It's so frustrating seeing nuclear pitted against renewables, while fossil fuel powerplants are still operating/being built, whose baseline power could be replaced by nuclear.
But somehow the idea took hold that nuclear would be built instead of solar, and not instead of coal.
The problem is that hardly anybody does a clear cost calculation of a nuclear powerplant.
We know roughtly what it costs to build solar or wind. There is a bit of subsidies and commercial parties take care of the rest. In the short term we need natural gas as a backup for solar and wind. But even that is not hard to build.
And then we have nuclear. Projects that are late, projects cost way more than projected. Building a nuclear powerplant takes so much time that financing the project is almost impossible.
Today, nuclear is just not a practical option. We need to build as much non-fossil capacity as we can and as quick as we can.
In future, we have to solve the storage problem for wind and solar. If that becomes a problem, then nuclear may make a comeback. At least, if somebody can figure out how to accurately project the cost and construction time.
> But somehow the idea took hold that nuclear would be built instead of solar, and not instead of coal.
Nobody wants to admit they are still considering coal, but everyone wants to take credit for blocking nuclear and building renewables. So at a glance it seems like it's nuclear vs renewables, when it's always been nuclear vs coal.
Please don’t fall for the villianization that the media adopt to push an agenda.
Energy is a fundamental need for society to flourish.
Fossil fuels have one of the highest energy densities and hence have been used for ages. We have much to be thankful for thanks to fossil fuels being around.
We are in a position today to bring change and I’m all for that. Losing sight of the benefits of energy simply because some sources have a negative connotation attached sets us up for failure.
I didn’t say it’s wrong. I said it villianizes those fuels.
We needed fuels as a society for those 3000 mile flights over the pacific that ships your iPhone here.
Energy “subsidies” are a strategic investment in securing your lifestyle. Just look at Europe right now as they head into winter with sky high natural gas prices. They’d go ahead an strike any deal that secures their supplies so they do t freeze half to death like they did with Russia.
Energy is a strategic asset and simply saying “it gets subsidized” makes it sound like charity.
It's not "you first". There are perfectly good replacements available, we just need governments to invest heavily on replacing them instead of using that money to maintain the status quo.
I've already substantially changed my lifestyle to be more sustainable.
I don't own a car, I don't eat meat, I consume very little and try to buy used things instead, I repair all my things as much as possible, I try to steer my investments away from anything close to fossil fuels.
I do everything you just listed. But that was by choice, and I know people who won't want to e.g. ever give up eating meat.
We have to accommodate these lifestyles (and build tech to make it more sustainable) - people generally don't want to go 'backwards', even if you or I don't perceive that as a problem.
Ultimately it's irrelevant, because both of our lifestyles are still heavily carbon negative without offsets. We both own a computer or live in a house I assume? That's why I'm sceptical of the "just live more sustainable" movement.
Oh, i didn't miss that part, i think you may have missed my assertion that Energy is crucial to flourish. One may see a society "Flourish" by innovating their way out of an unsustainable path.
Everything we consider advanced tech today is built on an economy made possible by vast, cheap and accessible energy sources such as the ones we're dissing.
I agree that we need to stop using energy sources in a way that threatens our existence. But i assert that there are massive benefits we have to be thankful for as well.
Our lifestyle is sustainable. It just doesn't scale for 10 billion people. The only problem what we have is the amount of people. We can do something against it, but we won't.
what both? Any existing prediction says that the Earth won't support more than 10 billion people. Our life is much more "sustainable" now than before. Yes we still have a lot to do, we will always have, but gosh, we are simply too many. I can't believe in a COPXX if birth control isn't part of the solution.
> Fossil fuels have one of the highest energy densities and hence have been used for ages. We have much to be thankful for thanks to fossil fuels being around.
>Energy is a fundamental need for society to flourish.
Energy is needed for basic modern services.
Humans have survived a long time without electricity. It could be simpler to 'go without' or 'find a workaround' for a lot of conveniences if we were serious at combating climate change.
Not for eight billion people. Just look at what happens when we stop loading trucks for a little while. Now imagine if you expanded all that "going without" to everything that uses energy. You'd have days at most before mass chaos.
In what condition? Without the energy of the fossil fuel, lots of the energy came from human labor. Without it, we wouldn't have gotten rid of slavery. Most people were doing a manual labor, which is also more discriminatory to the weaker ones (e.g. woman)
So your just suggesting we go back to the middle ages? No, thank you.
Coal was already in reasonably widespread use in industrial processes 200 years ago, and produced unpaid-for externalities then just as it does now (actually worse ones, presumably, given that air quality was not yet regulated in any meaningful way).
I’m not saying the parent is necessarily wrong, but given the recency of the industrial revolution and the length of time between which it “began” and when many of the most useful industrial applications for coal were discovered, I can’t take it at face value “centuries” is correct. It might be close to correct, it might be technically correct, but it’s not merely an pedantic point: his comment reads as hyperbole because of the vagueness of what centuries even means here. Even if it has been technically two centuries, century plural technically, that’s overstating his case. Overstating your case is a good way to get people to turn off to what you are saying if they perceive it that way.
A lot of the coal used in Swedish metal-working (up to relatively late, but I don't actually have dates, here, gut feel is 18050s) was charcoal, rather than mined coal. With quite advanced cooperatives[1] producing the charcoal for the mining/refining cooperatives[1].
[1] Somewhat loose translation of "kolare" and "bergslag", here.
With renewables baseline doesn’t make sense. Nuclear doesn’t combine well with renewables, not in a way that would complete the picture. Meaning: you can’t build something that works with only those two building blocks. Even more: baseline is not at all needed with renewables.
Renewables need to be combined with power sources that can be turned on and off quickly and on demand. Nuclear emphatically cannot provide that.
Talking about baseline power – as if that‘s needed – is highly misleading in that context.
Nuclear emphatically can provide enough scaling to follow the broad diurnal solar cycle and the duck curve.
> Historically, nuclear power plants were built as baseload plants, without load following capability to keep the design simple. Their startup or shutdown took many hours as they were designed to operate at maximum power, and heating up steam generators to the desired temperature took time.[2]
> Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope. Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode and so participate in the primary and secondary frequency control.
Also this is what we are capable of now. Imagine what we could do with advances in thermal storage. Nuclear has one huge advantage over other power sources: you can simply throw more power at the problem. E2E efficiency is less of a factor when you have excess capacity you can't otherwise do anything with.
This argument does not make a lot of sense without detailing which power sources that can turn on and off quickly you are talking about. The only ones I can think of are hydro and gas-powered thermal? So you want natural gas over nuclear?
On the other hand, your comment presumes that there is such a thing as too much power. Once hydrolyzers mature, we could use all of the current renewable power in Europe just for producing hydrogen for steel production to replace coal there.
> All the nuclear supply has already been sold and is being constantly used 100% of the time.
This couldn't be further from the truth, at least for France: hover over the lower graphs to animate the source upper graph here:
https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/FR
Every single day nuclear oscillates between 60% and 80%, in strong anti-correlation with wind, solar and border exchanges.
With hydro and pumped storage, this margin is well enough for attending to peak demand. And it is economically viable; This is the thing about nuclear: it costs practically the same wether you're at 20% or 95% of the plant's capacity. You consume your fuel faster, but it is only a small fraction of the cost (15% IIRC). And you still get 0 CO2 emission.
And with current gas prices this is the cheapest solution we have at the moment. (not the cheapest in terms of political will, but educating masses can solve that)
If you're at 20% capacity it costs about 5x as much as when you're at 100% capacity. With nuclear almost all the cost is in building (and decommissioning) the plant.
Working in the strategy back office of a one of the worlds largest producer of renewable power, I feel I have a reasonable grasp of the problem here. Not sure what background you believe I am missing.
The point I was trying to make in my second paragraph is that when hydrolyzers get sufficiently cheap that you can buy enough to cover your peak over-production and let them idle when you are missing power, then you have effectively moved the elasticity from the production side to the demand side -- and then slow baseload does not require you to derate down your renewables.
This is far from the situation today where hydrolyzers are so expensive that you need to run them at pretty high utilization to make the economics work out.
The question is: given that we MUST be reducing our CO2 output extremely quickly (5% a year, equivalent to an additional COVID19 crisis every year), what are the chances for your magical cheap hydrolyzers to 1° be developed 2° be deployed at scale before large parts of the world dive into climatic chaos?
BTW there is a very efficient way to run hydrolyzers at 95%: run them on nuclear power. Problem solved?
> All the nuclear supply has already been sold and is being constantly used 100% of the time. It never makes sense to turn off the nuclear power plant.
Which will be less and less the case for the European nuclear champions whose plants are approaching their 40-50 years lifespan of commercial support and safe operations (or so I am told) and it's going to cost a lot to replace them, more than going full renewables apparently.
In Belgium, at some points we had to shut down offshore wind turbines because there was not enough demand on the grid and turning off and on our nuclear plants would take too much time.
Gas plants don't have that problem (or so they say). So we are building some to compensate until we have enough renewables to shut them off for good.
Also, SMR are gaining tractions so who knows.
Disclaimer: I hear both sides, one claiming we don't need nuclear to reach our emissions carbon target and the other claiming we need classic nuclear plants to manage climate change and I don't know who's right.
> We are not even remotely close to living in a "We have too much power" world
Not a "world", but this happens locally in Europe due to wind/solar momentarily producing more than demand. There have been instances with negative prices.
Anecdotally, one mitigation seems to be adjusting the local base voltage to 220V so that peaks due to solar stay below 240V (or something like that).
Nuclear can, at least theoretically, be throttled hour-by-hour over the day to compensate wind, although hydro is probably more cost-effective if available.
In addition to hydro and fossil fuels, (most) energy storage setups are quickly dispatchable.
I don’t think the question is “is natural gas better than nuclear?”. It’s more “nuclear isn’t quickly dispatchable, which is what we need”. It’s not that gas is better than nuclear, it’s that they solve two different problems. Solar and wind need something to fill gaps when production fluctuates. Today that can be hydro or fossil fuels. In the near future, that will also be storage. For the foreseeable future, nuclear can’t fill that role.
Demand response is an interesting concept, and a subset of researchers have been pushing it for years. I’m skeptical that the economics would work out (large fixed costs mean that there’s pressure to run 24/7 and eat the high electricity prices), but I’d be happy to be proven wrong. That said, it doesn’t fix the fundamental problem that sometimes the wind dies at night, and something needs to turn on in the next 5 minutes or streetlights start going out. Right now, nuclear isn’t capable of filling that niche.
> “nuclear isn’t quickly dispatchable, which is what we need”
> something needs to turn on in the next 5 minutes or streetlights start going out. Right now, nuclear isn’t capable of filling that niche.
Depends on the reactor. A single ~1GW reactor should be able to adjust its output up by 150MW or so in 5 minutes. If you have multiple that number multiplies obviously.
For example a typical reactor in France with a max output of 1300MW can be adjusted all the way down to 400MW within 30 minutes (and up to max 1300MW output from minimumn 400MW in the same time). If they could not do that there is no way France could generate 70%+ of their electricity with nuclear.
(obviously the reactor has to be designed with the goal of being adjustable for it to be able to do this. France started to do this in the 80s)
edit: Though because the vast majority of the costs of running a nuclear power plant is in building/maintaining it and running it at max vs min output costs the same amount of money most owners want to run their reactor at max output always.
France and Germany stabilize each other's nets. There actually isn't really a "French" or "German net" anymore as all European countries are very tightly connected nowadays.
They probably want Hydrogen or synthetic Methane (from electrolysis Hydrogen and atmospheric CO2) instead of natural gas. Power2Gas is a promising technology for long term storage of energy.
Gas and nuclear can’t replace each other. So that instead I’m your sentence is completely misplaced.
We certainly need gas in the short term. Sure. But you can’t let nuclear take over the role of gas (and other potential on demand power sources, pumped hydro and maybe batteries in the future). That just doesn’t work.
Also, I‘m all for producing an overabundance of power and using that in a meaningful way. But that’s not the issue we are talking about here. Baseline framing of the current problem we are facing makes no sense and that is my point.
If batteries fill the need we can ramp up production of batteries. Lithium ion in the short term, and flow batteries or other utility scale batteries (Eg iron air), in the medium to long term.
There are multiple utility scale competing battery technologies becoming quite mature and Thats a good thing. Especially if one or more of them are viable.
It’s almost certainly easier and faster to scale battery tech than it has been nuclear.
> If batteries fill the need we can ramp up production of batteries.
No we can't. Not in the amounts required. We're not talking about 100kW Tesla batteries.
> There are multiple utility scale competing battery technologies becoming quite mature
You mean, there are multiple competing battery technologies that are barely at the theoretical level with multiple significant challenges and no implementations beyond theoretical or impractical for the use case in question.
Flow batteries: low energy density, requires large tanks to be anywhere useful. Low charge and discharge rates, so are not practical for load following applications
Iron-air: only theoretical so far with first small plant potentially in operation by 2023, and its efficiency is yet to be seen (so far it's mostly marketing materials and hype).
> t’s almost certainly easier and faster to scale battery tech than it has been nuclear.
Ah yes, it's certainly easier to scale non-existent and non-scalable tech.
Nuclear works fine with renewables. Use nuclear for the minimum demand level, since it's cheaper than batteries per kWh. Build enough solar on top to cover the extra demand during the day. For remaining discrepancies with demand, build the cheapest combination of storage, excess production, and load-following by nuclear (which is perfectly capable of that with modern reactors). Wind adds some randomization but on the other hand it's less likely to go down all at once over a whole continent, so probably doesn't hurt if the grid is large enough.
This assumes your goal is to meet energy demands reliably with clean power at the lowest possible overall system cost. If instead your goal is to maximize wind/solar no matter what, then of course nuclear doesn't fit in.
Interesting article. It shows that since nuclear is at least 3x faster to respond than wind power in France at the time of the study, its response time is more than adequate as a major part of the energy mix. However, even in France with their dozens of reactors, it is not fast enough to respond to more than 2/3 of peak demand changes (100MW/min of their peak 150MW/min change in demand).
