Do please remember that amongst the reasons nuclear is expensive and slow is the weight of legal peril and delay intruded by .. the anti nuclear movement.
Not all, by any means but in the "it takes too long" side of things, there's a reason.
One of the reasons Germany is behind countries like Portugal in Wind power, is exactly the legal ways that anyone can prevent wind farms to be deployed, because "they are ugly", or "break the landscape view", or other nonsense.
Thankfully some states are finally voting on changing this.
Regulation also slows down green projects. There are reasons for these regulations and some of them will be around for thousands of years...
Green energy is cheaper, less risky and regulation (while also painful) is easier in most cases. As a result a project can be built much faster. Land usage is bigger but mixed usage is OK (e.g. solar over crops, parking lots etc.). Wind can reside in the sea and geothermal can be in the middle of the city.
I think the discussion over nuclear is based on data from a decade ago. The world changed. It isn't Greenpeace that should object, its the business interests. It just isn't viable anymore and the viability is declining, since solar/wind, storage etc. keep improving at an amazing rate.
From both an engineering sense and an aesthetic sense, I would much rather have 2 nuclear plants serving as base load (not total load) for 10M people, supplemented by solar/wind, than relying solely on solar/wind/storage. (In part because that requires an incredible amount of storage to preserve the current uptime in my part of the US, but also because it's a much better match to the load profile [engineering] and a smaller footprint near people [aesthetics].)
> It just isn't viable anymore and the viability is declining, since solar/wind, storage etc. keep improving at an amazing rate.
Yes renewables are growing at an amazing rate. But they don't cover countries' energy needs entirely, all the time. Which you need for a power grid.
The storage problem is by no means solved. And eg. hydro is only an option in a few places.
So you need other power generation to fill in the (big!) gaps.
Right now, that's a choice between a) let power grid go down, b) fossil, or c) nuclear. Note this is temporary! Only needed until sufficient storage comes online to let renewables do the job.
Given the urgency of the situation we're in, I see nuclear as the lesser evil here. And it's very annoying that NGOs like Greenpeace are actively blocking that escape hatch with their outdated stance. They should NOT get in the way of those working to reduce CO2 emissions. Even if nuclear.
At scale they do cover countries energy needs. Storage at grid scale is pretty great, are there enough batteries to replace all the current energy requirement?
No. But they can be manufactured much faster than setting up a nuclear plant.
If you have a combination of wind, solar, hydro and geo over enough of a distance then you can get continuous energy with very little reliance on storage. The main problem is that this only works at scale and some countries are smaller. For this we need marketplaces that sell energy between countries automatically. That isn't a hard problem on the technical level, but might be a political issue and a logistic issue (grid connections, security etc.).
Because of the urgency nuclear isn't viable. The same capacity *with storage* can be setup in less time than it takes to build a nuclear plant. It will be cheaper to boot. The economics of nuclear made sense a decade ago, not now.
Renewables industrialize much more land than nuclear and nuclear solve the challenge of renewables being dependent on the weather. Renewables are far more expensive than nuclear when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.
Not accurate. Renewables can be multi-used. You can put them on agriculture lands, on buildings, on parking lots. You can put a wind turbines in the deep sea (where you have constant wind). Geothermal works all the time and you can put it in the middle of a city without disturbing anything.
When you have a large enough territory then you always have power from one or the other. Storage is enough to cover the rest and still keep the costs down.
Now tell me where you think the entire southeastern quarter of the US should deploy its wind farms, bearing in mind its periodic susceptibility to hurricanes along the coasts and offshore.
Geothermal? The largest geothermal plant in the world is the Geysers Geothermal Complex with a capacity of 900 megawatts. It is made up of 22 power plants and spread over several kilometers, located north of San Francisco. This is hardly something where "you can put it in the middle of a city without disturbing anything." Additionally, it sits on top of a deep magma chamber that spans over 30 square miles. If you don't have a thermal source quite as abundant and close to the surface, costs and losses rise dramatically. (For reference, Diablo Canyon in California has two 1,100MW reactors on a single plant that has already been producing CO2-free power for decades, and folks are still trying to take it down.)
