[throwaw4ybio]

If you want nuclear to happen:

1) Disrupt the nuclear construction contracting process. Until fleet contractors like Bechtel et al are stopped from parasitizing the industry, it's going nowhete due to spiralling costs.

2) Lower the cost of reinforced concrete.

3) Close the fuel cycle.

3 is technically feasible, 2 isn't very sexy, but possible. 1 seems insurmountable.

[toomuchtodo]

The only way it works is if the power consumer owns the entire lifecycle (construction, ongoing O&M, etc) (the US Navy, for example). There is absolutely no way any commercial power purchase agreement buyer is going to spec nuclear when they can get renewables backed by storage for pennies per kwh [1], both of which have install lead times measured in months (versus a decade for nuclear).

Tesla committed to having the Hornsdale Power Reserve built in 100 days or it was free [2]. That is what nuclear is up against. Please don't argue base load; there is no need for base load, only diverse firm dispatchable generation assets [3], robust transmission, and demand response for non-essential industrial loads.

[1] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/solar-plus-storage-poised-t...

[2] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/11/28/167090...

[3] https://energypost.eu/dispelling-nuclear-baseload-myth-nothi...

[sir_bearington]

There isn't remotely enough storage available to make wind and solar feasible. To put this in perspective, the world consumes 60 TWh of electricity daily, about 2.5 TWh per hour. We have only a couple GWh of battery storage. Hydroelectric provides more, but that's harder to scale because you need the right geography.

Once solar saturates daytime demand, provisioning further solar power doesn't contribute to decarbonization. This is why nuclear is really the only known path to decarbonization. Maybe we'll figure out scalable ways to provision hundreds of terawatt hours of storage, but we might be waiting a long time.

[toomuchtodo]

https://gspp.berkeley.edu/faculty-and-impact/news/recent-new... ("The US can reach 90 percent clean electricity by 2035, dependably and without increasing consumer bills")

https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/europe-win... ("Europe has space for enough wind turbines to power the entire world, study finds")

https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/uploads/ee2523dc632c9b01df... ("Australia is the sunniest country in the world and one of the windiest. Australia’s potential for renewable energy generation is 500 times greater than current power generation capacity.")

https://www.afdb.org/en/news-and-events/why-africa-is-the-ne... ("Africa has an almost unlimited potential of solar capacity (10 TW), abundant hydro (350 GW), wind (110 GW), and geothermal energy sources (15 GW). The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) estimates that renewable energy capacity in Africa could reach 310 GW by 2030; which would put the continent at the forefront of renewable energy generation globally.")

[sir_bearington]

Neither of these articles offers a detailed plan on how this storage will be provisioned. The second doesn't even mention storage at all, only that Europe has enough wind power to power the whole world. Sure, but that's not very useful if that power isn't delivered when you need it.

[7952]

Easy. Create a market that makes it profitable to build storage and encourages price reduction.

[sir_bearington]

I like framing the problem in this term. Our ultimate goal is decarbonization: $1 million per gram of C02 emitted unless equivalent mass is sequestered.

Do we have a realistic plan to built a wind and solar grid under that market? I don't think so, wind and solar are useful for taking a bite out of natural gas but not actually serving as the backbone of an electrical grid. The amount of storage necessary to decarbonize with wind and solar is not feasible, and essentially amounts to betting on some future invention of a cheap mass energy storage device that works everywhere.

By comparison we have demonstrable examples of countries going 80+% nuclear, and the US is already at 20% nuclear power generation. Building four nuclear plants for each existing plant is a lot more achievable of a goal than first building a massive amount of solar and wind, and building extensive HVDC transmission, and building tens of Terawatt hours worth of storage. The first step in the latter is cheaper than building nuclear, it's the other two steps that are wildly expensive if they're even possible. If we actually enacted a binding rule of zero emissions by 2050 people would start building nuclear power plants.

[andromeduck]

yeah and we'll have fusion in 10 years

[Hammershaft]

We have methane seeping through thawing permafrost today. We can't delay decarbonizing our energy mix for technologies we haven't even invented yet, let alone mass produced.

[andromeduck]

Yes that is the point, it's basic risk management. Betting the farm on future breakthroughs if you consider climate change to be an existential threat is being on fire and waiting for the fire department because you don't wan't to get your soiled jumping to a pond nearby.

Nuclear is by far the best technology we have today so we should go with it until we have better options in our hand.

[toomuchtodo]

Cost effective fission and fusion are always 10 years away.

[andromeduck]

just like cost effective and environmentally advantageous grid scale batteries at the scales required to smooth day and week scale intermittency

[PoignardAzur]

That's the joke.

