"Each plant would produce 440 megawatts of electricity - roughly enough to power Sheffield - and the hope is that, once the first few have been made, they will cost around £2bn each.
The consortium says the first of these modular plants could be up and running in 10 years, after that it will be able to build and install two a year."
The hope is to deploy 880MW of electricity a year, starting in 2030—call it 9GW in the 2030s. Meanwhile we are adding (50GW * ~0.50 capacity factor) ~= 25GW of wind capacity every year. By the time these new systems are planned to deliver their first GW in 2030, we'll have 500GW (nameplate) of wind delivering between 50 and 500GW round the clock, augmented with utility-scale storage that currently runs about $200M/GWh and will be at least 2x cheaper by 2030. [2], [3]
Then there is geothermal, and solar plus li-ion storage (or better), and solar/wind augmented with hydrogen electrolysis. I'm glad we're developing new nuclear power, I really am. But the competitive landscape it faces is daunting.
I am hopeful that the whole UK energy grid could be exclusively run on lithium-ion batteries for extended periods, and charged exclusively by buying renewable from overproduction, and have the sum be cheaper than nuclear. I am however skeptical, and I suspect the skepticism is very similar to the other side who think nuclear is not economic viable compared to batteries.
However we don't need to chose as long as we both agree that the grid need to be carbon zero and the cost to the climate from fossil fuels need to be added so that either nuclear or lithium-ion batteries will be guarantied cheaper than continuing running fossil fuels plants when wind/solar are not producing. As long that is true then the market will figure out which one is cheaper, and the consumer can enjoy the cheapest energy grid which do not burn fossil fuels.
Wind is not consistent and the scaling of the plants is non-uniform/sublinear... Wind is also supplementary because of its inconsistencies and so will not directly power grids.
And there are other problems that I rarely hear people mention when they do the comparison.
So wind and solar are intermittent so you have to factor the cost of a stand by power supply (which you need to pay for whether you use it or not), or power storage (which we can't do at scale).
You also rarely hit peak capacity with wind (unless you have a reliably strong and steady wind) so you need to over provision by a larger ratio. Nuclear is about 70% utilisation on average, wind about 20%. Similar story with solar.
Nuclear plants tent to have a very long shelf life, wind not so much (to take into account in the cost comparison)
There is a lot of diversification in the demand, not all machines of a country are switched on at the same time, in fact a small fraction of the machines are consuming electricity at a given time. When you adopt a centralised grid with large sources of power, you benefit from this diversification. When you produce the electricity locally, you need to size it for the max local demand, and you need to do that everywhere. That means you end up installing a lot more capacity than you would need with a centralised network.
And the grid in most developped countries is already designed for a centralised supply, so if you switch to a completely different approach you need to invest in your grid.
It's not enough to compare the cost per W produced.
Dump excess wind-originated electricity into organic-solution redox flow batteries (because we don't care how big and heavy utility-grade storage is), and we're easily looking at 50-year lifecycles before the batteries need major maintenance, which currently consists of electrical controls, pump and container integrity. I don't know the lifecycle of the organic chemistry yet, as its discovery was only published this year so they haven't had time to perform accelerated aging tests upon it, so maybe the solution might have to be replaced sooner than 50 years, but based upon what I saw in the paper I suspect not. With appropriate civil engineering (pozzolanic concrete, basalt rebar), the containers can be built to last 5+ centuries.
Build enough of these redox flow plants on the grid, pour in enough excess from all kinds of renewables, and hopefully in 3-7 generations our children won't worry about coal-originated mercury poisoning from eating "too much seafood".
Interesting thing is that nuclear has the exact opposite problem, it’s extremely consistent.
You can’t easily vary the output of a nuclear plant (maybe these will be different, but I doubt it), they take days to weeks to spool up and down. Which makes them only useful for base load.
Ironically pairing them with grid storage would be an enormous help, because then you could use the storage to rapidly respond to demand, while your nuclear plant ramps up and down very slowly.
In short nuclear also isn’t a one size fits all solution for power production, and if it needs to be paired with storage in a carbon free world, it makes you wonder if it’s really worth all the trouble compared to wind and solar.
Navy nuclear reactors can ramp up and down very quickly, unfortunately for the civilian power they don’t save much money by doing so. Which is why they civilian power plants are generally designed for steady state operations.
That is the purpose of the Hornsdale Power Reserve, a giant battery in South Australia, except instead of nuclear it is helping balance gas turbines and renewables. SAs energy is produced from renewables and gas turbines, with the battery providing grid stabilizing services. It has been so transformative that it can even stabilize the grid across the country faster than their local power supply can kick in. Typically that kind of service is charged by response time and time spent responding, but the battery is so fast that the they get far less than a responding gas turbine would for the same service.
True, however this is a far smaller variation ("several tens of percent" [1]) and only happens slowly (~once per day). This is in contrast to gas turbine peaker plant with can ramp by 10-20%[2] of rated power per minute.
“Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope. Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode and so participate in the primary and secondary frequency control.”
One of the ideas I've heard behind these smaller reactors is that since you have say 10 small reactors instead of 1 big reactor, you can decrease the overall output by just shutting down a few of the smaller reactors.
It's absolutely not perfect but it's an improvement.
And should a country end up many of these small reactors, nuclear could actually be quite flexible. The reactors could be shut down and started up on schedules such that each morning, some reactors that were shut down are coming online and in the evening, some of the reactors that were online are shutting down.
I can see why the nuclear is competitive. Here in California, from looking at the states graphs it seems that about 90% of our renewables are being generated in a 12 hour window[0] (a window which unfortunately ends at the time when demand starts to build up to its peak). If you want to even out 50GWh of renewables across 24 hours, you'd be spending billions of dollars on storage and you'd still be burning fossil fuels on cloudy and/or low-wind days. Nuclear reduces storage needs, as well as the bursty-ness of renewables. I can see how they'd be complementary
Eyeballing the graphs, looks like we need maybe an average of 25GW for the 16 hours of low solar output, for 400GWh. If batteries don't increase in price and the grandparent's prices are right ($200M/GWh, ignoring the prediction of it halving), that's $80Bn of storage. The proposed mininuclear is a bit over £4Bn[0]/GW, so £100Bn to get 25GW.
Seems like storage wins if you don't consider cloudy days (bad for solar), maintenance/operations cost (I assume much lower for batteries+solar than nuclear), or replacement times. (I'm guessing nuclear plants last longer than storage.)
I'm a little surprised how little wind is being used in California. It's worth noting that wind actually picks up slightly when solar drops, but not as severely, judging from the graphs.
[0] I hate that some of our units are £ and some $, but I'm going to pretend they're equal. That unfairly helps nuclear in the calculations.
How is 440 MWe small? Output of this reactor is equivalent to the Russian VVER 440 that has been around for decades. The Russians also did the sensible thing when they started with a 210 MWe design and slowly scaled it up to 1200 MWe. Two of these 1200 reactors have been just finished and test fired in Astravets, Belarus, near the Lithuanian border. This got Lithuanua all worked up because of 'safety concerns', halting power imports from Belarus.
Describing these as mini-plants gave me the impression that they're talking about say a container sized "unit".
While they would be considered small at 440MW, they are still full nuclear plants - the novelty seems to be that as much of the structure as possible will be assembled from prefabricated modules constructed off-site.
I can't figure out the economics here. They project $2.7B to construct each 440MW plant. This is presumably an optimistic estimate since they haven't even designed it.
