Anything alive after that wouldn't be human and wouldn't be worried about electricity.
This isn't aimed at you, but more at the people dismissing the utility of solar and wind power.
Nukes require lots of cooling, needing access to large amounts of water from water bodies, that's definitely not "most places" by definition.
This limits a lot nuclear facilities placement.
Only in rare cases, such as during revisions or emergencies, they might be unable to cool the condenser using the tower-coolant-loop. Then they might have to warm up the water temporarily.
> you definitely don't want to have a nuke potentially discharging contaminated water near population centres (in case something goes wrong and the discharge needs to happen).
There is no such failure case that a "discharge needs to happen" for the irradiated water. There is a comparatively tiny amount of deionized and supercleaned water in the reactor that is always cycled around. Even if such a case were to occur (how??), the amount of water would be easy to handle/store.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
And Brits are not exactly leaping into action about raw sewage discharges into rivers.
These are hardly the only viable plant designs that exist. Molten Salt, Pebble Bed, and other designs exist.
China is currently underway building a molten salt cooled Thorium reactor.
Russia also had lead-bismuth reactors, at least militarily, with the Alfa-class.
[0]: https://www.neimagazine.com/news/mox-use-at-russias-bn-800-r...
Two units cooling for every unit of electricity, at least with PWR/BWR. At a 10 degree C rise it requires about 50ml of water (per second) per kW of electrical power.
Palo Verde NPP in Arizona happens to be in a rather dry area. It uses treated sewage for cooling and is trying to use rather poor quality groundwater too.
https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2020/02/25/palo-verde-nuclear...
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-69f8723dccb62f0572daf...
This is what happened to Germany. They tried going 100% renewables and then had Russia take up the slack for the rest of what they needed. Then they realized they had a massive shortfall and then was leaning far too much on Russia to take up the slack.
As someone else pointed out, geopolitics always weighs heavy in energy production. Just like in Germany's case where they relied too heavy on Russia for the shortfall of renewables, then Russia invaded Ukraine and Russia used their energy production as leverage to essentially blackmail Germany into not going along with UN sanctions against them.
However we need to get to total energy independence, I'm all for, and this whole idea it has to be one or the other only lengthens the process of getting there. In the mean time, it puts us in a precarious position to be involved with countries and regime's that don't like us and will never have our best interests in mind.
This will have cost them Billions, similar to the British right wing effectively banning onshore wind in Emgland at roughly the same time.
Both nations have done well with renewables, but could have done better and saved money and supported local business at the same time.
Germany would have been much better off building nuclear in the 90's. But because they invested in renewables instead, everybody (including Germany) has a much better option of building renewables in the 2020s.
Especially once you take systems costs into account, which you must, but renewable fanbois never do.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...
I'm dubious about many of their assumptions but even your source shows that renewables are the obvious choice to power the world.
It's also interesting that the cost drops 50% if you don't need to cover the last 5%. A shame he didn't go further and calculate at 80% and so on like the recent Australian working paper.
I guess that would show that starting the rollout now would provide lots of savings that could be used to deploy the later percentiles.
You actually don't. Not one fit for that purpose, at least without significant investment, permitting hurdles, delays etc etc.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...
Question though... do we understand the tail risk from volcanos on solar outputs, either natural-occurring eruptions or maliciously-triggered ones?
Once you start adding nines, nuclear starts to be become attractive again. Hence these deals.
Only if you ignore reliability issues with nuclear, such as France having to take a lot of reactors offline at the same time to check for cracks. The comparison has to be fair.
Second, the could have kept those plants operating and taken a more piecemeal approach to fixing the cracks. They shouldn't have, and didn't, because you really want that triple or quadruple redundancy in your cooling systems, but they could have if push had come to shove, the plants were still operational.
But since there was plenty of capacity available, they could afford to take those plants offline and do the checks and repairs all at once.
Intermittent renewables afford you no such optionality.
If the sun don't shine, the sun don't shine.
If the wind don't blow, the wind don't blow.
Nuclear and reliable renewables for base load, intermittent renewables for intermittent load where and when it matches.
Wind/solar are not cheaper. Per kWh they are more expensive. Thanks to China, they are a lower and smaller-grained capital investment.
These cracks are not the only factor for the poor performance on nuclear in 2022 : several reactors had to do their 10-year maintenance (grand carénage), which had been delayed because of the pandemic.
It's hard to extrapolate reliability issues from an event that happened once in 30 years.
German und US plants had/have capacity factors of well over 90%, and the downtimes are scheduled.
The "overbuild" is minimal.
Dayjob is in energy market algo trading and DER ancillary services in EU, and I can tell you with confidence this is far from true.
And when the nukes trip for safety reasons - which happens multiple times per year - that’s a GW that just dropped off the grid from one second to the next.
For me, I much prefer the reliability of wind and solar; never seen a correlated failure, and we know their production pattern days in advance.
How these things will be managed in the real world matters, too, not just how it could play out hypothetically.
Until March 2023, there was a law in France that made it illegal to increase nuclear capacity in absolute terms and mandated reduction to under 50% in relative terms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=isgu-VrD0oM
But again, a one-time event, and it doesn't change the high capacity factors world-wide (over 80%) and the extremely high capacity factors in reasonably well run fleets ( > 90% in the US, and also inGermany when they still had nuclear ).
2. A one time event has little to no effect on overall capacity factors.
3. Underinvestment is very easy to deal with: invest adequately.
Since we didn't have "no electricity for some months" in this one-off, and, as I explained elsewhere, had optionality, not quite sure how you extrapolate from an event not happening to an event happening every few decades.
