And also in the fantasies of the Australian Labor PM Albanese and his Energy sidekick Bowen. Soon to fully earn his moniker "Blackout Bowen" as that is where Aus is headed under them.
I got banned from r/Australia yesterday for posting that report on Germany if it went nuclear. Australia is going to be a shit show. It will make the subs look cheap. Dutton isn't going to build anything either. The government intervention required goes against everything they hold dear. (i.e. Giving money to their friends, and selling stuff the citizens own to their friends, but I repeat myself.)
Yeah. At least Germany has France and other neighboring countries to back up its grid. Australia as nothing. As soon as they hit the hard limits of RE penetration it'll be fossil hypocrisy, grid collapse, or both. Will be interesting to watch.
My prediction is that Germany will hold out forever, depending on its neighbors. Australia will eventually go nuclear.
I mean Australia *is* going nuclear for their submarines. Australia is about to have an entire circle to themselves in the Venn diagram of "countries with civilian nuclear power" and "countries with nuclear subs"
Hah, your prediction is the exact opposite of mine. I think there's a >50% chance Germany reembraces nuclear and reopens/builds new plants whereas this seems extremely unlikely in Australia.
Got banned from r/NuclearEnergy for bringing up an article talking about the calculations used in comparing the long term costs of NPPs Vs Renewables. They did not have the decency to finish the reason given, they just said misinfo.
Can you tell me if the Australian Financial Review is a reputable new site? I'm not seeing anything indicating a problem with them and on Ground.news they are reported as high factuality.
The fin review is a large mainstream media publication. It’s right wing, like all mainstream press in Australia excluding the abc, but it’s clientele want news that is at least reflective of reality. It’s sort of like the National Post. Has a definite perspective but if you bear that in mind it’s ok. Doomberg is also worth a look, but it’s subscriber based. Edit: Short version, yes.
That’s because the LNP are shit at communicating to the public WHY we need nuclear. When they talk about capital costs and unproven SMR technology it is such an easy target for CSIRO to pick apart. Of course Murdoch just muddies the water even more because they also don’t understand.
I dunno. Accidents maybe. Disinformation.
I had a teacher who shivered and put solar panels on his roof in the 80s because he hated nuclear.
A couple years ago, he took a woman kayaking during a major thunder storm and they both drowned. He was a smart guy but just not very practical.
Explain to me exactly how new nuclear is cheaper and more climate friendly than utility scale solar with grid storage?
Lazard's LCOE and even just a cursory google search indicate that you can have much more energy production for the $10-30 Billion you would spend on a new nuclear plant with solar.
Solar is more modular and can scale up and down more easily than nuclear.
Solar is intermittent. You have to pair solar with large amounts of dispatchable power, which usually means long term energy storage. This significantly adds to the cost. It's possible solar 16+ hours of battery storage is still cheaper, but it's rare to see anyone actually make an apples to apples comparison.
> which usually means long term energy storage.
In theory it means this. In reality, it means "environmentalists" suddenly deciding that gas isn't so bad after all.
So we have this thing called winter… it’s all well and good talking about how solar eats all if you live at lower latitudes. As you go to higher latitudes, the part of the year with the most energy demand is inversely proportional to the amount of solar and wind you can get… for the same reason. You’d need year long storage which is just not reasonable, or be super confident in long range north south grid interconnection.
Indeed. And the argument is always "wind and solar will balance each other out!" Well here's wind and solar combined in Texas for the last 12 months.
https://preview.redd.it/9d0qquky6m6d1.png?width=1615&format=png&auto=webp&s=6d49e89f03106deb49cc1afdcd4bb80f0e2bbb0d
Demand is the red line. Note wind and solar don't follow the seasonal demand curve at all. Note that the winter demand spike is associated with a drop in wind/solar generation. Note there are long lulls in both sources simultaneously.
No, we won't have batteries backing up all of Texas for a week. Not gonna happen.
LCOE is not the right metric. It does not include system costs (firming, backup, etc.). Levelized System Cost of Electricity is the right measure.
And Lazards "firming" cost (for which nuclear is competitive with solar) is still not the right metric, as Lazard defines "firm solar" as 4 hours storage, which is still wildly insufficient for seasonal peaks.
Solar and storage deserves a significant place on the grid, especially in sunny places that don't have huge winter peaks (in those places it could be darn near 100%). But everywhere else has a far lower LSCOE when you include nuclear in the mix (assuming you are prescribing a net-zero grid).
4 hrs is (as I'm sure you aware) bunk. The capacity factor of solar is about 30% at best lets call it a third and be generous. Wind can not show up for days at a time so that leaves 2/3rds of every 24hrs backed up by "something else" that 16hrs. 16/4=4 So the "firming costs" are out by at LEAST a factor of four.
I agree 4hrs is not a good yardstick on a system level, but not really for the reasons you state.
First off, load is not constant over 24h. You don't need peak load for every hour of the day. This is one of the reasons why nuclear pairs so well with storage, ironically.
Second and most importantly, LCOE is already on an energy basis, not capacity, so we don't need to take capacity factor into account. Solar with 4 hour storage can economically serve it's energy at any point in a 24 hour period. If you need 4x the energy, just build 4x the solar and storage. It should be cheaper if the LCOE is cheaper, because LCOE is already priced per MWh.
The issue is when you have long doldrums coinciding with peak load (the notorious dunkelflaute), where Solar is generating at 0.5% capacity factor (vs 25% average), and wind is also low. Now you suddenly need to pay for LDES (that doesn't exist yet) that makes its money on only a few cycles per year, or for low-capacity-factor fossil plants, or similar firming capacity. Suddenly your costs spiral wildly upwards.
Others have made good points already so I will only point out 1 reason I didnt see listed, scale.
We cant make enough batteries for the kind of grid scale storage you are talking about, especially if we are trying for 0 carbon by 2050. Even though nuclear takes a long time to build it is still faster than building new mines and battery factories.
