There seem to be a series of pro-nuclear submissions here, driven by articles that are, perhaps, driven by lobbying. That would be an interesting story to dig out.
The resulting discussion points out that the cost of nuclear power plants is very high, the long term risks high, the time taken to build and cost overruns extraordinarily high and so on and on. Meanwhile renewables are cheaper, even when adding the batteries required to smooth lumps, and they can be stood up very quickly. Sure keep the old plants and improve regulation, but investors are not going to get returns from nuclear plants when the competition is low capex, free sunlight and almost zero maintenance.
>driven by articles that are, perhaps, driven by lobbying
Or because people are waking up and realizing that climate change is gonna screw us faster than we can build the tech to prevent that and people are defecting toward nuclear which is relatively shovel ready compared to grid scale solar/wind and the storage they necessitate.
You're arguing for nuclear on the basis of its build speed? That doesn't seem to be born out in reality. Maybe another X* years when we've got cheap, factory built small modular reactors, but that certainly doesn't describe nuclear today. In which case we're back to waiting for new tech.
* X being some number of years that increments by 1 year, every year.
We can hope that all countries will find the space for all the solar panels, wind turbines, have some convenient height differences for hydro power and pumped energy storage, money for li-ion storage for the night or windless days, grid upgrades to get it from where it's produced to where it's needed...
or we could apt remove coal_plant && apt install fission_plant on the same surface area and be certain that we'll be done in the 15 years that this takes to build.
I'm very much afraid the former isn't going to cut it. I also know solar is cheaper if you compare kWh produced by panels on roofs to kWh produced by nuclear plants, but we need to increase our energy production nearly tenfold and renewables only won't make it easy to get there. We need to continue on both fronts, we can't rule out nuclear if we want to avoid this disaster. Best case the money is wasted. Currently, the best case is that we'll succeed and the average case a disaster.
I'm not sure what your point is by linking to just that graph without context.
No one denies that nuclear makes up the majority of France's generating capacity. It's more debatable as to whether or not France is capable of building them out at competitive prices compared to renewables. It's worth looking at the ongoing cost disaster that is Flamanville unit 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
Short version: supposed to be 54 months to build at €3.3 billion, is currently now targeting 180 months of total construction time at €19.1 billion. Not a good look.
The point is that nuclear is indeed capable of being built rapidly. Over the span of 15 years France went from 10% nuclear power to 80%. You claim that nuclear can't be built at speed, and that this isn't borne out by reality. This is not only untrue, it is the opposite of true: it was borne out by reality.
You're making a sharp pivot here, away from construction time to cost. Yes, nuclear is much cheaper when the same design is built repeatedly instead of first-of-a-kind reactors. This is already well known.
Solar and wind are cheaper in terms of raw generation costs, but don't actually offer a path to decarbonization because of their intermittency. Solar and wind are cheap when they supplement fossil fuels. But they need to be paired with storage to be used as a primary source of power, and we don't have a feasible plan to provide that much storage let alone how much it'd cost.
Not sure if you're writing that off as unfeasible, but clearly there are solutions being thought about, and there are companies in the market today selling storage with costs going down every single year. It's not unreasonable to think that the 'feasible' plan for storage is to, well, simply buy/install it; which becomes cheaper every single year.
> Not sure if you're writing that off as unfeasible, but clearly there are solutions being thought about, and there are companies in the market today selling storage with costs going down every single year. It's not unreasonable to think that the 'feasible' plan for storage is to, well, simply buy/install it; which becomes cheaper every single year.
Yes, it is. There's enough known lithium deposits to produce 5 minutes worth of storage. With current mining techniques, there's an estimated 20 minutes worth of storage. [1]
> Also, solar thermal plants (no storage required) are a thing:
The plant was fully capable of continuing operation, but they're restricted in how much they can increase the temperature of the river used for cooling. There has been no demonstrated impact of reactor cooling on fish populations, so this is really just the government shutting down the nuclear plant just for the sake of it.
Large parts of build speed issue with nuclear is regulation. If we could just get a permit to build done in a reasonable amount of time and then not stop progress again and again it would make a big difference.
Given the price tag for Fukushima is at $187 billion and rising, arguing for deregulation _should_ be a hard sell.
The axiom 'safe, cheap, fast; choose any 2' doesn't even apply to nuclear. It's more like choose 0. You might be able to argue for some version of 'safe' by talking about actual fatalities from nuclear energy being low, but I think the 5000ish square kilometers of exclusion zones from Chrenobyl/Fukushima should be part of the conversation about 'safety'. Safe for people perhaps, safe for property, apparently not. So maybe choose 0.5?
