Some might proclaim that's not fair competitively. I have no interest in being fair about the matter, I don't want my government to be either.
This is what France tried to do with the reactor they built for Finland. There was a budget hole of a few billion and an argument/lawsuit over who would pay for it.
Nuclear costs are a hot potato.
Sadly, I had one months ago but I can't find it again.
The EPR have a double containement layer where EPR2 have a single one. The EPR was also an industrial demonstrator.
> supposed to be able to withstand a passenger jet collision.
Our autorithy of nuclear safety says any regular nuclear plants should be able to whistand an passanger jet collision, but added extra protection on the EPR for it: https://www.francetvinfo.fr/replay-radio/le-vrai-du-faux/seg...
> Even if "they are not built to withstand such a shock without damage, nuclear power plants would offer a good resistance capacity", assures the Nuclear Safety Authority. But no evaluation exists because this type of accident was considered at the time as totally improbable.
That said, after the authorities and EDF claim to have made arrangements for the construction of the future Flamanville EPR. "The specific protection against falling aircraft called aircraft hull is a reinforced concrete structure covering the following buildings: the reactor building, two divisions of the safeguard auxiliaries building and the fuel building".
The fact remains that zero risk does not exist, as Jacques Repussard, Director General of IRSN, affirmed during his hearing before a parliamentary commission of inquiry last February: "I could not affirm under oath that in the event crash of a very large aircraft, loaded with tens of tons of fuel, the consequences of the fire would be brought under control"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant supply.
Contrast that to the Al Dhafra PV project also in the UAE - $1 billion for 2 GW of nameplate capacity. One can apply whatever discount is wanted to account for solar's shortcomings and it still comes out ahead when planning an energy generation portfolio. Further away from the equator a similar case can be made for wind.
The Barakah reactors will be generating 5.3 GWh from 6 pm to 8am which of course solar can't do. In that time it will deliver 14 hours X 5.3 GW ~= 75 GWh of electricity.
Capital costs for 4 hour utility scale lithium storage are expected to be $250 million per GWh by 2025. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/79236.pdf
75 GWh x $250 million = ~$19 billion to get those gigawatt hours from storage.
The nameplate capacity of the solar plant to generate 75 GWh for night time use in the hours from 8 am to 6pm is 7.5 GW. To prove my point let's double that to 15 GW.
The cost of that 15 GW solar plant, based on the Al Dhafra PV plant would be $7.5 billion. Another 5 GW solar plant to deliver the same day time GWh that the reactors do...let's double that to 10 GW so another $5 billion.
So my back of the napkin calculations say that the cost to replace the Barakah reactors with solar + storage are: - $19 billion for Li-ion storage - $7.5 billion for a solar plant to charge that storage for nighttime use. - $5 billion for a solar plant to deliver (more than) equivalent daytime use.
$31.5 billion in total. Very much competitive with the nuclear option taking into account a) time to completion / general project risk b) the falling cost of storage plus the development of new options like sodium ion storage c) radioactive waste risks, solvable as they are d) security concerns - Houthi rebels fired a few missiles at the Barakah site a while back. e) construction and operational workforce skill requirements
I'd have to imagine not. And that it might take as long to get all the batteries built and installed as it does to build a nuke plant.
If I want enough solar panels and batteries to make my house off grid I can just write a check and the stuff shows up in a few weeks. But that doesn't scale upwards without limit. Eventually the limits on global supply kick in no matter how much you want it.
Even leaving out better battery chemistries for the moment, you can use pumped hydro (even with seawater - some of the UAE’s highest mountains are near the coast) and thermal storage (you might think you don’t need it in such a hot place but you’ve still got to bake bread etc etc).
Valleys are useful as they provide a large volume that can be capped with relative ease.
An underground reservoir requires a large volume to be excavated (or a pre existing cave system) and a deeper chamber again for the turbines to powered by the fall .. to yet another deeper underground reservoir.
I'm not saying this is impossible, I stating that as an engineering venture (actual civil engineering not software "engineering") there are some real challenges and greater ones than using existing topography.
You're hand waving a lot away with your comment.
Could you provide some more info for this? My understanding was a lot of the sites that could do this, have done. If that's not the case it'd be good to see what the real picture is.
https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/
Probably won't happen because batteries will be even cheaper by the time much of it is developed.