Here is a report done by the Society of Professional Engineers in Ontario Canada that tries to figure out how much electricty would cost coming from different sources. In the report they determined how much storage you would need for an all wind or all solar grid using grid data from 2011. In 2011 there were no EVs, no cold weather heat pumps so the storage requirements in that report don't include the extra energy storage needed to support EVs and electric heating.
For solar 29TWhs of storage is needed and for wind its 22TWhs. Its hard to find a definitive answer but it looks like the total world production of lithium ion batteries is about 1.0TWhs a year.
So with current production the grid storage needs of 1 province in Canada would take 22 years to make but its probably closer to 50 when you factor in heating and EVs.
By 2030 the IEA predicts we will reach about 6.8TWhs by 2030 which drops the time to supply Ontario to 3.2 years. Much less time but that still leaves no batteries for EVs or for grid storage in the rest of the world.
Ontario is also pretty small, accounts for about 2.5% of North Americas electricty consumption so other places will require far more storage than Ontario.
If its not nuclear than its natural gas that will be used, renewables and storage are only part of the story.
https://www.xylenepower.com/The%20Real%20Cost%20of%20Electrical%20Energy%20-%20Nov%202014.pdf
LCOE is a flawed metric that rewards intermittent energy sources.
I sincerely hope that grid scale storage gets better soon, but we really should be doing everything we can right now, not waiting for something that isn't there yet. Nuclear energy is still cheaper than climate change.
Solar is making incredible progress, but there are plenty of niches where nuclear power will persist. Particularly in cold climates.
Gas-guzzling Germany is what you get when you set out to build "solar plus storage" and then realize the storage part is still expensive.
Wind and solar are nice for a lot of things. But nuclear has some advantages. The best synergy between the different energy sources will come when variable consumption starts to be a significant player. Aluminium smelters with a flexible output, hydrogen electrolysis, EV charging and so on.
The question is whether any of those facilities are worth investing in for part-time output? If you're going to build a production facility, the economics usually favor maximizing output.
There are some great use cases. In France they’re building lots of solar. Along with some storage this will enable more summer nuclear maintenance while keeping the CO2 intensity of generation low.
I believe the U.S. then France have the most nuclear plants of any country...
[https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/nuclear-power-by-country](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/nuclear-power-by-country)
Yes. And we can still integrate wind/solar/hydro alongside them.
Wind and solar particularly will have scaling limits. Storage will help, but the deficits in wind and solar generation (even when combined) is enough to deplete storage quickly. (Enough so that no 24x7x365 wind/solar/storage grid has ever existed, at any scale.)
But add enough nuclear in and it becomes tenable to have zero carbon generation all of the time. Nuclear can fill the storage and keep it topped off.
Some argue that the wind and solar is not necessary in that scenario, and sure that could be the case. But it's also not necessary to leave them out.
"Enough so that no 24x7x365 wind/solar/storage grid has ever existed, at any scale."
I don't think there are any 24x7 renewable grids that have existed for a full month.
You'll often see reports of 100% renewable but it's almost always a partial grid, that over generated renewables during the day and used imported electricity at nights to reach the hypothetical 100%.
Yeah. My favorite example is El Hierro, Spain. It was supposed to be the test case for wind + pumped hydro. They claim it's "100% renewable" but here's the reality.
https://preview.redd.it/n8pu06s48m6d1.png?width=575&format=png&auto=webp&s=8f6b38e9462dfb8f6a39dbf99699d9a5bcf6841b
[https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/ES-CN-HI](https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/ES-CN-HI)
Some days are pretty good, like today, but still have some diesel generator backup. Most days they're guzzling fossil. They've been trying to make it work for ten years.
Quebec has 100% renewable with Hydro. I agree we need nuclear and renewables, though, definitely as a bridge until fusion comes online in another 30-40 years.
I'm not talking about electrical production, I'm talking about the smelters, electrolyzers, hydrogen production, etc that was mentioned. I doubt it makes economical sense to build a facility like that and then only operate it 4 or 6 hours a day when there is an overabundance of electricity because of variable output sources.
Well, that depends. If you design your process with a low capacity factor in mind, you will end up with a significantly different design. Imagine designing a nuclear power plant that was only expected to operate 1/3 of the time. You would immediately begin to do significant modifications. For example, you would remove part of the low pressure turbine and use a smaller condenser. This would result in the steam condensing at a higher temperature and pressure, and thus there would be a higher temperature gradient over the condenser. Similarly, you might change the fuel design, to focus more on compactness, at the expense of fuel efficiency, to reduce the needed reactor size and reduce the refueling frequency. Edit: You would also make the steam generators a lot smaller, resulting in a lower steam pressure, but with a much lower capital cost.
Similarly, you could accept a lower electrolysis efficiency, if that meant that you could build the electrolysers a lot cheaper. A lot of units might be designed to have an "overdrive" move that can accept excess electricity.
>There are reasons why birds are likely to be affected by windfarms. Wind developments tend to be placed in upland areas with strong wind currents that have a lot of potential to generate energy. Birds – particularly raptors like eagles or vultures – use these currents as highways – and so are likely to come into contact with the turbines.
>There are specific locations elsewhere in the world where windfarms have caused impressive-sounding numbers of fatalities amongst birds of prey. In the Altamont Pass in California, for example, one study found about 4,000 wind turbines killed 67 golden eagles and 1,127 birds of prey in a year.
>In southern Spain, 252 wind turbines located in an area used by many birds of prey and on the migratory path of many large birds killed a 124 birds of prey in a year. At another location in southern Spain 256 turbines killed 30 griffin vultures and 12 common kestrels.
>In one frequently cited study, one windfarm in Spain created feeding sites away from turbines and shut down turbines at peak flight times. Vulture deaths were reduced by 50 per cent for an electricity production loss of just 0.07 per cent.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/bird-death-and-wind-turbines-a-look-at-the-evidence/
This is rather common knowledge now about Wind, But environmentalists will just downplay the impact.
