[Arnt]

Or, if you want: Not building twice as many (wind/anything) was a major mistake.

Nuclear power plants fail sometimes, just like the wind fails. In 2016 almost a third of the plants in France were offline at the same time, some for planned maintenance, some unplanned, and the peak prices were higher than now.

All these things are fixable by overbuilding enough. There's nothing special or magic about nuclear.

[roenxi]

> There's nothing special or magic about nuclear.

Apart from the technology, safety profile and generally being the cleanest source of energy ever discovered. And being able to stockpile enormous amounts of energy in a small heap if necessary ^^.

And if we could just convince people to accept it only causing say, half as much damage as coal it would be ridiculously cheap too. These appallingly high safety standards are expensive.

^^ EDIT Which would really help if there was some sort of large, unexpected event which disrupted the world's logistic chains for a few years. Unlike natural gas. Longer term supply rather than short term spot markets, lots of room to recover from surprises.

[aljg]

Half as much damage as coal is a pretty low bar! Natural gas also meets it, for example.

Your broader point is strong though, and there's no reason 4th-gen nuclear power plants being designed now couldn't deliver a quarter (or less) the damage of coal while still being economical.

[aeternum]

Could they really be economical though? There is potential for harm (including terrorism) that must be insured against, you also need to pay a premium for the land compared to solar/wind since few want to live nearby. The construction timelines are huge compared to solar/wind and you don't have the economies of scale that drive prices down.

Nuclear easily beats coal if we include the environmental costs but it's also up against solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal options which have seen huge efficiency gains in the last decade.

[opo]

>Half as much damage as coal is a pretty low bar! Natural gas also meets it, for example.

Natural gas has advantages over coal, but if we are talking about effects on climate change, natural gas is unfortunately comparable to using coal. The CO2 emissions from a natural gas plant are much lower than a coal plant, but it isn't clear that if you account for methane releases during production/transporting/storage that it is better for climate change than coal.

>...Back in August, a NOAA-led study measured a stunning 6% to 12% methane leakage over one of the country’s largest gas fields — which would gut the climate benefits of switching from coal to gas. We’ve known for a long time that methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2), which is released when any hydrocarbon, like natural gas, is burned. But the IPCC’s latest report, released Monday (big PDF here), reports that methane is 34 times stronger a heat-trapping gas than CO2 over a 100-year time scale, so its global-warming potential (GWP) is 34. That is a nearly 40% increase from the IPCC’s previous estimate of 25. ...The IPCC reports that, over a 20-year time frame, methane has a global warming potential of 86 compared to CO2, up from its previous estimate of 72. Given that we are approaching real, irreversible tipping points in the climate system, climate studies should, at the very least, include analyses that use this 20-year time horizon. Finally, it bears repeating that natural gas from even the best fracked wells is still a climate-destroying fossil fuel. If we are to avoid catastrophic warming, our natural gas consumption has to peak sometime in the next 10 to 15 years, according to studies by both the Center for American Progress and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

https://thinkprogress.org/more-bad-news-for-fracking-ipcc-wa...

As we use more and more natural gas, we can expect more and more methane disasters like the leak from Aliso Canyon in CA which was the largest methane leak in US history. This released over 100,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere and required 11,000 residents to be evacuated.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35659947

[ephbit]

> ... appallingly high safety standards are expensive.

Not an expert on probability/statistics ... but wouldn't lower safety standards have meant, not 1 Tschernobyl and 1 Fukushima but most probably like say 10 such events in the last 30 years?

Yeah no, something tells me that having lower than "appallingly high safety standards" isn't a deal I'd want. Not at all.

[Arnt]

Yes or no.

Arguably the accident wasn't due to lax rules, but rather to lack of observance. The rules weren't followed. If that argument is correct, then the key isn't to make the rules stricter or looser, but rather to change the rules and/or environment to eliminate violations. Thus, IMO it's not a statistics problem, but rather a matter of how to design rules and the organisations to which the rules apply.

Germany, too, failed at designing rules for nuclear power: All of the nuclear operators disposed of contaminated waste without permission and without keeping records. How much? Probably not very much (or else it wouldn't have gone on for as long as it did), but there are no records.

Germany and Japan are good at rules. If those two failed, this task can't be a simple one.

[4ggr0]

The issue for me is the trash, or rather, how we are supposed to handle the trash these plants produce.

If you really think just burrying that stuff in a mountain is good enough, then I can't really agree.

