I disliked the headline, because it seemed to me that at the very least Renewables have a substantial role to play, even if nuclear is required for guaranteeing baseload.
"Robert Bryce works for the Manhattan Institute, a think tank that has received more than $6 million in donations tied to the fossil fuel industry. He has written numerous critical books and articles about renewable energy."
Baseload isn't really relevant when talking about meeting demand. What's important is that for any point in time all the energy sources added up are equal to the demand. System operators will use the cheapest source first, which is always renewables, then (at least in the UK) it'll typically use gas generation to meet the shortfall. Gas is particularly good for this because it can easily be turned up and down. In all this, baseload isn't really a relevant concept.
In the UK, where there's a semblance of a free market in electricity generation, it's been possible for decades for nuclear power stations to be build by private industry. None have because they just can't compete economically. The cases where they have been built have all been when the government intervened in the market and heavily subsidized them. Nobody really knows why!
>What's important is that for any point in time all the energy sources added up are equal to the demand. [...] then (at least in the UK) it'll typically use gas generation to meet the shortfall
But does that work out to be better overall (ie. in terms of cost, or in terms of the environment) than having nuclear providing the baseload?
If cost were the only thing you cared about, then no nuclear power stations would ever be built, they're simply much more expensive than gas, wind or solar. From an environmental point of view you wouldn't have nuclear either, the reason is that you can't turn it up and down as you can with gas, and so you always need to the gas to make up the difference between supply and demand. So really, nuclear is in competition with wind and solar, and nuclear will always lose out because it's so expensive.
Is it true you can't adjust the output of a nuclear plant? I thought I heard something about being to slide the cooling rods from "minimal output" to "Chernobyl", but I'm not a nuclear person.
Sure they can adjust output. Some are not licensed to do so, but that's more a paperwork hindrance than any actual physical reason. They can ramp about as fast as other generators using a steam cycle, like ccgt or coal. There are some situations like when you're at the end of the fuel cycle if you ramp down quickly you might have trouble starting quickly again due to Xe poisoning. But, if there was a reason to, the control system can be designed to provide sufficient excess reactivity to power through events like that (e.g. naval reactors).
That being said, since most of the cost of a nuclear power plant is the capital cost, every time you're not generating at full power is time you're generating less revenue to cover the capital costs. So even in a hypothetical lowest cost zero carbon system with very high penetration of variable renewables (solar, wind), the nuclear plants would be mostly running flat out.
Nuclear plants can adjust output, but not quickly. As reaction rates change the composition of the core itself changes, which further modifies reaction rates. Ramping up to full power might take a plant 12 hours. While this is fine for dealing with seasonal variation in demand, or compensating for another plant going down for maintenance, it can't deal with the short term spikes in demand that happen throughout any given day. There are some designs that can ramp up faster, but they are uncommon at least in the US. All plants can decrease output quickly (critical for safety) but without that quick ramp up its still not suitable for dealing with short term dips.
That being said, fuel represents only a tiny fraction of the cost of nuclear power, so it's fine to run a nuclear reactor at close to max power 24/7 and just use excess power for tasks like water desalination or simply vent off steam instead of passing it through the turbines when demand is lower.
Having something useful you can do with excess energy is not the same as scalable storage sufficient to deal with all fluctuations in renewables.
Sure if you have a solar plant producing too much power, you can use that power to generate hydrogen, and that hydrogen can be burned later as a clean energy source. But generating and storing and using enough hydrogen to consistently get you through the night is substantially harder.
Further, renewables are not simply cheaper, safer, and greener. From a safety perspective nuclear is by orders of magnitude safer. Green-ness is a nebulous concept but in terms of damage to the environment nuclear is way better than solar or hydro and comparable to wind and geothermal. Solar and Wind are cheaper than nuclear in terms of nameplate capacity, but their load factor is dramatically lower and their lifetimes are much shorter, to replace a 1 GWe nuclear plant you basically need 3 GW of solar capacity, which are going to have to be replaced twice over the same lifetime, and 12,000 MWh of storage capacity.
It's hard to say any one technology is "greener" than another when they have vastly different types of impacts...
* Nuclear waste remains a big issue for all except the newer reactors, which are uncommon, with little to no planned upgrades to existing generation or storage facilities
* Solar runs into land use concerns & endangered species, along with battery-related supply issues (child labor for mining minerals, political issues for where those materials are usually mined from, etc.), waste issues for end-of-life panels and batteries
* Large hydro devastates river and riparian ecology, not to mention local human communities all up and down the watershed. It has non-negligible greenhouse gas emissions too, between altering river carbon stores and using a metric asston of concrete.
Most of those concerns can be improved upon in human lifetimes. In terms of climate change though, arguably the priority should be to get "good enough" technologies deployed widely and quickly enough to change the emissions trajectory ASAP, if it's not already too late (it probably is). In that sense both nuclear and renewables are a net positive (in an off-the-cuff cost-benefit analysis weighing the urgency of climate change vs future issues).
But of all the types, nuclear alone leaves behind a non-trivial issue for thousands of years into the future. We can fix most other energy mistakes within a decade or few; not so much nuclear waste creation and storage, especially in an era of increasing geopolitical instability and waning democratic checks & balances. Stable and safe nuclear power relies not just on technological and economic factors, but also on stable and safe world regimes and balances of power that can limit both combat and proliferation, especially to non-state actors. None of those can be guaranteed in this century. Domestic regulations aside, existing nuclear powers have a strong vested interest in limiting nuclear access to nations outside of existing blocs/alliances.
I would be strongly pro-nuclear in an idealized world run by sane scientists and engineers, but that's very much NOT the world we live in.
Nothing is as economic as fossil fuels, especially considering the infrastructure and know how we’ve built around them. If they didn’t have the side effect of climate change there would be no reason to push so hard on alternatives anytime soon. Renewables + nuclear gives us a chance at achieving a comparable quality of life without the impending climate risk but it will take a lot of investment at the expense of fossil fuels and other economic areas. Only policy will do that.
