[xroche]

> Because nuclear plants are expensive, and they take a long time to build, financing their construction can also be a significant fraction of their cost, typically around 15-20% of the cost of the plant. For plants that have severe construction delays and/or have high financing costs (such as the Vogtle 3 and 4 plants in Georgia), this can be 50% of the cost or more.

This is why nuclear power plants should be state-sponsored projects. States typically have loans at 0% rate, or even negative interests.

[mellavora]

Huh. I'd argue that they should be state-sponsored because that is what the state is for-- investing in long-term infrastructure where the value is widely diffused and thus hard to capture via market mechanisms, i.e. investments which are foundational to the more focused investments which business is so well suited to maximize.

similar to things like interstate highways or internets or public schooling. I'd add "healthcare" to the list, but some countries haven't realized this yet.

[joe_the_user]

Indeed, US large-construction has reached a point of fundamental/terminal corruption through the process of private contracting and especially through the bid-based system.

You can see this with the disastrous failure of public transit construction and planning in the country and if nuclear became an option, it seems very likely that the same corrupt mouths that eat up transit spend would also eat nuclear spending. Something for nuclear proponents to consider.

[belorn]

One of the largest problem is the concept of cost-plus contracts, where the construction doesn't have a fixed cost from the beginning. Government could in theory avoid this problem by doing the design first and then have companies bid on the construction without a cost-plus contract. This assumes that the regulations remain constant from start to finish, as well as the contractual obligations.

[this_user]

> This is why nuclear power plants should be state-sponsored projects. States typically have loans at 0% rate, or even negative interests.

Not anymore with inflation at around 8% in many western countries. And even so, construction and operation still remain expensive. France's EDL is basically bankrupt if it were not for the state backstopping them. However you want to slice it, nuclear power is not economically viable, and looks even worse compared to the rapidly decreasing costs of renewable sources of energy.

So why waste more money on an obsolete technology rather than use it for solving the remaining issues with renewables like energy storage? Invest that money in battery technology and everything that comes with that. That approach will do a lot more good in the long run than trying to keep the nuclear industry on life support even though it has failed for half a century to deliver on its promises.

[outworlder]

> So why waste more money on an obsolete technology

It is not obsolete. At all. You can argue that some reactor designs should not be used and I would agree. But fission is the only answer we currently have for baseline power that doesn't involve burning things. It will become obsolete if we can ever make fusion work.

We should be deploying more reactors. There are small reactors (shipping container-sized) that could be used to power small towns and are pretty safe. Good luck getting one approved and installed in your neighborhood. It's not the tech that's being held back, it's people.

Look, I love batteries, I drive EVs since 2015. But if we want to avoid the worst effects of climate change, we need to provide cheap and reliable baseline power 24/7. There's not enough time to do so with batteries alone.

[derriz]

The electricity from small modular reactors is far more expensive than that from large reactors - about twice as expensive by some estimates[1]. They also produce more waste per MWh generated.

The industry has been pushing in the opposite direction with larger reactors like the EPR[2] to reduce costs.

When measured by LCOE, a MWh from a new conventionally sized nuclear plant is 4 to 7 times as expensive as a MWh from solar PV, then SMR are simply out of the question from a cost point of view.

[1] https://publications.csiro.au/publications/publication/PIcsi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)

[trashtester]

Solar is great in deserts, where the sun always shines and were the main use of electricity is air conditioning during the hottest parts of the day.

Solar is near-useless in colder areas, where you want to use the power for heating in the winter.

If you include the storage + grid expansion needed to compensate for the intermittent nature of most renewables (especially if you don't want to rely on fossil fuels when the wind is not blowing), the LCOE of many of them will be many times higher than just the production cost.

Meanwhile, Korea claims to be able to construct Nuclear capacity at prices down to $0.03/kwh with their APR1400 reactors:

https://www.kns.org/files/pre_paper/34/15A-435%EC%9D%B4%EA%B...

That's at least an order of magnitude lower than the cost of renewables when constant output is required.

[Gwypaas]

Awesome then that on-shore wind is even cheaper than solar, and exists at night. Then for some more, still less than 1/3 to 1/4 of nuclear you get off-shore wind with higher capacity factors.

[trashtester]

When the wind is not blowing, the cost of wind per kwh is infinite.

[freemint]

> Solar is near-useless in colder areas, where you want to use the power for heating in the winter.

