[lispm]

I find it puzzling that proponents of nuclear technology make various claims without any calculations to back that up.

'a vital tool agains global warming'? What does that mean in numbers? How many nuclear power plants of what types for what amount of effort would be built in what timeframe for to make any sizeable contribution? How would it work?

A single reactor in the west is >10bn $ and takes a decade or more to build, while not being able to be financed on the market (see the UK).

[pytester]

Yep, Hinkley point is ~£95 per MWh while renewables are ~£45. It makes no sense to complain about how polluting coal plants are in relation to nuclear. It isn't the main source of competition.

Germany has been taking both nuclear and coal offline and renewables have been plugging the gap for both for some years now and will likely continue to do so.

It boggles my mind that the nuclear industry itself demands that all disaster cleanup costs over $300 million be shouldered by the government yet it is trying to project an image of how it is the "safe" option. If they don't have enough faith in their own safety to raise the cap why should we?

[Gondolin]

Germany has been taking coal offline after taking nuclear offline; and are replacing coal by gas (so they depend even more on Russia) instead of replacing it by nuclear or renewable.

They produce 3x the CO2 of France, despite their commitment against global warming.

In an ideal world, renewable would replace everything. We are not yet in this ideal world, and we don't know the time frame to get to it (there are huge technological challenges, while the challenge for nuclear reactor are solved since 50 years. Of course they are still RD to be done on the nuclear side too, like molten salt reactors).

Given the economic and human cost of global warming, investing into nuclear too alongside renewable (rather than instead) seems the safer bet. Again, I am not saying that nuclear is a miracle energy that will solve all our problem (fusion would be). Nuclear energy does have a lot of problems. But these problems are trivial which respect to global warming, and we should solve global warming first (which again will involve even more electricity than we produce right now).

Focusing on closing nuclear first (like Germany did!) is like worrying about a leak under the sink while the whole house is on fire.

[pytester]

It certainly doesn't look like natural gas usage is ramping up:

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...

>They produce 3x the CO2 of France, despite their commitment against global warming.

That's because France started replacing fossil fuels with nuclear in the 80s. That was the only sensible approach to reducing CO2 in the 80s. This isn't the 80s though.

>In an ideal world, renewable would replace everything. We are not yet in this ideal world

I mean, it's half the cost of nuclear and it doesn't include the risks (however small) of catastrophe.

In an ideal world we could swap out fossil fuels for something clean overnight - obviously it takes about 30 years. The question isn't "what can we replace fossil fuels with overnight", it's "what can take over from fossil fuels?"

[Gondolin]

If I count lignite + coal + natural gas + mineral oil, it goes from 76.9GW in 2010 to 79.3GW in 2019. So it did not go down either. That's because Germany needs a back up energy source for now. It could have gone down by 10GW had Germany closed coal rather than nuclear first.

[pytester]

Yes, maybe they should have closed coal rather than nuclear first between 2010 and 2014.

However, from this point onward it makes little difference. It makes little economic sense to build new nuclear plants given that they are more expensive and no sense to build coal. Renewables are more than capable of taking over as old nuclear and coal plants are phased out.

The issue now is how fast to phase out rickety old nuclear plants and rickety old coal plants.

[lispm]

What does GW measure in this context? Electricity production is usually measured in TWh.

[Gondolin]

This is the production capacity (you are right it is not a good measure), but I was replying based on the graphic.

If I look at wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany Germany went from 60% fossil, 23% nuclear, 17% renewable to 49%/13%/38% respectively.

How much further down do you expect fossil to go in ten years? I am pretty sure that by investing both on nuclear and renewable germany could have been at close to 0% right now or in a few years.

[ftr45]

>I mean, it's half the cost of nuclear

it's not https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2015/7057-proj-costs-elect...

[pfdietz]

Your report is from 2015. Given how rapidly PV costs have continued to decline (and how major nuclear efforts collapsed with cost explosions since then), that's useless.

[ftr45]

> Your report is from 2015

so ?

