[magicalist]

> For example, in Denmark[1] a solar-dominated grid would cost around 565 EUR/MWh. A nuclear-dominated grid would cost around 141 EUR/MWh.

That's not what it says. It says that would be the cost assuming the current grid and power came from only solar or only nuclear. The majority of the cost then is for overprovisioning and storage, especially to handle the lack of sun in the winter.

The actual low cost power comes from mixes of renewables, that they note nuclear can't compete with (especially in their hypothetical future energy system with things like scheduled EV charging). They give an example of offshore wind (66%), solar (8%), CCGT (26%) (primarily natural gas) for 66 EUR/MWh, or, restricting to biomass for the gas plant: offshore wind (84%), solar (13%), CCGT (3%) at 99 EUR/MWh.

(it's also worth noting that this is for Denmark. Something like 98% of Canadians live south of Denmark's southernmost line of latitude).

[leonidasrup]

Biomass in Demark is in large part not green technology. Could be even worse then fossil gas.

"The utmost amount (46%) of wood pellets comes from the Baltic countries (Latvia and Estonia) and 30% from the USA, Canada and Russia.6 Estonia and Latvia have steadily been the primary exporters of biomass to Denmark, mainly in the form of wood pellets and wood chips."

https://noah.dk/Biomass-consumption-in-Denmark

[lukan]

Even if the wood is imported, it still counts as green, as it regrowing and does not add CO2 that was in the ground before.

(So it depends how much CO2 the ships used to transport it there)

[leonidasrup]

1. We can comfortable say that the CO2 from burned wood stays in the atmosphere for at-least 100 years (time necessary for the next tree to grow), with all the associated effects.

2. I could not imagine scaling biomass to country like India or China to cover the same share in electricity production mix as in Dermark (Denmark currently produces 20% of electricity from Bioenergy).

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/denmark

[lukan]

1. No, if you take wood out of the forest and let it regrow, it is roughly +-0 CO2 balance (It is not just the new trees binding CO2, taking advantage of the new sunlight, all the other plants and existing trees start to bind CO2 the moment they can)

2. No, it is not and I doubt anyone claimed that this is possible.

[leonidasrup]

"Does wood bioenergy help or harm the climate?" by John Sterman.

John Sterman is the Jay W. Forrester professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management

"The EU, UK, US, and other nations consider wood to be a carbon neutral fuel, ignoring the carbon dioxide emitted from wood combustion in their greenhouse gas accounting. Many countries subsidize wood energy – often by burning wood pellets in place of coal for electric power – to meet their renewable energy targets. But can wood bioenergy help cut greenhouse emissions in time to limit the worst damage from climate change? The argument in favor seems obvious: wood, a renewable resource, must be better than burning fossil fuels. But wood emits more carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour than coal – and far more than other fossil fuels. Therefore, the first impact of wood bioenergy is to increase the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, worsening climate change. Forest regrowth might eventually remove that extra carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but regrowth is uncertain and takes time – decades to a century or more, depending on forest composition and climatic zone – time we do not have to cut emissions enough to avoid the worst harms from climate change. More effective ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions are already available and affordable now, allowing forests to continue to serve as carbon sinks and moderate climate change."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2022.2...

[onraglanroad]

> But wood emits more carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour than coal

Utterly irrelevant since that carbon came out of the air to grow the tree in the first place.

> Forest regrowth might eventually remove that extra carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but regrowth is uncertain

Of course it's not! Trees are grown as a crop. These aren't ancient forests, they're fields of trees for harvesting. If it was uncertain no-one could make money from forestry.

[Moldoteck]

it also depends on the rate of consumption. On top of that, the burning aint perfect, you also get amplifiers like monoxide or NOx. It also depends on the type of burned wood - some trees grow faster, others slower. If you burn a tree that grew slowly, it'll be +- zero after a long time

[TheOtherHobbes]

Battery and storage tech is improving and innovating all the time. It also has a fast build cycle.

Commissioning reactors that won't come online for 10-15 years makes no sense at all, economically and practically.

[xethos]

> Commissioning reactors that won't come online for 10-15 years makes no sense at all, economically and practically.

Because we won't need base load in 15 years? Or because you're arguing that we'll have so many batteries, and they'll be so cheap, and they'll be so over-provisioned regarding summer/winter variance, that we won't be able to sell excess nuclear power to the states?