Don't believe the hype. I'm firmly in the camp that global climate change is an existential crisis that we may already be too late to properly mitigate. This also means we're far too late to be discussing hypothetical solutions to the problem like geothermal and wind options that simply don't exist in large swaths of the US let alone the world.
It happens _all the damn time_ in winter and late fall. Anyone who doubts that is conjuring their own reality.
Poland had 2x larger share of renewables in July than in November.
There's barely any sun, wind increase isn't that significant to cover lack of it, and energy demand is very very high.
A reduction of only 2x between July and November is actually super positive for renewables. Wind and solar energy is almost free on an ongoing basis and installation of new capacity isn't expensive. Your number suggests that simply installing 2x the capacity needed in favorable weather would be sufficient for unfavorable weather. Actually it's more like 3x but that's still often very doable.
It's ridiculously uneconomic of course but a limited number will continue to be built in spite of this because of the overpowering military imperative.
If you have nuclear weapons/submarines/carriers/etc. like Russia or the United States or France it shares some of the gargantuan cost of building and maintaining them. I expect North Korea will get into it in the next few years too for precisely this reason.
Countries like Iran, Sweden and Korea, on the other hand, want to be able to manufacture a weapon on a tight deadline because of extremely self evident geopolitical fears.
Nobody else builds nuclear power plants. The vast power of the global hippy-industrial complex apparently prevented it :/
Of course, the western nuclear military industrial complex, who always HATED environmentalists with a seething passion, are aware of just how massively uneconomic it is but that doesn't stop them from trying to dress up as "young climate activists" to sell a form of power that is 5x more expensive as a green gamechanger. Consent for enormous subsidies needs to be manufactured somehow if nuclear power is to remain competitive with solar and wind.
Commercial reactors and military/medical isotope reactors are usually completely separated. The reason for that is that BWR/PWR reactors don't let you manipulate the fuel while the reactor is working, which makes it considerably harder to get plutonium.
China has reactors started in for example 2010 and 2015 that were finished in 5 or 6 years (and some others that took 10 years). India and Japan has reactors started in 2000 finished in 5-6 years. Pakistan has reactors stared in 2011 and 2016 finished in 6 years. Korea has reactors started in 2000, 2005, 2006, finished in 5 years.
Wind and solar have legal perils as well. Mostly NIMBYs, but some sincere concerns exist about impact on wildlife, loss of agricultural space, etc.
I think the reason the effects of those concerns in monetary terms pale in contrast to nuclear, is that nuclear technology is much more complex and complicated and therefore many more issues need to be addressed. At this stage, it's still a pretty immature technology and it can't progress very fast because it's considered more hazardous than alternatives.
As it is, I'm tempted to agree with the young climate activists if nuclear could short term buy us time to instantly shut down coal and gradually transition to renewable sources. Problem is, that even building "off the shelf" nuclear plants tends to take way longer than wind or solar.
True. The problem is that instant action is needed.
In that perspective, Germany's decision to shutdown operational nuclear plants in favour of ramping up brown coal energy seems especially poor. But had it's politics been different and the existing reactors kept open at expense of ditching coal, that still would not have helped advance nuclear innovation that might possibly have led to cheaper or safer nuclear power. As it stands, nuclear is too expensive to compete with renewables.
And I don't think the young climate activists would argue for leniency, building and managing nuclear plants with the same sloppiness as their coal competitors.
They can pack a nuclear power plant on a boat/submarine. It means, they can build a system which is compact and reproducible.
If the authorities would be ready to allow the use of such systems as stationary deployment and provide financial incentives to get them online fast for "base load", I expect Rolls Royce and cie. to quickly deliver.
Even a reactor designed to power an aircraft carrier wouldn't do much more than power a few suburbs. We would need many, many boat powerplants to replace a single coal fired power station which looks impractical against batteries and wind/solar both on cost and deployment speed.
I'm not here to try and float the nuclear boat, 'that ship has sailed' -but I think your economics are true now, but somewhat shallow.
There have been decades lost getting PV and wind viable to power a few suburbs and the LCOE of SMR would have been just fine if the industry had been allowed to achieve the same economies of scale of production. Now? It's two to three or more times expensive than solar/wind. (CSIRO)
Instead we've got billions of overspend on giant Reactor complexes like Hinckley. It can't compete. But undeniable huge sums of money have been flung at nuclear.