Then you have high running and security costs and subsequent decommissioning costs. You need security infrastructure for storage and transport of fuel and waste.
And I guess it's envisioned it will take a least 10 years to get the first one operational given they've just started on design work?
In contrast, you can build 2GW of on-shore wind capacity for that money and have it delivering electricity in a year or less. The plant will require almost no personal at all to run, and maintenance can be done one or two part-time engineers. Operating costs are effectively zero.
Sure, depending on location 10% of the time you'll dip below 1/3 operating capacity but that will still exceed the output from one of these plants. Even if the peak 2GW cannot be utilised efficiently immediately, advancements in storage and increases in BEV sales will make the excess valuable.
I think there little future role for fusion for electricity generation - it's just too complex and expensive. The collapse in price for wind/solar in the last decade have changed all the numbers. Prices are so cheap that you can basically over-provision wind/solar by a factor of 3 to minimise effect of fluctuations. Add in cheap efficient combined-cycle gas peaker plants to provide smoothing in production and you can get to 80% carbon-free relatively easily and economically.
> I can't figure out the economics here. They project $2.7B to construct each 440MW plant. This is presumably an optimistic estimate since they haven't even designed it.
Same here, this makes no sense from an economic perspective.
The article quote was even worse: they think that after they have built a few, they think they will be able to build them at roughly $2.7B a pop. How much will the first few cost?
Who pays for the handling and storage of the nuclear waste? That's never included in the cost estimates for nuclear plants, mini or not.
How much grid-scale battery would $2.7B buy today? Looks like a Tesla megapack is ~$300/kWh with all the batteries and electronics included (https://cleantechnica.com/2020/10/05/tesla-megapack-powerpac...). $2.7B would pay for ~9GWh of grid-scale storage, or about 20 hours of output from a 440MW plant. Of course you would still need to add the generation piece - solar or wind is cheapest today.
I'm going to guess that in 10 years, when those mini-plants may finally be a reality, the combination of grid-scale batteries with solar/wind or wave generation will be so much cheaper that there will be no market for mini-nuclear plants.
They might be a worthwhile investment if you can use them to straight up buy political support for green policies like co2 taxes and energy efficiency regulations.
The cost of compensating wind farms for overloading the power grid, which considering the UK's current (and future!) wind generation capacity, is not inconsequential.
Wind farms in the UK have to be disabled for periods during the Winter, which is hardly ideal, even if such downtime is a few hours at a time.
If you factor in the cost of upgrading the grid wind turbines are still a bargain.
Especially if you consider the economic possibilities of periods of nearly free electricity - e.g. fleets of electric cars/storage heaters/aluminium shelters demand shifting to take advantage.
We need to begin building that smart charging/discharging capability into electric cars now, then.
We need to establish the regulatory and user interface standards around this ideally before we start manufacturing tens of millions of EVS each month.
It might make sense to also unbundle electricity for consumers, charging the live wholesale rate and indicating the pricing via apps, alerts, or indicators on the meter itself.
How much would it cost for wind capacity plus enough battery storage capacity to make the whole setup functionally equivalent to a 440MW nuclear plant?
Can't speak to wind, but I know off hand that solar and storage is cheaper than coal [1], and onshore wind is cheaper than solar at utility scale [2]. Offshore wind still has a premium, but is still coming down in cost.
Your link only has 4 hours of storage, won't even last the whole night. Also, solar in UK will perform significantly worse than in New Mexico, for obvious reasons.
It’s not meant to last all night, just to bridge the later hours between when the sun sets and everyone goes to bed (and load drops substantially). Europe has enough wind potential to power the world, its simply a deployment, storage, and transmission issue [1].
The New Mexico example was only to demonstrate that renewables and storage paired are cheaper than coal and nuclear, today.
That is deeply misleading, there are sometimes several days of little to no wind, you 4 hours of storage are going to lead to nationwide blackouts and bodies in the streets
Grid operators and generators aren’t going to decommission generation that’s necessary for grid stability if renewables, transmission, and storage haven’t proven themselves as adequate replacements. Tasmania (Australia) electrical supply is served primarily by hydro, solar, wind, and an undersea HVDC cable [1], and they still keep two gas turbines available [2] (one combined cycle, one open cycle) for meeting energy and ancillary service needs (but their run time is fairly low, if you look at the OpenNEM graphs).
Check out South Australia as well on those OpenNEM links below; they’re also close to meeting all of their electrical demand with renewables and battery storage (should be there in another year or two, rooftop solar uptake rate has blown away everyone’s expectations, to the point where the grid operator nervously expects there to be occasions where they might see zero grid demand [3]).
A rapid transition to exclusively renewables doesn’t mean a loss in grid reliability, simply a different grid configuration, occasional curtailment of renewables, and storage (hydro where available, battery everywhere else).
Not to mention the land cost for solar as well as the environmental consequences of non-recyclable windmill parts. And the significant impact on birds. When people talk about the cost of power, they need to factor in the entire supply chain. And batteries have a very significant environmental cost in terms of mining and disposal.
Indeed. This government has made it absolutely clear that its Prime Directive is handing public money to cronies and party donors. So this fits perfectly.
And these are not small reactors, and there's nothing "mini" about them. They're comparable in power output to the first generation of UK reactors which operated from the 50s/60s to the 90s/00s.
It’s 6000 jobs, generating electricity without producing carbon, sustaining an industry and construction and manufacturing know how, and creation of a product for export. These seem like worthwhile pursuits to me and a good use of public funds.
Absolute numbers of jobs without a number of years aren’t useful (most of those may be transient), and they especially aren’t useful when not compared to the job creation impact of other expenditures of those same dollars.
Giving a grant to an existing company with a long history of technical excellence and delivering products to build a new product and a factory for it means jobs that don’t go away. A power plant built creates jobs to run it for as long as it exists.
On the other hand All construction jobs are not permanent - they finish building the project and have to move on to the next one, if it is the factory for the power plants, the power plant itself, the next power plant, or something else.
18 million pounds is a lot of money, but it’s a pittance compared to what tech companies are raising from VCs. In relation to the size of tech companies and the size of investments in them, 6000 jobs and the kick start to an industry for 18 million pounds seems like a bargain to me.
Looks more like at Medium Modular Reactor. The Reactor Pressure Vessel (RPV) and three Steam Generators (SG) are all sized to fit on large trucks, 4.5m wide.
You’re not accounting for the real life costs like paying consumers to take excess energy when demand is lower than fluctuating supply, or replacing renewable infrastructure as often as every other decade (nuclear reactors may be able to last centuries, and their “waste” is recyclable).
Renewable sources can be easily curtailed, so in a high renewable grid prices cannot often go negative, unless someone is paying extra for the renewable sources to produce (which production tax credits do today in the US.)
Renewable sources are much cheaper per watt than new nuclear. By like an order of magnitude, for PV. They are also cheaper per kWh (levelized cost).
Nuclear's sole remaining argument is that the cost of intermittency of renewables is too high. But if that argument has any remaining validity, it requires that the rapidly decline of the cost of renewables and storage soon and suddenly runs into a brick wall.
I don't think we can blindly assume that the extraordinary improvements to energy storage of the last few decades will continue forever; things like the Samsung exploding battery issues suggest we're already pushing the limits. CPU single-core performance was always increasing rapidly until it wasn't.