Heating is super awesome with renewables. As you can store heat in an well isolated home. Yes you need capacity for that but heat pumps well a lot with that.

[trashtester]

> Heating is super awesome with renewables. As you can store heat in an well isolated home.

Sounds like you're not speaking from experience. Actually, houses are pretty lousy batteries. Most people have a range of only a few degrees that they find comfortable indoors. They will tend to set the thermostat to about the middle of that range. If they turn off the head, the temperature will go the lower end of that range after a few hours. Very few hours if it's really cold outside, and that's when it matters most.

Admittedly, my house is old and not super-well isolated, but during the coldest days of winter (around -20C), it can easily require 10kw, constantly, to keep it warm enough to prevent my wife from becoming agressive.

If we turn off the power for 2 hours, it's already pretty cold.

Heat pumps would reduce overall energy consumption, but not the need for constant use, and more isloation would reduce both, but it would still likely take several kw constantly on days like that.

[epistasis]

> There's not enough time to do so with batteries alone.

I suggest you run the numbers on this, because I think you have them exactly reversed.

We are increasing battery production capacity 10x every five years. This could be accelerated if there was government investment as is done for every single nuclear reactor. At current rates we expect to produce 20-30TWh/year of lithium ion batteries, not including other chemistries that could be used for stationary storage but not mobile applications.

Currently in the US we are only building 2GW of reactors, but we have ~100GW of reactors quickly reaching retirement age. Even if we scale our current nuclear construction capacity 10x every five years like we do for batteries, and add in the 10 year construction time, we are going to see a big decrease in nuclear before we see an increase.

[ncmncm]

Anyway only the tiniest fraction of utility storage will ever be batteries.

[epistasis]

Your comment conveys cynicism, but I'm not sure what you're saying.

So you're proposing 100s to 1000s of TWh of utility storage in what form, exactly?

Or are you saying that there will be almost not utility storage?

Are you counting EV batteries as part of utility storage? How about if the batteries take part in vehicle to grid transmission?

People have been skeptical of batteries for decades, claiming that they are never going to be ready for EVs. Then they were ready. You can still find absolutely ridiculous videos on YouTube only a few years old of people going through all sorts of numerical arguments about volume and size to say that EVs will never work on lithium ion batteries. Millions of Tesla owners are proving them wrong on their bad "physics" every single day.

I have a feeling that utility battery storage skepticism is even less rational. Batteries are being deployed extremely effective on the grid right now, disproving the faith.

[ncmncm]

Batteries just cost more than alternatives. They are excellent for load smoothing, because they can vary power intake and output very quickly, at any wattage out, but they are an expensive place to keep energy. For home use, batteries are the only practical storage we have, which is why off-grid power is much costlier than utility scale need be.

Battery cost is per Wh of total capacity, with typically a very high limit of W in or out. Alternatives mostly cost, instead, per W of power in or out, with an increase of total Wh stored costing relatively little, mainly limited by convenience.

For example, pumped hydro. The expensive part is the turbine. (You often don't even need a dam.) Want more watts, you need another turbine; but you can usually pump up way more water than you will need.

Likewise, synthetic ammonia or hydrogen, or liquified nitrogen or compressed air. Tankage is super-cheap, but electrolysers, cryo units, and compressors cost, as do turbines. More watts out means more turbines, again.

For buoyancy storage, the floats, sea-floor pulleys, cable reels, and clutches are cheap, the size or number of winch motor / generators determines how many watts you can put in or get out. Similarly for mineshaft gravity storage: The 10,000 ton weight is cheap, and the mineshaft has plenty of depth. Wattage is in the winch.

Producing enough lithium batteries for both cars and utilities would put a serious strain on world capacity to mine lithium. It is better reserved mainly for cars, where its light weight matters. Where you do want batteries, other chemistries are likely better for utilities than fought-over lithium. I expect molten metal batteries to be competitive soon.

It is strange that most people who talk about storage seem to have no conception of what makes a thing more, or even prohibitively, expensive. Thus, Energy Vault has a $2B market cap for a system that is very obviously totally useless. People propose putting expensive electromechanical equipment on the sea floor. The storage that will be used will be the storage that is cheap to buy and cheap to use.

[epistasis]

Argh, there's a typo there, we expect 20-30TWh/year in 2031.

[samstave]

I have long thought there should be a global nuclear consortium and have that organization build and run and manage and secure all the nuclear power plants in the world.