It seems obvious that it's extremely useful to be able to produce so much electricity and reduce the need for fast switching power by 2/3. Surely 100MW/min of fast switching energy storage is not without its own massive environmental footprint, something that significantly reduces the calculated impact of nuclear.
If we could ramp up construction of solar, wind, and long range transmission capabilities to the point where they could effectively respond to all demand, we would not need to have a conversation. But in the midst of worldwide supply chain disruptions that will likely last for years, it seems irresponsible, even extremely irresponsible, to push aside the parallelization of additional low emission energy production capabilities. Seeing as this is all very time sensitive at this point, and the consequences of failure are likely a widespread collapse of society and suffering for generations.
I made one major error there. Since the article is based on actual performance rather than an intimate knowledge of France's grid capabilities, it is wrong to presume that their historical 100MW/min ramp up was the best they could do, rather than all that was required and basically just an algorithmic artifact. I got that in the comparison to wind, but somehow missed it in comparison to their total fast switch requirements.
So the power supply used to change the speed of nuclear warships from bare steerageway to 30+kts rather quickly is not responsive to changes in demand? Friend you seem to have some conceptual errors.
There is a lot of things you need to do if you take a plant out of operation, and there is a significant amount of decay heat from fission products that does require external power (basically what caused fukashima's fires) to cool over days if you turn a plant off, but you are oversimplifying solved engineering challenges to present them as intractable challenges.
Its not directly a technological problem, its an economic problem. Even the optimistic side of the cost analysis for nuclear power must assume that the reactors are operating at full power as much as possible.
The operating cost is essentially independent of power output.
>Nuclear emphatically cannot provide that.
This is a falsehood. Nuclear plants can and do load-follow.
They typically are run as close to 100% as possible because so much of the cost of the plant is divorced from the power output at any one time. Framed a different way, they are somewhat more expensive to idle or run at lower utilization fractions than other sources of electricity. But they certainly can (and do) operate this way when needed.
Renewables and gas are not enough either: you need lots of storage anyway. Plus, at this point you’ve lost the plot because you are still burning fossil fuels. Without nuclear there is no scenario in which we stop carbon emissions without seriously decreasing energy consumption (about an order of magnitude in 50 years) or paying significantly more (tens of billions per year) and relying on hypothetical future technologies.
The arguments against nuclear are not really technical, and are overall incompatible with our energy supply getting rid of fossil fuel in the near term.
> Renewables need to be combined with power sources that can be turned on and off quickly and on demand. Nuclear emphatically cannot provide that.
That's true of current nuclear, but it's not an intrinsic property of nuclear power. Proposed plants that use molten salt as a working fluid, for example, give you the option to run the plant all the time, but at any given time either use the heat in the molten salt for power generation immediately, or move the molten salt into a storage tank for later use. Molten salt is already used this way in concentrated solar plants, and works fine for that purpose.
Well you are just proposing to use molten salt as energy storage, but if we have efficient storage we don't need nuclear because we can charge the storage much cheaper and environmentally friendlier using renewables.
As a side note, every time someone points out the shortcomings of nuclear power plants (not easily adjustable, huge investment costs/expensive, storage ...) there's the replies about, "but those new future plants that we are researching will solve all this". We don't know if reality will actually deliver on those promises (nuclear has quite a history of broken promises), especially if we are talking about acting fast.
Yes, this is energy storage, but a big tank to put salt in has the potential to be considerably cheaper than lithium ion cells.
To your second point: all technologies have the property that we can't know for sure if they'll deliver on their promises without trying them, and the very reason we don't know in the case of nuclear is because opponents of nuclear power undermine attempts to try out novel architectures, pointing to limitations in current technologies as justification.
If what we have is electricity, turning it into heat to turn it back into electricity again is very inefficient. If what we have is heat and we're going to turn it into electricity anyway, storing it as heat for now and turning it into electricity later is much better, and comparatively trivial to do. That somewhat limits the applications, though, with concentrated solar being the only obvious renewable one. Solar PV and wind don't generate electricity from heat.
Nuclear changes the game completely. Think of the most audacious, energy intensive expense of effort that’s deemed infeasible today?
Let’s consider something like desalinating water from the pacific and continuously pumping it inland to the Australian Outback or the middle of the Sahara.
With an investment in Nuclear, hypothetically, it’s cheaper. Present nuclear reactors have a high cost of operation simply because they’re aligned to energy consumption and regulatory patterns not suited to them.
Also, Small Modular Reactors are a thing. They’re available today for use and that’s what France is going all in on, but in the US, the first entity to try will be sued to the ground.
You have your enormous electric desalination plant, or metal smelter. It needs cheap electricity to be profitable, but there is cheap enough electricity during the day to be feasible. As a result, coal is now dirt cheap. You build a coal plant to keep working at night.
Are you really saying nuclear + renewables in a grid is less feasible than renewables alone? Please cite some source. At a surface level, the amount of battery capacity needed to deal with power droughts with renewables would be far less with nuclear power present.
Saying that fossil fuels + renewables works well doesn't really have a place in a dialog about the best way to eliminate fossil fuels.
> Even more: baseline is not at all needed with renewables.
What?
> Renewables need to be combined with power sources that can be turned on and off quickly and on demand. Nuclear emphatically cannot provide that.
--- 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
The minimum requirements for the manoeuvrability capabilities of modern reactors are defined by the utilities requirements that are based on the requirements of the grid operators. For example, 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 Pr, with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% of Pr 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% Pr per minute
Maybe they should work on a nuclear plant that can be turned on and off quickly then.
The basic nuclear value proposition is [negligible fuel -> enough energy to power a country]. We should be exploring the options, vigorously. There will be less pollution than the alternatives where [large amounts of stuff -> enough energy to power part of a country].
The whole reason why nuclear energy is not because it technically is inferior, but, rather, the NIMBY mentality of nuclear energy at large. Many people see the consequences of mishandled nuclear energy and immediately see this as a eventual reality for all nuclear plants.
We suck at risk assessment. We fret about radiation whilst fossil fuelled power plants have been releasing radionuclides and particles in the open air for about a century.
Coal based irradiation is slow and wide. It does not have the potential to render a concentrated area semi-permanently uninhabitable. There is nothing irrational about watching a relatable peer's life investment crash to a value of zero and deciding you want none of that kind of risk.
I don't understand. One of the benefits of nuclear is that it can be turned on and off quite easily. There are several mechanisms to throttle on and off the reaction.
Is this a new thing? In France, the nuclear plants built between 1960 and 1980 have throttling but it takes more than 20hrs to cool down, making it inefficient to stop at night (hence over-provisioning overnight leading to price shifts to encourage people to run water boilers and washing machines at night).
Sure, but you don’t want to do that. Nuclear is monstrously expensive already. For it to have any chance of being economically viable at all you have to run it all the time. It doesn’t make sense as an on-demand power source.
Nuclear is totally economically viable. It's not viable in the current regulatorily climate. Investing $1 billion in a nuclear plant that will return profits for 80 years is an easy financial decision. Investing $1 billion in a nuclear plant that will be shut down by moonbats every 4 years when the next batch of princess unicorns is voted into office is not economically viable.
Indeed the regulatory climate is missing to put the costs of handling nuclear waste onto the producers. I doubt it would be economically viable to operate a nuclear plant if those costs were fully factored in.
There’s very little storage cost as the fuel can be burned til there is nothing radioactive left.
Nuclear doesn’t produce radioactive materials it reduces radioactivity. If you mix the spent fuel from a heavy water reactor back into the ore, it’s radioactivity will have been reduced.
While you can burn the fuel until very few long-lived isotopes are left we don't do that currently. Nuclear reactors also turn relatively harmless Uranium into much more active elements. Just mixing the waste back into the rocks you got the Uranium from is not a safe storage method.
We don't do that currently because there hasn't been a new plant built in 50 years and the designs of the old plants were specifically engineered to make materials for nuclear weapons.
If there wasn't a huge stigma against nuclear energy they would be making advancements, but nobody is going to fund advancements while there is no guarantee they will be allowed to apply them.
What would happen to the JavaScript language if every year half of congress gave speeches condemning JavaScript and calling for a prohibition against any new JavaScript code? How many new people would bother learning JavaScript.
I'm an advocate for nuclear power, but I have to point out that this isn't actually true. A nuclear plant can load-follow to a certain extent if it is designed to do so, but if you reduce the power output of a nuclear reactor below a certain threshold then the reactor will need a decent period of time (around a day) to cool down before it can be started up again.
The fundamental problem is nuclear physics itself. Running a nuclear reactor produces Xenon-135, which has a huge potential to soak up neutrons, and therefore given half a chance will try to shut down the nuclear reaction. When the reactor is going full pelt, then there are enough neutrons flying around to burn up the Xenon, and all is good. When you reduce power output, then there is still a large amount of Xenon in the reactor, and it will soak up lots of the neutrons and reactivity of the reactor, shutting the reaction down. The Xenon takes about a day to decay by itself down to a level where it is safe to restart the reactor again. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon-135 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_poison
One of the contributing factors towards the Chernobyl accident was the reactor controllers trying to overcome the effects of Xenon by pulling the control rods of the reactor out. This made the reactor highly unstable, because as the reaction rate increases the Xenon will be burned off increasing the reactivity, which can lead to the reaction ramping up very quickly.
Capital expense for nuclear is so high that to be economical you need to run the plants at full power as much a possible. So while you can regulate them (slowly, there is quite a bit of thermal inertia in the system), it's much cheaper to regulate the renewables.
For that we should look at what baseline is. Ideally all our power sources would adjust instantaneously to demand. In reality that is not possible. Traditionally, power plants which can be run constantly at fixed output (i.e. coal plants, nuclear power plants), have been cheaper to operate, so we used those for "baseline" power and more expensive adjustable plants (e.g. gas turbines) to follow the load.
However, the new reality is that wind/solar are cheaper than the old baseline plants. Now wind/solar do not supply us a with a constant power like those old baseline plants, but instead with variable supply as well. So we still need fast adjustable sources (or storage), which now even out both variable supply and demand. By over provisioning (and net interconnectivity) we can reduce the need for adjustable sources. Essentially if you have enough renewable sources to cover the high demands at low wind/sun you can always turn off the sources when you overshoot and because they are cheap it is economical unfeasible.
> By over provisioning (and net interconnectivity) we can reduce the need for adjustable sources. Essentially if you have enough renewable sources to cover the high demands at low wind/sun you can always turn off the sources when you overshoot and because they are cheap it is economical unfeasible.
Overprovisioning by how much? Currently ( at least since a month or so) across Europe there's a meteorological phenomenon that makes for cold temperatures, lower than usual wind speeds, and clouds. 2 out of the 3 main renewable power sources ( solar, wind, tidal) are heavily impacted ( wind most of all iirc) and producing less electricity than usual, while people need to warm themselves. And this is expected to continue into the winter.
To combat such a scenario if everyone was on renewables+storage+interconnects, you'd have to built massive storage ( which we don't have the tech/space for) or massive interconnects from really far away places like Africa.
IIRC correctly we'd need to overprovision by more than 100%, and huge storage too. Is it less expensive then? Also what has the least impact on the environment? On space and material requirements given the required massive overall of the grid (to move power across continents)?
> the new reality is that wind/solar are cheaper than the old baseline plants
Not if you take into account land use. A single nuclear plant can supply about a GW of electrical power. The equivalent capacity in wind and solar--even without taking into account the overprovisioning that, as you note, is required because of the lack of reliability of those sources--takes up far more land than that nuclear plant. That has a huge environmental impact that nobody takes into account when figuring the actual cost of wind and solar--though of course the same people are quite happy to hunt down every last little environmental impact of nuclear and point out how it increases the actual cost.
(The requirement for massive amounts of storage, which others have pointed out, is another environmental impact of wind and solar that nobody takes into account when figuring the actual cost.)
"Renewables need to be combined with power sources that can be turned on and off quickly and on demand. Nuclear emphatically cannot provide that."
There is an illogical assumption underlying this claim - if both power sources are zero-carbon, why does it matter which one we turn off? Why do have to turn off nuclear instead of disconnecting a wind turbine? What difference does it make?
Instead of being combined with power sources that can be turned on and off quickly on demand, they can be overbuilt and combined with power sinks that can be turned on and off to keep demand stable. grid controlled EV chargers and bitcoin mining are two such sinks.
Eh no I think. If you have a robust power storage mechanism, say pumped hydro, batteries, etc, you can run the nuclear continuously while having capacity to supplement renewables.
Or combined with variable sources - say green hydrogen production. Produce too much, push energy into electrolysis, produce too little and turn that off.
First, you can't predict solar or wind days ahead in the same way you can't predict rain, days ahead. There are "weather forecasts", not cloud reading.
Second. Even if you knew two days ahead about wind speed fluctuations that lasted for 10 to 20 minutes. What, then? You can't inform the population there will be 10 minute outages, in advance, or ask them to turn off appliances for exactly 10 minutes, in advance.
Solar and wind aren't reliable. The plan is to turn on thermal plants when the wind stops blowing. In my very humble opinion, solar and wind aren't THE long term future of energy production. They have their uses, but the way it is being marketed obeys to political discourse, not reality.
> First, you can't predict solar or wind days ahead in the same way you can't predict rain, days ahead. There are "weather forecasts", not cloud reading.
You can. And there is companies specialized in that for the Wind and solar industry. [1]
The reason is pretty simple: Weather variability tend to be high at the local level but pretty predictable at the national level (the energy grid level).
And to answer to the original post, yes Nuclear energy can also be fine grained controlled to compensate the renewable energy intermittency. It is done every day in France. It can be done yes, Is it efficient ? Not really.
On a technical note, the first point is not really true. Using atmospheric models like WRF get you pretty good irradiance forecasts that are roughly proportional to PV output. I (very briefly) worked with a group doing just that for power companies in the southwest, and it was pretty decent out to 5 days or so. It eventually got picked up into another program [1] that would contract out to big PV installations.
