In contrast, there is exactly one company that fully understands a particular nuclear reactor design. If that company disappears, it will take a lot of specialized knowledge transfer (likely requiring the continued employment of many of the original designers and builders) to allow another company or the government to take on that maintenance burden.
Still, I'm not convinced solar + wind + storage will come along soon enough at scale to eliminate enough fossil-fuel burning in order to dig us out of our climate change hole without things getting so much worse first. Then again, if it takes 16 years from permit application time to get a nuclear plant project completed in the US, maybe we're screwed either way.
We are, generally, pretty screwed though yes.
Why only during the day?
Yes, I always had the impression nuclear proponents vastly underestimate the time and work such a plant takes.
Storage cost is falling even faster than renewable generation did.
Big wind projects have had issues reaching viability due to insufficiency of the transmission grid. T. Boone Pickens and the Texas Panhandle comes to mind.
1. https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2022/growing-plants-power-...
Built by elves, perhaps, like the fairytale about the shoemaker?
Sorry, no. Replacing any significant portion of the grid with solar is going to take many years. More likely decades.
> In that time we can immediately begin producing clean power at least during the day
During the day, in the summer, when it's not cloudy, perhaps.
You are aware that not every place in the world has the weather found in California, yes?
> You are aware that not every place in the world has the weather found in California, yes?
Your info is sorely out of date. Modern solar panels can operate in cloudy conditions. And they operate better when they are cool. The UK is installing solar all over the place. Solar panels operate on daylight, not direct sunlight.
Cleve Hill solar farm in the UK was approved in 2020 and will generate 350MW. The idea that solar is only feasible is sunny climates is frankly absurd.
What's the capacity factor for Cleve Hill? We don't have to guess, it's in this document:
https://infrastructure.planninginspectorate.gov.uk/wp-conten...
It's 10.8%.
This is a 35MW plant. Oh, but it has batteries I hear you saying!
Doesn't matter. It will generate 35MW-years per year. Batteries, at best, mean wasting less of it.
Meanwhile, a 350MW nuclear plant has a capacity factor of 90%, most of the loss being conversion to AC, with a bit of downtime.
So that would deliver 315MW-years of energy, per year.
Nothing you mentioned supports the false claim that you need sunny weather for solar to be a viable source of energy.
Not to mention that several sources say it will generate 350 MW of power. And that it will power about 100,000 homes. I'm pretty sure that's not happening with a 35MW plant.
That doesn't speak well of either your perspicacity nor judgement. Good luck.
"This is a project that will generate up to 350MW of clean renewable electricity to power over 91,000 homes"
Considering this solar instalation is a for-profit venture in cloudy UK and will reduce carbon output without subsidies, I'm calling it a win whether it powers 1000 houses or 350,000.
91,000 homes would be about 91,000 * 3,000 kWh / year = 273 TWh / year. You need an average of 31 MW over a year to produce this, which roughly tracks 350 MW with ~10% capacity factor. So over a year this seems to be correct.
On a day to day basis however the project only includes 700 MWh of storage. That's about 24h of the electricity consumption of 91,000 homes. A single cloudy winter day and those batteries are empty. So if you look at shorter time periods than a full year there's a huge variation in how many households can actually be reliably powered by such an installation. It's likely somewhere between 1,000 (several days of cloudy winter) and 350,000 homes (sunny summer).
> It's likely somewhere between 1,000 (several days of cloudy winter)
How do you figure? Solar technology is moving so rapidly you can't even look at the efficiency of the panels from a few years ago to do the math. Is the 1,000 number a guess or did you do the math for the 900,000 some panels they will have at that site?
Your original comment was wildly correct. I do admire your effort to correct an Internet.
I do wonder why so many people seem to be so tragically misinformed about the topic of power generation. It is a complicated subject, but the information is available, and yet simple facts seem to be so wilfully ignored. Where is the canonical resource for well written truthful FAQs about power generation?
This year, for instance, the majority of Chinese manufacturing capacity, the largest manufacturers (and possibly the majority of panels manufactured, although data are sparse) have moved from p-PERC to TOPCon, precisely because of the latter's better low-light performance (and lesser reasons). p-PERC dominated from about 2015 to 2021 (after polycrys, a-Si, CdTe thin-film and CI(G)S lost the growth race). Some manufacturers are moving to heterojunction instead. HJT also does better than p-PERC. So we are moving on from p-PERC apparently.
