“They just want to have coal plants without coal,” he said. “We’ll never solve the climate problem that way.”

Given that the coal specifically (as well as oil and gas) is the problem, why is that bad? Coal plants without emissions sounds great!

Yes, replacing coal boilers with nuclear boilers seems like a total no-brainer. Which is why it probably will never happen.

It’ll never happen because coal plants are actually littered with radioisotopes from the coal ash. You could hook up a reactor to a coal plant’s turbine for cheap, but they would immediately violate regulations because of the existing levels of radiation.

As an Atlanta resident, I LOVED when this was announced, and I'm thrilled to live in GA with this plant, and I hope to see more. Yeah, it's going to drive my bills up a few bucks for a while, but I get to know we're burning that much less coal and gas.

Why would it drive your bills up?

Nuclear is one of the very most expensive forms of new electricity.

There's basically zero chance that a new reactor of this style will be built, voluntarily. It took a massive amount of government backed insurance and loans to even make these possible, but no utility will be insane enough to try again without someone shouldering the construction cost risk.

Nuclear is only expensive compared to renewables if you ignore storage. Since storage is more expensive than nuclear (unless you have plenty of mountains and water to do pumped hydro), nuclear is actually cheaper than wind+solar in most places.

Please more. And next time without so much wasted time. We don’t have much time.

If folks really cared about climate change we would building lots of these. The fact that we aren't is evidence that folks don’t truly care about solving anything … just want to push their own narrative.

I mean, in 60-s and 70-s, France and US were stamping out nuclear reactors like hotdogs, building them literally by dozens. And they were moderately cheap. I don't know what happened afterwards, but now building a nuke plant has become a nightmare.

Solar/wind/battery/hvdc is more than capable to providing gigawatts of power, cheaper.

Nothing close to nuclear

Yesterday in California nuclear produced 54 GWh of energy - that's pretty good except solar/wind produced 237 and batteries 11. And the growth of both is only accelerating.

https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html#sectio...

So you're kind of right that nuclear isn't close to renewables..

“ The Public Interest Advocacy staff of the Georgia Public Service Commission warned back in 2008 that the costs could skyrocket. They advocated for a risk-sharing mechanism to incentivize Georgia Power to keep the construction costs down and opposed plans to bill customers for the Vogtle construction while it was underway.

Both proposals failed. Thanks to a 2009 state law, Georgia Power ratepayers are billed a monthly Nuclear Construction Cost Recovery fee. They will begin paying an additional monthly charge when each of the new Plant Vogtle units come online.”

If I were a Georgia Power customer I’d be livid. Why on Earth should I be on the hook for cost overruns instead of the company building the thing?

GP customer here.

They have a monopoly anyway, so they will recover costs one way or another anyway.

Also, we pay some of the lowest energy rates in the country so there's not much to be mad about. Overnight I pay $0.01/kwh ($0.03 if you include fees).

Lastly, why get mad when you can get solar.

Wow, I thought my $0.08/kWh in PNW was great.

Note that elif said "overnight" rate. I'm pretty sure they're on the EV rate plan from GA Power[1]. You only get that rate at night, and you pay a pretty punitive $0.21/kwh for any peak usage. As they mentioned, that's a pretty solid number for the marginal rate you'll pay for an extra kwh, but there are a number of base fees tacked on to that. I'm not on the EV plan, but my average out the door winter final rate is about $0.13/kwh and my summer rate ends up being more like $0.17/kwh.

[1] https://www.georgiapower.com/residential/billing-and-rate-pl...

Oh, that makes more sense.

Pff, your punitive 21¢/kWh is cheaper than our overnight 25¢/kWh or so in the Bay Area :P

That also incentivizes home battery systems. Charge it up overnight and then use the battery power during peak times. It's a good deal for the power company if you do that too because it reduces amount of swing in the grid.

Yup during peak hours I'm usually pumping 3-5 kw to the grid. It's a win-win.

Jesus. I pay 28c/kWh + 8c/kWh delivery (and many other fees that add to another 7c/kWh).

California costs are unhinged. I'm extremely excited to get my ducks in a row and move out.

These are MA prices.

The entity responsible for these overruns is the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They are the ones who should lose funding!

In what way? Be specific. I have never heard a single regulation that should change, and the AP1000 reactors at both Summer and Vogtle were approved under a new process pushed for by the nuclear industry.

In truth, basic incompetence from design to EPC has caused these disasters. And it's not just the US NRC, it's happened in Europe with France's EPR, too.

The NRC is a scapegoat for the incompetent, that don't want to look at the true sources of failure.

Here's a specific complaint about the application of a new and unnecessary airplane strike rule to an already approved design: https://atomicinsights.com/nrcs-imposition-of-aircraft-impac...

Personally, I think what will happen is that other countries like China and South Korea will build lots and lots of NPPs cheaply and quickly and the US will only consider making changes to the way things are done after looking incredibly inept in comparison. The NRC is only one of many things that needs to change.

This doesn't explain why the Vogtle AP1000s had cost/schedule overruns. You can blame the NRC rules for adding complexity and cost but you can't blame the NRC for the nuclear industry's wildly over-optimistic estimates.

According to that article, the airplane strike rule was added in 2009. The reactors began construction in 2013 with certain cost/schedule estimates. If the airplane strike rule significantly increased effort, that should have been accounted for before they actually started building. They had 4 years in advance to figure it out (or, if they couldn't figure it out in time, to postpone until they understood the consequences). After construction started the project kept slipping and costs kept going up for 10 years, despite the rules remaining the same since construction was actually under way.

It was one of many factors of course. There's plenty of blame to go around. Votgle is still a net societal good and will provide clean energy for 60 to 80 years.

They specifically asked the NRC if the new rule would apply to Votgle and were told it would not since the design was certified prior to the rule. Then the NRC changed their mind and incurred billions of dollars worth of delays and no one seems to blame the NRC for this unnecessary delay.

They specifically asked the NRC if the new rule would apply to Votgle and were told it would not since the design was certified prior to the rule.

Where do you see that? According to the Rod Adams piece you linked above, the final design certification document for Vogtle included that new rule and it was completed in 2011:

"As it turned out, meeting the new rule ended up requiring three more iterations on the design document and raised several issues of contention including concerns about the revised heat transfer capacity, concerns about the innovative shield building construction process devised, and concerns about the validity of the testing regime for the steel concrete composite modules that make up the shield building.

Those and other related issues were not completely resolved until the issuance of the final design certification document in late 2011, more than 2.5 years after the PSC had approved the project using the previously approved design revision."

In 2014 Westinghouse was still touting high confidence in affordable, predictable construction for the AP1000:

https://web.archive.org/web/20141225195417/http://westinghou...

From the outset, the AP1000 PWR was designed to reduce capital costs and to be economically competitive with contemporary fossil-fueled plants. This requires lower overnight construction costs and higher confidence in the construction schedule.

The AP1000 plant reduces the amount of safety-grade equipment required by using passive safety systems. Consequently, less Seismic Category I building volume is required to house the safety equipment (approximately 45 percent less than a typical reactor). The AP1000 plant’s modular construction design further reduces the construction schedule and the construction risks, with work shifted to factories with their better quality and cost control as well as labor costs that are less than those at the construction site.

This also allows more work to be done in parallel. The use of heavy lift cranes enables an “open top” construction approach, which is effective in reducing construction time.

With new computer-modeling capabilities, Westinghouse is able to optimize and choreograph the construction plan of an AP1000 unit in advance by simulation. The result is a very high confidence in the construction schedule.

If the airplane strike rule had made that impossible, they shouldn't have been advertising the impossible. I'm not even confident that the airplane strike rule bears particular responsibility for the bad outcomes of this project, because large construction projects often run over schedule and budget even if the NRC never comes near them.

In 40 years? So roughly 2060?

Watts Bar #2 was the last one in the US to come online started construction in 1972 came online in 2016... These are the sorts of timelines that make these things hard sells to modern boardrooms and investment strategies.

Stopped in 1985, resumed in 2007

After the restart of construction it ended up being considerably more expensive than promised.