Gosh, so we're not ever going to invest sufficiently in battery tech for that to ever work. Glad you cleared that up for us.
But to be clear, it wasn't some random "human nature" that caused the underinvestment. It was official government policy, and that government policy has now been changed.
The renewables mafia that is still in control in Germany was also in control in France. That has been taken care of, mostly by being exposed to the harsh light of Reality™.
The law that mandated reduction and forbade expansion of nuclear was repealed March 2023. They are now expanding capacity, build first 6 and then an additional 8 simplified EPR2 reactors.
And there was one more reason for the lull in investment: France did the initial expansion under the Messmer Plan far too quickly. They nuclearized their grid in just 15 years.
Which sounds great, and of course completely puts the lie to those who claim that nuclear is "too slow". But there is a problem: these nuclear plants are not just quick to build, they also last pretty much forever, at least 60 years, many if not most are being extended to 80 years and the experts say there's no reason not to go to 100.
If you have built all the nuclear power plants you need in 15 years and they last 100 years, you have nothing to build for 85 years (or 65 / 45 years if you assume 80/60 year lifespans).
That's a problem, because your nuclear industry will wither and die in that time.
Which it pretty much did.
Poor policy can happen again - such is human nature. So things need to work under poor policies, too.
Exactly, as I wrote. Which is why they were able pursue the option "shut everything down at once and fix immediately" without any negative repercussions apart from EDFs bottom line for that one year.
(Though that apparently was not the biggest negative impact on their bottom line that year. The bigger one was being compelled by law to sell electricity to their competitors at 4 cents/kWh and having to buy it back at market rates that were spiking due to the energy crisis).
There was also the option "stagger the shutdowns and take a slightly elevated risk of one of the triple-redundant cooling systems failing". Which they might have preferred to reducing electricity supply for the country or accelerating repairs. But they didn't have to do that.
> So things need to work under poor policies, too.
Nothing works under arbitrarily bad policy, and such a standard is not applied to anything in the real world.
Build all of it.
Exactly. And everyone is putting their heads in the sand over this calculation.
Seasonal energy storage is simply not a problem we have even begun to solve yet. We know the numbers, we're just not talking about them.
Something close to that happens almost every year in Europe. Last year there was nearly 3 weeks in winter where there was very little wind across the continent (<20% capacity production on all wind farms), and obviously little to no solar (high latitudes).
Also, Spain only has a ~2 GW connection to France to sell their solar power to the rest of Europe.
Same reason why almost no one goes 100% solar at home deep in the south/north because you'd need 20x your needed capacity in batteries to account for that once in a decade bleak winter week
People say one thing--"we require 100% uptime"--but do another--"but I'm only willing to pay a fraction of the price it would take to achieve that, and then I'll complain bitterly during the inevitable power outages."
I'm all for nuclear, but let's be honest about how real-world infrastructure truly works. And, yes, I believe this means safety claims of Gen 4+ nuclear are off, just as they were for prior gen plants. Through motivated accounting people arrive at the numbers that are demanded, but knowingly or not the actual risk of an incident will be greater, as it manifestly always has been. At the same time our real risk tolerance is much greater than we claim, and this will eventually be born out in the power markets, whether through greater nuclear, less reliable power, or some other state of affairs.
Correction: Texas, the state, doesn't require producers to maintain adequate reserve generation or robust infrastructure, and since they are not (except for a couple of small exceptions) connected to other regional grids, they can't be made to do so by the federal government. This is by design. It's a bad design, but one that greatly pleases corporations.
> People say one thing--"we require 100% uptime"--but do another--"but I'm only willing to pay a fraction of the price it would take to achieve that, and then I'll complain bitterly during the inevitable power outages."
This was not my experience when I lived in Texas. There was a brief moment in time for me (~2017 – 2019) where it was actually substantially cheaper, but only if you had the time and knowledge to scour all of the available plans and run some kind of modeling on them, since some had a lot of weird rules. Around COVID, that changed, and the cost savings evaporated. I check periodically, and it still hasn't recovered. Cheapest I could find for where I lived was 10.1¢/kWh, but that's just the base price. In contrast, my base price in North Carolina, on an REMC, is an annual average of 7.48¢/kWh.
All that to say, Texans were/are paying more than many others for sub-standard service. I bought a generator while there, and had to use it many, many times. I have used it precisely once here in NC, and that wasn't even a real need – sunny, pleasant afternoon, and someone hit a transformer with their car. Lost power for about 2 hours. Could've easily just done without and been fine.
For a once-in-a-century situation, you can have alternatives other than batteries. For instance, backup diesel generators; any extra CO2 emitted by them in that situation would be insignificant when spread over a hundred years. And once you're planning for once-in-a-century events, you need backup generators anyway, since you can have failures other than just cloudy windless weather.
If it were still a problem towards the end of that period, then you can in fact extract uranium from seawater.
Problem is: raw Uranium is too plentiful (=cheap) for recycling to be worth it.
"Problem"
We absolutely do not have long-term climate models with that sort of accuracy.
Forget about two months, the cost to battery store just for two or three days is enormous. At the same time, it does not happen often enough to justify the cost over just using natural gas as a backup, so that is how it is done.
But apparently, in zero marginal cost energy it’s impossible. The only energy systems where you can have reliability have rent seeking minerals companies selling you fuel.
I don’t understand why wind solar is subject to absolutes devoid of probability - “what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months?”
We know the probability that the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing for N days, we can calculate it from historical data.
You can absolutely build solar+wind+storage systems that deliver 24/7/365 energy with many nines SLAs, on the real earth with real statistics on weather.