>Given how rapidly PV costs have continued to decline (and how major nuclear efforts collapsed with cost explosions since then), that's useless.

you say so, but the one with evidence is me not you

[lispm]

> Germany has been taking coal offline after taking nuclear offline; and are replacing coal by gas (so they depend even more on Russia) instead of replacing it by nuclear or renewable

Germany's Energiewende is a many decade long plan with going beyond 80+ renewable energy for electricity in 2050.

The Energiewende is not just about CO2 reductions, it is about making renewable energy viable in an industrialized country. This has impact for all of us. Not just in Germany.

If the US had a forward looking government and population, we would much further along the way. The energy consumption in the US is twice as high per capita as in Germany and there is no credible energy policy beyond fracking gas. The current US president is a coal lover and he was voted for that into his office. Imagine the amount of research money and infrastructure money the US COULD invest into a new energy systems - instead it wastes money on wars, consumption and trillion dollar deficits.

> investing into nuclear too alongside renewable (rather than instead) seems the safer bet

That's why it has to go and somebody has to invest to make that viable. Germany is doing exactly that.

> Focusing on closing nuclear first (like Germany did!)

Germany did focus on renewable energy and the most incompatible industry had to go first.

Renewable energy is not about nuclear and renewable side by side - this won't work.

Nuclear is a huge state owned monopolistic system. Renewable is market oriented, decentralized, non-monopolistic. The break-up of the old system was inevitable to jump-start the new energy system.

It's a complete paradigm shift like going from Mainframe computing to a distributed Internet.

[Gondolin]

Germany's goal is laudable, but even if it manages to go full renewable by 2050 that's still 40 years of green house gas emissions it could have avoided had it gone both nuclear and renewable.

Nuclear can be made smaller (molten salt reactor, but I do admit that there are huge challenges for that too), and more flexible. Germany's plant were not as flexible as France's, but France's can be quite flexible: for those of you who can read French <https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1102620969808658432.html> a variation of 10GW of nuclear production in a few hours.

[lispm]

> molten salt reactor

will have zero impact in the next three decades. There is no market offering and no buyer.

No one is investing in yet another fuel cycle and nuclear technology. There are no reactors of scale and there is no industry surrounding it.

> Germany's plant were not as flexible as France's

Germany had a few flexible nuclear plants. But all old.

> a variation of 10GW of nuclear production in a few hours.

The result is that France has invested very little in renewable energy in the last decades and created a very inefficient and state owned energy system.

France's centralized nuclear state owned energy system and distributed multi-producer/owner renewable energy are largely incompatible systems. Proof: the lack of investments into renewable in the last decades in France.

The main question is this: where are CURRENT investments going. Not nuclear, but renewable. This future had been made possible by investments like the German Energiewende, while other countries did invest in mostly nothing. They even failed to bring nuclear forward (-> US). The US sits on a bunch of outdated reactors and not much idea how to replace them economically with newer and better ones.

[pfdietz]

The big trend in the US was the switch to natural gas (a trend now ended by the rise of renewables and soon storage.)

Natural gas had the big advantage of being burned in combustion turbines, which are cheaper than other thermal cycles. Heat exchangers are costly, but a simple cycle turbine doesn't need any (if it doesn't have a regenerator).

The biggest nuclear operator here (Exelon) is shit talking new nuclear, putting their investment into CO2 capture, renewables, and storage.

[ElBarto]

Calculate how many wind generators you need to guarantee the same production as Hinkley point and you'll see that it is not really realistic.

Then, take into account the goal of making of vehicles electric in the next 20 years.

There is no viable alternative to nuclear as of today even if renewables should of course be pushed as much as possible.

Germany is emitting heavily because most of its electricity comes from fossil fuel and it decided to kill nuclear power of purely ideological reasons. (wood fired plants are counted as renewables in the EU, by the way)

The absolute priority should be to get rid of emissions, i.e. fossil fuels. Germany decided to get rid of nuclear energy first.

They are not a good example to follow.