Also this year, a large minority, or the majority (again public data are rare) of panels are bifacial, in order to capture light reflected off the ground (snow, in particular) to improve winter performance and low sun angle performance/capacity factor.
Clouds and winter are not PV killers.
Hope is not a plan.
As Germany is going to find out this winter.
> As Germany is going to find out this winter.
Germany's problems have more to do with the non-viability of relying on Russian gas than on anything else. You can predict things like the Ukraine war as well as you can predict an earthquake at Fukushima.
There was no such claim.
Again, I think we're done here.
Anyone can read to the top of thread and see that you are wrong about what started the discussion.
Things are stalled in nuclear. Hope is, indeed, not a plan.
A plan is a plan, and PV has one. Wind has another.
Straightforward engineering optimisations, hundreds of them, all adding up, with few political considerations. (I won't say no political considerations, because there are always people who will cut off their nose to spite their face.)
Nuclear has hope and promises.
Well, it doesn't, because they've shut all their nuclear plants down.
That's rather the point, yo.
1. If you mean solar thermal panels, then yes, PVs are better in cloudy conditions. Solar thermal panels only collected the specular light from the sun, not the diffuse light from the rest of the sky.
Vertical bifacial modules produce significantly less energy overall, but more during morning/evening and during snow or cloudy conditions.
This latter fact combined with the much lower module costs mean that -- in practical terms -- they perform vastly better in cloudy conditions.
"Can operate" is a different thing from "can operate at the claimed efficiency".
You're saying that modern solar panels produce the same output on cloudy days that they do on sunny ones?
I don't think so.
> Cleve Hill solar farm in the UK was approved in 2020 and will generate 350MW.
At what cost per MWh, including government subsidies?
Who said that?
> At what cost per MWh, including government subsidies?
No government subsidies.
Westinghouse Electric declared bankruptcy over the Vogtle nuclear plant in discussion. The U.S. government has given $8.3 billion of loan guarantees to help finance construction of the Vogtle reactor.
So yeah, at what cost per MWh is a great question. Someone should do the math. And the math should include the loan guarantees and the bankruptcy costs.
The original poster.
One of the followups has pointed out that in the REAL WORLD, a major solar plant is only expected to produce about 10% of its nameplate capacity.
While nuclear plants routinely produce 90% of their nameplate capacities.
Companies investing in large scale commercial solar plants in the cloudy UK at the north of the planet, for profit, and without subsidies, proves that this is true.
Meanwhile Westinghouse Electric declared bankruptcy trying to finish the Vogtle nuclear power plant in discussion. 90% of nameplate capacity doesn't mean much at all if you can't afford to finish building the thing.
Tell you what: get back to me when someone actually builds one of your fantasy solar power plants at a competitive cost (which will involve multiplying the nameplate capacity by 9).
But we need to keep civilization running until then. Sorry.
Hey! I'm already back with proof positive results!
NextEra energy has installed over 45,500Mw of renewable energy and their earnings per share are 1.30. This all happened while the latest nuclear build put the builder into bankruptcy, yo!
The are - get this - the world's largest utility company.
Their future plans do include continuing running existing nuclear plants. But get this: it does not include building new nuclear. It does include building LOADS of new solar.
Lots more where NextEra came from.
> But we need to keep civilization running until then. Sorry.
We are. 1/5 of all the solar installed in the US was installed just last year. Your beloved nuclear is slowing fading into history while solar plants go up everywhere you look. Sorry! Even France knows the deal and will rely far less on nuclear in the coming years.
Didn't you say we were done here? Twice? What happened?
Ah yes. The magical immediate construction of dollars and windows. Blink, and it's there.
Wind and solar farms off similar capacity take about as much to complete as nuclear and often cost about as much.
Many western countries haven't built a nuclear power plant in ages, and are only ramping up (against unending pushback). China takes about 2 years to build a reactor.
Does it? And does this math scale?
https://energypost.eu/dispelling-nuclear-baseload-myth-nothi...
There is ~1TW of renewables in US grid queues, and ~427GW of storage. While many of these projects might not get built, the velocity should be noted. ~95GW of nuclear generation capacity remains.
https://www.pv-tech.org/nearly-1tw-of-renewables-in-us-inter...
https://www.energy-storage.news/estimated-427gw-of-energy-st...
This is a lie repeated by anti-nuclear types. Base load is simply the year round constant electricity demand.
How are we actually going to build hundreds of billions of dollars worth of batteries? How are we going to dispose of them?