In this case, from the study:
> None of the PHES sites discussed in this study have been the subject of geological, hydrological, environmental, heritage and other studies, and it is not known whether any particular site would be suitable. The commercial feasibility of developing these sites is unknown.
There it is. Always so concerned" about whatever imaginary downside alternatives have, but completely credulous about nuclear which has failed over and over again.
You're claiming without any evidence whatsoever that at least 99% of geographically appropriate sites are unusable.
It's not a downside. It's a problem with the study.
> completely credulous about nuclear which has failed over and over again
Can you cite where I've done this?
> You're claiming without any evidence whatsoever that at least 99% of geographically appropriate sites are unusable.
And where I've done this?
In a nutshell, you put in more generators to maximise your peak generation capacity, and operate them only when required.
Based on the lifetimes of these South Korean plants(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_South_Korea), I'm just going to use 40 years as the lifetime for these calculations as I couldn't find any numbers for how long the UAE expects that plant to be operating regarding that operational costs of $20 billion which gives us:
Maintenance costs for solar of: 40 years x $23 billion x 2.5% = $23 billion
So now we're at a total current cost of $46 +7.5 = $53.5 billion for Solar vs. $45 billion for Nuclear.
Edit: Forgot the actual cost of the solar array that G80z said was $7.5 billion
It isnt just a matter of getting 2GW of solar and getting enough batteries to supply 2GW through the night.
...if you ignore storage.
Solar and wind will continue to be the most expensive, difficult to scale method until the issue of energy storage is resolved.
Batteries are getting cheaper, but they're not being produced on the scale necessary to supplant base load power. Until then, you need to calculate the full cost of base load into the cost of solar and wind if you want to consider them a substitute, rather than a compliment.
Nuclear reactors connected to the grid in 2021 had a median construction time of 88 months. (7.3 years) [1]
According to an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) study, Tuesday, 15 countries have built a total of 83 nuclear plants over the last 20 years among the 31 countries with nuclear power. It took on average 190 months to build each plant.
During that period, Korea has built a total of 13 nuclear power plants. The average construction period for each plant was only 56 months (4.6 years), more than three times faster than other countries building nuclear plants. [2]
In France, [ ... ] taking an average of 126 months to build each plant, nearly three times as long as Japan. [2]
The United States has a total of 100 nuclear power plants, taking on average 272 months to complete one. [2]
[2] https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/2027347/south-korea-s...
Japan, which has built a total of eight nuclear power plants since 1996, was the fastest, taking only 46 months to build each plant, while China ranked third, building 28 nuclear power plants during that period and averaging 68 months to complete each one.
Japan’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant Unit 6 is the world’s fastest-built nuclear power plant, taking only 39 months for completion, while of Korea’s Wolseong Nuclear Power Plant Reactor 3 took 49 months to build.Looks like one or two plants never finished.
Most of the cost of nuclear power is in building and demolishing the plant, not in operating it. So if you plan a plant now to go operational in 10 years and run for the next 50, you are locked in to producing electricity for (amortized) $60/MWh for the next decades. Or shut it down early and eat a giant loss, if the projections for solar, wind and storage costs become true. That's a hard sell when you also have the option to build a wind farm in 5 years or a solar installation in two, decommission them after 20 years and repeat with whatever is the most cost effective then.
Time will tell if that hypothesis remains true, but inflation is a thing. What you build now with an amortizing cost over decades may weight much cheaper on your debt than you thought.
In that aspect, if you're a state actor, paying more to get lower maintenance costs is usually a good choice.
It's a false dichotomy anyway, because I wouldn't put _any_ money into nuclear stocks.
I also expect a lot more hydro to be built eventually, it's not as dependent on geography if you just build two ponds at different elevations for pumped hydro, or repurpose old mineshafts to get the elevation difference on flat ground.
Nuclear power plants also aren't being produced at the scale necessary to supplant base load power.
It's even more cost effective to use solar and wind to synthesize natural gas (an inefficient process) and burn that for electricity.
https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...
Nuclear is compact, and can really be built anywhere (may be consider earthquakes and don't build near tsunami zones). Therefore, a country that does not have suitable solar or win terrain would necessarily have to consider nuclear. A place like South Korea.