And I don't think we can safely assume the decline won't continue. And you need to make that assumption if you're going to invest in nuclear, otherwise you've pissed away many billions of dollars.
Renewables and storage right now could handle the grid. So the downside, if we go with them and the decline suddenly stops, is that costs are higher than we wanted them to be. But that's it -- they can still do the job. If the economic risk for nuclear is higher than that, it's still worth going with renewables. At best, it might make sense to do some token nuclear projects to keep the industry from dying completely. You can view SMR efforts, or even Chinese reactor building, in that light.
I think, though, that renewables and storage will continue to get cheaper. For storage, in particular, I think the trends are very clear. There are many different storage technologies vying in the marketplace -- for example, hundreds or thousands of battery chemistries, or more with organics -- and increasing economic incentive to make them work and install them. Zero or even negative grid pricing is becoming common in more and more places. Trillions of dollars are available to those who win at this.
The insurance argument would support small efforts to sustain seed groups that could be expanded if the insurance policy has to be "cashed". It would not justify any large nuclear building program, or even justify replacing existing nuclear power plants as they age out.
That seems to contradict the thread I linked to above.
> the rapidly [sic] decline of the cost of renewables and storage soon and suddenly runs into a brick wall
That doesn’t seem too unlikely given how tiny the combined storage capacity of all the batteries ever made, and all that could be made with all the raw lithium that can mined on Earth, would be compared to modern energy needs.
> That seems to contradict the thread I linked to above.
That thread was wrong, then. The cost of PV, utility scale, is about $1/W(dc). Nuclear is an order of magnitude more expensive, per watt. PV has lower capacity factor, but it's still cheaper per kWh.
It's way more complicated: Rolls-Royce Motors was split off from the (nationalised, bailed out) Rolls Royce Limited and sold to Vickers plc, who then sold the company to Volkswagen Group following a bidding war with BMW.
However, to this day, the Rolls-Royce trademarks (name and logo) are owned by Rolls-Royce Plc, and had been licensed to Rolls-Royce Motors. The change of ownership meant that those trademarks had to be renegotiated, and it ended up with BMW getting the rights to those. Ultimately, the old Rolls-Royce Motors is what is now VW's Bentley division (Bentley having been the "entry level" marquee!), whereas BMW's modern Rolls-Royce company has no such heritage.
Most, if not all British Car Brands / Manufacturers are not owned by the Brits anymore. May be Aston Martin ( Which was sold to Ford and resold to ProDrive and now gone public ), but that might be changing as they continue to lose money, soon to be owned by Canadian Billionaire Lawrence Stroll.. Not saying that is a bad thing since he actually cares about the brand.
I doubt these will actually be built. With a projected price point of $78/MWh [0] these are already way more expensive than existing offshore wind, even if they'd actually get built without budget overruns.
You're correct, I misread Norways wind LCoE of 44€/MWh as offshore, though it was onshore.
The publication you linked projects a 44% cost reduction until 2025, though. Given UK's listed offshore LCoE of $125 in 2018, that would be $70/MWh for the UK. The trend looks linear, but if we conservatively assume it only falls at half the rate after 2025, it will be at $51/MWh once the first Rolls-Royce plants come online in ten years.
You used a 2018 number when the 2020 number is vastly lower. You have to use up to date information - and you have to pay attention to trends, since nuclear takes a decade or more to install.
Nuclear should do a big comeback. It is time to develop a better fission energy and more efficient reactors. I understand that we were traumatized by what happened in Chernobyl but that was almost 40 years ago, we should unlock investments and the science to bring this technology to the future.
At least if we want to go zero emissions and save the planet, that is.
If we want to go zero emissions and save the planet, we need to spend our money efficiently. Almost every renewable source is now far cheaper than nuclear, and politically easier too.
Emissions reduction has almost nothing to do with technology advancement. If this were really a priority we’d get rid of low density zoning in cities and let the market reduce power usage for us.
It's not that hard conceptually to deal with. Ideally you reprocess it into more fuel. Worst case you store it on-site in casks, or bury it somewhere geologically stable.
It may not be hard conceptually, but it does seem hard practically. To date, the number of geologically stable sites used for commercial - as opposed to experimental - storage of nuclear waste appears to be zero.
We could also drop it to the bottom of the ocean, as we did for decades. Any spillage will dilute heavily (there's already plenty of radioisotopes in seawater), and it will take quite a while until geological processes get the bottom of the ocean to surface.
Of course, we don't do that anymore, because it's stupid: nuclear waste is too valuable to just dispose of it like that.
>>And, because so few new nuclear power stations are built, there are very few opportunities to learn from mistakes.
That is a horrible turn of phrase for nuclear power. In the real world, having very few nuclear mistakes from which to learn is a good thing. I'm all for nuclear power, but it doesn't help the cause for the BBC to imply that building more plants will allow for more learning from more mistakes.
A better wording: The economies of scale will allow lessons learned during construction of early units to be quickly integrated during production of subsequent units.
Why should the BBC mince words to help the cause? This is referring to construction, not operation. But a critical mind will obviously come to the conclusion that a higher number of reactors in operation will also increase the risk of failures during operation, unless the risk per reactor is reduced at the same time. And since all big accidents were 'exceptional' in some sense anyway, more 'moving parts' mean more chance for exceptional circumstances. There is no need to hide that fact.
The reason small reactors are in fashion is that (like renewables) they decrease the risk for investors, not the population at large.
Well, Three Mile Island seems to be regarded as a massive mistake despite never exposing people to more radiation than an X-ray, so it could be a good learning opportunity if people could see it as something other then some catastrophe that justifies never learning from new nuclear experiences again.
I know it seems kind of dismissive, but there is approximately zero chance that these will be built. Even if the underlying idea has merit—which I think it could in some circumstances—the combination of reduction in renewable prices, a complex political environment, and the UK’s inability to commit to infrastructure projects means that this project will be a money sink that will never deliver.
Maybe if we had taken this kind of approach 30 years ago, there’d have been a decent possibility of it working out, but it seems too late now.
They are small, quick to build and useful for quick infrastructure upgrades. I imagine they would have a different place in economics and politics than the grand old billion-dollar plants of the past. It doesn't take much commitment to build one of these. That's the entire idea.
These are 440MW reactors. They are not ‘small’, and they’ll still take about the same time to build, because the modular efficiencies here only apply to a small part of the construction timeline.
They’re also $2.7B (might be £). These are not anything like a “different place in economics and politics”.
That is really pretty small. Modern big plants are 30-40GW, 100 times larger. That makes these 'toy' nuclear plants.
And they cost a linear increment of what one grand plant would cost. Around 10%. Making them definitely a 'different place in economics and politics'.
This is all clear from the article. Just being contrary isn't adding to the conversation. How about discussing the potential to build scalable plants, with room to grow as demand grows? Things like that, which should guide the future of nuclear.
His statement was off by a factor of ~20 (on the power of the reactor; the proper comparison is reactor vs. reactor, not reactor vs. multiple reactors), or more than an order of magnitude,
While I appreciate that Rolls Royce isn’t going to pivot to insulating old houses anytime soon, there are far cheaper ways to solve energy supply/demand problems.
Given that a large portion of this almost always ends up funded by a government, though, I wish the UK government would spend efficiently instead of on megaprojects. Emissions could be so much lower right now.