With battery factories. The very same that will be required to electrify vehicles when jurisdictions are enacting combustion vehicle sales bans at the end of the decade. 74-78 million new vehicles are sold each year. That's a lot of battery demand, which will be a forcing function to scale up battery manufacturing, driving down costs.
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/electri...
> How are we going to dispose of them?
We recycle them. We already do today. https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/ (Redwood has battery recycling agreements with several automakers)
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/electric-vehicles-wor...
The world could face lithium shortages by 2025, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says, while Credit Suisse thinks demand could treble between 2020 and 2025, meaning “supply would be stretched”.
About 2 billion EVs need to be on the road by 2050 for the world to hit net zero, the IEA says, but sales stood at just 6.6 million last year, and some carmakers are already selling out of EVs.
Lithium supply faces challenges not only from surging demand, but because resources are concentrated in a few places and over half of today’s production is in areas with high water stress.
Sure, and rare earth metals aren't really all that rare. The problem is that the processing cost is well beyond economical for most of it.
Abundance alone is irrelevant; you need certain concentrations for the mining process to be viable. AFAIK that is the challenge with Li: the necessary concentrations are only found in several places of the world.
In the future, we might be able to mine lithium from some sources that are now useless, but the environmental cost might be enormous.
In an ideal world we would innovate with better chemistries which would render the need for lithium obsolete before we cause more damage. I know the technology exists (particularly for grid scale storage), but knowing humans, we will probably ruin more environments (and foreign economies) before such technologies will be meaningfully explored.
Anyway, consider: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4994054
This paper explains how one can storage power at an efficiency of 65-75% using machinery made with ordinary materials operated at modest temperatures.
A number of alternative chemistries exist, which are much less expensive and less flammable. They of course have lower energy density, but it does not play a major role: batteries sitting on the ground can afford to be be bulky and heavy.
A good summary is at https://www.ceem.unsw.edu.au/sites/default/files/uploads/pub...
and https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-thr...
The truth is that a "base load plant" is one that can only supply the base load, as it has to be kept running most of the time to have a possible chance of making economic sense. Being a base load plant is a negative thing, indicating inflexibility.
Not if they are generating base load. This is why base load is an important concept.
As an example: the combination of wind/solar/storage that could be used to provide the equivalent of a nuclear power plant's output could ALSO be used to provide some flexibility, by altering when the storage is charged and discharged. This flexibility would allow it to generate more value for the same number of kWh provided to the grid.
The variability of wind and solar is actually a HUGE problem. It makes managing the grid much harder and required a large amount of idle generating capacity as backup. This is why proponents love to argue against the very fundamental concept of base load.
Variability is in fact a trivial problem solved by storage and transportable backup. Even NG suffices as backup. Even coal suffices as backup. In the future, ammonia will take up that role.
We have the tech (you're almost certainly already using it), we have not deployed it at sufficient scale yet.
But we are building the factories to make the batteries, and the mines to feed the factories, as fast as we can raise money to do so.
I'm not sure what's happening with hydrogen (apparently it's much cheaper than batteries?); but regardless, that technology predates all forms of generating electricity more complex than the etymological origin of the word (ἤλεκτρον, amber) — "rubbing things together" was the only option when Deimand and van Troostwijk charged their Leyden jar back in 1789 and demonstrated electrolysis.
It's fine to say "the factories need to be built", as long as they can be built at a manageable price. But price is a huge factor that cannot be ignored, and it's high enough in this situation to make the word "trivial" incorrect.
No new problems need to be solved, so in that sense it is trivial.
It costs a lot of money in absolute terms, so in that sense it is not trivial.
The cost (for global battery based storage, the most expensive serious storage option) is in the order of 6 months global supply of crude oil to turn rocks into batteries (i.e. the dumbest possible limit on the cost of recycling), those batteries last at least three years even using the worst cycle-count estimates I've seen and throwing the batteries away at 70% of initial peak capacity, that's trivial.
Opening new mines and factories, even if the new mines provide new work for workers currently in fossil fuels, may be a significant geopolitical and economic shift, so in that sense it isn't trivial.
And so on.
For hydrogen, it's "build a tank that only leaks a little bit". (We'd probably be better off adding some carbon to that hydrogen, but I have no idea if anyone is working on that at sufficient scale even though the tech is over a century old).
Factories for any form of storage are not different in any material way from a thousand other factories we know work. We have been making factories for going on three centuries, and know we can. Making and operating factories is expensive capex, but exploring, extracting, transporting, and refining fossil fuels is an even more expensive opex. If we could afford fossil opex, renewable capex of similar order is strictly better.
