Nuclear energy is a pretty sophisticated topic and I'll be honest, as someone with a degree in physics, who has worked on radiation shielding, and worked at DoE labs (in CS, not physics or engineering, but I was talking to those folks quite a lot given my background and worked on analyzing data), I'm not even confident enough to put my face to my statements. I'm not putting my credentials to boast, but to say that this is a threshold for "unqualified."

It's just too easy to get something little wrong which makes your whole belief collapse. I can tell you, I even see people on the pro-nuclear side make a lot of blunders that have meaningful changes (I've even seen this in shielding even when I have slides showing Geant4 simulations and the results are expected from the math). Nuclear is a pretty tough topic and requires a lot of nuance. Climate even more so. I know a lot of people have strong opinions on these topics but I hope those opinions also do not come with high confidence. A paywall to me suggests higher confidence. Plus is a weird move to advertise your substack. Advertise your domain expertise! That's your quality content.

Solar and wind are winning not because they are cheaper or more balanced for the grid but because you can buy off the shelf components, install them quickly and make it to profitability sooner. There's just a whole lot less time and risk.

If we subjected all our generation to the same regulatory burden, nuclear would be profitable again because our power would be drastically more expensive.

I don’t find the argument that nuclear reactors could be regulated as windmills super compelling, but that’s just me.

I don't think everyone agrees that fatalities per MWh is the right metric.

Why not; what would be a better one?

Doing X (new medical procedure, changing a road intersection) would save Y lives for Z cost.

If the cost Z is low you can shift resources to it from areas where cost Z is high per life or QUALY (quality adjusted life year) saved and overall save more lives.

The US nuclear regulatory regime _explicitly_ does not include costs when determining if a new regulatory rule is necessary. Any amount of safety at any cost is always justified. No other generation technology has that mindset.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

Even using sources from a decade ago, pro nuclear sources like world in data couldn't find any credible sources to back that claim.

And solar and wind were just getting started a decade ago.

[0]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261...

-edit- yeah after further investigation, according to their "learn more about this data" button, the original source for that data is two publications, the one I linked, and the 2007 paper. The 2007 paper is primirly about comparing nuclear to fossil fuels, and mostly from the perspective of indirect effects from CO2. I'm skeptical of it's claims, as that's a bit too roundabout. The one I linked above is direct effects only (except that it includes cancer deaths from nuclear accidents), which I think goes too far in the other direction. I'd personally include deaths from particulate emissions from fossil fuel generation, but that has no bearing on the comparison between nuclear and wind/solar.

I don't know how they ended up with the plot they display given the sources that they have, but I trust the graphs in the 2016 paper more, which show much larger effects.

In any case, it's certainly not true that there are no credible sources backing up the claim. One can dispute it, I'm sure, but there are credible sources backing it up.

Nuclear has far fewer fatalities, but it's accidents are also dramatically more expensive. Although both nuclear and hydro are having their numbers mostly driven by a single catastrophic event (the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure in China and Chernobyl), so how one feels about this whole analysis is going to depend on how likely one thinks future catastrophic events are to be. The numbers are so low that it's hard to come up with very rigorous estimates.

I personally think that catastrophic accidents on the scale of Chernobyl are as close to impossible these days as makes no difference. I'm not even too worried about Fukushima level events (which was not particularly deadly but was very expensive)

However, I have to admit that my opinion on that isn't really backed up be empirics, as is always going to be the case with rare events.

[0]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

However, be sure to dig into the methodology.

Data on death rates from solar and wind is sourced from Sovacool et al. (2016) based on a database of accidents from these sources.

We estimate deaths rates for nuclear energy based on the latest death toll figures from Chernobyl and Fukushima as described in our article here: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...

Note that the deaths for nuclear energy include only radiation related deaths, whereas the accidents for solar and wind include "mundane" accidents like workers falling from heights. Nuclear power plants have their own non-radioactive accidents, though, like this one:

https://www.shippai.org/fkd/en/cfen/CB1011025.html

(5 workers killed at Mihama nuclear power plant due to accidental steam release)

I have not seen any comparison that tries to sum up non-radioactive accidents for nuclear power and incorporate them in the deaths-per-TWh rate for nuclear power. The number will still be lower than anything based on combustion, but at these very low numbers it could make a meaningful difference in the relative rates.

to some extent this I what's happening now. If a wind turbine (or indeed whole wind farm) catastrophically fails then you can clean it up in a matter of days or weeks. The range of potential damage in space and time, is very limited.

