| HN Mirror

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...

Why do you keep trying to alter what you said? Can't you stick to the truth?

> It is the only viable path to decarbonization for most countries.

The research disagrees with you.

See the recent study on Denmark which found that nuclear power needs to come down 85% in cost to be competitive with renewables when looking into total system costs for a fully decarbonized grid, due to both options requiring flexibility to meet the grid load.

> Focusing on the case of Denmark, this article investigates a future fully sector-coupled energy system in a carbon-neutral society and compares the operation and costs of renewables and nuclear-based energy systems.

> The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources.

> However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour.

> For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.

Or the same for Australia if you went a more sunny locale finding that renewables ends up with a grid costing less than half of "best case nth of a kind nuclear power":

https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost2024-25Co...

Or if you want meta analysis have articles like:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

But they are of course all wrong by some tiny insignificant factor you will now pick up and attempt to blow up like it would be the end of the world.

You are being purposefully aggravating here because your argument is weak but it's been socially supported for some time now. Nuclear power lagged behind renewables due primarily to proliferation fears and subsequent over-regulation in most of the world, not technical flaws, missing out on innovations like modular reactors. China’s pushing ahead with 150 GW by 2030, leveraging nuclear’s advantages: it’s compact (1-4 sq mi/GW vs. solar’s 10-20), reliable, and resilient to extreme (and simply changing) weather, without reliance on rare earths or massive storage (with their own host externalizations and supply risks). Costs can drop to $50-100/MWh with new tech and long lifespans, rivaling renewables when accounting for their hidden expenses (storage, grid upgrades). Proliferation risks exist but can be managed with oversight. Nuclear remains the best bet for scalable, clean energy.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

Nuclear power has famously had negative learning by doing throughout its entire life.

There was a first large scale attempt at scaling nuclear power culminating 40 years ago. Nuclear power peaked at ~20% of the global electricity mix in the 1990s. It was all negative learning by doing.

Then we tried again 20 years ago. There was a massive subsidy push. The end result was Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto and Flamanville. We needed the known quantity of nuclear power since no one believed renewables would cut it.

How many trillions in subsidies should we spend to try one more time? All the while the competition in renewables are already delivering beyond our wildest imaginations.

China is barely investing in nuclear power. At their current buildout which have been averaging 5 construction starts per year since 2020 they will at saturation reach 2-3% total nuclear power in their electricity mix.

China is all in on renewables [1]() and [2] storage.

Then rounding of with some typical ”SMRs” nonsense!!!

SMRs have been complete vaporware for the past 70 years.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc...

Or just this recent summary on how all modern SMRs tend to show promising PowerPoints and then cancel when reality hits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XECq9uFsy6o

Simply look to:

- mPower: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%26W_mPower

- NuScale: https://oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2024/10/29/the-rise-and-f...

And the rest of the bunch adding costs for every passing year and then disappearing when the subsidies run out.

[1]: https://reneweconomy.com.au/chinas-quiet-energy-revolution-t...

[2]: https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-storag...

It's too costly to build high speed rail in many parts of the world (California for instance). It's not because high speed rail isn't a viable solution, it's regulation.

The article you posted from sciencedirect supports this. The study points primarily to a changing complex regulation landscape as a primary driver of costs. Meanwhile, France is in an excellent position in the EU in terms of energy in large part because it stuck with nuclear instead of attempting unsuccessfully to transfer to wind and solar like some of it's neighbors (who now burn lignite to meet energy demands).

Solar panels, for instance, are mostly made in places where actual costs of construction are externalized to the environment and workers with depressed wages. Nuclear plants need to be built and decommissioned in the same place - places that are often actively hostile with complex regulation meant to curtail nuclear specifically for the sake of non-proliferation. SMRs help sidestep a portion of this hostile regulation but there are countless reactor designs that are possible that we can't even begin to explore until regulation is made reasonable.

Given that Flamanville 3 being 7x over budget and 13 years late on a 5 year construction schedule even the French are wholly unable to build new nuclear power.

We should of course keep our existing fleet around as long as it is safe, needed and economical.

Then you round of with an endless stream of excuses as to why nuclear power does not deliver.

The only thing hindering nuclear power is its economics. Otherwise less regulated countries would pounce on the opportunity to have cheaper energy. That hasn’t happened.

Where nuclear power has a good niche it gets utilized, and no amount of campaigning limits it. One such example are submarines.

So stop attempting to shift the blame and go invest your own money in advancing nuclear power rather than crying for another absolutely enormous government handout when the competition in renewables already deliver on that said promise: extremely cheap green scalable energy.

Unsubsidized renewables are today cheaper than fossil fuels. Lets embrace that rather than wasting another trillion dollars on nuclear subsidies.

Your figures for China's mix are meaningless because you don't bother to mention when you think "saturation" occurs. They are on track to build far more Nuclear than 2-3% of their current mix in the next 20 years - and this is as the world's top manufacturer of solar and wind products.

Love the excuses when apparently China was not building as much nuclear power as your fantasy land imagined.

You do know that nuclear power as a share of the Chinese electricity mix is dropping?

