[tsjackson]

There's a weird sociological phenomenon where people declare that "renewables won't get us there" without any real justification.

A recently announced deal in California would build out solar for $20/MWh compared to your $200/MWh nuclear worst case. Renewables can and will get us 90% of the way there. I recognize that a renewables based grid will require massive investments in grid infrastructure, which are long overdue anyway, as well as eventually storage/batteries, which is still on an exponential cost reduction curve. Bbut given the massive cost difference of generation, that would still be a dramatic net benefit.

Particularly when nuclear plants take a decade to build compared to a year for a solar plant.

I get that nuclear is cool, particularly fusion, but I really don't understand this "renewables won't get us there" argument beyond that.

[greggman3]

Sabine Hossenfelder had a pretty good video about the issues not yet solved with renewables. In particular we don't have viable method for storage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8xsg9iK5yo

The short version, when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow you need storage. How much, in many places you'd need several weeks of storage.

One way to do storage is to pump water into a reservoir. That is currently 80% of our storage. We'd need 500x what we currently have in that kind of storage to cover our needs. For batteries, we'd need 250,000x the amount of all batteries the currently exist in the entire world. She goes over other methods of storage.

She also goes over how much energy we get from things. Examples:

1kg of oil generates 13 kWh (13 kilowatts for 1 hour or 1 kilowatt for 13 hours)

1kg of coal 8 kWh

1kg of lithium battery 0.2 kWh

1kg of water 2.7 Wh (not kilowatts, watts so 1000x less)

1kg of uranium 24 GWh (24 gigawatts, so 1 million more than oil kilo->mega->giga)

She also goes over how much pollution the storage itself makes.

[pydry]

The amount of storage required is perfectly doable:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...

It's also quite a bit cheaper doing this than building out enough nuclear power + storage to service our needs.

[fendy3002]

overshoot production, my go-to way in Factorio until mass-production accumulator is available

[thrown_22]

> The amount of storage required is perfectly doable:

Snowy 2.0 can provide about 5% of the power NSW needs. That means we only need to build another 20 of those.

And that's only for power, we're not even talking about energy here. And we're already out of mountains. So no: it isn't doable even until we can build mountains on demand.

[pydry]

>we only need to build another 20 of those

The study says one more.

[thrown_22]

The study is written by morons.

If they can't divide a number by another number they should stick to eating glue.

[Schroedingersat]

You're not comparing like for like.

First in a PWR (the only nuclear technology viable even with subsidy) 1kg gets you 150MWh not 24GWh. This is even more misleading than pretending a solar panel will produce 1.3kW/m^2 every hour of the year or pretending a lithium battery is 10kWh/kg based on the voltage and the density of pure lithium.

Second the uranium is only a tiny portion of the unrecyclable waste and a miniscule fraction of the reactor. The net mass power density is not much better than wind, or par with wind and worse than glassless solar. Naval reactors have higher power density but have much stricter operating conditions and costs that cannot even be borne with tax money covering the bill.

Solar + battery has powered a multi day flight. Nuclear has not.

Additionally comparing cost for cost, nuclear requires just as much storage as renewables because storage is vastly cheaper than paying $12000/kW for capacity you only use for 100 hours a year.

In a context where you're considering the labour and resources required to provide the energy with fission, storage has been solved for a decade.

If we come back to the real world and consider the only metric that matters of joules of radiative forcing removed per dollar then there are only a tiny handful of places you'd consider putting a new nuclear reactor, and then only once you'd paid to maximise the renewables in the region.

[llsf]

You need less ressource (metal) per GWh with a nuclear power plant than with solar or wind. The Uranium waste for a French person is about 10gr/year (France is 70% nuclear when it comes to electricity).

[Schroedingersat]

That only accounts for a small fraction of primary energy (about 300W Net). It also does not include all of the high level waste or its containment vessels and shielding (which are many times heavier).

The mast on a wind turbine is inert and recyclable and the nacelle is fully recyclable. A 15MW or 10MW net wind turbine blade assembly is about 100t or roughly 4t/yr. At 300W per person that is 120g of fiberglass. It is fully downcyclable at positive roi.