I imagine nuclear + solar + wind + battery setups like Tesla's grid batteries would work just fine, anyone with enough knowledge of nuclear grid power that can chime in?
Read between the lines. It's not about the best solution(s), it's about _their_ solution. Nuclear solves the problem they champion, which means, it negates the need for their efforts and existence (economic). Ironically, the rejection of nuclear as a viable option seems to be the result of a psychological existential threat to the supposed "elite" of our world.
The mask is off. Protecting the future of humanity isn't the goal; it's protecting their own egos.
I think you could make the same argument against nuclear advocates. Ego based focus on the "best" option and endless ad-hominem against proponents of good options. When actually the best option is one that is politically possible.
Also, the green zone is managed by the British Government rather than the UN who are fairly supportive of nuclear. Nuclear is politically viable in the UK so it gets built. Onshore turbines in South-East England are not politically viable so they don't get built and we go offshore instead. The objective should be to stop climate change rather than chase optimal technology.
The reason nuclear is unpopular is that it is expensive. It's more expensive than coal and gas typically. It's also very slow to deploy. A decade is nothing. We'll hit 2035 when several countries are planning to be 100% renewable powered in about 13 years. That's not a lot of time to build a meaningful amount of nuclear plants. Nuclear plants coming online recently are not great examples of speedily execution on a tight budget either. Despite this, there are still a quite a few under construction (around 50 world wide). It's their financial performance relative to renewables that determines if we end up with more of them.
The word baseload always comes up in these discussions but its meaning never really gets specified in a very satisfying way. For example in GW needed for how long (i.e. GWH). Having such a number would facilitate a discussion about alternate ways how we would get that power more cheaply. That's not a debate nuclear proponents like having because it focuses attention on poor financial performance of nuclear relative to just about anything else.
The simple reality driving a lot of the decision making is that you simply get more GWH per $ with solar and wind. And not just a little bit; the difference is massive. And you get it much quicker too. And it's far less risky from a political point of view.
So instead of getting say 8GW with a very big nuclear plant costing maybe 30-40 billion and taking two decades to get built and planned with lots of uncertainty around the process, you can have 30-40 GW online two years from now for about the same amount of money. That's based on a price of 5000$/kw for recent offshore wind installations. A couple of hundred GW of wind came online over the last few years. The investments in renewables are massive and for good reasons: it delivers results quickly and prices are trending down.
Offshore wind is actually relatively expensive compared to solar and onshore wind. But also relatively reliable. People put solar on their roofs for less (2-3k/kw) and solar plants are even cheaper but of course less stable sources of power. Add batteries to the mix and other forms of storage (ammonia, hydrogen, thermal mass, pumped hydro, etc.) and there is no lack of a "baseload" that can't be planned for and mitigated. It will have a price and a certain capacity and that's what needs to be debated in Glasgow. It's a conference about allocating massive amounts of money in the next decades. The stakes are high both in financial terms and in the outcomes.
Nuclear might be part of this if the price is right. But the whole nuclear or nothing attitude is just not a very productive argument. Many countries that have the option are still doing some nuclear of course. But far less than what they are allocating for wind and solar (in dollars and planned GWH capacity).
Not everything is about price, and it shouldn't be. If it were, we'd have stayed with coal and gas a few decades ago.
As i mentioned elsewhere, much of Europe is currently facing an ongoing wind shortfall ( since around a month ago and projected to continue into the winter), which is adding extra fuel to the ongoing energy crisis.
To cover such a potential future scenario with renewables only, you'd need to build absolutely massive storage, which would certainly change the costs.
But in any case, fuck the costs - investment is needed into more nuclear, different types of storage tech, more renewables, because this is a very serious issue and making the wrong decisions purely based on costs would be really sad.
This!
Almost all of the pro-nuclear crowd misses that nuclear is just too expensive.
Nobody brought a convincing argument why e.g. China wouldn't push Nuclear way more if nuclear would economically be viable - there are no "activists" over there that would stop them from building thousands of reactors.
Additionally, most calculations that result in somewhat competitive prices for nuclear energy dismiss the implied subsidies (state guarantees as nuclear plants are uninsurable, waste handling until eternity) which are massive.
China is also still building coal plants. But that doesn't mean they see that as the future either. Like everybody else, they are not putting all their eggs in one basket but at the same time they like wind and solar a lot more than nuclear and coal. The bulk of their investments are going towards those at this point.
> The reason nuclear is unpopular is that it is expensive. It's more expensive than coal and gas typically.
It wouldn't be if coal and gas were forced to completely capture their carbon externalities-- (e.g. recapture and storage).
Since much of the energy we get from burning coal just comes from liberating the carbon from a nice stored form in the first place, I wouldn't even assume that in a no-carbon-externality-world if coal was even an energy source at all.
The original title "Message: Nuclear must be represented at COP26, says World Nuclear Association" reminds of meme "The cat is being starved, according to cat".
The most pragmatic solution is making high pollutant energy costly. Some small set of polluters are responsible for the majority of the emissions. (1) This is only possible because of being able to chalk the damage up to externalities.
We need to set up systems to adding cost to emissions.
A substantial PR rebrand modern Nuclear energy (maybe called something else) would be needed if you wanted to get traction on that.
Long gone are days where people / governments make decisions based on any objective facts and pragmatic cost/ benefit/ risk analysis.
I understand solar is competitive and full tilt on that would be good. It's got better PR right now.
Whatever we do .. install some some smoke scrubbers on dirty energy ASAP.
And probably do your 15 year R&D plan on carbon capture tech (if we had to choose one direction) as we have already done (otherwise) irreversible harm that switching to renewables / Nuclear now won't solve.
> Long gone are days where people / governments make decisions based on any objective facts and pragmatic cost/ benefit/ risk analysis.
There are governments choosing to build nuclear right now, despite its general unpopularity in many circles so I don't know that such days are "long gone".
And how could anyone sell another nuclear plant to France when the Flamanville 3rd reactor is 5X++ over budget and 8 years behind schedule? It is hard to win any rational cost/benefit/risk analysis when you have to fight a well-deserved reputation of being absurdly expensive and very high risk!
Rebranding might help, but there are some places where these bridges are simply burnt and the industry won't be getting back in, which is unfortunate but also kind of deserved in a way.
What you will then get is an unsustainable set of shortcuts that threaten your energy supplies at crucial times.
ie, what's happening in Europe now[1]
Germany went on a spree, dismantling their nuclear plants after being scared by Fukushima. Fossil fuel plants tool their place. Subsidies to unsustainable alternatives and penalties on polluters made it so it was not profitable to increase energy supply on sources such as natural gas and fossil fuels that could ramp quickly in response to demand.
And the price of natural gas in Europe went parabolic.
> Germany went on a spree, dismantling their nuclear plants after being scared by Fukushima. Fossil fuel plants tool their place.
Not true. Renewables took their place. Nuclear wasn't a huge part of the mix before Fukushima either. The change immediately following 2011 wasn't very large, and much smaller than the power added by renewables. Lots of plots available to see for yourself at [0].
For some reason this story is told wrong in every single discussion on nuclear here on HN.
For the record, I actually agree that the decision to accelerate the shutdown of nuclear power was misguided, since it delayed the shutdown of coal power. It did not, however, lead to an expansion of fossil energy sources.
I live in Europe. Most notable substitution for Nuclear is Green Russian gas. I see this decission each month in my heating bill.
Renewables is cool, but u know there is winters in Europe. As gas storages are not full here and our comrades from East wants to get nordstream2 certified, they are pressing with not delivering additional capabilities. As there are no serious alternatives still. I would be really happy if there would be enough capacity of decentralized green energy, but there are not.
Nuclear is one of patches what we have got in our hands to live thru Fussion and/or enough capacity trully green energy. All other is lyrics
This is a very common myth but fossil fuel plants did not take their place. Wind and solar did though. Both nuclear and fossil fuel plants are a smaller piece of the pie compared to when Fukushima happened and the Energiwende happened. [0]
Do I misunderstand this issue when if say: "The loss of 8GW of nuclear electricity generation created new renewables projects immediately that would not have been constructed if that generation capacity was not lost."
To me, regardless of the change in energy mix in the meantime, every extra GW of other renewables would have decommissioned coal generation by some significant factor (maybe not the full 8GW less coal, but quite a bit). Instead those renewables were replacing missing nuclear capacity. The only way I see that decommissioning nuclear didn't result in more coal burning to meet the country's needs would be if it was immediately followed by a huge investment that would have otherwise not occurred.
ETA: Looking again at the link hard coal + lignite 45.5GW in 2011, 43.5GW today - not great! Relative decline is good but climate change demands absolute declines more substantial than this.
> What you will then get is an unsustainable set of shortcuts that threaten your energy supplies at crucial times.
I like the idea of solar energy, but I also wonder about how safe it is to use. I'm thinking of events such as the 1815 volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora[0] which reportedly caused a "year without summer[1]".
Presumably, something like this would have a major impact on solar cell energy output, and if we'd significantly depended on solar, would have catastrophic consequences for our society. Unless, of course, I overestimate the effect that volcanic ash could have on solar cells.
Simple to say. Not simple to implement in practice and in a competitive environment. It is very hard for CEO to justify massive spending on something that has oy a 1:2000 chance or something in any given year.
And for example, The Netherlands, which is a lot smaller than Germany, consumes half the amount of Germany.
Coming back to nuclear energy, France, a country that is certainly in favor of nuclear energy, has failed to build one since 2002. UK and Finland are trying to build one, with similar lack of success.
So the only option for nuclear energy in Europe seems to be to keep aging power plants running and hope that they don't fail. Not a very attractive future.
So a lot of the discussions here are around EU or US opinions about nuclear power. The problem is something entirely different.
India and China will move to emphatically reject coal restrictions during COP26. Remember India has probably some of the largest investments in renewable rightnow. But I dont think people outside of these countries have even an idea of the amount of hunger for power that is being generated as huge populations start clawing out of hunger and poverty.
3 years back, there were 240 million Indians who had NO electricity - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-01-24/living-in...
So talking about pollution in this context is only solvable through large sources of clean power. We dont have enough land in India to support renewables for 1.3 billion people. Neither does China. Europe ? Very easily so.
Coal ban is not an option. Unless nuclear power and technology transfer is on the table.
China's nuclear power plants come from the US. Westinghouse's bankruptcy set back the targets for many years.
Of course, the big problem is also geopolitical concerns here.
I would say that India is in a better position here (on geopolitics), however the tech transfer from US even to India has been iffy at best.
Here's a bigger problem - India has set a goal to switch to electrical vehicles by 2030. If that happens, all gasoline/petrol/diesel consumption will switch to coal.
Which means that switching to EV will double India's pollution norms.
Unless nuclear power takes over.
Actually the majority of China's nuclear power plants are a local design based on French technology (there's been a long term cooperation with France, which has built a couple of nuclear power plants there, including recently)
China's reliance on US tech for nuclear is over. Now they're using French tech domestically manufactured for their current gen reactors, and building next gen reactors with their own tech.
> To me it seems like the worst case is probably human deaths in the hundreds of millions, not extinction.
I think this underestimates the societal repercussions of an initial set of hundreds of millions of deaths.
Millions of deaths probably means billions of refugees looking for new places to live, probably in places that are already struggling with the changes themselves.
As you accurately describe the threat is mass conflict and disorder. Why do you willingly support that or changing the narrative?
Global instability is likely to lead to more conflict and war without any guarantees of end. A vast population reduction of vulnerable people for a lot of people IS extinction.
I’m sure where you got that impression. But language matters and the worst case outcome isn’t a situation that “kills humanity”. I was asking for clarification in case there was something I was missing in terms of impact that would actually lead to extinction, which by definition means a complete end to all human life.
As long as nuclear energy is treated as PICK_ANY(obsolete, uneconomical, systemically dangerous) it leaves me with zero hope for humanity.
Nuclear is way more than technology, it's Prometheus' fire. It may burn the unprepared but it is incomparable to anything else we possess. That factor million more energy per gram than chemical reactions should be enough for us to treat it as literally unlocking the next level of human development.
This petty discussion on whether it is sustainable, dirty, expensive or dangerous is simply mind-boggling. Yes, it requires a much deeper "readiness" to utilise by our civilization than any other energy source, but the long-term benefit should be what it is held up against.
If it is Prometheus' fire, we are not ready to handle that fire yet. When one of the core concerns of using a technology is to prevent it being used to create weapons capable of obliterating entire cities, we are not as a species mature enough to use it on a wider scale. This is only one example of why we are not ready yet.
Nuclear (fission) technology is not the problem, we are the problem. Looking at the recent history of political leadership all over the world, and the baffling level of support even the most immature of policies have, it's clear we have a ways to go. Most people doesn't even seem to realize that as a species we've only just emerged, we're so young. Toddlers on any timescale but the most naïve and short sighted.
> If it is Prometheus' fire, we are not ready to handle that fire yet.
If we should only be allowed to use technology when we fully understand its consequences, then we should still be living as hunter gatherers (agriculture).
Heck, most people don't understand how wood has shaped humanity:
Either we use it and learn to use it or we wipe out wide swathes of the human population over the next hundred years. I'm sure the millions who die and suffer over the next few decades will be grateful to your absolute principles.
1) We already have a ton of nuclear weapons laying around, without even getting the upside of lots of electricity. Stopping nuclear power to avoid nuclear proliferation has not worked.
2) The alternative for lots of the world is coal. Between letting the Germans have access to refined Uranium (not highly refined) and letting the Germans continue to burn coal, I’d take the former.
3) This argument falls apart once you realize how little we’ve invested in Thorium reactors, which don’t post a nuclear proliferation risk.
I think that the ugly reality is that fossil fuel companies have cynically co-opted legitimate fears about nuclear power (and there are legitimate concerns) in order to shut them down or push them off into “we can use them once <impossible condition> has been met” specifically because nuclear power is the only serious threat to their continued profits.
