So little nuclear has come online since 2010 partly because of fear-mongering from activists and people for the last 20 years complaining that Nuclear takes too long to build.
If only 20 years ago people realized all our climate and energy problems wouldn't be solved and we should build the safest, cleanest and only technology to prevent climate change caused by energy production...
No, it's because nuclear fell out of the running economically. In large part this was due to the steady advance in gas turbine (and combined cycle) power plants. The capital cost of these plants is just incredibly low, 10-20 times cheaper per kW than a nuclear plant.
If "activists" stopped spending all their time fear-mongering about how expensive, dangerous, and time-consuming nuclear is we could have had massive government subsidies to almost entirely end fossil fuel production for energy!
The "it's all the activist's fault" argument has long since become ludicrous. No, it's because the nuclear lied about how cheap it would be, then failed to execute properly.
The cost and timeline estimates for building new reactors at Vogtle and VC Summer were woefully lowballed.
The VC Summer project was ultimately cancelled in 2017, 4 years after construction started, with no reactor completed. $9 billion had already been spent. Utility executives criminally concealed the dire state of the project before it was cancelled.
"US utility boss pleads guilty to fraud over failed nuclear construction scheme"
With the guilty plea, Marsh admitted that he intentionally defrauded ratepayers by giving over-optimistic assessments of progress on the scheme so that his company could obtain rate increases from Scana’s customers and qualify for up to $2.2bn in tax credits.
After the scheme broke ground in March 2013, it suffered delays and cost overruns. By late 2016, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ), Marsh knew that efforts by engineer Westinghouse to improve the pace and productivity of the project were “woefully inadequate”.
...
Shortly after, Marsh fraudulently withheld this information from South Carolina’s utility regulator.
Also:
"US executive pleads guilty in nuclear project delay cover-up"
A former executive of South Carolina utility Scana Corp has pleaded guilty to his role in what investigators called a “breathtaking” conspiracy to hide unresolvable problems in a project to build a $10bn nuclear power plant.
Prosecutors said Byrne knew the scheme was hopelessly behind and over budget, but that his and co-conspirators’ deceptions allowed Scana to obtain rate increases from Scana’s customers to continue financing it.
There are no criminal charges I'm aware of in connection with the Vogtle project, but it seems to have been estimated with a similarly ludicrous degree of optimism. Construction started in March 2013. In 2014 Georgia Power was telling the public that its new reactors would be operating in 2017 and 2018 respectively.
It is highly relevant, because renewables are not presently capable of replacing fossil fuels. And they won't be until massive energy storage systems, literally thousands of times better than what we have now, is developed. California, Hawaii, and other places are already hitting saturated electricity markets during the daytime. Companies aren't starting to install storage, as renewable evangelists promised.
Th fact that California only has 1.5 GWh of storage is precisely the reason why wind and solar cannot form the primary source of energy. Who cares if the state met it's storage goals if the storage goals were tiny?
That's not 1.5GWh energy stored, it's 1.5GW output from storage systems (output is the key metric because the storage systems aren't very rapid discharge, and the key factor in adequacy isn't how much energy is stored but how much power can be delivered from storage when other systems aren't delivering. And it's not just about meeting current targets but the rapid pace of new storage coming online.
That's not actually the key figure of merit, the problem isn't how long stored sources can be used but peak output.
> 1.5GW for 10 minutes? 15 minutes?
All of it for longer than that (none of the various utility-scale sources have a discharge that quickly), which is why power and not energy is the thing that is targeted. But it varies (utility-scale battery systems have a different profile [and differing within that by specific battery tech] than thermal storage which has a different profile than pumped hydro, etc.)
> Watts isn't a unit of storage
No, it's a unit of power, and the main problem right now is being able to meet needed output levels when other sources are offline. The concern is the depth of the trough that storage can handle, you need breadth too, so a substantial level of that comes inherently with depth, and the main concern is short-term variation.
> That's not actually the key figure of merit, the problem isn't how long stored sources can be used but peak output.
That is exactly the problem. Yes, output matter, too, but capacity is the main figure people are interested in. If storage system A can output 1.5 GW but only for 1 hour, and system B can output 1.5 GW but for 10 hours then these are very different systems.
> All of it for longer than that
And how long is it? Basically we're trying to find the area of rectangle. You're providing the height, but staying conspicuously mum about the width.
> The concern is the depth of the trough that storage can handle, you need breadth too, so a substantial level of that comes inherently with depth, and the main concern is short-term variation.
No, the concern is both depth and breadth. It's easy to build a battery system that puts out a lot of energy for a short period of time. It's hard to build a battery system that puts out a lot of energy for 12 hours.
Absolutely none of this changes the undeniable fact that "storage" is incapable of meeting the demands of baseload power generation currently provided by Nuclear and fossil fuels.