Nuclear is vastly more efficient than wind and solar, requiring much less copper, concrete, and ground space for the same amount of available energy. Plus this is entirely controllable production, requiring only minimal hydro power for production smoothing (French nukes can ramp up from 0 to 100% or the reverse in 10 minutes), while wind and solar produce whenever they want, and therefore require either storage (no technology exists at scale, particularly nothing that could be massively available and producing in the next couple of decades) or backup production (usually gas, which is really bad from a CO2 point of view).
That's why Germany's Energiewende is going into the wall: it's already much more expensive than planned, and will require humongous additional investment, so far for very limited impact on absolute emissions. Remember that what counts for the climate are absolute emissions, not relative proportions of low-carbon and high-carbon production!
> "Nuclear is vastly more efficient than wind and solar"
With current technology, nuclear is significantly less efficient than solar and wind in one very important metric: cost. Or to put it another way, a dollar invested in solar or wind will produce more energy and offset more carbon emissions more quickly than if that dollar was invested in nuclear.
This may change when we're chasing after the last 10-20% of grid emissions, but for now there's still a lot of low-hanging fruit.
Just like you can't compare a gigabyte of cloud storage with 90% uptime to one with 99.9% uptime you can't really compare a kw/h of raw solar/wind to nuclear.
And once you install enough storage to make the 9's comparable, the solar/wind is quite a bit more expensive than the nuclear.
That just says they built a solar array with batteries for that price. It doesn't say anywhere that the uptime is comparable to traditional energy sources.
The relevant metric is not reliability, it's reliability per dollar spent. And in that metric a grid built for 95% mix of renewable 5% natgas peaker with geographic diversity will trounce a nuclear.
Building nuclear in 2021 is like buying UltraSPARC in 2021. Sure, it's more reliable than a single PC, but a cluster of PC's is way cheaper and more reliable in aggregate.
Your expectation that renewables will be able to handle 95% of the load without MASSIVE batteries and hence massive costs, is exactly the problem.
As an example, the large solar facility in Arizona produces 15% of the power in January, as it does in June. The batteries or overbuild needed to compensate for this tremendous imbalance in power production can only be offset with absolutely staggering scaled batteries.
...something that never seems to be modeled in the articles pushing renewables.
Arguing uptime is a bit out of scope here, considering that especially in the US rolling blackouts are very common and the reason is basically the net, not the suppliers. On the contrary a decentralized PV grid would probably open opportunities for a lot of micro grids.
You're right that a kW of nuclear can't be compared to a kW of solar, because the load factors will be very different.
But power stations are contracted/paid on the basis of the energy (ie MWh) they generate. And solar and wind can produce each MWh significantly cheaper than new-build nuclear can.
> But power stations are contracted/paid on the basis of the energy (ie MWh) they generate.
But will they be continue to be paid by the solidified alumunium smelter and the gunged-up paper mill the week after the cloudy weather?
That said, in interesting innovation that may deal with dispatch-ratio limitations of renewable energy has become popular here in Africa for domestic lighting.
As you know, we have 'moved on' from electricity to candles and bush-fires for reasons relating to what is euphemistically called a skills-shortage.
Many of us are now using LED light bulbs with batteries in them. They charge when the power is available (Deo Volente) and offer ~4 hours light.
It's true that most energy providers aren't really compensated well enough for uptime ( As seen in Texas this past winter). But that mispricing of current power doesn't solve any of the issues we'll need to solve to migrate to a lower carbon energy infrastructure.
The regulations are a consequence of the technology being risky if not properly regulated. This does not apply to most renewables (with the exception of dams for electricity generation)
I don't think we've even started to account the immense costs of reciclying solar panels. Not even mentioning wind turbines, which today are partly not even recyclable. A nuclear power plant can last 50-75 years. What are we going to do with millions of heavy-metal filled solar panels?
> "immense costs of reciclying solar panels ... A nuclear power plant can last 50-75 years."
How long do you think it takes to "recycle" a nuclear power plant after it finishes operation? Decommissioning an old nuclear power plant can take more than 100 years and costs billions.
Decommissioning and clean-up of the UK's fleet of 17 retired Magnox reactors, built between the 1950s and 1970s, is estimated to cost in excess of £100 billion, and will still be ongoing well into the 22nd century:
The cost of recycling solar panels is maybe $.01/watt, if that? It's a small fraction of the cost of installing the solar panels. This also assumes the solar panels even need to be recycled. Maybe to recover silver from front contact wires?
Have a look at France - they get over 70% of their electricity from nuclear just fine. And it is much cleaner and cheaper than in Germany which opts for Russian gas instead.
France is fine for the next 10 years but all of its plants will start aging out - more or less at the same time.
That either means a gargantuan cost to build new plants (making germany's recent renewables building spree look cheap) or trying to make a plant that was designed for 80 years last 100 with all of the exciting safety concerns which go with it.
> "Have a look at France - they get over 70% of their electricity from nuclear just fine"
Even France has cooled on nuclear due to the high costs involved. As old reactors are decommissioned, they plan to replace them mainly with renewables:
> Nuclear is vastly more efficient than wind and solar, requiring much less copper, concrete, and ground space
That's like saying "solar is vastly more efficient than hydropower because it requires less water, concrete, and river space."
Neither nuclear nor renewables are limited by those things, compared to things like cost, regulatory hurdles, political factors, fossil fuel lobbies, etc. Then there's the actual specific hurdles per energy type, like limited storage/battery tech/lithium/cobalt for solar, volatility for wind, nuclear waste and long-term capital risk for nuclear, etc.
You copied from the "Capital Costs" section of your link [0] and apparently didn't bother to read the rest of the document.
You shouldn't compare energy sources based on capital costs alone. For that, your link references LCOE [1], which is essentially (total cost) / (total energy produced).
Your link further has a "Global Studies" section [2], which references numerous studies that compare LCOE by power source, worldwide, and a "Regional Studies" section [3] which does the same for specific regions.
If you look at the relevant sections from your own link instead of cherrypicking irrelevant data that suit your position, you'll see that nuclear isn't so clearly uncompetitive. Whether it's cost-effective or not seems fairly contentious.
You really need to compare costs on the basis of energy (kWh) produced, not power (kW) rating. It's mostly irrelevant to compare on the basis of kW/MW ratings without also considering load factors.