I don’t understand how they figure this is the first new reactor in the US in 40 years? The page that that assertion links to says that one of the reactors at Watts Bar came online in 2016, and the prior reactor there came online in 1996. And I know that there was at least one nuclear power plant that came online in the early 90s which is, urk, 30 years ago, but hey, still not 40.

Watts Bar got approved an eternity ago and just got finished 30ish years late.

Vogtle 3 & 4 got approved recently, though I’m not sure the 40 years number is an apples-to-apples comparison.

The elephant’s foot in the room (see what I did there?) is that nuclear is just not cheap the way it used to be. It takes a lot of steel and a lot of concrete.

The reason we haven’t been building nuclear plants is that other plants, gas, wind, and solar, deliver way more power in way less time, and with a lesser quantum of plant size.

The fossil fuel consumption of a nuclear plant, while certainly less than coal, is still higher than wind or solar.

Nuclear offers a steady cheaper than solar base line of power. While gas has many advantages climate change isn't one of them.

Than solar, ok.

Than solar plus batteries, the numbers don't back you up on that (or no longer do).

The only thing more expensive than a nuclear reactor is a battery bank of the same capacity.

Now that’s just silly. Lots of things are more expensive than a nuclear reactor.

Grid-tied batteries are now about $300/kWh. Capitalized over 25 years, that adds 3.3 cents to peak (11AM) solar prices, which themselves can go negative at times (duck curve in action), and overall are 3-4 cents per kWh.

Nuclear (new) portends to cost between 7 and 20 cents per kWh according to Wikipedia.

Downvote me if you must, but the numbers are right there. Nuclear may have been the best option for a time, but that time has passed and is not coming back.

In some locations on an industrial scale.

For everyone else: The average solar panel cost is $3–$5 per watt or $15000–$20000 for a typical 5 kW system

2008 called. It wants its prices back.

A visit to sunelec.com or santansolar.com yields a litany of panels for sale well under $1/W. Half the offerings on Amazon are below $1/W as well.

As such, nowadays you should be paying no more than $10k for a 5kW system.

according to the wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St... while they came online then, they were started in 1973

One of the opponents in the article says nuclear power is not a silver bullet. But that argument only makes sense if people are advocating nuclear power to the exclusion of other techniques to deal with renewable generation being unavailable. Are there many nuclear power advocates who oppose grid upgrades or moving energy use toward times of day when renewables are generating a surplus?

I concur that nuclear is not a silver bullet for only one reason: overproduction. If we had enough nuclear capacity to support the peak grid, we would have a huge surplus for the remaining 80% of the day.

In order for nuclear power to be a viable path toward decarbonization, it requires a coupling with: insanely large scale battery storage, global scale grid power redirection, a lot of dams which can act as peaker plants, a load generation which can scale with an economic model that makes sense (like server farms, crypto mines, etc which can be turned up or down on schedule) and/or an uninvented carbon-free peaker plant technology.

Personally, I think nukes and batteries are the most straightforward and developed combination, but any combination could also be viable just with more research and development, and without an obvious economic model for them to work.

overproduction is a feature. plenty of useful things to do at night. synth fuels, carbon capture, desal. mostly synth fuels though.

Given how badly both AP1000 projects in the US have gone (the other project was cancelled after spending $9B on a hole in the ground) its extremely unlikely it or any other big reactors will ever be built here. All the previous AP1000 projects that were in the development pipeline were cancelled and no generator in their right mind would order one without the feds agreeing to take on construction risk.

Looks like the only game in town are SMRs and none of those are supposed to come online until 2030. But everything about them is highly speculative, who knows which ones will work or be economic. The costs of the one furthest ahead, NuScale, are already exploding and the power will be way more expensive than planned, even with big new money from the feds.

The costs of the one furthest ahead, NuScale, are already exploding and the power will be way more expensive than planned.

Not sure if you've heard - there was some inflation that hit the US back in 2022. Are you asking for NuScale to be immune to inflation? Even regular cars became more expensive.

In mid 2021, NuScale was estimating $58/mwh.. it's now $89/mwh. I don't think you can blame 'inflation' for a +50% increase in estimated power costs over the last 18 months.

Its $89MWH with a $30MWH generation credit and a $1.4B subsidy (thanks Biden). This is all before construction has started, there will certainly be more cost inflation coming.

https://ieefa.org/resources/eye-popping-new-cost-estimates-r...

I don't think you can blame 'inflation' for a +50% increase in estimated power costs over the last 18 months.

Yes you can. One of the main costs in a project like this is the financing cost. Interest rates were nearly zero, now they are at 5%. Of course, NuScale would pay more than the rate published by the Fed, so, let's say they could secure financing in early 2022 at 4% and now they can at 9%. That's a steep increase.

The reason the rates went up is because the Fed is fighting inflation.

Just abject nonsense. If they were relying on 0% interest rates and no inflation for the next 10 years for the project to pencil, we should shut the whole thing down today.

Edit- just looked at their explanation and their discount rate only increased by 2%.

We should probably shut it all down today regardless. It actually increased from $58 to $119 but the IRA gave them a $30/mwh subsidy. So a 100% miss on price in only 18 months and we’re still nearly a decade before it’s planned to be operational:

https://ieefa.org/sites/default/files/inline-images/UAMPS-Nu...

we should shut the whole thing down today.

Who is "we"? You are just a random guy on the internet. The people who actually invest money have a different opinion [1]:

  “Despite the project’s rising costs, felt worldwide by all large energy projects due to interest rates increases and rapidly escalating inflation in commodities such as fabricated plate and structural steel, copper wire and cable, not seen for over 40 years, participants felt overwhelmingly that the CFPP remains viable and is a key energy resource for the future,” said Mason Baker, UAMPS CEO and General Manager.

[1] https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/small-modular...

It's because we only build them one at a time, and after 40 years of hiatus. At which point nearly all of the expertise for building them has retired.

The problem is that environmentalists are fundamentally unserious about climate change. They pander to wishful thinking as hard as those who reject the existence of climate change. If we were really serious about it, we'd build 500 nuclear reactors all at once and demand they get built as fast as possible.

And it isn't even that expensive once you get down to it! How many nuclear reactors could we build for the price of the F-35 program? We could easily afford thousands of them if we really needed to.

So no, the problem is lack of willpower and seriousness, not cost.

Blaming environmentalists for the complete and utter failure of nuclear power plant EPCMs to actually build nuclear power plants seems pretty misguided.

Edit;

Environmentalists didn't bankrupt multiple international conglomerates and blow their construction schedule and budget by >100%. What part of this did Greenpeace influence; https://www.reuters.com/article/us-toshiba-accounting-westin...

Then why is the US one of the few nuclear countries that hasn’t build in years?

I saw a calculation that suggested that anti-nuclear campaigning has resulted in 1/3 of current emissions because it resulted in increased coal and gas use. That wouldn’t have happened if the environmental movement wasn’t so anti-nuclear.

That comes down to capacity factor + minimal increase in electricity demand.

The US can operate nuclear at 90+% capacity factors because it’s such a small fraction the overall grid. Seasonal, daily, and weekend dips in demand mean you just don’t want that much base load power. France could export power to other countries and still only hit 70% capacity factor which means your paying the exact same capital, and nearly identical operating costs driving up cost per kWh by about 30% on average except that cost isn’t spread evenly the marginal costs go up much faster.

To simplify if you hypothetically built 50GW and you’re paying 8c/kWh, the next 10GW is at 9c/kWh, the next 10GW at 10c/kWh, and it just keeps getting worse. Sure on average that’s 70GW for 8.42c/kWh but each new project just keeps looking like a worse deal.

Seasonal, daily, and weekend dips in demand mean you just don’t want that much [nuclear] base load power

One problem is that the US regulatory agency doesn’t like load-following - apparently only one nuclear reactor in the states does it.

It is common in France to do load following i.e. using Nuclear not only for base load but varying load too:

  This means that RTE can depend on flexible load following from the nuclear fleet to contribute to regulation in these three respects:
  * Primary power regulation for system stability (when frequency varies, power must be automatically adjusted by the turbine).
  * Secondary power regulation related to trading contracts.
  * Adjusting power in response to demand (decrease from 100% during the day, down to 50% or less during the night, and respond to changes in renewable inputs to the grid, etc.).