We aren't anywhere close and won't be for many years which is why it's so absolutely ridiculous how green activists implicitly endorse using coal, natural gas and other fossil fuels which kill tens of thousands of people every year and are cooking the planet, when we have nuclear, which kills no one, and does not contribute substantively to climate change.
It's almost like the activists care more about posturing and magical thinking than they do "saving the planet"...
it is literally impossible for renewables to replace fossil fuels given current technology and anything on the horizon for at least the next decade, probably much longer.
So that leaves...Nuclear.
So again, why are you fear-mongering about how "dangerous" nuclear is when it's a tiny tiny fraction of the real danger of fossil fuels?
I thought climate change was like an urgent crisis or something....?
I think the question is whether renewables should replace nuclear or fossil fuels first. The top level comment isn't talking about replacing fossil fuels with nuclear.
Renewables CANNOT replace nuclear OR fossil fuels. It's literally impossible based on current or any near-term technology.
We are being told on the one hand that climate change is an existential threat to tens (hundreds?) of millions of people. Oh but actually we can just refuse to decarbonize our energy production because maybe someday 10, 20, 50 or 100 years from now there's a true "green" renewable energy I guess.
About 1/5th of US energy usage is renewable. That means we can shutdown 1/5th of nonrenewable plants or shutdown all nonrenewables 1/5th of the time, real answer somewhere in between. The top level post recommends doing this only to carbon sources and leaving nuclear alone.
There are good arguments for and against pivoting to nuclear right now. But there is an (I think) unquestionable position presented here that we shouldn't be pivoting away from nuclear and shutting down plants.
> although it's more than just using Li-ion batteries.
It'd probably be helpful to elaborate, rather than just insist that the above commenter is wrong and loosely suggest at other solutions.
Things like hydrogen storage, synthetic methane, and thermal storage remain in the prototyping phase. I think it's not correct to say that they can, seeing as there isn't even a commercial market for these technologies let alone one that we know will scale. By comparison countries have already powered >80% of their electricity with nuclear.
It's clear than nuclear power can completely replace fossil fuels. Renewables might be able to replace it, but that's a gamble based on assuming a new storage solution will work excellent. Not just better, but truly blows-everything-else-out-of-the-water phenomenal. When the stakes at play are stopping climate change, this is a very risky assumption to make.
Really? What company can I call up and buy 50 GWh of storage from? That's only 6 minutes worth of storage for the USA.
I'd say if we could provision 1 hour's worth of storage over the span of a decade, that'd amount to a demonstration of economic feasibility. But few of these upcoming technologies are making it out of the prototyping stage, let alone commerical success on this scale.
There isn't a company you can call up because projects of this magnitude aren't quoted over the phone to internet forums users.
50 GWh is stored in ~30,000 barrels of synthetic fuel. GWh is an incomplete way to specify storage, there are different technologies for the different ways storage may be needed, depending on what resources are on the grid: short term to handle the peaks of everyone microwaving their breakfast and coffee at 7am or long term storage to handle a once every few decades event like a Texas snow storm.
No one is presently making these because the policy of the grid was developed around power plants that dig stuff out of the ground and burn it - the markets are based on bidding with the assumption every power plant will have a marginal cost of generation relative to the cost of its fuel. This policy doesn't reflect the nature of renewables which besides their capital cost have very low to 0 marginal cost of production. This has disrupted the energy markets in many ways and policy is still being developed to incentivize storage capacity.
The point is that saying "No one is presently making these" on one hand, and claiming that they're within existing industrial capacity is contradictory. Energy markets like Hawaii and California are already hitting situations where energy cost is near zero due to overproduction from intermittent sources. But the promise that entrepreneurs will store this energy and put it back on the grid later has yet to pan out - contrary to the insistence of storage evangelists, hydrogen storage, synthetic methane, thermal batteries, and whatnot are a lot harder to build than one might think.
It's not contradictory. The storage is not being done now not because it's impossible, but because the market conditions that would cause it (specifically, high carbon taxes) aren't there yet. Something like pumped thermal storage requires no new technology. It's just putting together things we can already build.
I'm glad you can google "energy storage" and click on one of the first links but literally none of these are currently capable of replacing baseload nuclear and fossil fuel energy generation.
You can listen to the people who work in this industry and have studied it deeply or you can keep googling furiously for webpages that support your magical thinking.
I didn't "furiously google" anything I "calmly referenced" some of the MANY notes I have from following articles, podcasts, and journals in this field, which I have spent most of my career in.
In fact, I didn't see ANY links from you supporting your nonsense about renewables not working, despite them working in many places across the globe.
>literally none of these are currently capable of replacing baseload nuclear and fossil fuel energy generation.