A solar panel frame is inert and recyclable, as is the glass. The part generating the energy which wears out is about 5kg for 400W (upper bound based on glassless hail resistant panels available at retail) or 1kg/20W net of mostly-sand for a 20 year life. This is 750g/person or a few times more than the uranium + storage facilities, but hardly prohibitive and fully recyclable at near break even cost (you can even turn them back into new solar panels without re-purifying at reduced efficiency). The glass is substantially heavier, but if you're pretending we as a civilisation can't have 30kg of glass per person, then I really don't know how to talk to you -- it's such a non issue that panels are rarely optimized for mass even though doing so adds very little cost.

The low level waste and inert recyclable structure of a nuclear reactor is commensurable with the 1200t/10MW of a wind turbine and also the ten or so kg per 100W net of solar. The concrete holding up the wind turbine is substantially heavier. Solar requires little to none. Solar can coexist with other uses for the structure or land.

[notacop31337]

Whilst I understand that in reality the costs will always win out, I think only addressing the cost aspect is a strange way of tackling the issue given that cheap energy has gotten us where we are.

Not to mention that you're comparing costs unfairly, given the costs of nuclear include the costs of processing and storage of waste output, and nuclear is the only energy source in which we control all outputs and have dedicated and well engineering processes for dealing with those outputs.

I think that people are being completely unrealistic regarding the cleanliness of solar and wind, currently we bury the blades and we just turf the panels, both of which are hardware that needs to be upgraded. The heavy metals in panels do not break down at all. Which is funny given everyones focus on the radioactivity of nuclear waste, which even though takes a long time to completely stop being toxic, does actually stop being toxic.

I think there's a happy middle ground, and we need a good mix of sources, but people are comparing on features that they want to compare on, and ignoring others.

[tsjackson]

I work in the solar industry, and very few large projects are turfing solar panels anymore. There are at least three companies that will usually bid against each other to purchase used/broken solar panels for recycling/reclaiming materials.

One of the early issues with recycling companies scaling is that solar modules don't break very often, so there hasn't been enough volume to get the industry off the ground. Solar modules are generally good for 10-40 years, so we're just starting to get the first generation of decommissioned plants (which by the way, are generally being repowered with more efficient modules).

Same with wind turbines. In any case, outside of the valuable heavy metals, landfills really aren't that huge of a problem, despite consumer focus. Decommissioned landfills are already a hot commodity among solar developers in the Northeast for instance because they're great, relatively flat, centrally located land that you can build a solar farm on. So as long as we're succeeding at reclaiming heavy metals, the waste generation component is pretty trivial. They're really just part of the cycle.

Finally, the decommissioning cost of solar plants is usually bonded in with a utility PPA to be borne by the project company, just like with nuclear, so it is indeed a fair comparison.

I agree regarding our regulatory environment for nuclear being counterproductive (it's counterproductive for wind and solar too, though to a lesser extent). However, even in positive regulatory environments such as France, Nuclear costs 3-5 times as much to build on a $/MWh basis and takes much longer to site, permit and construct. There may be a small role for base-loading nuclear in certain areas that have poor renewable resources, but it otherwise rarely makes sense, regulatory issues aside.

[notacop31337]

Cheers for the great comment mate! I replied to you initially and I am still learning about this very vast topic, I try not to take a partisan approach to this stuff as it is obviously important, always trying to update my understanding and I do change my position as I learn new stuff.

It's interesting to hear that the recycling processes have changed, how recent of a change is this? I took my viewpoint from what seemed to be a overwhelming amount of (what I consider to be non-biased) resources, around the panels "being" recyclable, but not actually being recycled. And I don't think it's unreasonable to be wary of toxic waste given the entire purpose of this thing is to clean up our energy system etc.

I also wasn't aware of the decommissioning being bonded, cheers for that.

Do you think there's a difference between (what I assume for you is) the US and other countries progression along the lifecycle of solar? I feel like in Australia where I am, a lot of the articles I'm seeing are bringing up that what you've mentioned as solved problems, don't seem to be here. I will admit though that we are fairly useless being an economy that derives so much from coal exports.