  PWR plants are very flexible at the beginning of their cycle, with fresh fuel and high reserve reactivity. An EdF reactor can reduce its power from 100% to 30% in 30 minutes. But when the fuel cycle is around 65% through these reactors are less flexible, and they take a rapidly diminishing part in the third, load-following, aspect above. When they are 90% through the fuel cycle, they only take part in frequency regulation, and essentially no power variation is allowed (unless necessary for safety). So at the very end of the cycle, they are run at steady power output and do not regulate or load-follow until the next refueling outage.

From https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr... and click on “Load-following with PWR nuclear plants” in the right-hand menu.

NuScale is supposed to be able to vary output too “plant incorporates unique features that enhance its ability to load follow” https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Example-of-NuScale-modul... and https://www.researchgate.net/publication/295114246_Integrati...

Load following is economic suicide when most of the costs are fixed, which is why nuclear plants tend to shy away from it.

You’ll note that the US can’t build subways or high speed rail either. Large construction projects tend to be disasters in the US, it’s not just nuclear plants.

When you only build them every few decades, you tend to consistently find yourself with managers who have no experience in the field.

The major issue with nuclear power is and always has been costs are just too damn high. What nobody talks about is increasing the efficiency of coal power plants significantly reduced their operating costs. The same was true of everything including hydro except nuclear which just kept getting more expensive compared to alternatives over time.

Coupling long plant lifespans with minimal growth in electricity demand for decades meant there was no incentives to build nuclear after it reached ~30% of total demand. It couldn’t pass that ~30% threshold because costs enter an exponential spiral of decreasing capacity factor meaning higher fees when it’s in operation.

PS: I say ~30% because the actual economics get really complicated that’s just what most countries seem to roughly settle on. Forecasting today out a full plants lifespan and I don’t think even 30% is still viable without massive subsidies.

It's not just environmentalists, but environmental regulation that is used by anti-nuclear opponents to stall, slow down, and halt all nuclear development.

Costs for nuclear don't really benefit that much from economies of scale, each installation has to be heavily reinforced and the required equipment is very expensive (you really don't want primary coolent pumps to ever fail, so they're over-engineered to essentially eliminate accidental failure - although exceptional situations e.g. Fukushima are still always a possibility). Also, the global uranium fuel pipeline is limited (US imports most of its uranium fuel doesn't it?).

Building 500 1 gigawatt solar/storage plants would be much cheaper - by at least a factor of ten - and could be done much faster.

If you take into account load factor, you will need closer to 2,000 such solar plants. And you need far more land too. Also, you’ll end up being most of them in deserts, far away from any human habitations. So you will then build a vast network of power distribution.

Now, to be fair, we could do that. It will just need trillions of dollars, and will have its own set of huge complications. It’s mostly just a fantasy that this will be all that much more cheaper.

I'm not quite sure what your 2000 could be referring to.

If it's land use, that's off by orders of magnitude.

Nuclear at this site: 3100 acres [1], 1/3 of which is a nature preserve, so 2000 acres. It will be 4.5GW at 90% capacity factor, so roughly 500 acres/GW.

NREL puts the least land efficient solar PV at 6.1 acres/MW [2], which with a 0.2 capacity factor corresponds to 30500 acres/GW.

This is a factor of 61 for land use, which is nowhere near the 2000, but I'm not sure if that's what you were talking about.

But land use is not a concern for powering the US by solar. It doesn't take that much land, and even the land it does use is easy to use simultaneously for pretty much anything else.

You talk about "trillions of dollars" as if we should be scared of big numbers, but for some reason forget that it would be far more trillions of dollars just to continue with our current system! That's a very biased way to look at things. And if we were to use nuclear instead of fossil fuels like we do now, it would be far more trillions.

Seriously, this is just one GW at a cost of $15B. Average US load is ~500GW, but will be much higher in the future after the energy transition. A nuclear grid is easily a $15T prospect! And that's without the absolutely massive amount of storage that nuclear needs in order to deal with load following.

[1] https://www.bechtel.com/projects/plant-vogtle-units-3-4/

[2] https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/tech-size.html

It comes from 20% capacity factor versus 90% capacity factor. Replacing 500 GW of nuclear will vaguely require 2,000 GW of solar.

The problem is you want to build it in the southwest of the US, and has a long ways to go to reach the rest of the US. That will be a challenge.

If you think nuclear has a load-following problem, you have no idea how big the problem for solar will be!

And cost will go down, not up when we build more. The cost is because we build them so slow and only one at a time. If we built 500 at once, cost per GW will drop dramatic. Anti-nuclear people are just being dishonest about economics. Ultimately, even if we had to spend a few trillion dollars on this, it will still save money in the long run.

"A few trillion dollars" is enough for a global HVDC grid sufficient for global energy demand (why yes, I did do the maths, it's in an old comment of mine somewhere on here), and you previously gave me a link saying a hydrogen pipe was x10 cheaper, and electrolysis doesn't care if its nuclear or PV, and PV is much cheaper than nuclear per MWh when you don't have to add on the storage which you obviously don't in this scenario because that would be double-counting.

And the US already has north-south lines (with a Texas-shaped asterisk), so even without a global grid the "winter?" question is: what's the capacity of those lines and substations, and how much loss are people willing to face when the price at the plant is only 1-2¢/kWh.

First of all, that is unlikely to ever happen. It is likely geopolitically impossible. But also it is very fragile as you still do not have any real backup power generation. Ultimately, it will make more sense to build system of hydrogen distribution and storage. As you already known, this is 10x cheaper than your HVDC idea.

1 gigawatt solar is not the same as 1 gigawatt nuclear though. Also, building solar in Alaska or in Northern Canada would be a waste of money.

But yes, a solar power plant is cheap and can be implemented almost instantly, it is a huge advantage.

The right comparison is roughly 4GW of solar plus 6-12GWh of storage for 1GW of nuclear, but even then nuclear is about 2x as expensive.

4GW of solar plus 6-12GWh

It will use a lot of land and I'm not sure if anyone ever did 6GWh storage, not even mentioning 12 GWh. The Li-ion battery technology that is currently being used for storage is very expensive and will last maybe 15 years at best before becoming chemical waste, while the nuke is normally planned to last 60+ years.

And that is just to match 1GW of nuke. Now, if you want 100GW, you multiply that by 100. Now solar isn't looking all that advantageous or even technologically feasible (with storage factored in) to me.

I don't think you have a good idea of scale here 4GW of solar and 12 GWh of storage are a tiny fraction of what we produce every year, barely worth mention.

Whereas even a single GW of new nuclear is newsworthy because it was such a monumental effort, over budget and behind schedule by factors of 2-4x

Wind, solar, and storage get delivered on time, under budget, and at a scale that nuclear can not even dream of achieving for decades. Claiming that 100GW/year of nuclear is even in the realm of possibility is beyond delusional, whereas 400 GW/year of solar is close to happening, and we will deploying TW/year in the 2030s, before a second site of nuclear could even come online in the US.

Land for solar is similarly a red herring. Solar "land use" is easily dual purpose, if need be, but it need not be. Using even a fraction of land that we currently use to grow corn for ethanol would completely power all of our transportation.

According to a recent report, there was only 13.4 GWh of grid storage in the US 2022.

Even with projected growth, each addition 12 GWh is not trivial.

https://www.smart-energy.com/regional-news/north-america/us-...

We're building batteries and panels at scale now? When did that start?

If we were really serious about climate change, we'd build a ton of wind and solar and batteries, plus a ton of new transmission to get electricity from the windy and sunny places to our cities.

That's currently the fastest way to cut our greenhouse gas emissions.

Renewable energy in the future is predicted that by 2024, solar capacity in the world will grow by 600 gigawatts (GW), almost double the installed total electricity capacity of Japan. Overall, renewable electricity is predicted to grow by 1 200 GW by 2024, the equivalent of the total electricity capacity of the US.

From a study on earth.org. Solar will also become 35% cheaper is expected by 2024.