How about airplanes and internal combustion engines?
Those are weaponised with track record off killing millions and millions.
Should we immediately throw away those as well?
That seems like a little bit of a non sequitur to the topic in this particular thread chain.
Anyway, yes of course they happen. They happen in every power producing industry. It's hard to find good numbers of course as there's going to be some amount of error, but here's one [1].
The point isn't that in that report nuclear has fewer deaths than wind and solar as I'm sure that will cause an emotional reaction. The point is that it's so low and comparable. Even if it was 10x worse it would be worth the tradeoff of replacing coal.
Nuclear is our only choice for replacing industrial scale use of coal and oil. It's unfortunate that that's the case, but those are the facts on the ground currently and there's no sign of that ever changing. The way Wind and Solar generate energy are wholly incompatible with high temperature industrial uses where coal and natural gas are used let alone the problems of variability (batteries help, but there are limits and batter manufacturing at scale brings its own challenges).
If you're comparing Nuclear to Wind and Solar power generation, you're comparing power sources that don't compete. Nuclear is about replacing the worst problems coal and oil present us and staving off global warming. It's an extremely critical and underdeveloped resource and only gets safer and better with time. It would be erroneous to state any risk in a vacuum - you have to compare it with what's happening today.
To boot, almost every time a nuclear reactor is decommissioned, it is replaced by more fossil fuel plants, not by renewable energy. You can’t be seriously opposed to climate change and nuclear energy at the same time.
I’ve learned there are two distinct groups of people who claim to be concerned about climate change. One group that sees it coming and sincerely wants to find viable solutions to the problem, and a much larger group who use it to fuel somewhat misanthropic psychological control issues. This second group spend most of their time thinking (and arguing!) about how other people are not riding bikes to work, not using reusable grocery bags, not buying electric vehicles, and voting in ways that they don’t like. They see Greta thunderberg as the solution to climate change, “if only we could shame enough people into riding their bike to work, we will save the planet,” they think. “If we just invest in solar” they say, never mentioning the tricky details like battery manufacture and placement, “we won’t solve the problem, because it’s too late for that, but it would be better.”
These people are not going to solve the problem of climate change. That’s not really what they are in it for. And so the much smaller first group of people, who aren’t focused on changing behaviors of other people (social control) are the only hope. They, the first group, are hampered at every turn by the second group. The second group indeed are the cause of “climate denialism.”
It’s good to learn to spot these people and simply not engage. When they make inane claims about nuclear being unsafe, just correct the record and move on.
Does that mean hydroelectric dams should be shut down?
Over the many decades of nuclear operation, there have been two major incidents: Chernobyl and Fukushima. And Chernobyl could probably have been prevented with a containment building.
I live with-in 50km of a nuclear power station: I'll take my chances with nuclear over climate change, given the choice.
> When one of the core concerns of using a technology is to prevent it being used to create weapons capable of obliterating entire cities, we are not as a species mature enough to use it on a wider scale.
Just wanted to point out that stone (trebuchets), wood (arrows), bronze (swords), and steel (guns, bombs, tanks, etc) fall into this category too. Silicon is probably there already as well, but hasn’t been used yet.
Mankind has used everything as his disposal to gain the upper hand over another group of humans since well before history began. I don’t ever expect it to stop.
I wonder what the pathway would be (in a perfect everything-matures-at-a-constant-rate way)
Probably better representative systems that don’t pit countries or peoples against eachother. A way to identify as a human or earthling above all nationalities.
A revolutionary better economic understanding so we don’t have to choose politically and have clear economic growth tied to wellness of people.
Probably connected to the above is a superior education system for everyone who wants to and help to realize mature atomic sciences.
The issue that concerns me about nuclear power isn't so much weapons (they tend to be well-guarded, and it's hard to make weapons from reactor fuel), but decomissioning.
The UK was one of the first countries to build nuclear reactors; no UK reactor has ever been fully decomissioned, and from what I can see we haven't even got a strategy - WP says they're still working out whether decomissioning should occur over a 20-year or a 100-year span. The UK's first nuclear reactor, Calder Hall, was built in the year of my birth, and decommissioning is estimated to take well into the next century; my grandchildren will have died of old age.
You can stand next to a thermonuclear bomb without a mickey-mouse suit; you can even open it up, take the components out, and render the weapon unusable, fairly easily. Nuclear reactors, not so much.
I have grandchildren under 5. Until we've proved that a reactor design can be fully decommissioned, I don't think we should build more. That's not a problem that I want to dump on their shoulders.
What sort of world will your grandchildren inherit if we don’t invest in nuclear? What happens if the mystery renewable energy storage and carbon scrubbing technologies never materialize? What happens if the climate scientists are right about the increasing droughts and floods and the knock-on effects to food supplies and so on? By comparison the risk of nuclear is negligible.
That depends. The trajectory we're on is one of unrestrained economic growth. In that scenario, demand for power will only increase. Growth has many other harmful effects, including ever-greater quantities of plastic waste, and depletion of natural resources like fish stocks and rainforests.
I have no idea how to tame growth. Most governments put growth near the top of their objectives. But I think it's growth that will blight my grandchildren's lives, not a shortage of electricity.
Am I missing something? Why is decommissioning nuclear power plants the problem here? There are plenty of nuclear power plants that has been decommissioned. So this is nothing new.
In the UK, several nukes have been taken out of service; none has been "decommissioned", in the sense that the site can be re-used, people can live and work there. The first nuclear power plant in the UK was built in 1956, and the current plan is that decommissioning will be completed by 2104; I will be long gone. Until then, the site will be closed to the public.
Perhaps you know of nuclear power plants elsewhere that have been fully decommissioned. I don't, but there is an infinite number of things I don't know, and I would love to be surprised.
>using a technology is to prevent it being used to create weapons capable of obliterating entire cities, we are not as a species mature enough to use it on a wider scale. This is only one example of why we are not ready yet.
So now this big countries like US,Russia and the rest still have the bombs, you don't reduce the risk of a nuclear war or a big country accidentally or intentional detonating one by reducing the number of nuclear power plants.
Unfortunately the nuclear weapons already exist and any country with enough budget can create one, I suggest you try to understand that you can't have a group of terrorists dropping a plane in a nuclear plant and have it explode like a bomb, nuclear plants do not explode like an atomic bomb.
I tend to agree with you, but it should not be the conclusion. We must become ready to handle this, it is in my opinion the real underlying challenge behind the climate problem.
We have started this technologically driven expansion of the human footprint, and either we revert to pre-industrial levels or progress. Assuming that non-nuclear technology will let us have the cake (of prosperity) and eat it too (without drowning our cites) is the collective lie I see propagated politically.
In the spirit of the recent TV series release of "Foundation", this is our Seldon problem.
Running a nuclear reactor does not produce nuclear weapons. This is simply fear-mongering fake news.
Also, modern nuclear reactors are dangerous. The GenIII+ specification for all new reactors requires the use of passive shut off. Which means the operator must actively keep the reactor on.
If they were to all turn into zombies, for example, the reactor would simply shut off.
Omega Tau podcast also did an extensive series on nuclear waste storage that I highly recommend every skeptic listen to. Nuclear waste storage is not a problem.
The problem is that naivete people seem to have that renewables can provide 99% uptime baseload, the boomer ignorance that all-things-nuclear-are-bad-because-Greenpeace-told-me-so.
Moreover, China has proven that nuclear Gen III reactors can be built cheaply - they are concurrently building 24 1GW plants.
Steamline ancient western regulations, block the endless lawsuits against plant development, re-open the Nevada storage center, tell boomers to stop stonewalling the only ready climate change solution, and BUILD THE DAMN NUCLEAR PLANTS.
We have a PROVEN solution ready to go that can be deployed in literally 10-15 years. We just need to end the ignorance.
> We have a PROVEN solution ready to go that can be deployed in literally 10-15 years. We just need to end the ignorance.
No we don't. We don't have even one new Gen reactor running and even more important we don't have the people educated to build them in a massive scale.
It would take at least ten years to educate the nuclear engineers needed to build dozens or even hundreds of them.
And even then they don't have experience, they are juniors building very complex multi billion dollar installations.
It’s frustrating that the anti-nuclear folks (perhaps not you specifically, parent) worked to drain western societies of nuclear experience and advancement, and then use that inexperience and associated costs as a reason not to invest in nuclear.
Yes, nuclear has a long lead time, but so does economics grid-scale storage for renewables. “Long lead time” isn’t an excuse to forestall investment, it’s a reason to start now.
Moreover, nuclear has promising solutions for criticisms of cost, safety, and experience: Small Nuclear Reactors. A relatively small number of nuclear engineers can design blueprints for nuclear facilities which can be mass produced and shipped to site. The cost projections seem very favorable and certainly worth looking into more, but the biggest obstacle is anti-nuclear FUD. I’m not asking the anti-nuclear folks to help, but I do wish they would get out of the way so everyone else can save our planet.
Also the most efficient and safe reactors are arguably in the bellies of the leading edge Submarines. It's no surprise France is going all in on the Small Modular Reactor tech since they are rumored to possess some of the best in the world already. Likely a question of declassification.
The reactor at MIT has students allowed to run parts of the operation after they pass a few strenuous tests. This hypothetical scenario where the political will is ready to go and the skill gap is what is holding it up is imaginary.
Military reactors tend to use weapons grade fuel. Would not want to spread that across all unstable regions of the world. So quite the different beasts compared to the civilian side.
> It would take at least ten years to educate the nuclear engineers needed to build dozens or even hundreds of them. And even then they don't have experience, they are juniors building very complex multi billion dollar installations.
How did they do it in the past then? The first power station opened in 1956 when the technology was secretive and when there was no internet. The real problem looks completely because of red tape and NIMBY
As i said to another commenter, you are right, i was thinking of Gen III+ like EPR.
When we started out building nuclear plants the where much simpler, much smaller designs and a lot of designs didn't work out the way hoped.
Nuclear is hard, it's hard on the materials and often you problems appear while building or running it.
Define "we" and "running". While the US nuclear industry is admittedly a bit moribund at the moment, there are already many gen 3 plants in operation with passive safety features, and several gen 4 in late research and plans to build commercial plants. But the majority of plants in operation are gen 2. We could be doing so much better by just building out gen 3/3.5 plants today.
The big 3 nuclear disasters, Chernobyl (started construction in 1972), Three Mile ('67), and Fukushima ('67), were al really early gen 2, designed in the 60s.
> Also, modern nuclear reactors are dangerous. The GenIII+ specification for all new reactors requires the use of passive shut off. Which means the operator must actively keep the reactor on.
This seems confused. Shouldn't this read not dangerous?
100% agree though on the broad point. Newer reactors have way better passive safety, and the way to cheaper, safer nuclear energy is build more new plants and retire the old ones.
Earth gets hit by 170 000 TW of sunshine every hour. That's more than the yearly global consumption of energy.
If we could capture only 1% of that, we'd have 80 times more than we need, from just the sunshine reaching earth.
This makes the photovoltaic cell and related technologies more interesting than nuclear to me. A way more abundant energy source with none of the downsides of nuclear is clearly within our reach. It's not even unknown technology, we just haven't made the infrastructure to capture it yet.
Nuclear seems to me to be similar to Coal in that we may think it's a good idea now, only to discover later on that it actually killed us due to things we didn't think about. Or didn't want to think about.
They are also similar in that we who get the benefits today are leaving the problems with it to future generations.
Listing large numbers and then saying "if only we could get this small percentage" doesn't make for a solid business plan, and it doesn't make a solid energy plan either. We're talking about insane amounts of land, for one thing, and ignoring distribution for another. Plus "80x more than we need" assumes a fixed level of need forever, humanity capped off, the book of progress written and closed.
But knowing the potential is a first step, wouldn't you agree? You don't build the mine before the geologists have determined that there is indeed gold to be found, so to speak.
Distribution is not as big a problem I think, since you can have small installations everywhere, combined with larger installations where possible. Storage is a problem, but we know of several solutions that could be developed.
As for land, the land already wasted to man-made lakes for hydroelectricity more than covers it 100-fold if my roughly estimated math is correct (assuming ~30MW per km2 from newer solar installations and based on a list of man-made lakes on wikipedia). Floating solar is already a thing, it works.
How about a hydroelectric dam-duo where solar panels on the artificial lakes pump the water back to the upper reservoir when there's lots of sun? Energy and storage combined! Elon Musk - are you listening? ;-)
Solar can also easily be installed on buildings or in deserts, so I don't think large amounts of any valuable land would be needed.
As a whole it seems totally feasible to me, at least as a big part of the puzzle, much bigger than it is today.
Solar isn't without its flaws. The solar deployed today will be EOL 25-30 years from now. That's 6M metric tons of waste yearly estimated by 2050 and almost 80m metric tons total [1]. Coupled with the increased demand for materials in PVs and supporting battery infrastructure, more mining and mines have real environmental and social consequences.
That's a lot of lead and other toxic elements that if not properly disposed of will lead to massive ecological consequences. The current strategy of dumping in north africa is not a solution, and we're setting ourselves up with a PV waste problem for future generations.
A valid point for sure, this is indeed a problem. Luckily it seems like it can be solved and that people are trying to do it. The first european solar panel recycling plant opened just 2 years ago:
I think the reason why it hasn't been done earlier is that the volume was not there to make it a good business. 20 years from now it surely will be. Just like the business of recycling batteries.
I agree about hypotheticals, and sadly I find that is usually the problem with this topic.
Some people "know" why some thing will definitely work because they ignore problems, and others "know" why something will not work because they don't realize the problems are solvable or even non-existent.
Such as in your example - the three countries you mention are already (at least combined) self-sufficient in renewable energy. (Norway is a net exporter and covers the diesel generators some of the 50 000 people living in Greenland use).
Not only that, but solar is totally feasible in all those countries. The notion that solar can't be used far north or far south is just not true. They even use solar power in Antarctica:
Norway is powered 95% by hydro and Iceland by geothermal, so it says nothing about feasibility of wind / solar.
