The one nuclear plant in California makes 10% of the entire states electricity. And last night the state assembly voted 31/1 to not prematurely shut it down as planned.
It was interesting to see (thanks, Europe) how nuclear power plants are still somewhat susceptible to global climate change, since they require vast amounts of water below a certain temperature to run.
Nuclear plants can also be cooled with nearly zero water usage, using dry cooling (dump heat straight to air basically with air radiators). This is more expensive, but may make sense as climate change kicks in. It's perfectly doable and safe.
Today creating hydrogen from solar and burning it in a turbine is competitive with new built nuclear. Not that anyone suggests it for anything else than emergencies, since the round trip efficiency cost would be ludicrous.
Yet everyone just says "ok nuclear is the most expensive and always will be no matter what"
Add in a carbon fee and a low-carbon capacity market and all of a sudden nuclear would be the cheapest.
Markets are human constructs that are currently woefully messed up and leading us in dangerous directions.
Transmission lines are not but comparing how many HVDC lines you can get for the difference between renewables and a single nuclear reactor is laughable. This is not even mentioning the cost that has gone into building the current grid in a hub and spoke model around big centralized producers.
Not that we need to throw it away, but it is worth mentioning when talking nuclear. Especially new builds.
Power 2 X makes storage solved at costs lower or in line to nuclear. Not that anyone would accept those costs.
The real interesting research which is currently happening is around grid forming inverts. Being able create a country wide grid without any synchronous producers or coupling.
The way people argue about it, no it absolutely not. CAISO generates about 25,000 MWd in a day. If you just use LCOE you would say, ok let's take the LCOE in $/MWh, convert to $/MWd and multiply them for each energy source. Wow look how cheap 100% wind and solar are!
But oops they totally missed the fact that oops in Winter they have to build at least 4x capacity to fill up the shockingly large amount of chemical batteries (hundreds of skyscrapers full) and wires during the windy/sunny periods, and then rebuild all of this stuff every 25 years. Now it looks very expensive and crazy.
The 92% capacity factor nuclear plant running for 80 years is looking good.
Wind and solar alone are the cheapest forms of energy as tents are the cheapest form of housing.
Many studies suggest that a good mixture of hydro, nuclear, wind, and solar are the ideal. Let's not rule out nuclear due to current market quirks.
And we don't fear russia bombing Ukraine's WECs
Oh and nuclear fission used in breeder reactors is just as renewable as the fusion fuel in the sun that powers wind/solar/hydro/bio. We can make 100% of the world's primary energy for 4 billion years with nuclear before running out of fuel.
France 69.0%
Ukraine 55.0%
Slovakia 52.3%
Belgium 50.8%
Hungary 46.8%
That is 24 giga watt hours from a kg or uranium. The article says California is set to "top 48 gigawatts" on some days. If it stayed at peak usage all year 48 * 24 * 365 / 24 = 17,520 kg of uranium for constant peak California consumption.
That seems like a lot until you think about how much oil it saves
That same capacity would require 26 Diablo canyon equivalent stations or only 30.5 sq.mi. [2]
Of course, Greater Los Angeles area itself is 33,954 sq.mi, so if we assume 10% of that are roofs, parking lots and other structures that can be covered with a solar panel setup somehow (big assumption, but this is a thought experiment after all), we’d have close to 1/2 of the total already covered. Add other populated areas in CA and things don’t look so outlandish with some combination of Nuclear/storage/solar.
The big question is whether we have the social cohesion to pull this off or not. The train from LA to SF mess has me worried here…
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_plants_in_the_Mo... [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant
You also have to consider what you need to get that 1kg of U-235 and building your huge power plant. This is called doing a life-cycle analysis. In that it has been shown the wind power is by far the cheapest in terms of material use, and solar and nuclear is about equal.
> The TMR (total material requirement) of nuclear power generation is significantly lower than that of thermal power generation and is similar to that of renewables. On the basis of the low greenhouse gas emissions associated with nuclear power generation, like renewables, it can be considered favorable not only from the global warming perspective but also from a resource use perspective.
"Life cycle resource use of nuclear power generation considering total material requirement"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262...
Edit: a typo