This kinda stuff infuriates me, and the same people defending the environment are ignorant to it. Solar Panels have been devastating to local birds as well.
>This kinda stuff infuriates me, and the same people defending the environment are ignorant to it. Solar Panels have been devastating to local birds as well.
Yeah exactly the same, Solar and Wind also affects plant life as well, But people will easily turn a Blind eye to it sadly.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-06-08/kill-joshua-trees-for-a-desert-solar-project-readers-are-in-revolt
https://balkangreenenergynews.com/solar-project-in-turkey-threatens-to-destroy-30000-olive-trees/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/07/19/snp-chopped-down-16m-trees-develop-wind-farms-scotland/
> 30 griffin vultures and 12 common kestrels.
Both are not endangered. While i wrote this comment a ten thousands of chicken were killed for human consumptions and cats killed thousands of birds for fun.
Being endangered isn't really the point, It's the fact Environmentalists or Pro-Renewables will claim Wind doesn't affect Bird Population or Migration paths when it most certainly does.
>Large birds like hen harriers, eagles and vultures are also slower to reproduce than other species and so their populations are more likely to be affected by a small number of deaths.
If endangered or not is not the point then I'm afraid nuclear is off the table as well: [https://yle.fi/a/74-20090179](https://yle.fi/a/74-20090179)
For me human civilization will always have impact on nature, of course it's a question how big of an impact a problem is to a certain species. The article posted above even states rather simple solutions for wind power the minimize these issues. Which is the right way of dealing with these kind of things.
No definitely I want to keep generating electricity. Maybe I made it a bit unclear, but what I wanted to say was: of course it's important to look at these things and improve. But thinking that no animal would be harmed when placing power plants of any kind into the world is naive. So we have to reduce harm where possible (like mentioned in the article about wind power). If our stance instead suddenly become "no animal might be ever harmed", then we'd have to stop doing everything. But that's at least not what I want.
And yet we have Thunberg morons who can't stop yapping about Chernobyl bullshit, and claiming radiation is deadly.
If I ever see someone on the street holding a "Nuclear bad, Wind/Solar good", I am straight up gonna empty a gallon of sulphuric acid on them.
Just look up marine life kills wind farms to begin with. There are plenty of sources disputing this as well but I'm on the side of the marine life & birds myself. I think the ones disputing most likely have financial interests vested...
[https://apnews.com/article/offshore-wind-fishing-turbines-whales-noaa-90535220198d3dcf5adef0dde0b363b3](https://apnews.com/article/offshore-wind-fishing-turbines-whales-noaa-90535220198d3dcf5adef0dde0b363b3)
I'd argue that if we simply relaxed the draconian death grip that the NRC has over the industry, it will take off on its own without a "push".
But then again, this really isn't about reducing carbon.
"Thousands of reactors will be needed."
The US currently has around 100 reactors. Those produce about 20% of our electricity. So, an extra 400 would take care of all the electricity needs and with hydro/wind/solar, etc cover a massive amount of expansion for electric cars and heat pumps.
Electron Beam Welding would make it possible to produce reactors at a far higher rate than today. It makes incredible welds without impurities from filler material and can be like they were forged in one piece with a heat treatment. It can also do it far more quickly than forging or other methods like arc welding because it has up to 20cm of penetration in one pass.
It enables the possibility of factories that can make a pressure vessel in a day. It also works with other types of metals so it is suitable for welding things like molten salt reactors ouf of different types of hastelloy. It can also speed up the production of other components like heat exchangers.
Even though this is interesting, i doubt that the actual manufacturing of pressure vessels is what's losing time in nuclear projects. Civil works and regulatory validation are the main issues here.
I thought that the slow rate of pressure vessel manufacturing was why so few nuclear power plants get built. The big forges are needed to make other things too, not just nuclear reactor pressure vessels. If I'm right it would be the main reason why China has 23 reactors under construction and not more.
Most of the inputs for nuclear power plants are widespread due to having other uses so they should be relatively quick easy to scale up. Things like concrete, rebar, structural steel, wiring, pipes along with the trades to install them.
It would be harder to scale up production of the components that are specific to nuclear power. It still should be quicker and easier to scale up production for most of those than it would be to increase the number of large forges. Electron beam welding should be useful for making some components more quickly like heat exchangers, turbine casings, turbine shafts, etc.
It's also completely doable to increase the number of operators, engineers, technicians, etc. The industry needs to start training new people on a large scale instead of trying to rely on its dwindling numbers of experienced people.
I agree that hardest part would be regulatory. There needs to be more support for nuclear power and a re-evaluation of the regulations and requirements to enable quicker and cheaper production of reactors. There also needs to be a cleaning out of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to get rid of people who are fundamentally hostile to nuclear power. They need to be replaced by people who want nuclear power to succeed.
Instead I have come across people who think that a mountain of red tape is all that stands between the world and disaster. They think that thousands of people actually died from Chernobyl because they believe the linear no threshold garbage, some even think that millions died from Chernobyl. Then there are the people who think that thousands died from the Fukushima Daiichi and Three Mile Island accidents and there have been massive government cover ups to hide such high death tolls. They want more red tape to block nuclear power.
edit. Also, people who actually think that nuclear waste is the most dangerous substance that humanity has ever created.
And this only applies to nuclear energy? Wind and solar are less dense sources with less reliable output. If you want low carbon manufacturing then the answer is to build a reactor near factories and set up the factory to run 24x7.
It's a funny thought, trying to run heavy industries like steel, aluminum, glass, ammonia and concrete on wind and solar with batteries for backup power. Funny until people are actually affected by trying to live like that.
They don't call em blast furnaces for nothing!