Between 2010 and 2016, natural gas prices collapsed and Westinghouse was in big trouble. Also the price of renewables (especially solar) and batteries fell dramatically. We went from a situation where nuclear would save on expensive natural gas, and would likely be needed eventually, to a situation where nuclear was not competitive with gas CC even with fairly high CO2 taxes, and where it would need to pull an inside straight to not become obsolete.
Greenpeace's comment is pretty disappointing. They refuse to back nuclear without offering any reasonable alternative (let's be honest if there was a good alternative we would already be using it). Hand-wavey stuff about hydrogen and turbines don't cut it I'm afraid. They have done good work in the past, but perhaps if they had backed nuclear a long time ago we wouldn't be in the mess we are in now?
I've actually been pretty critical of them for years because of this stance they have.
And before anyone comments about Chernobyl, my view is all energy production comes with risks. You have to weigh those up against global climate change IMHO.
But completely unsurprising. Greenpeace pivoted from an anti-military nuclear to an anti-civilian nuclear stance to try and remain relevant, they've been a negative force in the world ever since.
They've been raising awareness about AGW while actively fighting one of the best tools to mitigate it for more than 30 years.
Don't mention nuclear on HN if you value your karma ... but in the UK, at least, civilian and military nuclear have never really been independent.
See, for example, the UK government's otherwise incomprehensible willingness to pay extraordinary sums for new nuclear capacity such as Hinkley C[1]:
"it is difficult fully to comprehend the persistent intensity of official UK attachments to nuclear power, without also considering aims to maintain nuclear submarine capabilities". [2]
I don't think the military angle plays a big role in the British case. Hinkley C uses mostly foreign technologies and expertise, not domestic one. There were even talks about building a plant using Chinese technologies! Also submarine and power plant reactors are two very different beasts, so building the latter does not help much with maintaining expertise for the former. Plus Britain is quite dependent on the US help to maintain its nuclear capabilities.
But I think it's true for Russia, maintaining full nuclear cycle does help with supporting its military nuclear capabilities. Thus the substantial political support which the industry gets there. For example the floating plant [0] is based on reactors used in icebreakers, which in turn have roots in submarine reactors.
I think that doesn't explain Hinkley, but it does explain the Rolls Royce initiative. These modular nukes are much more like the zip it up and leave it for 25 year nuclear powerplants that they make for subs.
"One of the best" assumes that nuclear power generators are competently run and fuel competently disposed of. Which organisations do you trust more to be more competent than the Japanese (Fukushima) and Germans (who ditched unknown, unrecorded, probably large quantities of nuclear waste in an incompletely built facility)?
We have better, anyway. The combination of wind, power, burning things that have grown in our lifetime and time-shifting power usage seems to be good enough AFAICT.
By the latter I mean that a lot of big power users don't really need to run all the time. A company like BMW needs a lot of electricity to produce a car, but the factories are built with capacity to spare (building extra capacity while building is cheaper than adding if a car sells well) and most the power-hungry bits can be shut down for a while if the power grid really needs it. Unless a car model is really, really popular and the factory runs at full capacity, but in the case competing factories don't.
There is no energy grid anywhere in the world t1hat has ever run only on intermittent power sources.
As for the hypothetical BMW factory, what are the workers meant to do while the power is low?
You have to be honest that cost of such setup would be significantly higher because you need huge amount of storage, or large overcapacity, or both.
Lastly, zero people died from radiation at Fukushima - the tsunami killed 15,000. Why is anyone surprised that a natural disaster can damage a building? Do we have tsunamis in UK and Germany?
150 years ago there was no energy grid anywhere in the world. We've come a long way since then. You seem really confident that a renewable grid will never happen. Do you have credible projections on storage and deployment costs that indicate asymptotic bounds on cost that are above the cost of similar projections for comparable nuclear?
I am not saying it won't happen. You are free to argue we should be paying more for energy so its sustainable, but unless you are going to bring some serious evidence you can't just claim the problem is easilly sorted and wind + solar grid would be cheaper than nuclear.
Current and projected cost of storage is relatively high, the most cost efficient storage is hydro and compressed air, they are not showing any kind of fast decrease in cost.
Maybe there is potential in energy grids that span continents and have large over-capacity - then you dont need much storage.
I am assuming we are talking about imminent future, in 50 years maybe math is different, but thats too late for climate change.
It doesn't make sense to invest into storage until you are well beyond 80% renewable energy. If we had 80% renewables today then climate change wouldn't be as big of a problem as it is right now, so the next best thing is to build more renewables until we actually hit bottlenecks.
Nuclear power has always been a government funded energy source so unless government policy changes and UK orders 50-100 of these power plants by 2050 then nuclear power is not going to make any difference. Convincing all governments on the planet to invest into nuclear power is extremely unlikely. Without the introduction of a CO2 tax nuclear power will always look bad vs coal and coal will always look bad vs renewables and from what I can tell the vast majority of people don't want a CO2 tax even though it would be the best solution for climate change.
>A company like BMW needs a lot of electricity to produce a car, but the factories are built with capacity to spare
So interestingly, one of the reasons why the steam engine took off in working factories was because you didn't have to rely on the intermittent nature of water or wind power.
Greenpeace's real opposition is mainly that, since SMR's are related to submarine reactor designs, they're subsidising those same subs. Sort of like if you oppose beef by-products because you think a cow died for it.
They're wrong - the cow died regardless, because of high-profit steak, and the submarines are funded regardless of whether we also get carbon-free power from it - but it's a valid argument.
But yes, in northern latitudes - in winter we run fossil fuels, which create literally millions of tonnes of gaseous waste for ever tonne of solid nuclear waste, or we freeze and die.
If you respond but what about [green magic], congratulations, you've not done the sums for winter in cold countries, and I'm not wasting time arguing with you. Go do them.
I don't think you can dismiss the beef/submarine by-products argument without further analysis.
If the beef by-products are being sold by cow farmers for a profit, that makes slaughtering a cow more profitable for farmers. It could mean that more cows are farmed, the price of beef goes down, and therefore the demand goes up. It's only if beef by-products are relatively worthless that your argument is justified, and from a quick search that doesn't seem to be true at all - byproducts are worth 10-15% of the carcass [1].
Similarly, if commissioning new nuclear submarines is cheaper because the SMR research has already been done, then defence procurers can make a stronger case to buy more of them as opposed to other military technologies.
> Similarly, if commissioning new nuclear submarines is cheaper because the SMR research has already been done, then defence procurers can make a stronger case to buy more of them as opposed to other military technologies.
it's still a silly position. pretty much any research in physics/engineering enables the military to create more efficient ways of killing people. should we stall all technological progress to starve the military?
Thanks to long-standing agreements with the US, British submarine reactors are largely copycats of the American ones. And everything about them is super-classified, hard to see how they could use any of that knowledge for civilian reactors.
At most one could argue that if this civilian reactor project succeeds beyond the wildest dreams, they could use that knowledge to design indigenous submarine reactors rather than relying on the Americans. If so, one hopes they could, as the French have already done, switch to low enriched fuel and reduce proliferation risk.
You don’t need magic. You have tons of cheaper ways to reduce your fossil fuel use. Efficiency in building upgrades is almost always the cheapest way to reduce heating emissions. Geothermal is next.
I also strongly agree with the other reply’s point - reducing the amount of money made in raising a cow or increasing the cost of building a nuclear submarine has an attritive impact on both. Those strategies work, potentially better than any other strategy!
The part everyone forgets is that there have been plenty of other power plan disasters far worse than Chernobyl and most of them were Hydropower. Judging nuclear power by Chernobyl is an absurd proposition.
