[manfredo]

Nuclear's non-intermittency is why it wind in the long run. Once intermittent sources fulfill demand during peak production hours, the actual cost of adding each usable watt goes up dramatically. If your goal is to run a primarily fossil fuel grid, supplemented by renewables that's fine. That's what Germany is doing.

But if your goal is to actually eliminate carbon emissions, you need to factor in the cost of storage. And there really no feasible plan of storing the amount of energy required at the moment.

If your goal is to actually eliminate carbon emissions, nuclear presents a much more realistic option. We keep celebrating Germany, but in reality their carbon emissions per KWh of electricity is not actually very good. It is worse than Britain. And it's ~7x worse than it's neighborhood to the west, which we tend to ignore for some reason.

[dale_glass]

Nuclear's cost is almost entirely in the infrastructure, and it's paid over a very long time period. The business plan for nuclear is to spend a decade or two paying back your loans, after which you make big $$$ because the plant costs relatively little to run.

The ideal plan for nuclear is to pump out power at 100% 24/7. You save nothing by being idle, and you want to pay off your loan as soon as possible.

All that goes to hell once cheap renewables show up, because the moment wind or solar can sell power cheaper, a rational person would buy it from renewables. Which means that if the sun is shining, you're either not selling at all, or selling much less or cheaper than you'd like to. And so your loans now get repaid much later.

At some point a bank looks at that and figures that the proposition of maybe making a profit 30 years in the future isn't that great of a deal. That's a long time, for all the bank knows, solar might be dirt cheap by then and kill nuclear for good before it gets to making a profit. Probably better to put billions to some safer use.

Politically it's not a lot better -- nuclear costs $$$, and takes a long time to build, which means that if you're the one who got the country into nuclear on a large scale you can't really expect to see a benefit within your term. Worst case it goes wrong and is an expensive boondoggle, which doesn't bode well for reelection.

Nuclear may make sense if you think "emissions are paramount, screw money". But there's not a lot of people who'd be willing or even able to risk billions in such a manner.

[sir_bearington]

Yes, nuclear hardly costs any more to run at 100% capacity than it does at 50% capacity. That's why decarbonization with renewables as a primary source doesn't make much sense.

Solar and wind are both intermittent. Wind is dependent on the weather and experiences situations with near zero production for long stretches of time. Solar is also weather dependent, and has day-night cycles on top of it.

This is fine if you're not actually looking to decarbonize a grid, just trying to opportunistically shave off carbon emissions here and there in a primarily fossil fuel grid. But if you're actually trying to eliminate fossil fuel use this is not a good approach. Theoretically we could store excess energy, but no scalable storage solution exists at the moment. That leaves nuclear power plants to serve as a dispatchable source. But as you pointed out, nuclear plants are just as cheap to run 24/7 as it does to run intermittently. So why not just build the nuclear plants and skip the renewables?

[dale_glass]

The issue as I see it is that pretty much nobody is looking at decarbonizing a grid, money be damned.

Unless your power production is run by the government, generation is done by companies looking to make a profit. Solar and wind companies don't mind in the slightest that they're screwing up the business model of nuclear. The fact that their production is intermittent isn't important to them -- it's already accounted into their business model, and nuclear's lack of ability to deal with that and grid stability is somebody else's problem.

If you think nuclear is the solution here you must be prepared to pour many billions of tax money on supporting its existence even though it's currently unprofitable. China can do that, because China's government has the long term control and lack of concern about public opinion to get such things done.

Politicians in democratic nations in general lack such a luxury. They know that they can get kicked out of power before their first plants get built, and then the successor either pulls the plug on the project entirely, or keeps whatever got built, but almost definitely nowhere near close to the full capacity needed.

You'd have a hard time skipping the renewables, because you'd essentially have to forbid them. You'd have to go there and make a law that you can't build solar even though it would produce power that's twice as cheap, or take craploads of tax money and subsidize nuclear. I suspect neither is going to look very good in the news.

[sir_bearington]

Introduce carbon taxes and all of a sudden nuclear becomes a lot more viable. Existing plans for renewables are for them to exist in a primarily fossil fuel grid, supplementing them when the conditions are right. Make it so that using fossil fuels for even 20% or 10% of electricity generation is prohibitively expensive, and people will switch to nuclear power.

Last time I checked France was a democratic nation. So was Belgium. Both of those have achieve majority nuclear power generation, and France over 70%.

The cynical reality, though, is that you're right. People would rather make a token effort on intermittent sources, while continuing to burn fossil fuels for most of their energy. The damage to the environment caused by the continued use of fossil fuels in this approach, though, will eventually take a toll. But that toll will mostly be borne by poor people in the global south, not in the countries that had the capability to build nuclear but chose to primarily use fossil fuels supplement it with intermittent sources.

[dale_glass]

"Last time I checked France was a democratic nation. So was Belgium. Both of those have achieve majority nuclear power generation, and France over 70%."

That was the past. The dynamics have changed, and renewables are much more competitive now. Nobody is building more nuclear right now. True, there's paranoia, but there's also economics.

And I'm not talking about fossil fuels either.

Here's what I expect to happen today with a carbon tax: it'll kill fossil fuels, and give a huge boost to renewables. Nuclear won't benefit nearly as much, because renewables can sell each GW/h cheaper and are much faster and easier to build. We'll get a grid full of solar panels and wind, and probably serious instability. This is because the people that build powerplants don't care about the system as a whole, but about making profit within it.

At that point you can subsidize nuclear, heavily tax renewables, or subsidize storage. My view is that the last one is the long term solution because nuclear won't outcompete renewables long term.