Soon we will have too much solar. Which is a nice problem to have but still. In 2021 Dutch solar and wind produced >100% of the demand 0.4% of the time. In 2023 it's already 5%. It's not a disaster but the producers have to switch the plants off (due to negative el. prices). Which makes the business case worse - you are not making money at night, when it's cloudy or when it's too sunny. And they will add another ~7.5GW peak solar+wind this year (60% of demand)! Hopefully, someone can figure out what to do with all the extra energy (hydrogen? synthetic fuels?)

If we were serious about doing it with renewables, we'd skip the batteries and build as much green hydrogen capacity as possible, plus hydrogen pipelines to move it around. People who bring up batteries have failed to realize that winter exists, and in winter you will need far more energy storage than you can possibly achieve with batteries.

The green hydrogen stuff is happening, (like hydrogen pipelines across the Mediterranean) but it's not really a competitor to batteries, but a complement.

The primary use will be chemical and industrial and a demand sink for renewable power, then any use as electricity peak fuel source will be a bonus rather than the main purpose.

This ignores the part where no amount of batteries can actually solve the peak and valleys of renewable energy. Even partially solving this requires a truly ridiculous quantity of batteries, and likely equally absurd amounts of raw materials to build all of this.

Ultimately, this is just another unsustainable idea likely motivated by people who own BEVs. Same story as those that went after mass transit in favor of more electric cars. It's a classic example of people who have hammers and see everything as a nail.

There's lots of different combinations of solar, wind, batteries that will solve it. The lowest cost one likely has lots of solar and wind, and a small amount of storage, but it varies by location.

Here's a worked example for Eastern India:

https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...

See also, setting up other critical infrastructure like new rocket launch sites. So called environmentalists have taken every chance to file lawsuits against the FAA and SpaceX regarding activity at Boca Chica, filing complaints about animals that were seen once in the area 40 years ago and complaining about pollution on the beach even though it was completely uncared for before the facility got going.

On the other hand, when the abnormally cold front hit the area, none of those groups were anywhere to be seen trying to help the turtles while SpaceX employees were out helping and had helped setup generators etc at nearby NGOs (where the turtles were kept) who actually do care about the environment.

Also, regarding the F35, it's also a nice example of how valuable mass production and continuous refinement can be. Despite its original obscene cost, the program by now has produced so many planes that per unit it's actually not that expensive relative to other modern jets, despite being much better than essentially all of them.

Aren’t those kind of environmental complaints usually by hostile competitors? For instance - Blue Origin hires a person/lawyer to set up an environmental impact complaint against SpaceX just to tie up resources?

I thought these kinds of things were generally all corporate shenanigans and bullshit? Maybe i have too much tin foil on.

Comparable solar plant output (with storage for consistent delivery) seems to cost in the neighborhood of $1 billion per gigawatt. Vogtle's two 1GW reactors appear to be coming in at a total cost of $30 billion (and that's not counting long-term costs of hot 'spent' fuel rod management and uranium fuel sourcing), so $15 billion per gigawatt if I'm reading correctly.

https://commercialsolarguy.com/americas-first-gigawatt-solar...

Incidentally, the US federal government also provided $12 billion in loan guarantees to Vogtle, which counts as a pretty big subsidy.

Even with a few hours of storage, I doubt that solar/battery plant's combined capacity factor will exceed 50%. A well-managed nuclear plant can exceed 90% capacity factor and keeps working even when it is cloudy and raining for a week.

Who cares about capacity factor, just build more than enough solar/wind/battery/hvdc and transport it where needed. Faster, simpler, safer, cheaper.

Let's say it was faster, simpler, safer, cheaper. I find the idea of making your energy systems entirely dependent on weather to be an odd choice when we are expecting global climate change now and in the future.

At the very least, it will make forecasting supply more difficult. At worst, what if there are major wind pattern shifts or catastrophic weather events that damage your dispersed energy harvesting machines? A nuclear plant is designed to survive a direct impact from an airliner but a hail storm can ruin a region's rooftop solar panels.

The key is over a large enough area and with enough integrated storage systems it all averages out. It ends up being a lot more decentralized and resilient.

It definitely won't be more resilient, that's silly. In no way will a weather based energy system be more resilient than one based on dispatchable energy sources. The best you can hope for is it to be only slightly less reliable. You can never be completely sure you've built enough storage in a certain area since you're relying on historical/statistical phenomenon like weather. And since you'll need a lot more transmission lines to move the energy from your turbines and panels to where people actually live, you're more exposed to failures along those corridors.

Like I said, over a large enough area and with storage, it averages out. The wind will blow, and the shine. More transmission lines allow routing around failure points.

Also the 'cloudy day disaster of 2034' sounds a lot better than the 'spent fuel pool disaster of 2034'

https://www.science.org/content/article/spent-fuel-fire-us-s...

Then you need to factor in the massive grid upgrades in the cost as well.

Anyway, nuclear mega projects are probably a thing of the past once mass produced small modular reactors come to market.

What about all the nuclear powered submarines and carriers? Don’t count?

The people who oppose nuclear power always point to the construction cost and long delays.

BUT.

The reason for the long and expensive construction has a lot to do with the people opposing the construction! We could build these reactors so much more cheaply and quickly (and more safely!) if we decided to!

This in an argument from unclean hands. Nuclear skeptics, like the ones given so much airtime in the linked article, have been very successful in driving up costs and adding delay. But these costs and delays are not intrinsic to the technology. It's not fair if I delay a thing for me to claim the thing has failed because it was late. No, it failed because I delayed it.

I wish the nuclear skeptics would apply their delay tactics to coal power plants, which spew staggering amounts of radionuclides over huge swaths of the world, not to mention their carbon emissions.

Nuclear is a decade long planning

Doesn't work if the government changes hands every 4 years and comes with radical different ideas and starts reversing stuff from the previous government.

Totally different to China, with their 20 year plans, where they're committed to developing nuclear, are putting superior resources into it and are building at scale.

Every country with nuclear had a period where they went ahead and build a bunch.

Building one or two in isolation is just a gamble

Again, this isn’t intrinsic to the technology, we could be nuclear reactors on time and on budget if we decided to.

Then Russians will blow up a dam, so the reactor will run out of water for cooling and then run away into a Red Forest.

OR climate change will make a water pond dry, so you cannot even start the reactor.

OR terrorists will capture a reactor and mine it.

OR massive change in water weight due to climate change will create a massive earthquake.

Nuke plant aside, why would the Russians blow the main water supply to Crimea after only recently getting it back flowing? Or flood out the "Russian" side (their claim, not mine) of the area including their own troops? Especially when they could have just opened the gates. Guess I'm not understanding the logic or advantage here.

This is not an accurate description in any way of the nuclear regulatory process. Presidential elections, even if they swapped parties every four years, do not result in massive regulatory changes.

The nuclear industry has no one but itself to blame for its failures and bankruptcies.

The delays on this project have nothing at all to do with people opposing nuclear construction.

The site welcomed more reactors. The results were approved under a new proces that was explicitly requested by the industry in order to expedite everything.

Nuclear is a big construction project, and suffers from the same big construction project cost disease that every other big construction project suffers from in the US. In addition, it suffers from needing absolutely massive amounts of custom, high precision welding, and high precision concrete pours unlike any other construction project. In addition to being some of the most complex projects ever designed, it requires a large amount of highly skilled labor really only gets used for this one purpose in our economy.

I wish nuclear proponents would recognize the inherent challenges of the problem, the inherent labor and construction efficiencies that made nuclear a good fit for the mid-20th century, but a less good fit for the 21st century when labor is much more valuable, and perhaps we should put it to more valuable purposes when we have far cheaper alternatives. Building buildings for manufacturing results in much better utilization of labor. A manufacturing facilities that produce 4 GW of solar/year is an exponential improvement over a 1GW nuclear reactor.

More solar is better if it displaces fossil fuels, loads can be moved to coincide with sunshine, output can be cost effectively stored and/or the climate is co-operative.

Not all of these assumptions hold everywhere or every time.

The same caveats are also true of nuclear, and happen far more frequently for nuclear.