> Judging nuclear power by Chernobyl is an absurd proposition.
Exactly this. Nuclear is held to an absurd different standard to all other forms of energy generation.
If we consider damage to wildlife: fossil fuels, in particular oil, kills millions of birds and fish. Nuclear? Zero as makes no difference. If anything, nature is thriving around Chernobyl. Wind farms routinely kill birds, and no outcry, but cover the birds in a bit of oil, and it's front page.
Deaths mining uranium again, practically zero since such little is needed, vs the thousands of deaths mining coal, or drilling for oil.
Deaths through breathing in pollution? Fossil fuel plants have and are killing millions of people, and quite literally, the planet.
I believe Chernobyl + Fukushima accidents combined have directly killed less than 100 people. Greenpeace would have you believe that millions will die from cancer, but that's strongly disputed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...
Both these disasters are pretty horrible, of course, but I think the OP's point was that Chernobyl and nuclear disasters leave an area uninhabitable for periods of time that far outstretch the entirety of human civilization up to now.
Horrible dam failures don't do that, though of course there's a massive human cost for infrastructure failures like that. There's nothing like the "this is not a place of honor" warnings (for regions contaminated with nuclear waste) for dam failures, e.g.
Tell that to the ton of wildlife around everything but the refactor proper?
And also even taking your argument at face value, I fully believe a handful of 20,000 year dead zones would be superior to global warming at our current rate. The alternative we get now is way more than 20,000 years of wrecked biodiversity almost everywhere.
How is the orange website so full of self-avowed rationalists so incapable of comparing sudden and quick vs slow and steady harm...
Point is, current energy sources can be stopped and reworked, once you go with nuclear disaster you assume the 20k year scenario. Tell me you won't change your opinion in that time span.
In fact fair few parts of the exclusion zone are under discussion to be reopened very soon, and Chernobyl is quite habitable for some definition of habitable. Thousands of people stay and live there (decontamination workers, and a big tourist trade), though they are only allowed to stay three months at a time.
They are exposed to less radiation than an airline pilot or a stewardess receives in the course of their job -- so "habitable" is relative.
Anyway, nuclear power GENERATES heat and electricity, so it increases global temperature, while renewables are CUTTING part of solar energy, so they decrease global temperature.
> while renewables are CUTTING part of solar energy, so they decrease global temperature
Do you know why solar panels looks dark, almost black? Because they absorb as much solar as they can. IN real life if you cover surface with panels, albedo would decrease and system as a whole would absorb MORE solar energy. But part of absorbed energy would be converted to electricity and do some work. At the end it all would be heat, so on pure heat basis solar panels would increase temperature
Problem with solar panels is solvable: a special material to emit heat in a narrow infrared region, to which Earth atmosphere is transparent, is already invented in India. It will keep solar panels cool, which will increase their efficiency. Per watt price for this material is unknown for me.
Reasoning is that coal kills more every day. As someone else said under one of the parent comments, even hydro kills more than nuclear. Dams have wiped out whole regions.
However, just as nobody seriously tried to run a national power grid on PV 30 years ago because it was too expensive, today nuclear is the expensive white elephant of power that can only be justified by other benefits such as weapons and radioisotope medicines.
> let's be honest if there was a good alternative we would already be using it
No one's using the SMR's that are proposed here either. They're hoping to get the first one online in 10 years. A lot of nuclear fans get excited about unproven future tech when it comes to nuclear and then dismiss non-nuclear alternatives for being unproven future tech.
No one should be inherently excited about SMRs for the technology alone. The excitement is it's a way to hack around political failure.
- Renewable are great, but our current political economy just likes them because they don't require coordination and are marginally cheap. But when trying to do a completely renewable economy, those benefits dissipate when we need electricity storage or arbitrage/rationing on a huge scale, and that requires good good old coordination and politics again.
- Regular nuclear power plants are great but the anglo-sphere can't do them for the same reasons they can't do subways.
- Tiny nuclear power plants aren't intrinsically better at all, but perhaps can both have reneweable's ability to accommodate our shitty political economy, and maintain that ability all the way to 100% no fossil fuels for electricity.
There's nothing great here, just a last ditch to throw technological band-aids on social issues.
Similar opinions are expressed by a number of Green political groups around the world, and I've also struggled to reconcile their commitment to slowing global climate change with their rejection of nuclear power.
Ignoring the typical arguments against nuclear, I think a main point from them specifically is that investment in energy is zero-sum, and state resources directed towards nuclear energy are resources not going towards renewable energies. Furthermore, heating and transport make up a large proportion of carbon emissions, and these generally aren't powered by nuclear energy. So nuclear places the focus of energy transformation in the wrong place, and allows governments to believe they are solving the problem when much larger investment in renewables is required.
I'm not qualified enough in the area to agree or disagree with the implicit tradeoffs there, it's just the argument I've heard.
> I think a main point from them specifically is that investment in energy is zero-sum, and state resources directed towards nuclear energy are resources not going towards renewable energies.
If we're taking climate change seriously, we need massive investment in clean electricity generation. There's place for both nuclear and renewables.
Secondly, the goal is to reduce emissions. Increasing renewables (or nuclear for that matter) isn't the goal. What we need is a least-cost zero-carbon grid. If that happens to be 0% nuclear, fine. Just as fine as if that happens to be 100% nuclear. Most likely it'll be a combination (see e.g. work by Jenkins, Caldeira etc.).
> Furthermore, heating and transport make up a large proportion of carbon emissions, and these generally aren't powered by nuclear energy.
They aren't powered by wind or solar either, which are the renewable sources with, so far at least, the best potential. That's why there needs to be, together with a massive push to clean and expand the electric grid, a massive push to electrify transportation and heating.
Here is an easier argument for the nuclear anti-support: Green parties across the globe are spouting Chinese propaganda to further China's hold on the energy market (since they own 99% of rare-earth metals + a good grip on otherwise "green" energy manufacturing).
I'm not attempting to argue against the merit of hydrogen as a feature of the energy infrastructure....But, the only reason hydrogen is taking off, in a political sense, is because it's a transport mechanism. "Green" people like it because it can support renewable sources although it works just as well for fossil fuels.
The potential of nuclear is locked between two well funded lobbies. Nuclear is extremely viable and I'm consistently disappointed with people's inability to recognize and invest in the necessary research for cleaner and safer plants. Or, those who succumb to an illusion that fusion will be ready and commercialized in the near future.
Hydrogen is taking off because, first, there's already a global demand for many megatons of the stuff each year, and second, because the cost per kWh (equivalent) of storage capacity for it is extremely low, compared to just about any other scaleable way to store excess electrical power.
The RBMK has a lot of issues that make it really unsuitable for further development:
1. Because of the size of the core, it develops uneven reactivity during operation and requires attention to be paid to this.
2. The measures put in place do not entirely eliminate the chance of a power excursion.
3. The cost of a suitable containment building would make RBMK more expensive than an equivalent VVER installation. Also as far as I can tell no such containment building has ever been designed.
4. No international agency or government would allow the construction of a new RBMK. Edit: to be clear, this is not only because of the safety issues, but also because of the nuclear weapon proliferation issues associated with the design.
Overall, the cost savings of a RBMK depend on not having a large containment structure and the RBMK was on its way out as a design by time the Chernobyl accident happened. The large number of RBMKs under construction at the time was largely because of initiatives to increase the installed nuclear capacity in the Soviet Union during the mid 80s, existing RBMK sites would receive additional reactors and all but one of the new sites were to receive
VVER reactors.