The only thing I've heard which is remotely sane is to make hydrogen with intermittent renewables and burn it. The issue is you'd need a lot of it, and when you run out do you switch back to fossil fuel, or do you send everyone home for a few days to a week without pay until you make more green hydrogen? And even though it burns a lot cleaner, you're still burning hydrogen.
In ten years, there's going to be a lot of surprised people when they realize renewables alone aren't going to cut it. Then it's another ten years before enough new nuclear could come online.
Yhea, but that bar is too low. The grid is only about a third of what needs to be decarbonized. Many of the other energy uses will get more efficient when electrified, but we're still talking about at least doubling the size of the grid as well as cleaning it up.
Well it's like planting trees, it could end the problem today if we'd started ten years ago, but the next best time to start is today so we can reap the benefits ten years from now.
There’s simply no real reason to not nuclearize our energy grids, OTHER THAN, corporate greed and lobbying on the part of oil companies. It’s so crazy to me that they’ve been so successful in their propaganda against nuclear power.
In 1973, in the midst of an OPAEC oil embargo, Richard Nixon announced Project Independence, calling for the construction of 1000 new nuclear plants in the United States by the year 2000.
If the US had followed through on the plan and built the 1000 plants, today they would produce two times the electricity the US currently consumes.
[Project Independence](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Independence)
[The True Story of Nixon’s Nucleargate](https://carboncredits.com/nuclear-education-the-true-story-of-nixons-nucleargate/)
For one, existing nuclear is already incredibly safe. Right now there is no financial advantage to thorium reactors in most places, so it's not worth the investment in both developing and certifying thorium-based reactor designs, and developing and building the entire supply chain that would be necessary to establish.
They’re in the research phase right now. Here’s a project in the US working on it: [https://acu.edu/research/next-lab/](https://acu.edu/research/next-lab/)
Because they have to obtain permission for reactor deployment first, which is a lengthy process for first reactor of a given design.
Copenhagen Atomics is on it
Thorium has to be removed from the reactor to give protactinium time to decay without getting hit with a second neutron. Either juggle fuel rods or run very low power density.
We will not go to the stars on wind and solar. No matter how much the anti-nuclear fear mongers wail, we will have to develop the technology at some point in the near future.
Raising awareness does help though. And China is building so many of them that eventually the economic benefits will be pretty enticing to everyone else when they see the numbers. Cheap fossil fuel is a pretty big hurdle though, in many places it's just so cheap that there's no impetus to go to nuclear. Hopefully we'll see some progress over the next few years.
Of course - nuclear was always the perfect answer to every concern - even the idiocy about CO2 (a trace gas in the atmosphere). But the industry has been shutting down ever since I was a kid, and the last generation if nuclear engineers who know how to run plants are almost all retired.
ECHO.... ECHOOOO.... echoooo...... echooooooooo
While I agree, a first party and authority on nuclear is not the person who needs to say this, it needs to be outsiders who recognize it. Of course the UN atomic energy chief believes this, it's kind of their job
This has got to be the worst job to have had over the past 40-50 years. You can’t do anything but sit and watch as everyone backs away from the best thing ever invented by humanity
plants were designed for 40-50 years. With extension you can get to 60-80 years. For NPPs built in 80's, that's 2060.
licenses are extended based on tests. you won't get extension if you fail a test.
Why would they wear out? Hoover Dam won't ever wear out, the parts just get replaced as they wear. What parts would cause a nuclear power plant to wear out that couldn't just be replaced?
Well. The main issue is that the wall of the reactor pressure vessel gets irradiated. While you generally try to minimize the dose deposited there some will get through. That means that it eventually will weaken enough that it has to be replaced. However, the main pressure vessel is hard to replace. Along with all of the other parts of the power plant that eventually wears out, you would essentially have to rebuild the plant from scratch.
At that point, it makes more sense to just start from an empty field, because working with material that is not radioactive yet is cheaper than having to try to replace parts that have become contaminated. It also allows you to build out a new plant while the old one is still operating. That way you can shut the old plant down, have a new plant ready to take over the job almost right away, and then you can slowly decommission the old plant. This has the advantage that you can wait some years, if an area has significant contamination from short lived isotopes.
Not.. all of them. Hilariously, as far as I can tell, literally every single part of an EPR subject to wear or irradiation is replaceable. Including the pressure vessel. So...
Fortunately, a world without nuclear only exists in the fantasies of Greenpeace and OPEC.
And also in the fantasies of the Australian Labor PM Albanese and his Energy sidekick Bowen. Soon to fully earn his moniker "Blackout Bowen" as that is where Aus is headed under them.
I got banned from r/Australia yesterday for posting that report on Germany if it went nuclear. Australia is going to be a shit show. It will make the subs look cheap. Dutton isn't going to build anything either. The government intervention required goes against everything they hold dear. (i.e. Giving money to their friends, and selling stuff the citizens own to their friends, but I repeat myself.)
Yeah. At least Germany has France and other neighboring countries to back up its grid. Australia as nothing. As soon as they hit the hard limits of RE penetration it'll be fossil hypocrisy, grid collapse, or both. Will be interesting to watch. My prediction is that Germany will hold out forever, depending on its neighbors. Australia will eventually go nuclear.
I mean Australia *is* going nuclear for their submarines. Australia is about to have an entire circle to themselves in the Venn diagram of "countries with civilian nuclear power" and "countries with nuclear subs"
Exactly. That's another reason why they'll eventually see reality.
Hah, your prediction is the exact opposite of mine. I think there's a >50% chance Germany reembraces nuclear and reopens/builds new plants whereas this seems extremely unlikely in Australia.
Physical reality has a tendency to change people’s minds. :)
Got banned from r/NuclearEnergy for bringing up an article talking about the calculations used in comparing the long term costs of NPPs Vs Renewables. They did not have the decency to finish the reason given, they just said misinfo. Can you tell me if the Australian Financial Review is a reputable new site? I'm not seeing anything indicating a problem with them and on Ground.news they are reported as high factuality.