Yeah so the pricing thing I do understand, but I also just think it's important to continue nuclear as an option anyway for future improvements and general management of brain drain.

Cheers for being chill, I find topics so divisive these days, I never mean to come across and ignorant of other opinions and I try to engage and not just be a "this is my tribe and I'll die on this hill", this problem is too important for it to be a "I'd rather be right" type deal.

[tsjackson]

Thanks for checking me on my U.S.-centrism and your comment as well! For the record, I think Australia's market is a bit younger even though it's already a bit larger as a percentage of power consumed than the U.S.'s thanks to some amazing solar resources in the desert. I'm fairly certain that all of this gets much easier for everyone at scale - it's just a matter of waiting it out until there are enough modules ready to recycle to generate regular revenue for recyclers, so it's likely just a waiting game.

[jfengel]

Out of curiosity... for utility-scale solar, do they tend to dismount the old panels, or just leave them in place for whatever small fraction of their original generating capability they still provide?

I imagine that they'd eventually run out of land to put them on, but from what I've seen, utility-scale solar often sits in places with a fair bit of room for expansion.

[tsjackson]

Modules degrade in production really slowly (<1% per year) and are often used for 40 years. They're generally replaced quicly if they break due to manufacturing defects or impact damage (hail, tree branches etc.). A lot of the recycling of solar panels is for panels that are a decade or two old but in perfectly good condition. What's happening is that new modules have increased 30-40% in efficiency over the same time frame that the old modules have decreased by 10-15%. So its cost effective to upgrade them in certain cases - generally where the utility will allow it.

The other factor here is that many agreements between a solar power and a utility that buys the power only have 20 year terms. Generally, there's a strong incentive to renegotiate at the end of the term, but frankly, that renegotiation is kind of a mess in practice. It depends on the policies of the state, the utility's interests, the ISO market, etc. as to how that ends up working. Every solar farm is working in at least five overlapping regulatory environments - local, state, utility/retailer domain, the ISO or regional grid, and the federal regulatory environment. Decentralization is nice in theory, but definitely makes it difficult to scale the widespread change that's required right now.

[forgetfreeman]

The notion that turbine blades are not and cannot be recycled is a bit behind the times. Carbon Rivers is scaling up their turbine blade recycling capacity as we speak.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/articles/carbon-rivers-make...

EOL turbine blades have also been used in several architectural projects as everything from a concrete reinforcing agent to actual structural components.

Solar panels are currently still problematic, however there is huge industry spend on recycling R&D. Are you prepared to bet the farm that recycling tech won't run down the problem in less time than it would take to permit and construct a nuclear power plant given the 5 years it takes to permit one and 7-10 years it takes to construct?

[amarant]

If we're gonna talk of stuff in the pipeline, don't forget that nuclear Gen 3 reactors can actually reuse current waste and reduce it by up to 90%.

Currently those reactors only exist as experimental reactors, so it's fair discounting them. Same as it's fair to consider the waste generated by wind since the vast majority of blades end up in landfills. Even though on theory they needn't.

[igorkraw]

Difference one being that the wind turbines can start producing electricity and remove carbon emissions within months, while building a new reactor happens within years.

Difference two being that after those gen3 reactors are done you still have 10% of waste which can be used to wipe out cities and ecosystems, while after you are done recycling turbine blades you have slag and (if properly neutralised) chemically inert goo

[Schroedingersat]

Except those recycling technologies exist at scale and are prohibitively expensive.

This is where PWRs are after 60 years of maturing the technology and there are many low hanging fruit to be picked because there have not been large quantities of silicon panels for more than a few years.

Those Gen 3 reactors are still steam engines, and it's questionable whether steam engines can compete even if the heat source is free.

[uup]

Burying blades is worse than burying nuclear waste?

[notacop31337]

I think I understand the point you're trying to make, but funnily enough, based on the current methods, yes.

That's not to say that the blades are more dangerous than the nuclear waste, just that the nuclear waste has many years of waste management engineering behind it, due to its danger. So there are defined processes of management that are well tested, well designed and well implemented.