Earth/Humanity needs electricity FOREVER. Its bizarre that we cant come together over this expressly universal need. This and water.

[ncmncm]

A global nuclear consortium would have as its first goal its own continuance and its continued hegemony over energy policy. It would be catastrophic. Fortunately there is no such possibility.

[freemint]

> But fission is the only answer we currently have for baseline power that doesn't involve burning things.

Patently false. The sun shines 24/7. This (besides power satellites) offers other possibilities like a world wide connected grid. Even if you are a proponent of nuclear you will also need that, as i assume you do not want to put reactors in every country.

[bozhark]

Had to delete my one line response because you embodied everything I meant. Cheers

[belorn]

> So why waste more money on an obsolete technology rather than use it for solving the remaining issues with renewables like energy storage? Invest that money in battery technology and everything that comes with that.

A few years ago Sweden did a study on green hydrogen, the energy storage that Germany and many other countries seem to view as the best bet as a storage for places where solar + daily discharging batteries won't work. The cost was then around 10-20 times more expensive than nuclear. Those costs has gone down a bit since then, but it is still several times more expensive than nuclear.

Sweden and Germany are still very much in favor of green hydrogen, and there are on-going experiment to use it for industries that need hydrogen itself (rather than burning it for energy), but they are no investments for a grid storage. If nuclear is not economically viable, a technology that is several time more expensive is not something they are just going to throw money at. Those money are currently going towards fossil fuels, since that is cheaper than nuclear.

If however we would ban fossil fuel, especially cheap fossil fuel from Russia, the economics might change. There is also always the hope that politicians investment into fossil fuels today will give green hydrogen enough time to become economical viable for the energy sector.

[pfdietz]

China is selling electrolyzers for < $300/kw. Given that renewable electricity's LCOE is a fraction of nuclear, I don't see how hydrogen could be 10-20 times the cost of nuclear. Were they doing something ridiculous like assuming it's stored as liquid hydrogen?

Also, remember the big use of hydrogen on the grid would be as a dispatchable backstop to cheap renewable sources, not as something that's used 24/7. So most of the energy flow would not be through hydrogen, it would be from the renewables directly (or through batteries for short term smoothing.)

[belorn]

There is a massive war and shortage of natural gas in Europe so if there exist cheap electrolyzers + wind power combinations that can solve that issue today then people should rush to invest before next winter where prices are predicted to sky rock. I recall that the study did say that existing natural gas power plants could cheaply and easily be converted to run on hydrogen. Hydrogen prices has also gone up a lot since the war.

And it was 10-20 times a few years ago. Prices has gone down a significant bit. If you get the prices to around $1 per/kg (about 3-10x reduction from this year prices), and we don't account for transportation, infrastructure and physical storage, the price would start to look really competitive to nuclear.

If you search online you will find plenty of predictions that prices might reach that magical $1 per/kg in say 2030 or so, in which case that will be a great choice. As a bonus it will make medical oxygen dirt cheap. At that point all discussions about nuclear power will mostly be made moot since hydrogen will be the factual best choice.

[freemint]

Hydrogen needs an complete overhaul to the pipeline system. Burning natural gas for energy is a fraction of it's use. More important are heating (where it can't be transported too), steel making and chemistry (CoViD vaccine ingredients are made using natural gas by BASF).

[pfdietz]

Not to supply grid leveling it doesn't. For that, the hydrogen is produced, stored, and consumed in a small range of places.

[ncmncm]

Hydrogen can be added to dilute NG, during the transition.

[trashtester]

This study from MIT found that the LCOE of fully renewable energy production, backed by LI batteries would be $3000/MWh vs $2400/MWh for hydrogen instead of batteries for storage:

https://www.greencarcongress.com/2021/08/20210829-mitei.html

Either alternative is about 15x to 50x more expensive than Nuclear, though....

[pfdietz]

That's grossly excessive. This website lets you look at optimization vs. actual historical weather data and reaches a much lower cost. BTW, you use both batteries AND storage; their combination can be cheaper than either alone. You also store the hydrogen underground rather than above ground.

https://model.energy/

[trashtester]

I agree that a combination of batteries and hydrogen would be a bit cheaper, but generally I would trust the MIT study over the model above, that states directly that it is a toy model.

It's fun to play with, though, so definitely upvoted.

