I think you've got that a bit reversed, trying to fix climate change with nuclear is a bit impossible at this point. We can't build it!
Why is this plant shutting down? Not because of some sort of hate of nuclear technology, as many would have us believe.
No, the real reason this plant is shutting down is because, like every other thermal generation plant, extending its lifetime past the original license means complying with environmental impact laws on waste heat. Once-through waste heat systems are no longer legal [1]. So why not just build a waste heat system and keep it running? Because when the utility tried to come up with one, the cost of the cooling system alone ran into the billions of dollars!
Much better to just by a few billion dollars worth of batteries and site them on location. At current costs, today, $1B gets you 5GWh at 1.25GW, roughly. The very cheapest estimate for a cooling system was $7B and they ran to over $10B for a new cooling system [2]. So even without the inevitable cost overruns, one could purchase 35-50GWh and 9-12GW of batteries.
A 40GWh/10GW battery would be a far better grid asset for California, and massive increase reliability far beyond what Diablo Canyon could ever produce.
When the mere cooling system for nuclear is more expensive than a better battery, the technology is dead, dead, dead. We don't need it and we have better alternatives.
In the US, it's mostly can't. The last attempt caused massive risk to Toshiba as its subsidiary Westinghouse was destroyed by its attempts.
In the UK, at Wylfa, it's more "won't", Hitachi just refused to go forward with a new build, since it couldn't find external investors despite very generous guaranteed pricing for its energy.
At least, it appears to be "won't", because who knows if a construction project that was started would ever be finished.
If the new nuclear startups come through, everything has changed. But the new small ones they are designing are not really anything like the nuclear reactors of yore, so we have to wait and see if they pan out on costs. And in the decades they need to come online, storage and solar and wind keep halving in price every few years.
But at the moment, pretend you're Jeff Bezos and want to buy $50B of nuclear reactors, however much that ends up in practice. Who do you go to? Toshiba, Hitachi? No. EDF? Hell no. Maybe South Korea? But they had their recent corruption scandal for inspections of nuclear plants. Rosatom? Feel like getting into bed with Putin? What's left of the industry?
> "Couldn't find external investors despite very generous guaranteed pricing for its energy."
UK is a world leader in finding particularly sadomasochistic ways of financing critical infrastructure. This is like the PFI debacle all over again. Interest rates are at zero, the government should take out the cheque book and finance the plant directly. You can absolutely just buy a reactor and they are being built in China at record pace.
Private investment contributes nothing of value to this type of project, because spesification, location, and everything else was already decided
It only accrues extra cost because of higher interest rates avaliable to private investors and risk hedging. All the current government is trying to do, is keep the cost of the powerplants off the book, and hiding it from the national debt.
But why would the government want to provide the loans, when it is already providing a massive subsidy on pricing to guarantee good returns, which should be far more valuable to a buildable technology?
The reason, of course, is that nuclear is not very buildable, and nobody is willing to make a bet, even with very high returns.
If private investors would rather invest in offshore wind, or storage, why should the UK government be less wise with its money?
If the UK is going to take on billion debt for energy infrastructure (an excellent idea in my opinion that would benefit the UK greatly!) it should invest in more sound and reliable sources of energy like renewables, that have a proven track record of being built on time and in budget. And technologies where we learn when we build so that next year's project is even cheaper.
Renewables _always_ require a fossile backup. You are _not_ fixing the climate with just renewables.
Look at electricitymap.org and compare the emissions of Germany (50% renewables) with France (70% nuclear). Germany is 7 times dirtier in its electricity sector.
I don’t understand why people keep repeating that non-sense that renewables reduce emissions at large scale, they don’t.
And building NPPs fast is no problem, look at China and Russia. Heck, Japan used to build new plants in just about three years.
That's simply untrue. Iceland for example is already 100% renewable. Other grids with large installed hydro generation (eg New Zealand) could move to solely renewable with the installation of more intermittent generation and transmission infrastructure.
Yes, most grids still rely on non renewable resources. But that is simply a relic of the fact that they were built that way. The existing examples prove it's possible.
Hydroelectric power isn't quite as clean as many believe though.
>We estimate that GHG emissions from reservoir water surfaces account for 0.8 (0.5–1.2) Pg CO2 equivalents per year, with the majority of this forcing due to CH4.