Processes for blades currently are just bury them in landfill, which causes a bunch of unmitigated issues.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...

The idea that we "just bury" nuclear waste in the same way a dog buries a bone, is kinda funny, but very far from reality.

This also doesn't even touch on nuclear waste recycling, which is enormously beneficial.

[cycomanic]

So you're saying there is years engineering experience behind nuclear waste management but burying wind turbine blades is somehow completely uncharted territory? Tell me how many landfills/regular waste processing plants (or are wind turbines fundamentally different?) exist compared to existing long term nuclear wast storage facilities? Do you think no engineers are involved in designing landfills? If you think the waste from wind turbines are a problem, what about the carbon fibres from all the other things (cars, planes, bikes...) that produce orders of magnitude more waste.

Same goes for solar cells, the recycling process is similar (but easier) than most regular electronics and if you think nuclear power plants don't require heavy metals in their construction, boy have I some news for you about what is in your laptop/desktop.

[forgetfreeman]

You might want to update your research on the state of play of turbine blade disposal. There are several companies with active recycling programs in place and scaling as we speak that do everything from recycling the blades into perfectly reusable fiberglass and fuel materials to converting them into building materials.

As far as disposal of nuclear waste goes, yeah there's a ton of engineering involved because the stuff is just that big a pain in the ass to deal with for any length of time. Given half-lives typically range between 30 years and 5 times the length of recorded human history and that the rule of thumb for "safe" levels of emission are 7 half-lives we're talking about borderline geologic time frames before certain types of waste meet anyone's definition of safe. We could also spend a moment here reviewing all of the incidents in the last 40 years where source material has managed to jump a fence and ended up crapping up an entire village or neighborhood. All of that is to say that anyone peddling the notion that storage of radioactive waste is a solved problem either has an agenda and no ethics or is grotesquely uninformed.

[largepeepee]

All I am reading is just how influential the nuclear lobby groups up if they can make these stupid comparisons and get away with it.

[mypalmike]

I'll give you this: nuclear proponents are really dedicated to twisting the facts to fit the narrative. "Actually, yes, large fan blades in landfills are worse than nuclear waste." Good stuff.

It looks less silly when you acknowledge the problems while explaining how they are outweighed by the benefits.

[towaway15463]

Here’s an enlightening calculation to do: total volume of fuel used by nuclear power plants over 100 years providing enough energy for the world vs total volume of turbine blades doing the same. Feel free to be generous with your lifetime estimates for turbines, the results will still be shocking. You can also repeat the calculation for any other fuel source or power generation method and be equally impressed.

[Schroedingersat]

The silver and copper in silicon panels is extremely valuable for recycling and is economically positive and CdTe panels are obsolete. CdTe panels are recyclable, and you would be most welcome to help pass a mandate that they get recycled -- the added cost would be a rounding error on total system cost. The silicon is also recyclable at energy-positive rates (although gathering it is not economically positive at the moment).

Windmill blades are inert, downcyclable and smaller in mass per joule than low grade nuclear waste.

[robotresearcher]

Uranium-238 decays into lead. No longer radioactive, but still toxic.

[melling]

10 years ago people said nuclear power plants take 10 years

Battery technology is NOT on any kind of exponential curve.

We’ve been waiting decades for the promise of renewable energy. Time is running out quickly.

100 million barrels of oil a day and 40% of electric power generated from coal.

I get that no one likes to admit they were wrong, but it’s 2022 and not 1985. All that squandered time means we’re unlikely to avoid serious climate issues

UPDATE

Just to be crystal clear: Battery technology is NOT on any kind of exponential curve.

People who are telling us to wait because they think they’re improving exponentially are sending us past the point of no return

[cycomanic]

What do you mean? 10 years ago all the nuclear proponents were arguing against renewables because they are too expensive supposedly. Now they are cheaper they make up new bogus arguments. Nuclear has had 70 years of massive subsidies (even excluding military spending) is still more expensive with lots of unsolved problems, but you say its the solution because renewables&storage are not reducing prices fast enough? Have a look at the price curves for solar, wind and batteries I can tell you only 3 of them are exponential price reduction curves and nuclear is not one of them.