[bob29]

Actual experts have studied this. Full decarbonization by 2050 with <2% GPD spending per year. No new, and phasing out existing nuclear. Overprovision renewables and produce carbon neutral synthetic fuels with excess power production. Nuclear will never power chainsaws which many across the world depend on.

https://www.evolved.energy/post/2016/02/16/deep-decarbonizat...

[nmfisher]

This is a terrible article. It's basically a single chart showing (what I can only assume) projected energy demand in the USA for a 5-day period in March, and some dispatch figures between various energy sources, and a couple of random generic infographics. Zero explanation of:

- where those demand projections came from

- the feasibility of building capacity for the projected dispatch

- the cost of doing so

I'm not saying that the premise/conclusion is wrong, just that this article in particular adds nothing to the discussion. I can only hope that the linked reports actually address those questions.

[bob29]

The associated report does have more details whether or not you agree with them. The article is more of a summary.

re: demand projections "the carbon neutral and carbon negative scenarios were required to meet the same demand for energy services, for daily life and industrial production as the business as usual reference case from the EIA's Annual Energy Outlook and used its assumptions for population, for GDP and industrial production. So that's very much nothing changes in the world except for the energy system... kind of a view. And the modeling only allows technologies that are commercial today or that have been demonstrated at large pilot scale today. So in effect, I think that really sets a pretty high bar because in reality, I would expect a number of those things to change over the next 30 years. For example, I would expect probably lower population growth than EIA projects and considerably lower demand for energy services and industrial production as a result of a slowing economy. And I would have said that before we have the added effects of the pandemic. " re:feasibility "I think at it's core backcasting is about trying to understand what's entailed in the physical transformation. So the legacy of this work is in that discussion about feeling like that's the analysis that's needed. Not necessarily understanding what does a carbon tax do on the margin or what to other approaches do sort of in the short term and in the macroeconomic system. But really understanding how many more widgets do we need and how quickly do they need to be deployed if you don't want to do early retirement. So that context of the questions we're trying to answer really sets up the insights that come from backcasting. So one of the things we think a lot about is stock turnover. So sort of one of our modeling principles is that we don't do early retirement of any resources except for potentially an electricity supply. So for things like light-duty vehicles or industrial boilers, we really need to understand how long do those resources typically stay online? And that means if it's a 15-year turnover rate for something like a furnace or maybe it's a 30-year turnover rate for something like an industrial boiler."

re:cost "And we find that that case at a net cost of 0.4 percent of GDP in 2050 is able to achieve carbon neutrality. So that 0.4 percent of GDP in 2050 over the reference case, it really represents some major shifts in terms of monetary flows. So we're spending $950 billion on efficiency, new supply for low carbon solutions, and we're saving $800 billion on fossil fuels that are no longer being burned. So our analysis really only looks at the energy costs for the total system for that transition. We're not accounting for things like co-benefits or economic benefits from the avoided damage of climate change or other potential impacts, as well as potential health or environmental benefits. That total energy spending declines from about five percent of GDP for the energy system today to around four percent in 2050. " -quotes from podcast linked in first article

https://www.unsdsn.org/Zero-Carbon-Action-Plan

https://irp-cdn.multiscreensite.com/6f2c9f57/files/uploaded/...

[marcosdumay]

What isn't surprising, because up to now, grid storage was only profitable in very few niche cases, and for a very short time. Besides, there has been no government program to invest on those.

So you are saying that there is some business that has always been certain to lose money, and had never had government help, and nobody ever invested on it. And you are using this fact to suggest that in the near future, when that business will become needed and profitable, nobody will invest on it either... what isn't a conclusion one can make.

[jamez1]

Hornsdale power reserve derives most of it's revenue from selling ancillary services, it does not provide energy. Hornsdale's success is not foreshadowing a battery revolution unfortunately.

The reason nuclear costs so much is because we've stopped building plants. There's no industry anymore, let alone economies of scale. It's a fallacious argument to say it costs too much. If we went all in on nuclear to tackle climate change the costs would quickly collapse. After all, they were built in the 70s and dramatically decarbonized the industry at the time.

[toomuchtodo]

I do not agree.

For example, EnergyAustralia just announced that they're pulling forward the retirement of Yallourn coal powered station by four years [1], and building a 350MW utility scale energy system to absorb and discharge renewable power to offset the coal plant being retired:

"Under the agreement, EnergyAustralia will retire Yallourn in mid-2028 and build new storage capacity through a 350 MW, four-hour, utility-scale battery project that will be completed by 2026. This ensures energy storage is built to firm increased renewable energy in Victoria, before Yallourn exits the system.

EnergyAustralia’s goal is to be carbon neutral by 2050. Yallourn’s retirement will reduce the company’s emissions profile by 60 per cent, accelerating the pathway towards achieving this ambition."

