[beat]

One of the best things about the solar/wind + storage combination is that it's decentralized and cheap at small scale. This makes serious electrification of remote and impoverished places viable. It reminds me of the wildfire spread of cell service in places that didn't have phones before, only on a larger and more important scale. Give a village cheap electricity, and awesome things will happen.

This gets to another point that bugs me in these discussions... the pushback against wind/solar dominance by the pro-nuclear crowd. Insisting that nuclear power is the right way to go is western-centric. It's fine for the US, Europe, Japan, and other advanced nations that have the infrastructure to support it. But is it a solution for Peru? For Somalia? Of course not. Wind/solar/storage, on the other hand, is totally viable as a solution for even the poorest nations. This alone is an argument for solar over nuclear.

[DennisP]

I wrote a couple pro-nuclear comments here. I'm perfectly happy with wind and solar and think we should roll it out as fast as we can, as well as nuclear.

Many of the wind/solar advocates, on the other hand, are strongly anti-nuclear. Given the state of the climate that just doesn't make sense to me. All these technologies have their own advantages, and we should use each where it's most effective.

[flgb]

I think there are two separate dynamics here, and its worth keeping them separate.

Firstly, there is the traditional concern of the green movement with nuclear waste and nuclear weapons proliferation. Nuclear advocates say these concerns are misplaced because of nuclear technology innovations (although its not clear how close the new technology is to wide deployment).

Secondly, there is an economic and free-market concern. Nuclear power plants generally only get built in highly regulated, centrally planned electricity markets with a great deal of Government financial support.

The projects to build them, at least in modern Western states, tend to be complex, expensive and prone to overruns. These projects generally need the plants to run all the time with guaranteed rates for the business case to stack up.

This is entirely at odds with solar and wind, which are highly democratised -- your Aunty can put solar on her roof -- and even when deployed at 'grid scale' tend to suck the profits out of wholesale electricity markets, because they have the lowest short-run costs and always out bid other energy sources.

In deregulated electricity markets renewables plus gas beat nuclear on price. We need storage to push gas out of the market.

[snowwrestler]

The only reason Aunty can put solar on her roof is because she has the centralized electrical grid to back her up. Put another way, if Aunty had to choose between roof solar and centralized grid (exclusive of one another), most Aunties will choose the grid because it is much more reliable.

That's how we ended up with centralized generation and a grid in the first place--the initial roll out of electricity was highly localized, with factories, buildings, and blocks each having their own generators. Centralized + grid beat that architecture on reliability and cost.

So, the grid needs to be available with or without solar. Thus the "free market" concern is less of a differentiator than it seems on the surface.

[flgb]

This isn't about grid or no grid. We will have a grid for the foreseeable future.

This is a question about how distributed energy generation with battery storage shifts more and more loads to the edges of the grid, and onto private networks.

And then, relating to back to the question of whether nuclear is compatible with renewable energy, the question becomes how does this trend affect what technologies make the most sense?

Big expensive nuclear makes a lot of sense in an environment where all the loads are on are centrally managed and planned grid with either guaranteed rates of return, or steady wholesale electricity prices, but this is not what the future looks like.

[snowwrestler]

My point is that all electricity markets, at least in the U.S., will be highly regulated and centrally planned for the foreseeable future, because customers absolutely expect the grid to meet 100% of their needs no matter what happens.

More generation might move to the edges, but that is simply a factor that will be taken into account by the regulation and central planning.

There has to be central generating to meet demand that local generating fails to meet; but the choice of fuel source doesn't have any implications for "free market" concerns. Electricity is not a free market. For example, net metering is only an option for home solar because a federal law says it must be. In a free market, the central electricity utility could simply decline to purchase from edge generators. Or decline to connect home solar people to the grid at all.

[beat]

I'm neither pro- nor anti-nuclear. I'm not afraid of it and recognize that it has value (I really like the idea of using it for base load generation with wind/solar), but I also think it's a very limited solution, due to its expense, complexity, and political difficulties. If we can build a purely solar/wind/storage model that is inexpensive, safe, and uncontroversial, I'd much prefer that.

[lotsofmangos]

I am not anti-nuclear, I am just anti-nuclear (of the type that is useful for enriching for weapons) for the global solution to electrical power, given that for a general solution you need something that politically, you don't worry too much about your enemies having.

Look at the situation with Iran for instance. Any development of nuclear there is viewed with extreme suspicion, even while we are trying to reduce global oil dependence.