[melling]

So we waited for the renewables and lost another decade. Solar and wind are up to perhaps 10% global usage?

Maybe we can get it to 25% by 2030?

Hopefully we can stop building coal plants. Incredible emissions. 40% of global electricity…

And Germany is restarting

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/19/world/europe/germany-russ...

[tchaffee]

Why did you wait? A poor country like Brazil is already 80% renewable for electricity. You cannot buy pure gasoline at the pump. It's mixed with a minimum of renewable ethanol, and that minimum has been going up every year for over a decade. Almost all cars run on pure ethanol and some consumers choose to never use petrol based fuel for their car. Diesel is not pure either. It's mixed with biodiesel by law and that percentage goes up every year.

If a poor country can achieve this, there is nothing stopping much richer countries.

You didn't lose a decade due to renewable capabilities. You lost a decade due electing the wrong politicians, influenced by big oil.

Carter installed solar panels on the White House. Reagan removed them two years later. It's nonsense like that that resulted in your lost decades. While other countries were already racing ahead.

[otabdeveloper4]

> renewable ethanol

Is it really renewable? (I don't know, but I assume biofuels are only viable with massive fertilizer subsidies. Also, I hope "renewable" doesn't mean "let's cut down the Amazon rainforest and wait 200 years for it to grow back".)

[tchaffee]

You get a new crop 2x a year as opposed to waiting 180 million years for new fossil fuels, so yeah, it's really renewable. As far as net carbon, I'd like to see the math but since plants take carbon out of the air it's far closer to carbon neutral than burning fossil fuels.

Cutting down the Amazon to power cars would indeed be foolish but the same folks protecting the Amazon are the same folks pushing renewables. Likewise, the current president turned a blind eye to deforestation while pushing for more fossil fuels. For the time being if you want to protect the Amazon it's the renewables folks you need to get behind.

[forgetfreeman]

If your target is 2030 that's not enough time to permit and construct a single conventional nuclear power plant in North America. The permitting process alone typically runs 5 years or more before ground is even broken on construction.

[melling]

Yeah, yeah, I heard all this 10 years ago. I imagine you’ll be saying the same thing in 2030 when coal usage will be about 35% of global electricity.

[forgetfreeman]

I'm not sure I follow you here. It takes 12+ years to permit and construct a nuclear power plant in North America. This isn't a matter of opinion but of observed reality. They take on average 7 years to build with a 5+ year long permitting process before ground is broken. So unless you're proposing the government imminent domain a bunch of reactors into existence I don't understand what we're even talking about?

[zarzavat]

Does battery technology need to be on an exponential curve? We already have electric car batteries that can power your home for a good long time. Note that a battery for a home is cheaper as there is no weight restriction, unlike with a car. You can use old refurbished batteries that are no longer suitable for cars.

On the grid scale, a pumped hydro facility can provide energy storage for thousands. Energy storage is technologically a solved problem, it’s just not equally distributed yet.

[towaway15463]

I’d like to see a cost estimate in both dollars and land area for pumped hydro.

[epistasis]

> 10 years ago people said nuclear power plants take 10 years

More like they said five, then ten after five years ahf passed.

>Battery technology isn’t on any kind of exponential curve.

Thats simply false, and a weird thing to fabricate. The very idea discredits the rest of a person's assessment of tech.

https://news.mit.edu/2021/lithium-ion-battery-costs-0323

> I get that no one likes to admit they were wrong,

This is some extremely strong projection. J'accuse

[melling]

Where do you see an exponential curve?

The article doesn’t discuss any exponential decrease for a reason. And most of the “dramatic drop” looks like it happened in the first 10 years

Time is running out.

[erikmolin]

Ok, here's one with a log scale so you can clearly see the exponential trend line

https://spectrum.ieee.org/chart-behind-the-three-decade-coll...

[melling]

“Between 1991 and 2018, the average price of the batteries that power mobile phones, fuel electric cars, and underpin green energy storage fell more than thirtyfold”

THIRTY FOLD ISNT EXPONENTIAL.