Do you have an alternative peer reviewed study to support the conclusions?

[freemint]

I thought the article we are replying to said >>$4000+/MWh for nuclear not including financing.

[trashtester]

No, it is saying that it is currently about $6000000/MW construction cost. Then you devide by number of hours of operations to get the cost per MW/h. (Not adjusted for interest rate.)

The LCOE of new nuclear plants have estimates ranging from less than $30/MWh to around $150/MWh, while estimates for the cost of plants built a few decades ago end up at around $40-60/MWh, from the numbers I've seen.

[samstave]

Inflation is WAY fn higher than 8%.

Try more like 30%

Go to costco's meat section, walmarts juice section, any fn gas station.

Fleecing is whats happening.

EDIT:

Cool, clearly you arent tracking prices like I do.

Costco's meat section is up ~22%$

Walmarts Juices are up ~30%

We all know what gas prices are. $7 a gallon in Napa.

[pmyteh]

Yes, probably. This can bring its own problems, though. In Britain, for example, the Treasury is extremely reluctant to approve new public capital projects, even at negative real interest rates. Investment is effectively rationed by requiring a benefit/cost ratio of above 2 (at net present value, after making heavy optimism bias adjustments) before it will approve funding. New nuclear won't get close to that on any conventional appraisal, which is one reason why our current nuclear new build is happening on an eye-wateringly expensive private finance arrangement.

[ImHereToVote]

This is because of "not corruption"

[pmyteh]

It's mostly because the ability of the economy to produce positive economic (but not direct financial) returns on very cheap credit is basically infinite, and borrowing money to invest in all of these things would need a huge amount of extra tax revenue to pay off the loans, which is hard. (Even in principle it's not straightforward for government to capture the consumer surplus of infrastructure investment. And in practice tax increases are politically problematic). So it's rationed, instead.

[sfe22]

Zero percent or negative just means people involuntary pay by inflation. There is not free lunch (someone had to work to make it)

[trashtester]

It is a tax on deposits. You only have to pay if you have deposits. Basically, it means the saver has to pay to store value as currency. On the other hand, they also have to pay if they want to store other valueables, such as gold or the most ancient store of value of all, grain.

I don't think a negative real interest rate is inherantly unfair, any more than it was unfair to have 10% of grain go to waste 3000 years ago when storing for a bad year.

If you had 7 good years, and expect 7 bad years, the utility of the stored grain may be way higher in the bad years than the good years, even when accounting for the waste. The same goes for cash.

The same can be true with cash.

To demand that cash maintains its purchasing power, is the same as ancient farmers demanding to purchase grain from their neighbour (who did save) in a bad year as they themselves got paid for their grain during the good years.

In periods of growth, we may start to think that positive time preference is natural. But the fact is that throughout most of human history, we would switch to negative time preference in good times, since we expected bad times to come back. During good times, humans would store grain, dry meat, fish and fruit, build housing, tools or boats, all of which were investments into goods that were likely to gradually perish over time.

Even after people started to use coins, this was true. If you produced a surplus during one year, you could trade it for cold coin instead of storing it. But not only was there a risk that the coins would be stolen or otherwise vanish, it was also highly likely that at the time where you needed to spend that goal, prices would be higher.

[imtringued]

One has to consider that the storage capacity of the economy isn't infinite. Charging money for storing something is a very straightforward business model. When your economy is growing the storage capacity appears endless as no storage is actually needed, you can just produce the good in the future with your expanded production capacity. Once the economy stops growing for even a single year, then you will effectively hit the storage capacity of the economy and must pay to store additional goods that are intended to be consumed in the future.

[danuker]

Negative interest rates mean more than your units of currency going down in purchasing power.

It also means them going down in number (a bank CHARGES you for the costs incurred holding your money).

[kube-system]

No, interest rates are quoted nominally -- i.e. they are independent of inflation.

If you purchase a negative interest rate instrument and experience inflation, you will lose real value to both.

[imtringued]

If there is a negative interest rate of 4% on cash, then the easiest way to avoid it would be to lend out your money at 0%. Since there is no growth dependence and excessive savings do not grow automatically anymore there is no need for inflation and the central bank can do price level targeting instead.

[Tenoke]

If you think 50% cost overruns and overheads are uncommon for state sponsored projects.. you will be right but only because often the actual numbers are much higher.

[ncmncm]

Maybe if they had to be state-sponsored, we could manage to do entirely without them, instead.