That would make it more expensive than onshore wind($45/MWh) and solar yet($48/MWh) cheaper than all other sources of energy including natural gas($59/MWh). Double the final cost of energy to $110/MWh and it would still be in theory cheaper than the average for coal($115/MWh). Granted I'm pulling these numbers from Wikipedia so it's not that simple but the numbers aren't unrealistic.
We regulated the industry so much that we made nuclear plants almost entirely economically unviable.
Some of the regulations are good, some are bad - and a lot were born out of irrational fears about an immature industry that we didn't fully understand at the time.
There is no reason a nuclear plant cannot be economically viable. They're all over Europe, Japan, Russia, China and I'm sure other countries as well.
That doesn't make sense. If you feel pressure by time, nuclear is and never was your solution. It takes too long to construct. By the time a single reactor is build, renewables will jump several development steps.
That's fantastic but unfortunately there is no viable grid storage close to being capable of actually utilizing renewables for the majority of power all over the world.
Are we really going to risk human civilization on the immediate invention and mass fabrication of new storage technologies orders of magnitude more efficient then what we have?
Well, let’s get to 30-40% solar/wind before we start worrrying about grids that cannot accept majority renewable.
And guess what, at that point maybe some of the newer, safer, and cheaper nuclear designs would have been proven so the nuclear plays we build then for the next few decades are better than the ones we would build right now.
How does that change something the amount of time it takes to build each of them?
If you start now, it'll still take you almost a decade (or maybe it even will be a decade. You never know with NPPs because they always take longer and cost more than projected) and in that decade renewables will jump generations of development. In the end you just wasted money which could have been invested into true clean energy which is still improving fast.
Try running a gigawatt's worth of solar panels attached to enough battery capacity to fill a small stadium. There is plenty of maintenance to be done. Nuclear and solar are really apples and oranges. They each have advantages and disadvantages. In a given time/place/need one will always be better than another but neither are superior always.
Maybe it's because I'm in Canada where several provinces use hydro as a primary energy source, but why doesn't make it to the top of the lists more often?
Nearby ecosystem damages, relatively speaking, seem rather low in comparison with nuclear or fuel, and for dealing with future climate change issues in general. While they don't explode, I'm sure they can can cause disasters of their own.
But wind/solar require massive storage capacity to become a primary source and require a lot of space/disruption at these scales. I'm not sure how the affected landmass (in the long term) compares with Hydro, or maintenance costs.
Hydro has this great combination of zero emission and the water being its own battery. Not relying on rare materials and battery production avoids adding competition and could favor the transition to electric vehicles at a global scale.
Like nuclear, initial costs are problematic. Social acceptance is so-so. In some places like the US many "good spots" are taken, but it appears 2/3 of potential in the world is untapped. More numerous but smaller damns seem to be a possibility too.
Hydro dams and flood dams are different. I really do not understand the point you are making. I want to highlight that the fear around nuclear is not rational since you need to compare the risk profile of the alternatives and it seems some people completely fail to do so.
For the record, I didn't say I fear nuclear. I'd pick Nuclear over coal any day. I'm not for or against any particular technology.
In normal circumstances Hydro seems among the safest [1] for both humans and the environment all things relative. It has served Quebec quite well at least with very low electricity rates and emissions, and environmental impacts are likely long paid off with no radioactive waste to manage. Being in a low populated region (a rare asset..) also helps on the safety side.
Bringing up a single dam incident due to an estimated once-in-2-millenia rainfall/typhoon [2] in a populated region to dismiss an entire renewable energy source.. sounds like that kind of irrational fear you mention.
I think the arguments around possible lack of locations, costs, planning, and water supplies are more relevant -- and affect both hydro and nuclear. Those are also what make wind/solar interesting -agility- as tech improves.
I was not being dismissive to your comment specifically, but the position where people are terrified of nuclear but don't even blink at hydro is just strange to me. Your post was quite reasonable, so I apologize if I worded it too strongly.
> Bringing up a single dam incident due to an estimated once-in-2-millenia rainfall/typhoon [2] in a populated region to dismiss an entire renewable energy source.. sounds like that kind of irrational fear you mention
Yes, this is an excellent example. Similar ish kind of attenuating circumstances at Fukushima. But people don't now go "hydro is unsafe" as they go with nuclear.
I am not against hydro, by all means let's leverage it as much as possible. I am just against coal plants and want to live in a sustainable world and the only path I see right now is nuclear. If we can get there with renewables, great, let's! I just think we can not at the moment and am unwilling to risk our entire species on the tradeoff that we have 2,4,10? nuclear fallout accidents of the scale we had every 50 years.