Please reevaluate the plan. It likely contains a lot of optimism and a few required miracles

[evilsetg]

> THIRTY FOLD ISNT EXPONENTIAL.

A * exp(b * t) = A / 30 => b = - log( 30 ) / t

As far as I can see a thirty fold decrease does fit into any exponential curve if you have the right rate constants or times, so I don't really get what you mean with that.

[epistasis]

The data is right there, it's on an exponential cost decrease. Very weird to be pointed directly at the data and deny that it says exactly what it says.

You say that "nobody likes to be proven wrong" but I in fact do like to be proven wrong. The "nobody" appears to only apply to yourself.

[nerbert]

Seems like in 2022 renewables are getting us there: https://ember-climate.org/insights/research/global-electrici...

[lm28469]

Are they ? Seems like we're using just as much fossil fuel as previously, which is still waaaaaay too much for any kind of sustainability

As always the rebound effect is kicking our ass, instead of producing the same and polluting less we pollute the same and produce more

[elevaet]

> +389 Change in global electricity demand (TWh)

> +416 Change in renewable generation (TWh)

> +5 Change in fossil generation (TWh)

I'm confused by this, it doesn't add up: change in renewables + fossil generation = +421TWh, so why does it say +389TWh for change in global electricity demand? Is 32TWh just going to waste?

[confidantlake]

Maybe a third category (perhaps nuclear) went down? Just speculating, it isn't very clear.

[lovemenot]

You are right. I believe the disconnect with many of those who argue like your parent is that they expect no societal changes should be forthcoming. So nuclear (both kinds) is the only way to continue with this lifestyle. As wastefully as we may wish, since massive over-provisioning is a possibility with these technologies.

I disagree with the premise and therefore with their conclusion. Renewables (plus storage, plus demand management, plus HVDC transmission) will get us there. But there isn't here

[myspy]

When I read here about nuclear as a solution I never read about how much fuel there is left, where it comes from, how much CO2 digging up the fuel and processing it is created as well as the waste management.

The waste is not a solved problem. In Germany we have huge problems with it hence why nuclear is on the way out.

Nuclear in France had problems with running during the summer due to the water in rivers being too hot and the system not maintaining the correct temperature difference.

[llsf]

Good questions. Just the first question is a rabbit hole on its own. How much nuclear fuel (lets focus on uranium) is left on Earth ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium Looks like there is uranium everywhere, including under your feet. There is more uranium than gold for instance. The question is about cost to extract. The more you spend the more you find. And the more you look and the more you find. "As of 2017, identified uranium reserves recoverable at US$130/kg were 6.14 million tons (compared to 5.72 million tons in 2015)".

Then on the other hand, it depends on how much uranium we use. "LWRs only consume about half of one percent of their uranium fuel while fast breeder reactors will consume closer to 99%. Currently, more than 80% of the World's reactors are Light Water Reactors (LWRs)."

So moving to fast breeder reactors would essentially live us with enough uranium for hundreds of years.

[towaway15463]

Those numbers are easily found but you also have to ask the same questions about waste produced by manufacturing renewables.

[belorn]

California is an excellent place to build out solar. They got the Mojave Desert, the Colorado Desert, and the Great Basin Desert, the later being the largest one in North America. The only time they need storage support is for the predictable hours of the night, and rare weather conditions. The first is solved by a few hours of battery capacity, and the later is solved by fossil fuels or imports. They don't even need that massive investments into grid infrastructure to span the distance between deserts and population centers.

California is the great example for solar power without needing a lot of storage/imports, in a similar way that Iceland is a great example for geothermal.

[XorNot]

Solar reliability is a big unsolved problem. Even at nation-state scale, we can't store power at enough scale without having to massively overbuild and even then.

The right way to fix this of course would be to take the same technology that lays undersea fiber optics, and take REBCO superconducting tapes and lay completely efficient under-sea power cables to locations with 8 hour separations around the world, then build solar their. It becomes a very different equation if you start having reliable sunlight.