That said, solar and wind are still considerably cheaper than nuclear when the per-MWh prices are compared. Large (multi GW) off-shore wind farms are now being contracted in Europe for less than half the cost of new-build nuclear.
Solar PV modules are recyclable after their 25-35 year lifetime. Same for batteries. No long term storage repositories, no reprocessing or proliferation concerns (unlike nuclear). Metals and glass in, metals and glass out.
Specifically, this report presents an analysis of potential human health risks associated with non-sanitary landfill disposal for three PV technologies, focusing on release of the highest-prioritized chemical element for each: lead (Pb) in crystalline-silicon (c-Si) PV modules, cadmium (Cd) in thin film cadmium telluride (CdTe) PV modules, and selenium (Se) in thin film copper indium selenide (CIS) PV modules. The prioritization of these chemical elements for analysis is based on stakeholder interest. Because the methodology is chemical-specific, the risk assessment results for these chemicals cannot be directly generalized to other chemicals, although the risk assessment methodology can be applied to other chemicals. If the chemicals chosen are indeed the ones presenting greatest risk, then the results herein should represent the upper bound of health risk from exposure to a single constituent.
Solar photovoltaic (PV) installations must be properly dismantled and any waste treated and disposed at the end of project life. However, because most of the world’s nearly 400 GW of PV systems have been built in the past decade – each expected to operate for between 20 and 30 years – current PV module waste volumes do not yet justify widespread operation of PV recycling facilities.
It is indeed an unfair comparison, because there's not enough data to compare.
I don't see anywhere where the cost of all of this is factored into solar/wind. Neither can you, because probably no one knows at this point.
One of the largest negatives of nuclear is it's cost efficiency, namely it being pretty bad and not dropping, compared to renewables
> no technology exists at scale, particularly nothing that could be massively available and producing in the next couple of decade
P2G? Hydrogen can be produced, stored and given back to the grid at scale. Do also keep in mind that it currently take decades before new nuclear power plants go from beginning the planning phase to producing energy (at least in the west), so it may be even worse for nuclear power
Regarding germany's Energiewende: A large part is that the EEG-Umlage is very expensive while not helping much in the last decade. If you look at the increase in wind & solar, it has pretty much stagnated the last few years while costs didn't. It's just not a very good instrument. Additionally, new rules (at least for wind) decimated available land and the "Ausbaukorridor" (added in 2013) also ensured that there couldn't be much growth for renewables.
Have you got any citations to support these claim?
Nuclear usually requires vast subsidies to operate and imposes costs that go on for decades or more in waste management. And according to this data, all the nuclear energy output reduced in Germany has already been more than made up for with non-hydro renewables, which are getting cheaper and cheaper all the time:
> "all the nuclear energy output reduced in Germany has already been more than made up for with non-hydro renewables".
Which means despite all the efforts and billions spent the renewables have helped zero in reducing carbon emissions, because they were used to replace nuclear rather than coal.
> Nuclear usually requires vast subsidies to operate
This is not true, notably unlike non-hydro renewables.
Yeah, and they didn't do much to reduce their CO2 emissions. They even brought a new pipeline online (NordStream2) to get more gas (because sometimes there's no sun or no wind). What counts for climate is absolute emissions, you know. Investing 300 billions € to get out of nuclear and hardly lower emissions is the very definition of madness to me.
Then again, France is unable to get their EPR design implemented in time and on budget in their own country, let alone in the UK. Even in France, there's a growing trend towards renewables.
The reasons are political, and German meddling isn't exactly innocent in this matter. Wind turbines are MASSIVELY subsidized and are actually an elaborate form of scam against taxpayer money; plus EDF has been coerced into selling its cheap nuclear power to its "challengers" with a loss, to create a "market" with "competition" that was supposed to drive costs down, and instead increased dramatically electricity prices (+60% in 14 years).
Yeah, no. You can't sell energy that you are not producing and the EPR in France and the UK is still not running. Just check the price in EUR/kWh and start to weep.
I'm not in principle against nuclear, but it's just not economically feasible to run on full nuclear, not when renewables are much cheaper.
Renewable can't provide energy on demand. They work only as long as you have an equivalent alternate source for times with no wind or no sun. A grid running 100% on renewables isn't physically feasible, or at a prohibitively expensive price.
Hinkley Point C is estimated to cost $32.5 bn and is expected to take 18y from go-ahead till operation. You'd need 15 NPPs of the same class to satisfy the UK's electricity demand at close to 100% utilization ratio. That's $4.9tn or 150% of the UK's GDP, just in capex. And there's no way EDF could simply build 15 of the things till 2030 or 2050 or whatever our climate goals for decarbonisation demand.
And please don't reply with "it's getting a lot cheaper if we build more" - that has never really worked for nuclear.
I know that, good for them. One just got classified a radionuclear threat, EDF is complaining about the hush-up the Chinese authorities are conducting and running to Washington so they are allowed to fix it. In Europe, three are unfinished, have brutal cost overrun and are late. And in contrast to China, European NPP operators are at least transparent.
Our whole discussion, you are not ONCE acknowledging I just MIGHT have a point or countering them, you are constantly moving the goalposts or deflecting. And with that kind of bad faith discussion style, count me out. Good day to you, Sir.
That seems like a very high bound. Another source says there are 7.2B birds in US and canada[1], so 1B birds would be 14% of all birds, which is really high. I also feel like 7.2B dead birds would be very noticeable in the form of dead birds on sidewalks, which I'm not seeing.
It might surprise you, but buildings in places other than the US and Canada now have windows too. By some estimates 95% of the world's windows are outside of US/CA!
(Not that it matters, birds are a pretext, nobody really cares about birds, otherwise outdoor cats as pets would not be a thing.)
The source linked in the parent post says the 1 billion figure is for US only. Maybe the number is more plausible if it's applied worldwide, but the source should be considered as unreliable.
Shouldn't this be scaled to the drastic difference in proportion? I'm willing to accept the hypothesis that turbines are no more dangerous (or even less dangerous) than windows, but with raw numbers it feels like we're comparing apples and oranges. I don't have accurate counts for the number of windows globally, but I'm fairly confident it's much higher than the number of wind turbines.