But of course, countries like australia (and to some extend the USA, and many other countries that's not in europe) would have the land, and it's just political and financial reasons that these power sources aren't more invested in.
In theory nuclear power being compact would serve it well for small countries without a lot of space (e.g. Singapore), but because of the risks they want nothing to do with it.
South Korea builds nuclear power for the same reason as Iran and Sweden: it's part of their national strategy to be able to quickly develop nukes. It's not about economics.
It really isn't if mining is expanded. Low yield mines (the only kind left for new resource) produce tens of watts per m^2
It has also shown no evidence of being viable without a river, coastline or lake. It needs specific geological and geographic features and it can't be too close to population centers or important watersheds.
Contrast with wind where the land right up to the base of the tower can be used and solar where the land under the panels can be more productive than it would without partial shade (effectively a negative land use).
Not that the quantity of land matters because for solar it's over 20W/m^2 and usually over 50W/m^2 -- more land is reserved for the average US car to park in than required to power someone's life.
What's the price of the Ukraine war?
Maybe nuclear isn't a great alternative to natural gas. I'm down with that. I'm not going to ignore the fact that wind and solar are at best complimentary, and that we can talk about pricing them without also talking about pricing in the base load that they're supplementing.
Windgas (synthesized natural gas) is carbon neutral, for what it's worth. It's inefficient to make but stores for long periods very cheaply so it's good for when the pumped storage and batteries run dry - e.g. rare long spells of relatively dark/still weather.
Short term while grids are 60% natural gas powered with no need for baseload it makes even less sense to build nuclear instead of solar or wind. 5x more expensive and 5x-20x as long to build? Why?
Counter example. South Australia hit 80% of it's electricity production from renewables in the last two quarters:
https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australia-enjoys-80-1-pct-wind-and-solar-share-in-blackout-free-summer/
https://www.aemc.gov.au/sites/default/files/2021-11/sa_fact_pack.pdf
https://reneweconomy.com.au/five-years-after-blackout-south-australia-now-only-state-with-no-supply-shortfalls/The cheapest low-end estimate for sodium-ion batteries is $40 per kw/h of capacity. The Texas grid at any point had about 85 gigawatts of available generation capacity in 2021 (100% would be around 115, but solar and wind aren't always producing, plants are sometimes offline for maintenance, etc).
So, with no nuclear or fossil fuel production, you're looking at $27 billion just to buy the batteries (not counting installation or maintenance costs) to keep the lights on for 8 hours in Texas on a windless night.
That's at the cheapest option, so you can figure that you'll need to pay roughly 1/4 of that a year making up for batteries that have lost capacity. If you double it, that drops to 1/5 to 1/6 the total cost, unless a miracle occurs in anode tech or the weather is wonderful and they don't cycle as frequently.
Of course, three days of mild, cloudy weather means brownouts or blackouts, because 8 hours of storage is not very much at all. If it were connected to other grids, they could import excess energy from across the continent, but that means those places won't be recharging their own batteries, and you now need to factor in more HVDC lines, and over-provisioning to cover transmission losses into your base price.
I wish this bad-faith nonsense would vanish, and people would stick to issues.
I was in South Africa when the blackouts really started, in 2014 and 2015, and every person and business that could afford it bought a diesel generator. Not for their comfort, except in an extreme definition of the word. For their survival. Businesses cannot survive without power. Hospitals cannot. Communications networks cannot. Electric cars cannot.
But diesel and petrol generators and vehicles can. That's the most likely "preparation on our end".
I do not believe "smart-grids" or blackouts are the solution. And especially not having my power cut because someone somewhere decides that I should cook inside my house because the power consumption priority lies elsewhere.
And there it is. Active hostility to improving our civilisational capabilities, celebrating decline. "People shouldn't have so much", and of course they never mean themselves. Politburo mindset.
I'm not saying climate change isn't real or that it isn't a problem, but we're certainly not "boiling the planet", and attacking the most vital foundation our societies are based on, namely reasonably cheap energy (everything depends on this), is insanely dangerous.
If the medicine is worse than the illness, its time to get rid of the doctor.
[0] "Advice to Young People as they face Annihilation" https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xlEbMab_dRs4Wx3nESYT0bkF...
See, you accuse me of rationalizing, because I apparently choose „the easy way out“. Making sacrifices is a feature, not a bug! This tells me climate activism satisfies a deep human need, the need for redemption, now that Christianity is dead. We sinned, and thus must atone. I get it, we all like to feel like Good People.