We could do this today - none of it requires new technology. What it would require is a degree of international cooperation and trust which would be more or less unprecedented.

I do kind of wish some "change the world" billionaires would get interested in this, because it's an expensive project but it can both make money and is not the sort of the thing that requires more then commercial cooperation agreements to get started. And a single, global-scale electricity grid would definitely revolutionize things.

[gregw2]

It’s one form of risk to potentially allow your adversary to cut your undersea communication channel which has an over the air transmission backup, quite another to allow an adversary to cut your energy channel used by all homes hospitals and businesses, and with even less of a backup.

To get a billionaire interested you can’t position this tech as a global solution; it’s a nonstarter. However you could get a billionaire interested if you identify an economic arbitrage opportunity it enables that isn’t easily eroded.

[raxxorraxor]

Plus fission has its own problems and is very expensive and the storage problem is not solved.

Doesn't mean you should turn of any power plant, but it is just not a very good or efficient way to generate energy right now. Economic considerations will always restrict security. It was the case in Japan and will be the case everywhere else as well.

Fission is only efficient if you manage to reduce the question of ecological impact to CO2. But the overall calculation is far more in favor of renewable forms of energy.

[llsf]

Nuclear waste storage is solved. And for the last generation (4th) of nuclear power plants, the waste gets back to natural level of radioactivity in only 1,000 years. We have in France bridges that are older than that.

Running a nuclear power plant is very cheap. Building it is expensive and requires lots of capital upfront. The cost of nuclear is mostly interest. That is why it is a bit more expensive in UK (private capital) vs France (state capital).

How "the overall calculation is far more in favor of renewable forms of energy." ? In order to build enough solar or wind, plus batteries to replace all the nuclear production, we will have to extract a lot of resources (rare earth, lithium, etc.) pour a lot of concrete (for wind) which creates a lot of CO2, make lots of iron (energy hungry and producing lots of CO2). And all the waste involved, and they also have a lifespan, and needs to be replaced over time.

Not saying that we should not use solar/wind. But I am not convinced that it is the silver bullet and we can replace all the current and growing energy production with solely solar+ wind. It seems to me more reasonable to have a base line with nuclear, esp. if CO2 reduction and preparing for oil/gaz/coal peak are the goal.

[mgoetzke]

Yes! And without data to back that up.

Auke Hoekstra would disagree with the claim EE alone is not sufficient.

https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/1557466581185224704

[drdrey]

The justification is that renewable* power can not be easily adjusted to match demand and storing electricity on a large scale is tricky and expensive

*really just solar and wind, which seems to be mostly what people mean when they say renewables

[epistasis]

A weird thing to bring up when nuclear has the same problem. Making reactors that can respond to load is.... not cheap or trivial. And basic baseload type start out an excessive level of expense and complexity.

[XorNot]

Running a reactor over the grid demand load is wasteful of fuel, but can be done whenever. You just factor that into your cost equation.

A renewable does the same thing, but when there isn't sunshine or wind you cannot just bring more in.

[epistasis]

It's trivial to shut off an inverter or to feather a wind turbine's blades and stop generating.

Throttling a nuclear reactor can not happen as quickly, and the have much slower ramp rates as well.

Pumped hydro storage was developed because of this reason. We would likely use batteries today, instead of more pumped hydro.

[XorNot]

Missing my entire point: you can't cycle up renewables whenever you want, and that's the problem.

[epistasis]

If you want to cycle renewables up, but can't because of limited capacity, the one simply hasn't installed enough renewables or storage.

Same answer for nuclear, if you can't turn it up enough, then you simply haven't installed enough.

Storage can help mitigate the ramping concerns about having lots of nuclear on the grid. For France to be able to have 70% of generation as nuclear, they depend on using the continents grid for balancing, in addition to having some very high priced fast damping nuclear plants. But charging storage with solar, and using that stored electricity, is cheaper than using nuclear in the first place.

And at current prices of roughly $200/MWh for nuclear, and $20/MWh for solar, you can throw away an awful lot of solar capacity before nuclear makes any sense financially. And at $160/MWh for storage, which is a levelized cost which includes charging at ~$50/MWh, there's even room to not use all the battery capacity everyday and still have a firm energy source cheaper than nuclear.