[lispm]

> Germany is emitting heavily because most of its electricity comes from fossil fuel and it decided to kill nuclear power of purely ideological reasons

It does because it is a relatively industrialized country. CO2 emissions fell last year by 4.5%.

These are actual numbers for electricity production in Germany: from 2017 to 2018:

5.6% more wind electricity, 6.3% more solar electricity.

2.7% less coal/lignite, 6% less hard coal, 9% less gas.

The share of renewable energy of electricity production is 40%.

In 2030 it is projected to be at around 65%.

This is going to be a revolution. We now have working days in 2019 where >60% of the electricity are coming from renewables. There was a week this year with 64.8% renewable energy for electricity, with wind providing 48.4%. Two decades ago this was thought to be impossible.

[ElBarto]

> It does because it is a relatively industrialized country.

No, it does because its electricity comes from fossil fuels.

You are completely avoiding the point of my comment. Germany could have much, much lower emissions with nuclear but it has decided to continue emitting for political reasons, while trying to claim that they are 'green'...

[lispm]

We could also be much much less habitated with one Fukushima or Chernobyl scale event.

[ElBarto]

We know how to make nuclear power safe. Nuclear power is safe.

It's not helpful to try to kill the discussion by stroking irrational fears.

[pytester]

>Calculate how many wind generators you need to guarantee the same production as Hinkley point

Hinkley Point = 3200 MW Average wind turbine generates = 3 MW

That's about 1,100 wind turbines at current tech. GE is working on a 12 MW wind turbine - it would take 270 of them would replace Hinkley point.

[joss82]

3MW is the peak power when the wind is blowing constantly at the maximum speed the wind turbine was designed to operate (and not over, at which point the turbine enters safe mode and stops to prevent damage).

Load factors for wind turbines are rarely over 40%. Nuclear's is 80%. So you'd need 2200 turbines to replace one Hinkley point. And all the gas power plants to make the energy when the wind is not blowing...

[pytester]

https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/offshore-wind...

Quite right, my mistake.

GE's new turbine has a 63% capacity apparently. So, 428 of them are needed, apparently.

Either way, I don't see what is so intrinsically unrealistic about setting up 500 of these things offshore as compared to a hinkley point.

Gansu Wind farm in China is 8,000MW - already 2.5x onen Hinkley.

[nikdaheratik]

You seem to be leaving out the fact that most nuclear plants have a fair amount of downtime as well in order to refuel. While I don't have UK statistics, in the US it's typically 30-40 days per year when they don't run (so 10% of the time or more). So, you would need more than one source to make up for the nuclear plant's downtime just as you would to make up for areas offshore where the wind isn't blowing at top speed.

[logifail]

> Nuclear's is 80%

Why is that?

I'm sure we're all broadly in favour of free markets. Do electricity consumers buy nuclear because it's good value?[0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c...

[joss82]

Because the nuclear reaction is not dependant on the wind blowing to produce energy.

It's not 100% because you need to do maintenance at times.

[lispm]

Germany has 30000+ wind turbines.

[ElBarto]

> An average onshore wind turbine with a capacity of 2.5–3 MW can produce more than 6 million kWh in a year

(Source: http://www.ewea.org/wind-energy-basics/faq/)

That's an actual average of 685 kW, so 4,700 turbines for Hinkley Point. But that's still the _average_ production. If, or rather when, there's no wind during a high demand period you get a nice blackout.

Also:

> So a 2-megawatt wind turbine would require a total area of about half a square kilometer

(Source: https://sciencing.com/much-land-needed-wind-turbines-1230463...

So for those 4,700 turbines you need more than 2,350 km^2, so the whole of Dorset covered and as said, you'd still need a backup.

[ftr45]

>Average wind turbine generates = 3 MW

it doesn't work like that , capacity factor of wind is almost half of the capacity factor of nuclear

[yostrovs]

... when the wind blows.

[pytester]

Yep, although:

* The wind is always blowing somewhere.

* At current prices it makes sense just to overproduce and figure out ways to time shift demand (e.g. start using electric storage heaters again)

[throw082]

Regarding your comment on wood fired plants: To me it seems that you imply that that is not renewable, which I do not understand. If you regrow the trees that you've burned (cleanly) down then your net impact will be zero, right?