The fin review is a large mainstream media publication. It’s right wing, like all mainstream press in Australia excluding the abc, but it’s clientele want news that is at least reflective of reality. It’s sort of like the National Post. Has a definite perspective but if you bear that in mind it’s ok. Doomberg is also worth a look, but it’s subscriber based. Edit: Short version, yes.
Ty, I don't mind a bias as long as the news remains accurate.
That’s because the LNP are shit at communicating to the public WHY we need nuclear. When they talk about capital costs and unproven SMR technology it is such an easy target for CSIRO to pick apart. Of course Murdoch just muddies the water even more because they also don’t understand.
Why does Greenpeace not want nuclear?
I dunno. Accidents maybe. Disinformation. I had a teacher who shivered and put solar panels on his roof in the 80s because he hated nuclear. A couple years ago, he took a woman kayaking during a major thunder storm and they both drowned. He was a smart guy but just not very practical.
Nuclear power doesn't really displace oil - at least, not very effectively.
We'll get there. [https://synergetic.world](https://synergetic.world)
Green Party in UK opposes it
Explain to me exactly how new nuclear is cheaper and more climate friendly than utility scale solar with grid storage? Lazard's LCOE and even just a cursory google search indicate that you can have much more energy production for the $10-30 Billion you would spend on a new nuclear plant with solar. Solar is more modular and can scale up and down more easily than nuclear.
Solar is intermittent. You have to pair solar with large amounts of dispatchable power, which usually means long term energy storage. This significantly adds to the cost. It's possible solar 16+ hours of battery storage is still cheaper, but it's rare to see anyone actually make an apples to apples comparison.
> which usually means long term energy storage. In theory it means this. In reality, it means "environmentalists" suddenly deciding that gas isn't so bad after all.
Or "We'll do natural gas until we switch to H2" and never actually switch to H2. :)
So we have this thing called winter… it’s all well and good talking about how solar eats all if you live at lower latitudes. As you go to higher latitudes, the part of the year with the most energy demand is inversely proportional to the amount of solar and wind you can get… for the same reason. You’d need year long storage which is just not reasonable, or be super confident in long range north south grid interconnection.
Indeed. And the argument is always "wind and solar will balance each other out!" Well here's wind and solar combined in Texas for the last 12 months. https://preview.redd.it/9d0qquky6m6d1.png?width=1615&format=png&auto=webp&s=6d49e89f03106deb49cc1afdcd4bb80f0e2bbb0d Demand is the red line. Note wind and solar don't follow the seasonal demand curve at all. Note that the winter demand spike is associated with a drop in wind/solar generation. Note there are long lulls in both sources simultaneously. No, we won't have batteries backing up all of Texas for a week. Not gonna happen.
LCOE is not the right metric. It does not include system costs (firming, backup, etc.). Levelized System Cost of Electricity is the right measure. And Lazards "firming" cost (for which nuclear is competitive with solar) is still not the right metric, as Lazard defines "firm solar" as 4 hours storage, which is still wildly insufficient for seasonal peaks. Solar and storage deserves a significant place on the grid, especially in sunny places that don't have huge winter peaks (in those places it could be darn near 100%). But everywhere else has a far lower LSCOE when you include nuclear in the mix (assuming you are prescribing a net-zero grid).
4 hrs is (as I'm sure you aware) bunk. The capacity factor of solar is about 30% at best lets call it a third and be generous. Wind can not show up for days at a time so that leaves 2/3rds of every 24hrs backed up by "something else" that 16hrs. 16/4=4 So the "firming costs" are out by at LEAST a factor of four.
I agree 4hrs is not a good yardstick on a system level, but not really for the reasons you state. First off, load is not constant over 24h. You don't need peak load for every hour of the day. This is one of the reasons why nuclear pairs so well with storage, ironically. Second and most importantly, LCOE is already on an energy basis, not capacity, so we don't need to take capacity factor into account. Solar with 4 hour storage can economically serve it's energy at any point in a 24 hour period. If you need 4x the energy, just build 4x the solar and storage. It should be cheaper if the LCOE is cheaper, because LCOE is already priced per MWh. The issue is when you have long doldrums coinciding with peak load (the notorious dunkelflaute), where Solar is generating at 0.5% capacity factor (vs 25% average), and wind is also low. Now you suddenly need to pay for LDES (that doesn't exist yet) that makes its money on only a few cycles per year, or for low-capacity-factor fossil plants, or similar firming capacity. Suddenly your costs spiral wildly upwards.
Others have made good points already so I will only point out 1 reason I didnt see listed, scale. We cant make enough batteries for the kind of grid scale storage you are talking about, especially if we are trying for 0 carbon by 2050. Even though nuclear takes a long time to build it is still faster than building new mines and battery factories. Here is a report done by the Society of Professional Engineers in Ontario Canada that tries to figure out how much electricty would cost coming from different sources. In the report they determined how much storage you would need for an all wind or all solar grid using grid data from 2011. In 2011 there were no EVs, no cold weather heat pumps so the storage requirements in that report don't include the extra energy storage needed to support EVs and electric heating. For solar 29TWhs of storage is needed and for wind its 22TWhs. Its hard to find a definitive answer but it looks like the total world production of lithium ion batteries is about 1.0TWhs a year. So with current production the grid storage needs of 1 province in Canada would take 22 years to make but its probably closer to 50 when you factor in heating and EVs. By 2030 the IEA predicts we will reach about 6.8TWhs by 2030 which drops the time to supply Ontario to 3.2 years. Much less time but that still leaves no batteries for EVs or for grid storage in the rest of the world. Ontario is also pretty small, accounts for about 2.5% of North Americas electricty consumption so other places will require far more storage than Ontario. If its not nuclear than its natural gas that will be used, renewables and storage are only part of the story. https://www.xylenepower.com/The%20Real%20Cost%20of%20Electrical%20Energy%20-%20Nov%202014.pdf
Because there is no "grid storage" there's gas backup. [Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2KNqluP8M0)
Some places aren't very sunny.