[pydry]

This isnt true:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...

Storage isnt particularly cheap, but while solar and wind are 5x cheaper than nuclear power it is waaaay cheaper to combine solar+wind+more storage for a fully dispatchable grid than it is nuclear+less storage.

[headsoup]

There are also just as many people stating "renewables will get us there" without any real justification...

[thrown_22]

> There's a weird sociological phenomenon where people declare that "renewables won't get us there" without any real justification.

Sun doesn't shine at night.

The end.

[hebrox]

Just add some other renewables, storage, load shifting and interconnects, and the story continues.

[thrown_22]

At ten times the cost of a nuclear plant of the same capacity.

[pvaldes]

There is always some place in the planet when the sun is shining, and it is happening since the entire history of the planet.

Imagine a world when we could move stuff and communicate with the other coin of the planet from coast to coast. We could call it pipelines, internet, telephone cables or something like this. Can't wait for this to be invented

[thrown_22]

Sure, at that point nuclear power is cheaper building and maintaining that grid.

[pvaldes]

Cheaper only until you have a war, or a tool taking shortcuts in managing the place

The nuclear central of Vaporhizeyou in Ukraine is a liability? In some aspects, for sure it is a weak point in the safety of Ukraine. It depends on the point of view and in what direction the winds blow.

[Archelaos]

Rivers flow, when it is not raining.

The beginning.

[thrown_22]

>From the Danube to the Loire, Europe's prime rivers — lifelines for the continent's economy — are running low after a brutal five-month drought. After years of dry weather, scientists are warning that low-water conditions could become the norm in Europe as the climate changes.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/europe-rivers-drought

Not any more.

[TedDoesntTalk]

Similar story for the Colorado river in the US.

[neilwilson]

For renewables to be renewable you have to make the solar panels and turbines and storage systems from the energy generated by solar panels and turbines - from raw materials to raw materials.

When you do that you find that although you may be able to build the current version of renewables cheaply, that is because we are leveraging very cheap fossil fuel energy from China, and a world full of fossil vehicles, not sustainable vehicles.

Renewables wear out - far faster than initially thought - particularly turbines. When they come to need replacing the costs will be very much higher - as the material and power requirements will be competing at that point with a world that can't use fossil power or fossil locomotion.

Nuclear, on the other hand, can go the other way. Nuclear power in a shipping container (ie the same system we use on submarines) should mean we can bring economies of scale to fission, using little more than steel pipes and a bit of wiring, with the waste transportable in the same way as submarines. After all we've been able to control nuclear plants since the 1950s using relatively simple technology.

[esperent]

> For renewables to be renewable you have to make the solar panels and turbines and storage systems from the energy generated by solar panels and turbines

This is only true if you're going for some pedantic definition of renewable energy where it only counts if you're at 100%. Which, this being HN, is the kind of thing I expect but...

The reality is different: we need to reduce the impact of climate change by any means necessary since are already in a state of climate emergency. If we calculate that using fossil fuels to build solar/wind turbines/wave energy/etc. and then using those to power homes will be a net negative in global emissions, then we should do it. We can build the next generation using renewable energy.

Worrying about whether this fits some definition of renewable energy is just a distraction. Renewable energy is not the end goal, tackling climate change and reducing pollution is.

[afiori]

I believe that the argument is that you should calculate "pollution per kWh" along the entire lifecycle, not just restricted to the operating time.

This will surely still put most renewables in front of fossil fuels and (depending how you count it) most nuclear.

But it is a largely ignored metric by the general public

[headsoup]

I don't think you answered the argument there, merely suggesting it's fine to kick the can down the road because "emergency now!"

First, we need to look at where renewables are being used and if they're actually in the areas of greatest pollution, i.e creating a net reduction rather than just meeting a government number.

[Schroedingersat]

The relevant metric is joules of forcing avoided and joules of forcing avoided per dollar. Nuclear is very rarely a good choice by this metric even compared to changing coal for gas.