Also being a 'Net Exporter' is not enough - Scotland is a net exporter of wind energy, but was actually only able to cover ~30% of it's own needs, because sometimes there is too much wind, and sometimes not enough.
"Not only that, but solar is totally feasible in all those countries."
Research station in Antarctica is not a suitable benchmark: if their setup produces electricity at £2/kWh, that's a great deal because their only alternative is shipping diesel thousands of kilometres at 50x the price.
But charging even £1 for electricity in UK would have major repercussions.
In the UK, during the summer there is 10x more solar irradiance than in Winter, Norway will be even more extreme.
Anything is feasible if you invest enough, but you probably have to overbuild your renewables, and have cross-continent power transmission to even it out.
While I agree with you regarding the political dimension, the technical, especially regarding safety may not be underestimated regarding cost implications. But the right political setting could imply cheap, mass produced plants, e.g. SMR's. The problem is that were too late, would take several decades to scale up to where we we should be already...
I'm not sure I follow this. Nuclear power is significantly less deadly than coal and that's just talking about accidents in power generation. If you include general death by radiation pollution, that difference grows more disparate (coal energy production emits an enormous amount of radiation into the atmosphere as pollution).
Will do. Nuclear energy is 10x less deadly than rooftop solar per Twh and 4x less deadly than wind.
Solar kills! Maybe we need to mount a campaign to shut down this deadly and dangerous form of energy generation. I will start working on the posters and clickbait web site, you gather the activists to organize a protest.
China is shifting their entire coal production to nuclear. America is shutting down nuclear and replacing it with? Coal. Wind and PV cannot handle the load requirements so you end up having to build coal anyway.
I’m not against wind and PV. I’m just realistic about where the energy mixture has to look like to actually accomplish the goal of sustainable energy production. The earth can’t handle us dithering yet more on this argument.
The United States is not replacing nuclear power with coal. Coal-derived electricity has declined dramatically in the past 15 years while nuclear power has declined slightly. See this chart of US electrical generation from 1950-2020:
Fossil generation peaked in 2007, as did generation from coal.
Coal plus gas generation in 2007 was 2913 TWh, composed of 2016 TWh from coal, 897 TWh from gas. In 2020 gas generation was up to 1617 TWh and coal was down to 774 TWh for a total of 2391 TWh (-522 from 2007).
Between 2007 and 2020, renewables grew from 353 TWh to 792 TWh (+439 from 2007).
No, the US is not replacing nuclear with coal. It is shutting down nuclear that is aging out, but all energy growth in the past 20 years in the US has been renewables and gas. Mostly gas. The US is drowning in cheap natural gas from fracking and because of this switch away from coal it is one of the few major western nations to actually reduce its CO2 footprint over the past couple of decades.
My bad. Natural gas still emits 50% of the CO2 that Coal does, so it's still a very significant emitter of CO2 as compared with nuclear. That's ignoring the methane leaks inherent in transporting natural gas.
China can also build anything they want where they want and sell power for state guided prices which is not possible in e.g. europe where people oppose. Also solar is much cheaper already which makes such investments uninteresting for power companies.
The parent comment said overprovisioning and storage. With enough overprovisioning, you'd need storage for half a day at most (keep in mind that the parent thread was talking about pure solar with storage, not wind). The question on this sub-thread is: what would be the optimal (minimum cost) balance between overprovisioned solar and storage, and what would be the cost of that solution (the question was about 1GW, but it probably scales almost linearly), with similar reliability to pure nuclear (I'm assuming this pure nuclear scenario is overprovisioned too, since it has to deal with refueling pauses and the occasional electrical faults)?
(Of course, except for very small isolated networks, a real-life solution would not use only pure solar and storage; adding other things like wind to the mix would probably decrease the cost while keeping the same reliability.)
“Too late” relative to what? We don’t have an alternative. It will similarly take decades to scale up renewables (we need some combination of economical grid-scale storage and massive over-provisioning).
>the long-term benefit should be what it is held up against.
how about the long term risk? we havent even figured out how to deal with plastics in the ocean and in our bodies let alone responsibly harness the atom. we're talking about a waste product that does not cease to create a danger for hundreds of years at minimum. Reactor 4 at chernobyl is predicted to be "safe" in 20,000 years and before you say thats an exception id like to remind you that ALL high level nuclear waste has a cooldown of tens of thousands of years and it is routinely generated in the pursuit of the electron today.
The Roman empire only lasted 1500 years. these nuclear byproducts last so long that modern scholars cannot unilaterally agree on a simple means of warning the future inhabitants of whatever society exists, let alone passing on any tips or tricks for processing or salvaging these lethal artifacts.
we are talking about a waste product that outlives not only written but spoken language and dozens if not hundreds of civilizations and the stalwart of the atom --the United States-- still couldnt even manage to get Yucca mouuntain together as a disposal ground after two decades.
nuclear isotopes do not have a rate of return. they do not care about profit or equity or economies and will without remoerse kill you all if you forget them.
waste is currently stored in large pools at your local nuclear plant that require constant cooling. once these sites are inoperable they will require the care of generations for millennia before with a clear conscience you can say 'nuclear power was worth it'. that the atom will be taught as a religion is less far fetched a premise to a Fallout game when you realize in 12,000 years the only means of conveying the lethality of our hubris will be as such.
This is anti-science fear mongering for a variety of reasons.
Most importantly, we need to consider the risks of NOT investing in nuclear, which are that we continue to burn fossil fuels while we pray for a solution for the renewable storage problem. This is a civilization-ending risk by which the worst nuclear disaster pales in comparison.
> we havent even figured out how to deal with plastics in the ocean and in our bodies let alone responsibly harness the atom.
Plastics are a problem because billions of people throw their trash haphazardly into the environment. As long as we don’t do that with nuclear waste, we’re fine.
Yes, nuclear waste takes a long time to decay, but the risk is inversely correlated with the time it takes to decay. Something with a long half-life by definition emits low rates of radiation. Moreover, nuclear waste is very dense, so we can easily manage a lot of it (and we already have to manage some of it anyway). Lastly, we already have the answer for managing nuclear waste—deep geologic storage.
There is a lot of uranium ore in the ground already, much of it radioactive enough that it will absolutely cause illness if you live or work in its proximity (not even counting the radon it gives off).
Any analysis of the dangers of long term disposal shouldn't concern itself with risks comparable to that given by rich natural deposits of radioactive materials.
We seen it first hand in these last 2 years how hard it was for the government to control the lowermost layers of society, even when we talk about a life, and death matter, just because they can't get a hamburger, and toilet paper.
Now, imagine talking about rationing electricity, or fuel for F150s
> treat it as literally unlocking the next level of human development
That was literally the way it was thought about a three quarters of a century ago. It... didn't work out.
It's just not there. It's fine. It's safe enough. But it's outrageously expensive relative to other equally advantageous sources, and all the magic technologies needed to "fix" that are always a decade away.
It did work out. The only reason we don’t have more of it is because of anti-nuclear FUD campaigns.
> It's just not there. It's fine. It's safe enough. But it's outrageously expensive relative to other equally advantageous sources,
It’s disingenuous to compare unreliable energy sources with reliable energy sources and claim the two are equally advantageous. We can make renewable energy reliable at significant cost, so we must compare that cost with nuclear. Moreover, the price projections for SMRs handily beat out fossil fuels and reliability-adjusted figures for renewables.
> and all the magic technologies needed to "fix" that are always a decade away.
This is rich considering (1) we know what the “fix” is and it’s not magic (mass produce nuclear reactors i.e., SMRs) and (2) the plan for reliable, economic renewable energy is “pray for an unknown miracle breakthrough in storage” as though that will be discovered and scaled in less than a decade…
No longer true. New reactors coming that are way, way less expensive. If we can stop thinking in terms of a quarter century ago, we can finally get to that future we used to imagine.
> Gotta love anti-nuclear folks. They work to hinder nuclear development and then point to the lack of nuclear progress as “evidence” that nuclear is a pipe dream.
Gotta love anti-nuclear folks. They work to hinder nuclear development and then point to the lack of nuclear progress as “evidence” that nuclear is a pipe dream.
Stop with the conspiracy theories. There are no "anti-nuclear folks" in this thread. It's a bunch of people looking at a balance sheet and trying to decide on how to prioritize energy spending. And nuclear doesn't fit. Maybe it will. But it doesn't. It's not there. If you have $100M to spend on non-carbon electricity right now you build a wind farm, not a reactor.
That's the problem you have to fix. Make something people want, basically.
Oh, it's safer than all other reactors ever designed? Yeah, but it isn't PERFECT, is it? What if I <impossible scenario>? Then it might be dangerous!
Oh, it has 1/10th the nuclear waste of all other reactors ever? But it STILL MAKES NUCLEAR WASTE.
Oh, it can be built at half the cost of previous reactors for twice the energy? THAT'S STILL WAY TOO MUCH.
And to be clear, I think renewables are major important part of the solution. But waiting for them to meet the demand that nuclear can hit immediately means decades of dirty energy generation. We need to do both renewables and nuclear right now.
>> Excessive concern about low levels of radiation led to a regulatory standard known as ALARA: As Low As Reasonably Achievable. What defines “reasonable”? It is an ever-tightening standard. As long as the costs of nuclear plant construction and operation are in the ballpark of other modes of power, then they are reasonable.
>> This might seem like a sensible approach, until you realize that it eliminates, by definition, any chance for nuclear power to be cheaper than its competition. Nuclear can‘t even innovate its way out of this predicament: under ALARA, any technology, any operational improvement, anything that reduces costs, simply gives the regulator more room and more excuse to push for more stringent safety requirements, until the cost once again rises to make nuclear just a bit more expensive than everything else. Actually, it‘s worse than that: it essentially says that if nuclear becomes cheap, then the regulators have not done their job.
Basically the safety regulations (some of which are nonsensical -- the whole article is worth a read) preclude cost-effective nuclear. I won't address your point on waste, I think it's covered elsewhere on this page well enough.
> * don't disturb the neighbours (not met reliably)
This is a false dichotomy that’s always bugged me. I’d sure find living near a nuclear plant a lot less disturbing than living near a coal plant. And with nuclear plants, far fewer people would have to live near any power plant.
I don't see this as a requirement. The cheaper options that provide the large base load needed are all fossil fuel based. They are "cheap", but only if you don't charge for the CO2 cost to the environment.
Ontario has a 60% base energy load provided by nuclear. Smog is rare, except when it blows up from the south. The CO2 production is very low.
> no waste that takes >100y to decay
The waste from alternatives are huge amounts of CO2, which is causing far more harm to the world than the small amount of nuclear waste that would be produced.
We have so many nuclear power plants running and the amount of waste so comparatively negligible (compared with coal, oil, natural gas) that it's moving the goal posts to require it to hit everything.
Humanity doesn't get better at doing something by doing it less. We need more power plants so that we build experience and costs go down. The market has to be there so that power plant design is invested in to drive down costs, improve efficiencies and reduce risks further.
Repeatedly building and improving is how South Korea and France have nuclear power plants that work pretty swell despite the massive political obstacles in their way. A great deal of the costs of nuclear come not from intrinsic technological or process costs but the bureaucracy setup that will almost guarantee non-viable economics. It thus becomes nearly impossible to compare nuclear and solar / wind sources in terms of cost efficiency honestly whatever you support. Costs of anything are a function of the technical, market, and political factors.
This so much. One barrel per year per reactor means we can run the US on 100% nuclear and store all the waste for the next 1000 years in the one existing facility in Nevada.
Maybe. But until we have that first plant, it's too early to go for mass implimentiion.
I wish Musk would take a shot at it. He's the only engineer/financier/crazy-person who I think could make an impact. Government's clearly aren't interested and no one else can get the cash together.
As he’s said numerous times, solar is fusion at a distance and solar combined with batteries is the future, both of which can be safely recycled and manufactured rapidly at scale. Tesla’s entire business is selling batteries to store clean energy for later use (either in vehicles or stationary storage), and enough sunlight hits the earth every 30 minutes to power humanity for a year. Lithium is abundant in the world’s crust, and there are no proliferation risks.
“That free fusion reactor in the sky conveniently converts ~4 million tons of mass into energy every second. We just need to catch an extremely tiny amount of it to power all of civilization.”
I don't disagree that there is abundant solar opportunity at the planet-level, but it's unrealistic to build infrastructure to funnel energy from eligible deserts to the rest of North America.
Here where the sky is cloudy as much as it is sunny, and clear even less, and where it snows, solar works but isn't reasonable to replace all power needs at an individual, county or state level. The logistics involved are much more complex than, say, having a few nuclear reactors in the state. Which work regardless of the weather.
HVDC transmission, pumped storage where the geography allows for it, and grid interconnectors allow for moving power between geographies. Seasonal deltas are solved for with overbuilding renewables and curtailment when there is oversupply.
If nuclear was easy, it’d be done, but it isn’t because it is the more complex, more expensive technology. The sun is free and requires no human management.
I cannot stress enough (as an armchair energy analyst who tracks renewables and energy storage manufacturing and deployment rates) how fast solar PV, wind, and batteries are being deployed.
It is done? It is easy? My power needs are completely served right now by hydroelectric and nuclear.
Just because you don't have nuclear reactors in your neighborhood doesn't mean they're more out of reach than solar. HVDC is already widely available. Grid interconnects are mostly political.
We looked at installing PV on a semi-remote home and it was not feasible. The roof was only large enough for a few panels and significant tree removal would've been necessary. The cost was prohibitive.
Existing nuclear is of course valuable as a zero carbon energy source, its new nuclear that can’t get built. We should continue to support existing nuclear as long as can be done safely so carbon intensive generation doesn’t fill in for those generators if they’re retired early (Illinois recently enacted policy to subsidize Exelon’s aging nuclear merchant fleet in the state so that generation wasn’t replaced with natural gas, for example).
> We looked at installing PV on a semi-remote home and it was not feasible. The roof was only large enough for a few panels and significant tree removal would've been necessary. The cost was prohibitive.