That's between 2% and 3% of our global greenhouse gas emissions. About three quarters of greenhouse gas emissions come from energy production and about 15% of all energy production is hydro power if I recall correctly.
It's much better than fossil fuels, but not quite clean.
That’s the equivalent of saying “be born rich” to a poor person. Iceland is running on geothermal which most places don’t have and dams are a non-starter in the vast majority of river systems due to the ecological destruction.
There are no countries running on wind/solar, which is the only renewable technology that can actually run everywhere.
The comment I was replying to stated that "Renewables _always_ require a fossil backup". This is clearly untrue, as the multiple examples of grids that do not have or need fossil backup shows.
Certainly the examples I have given are those that have the easiest path to renewables. It is entirely logical that they would be the first to transition. But it proves that it's possible.
If the backup is run infrequently enough then that becomes a non-issue. I can definitely forsee a future where the fossil backup is only used once a decade in particularly abnormal weather conditions.
It would be possible if you have a huge well-connected grid, spanning thousands of kilometers, with low costs of sending energy over long distances and small energy loss (ideally, spanning multiple timezones, or connecting sunny regions and windy regions with the less renewable-friendly ones).
There has been some research into this topic, but we're not there yet. First, the connectedness of e.g. EU grid is not that high. Second, it's a very political subject in a way (everyone wants to be energy independent on its own, without needing to import too much). Finally, IMO Europe is not that big to be sustainable on its own regardless of weather (which is often similar on large part of continent).
Alternatively we build out masses of storage capacity, coupled with much more aggressive load shifting (this would be disruptive to the economy, but not overwhelmingly so). We're not there yet either, but it doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem to me.
Every power source requires some reserve capacity; nuclear goes offline for long periods of time to refuel, for example. Large generators trip offline.
Germany emissions don't come from the 50% renewables, they come from burning 50% coal. I'm not sure why you are blaming renewables for those coal emissions.
Will you blame their current emissions on renewables? No because if you click on the "emissions" tab you'll see that it's almost all coming from gas, and second highest source of emissions are nuclear.
Does nuclear always require a fossil fuel backup? No, of course not, so there's no need to make up false rules about other sources. Wind reserves can come from hydro, geographically distant wind (offshore is running at insanely high capacity factors these day), batteries as we start to deploy them, and yes even from existing nuclear plants.
But having built nuclear many years ago, and Russia and China building some now, doesn't mean that France or Germany or the US will be successful when they try to build. However, the one thing they have been successful at is building more wind. I hope they lean into their strengths, instead of betting everything on something they have repeatedly failed at.
Germany coal percentage in electricity production in 2020 is 21% and 66% of electricity generation is 0 carbon (renewable + nuclear). Coal part in total production is decreasing year over year.
Of course Germany is using other country to import when wind is not blowing, but at the scale of a continent we can see that most west European countries can go soon to an almost 0% carbon electricity production.
Yes, I've looked at those, but I don't see what your point is. The carbon comes from coal, not renewables. When you see a mix of 50% coal and 50% renewables, and you blame Germany for high emissions by not even mentioning the coal, I kind of wonder what's going on in the poster's head. I have seen this repeated again and again in this thread, and I literally can not comprehend the logic that chains these types of statements together, because the only connections seem to be huge and incorrect logical leaps, so I therefore have not engaged with what seems to have no logical way forward for discussion.
I will say this: Europe has been decreasing its carbon emissions by replacing fossil fuels with renewables. Renewables reduce carbon emissions everywhere that they replace fossil fuels. This is just physics.
Because subsidy is an idiotic way to fund it. What's the point of seeking private investment if the government guarantees profit, selects the reactor design and it's location? What usefull funcrion do private investors fullfill, their funding is more expensive than a government loan.
They should contract EDF to build it for a fixed price, job done.
The point is that it motivates the builder to complete it in a certain amount of time, not just at some time in the future. However, that induces too much risk apparently.
In the US most contested have been for a fixed price, it's just that nobody meets that fixed price nor the schedule. And since nuclear front-loads 50 years of generation prices into the construction, Amy delay at all I'm starting service is a financial disaster.
The US and every other developed nation 'absolutely can'.
The tech, research and regulations are '40 years old' stuck in an old era.
The 'existential risks' from Nuclear are partly fallout but that can mostly be managed.