If an inflexible source is cheaper, then it may better a fit as a high capacity factor supplier to meet constant demand.
We first need to agree on the problems and the solution, using levelised costs for lifetime of plant, and safe disposal, preferably using real examples, but theoretical best case examples are also worth discussing.
I'm inclined to believe there is no best pasta sauce, only best pasta sauces. One size does not, in face, fit all.
You must be misreading the comment or something.
They didn't say it's the only factor, they said it's a negative. It's a negative no matter how the costs align.
In what world is it reasonable to implement unrequired, unnecessary, and costly, features and call that a net positive in all cases under all circumstances.
Also, some sources are more flexible by their very nature and get the flexibility for free.
But more generally, lacking flexibility is a negative by itself. It's an acceptable negative if adding flexibility would cost more than the benefit, but it's still a negative.
Not for baseload generation.
And most people would call "can't be used for the more difficult parts of power generation" a negative too.
Lol, is that supposed to impress? Tens of trillions, and you're talking money.
Global spend on oil and gas is in the neighborhood of $4T per year. Coal is another $1T. Per year.
$0.1T or $0.8T spent on making batteries, that last ten or twenty years apiece, is small change in comparison.
The argument is about who gets the money.
A 4 hour battery for the entirety of world primary energy is about the same cost as one year of auto industry revenue. SIBs require no scarce resources and no toxic elements -- they're basically fancy dirt.
For longer scale storage, there are electrolyser industries spooling up in multiple countries. Some of the individual factories are big enough to produce the entire presently installed base in 5 years. Existing OCGT plants have minimal capital and fixed costs, and can burn hydrogen or ammonia basically at cost -- yielding indefinite storage for what is effectively a fixed 4x multiple of the cost of energy.
Storage isn't measured in GW, but rather in GWh.
I'd take any source that doesn't know the difference between W and Wh with a very, very large boulder of salt.
I also don’t want every appliance in my house connected to the cloud and collecting usage data.
I sincerely doubt I’m in the minority on the former, and I hope I’m not in the minority on the latter.
So, I guess my point is, why are you reducing a panacea of mutually beneficial options down to a binary decision?
> and ~427GW of storage
Got a source for this claim? That's an order of magnitude off [2] from what I've read before.
1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
2. https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
It's of course the fossil fuel industry which profits from this relentless mendacity. Renewables are great, but they aren't coal's competition and coal knows it. Nuclear is.
Not a good look.
Show me the $13/MWh nuclear reactor (or even fuel for that matter).
Granted that's variable wholesale, and a full 100% renewable system costs $50-100/MWh in countries with high labour cost and without optimal climate, but this is still vastly cheaper than nuclear.
Solar is indeed better than nuclear if your goal is to reduce the amount of fossil fuel use by shutting coal and gas plants down during sunny days. But if the goal is a total elimination of fossil fuel use, then the cost of storage has to be included and nuclear wins out.
Yes. Bringing the total price to almost that of nuclear.
But unlike nuclear -- the price of which increased continuously from the 60s through early 90s while production was the highest it has ever been -- they are both dropping precipitously. So much so that the whole system cost could plausibly be lower than just the steam turbine and heat exchanger component before a new reactor would open (which is already mass produced more than any other production technology).
By all means build nuclear, but do it on a level playing field. Either give 60 year guaranteed prices at 2-4x current market rate, zero risk loans, and free insurance to all zero carbon sources with >90% availability or none.
This is the complete opposite of reality. Nuclear saw it's largest period of growth during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Following the mid 1970s growth tapered off, and higher prices ensued as economies of scale were lost.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
Here's a chart from that paper plotting plant construction vs cost over time. The big cluster of cheap plants in the late 60s and early 70s is what nuclear looks like when economies of scale are leveraged: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03014215163001...
If you're going to accuse me of dishonesty, it'd be good to at least try to explain what I lied about. Did plant construction not slow down? You have the history of nuclear plant construction available to you in the previous comment. If you want to make the claim that it was plant designs changing that led to raised costs, then it'd be good to explain how nuclear plants changed.
> If you're going to accuse me of dishonesty, it'd be good to at least try to explain what I lied about.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=2030
You showed a graph of prices which decreased a little with tye first few large scale PWRs, then continuously increasing from late 67 through 72 when construction was at its peak. Then continuing to increase for the second peak of construction start (which was when those first set were just finished).