But it didn:t save France from needing to spend tens of $billions decommissioning old junk reactors.

[fulafel]

States tend to have self imposed debt limiting policies, so opportunity costs are still there for investments.

[strainer]

A project should garner favorable financing arrangements for its merits, not for its risks.

[danans]

Merit must be determined in a way that includes known risks. Anything otherwise would be fraudulent.

[Krasnol]

Why should states invest it's taxpayer money into overpriced and slow technology when there are cheaper and fast improving alternatives?

[sofixa]

Because you can start a project with the existing, proven and expensive tech today. Grid-scale storage is purely theoretical today (bar pumped-up hydro, which is infeasible in most locations). There's lots of hope, and money should be invested in the various alternatives, absolutely. But nobody can say when and if that tech would be ready.

[Krasnol]

You make it sound like it's some SciFi tech where in reality Germany has replaced half of it's whole production with true green energy in the last two decades. Replacing nuclear years ago.

[larsrc]

That's inaccurate. Germany has replaced half of its _electricity_ production with renewables (modulo dispatchability), but electricity only accounts for a quarter of the energy usage. We frequently have to import electricity from France now, where it's largely made by nuclear, and electricity in France is a lot cheaper than here. Closing the German nuclear plants was grand scale stupid.

[Krasnol]

I may have been inaccurate but you are wrong.

We buy sometimes electricity from France on the EEX because it's cheap. Not because we lac electricity. We actually sell more than we buy and that never changed.

France has to sell cheap because they can't shut down their rotting fleet. They HAVE to produce and they HAVE to sell. Even when the price is low. This is just another reason why the company running this hilarious "business" is bankrupt.

Germany has long ago replaced what nuclear has produced.

The only thing we HAVE to buy is gas because we need it for heating. Something nuclear can't replace since we don't even have 5% electrical heating in this country.

[larsrc]

I'd like to see a reference for them having to produce. According to https://www.neimagazine.com/opinion/opinionnuclear-in-france..., they operate in load-following mode and sometimes simply shut down over weekends.

[larsrc]

Nuclear could provide heat if people weren't all NIMBY about it. A dual-cycle reactor produces a lot of hot steam, perfect for Fernwärme.

[jeffbee]

This is really not correct at all. Half of the utility-scale generating projects waiting for interconnect approval are combined solar and battery installation. Grid-scale storage is a solved problem, technically and economically. There were over 400GW of grid storage project proposed in the U.S. at the end of 2021.

[renewiltord]

According to this commenter, we can't build with the proven and expensive tech today because we don't have it any more

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31682876

[sofixa]

Depends who.

For EPR, we're almost over the hump, with the latest projects in Finland and France coming online and becoming fully operational in the near future.

Rosatom has continued pumping out reactors at a decent rate.

[renewiltord]

Looks like they should do it and we shouldn't in America unless we can somehow allow them to build ours (I think a fear of competition will make this infeasible but if we're lucky we'll get the stuff).

[epistasis]

This is inaccurate, GW scale batteries could be deployed today, but because storage is so scalable it's often a better idea to build multiple smaller batteries that help alleviate grid congestion.

[belorn]

A month or so back someone posted a report by a financial investing advisor for the energy sector, and they were pretty clear what is and what isn't economical viable right now.

Solar + storage of 1-6 hrs can be made economical viable as long as the storage can have 365 discharge cycles each year, assuming prices get high enough each such cycle. Each unit of storage get a return on investment each day, and each are used fully at the point in time when the market price is at peak.

Under those precise circumstances the economics of storage is cheaper than nuclear. The only other cheaper alternative to nuclear is to use renewables when the weather is optimal and fossil fuel when the weather is not optimal, or just use fossil fuels (through that is just a waste of money and the climate).

Naturally this advisor firm could be wrong and someone here could start the world first economical viable operation that uses wind for renewables and then charge a reverse hydro operation. It would make for a nice news item.

[epistasis]

Making such broad statements about economical versus not economical is difficult, because batteries serve so many purposes and have so many revenue streams that deployment is highly locational, depending on the specifics of the grid and where and when demand causes congestion.

There's also little incentive to install storage when solar and wind penetration is low, but as higher percentages of the grid is powered by renewables, then storage quickly becomes far more attractive.