I do not understand why solar fields do not take the ample roof areas. That is usually just wasted, even worse the roofs are mostly of some dark color where I live, they heat up the area for no good reason at all.
That's true, but a non-trivial factor driving down the cost of solar electricity is not only the panels themselves, but economy of scale in all the rest, like electrical systems to connect them to the grid, support structures for the panels, installation and maintenance, etc. etc. So rooftop solar, while attractive from the perspective of not industrializing the wilderness, is more expensive than utility-scale solar.
But yes, it would be nice with building codes requiring to either have solar or green roofs. That would certainly help drive down costs, and in the case of green roofs, reduce cooling demands as well as providing (depending on what you plant, granted) a haven for biodiversity.
The main impediment to roof-top solar is actually the roof tops themselves. Most were not constructed with the weight of solar panels in mind, nor are all roofs built to a common standard. Thus every roof needs an expensive inspection to see if it can have solar panels mounted as-is, and if not you also need an expensive custom plan to reinforce the roof.
Also the grid is really not designed for large amounts of decentralized power generation. While modifying the grid is probably easier than replacing roofs en masse, it's still expensive. Dedicated solar plants can take advantage of economies of scale.
The amount of birds killed by wind turbines is non-zero but negligible (Negative per W/Hr if we count oil spills) Solar fields do disrupt habitats, but less so then other commercial uses of the same land.
Dams have a species eradicating impact on Salmonoids. There would be no Salmon left on the west-coast if we didn't specifically breed and plant them.
> The amount of birds killed by wind turbines is non-zero but negligible.
Wind turbines don't equally affect all species. Raptors are much more vulnerable to them than are other birds in the area.
When raptors are hunting they are looking down to spot prey, and they have an eye ridge and feathers that try to block out other directions (to keep the sun out so as to not interfere with spotting small prey down below). This means that they have trouble seeing what is in front of them, reducing their chances of noticing that they are going to fly right into something.
Some wind farms are trying to address this by having spotters that keep a watch and when they see a raptor approaching shut down the section of the wind farm the bird is hunting in.
There's a company that has a system for automating this, using cameras and computer vision software to spot the approaching raptors [1].
So how "cheap" is it to store nuclear waste for the next 50 Thousand years in a secure place? Or should we do it as always and just dump in into the ocean?
Please check out some up-to-date information about nuclear waste storage. We've gotten to the point refinement has taken reactant levels down to acceptable levels for low-risk storage and can even re-use them in other reactor designs.
So, it looks like re-processing other then for weapon production only gets done on a very small, experimental scale because it is simply not economical, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing). This still leaves us with an endlessly growing stockpile of dangerous nuclear waste products.
The only reason reactors are dangerous is because everyone was still using the disaster plan from the 1960s. Cooling a melting reactor can be done very safely now if people put the effort in. This is a much cleaner solution than solar; wtf are we supposed to do with all of the solar cells every 10 years or so... landfill?
Specifically, the "design basis" accident in the 1970s was a "double guillotine" failure of the coolant intake at the bottom of the reactor.
In real life people are scrupulously careful in designing pressure vessels and pressure vessels just don't break like that -- not the way that people suck in storage tanks every day.
In the 1980s it was realized that the real "most likely" accident is that the power runs out at the plant and they are unable to manage the heat output -- if you can swirl some water around it is not that bad, but if you can't, you get Fukushima.
Modern (post-1990) designs keep enough water around that the reactor can stay cooled for two weeks without power. Had Fukushima kept a few spare diesel generators at a site above the flood waters we'd probably never have heard about trouble there on the news.
Solar cell recycling is a thing, it is easy to melt them down to get the silicon, they are even expecting to recycle the CdTe cells from First Solar. Solar cells are more like beer cans, cars and airplanes (recycle almost 100% of the steel and aluminum) and less like houses (landfill.)
I assume you are being ironic suggesting that putting solar cells into landfill is more problematic than disposing of spent nuclear fuel - and decommissioning old, radioactive installations.
Solar panels have a relatively short lifespan, require and enormous amount of material compared to the energy they generate, and contain toxic elements that never break down.
In contrast, all the nuclear waste generated by the world since the invention of nuclear energy can fit into a single Highschool auditorium.
For perspective, a giant freight ship that burns two tons of crude fuel per hour could run on 5g of plutonium per year.
You're right and wrong. The waste amount is rather small, but the steel, concrete, and water required to contain that amount is several orders of magnitude larger.
The parent is ignoring those containment requirements (or relying heavily on technologies that are still in the research phase).
But that 5g requires years of storage in a reasonably large body of water to cool it down, and then several tons of steel and concrete to store it safely.
What "certain toxic elements than never break down" would that be? Typical lifespans are estimated to be 25-30 years. I doubt that any other power plant will run that long without requiring major maintenance.
It’s an inexact measurement to give you an idea of how little waste is actually produced.
I used to feel very anti-nuclear, mostly out of fear and lack of information. Then I read more about it and learned that taking point.
Other sources I find from a quick google use different comparisons, like this one[1]:
> In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards.
> Used fuel can be recycled.
> More than 90% of its potential energy still remains in the fuel, even after five years of operation in a reactor.
Or this measurement[2]:
> a typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear power station, which would supply the needs of more than a million people, produces only three cubic metres of vitrified high-level waste per year,
Well, optimistically, there’s about 250,000 tons of high level nuclear waste worldwide, which represents about 13,000 cubic meters of waste. Auditoriums tend to max out at 5000 cubic meters, so, it’s fair to say it would take a few auditoriums. Best way to put it that can be understood visually is that it’s about 5-6 olympic sized swimming pools worth of waste. And generally the high level stuff is mixed in with other waste people don’t bother to separate, so could be considered a few times more than that.
Nuclear waste isn't really waste. That's part of the reason why projects like Yucca Mountain haven't been completed.
Natural uranium is a mixture of U235 and U238, an LWR consumes U235 and a small amount of the U238. It gets maybe 2% of the energy out of the uranium and most of the long-lived radioactivity is Pu239 and related actinides that have value as fuel. (In a reprocessing cycle almost all of the waste decays in 500 years.)
Reprocessing nuclear fuel to produce uranium and plutonium powder is a straightforward technology.