[ftr45]

nuclear is the safest and cheapest option https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2015/7057-proj-costs-elect...

https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2015/7057-proj-costs-elect...

[pfdietz]

Maybe you should try living in 2019, rather than 2012 or 2015.

[ftr45]

maybe 4 years aren't so relevant,maybe you should bring proof's of what you say

[pfdietz]

Solar costs have fallen very rapidly. Four years is forever for this subject. You should acquaint yourself with the basics of the situation.

[ftr45]

>Solar costs have fallen very rapidly.

proof? beacuse using solar and wind bring a rise in the cost of energy https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/05...

[theshrike79]

Building new nuclear is slow and expensive because we stopped doing it for a looong time.

Way too many power plants are from the 80's and before. Maybe they've had a few upgrades, but they're mostly at the end of their lifespan or even over their recommended life.

[lispm]

Check the fate of the EPR projects.

Just replacing eol reactors in the west will be hard.

[Amygaz]

There isn’t a single line in OP’s post that isn’t wrong. He gets the costs wrong, he gets the deployment wrong, he gets efficiencies wrong, he get political stories wrong. If a post is not going to get downvoted, HN should at least have a way to label it as incorrect.

[dv_dt]

A tell is the comparison is always vs coal instead of natural gas or renewables ...

[vlehto]

http://withouthotair.com/

"A vital tool agains global warming" means that it's our only possibility. It's not about cost, it's about what is physically possible.

[aurelwu]

It's always about cost, if it wasn't about cost we could just build so much PV/Wind + Power to Gas/Liquid Facilities as we need and be done with it. And building new nuclear is way more expensive than projected in your link, (No blame to the authors, 10 years ago they couldn't know that those numbers are not realistic) while Wind/PV are still becoming cheaper every year)

they assume ~1,3 Billion per 1 GW nuclear capacity[0], but right now it looks like 3-5 Billion per 1 GW is more whats happening. [0] http://withouthotair.com/c28/page_216.shtml [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...

[vlehto]

It's not about cost, because there is not enough wind, solar, tidal and geothermal energy combined on the British isles to satisfy power consumption.

If you take single fuck up, that's been shown in court to be fuck up and then deduct from there that nuclear power is all over as expensive Olkiluoto 3, then umm.

Do you also smoke because your granny smoked and lived to her nineties?

[kuzehanka]

> It's always about cost

As the direness of the climate situation becomes more and more urgent, cost becomes irrelevant.

During times of emergency and total war, dollars don't mean anything. If you have the manpower and the raw resources to do something, it gets done.

Ignoring the politics and economics of energy production, from a physics standpoint nuclear is a high outlier in terms of energy density per resource spent or per unit climate change impact, and that fact will increasingly override dollar costs or public perception as the the climate gets increasingly hostile.

Until the crisis becomes apparent, I am sure nuclear will continue to be a mostly ignored option across europe and the west while political forces dominate the issue. China on the other hand isn't bothered by public sentiment[1]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/china-nuclearpower/china-lik...

[nikdaheratik]

That isn't true about war and it certainly isn't true about public utilities. People went to jail all the time for overcharging the government during times of war. Money is a way to measure value and it always matters.

As far as public utilities go, the problem is that people who give them money expect a small but static return on investment. For almost all the 20th century they were a mostly safe place to keep money. That was part of the reason why Enron was one of the few companies where the white collar criminals were actually punished.

One of the major problems is that the people running them don't know how to manage projects that are more risky and the people doing the investing don't know how to account for the uncertainty around fossil fuels, versus intermittent renewables, versus huge nuclear projects. The message from the politicians is always "your money in these projects is safe", and they've made sure to keep that promise even if they've put a different spin on it because the underlying shockwaves would be as bad as government bonds going bad.

[lispm]

just claiming that without any numbers and without scenarios to back it up will convince no one.