> we know not to do the thing that makes them explode.
We collectively know a lot of thing, but as soon as you leave the opportunity to a human an accident will happen sooner or later. We know not to start heavy machinery while there is a maintenance technician inside it, but it still happens.
This is why we have safety lockout systems, to avoid an accident even if we know better.
"we know not to do the thing that makes them explode" This is not the core problem. The core problem is that explosion can still happen - even if we "know not to do the thing that makes them explode". It can happen because of a natural disaster, because of war and because of other unpredictable reason. To avoid the possible explosion and consequences altogether it is better to not have them in the first place!
Any technology will have deaths, that's inevitable. Without advocating for one versus the other, we should consider what will be number of deaths/diseases/etc versus costs/climate impact/energy produced over the lifetime of a solution
There is a good alternative, and we are already using it.
Solar PV and wind turbines are already the cheapest and greenest source of energy and are set to decrease in price more as they ramp up.
They're already causing the closure of existing coal and nuclear plants for purely economic reasons.
It sometimes feels like people with oddly strong opinions on nuclear power are posting from some alternate dimension where the only alternative is coal.
Nuclear is cool tech, so are vertical wind turbines and wave powered generators and concentrated solar molten salt generators. But they're all more expensive than PV and turbines.
Of course solar and wind are awesome, but they are dependent on external factors and thus not fully comparable. If there is no sun (or wind), you get no power. Nuclear and fuel-burning power plants are not like that, and the difference matters.
You either need to specify an an energy storage solution on a scale large enough to handle when there is no sun, or expect us poor folks in the Nordics (for instance) to just migrate to the south. :)
There are (at least) 6 solutions for the sun not shining.
In order of desirability.
1: A mix of renewables. Not solar or wind or hydro or geothermal, but a good mix.
2: A large grid. The sun is always shining and the wind is always blowing somewhere.
3: Over-provisioning. Size your installations for cloudy days and winds at 2km/h. Solar&wind are an order of magnitude cheaper than nuclear, so 1.5X - 3X over-provisioning is still a lot cheaper.
4: Indirect storage. If you're overprovisioned, then you will have lots of excess power, even more power than you can store in your batteries. (See 5). So use that power to hit several goals at once. For example, if you use it to produce methane, you can use that methane for carbon storage, use it to power peaker plants (see 6) or sell it for profit.
5: batteries
6: peaker plants. If 99.9% of your power is handled through 1-5, the emissions from the remaining 0.1% are negligible and can be offset with #4.
No wind or sun? What are we talking about here, an apocalypse? I know you're exagerating, but sun AND wind tend to balance each other out. If there's a freak occurence where there's "none" of either for several days.. well running some gas power plants once in a while is a drop in the bucket when it comes to CO2, and at such a small scale you could probably create the fuel renewably (biogas or synthetic gas from electricity+H2+CO2). I think finding a way to reuse the gas power plants we have already built in a CO2-neutral way will be a big key to solving the climate crisis quickly enough.
> You either need to specify an an energy storage solution on a scale large enough to handle when there is no sun,
And/or just integrate the continent with more HVDC lines. Germanys main problem now is getting power from the windy north to the industrial south. But if they manage to construct some HVDC lines they should be able to get pretty close to 100% renewable. They could restart the nuclear industry too, but I don't see how that's an easier problem than building HVDC lines.
Getting more off-shore wind should also help, since the wind is more stable there.
And why just "AN" energy storage solutions? There are dozens of different ones being constructed commercially right now, and they each have their strong sides. Li-ion is better for fast frequency regulation, flow batteries for medium term storage, and pumped hydro, and possibly compressed or liquified air for long term.
> or expect us poor folks in the Nordics (for instance) to just migrate to the south. :)
If you mean the Scandinavian region, there's already two solutions that are working great: exchanging power with Norway (where you got tons of hydropower to smooth out long term energy fluctuations) and trash burning power plants (which also supplies heat to nearby homes and businesses). We don't need to move south, we just need everyone in the south to send us all their trash for us to burn during the winter ;) If we can move more plastics over to bioplastics, then it could even end up being renewable. Yeah, we should recycle/reuse as much as possible, but there will always be a huge stream of material that's just too mixed up or recycled too many times.
And finally there's deep hydrothermal. It has most of the benefits of nuclear, at possibly a similar cost if we scale it up. The great thing is we can re-use a LOT of expertise from the oil and gas sector, which I think will be important for scaling it up quick and to gain political support from worker in that field.
I'm not against nuclear, we should definitely use the expertise we already have to keep developing and building reactors. But I'm not convinced about a large scale global bet on it, and I don't think it's as essential to solving the climate crisis as some would have us believe.
They're fighting yesterday's battles. We should have been pushing nuclear hard 10 and 20 years ago. Today we have alternatives that are both much cheaper and much quicker.
We need to increase electricity production because of the transition to EVs and we need a way to guarantee supply whenever it is needed.
Renewables should be encouraged but they are not a panacea and I doubt that they are enough as things stand. In addition, most renewables sources have their own downsides so it's not all positives.
The beauty of EVs is you don't need guaranteed supply. If you only have power half the day you can charge during that half the day. Most EVs already support time mode charging and price based charging exists in a few.
For always needed power we can just over provision and for variable power we can just turn it off if it's a particularly calm night. A surprisingly large amount of electricity use can be adjusted by a few hours. For example see how car charging locations are now adding batteries to allow them to avoid high demand charges by time shifting loads.
You need to guarantee a minimum level of daily production because even if an EV can charge at different times of the day it needs to be charged every day. This is in addition to all the other electricity needs.
In the UK solar is not that great because of the gloomy winters (when heating demand is at its peak, and the UK wants to also move away from gas central heating...).
Best bets, IMO are tides and offshore wind. But wind can also be quite variable.
If you add all of this up "just over provision" becomes unrealistic. There needs to be extensive storage capacity but I don't think we're quite there yet. Certainly batteries do not seem a very environmentally friendly option. Even this may bot solve the problem.
All in all I think renewables can minimise the need for nuclear power but cannot replace it, at least for now.
Isn't there a high environmental cost to building PVs? (extraction of required resources from mines - I realise nuclear requires this too). I like green energy a lot, but don't believe they come at zero cost. Also PVs work for half of the day at best, and wind blows sometimes... What we need is all of the above. Diversity in energy.
When most vehicles are electric are need to be charged at night, I'm not sure PV and turbines will cut it.
There's a reason the anti-nuclear people want to talk about radiation and not mining. In terms of pollution from resource extraction nuclear is inconsequential (relative to our other available energy sources) because it requires an infinitesimal amount of stuff you actually need to pull out of the ground. Oil, coal, minerals for solar panels, minerals for batteries, etc. require orders of magnitude more environmentally impacting activity per output because you need so much more of them for the same capacity.
Disclaimer: Wind might be better than nuclear in terms of mining impact. I don't know enough about the supply chain for those materials to make a good estimate and I haven't read any analysis of it. Hydo is obviously the best in terms of mining but it F's up watersheds and river systems for different reasons so it's kind of hard to make a comparison. Geothermal is good too but we can't all live in Iceland.
The Greenpeace guy's comments are devastatingly on the mark. This idea faces very serious headwinds, not because of naysayers or greens, but because it its own inherent inferiority, especially compared to where renewables and storage are likely to be by the time any of these could be online.