If we are serious about displacing fossil fuel use, and I am deadly serious about it, wind, solar, storage, demand response, new transmission, thermal storage, hydrogen for chemical process... all these things are deployable today at massive scale and should be quickly adopted. However, nuclear is further away and more expensive than we thought it was in 2008 when these reactors got started.

Back in the mid-2000s I was a huge proponent of nuclear. In the mid-2010s I change my tune because we had a ton of new data about nuclear being far more expensive than promised, and other tech had advanced massively. Nuclear has never advanced as a tech, it does not have a learning curve.

If we are going to reach a future with energy abundance, with clean tech, we need to invest in technologies with learning curves, that advance. Nuclear tech does not advance.

Is this inherent to the technology, or because so few nuclear reactors are being built? Is there anyone involved in the construction of the latest reactor that contributed to another one? You learn by doing, and there has been very little construction in the last decades.

Learning by doing has been tried many times, and it's never resulted in a learning rate where one could expect more than a small decrease in costs, and it has conclusively proven that even a halving of costs is probably out of the question.

Look at France in their first build out; subsequent reactors of the same design cost more than the first. And France was considered a success by most. The few buildouts that have seen cost decrease have never produced learning like you get in manufactured products.

I wish I had access to my bibliography right now for the papers on this, sorry I'm making statements without the research to back them up. But those that have looked into which technologies develop learning curves find that the learning curve is found early, and it tends to be tech wheee lots of the same small thing is made, with minimal customization at install.

Nuclear is inherently a big tech, with some customization for site install. Combined cycle gas turbines found some efficiency of scale by being small enough that they could have standardized plant designs that don't require design changes for the site (though it does limit which sites can install the designs). SMRs might change this for nuclear, but what people are calling "SMR" today is still is as big as 300MW, and it's hard to see how that could be standardized and manufactured. Nuclear does not scale down very well, which is why all these places are trying to pass off really big reactors as part of the SMR hype wave.

Nuclear is inherently a big tech, with some customization for site install Russia has successful small floating power stations, that can just dock and power a nearby town. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov

There is nothing "inherently big" about nuclear

Sure, if you want expensive reactors. Much of the technological base on nuclear either:

1. Scales with square or cube laws.

2. Are essentially fixed.

A 100 MWe reactor requires a very similar amount of security as a 1600 MWe reactor, maintenance intervals are similar and so on.

Thus, it has been evident from the very first days that bigger is better, from an economic perspective because you get both a more efficient reactor and more output to spread the huge fixed costs on.

The problem has been that even the bigger reactors are hideously expensive. Nuclear power never breached the cusp where it would be worth it and today the cost to build new renewables are in the same range as the operations and maintenance cost of existing, paid off, nuclear plants. Let alone trying to build one.

The same caveats are also true of nuclear, and happen far more frequently for nuclear.

Out of interest, how do you find the issues to be more frequent for nuclear?

Around these parts we run nuclear for base load and it pretty much runs full tilt 24/7. There is of course scheduled downtime for service, etc.

There is unscheduled down time as well. Almost invariably the planned down time stretches out far longer than planned.

See the UK and France over the last few years for recent examples.

Here in Finland nuclear availability is over 90%. Admittedly this is better than in most other countries.

Solar load factor is 9% and wind 30%.

I don't think it is fair to say that Nuclear technology has not advanced. There is a lot of excitement around small modular reactors now that are attempting to achieve some economies of scale. Yes, the aren't there yet, but the concept shows promise.

I do agree that the biggest threat to Nuclear at the moment isn't environmentalists or even NIMBY types, it is wind and solar getting so cheap and storage finally being deployed at scale that it will never be able to compete on price.

I wish nuclear proponents would recognize the inherent challenges of the problem, the inherent labor and construction efficiencies that made nuclear a good fit for the mid-20th century

Yeah, this argument might hold water if there was nothing to compare to, but there is.

China stamps these things out of an assembly line. Every year they’re building multiple nuclear reactors, leaving us in the dust. You can’t make the argument that China’s reactors are unsafe, because they’ve had less accidents than us. To me it’s obvious that it’s not an insurmountable engineering problem.

21st century china has a lot in common with early 20th western countries, namely cheap labor and the ability to push through people protests and regulations.

South Korea might be a closer comparison.

China? Not really.

Started reactors: 2019: 3 reactors (Yangjiang-6, Tianwan-5 et Taishan-2) 2020: 1 (Fuqin-5) 2021: 1 (Hongyanhe-1) 2022: 3 (Fuqin-6) (Hongyanhe-6) (Fangchenggang-3)

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...

This trend is old and clear: nuclear produces 6% of China's electricity with 50GW nominal electric power, long-term plans for future capacity are 120 to 150 GW by 2030 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China ) while China already has 253GW solar and 281GW wind (plan for combined solar and wind: 1,200 gigawatts by 2030) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_China ). In 2020 alone China added 71.6 GW windpower... Even taking into account the load factors (nuclear may reach .9 while wind-solar combined are at .3 to .5, mainly depending on the proportion of off-shore wind turbine power) this seems quite clear to me.

Isn't solar load factor 10% to 15%? And wind %30 to 45%?

I stopped following the improvements around 2019 when it became clear the issues were more social than technological, but that would be huge if wind load factors could reach 60%+,we wouldn't really need that much baseload.

A manufacturing facilities that produce 4 GW of solar/year is an exponential improvement over a 1GW nuclear reactor.

Except that 1GW of nuclear capacity means up to 900MW of production in practice, while 1GW of solar means 100MW.

Nuclear stops for maintenance, refuelling and repairs. A well maintained plant can operate for 60 years or more.

Solar stops at night, slows down on cloudy days, and so on. Panels degrade and have to be replaced after 20 years or so.

Non-hydro renewables only beat nuclear when you conveniently forget storage, which is insanely expensive, and when you look at nominal capacity, not actual production.

Just go look at https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR : currently, wind is barely producing anything across Europe. Germany has 67GW of wind capacity, yet they're producing a laughable 7.4 GW. It's been that way for *WEEKS*. You can't possibly store weeks of production.

This is reasonable. Nuclear is still valuable though. It still works after a week of bad weather that would badly affect wind or solar.

Regarding renewables: are we held back by solar panel manufacturing? I thought the constantly falling prices are a sign that the panels are abundant. I think serious utility use of solar is held back more by the cost of storage. If we speak about best allocation of scarce labor, maybe battery manufacturing would have more impact.

Thermal storage (mirrors hearing rocks or melting salts) is also pretty material- and labor-intensive, even though it likely would require slightly less demanding processes of laying concrete and welding steel than a nuclear installation.

Storage is definitely a factor currently, but a lot of battery factories are scheduled to come online in the next few years and I expect the situation to improve considerably.

I watched a representation of an mining industry insider ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgOEGKDVvsg ) some months ago who makes the point that all these projections are completely unrealistic because of mining constraints. He says/shows that you need an order of magnitude (I think) more ore of many elements and this is impossible because:

1) The Mining industry is incredible mature and there are no easy disruptive technologies on the horizon.

2) Even if there was the will to do it, new capacities take at least ten years to go live and he does not even see any relevant increased investment in the sector, never mind concrete projects.

Mark P. Mills [1] may be a number of things but he is absolutely not by any means a "mining industry insider".

He is a senior fellow for a think tank that claims as axiomatic that the popular conception of climate change as posing an existential threat to modern civilization is not supported by climate science or economics.

It comes as no surprise that he repeatedly makes presentations aimed to undercut transition to green energy.

Regardless of the truth of his position though he is clearly no expert on the mining industry.

[1] https://manhattan.institute/person/mark-p-mills

My friend who works at the mines says the same thing. But maybe this is just a meme in the industry.

One can build storage with only common elements (see pumped thermal, pumped hydro).

The world makes about 2 BILLION tonnes of steel a year. Storage made from materials like that will not cause significantly increased mining.

I wish nuclear opponents would perform a like for like analysis of non-nuclear vs nuclear.

- How much does it raise co2 parts per million when operational?

- How much does it raise co2 parts per million when being built?

- Full environmental cost of the entire supply including construction?

- Deaths during construction.

- Deaths in the general population from "emissions" or accidents.