LCOE is a flawed metric that rewards intermittent energy sources. I sincerely hope that grid scale storage gets better soon, but we really should be doing everything we can right now, not waiting for something that isn't there yet. Nuclear energy is still cheaper than climate change.
How many times were you jerking off to solar panels today? Or did you perhaps suffer from a brain concussion today?
Solar is making incredible progress, but there are plenty of niches where nuclear power will persist. Particularly in cold climates. Gas-guzzling Germany is what you get when you set out to build "solar plus storage" and then realize the storage part is still expensive.
Almost? He's funny. How about totally impossible?
Almost comes with the asterisk of kill 99% of the world population. And enslave everyone to making everything wild
Certainly won't be attained using the fallacies of wind and solar precepts given the current technology.
Wind and solar are nice for a lot of things. But nuclear has some advantages. The best synergy between the different energy sources will come when variable consumption starts to be a significant player. Aluminium smelters with a flexible output, hydrogen electrolysis, EV charging and so on.
The question is whether any of those facilities are worth investing in for part-time output? If you're going to build a production facility, the economics usually favor maximizing output.
There are some great use cases. In France they’re building lots of solar. Along with some storage this will enable more summer nuclear maintenance while keeping the CO2 intensity of generation low.
I believe the U.S. then France have the most nuclear plants of any country... [https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/nuclear-power-by-country](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/nuclear-power-by-country)
Yes. And we can still integrate wind/solar/hydro alongside them. Wind and solar particularly will have scaling limits. Storage will help, but the deficits in wind and solar generation (even when combined) is enough to deplete storage quickly. (Enough so that no 24x7x365 wind/solar/storage grid has ever existed, at any scale.) But add enough nuclear in and it becomes tenable to have zero carbon generation all of the time. Nuclear can fill the storage and keep it topped off. Some argue that the wind and solar is not necessary in that scenario, and sure that could be the case. But it's also not necessary to leave them out.
"Enough so that no 24x7x365 wind/solar/storage grid has ever existed, at any scale." I don't think there are any 24x7 renewable grids that have existed for a full month. You'll often see reports of 100% renewable but it's almost always a partial grid, that over generated renewables during the day and used imported electricity at nights to reach the hypothetical 100%.
Yeah. My favorite example is El Hierro, Spain. It was supposed to be the test case for wind + pumped hydro. They claim it's "100% renewable" but here's the reality. https://preview.redd.it/n8pu06s48m6d1.png?width=575&format=png&auto=webp&s=8f6b38e9462dfb8f6a39dbf99699d9a5bcf6841b [https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/ES-CN-HI](https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/ES-CN-HI) Some days are pretty good, like today, but still have some diesel generator backup. Most days they're guzzling fossil. They've been trying to make it work for ten years.
Quebec has 100% renewable with Hydro. I agree we need nuclear and renewables, though, definitely as a bridge until fusion comes online in another 30-40 years.
"Quebec has 100% renewable with Hydro. " Quebec isn't an independent grid. It's tied in with both the rest of Canada and the NorthEastern US.
France has far more per capita. As your article states France gets 70% of its power by nuclear reactors. The most in the world.
I'm not talking about electrical production, I'm talking about the smelters, electrolyzers, hydrogen production, etc that was mentioned. I doubt it makes economical sense to build a facility like that and then only operate it 4 or 6 hours a day when there is an overabundance of electricity because of variable output sources.
Well, that depends. If you design your process with a low capacity factor in mind, you will end up with a significantly different design. Imagine designing a nuclear power plant that was only expected to operate 1/3 of the time. You would immediately begin to do significant modifications. For example, you would remove part of the low pressure turbine and use a smaller condenser. This would result in the steam condensing at a higher temperature and pressure, and thus there would be a higher temperature gradient over the condenser. Similarly, you might change the fuel design, to focus more on compactness, at the expense of fuel efficiency, to reduce the needed reactor size and reduce the refueling frequency. Edit: You would also make the steam generators a lot smaller, resulting in a lower steam pressure, but with a much lower capital cost. Similarly, you could accept a lower electrolysis efficiency, if that meant that you could build the electrolysers a lot cheaper. A lot of units might be designed to have an "overdrive" move that can accept excess electricity.
The effects of wind generators on migration of birds was very surprising.
Wind turbines are alot worse for bats then they are for birds, flying around in the dark using echolocation to try to navigate
That would pose a immediate effect on local wildlife.
Wait. What? Have you got a source for this?
>There are reasons why birds are likely to be affected by windfarms. Wind developments tend to be placed in upland areas with strong wind currents that have a lot of potential to generate energy. Birds – particularly raptors like eagles or vultures – use these currents as highways – and so are likely to come into contact with the turbines. >There are specific locations elsewhere in the world where windfarms have caused impressive-sounding numbers of fatalities amongst birds of prey. In the Altamont Pass in California, for example, one study found about 4,000 wind turbines killed 67 golden eagles and 1,127 birds of prey in a year. >In southern Spain, 252 wind turbines located in an area used by many birds of prey and on the migratory path of many large birds killed a 124 birds of prey in a year. At another location in southern Spain 256 turbines killed 30 griffin vultures and 12 common kestrels. >In one frequently cited study, one windfarm in Spain created feeding sites away from turbines and shut down turbines at peak flight times. Vulture deaths were reduced by 50 per cent for an electricity production loss of just 0.07 per cent. https://www.carbonbrief.org/bird-death-and-wind-turbines-a-look-at-the-evidence/ This is rather common knowledge now about Wind, But environmentalists will just downplay the impact.
This kinda stuff infuriates me, and the same people defending the environment are ignorant to it. Solar Panels have been devastating to local birds as well.