The problem is just that so much is at stake, namely our energy supply.
I take issue with the "if it doesn't hurt, it doesn't count" sentiment I so often encounter in these discussions. This tells me that it is not about solving a physics problem, which it is, but something different and potentially much more dangerous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Cape_Colony_fro...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nongqawuse
They had a real problem with cattle diseases -- and a more imaginary problem with Europeans in "their" land -- and somehow imagined killing ALL their cattle would help solve both problems.
(Both the Xhosa and the Europeans were recent immigrants to the area.)
While the fossil companies - the ones that suppressed the research from those scientists for decades - are the freedom-loving heroes in this story?
Also, changing my home’s thermostat to 72 from 68 isn’t going to make renewables-only (or mostly) feasible. It would barely make a dent.
Humans have always fought over resources. The idea that we should sacrifice advancement for purported sustainability is a very recent idea.
I’m overall still very happy the Industrial Revolution happened (despite global warming effects) and that we aren’t still living in an 1800s society where I have to worry about dying from an infected papercut or toiling away with a pickaxe.
We are living in the most peaceful time ever recorded. It’s hubris to think we are the “problem generation” or that the problems we face today aren’t solvable.
There's a solar install not too far from the Canadian border that has produced zero energy for months. It had to be shut down because, despite the panels being 16 feet tall, there are 12 feet of snow around them from accumulation and drifting. Over the next two days, they're getting another 6-12 inches of snow and sleet- conditions which cause wind turbines to draw energy from the grid to heat the blades so they don't build up ice and get damaged.
Is the answer to everyone not on the coast north of Arkansas to move somewhere else? For the whole of Canada to just get fucked?
That’s because it’s weeks, if not months, in places that have actual seasons.
> moving load around to avoid the “worst case,”
There is no such thing with base load in winter. You either provide constant heating or people freeze.
There are places where rearranging the chairs works and there are places where it doesn’t.
What's your calculation on the amount of batteries needed for a nuclear grid to meet all peak needs?
Once you've done the sums you'll almost certainly say something like, "well we can just overbuild nuclear and find uses for the excess, including timeshifting".
It's the exact same problem (matching demand and supply), with the same solutions but one gets hyperfocus at the same time the other is totally ignored.
If you want to have all the power generated by renewable, you would need big enough storage to hold all the power consumption during the highest peaks - like really hot summer nights where everyone is running AC at maximum. And it tends to cost quite a lot to have a giant UPS. And, because we need power 24/7, you need to have that in a redundant fashion, which basically boils down to two giant UPS systems in the gigawatt range. And I have this feeling that doing this is very dirty and very expensive to build and maintain.
Note: it's much easier to "overbuild" nuclear because nothing can compare to it in terms of power density.
Of course it can. https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
--- start quote ---
Modern nuclear plans with light water reactors are designed to have strong manoeuvring capabilities. Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode, i.e. they participate in the primary and secondary frequency control, and some units follow a variable load programme with one or two large power changes per day.
... according to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100 % of its rated power P. with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% of P, per minute.
Most of the modern designs implement even higher manoeuvrability capabilities, with the possibility of planned and unplanned load-following in a wide power range and with ramps of 5% P, per minute.
(Where P is rated power)
--- end quote ---
Wouldn't it make sense to take some of that power and make hydrogen or something that can be stored for later peaks? Then maybe you can close the nuclear plant you only turn on 1% of the time and fill that peak with hydrogen instead and save a lot of money.
Maybe offer cheap rates at night so EV users fill up on cheap nuclear power when it's available. Or store heat in water tanks or brick. Or use some of that power to pump water uphill like nuclear plants have been doing for half a century already.
You could do like France and schedule refueling during the summer when the demand is lower and taking a plant offline has less impact.
Lots of boring sensible things you can do to match nuclear supply to demand.
But of course if you admit these things exist, it kind of puts a big hole in your argument, so best to pretend they don't happen and are only needed for renewables.
So are complaining about changing demand or about overbuilding?
> Wouldn't it make sense to take some of that power and make hydrogen or something that can be stored for later peaks?
Yes, you could probably do that if any if those solutions scaled in any meaningful shape or form.
