We have to expand nuclear power. Many don't like it but at this point we have no other choice. Let solar drive the phasing out of nuclear reactors instead of coal power plants! Sadly in my country (Sweden) nuclear is not only taboo but it's illegal to perform research of the subject.. Laws passed by a severely misinformed "green" movement...
The problem with nuclear (at least in countries like the UK and USA) is not so much public perception or misinformation but the cost, particularly once eventual decommissioning and long-term waste storage costs are accounted for.
It's increasingly difficult for nuclear projects to compete with things like renewables, inter-connectors, and carbon-taxed gas turbines. The one project that has gone ahead recently in the UK (Hinkley C) did so only with a significant government subsidy (ie guaranteed inflation-linked strike price).
Renewables (wind turbines, solar panels, storage technologies, etc) all tend to benefit from commoditisation and economies of scale, so their costs keep coming down. Nuclear costs, on the other hand, keep spiralling upwards.
There's "small modular reactors" [0], which could solve this problem. Renewables are where they are from years of research and investment, we should offer the same to nuclear.
I don't follow the whole landscape, but I remember reading about Toshiba 4S getting a contract in Alaska, but having to abandon it because the cost of just certifying was cost prohibitive (because the regulations around giant nuclear don't apply to it). And that sucks.
Yes, but as this article shows, there are much higher costs coming up for us. If we came to a consensus that this technology is important and devoted resources to this, we would see a lot of improvements in these parameters.
The problem is that neither the market nor governments work well for these long term decisions.
We are spending lot of resources on trivialities due to our short term mindset.
I think Reason077 is arguing that it is quicker and cheaper long term to invest in wind/solar rollout and storage solutions than nuclear. i.e. it is a better solution all round.
It is a valid point. Once batteries are cheap enough, it solar and wind become an obvious solution, with little political backlash.
We're having this conversation with Hinkley Point C in the UK. It's going to get subsidised more than wind power and it's going to take a decade to build.
If you start building reactors now, then in a decade you end up with a bunch of eternal liabilities that are more expensive than renewables+storage will likely be by then.
The subsidy per KWh from Hinkley Point C is roughly equal to to the current market rate for electricity because of the guaranteed price needed to build the plant, so the electricity effectively costs twice as much.
Holy crap: "In October 2013 the Government agreed a deal with the French state-owned energy giant to guarantee it a price of £92.50, index-linked to inflation, for every megawatt-hour of electricity the £18bn nuclear plant would produce over a 35 year period."
That's madness. The same madness, IMHO, inherent to most 'targeted' energy generation subsidies. Although, it's a little hilarious that they've managed to get themselves into a situation where their own subsidies will be competing with one another (i.e. subsidising some other non-nuclear generator will reduce wholesale electricity prices, forcing them to pay out more because of their guaranteed 'strike-price' for Hinkley).
However, just reading that Guardian article, there's some pretty questionable thinking going on at the NOA if their quoted statements are representative:
Supporting early new nuclear projects could lead to higher costs in the short term than continuing to support wind and solar. The cost competitiveness of nuclear power is weakening as wind and solar become more established,” according to the report, titled Nuclear Power in the UK.
I don't understand this fixation on short-term costs (and yes I do understand that money has a time-value). Given climate change is a long-term problem, and we're probably going to be generating electricity well into the future, why are short-term costs in any way relevant? Also, despite being depressingly common, weasel phrases like 'the cost competitiveness of nuclear power is weakening' really have no place in a government report on a matter of this importance. Is the financial case presently stronger or weaker for nuclear? And which option maximises net social welfare? Those are the only relevant questions in my mind.
“The decision to proceed with support for nuclear power therefore relies more on strategic than financial grounds: nuclear power is needed in the supply mix to complement the intermittent nature of wind and solar,” it added.
Meaning it is a financial issue? No matter how you choose to solve the intermittancy problem, they all cost money. Very sizeable amounts of money. Pumped-hydro plants and HVDC lines don't exactly grow on trees.