If Iran was rolling out solar and building silicon foundries, we might get into trade disputes over it, but we are not going to be that paranoid about them purifying silicon as it generally does not go boom.

edit - anyone pro-nuclear power who is not pro-nuclear power for Iran should really think on this one. A solution for electricity generation that you are scared of people having is not a good general solution.

edit 2 - I am not meaning to dump on Iran here, is just that the Iranian situation with this has been making the most news recently.

[beat]

The Iran situation highlights what I said in the first place - not only is nuclear not a technical option for the majority of the world, we would be actively hostile to it for a lot of countries. So basically, the nuclear > solar position is, consciously or unconsciously, relegating parts of the world to permanent poverty, deliberately leaving them behind.

And again, take a remote village. Give them electricity and decent internet. What happens? Their lives get a lot better, their opportunities grow. But focusing on government-centralized systems will continue to exclude them.

[lotsofmangos]

I have talked to engineers from oil and gas as well as from nuclear industries about solar. The oil and gas folk generally like it and have an eye on the jobs, whereas the nuclear folk haven't looked into it and claim it is pointless. One of them even thought that the incoming solar is far less than we use and spat his drink out when I told him the actual numbers involved.

[snowwrestler]

Very few people oppose nuclear power for Iran on principle. Opposition to development so far has been based on the obvious evidence that in Iran, "nuclear power" has so far been a fig leaf for developing a nuclear weapon.

The framework that the U.S. is negotiating with Iran right now will allow them to continue nuclear activities that legitimately lead toward peaceful nuclear power.

[pkulak]

Well, sure. But we can't let perfect be the enemy of good.

[amelius]

I'm genuinely wondering, if it is possible to rob 250 million pounds' worth of diamonds from a bank vault in London, how difficult it would be to obtain access to some nuclear waste.

[chrstphrhrt]

Yeah, TIMTOWTDI ftw! Same goes for any kind of social/political change. Diversity and solidarity go really well together.

[cwp]

Agreed. The only objection I have to wind and solar is that they are insufficient. We should use them as much as possible, but we're going to need nuclear if we want to replace fossil fuels.

[ghshephard]

The more advanced (Stanford Energy Symposium) research that I've seen suggests that there is only one possible power source that we can look to long term to meet the energy needs of the world, and that is Solar Energy. Nuclear Energy just won't be possible to build out quickly enough, inexpensively enough - even if we could do it safely.

In particular, check out Nate Lewis's Solar Energy 101 (https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodca...) - In the Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) where he makes a strong case that the only choice is Solar - not because it's a good one, but because there is nothing else out there that can meet our needs (And he spends a bit of time talking about Nuclear Energy, and why it comes up short).

[lotsofmangos]

We use ~ 20 terawatts

Incoming solar hitting the ground is ~ 89,000 terawatts

At current conversion efficiencies and accounting for transmission losses, this translates to an area of about twice the size of Portugal spread out globally.

[brrt]

This is an article about energy storage. Nuclear doesn't have much to do with that. Nor does the alleged aversion of 'green people' to nuclear. Please give it a rest.

[john61]

Technologies also have risks. If the risk of a technology is the vast devastation of life it should not be used.

[hyperbovine]

Compared with the vast devastation of life which is already taking place as a result of climate change? I'll take my chances with the nukes.

[Lorento]

Human life? Is it? Remember famines that used to regularly wipe out the peasants in most civilizations? It's been a while since disasters on those scales happened in most countries. Climate change doesn't sound so bad when you compare it to normal life a few centuries ago.

[saiya-jin]

yes and no... climate change is not about having +2 degrees globally, we can handle that easily even if sea rises significantly. Not even about extinction of a lot of species, which will trash some foodchains around the world. It's more about longer perspective - some effects are cascading, and in longer uncontroleld run, we might end up with pretty much inhabitable planet (at least for mankind). Life itself will handle this easily, mass extinctions happened many times in the past for various reasons, mankind in its current level of evolution would be probably over.

[DennisP]

For a look at what's actually projected for the climate, read the book Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, who read about 3,000 peer-reviewed papers and summarized them, with extensive references. It's quite frightening, and far beyond anything that human civilization has ever experienced, even at +2C. If we go all the way to +6 it's hard to imagine anyone surviving. Somewhere between +2 and +3, climate feedbacks kick in and take it several degrees further with no more help from us. Right now we're at +0.8.

[hyperbovine]

I didn't say anything about humans, but even the most anthropocentric among us can see that killing everything in sight serves to hasten our own demise. And yes, it is. Read the latest predictions, they are really that bad.