It's really 1) waste and 2) proliferation.
The waste ... might possible to be dealt with. We can re-process and turn waste into something that can reasonably sit somewhere safe for '100K years' - that sounds like a challenge but I think it's possible.
Proliferation is the real problem. Nuclear requires 'very responsible systems' from top to bottom. Advanced nations, with transparency and oversight and scrutiny, can handle it.
But as soon as US, Canada, France starts building reactors, then Chile, Ecuador, Afghanistan will want to as well, and who is going to stop them?
Then it's only a 'small bribe' from 'very bad actors' getting a hold of nuclear material, enough to build a bomb, or much easier, just a dirty bomb, enough to very easily do some very bad damaage.
I can see contamination being released in NYC, which maybe only makes a few people ill, another few thousands with 'somewhat unsafe exposure' - but which requires evacuation of Manhatten and 200 years of 'no go zone'. This is the real risk.
So the UN, West, China, Russia would have to all perfectly align on 'the rules' and be very serious about enforcing them.
Because it's political, I don't see it happening. Russia has tons of Fuel they want to sell to Kazhakstan, a civil war breaks out there, baddies get ahold of a reactor, and 'somewhere someone takes a bribe' and some bad materials slip out the back.
We can definitely save the world with nuclear, we just have to act responsibly on a collective level. Not sure if we can, sadly.
The proliferation risk of nuclear fuel is overblown. Reactors don’t use weapons-grade fuel, and purifying it to weapons-grade material is harder than making the fuel to begin with; if you can take fuel and refine it into a weapon, you might as well start with unprocessed uranium.
I find it interesting that spent nuclear fuel contains a fair amount of weapons grade Pu, but it also contains other isotopes of Pu which you wouldn't want and would be difficult to separate.
It could definitely be used for a dirty bomb, which could, if nothing else, cause significant economic damage from the fear of radiation.
"Nuclear waste generally is over 90% uranium. Thus, the spent fuel (waste) still contains 90% usable fuel! It can be chemically processed and placed in other reactors to close the fuel cycle. A closed fuel cycle means much less nuclear waste and much more energy extracted from the raw ore. Additionally, this process allows you to convert your waste into chemical forms that are totally immobilized.
France currently recycles their spent fuel. They put the remaining good nuclear fuel back in their reactors in the form of MOX fuel and immobilize the remaining waste in vitrified borosilicate glass.
The US had a recycling program featuring the use of advanced fast reactors (which have not been deployed on any major scale yet) that was shut down because it created Plutonium, which could be used to make a nuclear weapon. Were some plutonium diverted in the recycling process, a non-nuclear entity could be one step close to building a bomb. However, under programs such as the (now stalled) GNEP [wikipedia], where only countries who already have nuclear weapons recycle, proliferation-free waste recycling can exist. Since the many of the largest energy users are already nuclear weapons states, a massive expansion of nuclear could be done there with no additional proliferation concerns whatsoever.
If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 39.5 grams. That’s the weight of seven U. S. quarters of waste, per year! A detailed description of this result can be found here. If we got all our electricity from coal and natural gas, expect to have over 10,000 kilograms of CO2/yr attributed to each person, not to mention other poisonous emissions directly to the biosphere (based on EIA emissions data).
If you want raw numbers: in 2018, there were just over 80,000 metric tonnes of high-level waste in the USA. Between 1971 and 2018, nuclear reactors in the USA generated 3000 GW-years of electricity to make this waste.
For comparison, in 2007 alone the US burned 948,000,000 metric tonnes of coal. This means that coal plants made 32 times more waste every single day than the US nuclear fleet has made in the past 45 years! Granted, coal made a higher fraction of the country’s electricity, but the numbers are still crazy impressive for nuclear."
Interesting: "2018 Nobel Prize for Physics-winner Gérard Mourou has proposed using Chirped pulse amplification to generate high-energy and low-duration laser pulses to transmute highly radioactive material (contained in a target) to significantly reduce its half-life, from thousands of years to only a few minutes."
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I do not think nuclear waste and proliferation are a problem. Consider ITER, for example:
"Fusion reactors, unlike fission reactors, produce no high activity/long life radioactive waste. The "burnt" fuel in a fusion reactor is helium, an inert gas. Activation produced in the material surfaces by the fast neutrons will produce waste that is classified as very low, low, or medium activity waste. All waste materials (such as components removed by remote handling during operation) will be treated, packaged, and stored on site."
