved to be economical on a certain day, or maaaybe overnight. ...but there are zero studies that any solar and/or wind (even combined), can provide consistent power for a full year. ...because that is not currently possible with economical tech.
The problem is that “100 year”, “1,000 year” or worse events will require more than currently stored. Then, potentially millions of people will be at risk of injury or death from cold or heat.
Reliable generation of at least enough to cover survival seems necessary.
Okay, then we can keep gas power stations around for another 100 years and only turn them on for the few days they are needed. Probably, though, after 50 years we will have solved climate change and energy storage (or wiped ourselves out) anyway.
China – 288.32 GW. ...
United States – 122.32 GW. ...
Germany – 62.85 GW. ...
India – 38.63 GW. ...
Spain – 27.24 GW.These are just PEAK numbers that are totally useless when planning a grid.
It's tough to really get that ball rolling if that's your goal due to this marketing issue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
Duration: 23 min
Speaker: David Ruzic, Prof of Nuclear Engineering at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
"Don't underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with tapes" also applies here. The amount of energy you can deliver by transporting fuel rods by truck/train/ship is immense.
Capital costs is why Hawaii has traditionally imported oil versus having an undersea power connection to the continental US.
When costs are all capex, the more you use, the less it costs. (And, as with nukes, the less you use, the more it costs.)
But they do. Normally. A fraction of the fuel transmitted through the pipe will be lost, seals, punctures, breaks, medium changes, over-pressure release through venting and so on.
> Power lines do leak. It's called "line loss" and it's a significant factor in power distribution.
Not all that significant in short range transmission, and until we figured out HVDC a major factor in long range transmission but the number of HVDC links that are coming online is increasing rapidly making this much less of a problem. The gear used for this is very impressive stuff, it is a different level of semiconductor engineering than what you normally have kicking around the yard but it works and is deployed at scale already with very good results.
Power losses are measured in single digit percents per 1000km. That's not nothing of course, but it's sufficiently low to transmit power from windy places to less windy places and from sunny places to less sunny places.
????
> Currently, the most complete bottom-up inventory of natural gas system emissions is the 2012 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Greenhouse Gas Inventory (GHGI). (2) It estimates an overall system-wide methane loss rate of 6.2 Tg/yr of methane, or 1.3% of methane transported (Supporting Information (SI), Section 16) and that the transmission and storage sector (T&S) is the largest emitting segment of the natural gas industry, (2) accounting for about one-third of methane emissions.
> For T&S stations that are required to report to the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP), this study estimates total emissions to be 260% [215% to 330%] of the reportable emissions for these stations, primarily due to the inclusion of emission sources that are not reported under the GHGRP rules, updated emission factors, and super-emitter emissions.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.5b01669
Gas will literally bleed right through the seals at a certain rate, especially with the compressor motors, which is no different to the electrical losses from stepping voltage up/down.
And this is actually a huge problem with natural gas specifically because methane is an incredibly potent greenhouse gas... around 30x as potent as CO2 over 100 years. Losing a couple percent of your methane is a big deal. That is actually what is driving the push for electric-driven heat pumps for home use... it's better to lose a little bit of electricity than to have thousands of miles of poorly-maintained residential gas distribution that even in the best case are leaking highly potent methane through seals.
That said, there is only one submarine power cable connecting Norway and Germany, and it's been operational for one year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NordLink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HVDC_Europe.svg
https://np.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/9unimr/dutch_satiric...
It isn't enough to build solar and wind, you also have to build backup. This is currently done by coal and gas but in the future it has to switch to climate friendly sources of energy. A hydrogen economy is very very expensive.
Here's an example: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...
Also, I’m not sure those comparisons take into account the ~20 year lifespan of solar panels and windmills, versus the ~40-50 year lifespan of nuclear plants.
Finally, another factor that may drastically reduce the cost of nuclear is the fabrication of small modular reactors which eliminate custom construction/permitting and simplify installation.
The 40-50 year lifespan of a nuclear plant is also somewhat illusory, as planning on achieving that is a bet that competing technologies don't keep getting better.