You'll need to answer real practical questions like the UK currently faces: who will build the proposed reactors and who will pay how much for it. It's not like this is an easy question, just check the news the UK from the past few years, with Hitachi and Toshiba giving up.

France's state owned nuclear industry builds another plant in the UK - with a proposed cost of 20bn pounds... The decision for this reactor took almost ten years.

[aurelwu]

the energy density would be a factor if we had any actual space issues. But the area needed for solar and wind is not what is the problem. I agree with you that it is an emergency where not enough action is taken, but even then why not go for 100% Renewables (with Battery, Power-To-Gas, Power-To-Liquid etc. as storage) when that is cheaper than nuclear.

[kuzehanka]

Three reasons.

1: It's not actually cheaper than nuclear. The majority of the cost associated with nuclear is regulatory compliance and political rather than practical in nature (see: China). Discounting this cost makes nuclear the dominant option. Factoring for lifecycle costs pushes it much further ahead. Fun fact: there is currently no way to recycle photovoltaics whose useful lifespan is 20 years.

2: Use of landmass. Deploying wind or solar consumes landmass which must be cleared of flora/fauna. The landmass required to power a nation via these means is not at all negligible. This is contrary to managing climate change for obvious reasons.

Geothermal power stands as an exception here and should absolutely be deployed over nuclear where permissible.

3: Excess capacity. The climate debate is converging on the fact that we are past the point of no return and we need to actively sequester carbon out of the atmosphere to get back to a healthy scenario. Ignoring the specifics, this basically means that we need to 'un-spend' all the energy that we have consumed over the last 50 years via fossil fuels. While still meeting the growing energy demands of civilisaion. We need to be producing a huge excess of energy for this strategy to be viable.

Renewables are nice, but pragmatically they are not nearly enough to dig us out of the hole where we have found ourselves.

[pfdietz]

| The majority of the cost associated with nuclear is regulatory compliance and political rather than practical in nature (see: China).

An engineer in Shanghai costs $20K/year. You can't point to the cost of nuclear in China and pretend it will reflect the cost in the west.

[lispm]

> is regulatory compliance and political rather than practical in nature (see: China)

Any opposition to the the energy policy in China will see themselves in a labor camp. That's a cheap way to deal with it.

If you think that nuclear is cheaper in China than in the West, then part of the reason is that it has other hidden costs.

[lispm]

repeated appeals were not what I was looking for. where are the numbers which describe the the contribution of nuclear power to control global warming? How many? What timeframe? Costs? Who builds them? Which models? Where do we build them? What effects does it have when? What are possible scenarios?

If nuclear proponents want to be taken serious, they need to answer those kinds of questions. Currently nuclear is stagnating on a global scale.

[vlehto]

If you take climate change stuff seriously, then the answers are these:

>How many?

As many as you can build. You run out of engineers and carpenters before you make too many reactors in time.

>What timeframe?

Now.

>Costs?

Doesn't matter that much. Easily cheaper than climate change.

>Who builds them?

Whoever can.

>Which models?

Hardly matters, any model is safer than burning coal.

>Where do we build them?

Doesn't matter. Any location is safer than burning coal.

>What effects does it have when?

Hope that we might have climate change to stop below 3 degrees.

[lispm]

Just like I thought. You have no idea how to do it, what it is going to cost and what impact it will have.

This will convince nobody.

[vlehto]

Are you doubting nuclear or are you doubting climate change?

[jason0597]

I'm a bit on the pro-nuclear side, but if you met a banker and asked him for a couple of billion upfront to build a nuclear plant, and said those things, he'd reject you outright.

[mch82]

Two important questions to ask are:

- Will you volunteer to live by the nuclear plant or waste storage facilities?

- Will you work at or advise your friends & family to work there?

[orbifold]

People have done these calculations. They come out in favor of nuclear in terms of area efficiency and price per kilowatt hour. It is just that politically it is a hard sell in a lot of countries.

[pfdietz]

And in the real world, instead of the calculations, nuclear is far behind in price per kWh. Unfortunately for nuclear, the power has to be generated in the real world, not on powerpoint slides.