Currently, there are 14.5GW of batteries in development across the US, and this is just a tiny nascent industry. Even as a small industry, this is many times the power capacity of nuclear currently in development.

This biggest challenge with batteries right now is low supply, and competing with demand from EV production, which provides higher margins:

https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/how-ba...

[belorn]

If we are talking about the US and not like places like northern Europe, then they have a lot of existing capacity for fossil fuel production. The cheapest way to produce energy would be to just add more renewables and use that fossil fuel whenever that weather isn't optimal. Batteries might be competitive to fossil fuel in places such situation as highlighted by the financial advisor, ie when they can discharge fully each day of the year at the maximum price point.

[jacquesm]

A big variable too is the price development of batteries, which is trending in the right direction due to more and more production capacity coming on-line but once grid storage and EVs start to compete for those batteries the price could well be going up.

[orthecreedence]

Storage is not not purely theoretical!! In fact there are <lists five completely theoretical storage methods that rely on stable climate or perfect geography>.

[pydry]

>Grid-scale storage is purely theoretical today bar pumped-up hydro, which is infeasible in most locations

Viable locations arent in short supply at all:

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-spot-530-000-potenti...

[sofixa]

They aren't in short supply, but aren't present everywhere - e.g. in Europe there's nothing north of Slovakia. If Denmark wants storage, they have to work with other countries and rely on transit. It's even worse for the Baltics.

[Krasnol]

You make it sound like it's some burden while the EU grid is actually a single market with a significant expansion last year: https://www.tennet.eu/our-grid/international-connections/nor...

[arethuza]

Norway, UK and Ireland aren't in Europe?

Edit: I was a bit puzzled as there are already pumped-storage plants in Wales and Scotland with more planned.

[raphaelj]

Well, that also applies if Denmark wants uranium, oil or gas.

[freemint]

You know that you can just pump all the water Denmark has. Build underground caverns full with air, let water in for energy and pump it out later.

[babypuncher]

Hedging your bets. We know nuclear works. Grid-scale energy storage for renewables still feels far fetched. Maybe it's not. Either way, we should not put all our eggs in one basket.

[jacquesm]

No, it also works:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/04/austr...

We just need a lot more of it, but it definitely works.

[7952]

We shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket. But I don't think rapid growth of the battery industry is far fetched at all. It has already experienced massive growth and is ridiculously mass producable. And we will need batteries anyway for electric cars.

[trashtester]

The battery capacity needed to replace all cars with electric ones is about two orders of magnitude lower than the battery capacity needed to replace all fossil fuels with wind and solar, at least in temperate regions, where you need heating during the winter.

According to this MIT study, the cost (LCOE) of doing this today, would be $3000/MWH:

https://www.greencarcongress.com/2021/08/20210829-mitei.html

Even if the cost of batteries continue to come down by x4 in price every decade from now on, it will take 30-40 years for prices to come below current energy prices.

If we hit an S-curve before then, it could take much longer.

[7952]

I was arguing that we shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket and the scale of the challenge really confirms that. But yes, I do think that the battery industry has the best chance of scaling up and achieving order of magnitude improvements. But we don't actually need that for that industry to play a part in defeating climate change. And failure to meet some hypothetical objective does not invalidate that. Again, we don't need to put all our eggs in once basket and that certainly means not relying 100% on battery storage.

[fulafel]

That link is summarizing a nonpublic paper from a research group making the case for hydrogen as grid storage for California, not a very strong cite for this.

Generally keeping houses warm with low evergy is solved, well insulated passive houses need little heating energy even in places with long cold winters.

[trashtester]

That link links to MIT's summary, which in turn links to this original paper:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03062...

(probably paywalled)

> Generally keeping houses warm with low evergy is solved, well insulated passive houses need little heating energy even in places with long cold winters.

What is your definition of "places with long cold winters" and how much energy do you think it takes (kwh) to heat a house in such climates during winter?

[xienze]

Because transitioning over to green technology is a decades-long project, it's not something you can just snap your fingers and make happen, as many countries are discovering. You still need non-renewable energy sources to fill in the gaps that renewables currently have.

[Krasnol]

You don't have to transition completely in decades. You can start today. Meanwhile building a single nuclear reactor is a "decade-long" project, you can't start today and in the end you're still left with an old and expensive tech while the green tech moved ahead rapidly during the same time.

Germany managed to replace almost half of their generation in 2 decades: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-renewable-powe...