[jonnycomputer]

The safety profile of nuclear is difficult to assess in face of changing climate patterns. In general long-tail events are hard to evaluate. Think Fukushima.

[gabaix]

Building more nuclear helps de-risk wind droughts.

This isn’t specific to nuclear; building more of a different kind mitigates the risk.

[tjansen]

It's true, but when does it make sense to include plants that do not deliver reliable power?

Wind power makes a lot of sense as long as you are still using fossil fuels. Every watt generated by wind power means that you can reduce fossil fuel, and thus lower your CO2 emissions. But once you got rid of fossil fuels and you have a reliable source of power without CO2 emissions, you can get rid of the unreliable ones.

[adrianN]

Wind and solar are pretty cheap and storage keeps getting cheaper, that's why they make sense.

[jules]

Batteries are so expensive that it is unclear whether they will ever solve the large scale storage problem: yes they're getting cheaper, but they have to continue to get cheaper for a long time before they're suitable, and it's unclear whether fundamental limits will be hit before that. If battery technology improves to the extent that it becomes viable for large scale storage, then wind and solar can become our main source of energy. Until then, nuclear is the only proven solution. Betting on batteries now amounts to gambling with the planet.

[jhgb]

Batteries are not supposed to solve the large scale storage problem. They're best at solving the small scale storage problem. Recently they solved the problem of small scale storage on wheels.

> If battery technology improves to the extent that it becomes viable for large scale storage, then wind and solar can become our main source of energy.

Batteries are not the only way of storing electricity.

[craftinator]

First thought I had here was hydroelectric storage.

[pydry]

Battery backed solar/wind is cheaper than nuclear these days.

It's not been that way for long though. Economic grid scale batteries are here but still relatively new.

It makes sense to continue running old nuclear plants but not to build new ones. Much too expensive.

[sudosysgen]

Is it? Are you taking into account battery degradation from 1 cycle every day? The vast majority of battery chemistries won't last more than 3-4 years under those circumstances, and those that would are either much more expensive or experimental.

As of now storing 10kWh at 1kW costs around 1000$ from the cells alone. If you're changing them every 3 years then you have to spend 10 000$/kW over 30 years whereas nuclear is the same price per kW for a 30 year period.

If you don't take that into account then sure.

[Gibbon1]

Probably.

I'll point out using existing natural gas peaking plants to make up for temporary shortfalls of solar and wind power is also a viable stop gap.

[adrianN]

As far as I know, few people suggest (Lithium-)batteries for long term storage. Electrolysis, optionally followed by turning the Hydrogen into Methane, seems like a much more scalable solution. That works at scale today, it's just too expensive to make sense at this point. Then there are other types of batteries that might become much cheaper in the future, perhaps redox-flow batteries or something like that.

[p_l]

According to people I talked with, who did analysis for "Green hydrogen" as storage method, assuming Poland - we would need something along the line of 150% peak production, locally, before it started moving the needle at all - and I'm not sure of this wasn't in combination with nuclear (though limited by the idiotic free market on electricity).

All of that assumes that the demand doesn't go up... Which is not compatible with things like climate goals

[chess_buster]

Hydrogen, molten salt to drive ex-coal plants, redox-flow, …

[tjansen]

We are decades away from having enough storage to make wind and power a reliable power source. There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days.

China just has announced ambitious plans to install storage for 100 GWh by 2030. China's electric power generation capacity is 2200 GW (in 2020). That's not even enough to provide electricity for 5 minutes....

[ben_w]

> There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days.

Don’t mistake a manufacturing limit for a tech scaling limit. While it may take decades to get there, batteries could do that; in the mean time, intercontinental HVDC connections could substitute for some of that storage (not all the storage all at once unless mining increases, but certainly plausible over the scale of a decade or so and we would need that timescale to build the renewables themselves anyway)[0], and the batteries are in addition to existing pumped hydro, and even in the current “low wind” scenario the UK is still getting 3.8 GW (~11%) from wind[1][2] rather than getting nothing.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28474201

[1] https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

[2] https://gridwatch.co.uk/demand/percent

[throwaway894345]

Do we have the lithium/etc reserves to meet the storage needs for the entire planet? Nuclear is proven and if we claim to believe that climate change is an existential threat I don’t know why we would pin all our hopes on solar and wind and some to-be-discovered storage solution. To be clear, I’m not against solar and wind—on the contrary, I want a diverse clean energy portfolio. But wasting time emitting while we pray for a storage solution for wind/solar seems utterly foolish.