Literally STORAGE will never replace GENERATION, they are two different concepts which most people understand but you apparently don't. STORAGE can supplement INTERMITTENT GENERATION to create DISPATCHABLE GENERATION for far cheaper than nuclear plants.
No sir, YOU have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Note that you are not claiming that they could be competitive, but that they could not do it at all, regardless of price. This is clearly nonsense.
Please feel free to point me to any developed country that has successfully replaced fossil fuel and nuclear baseload generation with renewables and energy storage.
I'll save you the time. No one has done it. And no, not because evil mustachio-twirling Koch brothers are pulling the strings. Because the technology does not exist at scale to do this.
Or do you want to continue with your speculative science fiction daydreams?
Your argument is "it hasn't happened yet, therefore it cannot happen". This argument proves entirely too much; it implies no technological change can ever occur. To make this argument, you have to demonstrate that the situations in which the change did not occur are the same in all important respects as the current situation. And you cannot do that. Here's what's different.
(1) The cost of renewables has crashed, especially in the last decade. In the case of PV, by nearly an order of magnitude. This is an extreme rate of change for an energy technology.
(2) The cost of storage has also fallen rapidly, and continues to fall.
(3) Market conditions are now beginning to favor installation of storage, as they didn't before (when there's enough dispatchable gas on the grid vs. renewables storage doesn't pay off.)
(4) The existing infrastructure was largely installed at times when renewables were not competitive. However, it won't be ripped out until it becomes uneconomical to operate it (which means ignoring its capital cost). So observing that the source are still being used doesn't imply renewables are not winning.
(5) Fossil fuels have not, and still large are not, being taxed at a level appropriate for the damage they are going to do. Renewables don't have to beat fossil fuels unburdened by CO2 taxes (although we may have waited long enough with CO2 taxes that they may increasingly do so, at least in some market conditions). CO2 taxes will rise to the level needed to push fossil fuels entirely out of the market, and then the question becomes "which is cheaper, nuclear or renewables (or, possibly, fossil fuels with CCS)"?
(6) Once fossil fuels are out of the way, it is crystal clear from the data that absent some technological breakthroughs, new nuclear power plants are grossly uncompetitive vs. renewables. This (and not ludicrous conspiracy theory) is why you're seeing massive installation of renewables around the world, and nuclear installs are gasping for breath.
What I didn’t say that. I said those are meme stock arguments, which they are. Surface level factors that may or may not matter but don’t give the whole picture of cash flow which is ultimately what matters.
Ben Graham said many decades ago that over the short term the market is like a voting machine but over the long term it's a weighing machine.
There have always been periods of irrationality in the markets but there's no reason to believe that equities are fundamentally untethered from their inherent value in perpetuity.
Eventually most of the overnight WSB stock picking geniuses are all going to lose their shirts and we'll see less of this GME nonsense. They make up a tiny fraction of trading volume anyway.
It happened in '07-08, late 90s dot-com bubble and about every decade or so before that for different reasons
>but there's no reason to believe that equities are fundamentally untethered from their inherent value in perpetuity.
Yes, but human lives are finite. Of course the current market is mostly a ponzi, but what if it lasts yet another decade? That's a major fraction of anyone's lifespan.
Fundamentally the ponzi started to collapse in 2007/2008, but it was bailed out by the government. Increasingly it looks like the only way the ponzi can actually collapse is by dollar inflating, everyone getting poorer and ponzi games collapsing in real terms, but not nominal terms.
Unfortunately, probably the best thing to do in the meantime is to try to win at ponzi games and try to leave others with bags.
I like that Graham quote, and you make good points. I guess when I say "investing," I mean more like - Purchasing an equity entitles you to a share of that business' income and potentially assets, but if you buy the equity on the stock market, you're not actually investing in capacity, the way you would be if you bought an IPO or even just a piece of equipment you could use to make something.
And I think people have always given the stock market more credit than it's due as being "the economy," when really the stock market is a set of signals about the economy. The economy is the people and machines and the buildings that do stuff and make things, and the economy remains regardless of what's happening in the stock market.
If a bunch of silliness happens around a certain stock, or if the stock market becomes wildly detached from reality, it doesn't have anything to do with peoples' ability to produce value.
> you're not actually investing in capacity, the way you would be if you bought an IPO or even just a piece of equipment you could use to make something.
while you are not directly investing in capacity like you might in an IPO, purchasing stock does create the same outcome. It's just not _you_ who is doing the capacity investing directly, but someone else who does so, as a result of the chain of investments.
It doesn't necessarily though. When I buy an IPO, my dollars go straight (kind of) into a company's bank account. When I buy stock on the market, my dollars go to whoever I bought the stock from, who will probably use those dollars to buy more stock. The only time a company ever receives dollars it can use is when it sells stock to the public or gets a loan, and the vast, vast majority of transactions on the stock market do not involve dollars going to anyone who will use them to invest in capacity.