[john61]

There are other possibilities than nuclear and fossil energy without those vast risks. The OP article is all about that. Nuclear is not a viable alternative energy.

[maccard]

I agree. How many more thousands of miners must be killed before we finally abolish coal as a fuel source?

[john61]

Yes I agree. Let's move on to modern and safe technologies. For example wind, solar and energy storage.

[mauricemir]

There regularly have been single mining accidents that killed far more then ALL the nuclear accidents.

[steve19]

Westerners arguing that Nuclear is better for them in no way means solar is not better for an African village in the middle of nowhere....

Or are you arguing that Westerns should adopt solar so that African villagers get slightly cheaper solar? That seems like an inefficient form of aid.

On a side note: solar is not cheap on a small scale, it might be convenient, green, safe, etc. but not cheap (cheap infers low cost versus conventional power generation)

[beat]

No, I'm not arguing that Westerners should adopt solar as a form of aid for Africa. I don't see how you could have concluded that from what I said.

And narrowly measuring "cheap" in cost per kwh does not address my point - that the up-front cost to get power at all is far cheaper for solar/wind + storage. A village is not a city. It doesn't need a gigantic power plant, and can't afford one. Look at it this way - I could buy myself a can of soda for a buck, or I could buy a bottling plant for a million bucks. In terms of cost-per-liter, the bottling plant is a huge bargain. But I don't need a bottling plant! It's actually useless to me. A can of soda? That's useful, and scaled correctly for my budget and needs.

I don't think this is hard to understand.

[sgrove]

I'm somewhat curious how these things enable very unexpected political change, a la the air conditioner and Reagan - http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-10-04/how-air-conditioning-g...

[iamcurious]

Please do not use "western" when you mean "developed".

[beat]

Good point. What I really wanted to say was "American" in terms of cultural bias, but "developed" in terms of social structure. Got neither right, I suppose.

[nextw33k]

I am very much pro-nuclear.

I argue against wind and wind alone, it is a very unreliable source of energy, I think it is crazy to rely on gusts of wind to power a population. Nuclear is the only technology which offers a base load without burning fossils.

Solar I am happy with, it could be better than nuclear but the storage problem needs solving before it gets onto everyone's roof.

That's another problem with solar, people are putting up fields of the stuff when there is already enough roof space. In my mind large retail shops should be mandated to fill their roofs with solar.

[luch]

I live in France, where nuclear energy is dominant, and I can tell there are some serious issues with nuclear power.

First, nuclear can be extremely inefficient since it's heavily centralized : I have friends working for energy distributors telling me they can lose more than half the energy between the power plant and the client's house.

More importantly, nuclear waste disposal and power plant cleaning costs are heavily underestimated. I've worked for the CEA, the French nuclear agency where they invented the first French atomic bomb and reactor in the sixties, and some experiments aren't still cleaned up yet in 2010's (the current objective is to fully clean up the laboratory in 2025-2040). That is a massive cost which is not factored into the kW price.

I think decentralized technologies are the way to go regarding energy (using local loops and "smart grids") even if they aren't viable now (solar panels cost more in energy to produce than they give back during exploitation for example).

[bainsfather]

"solar panels cost more in energy to produce than they give back during exploitation for example)"

is not correct (maybe your information is from e.g. 20+ years ago). There are many sources, here is one of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystalline_silicon#Energy_pay...

About: ".. they can lose more than half the energy between the power plant and the client's house." - this seems extremely unlikely to be a representative case. Maybe your friends were telling you about some extreme case (they are always the best stories :)

[lotsofmangos]

solar panels cost more in energy to produce than they give back during exploitation for example

The EROEI for solar is around twice that of wind and oil, but it is definitely not negative.

[olau]

I think you'd benefit from looking at some actual data. In practice, wind is predictable enough.

You don't need baseload. It's a concept that makes sense when you have power plants with flat output profiles.

What you actually need is to always match the demand. Nuclear isn't some magical silver bullet here. As it turns out, it's simply far too expensive to use for fulfilling the daily peak demands.

[beat]

Wind + storage, on the other hand, provides base load just fine. You just need to capture enough wind energy over the course of the storage capacity / baseload to keep it stable. On sufficiently large scale, you can get its probabilities up to the level of nuclear plant uptimes.

We're turning a bandwidth problem into a caching problem. That's the game-changer.

[singingfish]

meh once the storage problem is for some value of solved it all becomes a mere optimisation problem.