- Deaths during use and maintenance.

- How much area does the site area?

- How much area lost to 'contamination'? Oil spills, coal slag piles [1], but for nuclear, nature does quite well after humans leave the area. What are the byproducts of producing turbine blades and solar panels, including the construction of new factories and all the transport of materials to those factories, and the emissions of those factories?

- Post-use recycling (solar panels after 20yrs, wind turbines when a blade breaks)

Nuclear power hasn't been industrialized until recently and even then there's not a huge effort towards that.

Imagine if every single modern plane built is a one-off ad-hoc design. I wonder how much they'd cost? Best example I can think of, but huge complexity, safety-critical, a similar lifespan, with on going maintenance.

A manufacturing facilities that produce 4 GW of solar/year is an exponential improvement over a 1GW nuclear reactor.

How are they an "exponential" improvement?

There's a vast amount of digging in some out-of-sight out-of-mind country to get materials out of the ground, with sketchy practices, shipped across the sea in a diesel power ship, to be refined, consuming more power, day-in-day out. And then there's the solar panel recycling story that we haven't even figured out yet. [2]

And with wind turbines, we started off on the wrong foot there as well. [3]

Apparently we're in a critical climate emergency, but nuclear is "too costly". And 'green' solutions are seen to be greener than they actually are.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster 2. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-65602519 3. https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/can-wi...

- Full environmental cost of the entire supply including construction?

And also including dismantling and spent fuel/ contaminated material storage and disposal for unknown time to come. Also not only environmental, but social cost of creating a spent fuel site that does have to be cared for hundreds of years while bringing no benefit at all, with huge costs.

That BBC article is actually funny. There is no disaster, it's glass, aluminum and some metals, all of them eminently recyclable but since there was not a lot of PV panels until now it was not an issue. It will be an issue now and it will be solved, but it pales in comparison with other waste.

The solution to nuclear waste is simple. Build a single warehouse in the desert somewhere and keep it there until we use it as fuel later in breeder reactors. The waste is already in concrete casks. You basically just need a concrete pad for them to sit on. Hell, just build it at Area 52 or something. Or the existing WIPPS site where military nuclear waste is disposed of. It was originally meant for civilian waste as well anyways.

Lets say you insist we bury perfectly good U238. Fine, just expand WIPPs a bit. Or we can use deep borehole disposal to bury it several km underground in a seismically stable location. Done. No monitoring necessary. We know this will be fine because nature formed natural nuclear reactors in the ground billions of years ago and the 'waste' has moved less than a meter in billions of years. The dangerous part of the waste (fission products) will be gone in a few hundred years anyways. What is left after that needs to be ground up and eaten to be dangerous.

Build a single warehouse in the desert

There are countries with no desert and for some unknown reason most countries are not desperate to import spent fuel.

You basically just need a concrete pad for them to sit on.

And the elements and radiation to take the 'concrete casks' apart and blow the bad stuff out.

All solutions to that are expensive and you have to monitor and fix leaks for a very long time. The deeper you bury it, the deeper you have to dig later to fix the leaks.

will be gone in a few hundred years anyways

That's a lot of time (and associated costs) in human lifetimes.

until we use it as fuel later in breeder reactors

After approx 70 years and many projects there not a single industrial breeder reactor working satisfactorily.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Development_an...

?

The BN-600 and BN-800 are operating commercially today and they are looking to expand the design to the BN-1200.

Also, there's little need for breeders today because the overall percentage of energy we get from nuclear energy is low. In the future, if this expands is when we would need to deploy breeders. The casks that the waste is put in are rated for 100+ years and its trivial to swap containers.

The BN-600 had many problems (leaks) and is an obsolete version.

The most successful was its successor, the BN-800, but "problems ((...)) indicated a redesign was needed", and construction of it's successor (the BN-1200) was postponed many times (now 2035). Problems related to cost and process/security seem quite difficult to solve... Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-1200_reactor

Instead of deploying BNs Russians pause them and are back to the drawing board. The sole officially actively pursued (since 2021) pertinent design, BREST-OD-300 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BREST_(reactor) ), is a very different architecture (lead, not sodium, is the coolant) and will only (when completed, if ever) be a demonstrator (low power: 300MWe).

Hence: the is no satisfying industrial breeder reactor.

there's little need for breeders today

The whole nuclear industry knows since the 1950's that breeding is the only way for nuclear to really gain momentum and this is sound from a strategic viewpoint (dependency towards uranium exporters). However after huge R&D efforts in many nations ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Development_an... )... there is no adequate reactor.

And also including dismantling and spent fuel/ contaminated material storage and disposal for unknown time to come. Also not only environmental, but social cost of creating a spent fuel site that does have to be cared for hundreds of years while bringing no benefit at all, with huge costs.

Indeed. Decommissioning a nuclear power station is a serious task. But the waste fuel can just be buried somewhere where humans aren't. It's really not a problem. If people are too stupid to read 'stay away' signs, there's not much hope for us. After all, people manage not to fall off cliffs every day that have signs saying 'warning cliff'. It's not difficult.

Given the return of animals to Chernobyl and Fukushima, is that really such a high price to pay? Animals are largely unaffected, and we're the ones messing up the planet.

Renewables lead on all these metrics.

People who support nuclear as anything more than a footnote in the future energy mix are, at best, looking at decades old data in an area that is famous for changing faster than even proponents expected.

Renewables lead on all these metrics.

Do they? That's my question, "citation needed". I've yet to find empirical evidence of a like for like comparison of the full and complete lifecycle and supply chain of both. And that's in addition to environmental costs.

Nuclear: dig uranium out of the ground, refine it. Build power station building (pipes, concrete, etc.), maintenance (replacing mechanical parts, etc.). Decommissioning.

Renewable proponents always talk about the end product, the panels or turbines.

But not the continual manufacturing chain (new factories, consuming more raw materials and power), or the on going maintenance (how often do turbines fail, blades fail, panels fail), or the end-of-life recycling. Nuclear power stations are a one off. Wind turbines and solar panels are being manufactured continually, consuming huge amounts of raw materials and power before they even come online.

And don't forget storage of excess power for a rainy/dark/windless day. So then there's whole other supply chain and manufacturing processes for battery storage. Renewables on their own are no good for baseload because of the variability.

Nuclear power stations are a one off.

No? You still have to replace fuel, fix mechanical issues (if they are fixable). There are turbines in nuclear plants too. And another thing is that nuclear plants need highly competent and educated specialist workforce, and after that the very expensive decommissioning needs another specialist workforce, and so on.

Nuclear power stations are a one off build. I can’t think of two or more identical builds.

Are you talking stations (size of ground pads, number of toilets | parking bays) or reactors ?

( Hydro electric dams are largely "one off builds" - yet many share common turbine units and families )

Does that include the 25 reactors in South Korea that come from families such as OPR-1000 (basic), OPR-1000 (improved), APR-1400, etc?

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPR-1000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APR-1400

Can you name a single factor that isn't covered in great detail here, in this review of what life cycle analysis covered between 2009-2018 (edit to add some context, the cost of solar dropped 82% over that period)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266679242...

local environmental conditions such as hydrology can influence operations and environmental impacts [13, 14]; population distribution and demand levels can do the same by shifting the burden of supply [15], [16], [17]; regional electricity mixes result in variable environmental impacts [18, 19]; fuel supply and distribution distances can amplify the impact of fuel transportation [20] but also the delivery of electricity to consumers [19]. Environmental releases from electricity generation depend on hourly, daily, and weekly demand cycles at subnational scales [3, 21]; seasonal cycles, both in environmental conditions and demand [22]; degradation of capital [19, 23]; and changes to the regional energy system, including fuel supply, production, and distribution [18]. Joint spatiotemporal factors are exemplified by supply and demand dynamics on the electric grid because interactions between consumers, power plants, transmission and distribution networks, and the fuel supply also depend on locations [18, 20, [23], [24], [25]]

That's the best article I've seen. Thanks.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266679242...

But... note in fig. 2 how the renewables just start at 'manufacture', not 'mining' -> 'transport' -> 'refining' -> 'transport' -> 'manufacture'

And how it also ends without '-> battery storage' and all the mining/transport/refining/manufacture that that entails.