Manuel_D 476 days ago

Again, why are you talking about cost, when the real question is viability? How does the study you linked plan to accommodate intermittency? The answer is just a vague statement about storage mechanisms:

> Storage of energy is an important element of 100% RE systems, especially when using large shares of variable sources like solar and wind [14], [40]–[42], and it can take various forms [43]–[45]. Batteries can supply efficient short term storage, while e-fuels can provide long-term storage solutions. Other examples are mechanical storage in pumped hydro energy storage [46], [47] and compressed air energy storage [48], [49], and thermal energy in a range of storage media at various temperature levels [43], [50].

Nowhere do they actually outline how much storage of each system they will provision. How many TWh of batteries? How many TWh of pumped hydro? Totally unanswered. They just mention the existence of storage, and avoid any tangible discussion of scale. Like I said, there's no realistic plans for a grid primarily powered by intermittent sources. The storage required for such a grid is orders of magnitude larger than what can be feasibly provisioned.

This isn't a tiny insignificant detail. It's is a foundational part of a primarily renewable grid. And nobody has a plan to solve it that doesn't amount to "assume some different system, which has never been deployed at scale, can tens of terawatt hours of storage".

Love that you try to avoid the issue of cost. Yeah, in the land of infinite money and resources you can do anything.

In the real world the energy crisis was a cost crisis. But you seem to no care the slightest about massively increasing the ratepayers bills and by that creating a new self made energy crisis. This time fueled by nuclear subsidies.

So you skipped the first two studies. I suppose because you found nothing to complain about in them. Good to know.

Then you go on a meta-analysis on the entire field and demand them to produce a TWH figure for some energy system you can't even specify.

You truly are grasping for the straws.

Here's the quote you missed:

> Much of the resistance towards 100% RE systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible since these energy sources are variable. Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276]. However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]– [282]; storage [40]– [43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]– [92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place.

> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive. Variability, especially short term, has many mitigation options, and energy system studies are increasingly capturing these in their 100% RE scenarios.

With the conclusion based on the meta-analysis:

> The main conclusion of the vast majority of 100% renewable energy systems studies is that such systems can power all energy in all regions of the world at low cost. As such, we do not need to rely on fossil fuels in the future. In the early 2020s, the consensus has increasingly become that solar PV and wind power will dominate the future energy system and new research increasingly shows that 100% renewable energy systems are not only feasible but also cost effective. This gives us the key to a sustainable civilization and the long-lasting prosperity of humankind.

Since the study was released in mid 2022 has it become easier to harder to create 100% renewable energy systems? Easier.

The cost of nuclear is primarily from regulation/human decision making that prevents it from externalizing its costs onto the environment (decom costs, waste handling) not physics. Wind and solar are limited severely by physics and they are much more vulnerable to a changing climate. China eating its own dogfood with heavy investments in renewables is meaningful but only illuminates some of what is happening. A significant amount of this stuff is going into the ground in 25 years and it won't be handled with nearly the safety and care as waste streams from nuclear power.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

All I see is a bunch of excuses to nuclear power not delivering. Nuclear power has had a negative learning curve throughout its entire life.

And don't come and tell me that the Uranium supply chain is cleanest thing known to mankind. It currently is generally outsourced from the west because the enormous amounts of cost managing the externalities adds. Especially the processing steps from raw uranium to fuel rods.

Manuel_D 476 days ago

> Here's the quote you missed:

Nowhere in that quote does it list how much of each type of storage is required. Again, they just list a range of storage systems, most of them never deployed at scale, and just don't even bother to lay out a concrete plan. The quotes you're posting are fitting this pattern of vague statements about storage and a total absence of concrete plans.

How many TWh of batteries? How many TWh of pumped hydro? How many TWh of some more exotic storage systems like compressed air or hydrogen? There's a reason why plans for a renewable grid don't go into this detail and stick to vague statement: actually sketching out how much storage would be required would show just how infeasible it really is.

Like I said, proponents of a mostly renewable grid don't have a plan to address intermittency. Or rather their plan is, "assume something solves storage, and don't worry about it".

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...

I have already given you all that but you keep dodging instead single mindedly focusing on what is outside the scope of a meta studie of the entire field.

Trying to frame it like you disprove something when you truly don’t. You can go and read the individual studies it sources the statements from, which are then used to build those arguments arguments.

But I suppose that is too hard when you gotta find any possible straw to grasp instead of accepting reality.

Lets go back to the to studies you’ve decided to completely ignore. Likely because they answer your complaints and you haven’t found any nitpick to paint as the end of the world.

So again:

> For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.

Or the same for Australia if you went a more sunny locale finding that renewables ends up with a grid costing less than half of "best case nth of a kind nuclear power":

https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost2024-25Co...

Manuel_D 476 days ago

> I have already given you all that but you keep dodging

No, you have not. The quotes you posted just list various storage systems and don't bother to set specific capacity requirements. I'll ask again:

How many TWh of battery storage are provisioned in your hypothetical 100% renewable world?

How many TWh of pumped hydro?

How many TWh of other storage? And what are these alternative storage systems?

The posts you link only talk about the cost of storage, but not the total capacity requirements. This is important, because 12 hours of storage for global electricity consumption is 30TWh. Only about 1 TWh of batteries are produced each year globally. So actually trying to provision grid scale storage would massively increase battery demand and drive up prices. This is the a reason why nobody wants to talk about the total capacity requirements for a primarily renewable grid.