What's not straightforward is fabricating fuel out of that powder. The most practical way to alloy oxides of U and Pu is to put them through a high-energy ball mill that fuses together nanoparticles of U and Pu.
The HEBM can make something like Silica into a deadly poison, so just think what it can do with Plutonium!
It seems impossible to run a Pu fuel fab that is a safe place to work without using a respirator full time. The French seem cool with it, but it violates the labor laws in every other country. To make it worse, fuel fabrication is a labor intensive process which involves somebody putting pellets into a fuel rod with gloved hands.
There are alternatives (co-precipitation, liquid fuel reactors, robotics) but they have to be developed to close the fuel cycle.
Because currently fresh uranium is cheaper than reprocessing spent fuel. Further, to really close the fuel cycle and get the full benefits of reprocessing you need breeder reactors, another technology that exists and is proven to work, but with current Uranium prices isn't yet competitive with thermal reactors and a once-through fuel cycle.
None of the cost estimates on this subject really make sense because of the period of time involved.
For instance "no nukes" think it is a scandal that we could spend $100 billion on Yucca mountain, but the average nuclear plant makes about $500 million per year in electricity so that is about 2 years of energy production. It's significant, but it's not crazy.
A reprocessing cycle could easily take a century to fully burn U238 so "what it costs" is influenced by what you think interest rates will be (or should) be for next 100 years.
Fuel cycle costs are nearly zero compared to the cost of the steam turbine at an LWR. If the price of uranium tripled, it would make little different in the basebar price of electricity.
Advanced fuel cycles, today, are mostly long-term insurance against Uranium prices rising significantly.
And nope, given reprocessing, breeding, Thorium, and Uranium extraction from seawater, we're not going to run out of nuclear fuel for tens of thousands of years, if ever.
The scale of the waste created matters. Nuclear energy is about 20% of the US load, and in the entirety of the last 50 years has generated about 100,000 tons of waste. By 2050, the US is estimated to have about 10% of its electricity come from solar panels, and for 78 million tons of waste to have been created by this. We’re essentially talking two orders of magnitude more waste being created, so even if the waste involved is less of a problem it’s far from trivial. And solar panels have plenty of toxic materials in them, so it’s not like just dumping them in a landfill is safe for the surroundings either.
If we figure out a good way to recycle solar panels, then it won’t be an issue. If we do just throw them into landfills, the waste issue with solar is only marginally better than nuclear.
Well, the efficiency warranty is usually at least 80% until 25 years, so 10 years seems a bit short.
If there are enough of them, recycling can be made efficient, and disposing of them would in any case be easier than for the spent yet radioactive materials. If we wanted to we could even enclose in glass container the nasty stuff, and it would not decay its container at nearly the same rate as the radioactive stuff.
I think the problem is that doing it right requires "putting in the effort".
Unless there is a 100% idiot-proof reactor is made, mistakes and crises will still happen, maybe less often, but still sometimes, and it will kill the PR of nuclear.
The recycling argument against renewables is usually a strawman. Very few things can be recycled economically, so its an easy argument to trot out against something you don't like.
OTOH, if we decided that it was a priority to recycle more stuff and minimally subsidized it, suddenly a lot of stuff would become viable to recycle, including wind turbine blades and solar panels.
Solar panels are mostly silicon in two different forms: glass and substrate. Both can be recycled if it is a priority.
I'm sure the world will let countries freely access nuclear material, when it took the US years and a whole lot of political capital to sell nuclear raw material to a country like India.
For the same reason people 60 years ago talked as if they'd solved all the potential hazardous problems of jet travel. There will always be a little more you can squeeze out of a technology, but at some point it is good enough to be considered safe.
In the worst case scenario there is some unknown physics that leads to a jet engine destroying the universe. There is no way to prove that such a disaster can't happen. You may say "well that's absurd, we know how jet engines work" and that's exactly what I'll say about nuclear reactors.
Yes, we know exactly how catastrophic a nuclear accident can be .. and have no sensible solution for nuclear waste other than bury it and hope for the best.
Nuclear gets a lot of support from the fossil fuel industry and also the defence industry, unsurprisingly enough. There are some interesting points against embracing more nuclear energy which go beyond the usual fears of its danger and waste disposal. /r/uninsurable is a space that discusses these a lot. They aren't necessarily more correct but it does seem there is a lot of misinformation out there about nuclear energy and we should definitely be skeptical when it is being pushed hard and evaluate who is doing so and why.
... there will be no new light water reactors built outside of China because a LWR can't possibly be competitive with renewables or fossil fuel with carbon capture.
The problem is that LWR works at low temperatures to drive a steam turbine. Modern fossil fuel plants use gas turbine generators (like airplane engines) that have a power density more than 10 times greater -- if airplanes were driven by steam turbines the whole fuselage would be a steam turbine and there would be no room for the passengers.
Even if they solved the problem that the $5 billion LWR that is supposed to be built in 3 years is really a $20 billion LWR built in 10 years, an LWR still not economic.
People quit building nuclear plants at the same time they quit building coal burners for the same reason -- steam turbines can't compete economically. Even if the heat was free, the balance of plant is too much.
If we switched to (say) a sodium cooled fast reactor or HTGR or a molten salt reactor it's possible nuclear could be competitive but any new reactor faces challenges in terms of materials, fuel fabrication, control...
Lack of energy density in the turbines is not really what drives nuclear costs up. For a power plant it's not really an issue.
That being said, you're correct though. Compared to steam, power conversion machinery based on supercritical CO2 is amazingly compact. Fairly proven technology is higher temperature steam (about 540C rather than 300C) which is widely used in fossil fuel power plants, and would allow slightly better efficiency and smaller size.
Well, somebody has to step up and do the R&D to productisize supercritical CO2 technology. Steam has been around for a couple of centuries and is extremely mature.
One potential cost reduction in none-LWR's is that those LWR reactor vessels are awfully thick and heavy to withstand the pressures involved. Making them is pretty involved, and there's only a few forges around the world capable of making such large objects. Metal or salt-cooled reactors work at roughly atmospheric pressure, which can be easily made by just welding sheet metal together.
Nuclear power is more expensive per KWh than renewables. Even more if you factor in nuclear waste storage. Why would you ever consider nuclear instead of renewables with this in mind?