The thing that gets me is: even if hydrogen and turbines can solve the issue, it's still years and years and years out and may or may not end up being good enough. We've got nuclear as an option RIGHT NOW for a problem we have to solve RIGHT NOW.
I think what frustrates me more than anything are the people that just think/say: "well we have amazing scientists so we'll find a solution to the problem when it becomes an issue" - in response to global warming. And more often than not they're the people saying that scientists warning that global warming is going to be a catastrophe that may be impossible to stop are just overreacting.
Green Peace kind of feels like its policy is being set by one of those folks...
> hydrogen and turbines can solve the issue, it's still years and years and years out and may or may not end up being good enough. We've got nuclear as an option RIGHT NOW for a problem we have to solve RIGHT NOW.
If you look at the past ten years of the UK, we've hugely expanded our wind production, shut down and demolished almost all the coal plants, and ... failed to build a nuclear plant.
Renewables are the technology that's ready. Nuclear is the technology that suffers huge time overruns.
We can build hydrogen turbines and storage caverns (and renewables to make the hydrogen) much faster than we can make nuclear power plants. Electrolysers are being built at gigawatts/year rates now, and factories can be scaled up rapidly.
The speed argument comes down strongly against new nuclear power plants.
A global deployment of nuclear would still need a vast amount of engineering hours to complete. There may be room for optimisim, but that is also true of other technologies. And those other technologies are often simpler. It may well be easier to deploy battery farms with new technology than build an existing nuclear design.
It's possible that Greenpeace's quote is misinterpretable; it depends on the context it was taken from.
"Greenpeace ... says if the government wants to take a punt on some new technology to tackle climate change it would be better off investing in hydrogen or geothermal power."
(emphasis mine)
Perhaps they consider renewable energy to be existing -- that is, not new -- technology. Here is Greenpeace's renewable energy policy:
No, actually it's not. None of these can satisfy the energy needs. We have data[1]. The only technology that displaces cole & natural gas power supplies is nuclear (& hydro technically but that's generally tapped out).
To me, Professor MV Ramana in the article raises far more valuable concerns/questions than Greenpeace & he's actually an expert on SMR and nuclear energy policy:
> He says UK SMR's 10-year time-scale for its first plant may prove optimistic. The one constant in the history of the nuclear industry to date is that big new concepts never come in on time and budget, he says.
> He is sceptical[sic] that the factory concept can deliver significant cost savings given the complexity and scale of even a small nuclear plant. Smaller plants will have to meet the same rigorous safety standards as big ones, he points out.
> He says where the concept has been tried elsewhere - in the US and China, for example - there have been long delays and costs have ended up being comparable to large nuclear power stations.
> Finally, he questions whether there will be a market for these plants by the 2030s, when UK SMR says the first will be ready.
> "Ten years from now, the competition will be renewables which are going to be far cheaper with much better storage technology than we have today," says Prof Ramana.
Thanks for the video reference - I'll check that out.
> No, actually it's not.
Sorry, not sure I follow - which part of my comment were you responding to here?
> To me, Professor MV Ramana in the article raises far more valuable concerns/questions
Yep - there are some fairly blunt conclusions in a recently co-authored publication[1] of theirs regarding SMR prospects for the UK and elsewhere:
"There is every likelihood that, as with the previous nuclear renaissance, SMRs will be still born with few reactors built. This will mean that public money will again have been wasted on nuclear technology, but, as previously, the main cost will be the opportunity costs of the options not pursued and properly funded because resources have been pre-empted by the nuclear sector."
> No, actually it's not. None of these can satisfy the energy needs.
Of course they can, and already do in some countries.
> We have data[1].
Or at least a TED talk. Checking it out...
1:26 "From 36% to 31%": Well, it certainly dropped, but it doesn't look from a quick scan as if that trend is continuing after 2010. Looks like it goes up after 2013. And, indeed if I check the source he used, the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, it has figures now up to 2019, which show we're at 37% so the trend has reversed in the right direction. Also, that talk was given in 2016, so why are the figures only up to 2013? I was able to get last year...
Moving on...no, wait, that graph looked a bit weird. That "arrow" was meant to look like a trend line, but it's actually just hovering above two points. What're the rest of the data for, decoration? That's just two cherry picked points! That isn't statistics, it's join-the-dots.
We're less than 2 minutes in and it's not looking good for the "we have data" video.
2:07: "There's just a lot of poor countries that are still using wood and dung and charcoal as their main source of energy": ironically, these are carbon neutral, but at any rate, these are not the countries that have the highest CO2 emissions, so why are we trying to suggest it's their fault?
2:44: "Barely makes up half": not true anymore; renewables have overtaken nuclear and as mentioned, have reduced the usage of fossil fuels already.
2:50: "Let's take a closer look in the United States." - This seems a bit like talking about how to get to the Superbowl and suggesting we take a closer look at the Cleveland Browns. Would it not be a good idea to look at countries who're actually good at renewables?
3:15: "People think of California as a clean energy and climate leader": Heh, no, I think of countries and states with >80% electricity from renewables as leaders. California doesn't qualify.
3:21: "What about Germany?": Ah, lets move on from Cleveland and talk about the Detroit Lions...Why is it that the nuclear fanboys always want to talk about Germany, rather than the other countries in Europe who have far more renewable energy.
3:21: "and there's really not anybody who's going to tell you that they're going to meet their climate commitments in 2020.":
Narrator: "They met their targets."
3:36: "Solar and wind provide power about 10 to 20 percent of the time": Genuinely baffled by this one. This guy thinks there's only daylight 20% of the time? He thinks that wind turbines are built in areas that only have wind 20% of the time? Is he a complete idiot?
I think I'll stop here. I've just one more point to add: this guy says he's been travelling and researching this himself, yet his actual graphs came from the BP report I mentioned earlier. Why did the data come from an oil company if they compiled it themselves? I get the feeling that the real push for nuclear is simply a stalling tactic being pushed by fossil fuel interests, because they know that if countries simply rolled out wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, tidal etc today, they couldn't possibly compete and they'd be finished.
Greenpeace opposes GMOs under the pretense that they are unsafe for human consumption. They may have scientists on staff, but that doesn't make them immune to spreading unscientific opinions.
Well proliferation is a constant bogey man but sadly far too much politics is involved that seems to insure it occurs more often than not. Just that the world tolerates North Korea should be example enough that politicians would rather look the other way and hope nothing goes boom.
That ten year lead time seems to be excessive for announcing at this time unless its more of a trial balloon - looking to gauge public and political reactions before sinking more money into it. Renewable combined with storage solutions cannot guarantee one hundred percent coverage and I doubt they ever will. However a well connected grid with wind and solar spread across the country as a whole can minimize some of the effects of weather.
Personally I imagine biomass/fuel could be a very attractive option if executed properly (sustainably and locally sourced):
* Where you grow the biomass you could create somewhat biodiverse piece of nature
* Storage of biomass is cheap
* Knowledge and machinery from regular fossil fuels can be (partially) reused
* No waste that will need to be looked after for 1000s of years in fear of leakage/terrorism
Unfortunately biomass seems to be looked at similarly as nuclear; just because it could be executed poorly the whole idea is written off..
That was an initial thought of mine about a decade ago. The energy densities don't work out.