[nradov]

While intercontinental HVDC interconnects are technically feasible, no major world power would ever depend on those for essential power supplies. It's just too risky if foreign countries can cut off your electricity during a war or other crisis. Energy independence is strategically critical in a way that transcends economics.

[tjansen]

I guess a manufacturing limit is bad enough. The global battery production is expected to reach 2063 GWh/year by 2028 [0]. That wouldn't be enough to store China's electricity consumption for a single hour. The production would need an increase by several orders of magnitude. Are there enough raw materials for this? How much waste would there be, given the limited lifespan of those batteries?

What about a no-wind scenario? I don't know what wind in the UK is like, but in Germany this happens quite often. In November 2015 wind output dropped to 0.2 GW (0.5% of its 40GW power rating) [1]. Hydro doesn't help in such a scenario (<4% in Germany), nor will bio mass (<10%).

[0] https://energycentral.com/c/ec/world-battery-production

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute (German)

[adrianN]

We're also pretty far away from the kinds of renewable penetration where you actually need a lot of storage, so we have plenty of time left to build more batteries and electrolyzers.

[nradov]

Electrolysis is extremely inefficient. It's unlikely to be a practical means of grid scale energy storage any time soon.

[ephbit]

Something makes me think that storing weeks worth of electricity isn't going to happen in the near future (< 30 years).

Storing hydrogen isn't that easy/cheap either.

So I'd guess we're going to see storage of energy in the form of liquid/liquefiable hydrocarbons (synthesized from hydrogen) like methanol or propane.

[dv_dt]

By recent performance, if we build nuclear we are decades away.

[tjansen]

Even if that's true, at least we would be betting on proven technology. What makes you think that unproven technology for storage can be built faster?

[autoliteInline]

>There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days.

My bet is that the Japanese will build some huge newfangled storage facility. There'll be a big earthquake. The storage will meltdown/burn/whatever somehow. It'll cause a great big semi-permanent problem. Everyone will declare victory and shout 'at least it wasn't nuclear'.

[pfdietz]

Not really. NPPs as backup to wind would be horribly expensive. Wind droughts don't happen often; even the current price during them would not make a NPP pay off.

What would make sense is larger local stores of hydrogen, to be burned in combustion turbines during the rare wind outages.

[Manuel_D]

Are there any commercial operators of electric grid storage using hydrogen? I can only find prototype or demonstration projects.

Most of the time, people saying grid-scale storage is feasible point to technologies that exist in the prototyping phase. The reality is that we don't know whether these solutions will be feasible at scale, or if they'll hit bottlenecks or poor scalability that drives up cost when deployed at scale. Comparing a hypothetical cost of hydrogen, to actual historical cost is comparing apples to oranges.

[pfdietz]

Why should any exist yet, when natural gas has been so cheap? Tighten the screws enough to eliminate fossil fuel dispatchable sources and you'll start to see it (or something else that can solve the same problem better).

[Manuel_D]

Many places are already seeing energy surpluses. California and Hawaii are consistently reaching excess daytime energy production. If we really can store electricity in hydrogen $1/KWh, then we should be seeing hydrogen storage being built to profit off these intervals of negative energy prices. But we aren't. Is it because people fail to see this market opportunity? Or, maybe, it's because writing a white paper claiming an extremely cheap cost is not remotely the same thing as actually building an energy storage facility at said cost.

I agree, we should tighten screws to eliminate fossil fuels. But hydroelectricity is the only scalable form of grid storage we currently have, and that's limited to the right geography. Expecting some unproven technology to be a silver bullet for storage is extremely wishful thinking. We need to be honest about technologies like hydrogen, compressed air, flywheels, etc: These are experimental technologies that might operate cheaply at scale, but we have no real-world experience to back up these claims. I could just say "storage is irrelevant because fusion will deliver energy at $1/MWh" and while nobody can technically disprove it, since they can't see into the future, it's also dishonest to claim this as fact for the same reason.

[pfdietz]

Natural gas is really hard to displace here, and won't happen until it becomes and stays expensive. It may now be above that price level in Europe, but it has to stay there to enable the capital investment in large scale green hydrogen production.

[p_l]

Scaling is also hard... Turns out you need more than "trickle" overproduction to make reliable amounts of green hydrogen for energy storage.

[ephbit]

Hydrogen is relatively inconventient/difficult to handle except when transported via pipeline.

There appear to be no dense long range pipeline networks (for hydrogen) connecting multiple countries (yet).