Both nuke, and solar and wind and batteries are dwarfed by the gross irresponsible subsidies which underpin coal, oil and gas. They launched the 20th century. They leave a trail of tears and ash behind, which will take centuries to remediate. Massive socialised losses as an externality.
I like wind, and PV and batteries. We're going to do fine.
I am not a grid expert, though I am fairly well versed in EVs/solar/battery storage.
I am curious if battery storage can be done on-site at solar/wind facilities rather than distributed locally in neighborhood grids. I ask, because in NY we are seeing huge NIMBY issues with installing battery storage in residential areas. A mix of realistic concerns (fire safety) and general FUD/NIMBYism for sure.
The facilities aren't even that big, which is why I'm curious if they could just be built out at the generation site and fight the NIMBY env. review paperwork game once.
Which has a huge effect on the speed of innovation, the cycle time is such that making a better nuclear system takes much longer than solar. So comparing costs gives one result, comparing cost curves quite another
My father pointed out an interesting counter to this to me recently: how many birds are killed by wind farms and how many are killed by house cats?
Studies show a million or so birds killed in the US by wind each year. Other studies estimate cats kill billions of birds- and most aren't eaten, because the cats are well fed pets.
> loss of agricultural space
Is that something we're short of? I'd argue that food prices, ignoring recent inflation fluctuations, are the cheapest they've been ever in the history of humanity. Hunger only exists in the world because capitalism dictates that those who are poor must starve.
The opposition to renewables is pure NIMBYism. Though I'd still back new nuclear any day (and my province recently announced some!)
Yes and no.
On the one hand, we destruct rain forests to have agricultural space. Bad of course.
On the other hand, we destroy the remaining nature by using pesticides to increase short term production.
Nevertheless, this wouldn't be necessary if the world would switch to plant based diets as much as possible
Why is the sourcing of nuclear fuel never talked about as a problem? France needs to maintain boots on the ground in Africa to protect their uranium mines. The German public, amongst others would be extremely against that level of direct imperialism.
In France, although no domestic uranium exploration and mine development activities have been carried out since 1999, majority government-owned Orano (formerly Areva) and its subsidiaries remain active abroad.
As of 2020, Orano S.A. has been working outside France, focusing on discovery of exploitable resources in Canada, Gabon, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Namibia and Niger. In Canada, Kazakhstan and Niger, Orano is also involved in uranium mining operations.
In addition, as a non-operator, Orano holds shares in several mining operations and research projects in different countries. In 2020, Orano started exploration in Uzbekistan.
Total nondomestic exploration expenditures remained relatively steady from 2017 to 2018 at about USD 30 million per year, before declining by 17% to around USD 25 million in 2019 and 2020.
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Also, I can't find any mention of the French having problems cooling down their reactors last year due to drying out rivers.
Nuclear might have been an option fifty years ago, but now it's too late to start, and we should focus on storage and renewables instead, if you ask me.
If you are doing a huge nuclear build out, you should also focus on storage. Nuclear plants are economic to run at peak all the time, even at night when the demand isn’t there. Renewables except reservoir based hydro have the same problem (the reservoir counts as storage for hydro, and anything else if you have can run pumps back up).
> France needs to maintain boots on the ground in Africa to protect their uranium mines
It seems rather coincidental to me that one of the countries where France has military presence happens to be a minor uranium producer (we're talking about Niger here I assume).
France has military presence in many more countries, and Niger is (or was, since there was a coup there recently) only a supplier for 1/5th of France's supply, and easy replaced with other sources. None of the other suppliers have French military bases.
Uranium is also very easy to stockpile since it takes little space, which makes it much easier to switch suppliers if needed.
Beyond the mere Uranium, power plants need specific fuel rods, and afaik only Russia is currently capable of manufacturing the fuel rods for the remaining old soviet bloc power plants in Eastern Europe.
A non-sanctioned country can buy uranium on the open market relatively easily. Production happens in many places [1], including Canada and Australia.
French power plants don't need to worry much about African politics, at worst they'll have pay Canada or Kazakstan a little extra for short notice delivery. And even then, Uranium is a small part of the overall cost of nuclear energy.
Thankfully some states are finally voting on changing this.