"Because the half-life of most radioisotopes contained in this waste is lower than ten years, within 100 years the radioactivity of the materials will have diminished in such a significant way that the materials can be recycled for use in other fusion plants. This timetable of 100 years could possibly be reduced for future devices through the continued development of 'low activation' materials, which is an important part of fusion research and development today."
Or to put it briefly: "No long-lived radioactive waste: Nuclear fusion reactors produce no high activity, long-lived nuclear waste. The activation of components in a fusion reactor is low enough for the materials to be recycled or reused within 100 years.".
Proliferation: "Limited risk of proliferation: Fusion doesn't employ fissile materials like uranium and plutonium. (Radioactive tritium is neither a fissile nor a fissionable material.) There are no enriched materials in a fusion reactor like ITER that could be exploited to make nuclear weapons."
To repeat: waste is not much of an issue CURRENTLY, and in the future we will have ITER and the like, i.e. fusion reactors instead of fission reactors that solve the nuclear waste and the proliferation problem. It is sad how many people are misinformed about nuclear (other comments). There is no higher electricity consumption without nuclear, like... just forget about it. But then again, the future, that is fusion reactors, are pretty damn great. Just check out the last link in this comment.
The one thing I hate about the waste issue is that it is nearly never priced in. "Nuclear is cheap and clean", is what many will say, but dealing with the waste will create costs for the public multiplied by a 100k years. And this assumes the public exists, knows and wants to manage these things for a timeframe that long. 10k years ago we were still in the ice age and roaming around in huts, hunting with sticks. It would be even a challenge to garantuee such a thing for a single century in the current climate and there would be 999 to go just to deal with the stuff that we made at one point.
This is purely a debt to the future generations, and as such we are very easily blue to take them, because we will not be around when it needs to be payed. If we ever realistically counted that stuff in nuclear would be completely and utterly unaffordable.
Sure thing, we could develope ways of reducing the half life time of the waste, building better and greater storage facilities that manage to stay functional 25 times longer than the pyramides, find newer cleaner ways of using the limited nuclear resources we have, etc.
This factor alone makes me unsure this really is the best way to generate energy. One thing many don't realise is that reducing production emissions alone doesn't cut it. We have to use less as well. Eat less meat, based on the methane the cows fart alone. All in all buy and produce less stuff. Which in turn would break capitalism, which we realistically won't carry through even if it would mean extinction.
Arguing for less consumption is a non-starter. It's a tacit admission that the solution to global warming is killing say 30% of the global population, just framed in an indirect manner so it doesn't sound like genocide.
Genocide? Really? I thought it was part of the HN codex not to read others opinions in a unfavourable way unless there is no other conclusion, but okay.
Deforestation to make way for livestock, along with methane emissions from cows and fertilizer use, creates as much greenhouse gas emissions as all the world’s cars, trucks and airplanes combined.
The fertilizer has to be used for the life stocks food. If you eat 1 kJ of meat vs 1 kJ of the soy that is produced to feed it, there is less water usage [1], less CO2 emissions [2], less land usage etc.
If anything a move away from meat would help earth to accommodate more people. And that is only meat. What if you are able to buy one product that lasts a decade vs 10 that last a year?
This kind of "use the resources more efficiently"-stuff is what I mean when I say reduce consumption.
And that should by the way not be the task for individuals to tackle, we need higher standards when it comes to efficient resource usage, quality and lifetime of products, etc. This is not something that will be solved fast enough by consumers and their wallets.
Of course energy and transportation is a factor as well in all of this. If we don't want to move our planet into " lol maybe we go extinct"-territory, we will have to reduce individual transport and expand public transport and use renewable or otherwise more efficient means of converting energy.
The thing is: doing it later means we would have to do even harder changes. If we all started tackling this 4 decades ago we could have gone with a smooth, gradual change. Now even instantaneous change would be only amount to damage limitation.
The Greenlandic ice is over the tipping point. We cannot unmelt it. And heating 0°C ice to 0°C water takes the same amount of energy as it takes to heat 0°C water to 80°C water. This means thermally speaking our breaks are still working, but they will stop working any moment and we cannot stop them from loosing their function anymore.