That particular home design-- its siting, dimensions, energy usage, etc-- were just not viable in a particular energy environment. That doesn't mean that grid detached PV isn't viable-- many parties use it today-- it means it wasn't viable for that design.
A mostly insulated home wouldn't be a viable design in the arctic but they're acceptable designs in places with mild climates.
As the energy landscape changes some designs and locations that were viable in the past won't be viable anymore. There is no natural law entitlement for a given set of choices to work out. :)
I don't think the applications for nuclear energy were rejected for the reasons being implied by the original article. This article[1] mentions that they weren't accepted because they missed the submission deadline.
> According to Kirsty Gogan, cofounder of TerraPraxis and a senior climate and energy advisor to the U.K. government, “All three Green Zone applications by nuclear groups were rejected.” However, it seems some of that may be due to miscommunication regarding application deadlines for the COP26 Green Zone.
I couldn't find the original source for the miscommunication on application deadlines, hopefully someone can find it.
That's how you know none of this is real. If mankind was actually on the brink of extinction all options would be on the table. Especially one that offers free unlimited energy. Mankind does not have an energy generation problem. It only has an energy storage problem.
Agreed. It could also be real but no where near as serious as they are claiming. Mankind went from the first manned flight to footprints on the moon in 60 years. I'm not losing any sleep about a mathematically insignificant projection that may or may not lead to something 100 years from now. 100 years from now if they want terraforming to strictly regulate the climate it should be well within their capabilities.
Again, these people aren't serious. And their actions prove how the threat is either not real at all, or extremely distant to the point of being irrelevant for us.
If climate change wasn't a real threat... they would act as you said.
If climate change was a real threat to humanity... they would still act in spite of it. Tragedy of the commons. What is a better future? Having done your part, when nobody did, and facing a broken world with a broken economy OR Helped kill the world environment but playing an even field?
That has been China's stance all along, anyways.
The only reason to move toward "renewables" is to not depend on fossil fuel imports. It is about sovereignity, not about morality.
I don't disagree with any of that. People should pursue alternate energy sources. However world governments should not be putting their fingers on the scales in favor of green energy. Legislators who also just happen to have financial investments in these same new technologies. Yet another reason to be skeptical. Everyone points their fingers at the oil industry for the studies they fund, but Al Gore was a hair's width away from becoming the world's first green billionaire when he tried to pass a law forcing companies to exchange carbon credits and he was a 40% owner in carbon exchange network that would mediate it.
Green energy is making advancements. Unfortunately for them the fossil fuel industry continues to make advancements as well. Every year they get better at drilling, better at harvesting, better at converting from crude to fuel, better at burning, better at extracting energy from what is burned. At least a dozen different metrics get 2% better year over year which keeps fossil fuels competitive and makes it harder for other sources of energy to replace it.
Which is fine. It's all fine. I just want the best energy available. And the way our civilization has historically measured the "best" is through the free market. Green will win eventually. No need to rush it prematurely. It will happen.
That's how I interpreted it. If the end of the world was being triggered in 10 years we would use any and all options at our disposal, even experimental ones, all concurrently. We have enough labor and resources to go all in on energy production.
I think what you see, and quite likely misinterpret, is world leaders who are still waking up to the issue. I think most of them have not yet fully internalized what the climate crisis truly means (and even if they do, maybe some just are not able to care enough). It is good they at least are starting to do so, and I hope they won't lose momentum.
The climate crisis is likely the greatest challenge humankind has faced so far. I am starting to think that only true SF fans can actually process this information. It seems one needs to have thought about it for a while before being hit with this information (existential threat to our civilization), to be able to process it fast. SF may have provided people with the prerequisites to understand the situation. Or, alternatively, maybe people who are capable of thinking far into the future are drawn to SF.
Hate to conclude but climate change has evolved into a self-serving political agenda for our elites and this is yet more evidence of that.
Nuclear is obviously renewable and proven. Flourocarbons - CFCs - HCFCs - HFCs - and other related are extremely aggressive GHGs yet all of those are not phased out (or in case of CFCs there's plenty of evidence (see Nature) that emission continues in non Western nations) but making it part of the debate gets stonewalled too.
Nuclear is obviously not renewable; the fuel it consumes was created before the formation of the Earth, and there's a limited amount of it.
(And this shows that being renewable is not the most important factor if what you're worried about is global warming. Nuclear is not renewable, but other than the huge amount of concrete needed during the construction of a nuclear power plant, it emits a very low amount of global warming gases.)
Another year and the same old talking heads, literally screaming protestors and policy makers still unable to come up with realistic solutions other than screaming at each other.
At least the technologists and engineers at several companies and startups are doing something about it with real world solutions, products and ideas.
I won’t be surprised that next year the same people are going to have the same discussion and it will be a forever blame game until they miss their own unrealistic timelines.
I have respect for those who ‘do’ rather than those who continue talking, mocking, screaming or blaming others and repeat themselves without giving anything substantiative to contribute themselves to the problem.
At some point, you have to wonder: why does the nuclear industry seem to just suck at lobbying?
The wind lobby has professionals who made the case to people who matter. That's not evil, that's your - the industries - job.
At a high level the nuclear industry, sorry to say, honestly doesn't care. It's the Boeing of the energy world, except even more so: wring every last drop out of dead tech, and never invest a cent.
Nuclear technology and radiation are not sexy. Formed its image during several long centuries starting its career with mass murder in Japan followed by several high profile accidents and the cold war's arm race, giving birth to the concept of the nuclear apocalypse pictured in popular culture (novels, movies, games). Combined with people being afraid of cancer caused by radiation to their core. It is planted deeply into the human consciousness now. Wind is harmless and clear compared to that.
Try to run a big old truck driver against a cute puppy in a popularity contest, you can be the world champion of PR still you will loose.
Of course. Think of it in terms of cui bono. You're on the precipice of convincing a bunch of folks they should shut down their economies and give you trillions of dollars to send to your donors as you please. Then a guy comes along and says that your shit won't work (which will be amply demonstrated in Europe this coming winter) and offers something that actually does work. It's like that meme - the guy will fly straight through the window for suggesting such foolishness. They never were interested in solving the problem, they're interested in trillions of dollars that they'll get control over because the problem exists.
Common sense. We could solve climate and achieve net zero carbon in a decade if we focused on 4th gen nuclear. But that's not as profitable to the aforementioned donors, so it ain't happening.
While it is bla bla it is necessary. How else would you establish political pressure in a democracy? Many green transition tech would be feasible if co2 taxes were established, even within the eu.
> We are deeply concerned about the news that every application on nuclear energy for the Green Zone at the upcoming COP26 conference has been rejected
I don't understand what this means. What's an "application for the Green Zone at the upcoming COP26"? "Green zone"? What, is this a military occupation?
OK:
> The Green Zone is the ‘official’ fringe space (managed by the UK government), with around 200 events for the general public, civil society, youth groups and academia. Tickets are free.
> The Green Zone is managed by the UK Government, and is a platform for the general public, youth groups, civil society, academia, artists, business and others to have their voices heard through events, exhibitions, workshops and talks that promote dialogue, awareness, education
and commitments.
> …The Green Zone will be a stakeholder-led space and act as a key hub for engagement during the Summit. As such we are keen to see proposals that drive participation and interaction focused on the themes of climate change
>…In the Green Zone a number of exhibition spaces are available for organisations. As a public-facing venue, we are keen to receive proposals that engage audiences with the themes of climate change and climate action through interaction and participation. We see this two week showcase zone as a hub of tactile and immersive activity.
> …The Green Zone aims to facilitate discussion and engagement, and we’ve heard how important it is for organisations to have a focal point for convening attendees and having conversations. A number of stalls will be provided free of charge to use for one or two days, depending on demand, over the course of the Summit. These are spaces for dialogue and conversation, and might be of interest specifically for NGOs, trade bodies, and youth organisations.
Basically if you say to me that you care about climate change and then reject nuclear, I stop talking to you and taking you in any kind of seriously. Once you reject nuclear it’s just virtue signalling.
People can reject nuclear without empty virtue signalling.
They may believe that non-nuclear alternatives are perfectly viable. "The sun provides enough energy to power the world's needs 30,000 times over"...and all that.
You might be mistaking disingenuousness with ignorance, or naiveté.
Yes, you can use simple methods like this in every facet of life to have perfect knowledge of all situations. It's truly a marvel that everyone doesn't know everything.
My favorite trick is if someone blinks twice in 10 seconds I know they ate something with garlic today.
I am a fan of nuclear energy for various reasons, and it's obvious that the safety and waste problems can be solved with new technology like small modular reactors with inherently safe designs.
However, even I realize that nuclear energy is not viable to significantly combat climate change due to the following reasons:
* The technology is not there yet. There are a lot of promising companies that are trying to solve the safety problem, and there is a lot of research on how to better deal with the waste, but due to the inherent dangers it will take decades to prove these designs are safe, work as intended and can be produced at a significant scale at the promised cost. Sadly, we don't have decades, we need to start replacing coal right now.
* nuclear energy is way to expensive. Wind and solar are much cheaper. current numbers are roughly 50% cheaper for renewables, and while lots of companies promise cheaper nuclear design, these claims are unproven and the renewables are also still significantly improving in cost. The nuclear cost models I've seen also ignore most of the storage and security cost for handling the waste for millenia. There are cheaper alternatives with existing and proven technology. Power to gas for example has an efficiency of roughly 50%. which funny enough corresponds to its cost advantage over nuclear. simply building a lot more wind and solar capacity and using power to gas to fill existing gas storage systems with excess energy from renewables has roughly the same cost as nuclear, without the safety and proliferation headache, and the added advantage of long term storage.
* proliferation. even if we could solve the problem of safeguarding thousands of SMR in developed countries, you can't just export them to every country on earth. however, that's a requirement for replacing coal, as those countries need to reduce emissions, too.
So yeah, I'd love molten salt SMR to be a thing, and they probably will be in some applications in developed countries in 10-20 years, but the value of this to combat climate change is minimal and people who think otherwise are ignoring the previously mentioned facts.
> I am a fan of nuclear energy for various reasons, and it's obvious that the safety and waste problems can be solved
No you don't from your arguments.
> The technology is not there yet. There are a lot of promising companies that are trying to solve the safety problem.[...], we don't have decades, we need to start replacing coal right now.
That's bullshit. Even nuclear reactors designs from the 70s are statistically safer than coal. And kill a lot less than coal.
> * nuclear energy is way to expensive.
France had one of the cheapest electricity in Europe for 3 decades. Cheaper than anything produced by renewable right now. Nuclear is cheap but at the condition of government loans at very low interest rate and for multiple decades. That's has been analysed and reported many times already.
> Power to gas for example has an efficiency of roughly 50%.
There is today not a single installation world wide existing of power to gas to the scale it would be needed. And that would anhiliate any hypothetical cost of the renewable energy anyway.
One can be a fan of something without trying to blindly apply it to areas where it doesn't make sense.
> nuclear reactors designs from the 70s are statistically safer than coal. And kill a lot less than coal.
That's a strawman's argument, I'm not arguing for coal, I'm arguing for storage of renewables.
> France had one of the cheapest electricity in Europe for 3 decades [...] Nuclear is cheap [...]
That is simply false. The levelized cost of nuclear is about twice as high as that of solar or wind, see page 8 of the referenced EIA report [1].
> There is today not a single installation world wide existing of power to gas to the scale it would be needed
Again, strawman's argument. The discussion is about what should be built, not what has been built. There are already megawatt scale plants running for years without problems [2], and there are shipping container scale demonstrators for higher efficient versions [3]. So it's pretty obvious that the technology around power to gas is well understood, and ready for mass production and deployment.
> And that would anhiliate any hypothetical cost of the renewable energy anyway
Again, this is false. As explained above, nuclear energy is twice as expensive as renewables, and power to gas has an end to end loss of roughly 50%. So in reality, renewables + power to gas has roughly the same cost as nuclear, without the proliferation, safety, security, and waste problems. And as an added bonus every MWh you use while renewables are producing costs half of nuclear ;).
> One can be a fan of something without trying to blindly apply it to areas where it doesn't make sense.
Starting a discussion with a "I'm a huge fan" before spending the next 10 min to debunk the thing is not "being a fan of" but just a sign of being hypocritical, or manuipulative or both.
> That's a strawman's argument, I'm not arguing for coal, I'm arguing for storage of renewables.
Renewable alone (Without Coal or Gas) implies nationally to have close to 100% of the production capacity in storage alone (Battery, power2Gas or hydro storage) to compensate solar / wind intermittency. Which no country on Earth is able to do right now: not even close to, not even as a minor part of their production. That is the real straw-man argument.
Climate emergency need actions and solutions now, Nuclear is one of them. Dreams scenario where storage does everything renewable cannot do is not realist with the current technology available excepted in powerpoint bullshit slides.
And it will not for the next 20 years even with a Colosseum size investment.
> The levelized cost of nuclear is about twice as high as that of solar or wind, see page 8 of the referenced EIA report [1].
Solar and winds are currently highly subsidized and are still intermittent. With storage cost considered, any of their hypothetical advances goes into vapor.
At the opposite, France was producing electricity cheaper than its neighbours for around 30 years before photovoltaic and Wind power even became a thing.
> Again, strawman's argument. The discussion is about what should be built, not what has been built.
The discussion is about what can be and should be done now to reduce CO2 emission as fast as possible if we do not want get toasted in 20 years. Bcause in 20 years, it is already too late.
And the easy answer is built damn nuclear power plants and at the world scale. Not take 20 years to play with techs that are still on the design board: Power2Gas is one of them. And everything else is not scalable in term of storage.
> and power to gas has an end to end loss of roughly 50%
I do see power to gas as the last desperate attempt of the oil and gas industry to stay relevant in the next decade. Nothing more. For the rest it's a joke. It is a joke in term of investment, it is a joke in term of efficiency, it is a joke in term of economical viability. Hydrogen has its usage, but not as backbone of the power grid.