Personally, I wouldn't make either bet, no matter what odds you give me

[Moldoteck]

It makes sense for Canada. Unless you love using gas for firming of course

[red75prime]

I chose those numbers to emphasize the system cost. Too many people go "Solar panels are cheap! Why don't we have them everywhere?" That's why.

[brainwad]

Even then, the costs came down 10x in a decade, so it seems foolish to commit to nuclear which has no prospects of getting cheaper.

[somenameforme]

It will likely become significantly more expensive at scale. At current nuclear usage we use about 60,000 tons of uranium year powering nuclear reactors. [1] Global reserves are around 6 million tons, with estimates putting potential reserves around double that. [2] So that's enough for about 2 centuries of usage at current levels. Bump up nuclear by 10x and we're at 20 years until we're out, assuming all those potential reserves can be found.

The claims of endless nuclear energy rely on salt-water extraction which is like 3 parts per billion and not at all economical, or the development of breeder reactors which as of yet also remain prohibitively expensive, significantly more dangerous/finnicky owing to using liquid sodium as a coolant, and offer much easier weaponization.

Back in the 70s Exxon predicted the impacts of widespread CO2 output, but hand-waved it away. I feel people are doing the exact same thing with nuclear, and probably under the exact same motivation. They are biased towards nuclear and want it to work, and so are either ignoring the issues or assuming/hoping for a future technological breakthrough to resolve them, but as of yet that breakthrough appears nowhere in sight.

[1] - http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2026/ph241/flanagan2/

[2] - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-global-uranium-rese...

[credit_guy]

> Global reserves are around 6 million tons, with estimates putting potential reserves around double that

In the mining industry reserves are a technical term. They can be proven, probable, likely, etc. qualifying a deposit as a reserve of a certain grade costs money. Reserves are used as colateral for secured financing, so in some cases the cost is justified. But if the sum of reserves is about 100 years of current consumption (our case here), mining companies will not spend one dollar more to certify new reserves.

For all practical purposes, uranium is an inexhaustible fuel, even if we never develop fast reactors.

[Moldoteck]

global reserves are much higher. Anything above 100ppm can be extracted more or less economically. That's a ton of stuff even without purex/pyroprocessing/fast reactors or seawater

Seawater extraction is already comparable to most expensive land mines looking at China so it's no longer prohibitively expensive. India is moving fast with it's Thorium design https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/first-criticality-fo...

"feel people are doing the exact same thing with nuclear, and probably under the exact same motivation. They are biased towards nuclear and want it to work, and so are either ignoring the issues or assuming/hoping for a future technological breakthrough to resolve them, but as of yet that breakthrough appears nowhere in sight." - France decarbonized in 90s and to this day no country got similar emissions/kwh in similar timeframe with similar or lower hydro resources.

The hopium lies in exactly the opposite way where ppl hope H2 will become dirt cheap and will be used for firming

[peterfirefly]

Remember when the world ran completely out of copper?

[myrmidon]

First: I completely agree that extrapolating current ressource use towards a "exhaustion date" is naive, and historically things never worked out that way.

But copper price is still up by >500% since the early 2000s.

[somenameforme]

If it wasn't clear in my post, the entire point is not that we'd run out, but that it'd become economically unviable. As the supply starts to run out and/or we turn to more expensive sources, prices go up - sharply. We'll never really run out of anything - it will just become so expensive that it's no longer viable for widespread usage. Nuclear is quite sensitive to this issue because the primary, and arguably sole, argument for it is that it's cheap.

[leonidasrup]

The world will not run completely out of copper, be we can expect much higher prices.

"Copper and lithium are major exceptions where expected mined supply from announced projects falls short of projected demand in 2035, with implied deficits of 30% for copper and 40% for lithium"

https://www.iea.org/reports/global-critical-minerals-outlook...

[peterfirefly]

Copper prices may be higher in 2035 but I'll be astonished if lithium prices are. I expect lithium to be much cheaper by then.

Note that we kept extracting copper long after people said we would run out. We even increased production AND lowered prices.

[red75prime]

A few hundred years on thorium then fusion.

[rob74]

> Something like 98% of Canadians live south of Denmark's southernmost line of latitude

...while also having a colder climate than the Danish. At least while the Gulf Stream is still working.

[looofooo0]

There is not enough wind capacity in most countries