As we speak (mid day local Victoria time), renewables are providing 48% of total electrical demand in Victoria [2].

[1] https://www.energyaustralia.com.au/about-us/energy-generatio...

[2] https://opennem.org.au/energy/vic1/?range=1d&interval=30m

[toomuchtodo]

Also: https://reneweconomy.com.au/australias-big-fossil-fuel-gener... ("Australia’s big fossil fuel generators are being replaced by big batteries")

"But what is clear is that there is a massive shift happening here. Coal is on the way out, as is “baseload” gas, and wind and solar and storage facilities, particularly battery storage, are on the way in. And many of the biggest batteries are being planned at the sites of coal and gas generators already closed or expected to close in coming years or decades."

"The sizes it is mooting are up to 500MW (and maybe two hours storage) for Liddell, 250MW and four hours storage at Torrens (1,000MWh), and 200MW and four hours storage (800MWh) at Loy Yang A. The final call on storage duration will be determined by the sort of market opportunities it sees for the batteries in the different states – longer for storing excess wind and solar, shorter for grid security services."

[andromeduck]

1. Renewables are only pennies per KWh because their intermittency, and the carbon costs backups required due to it, isn't being priced in.

2. Look at Texas's recent "hiccup" around Feb 15 and compare it to year before. Wind dropped to <10% reliable capacity and it was almost all picked up by gas/coal. The drop wind/solar production starts a week before the cold snap that disrupted everything else.

https://www.eia.gov/beta/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/e...

https://www.wsj.com./articles/texas-spins-into-the-wind-1161...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-political-making-of-a-texas...

[PaulHoule]

No it is the steam turbine (& associated heat exchangers) that makes the economics of the lwr impossible. It is what made the economics of the old-school coal burning power plants impossible in most places compared to the methane fueled gas turbine not to mention wind and other renewables.

The power density of a gas turbine is so much greater than that of a steam turbine that a closed-cycle gas turbine powerset for a sodium cooled fast reactor would fit in the employee break room of the turbine hall of an lwr. Running at higher temperatures with liquid metal, molten salt, or gas-cooled reactors poses many practical problems, but means building a machine that processes more energy with less mass thus drastically lower capital cost.

[pfdietz]

The advantage of combustion turbines is that there is much less transfer of heat across fluid/solid interfaces. In a simple cycle combustion turbine, no such transfer is needed. The heat is generated by combustion in the working fluid, which carries away the waste heat after expansion. Combined cycle does add a steam bottoming cycle that needs heat exchangers (before and after) and cooling towers, but most of the power is still coming from the combustion turbine, so the steam part is much smaller than in a pure steam plant of the same rated power.

[DennisP]

Also, a big reason LWRs use so much reinforced concrete is that they have huge containment domes. The reason they're so big is that the water is pressurized at around 100 atmospheres, and if there's a pipe break it'll flash into steam at a thousand times the volume. You need plenty of space for the steam to expand inside containment.

A molten salt reactor is at atmospheric pressure and has nothing to cause a chemical explosion. You still need containment, but you don't need to contain a large empty space.

[PaulHoule]

Yep.

A supercritical CO2 turbine runs at 1000+ psi but if the pipes broke and the CO2 sprayed out into that salt, you might get an overpressure around 10 psi in a not-too-big confinement because the volume of working fluid is tiny.

[pfdietz]

You would not even run the CO2 plumbing into the containment building. There would be a secondary salt loop leaving that building.

[andromeduck]

By gas turbines do you mean scCO2 tech?

[PaulHoule]

That is one kind, yes.

[paganel]

> Lower the cost of reinforced concrete.

Is this doable? What's keeping it up? Is it anything artificial, like a business cartel or something similar? If not, lowering the price would practically mean subsidies.

[throwaw4ybio]

Cost of materials (e.g. sand) are going up, plus the "nuclear grade" upcharge. Add a 2x to 4x multiplier for "accidents" that require demolition and rework. :)

[jlnthws]

What about Terrapower and Nuscale? They are building new type of reactors, much smaller and allegedly safer/cleaner.

[thinkcontext]

Nuscale is targeting the end of the decade for its first project to come online. Terrapower does not have a licensed design yet, so it will be longer.

[AstralStorm]

Good developments, but we cannot wait for them. Even the coal grids are falling apart now, and building gas to replace them is not sane.

On the other hand, once they're available, switching to them is perfectly fine, and the 50+ lifetime of LWRs exists for a reason. Maybe we will even have workable fusion by then.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

It appears the NuScale pilot project is floundering. They announced cost raising about 50% and about a 3 year delay. Several of the utility customers have backed out of the project as a result, putting it on iffy grounds.