I'm not debunking nuclear, I'm simply stating that just because you have a hammer climate change doesn't magically become a nail. Nuclear is great, but for the reasons I mentioned it is not suitable to combat climate change right now. I'm not advocating against nuclear, I'm simply saying that it's expensive, has problems other energy sources don't have, and relying on the building of new, safe, and cheap, designs will take way too long.
> Renewable alone (Without Coal or Gas) implies nationally to have close to 100% of the production capacity in storage alone (Battery, power2Gas or hydro storage) to compensate solar / wind intermittency. Which no country on Earth is able to do right now
again, straw man's argument. No country is close to 100% nuclear power either. France is pretty far, and they are sitting at less than 70%. and the reactors they are trying to build to increase this number are plagued by budget and timescale overruns of massive proportions. See the new safer EPR designs they have been trying to build since 2005, which are still not finished and have already consumed more than 300% of the initial projected cost [1]. it is delusional to believe we can somehow quickly scale nuclear power to the capacity needed to combat climate change.
cursing and claiming that things are a joke that have already been successfully demonstrated is not going to help make your point...
If everybody in the room agrees on the benefits, why not spend most of the discussion debating the drawbacks and the contentious points? That’s a very common situation in my professional life.
Usually the reason for this behaviour is that at least one of the parties is not interested in resolving any contentious points, but merely in "winning" the debate by focusing on arguments where they can exploit a weakness in the reasoning of their counterpart.
Usually it's best to not waste time on these people and simply ignore them, up until now I wasn't sure this was really the case, though.
Things like power to gas would work economically because you buy cheap and sell high. The efficiency figure becomes less important if renewables are cheap and gas is expensive.
> * nuclear energy is way to expensive. Wind and solar are much cheaper. current numbers are roughly 50% cheaper for renewables, and while lots of companies promise cheaper nuclear design, these claims are unproven and the renewables are also still significantly improving in cost. The nuclear cost models I've seen also ignore most of the storage and security cost for handling the waste for millenia. There are cheaper alternatives with existing and proven technology. Power to gas for example has an efficiency of roughly 50%. which funny enough corresponds to its cost advantage over nuclear. simply building a lot more wind and solar capacity and using power to gas to fill existing gas storage systems with excess energy from renewables has roughly the same cost as nuclear, without the safety and proliferation headache, and the added advantage of long term storage.
Wind and solar aren't that much cheaper (or actually usually much more expensive), when you include the batteries that are required for them to operate as the entire grid. Right now they can only displace SOME not ALL of the energy generation of a country (unless you have huge natural resources of hydro or geothermal energy that can act as that base load). Nuclear is needed for that baseload, or tons and tons of batteries. Taken in that respect Nuclear is cheaper than solar and wind, for that purpose. Grids will eventually need to go somewhere around 80% solar/wind and 20% nuclear/geothermal/hydro (+/- 15%).
You do realize that batteries are not the only method of energy storage? In fact, there are lots of better ways to store excess energy from renewables over longer periods of time, but power to gas was mentioned as an example that works everywhere, and can use abundant existing storage and distribution systems.
Lets add a reference to get some actual numbers to play with: The US Energy Information Administration has published a report reasoning about the levelized cost of electricity (LCOS) for new power plants of different energy sources [1]. According to page 8 of this report, the LCOS of one megawatt hour of nuclear energy is around 69 USD, while solar is around 33 USD and onshore wind is 37 USD.
If you factor in a 50% loss in converting the renewable energy to gas and back to electricity you end up in the same ball park as nuclear, but without the proliferation, safety, and waste problems.
Something I’ve never understood about the anti-proliferation arguments of small reactors.
Ostensibly the reason why bad actors (“terrorists” etc [0]) don’t have nukes today is because it’s hard to enrich the fuel.
Because small reactors with safer designs often have a side effect of creating enriched fuel as intermediary product. (Meaning such designs would make it easier to enrich fuel than building thousands of centrifuges.)
So, we decide not to build them.
But, what’s stopping the bad actors from building the smaller reactors themselves, as an “easier than building thousands of centrifuges” method of enriching fuel?
In other words, why would preventing the bad guys from using such tech, be a reason for the good guys to avoid building such tech? If it really does make enriching fuel easier, couldn’t the bad guys just build the reactors themselves?
If we were serious about non-proliferation, and the breeder/thorium/molten-salt/etc designs make enriching fuel easier… wouldn’t the idea of a reactors be the thing we want to protect? Rather than just the physical reactors themselves?
[0] Substitute “bad guys” and “good guys” with whatever group you want, the point is the same.
1. Developed countries want to keep the developing country poor, by setting the narrative and keep nuclear: the cheapest/most efficient energy out of competitor's hand so they can stay poor.
2. Nuclear bomb ready country want to shut out every possibility for others to get a hands on them. Most nuclear warhead program started by using nuclear powerplant as disguise.
The environment problem is unsolvable because no one with the power want to solve them
What a dissappointment. Nuclear (of some kind, hoping for Fusion later) is a key component of any plan to stop global warming. Solar and Wind can get you to a greater than 50% green power production, but as you get closer to 100% you need exponentially more and more production and more and more transmission lines to handle dips and avoid blackouts from rare situations. You need a power generation source that is consistent.
At some point in the future we may have enough battery production for grid energy storage such that nuclear is not needed, but we are a long long way from that. Battery supply is growing rapidly, but not nearly rapidly enough.
We make millions/billions of high tech phones, battery is just peanuts compare to this, it was a problem of right kind of tech , which I think current gen battery tech have achieved and also price point requirement is also achieved, very soon, once all usual suspects starts manufacturing the same, sky will only be the limit.
Well based in the history, the United Nations Climate Change conference, or COP, started at Germany in 1995. There Merkel should play a central role. Looking back on her time in the Ministry of the Environment. Fast forward to 1998, the government of Gerhard Schroeder (SPD) reached what became known as the “nuclear consensus” with the big utilities. They agreed to limit the lifespan of nuclear power stations to 32 years. Add to it the (in)famous “German angst” caused after the Fukushima accident. With that narrative, built over the time, it will be very hard to change the actual scenario.
I think rejecting the nuclear fission power is the mistake of the these times and we are already paying for it. If the world goes that direction we've been in a better place in terms of global warming.
Nuclear is not a palatable political solution for a lot of people and it is easily simpler to reject the proliferation of such materials. The current 'theater' from a geopolitical standpoint for nuclear is China and it does not appear to be succeeding well. I don't expect France to succeed given all that has occurred.
Smaller nuclear devices will need constant care and monitoring that it is highly likely people will need to 'grow with' such devices. I dont think the will UN back something without a proof of concept which could delay adoption years.
It's not palatable because of poor education. We need to be including nuclear in the list of green technologies in basic school science textbooks. We don't.
Stronger controls on education about the nuclear industry is not the magic pill for success. The magic pill in my estimation is trust and time without accidents.
Currently Macron is trying to promote 'french nuclear power plants' and 'small nuclear reactors' across the globe. Both geopolitical opponents and activists are agains this.
It’s very disappointing to hear that nuclear solutions were rejected. Reuters ran a story just earlier today about how nuclear is a key high tech solution for climate change: https://youtu.be/TNSaRJylY4A
I'm working for a non-profit that is heavily involved in COP, because I care about the planet and preserving the environment as much as possible for future generations. This news is very disheartening for me, because there is no way that humanity achieves a sustainable energy future without either nuclear or catastrophic declines in human population. Inside both my organization and other climate organizations, it seems that humanistic science and innovation are being rapidly replaced by a humanity-hating religion that cares more about virtue signaling than actual environmental outcomes.
If anyone knows of any innovative, outcome driven organizations or startups working on sustainable energy, including nuclear, that are hiring, feel free to share.
What about drilling for geothermal energy? And what about thermal fusion which is upcoming? For what do we need fission any longer, except to bridge the time up to availability of fusion?
As long there is no good concept for the nuclear waste, that long nuclear shouldn't be praised as solution to anything, except for bridging.
There have been news on here, for a newly developed technique to "recycle" and/or to "treat" the nuclear waste by utilizing a collider. May be this is an solution for the nuclear industry? Safety of the power plants is, I think, comparably given by learnings of the accidents in history. Which shows quite a lot of incidences..
It's difficult. Me dunna want to have the power to decide on here.
> And what about thermal fusion which is upcoming?
Fusion is great, and we are making good progress. It could plausibly change everything in a couple of decades. But it is not available today, so we cannot rely on it. That’s the thing when you follow the latest r&d developments: we talk about a technology well before it is useable, so all we can use at a given moment are mature technologies that are old news.
Example with fusion: we’ve been talking about ITER for 20 years, but it’s not finished building yet. Other developments like spherical tokamaks and stellarators are nowhere near prototypes at the industrial scale.
If we are serious about climate change, we need to act now, which means putting in place solutions based on technologies that are already mature and useable. Waiting 10 years for the next fancy energy source with blockchain, or the mythical carbon capture solution (which cannot possibly work with anything resembling the current markets) is reckless.
> There have been news on here, for a newly developed technique to "recycle" and/or to "treat" the nuclear waste by utilizing a collider.
There are much better and cheaper ways of doing that, using breeder reactors. We’re further along the readiness path than with fusion, but they still require some engineering before we can build them.
Yes.. it's just, the times changed. ITER has been planned a long time ago (narrator makes a gesture of a looooong beard)
Just the findings of warm superconductors in 2018, let the development advance in much more speeedy manner. Atm, approx 40 startups (yes, most of them are new and poshy) have been founded, which already are building demonstrations and most of them are in stealth Modus. Others are already valued with 5 Billions getting a lot of venture. Chinese are just about to get it done - one's even don't hear anything about that here. The British having good progress.
But, me personally, I'm placing my odds on MIT having functional Demonstrator by 2025.
I'm looking forward. BITCOIN mining for less than a penny :)
Definitely. It’s most of the time fait to say that it will be available some day, but there always are a lot of kinks to iron out between the scientific idea and the useable implementation.
This provides a lot more information and context about what is actually happening as well as what the "green zone" is (as opposed to the "blue zone")... as well as maybe a bit of unnecessary editorializing too!
(I would add that the HN link name is misleading here, what applications for what that were rejected is not clear and it is misleading to imply that there is no representation for nuclear energy at COP26.)
The protests by this lobby group are targeted at the greenzone, yes, but the entirety of COP26 ignores Nuclear as a viable option. You may review the stated agendas of the leading participants or the goals they have published.
The global minimum alternative tax is a higher priority this week than anything climate.
I see this from the Canadian context and Canada is in the process of buying/building a new SMR and has more in the pipeline with funding lined up. Canada still has some coal to phase out, and the lure of the idea of small reactors for remote communities will always make is popular with Canadian technocrats - if not the public.
China is building a lot of plants now too, they will want to sell that technology and build for others.
I can understand why COP wouldn't be keen to have prominent nuclear stuff in the public areas, nuclear isn't very popular with the general public. But the host country is commissioning new plants right now, they obviously see it as a viable option, so it has a seat at the table at COP26.
I haven't heard a peep about global minimum taxes as it relates to COP26, maybe you are confused about the G20 meeting that just happened?
What's the point of COP26 if biggest polluters don't participate? If smaller countries take green measures, they'll force their bigger companies to move their factories to China or face bankruptcy and it's a certain death for SMEs.
Unless there are real sanctions and worldwide ban, this is self defeating.
Great news. At least there is some hope in politics, when they detect this high-paid lobbyists trying to selling their dangerous crap and super expensive power stations, when they still don't know after decades how to get rid of their radioactive waste. Not speaking about the risk yet.
I think this is a more complicated issue than most people seem to think it is.
Very few countries have knowledge in nuclear technology while they have decades of knowledge in other green technologies. So it’s only natural that there is a severe push from European countries to make sure Nuclear doesn’t become a “green” source of energy because our industries are build upon wind and solar, and if we start using Nuclear as a viable alternative then all that industry money will go to China rather than our local production industry. So there is a monetary issue.
There is also a democratic issue. The overwhelming majority of Europeans are against nuclear power and if you consider our current unstable political climate, I think nobody will want the “elite” to start pushing a technology that is genuinely seen as much more dangerous than coal. What I think a lot of Nuclear supports fail to grasp is that it doesn’t matter if Nuclear is safer or better solution if that’s not what people think it is. A good example that Americans might better understand is the covid vaccine and how irrational your country has been in accepting it. That’s how the EU is with Nuclear, and pushing it could quite literally end up toppling governments.
I’m personally not convinced Nuclear is the “right” solution. It may be the only real way to solve the climate crisis, but it’s only safe when you have a stable government that maintains it in a sane manner. I don’t think we can be sure that we are going to have such governments in 25 years. So it’s not that I don’t trust the technology, it’s that I don’t trust us to handle it.
The issue isn't whether nuclear energy is complicated, but whether it's part of the discussion. Of course it has to be part of the discussion, so this makes COP look less serious, as it seems like they are catering more to Green movement politics than to fossil fuel alternatives.
I’m not sure people view COP as serious in general. In my anecdotal experience, people sort of stopped thinking the political elite would solve this back in the 90’ies. And back then they managed to do something about the hole in the ozone layer. A hole that is bigger today than it was back then, prompting no action.
But you’re right of course. I was just getting into the myriad of reasons why some EU leaders actively work against Nuclear at places like COP.
My own country is actively lobbying against getting Nuclear recognised as green technology by the EU because wind and solar are major industries in Denmark.
The human death toll is no doubt greater from fossils, but it’s sort of like traffic safety isn’t it? Something we just live with.
In my part of Europe, anyone of my age or above still remembers Chernobyl and how we had to burn farming produce, clothes that had been drying outside and a range of other things, even here in Scandinavia because it wasn’t safe.
I don’t think you’re ever going to convince my generation and the ones that came before that Nuclear is a good idea. Because we lived through the risk of Europe becoming inhabitable due to human in competence.