The last year of reading up on climate science really made me realize that things are far worse than I thought they were.
But can it come back quickly enough to make meaningful impact on the climate catastrophe? By all means, try to bring it back, but please don't use the "only nuclear can possibly save us" rhetoric to delay a massive push towards other carbon free energy.
There was also a point not too long ago when there weren't any 3.5 inch floppy drives. If we are going to bring back obsolete industries, at least floppy drives could be thrown around the office for fun.
China and India are building some coal plants that they are going to highly regret, because it is even more onset than nuclear.
When building something new that lasts decades, and the current examples that have already paid off their capital costs are shutting down because fuel and maintenance alone is more expensive than newer tech, that is pretty much the definition of obsolete.
In India, the reason for coal and nuclear is that it's easier for local officials to take bribes. Not sure what the story is in China, as they are far more strict with the corruption penalties there. I suspect that it's mostly that there are old long term plans that haven't been updated for today's reality, a reality where renewables and storage got cheaper than even the most optimistic predictions.
That would continue a trend of willfull ignorance and stupidity that is not out of character.
Firstly, the evidence is that the Chinese are excellent at manufacturing and will likely be churning out high quality nuclear reactors.
Secondly, high quality energy production is a bad topic for nationalism. The West decided not to pursue nuclear decades ago. But it remains the most technically excellent form of energy production and we should be grateful that there are still nations in the world pushing technology and engineering forward. It isn't like there are a lot of choices; the obvious options the world has right now are either Chinese nuclear or Chinese solar.
But wha tid your remote be those artificial gov overhead costs designed to fail it out. Fro. What I understand the raw material is leased from the gov at high rates.
That is not the choice at all, and I have yet to see anybody make a serious case for it. There are lots of plans for renewable, carbon free grids out there. Most include nuclear, but not all. Nuclear is not an essential component of any of them, we have many alternatives, the only question is which will provide the cheapest energy. IMHO, it's unlikely to be nuclear, and I think that because those who include nuclear as a part of their future grids vastly underestimate the pace of change for renewables and storage.
I may have underestimate the potential of salt domes...
I think we will be making lots of hydrogen for decarbonization of industrial processes, and maybe even for aviation or shipping, so as long as we can dump electrons to Utah and find the water, this sounds great.
Would you believe the trillions of cubic feet of natural gas that is stored in a large number of storage systems across the US? A good chunk of that is in very large cavities in salt formations. This is not new technology.
Average electric power generation in the US, on the grid, is a bit less than 500 GW. So, 15 TWh is about 30 hours.
There are lots and lots of other salt formations, both in the US and in the world. Also, aquifers and exhausted oil and gas fields can be used to store hydrogen.
I really think the economics behind nuclear traditional power plants are a bit screwed. It takes years to build and costs order of magnitudes more than a gas turbines. In addition gas turbines are particularly well suited to be turned on in a mater of minutes whenever there is peak demand. And you still need power when there is no wind or no sun.
Unless there is strong support from government, Nuclear Plants can’t happen.
I’m really putting a lot of hope in the next generation of mini self contained nuclear plants. I think Bill Gate is also looking into that. These have the potential to be successful both for the planet (get rid of gas turbines for peak demand when renewables fail) but also economically (easier cheaper to build).
The one thing most people don't realize, is that this is not only about producing energy more cleanly, this will definitly also mean things like driving less (or less individual), eating different, flying way less, making all things more usable etc. And this quite frankly is the harder thing to tackle because it means changing culture.
And that culture needed to change not now, but a while ago. If the whole world fully stopped emitting CO2 today, the latency till we could measure the first effect on climate would be roughly 13 years.
Most people I know are way too optimistic about what it takes to deal with this. A good way to get a feeling is to play with the sliders of this model here: https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org
Edit: this is btw. not something that I am happy with. Like at all. It stresses me out to think about it. People down voting a post that simply states the scientific consensus on that topic doesn't make it any better to be honest.
France is able to produce 70% of their electricity through nuclear. Anyway, you do release the 40GWh electricity purchased would probably come from non-renewables.
France's efforts to come up with a new fleet to replace their current aging fleet have not been successful, they have had as much trouble as the US. They may be able to modify the EPR... but ever year that they fail to have a new more buildable design is another year that renewables and storage get cheaper while nuclear stays the same price or increases in price.