Besides, I think that if we were to deploy nuclear at scale, most of the problems will go away with time. Scale makes things safer, cheaper to build, cheaper to maintain.
Yep, but hydro dams are used to control floods too, so they save people from floods as part of their operation. An improperly maintained dam can increase risk of flood, of course.
>>why doesn't make it to the top of the lists more often?
Modern thinking on hydro is changing. It can be good, but many implementations are disturbing. If you wipe out a forest then you aren't carbon neutral. And all those rotting logs under the water release gasses that are worse can CO2. So while it may be a great idea in the American southwest, it might not be a great idea to flood a rain forest in British Columbia.
The cost of nuclear is high in the short term but when debt is paid off it becomes one of the cheapest sources of baseline energy in the long run. I don't think "big nuclear" is behind these posts, its just that more and more people are looking past a period of nuclear panic and recognizing that this is likely to be the only form of baseload power we can transition to in the face of climate change.
that we have so many pro nuclear articles here on HN is remarkable to me, too. However, I come from Germany where the general sentiment is negative. I'd guess in the US (where probably most of HN users come from?!) the sentiment is more positive? I can't explain it any other way (well, lobbyism, astroturfing... okay, but I wouldn't go that far without evidence). What I miss in all these energy discussions is arguments about reducing the load or better managing the load (with flexible pricing etc.), especially since that could be very data driven which should align well with the HN crowd. And those discussions should come before we start even thinking about nuclear. Same argument as with recycling: the best garbage [energy] is the one which never was (reduce > recycle).
Light water reactors are not the only option for nuclear power. CANDU reactors have a wonderful safety record. MSRs are on the brink of becoming commercially viable and have been for a long time, but funding is currently insufficient. Funding is insufficient largely because light water and heavy water (like CANDU and derivatives) plants are already researched on the one hand and light water reactors have created negative sentiment for all things nuclear on the other.
Would I like nuclear power that fails safe and doesn't produce bomb material? Absolutely. Would I live next door to a molten thorium salt reactor? I'd love to. Do I want to see new light water reactors built anywhere in the world? No.
In my opinion Germany's experience denuclearizing (and replacing it with renewables and lignite coal) has been some of the strongest evidence I've seen in favor of nuclear energy.
Why? It's not like Germany ran out of power or something like that.
The opposite is the case. It has been a frontrunner for renewable energy for years and moved the development for everybody on this planet and now they even have a plan (law) to phase out coal despite it being an important source for jobs in regions struck with unemployment.
I've never had a negative sentiment against nuclear energy, even though most of the people from my country seem to be or at least were so in the past.
And I feel many of the measures the Dutch government is taking these days to reduce CO2 seem borderline crazy. For example burning trees for energy (biomass), wood that is imported from the USA and Canada and shipped in huge container ships to The Netherlands [0]. And let's not forget that trees actually remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
Or the fact that the Dutch government wants the whole country cut off from gas for heating, while neighbouring countries (like Germany) are trying to get people to use gas for heating. In The Netherlands every house if connected to the gas network, but soon everybody will need to switch to waterpumps for heating.
Or the fact that the whole country will be covered with wind turbines which ruin the view, produce a lot of noise, need a lot of space and kill many birds.
Its always fucking baffling to me when people believe everything about nuclear is lobbying. Its a tiny industry that absolutely sucks at lobbying.
> reducing the load or better managing the load (with flexible pricing etc.), especially since that could be very data driven which should align well with the HN crowd.
Nobody is against that, but its not a actual solution, its an optimisation that doesn't play into the overall discussion.
At the end of the day you need to generate a lot of energy, no matter how much you want to reduce or recycle.
HN hates data on energy discussions. The HN vibe is strongly in favor of EVs, for example, despite the fact that EVs are the slowest and most expensive way to reduce transport greenhouse gas emissions. Fission is, likewise, the slowest and most expensive way to add electrical generation today. Fission is the only power source where the costs increased in the last 10 years. PV is now five times cheaper than fission. Onshore wind costs the same as PV. Batteries are easy to mass-produce. The substantive debate is over.
California has 250MW of battery facilities online right now. If you can do 250MW, you can do 50GW. The CAISO roadmap for energy storage does not list any technological risks.
>PV is now five times cheaper than fission. Onshore wind costs the same as PV. Batteries are easy to mass-produce.
This is an odd contrast of statements considering you gave no data to support your argument. I take issue with dismissing the massive problem of intermittancy and storage with "Battaries are easy to mass-produce".