Pipeline networks for natural gas aren't designed to safely transport pure (or high concentrations of) hydrogen, so over a certain concentration hydrogen would have to be converted into synthetic natural gas. The latter conversion appears to not yet be deployed at very large scales.

Seems to me that the reason why there is no large scale hydrogen generation yet (though there are medium-large/industrial scale projects now), is simply that until now large scale wasn't economically feasible. With hydrogen strategies and more pressure from a price on CO2 on their way we'll definitely see more of it soon.

[pfdietz]

For grid storage, hydrogen would not need to be transported at all (although the option to do so is there if it's favorable). It could be made above the storage caverns, pumped into them, then extracted and consumed there.

[FartyMcFarter]

> What would make sense is larger local stores of hydrogen, to be burned in combustion turbines during the rare wind outages.

Would this work when there's little wind for a week or more?

[pfdietz]

Absolutely. Hydrogen can be stored underground for maybe $1/kWh of storage capacity. There would also be power related costs, but those don't matter nearly as much for rare event backup.

Germany alone has the potential to store an estimated 9.6 PWh of hydrogen, enough to supply their average electric power demand for years, not weeks.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03603...

[modo_mario]

Creating hydrogen with excess power is really inefficient energy wise and also tips the scales of cost a lot.

[pfdietz]

Only a fraction of the renewable output would have to be routed through hydrogen, though. It turns out this is still cheaper than new nuclear for providing "synthetic baseload" supply, especially if one looks at projections of how much renewables should cost in the time it would take for any new nuclear plant initiated today to come online.

[dageshi]

If the energy is basically free which under certain circumstances (lots of wind) could happen, does it matter how inefficient it is?

[thrill]

The creation of the hydrogen is only a portion of the overall system cost, which may total cheaper than alternatives.

[xxpor]

We should probably prefer pumped hydro before stored h2.

[chess_buster]

Molten Salts powering the old coal plants in a closed system.

[pfdietz]

Hot sand looks even better (much higher storage temperature):

https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/07%20D...

[fundatus]

> Building more nuclear helps de-risk wind droughts.

No, not at all. Nuclear is used for base loads, not to compensate fluctuating electricity production of other sources.

[Arnt]

But if a country mitigates, e.g. by having many operators of different technologies, then consumers can hardly help noticing the price of nuclear. So the operators of nuclear plants end up having to explain ⓐ why they're expensive ⓑ that they are more reliable than the Japanese operators at Fukushima and c) why they still require public subsidy of their liability insurance.

[Chris2048]

When you say "why they're expensive" do you mean the plant itself, or the produced electricity?

In any case Fukushima is easily explained: They ignored the risk of tsunami despite two studies (and governmental bodies) warning of it. The real reason the Fukushima is so damaging, is that the Japanese are seen as generally "competent", so their mistakes/hubris are seen as reproducible anywhere i.e. "if the Japanese couldn't get it right".

[Arnt]

Either, since the income should justify the investment: One wants nuclear plant operators to have plenty of income, so as not to be tempted to save on maintenance.

I agree entirely with the hubris argument. And it's a harsh one, because if an organisation claims to be more competent than the Japanese and and safety-minded too, why can't it persuade an insurer to sell it liability insurance on normal commercial terms, at a justifiable price? It's a difficult argument to make.

[AnthonyMouse]

> if an organisation claims to be more competent than the Japanese and and safety-minded too, why can't it persuade an insurer to sell it liability insurance on normal commercial terms, at a justifiable price?

It's because nobody else buys that amount of insurance. A hundred billion dollar insurance policy has significant risks and costs to the insurer completely independent of the actual risk of a claim.

For one thing, the insurer is required to hold enough capital to pay out possible claims no matter how unlikely they are. So you're basically paying interest on that sum of money in the difference between the ordinary market rate of return and the lower return on the "safe" securities insurers are allowed to hold. That cost is completely independent of the risk of a claim; it's strictly based on the amount of insurance you want.

Then what happens if there is e.g. a major earthquake which causes a minor incident at a nuclear plant, so that 99% of the damage is caused by the earthquake but the insurer is a deep pocket and the judge is sympathetic to the earthquake victims? That's a risk an insurer has to account for, but it's not a risk you can address by improving the safety of the nuclear plant because the risk is rooted in politics.

When the risk of an incident is low enough, it's costs like that which dominate the premium for the policy. You can make the risk of a legitimate claim arbitrarily small and those costs would still be the same.