> But of course if you admit these things exist, it kind of puts a big hole in your argument
My argument was that your claim that "demand isn't flat and nuclear can't scale quickly enough to meet the daily peaks and troughs" is a lie.
None of the weird tangent you went off on makes a hole in this argument: nuclear power can scale quickly and is literally used to do that right now.
The fact that it isn't used for something that you want it used for is completely orthogonal to whether it can be scaled or not. For example, no one stores nuclear power in hydrogen or whatever because it's literally not needed because nuclear power can be scaled quickly on demand.
That was someone else's argument, and the second part is kind of irrelevant, but it's also true.
The speed that Nuclear can ramp, even in the best case is not enough to match demand spikes. It doesn't ramp as fast as gas plants and gas plants don't ramp as fast as batteries.
So even if you ramp nuclear, at an increased cost, you still need gas or batteries or hydro for fast ramps. So you might as well use the power you ramp down to fill batteries, make syngas or hydrogen or fill pumped storage.
Just like you'd do with excess renewables.
Because Nuclear isn't 100% of all power output. Of course it can't ramp up from, say 20% to 100%.
And yet, it does ramp up quickly.
> It doesn't ramp as fast as gas plants and gas plants don't ramp as fast as batteries.
5% of rated power per minute is plenty fast. Not as fast as gas plants, true. And for batteries... There's this funny little things of: there are literally no batteries at scale required by demand spikes. And won't be in any near future.
Meanwhile if you followed the links, you could see the graph showing how nuclear power plants go from ~650 MW to ~1400MW to meat demand (which is mostly predictable day to day).
How many batteries you need to have extra ~800 MW per plant every day? And how many renewable sources to provide that excess?
(Edit: largest energy storage seems to be Ouarzazate Solar Power Station with 510 MW of storage, thermal storage. Everything else is lower. To keep up with a single nuclear plant in the report you'd need two of those)
> Just like you'd do with excess renewables.
Except, for "excess renewables" you need to both overbuild them significantly more, and provide significantly more batteries because besides fast load following (which they can't do, and nuclear can) their base load is literally zero (and it's never zero with nuclear unless you take the plant completely offline).
Batteries already exist that handle demand spikes on the shorter timescales (e.g. in Australia). and hydro is currently the best for medium timescale storage (that said there's a bunch of R&D currently into better grid batteries since they have very different performance requirements than portable batteries since weight and volume don't matter, just cost and cycles).
Nuclear is pretty much the worst tech to overbuild because it's already expensive and it's price per kwh goes way up if you use it infrequently.
The first two are easily handled by nuclear (which you'd know if you read the report).
Literally nothing can handle "millisecond spikes due to random chance".
Renewables like solar and wind can't really handle any of the three because their power generation is intermittent. So you have to overbuild both them and their storage.
> Batteries already exist that handle demand spikes on the shorter timescales (e.g. in Australia).
Of course they don't exist. Not anywhere near the scale required.
> and hydro is currently the best for medium timescale storage
Ah yes, hydro. That is so easily available and easy to build just about anywhere, and on the required scale.
> Nuclear is pretty much the worst tech to overbuild because it's already expensive and it's price per kwh goes way up if you use it infrequently.
Of course it's the best tech to "overbuild" (because you don't need to overbuild much).
Once again:
- it's the highest energy density we know
- it's stable power generation (not intermittent like most renewables)
- it requires significantly less storage (because it can scale up quickly: most renewables can't even handle daily power spikes)
- it requires significantly less area to build
- the costs for renewables somehow never include the costs for the required overbuilding and the costs for required storage.
Again: in the report you can see just one of the power plants easily scale from 650MW to 1400 MW during the day. And that's for power plants built 45 years ago. What are your renewable + battery solutions capable of that, and their cost?
I never said or implied otherwise.
> Literally nothing can handle "millisecond spikes due to random chance".
Batteries can (see https://energytransition.org/2015/06/batteries-stabilize-the...)
> Of course they don't exist.
Wrong. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/08/australia-switches-on-victor...
> That is so easily available and easy to build just about anywhere, and on the required scale.
I know, right! It's so cool! https://www.energy.gov/eere/water/hydropower-program
> because you don't need to overbuild much).
Based on variation of demand, you need to overbuild any source by at least 50% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...