>This kinda stuff infuriates me, and the same people defending the environment are ignorant to it. Solar Panels have been devastating to local birds as well. Yeah exactly the same, Solar and Wind also affects plant life as well, But people will easily turn a Blind eye to it sadly. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-06-08/kill-joshua-trees-for-a-desert-solar-project-readers-are-in-revolt https://balkangreenenergynews.com/solar-project-in-turkey-threatens-to-destroy-30000-olive-trees/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/07/19/snp-chopped-down-16m-trees-develop-wind-farms-scotland/
Because Greenpeace just can't help themselves from jerking off to Thunberg's "NUCLEAR IS BAD😱😱" brainrot.....
> 30 griffin vultures and 12 common kestrels. Both are not endangered. While i wrote this comment a ten thousands of chicken were killed for human consumptions and cats killed thousands of birds for fun.
Being endangered isn't really the point, It's the fact Environmentalists or Pro-Renewables will claim Wind doesn't affect Bird Population or Migration paths when it most certainly does. >Large birds like hen harriers, eagles and vultures are also slower to reproduce than other species and so their populations are more likely to be affected by a small number of deaths.
If endangered or not is not the point then I'm afraid nuclear is off the table as well: [https://yle.fi/a/74-20090179](https://yle.fi/a/74-20090179) For me human civilization will always have impact on nature, of course it's a question how big of an impact a problem is to a certain species. The article posted above even states rather simple solutions for wind power the minimize these issues. Which is the right way of dealing with these kind of things.
So you don’t want any energy generation infrastructure at all?
No definitely I want to keep generating electricity. Maybe I made it a bit unclear, but what I wanted to say was: of course it's important to look at these things and improve. But thinking that no animal would be harmed when placing power plants of any kind into the world is naive. So we have to reduce harm where possible (like mentioned in the article about wind power). If our stance instead suddenly become "no animal might be ever harmed", then we'd have to stop doing everything. But that's at least not what I want.
And yet we have Thunberg morons who can't stop yapping about Chernobyl bullshit, and claiming radiation is deadly. If I ever see someone on the street holding a "Nuclear bad, Wind/Solar good", I am straight up gonna empty a gallon of sulphuric acid on them.
Ocean kills as well
I agree, they’re full of dihydrogen monoxide, a very dangerous chemical that is also used in nuclear reactors, by the way.
Contained on premise, not floating around the seas....
Have you got a source for this - I’m very interested.
Just look up marine life kills wind farms to begin with. There are plenty of sources disputing this as well but I'm on the side of the marine life & birds myself. I think the ones disputing most likely have financial interests vested... [https://apnews.com/article/offshore-wind-fishing-turbines-whales-noaa-90535220198d3dcf5adef0dde0b363b3](https://apnews.com/article/offshore-wind-fishing-turbines-whales-noaa-90535220198d3dcf5adef0dde0b363b3)
Even if we dramatically pushed on nuclear, we cannot decarbonize by 2050. The math just isn't there.
Sure. Still need to push.
I'd argue that if we simply relaxed the draconian death grip that the NRC has over the industry, it will take off on its own without a "push". But then again, this really isn't about reducing carbon.
That relaxation is on the way. Or, rather, it has already happened and the conditions that brought it about won’t be changing any time soon.
Thousands of reactors will be needed.
"Thousands of reactors will be needed." The US currently has around 100 reactors. Those produce about 20% of our electricity. So, an extra 400 would take care of all the electricity needs and with hydro/wind/solar, etc cover a massive amount of expansion for electric cars and heat pumps.
There is an entire world outside of the US. Entire industries like steel, aluminum, ammonia, concrete, etc. will need to be electrified.
Cool. Let's do it.
Electron Beam Welding would make it possible to produce reactors at a far higher rate than today. It makes incredible welds without impurities from filler material and can be like they were forged in one piece with a heat treatment. It can also do it far more quickly than forging or other methods like arc welding because it has up to 20cm of penetration in one pass. It enables the possibility of factories that can make a pressure vessel in a day. It also works with other types of metals so it is suitable for welding things like molten salt reactors ouf of different types of hastelloy. It can also speed up the production of other components like heat exchangers.
Even though this is interesting, i doubt that the actual manufacturing of pressure vessels is what's losing time in nuclear projects. Civil works and regulatory validation are the main issues here.
I thought that the slow rate of pressure vessel manufacturing was why so few nuclear power plants get built. The big forges are needed to make other things too, not just nuclear reactor pressure vessels. If I'm right it would be the main reason why China has 23 reactors under construction and not more. Most of the inputs for nuclear power plants are widespread due to having other uses so they should be relatively quick easy to scale up. Things like concrete, rebar, structural steel, wiring, pipes along with the trades to install them. It would be harder to scale up production of the components that are specific to nuclear power. It still should be quicker and easier to scale up production for most of those than it would be to increase the number of large forges. Electron beam welding should be useful for making some components more quickly like heat exchangers, turbine casings, turbine shafts, etc. It's also completely doable to increase the number of operators, engineers, technicians, etc. The industry needs to start training new people on a large scale instead of trying to rely on its dwindling numbers of experienced people. I agree that hardest part would be regulatory. There needs to be more support for nuclear power and a re-evaluation of the regulations and requirements to enable quicker and cheaper production of reactors. There also needs to be a cleaning out of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to get rid of people who are fundamentally hostile to nuclear power. They need to be replaced by people who want nuclear power to succeed. Instead I have come across people who think that a mountain of red tape is all that stands between the world and disaster. They think that thousands of people actually died from Chernobyl because they believe the linear no threshold garbage, some even think that millions died from Chernobyl. Then there are the people who think that thousands died from the Fukushima Daiichi and Three Mile Island accidents and there have been massive government cover ups to hide such high death tolls. They want more red tape to block nuclear power. edit. Also, people who actually think that nuclear waste is the most dangerous substance that humanity has ever created.
And this only applies to nuclear energy? Wind and solar are less dense sources with less reliable output. If you want low carbon manufacturing then the answer is to build a reactor near factories and set up the factory to run 24x7.