I think if you want to bring up a nuclear success story, Canada would be far better. Their CANDU has been really successful, and they haven't yet tried to build a new generation of reactors so they haven't yet failed.
Unpack this for me please, they were able to build a fleet of reactors in the past, but no longer can? Is the new design worse, or unbuildable? Old reactors could not be beluilt today? People with all the skills have kicked the bucket?
The new reactors that are permitted to be built, and that nuclear advocates stake safety claims on, are not economical, at least in the views of potential operators.
The old reactors are the things nuclear advocates dismiss and say modern designs are better than on issues like safety and other concerns.
I would also add that the word is very different Han 50 years ago. Some things have gotten very cheap, some things have stayed the same price.
So the technology that looked good, theoretically, in 1970 may not have the same outlook in 2020.
In particular, France's failing attempt is the EPR. There have been construction starts at three sites, and all have been massive off schedule. For the three not in China, they have been massively over budget. The build in China was the third to be started, but is the only one completed; planned construction time was 48 months, but it ended up taking twice as long. I don't know how to judge the pricing of construction in China, but if the Western world could do it in 8 years and at the stated cost of $7.5B, it would be a fantastic deal.
What has changed since the last time? I don't know. Maybe different sorts of people go into the same jobs. Maybe executive culture is to blame. Maybe engineering culture is to blame. Maybe procurement and construction is to blame. Nobody has provided a solid explanation of X, Y, and Z with concrete examples.
Some will say regulations are different and the cause, but at the same time nobody says that these are unnecessary regulations, or that there's a smarter path that would make them cheap, it's always just vague accusations without any specific call to action.
I mean, you began this thread by saying that they've added a new regulation on waste heat and nobody knows how to build a cooling system that satisfies it. Maybe we can begin by repealing that one and go from there...
We know how to build cooling towers. That's the $7B cost.
Why would we remove a common sense environmental regulation, when we can build cheaper better things that have less environmental damage? Why the obsession with nuclear, at any cost? What is the benefit and gain when we have cheaper better alternatives?
What was considered "cheap" in the 1980s is no longer the cheapest option. We have better, cheaper technologies.
And on top of that the US can no longer build big things. We don't have construction management competence.
> when we can build cheaper better things that have less environmental damage?
No we can't. The plans are to build nuclear plants that do exactly no environmental or social damage. Solar/wind/etc can't possibly compete to that standard. Try reliably isolating solar panel waste from the biosphere for even a century and see how much it costs. The figures would be too absurd to consider, which is why nobody is suggesting it.
I'd be happy to go with the cheapest thing if everything was to the same standard; but solar seems to getting a free pass that nuclear isn't, because people care about having to evacuate an area but have no fear of heavy metals poisoning. For reasons that continue to baffle the rationalists.
> The plans are to build nuclear plants that do exactly no environmental or social damage. Solar/wind/etc can't possibly compete to that standard.
I'm not sure if you're serious with post. "No" environmental damage, when we have to mine uranium, iron ore, and massive amounts of concrete? Yet somehow they "waste" of old solar panels is hazardous to the biosphere and impossible to separate? Nuclear waste is far more hazardous and we don't seem to have much problem isolating that in France.
And then you say that solar is getting a free pass, when you invent issues for solar that are far more difficult for nuclear to handle?
> when we have to mine uranium, iron ore, and massive amounts of concrete?
If you include the mining that tips the scale even further in the favour of nuclear. A renewables-first strategy use substantially more iron ore and concrete and many more rare-earth metals (which are typically mined in China last time I checked, because they are environmentally damaging to produce). Less uranium with renewables, for obvious reasons, but you can power a country with a very small uranium mine. And again, uranium mines are typically held to higher standards than other mines because they are so small and relatively easy to manage.
> ... Nuclear waste is far more hazardous and we don't seem to have much problem isolating that in France. ...
You seem to be inching towards enlightenment. Keep following that thought.
> you invent issues for solar that are far more difficult for nuclear to handle?
I care about the environment when it is convenient. Nuclear remains hands-down the most environmentally friendly option. The only defence renewables have against it is economics (which is a compelling case, I must admit).
The question is energy density and economics. Can solar/wind with the same environmental impact per kWh become cheaper than nuclear? Maybe it's already cheaper. Who knows. So far no one has really pointed at data in this thread.