By contrast catastrophic nuclear failure leads to immediate damage over a far larger area, and spans a much longer time (like hundreds of years. )

One can quibble about deaths from chernobyl but it displaced an entire city and rendered a substantial chunk of land unusable for centuries.

So I would argue that thd regulations are completely in line with the risks, as they stand right now.

1. https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/asia/futaba-fukushima-nuclear...

2. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

Unfortunately they still seem to be all promise and no deliveries.

Good luck, if one of them shows up in the hands of Daesh or other religious-ideologically or political-ideologically disturbed minds.

Edit: Furthermore, small reactors produce more radioactive waste than big ones. Although the study I read was about conventional reactors, IIRC.

Nuclear being much more heavily regulated is due directly to it’s intrinsic dangers.

For some reason, this seems to have omitted solar power from the list of examples of technologies that have a higher body count than nuclear power. In the meantime, let's examine how many cities have needed to be evacuated due to the catastrophic failure of solar plants.

I'm pretty sur solar kill more per generated MW than wind.

The main difference is that solar/wind only kill or inconvenience/maim blue collar workers. It's like chemical spills in North America, you only hear about it if it inconvenience white collar or large owners, if it's only 30k blue collar workers, it'll hardly make national news.

Damn ;), but they "waste" the lakes downstream by making them shallower by siltation over decades, not millenia, and "waste" the ecology and biology upstream by flooding the valleys they dam.

Neither would nuclear plants, if the world came to its senses and built breeder reactors: Their "waste" is fuel for other reactors.

> Nuclear being much more heavily regulated is due directly to it’s intrinsic dangers.

Partly that, and partly (IMO in much larger part) due to scaremongering propaganda. Like you seem to have bought in to.

Stop. Just stop. They are not winning. Neither solar or wind can actually replace traditional ways of generating power (nuclear, coal, gas, hydro). Solar and Wind are intermittent power sources and there is no grid-scale battery technology to remove this fatal intermittency problem. They cannot power a modern economy. Today there isn't even a small city anywhere in the world actually powered *solely* by solar/wind, much less a modern economy. Regions that overinvest in solar/wind, when they aren't dealing with gird problems, simply end up building up their natural gas infrastructure or buying electricity from neighboring regions.

Solar/Wind is never going to replace fossil fuels.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545044/electrify/

This is part of why plans for a primarily renewable grid assume that hydrogen or some other heretofore untested system will fulfill the overwhelming majority of storage. Because none of the existing electrical storage mechanisms are sufficient for grid-scale storage.

1. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac4dc8

It is unclear if nuclear would fill the gap they calculated.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chinas-dominance-in-battery...

https://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/research-analysis/growt...

There is no such thing as a 'moderate amount of storage'. The best you can get is pumped storage (if you have the correct geography for it).

Outside of that, sure, you can add solar/wind to the energy mix - does that invalidate my point? Does that actually support OP's point?

Wait, you say, natural gas? But natural gas is dirty. Well, in the US if we could magically remove all other sources of greenhouse gas emissions except for the natural gas power plants, we'd be at net zero right now.

Where is the bottleneck with mass producing batteries, that don't need rare elements, like saltwater batteries?

Surely it is not cheap either, but it is working technology, cannot burn, nor contaminate entire landscapes if something goes wrong.

"Today there isn't even a small city anywhere in the world actually powered solely by solar/wind"

Because of economics and not really factoring in external costs, fossil fuels are simply cheaper. But it surely can be done with current tech. And El Hierro, a canarian island, is pretty close:

https://renewablesnow.com/news/spains-el-hierro-island-beats...

1. https://cdn.aiidatapro.net/media/9b/7d/7c/t780x490/9b7d7ca4d...

Not saying it’s environmentally friendly, but if you have sunshine all year round it’s easily doable.

Here in South Australia we also have a massive Tesla battery to stabilise grid output.

I’m all for Nuclear though.