If what you said was remotely true, then the graph -- which you showed me -- would have its lowest price at the reactors which were permitted aroun '75 and finished around 85.
This is the opposite of what it shows.
You are showing a direct contradiction of your thesis and claiming it somehow proves it. Ergo you are directly lying whilst showing proof you are lying. This is what gaslighting is.
The graph shows a negative, learning rate, a positive correlation between under construction plants and price, a positive correlation between recently finished plants and price, and for the non-demonstration section, a negative economy of scale.
There are reasons outside that graph many of those aren't true due to confounding factors, but that's notwhat you said.
Unlike the solar panel factories, battery factories, and replacement distribution network required to replace the entire US electrical grid, which can be online tomorrow morning at the snap of someone's fingers?
The impression that I’ve gotten is that there isn’t a huge amount of slack panel production capacity sitting idle. If we’ve learned anything the last two years, hopefully it’s that supply chain problems can take a while to sort out.
On the other hand, likely all of that will be needed to meet Xi's 2030 target for PV power generation in China. (12,000 GWe capacity, up from 800 now? Something like that.)
So near exponential but not much slack for others to use, probably.
China hasn't stopped building nukes, you'll notice.
Edit:
See: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...
What this does require is significant investment in grid infrastructure which has been criminally neglected in years.
And I bet local storage is more economical to build and maintain than an additional network of huge continent-wide transmission lines.
This is something you have to factor in when reading boldly optimistic claims about how somehow solar and wind can work everywhere without even storage.
Maybe if we never stop pumping natural gas into our homes to burn it, but that's not exactly in line with the goals.
In reality, for anything north enough to get snow on the regular you can't use today's electricity consumption numbers to judge future needs. When everyone switches to heat pumps base load at night is going to skyrocket.
Gas (methane) doesn't have to come from the ground. The price of electrolysed hydrogen is dropping. It's early days; there's a lot of learning curve ahead, so we can expect further falls in price. Once you have hydrogen you can use it as-is or combine it with air-captured carbon for synthetic methane and re-use existing infrastructure.
Electrolysis is quite complementary to solar. It uses DC voltage (direct from the panels); and PEM (polymer electrolyte membrane) electrolysers start in a second or so, so passing clouds and such are not a problem. Solid oxide and alkaline methods have slightly longer startup times so may require an hour or so of battery storage alongside the panels. Carbon capture is similar to these latter two as I understand it.
That shouldn't be how an argument works.
> *B. Dealing With Variability and Stability*
> Much of the resistance towards 100% Renewable Energy (RE) systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible since these energy sources are variable. Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276].
> However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]–[282]; storage (battery, compressed air, pumped hydro)[40]–[43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]–[92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place.
> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive. Variability, especially short term, has many mitigation options, and energy system studies are increasingly capturing these in their 100% RE scenarios.
Given that renewables and storage will have to be made to work, and are likely to be cheaper, I don't see the point of nuclear in this scenario.
I don't want to be here in 30 years time wishing we'd built reactors 30 years ago (which is where we are today)
The current situation where you might regret not having built more reactors 30 years ago is not comparable. Renewables were not competitive with nuclear 30 years ago. But that situation no longer obtains.
Eventually, all fossil fuel use must be replaced, but that has nothing to do with the issue of responding to Putin that I was addressing. And the backup generation can eventually be non-fossil also, particularly hydrogen. Europe has massive amounts of potential capacity for underground storage for hydrogen, far more than would be needed.
It is my impression both pro-renewables and pro-nuclear like to downplay the resource sourcing issues.
Lithium is best for mobility applications and lithium formulations are much further down the learning curve than other chemistries.
However, all of vanadium redox, iron-air, organic polymer-based, calcium salt, and sodium chemistries are very nearly competitive, or actually competitive with lithium in various grid storage niches despite being at the very beginning of their learning curves. Is there ever going to be a shortage of iron or sodium? Or calcium or carbon, for that matter? No.
Grid scale energy storage doesn't exist.
1) grid connections fail sometimes. Do you want people freezing to death in NY when the Texas interconnect goes down for a day or two, or vice versa?
2) regional storms (Florida hurricanes, NY ice storms, etc), periodically take out large swathes of grid and would take out grid interconnections too.
Currently, the scope of the impact of these things is quite limited because everyone also has regional capacity.
But if you’re in a giant storm, you’d be super screwed and the whole region would be blacked out for awhile, because renewables also are impacted by these storms - far more than a gas turbine, for instance.