> it's the highest energy density we know
Doesn't matter at all. We don't pay by land used, we pay by total cost.
> it's stable power generation
True. That's why it makes sense to have for baseload (but is stupid to overbuild)
> it requires significantly less storage
Not really since no one would ever build a purely nuclear grid because it would cost way too much.
> it requires significantly less area to build
Again. Irrelevant
> the costs for renewables somehow never include the costs for the required overbuilding and the costs for required storage.
That's because the amount of overbuilding and storage needed depend strongly on a bunch of factors and aren't that useful.
Using https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e... as a source for LCOE numbers by power plant type (there may be a better one). Solar has LCOE of (very roughly) $70/MWH while nuclear has LCOE of roughly $175 if you ignore nuclear's decommissioning and operational costs (which are both significant and would almost certainly push the figure up to over $200).
This yields a pure nuclear grid cost of approximately $85B. Alternatively, you can overbuild solar and wind by 3x and have a couple days of storage (which is doable with hydro), and you come out ahead.
nuclear "battery" storage is the uranium or plutonium inside the plant.
Snowy 2. Fengning.
Nuclear makes a lot of sense if we want to be off coal and natural gas in the next 5-10 years. If we want to burn fossil fuels until 2060 then solar and wind are okay I guess. There is a reason that fossil fuel companies lobby heavily against nuclear and fund immense campaigns against it. It's a direct competitor. Solar and battery on the other hand are just barely off the ground right now.
1. https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/nuclear-construction-ti...
This is one problem I have with anti-nuclear propaganda. It uses the fact that it's been so successful at destroying nuclear power, as evidence that it's right in the first place.
Trees are great: solar-powered, recursive, self-assembling, carbon sequestration tech.
Forests can't be the only solution to carbon, because of the scale of emissions, but they can be a fraction of the solution.
Regarding other methods, people should Google for: norway carbon sequestration. Note: The volumes are very limited -- not enough to burn coal as your primary energy source, then capture all the CO2 and pump it underground.
To be clear, I am not shilling for non-forest/peat based carbon sequestration. To me, it is mostly a green washing game by big oil, gas, and utility firms to delay action and avoid responsibility.
There is no reason at all to scale carbon capture before the electricity generation is mostly carbon-free. As there is no reason at all to scale storage before most of the generation is intermittent.
What leads to ignorant people deciding that since nobody is doing it, it must be impossible.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/6/1/17416444...
For many years, this has been a debate about nuclear’s supposedly huge potential in the face of actually existing solar and wind capacity running circles around actually existing nuclear.
0. https://notesfrompoland.com/2022/12/20/poland-has-installed-...
1. https://www.world-nuclear.org/world-nuclear-performance-repo...
edit: checked your source and it in fact says global operating nuclear comes to around 370GW which makes more sense. Not making a comment on your point, the numbers just seemed off in my experience
This will not extrapolate linearly into the future though. The grid is already being destabilized by all the local generation of solar (most of the installations are on roofs of people's homes). This caused the government to change the law on how much it's paying the individual producers who sell their excess electricity to the grid and now, you're getting paid the actual, momentary price of kWh (which means that, on sunny days, you'll be paid hardly anything at all), instead of a fixed sum that was paid out before. This decreases the profitability of new solar installations by a lot.
With less than 30 hours of sunshine in December it contributes to the grid amount known as "fuck all": https://i.imgur.com/QVNpl06.png Capacity was over 10GW at this point.
It was installed only because of net metering policies, so you generate energy in summer when it does not really matter, and receive it in winter where there's lack of it. Bad policy.
Even wind generally fares better: https://i.imgur.com/2R2nfF2.png 1,3 GW out of ~8GW capacity.
On the other hand, the 5,3GW of nuclear capacity displaces 10x more fossils, because it's actually 5,3GW you can generally count on.
>For many years, this has been a debate about nuclear’s supposedly huge potential in the face of actually existing solar and wind capacity running circles around actually existing nuclear.
Yet, we install tens or hundreds of solar "capacity" that end up not generating any power or overgenerating when we have too much of it. It's pointless, especially in our climate.
https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...
32% solar and 60% wind, with an overbuild of 2.5x peak demand each (so 5x peak combined) is the cheapest option, according to the above analysis, filling the remaining 8% with other low carbon options.