And it's an isolated demand for rigor. Nobody else is required to carry that amount of insurance. When a coal mine turns an entire town into a superfund site and kills thousands of people, they just file for bankruptcy. What would the alternatives cost if they had to carry the same insurance, or pay for their externalities?

[nradov]

That's why huge insurance policies are typically syndicated across multiple insurers with reinsurance companies taking on part of the risk.

[tjansen]

You can't compare 1/3rd of all plants being down with the volatility of wind power.

On November 3, 2015, German wind power generated only 0.2 GW. Its power rating at that time was over 40 GW. How do you want to compensate for that?

[_ph_]

By having other power sources as well. Starting with offshore wind, then of course, solar cells. Build up more storage (both biological gas and synthetic gas, water, batteries), strengthen the European networks. The chance is very good that on windless days in Germany, there will be quite a bit of wind in France. Same with solar. A 1 GW DC line to Norway was put into operation just recently. And of course, we can keep all those gas power plants in reserve for those few days per year when nothing other is sufficient. The goal should first be, not requiring them to run on a day to day basis.

[Seanambers]

Yeah.. Lets base a large amount of our energy generation capacity on a resource that require a large amount of space and has a non zero chance of not producing anything, and lets back that up with excess power generation capacity which can mitigate this and does not exhibit this flaw.

Windmills are f.king stupid for anything other than local production.

Solar, Nuclear + Gas and grid storage seems like a way better approach.

Not to mention the fact that in wintertime windmills needs to be de-iced with the same chemicals they use on airplanes in colder climates.

[wcoenen]

Wind turbines that need to deal with ice typically have an internal de-icing system, with electrical heaters[1].

The meme about de-icing with chemicals was spread by oil and gas consultant Luke Legate. The picture he shared was actually showing a helicopter using plain hot water to de-ice a wind turbine in 2015[2]. This is sometimes used as a backup de-icing method.

[1] https://www.iqpc.com/media/1001147/37957.pdf

[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/02/18/fac...

[_ph_]

It is stupid not to have windmills in the mix. In Germany they contribute more electricity than solar cells. Especially at night, in the winter. So one should have both solar and wind, the mix depending on the local conditions. In southern Germany there is more solar, in the north more wind, especially near the coast. Wind power also doesn't require much space, you can farm or grow forests below them.

[_-david-_]

>There's nothing special or magic about nuclear.

Except it can run at peak efficiency when it is cloudy and not windy. This is one of the biggest selling points with dirty energy.

[asdff]

Whenever nuclear fails you can trace it directly to poor policymaking rather than any faults with the underlying technology, unlike something like coal which is flawed from the drawing board due to pollution.

[rualca]

> Whenever nuclear fails you can trace it directly to poor policymaking rather than any faults with the underlying technology (...)

This line of argument is pointless because policymaking is not something that you can remove from the equation or even ignore the risk that it fails. It's a kin to claiming that a machine mostly fails because of human error when human interaction is mandatory and a critical part of the process.

[asdff]

It's not pointless. It goes to show that there are good policies undertaken by certain groups in regards to managing nuclear power (such as the U.S. navy that has operated reactors longer than anyone without much incident), and bad ones (like Chernobyl).

On the other hand, for these other energy sources there are serious faults with the underlying technology that policy can't do anything about. Take a coal plant. The entire mechanics of that technology rely upon taking a block of solid carbon and converting it to a gas and expelling it into the atmosphere where it lowers air quality and increases the greenhouse gas effect. There is no way to policy your way out of that inherent fault with this underlying technology where you need to add more carbon into the air in order to produce any energy.

[wffurr]

Can't overbuilding also increase prices because all those plants have capital costs that have to be paid for whether they produce or not?

[xvedejas]

The capital costs mean the plants cost more to run than they would otherwise, but this wouldn't necessarily factor into the price. There's no reason to pay more for extra energy that costs more, so adding a plant that charges even more than the market price would not be able to sell any energy: the market already provides for demand at a lower price. What might actually raise the price is plants going offline, or existing plants raising their price. These things will probably happen, but they could happen anyway regardless of whether new plants come online.

To attempt an analogy, if I put up a sign that I'm selling iPhones at $6000 each, that won't actually raise the prices of iPhones. That's because customers can already get enough iPhones from Apple, even though they complain that Apple sells them for too high a price too. My offer is just never an alternative, not until Apple raises their prices much much higher (or goes out of business).