"A cost-optimal wind-solar mix with storage reaches cost-competitiveness with a nuclear fission plant providing baseload electricity at a cost of $0.075/kWh27
at an energy storage capacity cost of $10-20/kWh. To reach cost-competitiveness with a peaker natural gas plant at $0.077/kWh, energy storage capacity costs must instead fall below $5/kWh."
"The largest announced storage system, comprising more than 18,000 Li-ion batteries, is being built in Long Beach for Southern California Edison by AES Corp. When it’s completed, in 2021, it will be capable of running at 100 megawatts for 4 hours. But that energy total of 400 megawatt-hours is still two orders of magnitude lower than what a large Asian city would need if deprived of its intermittent supply. For example, just 2 GW for two days comes to 96 gigawatt-hours.
We have to scale up storage, but how? Sodium-sulfur batteries have higher energy density than Li-ion ones, but hot liquid metal is a most inconvenient electrolyte. Flow batteries, which store energy directly in the electrolyte, are still in an early stage of deployment. Supercapacitors can’t provide electricity over a long enough time. And compressed air and flywheels, the perennial favorites of popular journalism, have made it into only a dozen or so small and midsize installations. We could use solar electricity to electrolyze water and store the hydrogen, but still, a hydrogen-based economy is not imminent.
And so when going big we must still rely on a technology introduced in the 1890s: pumped storage. You build one reservoir high up, link it with pipes to another one lower down and use cheaper, nighttime electricity to pump water uphill so that it can turn turbines during times of peak demand. Pumped storage accounts for more than 99 percent of the world’s storage capacity, but inevitably, it entails energy loss on the order of 25 percent. Many installations have short-term capacities in excess of 1 GW—the largest one is about 3 GW—and more than one would be needed for a megacity completely dependent on solar and wind generation.
But most megacities are nowhere near the steep escarpments or deep-cut mountain valleys you’d need for pumped storage. Many, including Shanghai, Kolkata, and Karachi, are on coastal plains. They could rely on pumped storage only if it were provided through long-distance transmission. The need for more compact, more flexible, larger-scale, less costly electricity storage is self-evident. But the miracle has been slow in coming."
"Given the magnitude of the battery material demand growth across all scenarios, global production capacity for Li, Co, and Ni (black lines in Fig. 3) will have to increase drastically (see Supplementary Tables 9 and 10). For Li and Co, demand could outgrow current production capacities even before 2025. For Ni, the situation appears to be less dramatic, although by 2040 EV batteries alone could consume as much as the global primary Ni production in 2019. Other battery materials could be supplied without exceeding existing production capacities (Supplementary Tables 9 and 10), although supplies may still have to increase to meet demands from other sectors5,9. The known reserves for Li, Ni, and Co (black lines in Fig. 4) could be depleted before 2050 in the SD scenario and for Co also in the STEP scenario. For all other materials known reserves exceed demand from EV batteries until 2050 (Supplementary Table 5). In 2019 around 64% of natural graphite and 64% of Si are produced in China32, which could create vulnerabilities to supply reliability."
I have no idea where you got these numbers, but nuclear energy is good for base load, while batteries are good for handling load peaks. These two types of load are very different.
No, it's 250MW of peak power. I'm not sure what the total energy storage capacity is for California, but the typical project has 4 hours of capacity.
For an example please see this PG&E project which is coming online in Summer 2021. These installations have 700MW of power capacity and each has a 4-hour discharge time.
You're right about the numbers, but still this is tiny at the scale of the grid. 2.8GWh is still only around 5 mins of consumption. You would probably need a few days of storage to run a 100% wind/solar grid, so that's about 1000x more.
That is only one of the multiple problems discussed with mass pumped storage. Regardless, the efficiency does matter as if you are attempting to store peak power as %100 of baseline power then your input is no longer free. It is a factor in the energy output of the PV / Turbine over the course of its lifecycle. Lower efficiency means more PVs / Turbines and more massive pumped storage projects.
The lobby tries everything to paint themselves as a clean energy source and alternative to renewable energy. Striking aggressively left and right. Sometimes even by the same lobbyist:
The resulting discussion points out that the cost of nuclear power plants is very high, the long term risks high, the time taken to build and cost overruns extraordinarily high and so on and on. Meanwhile renewables are cheaper, even when adding the batteries required to smooth lumps, and they can be stood up very quickly. Sure keep the old plants and improve regulation, but investors are not going to get returns from nuclear plants when the competition is low capex, free sunlight and almost zero maintenance.