[qqqwerty]

This isn't about nuclear vs coal. It is about nuclear vs renewables. And what it really comes down to is that nuclear is really expensive and takes way too long to build. For every nuclear plant you build, we can build the exact same generation capabilities for about half the cost and it can be built in a quarter of the time[1]. That means that the renewable solution will have already mostly paid for itself before the nuclear plant delivers its first electron.

I am 100% in support of nuclear where it make sense. But there has been this weird strain of FUD being spread around painting renewable advocates as some sort of crazed anti-nuclear zealots. Some of this is coming from pro oil and gas groups looking to spread uncertainty and doubt to disrupt decarbonization efforts. But it is also getting picked up by a certain subset of "contrarians" that think they know better than everybody else, but are clearly not doing their research.

[1]https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/08/05/youve-got-30-billion-...

[eric-hu]

From the article you quoted:

> In order to replace the two nuclear plants while the sun is down, the batteries would need to replicate two 1.117 GW power sources for 16 hours. The total energy storage capacity would be 39.3 GWh, after we add an extra 10% for safe measure.

Sorry, but no. This is a brittle system proposed. A 16 hour battery backup doesn't account for bad weather events like hurricanes, let alone more severe ones like the Texas power crisis.

Take a look at this diagram of power production during said Texas power crisis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis#/media...

Compare the area of the solar curve at the start and end of this 11 day window to what it is in the middle. There's a huge difference between how much solar was produced between good days and bad.

Now look at the nuclear production for this same time and tell me these two can be used equally well for base load power production.

[epistasis]

A major cause of Texas's power outage was nuclear tripping off.

Meanwhile, massive amounts of batteries are far less brittle than the single point of failure like a nuclear reactor. Same with solar. It's the difference between building one massive mainframe and having a data center. In the data center you plan for failure, plan for individual nodes to go down, and the whole system becomes incredibly reliable because of the elimination of SPOF.

Solar and batteries distributed over a wide geographic area work fantastically, and this is a primary way that Texans will plan for their own energy security in the future, when they don't want to use fossil fuel based generators.

[eric-hu]

I request a citation that it was a major cause of Texas' power outage, because looking at this graph, there is a step-down in nuclear generation on Feb 15th from 5 to 4 gw, but that's smaller than the step-downs in natural gas (-15 gw), coal (-5 gw) and wind (-5 gw).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis#/media...

[epistasis]

I believe those numbers are correct. Perhaps "major" is a subjective position, but an unexpected drop of 20% is quite major, IMHO.

Whereas wind was expected to drop in output, because wind is intermittent, and any primarily renewables based grid will have large overages of generation capacity to account for that. (Just as we currently have large overages in capacity for traditional generators).

[qqqwerty]

As expected, the pro-nuclear comment is cherry-picking the details of the argument to make a poor attempt at a rebuttal. Did you miss the part where the proposed system was almost half the cost of the nuclear plant? That leaves quite a bit of money left over to address the long tail risks. A few nat gas peaker plants that rarely if ever get run could be more than sufficient. Maybe include a carbon capture system if you are so inclined. I am more than happy to entertain counter arguments, but please make a more comprehensive evaluation of the original argument before responding.

Nuclear is crazy expensive. Our current renewable technologies, at current prices are capable of providing solutions that in aggregate largely deliver the generation profile of what nuclear can provide at a cheaper cost. This is true for most regions of the world with the exception of the extreme latitudes. And renewables for the most part are continuing to get cheaper, whereas nuclear for the most part has only gotten more expensive. Also, the renewable solution, by incorporating multiple technologies will have greater reliability than the single point of failure that is the nuclear solution. And the renewable solutions can be built out in a few years, very likely paying for themselves before the nuclear solution is even producing its first electron. This is an issue that the pro-nuclear likes to ignore entirely because it is so damning. If you were a free market energy investor, would you rather invest in a capital project that pays for itself in 7-8 years, or a project that doesn't even start making revenue until 10+ years down the road, and has enormous amounts of uncertainty around ongoing maintenance costs to the point where it is not even certain the project would produce enough revenue to offset those? There is a reason renewable projects are getting built left and right, and nuclear projects are few and far between. It is because investors and project developers are running the numbers, and they know which technologies will make them money and which ones won't.

These are all essentially facts. They should be your starting point when attempting to make a pro-nuclear argument. If you fail to address these facts in your counter argument, you will not be taken seriously.

The main problem right now, is that when an energy developer goes to build a project, they are not seeking to build a robust renewable solution that mimics the generation profile of a nuclear plant, they are incentivized to build for the thinnest slice of the generation market as possible to keep costs down. There is some movement in the direction of these more robust renewable projects, we are starting to see more and more solar and wind projects with on-site storage for example. But what we really need is utilities and their regulators to step up and start shaping the energy market to incentivize these more robust renewable packages. Until then we will continue to see incidents like the Texas outage. And FWIW, nuclear will need a fairly large helping hand from those same regulators as well if it is to every be viable, so the need for regulatory changes isn't unique to renewables.

[thayne]

But part of the point of the article is that nuclear is unnecessarily expensive. And I would guess if we had put as many resources into R&D for nuclear fission as we had into wind and solar, nuclear would be a lot more economical today.

[happymellon]

Nuclear has had many decades of research.

[thayne]

> But there has been this weird strain of FUD being spread around painting renewable advocates as some sort of crazed anti-nuclear zealots

It's certainly not true of all renewable advocates, but such anti-nuclear zealots do exist, and cause resistance to nuclear. Although I don't think environmentalists and renewables advocares are the only source of resistance, and cold war fear of all things nuclear/atomic/radioactive also shares some blame.

[alerighi]

> And what it really comes down to is that nuclear is really expensive and takes way too long to build.

Also other form of renewable are expensive. Unfortunately we are not so good at doing calculation on large scale. Just because installing a few solar panels is cheap, it doesn't mean that if we start installing a lot of them will maintain the same price.

Especially these days there is a shortage (they said due to COVID, but it's obvious that we are in a commercial war with China) of electronic components and semiconductors, guess what solar panels are made of? Where do you produce them, of course you can't rely on importing them from China, because China in a couple of years will not sell you anything, but if you start producing them in the US good luck making them cheap. And where do you even get the raw materials to start with?

Sure, a nuclear reactor does use a lot of materials, but are mostly steel and concrete, something that is produced in every industrialized country.

Do we even talk about energy storage? How do we realize that? Batteries? Lithium ones, good luck finding them at a cheap price.

Overall nuclear power is cheap, is just that we focus on the initial price that is obviously high and don't think that all the cost of transitioning to renewable energy added up are even higher. I don't say that a private investor will ever construct a nuclear power plant, the upfront cost is too high, but it's something that a government should build.