SMRs are talked about as being cheaper, but they have inherent diseconomies of scale. They need more materials and components per unit power output than large NPPs, and have inherently worse neutronics (this is why NPPs got large). The putative economies of scale of manufacturing are first consumed clawing back this loss, and it's not clear they can even do that.
No, but there are limits on the amount of raw materials that said factories can use to produce equipment.
I believe a global renewable energy system can be constructed using only elements available in essentially unlimited amounts, and using those elements at a modest scale compared to industrial society as a whole.
Uh Lithium?
Utilities will choose the cheaper among many alternatives, not the most expensive; the which is why they are not building nukes.
Ironically ESG has guided capital away from extractive industries like this.
It's not a physical limitation, it's a timing of scaling limitation, and we haven't hit it in a hard way yet. Plenty of new lithium resources, and more being discovered all the time.
This is a generic problem with anti-renewable arguments: they argue against specific technologies rather than the entire class of possible technologies.
(And then they go and posit all sorts of as-yet unbuilt reactor types, blithely ignoring the irony.)
Aluminum is the most abundant metallic element on earth. Cobalt demand is already peaking. Copper and nickel have been produced in the millions of tons annually for a century, and will not slow down.
Personally though I really have always liked Geothermal!
Nukes, of course, have lots of other opex on top of the turbines, and also crippling capex.
Geothermal might be able to compete at very high latitudes where the alternative is shipping in synthetic ammonia from the tropics when wind flags and transmission lines don't deliver.
But steam turbine s are absolutely not getting any cheaper or more reliable.
It should be possible to say, given that power grid and this amount of solar, wind..... this would have happened in this region during that year.
"U.S. oil refiners’ margins smash records, but few plan to build more plants"
https://www.marketplace.org/2022/05/23/u-s-oil-refiners-marg...
Something I've been thinking about for a while: the best course of action to secure a nation is to build out renewables until the need for external fossil fuels is zero. Even if that means using renewables to make fossil fuels via a process like Fischer–Tropsch as a stop gap.
I also think it would be advantageous to start thinking about how to drive the cost of generation and distribution down until electricity is free or nearly free. This might sound utopian but imagine how secure and prosperous a society could be if energy was super cheap or free? We are moving towards an electrified future and at some point we will have to heat homes and charge cars with electric that will place significant demand on an ageing grid.
"Free" (as in, your taxes) energy for all is very likely to entirely wreck the economy.
Not to mention there are costs involved with maintenance which make that energy not free. Even ignoring the huge debt incurred by implementing such a solution, who will pay for the maintenance? Our taxes again?
What are the benefits of not paying energy? What innovation is not happening because the pesky electricity has a cost?
Most likely it would just become the country of choice to run computations (whether meaningful research or pointless crypto mining) - if we ignore the gargantuan tax rate this country will have.
Being independent is valuable, that's why I think everybody should source their electricity independently (eg. solar)
Probably the last big holdout for hydrocarbons will be aviation, but anywhere LH2 airframes start to move in, the old stuff will be wholly unable to compete. Transitioning the whole fleet will take a long time, though.
Except in some specific cases (Finland, other Arctic regions with long periods of low sunlight) I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage. Storage is the main cost barrier for 100% renewable-powered grids, but this is also an area where technological development is possible.
Much of the discussion of energy in the American media is pretty poor these days. For example, the solar tariff issue on China sourced PV - there are simply no US companies making panels of comparable quality (monocrystalline Si lasts longer and is more efficient). Concepts like requiring Chinese manufacturers to open factories in the USA if they want to sell in US markets would make sense but probably would violate some trade provision or other.
Another factor that this article should have mentioned is the reliability of the global uranium ore -> fuel rods supply chain. Costs vary significantly based on the purity of the ore (18% is the top, 0.1% is the economically viable limit) and like oil, uranium ore is not globally distributed (unlike sunlight and wind).
As far as Russia/Ukraine, the real agenda the US government seems to be pushing there is using that conflict to rapidly increase LNG exports to Europe from the US West/South coast, even though energy prices are spiking due to inflation (and plausibly due to exports of crude oil from the USA, allowed under that 2015 bill lifting that restriction). A far better plan for Europe would be to go 100% renewable asap, meaning no need for fossil fuel imports from any party. Yes, that's technologically possible, but would require massive economic investment.