When they started out the technology was terrible and managed to do all that despite a just recently retired government which did everything to stop further expansion.

[xienze]

> You don't have to transition completely in decades. You can start today.

Yes, I agree. If you start today, you’ll be done in decades. The boneheaded move is to start a green energy transition and immediately start decommissioning existing nuclear power plants and stonewall creating new ones by throwing up your hands and saying “well it’ll take forever to build them.” By the way, have you ever considered why it takes so long to build nuclear power plants? It’s a political and environmental special interest problem, not a technical one.

At the end of the day, when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining, you still have to generate power somehow. Until the day that problem is solved (that’s the “decades” part), you want something like nuclear power to fall back on.

[Krasnol]

I don't know why you're ignoring my reality example. Germany is part of a EU wide market and it just works. Also it's not like you put all your wind on one spot. There is always wind somewhere for example.

The idea that it's an "political, environmental and special interest" problem while we're watching several nuclear plants being FAR over budget and over due being constructed in pro-nuclear countries proves that your argument is false.

So basically: everything you wrote there is wrong...why are you doing this?

[trashtester]

> There is always wind somewhere for example.

There is always wind somewhere. But grid capacity is not free, in fact it is quite expensive. Let's say, on a given day, the only place in Europe with reasonable winds would be west of Cadiz, transporting all that power through Spain, Portugal and France to cover the needs of all of Europe, would require immensive grid capacity expansion. And even with super-high-voltage, the losses before the power reaches Estonia would be huge.

Also, if this load causes a brownout in Spain, due to improper maintaince, for instance, all of Europe could go dark, cold and stop moving (in a time after fossil fuels).

(I can imagine seeing this from space during some cold winter night around 2045, all the lights in Western and Central Europe disappear at once. Only Norway and parts of Sweden can be seen, since they have their hydro power.)

In other words, while a better grid can mitigate _some_ of the variability of renewable supply, you still need massive expansion of storage capacity when you stop using natural gas, especially when you switch heating and transportation to use electricity too.

Seen from the outside, it surely looks like the German population has been seriously misled.

[trashtester]

> Germany managed to replace almost half of their generation in 2 decades: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-renewable-powe...

Still, only 16% of Germany's total energy consumption comes from renewables:

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

If Germany wants to replace all uses of fossil fuels for heating, transportation, industrial use, etc, with renewables, HUGE investments remain.

In particular, giving up the ability to smooth out variations in production without the use of fossil fuels will be extremely costly, unless the cost comes down by at least a factor or 50.

[Krasnol]

> Still, only 16% of Germany's total energy consumption comes from renewables:

Sure but this has nothing to do with nuclear.

Germany heats with gas and oil. We don't even have 5% electrical heating here.

> In particular, giving up the ability to smooth out variations in production without the use of fossil fuels will be extremely costly,

It's not even close to how costly nuclear is and will continue to be for GENERATIONS.

Germany is connected to the most stable continental grid on this planet. Something other "developed" countries like the US can only dream of. Germany has been expanding their national grid and will continue to do so. Also we have build up renewable energy for the whole world. Paying for it. So don't worry. We'll manage. It's the rest of the world you have to worry about since they're stuck in the past. Especially France with their single source which is a rotting fleet run by a bankrupt state company eating up taxpayer money with no end in sight.

[trashtester]

Germany, for all it's renewables, let out significantly more greenhouse gases per capita than surrounding countries, such as France.

> It's not even close to how costly nuclear is and will continue to be for GENERATIONS.

Modern nuclear plants are designed to last for a minimum of 60 years, and can be renewed to last another 40.

Modern wind turbines as well as most solar panels have an expected lifetime of around 25 years.

> Also we have build up renewable energy for the whole world. Paying for it.

Germany even pays Denmark to shut down their wind power on days when production is high, to make the statistics of German renewable production look prettier.

Germany is still using fossil fuels for most of their energy.

> Also we have build up renewable energy for the whole world.

Norway has been on 100% renewable electricity since forever, and unlike Germany, Norway actually uses electricity for heating. Fossil fuel heating was banned in Norway i 2020. So Norway uses electricity for everything, meaning the population is not willing to pay German prices for much longer. Most likely, the Norwegian government will have to strangle exports through Nordlink and similar cables in the coming winter, if prices remain high.

Norway did NOT need German help for that.