Then just deploy more? The difference in price compared to nuclear is so high that we can easily install double the renewables we need and still come out cheaper.
Even if you're somewhere where the wind could give you 90% of your energy, you'll still need a reliable, baseline power source if you don't want everything to randomly shut down the other 10% of the time.
Wind + solar aren't as cheap as the LCOE makes it seem because you always have to pay for another source of power as baseline. If you added similar subsidies to natural gas it would be by far the cheapest energy source
It's all about the geographical decoupling with local storage and smart consumers to smooth the loads. For example tying the charging of your electric car while it's parked to the current price.
For example using Norwegian hydro together with German, British and Danish wind.
Converting energy into anything that can be stored long time is an absolute waste.
* The best option is storing it as potential energy for water, i.e. using a pump and a dam. That's 90% efficient, except, we can't exactly build dams everywhere.
* Power to gas to power has a dreadful 10% efficiency ratio, and it also requires energy to make. So, you use a ton of energy to store very little energy.
* Conversion to hydrogen has the same problems. Best we can do 25%. What do you do when you only have a tiny bit of excess energy? The process takes a constant amount of energy in, so you need a constant power source. Nuclear reactors, ideally.
Storing nuclear waste isn't hard. France is building a storage place that will handle all our nuclear waste produced until 2080, safely for hundreds of years. The project cost 25 billion euros, and that includes looking for potential places, running tests, and everything else involved in new things. Future projets would be much cheaper. Considering the country is subsidizing renewables to the tune of 70 billion, it costs us one third of the price for a solution of literally a lifetime. That's also taking into account that, ultimately, very little of the nuclear waste is truly oh-shit-oh-shit dangerous. With a simple phone call, you can most likely go visit a low activity waste storage location, which is 90% of the waste we produce, and you can just go dance on storage tanks. Radioactivity is basically nil.
Additionally, waste is only waste because we can't use it. Look at projects like Superphénix and breeder reactors, and suddenly you've got all this stored "waste" able to produce much more energy.
But you are storing it for thousands of years. That comes at a cost per year over thousands of years.
I doubt that it comes out cheaper than building pumped storage or hydrogen facilities. Even if that means building more renewables to account for inefficiencies involved
You can certainly charge batteries from solar during the day, to charge your electric car at night.
The challenge for countries like the UK is saving solar generation from summer to use for heating in the winter: The capital costs are much higher, because instead of storing one day's solar output, you need to store a few hundred days' output.
Of course, nuclear is super-expensive (or at least, it is the way my country tries to build it). I don't know what the answer is.
Space launches still fail. The fallout from a failed launch of radioactive fuel would be pretty devastating. Not to mention that launch prices are still, pardon the pun, astronomical.
This is flawed reasoning. Electricity is not just kWh. It is kWh delivered at specific times. The way electricity markets work, this is not factored into the price. Nuclear power is more expensive per kWh. But not all kWh or energy are available at the same time, which means nuclear's kWh are worth more, even though that is not reflected in the market price.
Density. Renewables use an insane amount of space (arguably wind energy can leave some space literally below it). (I leave mining operations out for simplification because such operations are necessary for both renewables and fission energy).
If you have seen what industrial-scale photovoltaic production can do to a rural area, you would at least consider this point. You need to build at least 1000a to cover the power output of even a small-scale nuclear power plant with PV. If you account for the load factor, you probably need something like 8 times as much.
Of course, nuclear power plants could be build close to cities and people living in cities are not affected by the space usage, so the political equation is clear.
edit: To put the space requirements into perspective. Germany has a (rough) requirement of 70GW of electrical power. To cover this with the (roughly) 1k hours of solar production and dense packaging of 1MW/a the country would have to install about 500000a of PV panels (plus some kind of storage over the year). That is about 3% of the currently used agricultural land. And covering here means putting up to 4m high steel structures on it, very close to each other. Generating the whole primary energy with PV would at least require five times the amount of space. Naturally, there are a lot of caveats (roofs, unused space, wind energy, storage, conversion efficiency...) but it should make clear why people are hesitant to accept such a buildup. Nuclear energy would, on the other hand, only require around 20-30 medium-sized powerplants for electricity or less than 100 of them for full primary energy generation (heating homes would be basically free due to waste heat). Of course, it would be much more expensive and you would have to deal with eithe proliferation and yet unknown error modes or an insane amount of radioactive waste, but you wouldn't need nearly the same amount of space.
The cost of land doesn't add a whole lot. PV in Texas, for example, is going on land costing $1200/acre. How much do you think an acre of installed PV modules costs, compared to this?
I don't know why you're being downvoted - this is more than likely the actual answer. Look at who sits on the FREOPP board and who funds it, and where their leanings/policies are politically. Daniel Garza is, I thought, well known for leading groups responsible for astro-turfing various political/minority issues.
This is obviously not an unbiased organization, regardless of claiming to be non-partisan.
> Nuclear power is more expensive per KWh than renewables.
You state this as fact but it seems to actually be pretty contentious. Wikipedia lists [0] many studies and the estimated costs of nuclear vs. renewables vary pretty wildly.
Of the global studies that considered nuclear, OECD NEA and IPCC both list nuclear as cheaper than solar and similar to onshore wind, while Lazard is quite favourable towards renewables.
Of the regional studies, on the positive side, France found nuclear cheaper than anything but hydro and Japan (pre-Fukushima) found it about half the price of solar or wind.
Of the regional studies, on the negative side, the UK found it marginally more expensive than solar, much more expensive than onshore wind and much marginally less expensive than offshore wind and the US EIA found it to be one of the most expensive options there were.
So the estimates vary pretty wildly, it's not an accepted fact that nuclear is more expensive than renewables.
Personally, I trust France, as they actually have large-scale nuclear power.
The OECD NEA numbers seem to assume the same interest rate for nuclear as for renewables. This is not a fair comparison, since nuclear builds are riskier and require a higher interest rate to account for the risk. Giving them the same rate is putting a thumb on the scales.
Nuclear and renewables do not work well together. When you model cost optimized synthetic baseload sources (with renewables, nuclear, and storage), the solutions swap (as assumptions change) from "all renewable" to "all nuclear" with no in-between.