There's zero chance, just politically, that anyone in this country will agree on additional gas dependency. Does this "cheapest option" actually includes cost of 30GW gas plants anyway?
Anyway I don't see any actual numbers on this page so it's hard for me to treat this seriously. "Cost comparison" only talks about whether "could POLAND run by only building new solar, wind and batteries?" which is very not interesting to me compared to having 30-50% of nuclear generation.
The model has several conservative assumptions that mean no power is imported as fuel or via cross border wires.
Thats fine, its just a model, the main point is that even with those constraints, renewables can provide 92% of power directly, and provide the power to meet the other 8% too. In Poland! (many other countries are more blessed with renewables).
https://ember-climate.org/app/uploads/2022/02/Global-Electri...
I'd gladly take expensive nuclear power that exists over non-existing cheap renewables. (Of course, renewables are great, I'm totally rooting for them. I just wish that they are actually, you know, available, instead of being only theoretically available and being used as a rhetorical device against nuclear power.)
Also you omitted some relevant details on South Korean politics: the previous president Moon and his party was staunchly anti-nuclear and tried hard to phase it out, for the sake of the "environment." Which predictably resulted in continued usage of fossil fuels, which these idiots see as a lesser evil.
(Sadly, his successor, the sitting president Yoon, is a raging buffoon. I mean, he muttered "Wouldn't it be fucking embarrassing for Biden" in front of reporters, what more do you want. Being pro-nuclear is probably the only positive thing I can say of him, but I'm not really counting on that - Yoon being such an idiot, there's a very good chance his policies would be put in reverse by whoever succeeds him.)
They are actually available, maybe Korea just doesn't want to build them? They don't play that well with constant output systems like nuclear so it would make nuclear unprofitable in the longer run. Although this obviously depends on the energy mix, maybe up until a certain percentage renewables would be fine for example.
...but it still won't be enough. We need something that can produce power when renewables can't.
They also intend to make 10% of their power from hydrogen/ammonia which is presumably going to be generated from some combination of nuclear and renewables when demand isn't peaking.
If this were the / a major factor in cost competitiveness, we'd expect to see much higher uptake of nuclear fission power plants in places where, as you might say, those things are disregarded (to varying degrees).
I don't believe that's the case, but can't find convincing data one way or the other.
I wonder if there are examples of massive cost overrun / delayed commissioning nuclear fission plants - say Hinkley in the UK - that could be pointed at to substantiate the 'process and regulatory approval' costs, where those process and regulations changed after the initial cost calculations.
Aircraft carriers and submarines.
The economics of nuclear powered subs is quite different from a commercial product. But it’s interesting to consider.
(And just for fun: imagine what effect a “right to repair” law would have…)
In addition, military spend capabilities will more readily compensate for the other two sides of the project management triangle. And AIUI a lot of those systems, once initial development occurred, were cookie-cutter / evolutionary designs.
I also understand the mini-reactors for seafaring vessels are much less efficient - but they don't need to be hugely efficient, primarily for the reason you mention.
In any case, I expect the regulatory-driven quality of those devices is ridiculously high. Well the USA systems at least -- obviously Russia had a much less pleasant experience with small reactors on submarines.
Historically NPT treaty prevented a lot of those countries from pursuing peaceful nuclear energy.
I'll reiterate my earlier two claims slightly more succinctly:
a) we should see a strong correlation between nation states with laxer attitudes towards safety AND more fission nuclear power plants brought online on budget and on time.
b) absent regulation changes through the life of any given project, we should expect to see any given plant brought online on budget and on time.
I don't believe we have a wealth of examples of the latter, and for the former the semi-obvious candidate would be China, however:
" ... China’s government has become more cautious about nuclear power [...]. The target in the 13th five year plan was only 58 gigawatts by 2020, and, as of April 2022, China is yet to reach that capacity target. Judging by what is under construction, China will miss the target of 70 gigawatts by 2025 as well.
"Many Chinese nuclear plants have been delayed and construction costs have exceeded initial estimates."
Citing: https://www.colorado.edu/cas/2022/04/12/even-china-cannot-re...