On the other hand, Norway also provides Germany with a large percentage of Germany's fossil fuel needs, both natural gas and oil (most of the imports not coming from Russia comes from Norway).

[petre]

Yeah, we've seen how it (hasn't) worked out for Germany.

[xyzzyz]

There are no cheaper and fast improving alternatives to provide plentiful electricity at 9pm every single day.

[Kon5ole]

Here are a few:

https://www.energy-storage.news/department-of-energy-confirm...

https://www.energy-storage.news/batteries-at-worlds-largest-...

https://www.energy-storage.news/energy-dome-launches-4mwh-de...

[xyzzyz]

That’s not cheaper. Run the numbers and you’ll see. Solar by itself is indeed pretty cheap per kWh if you don’t care about matching supply with demand, but storage very much is not. If it was, you’d see investors build standalone storage, to buy cheap electricity, store it, and resell when demand goes up. This is not what’s happening: instead, existing projects are based either on heavy government subsidies, or on vanity buyers, who want to pay above market prices to signal eco awareness, like Starbucks in one of your links.

[Kon5ole]

The problem with running the numbers is that the actual numbers for nuclear are basically unknowable and most governments have given a taxpayer insurance that covers this unknown number "in blanco".

This means that most of the costs that will be caused by operating a nuclear power plant are not included in the costs of operations, and therefore not in the "price per MWh" or similar numbers. We don't know what this number is but we do know it's a very large number, and by removing it from the resposibility of the plant operators it represents a very large hidden subsidy for nuclear power.

Chernobyl and Fukushima are the familiar elephants in this particular room of course with he most recent estimate for Chernobyl passing 600bn usd in 2016 (and counting still of course and for the forseeable future) but I like to use the Asse II salt mine in Germany as a more digestable example.

This mine was used to store nuclear waste in the 70s which turned out to be a very bad mistake that has to be fixed in the coming few decades. The cost of this project, (estimated to be at least several bn euros) is not added to the cost of nuclear, it's just charged to the current taxpayers. The power plants that generated the waste stored in this mine are closed long ago but they keep costing money decades later.

Nuclear seems cheap because we're paying for it with credit cards issued to our grandchildren.

[elihu]

How much of that is just sensitivity to the cost of battery cells? If most of the world can buy lithium iron phosphate cells at $100 a kw/h, would battery storage be cost effective in ways it isn't at $300 a kw/h?

(I'm not sure what the actually LFP cell wholesale costs are these days; I get the impression that historically they've been a lot cheaper in China due to patents, but the last of the major patents expired about a month ago so maybe low cost cells will show up everywhere if production can keep up with demand. As a retail customer though in the U.S. it's really hard to find anything under about $300 a kw/h -- if utilities are paying a similar price, I can understand them not wanting to go all-in on battery storage. There's no reason for them to continue to be that expensive.)

[BurningFrog]

Note that solar and wind power are NOT alternatives to the predictable base load of nuclear, hydro, or fuel burning power generation.

[Krasnol]

"Steve Holliday, CEO National Grid: “The idea of large power stations for baseload is outdated”"

https://energypost.eu/interview-steve-holliday-ceo-national-...

[trashtester]

This is a sales pitch from someone who makes a living from selling grid capacity.

[jacquesm]

But is it true or not?

[trashtester]

I'm not sure he's lying on purpose. But it's pretty common that people just stop thinking further when someone tells him what they want to hear.

The article certainly dismisses the need for storage way too easily, imo. It claims that consumption can be adjusted to match supply. There are not that many uses of electricity where you can simply lower your consumption when the supply is low.

There are some cases, like car batteries that can, sort of, be seen as consumption, but unless your car has some extreme storage capacity, you typically want to be able to recharge it when YOU need to have that range, instead of when the power company has additional supply.

And if you don't want to use fossil fuels for heating, the power saved by not charging your car is NOT enough to keep your house warm for a few cold days with no winds (unless you live in a place with no real winter).

[stewbrew]

The state better invests the money in cheaper technologies. Why should it waste the money on nuclear plants?

Edit: To the downvoters: Seriously, why should the state waste money on a technology that doesn't work and never has? More than half of France's nuclear power plants are currently offline and in maintainence mode. Maybe also because they could not produce electricity at market prices.

[ryan93]

They get 80% of their electricity from nuclear. And even export some.

[stewbrew]

They also import electricity, e.g. last Winter from Germany.