And that’s not even counting demand spikes and the like due to weather issues (longer than usual hot or cold, etc.)
Have you ever had a useful discussion after accusing the other side of wanting to kill people?
I was pointing out the real risks involved, and asking them if they were ok with them. Statistically, such a plan would result in that outcome pretty quickly.
Personally I just assumed they had no idea, not that they didn’t care.
Cites appreciated! I currently see zero.
> I heard recently of a study that found 2-4 hours is sufficient along with an interconnected grid.
That, literally, is not the same as:
> Really, 100% of experts think we need only a few hours of storage and reserve if we connect all the grids?
Again, you're not going to have a good conversation if you keep on doing this.
Tell me where those two statements you quoted are materially different (keeping in mind I was including the 0% of experts reply later), if you’d like to continue. Or don’t.
* The parts describing the grid look the same to me, and the percent of experts came from you, when you said 0% of experts agreed with their skepticism.
We could back up the entire damned grid with these things at a cost small compared to the cost of powering that grid with nuclear power plants.
As for "not actually existing yet", that's not anything close to a valid argument. Also, hydrogen storage doesn't require anything new -- all the component technologies exist, they just have to be integrated. This is the easiest and surest kind of innovation. It would be nice if higher demand drive electrolysers down their experience curve some more, I will admit. Cheaper is always nice.
I really want this to be true, I just don't think it is.
I suppose you may be meaning there's no good upper bound on how bad the expected unexpected cost overruns in nuclear can be.
Given that, it gives me pause that you don't actually know that information, given how eager you are to represent your "knowledge" on this subject.
Hydrogen could also be stored in aquifers and depleted natural gas fields, just as natural gas is stored in those.
Geological storage like this involves very thick layers (hundreds or thousands of feet), so the leakage will be low in any case. If geological formations can trap methane for millions of years, they can trap hydrogen for much shorter times.
"The total bill for the reactor expansion project at the Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia is now expected to exceed $30 billion"
Seems doable.
> And that's back of the envelope numbers assuming a 100% duty cycle for the batteries and no degradation.
Okay, toss on another 50% to make it $15 billion.
If the factories don't exist, the time scale of a nuclear plant should be enough to make more factories.
If the limit is materials bloating the costs horribly, then keep going until it stops being cheap.
And the batteries don't have to be lithium ion.
No, grid storage does not require violating the laws of physics. Indeed, it doesn't even need 20th century science to be done in a scalable way (see pumped thermal storage). The main problem with grid storage is trying to figure out which of the many possible solutions will come out on top.
And no, the technologies do exist. There is nothing new that has to be invented. They need to be run down their experience curves, but aside from that maturation everything is there.
Is there as much grid-scale storage now as there will be later? No. There will be lots more, of numerous kinds, in many, many places. They all work.
Where is the storage coming from? These reactors will produce 20 giga-watt-hours during the darkest 8 hours of the day.
That's ten times the battery capacity of every Tesla ever made, put together.
In one night.
This level of power would fill the worlds largest pumped hydro station in just over an hour.
We don't have the storage. It doesn't matter how cheap it is per unit or what your back of the napkin calculation says.
Also, consider that the second Vogtle class reactor will cost less and be faster to build, and the third even less and even faster... if they bought 50 of them, the cost per reactor would be pretty reasonable.
Solar power also benefits from economies of scale, but solar has already gotten much of the up front scale cost reduction, whereas modern nuclear hasn't even started yet.
This is, I assume, the point that gp is making. We’re about to learn whether the same cost reductions from repetition that happened in Japan will happen in Georgia.
Solar cells have an awesome reduction in cost over time
Wind has an awesome reduction in cost over time
Nuclear is a clown show
Yes but I would argue that the level of risk involved is different between different energy options. $20B worth of solar and wind plus energy storage (including subsidies for home solar/storage and EVs with V2G capability) would carry less risk for this scenario than a single nuclear power plant.
I still think based on my back of the napkin calculations that solar + wind + storage (with the above mentioned subsidies) can be a compelling alternative to nuclear. It can be built faster, avoids the risk of a single large terrorist attack target, provides more energy independence for those who receive the subsidy for their own solar and storage, diversifies the grid, and avoids the need for a powerful government to control risky nuclear production facilities.
You can do a quick calculation and see that $10B of solar and $10B of storage will produce similar continuous base load power as the $20B Vogtle system.