Because renewables don’t help reduce emissions as much as nuclear does.
Renewables need fossile backup plants.
Go on electricitymap.org and see how Germany has among the highest emissions in the electricity sector in Europe despite 50% renewables in their electricity mix.
Because the projects are started before they should have been. The permitting process should be a lot more final, the construction process should be monitored, and unless it exceeds some metric (too loud, too polluting, too costly), it shouldn't be stoppable just by simply filing a motion in court.
Of course the plans should be a lot more rigorous.
And then of course prices would go up. But cost overruns would go down.
Also, the fact that "the West" has stopped its building boom led to the construction industry atrophying. There is no efficiency, because there's no scale.
For starters, all the old designs are built with analog automation which is no longer available, so at the very minimum, you need redesign the automation system. Keep in mind, every component you install will need to be certified and tracked from raw materials up to follow stated processes, which need to be nuclear safety certified too. And you need to have two separate families of parts so the requirement of diversity in implementation is fulfilled, to avoid coinciding typical failures. At least now that EPR projects are close to completion, there's now a precedent that it is even possible to implement digital automation in accordance to western nuclear safety standards.
Also the mechanical safety standards are way stricter now, so you can't really just take an old design and add digital bus automation. You need more redundant safety systems, corium catcher and stuff. Not so easy.
China thought they could build them in 48 months, and it ended up taking more than twice as long.
Is China planning any more EPRs? I can't find any evidence of them.
I would agree that it's a bureaucratic problem, but it's a bureaucratic problem of the construction industries in all Western nations. And nobody can even figure out what exactly the problem is, or how to change it.
> It’s not a fundamental problem with nuclear power as both China and Russia build new reactors safe and economically.
Well, they've built them.
Even unsafe nuclear plants (at least historically) are higher frequency of still-rare but potentially-catastrophic failures, not regular failures that are likely to be obvious after a handful of years of a small number of reactors being in operation, its far from clear that they do so safely. (And, since neither of these regimes favors transparency, its not like you can easily externally analytically assess likely safety, either, and even the economics before considering safety may be less clear than they superficially seem.)
But, yes, getting things done that some currently-in-power faction would prefer is more complicatdd in systems in which the dominant faction is constrained by competing power bases rather than free to run roughshod over them. Though that's not something that has recently changed, its always been true, and those constraints have been a feature of the West for centuries, and most people in the West consider it a feature, not a bug; what is new in regard to nuclear power since the 1950s is that there are both more alternatives and more understanding that it has risks at all.
Every time I hear of heat from power plants and industrial processes treated like waste, I wonder if it can be repurposed to low-grade heat desalination [1], or other co-generation processes [2]. We can always use more potable water, for example. I'm sure they ran the numbers and worked out the opex isn't worth the effort, and/or the capex hurdle is too high.
But man, I'd love a tap into that industrial quantity supply of "waste" heat piped just to my backyard. I'd heat my pool in the cold months, run my spa and sauna all the time, and use it to run an absorption chiller the rest of the time. And of course skim some for my hot water heater.
I wonder the same thing! District heating would be an excellent use, if you could transport the heat to a site with dense population. But transport is the challenge, and why we convert energy to electricity in the first place.
As far as district heating goes though, it could be an absolutely fantastic way to solve the fuel oil problem in the north east; if we could store heat generated in the summer underground in large stores for clusters of houses, it could provide a great way to heat all through winter with simple heat pumps.
Well heat transport it, like any other industry, its own niche of expertise. I doubt plant operators suddenly want to turn into distribution experts, and the outsourcing is likely to be way more expensive.
Either climate change is an existential threat to life on this planet or it's not, and if it is we should be willing to discard the OTC regulations for it.
Of course climate change is an existential threat. But that doesn't mean drop all environmental considerations, especially when we have cost effective tech that passes environmental regulations.
France has the same problem of aging nuclear reactors that at some point have to be taken down, with problems building new ones in a timely and cost-efficient manner.
Flamanville 3 will probably cost 19 billion alone and won’t start regularly generating electricity by at least 2023 with construction having started in 2007.
In a thread of people arguing about existential threats, 19 billion dollars is not a very interesting figure. 19 billion would be a pretty good argument most of the time, it just happens that in this specific thread it is not a very well placed response.