It as never been illegal to perform nuclear research in Sweden. Between 1988 and 2006 it was illegal to perform preparatory actions for building nuclear power plants (in addition to actually building them, after the 1980 referendum vote). It was commonly referred to as "tankeförbudet" (a pejorative term, close to "illegal thoughts"). The law was removed 2006, one of the reason was this common misconception.
However, ABB created and exported (among others) the BWR90+ during the nineties, proving your statement wrong. You can read about it in the newspaper about how it iw popular to study nuclear power again (article from 2010). http://www.dn.se/nyheter/politik/karnkraft-hett-pa-universit...
In France we have much nuclear energy, yes it doesn't create much CO2 but the downsides are severe: expensive, long cycles, energy has to be stored in dams anyway. Nuclear incidents get concealed regularly. Leaving nuclear energy is expensive itself.
IMHO part of the problem is that globally the entire field of nuclear energy was underfunded. Sure, the Chernobyl disaster was horrifying, but it is as if humankind stopped trying for aviation after first passengers were killed in an accident.
If all the money that were poured into anti-nuclear propaganda and research of unstable and extremely low-yield [1] sources like wind and solar we might have had clean nuclear power by now.
Nuclear is over. Regardless if you're for it or against. It just is, at least in democratic countries.
After Fukushima it is political suicide to promote nuclear. The politicians will not vote for it. You'd need supreme political capital to expend on lobbying for it and the ROI is just not there for them.
It is mostly because of military influences (proliferation risk) and environmental activism that these solutions have never been fully developed and deployed.
There are actual risks with handling really dirty waste and turn it into really dirty fuel - you can't just hand-wave away that as "environmental activism."
It's much more risky than just leaving the waste in a pond cooling for 20 years while hoping that you will be retired before someone actually have to get rid of it.
Of course there are risks -- but are those risks really of a different order than having to build nuclear storage containers that will hold for thousands of years?
I'd say that activism has left us with the most undesirable outcome: we still have ancient reactor designs producing unmanageable waste, and every solution to actually reduce that waste has become politically unfeasible. All that we've done is create massive amounts of technical debt that will burden generations to come.
Are they wrong though? proliferation risk seems to me an important point. Also are risk of theft, attacks on facilities and transportation, leakage due to natural disasters, and of course: bad politicians doing "unavoidable" cuts. Moreover, even with FBRs you get Pu-contaminated MSO (http://e360.yale.edu/features/are_fast-breeder_reactors_a_nu...).
Once you take all these issues into consideration you just need to extrapolate and see how nuclear accidents will happen once in a while.
It's a non-problem, compared to various other chemicals we deal with in industry. Nuclear waste is relatively easy to store and there isn't a lot of it. Yes - it's nasty, toxic stuff, but we know how to handle it.
Having to store some of it isolated for 10000 years is a concern, yes, especially if you look at the average lifespan of human civilizations. But we already have ways to reuse the waste (fast breeder reactors), and we could likely figure out many more - but reluctance to fund nuclear research and applications, driven partly by the fear of "the waste", is not helping here.
The main benefit - IMO - is that it's relatively compact, lightweight, and solid compared to CO2. If there was a cheap and simple way to condense CO2 into a solid, we could stuff that into the ground instead. But CO2 would have to be stored indefinitely - we will probably see the catastrophic effects of what happens when stored CO2 is released in the atmosphere (permafrost, ice and ocean sediments are releasing their stored CO2 atm). Actually, fossil fuels can be considered to be stored, solid or liquid CO2 already, accumulated over tens or hundreds of millions of years.
On that scale, putting something away for 10K years seems relatively trivial and safe compared to CO2.
Does anyone have any numbers on what battery prices need to get to before Wind/Solar are cost competitive with nuclear? Double internet points if you account for direct/indirect subsidies given to both Wind/Solar/Nuclear (including if nuclear would have to purchase insurance for accident cleanup and a secured deposit for decommissioning costs, and likewise for solar's environmental damage from manufacturing).