Battery storage was not a thing before renewable energy sources, that must also be included in analysis like this. Prior to renewables some sort of pumped storage was being used in hydro projects, but nothing like the scale of battery storage we have now.

As I said in a previous comment, the supply chain (or whatever you want to call it) for renewables is far longer than is recognised.

SpaceX cut the manufacturing cost of rockets by a factor of 10. Before reusability. With that, it's probably a factor of 100. Or more.

Challenges in technology can be overcome.

when we have far cheaper alternatives.

the far cheaper alternatives that actually provide no 24/7 power, consume massive amounts of lands, and also have a non-nill carbon footprint once you take everything in account

These are all tendentious talking points that have been well debunked. They can provide 24/7 power when paired with storage (like pumped hydro at $300/kWh of capacity), the land use is no serious problem, and the carbon footprint of nuclear is much higher when you include all the CO2 emitted by fossil plants while waiting 10 years for the nuclear plant to come online.

I wish nuclear proponents would recognize the inherent challenges of the problem

Nuclear proponents have been wailing at the top of their lungs about this since the time I could start reading newspapers.

The largest problem is the pipeline of industry needed to build these things. That was completely destroyed by the anti-nuclear zealot crowd, knowingly so and with purpose. They absolutely knew (and I read articles on it) that if they froze most new construction for just a couple decades, the entire industry would vaporize due to lack of of talent pool and experience.

Everyone was correct.

That means if you want nuclear now, we better start on those giant 15 year construction projects or we'll never get better. It will take a generation - at least - to restart an industry from pretty much zero. Hundreds of thousands of current 2 year olds need to be trained before we can even hope to make a dent in this problem 20 years later.

We don't have proven "far cheaper" alternatives. It is irresponsible to advocate for a fully solar/wind grid if we don't have a single working large scale example that is able to sustain, let's say, a city with 5M people 24/7, all-season (examples including hydro and geothermal don't count as many places can't depend on these).

Don't get me wrong, I love solar and wind and I highly encourage continued investment and buildup so we need less of other forms of energy. However, ignoring nuclear is the same, in practice, as supporting a hybrid fossil/renewables future. If you are fine betting on technological developments such as megascale batteries or other energy storage approaches, you should also be fine betting on the less impressive, incremental improvements needed for reducing nuclear plant costs.

The future will involve many different energy sources, and nuclear fission has to be one of them until we discover a new major energy source (hopefully fusion).

We do not have a working economic nuclear grid. So it is irresponsible to advocate a nuclear grid unless throwing hundreds of billions of taxpayer money at Bechtel and friends is your goal.

It's worse than that. We don't have commercial reactors capable of powering the world. Thermal burner reactors like this one, if scaled up to provide the world's 18 TW of primary energy consumption, would exhaust economical uranium resources in less than a decade.

would exhaust economical uranium resources in less than a decade.

This doesn't seem right. Can you show your work? I'm assuming there's no recycling either? I feel like you're off by more than an order of magnitude.

Besides, who suggests using a single method to produce all the electricity? That seems a bit naive, doesn't it? Better to have a portfolio.

Recycling of spent thermal reactor fuel doesn't extend things much, since the breeding ratio of today's thermal reactors is much less than 1. CANDU might do a bit better.

The point is that existing nuclear reactors provide only a small fraction of world energy demand. A nuclear powered world has to power everything via nuclear energy, including transportation and industry. To ballpark this, we look at the primary (thermal) energy used by the world, 18 TW, and equate that to thermal energy produced by nuclear (3 GW(th) for a 1 GW(e) power plant.) This would be 6000 1 GW(e) power plants. These would use in excess of 1 million tonnes of natural uranium per year.

I'm asking for the math or a source, because I'm not able to verify your claim and it doesn't match my prior understanding. Especially the recycling comment, as utilization is quite low, allowing for massive amounts of reenrichment. It also doesn't match my understanding of the AP1000 which has a similar uranium consumption rate to CANDU 6. Not burnup, uranium consumption. The thermal energy estimate also seems naive and a bit obtuse as you're also including many things that one typically would not account for when discussing energy production. And again, it also seems naive to pigeon hole the entire world's energy consumption onto a single energy source, as if we did something similar for solar, hydro, oil, etc we'd find massively unsustainable numbers as well.

I want straight numbers and links, because something isn't adding up.

Most people right now are just trying to prevent nuclear reactors from being shut down. Despite being 30% of US energy it is 50% of our zero carbon energy. The west coast has done a good job decarbonizing without nuclear, and those numbers are more 10%/20%. Shutting down Diablo Canyon won't do much as the reactor provides <8% of Cal-ISO's energy portfolio (but <1% of emissions) and the change to gas has already been made but if you look at places like TVA (South) it is more 60%/80% (with hydro storage accounting for 80% of the green emissions). Mid-ITSO hasn't replaced their nuclear with renewables, nor has many other places.

Even if you don't believe nuclear is the way to go (which is fine) there is no doubt that when the plants have been decommissioned they have been replaced with fossil fuels. This is wild to the nuclear people. But it is why many (pro and anti-nuclear) people have started to advocate for a "fossil fuel first, nuclear second" strategy. After all, aren't we after carbon emissions? If that's our goal, then the conversation is just if we should build more or if renewables are enough. That's mundane, nuanced, and nit-picky. In this case the two groups shouldn't fight. They should form a coalition, at least for now, and be united against the fossil fuel industry (maybe there's a reason they fund Sierra Nevada). But if we're after cheaper electricity and don't care about carbon, then yeah I do think it makes sense to go after nuclear now and prioritize it. We just need to be clear on what our objectives are. Maybe we forget our actual goals because there's nothing "to do" when we agree and only when we disagree. But we shouldn't ignore our similarities. I for one am more concerned with the climate than a few dollars a year on my electric bill, as I know I pay far more than that for the carbon contamination.

I hope you are not referring to my comment, as I'm not advocating a fully nuclear grid. Instead, I'm advocating nuclear as the replacement for the energy needs that are beyond the reach of renewables in many places - for instance, nighttime consumption in areas without hydro potential.

For those against nuclear, feel free to give an example of a working large scale (supporting 5M+ people 24/7, all seasons) solar/wind deployment in continental Europe with zero dependence on fossil or nuclear.

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding how power grids work. They are generally not monopolistic markets anymore.

The problem is that renewables and nuclear are economically incompatible. They compete for the slice that is the cheapest and most inflexible, both requiring dispatchable power to fill the gaps. Renewables easily win this battle as the cost for new built renewables are in the same range as operations and maintenance for paid off nuclear plants.

For nuclear this inflexibility comes from pure economics. It is economic suicide to build a new plant and operate it at 100%, now try operating it at less than 50% on average. Or even worse only nights without wind like you propose.

There are no fully renewable grids yet, 70% is trivially possible as it us already in use, but we see no issues building them.

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

For nuclear this inflexibility comes from pure economics. It is economic suicide to build a new plant and operate it at 100%, now try operating it at less than 50% on average. Or even worse only nights without wind like you propose.

Agree, this mode of operating NPPs wouldn't be economically feasible.

Also, IIRC, running a NPP with load following would generally lead to significantly more wear and tear and thus maintenance costs. Which is why it wouldn't be done this way.

So why not run the NPP as baseload (say instead of coal powerplants) and then renewables like wind/solar (on top of that flat line of generation), which can easily be turned off/on according to current demand? Whenever high renewables generation coincides with a peak in demand, it's a win. Whenever renewable generation diverges from demand it's either turned off or as much of it as possible is stored. Having storage capacity for electricity, to compensate just the day/night demand fluctuation during a 24h day with stored renewable energy is far more easily done than trying to get to 100 % renewable generation. Especially since solar generation is ~ 1/20 in winter vs summer in some regions.

Seems like the obvious way to do it (to me at least), unless one is completely against nuclear power generation.

This mode would obviously make it somewhat more economically challenging for the renewable operators, since their capacity factors would be reduced.