1) I simply dont think that is true unless you are willing to be powerless 5% of the year or have backup generators

It is doable and people do it.

Here in Australia anyway.

You just need enough Solar, enough battery, and controls on your power load.

Not saying it’s easy or commonplace right now, but if you really want to, you can go off-grid!

In Australia at least.

Of course with enough money you can put in three times the panels you need on average to account for winter days. Similarly, you could put in a week's storage battery in case a nasty storm comes through.

But you can, if you want to...

That sounds great for everyone living in Spain, Italy and Greece, as well as New Mexico, Arizona, Southern Cali Georgia, Florida, Mississippi and Alabama. I guess everyone who lives north of thst is just SOL then.

That’s how it goes.

For them, other tech works though.

Wind and hydro to whatever extent.

And of course Nuclear.

You might want to pause and re-read GP's comment. It seemed clear to me that GP was saying that solar and wind are winning over nuclear, because of the special challenges that nuclear represents. While I agree with many of your points, it doesn't strike me as crazy at all to say that wind and solar are winning v. nuclear. Of course, whether they should be is a totally different question.

The options are Solar+Wind+coal/gas VS Solar+Wind+Nuclear.

I think nuclear is cool tech but am doubtful it will play a big role in most countries since renewables are so much cheaper (1/3rd the price, so you can overbuild substantially) for getting to 90% emissions free generation.

Renewables (wind/solar) could be free and they wouldn't be able to support a modern economy - that's the problem. It's why wind/solar, today, do not even power a small city, much less a nation.

No energy source will support an entire modern economy, but like nuclear they can supply the majority of electricity for one.

Denmark share of electricity production from wind power 2022: 55%. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...

France share of electricity production from nuclear power 2022: 63%. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...

OK ... If you want to claim that the future is wind + natural gas/coal - go ahead, but that's not what the public is being told. The public is told that wind/solar can replace fossil fuels, and they can't.

Here's the reality:

If you have nuclear, you don't need wind/solar - at all. In fact, you will not be able to use wind/solar, because nuclear can't be easily spun up and down to deal with the wind/solar intermittency. In your France example, wind/solar is pointless.

If you have hydro, and you have enough of it, you don't need wind/solar. If you don't have enough hydro, you need natural gas though you can optionally throw in wind/solar. Once you hit your geographic hydro capacity, the only way to increase is to build out your natural gas/coal infrastructure (regardless if you throw in wind/solar in there)

If you don't have nuclear, and you don't have hydroelectric, then wind/solar will not be able to replace fossil fuels. You will be forced to build out coal or natural gas infrastructure (or burn wooden pallets), as your Danish example shows.

Here are other examples: - Germany, which closed its nuclear plants, and now is using wind but also more coal/gas than ever before: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...

- Portugal, which is blessed by geography that gives it access to hydro, but because they don't have enough, and they built out their wind infrastructure, need significant natural gas capability: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...

- Costa Rica is another poster child for renewable usage .. but really, it's a poster child for hydroelectric power. They don't need wind/solar at all. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...

As the cost of generating electricity from gas is mostly the cost of the gas its perfectly reasonable to have those gas plants built and operated 10% of the time so long as the total system cost is much lower than building nuclear.

There's an arguable case that for 100% carbon-free electricity (rather than 90% carbon free) the economics of nuclear are potentially viable, at least for places like northern Europe where you can't just build a huge amount of solar and 24 hours of battery storage.

But it seems far more important to decarbonise the grid as fast as we can and that means building lots of cheap renewables. Nuclear is simply too expensive and too slow to build. Which is a shame because it is cool tech!

Closing existing nuclear plants like Germany has done is an absolute disgrace. We should keep existing plants open for as long as possible.

And of course, if anyone can figure out how to build nuclear cheaply then build a bunch more. Then maybe they will replace the renewables currently being built as they end of their service lives.

You can build an entirely solar/wind-powered storage and distribution center capable of putting out 1 GW of power 24/7 with modern PV panels, wind turbines, battery storage, hydrogen storage, etc. It's entirely feasible, and although costs for such a system are high (comparable to that of a 1 GW nuclear power plant), those costs are steadily falling and the long-terms costs are much lower as you don't need to acquire uranium fuel or store the hot waste.

https://hornsdalepowerreserve.com.au/

Worrying about running out of uranium (and the subsequent plutonium) is on the same level of worrying about what to do when the sun goes supernova. Both are problems on century long timescales.