Note that this is the production. Consumption is a bit different because Nordic countries share the electricity market and the grids are connected. Consumption could use hydroelectric from Norway or wind from Denmark or nuclear from Finland, or from Russia via Finland.
Their base-case assumption is a $50 per tonne price on co2 emissions, and they use a 'costs avoided' methodology so that things like cost of system stabilisation (e.g. grid batteries due to intermittent generation) are factored in as well. The paper concludes:
Assuming that reductions in carbon dioxide emissions are valued at $50 per metric ton and the price of natural gas is not much greater than $16 per million Btu, the net benefits of new nuclear, hydro, and natural gas combined cycle plants far outweigh the net benefits of new wind or solar plants. Wind and solar power are very costly from a social perspective because of their very high capacity cost, their very low capacity factors, and their lack of reliability.
For example, adjusting U.S. solar and wind capacity factors to take account of lack of reliability, we estimate that it would take 7.30 MW of solar capacity, costing roughly four times as much per MW to produce the same electrical output with the same degree of reliability as a baseload gas combined cycle plant. It requires an investment of approximately $29 million in utility-scale solar capacity to produce the same output with the same reliability as a $1 million investment in gas combined cycle. Reductions in the price of solar photovoltaic panels have reduced costs for utility-scale solar plants, but photovoltaic panels account for only a fraction of the cost of a solar plant. Thus such price reductions are unlikely to make solar power competitive with other electricity technologies without government subsidies.
Wind plants are far more economical in reducing emissions than solar plants, but much less economical than hydro, nuclear and gas combined cycle plants. Wind plants can operate at a capacity factor of 30 percent or more and cost about twice as much per MW to build as a gas combined cycle plant. Taking account of the lack of wind reliability, it takes an investment of approximately $10 million in wind plants to produce the same amount of electricity with the same reliability as a $1 million investment in gas combined cycle plants.
No problemo. And yeah, that's how I read it, bearing in mind the usual caveats like: all costs (mining to site remediation) being accounted for, technological and price changes over the past 3 years etc. etc. I think 'cost avoided' is a good measure; LCOE is so sensitive to assumptions and accounting trickery that it's basically meaningless (see: Lazard).
Brookings seem to have made a fair effort (best I've seen thus far). It makes sense that combined-cycle gas turbines would pip nuclear power (in most scenarios examined) as they produce highly dispatchable electricity (i.e. their output levels can be changed very rapidly in response to fluctuations in demand for electricity). You can forecast and 'plan ahead' with nuclear, but the ramping times are currently too slow. So you either overbuild, rely on a limited amount of grid-level storage or throw a more responsive form of generation into the mix (i.e. gas turbines).
Most of the cost of nuclear is in building the plant, after which the variable cost of generation is tiny (i.e. you just run it full-bore all the time, since oversupplying doesn't carry a high cost). Coal probably has a similar cost profile (maybe with slightly higher relative variable costs), although on a smaller scale and in a relatively under-regulated market: the WHO estimates pollution from coal-fired generation, not taking into account climate-change, kills ~1m people per year, whereas nuclear containment buildings must be built to withstand a plane crashing directly into it.
But the really big take-away for me is that, if we want to mitigate climate change efficiently (which I'm starting to think is the same as saying 'if we want to mitigate it at all'), we really badly need to place a price on carbon emissions (and their equivalents). It sucks that both extreme sides of the debate don't seem to want this: vested interests will obviously oppose it, and 'extreme greens' seem to think it's some sort of immoral conspiracy designed to allow financial markets to make money off climate change (if we're talking 'cap and trade').
Those who don't like market-based mechanisms such as 'cap and trade' should consider the other side of the coin: it creates the opportunity for direct action on your part. You could buy emissions permits on the open market and then sit on them, permanently lowering the emissions cap. You can finally 'put your money where your mouth is'.
