A real question is whether we can do with REN alone or not. If we can, good, let’s do it. If we can’t, then we must find something else, regardless of costs.
And by “do it” I mean electrify as much as possible (transports, heating, industries where possible) and compensate where we can’t (airplane, agriculture, cement).
Are we positive that we can make it? And what happens if we can’t? Should plan for the unhappy scenario too?
I'm skeptical that these can actually scale to the required level to provide baseload when renewables are unavailable. Don't forget to include EVs and electric heating, which we don't have in massive quantities today but will need to have in short order.
(To be ultra-clear: I would never argue against more renewable deployments. Yes, more renewables, always more. But I think not building nuclear, right now, is a big mistake.)
The generic problem with "it can't be done" arguments is you are claiming all possible ways of solving a problem don't work. This is a very strong claim, and is not backed up by such vague arguments.
Nuclear has the disadvantage that they've been trying for longer than either of us have been alive to make it cheap, and it hasn't worked. This real world evidence can't be easily dismissed, especially when competing technologies have crashed in cost by orders of magnitude over that time.
That's a reasonable position, and I think reasonable people can disagree here. I disagree for two reasons:
1) I think (could be wrong) the cost is largely regulatory. I suspect (could be wrong) that we could streamline that without sacrificing real safety and dramatically lower the cost.
2) Even still, the cost is absolute peanuts compared to the cost of climate change. Even the famous $30B Georgia plant cost less than the world's richest individual spent so he could smash a social media network against the wall like a toddler with a Tonka truck. The US Military gets about 100 of those plants in funding every single year. It's really not that much money in the grand scheme of things, when you're talking hundreds of trillions of dollars in damage about to smash us in the face. IMO we need to stop counting pennies here and really actually tackle this problem.
But yes, absolutely agreed it is relatively expensive compared to other solutions, and it should be a priority to get that cost down. I just don't think it's so expensive that it's disqualifying. And, again, I think reasonable people can disagree here.
(2)'s first sentence would be a valid argument if the choice were between nuclear and climate change. But that's not the choice being made. That nuclear is better than climate change is damning with faint praise, the "it's better than a poke in the eye" of energy arguments.
As for naval reactors... putting a nuclear reactor in a ship increases the overall cost of building and operating that ship, compared to burning oil. And this is true even though burning oil is very uncompetitive for grid power generation. There's a reason the majority of the ships in the US Navy are not nuclear powered.
Having power and not freezing to death when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow is a pretty solid point.
We just put a new nuclear power plant into service in Finland.
> Its LCOE is 5x that of solar and between 1.5x-3x more expensive than solar/wind paired with just about all viable forms of green large scale storage (hydrogen, batteries, pumped storage).
Do you have any sources to back up these figures? I’m genuinely interested.
How is hydrogen a viable storage form when you cannot burn 100% hydrogen and fuel cell aren’t available or cost effective at utility scale?
How are batteries a viable storage form when there isn’t enough global manufacturing capacity to store energy at scale?
How is pumped hydro a viable storage form when you are limited by geography and can’t really build any more?
What this means is you're going to lose your heavy energy intensive industry. Going with nuclear won't save you from that, if you're then competing with industry in places where solar is available all year at costs likely to be below $0.01/kWh.
Not really. Electricity usage is not actually constant and nuclear power doesn't do load following unless you double the cost again (10x LCOE).
Theres a reason only France tried that - and a reason why Areva went spectacularly bankrupt.
Theres no reality in which it makes any economic sense except #1 providing military support or #2 FUDDing the ever living jesus out of all available storage options.
Oh, really? What's your solution to producing non-polluting power when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow?
> Electricity usage is not actually constant and nuclear power doesn't do load following unless you double the cost again
Can you explain how you've come to this conclusion?
We recently turned up a new nuclear power plant in Finland and they did nothing but turn up and down the generation levels when doing tests. Looking at the graphs, I can see output has varied between 3,3 and 4,3 GW this week.
The local wikipedia article on nuclear power states that power output can be regulated 5%/min, which is faster than almost all other generation methods.
> Theres a reason only France tried that - strongly related to the reason why Areva went spectacularly bankrupt.
Are you saying that Areva went over budget because they build us a load following nuclear plant?
> Theres no reality in which it makes any economic sense except #1 providing military support or #2 a pretend reality where all available storage options dont work.
Pray do tell what those available storage options are. Give us the real skinny then, none of that FUDD.
Gosh you really didnt read anything I wrote did you?
You didn't read anything I wrote, nor did you raise any of the points I raised.
Its LCOE is 5x that of solar and between 1.5x-3x more expensive than solar/wind paired with just about all viable forms of green large scale storage. Pairing it with non-green gas is cheaper still, even at today's prices.