> vast majority of transactions on the stock market do not involve dollars going to anyone who will use them to invest in capacity.
If you could _only_ invest directly into capacity, the amount of dollars that people would be willing to put in would be much smaller than today's. That's because the risk profile is singular in direct capacity investment.
The reason the stock market can fund IPOs is because it allows the different stratas of risk to be separated, and taken on by different parties that want those risks. So without your dollar buying an existing stock, thus letting early investors for an IPO an exit, they would unlikely to want to invest in the IPO in the first place!
Yeah, it's certainly true that the financialization of everything allows for a lot more of every type of investment to be made (including in productive capacity).
If you read some of the posts on WSB a huge number of people just really have no clue about capital markets, investing, or basic business sense.
I don't know how many times I saw people claiming GME would go to $1000 because the new CEO has a brilliant new scheme to turn the company around by going digital! Why "going digital" in 2021 means your company is worth 100X what it was a few months ago I'll never quite understand. I guess no one had yet discovered the opportunity of these computer machines and the World Wide Web!
Or "it's the short squeeze" By people who didn't even know what a short was 72 hours before, long after the shorts had covered their positions.
Sure some people acknowledge they are essentially gambling in equities, but tons of people truly think they have some stunning insight into a business because of some anonymous WSB shitpost they read this morning.
Would you say those same people who just learned the phrase “short” or “short squeeze” are likely the same kind of people going to the casino and thinking they can successfully count cards?
As mentioned elsewhere in here, it’s ultimately gambling. It’s putting money up, exposing it to risk that could completely wipe you out. If someone doesn’t understand that about stock investing, I think they’re very similar to someone not realizing a casino could wipe out your money. But making sure everyone fully understands this - educating people who are risking money - certainly seems like a thoughtful thing for countries to incentivize.
But unless all the financial websites have to be styled to look like a casino, or areas of a physical bank space put up neon lights and blinking signs to emulate Vegas casinos, I don’t know if we can ever drive the point home clearly enough.
There's also the thing where buying equity in a company can seem very simple because you see something like Apple where they made a cool thing and obviously their stock went up. People just have no idea about how complex the markets are.
They also don't remember the very smart people who claimed the Iphone would be quickly overtaken by Android and other cheaper alternatives (Clay Christensen predicted this a guy generally very smart on tech/business)
Hindsight always makes it seem like it was easy to pick the great companies that were OBVIOUSLY going to do well.
They don't understand how incredibly sophisticated professional investors are who dedicate their lives to it, and on average even THOSE people don't 'beat the market'.
But people should be allowed the freedom to choose to gamble. Even if it's bad for them - as long as they own the responsibility, and not create a burden on soceity for doing so.
Bit of a tangent, but: it’s absolutely possible to learn a relatively simple card-counting system and play with positive expected value in a casino. You can easily run simulations to prove this.
I think this reinforces the GPs point. It's not all that hard to learn some basic card counting but probably 99% of people who try it casually end up playing a -EV game, due to the fact that the edge is very small and requires practicing/playing with much more discipline than most people want to bother with.
> Why "going digital" in 2021 means your company is worth 100X what it was a few months ago I'll never quite understand.
Understand it or not, it happened. Going from $3 to $300 in under a year.
Just because some people stated seemingly silly reasons for their predictions doesn't mean everyone betting on it is stupid. They may be trying to encourage others, have an intuition, hope to detect the peak and quickly sell, or even not care about money and be playing it as a game. But at the end of the day, whoever makes money is not the stupid one. Today GME is $250. Plenty of them can be getting rich now.
I have a thought that understanding how the stock market works doesn't matter much. Most of the knowledge from that is already bakes into share prices and the movements are pretty much random. So you very well could win by not knowing what a short is.
Plenty of people get lucky by winning the lottery. This doesn't make lotteries a smart investment in general (and yes I'm aware of some exceptions to that).
Getting in on the GME short squeeze was smart.
More than that means you are thinking there is something other than the short squeeze going on. There doesn't seem to be much evidence for that.
Yeah reviews are a shitshow almost no matter what.
It's human nature to be predisposed to leave reviews when you have a bad experience.
Then you have those f'ing weirdos who leave reviews like "Burger was really good and all but the food I had at the French Laundry was way better! 2/5 stars!" at a local pub or something.
And then if the owner gets caught up in some shit that hits the news the reviews get brigaded by trolls who don't even live in a 500 mile radius or have any intention of ever going.
If you're truly interested in finding a good place to eat or get your oil changed or whatever there are far better methods than Yelp or google reviews.
If only 20 years ago people realized all our climate and energy problems wouldn't be solved and we should build the safest, cleanest and only technology to prevent climate change caused by energy production...