The argument is "we could have avoided an apparently existential threat at any time with this tech, and there is evidence what we're actually doing won't avoid the thread" and the response is "nuclear isn't free". There is a mighty disconnect here somewhere.
1990 a kWh in Germany produced 800g CO2. That 400g figure would look better if instead of replacing nuclear with renewables we would've replaced more coal with renewables, but the political landscape didn't allow that.
The renewables would have helped, but only if we wouldn't shut down nuclear plants...
Effectively we're replacing nuclear power plants with renewables, which was one of the Green party's original goals (they were born out of the anti-nuclear movement).
It's a threat because it fucks up the environment, so discarding regulations doesn't really seem to help. (Yes, one could argue that it only does so "locally", but we need thousands of new plants.)
You should check out the recently approved in the US nuclear reactor by NuScale[1]. It is what everyone has been waiting for. A small (60MW electrical output) reactor built in a factory and shipped to the power plant site. This could be a real game changer.
They had to spend $500 million on just paperwork to get it approved, but they did it.
I have been following this closely, as well as the other nuclear startups. If nuclear becomes buildable again, it will almost certainly because of the efforts of NuScale, Terrapower, or other small scrappy startup. As you say. It would be a game changer, and the game must be changed before we start deploying nuclear.
But they haven't built anything yet. It's fairly easy to design something and show that it's safe. The AP1000 got approval, but the designs turned out to be too difficult to build, with the builders saying that some parts of the design were "unconstructable", resulting them in building their own design instead, which then had to get reapproved.
NuScale's bet is that factory-based construction will drive down the construction cost to the level that it compensates for the lack of scale that the larger reactors' teams used as justification for going really big.
"It's fairly easy to design something and show that it's safe." To spend 2 million man hours and 1/2 a billion dollars on creating documentation for certification? I would agree that one never knows if something will be successful until it is, but if it was "fairly easy" to get approval to build working reactors then a lot more people would be building them. I think a way to get a lot more innovation in this space would be to designate an area in the US, maybe the former nuclear testing area, as a place where the radiation protection rules could be relaxed and work on reactors could be done at a much quicker pace.
The problem is not with radiation. It's cost. There's no efficient way of "trying out" a design. Even if we would allow anyone to build almost anything with constant NRC monitoring, the cost would kill the project. (And we wouldn't really gain much insight, because of complexity. This is basically the same problem that we have with the FDA. Yes phase I-II-III clinical trials are expensive, but biology is complicated.)
Now, that said, the whole problem is that of scale. There's no real money in building nuclear power plants. It's basically a few fanatics doing it at new and old companies.
If the US would announce a 2T USD new plant budget, there would be competition.
And even then, probably we would need to build a few very similar plants to have some sort of efficient design.
Renewables don’t help with climate change. Germany has 50% renewables in its electricity mix and they’re one of the dirtiest producers of electricity.
You're ignoring the other 50% to make broad general claims about the first 50% not helping? That's not correct, on many levels. Moreover 'has in the mix' doesn't equal 'produces locally' so for all we know Germany is just importing all of it, and producing locally only using gas and coal. Which it isn't. tldr; you might have a point, but its way more nuanced than what you're presenting here (without evidence)
Why is this plant shutting down? Not because of some sort of hate of nuclear technology, as many would have us believe.
No, the real reason this plant is shutting down is because, like every other thermal generation plant, extending its lifetime past the original license means complying with environmental impact laws on waste heat. Once-through waste heat systems are no longer legal [1]. So why not just build a waste heat system and keep it running? Because when the utility tried to come up with one, the cost of the cooling system alone ran into the billions of dollars!
Much better to just by a few billion dollars worth of batteries and site them on location. At current costs, today, $1B gets you 5GWh at 1.25GW, roughly. The very cheapest estimate for a cooling system was $7B and they ran to over $10B for a new cooling system [2]. So even without the inevitable cost overruns, one could purchase 35-50GWh and 9-12GW of batteries.
A 40GWh/10GW battery would be a far better grid asset for California, and massive increase reliability far beyond what Diablo Canyon could ever produce.
When the mere cooling system for nuclear is more expensive than a better battery, the technology is dead, dead, dead. We don't need it and we have better alternatives.
[1] https://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/environment/article...
[2] https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/ocean/c...