It all comes down to the fundamental challenge that renewables introduce additional fluctuation which has to be compensated somehow. Ways to do this are: throwing away excess generation, following load via flexible demand, modulating fossil plants, adding more storage capacity.

The thing is: storage capacity for seasonal fluctuation which is going to significantly increase (due to heating and other processes becoming more electrified) is nowhere near. Even storage capacity for just 2 weeks of electricity is huge.

Let's say Germany quadruples it's 2022 wind generation capacity, then in the three Dunkelflaute weeks 48-50 of 2022 [1] (when they had ~ 22 % renewable share, mostly wind) there'd now be 100 % renewables. But in the meantime demand in winter might well go up 20-30 GW due to electrification of heating and other uses. Now there's still a gap between demand and renewable generation of say 30 GW that needs to be filled. Let's say the Dunkelflaute lasts not three weeks but 10 days.

30 GW x 10 days = 7.2 x 10^9 kWh

That's the equivalent of ~ 103,000,000 EV batteries with 70 kWh each. And each one of them would need to be 100 % charged before the 10 days Dunkelflaute and it couldn't be used for anything else during the 10 days and it'd be empty afterwards.

This amount of storiage isn't going to happen in the next 15 years.

I assume the actual way situations like this will be dealt with in Germany is: high electricity demand industries will be shut down during such times, home heating will be turned down, coal fired plants will be brought back online, less trains will run, and so on.

So it'd maybe look like a "80 % renewable grid". But in reality it could better be described as "electricity demand reduced to match renewable generation".

[1] https://energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?...

Power grids operate like marginal cost markets. Why would I as a consumer buy more expensive nuclear power when abundant renewables are available?

That is why the comment started with, (knowing you are not the same person as GP):

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding how power grids work. They are generally not monopolistic markets anymore.

In a monopolistic market what you propose is how it worked. The government/utility decided what power generation it wanted and the customers paid the resulting electricity rates without any choice.

Given the possibility of cheap distributed generation today what will happen if you force nuclear costs on consumers is that they will build local renewable generation and lower their grid utilization. Like we see with rooftop solar, just on a much grander scale.

The end result is again a marginal price market, but now with added inefficiencies.

nuclear fission has to be one of them

Unless for example green hydrogen manufacture, storage, and peaker plants are shown to be cheaper. Let's see in 10 years.

That would have to almost be a literal miracle given the round trip thermodynamic efficiency limit.

Not really. For long term storage, the cost of a unit of energy storage capacity becomes more important than the round trip efficiency. This is all the more the case when the cost of the input energy declines.

For seasonal storage, hydrogen is vastly better than batteries, even with a RTE of 40%. That's because the cost of an underground hydrogen storage cavern can be as little as $1 per kWh of storage capacity.

But the units of energy you need to store are directly related to your efficiency.

Efficiency of the discharge part, yes. But that's a less than factor of 2 effect that can't overcome the two orders of magnitude superiority over batteries in cost per unit of storage capacity.

I don't see how is that relevant. When for example PV energy is abundant and cheap enough to power green hydrogen manufacture, then it's a game of scale, not thermodynamical efficiency.

We should be so lucky as to have so much excess energy to throw away freely of green hydrogen.

But that future is nowhere in sight.

For starters we currently have 90 million tones of H2 that is made from fossil fuels. We should focus on making that green before we consider NEW use cases for it.

As for what to do with the excess energy:

1. Store it in hydro 2. Make water.

#2 is real informative. To make 1 kg of H2 you need ~9kg of pure water (let’s call it 10 for simplicity) and 50-65kWh of electricity. To make those 10 kg of water by desalinating seawater you need 0.035 kWh.

So instead of creating 1 kg of hydrogen, we could create 13,800-18,000 kg of pure water.

Given all the water problems we’re having, that might be a smarter use of that energy.

Every time the spot price goes to 0 or less we are throwing energy away. This is already happening. Every time we could be instead generating hydrogen, or desalinating water, whatever we are not doing right now. But with the ensuing enormouos rise in PV and wind this will get much much worse. Eventually something will use that energy. Why not generate supply for the time when sun is not shining? I don't really care if it's hydrogen, ammonia (easier to store) or pumped hydro (probably best, but not enough capacity possible) or something else.

Also not every country has access to sea and while here in EU the energy markets are interconnected, it's not perfect. And some countries have enough water, no need to desalinate.

Not quite true: there is no public opposition to anything in Russia let's say, and they build their nuclear plants for about that long. Belarusian NPP construction started in March 2011 and first reactor went online in November 2020, 9.5 years. Chernobyl NPP was probably built faster than it should've been given many issues they introduced in the process, and it took 7.5 years from commencement to first reactor going online, May 1970 to December 1977.

10 years down the road, there simply won't be a place for non-renewable power left on the market, apart from natural gas peaker plants for grid balancing. Too late to start any new ones.

Not true, for example Nizniy Novgorod NPP was cancelled despite being almost finished because of local radiophobic public movements. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%8C%D0%BA...

There's definitely truth to this and not. It's rather complicated. I don't want to get into arguments which will happen no matter what I say, so I'm just going to link three things and let the data speak for itself.

[0] is the cost of energy by year. We notice that nuclear is the only one to increase and coal is stable while everything else decreases. As time goes by, things usually get cheaper, so we have to ask what's unique to nuclear.

[1] Shows a graph of the decarbonization process of countries' energy sectors. I suggest including: US, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, and China.

[2] is a near real time map of energy production and tells you where the energy portfolio, its carbon intensity per source, and if the region imports/exports that electricity. All these matter.

So we should all keep these things in mind when discussing energy because carbon is a critical part. This is HN, people are familiar with how to read data, right? Let's not fight, and let's try to start any discussion with some facts that are inarguable. This is just data.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/decarbonizing-energy-progress

[2] https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

We notice that nuclear is the only one to increase

“ France and South Korea were at least able to keep prices and construction times constant.”

“ those countries that were able to avoid price surges are countries that do not stand out in regulating nuclear power less, but in standardizing the construction of reactors more.”

Source will be appreciated as the claims seem to be false according to quick search.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-19/french-wi...

[2]: https://tradingeconomics.com/france/electricity-price

The reason for the long and expensive construction has a lot to do with the people opposing the construction! We could build these reactors so much more cheaply and quickly (and more safely!) if we decided to!

Citation required.

Another explanation is that is that they're so complicated and expensive that it results in the people involved in managing the construction being incentivized to make it more expensive. They to siphon off as much as possible, empire build and collect more power for themselves by spending more money. And if they come up with more possible risks to mitigate, they sell a more complex and costly system and get more money, while the people doing oversight don't want to be the one that said okay to not mitigating a risk that causes a major problem down the line--they're so complicated that the safest butt-covering is to just spend the money.

All of that is just organic, free-range American middle-management capitalism at work. No hippies required to make it expensive.

Take a look at California, at non-nuclear large construction projects. Do you think that the pervasive delays and cost overruns have nothing to do with many forces actively opposing (almost any) construction projects? Do you e.g. think that costs and delays of building a railway have much to do with inherent expenses and complexities of railway technology?

How on earth is the US Navy managing its fleet of >64 nuclear powered submarines ?

There is also the narrative vs facts problem.

"It takes forever to build a nuclear power plant and it is very expensive"

This is a narrative.

"Lets compare how MW capacity / day (how long it takes to build) across different energy sources"

These are facts.

If you can build 10 MW in 10 days vs 1200 MW in 365 days which one is better?

This is ridiculous reasoning. There is nothing that prevents you from building renewable sources in parallel.

There absolutely is, for example physics

The reason for the long and expensive construction has a lot to do with the people opposing the construction! We could build these reactors so much more cheaply and quickly (and more safely!) if we decided to!

This doesn't make sense, the roadblocks have been cleared at that point. Once they started constructing, what opposition is still there?

The first EPR project in France (Flamanville-3) had problems documented in an official report (dubbed 'Folz', per the name of its main author), sadly AFAIK it wasn't translated into English: https://www.economie.gouv.fr/rapport-epr-flamanville

A piece about it: https://www.archyde.com/the-folz-report-draws-up-a-severe-as...

"the people opposing the construction" isn't a major cause.

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

More.