Important to note reasons for targets being unmet, apart from safety reevaluation delays due to Fukushima Daiichi (PRC laxer but not that lax on nuclear safety), delays and over cost can be attributed to foreign nuclear tech - french EPR underperforming, US AP1000s trouble with Westinghouse and sanctions against China General Nuclear as part of tech war. Recent indigenous CPR1000 plants post above drama have rolled out according to expectations. A lot can be explained by nuclear simply being hard, and domestic regulation around nuclear power in western countries capable of infra exports led to them consistently underdeliver. NPT and moat around nuclear tech also prevents many countries from indigenous nuclear power development. Few countries have the resources and expertise regardless of NPT to pursue indigenous nuclear power programs at all, but so far PRC plants with indigenous tech is performing alright. Other consideration is simpler and scalable renewable tech costs coming way down. Renewables are over performing while nuclear now performing at about expectations.
Even taking into account all OL3 construction delays the long term LCOE target for all three plants is 30 EUR/MWh. LCOE for the OL3 reactor alone is estimated at 42 EUR/MWh.
The main Wiki article includes a long list of reasons for delays and cost overruns.
The construction project also included very long term, underground storage. On YouTube, you can find a great, if slightly creepy, documentary about it called "Into Eternity".
Definitely cheap, if you make someone else pay.
I know, my point is that EDF is not related to that.
> EDF bought the bankrupt carcass of Areva to preserve the French nuclear industry.
Some parts were sent in other entities, like Framatome.
> Framatome (French pronunciation: [fʁamatɔm]) is a French nuclear reactor business.[1] It is owned by Électricité de France (EDF) (75.5%), Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (19.5%), and Assystem (5%).
edit: less than half
That's where the original argument fails to compel.
There's ~ 50 countries with nuclear reactors, and about 30 with nuclear power plants. (Australia's an example of having one reactor, for research, but not wanting any for power production.)
Anyway, it's unlikely those 32 countries that have nuclear fission power plant, which presumably is a subset of countries that could build them today, all have near-identical regulatory / process requirements that in turn are the reason they're uneconomical to build there.
Few projects means little standardization and shaky forecasts.
Is waste. The main problem is waste, we need to store it somewhere and it’s never in my backyard
Here's a source (also check the sourced on the video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uU3kLBo_ruo
The problem is more likely PERCEPTION of nuclear waste.
It came out of the ground, if we put it back there then how have we made things worse than they were? There are natural nuclear reactors in places untouched by humans.
> Solar panels are highly recyclable.
Really? At what energy cost?
> We are figuring out how to recycle the composite materials used for windmill blades.
Which is a fancy way of saying we can't and don't currently recycle them. There are reasonably advanced plans for reprocessing nuclear waste too.
> We need to move to a circular economy.
Fundamentally impossible. We need to keep pollution at manageable levels and expand into the universe. The environmental impact of nuclear waste is tiny in comparison to virtually everything else we do in everyday life; it should be a long long way down the list of concerns.
This is facile. Plutonium 240 isn't uranium 238. Nor is Cs, Tc, Pu241 etc.
You can just say you're not remotely interested in truth or reality. It's simpler for everyone.
Ore is cheap, natural uranium is still cheap, enriched uranium isn’t, and making fuel rods isn’t. Insurance, land, replacement equipment, decommissioning, etc it all adds up.
People love to talk about how cheap various aspects of nuclear power are compared to other types of energy, but it’s the total costs that matter not just individual parts aspects. Small modular reactors still need cooling, they still need turbines, spent fuel cooling ponds and processing etc etc.
Actually it applies even more, because renewables are decentralised and small scale, so there's a wide range of jobs from house-level local installations to international infrastructure.
Jobs for 500 people vs cheaper electricity for 1 million people which allows them to spend more money elsewhere and thus also creates jobs. The second option might seem roughly equal, except those new jobs are creating value and thus society is better off with increased efficiency.
Of course those benefits aren’t spread equally, but being poor today is still better than being poor 500 years ago. Hopefully being poor in 500 years will be a similar improvement.
It is astonishing the amount of red-tape when it comes to nuclear power, just because of all the FUD pushed by environmental groups, when it is the cleanest form of energy in the world.
I am a big fan of nuke as the generation source that is mostly environmentally benign right now today full stop. It's well known, though, that the main problem with nuke is that it's very expensive to build because we're quite worried about the safety so we have a lot of process and regulatory approval built into the design and construction. That extra process and regulatory approval is quite expensive.
Of course it's a lot cheaper if you just disregard those things.