I suspect the pervasiveness of HVAC in the US is also an aspect. They're pretty power-intensive and run all the time - you just don't really see them outside large offices in the UK, I'm not sure about elsewhere.
That's not the reason, if it were, then within the EU, southern members would use more energy. It's a lot more nuanced, with bigger houses in the USA, a lot cheaper construction, higher industrial output than poorer European countries and so on: https://www.statista.com/statistics/332520/primary-energy-co...
Air conditioning. It isn't really about efficientcy, though that is a concern. The simple fact is Europe doesn't need air conditioning most of the time. It is a major concern in the long term because as global warming gets worse, we will need more air conditioning to survive unless we start burying our homes.
Dryers in Europe are famously ineffective, and from what I gather even having them is rarer - many people still air dry on clotheslines etc. Plus, air conditioning is more common even in cooler areas of the US - I’m in the north but have and use central AC.
We should innovate ourselves out of this with solar, wind, nuclear rather than advocating for inferior living standards.
We bought an especially energy efficient dryer in Europe a couple of years ago. It takes about twice as long to dry a load of clothes (2.5~3 hours) as the one at my folk's house in North America.
That's part of how it gets to a high efficiency. You sometimes have a fast and inefficiency mode as well, although I've never needed to have my clothes dry right now, so I just run the dryer during off-peak hours and the clothes are dry in the morning.
People in Europe were/are reluctant to use dryers also because of the unnecessary power consumption. I also noted that a lot of clothes you buy in Europe are specifically not meant for tumble drying (according to the label) while this is practically unheard of in North America. Ironically, I suspect that in both cases, the clothes are produced in probably the same place somewhere in Asia.
They also destroy your clothes faster even if they are meant to be put in the dryer. All the stuff that's in the filter? Yeah, that's not actually useless lint, that was part of the fabric of your clothes. Clothes line is much better, also it doesn't cost you much, it rarely breaks, uses no energy. To me it's not inferior at all.
All of the dryers I’ve used have been electric, not gas in all of the apartments and homes I’ve lived in. Some places in the north do use natural gas but that’s more in older developments.
All dryers I have used in North America (Canada, not the US) were electric but simply dumped the hot and moist air to the outside. Compared to my current heat pump dryer (in Europe) they were horribly inefficient.
why do you even need AC in areas with moderate temperature? I get people in Arizona using it, but why would someone in e.g. New Hampshire need it, considering how much power it consumes?
Many over here (UK) both dry their clothes on lines, and wash their dishes in the sink rather than a dishwasher. Space is a big factor - I've seen walk-in closets in the US bigger than most UK bedrooms. Our houses are much smaller on average.
Pretty sure dishwashers use far less water than sink washing.
> Getting them clean in the sink can use up to 27 gallons of water per load. An Energy Star certified dishwasher can use as little as 3 gallons per load (around 11 litres), according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. [1]
27 gallons of water per load of dishes? That sounds like they were washing dishes under running water which is obviously wasteful. Fill a dishpan, do the dishes, rinse them with clear water at the end and you will need very little water in total.
That may well be true, but washing in the sink uses almost no energy - to directly compare the two, you'd have to compare the energy used directly by a dishwasher and hand washing (heating the water), plus the energy required to filter the waste water from each.
I agree it obviously doesn't use much power, though in a lot of places fresh water is a much bigger concern (and that's really saying something). California comes to mind.
That's not an unusual temperature in the summer in Central Europe. Still, people do fine without AC. I find this "I'm not going to suffer through that" attitude strangely disconcerting.
On the flip side, the costs for building a house are getting higher in higher every year not in small parts because the requirements for insulation and energy efficiency where I currently live in Europe have started to become borderline ridiculous.
Its 87F in late-afternoon Paris right now and 83F in London. Where I'm from the humidity would make this unbearable. Perhaps Paris isn't the same, but I wouldn't want to take the chance. I'd rather be able to set my own temperature.
For the record, I'm curious as to why the attitude of wanting a high standard of living is disconcerting.
fair enough, that's pretty damn hot. When you said cooler, I thought you meant something like a moderate year-round temperature - though with global warming even that probably isn't going to stick around long-term; we're going through a scorching summer (77F is a lot for us) in the UK right now.
I have a dryer but not really any room for a dishwasher unless I got a countertop unit; I live in a normal-sized starter house in the UK.
Why not both? I feel like at this point anyone who has done any research at all on climate change and its intersection with power generation fully acknowledges as accepted wisdom that nuclear is best for baseload and scaling and renewables are best for peak-load and have the lowest cost of production (ecologically and economically) at their highest output points.
What is unspoken in many discussions is how energy intensive a lot of technologies are that are going to be more necessary as global warming continues /and/ technologies which could help to counteract and perhaps reverse the damage we've already done (atmospheric carbon scrubbers). Having carbon neutral or carbon negative baseload generation in mass quantity is absolutely critical to any realistic plan to deal with climate change, which currently means nuclear as our only option. Given that nuclear (with the correct reactor designs) has better power generation density than competing technologies and superior scaling, if we had 1:1 replacement of existing fossil fuel power plants with nuclear in the US, for instance, we would have enough excess baseload generation to start running atmospheric carbon scrubbers full-time in major cities to counter-act pollution from ICE vehicles and excess energy for various other pollution mitigation strategies (such as water purification / ground pollution abatement).
We keep finding petroleum because there is a huge demand for it. Known reserves of uranium are low because we're not looking for more as the demand is low. If there was a demand, there is little doubt prospection would pick up and reserves would be found.
The link doesn't define "the world supply of viable uranium." Find other sources. (The article even discusses extracting uranium from seawater.) What about finding new deposits or new mines? According to the Virginia Geologic Survey, "The largest unmined uranium deposit in the United States is Coles Hill, in Pittsylvania County." (https://www.dmme.virginia.gov/dgmr/uranium.shtml) Virginia currently has a moratorium on uranium mining.
Also just reading, it doesn't seem such a device has been build so far. Why not then compare to fusion. Hydrogen seems even more abundant than thorium.