[sir_bearington]

> That was the past. The dynamics have changed, and renewables are much more competitive now. Nobody is building more nuclear right now.

Uh... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#/media/File:Nucl...

> Here's what I expect to happen today with a carbon tax: it'll kill fossil fuels, and give a huge boost to renewables. Nuclear won't benefit nearly as much, because renewables can sell each GW/h cheaper and are much faster and easier to build.

This is overly simplistic. Eliminating carbon emissions is not just about generating more clean energy. It's about replacing the energy that fossil fuels currently provide. It's hard to do that with intermittent sources.

> At that point you can subsidize nuclear, heavily tax renewables, or subsidize storage. My view is that the last one is the long term solution because nuclear won't outcompete renewables long term.

Perhaps, if we have a miraculous breakthrough in energy storage. But unless that happens, we'll end up building nuclear power to fulfill off-peak demand. And since nuclear power is just as cheap to run 100% of the time as it does to run part of the time it'll just make the bulk of renewables redundant.

If you have 100 GW of solar solar panels plus nuclear plants generating 100 GW for nighttime use, it's just as cheap to run the nuclear plants 24/7 and ditch the solar panels.

[belorn]

One can look at Sweden and the green parties strategy for dealing with grid instability. Government are interested in a stable grid so they pay fossil fueled power plants to operate in backup mode. That way the power plant get paid twice, once by the government and then for any power that they manage to sell.

The second part to the plan is to spend a lot of tax money expanding the power lines to nearby country in order to increase the capacity for importing energy from nearby countries coal based power plants.

As a conclusion I agree that the people that build power plants don't care about the system as a whole. The government however do care about stability and mine is perfectly fine with spending tax money on that. Politically, voters are not going to be upset that money is spent on grid stability, even if then ends up in the hands of owners of fossil fueled power plants.

[pfdietz]

Storage solutions are advancing fast enough that your argument cannot succeed. What you are saying used to be sort of plausible, but the sell by date on it passed long ago.

[manfredo]

Right, as evidenced by the extensive storage infrastructure being deployed /s.

The US has 25 GWh of storage, as compared to an hourly electricity consumption of 500 GWh. Literally less than ten minutes of storage. Almost all of it hydroelectric, which is a big infrastructure project on par with building nuclear power plants

I'm sure you're eager to talk about how thermal storage, or concret weights with pulleys, or compressed air is going to be 100x better than current solutions. But until those things move out to prototypes and I to mass production, they represent potential solutions not actual solutions. Like fusion. If the next attempt at fusion works, great! But building out infrastructure assuming it's going to work is extremely unwise.

[pfdietz]

> Right, as evidenced by the extensive storage infrastructure being deployed /s.

Invalid argument.

> The US has 25 GWh of storage, as compared to an hourly electricity consumption of 500 GWh. Literally less than ten minutes of storage. Almost all of it hydroelectric, which is a big infrastructure project on par with building nuclear power plants

Irrelevant point.

Storage was marginal in the past because there wasn't much of a business case for it. With renewables crashing in price and fossil fuels being phased out, that is changing. There are now strong market forces pushing development of storage technologies. Your insistence of carrying over the market conditions of the past into the future leads you astray.

[sir_bearington]

California has already saturated the daytime energy demand on sunny days. So does Hawaii. The market forces already exist. But people aren't building storage. Because it's not feasible, short of a decisive breakthrough in storage technology.

Maybe one of the proposed storage solutions will pan out. But building out trillions of dollars of infrastructure projects on the hope that a future breakthrough will make storage feasible is very risky. Fusion has been 10-20 years away for the past 50 years. General artificial intelligence has been 10-20 years away for the past 50 years. Between:

1. Going with a known solution, that already generates more electricity than solar and wind combined and one we have 70 years of experience working with.

2. Going with a solution contingent on a massive technological breakthrough to actually work.

When the stakes are as high as climate change, I cannot even remotely justify going with #2 over #1 even if the costs are potentially lower on paper.

[pfdietz]

> The market forces already exist.

And that is a recent thing there. The global market is still developing, and technologies don't materialize instantly. CO2 taxes are still low (or zero) just about everywhere.

But hey, I hope you are also not going to claim nuclear will be cheaper in the future, because I could reflect that argument right back at you. And I could observe that, unlike with renewables and storage, nuclear has a horribly bad historical experience curve.

> Maybe one of the proposed storage solutions will pan out. But building out trillions of dollars of infrastructure projects on the hope that a future breakthrough will make storage feasible is very risky.

It's only a $$$ risk. We absolutely know the storage is possible, we just haven't confirmed how cheap it will be. Worst case is we spend a bit more. This is fine. Investments are not guarantees; one is always gambling.

[sir_bearington]

No, it's not "worst case we spent a bit more". Total global lithium ion battery production amounts to less than one hour of storage for the United States alone. Things like pulleys and synthetic methane remain in the prototyping stage.

By this logic why not just use fusion? It's possible. We don't know which exact approach we'll use (lasers, magnets, etc.). We don't know how cheap it'll be, but hey it'll happen eventually right? No.

It's not "worst case we spend more money". It's "worse case we never solve climate change". And that's a pretty bad worst case.

We're already at the point where markets are starting to see saturation with renewables. But this unfounded aversion to nuclear power is hampering actual progress to decarbonization. The cost of waiting around and hoping for storage to become viable is not just the cost of building those storage systems, but also the continued release of fossil fuels as we wait for that to happen - and who knows when that will happen, if ever.