This is UK specific but people here might find the data represented here useful when arguing about energy sources and use: https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
An area where nuclear power makes a lot of sense is in desalination factories. Constant load can make clean water. And water can be stored effectively. There's no reason for these to change other than for maintenance.
The "Green Zone" at the COP26 conference, what the article is about, is described as: "Youth groups, civil society, academia, artists, business from across the UK and all over the world will be hosting events, exhibitions, cultural performances, workshops and talks." [1]
Nations deliberating on proposals and agreeing about climate actions is a whole other department.
Neither the technology nor the fuel for nuclear plants are abundant or renewable. For example, can Iran build its own reactors? No. Can Somalia run its hypothetical reactors? No. Can Syria import enriched uranium? No. Can we have reactors without them blowing up every 50 years? No. Do we have a solution for containing nuclear waste without leaks and without ruining the local communities? No.
Enough with this joke of pitching nuclear as a viable alternative. I get it that technologists love it because it will enable them to rule over the developing countries and it will open many high paid jobs but let’s stop pretending. Nuclear is what oil was 100 years ago.
Nuclear is essentially my canary in the coal mine for whether an American politician is taking climate change specifically seriously. If they’re not, then pretending to care is most likely cover for a whole bunch of other stupid crap.
Unfortunately proliferation actually is a solid argument against nuclear fission outside of countries that are already nuclear-capable, but the major powers that are don’t really have that excuse.
Nuclear fuel is incredibly abundant. People talk about the small amounts of nuclear fuel available but completely ignore how energy dense it is. You need very little of it. There's vastly more energy in nuclear ore in the ground than there is even coal and oil combined in the ground.
Do you have a source for this? To my knowledge, uranium would run out in a decade or two if one would use it to supply 100% of the world primary energy consumption [1]. Coal is obviously way more abundant.
Pop science articles like that mistake "proven reserves" with "how much is actually in the ground". When geopolitics talks they look at proven reserves as that's how much we know is available and accessible in the short term, but it's not how much is actually available.
Proven reserves expand whenever there is a shortage as effort is made to find additional amounts of the stuff. Additionally, most countries in the world don't even bother to look as they don't have nuclear technology of their own and there is so little demand for it.
This is why for example we keep finding additional coal and oil as known reserves run out.
Your article also mentions the solution to the fuel problem: Not throwing away almost all the energy, but instead using breeder reactors to extract it.
I would argue that 2009 is not very much out of date when it comes to geology research. The sources also agree with each other:
Scientific American: "According to the NEA, identified uranium resources total 5.5 million metric tons, and an additional 10.5 million metric tons remain undiscovered"
World Nuclear Association: 8 million tonnes "reasonably assured and inferred resources".
This does not change the conclusion that the uranium would run out in less than 20 years if used to supply 100% of the earth's primary energy consumption.
Rare earth metals are currently required inputs for wind to produce magnets and solar to produce photovoltaics. It’s not exactly abundant or renewable.
"Unlike the wind power and EV sectors, the solar PV industry isn’t reliant on rare earth materials. Instead, solar cells use a range of minor metals including silicon, indium, gallium, selenium, cadmium, and tellurium."
Sure but wouldn’t we need to mine exponentially less uranium? How many tons of neodymium need to be mined for wind turbines to produce the equivalent output of a nuclear reactor, for example.
That's an interesting question, actually, and the numbers seem difficult to come by. A master's thesis from 2011 says[0]:
"data on the amount of rare earths in wind turbines vary, ranging from 0.2 to 3.3 kg of neodymium content per kW of rated capacity"
For comparison, a nuclear power station generates[1]:
"24,000,000 kWh from 1 kg of uranium-235"
So, taking the lower estimate for the neodymium content, the wind turbine would have to produce energy for 0.2 x 24,000,000 hours to be as efficient in terms of mass. That's about 548 years. Even with recycling, that's a longer term commitment than some nuclear waste storage proposals, although with less of a proliferation risk.
235U may have an impressive energy density, but uranium ore contains very little natural uranium and natural uranium contains very little 235U. According to this back-of-the-envelope calculation [1], a typical energy density of uranium ore is only around 1400 MJ/kg, so only 60 times higher than that of coal.
To convert that into the (slightly more clumsy) units of my post above, 1400 MJ is about 390 kWh (which is a lot smaller than 24 million). Even taking the upper estimate of neodymium content then, 3.3 x 390 hours is only 54 days.
I don't know how much ore needs to be dug up to extract 1 kg of neodymium, but one site boasts 7% rare earth content in the material it processes[0] so there might need to be a 14x scale factor to avoid comparing apples to ore ranges.
54 days x 14 is 2 years, which should be well under the average life time of a turbine, even before recycling is taken into account. We do have to also consider the capacity factor of wind turbines, though (not just their rated capacity), which "range from 0.26 to 0.52" according to a recent factsheet[1], so that might bump the estimate to 8 years.
Don‘t forget all the CO2 emitted a) at mining and enriching uranium and b) in storing nuclear waste for 100000 years and c) in tearing down highly radioactive retired nuclear power plants. In Germany we started tearing down the GDRs only nuclear power plant in the early 90s and we‘re still not done. 30+ years of daily ops of a highly specialised destruction company operating heavy machinery requiring insulation from radiation. And 1000s of tons more radioactive waste that needs to be shipped around the country. Well, only 20 plants more to go, now that we exited. Somehow people who claim nuclear to be green only look at the CO2 emissions when ready made enriched uranium goes in and burnt fuel comes out. We need to look at the full life cycle of both the plants and the nuclear fuel though, and then nuclear energy‘s CO2 emissions are far far away frm being green.
CO2 is only emitted during mining and refining because the grid itself isn't clean. The same thing is true of solar panels and batteries until the grid is made green. But you can't say "we can't make green tech because it would produce CO2" as it completely ignores the lifetime of things.
> in storing nuclear waste for 100000 years
That's a red herring. You only need to store nuclear waste for around 100 years (or less) before it can be treated as "low level nuclear waste" of which tons of it is generated as byproducts of the medical industry. It doesn't need to be sequestered away, it can be buried safely like all the rest of the low level waste. At that point it's more toxic than it is radioactive so it just needs to be buried in a way that it won't enter the water table.
> In Germany we started tearing down the GDRs only nuclear power plant in the early 90s and we‘re still not done.
Germany is also building tons of highly polluting (and radioactive waste pumped into the air) lignite coal power plants because they shot themselves in the foot by shutting down their very successful nuclear industry. They should look to France for an example on how one should treat nuclear power.
No, they're not what-about answers. They're cause and effect. Germany's coal sector is growing BECAUSE of shutting down it's nuclear sector.
The other points are simply false (nuclear waste isn't dangerous for nearly as long, and his CO2 comment is actually a "what-about" complaint as a reason to not want nuclear power).
oh yeah, the French are so confident with their nuclear power plants they built many of them on their eastern border (with mostly west winds blowing any fall out nicely into Belgium and Germany)
Yep. And now you'll be spewing slightly radioactive exhaust into the atmosphere after burning Russian gas. Whoop-te-do, very green indeed, congratulations, you "won". You also get to pay twice as much for electricity as the French, because the French aren't as easily fooled. And the gap will widen - the French are building more reactors.
Scary that anyone could think that nuclear is not an option for clean power generation.
Should COP26 be taken seriously or should there be a more intelligent option?
Shame, I lived near windmills in the past and the moving shadow drove me crazy. The noise pollution wasn’t too bad compared to a busy highway. And they look so ugly.
Unpopular opinion in this thread but ... I don't want a world with nuclear. That makes me anxious. It's not if there will be a problem, but when.
I'd rather the world spend money on batteries and solar/wind energy, like South Australia. And by focusing on that technology, the market will drive innovation in that class of renewables. That technology is reusable in other applications, like domestic (rooftop), EVs and Space.
I understand the anxiety, and I suppose you've already weighted the pro / cons argument ; however, I'm curious about the psychology - and please don't read that as whataboutism.
So, how do you feel about the present problems with our current carbon heavy energy productions ? Are you less anxious about deaths from coal and every catastrophe related to climate change (heat waves, floods, mass exiles, civil wars, etc...) because they feel further in the future than the possibility of an accident at a power plant next close to home ?
I get that those can be blown out of proportion too ; and I get that using death/kWh is rather inhumane as a metric ; and I get that living in a country that had ~70% of it's electricity coming from very-much-non-exploding plants colors my thinking.
It's more long term thinking from me: I know that we can reach 100% renewables in 20 or so years, but I'd rather that it's wind/solar/hydro than something like nuclear, that is more volatile in nature and requires continuous maintenance from a capable overseer.
For example, what if a negligent person is promoted to maintenance overseer at a power plant that's several cities across? I have no control over that at all. I'm literally in the passenger seat with nuclear. I have to trust that a handful of people in charge of that plant are exceptional at their job, otherwise we all have a really bad day, and there are no safeguards or precautions that any of us can put in place that will protect us from a meltdown. That's a source of anxiety for me.
Worst case solar power disaster, the lights go out or something like that and I don't personally get seriously hurt.
The problem is that "100% renewable in 20 years" is practically impossible. It might be technically possible, but for various political reasons I think 20 years is far too optimistic. Even 50 years is. The only realistic option I see it nuclear power, although it's kind of too late for that really (should have done this 20 years ago).
> I have to trust that a handful of people in charge of that plant are exceptional at their job, otherwise we all have a really bad day, and there are no safeguards or precautions that any of us can put in place that will protect us from a meltdown.
It's not that bad; you can design systems with safeguards in place to prevent Chernobyl-like idiocy from happening, and modern reactors will just shutdown instead of meltdown on cooling problems. Also remember that both the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents actually had very low casualties and injuries, comparatively speaking.
Loss of control is always scary; that is why airplanes are more "scary" than cars, even though cars are far more dangerous. This is something education can help with. I appreciate it can feel scary but if it's not actually then, well... I don't think we can make such important decisions on the basis of feelings, even though I don't want to dismiss them.
Ok, I get the problem with "surrending control." Although, to be fair, we all do it constantly.
What if a bad actors at your local water plant decides to poison your tap water ? Or at the local Coke factory, to poison your local Coke ? What if your next plane pilot is suicidal ? Etc...
As stated in xkcd, that fact that most people are not homicidal psychopath is an often forgotten element of our safety system.
Easy to predict, once you get the notion that the real purpose of all this flailing is to disempower people, i.e., to change things so that ordinary people cannot buy and use as much electricity as they like, for that to be something for rich powerful people only.
If the assumption is that the major world powers don't cooperate enough to tackle a global existential crisis then we're fucked even without someone bombing a nuclear power plant.
Nuclear is currently the only viable option for buying enough time to address all the other negative consequence of 2C+ of warming. All the other plans currently on the table are accelerating us towards 3C of warming and that essentially means human civilization as we now know it is over.
They're not "nuke plants". "nuke" is a word that means "nuclear weapons".
Secondly, they're heavily surrounded by highly reinforced concrete with extremely high levels of security. The furthest any activist with a bomb belt could get is jumping a fence and getting immediately caught. Even if they could drive a truck through the front gate and set off a car bomb, they're not getting through the extremely thick concrete.
if we are in a position where civilian targets are getting bombed we have other problems. not mention in said "war" if we are reliant on green energy we will certainly lose to whoever bombed our power plants.
Your data actually directly disproves your argument. The highest number on that list which isn't hydropower or geothermal is 15% wind power in Scotland.
Look, wind power needs to grow at an exponential rate the next decade in order to meet current projections for how much wind power we need. But it's not doing that, instead it's slowing down.
The primary reason being wind power developers have for the last decade been just as bad as the fossile fuel industry when it comes to being a bunch of greedy a*holes that steamroll over local opinions, rights of indigenous people, and conservation of natural habitats.
Did you know that 50% of the largest on-land wind park in Europe may need to be disassembled and removed? It was recently ruled by grand assembly in Norwegian supreme court that its construction violates article 27 of the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, i.e. it was found to be a violation of the fundamental human rights of the indigenous people.
He did say South Australia, which is investing heavily into renewables and battery storage. The thing is that Australia has a huge coal lobby (being one of the biggest producers in the world) and the current conservative government is essentially in bed with them. Incidentally Australia is also one of the biggest producers of Uranium.
It's like California shutting down their nuclear plant. Well, OK it imports 30% of it's electricity from the rest of the grid already, so that can go up to 40%. Utah will add another gas plant, turn that on at night, and California can claim that it has replaced nuclear with solar. Both of them are pulling from the same grid and electricity is fungible.
So adding unreliable renewables to a grid is not an impressive achievement as long as you have a reliable source on the same grid. This is why I asked for examples of countries.
To switch entirely to wind or solar, you have to spend a lot on battery tech or other energy storage, and those costs dwarf the costs of the solar panels or wind turbines, and that is ultimately what determines whether something is feasible to scale up to the entire grid.
Can you share what is your storage solution that will be needed to make renewables without coal and gas practical? Where can I see storage handling gigawatthours to terawatthours in the real world?
Or are you relying on some magical technology we don't have?
I have read in theglobeandmail forums comments from some people who think that building battery parks is a great idea, and that it is a huge oversight that solar + batteries aren't pushed as the final solution to all energy needs in Canada.
And they seem as sincere as they are earnest.
It is very hard to argue with that logic. Where do we start? Just saying batteries are really expensive doesn't reach people who want a perfect magic solution.
I mean batteries might work! My problems with that approach is that:
1) Batteries are in everything. If we want to go from fossil fuels to renewables + batteries, at the same time as we go from ICE cars to BEVs, that's going to be a lot of batteries. Does the world have enough raw materials and batteries to do that?
Back of the envelope: My country consumes 77 TWh yearly or about 212 GWh per day (assuming it is evenly distributed). To cover day-to-night cycle, would we need 100 to 150 GWh of batteries? That's a lot of batteries (seem like yearly production of whole world but I can't find good source) and 10 % of our GDP in current battery prices.
2) If we're saying "renewables are cheaper", are we really adding the cost of storage?
But somehow the idea took hold that nuclear would be built instead of solar, and not instead of coal.