CANDU reactors can use thorium fuel. Hydrogen being more abundant doesn't really matter, you have to either electrolyze it from water or extract it from hydrocarbons. [1]
Regarding the argument that nuclear power plants "always work", I would like to point out that in France, a lot of them are built next to rivers and use river water for cooling.
Except in summer, when the water in the rivers becomes too warm to be effective in cooling. As far as I recall, a while back, during a really hot summer in Europe, the power output of French nuclear plants went down a lot.
As global warming progresses, this kind of problem is probably going to become more common.
You can dive in my history, i'm really not anti-nuclear.
But these kind of storytelling is damageable. It put in concurrence both type of energy. Can we agree than anything is better than coal and oil for electricity production, and go down from here?
i see this popping up around the internet every now and then and it's always the same few dudes who advocate "for nuclear". not "use nuclear and renewables" mind you, it's "nuclear good renewables bad". i genuinely wonder why.
nuclear power is inherently lethal. not nuclear plants, nuclear energy. to keep it safe, you need a. tons of money, and b. stable government. miss one and you won't build plants. if you have both, might as well build more cheaper and faster alternatives like renewable energy.
I want our dams here in the PNW shit canned. Our salmon and steelhead populations are dying due to the dams, which is going to take its toll on the rest of the ecosystem when they’re gone.
Ahead of its time, it was unjustly rejected and persecuted by the
ignorant masses. Its advocates are bonded by the quiet pride that at
least they weren’t unthinkingly siding with those masses. (And they’re
right!) Meanwhile, as the Amiga stagnated for terribly unfair reasons,
other, scrappier technologies like the i386 and UMG-Si grew from being
worthless boondoggles (except in special circumstances, like
spaceflight) to being actually far better and cheaper. But the Amiga
advocates keep the faith, sharing their suffering and resentment. They
inevitably try the alternatives a little and perhaps even start to
like them. Gradually their denial recedes, decade by decade.
But they know that however much fab costs go down and leave their
beloved Amiga behind in the dust, you’ll never be able to run nuclear
submarines and Antarctic research stations on solar panels.
— ⁂ —
Not all nuclear-energy advocates are so unversed in the basics of
energy as to say incoherent things like “replacing daily energy
consumption from crude oil will require 14.5 terawatts per day” or
pants-on-head things like “renewable mandates push up electricity
prices”
(https://freopp.org/why-nuclear-power-not-renewables-is-the-p...)
but today they are all suffering from serious truth deficiencies.
— ⁂ —
Wind, where available, undercut the cost of steam power (including
nuclear and coal) a decade ago, and PV undercut it in equatorial parts
of the world about four years ago, or in even more of the world if you
don’t include storage. As a result, last year, China, whose electrical
consumption has doubled in the last decade, built 48.2 gigawatts† of
new photovoltaic capacity last year
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-energy-climatechang...
but only has, I think, something like 10 GW of nuclear plants under
construction, scheduled to come online over the next several years. PV
installed capacity in China is growing by 23% per year, the same rate
it has been growing worldwide for the last few years; with some luck
that will return to the 39%-yearly-worldwide-growth trend that has
been the fairly consistent average over the last 28 years.‡
† China’s PV capacity factor seems to be only about 13%, so those 48
GWp probably work out to only about 6 GW average. It would be nice if
China managed to site its new PV plants in places that could provide a
capacity factor like California’s 28%.
‡ Why 28? Because I haven’t found figures yet on what worldwide
installed capacity was in 01992 or earlier.
Nuclear energy, in the current actual available and usable forms, means that you have a system which never ever can fail, or it will create issues for a big part of the world for the next thousands or even ten thousand years.
That means neither in the plants itself nor in the waste storage systems. Under ideal circumstances and change in society so that all live together peaceful happy, and we're incredible lucky with natural disasters of any form in the vicinity of plants and storage systems, then yes, we may even get away with it. But history tells us this is very unlikely to be the case once politics, real world behaviour of climate, tectonic plate movement, ... is involved.
IMO it's really egoistic to risk screwing over that many future generations.
E.g., during the Cold War both, West and East Germany choose an unfit place (some leaky old salt mine) for their long term storage of nuclear waste, overriding geological expert opinions, just as it was deemed to screw over the other side more in case of leakage, really nice result when then merging again into one country, basically screwed them self double time.
It may be that modern systems are much safer than those decades ago, but 1. those built decades ago are still running and 2. the risk factor cannot just be the probability of an incident, it needs to factor in possible impact and duration of said impact, and when doing so (current) nuclear just stinks.
Don't get me wrong, fusion reactors would be great to have and nuclear power itself can avoid high-carbon emitting power plants (albeit the mining of fissile material isn't exactly done in a green-way either), but the real risk+impact is just brushed over by the lobbyist.
Note, that there's actual astroturfing and greenwashing effort going on with nuclear[0][1], the amount of such posts on HN or reddit + the commenters jumping in to defend this stuff is always astounding.
Solar plant size vs production in Germany is not really a good indicator of the optimal areal efficiency of solar panels. Maybe looking at closer to the equator locations would be more fair to the technology.
And putting wind turbines in the sea would likely be less problematic for NIMBY people (plus dual use: fish nursery!)
I am not against nuclear per se, but Chernobyl and Fukushima taught me that accidents will happen, so in order to get my support, build them as far away from where I live as possible.
I prefer wind and especially solar over nuclear because:
- no megacorp and state monopolies (more price competition)
- faster innovation cycles
- faster scaling / much shorter project timeframes
- decentralization (on national and individual levels)
- romantic hopes of independence / self-reliance (on national and individual levels)
Not so much because of monetary or efficiency considerations. The nuclear lobby should address these points to get me to listen.
Why ARE types like the Koch Brothers so interested in nuclear? It's a massive upfront capital expenditure, and profitability is always questionable so they need to be subsidized by governments. Is it simply ideological aversion to solar and wind?
Lots of the push against nuclear is non-scientific. Worth pointing out that all humans reject science, not just conservatives - liberals do exactly the same thing.
This is salient to the nuclear discussion because, regardless of the science, liberals STILL push against nuclear science - even though it's the best hope for getting away from using fossil fuels that we have today.
This prompted me to have a look at the source and this may provide useful context https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Foundation_for_Researc...