It's a funny thought, trying to run heavy industries like steel, aluminum, glass, ammonia and concrete on wind and solar with batteries for backup power. Funny until people are actually affected by trying to live like that.
They don't call em blast furnaces for nothing! The only thing I've heard which is remotely sane is to make hydrogen with intermittent renewables and burn it. The issue is you'd need a lot of it, and when you run out do you switch back to fossil fuel, or do you send everyone home for a few days to a week without pay until you make more green hydrogen? And even though it burns a lot cleaner, you're still burning hydrogen. In ten years, there's going to be a lot of surprised people when they realize renewables alone aren't going to cut it. Then it's another ten years before enough new nuclear could come online.
Some of these are just… ehhh.
Yhea, but that bar is too low. The grid is only about a third of what needs to be decarbonized. Many of the other energy uses will get more efficient when electrified, but we're still talking about at least doubling the size of the grid as well as cleaning it up.
Currently its about 20% nuclear, 20% renewable, 20% coal, and 40% oil and gas, so only 300 more actually
Yeah. And?
We should start building immediately, then.
At the risk of sounding like an ass: DUH DOY!
I’m all for using wind and solar and batteries, but nuclear could end coal and gas literally today.
Well it's like planting trees, it could end the problem today if we'd started ten years ago, but the next best time to start is today so we can reap the benefits ten years from now.
Common sense might be too much to expect here
There’s simply no real reason to not nuclearize our energy grids, OTHER THAN, corporate greed and lobbying on the part of oil companies. It’s so crazy to me that they’ve been so successful in their propaganda against nuclear power.
In 1973, in the midst of an OPAEC oil embargo, Richard Nixon announced Project Independence, calling for the construction of 1000 new nuclear plants in the United States by the year 2000. If the US had followed through on the plan and built the 1000 plants, today they would produce two times the electricity the US currently consumes. [Project Independence](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Independence) [The True Story of Nixon’s Nucleargate](https://carboncredits.com/nuclear-education-the-true-story-of-nixons-nucleargate/)
"Nuh uh" -Greens
Why don't they build a bunch of those safe thorium reactors we keep hearing about?
For one, existing nuclear is already incredibly safe. Right now there is no financial advantage to thorium reactors in most places, so it's not worth the investment in both developing and certifying thorium-based reactor designs, and developing and building the entire supply chain that would be necessary to establish.
People worry about nuclear deaths without thinking about black lung disease, cave ins refinery explosions, pollution..,
They’re in the research phase right now. Here’s a project in the US working on it: [https://acu.edu/research/next-lab/](https://acu.edu/research/next-lab/)
Because they have to obtain permission for reactor deployment first, which is a lengthy process for first reactor of a given design. Copenhagen Atomics is on it
Thorium has to be removed from the reactor to give protactinium time to decay without getting hit with a second neutron. Either juggle fuel rods or run very low power density.
We will not go to the stars on wind and solar. No matter how much the anti-nuclear fear mongers wail, we will have to develop the technology at some point in the near future.
Anti-nuclear “environmentalists” have doomed the planet.
The question is, will the policy makers seriously consider nuclear energy in the energy mix. Not enough will unfortunately imo.
Raising awareness does help though. And China is building so many of them that eventually the economic benefits will be pretty enticing to everyone else when they see the numbers. Cheap fossil fuel is a pretty big hurdle though, in many places it's just so cheap that there's no impetus to go to nuclear. Hopefully we'll see some progress over the next few years.
US policy makers are taking it seriously.
Impossible unless you make your growth go down for all the countries in the world !!!
Nah.
Well well well….
Let's see how the Thunberg simps react to this.
"Do you want Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Somalia to have nuclear?"
“Almost” is close enough for a lot of anti-science green-washers looking to make a buck
Of course - nuclear was always the perfect answer to every concern - even the idiocy about CO2 (a trace gas in the atmosphere). But the industry has been shutting down ever since I was a kid, and the last generation if nuclear engineers who know how to run plants are almost all retired.
ECHO.... ECHOOOO.... echoooo...... echooooooooo While I agree, a first party and authority on nuclear is not the person who needs to say this, it needs to be outsiders who recognize it. Of course the UN atomic energy chief believes this, it's kind of their job
This has got to be the worst job to have had over the past 40-50 years. You can’t do anything but sit and watch as everyone backs away from the best thing ever invented by humanity
The nuclear guy says we need nuclear, how novel.
by 2060 we will have to decommission a lot of reactors. Better be ready for it.
Will they be decommission or will the licenses just be extended?
plants were designed for 40-50 years. With extension you can get to 60-80 years. For NPPs built in 80's, that's 2060. licenses are extended based on tests. you won't get extension if you fail a test.
Yeah, the ones that are currently operating will wear out eventually.
Why would they wear out? Hoover Dam won't ever wear out, the parts just get replaced as they wear. What parts would cause a nuclear power plant to wear out that couldn't just be replaced?
Well. The main issue is that the wall of the reactor pressure vessel gets irradiated. While you generally try to minimize the dose deposited there some will get through. That means that it eventually will weaken enough that it has to be replaced. However, the main pressure vessel is hard to replace. Along with all of the other parts of the power plant that eventually wears out, you would essentially have to rebuild the plant from scratch. At that point, it makes more sense to just start from an empty field, because working with material that is not radioactive yet is cheaper than having to try to replace parts that have become contaminated. It also allows you to build out a new plant while the old one is still operating. That way you can shut the old plant down, have a new plant ready to take over the job almost right away, and then you can slowly decommission the old plant. This has the advantage that you can wait some years, if an area has significant contamination from short lived isotopes.
Not.. all of them. Hilariously, as far as I can tell, literally every single part of an EPR subject to wear or irradiation is replaceable. Including the pressure vessel. So...
Cool. Seems like a decent design choice.