At present rates of per-capita energy consumption, population, and rates of plant growth, there is either not enough primary productivity, or too large an environmental impact. Humans simply use immense amounts of energy.
Other sources, lower per-capita usage, and/or fewer people, are the options.
Thank you for providing these links backing your claim, so far I haven't been able to disprove the numbers that have been used. I still feel like it could be made competitive somehow, I'll get back to shouting that biofuel is an option when I've found out how :)
I strongly recommend Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History and Energy and Civilization (along with many other books on resources). The "Burning Buried Sunshine" paper (Springer link above)describes human energy use relative to net primary production. As of the late 1990s humans wwere accounting for (using directly or indirectly) 20% of all net primary production, with other energy use roughly doubling that.
Whether or not remaining biological systems could survive on just 60% of plant life is a possibility, though the impacts would likely be large. Further growth in human energy consumption would obviously be limited.
I'd come across that independently, Smil also cites it.
Using less energy, at least on a scale that actually matters, is just never going to happen.
Sure, we can - and should - be striving towards energy efficiency, but without regressing a hundred years or so as a society a meaningful reduction in energy usage is impossible.
Agree. Given the push back green NGO:s and parties have directed towards nuclear energy around the globe it's as if they were funded by the coal industry.
If it's so much better to build n smaller plants instead of one bigger it would still be much better to build them all in one location instead of distributed over n locations. Electricity transmission over long distances is not free, but it's surely not so expensive/inefficient that you need those plants to be distributed over 16 independent sites for the UK. All those claimed learning benefits also apply to operation/maintenance and benefits of experience will transmit much better inside of a big facility than from one site to another. You only need to make sure that you don't take advantage of economies of scale that should better not be taken advantage of.
Coincidentally the Cruachan Scottish pumped storage loch also generates 440mw. Stores 7gwh of electricity. Obviously doesn't make any energy itself but has outlasted the nuclear plant it was built for by several decades. Built in 1965 for 500 million pounds in today's money. Sometimes it seems like these things were solved in the past but somehow we forgot them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruachan_Power_Station
The article continues to talk about 6 out of 7 of the UK's nuclear plants going offline by 2030. Given how slow UK infx projects - especially nuclear projects - move, I'd be surprised if these were online by then.
No man, let's build this thing rapidly using Kanban and the nodejs equivalent of nuclear energy technology. They'll have one whipped up in two months. Soon there'll he one of these hunks of metal in every neighborhood!
That's not fair. They have nearly none of the big-nuclear issues. And they have a different scaling pattern - they can be spot-built to shore up infrastructure. Remote locations, issues with reliable power, economic realities could make them quite desirable at the right place and time.
“No reason why” - there are many reasons, and it’s why they have become more expensive.
It’s not clear that nuclear is more reliable than any other similar monetary investment. People like to compare “wind that only blows 40% of the time” with nuclear, but you can build three or more farms for the cost of your single nuclear plant, so it’s not that hard to end up ahead. There’s a great comparison of that in one of the top level comments on this post.
We do need these, simply just to help provide a base. Only the other day the National Grid was worried we didn't have enough power for peak times because wind wasn't generating enough due to not enough wind.
https://www.ft.com/content/f5e8995f-00c8-4c74-8738-55b47a871...
In the past in The Netherlands there were ideas to have small mini nuclear plants per neighbourhood of a city which would power all the electricity needs.
It's a take on a very old joke, I believe originally about Rolls Royces. Unfortunately, I don't have a good reference to it; I haven't heard it since childhood, and all I can find via search is people selling bumper stickers with variations on it.
It's quite a lot bigger, and more conservative in the sense it has separate steam generators rather than steam generators integrated into the reactor pressure vessel like nuscale.
Which approach is 'better' for modular reactors? I would imagine that having the steam generator inside the pressure vessel makes it safer (at least in terms of leaks) since the primary/secondary loop never leaves the containment area.
Integrated steam generators might be safer, as you say, as the primary loop never leaves the pressure vessel, and thus less pipe joints etc. that might fail.
OTOH the pressure vessel becomes a lot bigger, which limits how big you can make the entire power plant. Making big pressure vessels if fairly tricky, and there's only a few forges in the world capable of making current large reactor pressure vessels. I think this is one of the reasons why the Nuscale reactor is so small (60 MWe IIRC), which might make it hard to get the economics to work out.
Free cooling. And it needs to be a sea, and not a river. France's nuclear power stations have had problems during the recent hot European summers because the river water warms up too much.
These legal limits are not 'the problem' but there for exactly this reason: operating the plant at full power would start killing aquatic creatures living downstream by excessively increasing water temperature.
My point is that this is not a problem for the nuclear plants. The recent heatwaves did not create a technical problem for the nuclear plants (well for cooling droughts may have but the high temperatures did not).
Sheesh, I am just clarifying that the plants did not shut because of operational reasons. Nothing controversial I would have thought, just a statement of fact...
I think the offense that people (including myself) took with it is that it conveys the idea that technical reasons are the only reasons that limit the operation of a power plant and that other, in this case environmental, reasons are second-class reasons that can or can not be taken into account.
Environmental impacts are externalities (i.e. positive or negative effects on others (or something, in the case of nature) who are not directly involved and have no influence over them) and basically all environmental problems are negative externalities. Ignoring externalities is how we got our current environmental problems in first place which is why the argument rubbed me the wrong way.
That's putting words into others' mouths instead of sticking to what is actually expressed.
I simply thought useful to highlight the reason the plants had to shut in order to avoid misunderstandings and because it is always important to understand causes. It was not a technical issue and nuclear plants have no problems functioning in an European heat wave (again...). It is quite obvious why limits are put on how much rivers' water may be warmed but that was not the point.
There is no offense to be taken and I am quite disappointed by the aggressive reactions. This argument is pointless.
I see- sure the plant could have safely (as in not melt down and cause a disaster) kept going. But real world requirements forced them to turn it down not to heat up the river too much.
Why bother with radiation protection, just run the cooling open cycle with the river water and pollute downstream. It wouldn’t need closing for operational reasons. Just stating a fact.
If these can be demonstrated safe it seems reasonable to place them close to cities - providing electricity and district heating.
The air pollution problems of Poland could be resolved a year after these were built, for example, by connecting them into and expanding existing district heating systems - meaning no one would need to burn coal or trash in ancient home chimneys.
> you could get twice the impact out of insulating ...
Yes, the concept of "negawatts" which was popularized by the Rocky Mountain Institute, and Amory Lovins in particular in the 1980s, seems to have vanished from the discourse.
Insulate properly and improve efficiency of usage, and suddenly your energy supply problems are a lot smaller--plants, transmission, distribution, raw materials, waste: all of them.
The hope is to deploy 880MW of electricity a year, starting in 2030—call it 9GW in the 2030s. Meanwhile we are adding (50GW * ~0.50 capacity factor) ~= 25GW of wind capacity every year. By the time these new systems are planned to deliver their first GW in 2030, we'll have 500GW (nameplate) of wind delivering between 50 and 500GW round the clock, augmented with utility-scale storage that currently runs about $200M/GWh and will be at least 2x cheaper by 2030. [2], [3]
Then there is geothermal, and solar plus li-ion storage (or better), and solar/wind augmented with hydrogen electrolysis. I'm glad we're developing new nuclear power, I really am. But the competitive landscape it faces is daunting.
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/renewable-energy-market-update/t... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/nov/05/victo... [3] https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/victoria-to-buil...