They will not and cannot win until we have cheap, highly dense, efficient power storage. That is, unfortunately, at least 20 years off (if we're lucky).

They will continue to be an important part of our energy ecosystem, and we should aggressively build them out, but we still need the fundamental power solution.

Especially in the case of a flooding, Fukushima style.

Volume and mass are just whatever they are. They don't matter.

I don't see anyone making this weirdly-specific claim. However, it's widely acknowledged that sufficient battery storage to guarantee national grid-wide power on-demand, sufficient for a modern industrial economy, is not currently feasible, in both economic and practical terms.

If a large chunk of current grid investment in Texas, profit-drivej by independent investors, how could it not be feasible to continue this level of investment? Especially when costs are falling dramatically and production capacity for batteries is just getting started and is scaling at a tremendous rate that will result in a complete excess of battery capacity within the time period that we could only build a thousandth of the same amount of nuclear wattage?

What is the blocker on feasibility?

I’m not saying your claim about the rapid pace of building out battery storage is false - your claim is true. However, there is no currently-feasible way to run an advanced industrial economy on intermittent energy sources backed by chemical batteries. It may become technically feasible at some point in the future (never bet against human ingenuity in the long run), but it’s technically and economically impractical right now.

There are of course feasible ways of running our entire economy entirely on renewables, saying otherwise means ignoring the massive amount of literature on the topic:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

Every argument I have ever seen attempted to say it is not possible makes simplifying unrealistic assumptions. Such as saying something silly like "here's our known lithium reserves, that's not enough."" Of course, our known reserves of lithium is going up every year, because we keep on looking for more, and the argument is not even sophisticated enough to acknowledge what proven reserves means as a concept.

So if you think you have a solid argument present it, and if I'm convinced let's get it published and overturn all this other literature.

You hand-wave with “we haven’t built the mines or factories, yet”. In the real world, discovery, proving, permits, construction, and commissioning new mines can take many years - and that’s if sufficient quantities of the required minerals are feasibly recoverable, or in a jurisdiction that allows extraction and export (e.g. not China).

So let’s get back to the real world & be realistic. 100% RE is not currently viable for an advanced industrial economy. Let’s get all the published literature revised to get rid of the hand-waves and ivory tower theoretical BS.

I would not consider that cheap. I would not consider that highly efficient. It is a step in the right direction, but it's not enough

> The idea that we are not currently, today, deploying massive amounts of batteries everywhere with today's technology is just plain ignorance

Nowhere did I say we weren't. They just simply aren't good enough for our needs. We can't get there without this intermediate step - and it _is_ doing good and helping humanity. But we're simply not there and won't be for at least a decade.

> take Texas's grid, which is one of the few places where storage is allowed to compete on its own cost merits

You mean the Texas grid that keeps failing and sticking people with $1000 monthly power bills? Not a great example lol

Personally I think your timeline for storage is going to prove wildly conservative (we already have 5GW installed in CA, China is building capacity exponentially.) But even if you're right: these nuclear plants are going to come online right at the moment when storage makes them economically obsolete.

I do agree wind and solar are cheaper presently. But this is primarily because they're being deployed in the context of supplementing a fossil-fuel backed grid. Provisioning more wind and solar starts becoming much dicier when you start saturating the grid during hours of peak production. In theory, negative electricity prices will prompt people to provision storage and capture the free (cheaper than free!) energy. But in practice, energy storage at grid scale is expensive and there are much better uses for batteries - chiefly in electric vehicles.

Nuclear, on the other hand, is one of the few carbon-free energy sources that is non-intermittent. The only others are geographically limited: hydropower and geothermal power.

Even more staggering is that from 2020 to 2021 solar+wind grew by ~15%.

recycled EV batteries could be a major source for cheap grid battery storage

It isn't about "nuclear and (wind+solar)" but about "nuclear and renewables": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38301796

> energy storage at grid scale is expensive and there are much better uses for batteries - chiefly in electric vehicles

Those are composable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid

It makes a lot of sense for Sweden to but nuclear, even if it is exceptionally pricy and slow to deliver, if they don't have better options. But the fraction of the world population in that situation is not large, either, so we shouldn't extrapolate from Sweden to too many other places.

1/ no new nuclear reactor since 1985, despite hydro being the best existing storage system for nuclear (hydro resources there are fantastic), and hydro remaining there the main source of electricity

2/ wind is very quickly gaining traction https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...

3/ Some may remember the Forsmark'2006 near-miss ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J... ) and fight against this project.

Why does it have to be run at a profit? Surely it could be just like healthcare or the defence forces - never designed or intended to run a profit.

In the context of Sweden though, with social health care, and a modest military your question makes more sense. And of course as long as it has govt funding it doesn't need to make a profit, or even break even.

Once you look to private capital though, investors expect that capital to generate a return.

Assuming no govt subsidy yo provide that return, it has to come from an excess after operational expenses. (aka profit)

Requiring a resource to be sold at a profit ensures it goes to where it is most needed, and that it is used efficiently.

If your little tale was true, the USA would have cheaper and better healthcare than developed countries that have free healthcare.

That is not the case. Your little tale doesn't have to always be true, there are other ways of doing things in this world.

Population health starts with urban design that forces people to walk.

Running it as a for profit business results in Worse / Worse.

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...

Genuine question. What kind of solar/wind installation could generate 2GW of power on demand (including when no wind or sun) and how much would that cost? is it even feasible with actual technology?

2GW of batteries attached to solar installations, spread over multiple sites, is quite common in 2023. What do you mean by "what kind"? Its just the normal kind.

Right now, batteries deployed on the grid cost $300-$500/kWh, and typically LFP batteries are designed to last for 5000-7000 cycles, and will have warranties for 15+ years. This places the cost of storing a MWh at between $42/MWh and $100/MWh. Solar costs vary based on location, but range from $20/MWh to $80/MWh. For places with high seasonal variation, sizing the install for daily storage, using the seasonal minimum of input, in some areas might double or triple the cost for a particular season. Nuclear costs vary widely by construction competence, but in the largely incompetent west costs are going to be far north of $150/MWh.

So for most areas, most of the time, solar+storage is going to be far cheaper than nuclear. But low insolation or high latitudes might make solar+storage more expensive than nuclear.

In the future, nuclear's prices will continue to rise very slowly, and solar and storage prices will continue to plummet at ridiculously fast paces. This is why solar and storage are winning.

For industrial processes that need heat, the storage options become even cheaper. And if the industrial site can be put somewhere with half-decent solar insolation, then the solar power can be directly connected without going through the grid, which means looping off that $60-100/MWh that utilities charge for the very very expensive grid transmission. We are just at the start of industry realizing what is possible with distributed renewables and thermal storage, and there is potential for drastically cheaper energy for energy intensive industry that be built at new sites.

This is why solar and storage are "winning" even if nuclear might be better for Sweden. And with the ever increasing deployment of EVs, people are going to be parking multiple days worth of their home's energy needs in their garage. People will soon realize just how cheap storage is, and how perhaps even their vehicles will act as grid storage, even if it's only though charging at selective times when energy is cheaper.

You can just open the circuit to disconnect a solar panel from the external load. The panel will get slightly warmer in full sunlight when it's not connected to a load, but there's no harm to it. Since there is no rotating mass or hot steam with accumulated energy in a solar farm, you can shut it down completely in seconds if necessary. Solar PV can safely go from 100% output to 0% faster than any other electricity source.

[1] https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/solar/10-large-solar-pr...

In Germany, the right parties did block any project that had the smell of environment protection. And the pseudo-green clowns are no game changer.

Whereas when you report your wind farm or solar farm after 30 years you can take advantage the fall in component prices.

Even that apparently won't be enough to bring in the private contractors, however:

> "Guarantees are very important, but that won't be enough," Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson said. "For this type of infrastructure it is going to require the state to take part and share the risk."

I'm not sure what that means, the loan guarantee already seems like quite a risk. Are they going to go for nationalization of the power sector or something like that?

Seems large parts already is nationalized. Vattenfall is a huge power company and is owned by the Swedish state.